With Hamas Gone, Gaza Still Wouldn’t be Free

As a classic settler-colonial state, Israel is doing the only thing it knows how to do. So long as the West keeps cheerleading, that includes genocide

by Jonathan Cook / October 28th, 2023

It shocks me that in my threads I keep coming across variations of the following tweet:

The Palestinians have it within them to rise up against Hamas to free themselves. Or Hamas can willingly surrender. Two real choices there.

This view isn’t just being promoted in bad faith by Israeli apologists. It seems to resonate with ordinary people who presumably know very little about the histories either of Palestine or of settler colonial movements such as the Zionist movement that founded Israel.

So let’s delve briefly into both.

First, settler colonial movements are distinguished from standard colonialism – like British rule in India – by the fact that the settler population wishes not just to steal the native population’s resources but to replace the native population itself.

There are lots of examples of this: European settlers dispossessed native peoples in what we today call the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, for example.

The definition of genocide in international law exactly describes what those Europeans did to the local population: mass killings; inflicting conditions calculated to bring about the physical destruction of all or part of the native community; preventing births within the local population; and forcibly transferring native children to the settler population.

European settlers who today call themselves Americans, Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders never had to account for their crimes against those native peoples. Which possibly explains why the tweet above is so commonplace – and why European countries and their settler colonial outgrowths are today lining up against the rest of the world to support Israel as it intensifies industrial genocide in Gaza.

The truth is the “western” world order was built on genocide. Israel is just following in a long tradition.

Settler colonial movements do not always end up committing genocide. In South Africa, a heavily outnumbered settler colonial population came to an “accommodation” with the native population: the system was known as apartheid.

The white group took all the resources and privileges. The black group was allowed to live but only in ghettoes and squalor.

In such circumstances, peace is possible only when the settler colonial project is abandoned, power is shared and resources distributed more equitably. This happened, imperfectly, with the fall of apartheid.

The final model for a settler colonial population is to drive the native population over the border, in an act of ethnic cleansing. This was Israel’s preferred option in 1948 and again in 1967, when it decided to expand its borders by occupying the remaining Palestinian lands in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza.

The Palestinians in Gaza are an object lesson in the various ways a native population can be abused by a settler colonial movement.

Most are refugees or descended from refugees from Israel’s ethnic cleansing operations of 1948. In other words, their family homes are in what we today call Israel. They were driven off their lands into a tiny enclave, to be ruled for the next 19 years by Egypt.

When Israel seized Gaza during the 1967 war, it had to fall back on the second settler colonising option: apartheid. So it turned the enclave into an open-air prison, or – if we’re going to be more honest – a long-term concentration camp.

Gaza was a large – and, with Israel’s 16-year siege, increasingly much harsher – version of the townships that held the native black populations in apartheid South Africa.

What we are seeing now is Israel finally recognising that the apartheid model has failed to subdue the Palestinians’ desire for freedom and dignity.

Unlike white South Africa, Israel is not looking for peace and reconciliation. It is revisiting other settler colonial options.

In the current attack on Gaza, it is implementing a mixed model: genocide for those who remain in Gaza, ethnic cleansing for those who can get out (assuming Egypt finally relents and opens its borders).

None of that has anything to do with Hamas. The most one can say is that Hamas’ resistance has forced Israel’s hand. It has had to abandon its siege-apartheid model – the long term imprisonment of a population with no resources, no freedom of movement, no clean water, no jobs.

Instead, it has returned to the tried-and-tested formulas of genocide and ethnic cleansing.

Hamas is a symptom of the decades of trauma Palestinians in Gaza have been through, not the cause of that trauma.

Palestinians overthrowing Hamas, or Hamas surrendering, would not turn Gaza into a Dubai-on-the-Mediterranean. Palestinians there would still be prisoners, though possibly allowed slightly better conditions.

If you doubt that, look to the West Bank, which is ruled not by Hamas but by the supine Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas. He calls security cooperation with Israel – suppressing on Israel’s behalf the Palestinians’ craving for freedom – a “sacred” duty. His biggest aspiration is a diplomatic solution that creates a severely circumscribed Palestinian mini-state.

If Israel can’t allow freedom to the West Bank under Abbas, how is it ever going to give freedom to tiny Gaza, even without Hamas, especially after the United Nations declared the enclave as fundamentally “uninhabitable” in 2020?

Israel could never allow the Palestinians out of their Gaza prison because their rapid growth in numbers is seen as a threat to Israel’s Jewish majority.

Remember: settler colonial populations are there to replace the native population, not to make peace with them, not to shares resources, not to give them their freedom.

Israel is doing the only thing it knows how to do. And as long as the West is cheerleading, that includes genocide.

Jonathan Freedland’s Enduring Bad Faith

Guardian columnist feigns concern for two peoples ‘fated to share the same land’. But yet again he finds excuses to keep one of those people penned into a prison

by Jonathan Cook / October 30th, 2023

Will the Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland ever write a column on Israel that doesn’t rehash dishonest, Zionist talking-points that were discredited decades ago?

It would be too tedious to deal with most of the misdirections in his latest contribution. Let’s just pull out the final sections of his column, italicised, and then point out the ahistorical, morally vacuous thinking behind each of his points:

[Israelis] have been framed as the modern world’s ultimate evildoer: the coloniser. That matters because, in this conception, justice can only be done once the colonisers are gone. Which is why the chant demanding that Palestine be free “from the river to the sea” sends shivers down Jewish spines. Because that slogan does not demand a mere Israeli withdrawal from the occupied West Bank. What most Jews hear is a demand that Israel disappear altogether. And that Israeli Jews either take their chances living in a future Palestine under the likes of Hamas – or get out. But where to?

Let’s replace “Israelis” with “white South Africans”, who were also a settler-colonising people. Did the fall of apartheid require them to “get out”? I think Freedland will find that they are still there.

Yes, we all understand that “most Jews” are frightened by a chant calling for the liberation of Palestinians from apartheid-style subjugation and confinement in their own homeland. Of course, Jews are frightened. Israel and its apologists, Freedland prime among them, have been telling Jews for decades to be frightened, just as apartheid South Africa’s apologists told whites they would be slaughtered if a black man ever ruled the country. Whites stopped being frightened only when the Freedlands of the early 1990s were forced to change their tune.

What’s more, such a framing brands all Israelis – not just West Bank settlers – as guilty of the sin of colonialism. Perhaps that explains why those letter writers could not full-throatedly condemn the 7 October killing of innocent Israeli civilians. Because they do not see any Israeli, even a child, as wholly innocent.

If Freedland stepped out of his bubble for a moment and tried living in my world, he might be surprised by the number of people – many of them doubtless those fearful Jews he worries about – who are explicitly calling for Palestinians to be wiped out, who openly support genocide in Gaza – echoing Israeli politicians and leaders of Israel’s nuclear-armed military who have long advocated for a ‘Shoah’, or Holocaust, in Gaza.

Perhaps the reason some people on the margins of social media are reluctant to join the establishment chorus condemning Hamas is because it is being so blatantly taken advantage of to excuse murdering Palestinian children. When our politicians and media turn this into a zero-sum game, when they rewrite international law to make shutting off food and water to Palestinians a legal and moral duty, you can perhaps understand why people might be reticent to fuel the flames of genocide.

This is where you wind up when you view this conflict in monochrome, as a clash of right v wrong. Because the late Israeli novelist and peace activist Amos Oz was never wiser than when he described the Israel/Palestine conflict as something infinitely more tragic: a clash of right v right. Two peoples with deep wounds, howling with grief, fated to share the same small piece of land.

Which could all be changed if those two fated, traumatised peoples actually began “sharing the same small piece of land” – in a one-state solution, as ultimately happened in South Africa. Indeed, that’s the only way a settler colonial project ends without genocide or the ethnic cleansing of one side or the other.

If Freedland wasn’t such a bad-faith actor, he would see where the logic of his own position leads. It would lead to peace. He could be part of that historic transition. Instead he castigates others for treating the catastrophe unfolding in Israel and Gaza as a football game in which everyone must take sides – even as he himself so obviously takes a side: in favour of turning a blind eye to genocide in Gaza.

So, this is not a football game. It has no need for spectators who root for one team against the other, goading their chosen side to go to ever further extremes. This is not a game, for one grimly obvious reason. There are no winners – only never-ending loss.

No, there have been winners. Over 75 years, Israel has received lavish support – military, diplomatic, financial – from Europe and the US to help it carry out the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. On the back of this support – and Israel’s integration into the West’s military-industrial complex – Israel has become a very wealthy country, rich in land it stole from the native people. Yes, it lives with a degree of insecurity – the price it pays, as do all settler-colonial societies until they ‘finish the job’, as one of Israel’s leading historians has explained – for dispossessing and oppressing the native people. But until Oct 7 it was clear to Israelis that living with that insecurity was worth it, given all the other benefits.

Feedland is right about one thing, however. Israel doesn’t want spectators in Gaza. Which is why the enclave has been plunged into darkness. None of us can know what horrors are unfolding there right now.

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.

 

Oh, Wow, It’s Raining JDAMs and White Phosphorus Again

by Randy Shields / October 31st, 2023

I’ve been thinking for quite awhile how the most depraved position of the Israeli government becomes the baseline view here in the United States, particularly in politics and media. It makes sense that the genocidal, racist, colonial project of Israel would find admiration in the ruling class of a nation founded on indigenous genocide and built by black slavery.

Here in the United States of Israel media, Hamas commits “massacres” but the Israeli government never “massacres” anyone – they do “ground operations.” (The latter typically kills 50-100-1,000 times more civilians than do the Hamas “massacres.” See Wikipedia for “Operation Cast Lead” and “Operation Protective Edge.”) Israeli Jews are “killed” (mostly occupation soldiers) but Palestinians “die” from unknown causes and are kept from food, water, medical supplies, building materials, electricity and the internet by mysterious forces of nature – genocide as a weather event. Oh, wow, it’s raining JDAMs and white phosphorus again.

Strangely, even though Israel has killed over 10,000 Palestinians in three weeks in real life, it never actually killed any Palestinians in mainstream media headlines. Nicholas Maduro and Daniel Ortega are often referred to as “Hitlers” but the Israeli government just murdered over 4,000 Palestinian children in three weeks but this was neither a massacre nor Hitler-like to the US Congress or the New York Times. There are worthy and unworthy victims as Chomsky said.

The US is a stinking trash heap of lies. Its media act as lawyers to frantically justify every Israeli atrocity while its politicians compete to see who is the most bloodthirsty toward Arabs and Persians. When the US empire finally implodes there will be Nuremberg-like trials for many commentators and “reporters” who are nothing but pint-sized Julius Streichers and Eichmanns promoting endless wars, justifying atrocities and vilifying innocents to be exterminated. Every article and news report takes for granted that no number of Palestinian lives have as much value as one Jewish Israeli life.

The racist war criminal Joe Biden says the Gaza Health Authority is lying about how many people Israel is killing even though the world sees on Twitter entire city blocks being flattened, mosques, churches, hospitals, bakeries and UN facilities obliterated, individual homes in northern Gaza already being bulldozed by Zionist soldiers for the upcoming land theft and ethnic cleansing, the second Nakba, 35 Palestinian journalists killed and – not the bare-faced lies of Zionists about beheaded Jewish babies – but real video of Palestinian children with their heads blown off from US-supplied bombs dropped by Israelis. Biden kills innocents then he slanders them. Psychopathic empire filth like Biden, Blinken, Nuland and Sullivan won’t be traveling to many countries because there will be arrest warrants for crimes against humanity.

One of these days millions of Americans are going to get tired of living in Israel’s world, the world of censorship where we can’t criticize a foreign country or are penalized for supporting a peaceful, 1st Amendment-covered boycott movement (BDS), where US police forces are trained by Israelis in the latest fascistic techniques, where college professors are drummed out of teaching or denied tenure because they dared to note Israel’s inhumanity and crimes.

Americans are going to get tired of all the Orwellian efforts to protect and promote a goddamned racist genocidal enterprise – charitably called the last apartheid state in the world – normalizing something that’s always been completely abnormal, a state that can’t exist without constant infusions of blood, money, munitions, lies, violence and repression, a tumor implanted in the Levant over 100 years ago by some British imperialists who were themselves antisemites. Americans are going to get tired of politicians who are supposed to be working for us but are much more responsive and animated by slavishly serving a foreign government.

My fellow US serfs, wake the fuck up. What do you think is going to happen in the coming months and years? Do you imagine that the joint US/Israeli genocide of Gaza will result in less “terrorism” and a more peaceful world?

Or you can close your eyes. Go to sleep. Dream on. And when you awake on a bloody street or in a bombed out cafe or a shot up concert, you can say stupid clueless infantile shit like “Why do they hate us?”

Randy Shields just released second book is Barackodile Tears: Obitchuaries on the Obama Years. He is also the author of Some Fantastic Place: Essays on Non-humans and Yahoomans. He can be reached at music2hi4thehumanear@gmail.com. Read other articles by Randy, or visit Randy's website.

US Stands Isolated in Backing Gaza Massacre

by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies / October 31st, 2023

Life in Gaza under Israeli bombardment. Photo credit: canada talks israel palestine

On Friday, October 27, the nations of the world voted in the UN General Assembly, by a vote of 120 to 14, for an “immediate, durable and sustained humanitarian truce leading to a cessation of hostilities” in Gaza. The resolution was sponsored by the government of sometime U.S. ally King Abdullah of Jordan. 

Israel’s UN Ambassador responded with utter disdain, accusing those who voted in favor of the “ridiculous resolution” of supporting “the defense of Nazi terrorists” over Israel. In Gaza, Israel’s response to the global call for a truce was to escalate its bombing and expand its ground invasion.

The U.S. corporate media have not helped Americans understand how isolated our government is in its unconditional support and resupply of weapons for Israel’s genocidal military campaign, which has killed over 8,000 Palestinians, 30% of them women and 40% of them children, while destroying hospitals, apartment buildings, streets and schools, and turning Gaza into nothing short of hell on Earth for the bereaved survivors. According to Save the Children, Israel has killed more children in Gaza in three weeks than have been killed in all global conflicts since 2019.

The UN vote makes it clear how diplomatically isolated Israel and the United States are. The mere 12 countries that sided with Israel and the U.S. in the General Assembly were 4 from eastern Europe (Austria, Croatia, Czechia and Hungary); 2 from Latin America (Guatemala and Paraguay); and 6 small island nations in the Pacific. 

Not a single country from western Europe, Africa, the mainland of Asia, the Caribbean or the Middle East voted with the U.S. and Israel. The countries that voted for a truce included many traditional U.S. allies (France, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Norway, Ireland, Switzerland, New Zealand), while other U.S. allies like the U.K., Germany, Canada and Japan were among the 45 countries that abstained.

Israel and the United States are not only diplomatically isolated, but their governments are out of touch with their own people. As Israel prepared to launch its ground invasion of Gaza, a Maariv poll of Israelis found that public support for an immediate large-scale ground offensive of Gaza had fallen from 65% on October 17th to only 29% a week later. 

Israelis, like the rest of the world, are watching the horrors of the massacre in Gaza, and have realized that their government has no real plan beyond massive, indiscriminate violence for its stated goal of destroying Hamas, which may well be unachievable no matter how many Israeli soldiers, prisoners captured on October 7 and Palestinian civilians it is ready to sacrifice. 

In the United States, a Data for Progress poll, published on October 20, found that 66% of Americans wanted their government to “call for a ceasefire and a deescalation of violence in Gaza,” and to “leverage its close diplomatic relationship with Israel to prevent further violence and civilian deaths.” 

Support was across party lines, but, for a Democratic administration and Democratic members of Congress, the 80% of Democrats who agreed with the poll’s statement should have been a wake-up call. Evidently they slept through the alarm, as Congress passed a bill promising unconditional military support for Israel’s campaign in Gaza by 412 votes to 10 on October 24, a green light for the anticipated escalation that followed. 

By October 30, only 18 members of Congress had signed the resolution introduced by Rep. Cori Bush calling for an “immediate de-escalation and ceasefire.” The new House Speaker Mike Johnson has pledged that the first piece of binding legislation he will put to the floor is one to spend $14 billion to resupply Israel with weapons, a bill that is likely to sail through with overwhelming support from both parties.

The impotence of the U.S. government to contain the chaos its policies have unleashed can hardly be exaggerated. The U.S. embassy in Beirut has posted a message to all U.S. citizens to leave Lebanon immediately. It says, “You should have a plan of action for crisis situations that does not rely on U.S. government assistance,” and tells them they will have to sign a promissory note to reimburse the U.S. government if it helps to evacuate them. 

So the results of the U.S. government’s massive investments in the power to kill and destroy have left it unable to protect or help its own citizens around the world. It instead directs them to a State Department web page titled “What the Department of State Can and Can’t Do in a Crisis.”

The current international isolation of the United States stands in sharp contrast to the way that Biden’s defeat of Trump in 2020 was welcomed around the world. Biden promised a new era of U.S. diplomacy, an end to U.S. wars in the Middle East, and renewed international cooperation on the most serious problems facing the world. 

Instead, his policies are the worst of all worlds, continuing Trump’s ratcheting up of military spending and his illegal sanctions against Iran, Cuba and a dozen other countries, while shifting Trump’s Cold War with Russia and China into overdrive, and now fueling and escalating catastrophic proxy wars in Ukraine and Palestine.

But alternatives to American “leadership” are finally emerging. The UN Security Council is immobilized by self-serving U.S. and Russian vetoes, and exclusive rich boys’ clubs like the G7 and the World Economic Forum have only further entrenched neocolonialism and inequality. But now the world is turning to more representative fora like the UN General Assembly, the G20, G77, BRICS and regional groupings like the African Union, ASEAN and CELAC to more honestly debate our common problems and find new ways to solve them.

As the world comes together to build a post-neocolonial, multipolar world, U.S. propaganda is losing its power to shape the way people look at each new crisis. Israeli and U.S. officials, including Biden, have done their best to cast doubt on the death toll in Gaza, but these numbers are meticulously documented by Palestinian health authorities and accepted by the World Health Organization, UN agencies and NGOs that work there. 

U.S. officials and media are more inclined to listen to Israeli officials than Palestinian ones, but this only increases U.S. isolation by making it complicit in Israeli propaganda, both in fact and in the eyes of people and governments around the world.

King Abdullah of Jordan, President Sisi of Egypt and Palestinian leader Abu Mazen canceled a meeting with Biden after Israel apparently killed hundreds of people with what appeared to be an air-burst bomb, as they sheltered at the Anglican Church’s Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City. Biden validated Abdullah, Sisi and Abu Mazen’s decision by doing exactly as they feared and publicly claiming that “the other team” was responsible for the hospital bombing.

While Palestinian officials have identified over 8,000 people killed in Gaza, Israeli officials have so far only identified 933 of the 1,300 or 1,400 people they say were killed in the Palestinian attack on October 7. 

The Ha’aretz newspaper in Israel has a web page with photos, names, ages and some personal details of the people killed in Israel who have been identified. At the prompting of the Israeli military, many Western politicians and media have painted the Palestinian attack as a massacre of civilians, so it may come as a surprise to see that at least 361 of the 933 dead so far identified were in fact soldiers, police and security officers. 

But Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other Palestinian fighters also killed hundreds of civilians on October 7, as surely as Israel’s air strikes have killed thousands of civilians in Gaza. The prisoners they took back to Gaza also included both soldiers and civilians.

Ha’aretz’s records also raise questions about another story that has been widely repeated by Western media and politicians, including President Biden, which is that Israeli soldiers found 40 dead babies who had been decapitated by Hamas. There are 7 children below the age of 10 among the 572 civilian dead identified in Ha’aretz, but the youngest was 4 years old, not a baby. As with all these questions, we don’t know the answers, but we should be skeptical of unverified atrocity claims, especially since Israel has lied about previous war crimes and resisted independent, international investigations of them.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union left the United States with no rival to act as a check on its leaders’ unbridled and often unrealistic ambitions for global power, the U.S. has squandered a historic chance to build a peaceful, just and sustainable country, with shared prosperity for us and our neighbors around the world.

Our leaders’ illusion of military superiority has been a poison pill that has undermined every aspect of post-Cold War U.S. foreign policy. It has led them down a dead end from where they can no longer imagine alternatives to fighting and killing or arming their proxies to fight and kill, even as the consequences of these policies have become so deadly and destabilizing that they undermine the position of the United States in the world and leave it increasingly isolated.

Apart from the United States, the world is remarkably united behind the goal of ending the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories it occupied in 1967. The United States should stop fueling the occupation with an endless supply of weapons, and stop diplomatically shielding Israel from international efforts to end the occupation. Since the United States has utterly failed in its role as a mediator and honest broker between Israel and Palestine, acting instead as a party to the conflict on Israel’s side, it must now step aside to allow real mediators to take on that role.

Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies are the authors of War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, published by OR Books, November 2022. Medea Benjamin is the cofounder of CODEPINK for PEACE, and the author of several books, including Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher for CODEPINK and the author of Blood on our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq. Read other articles by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies.

Gaza: Its Not a War; Its Genocide

by Graham Peebles / October 28th, 2023

It is carnage in Gaza. Over 5,700 Palestinian civilians are currently estimated to have been murdered by the relentless Israeli assault, 2,055 are children. More than 15,000 people have been injured, including 5,364 children. In the West Bank around 100 have been killed and at least 1,650 injured.

The Israeli bombardment has so far destroyed or damaged 169,184 residential buildings, 206 educational facilities, and 29 health care centres — including the al-Ahli Arab Hospital, which, despite denials and finger pointing, evidence strongly suggests was hit by an Israeli air raid on 17 October, killing 471 people.

The population of Gaza is 2.3 million (1.7 million live in refugee camps), almost half are children; not only are they being bombed, they are being starved. As a result of the Israeli blockade, Oxfam report that, “Just 2% of food that would normally have been delivered has entered Gaza,” as a result “A staggering 2.2 million people are now in urgent need of food”, and water. “Clean water has now virtually run out. It’s estimated that only three litres of clean water is now available per person….Children are experiencing severe trauma…their drinking water is polluted or rationed and soon families may not be able to feed them. How much more are Gazans expected to endure?”

The charity accuses Israel of using ‘starvation as a weapon of war against Gaza civilians’. Oxfam’s regional Middle East director, said: “The situation is nothing short of horrific – where is humanity? Millions of civilians are being collectively punished in full view of the world.”

Is this what Israel wanted?

Were they waiting for a terrorist event like 7 October in Israel, the rightwing fanatics, waiting for Hamas to loose control, to give in to the endless Israeli provocations, and go nuts, so that they could justify annihilating Palestinians? ‘Probably’ is the slightly cynical but most likely correct answer, ‘perhaps’, the more cautious reply, ‘no, don’t be absurd’, the politically correct but naive retort.

As Amira Hass, veteran Haaretz correspondent for the Occupied Palestinian Territories explains, the plan among the far right in Israel since 2017 (and no doubt before), has been to force Palestinians to either, a) live as third class citizens within Israel, b) giving up all hope of self-determination, emigrate – “expulsion by consent”, or c) if you (Palestinians) refuse to capitulate and continue to resist, “the Israeli Defence Force will know what to do with you.” And this is what they (the IDF) are now doing; and the world is bearing witness, but acting not. It is truly shocking and appalling.

This ferocious bombardment of Gaza and the siege, has little or nothing to do with Israel wanting to eradicate Hamas – which they cannot achieve anyway; it is not simply ‘revenge’ either for the shocking attack on 7 October by Hamas, although no doubt many Israeli’s want revenge, it is genocide. Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians and the US and Co., are allowing it to take place.

The response of Western governments (US, UK and EU most notably), to the bombing and the complete siege of Gaza has been disgraceful. With the odd exception, politicians (including Kier Starmer, leader of UK Labour party, and potentially the next Prime-Minister ) have justified Israels indefensible actions.

To there utter shame the US vetoed a recent vote by the UN Security Council for a “humanitarian pause” to the shelling of Gaza. The UK, devoid of principles, abstained. Both President Biden and Prime-Minister Sunak then independently set sail for Tel Aviv to offer unconditional support for Israel. Support for what? Support to slaughter Palestinians and destroy Gaza, support to create a humanitarian catastrophe, support to drive hundreds of thousands of Palestinians out of their homes, south to the Sinai, where a refugee crisis is inevitable.

What exactly do they think they are ‘supporting’ – other than ‘Israels right to defend itself’? Of course it has that right – as do Palestinians, but Israel is not defending itself, it is carrying out mass murder against a civilian population. And far from supporting such action, the US should withdraw its ‘support’, insist on an unconditional ceasefire and allow the humanitarian work to begin in earnest. Other western governments could and should also apply pressure, but only the US can force Israel to stop the madness.

It is a dark day indeed for these governments, these so-called ‘leaders’ — Biden, Sunak, Macron, Ursula von der Leyen — President of the European Commission etc. Not only are they enabling Israel, they and their cohort fill the newspapers and airwaves with lies, distortions, platitudes and evasions, whilst simultaneously trying to close down any criticism of Israel.

In France, pro-Palestinian protests were banned; environmental activists were detained in the Netherlands after demonstrating (outside the ICC) with a poster stating that Benjamin Netanyahu had committed “war crimes” and presided over an “apartheid regime” – all true; Greta Thunberg posted a photograph on Instagram and Twitter of her holding a poster calling for, “Solidarity with Palestine and Gaza”, and was attacked by a spokesperson for the IDF who said, “Whoever identifies with Greta in any way in the future, in my view, is a terror supporter.”

After making a powerful truthful speech, in which he pointed out that, “The bombardment and blockade of Gaza amounted to the “collective punishment of the Palestinian people” and [therefore] violated international law,” Israel demanded UN Secretary General Guterres resign. Israel’s Ambassador to the UN Gilad Erdan, described Mr Guterres’ speech as “shocking” and claimed he “is not fit to lead the UN.” On the back of this ludicrous row, Israel has refused to issue a visa for UN humanitarian affairs chief Martin Griffiths. “The time has come to teach them [the UN] a lesson,” said Erdan, with staggering arrogance.

Mass media is (with the odd exception), also a disgrace, repeatedly spewing Israeli mis/disinformation. Israel and her allies want to completely control and pervert the narrative and to paint anyone who stands up against the oppression and murder of Palestinians as anti-Semitic, and a friend of Hamas.

It’s pathetic, and people everywhere can see the truth. They see the dishonesty and manipulation; the heartbreaking suffering of Palestinians and the barbarism of Israel, for which there is no justification at all. But then hate needs no rationale, it is its own justification; hate is an expression of that which we call evil, and it is this destructive force which is animating the brutality and indiscriminate cruelty let rip upon Palestinians by Israel.

That Palestinian civilians are being killed and displaced like this, in the full light of day, and with the backing of the US and Co. is a deeply distressing sign of the times we are living in. Bleak times indeed, in which violent political extremists, like those directing the brutality against Palestinians, now inhabit the political mainstream and control large chunks of the media.

The way in which we, humanity, responds to this appalling crisis is critical, not just for Palestinians and the Middle East, but for the World as a whole. Give in to hate and division by doing nothing and perpetuate ever deepening levels of suffering, or unite against extremism, intolerance and injustice, and begin to rebuild and heal, both society and the planet; the time is now, the choice is stark, so too the consequences.

Graham Peebles is an independent writer and charity worker. He set up The Create Trust in 2005 and has run education projects in India, Sri Lanka, Palestine and Ethiopia where he lived for two years working with street children, under 18 commercial sex workers, and conducting teacher training programmes. He lives and works in London. Read other articles by Graham, or visit Graham's website.

Biden’s Bungles over Gaza

by Binoy Kampmark / October 27th, 2023

The main press stable was keen to see the scrappy benefits of the 31-hour visit to Israel by US President Joe Biden.  On National Public Radio (NPR), Scott Neuman expressed the view that the “largely symbolic” visit did yield a few “concrete accomplishments” including an announcement of $100 million in Palestinian aid, convincing Israel to permit humanitarian aid into Gaza and persuade Egypt’s strongman president Abdel-Fattah El-Sissi to open up an access route via land into southern Gaza.   If these were seen as achievements, one dare not look at the picture of bright success.

On an individual level, sharing the same stage with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was always going to be an awkward exercise.  A figure reviled and loathed for attacking the judicial system in his own country, and one self-touted as “Mr Security”, things looked rather shoddy.  Given that Israel’s own security was premised on a de facto encirclement and suffocation of Gaza, the occupation of the West Bank, and a virtual hibernation of talks about Palestinian sovereignty – the Israeli PM’s competence has been irreparably damaged.

To that, can be added the entire Israeli approach to Hamas, which was dubbed, in a research brief by the RAND Corporation from 2017 as “mowing the grass” – a less than grand strategy which accepted Israel’s “inability to permanently solve the problem and instead repeatedly targeting the leadership of Palestinian militant organizations to keep violence manageable.”

Biden was there to serve as prop and stay for a war that is moving into a phase of unceasing slaughter.   Slipping into hopeless locker room argot, he whispered his view that the “other team” (to be clear, not Team Israel) had been responsible for the attack on the al-Ahli Arab Hospital that killed hundreds.  This is from the same world leader who has made it a habit to use cue cards when conducting business. (That business is made particularly easier at press conferences, where Biden is seemingly receiving questions in advance from reporters.)

Things were also made that more interesting by a casual observation made at Ramstein Air Base en route back to Washington that, while he did not necessarily thumb Hamas as responsible for the intentional bombing of the hospital, “It’s that old thing: got to learn how to shoot straight.”

There was, however, a note of warning from the President, delivered while in Tel Aviv.  Remarking on comparisons of the Hamas attacks on Israel as the country’s own version of 9/11, Biden accepted that, “Justice must be done.  But I caution this: While you feel that rage, don’t be consumed by it.  After 9/11 we were enraged in the United States.  While we sought justice and got justice, we also made mistakes.”  Given that these mistakes involved a two-decade war in Afghanistan and a disastrous, destabilising invasion of Iraq that constituted a crime against peace while releasing the monster of sectarianism, the remark must surely win an award for understatement.

Biden’s Israel gambit also lends itself to the prospect for further mistakes.  To take the position that Israel is essentially above reproach, certainly publicly, is to flirt with a power potentially engaged in acts of genocide.  The line between rogue state and ennobled avenger becomes blurry.

While international law is exacting about the bar on what constitutes genocide (there can be no other inference, essentially, of an intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group), statements made by Israeli officials, the chilling dehumanising rhetoric towards Palestinians, the collective punishment of the siege, and the evacuation orders of over a million Gaza residents do not auger well for the historical record.

That record is already bulking, aided by suggestions that the Gaza Strip we emptied.  Calcalist, an Israeli business daily, was first to report on a plan from Israeli Intelligence Minister Gila Gamliel to forcibly transfer Gazans into the Sinai Peninsula.  Doing so would “yield positive and long-term strategic results”.  While the paper cautions readers about the influence Gamliel exerts in the government, the idea of relocating and ensuring a “final settlement of the entire Gaza population,” is something the Misgav institute for National Security & Zionist Strategy finds entirely palatable.

In an emergency briefing paper published this month, expert lawyers of the US-based Center for Constitutional Rights asserted that there was a “plausible and credible case, based on factual evidence, that Israel is attempting to commit, if not actively committing, the crime of genocide in the occupied Palestinian territory, and specifically against the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip.”

The authors also warned that the US “is not only failing to uphold its obligation to prevent the commission of genocide, but there is a plausible and credible case to be made that the United States’ actions to further the Israeli military operation, closure and campaign against the Palestinian population in Gaza, rise to the level of complicity in the crime under international law.”

These policies have all been subsumed under the elastic netting of “self-defence”, a term that solidly binds Israel and the United States to an expansive use of retaliatory force.  It has assumed the standing of holy writ in US foreign policy, shielding Israel from its more exuberant uses of violence.  On October 18, for instance, the US rejected a Brazil-sponsored resolution calling for a “humanitarian pause” as it, in the words of US Ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield, “made no mention of Israel’s right of self-defence.”  Every nation of the world had “the inherent right to self-defence, as reflected in Article 51 of the UN Charter.”  If so inherent, why expressly mention it?

On October 25, sharing the podium with his Australian counterpart, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in the Rose Garden, Biden reiterated the position that Israel not only had the right but a “responsibility to respond to the slaughter of their people.  And we will ensure Israel has what it needs to defend itself against these terrorists. That’s a guarantee.”

Sophistically, he sought to separate Hamas from the Palestinian people, a chaff-from-wheat exercise that Israeli politicians and a number of security personnel have distinctly refused to do.  “Hamas is hiding behind Palestinian civilians, and it’s despicable and, not surprisingly, cowardly as well.”  The task for Israel, then, was positively Sisyphean: “to do everything in its power, as difficult as it is, to protect civilians.”

With such a gulf between rhetoric and reality, the world’s most powerful cue card reader also made sure he would partake in the finest traditions of the IDF public relations effort, disputing the casualty lists released by the Hamas-run health ministry.  “I have no notion that Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed.  I’m sure innocents have been killed, and it’s the price of waging a war.”  At a tag of over 7,000 dead and rising, that’s a considerable amount of expended innocence.

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com. Read other articles by Binoy.

Background Facts about Gaza

by Rick Sterling / October 27th, 2023

Secretary General Antonio Guterres recently said, “the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum. The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation.” The Israeli Ambassador responded that Guterres’ comments were “shocking”, “unfathomable” and  “disconnected from reality”.  He called for the Secretary General’s resignation. Below are some facts about Gaza to evaluate whether Guterres was accurate or not.

Gaza is a tiny strip of land on the Mediterranean coast with the 5,000 year old Gaza City in the north. The entire strip is only 5 miles wide by 25 miles in length with 2.3 million Palestinians locked in this territory by Israel.  It is the size of a small US city.

In 1996 Israeli journalist Amira Haas published the book Drinking the Sea at Gaza. After living and researching in Gaza, she described the history, conditions, religion and politics. The subtitle was “Days and Nights in a Land Under Siege”. Gaza has been under siege for decades.

About 80% of the people in Gaza are descendants of refugees who were expelled from their villages in what is now southern Israel in the 1948 Nakba (Catastrophe).  Most Gazans have never been able to set foot outside the territory. They are born, live their lives and die in this concentration camp.

At least 50% of Gaza’s work force is unemployed. Israel restricts nearly all aspects of their economy. For example, Gaza’s fishermen are prevented from going into deeper waters to fish. If they try, they are fired on by Israeli naval boats. Farmers and shepherds are also fired on as they try to eke out a living.

From December 1998 to February 2001, there was an airport in Gaza until Israel bombed the control tower and destroyed the runways to make it unusable.

Gaza has a port but foreign boats are prevented from landing. In 2010, six civilian ships including the Turkish Mavi Marmara tried to bring humanitarian relief to Gaza. Israeli paratroopers attacked  the ships,  killing 9 passengers including one American.

Israel routinely demolishes the homes of Palestinians. In 2003, American peace activist Rachel Corrie was killed by an Israeli bulldozer as she attempted to prevent the destruction of the home of a Palestinian pharmacist in Gaza.

Israel routinely denies exit permits to outstanding youth who have received scholarships to study abroad.

In 2014 Israel bombed Gaza’s water reservoir and sanitation treatment facilities, escalating the shortage of drinking water while sewage ran in the streets. Since then, as documented by Oxfam, Israel has prevented the importation of equipment necessary to rebuild sanitation and water treatment.

In spring 2018 Gazans demonstrated against their imprisonment. They called it the Great March of Return.  The two year report documents that 217 Palestinians were killed and over 19,000 injured  by Israeli soldiers.

In 2020 the UN issued a report saying that Gaza is not liveable. “The primary cause of this ‘unliveable environment is a highly restrictive Israeli blockade … which has reduced Gaza to the point of ‘systematic collapse.’”

Conclusion

Clearly, the Secretary General was accurate in his statement that Palestinians have endured decades of “suffocating occupation”. It is a measure of the Israeli Ambassador’s sense of impunity that he attacks the top UN official who dares to mention this.

The diplomatic conflict will increase in the coming days and weeks as Israel’s genocidal campaign continues.

The facts about Gaza and Palestine are clear: Israel is violating international law and Western states that support this are complicit. It is up to the people all over the world to speak out.

Rick Sterling is an investigative journalist in the SF Bay Area. He can be reached at rsterling1@protonmail.com. Read other articles by Rick.

Israel and the Myth of “Self-Defence”

by Double Down News / October 30th, 2023

If there’s blood on anyone’s hands it’s on those who say: “Israel has a right to defend itself.”

David Hearst is editor-in-chief of Middle East Eye.

Eyewitness to Israeli Atrocities in Gaza

by U.S. Tour of Duty / October 28th, 2023

Eva Bartlett joins Scott Ritter and Jeff Norman to relate an on-the-ground perspective — a perspective entirely missing or marginalized from western mass media — of what Palestinians endure daily from the Israeli siege on the open-air concentration camp of Gaza. People have a right and a moral duty to be aware of what their governments are supporting.

U.S. Tour of Duty often features former US marine and UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter in video interviews: "Ask the Inspector." Read other articles by U.S. Tour of Duty, or visit U.S. Tour of Duty's website.

 

Satu Katajala becomes WANO regional centre director

27 October 2023

The World Association of Nuclear Operators (WANO) has appointed Satu Katajala as its next Paris Centre Director in what it describes as a "significant milestone in support of diversity in the nuclear industry".

(Image: WANO)

Katajala is currently Vice-President, Nuclear Safety Oversight and International Co-operation, at Fortum’s Loviisa nuclear power plant, and has worked in a wide variety of roles during more than three decades in nuclear operations and radiation protection.

WANO CEO Naoki Chigusa, said: “I am delighted that Satu has joined us and I’ve no doubt she will be a great asset to WANO, to our members of the Paris Centre region, and the global industry. Satu joins us with a raft of experience and expertise, and we look forward to her leading Paris Centre during a key phase in its development - with our shared aim to support our members in driving sustainable improvements to all plants and facilities. As the first female appointed to the position, this is also a major step in helping enhance diversity within our industry."

Katajala said: "It is a great honour to join WANO Paris Centre in the key role of director. I will work with my colleagues to ensure that WANO continues to work together to assess, benchmark and improve performance through mutual support, exchange of information, and emulation of best practices. My mandate is to continue our members’ successful implementation of Action for Excellence and drive sustainable improvement in the performance of the industry over the coming years. We are also ready to support the expansion of the industry, and support members that introduce and operate new technologies, such as SMRs."

WANO, a not-for-profit international organisation that helps its members maximise the safety and reliability of nuclear power plants worldwide, was established in 1989 by the world's nuclear power operators to exchange safety knowledge and operating experience amongst organisations operating commercial nuclear power reactors. WANO’s members operate around 430 nuclear units in over 30 countries and areas worldwide.

The Paris Centre covers 70 nuclear power plant units across 17 countries. WANO also has regional centres in Atlanta, Moscow and Tokyo and offices in London and Shanghai. Katajala, who will become the first woman to have headed any of the WANO regional centres, succeeds Luis Soriano Martinez, who completes his four year term in the role at the end of the year.

Researched and written by World Nuclear News

 

Poland's Pomerania backs proposed nuclear plant location

27 October 2023

The decision by the regional authorities to determine the territorial scope - on both land and sea - of Poland's first nuclear power plant in the Lubiatowo-Kopalino site in the Choczewo municipality in Pomerania means that Polskie Elektrownie Jądrowe (PEJ) has received the right to use the area for preparatory work.

An illustrative example of how the plant might look (Image: PEJ)

The proposed plant, to be built on the coast in northern Poland, is to feature three Westinghouse AP1000 reactors with a total capacity of 3750 MWe.

The decision, issued by the Pomeranian Voivode Dariusz Drelich, to determine the location is not the same as a building permit - a separate permit will be needed to perform preparatory work, followed by a permit to build a power plant from the National Atomic Energy Agency. A construction permit to allow construction work to begin would then be required from the regional authority.

Drelich said: "The nuclear power plant will influence power supply stability, balance the projected increase in demand for electricity and ensure energy sovereignty. It is an investment in the future, harmonious development and, most importantly, safety."

Mateusz Berger, President of the Management Board of PEJ, said: "The implementation of our investment is associated with a number of socio-economic benefits for the entire Pomerania region. The Lubiatowo-Kopalino location was indicated as the company's preferred location in 2021 due to the balance between environmental aspects, socio-economic factors and nuclear safety. Obtaining the decision to determine the location of the first nuclear power plant in Poland is another milestone achieved by the company this year, which brings us, as an investor, closer to the moment of starting the construction of the facility."

Anna Łukaszewska-Trzeciakowska, Government Plenipotentiary for Strategic Energy Infrastructure, said: "The decision to determine the location obtained by Polskie Elektrownie Jądrowe enables the company to carry out preparatory activities ... in the field, indicating, among other things, specific plots for the implementation of the investment. This is another key decision in the power plant investment process. The decision issued, combined with the recently signed contract for the design of the power plant with our American partners, proves that we are consistently achieving subsequent milestones, and the nuclear power plant in Pomerania is the most advanced nuclear investment in the country."

Last month PEJ signed an engineering services contract with US firms Westinghouse Electric Company and Bechtel to finalise a site-specific design for the plant featuring three AP1000 reactors. The design/engineering documentation includes the main components of the power plant: the nuclear island, the turbine island and the associated installations and auxiliary equipment, as well as administrative buildings and infrastructure related to the safety of the facility.

As part of the 18-month contract, joint activities with Westinghouse and Bechtel are planned to be continued to involve Polish industry in the project. Taking into account the needs and capabilities of Polish contractors, the activities are intended to allow establishing supply chains for the nuclear power plant in a way that maximises the local content participation, including contractors from Pomerania, while guaranteeing efficient and safe execution of the investment project.

The Polish government - which is set to be replaced following elections this month - selected the Westinghouse AP1000 reactor technology for construction at Lubiatowo-Kopalino in November 2022. The country's Ministry of Climate and Environment in July this year issued a decision-in-principle for PEJ - a special purpose vehicle 100% owned by the State Treasury - to construct the plant. The aim is for Poland's first AP1000 reactor to enter commercial operation in 2033.

Researched and written by World Nuclear News

 

Zoning permit issued for new Dukovany nuclear units

30 October 2023

The application for a zoning decision for up to two new nuclear power units at Dukovany in the Czech Republic was submitted in 2021 and ČEZ says the approval by the Ministry of Industry and Trade is a "key milestone".

There are currently four VVER-440 units at Dukovany (Image: ČEZ)

The permit application was submitted in June 2021 to the Construction Department of the Municipal Office in Třebíč and ČEZ said that there had been six deadline extensions requested by the department before a change in the country's Building Act led to the administrative proceedings being transferred to the Ministry of Industry and Trade in July 2022.

Tomáš Pleskač, Director of ČEZ's New Energy Division, said: "The complex authorisation process of the new nuclear power plant project at Dukovany, one of the largest projects in Czech history, has advanced to the next stage. The issuance of the current decision is a significant step forward in the project. We have already received a positive opinion on the Environmental Impact Assessment and a permit for locating the nuclear power plant from the State Office for Nuclear Safety and authorisation for constructing the nuclear power plant from the Ministry of Industry and Trade."

Daniel Beneš, Chairman and CEO of ČEZ, said: "This step marks the successful completion of another milestone in the preparation schedule. At the same time, it is also a clear signal to all bidders in the current tender for the construction of new nuclear power plants that the permitting process is being implemented."

The issuance of the zoning permit comes the day before the deadline for submission of final bids from US company Westinghouse, France's EDF and South Korea's Korea Hydro and Nuclear Power for a new unit, which is due to be built next to the existing power plant and will replace part of its output in the future.

Four VVER-440 units are currently in operation at the Dukovany site, which began operating between 1985 and 1987. Two VVER-1000 units are in operation at Temelín, which came into operation in 2000 and 2002. Past Czech energy policy has proposed two new units at each of the two existing sites. There are also developing plans for small modular reactors in the country in an area near the existing Temelín plant. The Czech Republic gets about 34% of its electricity from its nuclear power plants.

Researched and written by World Nuclear News