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)
Sunday, April 28, 2024
South Korean High Court Hears First-Ever Youth Climate Case in Asia
One of South Korea’s two highest courts on Tuesday began hearing Asia’s first-ever youth-led climate lawsuit, which accuses the country’s government of failing to protect citizens from the effects of the worsening, human-caused planetary emergency.
Nineteen members of the advocacy group Youth4ClimateAction filed a constitutional complaint in March 2020 accusing the South Korean government of violating their rights to life, the “pursuit of happiness,” a “healthy and pleasant environment,” and to “resist against human extinction.”
The lawsuit also notes “the inequality between the adult generation who can enjoy the relatively pleasant environment and the youth generation who must face a potential disaster from climate change,” as well as the government’s obligation to prevent and protect citizens from environmental disasters.
“South Korea’s current climate plans are not sufficient to keep the temperature increase within 1.5°C, thus violating the state’s obligation to protect fundamental rights,” the plaintiffs said in a statement.
Signatories to the 2015 Paris agreement committed to “holding the increase in global average temperature to well below 2°C above preindustrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C.”
According to the United Nations Environment Program’s (UNEP) most recent Emissions Gap Report, the world must slash greenhouse gas emissions by 28% before 2030 to limit warming to 2°C above preindustrial levels and 42% to halt warming at 1.5°C. UNEP said that based on current policies and practices, the world is on track for 2.9°C of warming by the end of the century.
A summary of the lawsuit notes that South Korea is the fifth-largest greenhouse gas (GHG) emitter among Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development nations, and that the government is constitutionally obligated to protect Koreans from the climate emergency.
Instead, the plaintiffs argue, the Korean Parliament “gave the government total discretion to set the GHG reduction target without providing any specific guidelines.” Furthermore, they contend that the government’s downgraded reduction targets fall “far short of what is necessary to satisfy the temperature rise threshold acknowledged by the global community.”
Lee Donghyun, the mother of one of the plaintiffs, told Reuters: “Carbon emission reduction keeps getting pushed back as if it is homework that can be done later. But that burden will be what our children have to bear eventually.”
The South Korean case comes on the heels of a landmark ruling by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), which found that Switzerland’s government violated senior citizens’ human rights by refusing to heed scientists’ warnings to swiftly phase out fossil fuel production.
The ECHR ruled on the same day that climate cases brought by a former French mayor and a group of Portuguese youth were inadmissible.
Courts in Australia, Brazil, and Peru also have human rights-based climate cases on their dockets.
In the United States, a state judge in Montana ruled last year in favor of 16 young residents who argued that fossil fuel extraction violated their constitutional right to “a clean and healthful environment.”
Meanwhile, the Biden administration is trying to derail a historic youth-led climate lawsuit against the U.S. government.
London Gaza protest: has row over ‘openly Jewish’ remark changed the march’s mood?
In the wake of a controversial viral video, Holocaust survivors joined pro-Palestine demonstration while fears of antisemitism grow
A woman is standing next to a group of Holocaust survivors and their descendants in Trafalgar Square, clutching her dog’s lead and livestreaming her challenge to the pro-Palestine marchers on her phone. “Why will none of you condemn Hamas?” she repeats several times, for the benefit of those watching online.
Most of the marchers ignore her, preferring instead to show their appreciation for the group of 11 survivors who oppose Israel’s actions in the war in Gaza. One man yells at her but is quickly ushered along by his friends. One young woman standing with the survivors kneels down to make friends with the dog.
But this is a march of thousands of people and one Londoner, probably in his 50s, takes the bait, yelling about “you bloody evangelical Christians” and knocks her phone out of her hands as she turns to film him. “Where are the police?” she calls, and in the commotion ends up on the ground, cutting her leg on some broken glass. Some of the marchers come to her help, and she dabs the blood with a tissue, then goes back to her livestream. She refuses to give her name, just that she “represents the kingdom of God”.
Does the scuffle show that London is a no-go zone for people who disagree with the demonstrators? Or, if even someone apparently trying to provoke a response can stand in relative safety, is that evidence, as the Holocaust survivors group hopes to show, that this is a peaceful protest where Jews should feel safe?
The survivors group were at the front of the march when it set off just before 1pm in Whitehall on Saturday, the thirteenth time demonstrators have gathered in central London to oppose the war in Gaza after the 7 October attacks by Hamas.
After the previous march, Gideon Falter, the leader of the Campaign Against Antisemitism, released a video clip of a police officer telling him that he could not walk across the march because he was “openly Jewish”, which Falter said showed that London had become a no-go area for Jews during the protests. It led to calls from former home secretary Suella Braverman for the Metropolitan police commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, to resign.
The Rev Hayley Ace at the Enough is Enough counter-demonstration on Saturday. Photograph: Sophia Evans/The Observer
But the release of a 13-minute video showed a much longer and more nuanced exchange between Falter and the officer, who offered to escort Falter away from the demonstration and said he was being disingenuous about his motives for wanting to cross the road at that point.
Stephen Kapos, an 87-year-old from Budapest who lost most of his family in the Holocaust, was in the centre as they walked up Whitehall.
“We want to stress our solidarity with the Palestinian people,” he said, adding that memories of the Holocaust should not be used as cover for Israel’s actions in Gaza. “The right wing has been claiming that there are no-go areas of London for Jews. We want to prove that’s wrong – we are very welcome here.”
“Openly Jewish” had become something of a slogan on the march yesterday, and some people were spurred to join the demonstration by Falter’s video.
Simon Moore, a GP from Muswell Hill in north London, wore a handmade sign around his neck about his father, who arrived on the Kindertransport.
“I know my dad would have believed in the Palestinian cause,” he says. “He was a victim of the same thing that is happening now. It’s very important that Jews or people with Jewish heritage say that this is wrong.”
Along Pall Mall, there was another potential flashpoint – a counter-demonstration by a group called Enough is Enough, separated by lines of police and barriers, too far away for anything except a few rounds of football finger-pointing. One of the organisers, Rev Hayley Ace, said: “We’ve had enough of open calls for support for terrorist organisations such as Hezbollah and Hamas.” Jews are being demonised, she said, adding of the marchers: “If they want a ceasefire, why aren’t they calling for the release of the hostages?”
Richard Wistreich from Hastings British Jews forming the ‘Jewish Block’ group gather outside the Ministry of Defence during the pro-Palestine march.
Photograph: Andy Hall/The Observer
Since 7 October, both antisemitism and anti-Muslim hatred have risen – factors that led to fewer organisations commemorating Holocaust Memorial Day on 27 January, according to Olivia Marks-Woldman, the chief executive of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust. Numbers fell from 4,500 last year to 3,700.
“Some local organisers were worried about the physical safety of their events,” she said on Friday. “At the same time, we had some people who were very deliberately disengaging and citing community tensions, but occasionally cited reasons which are intrinsically antisemitic.”
She said that Holocaust survivors who worked with the trust had a variety of views on the Israeli government and its western allies, but were “almost all very, very worried about the rise in antisemitism”.
“One thing we hear quite often is people saying ‘the war in Gaza is another genocide, it’s just like the Holocaust’, or comparing the Israeli government with the Nazis,” she said. “Those are Holocaust distortions, where victims of the Holocaust, the Jewish people, are being accused of being Nazis themselves. That’s antisemitic. It’s deeply worrying. And it shows a fundamental lack of knowledge of the Holocaust.”
Marchers at the protest in London on 27 April. Photograph: Andy Hall/The Observer
In Trafalgar Square, people stopped to greet the Holocaust survivor group. Mark Etkind is one of the organisers – his father Michael was from Łódź in Poland and survived after the 45 Aid Society brought him to the UK.
“It was quite clear from the beginning that Netanyahu was going to take the opportunity to conduct massive ethnic cleansing, what could become a genocide,” he said. “Myself and my friends in the group realised we had a responsibility to make it plain that we were opposed to that.
“It’s hard to talk about without getting a bit upset,” he added. “When we are on the protest, being openly Jewish, the level of warmth and support has been overwhelming.”
What of Marks-Woldman’s point that some of the ways the Holocaust is used in the debate are distortions?
“I think that people who compare what is happening in Gaza to the Holocaust are not being antisemitic,” Etkind says. “Anyone who knows history knows that we can’t understand things except in comparison to each other. What is happening now or in the future will never be on the scale of the tragedy of what happened in the second world war.
“But that’s not a comfort to someone who has lost their whole family in Gaza, and it would be cruel to say so to them.”
200,000 on streets of London for 12th national demo for Palestine
Build the workplace day of action on Wednesday, 1 May, International Workers’ Day
Anger at British backing for Israel on the Palestine march in London (Picture: Guy Smallman)
Around 200,000 people marched for Palestine in London on Saturday—another massive turnout for the 12th national demonstration.
Protesters were fiercely angry at Israel’s crimes and the backing from Britain and the United States.
Lots of marchers said they were lifted by the accelerating student protests in the US. But they were also fearful that the Israelis’ murderous ground assault on Rafah will start soon, and frustrated that the great movement for Palestine has not yet stopped the killing.
“The Israelis are going to wipe out Rafah, just as they did Khan Younis,” health worker Harriet told Socialist Worker. “When that happens we need more than a vigil or a march two weeks later. We need uproar.”
And as the demo assembled, news came through that British troops could be deployed in Gaza to “assist with aid deliveries”, after the US said it would not be sending any of its own soldiers.
The US previously said a “third party” would be responsible for driving trucks along a floating causeway onto the beach, a role the BBC has learned could be filled by British forces.
There should be no doubt—this is British forces aiding Israel’s plans. The US aid mechanism is a wholly inadequate cover for Israel’s refusal to open routes that could allow in unlimited aid. It is a famine-enabler, and British troops will be helping the illusion.
Israel will accept only proven friends of genocide to play such a role. In London, Julie came to her first national demonstration with her daughter Yasmin. “My husband’s parents were 11 and 12 years old when they were escorted from their homes in Palestine and forced to live in tents,” she said.
“For Rishi Sunak it’s all about money, power and control. What’s happening in Gaza is all down to Britain and the US.”
Salman, a volunteer for the Friends of Al-Aqsa group, said, “This is my second demonstration. Seeing the horrors coming out of Palestine I had to protest. It’s the least I can do.
Uma, a member of the PCS union, said campaigners need to show their anger “when we go to the ballot box”. She argued, “We need to check out all who voted against a ceasefire and not vote for any of those MPs. They aren’t working for us.”
“We need to use our voice in elections but also support actions such as shutting down arm factories.
“The students in the US have escalated the boycott movement and that’s what needs to happen here.”
“I object to arming Israel, which is a racist and imperialist project. So it’s fitting we are setting up in Parliament Square in front of a statue of Winston Churchill, who was the same.”
Mahmood, a pensioner from Ilford, east London, slammed the failure of the surrounding Arab regimes to support the Palestinians. “The regimes are weasels, they have no moral fibre,” he said..
Monday, a student at Greenwich university in south London, said she was on the protest because “I want to dismantle the narrative that all Jews are in favour of Israel. I’m currently ashamed to be associated with any Jewish state.”
Monday added, “The protests happening domestically in the Middle East show the Arab regimes are failing. They are focused on self-preservation, not the people of Gaza.”
Lydia, a member of the Unite union, said, “Workers should refuse to handle Israeli weapons. We need to stop the support for murder in Palestine.
And she hoped there would be wide support for the May Day workplace and student day of action for Palestine. “On the 1 May workers should be a voice against the supply of arms to Israel,” said Lydia.
Zahir, a health worker from Leicester said, “I’m an ex-Labour Party member. I thought Labour might change. I’m a socialist. I thought I could change things from the inside of Labour but it’s impossible.
“I’ve lost hope, I’m disillusioned. If only we could rise up. The same people who support Israel’s genocide are the ones who have let inequality run rampant and made people poorer and lined their own pockets.”
Anna, a young Muslim woman, said, “I’m here because this genocide has gone on too long. I’ve been on every national protest bar the first, and was part of the Palestine protests in 2021. But this feels different.
“The demographics are different. There are so many different nationalities and ages here. People are finally realising what’s happening.
“But this has been going on longer than seven months. It’s over 70 years of bombs and illegal settlements in Gaza and the West Bank.
“We need a ceasefire immediately. But longer term we need the Palestinians to have the right to return to their land. There’s already plans to put illegal settlements in Gaza.
“We need to keep protesting. The boycotts of Starbucks and McDonald’s have been really effective.
“We also need to speak up more in our workplaces. I find that really difficult because I don’t know how to raise it with people.
“We’re told we’re antisemitic for criticising Israel. The blurring of antisemitism and anti-Zionism is so dangerous, it waters down real antisemitism. Muslims, Christians and Jews lived together before and they can again.”
Lots of marchers are digging deep into the causes of the horror in Gaza. Maria, a Unison member from Portsmouth, said, “I’ll keep coming until this stops. The slaughter keeps getting worse. This is all down to colonialism and imperialism. And it’s been going on for years.
“But this won’t stop while Israel exists. We need a Palestinian state that is for everyone. To get that we need to keep raising our voices, boycotting and protesting.
“I work in a canteen and wear a keffiyeh on my head but I’ve been told that’s antisemitic. Yet we don’t see our unions stand up or MPs do anything effective.”
Diana, a Unison union member at Homerton hospital in east London, said, “It’s important that union members come together as a collective rather than as individuals. We’re part of a union and have to show that.
“There needs to be more from the unions. Every day at work I’m told I can’t speak out about Palestine and we can’t take sides. We’ve had demonstrations outside the hospital gates and wear badges but the union resists getting involved and shuts us down.
“They’re spineless. We have a vigil next week for May Day so we won’t stop standing up for Palestine. But we’re organising as health workers outside the union because the union nationally is too scared and gives into pressure from the hospital bosses and the government.”
New people are still joining the movement
Socialist Worker’s regular survey of demonstrators showed there are still many people joining the national marches, although slightly fewer on their first march than in earlier polls.
If our survey is accurate, 16,000 people were on their first national march on Saturday. And there is also a large core of very regular protesters who have been part of the marches from the start and stuck with them. Nearly a third said they have been on all the demos or all but one.
The revelation this week that ministers David Cameron and Kemi Badenoch authorised British arms sales to Israel right after an airstrike killed three British charity workers in Gaza has further exposed how complicit ‘our’ Government is in Israel’s genocide in Gaza. It also underlines why it’s so important that we remain active on the streets and throughout the labour and trade union movement, speaking up for Palestine.
Additionally, the Government is also refusing to rule out whether British machinery was used in the killing of the aid workers.
The obvious truth is that Britain is arming Israel’s assault on Gaza about which the United Nations Secretary-General, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and many others have said Israel has committed grave violations of international law.
This is why it is so vital to keep demanding – in the words of Zarah Sultana’s important Early Day Motion – that “in light of plausible breaches of the Genocide Convention, [we] further call on the UK Government to demand an immediate ceasefire and suspend all arms exports to Israel.”
In this context – and with a further horrific Israeli aggression against Rafah seemingly being prepared despite the ‘crocodile tears’ of Biden and his international supporters including Keir Starmer – Saturday saw another massive national demonstration for Palestine. Following this, next week sees further solidarity activities including on International Workers’ Day, May 1st.
Alongside our major May Day rally online which will be addressed by the Palestinian Ambassador, the Stop the War Coalition have called a range of workplace actions, Workers for Palestine have activities planned and then next Saturday there will be another national day of action called by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and others.
As Jeremy Corbyn said this week, “We must keep protesting and keep remembering why we are doing this: for an end to the occupation, for the right of return for refugees and for a free Palestine.”
Labour Hub readers should support all these initiatives and also take the new model motion (below) to their local Labour parties, which concludes that, “The first step towards justice and human rights for all Palestinians is the upholding of their right to self-determination under international law, including recognition, an end to the occupation and for negotiations leading to a just and enduring peace.”
Despite the Labour front bench’s shameful line – namely still not joining the growing calls in the UK and internationally for an immediate and lasting ceasefire in Gaza and to halt the trade of arms with Israel being used illegally in the war – we will keep speaking up for Palestine!
ACTION POINTS:
MODEL MOTION FOR CLPs, April 2024
“The Israeli bombardment of Gaza has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians since 7th October, over 70% of whom are women and children.
“This branch/CLP joins the growing calls in the UK and internationally for an immediate and lasting ceasefire in Gaza and to halt the trade of arms with Israel being used illegally in the war.
“Israel has a clear obligation to ensure the basic needs of Gaza’s population are met. As famine looms in Gaza, the UK Government and the international community must urgently secure not just a ceasefire, but unfettered aid access. The UK should restore its support to UNRWA.
“The first step towards justice and human rights for all Palestinians is the upholding of their right to self-determination under international law, including recognition, an end to the occupation and for negotiations leading to a just and enduring peace.”
May Day Rally for Palestine!
Online, Wed. May 1st, 18.30 : Register here // Share here // RT here H.E Ambassador Husam Zomlot plus: Richard Burgon MP, Kim Johnson MP, John McDonnell MP, Bell Ribeiro-Addy MP,Beth Winter MP, Louise Regan (Palestine Solidarity Campaign & NEU,) Maryam Eslamdoust (TSSA General Secretary,) Gawain Little (GFTU GS,) Jess Barnard (LP NEC member,) Mish Rahman (LP NEC member,) Sam Browse (‘Arise’), Hugh Lanning (L&P).
· Stop arms to Israel – take 30 seconds to lobby your MP
Zarah Sultana has put down an important Early Day Motion in Parliament noting “the ruling of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on 26 January 2024, which found that it is plausible that Israel’s ongoing attacks on the Palestinian people in Gaza are in breach of the Genocide Convention,” and “calls on the UK Government to demand an immediate ceasefire and suspend all arms exports to Israel.”
Please take 30 seconds to lobby your MP to sign it today here.
Main image: Ceasefire protest, London April 27th, c/o Labour Hub.
Israel detains and abuses Palestinian feminist scholar
On April 18th, respected Palestinian feminist scholar Professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian was arrested in Jerusalem on suspicion of incitement to violence. Academics from around the world condemned her arrest as an attack on academic freedom of expression. Penelope Quinton expresses her alarm.
Professor Shalhoub-Kevorkian, who is the Lawrence D. Biele Chair in Law at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and also the Global Chair in Law at Queen Mary University in East London, was detained in April in Jerusalem and charged with incitement, based on her research in the occupied Palestinian territories.
Professor Shalhoub-Kervorkian’s work is exceptional. When I started researching for my Doctorate, her work helped me understand how we humans process suffering and develop strategies to cope with living in long-term conflict situations.
In the past my role has been to collect affidavits from Palestinian university students detained by Israeli forces. The students routinely describe being deprived of their clothes, being beaten and being put in stress positions for hours.
When Professor Shalhoub-Kevorkian was detained, I knew she was in danger of coming to harm. I called the US embassy in Tel Aviv and begged them to do a welfare check – they refused.
The suppression of Palestinian knowledge creation is institutionalised within Israel and it is this system of routinised violence that is being used to break a globally respected academic.
Her recent detention is a brutal attempt to silence her through inhuman and degrading treatment. She was handcuffed, strip-searched, deprived of clothing, verbally abused, denied her hypertension medication and only after her blood pressure reached very dangerous levels was she given access to her medicine in her bag.
Shivering with cold, she was given a soaking wet blanket that smelled of garbage and urine. She said: “The cold was terrible, my teeth were chattering. Even though the blanket smelled and it was wet, in the end I covered myself with it because I couldn’t stand the cold. Although I research these things, I never felt them on my flesh.” Both her hands and legs were shackled as she was led from prison to court.
Had the staff at the American embassy done their duty by one of their citizens, they could have prevented the Israeli state abusing Professor Shalhoub-Kevorkian in the way they have.
The atmosphere within Israel is making it extremely dangerous for academic staff and students to freely express non- or anti-Zionist positions, or even to call for a ceasefire in Gaza, where according to the International Court of Justice, it is plausible that a genocide is taking place. Academic freedom has come under sustained attack and those who dare criticise Israel’s war on Gaza are routinely threatened and silenced.
After what she was subjected to this, it is chilling that Professor Shalhoub-Kervorkian was summoned for further interrogation on Thursday April 25th.
Penelope Quinton is a journalist and Doctoral Candidate at King’s College London.
The Ideological Coup: How Disciples of Kahane Became the New Face of Israel
Rabbi Meir Kahane addressing NCSY youth in Brooklyn in 1975.
Date 25 January 1975 - Moshezalman. Wikimedia.
Throughout history, fringe religious Zionist parties have had limited success in achieving the kind of electoral victories that would allow them an actual share in the country’s political decision-making.
The impressive number of 17 seats won by Israel’s extremist religious party, Shas, in the 1999 elections, was a watershed moment in the history of these parties, whose ideological roots go back to Avraham Itzhak Kook and his son Zvi Yehuda Hacohen.
Israeli historian Ilan Pappé referred to the Kooks’ ideological influence as a “fusion of dogmatic messianism and violence”.
Throughout the years, these religious parties struggled on several fronts: their inability to unify their ranks, their failure to appeal to mainstream Israeli society and their inability to strike the balance between their messianic political discourse and the kind of language – not necessarily behavior – that Israel’s western allies expect.
Though much of the financial support and political backing of Israel’s extremists originate in the United States and, to a lesser extent, other European countries, Washington has been clear regarding its public perception of Israel’s religious extremists.
In 2004, the United States banned the Kach party, which could be seen as the modern manifestation of the Kooks and Israel’s early religious Zionist ideologues.
The founder of the group, Meir Kahane was, in fact, assassinated in November 1990 while the extremist rabbi – responsible for much violence against innocent Palestinians throughout the years – was giving another hate-filled speech in Manhattan.
Kahane’s death was only the start of much violence meted out by his followers, lead among them an American doctor, Baruch Goldstein, who gunned down on February 25, 1994, dozens of Palestinian Muslim worshippers at the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron.
The number of Palestinians killed by Israeli soldiers while protesting the massacre was nearly as many as those killed by Goldstein earlier in the day, a tragic but a perfect representation of the relationship between the Israeli state and the violent settlers who operate as part of a larger state agenda.
That massacre was a watershed moment in the history of religious Zionism. Instead of serving as an opportunity to marginalize their growing influence, by the supposedly more liberal Zionists, they grew in power and, ultimately, political influence within the Israeli state.
Goldstein himself became a hero, whose grave, in Israel’s most extremist illegal settlement in the West Bank, Kiryat Arba, is now a popular shrine, a place of pilgrimage for thousands of Israelis.
Particularly telling is that Goldstein’s shrine has been built opposite Meir Kahane’s Memorial Park, which is indicative of the clear ideological connections between these individuals, groups, and also funders.
In recent years, however, the traditional role played by Israel’s religious Zionists began to shift, leading to the election of Itamar Ben-Gvir to the Israeli Knesset in 2021 and, ultimately, to his role as the country’s National Security Minister in December 2022.
Ben-Gvir is a follower of Kahane. “It seems to me that ultimately Rabbi Kahane was about love. Love for Israel without compromise, without any other consideration,” he said in November 2022.
But, unlike Kahane, Ben-Gvir was not satisfied with the role of religious Zionists as cheerleaders for the settlement movement, almost daily raids of Al-Aqsa and the occasional attacks on Palestinians. He wanted to be at the center of Israeli political power.
Whether Ben-Gvir achieved his status as a direct result of the successful grassroots work of religious Zionism, or because the political circumstances of Israel itself have changed in his favor, is an interesting debate.
The truth, however, might be somewhere in the middle. The historic failure of Israel’s so-called political left – namely the Labor Party – has, in recent years, propelled a relatively unfamiliar phenomenon – the political center.
Meanwhile, Israel’s traditional right, the Likud party, grew weaker, partly because it failed to appeal to the growing, more youthful religious Zionism constituency, and also because of the series of splits, which occurred as a result of Ariel Sharon’s breaking-up of the party in and the founding of Kadima in 2005 – a party which has been long disbanded.
To survive, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has redefined his party to its most extremist version of all time and, thus, began to attract religious Zionists with the hope of filling the gaps created because of internal infighting within the Likud.
By doing so, Netanyahu has granted religious Zionists the opportunity of a lifetime.
Soon, following the October 7 Al-Aqsa Flood operation, and in the early days of the Israeli genocide in Gaza, Ben-Gvir launched his National Guard, a group which he tried, but failed, to compose prior to the war.
Thanks to Ben-Gvir, Israel, now, per the words of opposition leader Yair, has become a country with a “private militia”.
By March 19, Ben-Gvir announced that 100,000 gun permits had been handed over to his supporters. It is within this period that the US began imposing ‘sanctions’ on a few individuals affiliated with Israel’s settler extremist movement, a small slap on the wrist considering the massive damage that has already been done and the great violence that is likely to follow in the coming months and years.
Unlike Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir’s thinking is not limited to his desire to reach a specific position within the government. Israel’s religious extremists are seeking a fundamental and irreversible shift in Israeli politics.
The relatively recent push to change the relationship between the judicial and exclusive branches of government was as important to those extremists as it was to Netanyahu himself. The latter, however, has championed such an initiative to shield himself against legal accountability, while Ben-Gvir’s supporters have a different reason in mind: they want to be able to dominate the government and the military, with no accountability or oversight.
Israel’s religious Zionists are playing a long game, which is not linked to a particular election, individual or government coalition. They are redefining the state, along with its ideology. And they are winning.
It goes without saying that Ben-Gvir, and his threats to topple Netanyahu’s coalition government, have been the main driving force behind the genocide in Gaza.
If Meir Kahane was still alive, he would have been proud of his followers. The ideology of the once marginalized and loathed extremist rabbi is now the backbone of Israeli politics.
Ramzy Baroud is a US-Palestinian journalist, media consultant, an author, internationally-syndicated columnist, Editor of Palestine Chronicle (1999-present), former Managing Editor of London-based Middle East Eye, former Editor-in-Chief of The Brunei Times and former Deputy Managing Editor of Al Jazeera online. Baroud’s work has been published in hundreds of newspapers and journals worldwide, and is the author of six books and a contributor to many others. Baroud is also a regular guest on many television and radio programs including RT, Al Jazeera, CNN International, BBC, ABC Australia, National Public Radio, Press TV, TRT, and many other stations. Baroud was inducted as an Honorary Member into the Pi Sigma Alpha National Political Science Honor Society, NU OMEGA Chapter of Oakland University, Feb 18, 2020.
Police Attack Palestine Labor Activists In Front Of Chicago Labor Notes Conference
Labor For Palestine held a rally on April 19, 2024 in front of the 2024 Chicago Labor Notes Conference in Chicago. It spilled into the street and police attacked and arrested labor Palestine activists. Trade unionists surrounded the police vehicle holding those arrested and forced the release of two of those arrested. After a standoff and a PSC CUNY professor Carol Tarlen interrupted the presentation of Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson inside the Labor Notes conference. Mayor Johnson’s deputy told the police to release those who had been arrested. People chanted union power in the victory.
How an ‘Antisemitism Hoax’ Drowned Out The Discovery of Mass Graves in Gaza
Agruesome discovery was made in Gaza at the weekend. Some 300 Palestinian bodies – of men, women and children – were unearthed from an unmarked mass grave in the courtyard of the Nasser hospital in Khan Younis.
Even given Israel’s record of committing relentless atrocities in Gaza over the past six months – killing tens of thousands of Palestinians, most of them women and children – this one stood out.
Some bodies were reported to have been found with their hands and feet bound, and stripped of clothing, strongly suggesting they had been executed during a three-month invasion of the city by Israeli soldiers. Others were said to be decapitated, or their skin and organs removed.
Some 10,000 people had been sheltering at Gaza’s second-largest hospital when it was attacked back in February. At the time there were reports of patients and staff being picked off by sniper fire. The medical facility was left in ruins.
Another 400 people are still reported missing in Khan Younis. More mass graves are likely to be uncovered.
Referring to some of the bodies, Yamen Abu Suleiman, a civil defence leader in Khan Younis, told CNN: “We do not know if they were buried alive or executed. Most of the bodies are decomposed.”
The revelations from Khan Younis fit a pattern that has been gradually emerging as Israeli troops have pulled back.
Last week, the latest of several mass graves were found at Gaza’s largest hospital, al-Shifa. Israel left the area earlier this month after destroying the hospital. Together, the graves are reported to have contained hundreds of bodies.
Further unmarked graves have been discovered in Beit Lahiya.
The United Nations human rights chief, Volker Turk, said he was “horrified” by the reports.
Groundswell of anger
Back in the 1990s, the identification of mass graves of thousands of Muslim men from the Bosnian town of Srebrenica led to the setting up of a special war crimes tribunal of the International Criminal Court. It ruled in 2001 that a genocide had occurred in Srebrenica committed by Bosnian Serbs – a judgment later confirmed by the International Court of Justice, sometimes referred to as the World Court.
In the circumstances, one might have expected the discovery of mass graves of hundreds of Palestinians to be front-page news – especially since the same World Court ruled three months ago that a “plausible” case had been made that Israel was committing genocidal acts in Gaza.
And yet, like so many other Israeli atrocities, this one barely caused a ripple in the news cycle.
Months ago, the establishment British media largely lost interest in reporting on the continuing slaughter in Gaza. The contrast with the media’s early coverage of Ukraine has been stark. The discovery of a mass grave containing some 100 bodies in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha – blamed on Russian troops – caused international outrage.
Bucha quickly became a byword for Russian savagery, and the discovery sustained months of calls for Russian leaders to be tried for genocide.
The general indifference of British media outlets to the mass graves found in Gaza is hugely convenient for Britain’s two main political parties.
The UK has avoided pushing for a ceasefire to end Israel’s bloodletting in Gaza. It refuses to stop selling Israel weapons and components that have helped in the killing of Palestinians – and potentially aid workers too.
On Israel’s say-so, Britain has cut funding to Unrwa, the UN aid agency best placed to stop a famine Israel is wilfully inducing in the enclave by blocking aid. And a British abstention helped foil a vote in the United Nations Security Council this month to recognise Palestine as a state, something 140 other nations have already done.
The Labour Party has offered only muted opposition.
Bipartisan support in the UK for Israel’s plausible genocide has provoked a groundswell of public anger, including regular protests in London that attract hundreds of thousands of marchers.
Pro-Israel hoax
Once again, however, the British media has seemed far less interested in reporting Israeli atrocities than in imputing malign motivations to large sections of the British public incensed by what is happening in Gaza.
It was quite extraordinary that the discovery of mass graves in the enclave was almost completely drowned out by an all-too-obvious hoax pulled by an Israel lobbyist.
Gideon Falter, chief executive of the Campaign Against Antisemitism, has been trying to shut down the peaceful London marches calling for an end to the butchering of men, women and children in Gaza since Israel began its military assault more than six months ago.
In Falter’s words, the hundreds of thousands of people who turn out regularly to call for a ceasefire – including a large bloc of Jews – are “lawless mobs” posing a direct threat to Jews like himself.
He has found powerful allies in the government. Home Secretary James Cleverly has said the march organisers have “real evil intent”, while his predecessor Suella Braverman labelled the protests calling for a ceasefire as “hate marches”.
Both have put pressure on the police to ban the protests for being supposedly antisemitic.
There is precisely no evidence for any of these claims. In fact, according to police figures, Glastonbury music festival-goers were nearly four times more likely to be arrested than those attending the London marches.
Which has left the continuing mass marches a major embarrassment to both the UK government and the opposition Labour Party by highlighting their continuing complicity in what has become – with revelations like the discovery of mass graves – ever more clearly a genocide.
‘Crossing the street’
That is the proper context for understanding Falter’s latest intervention.
As the Metropolitan police are only too aware, Falter’s group, along with other pro-Israel activists, have every incentive to engineer a provocation to add to the already considerable pressure on the police to ban the London marches and further curtail a fundamental civil liberty: the right to protest.
A video on social media shows Falter being confronted by police in a previous incident in which he tried to drive a large van with pro-Israel messages down the march route.
But his breakthrough came this month when, accompanied by an Israeli-trained security detail and a film crew, he tried repeatedly to break through a police line along the route and walk against the flow of the march. Responsible for maintaining public order at large protests, Met officers stopped him.
There are well-known rules imposed by the police surrounding large protests on highly charged ideological issues like this one.
The marchers are not allowed to stray from the route determined by the police, and opponents – whether Israel apologists like Falter or Islamophobic white nationalists – are not allowed to approach and antagonise the marchers. The job of the police is to keep the sides apart.
Blocked by officers, Falter had his script ready. He simply insisted on his right to “cross the street” as a Jew going about his business.
Given the way the public discourse about Israel and antisemitism has been malevolently manipulated by the British establishment over the past eight years – after the long-time Palestinian solidarity activist Jeremy Corbyn was elected Labour leader – Falter could not lose in this encounter.
If the police arrested him, he would have filmed evidence that he was being victimised as a Jew by an antisemitic police force.
If they refused to let him “cross the street”, he would have filmed proof that the march was indeed filled with Jew haters posing a threat to his safety.
And if the police failed in their duties and let him and his retinue walk against the flow of the packed protest, he – like anyone attempting to do this – would at the very least be jostled. Based on the established credulity of the establishment media in covering antisemitism, Falter was presumably confident that this could be spun as a hate crime against him.
Ugly politics
The police clearly seemed to understand Falter’s game plan. They appeared extremely reluctant to arrest him, even though a former chief superintendent, Dal Babu, observed that, in trying to push past them, Falter could have been charged with “assault on a police officer and breach of the peace”.
Instead, the officers patiently argued for at least a quarter of an hour with Falter, pointing out that he could bypass the march using a different route.
But in this lengthy, testy encounter, the Campaign Against Antisemitism boss finally got what he wanted. One officer made a slip-up, suggesting that the problem was that the skullcap-wearing Falter was “openly Jewish”.
As noted, lots of Jews attend the march and do so under banners declaring that they are Jews. Despite being “openly Jewish”, all say they are warmly welcomed by other demonstrators.
The officer’s mistake was understandable. Israel apologists and the British establishment spent years manipulating the public discourse to conflate Israel, the political nationalist ideology of Zionism and Jewishness in a blatant ploy to vilify supporters of Corbyn, the anti-racist former Labour leader, as antisemites.
The problem wasn’t that Falter is “openly Jewish”, it was that he is a vocal, openly Zionist supporter of Israel, one who makes excuses for its genocide and vilifies those who are opposed to the bloodletting. It is not his ethnicity or religion that are a provocation, it is his ugly politics.
But with the officer’s comment in the can, Falter released a heavily edited version of his confrontation with the police to an establishment media only too willing – at least, initially – to swallow two completely implausible ideas Falter was peddling.
First, that the police officer’s comment was proof that the Met is institutionally racist against Jews and that is why it has allowed the anti-genocide marches to go ahead. Falter called for the head of the Met, Sir Mark Rowley, to be sacked.
And second, and more importantly, that the officer’s comment was proof that the marches are indeed “hate marches” consisting of – as he declared to a BBC interviewer – “racists, extremists and terrorist sympathisers”.
Accusations of ‘fakery’
It may all have been fake news but it fitted an agenda the media has been promoting for years: that anything more than the lightest-touch criticism of Israel is evidence of antisemitism.
The political and media class have been increasingly struggling to credibly sustain that idea in the face of Israel committing a genocide – but Falter’s video served briefly as a shot in the arm.
From one police officer’s brief, verbal slip-up, he was able to fire up a national debate that took as its premise the idea that police were colluding with “antisemitic hate marches”.
On the back foot, the Met hurriedly agreed to meet Falter and “Jewish community leaders”, seemingly to get their advice on what needed to be done about the marches.
Sunday’s BBC evening news reported that pressure was growing on the Met “to get the balance right between allowing legitimate protest and cracking down on hate speech and intimidation”.
Good Morning Britain’s hosts fawned over Falter on Monday morning, accepting uncritically that the march posed a threat to him as a Jew and expressing concern that the police were not getting that balance right.
But quite unlike the years-long accusations of fake antisemitism whipped up by Falter and others to oust Corbyn, one that was enthusiastically amplified by the state-corporate media, the Met had powerful allies inside the establishment that pushed back.
Before Falter’s hoax could properly take hold, Sky released a much longer video of his confrontation with the police. It showed that they had blocked his way after identifying him as a provocateur. Police can be heard accusing him of being “disingenuous” and telling him to stop “running into protesters”.
Former police officers, including Babu, were invited on TV to offer a counter-narrative that cast Falter in a far less sympathetic light.
By Tuesday, the Met chief Rowley was feeling confident enough to go on the attack, praising the officer at the centre of the row and accusing pro-Israel activists of using “fakery” to undermine the Met.
Favourite tactic
But even wounded, Falter emerged decisively as the victor.
No one is talking – as they should be – about why groups like the Campaign Against Antisemitism, which regularly and so visibly meddle deeply in British politics in the interests of a foreign power, Israel, are treated as charities.
Instead, Falter has given the political and media class more ammunition to argue that the marches need to be banned, and has put police decision-making under yet more scrutiny.
Whatever bullishness Rowley exhibited in public, his battles behind the scenes against a government keen to silence the marches will have been made far more complicated.
But, more importantly, Falter has played an invaluable role in bolstering Israel’s favourite tactic. He has deflected attention in the UK away from its war crimes – including the mass graves in Khan Younis – to squabbles entirely divorced from reality about whether Jews are safe from the anti-war movement.
Precisely the same dynamic is playing out in the United States, where the establishment – from President Joe Biden down – is painting peaceful protests on college campuses against the genocide as hotbeds of hatred and antisemitism.
There, things are even more out of hand, with the police called in to make arrests of students and faculty.
In both cases, the real debate – about why Britain and the US are still actively supporting the bombing and starvation of Gaza’s population after six months of genocide – has once more been muffled by the Israel lobby’s fake news.
Establishment media have once again seized on any pretext available to them to focus on a twig rather than the forest. Truth obscured
The pattern is hard to miss: the British establishment, including the government and the BBC, are working hand in hand to help Israel and its genocide apologists win the public relations battle.
Only briefly, when the honour of the police – the establishment’s fist – got a bloodied nose, was there a degree of pushback.
Take, for example, the day in January when the World Court ruled there was a “plausible” case made by South Africa’s lawyers that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. That same day Israel successfully sabotaged the devastating news with a scoop of its own.
It alleged that some 12 Unrwa staff members it had seized in Gaza – out of a total of 13,000 in the enclave on the agency’s payroll – had confessed to taking part in Hamas’ attack on 7 October, in which some 1,150 Israelis were killed.
Israel demanded western states immediately cut all funding to Unrwa. It has been Israel’s long-term goal to eliminate the refugee agency and permanently erase the rights of Palestinians to return to homes their families were expelled in 1948 from what is now Israel.
Most western capitals, including the UK, dutifully complied, even though the decision was certain to plunge Gaza even deeper into a famine Israel has been engineering as part of its genocidal policies.
But the announcement’s timing was important too. Western media focused their coverage on a story about Unrwa that should have been marginal, even were it true.
The World Court’s finding that Israel was plausibly committing genocide was far more significant. Nonetheless, reporting on the ruling – especially the fact that the court suspected Israel was carrying out genocidal acts – was entirely overshadowed by the claims against Unrwa.
This week, months on, an independent review commissioned by the UN and led by the former French foreign minister, Catherine Colonna, found that Israel has still failed to produce any evidence to support its allegations against Unrwa.
But just as with Falter’s hoax, the goal of such accusations by Israel is never to expose the truth. The aim is to distract from the truth.
The same can be said of Israel’s still unsubstantiated claims of unprecedented savagery committed by Hamas on 7 October, from beheading babies to carrying out systematic mass rape.
None of these allegations, which have been widely regurgitated by the establishment western media, have ever been backed up with evidence. Whenever testimonies have been scrutinised, they have unravelled.
But all these claims have served a purpose. They keep western publics focused on evil humanitarian aid workers and evil anti-war protesters rather than the kind of evil that dares in broad daylight to kill 15,000 children, destroy hospitals, and hide bodies in mass graves.
Jonathan Cook British writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His books are Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State (Pluto, 2006); Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto, 2008); and Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair (Zed, 2008).
USAID: Israel Has Already Imposed Unavoidable, Exponential Famine on Gaza outpacing Somalia’s
Prominent foreign policy journalist Colum Lynch has an exclusive at the Devex site, which is devoted to economic development news and has a special relationship to the US Agency for International Development.
Lynch has seen a memo entitled “Famine Inevitable, Changes Could Reduce but Not Stop Widespread Civilian Deaths,” which was produced by food security experts in US AID and the State Department, and which they sent to Secretary of State Antony Blinken. These US officials gave the memo a subheading that is damning for the Israeli government of PM Benjamin Netanyahu: “Israel-imposed administrative challenges are preventing the delivery” of food.
So two things are being asserted:
1. Famine in Gaza is now unavoidable and will kill many civilian noncombatants even if more food aid starts getting in now.
2. The responsibility for this starvation of children, women and noncombatant males lies squarely with Israel, which is obstructing food aid deliveries.
That is all you need to know. These experts have never seen a situation so bad.
Lynch quotes the memo, sent earlier this month:
“Adequate health, nutrition, and water, sanitation, and hygiene … interventions, an immediate cessation of hostilities, and sustained humanitarian access will be required. Absent these conditions, all available evidence indicates rising acute food insecurity, malnutrition, and disease will lead to a rapid increase in non-trauma deaths, particularly among women, children, the elderly, and persons with disabilities.”
It continues that the
“deterioration of food security and nutrition in Gaza is unprecedented in modern history, exponentially outpacing in six months the long-term declines that led to the only other two famine declarations in the 21st century: Somalia (2011) and South Sudan (2017).”
The National Institutes of Health concluded that “During 2010–2012, extreme food insecurity and famine in Somalia were estimated to account for 256,000 deaths.” The population of the country was then about 12 million, so that is 2.1% dead of starvation. If Gaza’s coming famine were only as bad as Somalia’s we’d expect 46,200 dead from starvation alone, more than have been killed by Israeli bombing during the past six months. But the USAID and State Department experts are saying that the Gaza famine is outpacing Somalia’s. Hence we can expect even more deaths from this cause.
The USAID/ State memo is consistent with what the World Food Program is assessing as of last Wednesday. According to UN News, Gian Carlo Cirri, WFP Director, Geneva office, said at a news conference on Wednesday of Gaza, “people are clearly dying of hunger.” So this catastrophe is not in the future. It is now.
Cirri said, “People cannot meet even the most basic food needs, they have exhausted all coping strategies, like eating animal fodder, begging, selling off their belongings to buy food. They are most of the time destitute and clearly some of them are dying of hunger.”
He called for massive food deliveries “in a very short time.” He said,
“We’ve mentioned the necessity to rebuild livelihoods, to address root causes and so on. But, in the immediate time, like tomorrow, we really need to significantly increase our food supplies. This means rolling out massive and consistent food assistance in conditions that allow humanitarian staff and supplies to move freely and (for) affected people to access safely the assistance.”
Food security experts, Cirri remarked, say that “We are getting closer by the day to a famine situation. Malnutrition among children is spreading. We estimate 30 per cent of children below the age of two is now acutely malnourished or wasted and 70 per cent of the population in the north is facing catastrophic hunger,”
Cirr added “There is reasonable evidence that all three famine thresholds – food insecurity, malnutrition, mortality – will be passed in the next six weeks.”
Lynch at Devex also has seen a study produced by USAID concluding that Israel is in violation of International Humanitarian Law (IHL) and is impeding the delivery of US-funded humanitarian aid. It is therefore ineligible for US provision of offensive weaponry.
On February 8, President Joe Biden had issued a national security memo instructing Secretary of State Antony Blinken to seek written assurances from all recipients of such US military weaponry that they are abiding by IHL and not interfering with humanitarian aid shipments. Either the Israeli government has declined to proffer such assurances, or USAID has concluded that they aren’t worth the paper they are printed on.
The paper concluded that the killing of (at that time) over 32,000 persons by Israel, of which the US government assesses two-thirds or 21,120, were noncombatant women and children, could constitute a violation of International Humanitarian Law. The official death toll reported by the UN, based on Gaza Ministry of Health Statistics, has risen to over 34,000, but this number is widely considered to be a gross under-count, given that thousands of people were killed when Israeli fighter jets targeted their apartment buildings, and their bodies are under rubble, unrecovered. Many likely died a slow, agonizing death, trapped by fallen concrete blocks, thirsting to death. After 3 days without water, renal failure typically sets in. Some observers estimate that the real death toll may be 100,000, or 4.5% of the pre-war population. That is about the percentage of the non-Russian European population killed by Nazi Germany 1933-1945 (17 million out of about 400 million).
Although Israel claims to have killed 10,000 members of the Hamas paramilitary, the Qassam Brigades, and other militant groups, these assertions cannot be verified and seem unlikely to be true. It is likely that many of the 10,000 were elderly or boys or were civilian men with no connection to Hamas, or were civilian Hamas party members rather than Qassam Brigade fighters. International Humanitarian Law does not permit militaries to blow unarmed civilians who do not pose an immediate threat to smithereens from the sky, regardless of their party membership.
Juan Cole is Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan. For three and a half decades, he has sought to put the relationship of the West and the Muslim world in historical context, and he has written widely about Egypt, Iran, Iraq, and South Asia. His books include Muhammad: Prophet of Peace Amid the Clash of Empires; The New Arabs: How the Millennial Generation is Changing the Middle East; Engaging the Muslim World; and Napoleon’s Egypt: Invading the Middle East.
