It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Monday, January 01, 2024
World's Largest Lithium Reserve Discovered Beneath California's Salton Sea
The Salton Sea lithium deposit holds an estimated 18 million tons, enough to support over 375 million EV batteries.
The discovery could shift the U.S. towards self-sufficiency in lithium, reducing reliance on imports and enhancing national energy security.
Advancements in direct lithium extraction technologies promise more efficient and sustainable mining, potentially leading to a surplus in lithium supply and affecting market prices.
The U.S. Department of Energy has made its second major lithium discovery this year, both of which promise to make the country self-sufficient in the critical battery metal for decades. The DoE has discovered a massive lithium deposit beneath California’s Salton Sea, holding an estimated 18 million tons of lithium.
According to the DoE, with expected technology advances, the Salton Sea region’s total resources could produce more than 3,400 kilotons of lithium, worth up to $540 billion and enough to support over 375 million batteries for electric vehicles (EV)—more than the total number of vehicles currently on U.S. roads.
“Lithium is vital to decarbonizing the economy and meeting President Biden’s goals of 50% electric vehicle adoption by 2030,” said Jeff Marootian, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy.
“This report confirms the once-in-a-generation opportunity to build a domestic lithium industry at home while also expanding clean, flexible electricity generation. Using American innovation, we can lead the clean energy future, create jobs and a strong domestic supply chain, and boost our national energy security, ‘’ the DoE declared.
The DoE has acknowledged that the United States currently has limited capabilities to extract, refine, and produce domestically sourced lithium. Indeed, the country typically imports nearly half of the lithium it consumes, almost all coming from Chile and Argentina.
Much of the lithium imported into the U.S. is used in the manufacture of industrial products; however, a growing proportion is now going into the making of EV batteries. And, this proportion could skyrocket in the coming years, with U.S. battery capacity forecast to hit 620 GWh, up from just 38 GWh of capacity in 2021.
The Salton Sea lithium deposit appears to be a real goldmine. After all, the DoE has revealed its Known Geothermal Resource Area (KGRA) has about 400 megawatts (MW) of geothermal electricity-generation capacity currently installed but has the potential for up to 2,950 MW. The DoE notes that the combined subsurface geology and geothermal activity in the Salton Sea’s KGRA result in high concentrations of lithium, among the highest concentrations of lithium contained in geothermal brines across the globe.
Bad News For Lithium Bulls
The U.S. could soon become self-sufficient in lithium, thanks to an upcoming technology: direct lithium extraction (DLE).. DLE technologies aim to extract ~90% of lithium in brine water compared to 50% extraction rates using conventional ponds. Their biggest advantage is that they are capable of harvesting the metal in a matter of days,way faster than upwards of one yearrequired to extract lithium carbonate from conventional evaporation ponds and open-pit mines. Direct lithium extraction also comes with an ESG/sustainability bonus because not only are DLE mines portable, but they are also able to recycle their fresh water and limit the use of hydrochloric acid.
Advancements in direct lithium extraction might be great news for the EV sector, but are, unfortunately, certainly not the kind of news lithium bulls will rejoice over.
As Tesla Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA) CEO Elon Musk has correctly noted, lithium is a fairly common and abundant element, but its supply is currently hampered by slow and inefficient mining techniques. In fact, mining limitations are largely to blame for the crazy lithium boom/bust cycle we have witnessed over the past couple of years when lithium supply at first failed to keep up with heightened demand before prices came crashing down amid a deluge of fresh supply coming online. Lithium carbonate prices jumped more than tenfold from December 2020 before peaking at an all-time high of nearly CNY 600,000 ($84,015) per tonne in November 2022. Prices have since tumbled to CNY 97,500 ($13,650) per tonne.
Fastmarkets has forecasted that commercial-scale DLE projects could start coming online as soon as 2025 and could supply 13% of global lithium demand by 2030.
Overall, The DLE industry could bring in more than $10 billion in annual revenue within the next decade. One of the lithium bears, Goldman Sachs, has forecast that lithium carbonate supply will grow at a brisk 33% annual clip, considerably faster than lithium demand which is expected to only grow at 25% p.a. If this prediction turns out to be accurate, we can expect lithium carbonate to remain depressed in the foreseeable future.
“Our analysis suggests that DLE will widen, rather than steepen, the lithium brine cost curve with an average project likely sitting in the second or third cost quartile, according to Morgan Stanley.
“With resulting additional lithium supply we also see risk that DLE implementation could extend the size and duration of lithium market surpluses/reduce deficits vs. our base case SD balance (without a pull forward of demand with new supply), where ~20-40% of LatAm brine projects implementing DLE (recovery from ~50% to ~80%) could add ~70-140ktpa LCE from 2028+, increasing GSe global raw supply by 8%.’
By Alex Kimani for Oilprice.com
Ecuador’s NOC Declares Force Majeure After Indigenous Protests
Ecuador's state-run oil company, Petroecuador, has declared force majeure on three more oil blocks due to protests by the indigenous Kichwa community, just days after doing the same for another block.
The three blocks were jointly producing a total of about 142,000 barrels of oil equivalent before production fell to about 122,500 on Monday.
The indigenous community has accused the company of breaching agreements, though Petroecudor has said it remains open to dialogue. Petroecudor produced just over 362,000 barrels on Monday.
The latest development comes as yet another blow to Ecuador's beleaguered oil and gas sector. Earlier in the year, Ecuador’s energy minister Fernando Santos revealed that fuel imports have now surpassed exports for the first time in more than 50 years.
Crude and fuel oil exports clocked in at $2.9bn during H1 2023, $100m lower than imports which cost $3bn during the same period.
This marks the first time fuel imports have exceeded exports ever since Ecuador started exporting oil in 1972, highlighting the vulnerability of smaller economies that rely heavily on oil to oil price swings. Latin American economies generally depend on oil exports, a situation that is exacerbated by a lack of a clear roadmap in the energy transition.
The economies of Ecuador, Venezuela, and Colombia rely heavily on oil exports and revenues, while Bolivia and Trinidad depend on natural gas.
Back in August, Ecuadorians voted against drilling for oil in Yasuni National Park, home to the Tagaeri and Taromenani who live in self-isolation. Yasuni, designated a world biosphere reserve by UNESCO in 1989, encompasses a surface area of over 1 million hectares (2.5 million acres); 121 reptile species, 610 species of birds and 139 amphibian species.
Ecuadorian President Guillermo Lasso has been strongly advocating for oil drilling in Yasuni in a bid to boost oil exports. However, the results of the referendum mean that Petroecuador now has to abandon operations there.
By Alex Kimani for Oilprice.com
WRASTLING
Curse of the Iron Claw: the tragic, stranger-than-fiction saga of (U$) wrestling’s first family
Tom Fordy Sat, 30 December 2023
Jeremy Allen White, left, and Harris Dickinson in a scene from The Iron Claw - Brian Roedel
On February 18 1993, Fritz Von Erich – a legendary wrestling star and promoter – found the body of his own son, Kerry Von Erich, on his ranch in Denton County, Texas. Kerry, 33, was sitting upright against a tree. He’d shot himself through the heart with his father’s own .44 – a grisly suicide that still haunts professional wrestling lore three decades later. Kerry was the fifth of Fritz’s sons to die – and the third to die by suicide. “Dad found him and said he’d never seen such a peaceful look on Kerry’s face,” recalled the only surviving Von Erich brother, Kevin. “It must have hit him just right.”
In the early 1980s, Kerry Von Erich had been one of the biggest wrestling stars in the United States, often teaming alongside brothers David and Kevin in their father’s Dallas-based promotion, World Class Championship Wrestling (WCCW). The promotion revolutionised wrestling TV and made rock star-like heroes of the boys. But Kerry lost his brothers one-by-one and had his right foot covertly amputated – a secret later exposed in a macabre moment in the ring. And by the time he took his own life, Kerry Von Erich – also known as “The Texas Tornado” – was facing prison on drug charges.
The story of the Von Erich family – the subject of the new Zac Efron-starring wrestling biopic, The Iron Claw – is both horribly tragic and bizarre. In fact, the fate that befell Fritz, the wrestling Nazi-turned-all-American born-again Christian, and his brood of heartthrob sons, is almost too sad for one film.
The Von Erich “curse”, as it’s often called, is like a warning from a time when the wrestling business was booming, but also awash with steroids, cocaine, and painkillers – an epidemic born from the punishing, cutthroat demands of the pretend sport, in which the grip on reality is deliberately, sometimes perilously loose. Wrestlers all too easily loose themselves in the characters and storylines they peddle to sell not just tickets but their own mystique. Dave Meltzer, a wrestling journalist in the US, previously described how the Von Erichs lived in a “fantasy”.
Fritz Von Erich was not really a Nazi – or even German – though he’s often painted as the abusive, self-serving villain in the Von Erich story. Real name Jack Adkisson, he was a 6’3”, 275lb Texan who sold punters on a series of untruths: that he was the greatest wrestler who ever lived; that his trademark hold, the Iron Claw – a vice-like grip on opponents’ faces – was both agonising and unbreakable; and that his all-American athlete sons were pure-hearted, do-no-wrong, clean-living heroes.
He pushed his teenage offspring into tough workout schedules, punished them with a leather strap, and blatantly picked favourites. He marketed them as something that – in some cases – they couldn’t live up to and stooped to cashing-in on their deaths. Fritz may have sold himself on the biggest lie of all: denial about his sons’ drug problems.
For the Von Erichs, wrestling – and the pain that came with it – was almost a destiny. As surviving brother said Kevin in a 2006 documentary: “We got into wrestling because we wanted to be like our dad.”
Fritz – or Jack as he was then – had been a football player before learning to wrestle under Stu Hart, the patriarch of troubled wrestling dynasty the Hart family (members include Owen Hart, who died in the middle of a WWF ring after he plummeted 80ft from the rafters in a botched stunt, and “The British Bulldog” Davey Boy Smith, who died aged 40 after years of drug and steroid abuse). Adkisson created the character of Fritz Von Erich, a Nazi “heel” (wrestling parlance for the baddie). German, Japanese, and Russian heel characters were commonplace in the post-war period. Fans – called “marks” within the clandestine inner workings of wrestling – would pay to see the good guys, or “babyfaces”, defeat the dastardly foreigners.
In the 1960s, Fritz was an international wrestling star – one of the biggest drawing heels in both the US and Japan. But tragedy had already struck Fritz and his wife, Doris. In 1959, their six-year-old son, Jackie, was electrocuted by an exposed wire and drowned in a puddle
. Fritz Von Erich in 1976
From the mid-1960s, Fritz ran his own Texas wrestling promotion, Big Time Wrestling, which was later renamed World Class Championship Wrestling. Fritz made himself the top star, transitioning into a babyface hero (unusual for a Nazi) with an all-American family image. He later found God, although cynics would say it was another crafty promotional tactic.
At that time, the American wrestling business was divided into “territories” – regional promotions connected by a governing body, the National Wrestling Alliance (NWA). The NWA would select a world champion, who would travel between the territories to defend the title against the most popular local stars. Fritz was never NWA world champion, though he became NWA president and boasted that his sons – Kevin, David, and Kerry – were all future champions.
Kevin, David, and Kerry were all-star athletes at high school. Kerry – real name Kerry Gene Adkisson, the youngest of the three – was the most accomplished. He was a high school football player and discus-throwing champion. As reported by Dave Meltzer at the time of his death, Kerry was rumoured to be heavily enhanced by steroids by the 10th grade – aged 15-16. Attempts to carve their own paths were futile; even the teachers called the Adkisson boys “Von Erich”.
They were undeniable talents in the ring. Kevin (played by Zac Efron in the film) wrestled barefoot and dazzled fans with his aerial assaults. David (Harris Dickinson) was an instinctively skilled, highly charismatic grappler. And Kerry (The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White) was a raw athlete with an Adonis-like physique and known as “the Modern Day Warrior”.
Kerry and Mike von Erich in 1984
Sold to Texas wrestling fans as wholesome studs, the Von Erich brothers became legitimate superstars. They have huge success in a “feud” – a storyline rivalry and series of matches – with a three-man team known as the Fabulous Freebirds, led by a Confederate flag-wearing showboat named Michael PS Hayes. The Von Erichs vs Fabulous Freebirds business was, to use more wrestling parlance, hot. They sold out the Dallas Sportatorium week after week, while thousands were turned away from packed out arena shows. The Von Erich boys also wrestled the NWA world champion, Ric Flair, a flamboyant, platinum-dyed playboy who’s often called the greatest wrestler of all time.
Locally, the Von Erichs were folk heroes. Their rock star status drove girls wild. Kerry in particular, wrote Meltzer, was “the object of desire for every female in the state of Texas, and plenty in other states as well”. The Von Erichs, forever selling themselves to the marks – something that came from growing up in the carny-like wrestling biz – pretended they were single to keep the ladies happy.
The weekly WCCW shows also changed how wrestling was presented on television. Multi-camera set-ups put viewers right in action, while wrestlers entered the arenas to the sound of rock music – all now standard fare in wrestling. In a 2006 documentary, Heroes of World Class Wrestling, the producer admitted that the programmes were inspired by the Rocky movies.
Holt McCallany and Harrison Dickinson as Fritz and David Von Erich in The White Claw - Brian Roedel
The WCCW shows were syndicated and made the Von Erichs national stars. Kerry wrestled sell-outs against Flair around the country, while their TV shows reached as far as Japan, Europe, and the Middle East. From 1982 to 1984, WCCW was the most popular wrestling promotion in the world.
The Von Erichs appeared on magazine covers. They starred in their own comic book and featured on pizza commercials. Kerry even had a hotline number that fans – particularly female fans – could call to ask him anything. “I mean anything,” Kerry reiterated in the TV commercial.
In Texas, the Von Erichs’ reputation was so god-like that when Kerry was busted at Dallas Fort Worth Airport in 1983 – carrying an assortment of downers, powders, and marijuana – it barely made a dent in their reputations. This was long before wrestling had admitted to fans that it was in fact fictitious. As Meltzer noted, hardcore fans bought into the wrestling storylines so much that they dismissed the scandal and believed that the Von Erichs’ sworn enemy, Michael PS Hayes, must have somehow planted the drugs on Kerry. The evidence mysteriously disappeared from the police station.
Behind the scenes, there were stories about the Von Erichs’ drug use. Fritz told them never to drink in public, though the boys caused problems with local merchants and sponsors by turning up for public appearances in various states – if they turned up at all. Fritz refused to believe it.
Initially, it was David Von Erich who was tipped to be the biggest star of the three and the future NWA world champion. So in February 1984, David –whose baby daughter had died of SIDS at 13 weeks old – embarked on a wrestling tour of Japan. Before wrestling a single match, he was found dead in his hotel room. A common story within wrestling is that David died from an overdose of Placidyls, a sedative, and that fellow wrestler Bruiser Brody flushed the pills down the toilet when he found the body (Bruiser Brody met an untimely end himself – he was murdered in a Puerto Rico locker room in 1988). The official cause of David’s death, however – and the version depicted in the movie – was acute enteritis, a swelling of the intestines. It’s true that he was visibly ill before his death.
David Manning, a referee and backstage figure with WCCW, got the call from Japan and drove to Fritz’s ranch in the early hours to break the bad news. When Fritz saw him pulling up, he came out and asked, “Which one?”
A reported 3,000 fans attended David’s funeral. Fritz – not one to miss a trick – had a cash-in song, Heaven Needed a Champion, quickly recorded in his son’s honour. Fritz promoted a David memorial show at Texas Stadium, just outside of Dallas, which drew over 32,000 fans and made $400,000-plus at the gate – the second biggest gate in US wrestling history at the time.
Fans expressed their grief by snapping up copies of the record – performed live at the event – and overpriced David Von Erich memorabilia. In the headline match, Kerry finally defeated Ric Flair for the NWA world championship, winning the title in his brother’s honour. Kerry’s championship reign was short-lived – he lost the title back to Flair less than three weeks later. A scene from The Iron Claw
A fourth brother, Mike Von Erich (Stanley Simons in the movie), had debuted shortly before and was tasked with replacing David. But Mike – who did look like David – struggled with the pressure, and was not a naturally gifted wrestler like his brothers. “The only thing he had going for him is that he was called Mike Von Erich,” said Dave Meltzer on Viceland’s Dark Side of the Ring documentary. After dislocating his shoulder, Mike required surgery and contracted bacterial staph infection. Spiking a fever of 107 – at which point his organs began to shut down – Mike almost died from toxic shock syndrome.
Fritz, believing he needed another Von Erich, invented a pretend cousin, “Lance Von Erich” – actually a not-especially-good wrestler named William Kevin Vaughan. “Lance”, promoted as part of the family, soon fell out with Fritz over money and jumped to a rival promotion. The deception, which some fans suspected from the start, was a blow to the Von Erichs’ image and integrity.
In the mid-1980s, the New York-based World Wrestling Federation (WWF) – now WWE – began an aggressive national expansion. With Hulk Hogan as its biggest star name, the WWF stormed into other territories to take their TV slots, muscle into their business, and poach their best wrestlers. Loyalty to the Von Erichs held firm in Texas at first, but WCCW’s popularity ultimately declined.
In June 1986, Kerry crashed his motorbike. Speeding without a helmet or even shoes, he ploughed into a parked police car, suffering a dislocated hip, internal injuries, and a mangled right leg. Doctors performed microsurgery to save his foot, which one witness said looked like “an alligator had chewed on it”.
With business on the slide, Fritz advertised Kerry’s return to the wrestling ring just eight months later. Kerry got through the match after being pumped full of novocaine, but reinjured the ankle. Only 2,326 fans paid to – a far cry from the 32,000-plus who once paid to see him beat Ric Flair. At some point, his foot was amputated, though he continued wrestling with a prosthetic – a tightly guarded secret and later the stuff of wrestling legend. “He wanted me to promise to hide that… he was ashamed of it,” said brother Kevin on Dark Side of the Ring.
To hide the missing foot, Kerry would shower after matches with his boot on; other wrestlers put down to eccentricity. But the secret was exposed during a match, when Kerry’s opponent – a character known as Colonel DeBeers – grabbed Kerry’s foot for a hold and accidentally yanked his boot off. The audience was stunned by the sight of Kerry’s foot-less stump beneath.
The Von Erich brothers, as seen in The Iron Claw
Mike, meanwhile, never fully recovered from the toxic shock – physically or mentally. After a near-miss car crash and series of arrests, he went to Lewisville Lake in April 1987 and overdosed on Placidyls. He was just 23. The drug problems were not exclusive to the Von Erichs in WCCW. The year before, Gino Hernandez, a top heel for the company, died from a cocaine overdose.
On Christmas Day 1987, Fritz pulled out his most underhanded tactic yet. In a wrestling “angle” – a storyline incident designed to build hype for a show – Fritz was supposedly attacked by the Freebirds and feigned a heart attack, playing on the fans’ sympathy and very real heartbreak over his dead sons. As remembered by Dave Meltzer, TV broadcasts would update viewers each week on Fritz’s condition. If the arena did good box office that week, he’d show improvement; if there were still empty seats, his condition would worsen.
In 1988, D Magazine published a profile on the Von Erichs, which explored their tragedies so far. Kevin, talking about the allure of wrestling itself, gave a quote that now seems chilling. “I guess this is our destiny,” Kevin said, “and there’s nothing more to be said about it. You have to go where your destiny leads you, no matter where that road might be. And for us, this is it.”
A few years later, the youngest brother, Chris Von Erich – who is omitted from the movie completely – also took his own life. Chris had been severely asthmatic and took medication that left him with brittle bones. He idolised his brothers but didn’t have the physical aptitude for professional wrestling. He broke his arm – another setback as he failed to live up to the Von Erich name. In September 1991, aged just 21, he shot himself in the head.
By that time, Kerry had joined the WWF, which had all but eradicated the old wrestling territories. Entering the WWF with some fanfare, he was renamed “The Texas Tornado” and quickly won the WWF’s Intercontinental Championship. But Kerry – not the performer he’d once been and addicted to painkillers – slipped down the rankings. The WWF was on the cusp of its own drugs scandal – particularly steroid use among its wrestlers – and the company would soon purge its locker room of steroids and the most obvious steroid users.
After a stint at the Betty Ford clinic, Kerry was the first wrestler to speak openly about getting treatment for his addictions (Hulk Hogan, conversely, went on a TV chat show and unashamedly lied about using steroids). But Kerry – remembered by those who knew him as soft-hearted and generous – also talked about suicide. Fellow WWF wrestler Bret Hart – the biggest star from the Hart wrestling dynasty – recalled how Kerry had made up his mind to “join his brothers in heaven”.
Kerry was let go from the WWF in the summer of 1992. Already serving a 10-year probation for forging drug prescriptions, he was arrested in January 1993 for cocaine possession and indicted on February 17. Financially broke and with his marriage on the rocks, Kerry was very likely going to prison. The following day, Kerry Adkisson – the Modern Day Warrior – went to Fritz’s ranch, told his father he loved him, and went outside to end his own life.
Wrestling personality Gary Hart, who played a pivotal role in the peak of WCCW, wrote in his autobiography about how the Von Erichs’ mother, Doris, would visit his office. When she left, she would touch a photo of her sons and weep.
The “curse” of the Von Erichs is as much a fiction as any story that Fritz used to sell tickets. It was, more realistically, a cycle of copycat suicides – a sad, inescapable pattern – arguably enabled by Fritz memorialising his dead sons as American heroes. Bret Hart wondered if the Von Erichs were so competitive that killing themselves was “the ultimate act of bravado”.
Later, when Fritz was suffering from brain cancer, he held a gun to Kevin and said, “You’d kill yourself too if you have the guts.” Kevin – who relayed the story on Dark Side of the Ring – replied, “Dad, it takes guts to live, not guts to die.” Fritz himself died in 1997.
Kevin Von Erich has since summed up the story with an often repeated line. “I used to have five brothers,” he said. “Now I’m not even a brother.”
The Iron Claw is in US cinemas now and will be released in the UK on February 24
Urinating on Prisoners: Why Humiliation is Functional in Israel’s War on Palestinians
When Zionist militias, using advanced Western arms, conquered historic Palestine in 1947-48, they expressed their victory through the deliberate humiliation of Palestinians.
Much of that humiliation targeted women, in particular, knowing how the dishonor of Palestinian females represents, according to Arab culture, a sense of dishonor to the whole community.
This strategy remains in use to this day.
When scores of Palestinian women were released following prisoner exchanges between Palestinian Resistance and Israel, starting on November 24, there was very little room to hide the facts.
Unlike the 75-year-ago Palestinian community, this current generation no longer internalizes Israel’s intentional humiliation of women and men alike, as if an act of collective dishonor.
This has allowed many newly released female prisoners to speak openly, often on live TV, about the kind of humiliation that they were exposed to while in Israeli military detention.
The Israeli army, however, continues to act with the same old mindset, perceiving the humiliation of Palestinians as an expression of dominance, power and supremacy.
Over the years, Israel has perfected the politics of humiliation – a notion which is predicated on the psychological power of shaming whole collectives to emphasize the asymmetrical relationship between two groups of people: in this case, the occupier and the occupied.
This is precisely why, in the early days of the Israeli war on Gaza, Israel detained all Palestinian workers from the Strip who happened to be working inside Israel as cheap laborers, at the time of the October 7 operation.
The dehumanization they experienced at the hands of Israeli soldiers demonstrated a growing trend among Israelis to degrade Palestinians for no reason whatsoever.
One of the worst documented episodes took place on October 12, when a group of Israeli soldiers and settlers assaulted three Palestinian activists in the West Bank. Israeli newspapers Haaretz and The Times of Israel described how the three were assaulted, stripped naked, bound, photographed, tortured and urinated upon.
Those images were still fresh in the minds of Palestinians when new images emerged from northern Gaza.
Photos and videos published in Israeli media showed men stripped down to their underwear, being placed in large numbers on the streets of Gaza, while surrounded by well-equipped and supposedly menacing Israeli soldiers.
The men were handcuffed, tied together, forced to hunch down and then, eventually, thrown into military trucks to be taken to an unknown location.
Some of the men were eventually released to tell horror stories, which often had bloody endings.
But why is Israel doing this?
Throughout its history – violent birth and equally violent existence – Israel has purposely humiliated Palestinians as an expression of its disproportionately greater military power over a hapless, confined and mostly refugee population.
This tactic was infused more during certain periods of history when Palestinians felt empowered, as a way to break their collective spirit.
The First Intifada, 1987-93, was rife with this kind of humiliation. Children and men between the ages of 15 to 55 would be habitually dragged into schoolyards, stripped naked, forced to kneel down for endless hours, beaten, and insulted by Israeli soldiers using loudspeakers.
Those insults would cover everything that Palestinians hold dear – their religions, their God, their mothers, their holy places and more.
Then, boys and men would be forced to perform certain acts, for example spitting in each other’s faces, shouting certain profanities, slapping themselves or each other. Those who refused would be immediately overpowered, beaten and arrested.
These methods continue to be applied in Israeli prisons, especially during times of hunger strikes, but also during periods of interrogations. In the latter cases, men would be threatened with the rape of their wives or sisters; women would be threatened with sexual violence.
These episodes are often met with collective Palestinian defiance, which directly feeds into Palestinian popular resistance.
The image of the Palestinian fighter, dressed in military fatigue, brandishing an automatic rifle, while proudly walking the streets of Nablus, Jenin or Gaza, in itself does not serve an actual military purpose. It is, however, a direct response to the psychological impact of the kind of humiliation inflicted upon Palestinian society by the Israeli occupation army.
But what is the function of a Palestinian military parade? To answer this question, we must examine the sequence of the event.
When Israel arrests Palestinian activists, they attempt to create the perfect scenario of a humiliated and defeated community: the terror felt by the people when nightly raids begin, the beating of the family of the detained, the shouts of insults along with other well-choreographed horror scenes.
Hours later, Palestinian youth emerge on the streets of their neighborhoods, proudly parading with their guns, amid the ululation of women and the excited looks of children. This is precisely how Palestinians respond to humiliation.
Palestinian armed Resistance has grown much stronger in recent years, with Gaza currently serving as a case in point.
As the Israeli military is failing to reoccupy Gaza and to subdue its population, utilizing the politics of humiliation on a mass scale is simply impossible.
To the contrary, it is the Israelis who do feel humiliated, and not only because of what has taken place on October 7, but everything else that has taken place since then.
Unable to operate freely in the heart of Gaza, Khan Yunis, Rafah or any other major population centers in the Strip, the Israeli army is forced to humiliate Palestinians in whatever little margins they can control, Beit Lahia, for example.
Frustrated by their military failure to deliver on their promises of subduing Gazans, ordinary Israelis have taken to social media to taunt Palestinians in their own way.
Israeli women, often along with their own children, would dress up in ways that would convey a racist representation of Arab women crying over the bodies of their dead children.
This type of social media mockery seems to have appealed to the imagination of Israeli society, which still insists on its sense of superiority even at a time when they are still paying the price of their own violence and political arrogance.
This time around, however, Israel’s politics of humiliation is proving ineffective, because the relationship between Palestinians and Israelis is on its way to be fundamentally altered.
One is only humiliated if he or she internalizes that humiliation as a sense of shame and disempowerment. But Palestinians, this time around, are experiencing no such feelings. To the contrary, their ongoing sumud, and unity, have generated a sense of collective pride unequaled in history.
Why Is the Media Ignoring Evidence of Israel’s Own Actions on 7 October?
Barely a day has passed since the 7 October attack by Hamas when the western media has not revisited those events, often to reveal what it claims are new details of astonishing atrocities carried out by the Palestinian group.
These disclosures have served to sustain public indignation in the West, and kept Palestinian solidarity activists on the back foot.
In turn, the outrage has smoothed Israel’s path as it has levelled vast swaths of Gaza; killed more than 18,700 Palestinians, most of them women and children; and denied the enclave’s population of 2.3 million access to food, water and fuel.
Critically, it has also made it far easier for western governments to throw their weight behind Israel – and arm it – even as Israeli leaders have repeatedly engaged in genocidal talk and carried out ethnic cleansing operations.
Israel’s intense bombing campaigns have herded nearly two million Palestinians into a small section of Gaza, pressed up against its short border with Egypt, while starvation and fatal disease start to take their toll.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken even described in graphic detail – and wholly falsely – a Hamas attack on an Israeli family: “The father’s eye gouged out in front of his kids. The mother’s breast cut off, the girl’s foot amputated, the boy’s fingers cut off before they were executed.”
Little evidence
Atrocities were undoubtedly committed that day by Hamas and other gunmen in Israel, as groups like Human Rights Watch have been documenting.
They have continued to occur in Gaza every day since, not least through Israel’s continuing and relentless bombing of civilians, and through Hamas’ refusal to free the remaining Israeli hostages without an exchange of Palestinians held in Israeli prisons.
But in respect of the more shocking allegations against Hamas promoted by the western media – which have bolstered the case for Israel’s two-month rampage in Gaza – often little or no evidence has been forthcoming beyond claims made by Israeli officials and highly partisan and unreliable first responders.
Nonetheless, once more, coverage of the growing devastation in Gaza was sidelined.
Media readiness to re-examine 7 October long after those events took place has operated within strict limits, however. Only claims that support Israel’s narrative about what happened that day are being aired.
A growing body of evidence suggesting a far more complex reality, one that paints Israel’s own actions in a far more troubling light, is being ignored or suppressed.
This deeply dishonest approach from the western media indicates that they are not, as they declare, fearlessly pursuing the truth. Rather, they are regurgitating talking points being fed to them by Israel.
That is not only unconscionable – particularly given Israel’s long track record of promoting lies, both small and large – but it violates all basic journalistic codes.
And, worse still, the media’s credulous amplification of Israel’s version of 7 October continues to breathe life into the Israeli case that wrecking Gaza to eliminate Hamas is morally justified.
Active cheerleaders
Unknown to most western audiences, there has been a steady trickle of evidence from Israeli sources over the past two months implicating Israel’s own military in at least some of the killings attributed to Hamas.
This week the Israeli military finally conceded that it had killed Israelis on October 7 in incidents of an “immense and complex quantity”. Given this, it added with transparent non-logic: “It would not be morally sound to investigate these incidents.”
How is it possible, given their continuing interest in scrutinising the events of 7 October, that none of the western media has picked up on any of this distressing evidence, let alone investigated it?
It is hard not to conclude that the western media are only interested in stories – and largely indifferent to whether they are true or false – that portray Hamas, but not Israel, as the bad guys. That would mean the media are not dispassionate reporters, but have been recruited by Israel as its active cheerleaders.
Israel’s official story, echoed by the western media, is that Hamas had long planned a crazed, barbaric rampage through communities in Israel – driven by a mix of primitive, religious bloodlust and Jew hatred.
The group’s chance to realize this goal came on 7 October, according to the Israeli narrative, when Israel let down its guard momentarily and Hamas broke through the hi-tech fence meant to keep it and Gaza’s other 2.3 million inhabitants permanently imprisoned.
During the breakout, Hamas focused on the slaughter of civilians, killing babies by beheading them and using rape as a weapon of war and defilement. They fired into the homes of neighbouring Israeli communities, often leaving them in ruins and burning their victims alive.
Admittedly, the claim about 40 beheaded babies has been quietly shelved, because there is precisely zero evidence for it. According to Israel’s own published figures, only two infants died that day.
Nonetheless, the media rarely challenge Israeli spokespeople, or western politicians, when they make this long-discredited allegation.
But many of these other allegations are no less evidence-free and need scrutiny too.
Although they are rarely given a voice, Palestinians have their own, alternative narrative of what happened that day – and parts of it are being bolstered by accounts from Israeli sources.
Challenge to official story
In this telling, Hamas long trained for its breakout, and with a strategic aim in mind. The goal was to launch a commando-style assault on four military bases surrounding Gaza to kill or take hostage as many Israeli soldiers as possible, and a similar assault on local Israeli communities to seize civilian hostages.
The aim, according to this narrative, was to trade the hostages for Palestinian prisoners, thousands of whom are in Israeli jails, including women and children, often held without a military trial or even charges.
To the Palestinian public, these prisoners are no less hostages than the Israelis held in Gaza.
Hamas stormed military bases and the Israeli communities of Be’eri and Kfar Azza. That is why about a third of the 1,200 Israelis killed that day were soldiers, police or armed guards – and why many of the 240 hostages were serving in the Israeli military too.
According to most accounts, even Israeli ones, Hamas accidentally stumbled on to the Nova music festival, which had been relocated to an area close to the fence with Gaza. There were unexpected clashes with security guards, while the attack on festivalgoers turned especially chaotic and gruesome.
So why did Hamas depart from its plan by killing so many civilians? And why did it do so in such a savage, gratuitous and time-consuming fashion that involved burning Israelis alive, using its firepower to blast their homes into ruins, and setting fire to hundreds of cars on the highway near the music festival?
What did Hamas have to gain from expending so much energy and ammunition on horror-show theatrics rather than its plan to seize hostages?
For many western leaders and journalists, it appears no rational answer is needed. Hamas – and possibly all Palestinians – are simply barbarians for whom murdering Israelis, Jews or maybe all non-Muslims comes as second nature.
But for those whose minds are less bent by racist assumptions, an alternative picture of events has been steadily cohering, prompted by the testimonies of Israeli survivors and officials, as well as reporting from the Israeli media. Much of the evidence has been collected by the independent journalist Max Blumenthal and the Electronic Intifada website.
Because they contradict Israel’s official story, these testimonies have been studiously ignored by the western media.
Burned alive
Surprisingly, the person whose statements have most confounded the official narrative is Mark Regev, the spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
In an interview on MSNBC on 16 November, Regev noted that Israel had reduced the official death toll by 200 after its investigations had shown that the charred remains it had counted included not just Israelis but Hamas fighters too. The fighters, burned alive, had been too disfigured to easily identify.
Regev told MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan: “There were actually bodies that were so badly burned we thought they were ours. In the end, apparently, they were Hamas terrorists.”
There was an obvious problem with Regev’s disclosure that went unchallenged by the MSNBC interviewer, and has been ignored by the media since. How did so many Hamas fighters end up burned – and in exactly the same locations as Israelis, meaning their remains could not be identified separately for many weeks?
Did Hamas fighters carry out some strange ritual, self-immolating in cars and homes alongside their hostages? And if so, why?
There is a likely explanation, confirmed by an Israeli survivor of the 7 October events, as well as by a security guard, and a variety of military personnel. But these accounts starkly undermine the official narrative.
Shelled by Israel
Yasmin Porat, who fled the Nova festival and ended up hiding in Be’eri, was one of the few to survive that day. Her partner, Tal Katz, was killed.
She has repeatedly explained to the Israeli media what happened.
According to Porat’s account to Kan radio on 15 November, the Hamas fighters in Be’eri barricaded themselves into a house with a group of a dozen or so Israeli hostages – either planning to use them as human shields or as bargaining chips for an exit.
The Israeli military, however, was in no mood for bargaining. Porat escaped only because one of the Hamas fighters vacated the house early on, using her as a human shield, before giving himself up.
Porat describes Israeli soldiers engaging in a four-hour firefight with the Hamas gunmen, despite the presence of Israeli civilians. But not all of the hostages were killed in the crossfire. Israel ended the clash with an Israeli tank firing two shells into the house.
In Porat’s account, when she asked why this had been done, “they explained to me that it was to break the walls, in order to help purify the house”.
The only other survivor, Hadas Dagan, who was lying face down on the lawn in front of the house during the firefight, reported to Porat what happened after the two shells hit the house. Dagan saw both of their partners lying near her, killed by shrapnel from the explosions.
A 12-year-old girl, Liel Hatsroni, who had been screaming inside the house throughout the firefight, also fell silent.
Hatsroni and her aunt, Ayalan, were both incinerated. It took weeks to identify their bodies.
Notably, Liel Hatsroni’s charred remains have been one of the emotive pieces of evidence cited by Israel for accusing Hamas of killing and burning Israelis.
In reporting the deaths of Liel, her aunt, her twin brother and her grandfather, the Israeli news website Ynet stated that Hamas fighters “murdered them all. Afterwards, they set the house alight”.
Confused pilots
Porat’s testimony is far from the only source showing that Israel is likely to have been responsible for a significant proportion of the civilian deaths that day – and for the burned bodies.
The security coordinator at Be’eri, Tuval Escapa, effectively confirmed Porat’s account to the Haaretz newspaper. He said: “Commanders in the field made difficult decisions – including shelling houses on their occupants in order to eliminate the terrorists along with the hostages.”
The burnt-out cars at the Nova festival and their occupants appear to have suffered a similar fate. Worried that Hamas gunmen were fleeing the area with hostages in cars, it seems, helicopter pilots were told to open fire, incinerating the cars and all the occupants.
There is a likely explanation for this. The Israeli army has long had a secret protocol – known as the Hannibal directive – in which soldiers are instructed to kill any captured comrades to avoid their being taken hostage. It is less clear how this directive applies to Israeli civilians, though it appears to have been used in the past.
The goal is to prevent Israel from facing demands to release prisoners.
In at least one case, an Israeli military official, Col Nof Erez, has stated that “the Hannibal directive was apparently applied”. He called the Israeli air strikes on 7 October “a mass Hannibal”.
Haaretz has reported that police investigators concluded that “an IDF combat helicopter that arrived at the scene and fired at terrorists there apparently also hit some festival participants”.
In a video released by the Israeli military, Apache helicopters are shown randomly firing missiles at cars leaving the area, presumably on the assumption that they contained Hamas fighters trying to smuggle hostages back into Gaza.
The Ynet news website cited an Israeli air force assessment of its two dozen attack helicopters in the skies above the Nova festival: “It was very difficult to distinguish between terrorists and [Israeli] soldiers or civilians.” Nonetheless, pilots were instructed “to shoot at everything they see in the area of the fence” with Gaza.
“Only at a certain point did the pilots begin to slow their attacks and carefully choose the targets,” the outlet reported.
Another Israeli publication, Mako, noted that “there was almost no intelligence to assist in making fateful decisions”, adding that the pilots “emptied the ‘belly of the helicopter’ in minutes, flew to re-arm and returned to the air, again and again”.
In another Mako report, the commander of an Apache unit is quoted stating: “Shooting at people in our territory – this is something I never thought I would do.” Another pilot recalled of the attack: “I find myself in a dilemma as to what to shoot at.”
Secrets to the grave
Quite extraordinarily, in reporting the devastation of ravaged houses and burnt and crumpled cars, reporters have completely ignored the visual evidence staring them in the face, and simply amplified the official Israeli narrative.
There are plenty of more-than-obvious questions no one is asking – and for which no answers are ever likely to be forthcoming.
How did Hamas wreak such widescale and intense devastation when its fighters’ own videos show them mostly bearing light arms?
Were those carrying basic RPGs capable of accurately tracking and hitting hundreds of fast-moving vehicles fleeing the festival – and doing so from ground level?
Video footage from Hamas body-cams shows cars leaving the Nova festival with both gunmen and hostages inside. Why would Hamas risk incinerating its own people?
Given Hamas’ keenness to film its triumphs, why is there no footage of such actions? And why would Hamas waste its most prized ammunition on random attacks on cars rather than save it for the far more difficult task of attacking Israeli military bases?
Israel appears not to be interested in investigating the burnt-out cars and wrecked homes, possibly because it already knows the answers and fears that others may one day find out the truth too.
With religious organizations demanding that the cars be hurriedly buried to preserve the sanctity of the dead, the metal skeletons will take their secrets to the grave.
Grotesque fables
What seems certain from this growing body of evidence – and from the trail of visual clues – is that on 7 October many Israeli civilians were killed either in the crossfire of gun battles between Israel and Hamas or by Israeli military directives to stop Hamas fighters returning to Gaza and taking hostages with them.
This week, an Israeli commentator in the Haaretz newspaper called the testimonies “earth-shattering”, and added: “Was the Hannibal directive applied to civilians? An investigation and public debate need to happen now, no matter how difficult they are.”
But as the army has made clear, it has no intention to investigate when its whole genocidal campaign against Gaza is premised on lurid claims that appear to bear a limited relationship to reality.
None of that justifies Hamas’ atrocities, especially the killing and taking hostage of civilians. But it does paint a very different picture of that day’s events.
Remember, Israel and its supporters have sought to compare the Hamas attack on 7 October with the Nazi Holocaust. They have concocted grotesque fables to present Palestinians as bloodthirsty savages deserving of any fate that befalls them.
And those fables have served as the basis for western indulgence and sympathy for Israel as it has carried out ethnic cleansing and genocide in Gaza.
The truth is it would have been much harder for western governments to sell Israel’s rampage in Gaza to their publics had Hamas’ crimes been seen, sadly, as all too typical of modern militarised confrontations in which civilians become collateral damage.
What western governments and institutions should have done is demand an independent investigation to clarify the extent of Hamas atrocities that day rather than echo Israeli officials who wanted an excuse to trash Gaza and drive its inhabitants into neighboring Sinai.
The western media’s performance has been even more dismal – and dangerous. It professes to be a watchdog on power. But it has repeatedly amplified the Israeli occupier’s evidence-free claims, peddled libels against Palestinians with little or no scrutiny, and actively suppressed evidence challenging Israel’s official narrative.
For that reason alone, western journalists are entirely complicit in the crimes against humanity currently being perpetrated in Gaza – crimes being committed right now, not two months ago.
Jonathan Cook is the author of three books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His website and blog can be found at www.jonathan-cook.net. This originally appeared in the Middle East Eye.
