Statement of Solidarity with Israel/Palestine

by Tikkun / October 16th, 2023

We are outraged by, mourn deeply, and unequivocally condemn the horrific actions of Hamas. According to Israeli sources, more than 1,200 people were killed and 2,900 injured, most of whom were civilians, and over 100 individuals (including children, women, and the elderly) were taken as hostages into Gaza.

Tikkun magazine and Beyt Tikkun: A Synagogue without Walls partnered with others to write a joint statement that we hope can help us rise above divisiveness and division and call us to our highest selves.

What follows is our joint statement. We invite everyone who agrees with our statement to add your name. You can read the statement below and add your name by clicking here.

Solidarity with Israel/Palestine

This statement is written and signed by Palestinians, Jews, and others who are committed to holding complex truths and striving to overcome polarization. We feel the pain of our people, identify with their pain, and need to work together to uplift our shared humanity.

The unfolding horror in Israel and Gaza is an escalation of decades of state-sanctioned violence by Israel against Palestinians. We condemn the horrific actions of Hamas against Israeli civilians. We likewise condemn Israel’s unbridled bombing and cutting off access to all basic needs, including food, water, electricity, and medical care. Attacks on Palestinian and Israeli civilians are repugnant.

Israeli violence against Palestinians has been intentionally hidden, slow, and steady. Contrary to what the media is reporting, this attack was not unprovoked. The Israeli and American governments have worked together to suppress and deny the inhumane acts against Palestinians that have led to this moment. There are Palestinians and Jews who have been raising red flags and warning about this inevitable outcome for decades, only to be dismissed and ignored.

The world’s failure to challenge Israel’s ongoing occupation, apartheid, and unbridled violence by settlers and soldiers in the West Bank provides the context for what is happening now. The recent Israeli government’s escalation of violence, encroachment of Al Aqsa Mosque, and its 16-year siege of Gaza has led to the current explosion.

We repeat: the brutality of Hamas’ attack on Israeli civilians is unjustified.

As we watch the violent attacks and rallying of xenophobia on both sides, we are brokenhearted. Although it feels like a time to stand with “our people,” we know this is a time to come together. This is a time of great suffering for all; a time of painful emotions. It is only by recognizing our shared fears and our shared tears that we will find our way through this nightmare. It is a struggle we need to undertake jointly.

When we fall back into our separate and distinct identities we risk becoming part of the problem, not the solution. Both peoples suffer from ongoing trauma. We are all on high alert. The fear is palpable. And it is easy for us to objectify the ‘other.’

We seek a third path that neither perpetuates a xenophobic response nor sustains an unjust status quo. This moment calls us to slow down, sit with the pain and complexity, and grapple with our discomfort. It is a moment for digging deep, seeing across differences, and remembering our deep yearning for peace and justice. It is only through compassion and empathy that we will find a different way.

We recognize and uplift the humanity of all peoples in Israel/Palestine.

We call for an immediate ceasefire from Hamas and Israel.

We demand that basic needs be provided to Gazans.

We demand that the United States provide only humanitarian support to Israel and Gaza.

We support the creation of a movement that recognizes and affirms the humanity, dignity, and desire of both peoples to live in peace through reconciliation and justice.

Tikkun is a prophetic voice for peace, love, environmental sanity, social transformation, and unabashedly utopian aspirations for the world that can be. We speak to, and hear from, people from all communities, all races, all religions, all ethnicities, and all ages. Read other articles by Tikkun, or visit Tikkun's website.

 

The Geopolitics of Al-Aqsa Flood

by Pepe Escobar / October 16th, 2023

Photo Credit: The Cradle

Hamas’ Operation Al-Aqsa Flood was meticulously planned. The launch date was conditioned by two triggering factors.

First was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu flaunting his ‘New Middle East’ map at the UN General Assembly in September, in which he completely erased Palestine and made a mockery of every single UN resolution on the subject.

Second are the serial provocations at the holy Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, including the straw that broke the camel’s back: two days before Al-Aqsa Flood, on 5 October, at least 800 Israeli settlers launched an assault around the mosque, beating pilgrims, destroying Palestinian shops, all under the observation of Israeli security forces.

Everyone with a functioning brain knows Al-Aqsa is a definitive red line, not just for Palestinians, but for the entire Arab and Muslim worlds.

It gets worse. The Israelis have now invoked the rhetoric of a “Pearl Harbor.” This is as threatening as it gets. The original Pearl Harbor was the American excuse to enter a world war and nuke Japan, and this “Pearl Harbor” may be Tel Aviv’s justification to launch a Gaza genocide.

Sections of the west applauding the upcoming ethnic cleansing – including Zionists posing as “analysts” saying out loud that the “population transfers” that began in 1948 “must be completed” – believe that with massive weaponry and massive media coverage, they can turn things around in short shrift, annihilate the Palestinian resistance, and leave Hamas allies like Hezbollah and Iran weakened.

Their Ukraine Project has sputtered, leaving not just egg on powerful faces, but entire European economies in ruin. Yet as one door closes, another one opens: Jump from ally Ukraine to ally Israel, and hone your sights on adversary Iran instead of adversary Russia.

There are other good reasons to go all guns blazing. A peaceful West Asia means Syria reconstruction – in which China is now officially involved; active redevelopment for Iraq and Lebanon; Iran and Saudi Arabia as part of BRICS 11; the Russia-China strategic partnership fully respected and interacting with all regional players, including key US allies in the Persian Gulf.

Incompetence. Willful strategy. Or both.

That brings us to the cost of launching this new “war on terror.” The propaganda is in full swing. For Netanyahu in Tel Aviv, Hamas is ISIS. For Volodymyr Zelensky in Kiev, Hamas is Russia. Over one October weekend, the war in Ukraine was completely forgotten by western mainstream media. Brandenburg Gate, the Eiffel tower, the Brazilian Senate are all Israeli now.

Egyptian intel claims it warned Tel Aviv about an imminent attack from Hamas. The Israelis chose to ignore it, as they did the Hamas training drills they observed in the weeks prior, smug in their superior knowledge that Palestinians would never have the audacity to launch a liberation operation.

Whatever happens next, Al-Aqsa Flood has already, irretrievably, shattered the hefty pop mythology around the invincibility of Tsahal, Mossad, Shin Bet, Merkava tank, Iron Dome, and the Israel Defense Forces.

Even as it ditched electronic communications, Hamas profited from the glaring collapse of Israel’s multi-billion-dollar electronic systems monitoring the most surveilled border on the planet.

Cheap Palestinian drones hit multiple sensor towers, facilitated the advance of a paragliding infantry, and cleared the way for T-shirted, AK-47-wielding assault teams to inflict breaks in the wall and cross a border that even stray cats dared not.

Israel, inevitably, turned to battering the Gaza Strip, an encircled cage of 365 square kilometers packed with 2.3 million people. The indiscriminate bombing of refugee camps, schools, civilian apartment blocks, mosques, and slums has begun. Palestinians have no navy, no air force, no artillery units, no armored fighting vehicles, and no professional army. They have little to no high-tech surveillance access, while Israel can call up NATO data if they want it.

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant proclaimed “a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we will act accordingly.”

The Israelis can merrily engage in collective punishment because, with three guaranteed UNSC vetoes in their back pocket, they know they can get away with it.

It doesn’t matter that Haaretz, Israel’s most respected newspaper, straight out concedes that “actually the Israeli government is solely responsible for what happened (Al-Aqsa Flood) for denying the rights of Palestinians.”

The Israelis are nothing if not consistent. Back in 2007, then-Israeli Defense Intelligence Chief Amos Yadlin said, “Israel would be happy if Hamas took over Gaza because IDF could then deal with Gaza as a hostile state.”

Ukraine funnels weapons to Palestinians

Only one year ago, the sweaty sweatshirt comedian in Kiev was talking about turning Ukraine into a “big Israel,” and was duly applauded by a bunch of Atlantic Council bots.

Well, it turned out quite differently. As an old-school Deep State source just informed me:

“Ukraine-earmarked weapons are ending up in the hands of the Palestinians. The question is which country is paying for it. Iran just made a deal with the US for six billion dollars and it is unlikely Iran would jeopardize that. I have a source who gave me the name of the country but I cannot reveal it. The fact is that Ukrainian weapons are going to the Gaza Strip and they are being paid for but not by Iran.”

After its stunning raid last weekend, a savvy Hamas has already secured more negotiating leverage than Palestinians have wielded in decades. Significantly, while peace talks are supported by China, Russia, Turkiye, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt – Tel Aviv refuses. Netanyahu is obsessed with razing Gaza to the ground, but if that happens, a wider regional war is nearly inevitable.

Lebanon’s Hezbollah – a staunch Resistance Axis ally of the Palestinian resistance – would rather not be dragged into a war that can be devastating on its side of the border, but that could change if Israel perpetrates a de facto Gaza genocide.

Hezbollah holds at least 100,000 ballistic missiles and rockets, from Katyusha (range: 40 km) to Fajr-5 (75 km), Khaibar-1 (100 km), Zelzal 2 (210 km), Fateh-110 (300 km), and Scud B-C (500 km). Tel Aviv knows what that means, and shudders at the frequent warnings by Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah that its next war with Israel will be conducted inside that country.

Which brings us to Iran.

Geopolitical plausible deniability

The key immediate consequence of Al-Aqsa Flood is that the Washington neocon wet dream of “normalization” between Israel and the Arab world will simply vanish if this turns into a Long War.

Large swathes of the Arab world in fact are already normalizing their ties with Tehran – and not only inside the newly expanded BRICS 11.

In the drive towards a multipolar world, represented by BRICS 11, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), and China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), among other groundbreaking Eurasian and Global South institutions, there’s simply no place for an ethnocentric Apartheid state fond of collective punishment.

Just this year, Israel found itself disinvited from the African Union summit. An Israeli delegation showed up anyway, and was unceremoniously ejected from the big hall, a visual that went viral. At the UN plenary sessions last month, a lone Israeli diplomat sought to disrupt Iranian President Ibrahim Raisi’s speech. No western ally stood by his side, and he too, was ejected from the premises.

As Chinese President Xi Jinping diplomatically put it in December 2022, Beijing “firmly supports the establishment of an independent state of Palestine that enjoys full sovereignty based on 1967 borders and with East Jerusalem as its capital. China supports Palestine in becoming a full member of the United Nations.”

Tehran’s strategy is way more ambitious – offering strategic advice to West Asian resistance movements from the Levant to the Persian Gulf: Hezbollah, Ansarallah, Hashd al-Shaabi, Kataib Hezbollah, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and countless others. It’s as if they are all part of a new Grand Chessboard de facto supervised by Grandmaster Iran.

The pieces in the chessboard were carefully positioned by none other than the late Quds Force Commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps General Qassem Soleimani, a once-in-a-lifetime military genius. He was instrumental in creating the foundations for the cumulative successes of Iranian allies in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Palestine, as well as creating the conditions for a complex operation such as Al-Aqsa Flood.

Elsewhere in the region, the Atlanticist drive of opening strategic corridors across the Five Seas – the Caspian, the Black Sea, the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, and the Eastern Mediterranean – is floundering badly.

Russia and Iran are already smashing US designs in the Caspian – via the International North-South Transportation Corridor (INSTC) – and the Black Sea, which is on the way to becoming a Russian lake. Tehran is paying very close attention to Moscow’s strategy in Ukraine, even as it refines its own strategy on how to debilitate the Hegemon without direct involvement: call it geopolitical plausible deniability.

Bye bye EU-Israel-Saudi-India corridor

The Russia-China-Iran alliance has been demonized as the new “axis of evil” by western neocons. That infantile rage betrays cosmic impotence. These are Real Sovereigns that can’t be messed with, and if they are, the price to pay is unthinkable.

A key example: if Iran under attack by a US-Israeli axis decided to block the Strait of Hormuz, the global energy crisis would skyrocket, and the collapse of the western economy under the weight of quadrillions of derivatives would be inevitable.

What this means, in the immediate future, is that he American Dream of interfering across the Five Seas does not even qualify as a mirage. Al-Aqsa Flood has also just buried the recently-announced and much-ballyhooed EU-Israel-Saudi Arabia-India transportation corridor.

China is keenly aware of all this incandescence taking place only a week before its 3rd Belt and Road Forum in Beijing. At stake are the BRI connectivity corridors that matter – across the Heartland, across Russia, plus the Maritime Silk Road and the Arctic Silk Road.

Then there’s the INSTC linking Russia, Iran and India – and by ancillary extension, the Gulf monarchies.

The geopolitical repercussions of Al-Aqsa Flood will speed up Russia, China and Iran’s interconnected geoeconomic and logistical connections, bypassing the Hegemon and its Empire of Bases. Increased trade and non-stop cargo movement are all about (good) business. On equal terms, with mutual respect – not exactly the War Party’s scenario for a destabilized West Asia.

Oh, the things that a slow-moving paragliding infantry overflying a wall can accelerate.

First published at The Cradle.

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009). He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com. Read other articles by Pepe.

What the Media Forgets to Tell You about Israel and Gaza

Ignore the fake news. Israel isn’t defending itself. It’s enforcing its right to continue ethnically cleansing Palestinians

by Jonathan Cook / October 16th, 2023

The missing context for what’s happening in Gaza is that Israel has been working night and day to ethnically cleanse the Palestinian people from their homeland since even before Israel become a state – when it was known as the Zionist movement.

Israel didn’t just cleanse Palestinians in 1948, when it was founded as a Western colonial project, and again under cover of a regional war in 1967. It also worked to ethnically cleanse Palestinians every day between those dates and afterwards. The aim was to move them off their historic lands, and either expel them beyond Israel’s new, expanded borders or concentrate them into small ghettoes inside those borders – as a holding measure until they could be expelled outside the borders.

The ‘settler’ project, as we call it, is a misnomer. It’s really Israel’s ethnic cleansing programme. Israel even has a special word for it in Hebrew: ‘Judaisation’, or making the land Jewish. It is official government policy.

Gaza was the largest of the Palestinian reservations created by Israel’s ethnic cleansing programme, and the most overcrowded. To stop the inhabitants spilling out, Israel built a fence-barrier in the early 1990s to pen them in. Then when policing became too hard from within the prison, Israel pulled back in 2005 to the outer perimeter barrier.

New technology allowed Israel to besiege Gaza remotely by land, sea and air in 2007, limiting the entry of food and vital items like medicine and cement for construction. Automated gun towers shot anyone who came near the fence. The navy patrolled the sea, stopping boats straying more than a kilometre or two off shore. And drones watched 24 hours a day from the sky.

The people of Gaza were sealed in and largely forgotten, except when they lobbed a few rockets over the fence – to international indignation. If they fired too many rockets, Israel bombed them mercilessly and occasionally launched a ground invasion. The rocket threat was increasingly neutralised by a rocket interception system, paid for by the US, called Iron Dome.

Palestinians tried to be more inventive in finding ways to break out of their prison. They built tunnels. But Israel found ways to identify those that ran close to the fence and destroyed them.

Palestinians tried to get attention by protesting en masse at the fence. Israeli snipers were ordered to shoot them in the legs, leading to thousands of amputees.

The ‘deterrence’ seemed to work. Israel could once again sit back and let the Palestinians rot in Gaza. ‘Quiet’ had been restored.

Until, that is, last weekend when Hamas broke out briefly and ran amok, killing civilians and soldiers alike.

So Israel now needs a new policy. It looks like the ethnic cleansing programme is being applied to Gaza anew. The half of the population in the enclave’s north is being herded south, where there are not the resources to cope with them. And even if there were, Israel has cut off food, water and power to everyone in Gaza.

The enclave is quickly becoming a pressure cooker. The pressure is meant to build on Egypt to allow the Palestinians entry into Sinai on ‘humanitarian’ grounds.

Whatever the media are telling you, the ‘conflict’ – that is, Israel’s ethnic cleansing programme – started long before Hamas appeared on the scene. In fact, Hamas emerged very late, as the predictable response to Israel’s violent colonisation project.

And no turning point was reached a week ago. This has all been playing out in slow motion for more than 100 years.

Ignore the fake news. Israel isn’t defending itself. It’s enforcing its right to continue ethnically cleansing Palestinians.

Jonathan Cook, based in Nazareth, Israel is a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books). Read other articles by Jonathan, or visit Jonathan's website.

Lawless In Gaza: Why Britain And The West Back Israel’s Crimes

As Western politicians line up to cheer on Israel as it starves Gaza’s civilians and plunges them into darkness to soften them up before the coming Israeli ground invasion, it is important to understand how we reached this point – and what it portends for the future.

By Jonathan Cook

October 13, 2023

Source: Declassified UK


More than a decade ago, Israel started to understand that its occupation of Gaza through siege could be to its advantage. It began transforming the tiny coastal enclave from an albatross around its neck into a valuable portfolio in the trading game of international power politics.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which brings us to the second purpose served by Gaza.

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

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

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

“Gaza is about as flagrant a violation of this prohibition as can be found”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“If you do something for long enough, the world will accept it”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Starmer does not dare to be seen on the wrong side of this issue. And that is exactly the outcome Israeli officials wanted and expected.
Israeli flag on No 10

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

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

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

“The media is playing its part, dependably as ever“

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Israeli air force boasted on Thursday it had dropped some 6,000 bombs on Gaza. At the same time, human rights groups reported Israel was firing the incendiary chemical weapon white phosphorus into Gaza, a war crime when used in urban areas. And Defence for Children International noted that more than 500 Palestinian children had been killed so far by Israeli bombs.

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

Almost exactly a year ago, the European Commission president denounced Russia’s strikes on civilian infrastructure in Ukraine as war crimes. “Cutting off men, women, children of water, electricity and heating with winter coming – these are acts of pure terror,” she wrote. “And we have to call it as such.”

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

Meanwhile, France has already started breaking up and banning demonstrations against the bombing of Gaza. Its justice minister has echoed Braverman in suggesting solidarity with Palestinians risks offending Jewish communities and should be treated as “hate speech”.

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

President Joe Biden has promised weapons and funding, and sent in the military equivalent of “the heavies” to make sure no one disturbs Israel as it carries out those war crimes. An aircraft carrier has been dispatched to the region to ensure quiet from Israel’s neighbours as the ground invasion is launched.

“Washington is unwavering in its support for whatever Israel decides to do to Gaza”

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

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

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

Western officials are more than happy with the direction of travel. Not just for Israel’s sake but for their own too. Because one day in the future, their own populations may be as much trouble to them as Palestinians in Gaza are to Israel right now.

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

ZNetwork is funded solely through the generosity of its readers.DONATE


Jonathan Cook
British writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His books are Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State (Pluto, 2006); Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto, 2008); and Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair (Zed, 2008).

Gaza is Europe Here And Now

By Boaventura de Sousa Santos

October 14, 2023

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

Barrier 2: Fading homage to Delacroix. Credit hjl via Flickr

Without soul or memory, Europe is incapable of seeing the similarity between the images of death and destruction in the Warsaw ghetto, during the desperate Jewish uprising on 19 April 1943, and the images we see today of the Gaza Strip. The fate that Europe (and now also the US) legitimizes for those considered subhuman is the same: in Warsaw it was deportation to concentration camps and crematoria; in Gaza it is the strip reduced to rubble and scorched earth. Since they have nowhere to go, neither by land nor by sea, the fate of the people of Gaza is the same: death. Ultimately, this brutal policy is legitimized by what I have called the abyssal line, the line that has separated, since the beginning of colonial expansion, people considered fully human beings from those considered sub-human beings. It is no coincidence that we hear Israeli officials speak of Palestinians as animals.

At the time of the Warsaw guetto, Europe was dominated by Nazism and fascist governments. Today, Europe is dominated by democratic governments, some of which are even left-wing. What difference does it make? What is the political color of indifference? Why is it that the news is filled with voices of outrage and horror when a Russian bombing kills three people in Ukraine, whereas razing buildings, mosques, hospitals and schools with hundreds of people inside, and without warning, is reported as a legitimate response? Because the Ukrainians are white Europeans and the Palestinians are not? After all, weren’t the Jews also white and European?

Some news outlets (echoing their US sources) dared to characterize the Hamas attack as “unprovoked”, the same trope they have been using for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This year alone, 245 Palestinians have already been killed, including women and children, but this is not provocation “because nothing justifies the killing of Israeli civilians”. We don’t need to go back to the beginning, to the Balfour declaration of 1917 (the first authorization for the Zionists to settle in Palestine), or to the 60. 000 Jews who arrived in Palestine between 1933 and 1936, after several European countries refused to receive the Jews Hitler wanted to expel (it wasn’t yet the final solution), or the foundation of the State of Israel in 1948, which occupied more than 78% of the territory of Palestine, forcing 750,000 Palestinians into exile in their own land, destroying 530 villages and killing 15,000 Palestinians. Just think of 2006, the year in which Hamas won the elections to the Palestinian Legislative Council with 44.5% of the vote. These elections were free and fair, according to international observers, and since the Western world is the world of democracies in constant combat against autocracies, there was no reason for regime change. As it turned out, this result did not please the West. As has happened before in so many parts of the world under Western influence, Hamas’ victory was not recognized, the conflict between Fatah and Hamas was internationally instigated and what remains of Palestine was divided into two governments from 2007 onwards: the West Bank, controlled by Fatah, and the Gaza Strip, controlled by Hamas. It was then that Gaza finally qualified as the largest open-air prison. It is now in danger of becoming the world’s largest cemetery or dump for world’s human and non-human waste.

For a long time my position has been one of strict obedience to UN resolutions [UNGA Resolution 3314 (1974); UNGA Resolution 37/43 (1982)]. I have therefore been defending the two-state solution. This solution has been made unfeasible by the continuous annexation of Palestinian land against international agreements. The conclusion seems obvious: either there are two states or there are none. The State of Israel is behaving more and more like a colonial state and, therefore, as an illegitimate state. It is now on the verge of culminating this policy of extermination in the good colonial tradition, of which its best ally, the USA, is one of the cruel examples with the final solution it imposed on Native Americans. Suppose the genocide of the Indians that took place then was taking place now, would any democrat or person of common sense have difficulty in declaring the US an illegitimate state?

If anyone with common sense had any doubts about the concept of state terrorism, they must have been enlightened by the actions of the State of Israel. However, since common sense today has little to do with the behavior of international institutions, it is quite possible that the International Criminal Court will continue to have doubts about accusing Israel, since Israel is “acting in self-defense”. This will go on until the last Palestinian in Gaza is gone. It means that an occupying country can destroy the occupied country if it resists occupation. This is surely the new norm of rules-based international relations, the sacrosanct creed by which the US and Europe continue to guide their international policy. Their international isolation is clear when we look at the world map and see which countries are calling for peace. The protagonist of world peace today is the Global South (in the sense of all the countries, many of them former European colonies, that oppose the international policy of the US and Europe). The only exception is India, today dominated by a prime minister who, according to Arundhati Roy, is turning the country into a fascist Hindu regime that is increasingly inclined to treat Islamic Indians as Israel treats Palestinians.


ZNetwork is funded solely through the generosity of its readers.DONATE



Boaventura de Sousa Santos
 is the emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Coimbra in Portugal. His most recent book is Decolonizing the University: The Challenge of Deep Cognitive Justice.

End War Before It Ends Us

We have to learn to value and connect with one another, even, or especially, when it’s the last thing we can imagine doing.

By Robert Koehler

October 15, 2023
Source: Common Dreams


Humanity’s cancer shows up in Israel and Palestine. Missiles fly, hell makes global headlines, thousands of people die, many of them (oh God, of course) children.

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant declares: “We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly. . . . We are imposing a complete siege on Gaza. There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything will be closed.”

That’ll show ’em! Revenge rules. Kill the human animals, even if they’re toddlers.

Here’s the vicious cycle of war: One side commits a heinous crime against humanity — e.g, Hamas fires missiles into Israel, killing more than 700 people. This justifies an even more heinous response from Israel, firing its own (far more sophisticated) missiles into Gaza, declaring war on a trapped population of people in the “open air prison” of Gaza. Both sides feel justified as they continue to commit crimes against humanity — you know, look what they did! The essence of war is dehumanization.

I write these words not to try to “equalize” the wrongs of this conflict or to shrug off its history: the colonization of Palestine in the wake of World War I, the savage destruction of hundreds of its villages in the creation of the state of Israel. As Chris Hedges writes:

“Israel has spoken this blood-soaked language of violence to the Palestinians since Zionist militias seized more than 78 percent of historic Palestine, destroyed some 530 Palestinian villages and cities, and killed about 15,000 Palestinians in more than 70 massacres. Some 750,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed between 1947 and 1949 to create the state of Israel in 1948.”

In other words, he asks: What did Israel expect? This latest war is just one more upsurge of retaliation by a suppressed segment of humanity. Hamas, Gaza’s current governing organization, is deemed a terrorist organization — certainly by much of the U.S. media — but here’s the thing: Almost every national government with a military is a terrorist organization, or at least potentially so. The United States certainly is. Terrorism is just another word for war.

We live in a world that remains trapped in the consciousness of war. The only way to deal with harm and danger is to inflict it yourself. They just killed our children, so we’re gonna kill theirs. Whoever kills the most children wins, or so it seems.

Is a different way of thinking possible at the level of geopolitics? Is a world without war possible?

Orly Noy, who is Israeli (editor of the Hebrew-language news magazine Local Call), describes how terrifying it got when Hamas fired its missiles into Israel. Writing in The Guardian, she notes: “The public desire for revenge is both understandable and terrifying, but the erasure of any moral red line is always a frightening thing.

“It is important not to minimize or condone the heinous crimes committed by Hamas. But it is also important to remind ourselves that everything it is inflicting on us now, we have been inflicting on the Palestinians for years. . . . I keep reminding myself that ignoring this context is giving up a piece of my own humanity. Because violence devoid of any context leads to only one possible response: revenge.

And revenge, she writes, “is the opposite of security, it is the opposite of peace, it is also the opposite of justice. It is nothing but more violence.

“. . . we have not only brought Gaza to the brink of starvation, we have brought it to a state of collapse. Always in the name of security. How much security did we get? Where will another round of revenge take us?

“Terrible crimes were committed against Israelis this Saturday, crimes that the mind cannot fathom — and in this time of dark grief, I cling to the one thing I have left to hold on to: my humanity. The absolute belief that this hell is not predestined. Not for us, nor for them.”

How can her understanding of this terrifying moment be multiplied by, oh, let us say, seven billion human minds? Revenge and war don’t work. Even our enemy acts in a context. And conflict can only be understood — and transcended — in the context of all parties that are part of it. This is the creation of peace.

Yes, alas, this is more complicated than simply kicking someone’s ass — winning the game. It’s almost as though there’s a global commercial interest in keeping conflict alive — not just among political hawks and the arms dealers, but . . . well, as a lifelong journalist, I can certainly add my profession to the list: If it bleeds, it leads, as they say. How many headlines do you see that read: “Israel and Palestine (or Russia and Ukraine) Engage in Empathic Dialogue, Find Understanding”?

My God, making connection, even with the enemy? This is not what governments fund. This is not how we understand ourselves. At best, ending war — transcending war — is an unfathomably long, seemingly impossible process, and our understanding of what it will take is minimal, compared to how much we understand, let us say, about the structure of the atom.

Or is it so minimal? Perhaps we know more than we think we do. As the late Marion Woodman, author and Jungian psychologist, wrote: “Power in the sense of controlling somebody else is different from personal presence. That kind of power — patriarchal power — does not value other people. What I strive for instead is empowerment.”

We have to push on. We have to learn to value and connect with one another, even, or especially, when it’s the last thing we can imagine doing. This may well be the primary task of being human. If we don’t end war, it will certainly end us.


ZNetwork is funded solely through the generosity of its readers.DONATE

Related Posts

Norman Finkelstein And Mouin Rabbani Held An Emergency Teach-In On Gaza
Norman Finkelstein -- October 12, 2023

Manufacturing Hasbara – Cataclysm in Gaza
Igor Böhm 

--
Six Tropes to Look Out for That Distort Israel/Palestine Coverage
Lara Nour-Walton -- August 24, 2023

Israel Is Using Starvation As A Weapon of War Against the Palestinian People
Marjorie Cohn -- October 13, 2023

Robert Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist and nationally syndicated writer. Koehler has been the recipient of multiple awards for writing and journalism from organizations including the National Newspaper Association, Suburban Newspapers of America, and the Chicago Headline Club.

The Plan to Wipe Out Hamas

As refugees crowd the border with Egypt, Israel prepares to hit Gaza City with US-supplied bunker busters

By Seymour Hersh

October 15, 2023

Source: Seymour Hersh Substack

Smoke and flames billow after Israeli forces struck a high-rise tower in Gaza City, October 7, 2023. Palestinian militants have begun a "war" against Israel which they infiltrated by air, sea and land from the blockaded Gaza Strip, Israeli officials said, a major escalation in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Photo by Ali Hamad apaimages

It’s been one week since the horrific Hamas attacks on Israel took place, and the shape of what is to come from the Israeli armed forces is clear, and uncompromising.

Over the past week Israeli jets have conducted around-the-clock bombing of non-military targets in Gaza City. Apartment buildings, hospitals, and mosques were torn apart, with no prior warning and no effort to minimize civilian casualties.

By the end of the week Israeli jets were also dropping leaflets telling the citizens of Gaza City and its surrounding areas in the north that those who wished to survive had better start going south—walking if necessary—25 miles or more—to the Rafah border crossing leading to Egypt. As of this writing, it was not clear whether financially stricken Egypt will allow a million immigrants, many of them committed to the Hamas cause, to cross. In the short term, I have been told by an Israeli insider that Israel has been trying to convince Qatar, which at the urging of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was a long-time financial supporter of Hamas, to join with Egypt in funding a tent city for the million or more refugees awaiting across the border. “It’s not a done deal,” the Israeli insider told me. Israeli officials have warned Egypt and Qatar that without a landing site, the refugees will have to “go back to Gaza.”

One possible site, the insider said, is a long abandoned chunk of land in northern part of the Sinai Peninsula, near the border crossing from Gaza, that was the site of an Israeli settlement known as Yamit when the peninsula was seized by Israel after its victory the Six-Day War of 1967. The settlement was evacuated and bulldozed by Israel before Sinai was returned to Egypt in 1982. The Israeli hope is that Qatar and Egypt will take the refugee crisis off its hands.

Map courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Israel’s obvious contempt for the well-being of the citizenry of Gaza amid the forced migration of more than one million starving human beings has captured the world’s attention and led to increasing international condemnation, much of it aimed at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

And so the next stage must come soon. Here is what I have been told, in my conversations in recent days with officials from Israel and elsewhere, including officials I have dealt with in Europe and the Middle East since the Vietnam war, about the Israeli plan for the elimination of Hamas.

The major issue for the Israeli war planners is a reluctance, despite the mobilization of more than 300,000 reservists, to engage in a door-to-door street battle with Hamas in Gaza City. One veteran of the IDF, who served in a high post, told me that half of the Israeli Army has been engaged for the past decade or more in the protection of the increasing number of small settlements scattered in the West Bank where they are bitterly resented by the Palestinian population. “The Israeli planners don’t trust their infantry,” the insider said, nor their willingness to go to war but what could be a disastrous lack of combat experience.

With the starved-out civilian population forced to leave, the Israeli operational plan calls for the Air Force to destroy the remaining structures in Gaza City and elsewhere in the north. Gaza City will be no more. Israel will then begin dropping American-made 5,000-pound bombs known as “bunker busters,” or JDAMs, in the flattened areas where Hamas fighters are known to live and manufacture their missiles and other weapons underground. An improved version of the weapon, known as GBU-43/B, depicted by the media as “the mother of all bombs,” was dropped on a suspected ISIS command center in Afghanistan by the US in April 2017. An early version of the weapon was sold to Israel in 2005, allegedly for use against Iran’s suspected nuclear facilities, and the improved, laser-guided version was authorized for sale to Israel by the Obama administration a decade ago. (Israel bought 1,000 much smaller, GPS-guided bunker busters in 2021.) Even then, the Israeli insider told me, Netanyahu and his advisers understood that Netanyahu’s support for Hamas was dangerous, like “keeping a tiger as a pet.” “He would eat you in a minute.”

The current Israeli war planners are convinced, the insider told me, that the upgraded version of JDAMs with larger warheads would penetrate deep enough underground before detonating—thirty to fifty meters—with the blast and resulting sound wave “killing all within one-half mile.”

The insider said it was his understanding that the Hamas leadership wanted some civilians to stay put because of their need for “human shields.” The new Israeli plan of forced exit means “at least the people would not all be killed.” The concept, he added pointedly, dated back to the early years of América’s Vietnam War, when President John F. Kennedy’s administration authorized the Strategic Hamlet Plan that called for the forced relocation of Vietnamese civilians in contested areas to hastily built housing in areas thought to be controlled by the South Vietnamese. Their deserted lands were then declared to be Free Fire Zones where all who stayed could be targeted by American troops.

The systematic destruction of the remaining buildings in Gaza City will start within days, the Israeli insider said. The bunker-buster JDAMs could come next. Then, in the planners’ scenario, I was told, the Israeli infantry will be assigned to mop-up operations: searching out and killing those Hamas fighters and workers who managed to survive the JDAM attacks.

Asked why the Israeli planners thought the Egyptian government would agree, even if under pressure from the Biden administration, to accept the more than one million refugees from Gaza, the insider said: “We’ve got Egypt by the balls.” He was referring to the recent indictments of Democratic Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey and his wife on federal corruption charges stemming from his business dealings with senior Egyptian officials, and the alleged passing of intelligence about persons serving at the US Embassy in Cairo. Egyptian President Abdul Fatta el-Sisi, who seized power in a 2014 coup, ousting the elected Muslim Brotherhood, is a retired general who headed Egyptian’s military intelligence service from 2010 to 2012.

Not everyone shared the assumption that all would go well after the JDAM attacks, if they take place. One former European intelligence official who served for years in the Middle East told me, “The Egyptians do not want Hamas coming into Egypt, and they will do the minimum.”

When told of the Israeli plan to utilize JDAMS, he said that “a city in rubble is just as dangerous as at any time. The talk of JDAMS is the talk of people who don’t know what to do.

Hamas is saying, ‘Bring it on.’ They are waiting for this.” Using JDAMS “is the talk of a leadership that has been knocked off its feet. This was a carefully planned operation and Hamas knew exactly what the Israeli reaction would be. Urban warfare is awful.”

The official predicted that the Israeli bunker-buster bombs would not penetrate deep enough: Hamas, he said, was operating in tunnels built 60 meters underground that would be able to withstand the JDAM attacks.

Told this, the Israeli insider acknowledged that underground rocks and boulders would limit the capability of the rockets to penetrate deeply, but the underground surface in Gaza City is sandy and would offer little resistance, especially if the JDAMs were released from the highest point possible.

The insider also said the current planning calls for the JDAMs attack, if authorized, to come as early as Sunday or Monday, depending on the efficacy the forced expulsion of Gazi City and south proceeds, with a ground invasion to follow immediately.

Francesca Albanese On The Crime Of Genocide: “I Do Not Exclude It At All.”

By Francesca Albanese, Kristina Božič 

October 14, 2023

Source: Mešanec


The renowned expert in international law Francesca Albanese was on her way to cross the Atlantic, continuing to appeal to states, members of the international community, to stand up and demand respect of international law when it comes to human rights of Palestinians and to actions of the state of Israel. Last May she took up the position of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967 and until now she has not had a chance to present her findings to the UN Security Council. In her public talk on 3rd October she emphasized, that “international law is as valid as the will of the states to enforce it”.

It was a day after she and other UN experts issued a statement condemning the violence and indiscriminate attacks against civilians in Israel and Gaza, calling for, among other, respect of international humanitarian law and human rights, a ceasefire and an international protective presence in the occupied Palestinian territory. They warned of the “appalling language that dehumanises the Palestinian people” and warned that intentional starvation – an unavoidable consequence of the total Israeli blockade and siege of Gaza – is a crime against humanity.

Francesca Albanese began the interview by saying that the present was the most difficult time in her career so far. She has worked as a human rights expert for the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, and for Unrwa, the Relief and Work Agency for Palestine Refugees, she has written a book Palestinian Refugees in International Law and witnessed wars on Gaza in 2008, 2012, 2014, 2021, 2022 … For a year and a half now she has monitored, documented and reported on “daily brutalities, indignities and humiliations that Palestinians are subjected to under the Israeli occupation that is “completely illegal”. She explained that under international law occupation cannot last in perpetuity, must not be used for colonization and must not use apartheid. “But still I have never seen in all these years the ferocity I see being unleashed against a civilian population, which is trapped inside 365 square kilometers of land, half of whom are children,” she said.

Asked whether we are standing witness – again – to the international crimes of genocide or ethnic cleansing and whether the repeat of the mass atrocities can be prevented, her answer was unequivocal. “It must. It must be prevented. It is difficult to talk about international law in a context where there is no one single provision of human rights or humanitarian law that has not been violated. And yet: because of the level of destruction of Palestinian people – physically – and the destruction of the civilian infrastructure that is essential to people’s lives; hospitals, water cisterns, water plants, electricity … at this moment when 2,3 million people are being heavily bombarded, the international community has the obligation to prevent the possible destruction of the Palestinian people or part of the Palestinian people. This is what international obligations are about. Including to prevent the possible crime of genocide – I do not exclude it at all.”

The international law expert and the author of two pivotal UN reports on the question of Palestine continued to explain that ethnic cleansing is nothing new. It has happened during Nakba or Palestinian Catastrophe, between 1947 and 1949, accompanying the establishment of the state of Israel, and in 1967. It has been steadily unfolding in the occupied Palestinian territory by confiscations of the Palestinians’ land and forcible displacements of Palestinian people, by terrorizing them, revoking residency permits, destroying homes and schools. This abuse of power by the Israeli state has been well documented by Israeli, international and Palestinian human rights organizations, as well as by the UN. Yet no state sanctions or boycotts, worthy of mention, have been taken to ensure the respect of the international law. “Western countries, the Global North have huge responsibilities,” said Francesca Albanese. “But where are the rest? Where are the African countries, where are the Asian countries, where are the Arab countries?” She warned of the move into the opposite direction: “Now we see that even solidarity with the Palestinian people under occupation either coming from the Diaspora, international activists or from the Jewish communities has been quashed.”

The focus, especially in Western countries on battling anti-Semitism has been in the last decade with the imposition of the definition by the IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) hijacked to try to silence any criticism of Israel. Francesca Albanese clearly emphasizes that anti-Semitism remains a problem and a challenge we have not dealt with yet. “But to scrutinize Israeli practices as any other UN member state’s and to hold Israel to the same international standards that apply or should apply to the rest of the international community is not anti-Semitism,” she said. Instead, such extension of the definition of anti-Semitism represents an instrumentalisation that is to preserve immunity and impunity of Israel, she added.

The latest report by the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories introduces a new legal language and vocabulary of incarceration and explains how Israel by “treating the Palestinians as a collective, incarcerable threat erodes their protection as ‘civilians’ under international law, deprives them of their fundamental freedoms, and expropriates their agency and ability to unite, self-govern and develop as a polity”. Thus Israel can further its settler-colonial project. “This has entrenched segregation, subjugation, fragmentation and, ultimately, the dispossession of Palestinian lands and Palestinians’ forced displacement. Intended primarily to secure colonies’ establishment and expansion, this system suffocates Palestinian life and undermines Palestinians’ collective existence,” concludes the report.

Francesca Albanese says that the entire occupied Palestinian territory is administered as a prison, with the Palestinians on every step confined by physical – the wall, checkpoints, roadblocks, segregated roads – and bureaucratic barriers, topped by digital surveillance. This defines the lives of the occupied by all the rights they do not have – they cannot move freely, travel, they cannot live where they want nor go to the school they wish. “There is no normalcy in this. It is an open-air prison and it is a panopticon – the inmates are controlled from the outside and from within. And it touches the most vulnerable. Half of the Palestinians across the occupied territory are minors, they are children,” said Francesca Albanese.

In her two reports she describes settler colonialism and cultural erasure of Palestinianess – policies to de-Palestinianize the occupied territory; she writes about the need for decolonisation and cites reports on necropolitics. Overall, she offers a legal framework to understand the Israeli occupation policies. In the interview she paraphrased John. F. Kennedy saying that those who make peaceful resistance impossible make violent resistance inevitable. “This is what is happening and I do not justify it. I criticize the violence, I have condemned the crimes committed by Hamas,” she emphasized. However, she recognizes and warns about the omnipresent and structural violence the Israeli occupation needs to continue.

She said she does not despair but continues to talk to policy-makers. “I hope they will not turn their eyes away. So far their conscience sits elsewhere, it is not with the Palestinian people. But if you differentiate human beings on the grounds of their national group and if you are unable to recognize dignity, freedom and equal rights to everyone regardless of their nationality, then this is racism,” she said, and continued, that at the moment “the international community is tarnishing and undermining the very foundations of the system that has originated from the ashes of the Second World War”.

She has stressed, also in her reports, that the question of Palestine cannot be treated as a matter of security. “It is a matter of human rights and equality of all, Palestinians and Israelis – of equality in dignity and in human rights and freedoms. This is what I ultimately stand for,” she said. As possible alleys to greater respect of international law she pointed to the International Criminal Court and the national courts.

“But I do not think the situation will change with a top-down approach,” said Francesca Albanese. Israeli bombs and Hamas rockets continue to fall from top down. As an expert in international law she turned to the experiences from the apartheid South Africa but warned that creating a joint Israeli-Palestinian front and movement is much more difficult than was building a national antiapartheid movement with white and black South Africans. “We need to normalize the unity of the human rights discourse. I have had extremely humanely touching relationships with Israeli and Palestinian human rights organizations. They speak the same language. And in the tragic hours that Israeli people have gone through as of 7th October all major human rights organisations in Israel have condemned what Hamas had done as heinous crimes and then spoken at length of the context, of the reality of the Palestinian people and urged a de-escalation to protect the Palestinian people, to end the occupation and apartheid. This is humanity. This is where I see hope,” she said.

In her first report as the Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese emphasized that “the unlawfulness of Israel’s occupation cannot be remedied, or humanized, by reforming some of its most brutal consequences”. Furthermore, the international law obliges states “not to contribute or condone Israel’s settler-colonial apartheid, which criminalizes Palestinians for (re)claiming or refusing to forsake their collective right to exist as a people, and act to realize all conditions that would allow the Palestinian people to realise their rights including their inalienable right to self-determination”.

“We need to look at the people,” she said at the end of the interview, looking beyond netanyahus, hamases or fatahs. “We need to identify the people to talk to and to listen to in Israel and in occupied Palestinian territory and in the Diaspora. There are so many Jewish communities who have over the years stood up for peace, justice and equality for all – from the river to the sea. They are the bastions for the protection of human rights, together with the Palestinians, also in the Diaspora, and together with the international activists. They might be repressed but they do exist,” she said. “My trust right now is with the people.”

HEAR, HEAR

Spanish Minister says Netanyahu should be brought before ICC for war crimes

Jake Johnson, Common Dreams
October 16, 2023 

Spanish Minister of Social Rights Ione Belarra delivers a statement on October 16, 2023. (Photo: Ione Belarra/Twitter.com)

Spain's minister of social rights released a statement Monday calling on her country's coalition government to petition the International Criminal Court to open a war crimes investigation into Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, citing the ongoing aerial bombardment of the Gaza Strip and the devastating blockade that has prevented the free flow of desperately needed humanitarian aid.

"Using the horrific murders of Israeli civilians by Palestinian armed factions as an excuse to justify Israel's crimes in general and the massacre in Gaza in particular is unacceptable," Ione Belarra, the leader of Spain's left-wing Podemos party, said in a video statement posted to social media.

"We ask our partner, the Socialist Party, to work together to present on behalf of the government of Spain a petition to the prosecutor's office of the International Criminal Court to investigate the war crimes committed in Palestine by Netanyahu, as was done recently in the case of the Spanish aid worker murdered in the Ukrainian war, as well as those perpetrated by Hamas in Israel and occupied territories against the civilian population," said Belarra, who also called for immediate efforts to protect civilians and negotiate an end to the violence

Israel is not a member state of the ICC, but the top prosecutor for the Netherlands-based court toldReuters last week that war crimes carried out by Hamas and the Israeli government fall under the body's jurisdiction.

"It's horrendous what's going on, what we're seeing on our television screens. There has to be a legal process to determine criminal responsibility," said Karim Khan. "Willful killing, hostage-taking are grave breaches of the Geneva Convention and one has to comply with the law."

In the wake of Hamas' deadly October 7 attack on Israel, the Netanyahu government began what international human rights groups and legal experts have described as a campaign of collective punishment, bombarding the densely populated Gaza Strip, devastating civilian infrastructure, and cutting off the enclave's supply of food, electricity, fuel, and other critical supplies.

Israeli officials have admitted that the assault on Gaza is primarily geared toward inflicting massive damage, not on precisely targeting Hamas.

More than 2,600 people in Gaza have been killed since Israel's bombing campaign began and more than a million have been displaced. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) warned Sunday that the Israeli airstrikes and blockade have sparked "an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe" as Gaza's healthcare system nears total collapse.

On Friday, the Israeli government ordered the entire population of northern Gaza—more than a million people—to evacuate ahead of an expected ground invasion, a demand that prompted global outrage. Rights groups said the directive could amount to the war crime of forcible transfer, given that Gazans have been given no guarantee of safe passage or clear assurance that they will be able to return to their homes.

Israeli bombing on Monday reportedly dashed hopes of a temporary agreement to allow people to flee Gaza and let humanitarian aid enter through a border crossing between Egypt and the occupied territory.

In her remarks on Monday, Belarra decried the complicity of European governments and the United States—Israel's primary supplier of weaponry—in the devastating attack on Gaza and urged the E.U. to "stop blindly following" the U.S.

"The United States and the European Union are not looking the other way or acting in a neutral manner, they are encouraging the state of Israel in its policy of apartheid and occupation that seriously violates human rights," said Belarra. "Using Hamas as an excuse to murder thousands of Palestinian civilians, including children, is unspeakable hypocrisy on the part of both Israel and the countries that justify it."