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)
Wednesday, April 03, 2024
Mountaintop Removal
by Sean Reynolds / March 28th, 2024
Photo credit: Behind Enemy Lines Photo caption: U.S. Marine and Afghan War veteran Zachary Kern burns his medals and a paper flag at anti-genocide “Cancel the DNC” rally 3/22/24 in Chicago.
In his March 24th opinion piece for the Times, David Brooks agrees with a “broad consensus atop the Democratic Party” (is there room for such breadth on the peak of that lofty mountain?) saying that Israel has the right to defend its apartheid regime by killing, banishing or imprisoning not only Gaza’s entire military but its entire elected government (the West Bank’s elected government, as well, but for a 2007 Israel-assisted coup there reversing the election).
Brooks approves of this “consensus” among top Democratic party officials, but laments that it’s not the whole story, as those leaders, he feels, also believe the ongoing extirpation can and should be conducted more humanely. How could it be conducted any differently than it is, he asks, when Gaza has tunnels?!?!
Brooks seems earnestly to believe that a military enemy’s retreat underground requires ever more frenzied massacres of civilian populations left on the vacated surface. In his opinion piece Brooks intones the ritual cliché that by burrowing as far as it possibly can from the Gazan population – in the sole direction a hyper-crowded bantustan affords, which is downwards – Gaza’s Hamas-party government has chosen to use the population as “human shields.” To Brooks, the Gazans trembling before an Israeli troop detachment are “in between” those troops and their underground foe in some odd, non-Euclidean geometry where triangles are straight lines. All of this, in short, can’t be flat-out ethnic cleansing for its own sake. Brooks echoes Israel’s claims that each humanitarian institution making Gaza livable had, before its inevitable destruction, a Hamas base directly beneath it, later undetectable amidst the rubble. One wonders, short of tunneling into the next life, how Gaza’s elected defenders could have put themselves at sufficient distance from their families and friends that Israeli and American genocide apologists would stop slaughtering those families, then trusting the quick verbal ritual of “human shields” to wash bloodsoaked hands and souls beige-pink again.
Brooks feels the tunnels are a monstrously wasteful overspend on Hamas’ part – his clichéd assertion that Gaza-under-apartheid has, of all nations, the least (and not the greatest!) need of military spending is of a piece with his “human shields” cliché, depending as both ideas must upon the desirability of Gazans simply, and unfussily, dying.
But the horror of Gaza’s military and government existing at all depends as well on the media-frenzy myth that has sprung up around October 7th. Genocidal racists habitually summon up, then effortlessly believe, the most absurd such myths and this is no exception. Does Palestine, alone among nations, deserve to exist without a military and without a government – that is, stateless, in pure enslavement – due to a special inhuman savagery of this one attack?
On Oct 7 Hamas engaged in a sortie to kill Israeli soldiers and armed, combatant ex-military (nearly all adults in Israel are ex-military, trained precisely to fight alongside Israel’s troops at such moments) while taking noncombatants hostage to trade for the Gazan civilians Israel already held hostage in four figures, without trial or charge. Hamas will have taken hundreds more hostage than the reported 250 who reached Gaza alive on Oct 7 – hundreds killed by IDF pilots whose Hellfire missile strikes would leave Gaza littered with melted cars packed full before their destruction, and rows of Israeli houses reduced to ashen rubble – Gazans, hostages and all – clearly not by the guns, grenades and RPGs with which Gaza’s soldiers were equipped but by Israel’s own tank shells and helicopter-fired missiles. One pilot, invoking the infamous Israeli policy of killing hostages to prevent hostage exchanges, assured Ha’aretz that elimination of hostages was existing policy: “once you detect a hostage situation, this is Hannibal … What we saw here was a mass Hannibal. There were many openings in the fence, thousands of people on many different vehicles with hostages and without.” Concertgoers at the rave, though caught between two military bases under attack, were roadblocked against escape by an IDF terrified of further Gazan infiltration, and many report that after they had fled their cars, an IDF uncertain of their identities appears, in defense of Israel’s shaken authority, to have begun picking them off from the air.
Many actually unarmed civilians, actually killed by Gaza, will have fallen to the “fog of war” and many also, as with any military action, to the rage or callousness of individual soldiers, but not enough for their deaths to have been the sortie’s goal. They will almost certainly have died in fewer numbers than Israel’s own, unanswered, civilian death toll counted over any two successive years of Gazan quiescence and in incommensurably smaller numbers than the civilian lives any modern U.S. intervention reaps within its first 24 hours. Unlike Israel’s answering genocide, this wasn’t even “terror” – this military action had specific goals from which mass killing of civilians (hence any terror motive) were notably absent: from what Gaza had to accomplish with its action, there wouldn’t have been the time. Pure fictions about beheadings, tortures, and sexual violence, though amplified by top Democrats including Pres. Biden himself, are unsupported by the identification of even a single victim, and clearly invented to justify the massive terror for which, David Brooks argues, those Dems show insufficient enthusiasm.
Would the collateral damage in our own wars – not to mention Israel’s – justify the complete dismantling of the U.S.’ military and our elected government, top Dems and all, leaving our population completely defenseless and in an open air prison? Because unless apartheid containment of certain populations – certain cultures, certain races – is justified, Gaza’s violence was clearly far, far more just than any U.S. military engagement of the last seventy-five years; and its “collateral damage” comparably less blameful, even if ramped up to the horrific death tolls we – not to mention our Israeli client – customarily inflict.
Decades after the U.S.’ last plausibly ethical war, the genocide scholar Hannah Arendt warned us that “those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil.” In the 2024 election, no broad consensus will exist beneath the Democratic Party to support the genocidal fervor so devoid of mercy at its top. Despite Brooks’ assurance, no consensus likely exists among Dem leaders that their genocide is insufficiently humane: instead they seem to note with alarm that its cruelty has become an electoral liability for them, and an obstacle to fantasies of a restored unipolar dominance over a planet wracked with growing disgust for country and its leadership. Our Bidens and Clintons hope to squeeze through to victory through cosmetic gestures like the toothless demand for Netanyahu to cede his position to an even more bloodthirsty member of his own far-right government, and the Israeli-drafted plan for construction of a Genocide-Island pier over which still-starving Palestinians can be forced onto exile ships if Egypt continues in refusing to dot the Sinai Desert with their refugee-tent cities.
If top echelons of the Democratic or Republican parties minded starvation warfare, minded genocide, then our arms shipments to Israel would cease until Israel was one majority-Palestinian state with voting rights for all who had forgone fleeing to Europe or America with their apartheid-requisitioned wealth, and instead remained to share in the region’s poverty and precarity, performing the rightly arduous work of making neighborly amends. While few tools remain with which to denazify U.S. culture – at least, not from within the U.S. – some remain, and one of them consists of inching the Democrats towards basic humanity with not merely the threat, but the accomplished example, of resounding electoral defeats. Our commitment, not just to ending the genocide in Palestine, but to sustaining and upholding Palestinian democracy and with it, Palestine’s elected government, requires that lesser concerns for our safety and comfort be put aside so that the beginnings of a punishment of genocide – falling sadly short, at first, of Hague tribunals – might take place even here, within the United States.
We were lied into the Gaza genocide; Al Jazeera has shown us how
Myth-busting documentary finally breaks the stranglehold of Israel and its western media acolytes over the story of what happened on 7 October
by Jonathan Cook / March 28th, 2024
For weeks, as Gaza was battered with bombs and the body count in the tiny enclave rose inexorably, western publics had little choice but to rely on Israel’s word for what happened on 7 October. Some 1,150 Israelis were killed during an unprecedented attack on Israeli communities and military posts next to Gaza.
Beheaded babies, a pregnant woman with her womb cut open and the foetus stabbed, children put in ovens, hundreds of people burned alive, mutilation of corpses, a systematic campaign of indescribably savage rapes and acts of necrophilia.
Western politicians and media lapped it up, repeating the allegations uncritically while ignoring Israel’s genocidal rhetoric and increasingly genocidal military operations these claims supported.
Then, as the mountain of bodies in Gaza grew still higher, the supposed evidence was shared with a few, select western journalists and influencers. They were invited to private screenings of footage carefully curated by Israeli officials to paint the worst possible picture of the Hamas operation.
These new initiates offered few details but implied the footage confirmed many of the horrors. They readily repeated Israeli claims that Hamas was “worse than Isis”, the Islamic State group.
The impression of unparalleled depravity from Hamas was reinforced by the willingness of the western media to allow Israeli spokespeople, Israel’s supporters and western politicians to continue spreading unchallenged the claim that Hamas had committed unspeakable, sadistic atrocities – from beheading and burning babies to carrying out a campaign of rapes.
The only journalist in the British mainstream media to dissent was Owen Jones. Agreeing that Israel’s video showed terrible crimes committed against civilians, he noted that none of the barbarous acts listed above were included.
What was shown instead were the kind of terrible crimes against civilians all too familiar in wars and uprisings.
Whitewashing genocide
Jones faced a barrage of attacks from colleagues accusing him of being an atrocity apologist. His own newspaper, the Guardian, appears to have prevented him from writing about Gaza in its pages as a consequence.
Now, after nearly six months, the exclusive narrative stranglehold on those events by Israel and its media acolytes has finally been broken.
Last week, Al Jazeera aired an hour-long documentary, called simply “October 7”, that lets western publics see for themselves what took place. It seems that Jones’ account was closest to the truth.
Yet, Al Jazeera’s film goes further still, divulging for the first time to a wider audience facts that have been all over the Israeli media for months but have been carefully excluded from western coverage. The reason is clear: those facts would implicate Israel in some of the atrocities it has been ascribing to Hamas for months.
Middle East Eye highlighted these glaring plot holes in the West’s media narrative way back in December. Nothing has been done to correct the record since.
The establishment media has proved it is not to be trusted. For months it has credulously recited Israeli propaganda in support of a genocide.
But that is only part of the indictment against it. Its continuing refusal to report on the mounting evidence of Israel’s perpetration of crimes against its own civilians and soldiers on 7 October suggests it has been intentionally whitewashing Israel’s slaughter in Gaza.
Al Jazeera’s investigations unit has gathered many hundreds of hours of film from bodycams worn by Hamas fighters and Israeli soldiers, dashcams and CCTV to compile its myth-busting documentary.
It demonstrates five things that upend the dominant narrative that has been imposed by Israel and the western media.
First, the crimes Hamas committed against civilians in Israel on 7 October – and those it did not – have been used to overshadow the fact that it carried out a spectacularly sophisticated military operation on 7 October in breaking out of a long-besieged Gaza.
The group knocked out Israel’s top-flight surveillance systems that had kept the enclave’s 2.3 million inhabitants imprisoned for decades. It smashed holes in Israel’s highly fortified barrier surrounding Gaza in at least 10 locations. And it caught unawares Israel’s many military camps next to the enclave that had been enforcing the occupation at arms’ length.
More than 350 Israeli soldiers, armed police and guards were killed that day.
A colonial arrogance
Second, the documentary undermines the conspiracy theory that Israeli leaders allowed the Hamas attack to justify the ethnic cleansing of Gaza – a plan Israel has been actively working on since at least 2007, when it appears to have received US approval.
True, Israeli intelligence officials involved in the surveillance of Gaza had been warning that Hamas was preparing a major operation. But those warnings were discounted not because of a conspiracy. After all, none of the senior echelons in Israel stood to benefit from what unfolded on 7 October.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is finished politically as a result of the Hamas attack, and will likely end up in jail after the current carnage in Gaza ends.
Israel’s genocidal response to 7 October has made Israel’s brand so toxic internationally, and more so with Arab publics in the region, that Saudi Arabia has had to break off plans for a normalisation agreement, which had been Israel and Washington’s ultimate hope.
And the Hamas operation has crushed the worldwide reputation of the Israeli military for invincibility. It has inspired Yemen’s Ansar Allah (the Houthis) to attack vessels in the Red Sea. It is emboldening Israel’s arch-enemy, Hezbollah, in neighbouring Lebanon. It has reinvigorated the idea that resistance is possible across the much-oppressed Middle East.
No, it was not a conspiracy that opened the door to Hamas’ attack. It was colonial arrogance, based on a dehumanising view shared by the vast majority of Israelis that they were the masters and that the Palestinians – their slaves – were far too primitive to strike a meaningful blow.
The attacks of 7 October should have forced Israelis to reassess their dismissive attitude towards the Palestinians and address the question of whether Israel’s decades-long regime of apartheid and brutal subjugation could – and should – continue indefinitely.
Predictably, Israelis ignored the message of Hamas’ attack and dug deeper into their colonial mindset.
The supposed primitivism that, it was assumed, made the Palestinians too feeble an opponent to take on Israel’s sophisticated military machine has now been reframed as proof of a Palestinian barbarousness that makes Gaza’s entire population so dangerous, so threatening, that they have to be wiped out.
The Palestinians who, most Israelis had concluded, could be caged like battery chickens indefinitely, and in ever-shrinking pens, are now viewed as monsters that have to be culled. That impulse was the genesis of Israel’s current genocidal plan for Gaza.
Suicide mission
The third point the documentary clarifies is that Hamas’s wildly successful prison break undid the larger operation.
The group had worked so hard on the fearsome logistics of the breakout – and prepared for a rapid and savage response from Israel’s oppressive military machine – that it had no serious plan for dealing with a situation it could not conceive of: the freedom to scour Israel’s periphery, often undisturbed for many hours or days.
Hamas fighters entering Israel had assumed that most were on a suicide mission. According to the documentary, the fighters’ own assumption was that between 80 and 90 per cent would not make it back.
The aim was not to strike some kind of existential blow against Israel, as Israeli officials have asserted ever since in their determined rationalisation of genocide. It was to strike a blow against Israel’s reputation for invincibility by attacking its military bases and nearby communities, and dragging as many hostages as possible back into Gaza.
They would then be exchanged for the thousands of Palestinian men, women and children held in Israel’s military incarceration system – hostages labelled “prisoners”.
As Hamas spokesman Bassem Naim explained to Al Jazeera, the breakout was meant to thrust Gaza’s desperate plight back into the spotlight after many years in which international interest in ending Israel’s siege had waned.
Of discussions in the group’s political bureau, he says the consensus was: “We have to take action. If we don’t do it, Palestine will be forgotten, totally deleted from the international map.”
For 17 years, Gaza had gradually been strangled to death. Its population had tried peaceful protests at the militarised fence around their enclave and been picked off by Israeli snipers. The world had grown so used to Palestinian suffering, it had switched off.
The 7 October attack was intended to change that, especially by re-inspiring solidarity with Gaza in the Arab world and by bolstering Hamas’ regional political position.
It was intended to make it impossible for Saudi Arabia – the main Arab power broker in Washington – to normalise with Israel, completing the marginalisation of the Palestinian cause in the Arab world.
Judged by these criteria, Hamas’s attack was a success.
Loss of focus
But for many long hours – with Israel caught entirely off-guard, and with its surveillance systems neutralised – Hamas did not face the military counter-strike it expected.
Three factors seem to have led to a rapid erosion of discipline and purpose.
With no meaningful enemy to confront or limit Hamas’ room for manoeuvre, the fighters lost focus. Footage shows them squabbling about what to do next as they freely wander around Israeli communities.
That was compounded by the influx of other armed Palestinians who piggybacked on Hamas’ successful breakout and the lack of an Israeli response. Many suddenly found themselves with the chance to loot or settle scores with Israel – by killing Israelis – for years of suffering in Gaza.
And the third factor was Hamas stumbling into the Nova music festival, which had been relocated by the organisers at short notice close to the fence around Gaza.
It quickly became the scene of some of the worst atrocities, though none resembling the savage excesses described by Israel and the western media.
Footage shows, for example, Palestinian fighters throwing grenades into concrete shelters where many dozens of festivalgoers were sheltering from the Hamas attack. In one clip, a man who runs out is gunned down.
Fourth, Al Jazeera was able to confirm that the most extreme, sadistic and depraved atrocities never took place. They were fabricated by Israeli soldiers, officials and emergency responders.
One figure central to this deception was Yossi Landau, a leader of the Jewish religious emergency response organisation, Zaka. He and his staff concocted outlandish tales that were readily amplified not only by a credulous western press corps but by senior US officials too.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken graphically told of a family of four being butchered at the breakfast table. The father’s eye was gouged out in front of his two children, aged eight and six. The mother’s breast was cut off. The girl’s foot was amputated, and the boy’s fingers cut off, before they were all executed. The executioners then sat down and had a meal next to their victims.
Except the evidence shows none of that actually happened.
Landau has also claimed that Hamas tied up dozens of children and burned them alive at Kibbutz Be’eri. Elsewhere, he has recalled a pregnant woman who was shot dead and her belly cut open and the foetus stabbed.
Officials at the kibbutz deny any evidence for these atrocities. Landau’s accounts do not tally with any of the known facts. Only two babies died on 7 October, both killed unintentionally.
When challenged, Landau offers to show Al Jazeera a photo on his phone of the stabbed foetus, but is filmed admitting he is unable to do so.
Fabricating atrocities
Similarly, Al Jazeera’s research finds no evidence of systematic or mass rape on 7 October. In fact, it is Israel that has been blocking efforts by international bodies to investigate any sexual violence that day.
Respected outlets like the New York Times, the BBC and Guardian have repeatedly breathed credibility into the claims of systematic rape by Hamas, but only by unquestioningly repeating Israeli atrocity propaganda.
Madeleine Rees, secretary general of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, told Al Jazeera: “A state has instrumentalised the horrific attacks on women in order, we believe, to justify an attack on Gaza, of which the majority suffering are other women.”
In other cases, Israel has blamed Hamas for mutilating the bodies of Israeli victims, including by driving over them, smashing their pelvises. In several cases, Al Jazeera’s investigation showed that the bodies were of Hamas fighters mutilated or driven over by Israeli soldiers.
The documentary notes that reporting by the Israeli media – followed by the western media – “focuses not on the crimes they [Hamas] committed but on the crimes they did not”.
The question is why, when there were plenty of real atrocities by Hamas to report, did Israel feel the need to fabricate even worse ones? And why, especially after the initial fabrication of beheaded babies was debunked, did the western media carry on credulously recycling improbable stories of Hamas savagery?
The answer to the first question is that Israel needed to manufacture a favourable political climate that would excuse its genocide in Gaza as necessary.
Netanyahu is shown congratulating Zaka’s leaders on their role in influencing world opinion: “We need to buy time, which we gain by turning to world leaders and to public opinion. You have an important role in influencing public opinion, which also influences leaders.”
The answer to the second is that western journalists’ racist preconceptions ensured they would be easily persuaded that brown people were capable of such barbarity.
‘Hannibal directive’
Fifth, Al Jazeera documents months of Israeli media coverage demonstrating that some of the atrocities blamed on Hamas – particularly relating to the burning alive of Israelis – were actually Israel’s responsibility.
Deprived of functioning surveillance, an enraged Israeli military machine lashed out blindly. Video footage from Apache helicopters shows them firing wildly on cars and figures heading towards Gaza, unable to determine whether they are targeting fleeing Hamas fighters or Israelis taken hostage by Hamas.
In at least one case, an Israeli tank fired a shell into a building in Kibbutz Be’eri, killing the 12 Israeli hostages inside. One, 12-year-old Liel Hetsroni, whose charred remains meant she could not be identified for weeks, became the poster child for Israel’s campaign to tar Hamas as barbarians for burning her alive.
The commander in charge of the rescue efforts at Be’eri, Colonel Golan Vach, is shown fabricating to the media a story about the house Israel itself had shelled. He claimed Hamas had executed and burned eight babies in the house. In fact, no babies were killed there – and those who did die in the house were killed by Israel.
The widespread devastation in kibbutz communities – still blamed on Hamas – suggests that Israel’s shelling of this particular house was far from a one-off. It is impossible to determine how many more Israelis were killed by “friendly fire”.
These deaths appear to have been related to the hurried invocation by Israel that day of its so-called “Hannibal directive” – a secretive military protocol to kill Israeli soldiers to prevent them from being taken hostage and becoming bargaining chips for the release of Palestinians held hostage in Israeli jails.
In this case, the directive looks to have been repurposed and used against Israeli civilians too. Extraordinarily, though there has been furious debate inside Israel about the Hannibal directive’s use on 7 October, the western media has remained completely silent on the subject.
Woeful imbalance
The one issue largely overlooked by Al Jazeera is the astonishing failure of the western media across the board to cover 7 October seriously or investigate any of the atrocities independently of Israel’s own self-serving accounts.
The question hanging over Al Jazeera’s documentary is this: how is it possible that no British or US media organisation has undertaken the task that Al Jazeera took on? And further, why is it that none of them appear ready to use Al Jazeera’s coverage as an opportunity to revisit the events of 7 October?
In part, that is because they themselves would be indicted by any reassessment of the past five months. Their coverage has been woefully unbalanced: wide-eyed acceptance of any Israeli claim of Hamas atrocities, and similar wide-eyed acceptance of any Israeli excuse for its slaughter and maiming of tens of thousands of Palestinian children in Gaza.
But the problem runs deeper.
This is not the first time that Al Jazeera has shamed the western press corps on a subject that has dominated headlines for months or years.
Back in 2017, an Al Jazeera investigation called The Lobby showed that Israel was behind a campaign to smear Palestinian solidarity activists as antisemites in Britain, with Jeremy Corbyn the ultimate target.
That smear campaign continued to be wildly successful even after the Al Jazeera series aired, not least because the investigation was uniformly ignored. British media outlets swallowed every piece of disinformation spread by Israeli lobbyists on the issue of antisemitism.
A follow-up on a similar disinformation campaign waged by the pro-Israel lobby in the US was never broadcast, apparently after diplomatic threats from Washington to Qatar. The series was eventually leaked to the Electronic Intifada website.
Then 18 months ago, Al Jazeera broadcast an investigation called The Labour Files, showing how senior officials in Britain’s Labour Party, assisted by the UK media, waged a covert plot to stop Corbyn from ever becoming prime minister. Corbyn, Labour’s democratically elected leader, was an outspoken critic of Israel and supporter of justice for the Palestinian people.
Once again, the British media, which had played such a critical role in helping to destroy Corbyn, ignored the Al Jazeera investigation.
There is a pattern here that can be ignored only through wilful blindness.
Israel and its partisans have unfettered access to western establishments, where they fabricate claims and smears that are readily amplified by a credulous press corps.
And those claims only ever work to Israel’s advantage, and harm the cause of ending decades of brutal subjugation of the Palestinian people by an Israeli apartheid regime now committing genocide.
Al Jazeera has once again shown that, on matters that western establishments consider the most vital to their interests – such as support for a highly militarised client state promoting the West’s control over the oil-rich Middle East – the western press is not a watchdog on power but the establishment’s public relations arm.
Al Jazeera’s investigation has not just revealed the lies Israel spread about 7 October to justify its genocide in Gaza. It reveals the utter complicity of western journalists in that genocide.
Bishops Rapped over Feeble Response to Holy Land Genocide
Motion by two Cambridge churchmen to Ely Synod requiring Bishops to issue a more robust condemnation of Israel's violations of international humanitarian law was passed 23 for, 15 against.
by Stuart Littlewood / March 29th, 2024
Are we seeing, at last, the beginnings of a revolution in the Anglican Church against its leaders’ cowardice over Israel’s genocide of Muslims and Christians in the Holy Land?
On 31 October the Church of England House of Bishops issued a statement on Israel’s genocide against Palestinians which two clergymen in Cambridge found”profoundly inadequate as a response to the indiscriminate devastation already being inflicted upon the defenceless civilian population of Gaza”.
On 13 December and again on 13 February the bishops had delivered stronger statements, but “these still fall far short of what is needed. Four months on from their first intervention, with Gaza now described by the UN humanitarian chief Martin Griffiths as ‘uninhabitable’, and with the Israeli assault ruled by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to be ‘plausibly genocidal’, the bishops need to strengthen their stance substantially.”
So much so that the ‘Cambridge Two’, Dr. Jonathan Chaplin and Revd. James Shakespeare, proposed a motion calling upon the House of Bishops to address the issue again as a matter of urgency, and to issue a new statement specifically naming the illegality of the continuing Israeli military onslaught on Gaza, and fully recognising the historical context of sustained oppression of the Palestinian people by the Israeli state.
Bishops ‘to think again and speak more robustly’
In his speech introducing the motion at Ely Diocesan Synod, Chaplin said that the three official statements of the House of Bishops since October were the most authoritative interventions on the matter from the national Church but they were found lacking.
While the bishops made clear their moral disapproval of the Israeli onslaught on Gaza, they failed explicitly to call Israeli actions what they really were – violations of international law and war crimes.
Chaplin reminded his audience that in late October a letter from British lawyers, which now has 1100 signatories, made clear that there was ample evidence of multiple specific violations of many international laws by the IDF (Israeli Defence Forces). Since then the extent and severity of these violations has expanded massively, with the International Court of Justice in January ruling that Israeli military actions in Gaza were ‘plausibly genocidal’ and ordering Israel to take all immediate and effective measures within its power to protect Palestinians from further risk of genocide – “orders that Israel has ignored with impunity”.
Almost all Gazan hospitals are now destroyed or dysfunctional, said Chaplin. 80% of the population has been displaced and are surviving in catastrophically inhumane conditions while still under military assault; well over 50% of buildings in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed, meaning most Gazans will have nowhere to return to when the fighting stops. 90% of educational institutions, numerous churches and mosques and irreplaceable cultural sites have been damaged or destroyed, and there’s been extensive damage to agricultural land and to the environment generally.
“Many Gazans now face the immediate prospect of starvation due to continuing drastic Israeli restrictions on the supply of humanitarian aid – another war crime – and official bodies have reported that children are already dying as a result.
“None of this can remotely be justified under Israel’s ‘right to defend itself’. Israel is not bound by some iron necessity to inflict this level of devastating collective punishment on defenceless Gazans. International law demands that Israel find other ways to protect its citizens against Hamas and to retrieve its hostages.”
National Church must speak truth to power
He then came to the point:
“It is inadequate for the bishops merely to express moral disapproval of such criminal acts, because moral disapproval is easily set aside as a subjective judgment which can be legitimately contested…. These acts must be named as publicly verifiable and culpable breaches of international law, if what is happening in Gaza is to be truthfully described.
“The bishops’ statements fail to give an adequate recognition of the larger historical and political context of sustained Israeli oppression of Palestinians, since at least the 1967 illegal occupation…. There is ample verifiable evidence to support the bishops’ issuing a fuller and franker acknowledgement of the scale, intensity and recent harsh escalation of Israeli state oppression of Palestinians.
“Our aim is to urge our bishops to think again on this issue…. and to speak more credibly and robustly, into a calamity in which Britain is itself deeply implicated historically. As leaders of a church which continues to defend its status as a national church, our motion is an invitation to the House of Bishops to use that unique platform more courageously to speak truth to power on this question, and to send a much more powerful message of Christian solidarity to the people of Gaza, who feel alone and abandoned by many western churches.”
‘Israel ignores the ICJ’s orders for restraint with impunity’
“The bishops’ statements are deficient in at least two fundamental respects. (1) They fail specifically to condemn Israeli military actions as clear violations of international humanitarian law – as war crimes.
“Rightly, the October and December statements condemn Hamas’s brutal attack on Israel on 7 October; the October one calls it a ‘violation of international law’.
The October statement, however, does not condemn Israel’s counter-attack, calling on us only to ‘reflect’ on it. It calls on Israel to adhere to international humanitarian law, but does not charge it with already breaking such law…. None of the three statements yet explicitly call the actions of the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) by their name, that is, war crimes.
“What has unfolded in Gaza is not, as the first two statements put it, a mere ‘humanitarian catastrophe’. It is the result of actions by the IDF that, as early as 26 October, were considered by leading legal practitioners and academics, in a letter to the UK government, to be serious violations of international humanitarian law.
“Such law emphatically excludes the kind of disproportionate and indiscriminate bombardment of civilian populations, and civilian infrastructure such as homes, hospitals, mosques, churches, schools and universities, that the IDF have been daily engaging in, not to speak of its ongoing drastic curtailment of essential supplies to civilians and its attempt to force the removal of half of Gaza’s population to the south while continuing to bombard that area indiscriminately as well.
“Today, as has been amply documented by UN bodies, by humanitarian organisations, and by the media, as a result of the continuing brutality of the IDF, the scale of civilian suffering is catastrophically worse than it was when the lawyers’ letter was first published. Today, Israel simply ignores the ICJ’s orders for restraint with impunity.”
‘Bishops are silent on Palestinians’ right of resistance and fact that Hamas attack did not happen in a vacuum’
“In their October statement, the bishops pre-emptively and uncritically affirm ‘absolutely’ Israel’s ‘right to defend itself’, repeating the latter phrase in December and February. But Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur for the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, has pointed out that a state cannot claim a ‘right to self-defence’ under international law – which refers to invasion by a foreign power – against a territory which it is belligerently occupying.
“In all three statements, the bishops are also silent on the Palestinians’ own right of [armed] resistance against illegal occupation, equally affirmed in international law. Nor do they acknowledge that all non-violent attempts to exercise that right of resistance over many decades have been met with brutal suppression by the Israeli state.
“The bishops’ continuing reluctance to charge Israel explicitly with breaking international humanitarian law in specific, indictable ways remains a serious failure of judgement and has been received by many Palestinian Christians as a dismaying betrayal of solidarity at their moment of greatest need. This omission is even more egregious since the IDF’s acts clearly violate fundamental just war principles to which the Church of England is itself officially committed, but which receive no mention in either statement.”
“(2) They fail to place the events of 7 October and beyond in the full context of decades of oppression of the Palestinian people by the Israeli state. As the UN Secretary General said on 24 October, the Hamas assault, however repugnant, ‘did not happen in a vacuum’. It occurred against the background of decades of forced dispossession (1948-9), illegal occupation (since 1967), systemic discrimination and continual brutalisation inflicted on the Palestinian people by the state of Israel, all amounting to a suppression of their legitimate right to national self-determination as affirmed in international law. The bishops’ October statement is wholly silent on that overwhelmingly important history. The December statement briefly acknowledges it but only in the context of a reference to Israel’s security, noting that such security ‘cannot be achieved by continuing with a system of occupation that denies millions of Palestinians their rights and freedoms’….
“The February statement only expresses the hope that ‘All sides must begin to imagine a future beyond this conflict: for a just peace for Israelis and Palestinians. This war can’t result in the consolidation of a system of occupation that has for too long denied Palestinians their rights and freedoms’. But this still falls far short of a full acknowledgement of the breadth and depth of the systematic injustices practised by the Israeli state against the Palestinian people. Without such an acknowledgement, the latest outburst of violence cannot properly be understood, still less morally and theologically assessed.”
The following (amended) motion was passed 23 for, 15 against, 11 abstentions:
That this synod regards the House of Bishops’ three statements on the Israeli-Gaza conflict since October 2023 as seriously deficient, and calls on it as a matter of urgency to issue a new statement which, inter alia:
⦁ while reiterating its condemnation of Hamas’s attack on 7 October, condemns the military assault by Israel on Gaza since then not only as morally unacceptable, but as involving numerous egregious violations of international humanitarian law (as detailed in the UK Lawyers’ Open Letter Concerning Gaza of 26 October 2023 and the Order of the International Court of Justice of 26 January 2024);
⦁ affirms that an explicit recognition of the decades of forced dispossession, illegal occupation, systemic discrimination and continual brutalisation inflicted on the Palestinian people by the Israeli state, all amounting to a suppression of their legitimate right to national self-determination as established in international law, is essential for a proper understanding of the conflict and its resolution in a way that is conducive to a just and sustainable peace that must include independent Palestinian statehood.
Lesson in law
The UK Lawyers’ ‘Open Letter Concerning Gaza’ of 26 October 2023, referred to by the ‘Cambridge Two’, contains important lessons in international law (shown here in italics) which the Government in its statements and actions seems woefully ignorant of. Their full letter can be read here https://lawyersletter.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/GAZA_LETTER.pdf
Dear Prime Minister, Foreign Secretary, Defence Secretary,
We the undersigned legal practitioners, legal academics and former members of the judiciary, in the United Kingdom (UK), dedicated to upholding the rule of law both domestically and internationally, call on the UK Government to act urgently to fulfil its international legal obligations in relation to the ever-escalating conflict in the Middle East.
In doing so, we are deeply mindful that many people in the UK – including Israelis and Palestinians, and those in the broader Jewish, Arab and Muslim communities – have close ties to the region, and we express our sympathy to all of them, particularly the bereaved, and those whose loved ones are still in grave danger. We are moved to intervene because, in a region already accustomed to great suffering, the death and other harm visited on individuals, families and whole communities in the last 20 days has been truly terrible.
⦁ The commission by one party to a conflict of serious violations of international humanitarian law does not justify their commission by another party. That fundamental principle applies, whatever the nature of the armed conflict, and whatever “the causes espoused by or attributed to the Parties” (Geneva Conventions (GC), Additional Protocol I (API)).
⦁ It also applies where a party seeks to invoke the right to self-defence. Pursuant to the Geneva Conventions, Hamas’s war crimes cannot be justified by reference to any prior war crimes by Israel; neither do they justify further such crimes by Israel in its response, which must comply with international law (GCIV, Art 33; AP I, Arts 20 and 51(6); and customary law). As the UN Secretary General has made unequivocally clear, the “abhorrent attacks” by Hamas in Israel “can never justify the collective punishment of the Palestinian people. International humanitarian law – including the Geneva Conventions – must be upheld”. International humanitarian law is not being upheld.
⦁ The UK is duty-bound to “respect and ensure respect” for international humanitarian law as set out in the Four Geneva Conventions in all circumstances (1949 Geneva Conventions, Common Art 1). That means that the UK must not itself violate international humanitarian law, as set out therein and that it must neither encourage, nor aid or assist its violation by others.
⦁ We also call on the Government immediately to halt the export of weapons from the UK to Israel, given the clear risk that they might be serious violations of international humanitarian law in breach of the UK’s domestic Strategic Export Licensing Criteria, including its obligations under the Arms Trade Treaty.
⦁ We recall that UK nationals responsible for aiding and abetting international crimes, as well as those committing them as primary perpetrators, are liable for prosecution in the UK pursuant to the Geneva Conventions Act 1957 and the International Criminal Court Act 2001. Links to the UK Lawyers’ follow-up letters and the Foreign Office’s slippery, evasive replies can be found athttps://lawyersletter.uk/
I noted that the FO repeats its well-worn lopsided two-state solution: “a secure Israel, living side by side with an independent and viable Palestinian state”. But in the space of just 14 days this changed to “a secure Israel, living side by side with an independent, secure and viable Palestinian state”. Such a belated admission by the UK Government that Palestinians are equally entitled to security is worth a cautious welcome.
Stuart Littlewood, after working on jet fighters in the RAF, became an industrial marketeer in oil, electronics and manufacturing, and with innovation and product development consultancies. He also served as a Cambridgeshire county councillor and a member of the Police Authority. He is an Associate of the Royal Photographic Society and has produced two photo-documentary books including Radio Free Palestine (with foreword by Jeff Halper). Now retired, he campaigns on various issues, especially the Palestinians' struggle for freedom. Read other articles by Stuart, or visit Stuart's website.
The War of Numbers
Palestinian numbers do not count
by Dan Lieberman / March 30th, 2024
According to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), a war by Israelis against the Palestinian population for more than 75 years has become a global war against the Jews.
“The Global War on the Jews, Anti-Semitism surges, even in the West, which shows why Israel exists,“ by The Editorial Board WSJ, Oct. 30, 2023.
The disturbing fact of the past month is that Jews are under attack not only in Israel and not only by Hamas. The weeks since the barbaric Oct. 7 Hamas invasion of Israel have witnessed physical assaults on Jews the world over, including in the U.S. and Europe. This most modern of pogroms—global, televised, politicized—demonstrates exactly what is at stake as Israel ramps up its defensive war against Hamas in Gaza.
The Islamist group and its Western enablers are pursuing or justifying a genocidal war against Jews, not merely a territorial dispute with Israel. And since Western governments too often seem unable to protect the Jewish minorities in their midst, Israel must defend itself as the only safe home for the Jewish people.
To make the WSJ report official, we have the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) Recording a “Dramatic Increase in U.S. Antisemitic Incidents Following Oct. 7 Hamas Massacre.”
ADL recorded a total of 312 anti-Semitic incidents between Oct. 7-23, 2023, 190 of which were directly linked to the war in Israel and Gaza.
When conflict erupts in Israel, antisemitic incidents soon follow in the U.S. and globally,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, ADL CEO. “From white supremacists in California displaying antisemitic banners on highway overpasses to radical anti-Zionists harassing Jewish people because of their real or perceived support for the Jewish state, we are witnessing a disturbing rise in antisemitic activity here while the war rages overseas.
Here is a sampling of incidents reported across the country, a few of which are rigorously confirmed:
On Oct. 8 in Clifton, NJ: A car with individuals holding Palestinian flags appeared to intentionally swerve out of its lane, nearly hitting a visibly Jewish family.
On Oct. 9 in Detroit, MI: A Jewish student was harassed, shoved and called “Fucking Zionist” while painting a free speech rock with an Israeli flag on the campus of Wayne State University.
On Oct. 10 in Los Angeles, CA: An individual shouted “I am Hamas” and made death threats to Jewish individuals standing by a Kosher restaurant.
On Oct. 12 in Indianapolis, IN: A man carrying an Israeli flag was allegedly assaulted by a pro-Palestinian protestor.
On Oct. 15 in New York, NY: An individual allegedly punched a Jewish woman in the face at Grand Central Terminal. When she asked why, he responded: “You are Jewish.”
On Oct. 15 in Walnut Creek, CA: White Lives Matter California, a white supremacist group, held a rally on a highway overpass and displayed signs stating: “Save Gaza,” “No More Wars for I$rael” and “Watch Europa the Last Battle.”
On Oct. 18 in New York, NY: A group of Israeli individuals were harassed and at least one assaulted by a pro-Palestinian protestor in Times Square.
Tens of Palestinians are murdered and hundreds are wounded each day, whole families slaughtered, 70% of housing destroyed, people forced to wander on meager diets, some starving, hospitals demolished and no place to treat the wounded, and those happening are not important to the WSJ, the ADL, the U.S. government and most of the U.S. media ─ important is that a few Jews (who support the genocide) have been harassed. The latter is the extent of the global war against the Jews, for which WSJ blames Hamas. Is this a valid description of our world from a responsible newspaper or is this a story from The Onion? I cannot believe that America’s foremost financial journal published this article. Next, we might read in the WSJ that “Stage Coaches are the next great growth prospect, expected to overtake Tesla in energy-efficient vehicles.”
Put the incidents into numbers: The ADL reports 312 incidents (????) of anti-Semitism in the United States, none resulting in death (one death accidentally happened in California when a pro-Israeli demonstrator engaged pro-Palestinian demonstrators) or serious injuries.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) said it “received 3,578 complaints during the last three months of 2023, amid what it called ‘an ongoing wave of anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian hate.’ Complaints of employment discrimination led the list with 662 instances; hate crimes and hate incidents were reported 472 times; and education discrimination 448 times.” These complaints are only from the last three months of 2023 and are ten times the charges (???) of anti-Semitism. Included in the incidents were “a November shooting in Vermont where three students of Palestinian descent were shot and the fatal stabbing of a 6-year-old Palestinian American child in Illinois in October.”
On March 26, the Palestinian Health Ministry cited that “at least 32,414 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip since last October. A ministry statement said that 74,787 other Palestinians have also been injured in the onslaught. Many people are still trapped under rubble and on the roads and rescuers are unable to reach them.” According to the UN, “85% of Gaza’s population is internally displaced with acute shortages of food, clean water, and medicine, while 60% of the enclave’s infrastructure has been damaged or destroyed.”
Wonder if the Jews involved in the global war against the Jews will be willing to exchange places with the Gazans who are out strolling every day in the open air, cooking in rustic fireplaces, camping out in the evenings along the beautiful beaches, and just having a wonderful time.
Ooh, wait a second, could it be a coincidence that the PBS News Hour had an extensive report on the Russian imprisonment of one of Wall Street Journal reporters, Evan Gershkovich, whom they mention as being “the son of Russian Jewish immigrants?” Why the Jewish identification? If Evan was Catholic, would PBS mention his parents were Catholic?
Haven’t seen any PBS programs on Americans detained at Ben Gurion airport, languishing in Israeli prisons, killed by Israeli forces, and reporters killed by Israeli snipers. Two American brothers were detained in Gaza by Israeli forces during February and are being held in Ashkelon prison. A U.S. citizen, Samaher Esmail, who lives in New Orleans, “is being held in detention by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank over alleged ‘incitement on social media.’” Not much coverage of their plights.
While on the topic of how the Zionists influence the worldwide media —internet, newspapers, radio, television, comic books, cinema, theater, magazines, books, educational tools, Quora, Facebook, X, and the Dead Sea Scrolls, permit me to touch on an encounter I had with Senator Joseph Lieberman, my namesake, who recently died.
Joe arranged an evening meeting with his Connecticut constituency, which I was interested in attending to learn how Senators approach their votes and how voters approach their Senators. Among the “voters” were AIPAC representatives who set up a table recruiting for AIPAC. The discussion and questions were a pep rally for Israel, which to Joe’s credit, he toned down. I don’t remember if there was any recruiting for the Israeli Offense Force but if it ran short of manpower, they knew where to go.
Just to show the tentacles of the Zionists, appraise the use of the discussion group Quora for the most insidious and disgusting propaganda. A question that will receive an answer that defames the Palestinians and elevates the Israelis is posed:
Why are there many fancy cars and big houses in Gaza if it is so poor? An answer is offered.
Good question! The answer will not be so good: there are many things in Gaza that not every decent European country (for example, Estonia or Lithuania) has, because the whole world supports Gaza in gratitude for terrorism against Israel. To find out the number of holders of Gaza, just look at the list of countries voting pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli declarations and UN resolutions – all these legal entities are holders (pimps) of Gaza. New buildings on the seashore, where the foot of the Israeli military does not set foot, as well as reporters (just in case of information leakage), so all the pictures are from “private collections”! And this is not Israel, this is definitely Gaza – there are no Israeli flags anywhere, but we have them everywhere. Just don’t ask if there are rockets or rocket factories hidden in the basements of these buildings – I don’t know.
When someone comments that Palestinians are well educated, resourceful, and resilient and Israel engages in apartheid, the fangs come out.
Are you a goat enjoying terrorists up your arse, or just a useful idiot repeating whatever you hear? Israel has millions of Israeli Arabs, who are mostly those Palestinians that didn’t move away when Arab league told them to (planning to destroy Israel the next day after its independence was proclaimed). Israeli Arabs are in IDF, media, parliament, court etc. Now, in contrast, how about any Jew in Palestine or any of the surrounding countries? Apartheid much?
I answered the mendacious and crass comment with this authoritative reply and the comment was initially deleted.
Vulgar replies indicate the person knows nothing and therefore reverts to distractions. Almost the entire world and respected agencies cite Israel as an Apartheid state; I guess only you know better. Yes, Israeli Arabs cannot purchase property, cannot get loans, cannot obtain government housing, cannot live to live where they want, and cannot marry a Jew in Israel. Go to Israel’s apartheid against Palestinians and get the scoop. I trust Amnesty before trusting you.
Quora eventually reinstated my comment but does nothing about the myriad of comments from Israel’s supporters that violate platform policy for hate speech, harassment, bullying, and plain nonsense.
German Foreign Minister, Annalena Baerbock, displayed, to an unbelievable extent, the manipulation of minds by a remark she made during her first visit to Israel after Hamas’ October attack. “In these days we are all Israelis,” which means. “We are all genocidal killers.” What relation do contemporary Germans have with World War II happenings and what do those happenings have to do with allowing the genocide of an innocent people? What is she talking about? Oh, I understand ─ Germans have the GG, the Genocide Gene, and support genocide whenever and wherever.
Almost all news dispatches use the words, “the Jewish state of Israel, and “the terrorist state of Iran.” How do so many news agencies manage to use the same description, and why? The more correct words are, “the terrorist state of Israel,” and “the Islamic state of Iran.”
Inability to counter the Zionist influence in the thought process is the major problem for those who recognize the genocide. Suppression of campus protests against the genocide and replacement of the protests by those favoring the genocide with a fraudulent anti-Semitism demonstrates that the world is callous to the extensive damage done by manipulation of the mindset — fiction replaces reality, cruelty replaces humanity, a few evil dictate over masses of good, corruption replaces dedication, and destruction replacements construction. Israel and its cohorts are leading the world to an abyss. Although there are myriads of well-directed activities and hard-working and dedicated persons, nobody has implemented an effective plan to stop the descent into the inferno and gathered unified forces that react to the alarm and offer hints of salvation.
Nationalist USA permits a foreign nation to control its government. Free Media USA permits a foreign government to control its media. Democratic USA together with the United Kingdom, and Germany permits Israel to commit genocide.
The Jewish people permit the new Sicarri to bring them tragedy and they await their ultimate fate.
Dan Lieberman publishes commentaries on foreign policy, economics, and politics at substack.com. He is author of the non-fiction books A Third Party Can Succeed in America, Not until They Were Gone, Think Tanks of DC, The Artistry of a Dog, and a novel: The Victory (under a pen name, David L. McWellan). Read other articles by Dan.
