Pro-Turkish fighters killed in northwest Syria clashes: Monitor


A fighter with the Turkey-backed Faylaq al-Sham rebel faction in Syria shoots in the air during the funeral of 10 of the faction's fighters in the Idlib, Oct. 26, 2020. (AFP)


AFP
Published: 26 December ,2022

Eight Turkey-backed Syrian fighters were killed in clashes with regime troops that raged Monday in the country’s northwest, a rebel alliance said.

A statement from the Faylaq al-Sham group said six of its fighters were killed and three more wounded in an offensive launched by Syrian government forces backed by Kurdish fighters from Sunday night.

It later said two more fighters had been killed in the clashes in the Afrin region near the Turkish border, bringing the death toll to eight.

Faylaq al-Sham is an alliance of pro-Turkey rebel groups considered close to the Syrian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.

The fighting died down early Monday evening, an AFP correspondent said.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which has a wide network of sources on the ground, said the regime troops and Kurdish forces took control of two Faylaq al-Sham positions in intense fighting involving heavy weapons.

Exchanges of fire occur regularly between Syrian regime forces and pro-Turkish rebels who control part of the border.

Faylaq al-Sham has taken part in Turkish army offensives launched since 2016 in northern Syria, mainly against Kurdish fighters.

Monday’s fighting was unrelated to recent Turkish threats to launch a ground offensive in northern Syria, several sources told AFP.

France: Hundreds march in Paris in tribute to Kurds shot dead

The New Arab Staff & Agencies
26 December, 2022

The shooting at a Kurdish cultural centre and a nearby hairdressing salon on Friday sparked panic in Paris's bustling 10th district, home to numerous shops and restaurants and a large Kurdish population.

On Monday, several hundred people marched in the 10th district, chanting "Our martyrs do not die" in Kurdish [JULIEN DE ROSA/AFP/Getty]

Hundreds of people marched in Paris on Monday to pay tribute to three Kurds shot dead in France's capital last week as a judge weighed whether to charge the alleged shooter.

The suspect, a 69-year-old French man, has confessed to a "pathological" hatred for foreigners and spent nearly a day in a psychiatric facility before being returned to police custody on Sunday, authorities said.

The shooting at a Kurdish cultural centre and a nearby hairdressing salon on Friday sparked panic in the city's bustling 10th district, home to numerous shops and restaurants and a large Kurdish population.

Three others were wounded in the attack but none were in a life-threatening condition, with one out of hospital.

The violence has revived the trauma of three unresolved murders of Kurds in 2013 that many blame on Turkey.

Many in the Kurdish community have expressed anger at the French security services, saying they had done too little to prevent the shooting.

Hundreds of Syrian Kurds protest against Paris attack

The frustration boiled over on Saturday and furious demonstrators clashed with police in central Paris for a second day running after a tribute rally.

On Monday, several hundred people marched in the 10th district, chanting "Our martyrs do not die" in Kurdish and demanding "truth and justice".

"We decided to come as soon as we heard about Friday's terrorist attack," one young woman told AFP, declining to give her name for fear of reprisals.

"We are afraid of the Turkish community and secret services."

Small altars bearing candles, flowers and the photographs of the three victims who were fatally shot were put up on the pavement.

A procession headed to another street in the same neighbourhood where three activists from the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), an organisation Turkey and its Western allies deem terrorist, were killed in January 2013.

History of violence

The suspect – named as William M. by French media – is a gun enthusiast with a history of weapons offences who had been released on bail earlier this month.

The retired train driver was convicted for armed violence in 2016 by a court in Seine-Saint-Denis, but appealed.

A year later he was convicted for illegally possessing a firearm.

The suspect said he initially wanted to kill people in the northern Paris suburb of Seine-Saint-Denis, which has a large immigrant population.

But he changed his mind as few people were around and his clothing made it difficult for him to reload his weapon, the prosecutor said of the Friday shooting.

He then returned to his parents' house before deciding to go to the 10th district instead.

Last year, he was charged with racist violence after allegedly stabbing migrants and slashing their tents with a sword in a park in eastern Paris.

The Paris prosecutor said the suspect, described as "depressive" and "suicidal", admitted to investigators a long-held desire to kill migrants and foreigners since a burglary at his home in 2016.

The prosecutor said no links with an extremist ideology were found following a search of his parents' home, a computer and a smartphone.

The suspect said he acquired his weapon four years ago from a member of a shooting club, hid it at his parents' house and had never used it before.

Often described as the world's largest people without a state, the Kurds are a Muslim ethnic group spread across Syria, Turkey, Iraq and Iran.

US donors fund killers of Palestinian American grandfather

Michael F. Brown
The Electronic Intifada
15 December 2022

Netzah Yehuda Association CEO Yossi Levi, left, posted this

photo of himself with Israeli defense minister Benny Gantz in September. (via Twitter)

The Israeli army’s Netzah Yehuda battalion has “a track record of gross human rights abuses and war crimes, including extrajudicial killing, torture and physical abuse.”

That’s according to a new report from DAWN, a US-based human rights organization founded by Jamal Khashoggi, the journalist murdered and dismembered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018.

While the Israeli military as a whole is notorious for its crimes against Palestinians, Netzah Yehuda is attracting particular scrutiny.

Sometimes referred to as Nahal Haredi, Netzah Yehuda’s members are drawn from the Ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in Israel, particularly illegal West Bank settlements.

In what appears to be an effort to deflect attention from Netzah Yehuda, Israel is now moving the battalion out of the occupied West Bank. This follows its soldiers’ killing in January of Omar Assad, a Palestinian American great-grandfather.

The move had been underway for several weeks when Israel announced it officially on 29 November, the same day DAWN released its damning report.

By the end of 2022, soldiers with the battalion will relocate to the occupied Golan Heights, a move expected to last for approximately one year.
Attention from Washington

American pressure – however gentle – likely influenced the decision following Assad’s death.

DAWN urges the State Department to subject the battalion to “the Leahy Law vetting process and add it to the list of military units ineligible to receive US military assistance.” This would be an unprecedented move by the US against an Israeli military unit.

Named for Senator Patrick Leahy, the law prohibits the US government from funding units of a foreign country’s forces “where there is credible information implicating that unit in the commission of gross violations of human rights.”

Although Netzah Yehuda has just 500 soldiers, the battalion has the highest conviction rate of any Israeli military unit for offenses against Palestinians, according to Yesh Din, an Israeli human rights group.

That is in a context where only a tiny handful of soldiers accused of crimes against Palestinians are ever indicted or tried in what human rights defenders describe as a sham military justice system.

Nevertheless, 17 of the 83 soldiers convicted by Israeli military courts of various offenses against Palestinians since 2010 came from Netzah Yehuda.

The harrowing death of US citizen Omar Assad after he was stopped by Netzah Yehuda soldiers while on his way back to his house after a night visiting relatives in the West Bank village of Jiljilya meets the standard for applying Leahy Law sanctions, DAWN argues.

His case is just one among a pattern of abuses by Netzah Yehuda between 2015 and 2022, according to DAWN.

The group is also urging the International Criminal Court to “investigate the battalion and its commanders for their commission of war crimes as part of its ongoing investigation into the situation in Palestine.”

DAWN notes that “perpetrators were given minimal punishment or reprimand, while commanders escaped any command responsibility.”

In the case of Assad and two other extrajudicial killings, “the Israeli military did not impose any punitive consequences on any soldiers or commanders and instead promoted the commander at the time of [Assad’s] killing, Lt. Col. Mati Shevach, to the position of deputy commander of the Kfir Brigade.”

The battalion commander did receive a reprimand and the platoon commander and company commander were removed from their positions and barred from command roles for two years.

The notion that this constitutes anything close to justice would be impossible to stomach for Assad’s wife Nazmieh, the couple’s seven US-born adult children, 17 grandchildren, three great-grandchildren and their communities in Palestine and the United States.

Even though the US government has ignored the Assad family’s calls for a US investigation of Omar’s killing, Washington does seem to be leaning on Israeli officials slightly more than usual.

But Yossi Levi, CEO of the Netzah Yehuda Association – a charity that raises money for the battalion – claimed the timing of the move out of the West Bank was unrelated to recent developments and had been decided more than two years earlier.

Adam Shapiro, advocacy director for Israel-Palestine at DAWN, however, pushed back against Levi’s tweet, telling The Electronic Intifada that recent developments “suggest this is not coincidence.”

He cited Israel’s offer of compensation to the Assad family in October – which the family rejected – as well as the Israeli military’s announcement last month that it was considering charges against two soldiers in connection with Assad’s death – though those charges reportedly would not include manslaughter.

“While we cannot prove causality, the fact is that the State Department and embassy are asking questions in relation to Leahy Law vetting,” DAWN’s Shapiro said. “That has sent a message to the Israelis and the subsequent action should be seen as evidence that even cursory action by the US can indeed generate some behavior change by Israel.”

“The sad lesson is that the US usually doesn’t effectively use the tools it has,” Shapiro added.

“An independent militia”

The signs of subtle pressure from Washington include that US embassy officials have been compiling information about alleged abuses by Netzah Yehuda.

The embassy, however, has not responded to The Electronic Intifada’s requests for comment about its investigation.

But the fact that the State Department made the unusual request to the embassy in September to compile a report is clearly meant as a signal to Israel of Washington’s displeasure.

According to the Tel Aviv daily Haaretz, Netzah Yehuda “has become a kind of an independent militia that doesn’t obey the army’s rules.”

The newspaper, which has documented numerous abuses by the battalion, quoted an Israeli military official saying, “We very quickly realized that dissolving Netzah Yehuda would be a declaration of war for the settler leadership.”

“Their view on the ground is that this battalion belongs to them, that it’s a force that works for the settlement enterprise,” the military official added.

Of course that is true of all Israeli military units, but Israel likes to maintain the pretense that the army is in the West Bank for the purpose of “security” and “order,” not to help the settlers perpetrate outright land theft.

Raising “charitable” funds in the US

The US embassy also did not respond as to whether it would seek information about the role of Friends of Nahal Haredi, a US-registered tax-exempt organization that collects charitable contributions to benefit the battalion.

The organization is variously listed as operating out of Teaneck, New Jersey and Airmont, New York. Canadians are advised to donate via the Toronto-based Ne’eman Foundation.

Yossi Levi’s Netzah Yehuda Association invites supporters to make financial contributions via the Friends of Nahal Haredi website. This is a common arrangement that allows US-based donors to make tax-deductible contributions that benefit a foreign organization.

The Netzah Yehuda Association states that it supports unit members, “accompanying them throughout all stages of service: from enlistment, through active duty, to transitioning back to civilian life.”

Notably, Levi has warmly praised Bezalel Smotrich, a segregationist and promoter of ethnic cleansing, for helping the Netzah Yehuda Association.

Smotrich is being given a senior role in Benjamin Netanyahu’s incoming government and will effectively rule over Palestinians in the West Bank.

Smotrich’s hatred and incitement against Palestinians is so extreme that even Britain’s major Israel lobby groups felt the need to shun and condemn him when he visited the UK earlier this year.

Several other Israeli military units also receive support from the Netzah Yehuda Association.

“Material support” for war crimes

Friends of Nahal Haredi suggests a donation of $25 to buy personal care items such as a toothbrush and underwear for a soldier, and accompanies that request with an image of soldiers aiming their weapons.

Donors willing to give significantly larger amounts are told they can pay for the housing costs of two soldiers, “including quality beds, a private closet for each soldier, full equipment for the apartment, food every week.”

While there’s no mention that donations are used to buy weapons, donors would be directly supporting soldiers as they participate in a military occupation that deprives millions of Palestinians of their basic rights and sometimes their lives.

That hardly meets the “charitable” purpose that tax-exempt organizations are required to serve under US law.

Over the last decade, Friends of Nahal Haredi’s annual revenues have ranged from about $350,000 to over $1 million according to its public filings.

But the US-based organization does not openly declare on its tax forms that it is supporting soldiers who are members of an active military unit in an occupied territory.

On multiple filings it states rather more vaguely that the money it collects is primarily for “distribution to nonprofit organizations involved in rehabilitating young adults to receive an education, join the workforce, reunite them with their families and become productive citizens.”

As recently as last year, members of Congress called on the US Treasury to investigate the use of tax-exempt charitable funds raised by US-based organizations that finance Israel’s illegal settlements on occupied Palestinian land.

The lawmakers wrote that they were “seriously concerned” that allowing such organizations to fund illegal activities on occupied Palestinian territory “is in violation of the United States government’s international law obligations to not explicitly or implicitly recognize violations of international humanitarian law or peremptory norms.”

Exactly the same argument could be made about a US-based charity sending “material support” to an Israeli military unit engaged in human rights crimes in those same territories.

Friends of the IDF

Friends of Nahal Haredi is not the only US-based tax-exempt organization to spend tax-exempt charitable donations on Netzah Yehuda.

A Friends of the IDF event in August 2021 raised over $2 million for the battalion. The event was co-chaired by Friends of Nahal Haredi board member David Hager.

Hager works alongside Adam Milstein as a managing partner at Hager Pacific Properties.

A prominent player in pro-Israel advocacy, Milstein is a major donor to anti-Palestinian organizations, including – it has been reported by Al Jazeera – Canary Mission, a website that targets the reputations of US supporters of Palestinian rights in an effort to deter people from criticizing Israel.

Milstein attended a 2018 Friends of the IDF event that raised $1.4 million for Nahal Haredi and apparently personally contributed as well.

The Milstein Family Foundation has also supported Nahal Haredi.

Both David Hager and Adam Milstein have served prison time for tax evasion.

Both pleaded guilty to participating in an undertaking where they fraudulently claimed tax deductions for “charitable donations” to Orthodox Jewish groups in New York. In fact, 90 percent of those “donations” were given back to Hager and Milstein in the form of kickbacks.

Notably, before Hager was sentenced in 2009, sitting Israeli government ministers, the Israeli mayor of Jerusalem, a serving Israeli general, an Israeli soldier, and the chief rabbi of Israel all wrote to the federal judge in Los Angeles urging leniency. Ironically, so too did residents of illegal West Bank settlements.

As for Milstein, the Israeli consul-general in Los Angeles was among those who appealed for leniency on his behalf.

Praise for violence against Palestinians

On the fateful night of 12 January, Omar Assad was stopped by Netzah Yehuda soldiers while driving home in Jiljilya. The available evidence indicates he was bound by his hands, blindfolded and marched to a cold construction site where he was eventually left lying incapacitated on the ground.

Other Palestinians who were also being detained at the site called for help after the soldiers left, but it was too late. Omar Assad was dead.

A day earlier, Netzah Yehuda Association CEO Yossi Levi tweeted out a selfie of himself in military uniform as soldiers behind him aimed their assault rifles during an apparent training exercise. The accompanying caption in Hebrew reads: “Ready for battle!”

It is unclear whether any of the soldiers pictured were involved in the killing of Assad or whether they were even from the Netzah Yehuda battalion.

Levi posted the same photo to Facebook, identifying the soldiers as “reserve forces.”

Following Assad’s death, Levi has continued to post photos of soldiers brandishing weapons in Palestinian communities.

In October, Levi promoted an Israeli soldier as a possible “hero” after he exited his car in the West Bank Palestinian village of Huwwara and began firing an assault weapon indiscriminately after a rock was allegedly thrown towards his vehicle.

Levi has also blamed Al Jazeera correspondent Shireen Abu Akleh, killed in May by an Israeli sniper, for her own death and suggested her press work endangered the lives of Israeli soldiers who were invading the West Bank city of Jenin.

None of this is surprising given Levi’s response just six days after Omar Assad’s deadly encounter with the battalion.

“Cardiac arrest is murder?!” Levi tweeted dismissively.

Levi’s callous reaction is in tune with how Netzah Yehuda battalion members treated Assad with both brutality and indifference.

According to eyewitness accounts, when the soldiers discovered that Assad was unresponsive and possibly dead, they simply fled the scene, instead of providing first aid and calling for an ambulance.

Levi shares the violent, racist anti-Palestinian attitudes that are widespread among Israelis, including incoming ministers like Kahanist politician Itamar Ben-Gvir – the political partner of Bezalel Smotrich.

He has, for instance, expressed openness to stripping citizenship from Palestinian citizens of Israel, labeling them collectively potential “enemies” of the state

Lapid slaps the US

No one should be under the illusion however that support for the Israeli army’s violence against Palestinians is restricted to extremists like Levi.

After Israel’s killing in May of Al Jazeera correspondent Shireen Abu Akleh, the Biden administration urged Israel to review its rules of engagement – a minimal demand undoubtedly designed to deflect from calls for real accountability.

But Israel’s allegedly centrist Prime Minister Yair Lapid – now on his way out – would have none of it. “No one will dictate open-fire regulations to us when we are fighting for our lives,” Lapid shot back.

Lapid added that he would “not allow them to put an IDF soldier on trial who defended himself against fire from terrorists, just to receive a round of applause from the world.”

Yossi Levi was of course delighted with what he termed Lapid’s “very significant statement.”

Despite the Biden administration’s complicity in Israel’s attempted cover-up of Abu Akleh’s killing and lack of action to bring justice for the family of Omar Assad, there is a surprising amount of domestic pressure, including from Democrats in the House and Senate, for this to change.

Leading Democrats are of course still pushing to ensure that a minimum $3.8 billion in annual US “security aid” continues to flow to Israel, notwithstanding the even more open racism of Israel’s incoming government.

Justice and accountability for Palestinian victims of the US-backed Israeli army may still be a long way off, but the scrutiny Netzah Yehuda is receiving offers a little hope that Israel can no longer take for granted that its lies and excuses for wanton crimes will continue to be accepted at face value.

Michael F. Brown is an associate editor of The Electronic Intifada.

Europe’s dirty embrace of Israel’s occupation

David Cronin 

Rights and Accountability 

ELECTRONIC INTIFADA

23 December 2022

The EU strengthened its cooperation with Israel considerably while Benjamin Netanyahu was prime minister. Chine Nouvelle/SIPA

Does Benjamin Netanyahu’s imminent return as Israel’s prime minister fill the hearts of European Union representatives with dread?

It would be naive to think so.

Cappuccino-sipping sophisticates in Brussels would no doubt prefer if the new Israeli coalition did not include a gun-toting fascist like Itamar Ben-Gvir and if the prospect of formally annexing settlement blocs in the West Bank was removed from the agenda.

Yet the fact remains that Netanyahu was in power for most of the past 13 years. During that time, the EU actually took important steps to strengthen its cooperation with Israel.

The cooperation was stepped up in dirty and sneaky ways, even as newspaper headlines gave the impression that the EU and Israel were constantly at loggerheads.

Documents released following a freedom of information request show that delegations from Israel’s police visited Europol, the EU’s “crime-fighting” agency, on at least five occasions between 2017 and 2021.

At least two of those delegations were led by Roni Alsheikh, then Israel’s police commissioner.

Alsheikh headed a police force that sided openly with Jewish extremists intent on destroying Islamic holy sites in occupied East Jerusalem.

In tandem with Netanyahu, Alsheikh rushed to brand Palestinians killed by officers under his command as “terrorists.”

There is ample evidence that Alsheikh pursued a strategy of smearing the dead before their bodies had gone cold. When the police attacked Umm al-Hiran, a Palestinian community living inside Israel, and killed Yaqoub Abu al-Qiyan as he tried to drive out of that village in January 2017, Alsheikh lied by alleging that the victim had attacked the police.

His lies remained the official version of events, even when human rights monitors could prove that they were lies.

The EU rewarded him for his lies.

In 2018, Alsheikh signed a “working arrangement” with Europol. The “arrangement” allows the two sides to work together on war crimes and terrorism.
Frozen?

A further agreement on sharing personal data between Europol and Israel was clinched in September this year.

The Tel Aviv newspaper Haaretz recently reported that the EU told Israel in early December that it was “freezing” that deal.

The Haaretz story was exaggerated.

An official with the European Commission – the EU’s executive – told me that the deal reached in September had been concluded “provisionally” and at a “technical level.”

When the deal was subsequently discussed by the EU’s 27 governments, “concerns were raised” about a “territorial clause” in the agreement, according to the official, who requested anonymity. As a result, the European Commission “informed Israel that another negotiation round will be necessary to further clarify elements of the draft agreement,” the official added.

Contrary to what Haaretz claimed, this does not indicate the deal has been frozen. Rather, it suggests that some EU countries want a few words in it to be changed.

The deal clinched in September certainly should set alarm bells ringing.

It uses a euphemism when referring to the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, Gaza and the Golan Heights. They are described as “the geographic areas that came under the administration” of Israel after June 1967.

The deal would permit Israel to use data obtained from Europol in those “geographic areas” for a wide range of purposes. Such data may be used in the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan with Europol’s approval if it is deemed “necessary for the prevention, investigation, detection or prosecution of criminal offenses.”

While EU governments should indeed be objecting to such open-ended clauses, their “concerns” are patently inadequate.

Any form of cooperation with Israel’s police involves embracing an occupation.

The police force’s headquarters are located in East Jerusalem. If the EU was genuinely resolute in opposing Israel’s colonization of East Jerusalem, it would completely shun Israel’s police.

Far from shunning that force, the Brussels bureaucracy has categorized Israel as “a strategic partner country” on police cooperation.

Teaming up with Israel’s police does not appear to be the only way that the EU collaborates with forces occupying the West Bank and Gaza.

Since 2015, the EU has been holding “counter-terrorism dialogues” with Israel.

These discussions have been highly secretive but after making freedom of information requests, I have obtained some documents about them.

The documents – see below – show that the EU has been represented at a high level in these “dialogues.”

Among those who took part in such “dialogues” are Ilkka Salmi, the EU’s counter-terrorism coordinator, and his predecessor Gilles de Kerchove.

Laurent Muschel, a senior official in the European Commission, and Pawel Herczynski, an experienced Polish diplomat, have participated, too.

Depraved

The EU has refused to provide a list of Israel’s participants in these discussions or even say what authorities they work for.

Such discussions, according to the EU’s diplomatic service, “take place within a framework of absolute confidentiality.” Providing further details would “gravely damage the relations between the EU and Israel,” the diplomatic service added.

Significantly, the EU has not denied that Israel’s military and police are taking part in these discussions.

It is impossible to imagine that these forces are not involved in some way.

Almost all talk of “terrorism” in Israel relates to its relentless oppression of Palestinians. Every form of resistance – armed or otherwise – is regarded by Israel as “terrorism.”

Israel has gone so far as to accuse children and human rights groups of terrorism.

Privately, EU officials may consider some of Israel’s rhetoric as absurd. Yet by prioritizing the “counter-terrorism dialogues,” the EU is legitimizing the absurdity.

Itamar Ben-Gvir will soon become Israel’s national security minister. His portfolio gives him responsibility for overseeing Israel’s Border Police – part of the forces brutally occupying the West Bank.

The Brussels elite may well disapprove of Ben-Gvir’s crude anti-Palestinian racism.

No doubt, some members of that elite are aware that he was convicted by Israel’s court system of supporting a terrorist organization in 2007. Some are probably aware, too, that the aforementioned Ronnie Alsheikh regards Ben-Gvir’s policies as dangerous.

Nonetheless, the EU now faces the choice of whether it should hold “counter-terrorism dialogues” with an Israeli government featuring a minister with a conviction for supporting terrorism.

I asked the EU’s diplomatic service if the formation of a new government will have any impact on the “dialogues.”

“In the interest of protection of EU citizens and [the] fight against terrorism, the intention is to continue such dialogues,” the diplomatic service replied.

This response is depraved.

The EU is in effect saying that the safety of its own citizens depends on cooperation with a nuclear-armed apartheid state.

Pass the sick bucket now!

Palestinians warn of dangers of settler raids into al-Aqsa Mosque Palestinians warn of dangers of settler raids into al-Aqsa Mosque [26/December/2022] AL-QUDS December 26. 2022 (Saba) - Palestinian warnings continued on Monday of the dangers that threaten the blessed al-Aqsa Mosque as a result of the increasing settler raids. The website Palestine Online quoted al-Quds Center for Studies, in a statement, as saying: "The authorities of the Zionist enemy are trying to change the reality in al-Aqsa." The Center warned of the enemy's continuous attempts to impose new actions in al-Aqsa during the coming period. "The United States encourages the enemy to practice more crimes against the Palestinian people and their sanctities," said Ziyad Al-Hammouri, director of al-Quds Center. Al-Hammouri warned of the enemy's attempts to build the alleged temple on the ruins of the blessed al-Aqsa Mosque, pointing out that the occupation and extremist settler groups have established an entire city under the Old City of al-Quds. Over the course of a week, hundreds of settlers stormed al-Aqsa to celebrate the so-called Hebrew "Hanukah" holiday. It is noteworthy that since 2017, the "Temple Groups" have been seeking to develop their aggression during this holiday, so that they light the menorah at the Lions' Gate, and introduce the rituals of lighting it into al-Aqsa Mosque. Popular Front calls for response to crimes of Zionist enemy Popular Front calls for response to crimes of Zionist enemy [26/December/2022] GAZA December 26. 2022 (Saba) - The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine on Monday called for uniting efforts to respond to the crimes of the Zionist enemy in the occupied territories. The website Palestine Online quoted the front in a statement as saying "the escalating acts of resistance in the occupied West Bank are the most effective response to the settlers' ongoing crimes against our people, and the repeated storming of al-Aqsa Mosque." The Front praised the escalation of resistance in the occupied West Bank and in Nablus and Jenin in particular. The Front stressed the need to deter the crimes of the settlers, who are provided with full protection by the enemy army, which requires concerted efforts and raising the levels of field unity among the ranks of the resistance in the occupied West Bank to defend the Palestinian in the face of settler gangs. H.H

Jewish KKK comes to power in Israel


Ali Abunimah

From the Editors 

ELECTRONIC INFATADA

21 December 2022


What will it mean for Palestinians that Benjamin Netanyahu is about to return as Israel’s prime minister heading a far-right government?

Rania Khalek invited me on to her Breakthrough News show Dispatches to talk about this and other recent developments in the region. You can watch our conversation in the video above.

Netanyahu’s coalition will include Itamar Ben-Gvir, an anti-Palestinian racist who is considered extreme even by Israeli standards.

Ben-Gvir is notorious, among other things, for idolizing Baruch Goldstein, the American Jewish settler who massacred 29 Palestinian men and boys at the Ibrahimi mosque in Hebron in 1994.

Another senior minister is expected to be Bezalel Smotrich, a religious fanatic whose views are so reprehensible and embarrassing that even Britain’s reliably anti-Palestinian Israel lobby had to distance itself from and denounce him when he visited the UK earlier this year.

The head of America’s Union for Reform Judaism called Netanyahu’s naming of Ben-Gvir as public security minister akin to “appointing David Duke, one of the heads of the KKK, as attorney general.”

I told Khalek that such reactions are typical of the responses of both American and Israeli liberals. They mirror the response in the United States to the election of Donald Trump.

Among American mainstream liberals, Trump becoming president is seen as an intolerable injury to the soul of America that needs to be excised. Once a Democrat was voted back into the White House liberals could breathe a sigh of relief and feel proud to be an American again.

But US government abuses that happened before Trump was elected, continued while he was president and did not stop after he left office.

This includes the New Jim Crow – mass incarceration and systematic state violence against Black people – and an endless war machine that lurched from the 20-year disaster in Afghanistan almost immediately into a horrifying proxy war in Ukraine that threatens nuclear annihilation.

No more sugar coating

But from the perspective and experience of Palestinians, any change in an Israeli government is merely a change in the pair of hands holding the ax. It’s the same ax and it’s still going to come down on Palestinian necks no matter which executioner is now wielding it.

That’s why under the supposedly “centrist” coalition government led by Yair Lapid and Naftali Bennett, Israel this year killed more Palestinians in the occupied West Bank than any year since at least 2005.

That does not mean there are no differences between an Israeli “centrist” or “right-wing” government, but the difference is mostly about appearance.

Israeli Jewish leaders and voters no longer see a need to sugarcoat their colonial violence with progressive or liberal rhetoric as they did in past decades.

The institution of the kibbutz, for example, was key to this propaganda in the 1960s and 1970s.

Kibbutzes are Jewish colonial settlements that played a key part in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, but had a pseudo-socialist and collectivist flavoring that attracted naive or idealistic Western leftists.

Among them was EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, the nominally socialist Spanish politician who today conceives of Europe as a blissful “garden” surrounded by the wild “jungle.”

In the late 1960s, Borrell volunteered in a kibbutz founded by Polish Jewish colonists.

So too did Lars Faaborg-Andersen, a previous EU ambassador in Tel Aviv. In a love letter to Israel as he left his post in 2017, the Danish diplomat reflected fondly on the time he spent in one of these Zionist settlements in the 1970s.

“In those days, young Europeans and Americans flocked to Israel to take part in the socialist kibbutz experiment and show solidarity with David in his struggle for survival against the surrounding Arab Goliaths,” he faithfully regurgitating standard Israeli propaganda.

But with support from the United States, Europe and even America’s Arab client regimes assured no matter what it does, Israel’s Jewish leaders and voters no longer see much point in disguising the true character of their enterprise.

After all, the weapons, financial support and political rewards keep flowing to Tel Aviv no matter what crimes Israel commits against Palestinians. Israel feels free to reveal its true face, the face Palestinians have always seen, but the one the rest of the world is now being forced to wake up to.

Ultimately, however, Israel’s trajectory is not going to change because Yair Lapid or Benjamin Netanyahu is in office.

The Israeli settler-colonial project is heading towards its end. The idea of a stable and “normal” Israel that is sitting on the necks of Palestinians is a fantasy that can’t be fulfilled even if Israel succeeds for short periods of time in suppressing Palestinian resistance here or there.

As I told Khalek, this resistance will always re-emerge and take new forms until there is liberation and justice.

The future of Arab-Israeli normalization

We also spoke about how Netanyahu’s return is likely to impact the course of Israeli-Arab normalization.

Trump’s and Netanyahu’s key achievement was the so-called Abraham Accords, agreements that normalized diplomatic and economic ties between Israel on the one hand, and several Arab regimes on the other, notably the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco.

Saudi Arabia, the Gulf region’s heavyweight, never formally joined the accords, but none of these deals would have happened without Riyadh’s blessing.

It was always implicitly understood that Saudi-Israeli normalization was the big prize but that it would come last.

Geopolitical shifts in the year and a half that Netanyahu has been out of office may have changed the calculus however.

What would be the incentive for Saudi Arabia to normalize ties with Israel – a move that is deeply unpopular across the region, and almost certainly with the Saudi population itself, as the World Cup so amply demonstrated?

What it always boils down to is that embracing Israel is a way for any US client state to buy itself more American protection and support. The Saudis have depended on US protection since 1945 and this only intensified since the early 1990s, following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.

While this has not fundamentally changed, Riyadh appears to be looking for alternatives, perhaps worrying that the US is no longer such a reliable protector.

In the wake of the horrific 2018 murder and dismemberment of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Joe Biden was elected president after labeling the kingdom a “pariah.”

But Biden had to go to Riyadh cap in hand this summer, in the hopes that the Saudis would increase oil production and help bring down punishingly high gasoline prices ahead of November’s US midterm elections.

The Saudis, however, sent a relatively low-ranking official to receive Biden at the airport, and then rebuffed Biden’s pleas to increase oil quotas.
You can’t count on America

Contrast that with the grand welcome China’s President Xi Jinping received from the Saudis earlier this month, with CNN describing it as “pomp and circumstance normally reserved for the kingdom’s most strategic ally, the United States.”

Beijing and Riyadh signed a strategic partnership agreement that suggests the Saudis may attempting to realign away from total dependence on the US towards integration with a China-led Eurasian bloc that will provide it with better security in the long term.

All this is understandable from the Saudi perspective: Any regime that worries about its survival is also going to look at the US track record. If the rulers face a popular uprising or an external invasion, will the Americans save them?

Yes, the United States did liberate Kuwait after Iraq invaded and that was the high watermark of American unipolar power.

The 1991 Gulf War, which was supposed to exorcize the ghost of America’s defeat in Vietnam, was an exception.

Since then, the United States was unable to save Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak or the Tunisian dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.

Washington wasn’t even able to prop up the regime it installed in Afghanistan.

Instead, the US departure from Kabul in August 2021 drew comparisons to its chaotic and humiliating withdrawal from Saigon in 1975.

And after sponsoring a coup in Kiev in 2014, Washington has used Ukraine as a pawn against Russia – despite consistent warnings that this strategy was likely to cross all of Moscow’s red lines.

When Russia invaded Ukraine in February, the US chose escalation instead of negotiation, but it has promised Ukraine military backing that it cannot deliver.

What American leaders hoped would be a war to bleed Russia has instead turned out to be a catastrophe for Ukraine, but also economically speaking for Europe, which is suffering more from the sanctions imposed on Moscow than Russia is.
Saudi realignment?

With this in mind, it will be interesting to see if the Saudis pursue normalization with Israel with the same enthusiasm as before, or if they put it on pause.

After all, one of the main US, Israeli and Saudi common interests was forming an alliance against Iran. But the Saudis no longer appear to be playing along, causing alarm in Washington that Tehran and Riyadh are joining forces in support of Russia.

“Several factors are driving Riyadh and Tehran, but the biggest motivation is to strengthen their own hands against the United States in an increasingly multipolar world order,” according to two pro-Washington think tankers.

If Saudi Arabia slows it down, that could leave the UAE and other smaller players who embraced Israel with a nod and a wink that the Saudis would follow high and dry.

Ali Abunimah's blog

Lawmakers brace for legislation marathon as Ben-Gvir bill advances in Knesset

Lapid blasts incoming 'government of madness' for 'ransacking public coffers and democratic values'; Netanyahu accuses him of refusing to accept election results

Sivan Hilaie|Yesterday | Ynetnews 

A bill that will grant far-right firebrand and future national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir more control over Israel's law enforcement agencies was cleared on Monday for second and third readings in the Knesset plenum as lawmakers from both sides of the aisle are bracing for a long, sleepless night of filibustering in the Israeli parliament.

The Knesset select committee in charge of examining revisions to the Police Ordinance intended to delegate authorities from the police commissioner to the national security minister signed off on the bill Monday afternoon, and now the incoming right-wing coalition is hoping to complete the second reading that same day before sending the bill to a third and final reading on Thursday.


The Knesset Plenum
(Photo: Shalev Shalom)
However, their parliamentary rivals are planning to filibuster the vote, which is expected to run well into the night, hoping to defeat the bill.
The proposed bill will reshape the balance of power between the police and the political echelon, making Ben-Gvir the de-facto police chief while also granting him authority over Border Police’s operations in the West Bank which have hitherto been presided over by the army.


Itamar Ben-Gvir and Police Commissioner Kobi Shabtai
(Photo: Yariv Katz)

Prime Minister Yair Lapid slammed the future coalition, which is set to be the most hardline in Israel's history, during a faction meeting of his Yesh Atid party, calling it a "government of madness".

"What we saw in recent days was not coalition negotiations, but rather a ransacking of the public coffers and democratic values. A ransacking that humiliates us in front of the whole world," he said.

"This is not a full-on right-wing government, this is a full-on government of madness."
Lapid further warned that there are power-hungry far-right elements within the budding government that will go on to implement more radical reforms.

"They aren't going all of a sudden fall in love with democracy. They won't see the light and reach the conclusion that they believe in the liberal values of the Declaration of Independence," he said sarcastically. "They won't get up one morning and register that Judaism belongs to everyone."


Benjamin Netanyahu
(Photo: Moti Kimchi)

In response, Prime Minister-designate Benjamin Netanyahu lampooned Lapid and accused him of refusing to accept the results of the Nov. 1 elections, in which the Likud leader's conservative-religious bloc secured a comfortable 64-seat majority in the 120-strong Knesset.

"Losing an election is not the end of democracy, it is the essence of democracy. You refuse to accept the choice of the people and incite the public against its own choice. You are disseminating endless lies against the elected government," Netanyahu said in a video posted to social media.

"What's next for you, sending protesters to scale the Knesset's fences?" he added, evoking the January 2021 storming of the U.S. Capitol by supporters of then-president Donald Trump who refused to concede his election loss.

"I'm urging you to act responsibly, accept the people's choice and transfer power peacefully so that we can fix everything you destroyed in the last year and a half."

Harvard professor says every device that relies on lithium battery is powered by slavery

There is no such thing as ‘clean cobalt’, says modern slavery activist Siddharth Kara.

26 December, 2022

Siddharth Kara

By: Pramod Thomas

Harvard visiting professor and modern slavery activist Siddarth Kara has said that almost every lithium battery-powered tech device is powered by slavery in cobalt mines in the Congo.

Kara, who wrote Cobalt Red: How The Blood of The Congo Powers Our Lives, told podcast host Joe Rogan that there is no ‘clean cobalt’, a term which describes ethically mined cobalt.

The activist exposed the ‘illegal’ cobalt mining industry in the Congo in the recent episode of The Joe Rogan Experience which went viral and has already garnered over one million views.

To prove his statements, the Harvard professor shared videos he took from mines in the Congo, which showed thousands of miners digging by hand.

“We can’t function on a day-to-day basis without cobalt, and three-fourths of the supply is coming out of the Congo. And it’s being mined in appalling, heart-wrenching, dangerous conditions,” Kara, an adjunct lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and a visiting scientist at the Harvard School of Public Health, is reported to have said.

“By and large, the world doesn’t know what’s happening…I don’t think people are aware of how horrible it is.”

He revealed that child labor and slavery are rampant in these mines which are mainly controlled by the Chinese.

Last year, in an op-ed for CNN, he explained that a child told him he used his hands to dig for heterogenite, the primary source of cobalt. The kid then sells it to ‘buying houses’ run by ‘Chinese agents.’

According to Kara, those agents sell it to firms abroad thus a child labourer’s product enters the formal supply chain.

“Before anyone knew what was happening, [the] Chinese government [and] Chinese mining companies took control of almost all the big mines and the local population has been displaced,” said Kara, who is also a researcher, screenwriter, and activist on modern slavery.

“They dig in absolutely subhuman, gut-wrenching conditions for a dollar a day, feeding cobalt up the supply chain into all the phones, all the tablets, and especially electric cars.”

According to Kara, Cobalt is used in lithium-ion batteries to maximize charge and stability. He added that the Congo is sitting on more cobalt than the rest of the world combined.

“Before anyone knew what was happening, [the] Chinese government [and] Chinese mining companies took control of almost all the big mines and the local population has been displaced,” Kara told the podcast.

He pointed out that the pandemic has made matters worse for the country as ‘legal mines’ remained closed which paved the way for aggressive ‘illegal’ cobalt mining.

Kara has traveled to more than fifty countries to document the cases of several thousand slaves of all kinds in the past two decades. He has mapped global human trafficking networks, explored the perilous underground of trafficked sex slaves, and traced global supply chains of numerous commodities tainted by slavery and child labor. Kara advises several UN agencies and numerous governments on anti-slavery policy and law.

Previously, Kara was an investment banker at Merrill Lynch, then ran his own finance and M&A consulting firm.

US firms like Tesla and Apple have already committed to take action against slavery and violations of human rights in the cobalt supply chain.

Despite the Congo’s well-known problems with child labour, the Biden administration recently reached an agreement with the country and Zambia to strengthen the green energy supply chain.

GERMANY

If COVID is now endemic, it’s time to discuss permanent changes to the way we behave – like wear-a-mask zones on long distance trains

Jon Worth Euroblog

26.12.2022

 in Transport

Christian Drosten has today stated that the COVID pandemic is over, and the virus is now endemic. That has led, rather predictably, to the demand that all Corona protection measures be lifted in Germany – FDP Justice Minister Buschmann was the swiftest to make this demand today.

But that COVID is now endemic does not mean the virus has gone away, and cannot simply mean a return to the old normal. That does also then not mean that all measures should be dropped, and might indeed mean we need to think longer term about changes to how we behave and the quality of the air we breathe.

Most importantly the danger of COVID to an individual that has an underlying condition – is immune suppressed for example – has not disappeared. Removal of all measures poses a very real threat to people who have, for example, recovered from cancer, or have been struggling to recover from long COVID and cannot afford to risk an infection again. And when humans come together in enclosed spaces – like in a train for example – there is a limit to what an individual can do to protect only themselves if those around them are not taking any measures. The CO2 parts per million reading shown here was taken on a train in Poland this summer – and had there been a super spreader in that carriage we’d all have possibly fallen ill.

So here is a proposal for a way forward: wear-a-mask zones in public transport, especially long distance trains.

We have all sorts of zones in trains already – quiet zones, family zones, areas you can speak on your phone. Why not add a wear-a-mask zone? Anyone who themselves is vulnerable would choose to sit there. And anyone who is responsible towards others, and is willing to make a small contribution to everyone feeling safe, would mask up and sit there too. I’m personally not high risk, but I am keen enough to not get COVID again that I would happily put on a FFP2 mask and sit in the wear-a-mask zone. And then passengers who want to behave however they wish without a mask can choose to sit somewhere else. And given there are doors between carriages, that is enough of a barrier between the zones. Those who still take the COVID risk seriously can protect themselves, and those who instead strive for a return to normality can do so – without causing danger to the vulnerable.

I am not sure whether this policy would really work in other public transport – in planes or long distance buses would it make sense to have wear-a-mask rows perhaps? That might offer a little protection if the person right next to you happened to be infected? And perhaps some wear-a-mask sitting areas on ferries. But I cannot see how to apply it in metros, trams or city buses – but there at least journeys should be shorter. But at the very least in long distance trains – given the reasonably simple implementation – it ought to be worth doing.