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 say Israel is the only place in the ME where Christians can freely practise their faith apparently: pic.twitter.com/LeAzeo7XO6
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.
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.
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.
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)
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Musk said that free speech is necessary for an effective democracy, even if a person disagrees with it, a point that Netanyahu said he agreed with.
Musk added that he is “against attacking any group,” and “anything that promotes hate and conflict.
Everyone should have this view,” in response to a prompt from Netanyahu that Musk is “committed” to fighting anti-semitism.
Instead, he said, he is committed to making humans into a space-faring civilization.
Musk added that hate speech won’t be promoted on X, formerly Twitter, because it is not what people want to see on the platform.
Musk has alleged that the pro-Jewish advocacy group, the Anti-Defamation League, accused him of anti-semitism and promoting hate speech on X, which Musk denies.
VIDEO — Former Israeli Government Minister Shulamit Aloni confesses that “it’s a trick” for Israel to use false anti-Semitism accusations in accordance with its interestspic.twitter.com/CTfS4OqfgD
Musk said he laughs more about stuff he sees on X than anything else, which is a “good thing,” but added that among the hundreds of millions of posts every day, some of them “are going to be bad.”
The ADL has seen a surge in threats directed at the organization since Musk’s attacks escalated in recent days. As a result, ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt told CNN the ADL has been forced to increase its own security.
Antisemitism is a Nazi slur used by Jew hating Zionists
Elon Musk to sue ADL for accusing him, X of antisemitism
“Since the acquisition, The @ADL has been trying to kill this platform by falsely accusing it & me and of being anti-Semitic,” tweeted Musk on Monday.
“If this continues, we will have no choice but to file a defamation suit against, ironically, the ‘Anti-Defamation’ League.”
AIPAC’s top priorities include maneuvering the US to attack Iran, keeping US forces in the region as a buffer, protecting Israeli nuclear hegemony and making criticism and boycotts of Israel in the US impossible.
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.
Another traitor to the Palestinian cause on the long list of the Palestinians: Bahrain.
After the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain has agreed to establish diplomatic relations with Israel.
Bahrain will join the United Arab Emirates in signing the agreement concocted by the Trump administration on Tuesday 15th September.
Bahrain is officially known as the Kingdom of Bahrain which is a sovereign State situated in the highly volatile region of the Persian Gulf.
The Island-Nation is in fact a small archipelago made up of 40 beautiful natural Islands and an additional 51 artificial islands which are peppered around the main island which makes up the gross majority of the country’s landmass.
The main island is called as the Bahrain Island.
The King of Bahrain’s Clothes
For those who are interested with human civilization they will recall that Bahrain is the site of the Dilmun civilization.
The Dilmun civilization was a sort of mid exchange port.
A trade route between the Mesopotamia (the land between two-rivers Tigris & Euphrates) and the Indus Valley civilisation (the Tamils) which is close to the sea and to Artesian Springs.
Why the new agreement is important to Israel?
Simply to divide the Arabs.
On the economic front Bahrain is the 5th richest Arab country.
Its economy ranks 23rd in the world but it is one of the countries in the world where the inequality between rich and poor is very wide.
The current population of Bahrain is around 1.8 million people. The Bahrainis consist of around 45 per cent of its population.
Bahrain was one of the earliest areas to convert to Islam.
In fact the conversion to Islam happened during the very lifetime of the prophet Muhammad (PBUH) in 628 CE.
The announcement of the agreement comes less than a month after the United Arab Emirates agreed to boost ties and work towards full diplomatic relations with Israel.
Foreign ministers from both Gulf States will sign the pact of agreement with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday 15th September 2020.
It is clear that the Jewish lobby in the world is using all its levers to encircle the Palestinians.
With the powerful help of the Trump administration they will persuade the Gulf monarchies (corrupt to the core) to normalise relations with Israel.
We must not forget that the chief US negotiator is Jared Kushner who is the son in law of President Trump.
Kushner is a staunch Israelite and the next in line for the Americans is David Friedman (an anti-Palestinian who is the US Ambassador to Israel).
More and more countries will rush to join Israel. Why?
Because the Jewish lobby know that the time is ripe because of the divisions in the Arab world and the divisions among the Palestinians.
The Jewish lobby will do everything to re-elect Trump who is a special agent for them.
The Gulf monarchies are paving the way for Saudi Arabia to normalize ties with Israel which will happen once King Salman passes away.
It must be clear in our minds that the Gulf monarchies would not have done so without the Saudi approval.
But the Saudi crown Prince Mohammed Bin Slam (widely known as MBS) does not have the support of King Salman on that issue…
In the meantime the list of traitors will increase.
My forecast is Kwazi Morroco and Oman. Why?
Because without the support of the Americans and the intelligence services of Israel they will be out of power…
Palestinians must rely on their own forces and those who believe in justice.
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.
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.
I doubt Kennedy has read or heard of Luntz’s report [the Israeli propaganda playbook put together by the Republican pollster and political strategist, Frank Luntz].
But he has been spoon-fed its talking points and naively spits them back. Israel only wants peace.
Israel does not engage in torture.
Israel is not an apartheid state.
Israel gives Israeli Arabs political and civic rights they do not have in other parts of the Middle East.
Palestinians are not deliberately targeted by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF).
Israel respects civil liberties and gender and marriage rights. Israel has “the best judiciary in the world.”
Kennedy makes other claims, such as his bizarre statement that the Palestinian Authority pays Palestinians to kill Jews anywhere in the world along with falsifications of elemental Middle Eastern history, which are so absurd I will ignore them.
But I list below examples from the volumes of evidence that implode the Luntz-inspired talking points Kennedy repeats on behalf of the Israel lobby, not that any evidence can probably puncture his self-serving attachment to “Fantasy Israel.”
APARTHEID
The 2017 U.N. report: “Israeli Practices towards the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid” concludes that Israel has established an apartheid regime that dominates the Palestinian people as a whole.”
Since 1967, Palestinians as a people have lived in what the report refers to as four “domains,” in which the fragments of the Palestinian population are ostensibly treated differently but share in common the racial oppression that results from the apartheid regime.
Those domains are:
Civil law, with special restrictions, governing Palestinians who live as citizens of Israel; Permanent residency law governing Palestinians living in the city of Jerusalem; Military law governing Palestinians, including those in refugee camps, living since 1967 under conditions of belligerent occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip; Policy to preclude the return of Palestinians, whether refugees or exiles, living outside territory under Israel’s control.
On 19 July 2018, the Israeli Knesset voted “to approve the Jewish Nation-State Basic Law, constitutionally enshrining Jewish supremacy and the identity of the State of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people,” the Haifa-based civil liberties group Adalah explained.
It is the supreme law in Israel “capable of overriding any ordinary legislation.”
In 2021 Israeli human rights group B’Tselem published its report “A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea:
This is apartheid.” The report reads:
In the entire area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, the Israeli regime implements laws, practices and state violence designed to cement the supremacy of one group — Jews — over another — Palestinians.
A key method in pursuing this goal is engineering space differently for each group.
Jewish citizens live as though the entire area were a single space (excluding the Gaza Strip).
The Green Line means next to nothing for them: whether they live west of it, within Israel’s sovereign territory, or east of it, in settlements not formally annexed to Israel, is irrelevant to their rights or status.
Where Palestinians live, on the other hand, is crucial.
The Israeli regime has divided the area into several units that it defines and governs differently, according Palestinians different rights in each.
This division is relevant to Palestinians only…Israel accords Palestinians a different package of rights in every one of these units — all of which are inferior compared to the rights afforded to Jewish citizens.
“Since 1948,” the reports continues, “Israel has taken over 90% of land within its sovereign territory and built hundreds of Jewish communities, yet not one for Palestinians (with the exception of several communities built to concentrate the Bedouin population, after dispossessing them of most of their property rights),” the report reads.
“Since 1967, Israel has also enacted this policy in the Occupied Territories, dispossessing Palestinians of more than 2,000 km2 on various pretexts. In violation of international law, it has built over 280 settlements in the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) for more than 600,000 Jewish citizens.
It has devised a separate planning system for Palestinians, designated primarily to prevent construction and development, and has not established a single new Palestinian community.”
TARGETING CIVILIANS
Contrary to Kennedy’s claims that “the policy of the Israeli military is to always only attack military targets,” the deliberate targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure by the Israeli military, and other branches of the Israeli security apparatus, has been extensively documented by Israeli and international organizations.
The 2010 Goldstone report, which is over 500 pages, investigated Israel’s 22-day air and ground assault on Gaza that took place from Dec. 27, 2008, to Jan. 18, 2009.
The United Nations Human Rights Council and the European Parliament endorsed the report.
The Israeli attack killed 1,434 people, including 960 civilians, according to the Palestinian Center for Human Rights.
More than 6,000 homes were destroyed or damaged, leaving behind some $3 billion in destruction in one of the poorest areas on Earth.
Three Israeli civilians were killed by rockets fired into Israel during the assault.
[EDITOR’S NOTE: see the casualties for both sides here.]
Israeli soldiers arrest a young Palestinian boy in the West Bank city of Hebron, on June 20, 2014. (photo) The report’s key findings include that:
Numerous instances of Israeli lethal attacks on civilians and civilian objects were intentional, including with the aim of spreading terror, that Israeli forces used Palestinian civilians as human shields and that such tactics had no justifiable military objective.
Israeli forces engaged in the deliberate killing, torture and other inhuman treatment of civilians and deliberately caused extensive destruction of property, outside any military necessity, carried out wantonly and unlawfully.
Israel violated its duty to respect the right of Gaza’s population to an adequate standard of living, including access to adequate food, water and housing.
On 14 June of this year, B’Tselem reported that “Top Israeli officials” are “criminally liable for knowingly” ordering airstrikes which were “expected to harm civilians, including children, in the Gaza Strip.”
Palestinian children travel to an UNRWA school to seek shelter after evacuating their homes near the border in Gaza City on July 13, 2014.
Palestinian children travel to an UNRWA school to seek shelter after evacuating their homes near the border in Gaza City on July 13, 2014. (UN/Shareef Sarhan)
Contrary to the myth propagated by Kennedy, reports and investigations, both by the U.N. as well as by rights groups, domestic and international, routinely cover suspected or known violations by Palestinian militants when they investigate alleged war crimes.
As B’Tselem noted in the same 2019 report, in total, four Israelis were killed and 123 wounded.
Last month, the U.N.’s expert on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, Italian international lawyer and academic Francesca Albanese, presented her report to the U.N. Human Rights Council. It makes for very grim reading.
Deprivation of liberty has been a central element of Israel’s occupation since its inception.
Between 1967-2006 Israel has incarcerated over 800,000 Palestinians in the occupied territory.
Although spiking during Palestinian uprisings, incarceration has become a quotidian reality.
Over 100,000 Palestinians were detained during the First Intifada (1987-1993), 70,000 during the Second Intifada (2000-2006), and over 6,000 during the ‘Unity Intifada’ (2021).
Approximately 7,000 Palestinians, including 882 children, were arrested in 2022. Currently, almost 5,000 Palestinians, including 155 children, are detained by Israel, 1,014 of them without charge or trial.
TORTURE
Around 1,200 complaints “alleging violence in Shin Bet [The Israeli Security Agency] interrogations” were filed between 2001 and 2019, according to the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel.
“Zero indictments have been brought,” the committee reports. “This is yet another illustration of the complete systemic impunity enjoyed by the Shin Bet’s interrogators.”
Coercive methods include sexual harassment and humiliation, beatings, stress positions imposed for hours and interrogations that lasted as long as 19 hours as well as threats of violence against family members.
“They said they would kill my wife and children.
They said they would cancel my mother’s and sister’s permits for medical treatments,” one survivor said in 2016.
“I couldn’t sleep because even when I was in my cell, they would wake me up every 15 minutes… I couldn’t tell the difference between day and night… I still scream in my sleep,” another said in 2017.
The U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture, Nils Melzer, expressed “his utmost concern” after a December 2017 ruling by Israel’s Supreme Court exempting security agents from criminal investigation despite their undisputed use of coercive “pressure techniques” against a Palestinian detainee, Assad Abu Gosh. He called the ruling a “license to torture.”
Abu Gosh “was reportedly subjected to ill-treatment including beatings, being slammed against walls, having his body and fingers bent and tied into painful stress positions and sleep deprivation, as well as threats, verbal abuse, and humiliation. Medical examinations confirm that Mr. Abu Gosh suffers from various neurologic injuries resulting from the torture he suffered.”
CIVIL LIBERTIES
In the November 2022 elections in Israel, a far-right theocratic, nationalist and openly racist coalition took power.
Itamar Ben-Gvir, from the ultra-nationalist Otzma Yehudit, “Jewish Power,” party, is the Minister of National Security.
Otzma Yehudit is populated with former members of Rabbi Meir Kahane’s Kach party, which was banned from running for the Knesset in 1988 for espousing a “Nazi-like ideology” that included advocating the ethnic cleansing of all Palestinian citizens of Israel, as well as all Palestinians living under Israeli military occupation.
His appointment, along with that of other far-right ideologues, including Bezalel Smotrich, the Minister of Finance, effectively jettisons the old tropes liberal Zionists used to defend Israel — that it is the only democracy in the Middle East, that it seeks a peaceful settlement with the Palestinians in a two-state solution, that extremism and racism have no place in Israeli society and that Israel must impose draconian forms of control on the Palestinians to prevent terrorism.
The new coalition government is reportedly preparing legislation that would be used to disqualify almost all Palestinian/Arab Knesset members from serving in the Israeli parliament, as well as ban their parties from standing in elections.
The recent judicial “reforms” gut the independence and oversight of the Israeli courts.
The government has also proposed shutting down Kan, the public broadcasting network, although that has been amended to fixing its “flaws”.
Smotrich, who opposes LGBTQ rights and refers to himself as a “fascist homophobe,” said on Tuesday he would freeze all funds to Israel’s Palestinian communities and East Jerusalem.
Israel has promulgated a series of laws to curtail public freedoms, brand all forms of Palestinian resistance as terrorism, and label supporters of Palestinian rights, even if they are Jewish, as anti-Semites.
The amendment of one of Israel’s principle apartheid laws, the 2010 “Village Committees Law,” grants neighborhoods with up to 700 households the right to reject people from moving in to “preserve the fabric” of the community.
Israel has over 65 laws that are used to discriminate directly or indirectly against Palestinian citizens of Israel and those in the Occupied Territories.
Israel’s Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law prevents Palestinian citizens of Israel from marrying Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.
Interreligious marriage in Israel is also prohibited.
As explained by Jacob N. Simon, who served as the President of the Jewish Legal Society at the Michigan State University College of Law:
The combination of the blood line related requirements to be considered Jewish by the Orthodox Rabbinical Court and the restriction of marriage requiring religious ceremonies shows an intent to maintain race purity.
At its core, this is no different than the desire for pure blooded Aryans in Nazi Germany or pure blooded whites in the Jim Crow Southern United States.
Those who support these discriminatory laws and embrace Israeli apartheid are blinded by willful ignorance, racism or cynicism.
Their goal is to dehumanize Palestinians, champion an intolerant Jewish chauvinism and entice the naïve and the gullible into justifying the unjustifiable.
Kennedy, bereft of a moral compass and a belief system rooted in verifiable fact, has not only failed the Palestinians, he has failed us.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper.
He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor and NPR. He is the host of show “The Chris Hedges Report.”
Ahmed Al Mansuri, founder of Crossroads of Civilization private museum, passes by a painting presenting UAE and Israel friendship at an exhibition commemorating the Jewish Holocaust in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, Wednesday, May 26, 2021. Israel’s top diplomat to the United Arab Emirates attended a ceremony in Dubai on the grounds of the Arabian Peninsula’s first permanent exhibition to commemorate the Holocaust. Hours earlier, he’d attended an event establishing a joint venture between an Israeli and Emirati.
The UAE betrayed the world of Islam, the Arab world, regional countries and the Palestinian cause.
What the UAE government did is a stain of dishonor.
Of course, their policy will not work.
By Allah’s favor, it will not last long, but the stain will be forever marked on the foreheads of those who carried it out.
They committed an act of betrayal.
What they did was really bad as they helped the Zionists set foot in the region and they consigned the very important issue of Palestine – which is about usurping a country and rendering an entire people homeless: is this a minor crime? – to oblivion by normalizing relations with the Zionists.
The Palestinian nation, whether in Gaza or in the so-called occupied lands – of course, the entire Palestine is part of these occupied lands, but let us take the case of the lands that are conventionally referred to as occupied lands – is under strict pressures from all perspectives.
For example, the Zionists engage in building Jewish settlements and other such measures.
That is while the UAE rulers have reached an agreement with the Israelis and with malicious American Zionists who connive with the Israelis – such as the Jews in the Trump family.
They are unfortunately working against the interests of the world of Islam and they are treating regional issues with abject cruelty.
We should not help them, but the UAE rulers have helped this happen.
I hope that they wake up soon and make up for what they have done.
Last week, Emirati Minister of State, Sheikh Shakhbout Bin Nahyan Al Nahyan, visited Tunisia and met with President Kais Saied.
The head of Algeria’s National Construction Movement, Abdelkader Bengrina, has warned that the UAE is dragging Tunisia to normalize ties with Israel.
Bengrina, whose party is a member of the government coalition, said the UAE has always been behind “sowing discord and division in the region” including the differences between Qatar and Saudi Arabia, and the exacerbation of the crisis in Yemen.
Bengrina appealed to Algerian officials to remain vigilant after the “recent ill-fated Emirati visits to Tunisia”, in order to secure “imminent” normalization.
Last week, Emirati Minister of State, Sheikh Shakhbout Bin Nahyan Al Nahyan, visited Tunisia and met with President Kais Saied.
A few weeks ago, the Algerian El-Khabar newspaper, quoted “reliable” sources as saying that the “UAE is (also) exerting pressure on Mauritania to recognize Israel and normalize relations with it.”
According to the paper, the Mauritanian minister of defense recently visited Israel, travelling through Dubai, as part of a trip supervised by Emirati officials.
People’s Party Presidential candidate Cornel West criticized Robert Kennedy Jr. on Thursday while speaking about the Democratic presidential candidate’s stance on Israel and Palestine and said, “He needs to really get off the crack pipe.”
“You want a presidential candidate, and I think you just want this in any human being, to have backbone, to have integrity, to have consistency, not to check what you deeply believe after you’ve had some dialogue or discourse with a group of people or community that’s going to be shaping and molding how you perceive the world,” West said while speaking on the Bad Faith Pod.
“If he [Kennedy Jr.] thinks somehow that each [Palestinian] baby who was killed somehow was never in any way, intentional, deliberate, they didn’t know what they were doing…he needs to really get off the crack pipe.”
The comments by West come shortly after Kennedy Jr. (RFK Jr.) faced some criticism for expressing support for former Pink Floyd singer Roger Waters, who has widely expressed his distaste for Israel and shown support for Palestine.
Shortly after, Kennedy Jr. deleted his tweet and when asked about it he said, “I made the tweet applauding Roger Waters‘ courage in opposing the Covid mandates and the Ukraine war. I was unaware of his position on Israel. And when I learned that I immediately took it down.”
There is much in common between the Saudis and the zionists. Both are illegal regimes occupying holy lands. Their secret alliance has now been exposed. Muslims must take appropriate steps to confront this phenomenon.
Two illegitimate usurper regimes, one led by Zionists in the Holy Land and the other by Najdi Bedouins in the Arabian Peninsula, have been forced by rapidly changing developments to expose their long-maintained secret ties.
Not only Muslims but also many fair-minded non-Muslims recognize the illegitimacy of the Zionist pariah regime in the Holy Land.
The Saudis, however, have been able to conceal their true identity by claiming to be “defenders of the Haramayn,” the two holy cities of Makkah and Madinah.
If so, they have a strange way of claiming this on the one hand while being totally subservient to US imperialism and Zionist racism on the other.
It was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who several months ago mentioned the Zionist-Saudi alliance in the context of confronting Islamic Iran.
He had talked of the Arabian regimes but given Saudi Arabia’s size and importance, it was clear, he was talking about the regime in Riyadh.
Egypt, the other major player on the Arabian scene, had long embraced the Zionist regime publicly.
Two policy failures have forced the secret relationship between Riyadh and Tel Aviv to come out into the open: Saudi-Israeli policy in Syria and their policy of trying to isolate Islamic Iran in the region.
Both have unraveled as a result of developments beyond their control.
The Saudis in particular are not only furious at their longtime patron, the US, but also in panic because Washington has established contacts, however tenuous, with Islamic Iran.
Among a series of contacts between the Saudis and the Zionists, the latest was a brief encounter between Saudi Arabia’s former intelligence chief, Prince Turki al-Faisal and former Israeli ambassador to Washington (1992– 1996), Itamar Rabinovich, in Monaco in mid-December.
According to an Israeli radio report, Turki publicly shook hands with Rabinovich at the World Policy Conference.
Their contacts have progressed so far that Rabinovich took the unusual step of inviting Turki to deliver a speech before the Israeli parliament, the Knesset.
Turki reportedly declined the offer — what would he say to the Zionist occupiers of Palestine? — but the fact that the offer was made indicates their relations are deep and have been established for a long time.
The offer also shows the degree of trust they have in each other.
Rabinovich is an expert on Syria policy and clearly he was planning to engage the former Saudi spy master more deeply although the current Saudi intelligence chief, Bandar bin Sultan is more deeply involved with the Zionists.
Both regimes have been critical of US policy on Syria and Washington’s rapprochement with Tehran.
The Zionists have been blunt to the point of being obnoxious, as is their wont.
The Saudis have been more diplomatic with their American masters in public but no less vehement in their denunciation of America opening up to Tehran.
The Saudis sense a perceptible shift in US policy in the region.
President Barack Obama made this known when he announced a policy shift toward the Asia-Pacific region to confront the rising power of China.
The Saudis clearly see this as indication of their reduced importance to the US.
Further, Obama shocked the Saudis when he refused to launch a military strike against Syria last summer in what is now known as a carefully orchestrated plan by Bandar.
This was a personal slap in the face of Bandar and public humiliation of Saudi Arabia that was long believed to be America’s indispensable ally in the region.
Soon thereafter, Bandar announced that henceforth, the kingdom would go it alone in Syria without coordinating its policy with Washington.
The result has been the creation of what is called the “Islamic Front,” a grouping of six or seven different rebel factions that has taken on the Western-backed, Free Syrian Army (FSA).
According to several reports, the Saudi-backed and financed Islamic Front fighters have overrun FSA positions and taken over their weapon stockpiles from depots near the Turkish border.
The FSA chief Salim Idriss is also reportedly on the run.
The Saudis are determined to sabotage the Geneva II conference on Syria that is scheduled for January 22.
Saudi-backed groups are putting forward conditions for participation that would almost certainly wreck the chances of holding a conference.
The Syrian government has also said it will only attend if there are no pre-conditions.
This is what Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN and Arab League envoy had announced when the date of Geneva II was made public in November.
Syrian government forces have been making steady progress recently as rebel groups fight each other.
This has weakened them considerably.
Further, their barbaric practices have repelled most Syrians.
They do not want the Bashar al-Asad regime to be replaced by people indulging in beheadings and cannibalism.
Such behavior is no bar to the Saudis; they want al-Asad removed regardless of the price the Syrian people may have to pay.
Already millions of Syrians are refugees and the UN has asked for $6.5 billion in emergency aid otherwise these people will face virtual starvation.
Conditions in refugee camps whether in Lebanon or Jordan are appalling.
Recent snowstorms, unusual for the region, have added to the refugees’ woes.
The plight of refugees, however, is not something that bothers the Saudis.
Instead, they welcome it because it garners more sympathy for the Syrian people, which Saudi Arabia can blame on the Assad regime.
It is interesting to note that even US Secretary of State John Kerry has announced that he might meet Syrian rebel groups affiliated with al-Qaeda.
Did the US not invade Afghanistan to get rid of al-Qaeda or was that just a ruse to invade the mountainous but mineral-rich country?
The mastermind of the Saudi-Zionist alliance is Bandar.
During his long tenure as Saudi ambassador to Washington, he cultivated close links with the neocons, especially the Zionists.
His lavish parties were well known for booze and scantily clad women (one wonders what the Saudi ministry responsible for “enjoining good and preventing vice” would say about such conduct or is it permissible if one of the Saudi royals indulges in it?).
Soon after it became clear that the US would not attack Syria as the Saudis had hoped and planned for, Bandar went to the Jordanian port city of Aqaba to meet director of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency, Tamir Pardo.
The aim was to coordinate Saudi-Israeli policy on Syria and Iran.
This information was leaked by a source within the Saudi embassy in Amman, Jordan, indicating that within the Saudi ruling circles, there are strong differences.
It needs recalling that when the plot to stage the uprising in Syria was hatched in a Paris café in February 2011, Bandar attended it together with the US ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro and US Undersecretary of State Jeffrey Feltman.
Naturally a number of Syrian opposition figures were also involved.
Both Shapiro and Feltman are Zionists and staunchly pro-Israel.
The received wisdom at the time was that the Asad regime would collapse within a matter of months if not weeks.
Bandar has been making other moves as well, since the US refusal to attack Syria last August.
He reportedly met with French President Francois Hollande when he visited Tel Aviv to meet Netanyahu.
According to the Lebanese website, al-Hadath, Bandar proposed common policy on Iran’s nuclear policy to try and sabotage any deal with the US.
Further, Bandar proposed the strengthening of Saudi defences (read, the Saudis would purchase more weapons, this time from France).
This must have been music to Hollande’s ears since the French economy is struggling and any cash inflow would be welcome.
The Saudis’ open embrace of Zionists reflects their desperation. It should, however, alert all sincere Muslims to the true nature of this regime.
The question that Muslims must ask is, whether the two holy cities of Makkah and Madinah can be left in the hands of Zionist allied Saudis.
If Masjid al-Aqsa is under the direct occupation of the Zionists, Makkah and Madinah are under the indirect occupation of the Zionists since the Saudis are their close allies.
How long will Muslims tolerate this state of affairs to continue?
The Zionist movement needs war in order to exist, they need war in order to gain sympathy from the Jewish people.
Unfortunately this is so identical and so in pattern with what is going on there for seventy years and even before.
Unfortunately, what we are seeing in this decade is that Israeli Zionist movement needs attacks against them, in order to justify their war against the Palestinian people».
This is what Rabbi Dovid Feldman, the spokesman for Orthodox Jews against Zionism, also known as Neturei Karta International, told the Turkish news agency Anadolu.
His words do nothing but confirm a history of wars waged by Israel in Palestine under the aegis of Western Freemasonry which, with the Balfour Declaration, legitimized the planned settlements not so much by Jews of Israelite descent, resigned to the biblical diaspora, but by politicians of the Zionist Movement for the aims of a Great Israel.*
In an article published on the Foreign Ministry’s website, Maria Zakharova cited media reports suggesting that the organs of killed Ukrainian soldiers, such as hearts, kidneys and livers, have been appearing on some of the biggest marketplaces of the dark net, with prices starting at €5,000 ($5,500).
One dealer allegedly claimed that it takes 48-60 hours to receive any desired organ in a medical box, with deliveries limited to EU countries.
Zakharova noted that organs were also being traded offline, citing reports from June that representatives of a health ministry in a NATO country had struck a deal with some “private businessmen” who were assisted by Ukraine’s Health Ministry and Presidential Office to deliver a refrigerated train car full of human organs and body parts.
According to the spokeswoman, organ trafficking in Ukraine has boomed since the authorities in Kiev passed a number of laws that “drastically simplified the work of transplant specialists in the country.”
Specifically, Zakharova pointed to last year’s Law No. 5610, which exempted transplantation from value-added tax, and the December 2021 Law No. 5831, which removed the need to notarize the written consent or authenticate the signature of a living donor to give up their organs.
In an explanatory note attached to the 2021 bill, Ukrainian lawmakers explained the simplification of the country’s organ transplant regulations by the need to increase the efficiency of the transplantation system, in order to save more lives.
Additionally, Ukrainian law prohibits buying or selling human anatomical materials and bans the harvesting of organs from orphaned children, unidentified persons, or people who died in the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
Nevertheless, Zakharova claimed that according to experts, Ukrainian organ sellers are not able to specify the origin of biomaterial that they schedule for delivery.
It’s apparently believed that many of these organs are supplied by black-market transplant specialists, who illegally remove them from the bodies of dead soldiers and burn the unclaimed remains.
Zakharova claimed that such suspicions are backed by the high death rate and the large number of missing Ukrainian soldiers, as well the shortage of specialists and reagents for studying corpses in Ukraine.
“This allows these criminals to cover their tracks and send human organs and body parts to the western regions of Ukraine, where they are prepared to be sent abroad for transplants,” she said.
The greatest threat facing Israel is the democratic threat.
There is no greater danger to the regime in Israel than its turning into a democracy.
There is no society that opposes democracy like Israeli society.
There are plenty of regimes opposed to democracy, but not a free society.
In Israel the people, the sovereign, is opposed to democracy.
This is why the current struggle, which presumes to be about democracy, is a masquerade.
It is designed to maintain the pretense of democracy.
To most Israelis, real democracy is tantamount to “the destruction of Israel.”
They’re right. True democracy will bring an end to the Jewish supremacism they call Zionism, and an end to the state they call Jewish and democratic.
Therefore the threat of democracy is the existential threat, against which all Jewish Israelis unite: Should democracy be instituted for all the state’s residents, it will bring an end to the pretend democracy.
Therefore, the leaders of the protest make sure to steer clear of any true contact with democracy, lest the entire thing collapse like a house of cards.
It is not due to racism or hatred of Arabs that they don’t want Palestinian flags or protesters – they are good people, after all – but only due to the understanding that raising the question of apartheid will render their struggle ludicrous.
The mere mention of the idea of one democratic state, in which one person equals one vote and all are equal, evokes an instantaneous and hostile reaction among liberal and conservative Israelis alike: “What does that have to do with anything?” followed by “It’s never worked anywhere,” ending with “destruction of Israel.”
No less. There is no other country whose citizens view becoming a democracy as tantamount to destruction.
There is no other fight for democracy that utterly ignores the state’s tyranny in its own backyard.
As I write these words, early Wednesday morning, the protesters’ shouts in front of the Eretz Israel Museum thunder in the background, “Democracy, democracy.”
As legendary left-wing leader Moshe Sneh once famously put it, in notes for his own speech: “Raise your voice here, as the argument is weak.”
Raise your voices, comrades. Even if all your demands – as justified as any – are fully met, Israel will not become a democracy.
When democracy is shouted with pathos by hoarse throats, while a half hour drive away from the demonstration soldiers snatch civilians from their beds night after night with no judicial warrant; a town is under curfew because it fell victim to a pogrom; a thousand people are in prison without trial and rock-throwing teens are shot to death as a matter of course, the hypocrisy is impossible to stomach.
The most terrible articles of Justice Minister Yariv Levin’s plan are glorious monuments to democracy compared to the occupation regime.
Even if the Likud Central Committee were to choose all the Supreme Court Justices, one for each Likud voting district, that new court would be a beacon of world justice compared to the military tribunals.
And how can you ignore the military tribunals, when fighting for Israel’s justice system?
Are they not part of the justice system? Are they outsourcing? A foreign legion?
Are they not where many of Israel’s judges take their first steps?
Or shall we repeat the lies about an emergency situation and temporary state of things?
Keep protesting vigorously, do all you can to topple this bad government, but don’t utter the name of democracy in vain.
You aren’t fighting for democracy. You’re fighting for a better government in your view.
That’s important, it’s legitimate and it’s impressive. But had you been democrats, you would fight for a democratic state, which Israel isn’t – and which you aren’t.
You’re fighting against a horrible government, which must be fought because it is destroying the fabric of society with terrifying speed.
It is demolishing our good lives, our flourishing economy, science, culture, the justice system and also the most sophisticated military in the world.
Shame, shame, shame. It must be fought; and when you have time, fight for democracy.
The best-known Jewish family inside and outside the Jewish world are the Rothschilds, who separately and together have given thousands of millions of dollars for agricultural, industrial, medical, legislative, judicial, social welfare, educational and cultural causes in the various countries in which they live, with the State of Israel as their most common beneficiary in all of the above spheres.
Moreover, members of the Rothschild family have been consistently funding projects in Israel for more than 140 years, and continue to do so to this day.
When Edmond died in Paris in 1934, he left a legacy which included the reclamation of nearly 500,000 dunams of land and almost 30 settlements.
In 1954, his remains and those of his wife Adelheid were brought to rest at Ramat Hanadiv in Zikhron Ya’akov.
After Edmond’s death, his son James de Rothschild (1878-1957) presided over the affairs of PICA.
In his will of 1957, James instructed that PICA should transfer most of its land in Israel to the Jewish National Fund.
On December 31, 1958 PICA agreed to vest its right to land holdings in Syria and Lebanon in the State of Israel.
Edmond and James’ determination to continue to support Israeli institutions was carried out after their deaths by James’ widow, Dorothy (1895-1988), who founded Yad Hanadiv.
Jacob, 4th Lord Rothschild has followed the family’s charitable interests in Israel and is the chairman of Yad Hanadiv, the family foundation which gave the Knesset and the Supreme Court buildings to Israel.
GENEVA (18 March 2019) – Israel’s exploitation of natural resources in the Occupied Palestinian Territory for its own use is in direct violation of its legal responsibilities as an occupying power, says UN Special Rapporteur Michael Lynk.
“For nearly five million Palestinians living under occupation, the degradation of their water supply, the exploitation of their natural resources and the defacing of their environment, are symptomatic of the lack of any meaningful control they have over their daily lives,” Lynk said presenting a report to the Human Rights Council in Geneva.
“Israel’s policy of usurping Palestinian natural resources and disregarding the environment has robbed the Palestinians of vital assets, and means they simply cannot enjoy their right to development.
“Its approach to the natural resources of the Occupied Palestinian Territory has been to use them as a sovereign country would use its own assets, with vastly discriminatory consequences.”
It’s the resources, stupid.
The report, focusing on the impact of the occupation on the environment and natural resources, said people living under occupation should be able to enjoy the full panoply of human rights enshrined in international law, in order to protect their sovereignty over their natural wealth.
“However, Israeli practices in relation to water, extraction of other resources, and environmental protection, raise serious concerns.
“With the collapse of natural sources of drinking water in Gaza and the inability of Palestinians to access most of their water sources in the West Bank, water has become a potent symbol of the systematic violation of human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territory,” the Special Rapporteur said.
“As of 2017, more than 96% of Gaza’s coastal aquifer – the main source of water for residents of Gaza – has become unfit for human consumption.
The reasons include over-extraction because of Gaza’s extremely dense population, contamination with sewage and seawater, Israel’s 12-year old blockade, and asymmetrical wars which has left Gaza’s infrastructure severely crippled and with a near-constant electricity shortage.
The Rapporteur said natural and mineral wealth from the Dead Sea, which is partly within the occupied West Bank, were being extracted by Israel for its own benefit, while the Palestinians were denied any access to those resources.
“States are obligated to ensure that the enjoyment of human rights is not affected by environmental harm, and to adopt legal and institutional frameworks that protect against any environmental damage that interferes with the enjoyment of human rights,” Lynk said.
There are serious concerns about Israel’s practice of disposing of hazardous waste in so-called “sacrifice zones” in the West Bank.
The impact of Israel’s practices may be felt not only by Palestinians, but also by Israelis and others in the region, the Rapporteur said.
The report also questioned the ongoing use of excessive force by Israeli security forces against demonstrators in Gaza, and the near humanitarian catastrophe in the territory caused by the blockade.
Lynk also expressed fears about the fate of Palestinian families in East Jerusalem – nearly 200 of whom are at risk of forced eviction – and concern for human rights defenders facing increasing attacks on their credibility and pressure on funding.
“We must understand that these issues and violations block any visible path to Palestinian self-determination, and are instead leading to a darker future that heralds danger to both peoples,” he said.
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.”
Theresolution 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 narrowlymissed 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.
Abdul Aziz ibn Saud understood the utility of being a British puppet early on. By surrendering to the British, he secured vital support that brought the entire Arabian Peninsula under his family’s control.
Both Britain and the US encouraged Saudi Arabia and the UAE to take the lead when it comes to war with Yemen, after being burnt by the experience of Iraq and Afghanistan when it comes to direct intervention in the Middle East.
But after three years, and a brutal strategy of starving the civilian population in the country, British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt and US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo are now trying to rein the Crown Prince in, without detering him from continuing to spend billions on arms purchases from both countries.~2018
From trolls to TV, Riyadh is rewriting history to undermine the entire Palestinian struggle, softening up the Arab world for its pending normalization with Israel
“Liars, cheats and ungrateful.” That was the assessment of one of Saudi Arabia’s most senior royals, Bandar bin Sultan, on decades of Palestinian leaders.
It is also curiously close to the language employed for decades by Israel’s right-wing peace rejectionists.
Why would a Saudi royal who’s a former intelligence chief and ambassador to the United States, and once acclaimed as “the key figure in Middle Eastern diplomacy,” invest hours of his time in a tireless, televised attack on Palestinians past and present, not least when Riyadh’s official line is to accept normalization only when Israel agrees to “a sovereign Palestinian state with Jerusalem as capital,” in the recent words of another senior Saudi royal
The answer, of course, is to that Saudi Arabia is now the foremost protagonist of the ongoing regional normalization frenzy, and is engaged in an all-fronts media campaign to not only legitimize the UAE’s accords with Israel, but to embed a revisionist Mideast history in time for Riyadh to abandon decades of Arab consensus and establish relations itself with Israel.
The trigger for Bandar bin Sultan’s three-episode appearance on Saudi TV channel Al Arabiya, in which he unleashed this barrage of attacks, was what he framed as “shocking statements” from “the Palestinian leadership” in response to the UAE and Bahrain’s accords.
While premature normalization has evidently blindsided and frustrated Palestinian leaders, they have mostly conserved a cautious tone in their entirely reasonable criticism of a unilateral move that sacrificed core leverage for their rights.
During the Trump presidency, Saudi Arabia has been drawing closer to Israel, exposing a contradiction in its approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
King Salman and his government have periodically reiterated rhetorical support for the Palestinian cause and their continued adherence to the Arab Peace Initiative, most recently three weeks before Bandar’s interview.
Only two weeks before Bandar’s Al Arabiya broadside, his cousin, Prince Turki Bin Faisal, declared on the U.S. TV channel CNBC that his late father would have been “disappointed” by the normalization deals, and called Trump a “dishonest broker”; a month earlier, Turki attacked the Emirates for not having asked for a high enough price for their change in policy.
But at the same time, Crown Prince, Mohammed Bin Salman has commanded his vicious troll army to systematically praise Israel and bash Palestinians.
And the UAE has jumped into the trolling business, with its shills calling on loyal subjects to rat on online critics of normalization to the repressive UAE government.
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman smiles as he attends the Future Investment Initiative summit in Riyadh, Saudi ArabiaCredit: Amr Nabil,AP
Indeed, Bandar’s interview was quickly paraphrased on the UAE-based Sky News Arabic, presenting the same message discipline: “The UAE’s always supported Palestinians, but they don’t want to support themselves.”
But a Saudi prince of Bandar’s stature trolling Palestinians is a major escalation on MBS’s part.
Since Bandar’s interview aired, countless senior Saudi commentators and royals have flooded Twitter with praises for the interview as the beginning of a new era.
Bandar didn’t have a sudden change of heart.
He’s been a key advocate of normalization at least since 2007.
What changed, however, is that his rhetoric has gone far beyond promoting normalization to casting Palestinians as the new enemy of the Saudi people – instead of Israel.
The core message of Bandar’s interviews resembles the rhetoric of none other than Benjamin Netanyahu.
Consider his three conclusions: Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity; the Palestinians – rather than Israel – are the key cause of much of the disorder and conflict in the Arab world today; and Saudi Arabia have done everything possible to help Palestinians, but they don’t want to help themselves, so we should instead prioritize our own interests.
How does Bandar get there?
He unabashedly goes against the very official history that Saudi Arabia has always pushed, in order to reframe and rewrite history in a way more favorable to current Saudi policies.
His method is grey propaganda; mixing half-truths, decontextualized historical incidents and made up narratives.
A Palestinian vendor sits behind a counter with a photo of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Saddam Hussein, taken two years before Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. Jenin, December 14, 2003.Credit: AP
Bandar starts by fixating on two incidents whose inferences he reiterates throughout all three episodes.
The first incident is PLO chairman Yasser Arafat’s visit to Saddam Hussein during Iraq’s 1991 invasion of Kuwait; Bandar declares that Palestinians leaders “always bet on the losing side, and that comes at a price.”
Despite Abbas’ official apology to Kuwait in 2004, and the fact that Kuwait is now the Gulf’s most vocal opponent of unconditional normalization, that doesn’t stop Bandar from constantly invoking this incident to contrive an image of the treasonous, ungrateful Palestinians.
The second event Bandar centers is the intra-Palestinian division ever since Hamas’ hostile takeover in Gaza in 2007, only weeks after Saudi Arabia brokered a unity deal between both sides: “How can we speak in the name of all Palestine, and convince others to support our cause…when the Palestinians are divided amongst themselves?”
Saudi King Abdullah with President Mahmoud Abbas and Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal after the rival Palestinian factions signed a peace deal in Mecca, Feb 8, 2007. The agreement broke down soon after.Credit: REUTERS
Bandar cites this division repeatedly to portray Palestinians as inherently conspiratorial, so obsessed with stabbing each other in the back that their struggle is rendered hopeless.
He takes the Palestinian example as a warning to the Arab world writ large: “We [shouldn’t] allow [them]…to impose…their way of dealing with each other on us,” he concludes, stating that Gulf states must instead “pay attention to our [own] national security and interests.”
But Bandar ignores the fact that his close friend, the UAE-backed Palestinian dissident Mohammed Dahlan, ignited this intractable saga by organizing a U.S.-backed coup against Hamas that the militant group violently preempted.
He equally and consistently overlooks Israel’s role in this outcome, or in any of the incidents he invokes, including how Netanyahu has openly fueled this division to prevent Palestinian statehood.
Establishing this image of Palestinians as reckless losers, utterly disloyal to their Arab supporters, and inherently incapable of presenting a united front makes it easier for Bandar to go on to make the most bizarre claims.
He portrays Jordan’s 1970 Black September as an attempt by Arafat to “liberate not Palestine, but Jordan.”
But Bandar ignores President Nixon’s view of these events as “war by proxy,” and neglects the role of Iraq and Syria in fueling these bloody events, including Syria’s attempted invasion of Jordan.
Palestinians, in Bandar’s account, are the ubiquitous force wreaking havoc on the region.
He blames the Palestinians for jihadist terrorism in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.
He blames the Palestinians for trying to overthrow Jordan’s monarchy in 1970.
He blames the Palestinians for the Lebanese civil war.
He makes no mention of Israel’s provocations aimed at igniting and then intensifying war between Lebanese Christian Phalangists and the PLO, from car bombs to assassinations to facilitating the Sabra and Shatila massacre.
Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan at his palace in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. June 4, 2008.Credit: AP
With such methodological reductionism, oversimplification and deliberate inaccuracies, Bandar then aims to weave a meta-narrative of Saudi selflessness, generosity, and blind loyalty to the Palestinian cause, that’s only been repaid by blunders, lies and betrayal.
In Bandar’s account, Saudi Arabia has been the prime mover behind successive U.S. administrations, who have all generously embraced the Palestinian struggle and the pressing need to solve the conflict. But while Israel’s been amenable to peace proposals, it’s the Palestinians who’ve consistently squandered those golden opportunities.
To pick this apart with two examples: Bandar points the finger at Palestinian leaders who rejected King Fahd’s 1981 Peace Initiative. But he overlooks that Arafat had supported it, Egypt was absent from the summit, Syria preemptively rejected it and Israel called it “a plan to destroy us in stages,” hand, to show just how little it then regarded both the initiative and peace, subsequently invaded Lebanon in 1982.
Interestingly, Bandar makes no mention of the Saudi Peace Initiative of 2002, which Palestinians wholeheartedly support, and which is now the core of the ongoing dispute over premature normalization.
Bandar claims that in December 2000, Israel accepted the Clinton Peace Parameters which “could have changed the shape of the whole map,” but Arafat rejected them.
That both sides accepted the parameters with some reservations is already a well-documented fact. Bandar claims that the Palestinians were advised to wait until the next president, H.W. Bush, assumed office because he was likely to make a better offer.
U.S. President Donald Trump and senior advisor Jared Kushner meet with then-Saudi Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman at the Ritz Carlton Hotel, Riyadh. May 20, 2017.Credit: JONATHAN ERNST/ REUTERS
What he chose to omit is that it was the Saudis themselves who provided this advice, citing their close relations with the Bush family, according to a former senior PA adviser.
So what does Saudi Arabia want from its media theatrics pushing a comprehensively revisionist narrative of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?
First of all, to announce a new official line for Gulf states, if not the wider Arab and Muslim worlds. At the same time, to signal a threat to Palestinians: You’re on your own.
Mind your own business and don’t make trouble for us.
There’s a nod to Dahlan as the ideal “loyal, grateful” next leader for the Palestinians. And a warning to Sudan and other Arab countries to get on board, or be the next target for no-holds barred reckoning.
The Palestinians are now caught in a catch-22.
They don’t have their own international TV channels to push back against their own demonization, and they have depleted leverage to influence the Saudi giants.
They can’t afford to respond to deliberate Saudi provocation, and they don’t want to risk gratifying the online trolls thirsty for any retaliatory comments by Palestinian leaders that can be spun as yet more ingratitude and hostility.
That’s why, after the interview aired, Abbas ordered Fatah, PA and PLO leaders to keep quiet about Bandar’s remarks.
PLO secretary general, Saeb Erekat – whom Bandar referred to dismissively as a young “junior PLO employee” who almost blew up the Madrid conference by “wearing a Palestinian keffiyeh” – tweeted that “The Kingdom and [its kings] have always been loyal to Palestine and its people.”
If Arab regimes feel the need to convince Israel of the purity of their intentions then there is no need to sink this low.
To invest this enormous effort into turning Palestinians into the enemy shows that they want not only to abandon the conflict with Israel, but rather to cancel Palestinians altogether.
And it’s not just the Saudi people that they want to drag into this swamp, it’s the entire region.
The UAE-Saudi axis has moved on from throwing the Palestinians under the bus, to actually driving that bus over them. By doing so, they have realized Netanyahu’s dream, effectively doing the bidding of Israel’s hard right: They are erasing the Palestinian cause from the minds of the Arab public.
The disappearance of state anti-Semitism created a dilemma for the Zionist project.
If Zionism considers itself a response to anti-Semitic threats against Jews, with the end of state anti-Semitism Zionism’s raison d’être would be in jeopardy, as Jews would not be convinced of the need to move to the new state of Israel.
Moreover, as anti-Semitism came to be rejected by the post-World War II world, so was colonialism.
As the colonial age was ending and a post-colonial world of independent states was emerging, colonialism like anti-Semitism was thoroughly delegitimized in international relations and in European parlance.
This transformation placed Zionism in a quandary.
Zionism could only proceed with more colonization of Palestinian land, yet, recognizing the increasing hostility to colonialism, it began to present its colonial project as anti-colonial struggle.
As its British sponsors had to retreat and limit their support for the Zionist project since the beginning of World War II, right-wing Zionists turned against them.
Launching terrorist attacks against the British forces, the Jewish colonists were adamant that Britain had betrayed them.
In the period between 1944 and 1948 Jewish terrorism and the British response to it led to the killing of 44 Jewish terrorists and 170 British soldiers and civilians, a ratio of 4 to 1 in favor of the terrorists.
Unlike other anti-colonial struggles where the casualty figures would be astronomically in favor of the colonizers, Zionism would begin to call its terrorist war against Britain a “war of independence”, casting itself as anti-colonial movement.
Now that Zionists began to recode their colonial project as “anti-colonial” while proceeding with colonization, they understood that they could capitalize on the recent hostility to anti-Semitism in European public opinion. As the Palestinian people mounted their resistance to Jewish colonization year after year, and decade after decade, Zionism began to fight them by labelling them anti-Semites.
Indeed, it was then that any call for the end of Zionist colonization would be confronted with the argument of anti-Semitism.
Israel decided then that if state anti-Semitism did not exist, it must be conjured up, if attacks on Jews qua Jews did not exist, they must be engineered, if an anti-Semitic attitude could be discerned, it must be capitalized on, generalized and exaggerated.
For the only defence Israel could mount in the new world that was opposed to both colonialism and anti-Semitism was to use one in defense of the other.
Zionism would begin to rewrite the Palestinian struggle against Jewish colonization not as an anti-colonial struggle but as an anti-Semitic project.
The story of the Palestinian Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini would become Exhibit A in the Zionist version of Palestinian history.
Despairing from convincing Britain to stop its support of the Zionist colonial project and horrified by the Zionist-Nazi collaboration that strengthened the Zionist theft of Palestine further, the Palestinian elitist and conservative leader Haj Amin al-Husseini (who opposed the Palestinian peasant revolt of 1936 against Zionist colonization) sought relations with the Nazis to convince them to halt their support for Jewish immigration to Palestine, which they had promoted through the Transfer Agreement with the Zionists in 1933.
It was the very same Zionist collaborators with the Nazis who would later vilify al-Husseini, beginning in the 1950s to the present, as a Hitlerite of genocidal proportions, even though his limited role ended up being one of propagandizing on behalf of the Nazis to East European and Soviet Muslims on the radio.
Nonetheless, whenever the question of Jewish colonization was raised by the Palestinians, the Zionist response would be to insist invariably that Jewish colonization was the only way to end anti-Semitism and protect Jews, and that any and all opposition to Jewish colonization of Palestine was nothing short of a continuation of anti-Semitism.
Israel began to insist that any talk of colonization of Palestinian land was nothing short of a distraction from anti-Semitism targeting Jews.
In light of the new post-war period that saw the end of state-sponsored anti-Semitism, the Zionists set out to attack Jews in a number of countries and to conjure up the specter of anti-Semitism in countries that opposed Zionism.
In Iraq, the Israeli Mossad planted bombs in synagogues, libraries and cafes in the early 1950s, which killed and injured Iraqi Jews and spread panic amongst them that Iraqi Muslims and Christians were targeting them.
Collaboration ensued between Israel and the British-sponsored Iraqi regime to bring about the exodus of Iraqi Jews to Israel.
When Egyptian Jews still refused to go to Israel, the Mossad again placed bombs in Egyptian cinemas, train stations and post offices.
When the Egyptian authorities uncovered the terrorist operation, later made famous under the name the “Lavon Affair”, and its Jewish perpetrators were captured and tried, Israel launched a major propaganda campaign claiming that Nasser was “Hitler on the Nile”.
In the post-Stalin Soviet Union, which unlike its Stalinist predecessor, opposed Zionism, and where all Soviet citizens were not allowed to emigrate, a major Cold War Israeli and US propaganda campaign insisted that the Soviets were anti-Semites.
The Americans and the Israelis arranged to grant Soviet Jews special privileges over other Soviet citizens by forcing the Soviet government to grant them emigration visas.
Those Soviet Jews who left did so for economic reasons and as such went (to Israel’s chagrin) to the United States, a situation that forced Israel later to collaborate with the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu to reroute them to Israel forcibly.
Indeed, the Israelis would later try to introduce legislation in the US to prevent their emigration to the United States, which indeed would close off its borders to them after the USSR fell.
This would force many Soviet Jews (a majority of whom turned out to be Soviet non-Jews who pretended to be Jewish) to go to Israel as economic refugees in the 1990s.
The post-Soviet world
Israel and Zionism have been in deep mourning over the passing of actual anti-Semitic regimes and of regimes that they could cast in that role, as these regimes had provided them with so much propaganda power to justify their colonial project.
After the fall of the USSR, the Zionists ran out of arguments and of regimes they could label “anti-Semitic”.
In this new situation, Israeli propaganda would become outright hysterical.
Attempting to cast some of the anti-Zionist pronouncements of the Iranian President Ahmadinejad as genocidal anti-Semitism, Israel is hoping it could cover up its ongoing colonization of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
In case this did not work, the Israeli embassy in Dublin last week summoned the supernatural powers of Jesus Christ to help cover up Zionist colonialism.
In a Christmas Message to the Irish people on its official Facebook page, the embassy announced that the Palestinians would probably “lynch” Jesus and his mother Mary in Bethlehem today had they been alive as “Jews without security”, hence the need for Israel to continue to colonize Palestinian land while ensuring the security of its Jewish colonial settlers.
Indeed Binyamin Netanyahu argued in his UN speech last year that Palestinian resistance to Jewish colonial settlement in the West Bank and East Jerusalem is itself anti-Semitic.
He even compared Palestinian Authority laws criminalising collaboration with Jewish colonisation as akin to the Nuremberg Laws: “There are laws today in Ramallah that make the selling of land to Jews punishable by death. That’s racism.
And you know which laws this evokes.”
Netanyahu seems to have forgotten that it was the Zionists, not the Palestinians, who abetted the Nazis in 1935 when they supported the Nuremberg Laws.
Palestinians understood well these arguments and always insisted and insist that their struggle is against Jewish colonisation of their lands and not against Jews qua Jews.
When Khaled Meshal arrived in Gaza a couple of weeks ago and made a speech to that effect, he insisted: “We do not fight the Jews because they are Jews.
We fight the Zionist occupiers and aggressors. And we will fight anyone who tries to occupy our lands or attacks us.”
The British Observer mistranslated his speech as: “We don’t kill Jews because they are Jews.
We kill the Zionists because they are conquerors and we will continue to kill anyone who takes our land and our holy places.”
While the Observer would later run a correction after the tireless Ali Abunimah exposed the doctored quotes, its mistranslation was in line with Zionist propaganda.
Herzl’s strategy continues to be the strategy of Zionism and the State of Israel.
Whereas state-sponsored anti-Semitism has disappeared, Israel must create it and conjure it up, as this is its major line of defense against any and all international criticisms and censure of its ongoing colonization of Palestine.
While the four permanent members of the UN Security Council censured Israel last week for its plans to expand yet again its colonial settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the US will surely veto a possible UN Security Council resolution condemning these colonial activities.
Should this happen, we will immediately hear the Israeli and pro-Israeli chorus of condemnation of the international body as “anti-Semitic” yet again.
That this strategy has now run its course and no longer intimidates international actors has led to much panic in Zionist and Israeli circles.
Israel and Zionism now understand well that when the world, including the United States (excepting Barack Obama), hears “anti-Semitism” as an argument to defend Israel, they understand it as an Israeli diversionary tactic to distract the world from Israeli Jewish colonialism and colonial-settlements on Palestinian land.
Make no mistake about it, anti-Semitism in Israeli discourse is and has been nothing short of camouflage for the continuation of Jewish colonisation of Palestine.
FORTY-ONE YEARS AGO, I was in Lebanon leading a group of 10 U.S. relief and development directors hoping to introduce them to the extensive needs of impoverished Lebanese and Palestinian refugees.
On June 4, 1982, around 3:00 p.m., we were on our way to the crowded Fakhani district of Beirut when a fleet of Israeli warplanes (U.S.-made F-16s) roared in from the Mediterranean Sea, dropping bombs on the area we were about to visit.
We took cover in a hotel basement.
After the bombing subsided, I phoned our hosts, who proposed we meet them another day as they were busy searching for survivors from the bombing.
The next morning, we visited a Red Crescent hospital near the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps.
We were taken to a hospital wing that had been struck by the Israeli bombing the previous day. Suddenly air-raid sirens went off and we were rushed to the basement with the patients and hospital staff.
Again, Israeli F-16s were bombing the area.
About 20 minutes later a series of ambulances arrived at the hospital’s emergency entrance and unloaded stretchers carrying teenage girls—some having lost limbs and others enduring severe burns.
Hospital workers had just unloaded 19 body bags with girls who had died.
As the families of the teenagers began to arrive, learning that their loved ones had been lost, the cries and wailing of the mothers and sisters pierced our hearts.
Everyone in our group wept with them.
Later, we learned that the U.N. staff had provided the Israeli military with the route of the Palestinian girls’ field trip, but the military commanders chose to ignore the information, and the three clearly marked U.N. school buses were targeted on the coastal road.
Sickened by this savagery, I felt we had to tell this story to a U.S. media outlet.
We found the addresses and phone numbers of the CBS, ABC and CNN bureaus, but only NBC answered.
Mike Mallory, the NBC bureau chief, agreed to interview us. He warned us that all of their recent dispatches were cut by Israeli censors in the New York studios.
He conducted a 20-minute interview with our group, based on what we had witnessed. We learned later our interview was also rejected.
Our Lebanese and Palestinian hosts urged us to return quickly to the U.S. to tell what we had witnessed.
We left Beirut on Tuesday, June 8, and when I landed in Paris, I called my staff, asking them to arrange media interviews the next day.
One memorable interview was scheduled for Wednesday, June 9, with WMAQ, NBC-TV in Chicago.
Tim Weigel, normally a sportscaster, was assigned to the interview, and he called to confirm the time of the interview.
I was shocked when he said I would be interviewed in Grant Park while an Israeli general would be opposite me in the studio.
When I questioned the arrangement which privileged the Israeli general, I was told that one of the NBC staff had confirmed this arrangement with the Israeli Consulate. It could not be changed.
Israeli General Shromi had been touring the U.S. to offer Israel’s perspective on the invasion of Lebanon or what the Israelis called “Peace for the Galilee.”
He began the interview by stating that Israel was conducting a defensive war with “surgically precise bombings to root out PLO terrorist nests.”
I challenged his narrative, claiming Israel started the unprovoked war on June 4.
I noted that, according to the Red Cross, most of the casualties were civilians. I gave several examples of the casualties, including the hospital wing hit by Israel on June 4 and the tragic case of the school girls with 19 dead and several wounded on the morning of June 5.
The general was clearly upset by my remarks and then he said something that astounded me: “This is our final solution to the Palestinian problem.”
Having pursued extensive studies of the Nazi Holocaust, I communicated my shock: “I can’t believe what you just said, general.
Isn’t this ‘final solution’ language what the Nazis used concerning your people, the Jews?
You, sir, have just endorsed genocide, wiping out an entire people, innocent men, women and children.
If this is Israel’s plan, it is a war crime.”
The general tried to soften his statement, but I suggested that a proper response would be for him to apologize to the viewing audience and to the Palestinian and Lebanese people.
When I returned to the office, Tim Weigel called and said the NBC switchboard lit up with more angry calls and threats than they had ever experienced.
The news director said this was my last appearance on NBC-TV, which seemed a small price to pay for telling the truth.
RETURNING TO A MASSACRE
In mid-September, I returned to Beirut with the director and the board president of Mercy Corps International.
Over the summer we drafted three proposals for humanitarian relief and needed to confirm the projects with partner organizations, including the Middle East Council of Churches.
Arriving in Cyprus on Saturday evening on Sept. 18, we caught a taxi to the port of Larnaca for the overnight ferry to Lebanon.
Within 10 minutes, our driver turned his radio to the BBC news and we heard the first international broadcast of the massacre underway in Sabra and Shatila refugee camps.
Our driver delivered the obvious news to us—we weren’t going anywhere that evening. He recommended a hotel and we spent the evening monitoring the tense situation in Beirut.
By the next evening, the ferries were running again, and we were able to arrive in Beirut on Monday morning, Sept. 20.
After arriving at the office of the Middle East Council of Churches, our host, council director Gaby Habib urged us to drop our luggage and go directly to the refugee camps.
We entered Shatila Camp, walking past a seven-story apartment building filled with Israeli military personnel who were monitoring the movements in the camps.
The sun was bright, and temperatures were in the mid-90s with high humidity.
It was a surreal experience as families were returning to their destroyed homes, and workers were pulling bodies and body parts from the rubble.
A Red Crescent worker handed us handkerchiefs saturated in cheap cologne and told us to hold them over our noses as the stench of death would make us sick.
We decided to split up and meet again in an hour.
I walked toward a small group watching Red Crescent and Red Cross workers pull dead bodies from the rubble.
Within a few minutes, I saw them remove what looked like the leg of a child and place it in a body bag.
I assumed it was a mother who cried out to God when she learned it was her son.
The elderly gentleman beside me translated her cries of grief and invited me to walk over to his destroyed building, which was his home and shop.
Jamal began to share his story, noting he was out purchasing supplies for his shop on Thursday of the past week.
When he returned, all the entrances to Sabra and Shatila camps had been sealed off by the Israeli army.
He was able to stay with a relative two blocks away.
Phone services in the camps were cut and all he could do was watch what transpired from his cousin’s balcony.
On Friday, Lebanese militias began to pour into the camps and Jamal and his relatives could hear the gunshots echoing in the camps.
They assumed the worst.
On Friday evening, the Israeli army put up flares enabling the militias to continue their savage operations into the evening.
Tears streamed down his cheeks when Jamal said he had lost his wife and two daughters in the massacre as well as his home and small shop.
Fortunately, his son had been visiting a cousin in another part of the city, and now the two of them would need to start over again, having lost everything.
I thanked him and pressed $50 in his hand, wishing I could have given more.
Overcome by my emotional overload, I found a pile of dirt on which to sit and regain my composure.
The woman beside me was sobbing and I asked her if she was OK.
She was a journalist from Paris who had been covering the invasion all summer.
The massacre had been too much for her to bear.
She pointed to the mass grave we were sitting beside as workers carried body bags, dropping them at the bottom—the final resting place for the victims.
Then the journalist asked me the dreaded question.
“Where are you from?”
I hesitated but finally admitted, “I’m from the U.S. and my government is among those responsible for this tragedy since we guaranteed the security of these people.”
She quickly added, “Yes, and France also signed the security agreement.”
Just then a Muslim sheikh walked by and I excused myself, running to catch up with him.
I asked if I could have a few words, and he agreed.
He responded with perfect English, saying he was the sheikh at the mosque near Shatila Camp and had seen many of the massacre victims at Friday prayers.
I asked for his estimate of how many died in this massacre.
Shaking his head, he said, “We will never know.
On Friday evening, I saw militias line up men and boys against a wall and shoot them to death.
Their bodies were loaded onto trucks. We will never know where they were buried, but I would estimate between 2-3,000 were murdered here.”
Then he asked the dreaded question. “Where are you from, my friend?”
I was about to say Canada but admitted, “I’m from the United States, and the blood of these poor people is on our hands.”
His response surprised me. “Yes, the blood is on your hands, my friend.
But I thank God that you are here. All we ask is that you go home and tell of what you have seen. Just tell the truth of what you have seen—that’s all we ask.”
I was touched by his gracious spirit and readily responded. “Yes, I will return to the United States and tell this story.”
I’ve spent the better part of the last 40 years telling the story of the Palestinian people, but it will never be enough.
THE ZIONIST “FINAL SOLUTION” TODAY
The same as yesterday
There is one dimension of what I experienced in Beirut in 1982 that I failed to tell truthfully until I sat down last year to write my memoir, Glory to God in the Lowest: Journeys to an Unholy Land.
I failed to realize and articulate what now seems to be the obvious lesson from General Shromi and the brutal Sabra and Shatila massacre.
That lesson is the central narrative of the Zionist movement from its inception: the replacement of the Palestinians with Jewish settlers.
Achieving this goal necessitates genocide.
Today this goal is within reach with the present Israeli government.
Today we see members of Binyamin Netanyahu’s cabinet calling for “wiping out” entire Palestinian communities (Huwara) and militant settlers chanting, “We will replace you.”
Meanwhile, Western governments, led by the United States, refuse to hold Israel accountable for the murder of U.S. citizens (the 34 USS Libertycrewmen, the journalist Shireen Abu Akleh and the human rights activist Rachel Corrie are some of the many examples) let alone the daily murder of Palestinians by the army and militant settlers.
Gaza is bombed routinely with no accountability for those perpetrating the crimes.
The Nakba of 1948 continues daily in multiple forms, and the conditions are ripe for another massive Nakba, echoing General Shromi’s chilling words: “This is our final solution to the Palestinian problem.”
Today much has changed in relation to the Palestine question, while some challenges remain the same.
More of us are ready to criticize Zionism and utilize the analysis of settler colonialism.
More of us are convinced that Israel represents a vicious apartheid system “from the river to the sea.”
Some of us recognize the genocidal dimensions of the Zionist project now in power in Israel and no longer feel obliged to normalize or soften our critique.
We still have barely a hearing in the U.S. Congress, the majority of the Democratic Party, the president, or the mainstream media, but there are modest signs that change is underway.
A younger generation of Jews, Christians and Muslims is rising up in Palestine and globally, applying the above analysis and organizing a global grassroots movement grounded in justice.
They do not have the patience and timidity of my generation.
They have learned from our failures and will not make the same mistakes in abandoning the liberation for the Palestinian people.
They do not support an exclusivist Jewish state in any part of historic Palestine.
Nor will they be intimidated by false accusations of anti-Semitism, bullying, loss of employment and even death threats.
Some are religious, and many are secular, but this matters little.
They are committed to uniting across all lines of division and will not allow the divisive tactics of racism to thwart their quest for unity.
I know this generation understands both the urgency and utter crisis the sheikh in Sabra and Shatila expressed in the wake of the massacre: “Just tell the truth.”
The mask is off.
The impotence of the United Nations regarding Palestine has been exposed clearly by legal scholars and historians.
The future will not be easy, nor will Palestine be liberated soon.
The future is not with top-down political and military solutions.
The future is with a massive grassroots global movement for justice in Palestine.
A new day has already dawned, and the Zionist leadership knows they are losing credibility worldwide.
Everyone is needed to join the global grassroots alternative to the Zionist settler colonial project that will continue the daily genocide of Palestinians.
Today the momentum for injustice seems to be with Israel’s extremists, now controlling the government, and it will continue as long as the U.S. finances the extreme Zionist project.
The question for all of us is this: will the global movement for justice in Palestine have sufficient time to transform Palestine and Israel into a land of justice, respect for the rule of law, full equality and security for every citizen?
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.
Casting doubt on reports that the two teenage hookers, incriminating laptop, pile of Ukrainian-sourced cash, and spilled cocaine found yesterday at the White House has anything to do with Hunter Biden. Instead, they say, the story “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
While the letter’s signatories presented no evidence, they said their national security experience had made them “deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case” and cited several elements of the story that suggested the Kremlin’s hand at work.
“We suspect that Putin’s technicians may have built a Hunter Biden android that can snort cocaine, bang underage hookers, snag payoffs from Ukrainian oligarchs, and deliver bundles of cash to The Big Guy at the White House,” explained John Brennan, the letter’s lead signatory.
“Since the android would be indistinguishable from the real Hunter Biden, including the fingerprints, the fact that Hunter’s fingerprints have been found all over the cash, coke, and hookers, not to mention the laptop, just adds credence to our theory.”
Citing the intelligence officials’ letter, social media companies have banned discussion of the scandal, while the Department of Homeland Security has announced it will punish satirists who mention it, even in jest, by cutting off their intern.
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.
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.
Mirroring meticulous Chinese attention to protocol, they met at Villa 5 of the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse – exactly where Kissinger first met in person with Zhou Enlai in 1971, preparing Nixon’s 1972 visit to China.
The Mr. Kissinger Goes to Beijing saga was an “unofficial”, individual attempt to try to mend increasingly fractious Sino-American relations.
He was not representing the current American administration.
There’s the rub.
Everyone involved in geopolitics is aware of the legendary Kissinger formulation: To be the US’s enemy is dangerous, to be the US’s friend is fatal.
History abounds in examples, from Japan and South Korea to Germany, France and Ukraine.
As quite a few Chinese scholars privately argued, if reason is to be upheld, and “respecting the wisdom of this 100-years-old diplomat”, Xi and the Politburo should maintain the China-US relation as it is: “icy”.
After all, they reason, being the US’s enemy is dangerous but manageable for a Sovereign Civilizational State like China.
So Beijing should keep “the honorable and less perilous status” of being a US enemy.
Luttwak, 80, may not be as visibly influential as Kissinger, but as a behind the scenes strategist he’s been advising the Pentagon across the spectrum for over five decades.
His book on Byzantine Empire strategy, for instance, heavily drawing on top Italian and British sources, is a classic.
Luttwak, a master of deception, reveals precious nuggets in terms of contextualizing current Washington moves.
That starts with his assertion that the US – represented by the Biden combo – is itching to do a deal with Russia.
That explains why CIA head William Burns, actually a capable diplomat, called his counterpart, SVR head Sergey Naryshkin (Russian Foreign Intelligence) to sort of straighten things up “because you have something else to worry about which is more unlimited”.
What’s “unlimited”, depicted by Luttwak in a Spenglerian sweep, is Xi Jinping’s drive to “get ready for war”.
And if there’s a war, Luttwak claims that “of course” China would lose.
That dovetails with the supreme delusion of Straussian neocon psychos across the Beltway.
Same for Xi using a “very dangerous” concept, the “rejuvenation of the Chinese people”: that’s “Mussolini stuff”, says Luttwak. “There has to be a war to rejuvenate China”.
The “rejuvenation” concept – actually better translated as “revival” – has been resonating in China circles at least since the overthrow of the Qing dynasty in 1911.
It was not coined by Xi. Chinese scholars point out that if you see US troops arriving in Taiwan as “advisors”, you would probably make preparations to fight too.
But Luttwak is on a mission: “This is not America, Europe, Ukraine, Russia. This is about ‘the sole dictator’. There is no China. There is only Xi Jinping,” he insisted.
And Luttwak confirms the EU’s Josep “Garden vs. Jungle” Borrell and European Commission dominatrix Ursula von der Leyen fully support his vision.
Luttwak, in just a few words, actually gives away the whole game: “The Russian Federation, as it is, is not strong enough to contain China as much as we would wish”.
Hence the turn around by the Biden combo to “freeze” the conflict in the Donbass and change the subject.
After all, “if that [China] is the threat, you don’t want Russia to fall apart,” Luttwak reasons.
So much for Kissingerian “diplomacy.”
Let’s Declare a “Moral Victory” and Run Away
On Russia, the Kissinger vs. Luttwak confrontation reveals crucial cracks as the Empire faces an existential conflict it never did in the recent past.
The gradual, massive U-turn is already in progress – or at least the semblance of a U turn.
US mainstream media will be entirely behind the U turn.
And the naïve masses will follow.
Luttwak is already voicing their deepest agenda: the real war is on China, and China “will lose”.
At least some non-neocon players around the Biden combo – like Burns – seem to have understood the Empire’s massive strategic blunder of publicly committing to a Forever War, hybrid and otherwise, against Russia on behalf of Kiev.
This would mean, in principle, that Washington can’t just walk away like it did in Vietnam and Afghanistan.
Yet Hegemons do enjoy the privilege to walk away: after all they exercise sovereignty, not their vassals.
European vassals will be left to rot.
Imagine those Baltic chihuahuas declaring war on Russia-China all by themselves.
The off-ramp confirmed by Luttwak implies Washington declaring some sort of “moral victory” in Ukraine – which is already controlled by BlackRock anyway – and then moving the guns towards China.
Yet even that won’t be a cakewalk, because China and the about-to-expand BRICS+ are already attacking the Empire at its foundation: dollar hegemony.
Without it, the US itself will have to fund the war on China.
Chinese scholars, off the record, and exercising their millennia-old analytical sweep, observe this may be the last blunder the Empire ever made in its short history.
As one of them summarized it, “the empire has blundered itself to an existential war and, therefore, the last war of the empire.
When the end comes, the empire will lie as usual and declare victory, but everyone else will know the truth, especially the vassals.”
And that brings us to former national security adviser Zbigniew “Grand Chessboard” Brzezinski’s 180-degree turn shortly before he died, aligning him today with Kissinger, not Luttwak.
“The Grand Chessboard”, published in 1997, before the 9/11 era, argued that the US should rule over any peer competitor rising in Eurasia.
Brzezinski did not live to see the living incarnation of his ultimate nightmare: a Russia-China strategic partnership.
The crucial difference today, compared to seven years ago, is that the US is incapable, per Brzezinski, to “take the lead in realigning the global power architecture in such a way that the violence (…) can be contained without destroying the global order.”
It’s the Russia-China strategic partnership that is taking the lead – followed by the Global Majority – to contain and ultimately destroy the hegemonic “rules-based international order”.
As the indispensable Michael Hudson has summarized it, the ultimate question at this incandescent juncture is “whether economic gains and efficiency will determine world trade, patterns and investment, or whether the post-industrial US/NATO economies will choose to end up looking like the rapidly depopulating and de-industrializing post-Soviet Ukraine and Baltic states or England.”
So is the wet dream of a war on China going to change these geopolitical and geoeconomics imperatives? Give us a -Thucydides – break.
The real war is already on – but certainly not one identified by Kissinger, Brzezinski and much less Luttwak and assorted US neocons.
Michael Hudson, once again, summarized it: when it comes to the economy, the US and EU “strategic error of self-isolation from the rest of the world is so massive, so total, that its effects are the equivalent of a world war.”
