Sunday, March 10, 2024

Cut From the Same Cloth: The United States and Israel in Palestine

MARCH 8, 2024
Facebook

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Revolutionaries in Iran in the 1970s referred to the United States as the “Great Satan” and to its ally, Israel, as the “little Satan.” The truth of their rallying cry resounds today as Israel executes, unimpeded, its scorched earth policy in Gaza.

The Israeli war on Gaza has been oiled by the military, financial and diplomatic benefaction of the United States. While President Joe Biden makes passive public appeals for Israel to show restraint, behind closed doors, he reaffirms America’s continued support.

The administration’s recent indulgence of Israel was visible during a 4 March 2024 meeting in the White House between Israeli minister Benny Gantz and Vice President Kamala Harris. At that meeting, the vice president stated the administration’s displeasure with the dire humanitarian crisis in Gaza; but in the same breath, told Gantz that the United States wanted to continue supporting Israel, but that Tel Aviv needed to do its part; stating, “help us, help you.”

The infamous “hug that was seen around the world” has come to haunt even a committed Zionist like Biden. In order to retrieve a modicum of domestic and international credibility—after Israel’s massacre of more than 100,000 Palestinians—the administration has put on its “humanitarian face.” Salvage efforts that have been for Palestinians obviously too timid and too late.

The language, action and inaction that has emanated from the Biden White House indicates that either Israel is calling the shots in Washington, or the administration is on board with Israel’s genocidal plan to empty Gaza and the West Bank of Palestinians. It also seems evident, that Biden, who has said on a number of occasions “I am a Zionist,” has been beguiled by the myths and fantasies that the Jewish state has created.

In the face of domestic and global condemnation, the administration has embraced the right-wing regime in Tel Aviv. It has continued to block United Nations resolutions calling for an immediate ceasefire. Recently, on 29 February, the United States alone, among the 15 members of the UN Security Council, opposed a statement expressing “deep concern” over the Israeli military’s killing of Palestinians who had gathered near trucks carrying food to Gaza City. At least 112 were killed and another 760 injured in what is now called the “flour massacre.”

In a symbolic display of concern following the massacre, the United States began airdropping humanitarian aid into Gaza, while simultaneously supplying Israel with bombs to drop on Gaza.

During the administration’s first photo-op on 2 March, the U.S. and Jordanian air forces dropped 38,000 meals to some 1.5 million Palestinians. Water and medical supplies were not included. Biden refused to blame Israel for blocking aid into Gaza, but said he would “insist” that Israel open additional routes and allow more aid trucks to enter.

In its eagerness to indulge Israel, the administration has been willing to break U.S. laws. The Biden administration has used emergency powers to bypass arms sales reviews and Congressional oversight to expedite its arms transfers to Israel. It is currently violating the Foreign Assistance Act, 1961; Arms Export Control Act, 1976; War Crimes Act,1996; Genocide Convention Implementation Act (Proxmire Act), 1987-88; and the Leahy Laws, 1997-98.

The White House is awash in rhetoric. It has, however, refused to put any real limits on Israeli violence, choosing instead to stoke the Israeli war machine.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, for example, during discussions in February 2024 with Israeli leaders in Tel Aviv, sheepishly stated: “it will be up to Israelis to decide what they want to do, when they want to do it, how they want to do it. No one’s going to make those decisions for them….”

The administration’s actions, even when confronted with Israel’s systematic violence against the Palestinians, clearly indicate that U.S. financial and military hegemonic interests outweigh what little is left of its humanity.

Like his predecessors, Biden has shown no genuine concern for the Palestinians, for the region and its people. He has, however, been dedicated to integrating Israel into the Arab Middle East, with Saudi Arabia seen as the prize.

To realize his integration policy, Biden has continued to expand on former President Donald Trump’s objective of strengthening military cooperation and economic ties among family-ruled Arab dictators and Israel. He has pressed ahead with the Trump era Abraham Accords—a set of Arab-Israeli normalization agreements initiated in September 2020 and signed by the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan.

When the accords were initiated, the Trump administration and its Arab partners believed that Palestinians could be ignored; that they were irrelevant; and that they would simply accept their slow death. Biden has amplified that disregard.

The administration is under the impression that deepening economic and military ties with Arab despots will lead to regional stability—which ultimately translates into U.S.-Israeli hegemony. It is worth noting that the region remains volatile, even though Riyadh and Tel Aviv have cooperatedcovertly for years, as have Bahrain, the UAE, Oman, Qatar and Egypt.

After close to five months of Israeli atrocities, Biden continues to push for what Egypt’s president, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, once called the “deal of the century” — a normalization pact between Saudi Arabia and Israel. The United States sees Saudi Arabia as the integration linchpin. If Riyadh—the largest and wealthiest Gulf regime—allies with Israel, the White House believes that others will fall in line.

In addition to encouraging Israel-Arab economic ties, Washington has been actively promoting the furtherance of cybersecurity linkages. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security, for example, at a Cybertech Conference in Tel Aviv on 3 February 2023, announced an expansion of the Abraham Accords to include an agreement on cybersecurity. By giving official recognition to intelligence sharing and security agreements between Israel and the Arab states, the accords have made the spyware business easier and more lucrative.

The Gulf regimes, believing that linkages with Israel will shore up their security ties with the United States, have become eager customers of advanced surveillance technology; which they also see as useful in policing their populations. Israel—one of the world’s top spyware exporters—has been more than willing to sell its technology, with little regard for human rights abuse.

The United States, Israel and Arab dictators have become deeply enmeshed in the cybersecurity/intelligence world. Israel has positioned itself in the international “order” through its global cybersecurity/surveillance web and the lucrative global tech weapons industry that have developed around it.

Washington’s steadfast support for and unwillingness to criticize Israel can plausibly be attributed to the cyber power and economic clout that together they have been able to wield in the region and globally.

The ongoing collaboration between the U.S. National Security Agency and its Israeli equivalent, the secretive Cyber Unit 8200—the tech intelligence unit of the Israel Defense [occupation] Forces—is just one example of the cybersecurity network that has linked the two countries.

Former soldiers of the elite 8200 cyber warfare unit, for example, have gone on to found and occupy top positions at cybersecurity and international IT companies and in Silicon Valley. Google, for one, has two offices and over 2,000 employees in Israel.

Washington cares little that Israeli cybersecurity companies (numbering 700) export their spyware around the world or that Unit 8200 honed its intelligence skills through mass surveillance of innocent civilians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza; personal information that was used to blackmail Palestinians, to turn them into Israeli collaborators.

Zionist hubris, facilitated by the United States, has no bounds. After stealing Palestinian land, water and pillaging Gaza, Israel has been seeking to plunder the maritime offshore natural gas reserves that are the property of Palestine.

On 29 October 2023, amidst its brutal war in Gaza, the Israeli Ministry of Energy and Infrastructure announced that it had awarded licenses for natural gas exploration in areas that overlap with the recognized maritime borders of Gaza. As an occupying power, Israel has no legal right under international law to award licenses in areas it does not hold sovereignty over.

The bidding process for the illegal licenses was launched in December 2022, a year before Israel’s horrific assault on Gaza. Licenses were issued to six companies: Ratio Energies and NewMed Energy (Israeli), ENI (Italian); Dana Petroleum (UK subsidiary of Korea National Oil Company); SOCAR (Azerbaijan’s national oil company); and British owned BP.

The U.S.-Israeli economic and military stranglehold over the region has been challenged by the colonized Palestinians in Gaza who have bravely resisted despite having no sizable army, air force or sophisticated surveillance technology or weaponry. Gaza has become an inspirational symbol of resistance in the Middle East and worldwide; a reality the U.S. and Israel will be powerless to overcome.

To understand the unsavory alliance that has held the United States and Israel together, is to understand that they are cut from the same cloth. Both countries share a ruthless exploitative settler-colonial ideology and psychology, that has set them on parallel social, political and economic paths. They have existed by exploitation and churning the cauldron of division and conflict among countries in the region.

After a half century of steadfast support, it has become virtually impossible for Washington to imagine a regional reality that does not have Israel at its core. The United States has finally been forced to confront the brutishness of its “ally,” and to recognize that Zionists, and they, have no place or future in the Middle East.

Stop the Worsening UNDERCOUNT of Palestinian Casualties in Gaza

BY RALPH NADER

MARCH 8, 2024
Facebook Twitte

Image by Nikolas Gannon.

Since the Hamas raid penetrated the multi-tiered Israeli border security on October 7, 2023 (an unexplained collapse of Israel’s defensive capabilities), 2.3 million utterly defenseless Palestinians in the tiny crowded Gaza enclave have been on the receiving end of over 65,000 bombs/missiles plus non-stop tank shelling and snipers.

The extreme right-wing Netanyahu regime has enforced its declared siege of, in its genocidal words, “no food, no water, no electricity, no fuel, no medicine.”

The relentless bombing has destroyed apartment buildings, marketplaces, refugee camps, hospitals, clinics, ambulances, bakeries, schools, mosques, churches, roads, electricity networks, critical water mains – just about everything.

The U.S.-equipped Israeli war machine has even uprooted agricultural fields, including thousands of olive trees on one farm, bulldozed many cemeteries and bombed civilians fleeing on Israeli orders, while obstructing the few trucks carrying humanitarian aid from Egypt.

With virtually no healthcare left, no medications, and infectious diseases spreading especially among infants, children, the infirm and the elderly, can anybody believe that the fatalities have just gone over 30,000? With five thousand babies born every month into the rubble, their mothers wounded and without food, healthcare, medicine and clean water for any of their children, severe skepticism about the Hamas Health Ministry’s official count is warranted.

Netanyahu and Hamas, which he helped over the years, have a common interest in lowballing the death/injury toll. But for different reasons. Hamas keeps the figures low to reduce being accused by its own people of not protecting them, and not building shelters. Hamas grossly underestimated the savage war crimes by the vengeful, occupying Israeli military superpower fully and unconditionally backed by the U.S. military superpower.

The Health Ministry is intentionally conservative, citing that its death toll came from reports only of named deceased by hospitals and morgues. But as the weeks turned into months, blasted, disabled hospitals and morgues cannot keep up with the bodies, or cannot count those slain laying on roadsides in allies and beneath building debris. Yet the Health Ministry remains conservative and the “official,” rising civilian fatality and injury count continues to be uncritically reported by both friend and foe of this devastating Israeli state terrorism.

It was especially astonishing to see the most progressive groups and writers routinely use the same Hamas Health Ministry figures as did the governments and outside groups backing the one-sided war on Gaza. All this despite predictions of a human catastrophe in the Gaza Strip almost every day since October 7, 2023, by arms of the United Nations, other besieged international relief agencies on the ground, eyewitness accounts by medical personnel, and many Israeli human rights groups and brave local journalists in that Strip, the geographic size of Philadelphia. (Unguided Western and Israeli reporters and journalists are not allowed to enter Gaza by the Israeli government.) (See the open letter titled, “Stop the Humanitarian Catastrophe” to President Biden on December 13, 2023, by 16 Israeli human rights groups that also appeared as a paid notice in the New York Times.)

Then came the December 29, 2023, opinion piece in The Guardian by the Chair of Global Public Health at the University of Edinburgh, Devi Sridhar. She predicted half a million deaths in 2024 if conditions continue unabated. (See her piece here: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/dec/29/health-organisations-disease-gaza-population-outbreaks-conflict).

In recent days, the situation has become more dire. In the March 2, 2024, Washington Post, reporter, Ishaan Tharoor writes: “The bulk of Gaza’s more than 2 million people face the prospect of famine — a state of affairs that constitutes the fastest decline in a population’s nutrition status ever recorded, according to aid workers. Children are starving at the fastest rate the world has ever known. Aid groups have been pointing to Israel restricting the flow of assistance into the territory as a major driver of the crisis. Some prominent Israeli officials openly champion stymying these transfers of aid.”

Tharoor quotes Jan Egeland, chief of the Norwegian Refugee Council: “We must be clear: civilians in Gaza are falling sick from hunger and thirst because of Israel’s entry restrictions.” “Life-saving supplies are being intentionally blocked, and women and children are paying the price.”

Martin Griffiths, the United Nations lead humanitarian officer, said “Life is draining out of Gaza at terrifying speed.”

U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, according to the Post, warned of an “‘unknown number of people’ – believed to be in the tens of thousands – lying under the rubble of buildings brought down by Israeli strikes.”

Volker Turk, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, said “All people in Gaza are at imminent risk of famine. Almost all are drinking salty and contaminated water. Health care across the territory is barely functioning.” “Just imagine what this means for the wounded, and people suffering infectious-disease outbreaks. …many are already believed to be starving.” UNICEF, the International Rescue Committee, the Palestinian Red Crescent, and Doctors Without Borders are all relating that the same catastrophic conditions are getting worse fast.

Yet, and get this, in this article, the Post still stuck with the “more than 30,000 people in Gaza have been killed since the ongoing war began.”

Just like the entire mass media, many governments, even the independent media and critics of the war would have us accept that between 98% and 99% of Gaza’s entire population has survived – albeit the sick, injured and more Palestinians about to die. This is lethally improbable!

From accounts of people on the ground, videos and photographs of deadly episode after episode, plus the resultant mortalities from blocking or smashing the crucial necessities of life, a more likely estimate, in my appraisal, is that at least 200,000 Palestinians must have perished by now and the toll is accelerating by the hour.

Imagine Americans, if this powerful U.S.-made weaponry was fired on the besieged, homeless, trapped people of Philadelphia, do you think that only 30,000 of that city’s 1.5 million people would have been killed?

Daily circumstantial evidence of the deliberate Israeli targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructures requires more reliable epidemiological estimates of casualties.

It matters greatly whether the aggregate toll so far, and counting, is three, four, five, six times more than the Health Ministry’s undercount. It matters for elevating the urgency for a permanent ceasefire, and direct and massive humanitarian aid by the U.S. and other countries, bypassing the sadistic cruelty against innocent families of the Israeli siege. It matters for the columnists and editorial writers who have been self-censoring themselves, with some, like the Post’s Charles Lane fictionally claiming that Israel’s military doesn’t “intentionally target civilians.” It matters for accountability under international law.

Above all, it lets weak Secretary of State Antony Blinken and duplicitous President Joe Biden be less servile when Netanyahu dismisses the low death toll by taunting them: what about Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

As a percentage of the total population being killed, Gaza can expose the Israeli ruling racist extremists to a stronger rebuttal for ending U.S. co-belligerent complicity in this never-to-be-forgotten slaughter of mostly children and women. (The terrifying PTSD on civilians, especially children will continue for years.)

Respecting the more accurate casualty toll of Palestinian children, mothers and fathers presses harder for permanent ceasefires and the process of recovery and reparations for the survivors of their Holocaust.

Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, lawyer and author of Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!

On Solidarity and Kushner’s Shame: How Gaza Defeated US Stratagem, Again

Jared Kushner, a former US official whose relationship to power is that he married the wealthy daughter of a man who was later to become the US president, once attempted to teach Palestinians how to handle their own struggle for freedom.

In 2020, he advised Palestinians to stop ‘doing terrorism’, summing up the Palestinian problem in the claim that ‘five million Palestinians are (..) trapped because of bad leadership’, not the Israeli occupation or US support for Israel.

The inexperienced politician, who once bragged about reading 25 books on the Middle East, presented Palestinians with the same clichéd rhetoric already offered to them by other ill-intentioned self-imposed ‘peacemakers’.

Palestinians “have a perfect track record of missing opportunities,” he said, re-hashing the condescending language once used by Israel’s former Minister of Foreign Affairs, Abba Eban: “If they screw this up, I think that they will have a very hard time looking the international community in the face, saying they are victims”.

But why bring up Kushner now?

Every few years, Americans, at the behest of Israel, peddle such ideas that the Palestinian cause is finished, that solidarity with the Palestinian people is dead and that the Palestinian people and their leadership should accept whatever political or financial crumbs thrown their way, courtesy of Washington, Tel Aviv and a few of their western allies.

Yet, every few years, the Palestinian people prove them wrong; that despite all the pressures – arm-twisting, sanctions, sieges, and relentless violence – they remain strong and not the victims ignorantly dubbed by Kushner.

What Kushner may not know is that there is a critical difference between victim and victimhood. While Palestinians cannot control their victimization, since it is imposed on them from an outside force, Israel – generously financed by the US – they do not seek to be victims.

Indeed, victimhood is a different issue. It is the state of perceiving oneself as a perpetual victim, with no aspirations, no agency.

While it is true that the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza is one of the greatest crimes of mass killings and ethnic cleansing in modern history, it is also true that no nation, in recent decades, has fought back as ferociously as the Palestinians. This is hardly the behavior of a victim.

The Joe Biden Administration, like every other US administration, has talked down to Palestinians, declaring them foolish for not accepting political deals that would fail to guarantee them the most basic of their long-denied rights. While Palestinians sought total and unconditional freedom, Camp David (1979), the Oslo Accords (1993), the Road Map (2004), and every other ‘offer’ before, during or after were political attempts at prolonging the Israeli occupation and denying the rights of the Palestinians. Kushner’s was not the exception.

All of these previous American ‘peace proposals’ were obviously unfair, as they were to Israel’s advantage and were designed entirely independent from international and humanitarian laws. All of these pro-Israeli proposals have failed, not due to the international community’s ability to challenge Washington, but due to the tenacity of the Palestinian people.

Palestinians defeated the US agenda, but that was not enough to clinch their own freedom, simply because they were in this difficult battle alone.

Solidarity with the Palestinian people has always been one of the pillars of all international solidarity movements worldwide for decades. The phrase ‘Free Palestine’ has been written on countless walls, in every language, in every city, town, or working-class neighborhood. Still, that solidarity was not enough to turn the tide, to achieve the coveted paradigm shift or to reach the critical mass needed to globalize the struggle for the freedom of the Palestinians the way that the struggle to end South Africa’s apartheid imposed itself as a moral necessity on the whole world.

There should be no illusions that the anti-apartheid struggle of South Africa and the struggle for Palestinian freedom are identical. Back then, the global geopolitical shift made it difficult for Pretoria to maintain its racial segregation regime. Moreover, the power of that racist government, if compared to that of Israel and its backers, is minuscule.

Washington sees Israel as an integral part of the US global influence. For US politicians, Israel is a domestic and not simply a foreign policy issue. Moreover, if Israel ceases to exist in its current dominant form, the US will lose a stronghold in a region teeming with precious resources, strategic waterways and much more. This is precisely why Biden has repeatedly declared that “If Israel didn’t exist, we would have to invent it”.

However, things are finally changing, and the new solidarity, ignited in response to the worst killing campaign in the history of the region, has exceeded the confines of conditional solidarity, ideological solidarity and symbolic solidarity, which, to some extent, had defined global solidarity with the Palestinians.

This solidarity is now expressing itself at the highest level of political discourses. In his testimony before the International Court of Justice’s public hearings (February 19-26), China’s representative, Ma Xinmin, went as far as defending, while referencing international law, the Palestinian people’s right to armed struggle. Russia’s Ambassador to the United Nations, Vassily Nebenzia, called on sanctions on “those who obstruct humanitarian access to those in need”. European governments, such as Spain, Ireland, Norway and Belgium, are using unprecedented language to describe Israel’s war crimes in Gaza, while demanding real action.

The Global South is back at the forefront of championing the cause of Palestine as the world’s most inspiring national liberation struggle.

None of this was born in a vacuum. While the majority of global protests and rallies in post-October 7 were related to Palestine and Israel, 86 percent of these protests were reportedly pro-Palestine. It is not only the frequency or size of current protests that matter, but their nature as well. This includes a group of Italian youth trying to storm the US consulate in Pisa; Palestine activists taking over the Congress building, and an American soldier self-immolating out of sheer anger at the culpability of his government in the crimes underway in Gaza.

This is truly earth-shattering. The critical mass for meaningful solidarity has finally been achieved, signaling that, once more, Palestinians have imposed themselves as the guardians of their own struggle, standing proudly at the frontline of the global struggle for freedom and justice.

This leaves us with the question: Who is truly “having a hard time looking at the international community in the face?” Certainly, not the Palestinian people.

Dr. Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of six books. His latest book, co-edited with Ilan Pappé, is Our Vision for Liberation: Engaged Palestinian Leaders and Intellectuals Speak Out. His other books include My Father was a Freedom Fighter and The Last Earth. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA). His website is www.ramzybaroud.net.

Murder in Gaza

Good work, Mr. President Biden. You have managed to do what America’s enemies have not – creating widespread hatred for the United States around the globe. Your destruction of the Gaza refugee camps has inflamed antisemitism everywhere.

There is widespread disgust and anger at the US government over your decision to give Israel’s new far right government carte blanche to massacre rebellious Palestinians in the open prison of the Gaza Strip. The death toll is now over 31,000 killed and at least 70,000 seriously injured, not counting the long-term effects of malnutrition and even starvation. Most victims are women and children.

All of Gaza’s hospitals have been wrecked by Israeli bombs and tank fire. The Biden administration has thoughtfully rushed tank shells to Israel’s armored forces. Large stores of arms and supplies, supposedly provided by the US to Israel for an emergency situation, have been offered up to Israel to continue its massacre of Gaza. Such action violates US law – which bars the use of US-supplied arms against civilians. Dropping 2,000 lbs bombs on residential buildings is, according to Israeli spin doctors, ‘counterterrorism.’ The rest of the world does not think so.

Except of course the US, Canada and Britain, where the media is totally dominated by supporters of Israel’s now governing far right. And Washington, which is paralyzed by pre-election fever. Palestinian ‘terrorists’ are purposely running into Israeli tanks, shells and bombs just to discredit Israel. Big money financial donors are terrorizing major US and British educational institutions. Writers who dare challenge Israel’s party line on Gaza are blacklisted. Those honorable Jews who denounce Israel’s brutal policies in Gaza are denounced as ‘self-hating Jews.’

We are not told that Gaza’s terrified civilians originally came from areas around Gaza and Galilee from whence they were driven into the prison camp of Gaza from their historic homes by ethnic cleansing and massacres after 1948. Their lands were seized by the Israeli government or far-right settlers, many from the US.

As yet, we know little about the alleged massacre of some 1,200 Israelis on October 7 on former Arab lands. I know this region fairly well after visiting the kibbutz of Nahal Oz in the 1950’s to meet relatives and see how Israel was allegedly making once supposedly barren lands flower and blossom. There were no such people as Palestinians, according to Israel’s then prime minister, who herself hailed from Ukraine.

Israel’s governing far right – was described by the late, great Israeli writer Uri Avnery as ‘Jewish fascists.’ They clearly intend to grind Gaza and its people into dust. There are large numbers of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, some of whom were gunned down this week. The objective of Israel’s far right is to expel these Arabs from the entire West Bank that Israel seized in the 1967 War and shove them into the arid Jordanian desert. Israel has long had its eye on southern Lebanon and its Litani River waters.

‘Don’t worry what Washington will say,’ said the architect of this mess, the late General Ariel Sharon. ‘I control Washington.’ True enough, as Biden and his party are showing. Wall Street donors have become more important than America’s geopolitical interests.

Interestingly, the likely winner of the upcoming US presidential election, Donald Trump, is an even stauncher supporter of Israel. But even many Democrats don’t trust his fidelity to Israel even though he openly dislikes Arabs and Muslims. Trump appears to have a clearer idea of where America’s interests lie – he may not allow Israel to lead America around by the nose.

Israel’s North American partisans keep running old films about the Holocaust to help justify their laying waste to Gaza. We ought to remember there were less than half the numbers of Jews in the besieged Warsaw Ghetto than there are today Palestinians in Gaza.

Americans should be ashamed of Biden. His administration, infiltrated and directed by far-right neocons, does not represent America’s values or traditions. Gaza will remain a major crime as well as a dark stain in America’s honor.

Eric S. Margolis is an award-winning, internationally syndicated columnist. His articles have appeared in the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune the Los Angeles Times, Times of London, the Gulf Times, the Khaleej Times, Nation (Pakistan), Hurriyet (Turkey), Sun Times (Malaysia), and other news sites in Asia. He writes at EricMargolis.com.

Business as Usual: The US and Israel in the Middle East

The infamous “hug that was seen around the world” has come to haunt even a committed Zionist like Biden. In order to retrieve a modicum of domestic and international credibility – after Israel’s massacre of more than 100,000 Palestinians – the administration has put on its “humanitarian face.” Salvage efforts that have been for Palestinians obviously too timid and too late.

In a symbolic display of concern following the massacre, the United States began airdropping humanitarian aid into Gaza, while simultaneously supplying Israel with bombs to drop on Gaza.

The White House is awash in rhetoric. It has, however, refused to put any real limits on Israeli violence, choosing instead to stoke the Israeli war machine.

To realize his integration policy, Biden has continued to expand on former President Donald Trump’s objective of strengthening military cooperation and economic ties among family-ruled Arab dictators and Israel. He has pressed ahead with the Trump era Abraham Accords – a set of Arab-Israeli normalization agreements initiated in September 2020 and signed by the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan.

The administration is under the impression that deepening economic and military ties with Arab despots will lead to regional stability – which ultimately translates into U.S.-Israeli hegemony. It is worth noting that the region remains volatile, even though Riyadh and Tel Aviv have cooperated covertly for years, as have Bahrain, the UAE, Oman, Qatar and Egypt.

After close to five months of Israeli atrocities, Biden continues to push for what Egypt’s president, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, once called the “deal of the century” – a normalization pact between Saudi Arabia and Israel. The United States sees Saudi Arabia as the integration linchpin. If Riyadh – the largest and wealthiest Gulf regime – allies with Israel, the White House believes that others will fall in line.

By giving official recognition to intelligence sharing and security agreements between Israel and the Arab states, the accords have made the spyware business easier and more lucrative.

Gulf regimes, believing that links with Israel will shore up their security ties with the United States, have become eager customers of advanced surveillance technology; which they also see as useful in policing their populations. Israel – one of the world’s top spyware exporters – has been more than willing to sell its technology, with little regard for human rights abuse.

The ongoing collaboration between the U.S. National Security Agency and its Israeli equivalent, the secretive Cyber Unit 8200 – the tech intelligence unit of the Israel Defense [occupation] Forces – is just one example of the cybersecurity network that has linked the two countries.

Dr. M. Reza Behnam is a political scientist whose specialties include U.S. foreign policy and the history, politics, governments and cultures of the Middle East.

Aiding Those We Kill: US Humanitarianism in Gaza

by Binoy Kampmark / March 6th, 2024

The spectacle, if it did not say it all, said much of it. Planes dropping humanitarian aid to a starving, famine-threatened populace of Gaza (the United Nations warns that 576,000 are “one step from famine”), with parachuted packages veering off course, some falling into the sea. Cargo also coming into Israel, with bullets, weaponry and other ordnance to kill those in Gaza on the inflated premise of self-defence. Be it aid or bullets, Washington is the smorgasbord supplier, ensuring that both victims and oppressors are furnished from its vast commissary.

This jarring picture, discordant and hopelessly at odds, is increasingly running down the low stocks of credibility US diplomats have in either the Israel-Hamas conflict, or much else in Middle Eastern politics. Comments such as these from US Vice President Kamala Harris from March 3, made at Selma in Alabama, illustrate the problem: “As I have said many times, too many innocent Palestinians have been killed. And just a few days ago, we saw hungry, desperate people approach aid trucks, simply trying to secure food for their families after weeks of nearly no aid reaching Northern Gaza. And they were met with gunfire and chaos.”

Harris goes on to speak of broken hearts for the victims, for the innocents, for those “suffering from what is clearly a humanitarian catastrophe”. A forced, hammed up moral register is struck. “People in Gaza are starving. The conditions are inhumane. And our common humanity compels us to act.”

It was an occasion for the Vice President to mention that the US Department of Defense had “carried out its first airdrop of humanitarian assistance, and the United States will continue with these airdrops.” Further work would also be expended on getting “a new route by sea to deliver aid.”

It is only at this point that Harris introduces the lumbering elephant in the room: “And the Israeli government must do more to significantly increase the flow of aid. No excuses.” They had to “open new border crossings”, “not impose any unnecessary restrictions on the delivery of aid” and “ensure humanitarian personnel, sites, and convoys are not targeted.” Basic services had to be restored, and order promoted in the strip “so more food, water, and fuel can reach those in need.”

In remarks made at Hagerstown Regional Airport in Maryland, President Joe Biden told reporters that he was “working with them [the Israelis] very hard. We’re going to get more – we must get more aid into Gaza. There’s no excuses. None.”

In a New Yorker interview, White House National Security spokesman John Kirby keeps to the same script, claiming that discussions with the Israelis “in private are frank and very forthright. I think they understand our concerns.” Kirby proceeds to fantasise, fudging the almost sneering attitude adopted by Israel towards US demands. “Even though there needs to be more aid, and even though there needs to be fewer civilian casualties, the Israelis have, in many ways, been receptive to our messages.”

The other side of this rusted coin of US policy advocates something less than human. The common humanity there is tethered to aiding the very power that is proving instrumental in creating conditions of catastrophe. The right to self-defence is reiterated as a chant, including the war goals of Israel which have artificially drawn a distinction between Hamas military and political operatives from that of the Palestinian population being eradicated.

Harris is always careful to couple any reproachful remarks about Israel with an acceptance of their stated policy: that Hamas must be eliminated. Hamas, rather than being a protean force running on the fumes of history, resentment and belief, was merely “a brutal terrorist organization that has vowed to repeat October 7^th again and again until Israel is annihilated.” It had inflicted suffering on the people of Gaza and continued to hold Israeli hostages.

Whatever note of rebuke directed against the Netanyahu government, it is clear that Israel knows how far it can go. It can continue to rely on the US veto in the UN Security Council. It can dictate the extent of aid and the conditions of its delivery into Gaza, which is merely seen as succour for an enemy it is trying to crush. While alarm about shooting desperate individuals crowding aid convoys will be noted, little will come of the consternation. The very fact that the US Airforce has been brought into the program of aid delivery suggests an ignominious capitulation, a very public impotence.

Jeremy Konyndyk, former chief of the USAID’s Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance during the Obama administration gives his unflattering judgment on this point. “When the US government has to use tactics that it otherwise used to circumvent the Soviets and Berlin and circumvent ISIS in Syria and Iraq, that should prompt some really hard questions about the state of US policy.”

In his remarks to The Independent, Konyndyk finds the airdrop method “the most expensive and least effective way to get aid to a population. We almost never did it because it is such an in-extremis tool.” Even more disturbing for him was the fact that this woefully imperfect approach was being taken to alleviate the suffering caused by an ally of the United States, one that had made “a policy choice” in not permitting “consistent humanitarian access” and the opening of border crossings.

Even as this in extremis tool is being used, US made military hardware continues to be used at will by the Israel Defence Forces. The point was not missed on Vermont Democratic Senator Peter Welch: “We have a situation where the US is airdropping aid on day one, and Israel is dropping bombs on day two. And the American taxpayer is paying for the aid and the bombs.”

The chroniclers of history can surely only jot down with grim irony instances where desperate, hunger-crazed Palestinians scrounging for US aid are shot by made-in-USA ammunition.

Gaza is Paying the Ultimate Price for Decades of Media Pandering to Zionist Bigotry

by Jonathan Cook / March 6th, 2024

We all understand that, shamefully, a number of Zionist Jews and non-Jews identify so completely with Israel that they are not only willing to excuse the mass slaughter and starvation of civilians in Gaza but think others should not even be allowed to express disquiet at the slaughter.

Hardline Zionists tell us they find concern for the welfare of Palestinians “offensive”, and that they feel “unsafe” when others raise such concerns or call for a ceasefire to end the bloodshed.

The question for the rest of us is: How do we deal with those “sensitivities”, and how much do we prioritise the “offence” taken by hardline Zionists?

Not unreasonably, most ordinary people place very little weight on the “sensitivities” of those who believe mass slaughter and the starvation of children should be allowed to proceed, at least when weighed against the sensitivities of those opposed to mass death.

What’s so weird is the way, as far as official bodies and the western media are concerned, those priorities have been turned upside down.

Here, in typical fashion, the Guardian falls over backwards to indulge the “feelings” of a few Jewish Arsenal fans because they “felt unsafe” and “betrayed” by their club for not more aggressively stopping protests last weekend at a Women’s Super League game by other fans over the complicity of the UK government in Gaza’s genocide.

No evidence is produced by either the fans or the Guardian that any Jewish fan was in any danger whatsoever. Just that a few Palestinian flags were smuggled into the stadium, that leaflets and stickers were handed out, and that some protesters tried to “engage” with fans as they arrived at the stadium – presumably in that dangerous tradition of trying to persuade others of the validity of one’s position.

But the Guardian sympathetically dedicates a great deal of space to relaying the concerns of the handful of Jewish fans who “believe their safety was compromised by security staff not curtailing the protest” – that is, those who wanted to prevent an entirely peaceful demonstration taking place in a public space outside the ground.

The story is risible. It is news as therapy for Zionists and gaslighting for the rest of us.

But it is decades of nonsense journalism about Israel and its apologists of precisely this kind that has led us to the dismal place we are today.

The constant indulgence by the political and media class, the constant elevation of these kinds of ugly, ignoble “feelings” – feelings that dehumanise and vilify Palestinians, as well as anyone acting in solidarity with their suffering – the constant treatment of Zionist bigotry as warranted, as justified, as normal, that has gotten us to a position where Israel can commit genocide and its western allies and parts of their Jewish populations can treat it as “offensive” to raise the matter.

If we had not got so entirely used to it, we would immediately understand how completely nuts – and catastrophically inhumane – the coverage is.

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.

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment