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)
Tuesday, October 15, 2024
The New York Times Finally Admits Gaza is an Outdoor Prison
“Gaza’s Are Trapped in a Prison That Was Decades in the Making,”
– Mark Landler, New York Times, October 8, 2024.
Gaza is a “big outdoor prison.”
– British Prime Minister David Cameron, July 28, 2010.
Fourteen years after British Prime Minister David Cameron charged the Israels with creating a “big outdoor prison” in Gaza, the New York Times finally acknowledged that the Palestinians in Gaza have been “effectively imprisoned…in a 141-square-mile strip of land between Egypt and Israel that has become a killing zone.” On the same day, the Washington Post finally acknowledged that it would take “80 years to rebuild all of Gaza’s destroyed homes” if the pace of construction “mirrors previous conflicts.” Israel has bombed Gaza on several previous occasions, but the past year has seen “an unprecedented scale of destruction,” according to the United Nations”
A U.N. satellite assessment recorded that Israeli shelling and airstrikes have “damaged more than 65 percent of structures in Gaza, including 230,000 homes. The World Health Organization estimates there are at least 10,000 bodies buried beneath these buildings. Clearing the rubble and getting to these bodies will be particularly difficult because approximately 70 percent of Gaza’s road network has been damaged. The toxic dust and debris from Israeli bombings over the years has caused long-term health problems, according to Natasha Hall, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Toxic byproducts from the current war are likely to pollute Gaza’s already limited water supply, according to the Washington Post, and will undoubtedly cause many more serious health issues.
The mainstream media has been very slow to acknowledge the Israeli-Egyptian collaboration that has imprisoned Gaza since Hamas’ election victory in 2005, which endorsed Hamas for its opposition to Israel and for providing welfare, schools and nurseries to the impoverished residents of the territory. Hamas won 75 out of 118 seats, leaving Fatah with 39.
More than two million Palestinians have been in this lockdown for the past 17 years. Since 2007, Israel has banned Palestinians from leaving through Erez, the passenger crossing from Gaza into Israel; it is through Erez that they can reach the West Bank and travel abroad via Jordan. Palestinians are not permitted to operate an airport or seaport in Gaza, and Israeli authorities sharply restrict the entry and exit of goods. As a result, the rebuilding of Gaza will take decades if it is even possible to create a postwar Gaza.
Israel also has made it impossible for Palestinians from Gaza to relocate to the West Bank. Because of Israeli restrictions, thousands of Gaza residents who arrived on temporary permits and now live in the West Bank are unable to gain legal residency. Although Israel claims that these restrictions are related to maintaining security, there is ample evidence that the main motivation is to limit Palestinian demography across the West Bank, whose land Israel seeks to retain, in contrast to the Gaza Strip.
Egypt is no better than Israel when it come to the humiliation of Palestinians trying to leave Gaza for legitimate medical reasons. The parents of a 7-year-old boy with autism and a rare brain disease said they sought to travel for medical treatment for him in August 2021; Egyptian authorities only allowed the boy and his mother to enter. The mother said their journey back to Gaza took four days, mostly as a result of Rafah being closed. During this time, she said, they spent hours waiting at checkpoints, in extreme heat, with her son crying nonstop. She said she felt “humiliated” and treated like “an animal,” observing that she “would rather die than travel again through Rafah.”
The laws of occupation permit occupying powers to impose security restrictions on civilians, but they also require them to restore public life for the occupied population, which Israel has never done and which the international community has ignored. A prolonged occupation, such as Gaza, demands that the occupier must develop narrowly tailored responses to security threats; these must minimize restrictions on rights. Israel has never done so, and the mainstream media has never paid any attention to the debilitating effect of Israeli unwillingness to respect the human rights of Palestinians.
For years, Human Rights Watch has documented the cases of Palestinians in Gaza who were denied permission to reach the West Bank or East Jerusalem for professional and educational opportunities. In 2019, a Gaza soccer team had a match scheduled on the West Bank with a rival in a match that would determine the Palestinian representative in the Asian Cup. The Gaza team applied for permits for the entire 22-person team and 13-person staff, but Israel granted permits to only four people, only one of whom was a player.
For the past 17 years, Israel has limited Gaza’s use of electricity, forces sewage to be dumped in the sea, makes sure that water remains undrinkable, and endures fuel shortages that cause sanitation plans to be shut down. Netanyahu’s actions ensures the perpetuation of desperation among those forced to live in these conditions. Such desperation would lead any human being to believe that violent resistance is the only recourse. Is there a comparison here with the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943?
No one can ever justify the brutality of the Hamas invasion of Israel on October 7th, but the brutal conditions that Israel and Egypt have imposed on the citizens of Gaza help to explain the motivations for that invasion. There are two compelling factors that stand out in any examination of the crisis in Gaza: the persistent intransigence of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and the Israeli unwillingness to pursue a diplomatic and political solution to the Palestinian tragedy. Like a long line of Israeli politicians, Netanyahu favors total humiliation of the Palestinian people. The Hamas invasion of October 7th was inevitable.
There is a good bit of evidence that suggests Israel is unraveling from within. It now appears that Zionism, like communism, is a self-defeating project. In June of this year, renown Jewish historian, Ilan Pappé, suggested that the collapse of Zionism may be imminent. According to Pappé, “We are witnessing a historical process – or, more accurately, the beginnings of one – that is likely to culminate in the downfall of Zionism.”
In a manner eerily reminiscent of ancient Israel, modern Israel is quickly dividing into two separate states: the State of Israel and the State of Judea. The former identifies as a secular liberal democracy while the latter consists of far right religious zealots who want to establish a theocracy, and believe that God has promised them all the land between the Nile and the Euphrates.
Israeli finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich is a leading figure of this latter group. In a new documentary produced by Arte, Smotrich claimed that “the future of Jerusalem is to expand to Damascus.”
Not surprisingly, Smotrich’s vision for the State of Judea includes annexing territories presently belonging to Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. The members of this group, including, Itamar Ben-Gvir, Minister of National Security, believe that the events which transpired on October 7 provide the perfect pretext for them to realize their vision of Greater Israel.
Moreover, domestically things are deteriorating rapidly. There’s been a sharp increase in Israelis leaving the country with no intention to return. It is estimated that up to 60,000 small businesses will close by the end of this year. Foreign investment was down by 18% overall in the first half of 2024. Tourism declined by 80% after Oct 7, 2023, and the State’s credit rating has been downgraded, not once, but twice.
In a word, Israel is in trouble.
It’s troubles, however, are not only internal. Israel may soon be facing what Colonel Douglas MacGregor has called its “Little Big Horn moment.” According to MacGregor, Israel, like Gen. Custer, may soon find itself surrounded, not by Indians, but by Arabs, Persians, and Turks with nowhere to escape.
If this scenario does play out in the way Macgregor anticipates, one may conclude that Israel has no one to blame other than itself. This may ultimately be true, but it is not the whole truth. Other parties cannot escape their culpability in this debacle including the government of the United States, the defense industry, AIPAC and other Israeli lobbies, and Christian Zionists who are among the biggest supporters of Israel’s territorial expansion and escalation of the war.
The real irony in all of this is that those who think they are helping to save Israel may actually be contributing to its demise.
Yitzhak Brik, former commander of the IDF military colleges, observed that “The country really is galloping towards the edge of an abyss.” Brik predicts that if the war continues on its present course “Israel will collapse within no more than a year.”
If Brik’s logic is correct, then those encouraging Israel’s escalation and expansion are in actuality helping to expedite its end.
Yet, even if Israel survives the war, it is not at all clear that it will survive as a healthy state. As one headline put it: “Israel will survive the war. But what kind of Israel will it be.”
Dahlia Scheindlin wrote in Haaretz, that after just a little more than six months into the conflict, “Israel was already becoming an international pariah.”
With recent announcements coming from France, Spain, and the United States, Israel may soon be completely isolated in the international community.
President Macron of France and PM Pedro Sanchez of Spain have both urged the international community to stop sending arms to Israel. Then on October 9, US Ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, delivered remarks at a UN Security Council briefing which called for a “hostage and cease fire deal consistent with UN resolution 2735.”
In essence, this resolution is a three phase plan that calls for the return of all the hostages, a surge in humanitarian aid, security assurance for Israel, ending the war, return of all Palestinian civilians to their homes, and a commitment to a two-state solution.
Taken at face value, Ambassador Greenfield’s remarks represent a radical shift in American-Israeli policy. The United States has consistently used its veto power to block any resolution calling for an immediate cease fire.
However, even if the US were to vote in favor of resolution 2735, it’s hard to believe that Netanyahu would agree to it.
In his speech at the UN in September, Netanyahu vowed that “Israel will not go gently into that good night.”
In May, on Holocaust Remembrance Day, Netanyahu pledged that “…no amount of pressure, no decision by any international forum, will stop Israel from defending itself… If Israel is forced to stand alone, then Israel will stand alone.”
Apparently, Netanyahu is just fine with Israel becoming a Pariah state. It remains to be seen, however, if the people of Israel will share in his enthusiasm for this new prospect.
One thing is certain, if Israel is going to survive it must immediately end the war, replace the government, comply with the International Court of Justice, and return to the pre-1967 boarders.
Since this is highly unlikely, the collapse of Zionism may be inevitable.
Those who know their biblical history will recall, that at the time when the Biblical kingdom of Israel divided into two separate kingdoms, the United Monarchy had only been in existence for a meager 120 years.
Of course, the modern state of Israel should not be confused with biblical Israel. Nevertheless, the historical circumstances are somewhat similar.
As Mark Twain once quipped, history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.
Jim Fitzgerald is a minister in the Presbyterian Church in America and a missionary in the Middle East and North Africa. His articles have appeared in American Greatness, American Thinker, Antiwar.com, and the Aquila Report.
War on Gaza: Israel Wants To Finish the Job Washington Started After 9/11
Nearly a decade ago, a leading Israeli human rights activist divulged to me a private conversation he’d had a short time earlier with one of Europe’s ambassadors to Israel. He was shaken by the exchange.
The ambassador’s country was then widely seen as one of the most sympathetic in the West to the Palestinian people. The Israeli activist had expressed concerns about Europe’s inaction in the face of relentless Israeli attacks on Palestinian rights and systematic violations of international law.
At the time, Israel was enforcing a lengthy siege on Gaza that had deprived more than two million people there of the essentials of life, and it had repeatedly bombed urban areas, killing hundreds of civilians.
In the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, Israel had intensified its expansion of illegal Jewish settlements, leading to a surge in violence from settler militias and the Israeli army. Palestinians were being killed and driven off their land.
The activist asked the ambassador a simple question: What would Israel need to do for his government to act against it? Where was the red line?
The ambassador paused as he thought hard. And then, with a shrug of the shoulders, he responded: there was nothing Israel could do. There was no red line.
A decade ago, that comment might have been interpreted as evasive. A year into Israel’s erasure of Gaza, it sounds utterly prophetic.
There is no red line. And more importantly, there never has been. That conversation took place many years before 7 October 2023, when Hamas broke out of Gaza and killed more than 1,000 Israelis.
That date is not quite the turning point, the rupture, that it is universally presented as.
Hamas’s brief jail-break from Gaza certainly triggered an explosive desire for revenge among Israelis, who had grown used to being able to subjugate and dispossess the Palestinian people cost-free.
But more importantly, it offered a pretext for Israel’s leaders to erase Gaza – to carry out a plan they had long harboured. And similarly, it offered western states the pretext they needed to stand with Israel and excuse its savagery as Israel’s “right to defend itself”.
Horror show
Call the events unfolding over the past 12 months in Gaza what you will: self-defence, mass slaughter, or a “plausible genocide”, as the world’s highest court has termed it. What can’t be debated is that it has been a horror show.
In the first two months alone, Israel destroyed more of Gaza proportionally than the Allies managed in Germany during the entire Second World War. It carried out more air strikes on Gaza than the US and UK did against the Islamic State group over a period of three years in Iraq.
The official figures are that Israel has so far killed more than 42,000 Palestinians in Gaza – more than half of them women and children – through relentless and indiscriminate bombing of the tiny, overcrowded enclave.
According to human rights groups, more children were killed by Israel in the first four months of its bombing campaign in Gaza than were killed in four years of all other global conflicts combined.
Oxfam reported last week that in the past two decades, no conflict anywhere else in the world has come close to killing so many children over a 12-month period.
But the true death toll is far higher. Gaza, bombed into 42 million tonnes of rubble, lost the ability to count its dead and wounded many months ago.
Last week, a group of nearly 100 American doctors and nurses who have volunteered in Gaza’s healthcare system as Israel has systematically eviscerated it wrote an open letter to US President Joe Biden. They estimated that the death toll was nearly three times higher than the official figure.
They added: “With only marginal exceptions, everyone in Gaza is sick, injured, or both. This includes every national aid worker, every international volunteer, and probably every Israeli hostage: every man, woman, and child.”
Medieval-style blockade
Back in July, a letter published in the Lancet medical journal put the figure still higher. Using standard modelling techniques, drawing on data from previous wars in which densely populated urban areas were destroyed, a team of experts concluded that Gaza’s death toll would reach much closer to 200,000, based on conservative parameters.
That would amount to nearly 10 percent of Gaza’s population killed outright by Israeli bombs, disappeared under rubble, dead from medical conditions that could not be treated, or dying from mass malnutrition after a year of an Israeli medieval-style blockade of food, water and fuel.
Israel appears certain that there are no red lines, and as a result, things have only gotten worse since the Lancet letter.
In September, deliveries of food and aid into Gaza sank to their lowest level in seven months, according to figures from the United Nations and Israel.
In other words, Israel’s stranglehold on aid to Gaza’s starving population has actually intensified since May, when Karim Khan, the British chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), requested arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for crimes against humanity.
One of the main charges was that the pair were using starvation as a weapon of war.
Israeli leaders are so confident that the US and Europe are watching their backs that, according to a Reuters report last week, Israel’s military authorities have in recent days been blocking UN-chartered aid convoys from entering Gaza.
Netanyahu clearly isn’t worried about being dragged to the dock of a war crimes tribunal at The Hague any time soon.
One-sided anniversary
If western politicians have no red lines when it comes to Israel, much the same can be said of the West’s establishment media.
They barely report on conditions in Gaza anymore, apart from the occasional headline figure of deaths from Israel’s latest bombardment of a school shelter, refugee camp or mosque.
Media outlets marked the anniversary of 7 October this week but, predictably, most have done so from an exclusively Israeli perspective – as the day when 1,150 Israelis and foreigners were killed during Hamas’s attack, and a mix of some 250 captured soldiers and civilian hostages were taken into the enclave.
The BBC, for example, has been heavily promoting its documentary We Will Dance Again, recounting the experiences of Israelis who attended the Nova rave close to Gaza, which turned into a killing field.
Similarly, Britain’s Channel 4 aired a documentary titled One Day in October, billed as “an intimate and shocking account of the Kibbutz Be’eri atrocity”. Some 100 kibbutz inhabitants were killed that day and 30 hostages seized.
Notably, more than a dozen of those residents in Be’eri were killed not by Hamas, but by the Israeli army, after an Israeli tank was ordered to fire into one of the homes where Hamas was holed up with them.
Israeli army commanders on 7 October invoked the highly controversial Hannibal directive, authorizing soldiers to kill their comrades to stop them from being taken captive. On that day, Israel appears to have applied the directive to civilians too. One of the people killed by the Israeli tank fire in Be’eri was a 12-year-old girl, Liel Hetzroni.
Western media outlets have so far almost completely avoided drawing attention to the role Israel’s Hannibal directive played that day.
This week, in a sign of how one-sided the media’s portrayal has become, the Guardian hurriedly removed from its website a review criticizing the Ch4 film for failing to provide any context for the Hamas attack on October 7 – decades of military oppression and siege conditions on Gaza. The review provoked a predictable storm of protest from leading Zionist journalists.
No consequences
7 October was not only the day Hamas launched its surprise attack on Israel; it was also the day Israel began its slaughter of Palestinians in revenge.
The day marks the start of what the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has concluded amounts to a “plausible genocide” – one that Israel has barred foreign correspondents from covering in person. Instead, the slaughter has been live-streamed for 12 months variously by the population under attack, and by the Israeli soldiers committing war crimes in plain view.
In a sign of how odiously anti-Palestinian western media coverage has become over the past year, the supposedly liberal Observer newspaper – the Sunday sister paper of the Guardian – chose to give space last weekend to British Jewish writer Howard Jacobson to equate the reporting of the thousands of young children killed and buried alive in Gaza with a medieval, antisemitic “blood libel”.
The paper even chose to illustrate the column with a photo of a blood-smeared doll – presumably suggesting that the massive death toll reported by every human rights organization was false.
The only major broadcaster to try to honor the civilian victims in Gaza and the experiences of those who have survived – just barely – since last October was not a western outlet. It was the Qatari channel Al Jazeera.
Its documentary, Investigating War Crimes in Gaza, uses footage shot by Israeli soldiers and posted to social media as they carried out horrifying atrocities against the civilian population.
The soldiers’ delight in broadcasting their war crimes – and the license they received from Israel’s military authorities to do so – underscores the confidence in Israel that there will never be any consequences.
Unlike the western media, Al Jazeera humanizes the Palestinian victims of Israeli atrocities, giving them a voice and a backstory that the western media has largely reserved for the Israeli victims of 7 October.
Courts dragging their feet
Similarly, there appear to be no meaningful red lines, at least so far, for the world’s two highest courts in responding to Israel’s destruction of Gaza.
The ICJ agreed to put Israel on trial for genocide back in January, after hearing the case made by lawyers representing South Africa, and Israel’s response.
One might have assumed, given that genocide is the ultimate international crime, that the court would have fast-tracked a definitive ruling. After all, the people of Gaza do not have time on their side. But a year into the slaughter and imposed starvation, there is only silence.
The same court has in the meantime ruled belatedly that Israel’s 57-year military occupation of the Palestinian territories is illegal, that Palestinians have a right to resist, and that Israel must withdraw immediately from Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Western politicians and media have ignored the significance of that ruling, for obvious reasons. It provides the historical context for Hamas’s breakout from Gaza after its illegal siege by Israel for 17 years. Hamas is proscribed as a terrorist group in the UK and other countries.
The problem for the ICJ is twofold. It is under enormous pressure from the US global superpower not to declare a genocide in Gaza by Washington’s favorite client state. Such a verdict would tear off the veil, exposing western powers as fully complicit in that supreme crime.
Secondly, the court has no enforcement mechanisms outside the UN Security Council, where Washington enjoys a veto that it routinely wields to protect Israel.
On much the same grounds, the ICC is also dragging its feet. Khan says he has enough evidence to issue arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant for crimes against humanity. European states are obligated to enforce any arrest warrants, so unlike an ICJ ruling, this one could be carried out.
But for months, the judges of the ICC have delayed approving the warrants, despite the urgency, apparently because they, too, are fearful of incurring Washington’s wrath.
Both courts can be in no doubt that taking on Washington in these circumstances is a suicide mission.
On the one hand, Israel has shown that it will not abide by any of the legal red lines once insisted upon by the West to avoid a repeat of the horrors of the Second World War. And western powers have demonstrated that not only do they have no intention of restraining Israel, they will assist in its violations.
On the other hand, by hesitating month after month, the two international courts discredit the very rules of war they are there to uphold. They have returned the world to an era of jungle law, but now in a nuclear age.
International law is being shredded in the maw of a US-imposed, self-serving “international order”.
On the warpath
It is that utter lack of accountability from the centers of power – from western politicians, western media and world courts – that has paved Israel’s way to escalate its bloodletting to now encompass the occupied West Bank, Lebanon, Yemen, and Syria.
Israel’s theatre of war is rapidly expanding to fully embrace Iran, too. The world is braced for an imminent Israeli attack.
There is already an undeclared regional war, and the risk grows daily of this expanding into a world war – and with that, all the inherent risks of a nuclear confrontation. But why?
For Israel’s apologists – a group that includes the entire western establishment, it seems – the narrative is a simple one, though rarely articulated clearly because its racist premises are so hard to miss.
To make Israelis feel safe again, Israel needs to reassert its military deterrence by crushing Hamas and its supporters in Gaza. To do so, Israel must also take on those in the wider region who refuse to submit to Israel’s – and by extension the West’s – civilizational superiority.
The mantra of Israel and its apologists is “de-escalation through escalation”. In blunter language, the policy is an updated colonial one of “beat the savages into submission”.
Israel’s critics – now mostly silenced as “antisemites” – argue that Israelis can never be made safe simply through military aggression rather than diplomatic solutions. Violence begets more violence. Indeed, Israel’s decades of structural violence against the entire Palestinian people led us to this point.
And, they note, Israel hasn’t just ignored diplomatic options; it is actively tearing down any chance of them bearing fruit. It assassinated Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh, a relatively moderate figure, as he was leading negotiations towards a long-anticipated ceasefire in Gaza.
And it now seems likely that Israel chose to kill Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader, shortly after he had agreed, along with the Lebanese government, to a 21-day ceasefire while the international community worked on a peace deal.
‘Clash of civilizations’
But this only gets halfway to understanding the problem.
True, Israel now appears determined to finish once and for all the job it began in 1948 of eradicating the Palestinian people – the native population its western-backed, settler-colonial project was predicated on removing.
Israel has repeatedly failed to ethnically cleanse historic Palestine, while the fallback position – decades of apartheid rule – could never be more than a holding measure, as South Africa’s experience proved.
Now, armed with 7 October as the pretext, Israel has rolled out a genocidal program instead; first in Gaza, and, if it gets away with it, soon in the occupied West Bank.
But Israel has long had a much grander ambition – one that it is getting a second bite of the cherry to achieve.
More than 20 years ago, a group of extreme ideologues known as the neoconservatives seized the foreign policy initiative during the presidency of George W Bush. They have since become a permanent foreign policy elite in Washington, whichever administration is in power.
What is distinctive about the neoconservatives is the centrality of Israel to their worldview. They regard Israel’s unapologetic Jewish supremacism and militarism as a model for the West – one in which it returns to an unashamed white supremacism and militarism in a revived spirit of colonialism.
Like Israel, the neoconservatives see the world in terms of a never-ending clash of civilizations against the so-called Muslim world. In this context, international law becomes an obstacle to the West’s victory, rather than a guarantee of global order.
In addition, the neoconservatives view Israel as the battering ram to keep the US in charge of international affairs in the world’s main oil spigot, the Middle East. Israel lies at the heart of Washington’s policy of full-spectrum global dominance.
The neoconservatives have long been sold on Israel’s strategy for achieving such dominance in the Middle East: by Balkanizing it. The aim has been to demand utter subservience to Israel, with any source of dissent not only punished, but the social structures that support it crushed into ruins.
In Gaza, that method has been on full show. In destroying government buildings, universities, mosques, churches, libraries, schools, hospitals and even bakeries, Israel has sought to reduce the Palestinian population to the barest of human existence. National identity, and the desire to resist, are luxuries no one can afford. Survival is all.
Israel is beginning to roll out the same scheme for the occupied West Bank, Lebanon and Iran.
Destabilizing the Middle East
None of this is new. Just as Israel is currently grasping the pretext of 7 October to justify its rampage, the neoconservatives earlier seized on al-Qaeda’s destruction of New York’s Twin Towers on 9/11 as their opportunity to “remake the Middle East”.
In 2007, former NATO commander Wesley Clark recounted a meeting at the Pentagon shortly after the US invasion of Afghanistan. An officer told him: “We are going to attack and destroy the governments in seven countries in five years. We’re going to start with Iraq, and then we’re going to move to Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran.”
Clark added of the neoconservatives: “They wanted us to destabilize the Middle East, turn it upside down, make it under our control.”
As I documented in my 2008 bookIsrael and the Clash of Civilisations, Israel was supposed to carry out a central chunk of Washington’s post-Iraq plan, starting with its war on Lebanon in 2006. Israel’s attack there was supposed to drag in Syria and Iran, giving the US a pretext to expand the war.
This was what the US secretary of state of the time, Condoleezza Rice, meant when she spoke of the “birth pangs of a new Middle East”.
The plan went awry largely because Israel got bogged down in phase one, in Lebanon. It blitzed cities like Beirut with US-supplied bombs, but its soldiers struggled against Hezbollah in a ground invasion of southern Lebanon.
The West subsequently found other ways to deal with Syria and Libya.
To the bitter end
Now we are back where we started, nearly 20 years later. Israel, Hezbollah and Iran have all been preparing for this second round.
The western-Israeli goal, as before, is to destroy Lebanon and Iran, just as Gaza has been destroyed. The aim is to smash the infrastructure of Lebanon and Iran, their governing institutions, and their social structures. It is to plunge the Lebanese and Iranian people into a primaeval state, where they can cohere only into simple, tribal units and fight among themselves for the bare essentials.
There is no evidence that this goal is any more realizable today than it was two decades ago.
Even Israel’s top military spokesperson, Daniel Hagari, has had to admit: “Anyone who thinks we can eliminate Hamas is wrong.”
The Israeli army is once again floundering in southern Lebanon against Hezbollah’s guerrilla fighters. And Iran’s very limited, sampler ballistic-missile attack on Israeli military sites last week showed that its arsenal can get past Israel’s US-supplied defense systems and hit its targets.
But Israel has made clear that for it, and for the US military titan behind it, there is no going back.
Last week, US State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said the quiet part out loud: “We’ve never wanted to see a diplomatic resolution with Hamas.”
According to “conservative” calculations from Brown University’s Costs of War project, the US has already spent more than $22.7bn on military assistance to Israel over the past year – equivalent to more than $10,000 for every Palestinian man, woman and child living in Gaza. Washington’s pockets appear to be bottomless.
For Israel and the US, there are no red lines. The same holds true in European capitals. They appear ready to continue this to the bitter end.
Jonathan Cook is the author of three books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His website and blog can be found at www.jonathan-cook.net. This originally appeared in the Middle East Eye.
Do They Want American Troops To Die?
Biden Administration mismanagement – or worse – from day one of the latest Israeli multi-front war in the Middle East has led us to where we are today, at the brink of an all-out regional war with some 40,000 US troops and multiple US military bases in the region with targets on their back.
Biden’s blank check to Israel after the attacks of October 7, 2023, to launch multiple wars against its neighbors and carry out the mass murder of Palestinian civilians in Gaza has drawn the US right into the middle of a bubbling cauldron of WWIII. And rather than take a sober look at actual US national security interests, Biden and his neocon incompetents are busy adding fuel to the fire hanging on to the pipe dream that they could do what they failed to do so many times before: remake the Middle East in their neocon image.
According to an article in Politico this past week, while Biden Administration officials publicly urged restraint and a reduction in violence, they privately were working with the Israeli government to encourage a widening of Israel’s military operations to include its northern neighbor, Lebanon. Two top Biden Administration officials, Amos Hochstein and Brett McGurk, urged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to shift Israel’s military focus from the already-flattened Gaza northward to Lebanon.
As Politico reports:
Behind the scenes, Hochstein, McGurk and other top U.S. national security officials are describing Israel’s Lebanon operations as a history-defining moment — one that will reshape the Middle East for the better for years to come.
Where have we heard this kind of “let’s do war to re-shape the Middle East” argument before? As Wikileaks reminds us, appearing before the US Congress in 2002 and urging the US to attack Iraq, Netanyahu himself promised that “If you take out Saddam, Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region.”
Yeah, Bibi. How’d that work out for us?
So why is it that 22 years later senior US officials are echoing Netanyahu’s bogus 2002 lies to draw the US into another “history-defining” catastrophe in the Middle East? For Hochstein it might be that he is not the unbiased “honest broker” we need to keep us out of unnecessary war. After all, as the New York Times reminds us, Hochstein was born in Israel, had/has Israeli citizenship, and even served in the Israeli Defense Forces!
Now he is serving as President Biden’s top advisor for the Middle East – a position where it is critical to bring no personal biases to the table.
This should not automatically disqualify him from the position, of course, but just as with concerns over Victoria Nuland and Antony Blinken’s Ukrainian background, neocons pushing for war in the “old country” from which they should have left old allegiances behind should raise a few eyebrows.
McGurk is similarly compromised, as he is another Victoria Nuland/Zelig-like character who has spent his career weaseling into Republican and Democratic Administrations as an “expert,” while his actual expertise comprises solely his adherence to the neocon ideology of all war all the time. He was on board for Bush’s “remaking of the Middle East” to Obama’s fake “Arab Spring to remake the Middle East” to Trump’s “trash the Iran deal to remake the Middle East.”
The guy is a loser who has been wrong his whole career, with a trail of failures that would sink a normal person. But like the Energizer Bunny he just keeps on ticking and ticking toward yet another disaster.
As Politico goes on to note, the Hochstein/McGurk plan to urge Israeli attacks on Lebanon was not widely accepted among actual experts in the Administration:
The decision to focus on Hezbollah sparked division within the U.S. government, drawing opposition from people inside the Pentagon, State Department and intelligence community who believed Israel’s move against the Iran-backed militia could drag American forces into yet another Middle East conflict.
Of course there is built into the Politico article the assumption that Hochstein and McGurk were at all concerned about “dragging American forces” into Israel’s regional war. In fact, their intent was the opposite. They no doubt yearned to draw the US government into Israel’s regional war.
Which brings us to where we are today, with the Biden Administration committing more US weapons systems and more US military personnel to serve on the ground in Israel in its war against Gaza, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Iran. All at once. How’s that for neocon ambition?
As Pentagon Press Secretary Patrick Ryder announced Monday:
With today’s news that Lebanon successfully counter-attacked Israel – hitting an Israeli military base and taking out dozens of IDF soldiers – it appears certain that President Biden and his neocon-dominated foreign policy team are setting up US military members to be killed in Israel to manufacture consent for a full-on US war against all of Israel’s enemies in the region.
They want American soldiers killed in Israel because they know the enormous propaganda value, particularly among a US population that is increasingly against US involvement in Israel’s wars and in favor of ending them instead.
With Kamala tanking in the eyes of a voting public increasingly unappetized by wilted word salads, an old-fashioned war might be just what the Biden brigades are cooking up to pull their chestnuts out of the fire.
With their track record of failure, it is time for those of us who are sane to be very, very worried.
This is going to get really bad really fast if we cannot get the attention of a slumbering – or worse – Congress.
Daniel McAdams is Executive Director of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity and co-Producer/co-Host, Ron Paul Liberty Report. Daniel served as the foreign affairs, civil liberties, and defense/intel policy advisor to U.S. Congressman Ron Paul, MD (R-Texas) from 2001 until Dr. Paul’s retirement at the end of 2012. From 1993-1999 he worked as a journalist based in Budapest, Hungary, and traveled through the former communist bloc as a human rights monitor and election observer.Reprinted from The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity.
Let’s Go Israel! Bomb Iran!
Canadian officials are encouraging Israeli violence in Iran. Once again, they are supporting the neoconservatives who view the genocide in Gaza, weakening of Hezbollah and Iran’s response to Israeli provocations as a bid to remake the Middle East just like in the build-up to the last US invasion of Iraq. As former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett crowed, “Israel has now its greatest opportunity in 50 years, to change the face of the Middle East.”
Last week Bill Blair said it would be “appropriate” for Israel to bomb Iranian oil facilities. “When we talk about (Israel’s) ability to defend (itself), certainly that would include missile launch sites, military installations, airfields from which these attacks are being launched,” Canada’s defence minister said. Asked whether that included attacking Iranian oil facilities, Blair said he thought that would be “appropriate.”
Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre incited the apartheid state to go further. He stated, “I think the idea of allowing a genocidal, theocratic, unstable dictatorship that is desperate to avoid being overthrown by its own people to develop nuclear weapons is about the most dangerous and irresponsible thing that the world could ever allow,” Poilievre said. “If Israel were to stop that genocidal, theocratic, unstable government from acquiring nuclear weapons, it would be a gift by the Jewish state to humanity.”
If Israel carried out Poilievre and Blair’s positions it would likely elicit a significant reaction from Iran. In turn, Israel would probably escalate and the two countries could descend into a war that may directly involve the US, which just announced it is sending 100 troops to Israel to operate a sophisticated anti-missile system.
Poilievre’s claim that Iran is “genocidal” is absurd. It’s Israel that’s been committing genocide for a year in Gaza. Iran is also less “dictatorial” than other countries in the region. Saudi Arabia has already executed 213 people this year and is far more repressive towards women. While Iran’s 290-person parliament reserves five seats for Armenians (two) Assyrians, Zoroastrians and Jews, the Saudi monarchy effectively bans the Christian Bible.
Iranian democracy has never been a priority for Ottawa, as Owen Schalk and I note in Canada’s Long Fight Against Democracy. In 1953 the US and Britain overthrew Iran’s first popularly elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh and Ottawa played a small part in this destruction of Iranian democracy.
Mossadegh wanted Iran to benefit from its huge oil reserves. Following the British lead, Canada’s external minister criticized the Iranians move to nationalize its oil. In May 1951 external minister Lester Pearson told the House of Commons the “problem can be settled” only if the Iranians keep in mind the “legitimate interests of other people who have ministered to the well-being of Iran in administering the oil industry of that country which they have been instrumental in developing.” Later that year Pearson complained about the Iranians’ “emotional” response to the English.
In response to the nationalization, the British organized an embargo of Iranian oil, which Ottawa followed. The embargo weakened Mossadegh’s government, enabling the CIA’s subsequent drive to topple the nationalist prime minister.
Ottawa did not protest the overthrow of Iran’s first elected prime minister. Privately, External Affairs celebrated. Four months after the coup, Canada’s ambassador in Washington cabled Ottawa about “encouraging reports from their [US] embassy in Tehran on the growing strength of the present [coup] government.”
Establishing diplomatic relations with Iran in 1955, Canada followed the lead of the UK and US in doing business with the brutal dictatorship of Mohammad-Reza Shah Pahlavi, which ruled for 26 years.
Throughout the Shah’s reign Canadian politicians visited regularly. Ontario Premier William Davis, for instance, went to meet the Shah in September 1978. During the 1970s the Canadian government’s Defence Programs Bureau had a representative in Tehran and Canada sold about $60 million ($250 million today) worth of arms to Iran during the decade. This was during a time when Amnesty International reported “no country in the world has a worse record in human rights than Iran.” The Shah’s brutal SAVAK intelligence forces killed tens of thousands, which prompted little condemnation from Ottawa. In fact, in the early 1970s, $250,000 ($1 million today) worth of Canadian aid went to the University of Montréal’s International Center for Comparative Criminology (ICCC) whose advisors in Iran, according to ICCC director Dennis Szabo, “trained police forces in the use of the most modern methods to suppress protest demonstrations and the causes of criminality.”
Not Long after the Shah’s 1979 departure, Canada closed its embassy in Tehran, which wouldn’t reopen until after Iran won a US-backed war instigated by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Over the next quarter century, the two countries had limited ties. As part of its extreme pro-Zionist bent, the Harper Conservatives severed diplomatic relations with Iran in 2012. Justin Trudeau promised to restart relations prior to being elected but his bid to do so was thwarted by the Israel lobby working through ultra-Zionist Liberal caucus members Anthony Housefather and Michael Levitt.
Relations spiraled downwards after the January 2020 US assassination of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani in Iraq and Iran mistakenly downed an airplane with 50 Iranian Canadians aboard in the aftermath. The fall 2022 Woman Life Freedom protests boosted anti-Iranian sentiment and in June the Trudeau government listed part of Iran’s military, the 100,000 strong Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, as a terrorist entity.
In recent years Canadian politicians have been increasingly close with the violent, cult-like, Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), which has assisted Israel in assassinating Iranian scientists. The MEK is excited at the prospects of Israel’s war with Iran as is the son of the deposed Shah, former crown prince Reza Pahlavi. Both view an Israel/US war against Iran as an opportunity to come to power.
While neoconservatives argue a war would somehow “bring democracy” to Iran, history proves that is a lie. Just look at Libya or Iraq. Instead, the war would be about destroying the only military that Israel views as a significant rival. And teaching yet another lesson to any country that threatens US hegemony.
As for Canadian politicians who encourage Israel to unleash even more violence after a year of genocide in Gaza whose side are they on? Certainly not humanity’s.
by Dissident Voice Communications / October 14th, 2024
The Israeli plan calling for the forceful emptying of northern Gaza and starving to death whoever remains behind is being aggressively promoted since its launch, including by prominent media figures.
Dissident Voice Communications (DVC) is a non-profit meta-company in the public interest (well, depends on which public), we aim to challenge the hegemony of Big Media by communicating... all sorts of stuff. Read other articles by Dissident Voice Communications.
Indigenous Peoples Day, Some History
by Ted Glick / October 14th, 2024
I was very surprised a few days ago to see the local bank where I have an account displaying a sign outside the front door which referred to what they called, “Columbus Day/Indigenous Peoples Day.” Although I wish the first two words had not been there, it is still a positive thing that they went public in this compromise kind of way.
There’s something personal to me about this day. I’m not Indigenous, am very much of European ancestry, but in 1992 at the time of the 500th anniversary, official celebrations in the US of Columbus’ arrival in the western hemisphere, I took part in a 42 day, water-only Fast for Justice and Peace in the Americas. It was initiated by Brian Willson, Scott Rutherford and Diane Fogliatti, and it went from September 1 to October 12.
The overall message of this action and the much broader movement out of which it emerged was that it was long past time to turn away from all that Christopher Columbus represents—racism, slavery, militarism, imperialism and ecological destruction—and commit ourselves to working for a next 500 years very different than the one experienced between 1492 and 1992. One specific demand was for Columbus Day to be replaced by Indigenous Peoples Day.
There was an Indigenous-led movement that had been taking action over many months in 1991-92 in support of this essential new direction for the USA and other countries in the Americas. The fast was inspired by that movement.
20 years before I had taken part in two long fasts/hunger strikes, one in 1971 for 33 days while in prison for draft resistance and another in 1972, a 40 day, water-only fast to end the war in Indochina.
When I heard about this initiative by Brian, Scott and Diane about a month before it was to begin, it struck a chord in me, and my life circumstances were such that I could join it. Then, toward the end of the fast, Diane Fogliatti came up with an idea for how to continue to build this movement: do an organized fast for 12 days, from October 1 to October, each year going forward. I ended up taking part in this, helping to lead a People’s Fast for Justice loose network which did so from 1993 to 2001. Our two demands were for Columbus Day to be renamed Indigenous Peoples Day and for political prisoner Leonard Peltier to be freed.
Doing some research for this column, I have learned that since 1992 there have been a growing number of localities and states which have officially recognized in some way the second Monday of October as Indigenous Peoples Day, including the states of Alaska, California, Iowa, Louisiana, Maine, Minnesota, Michigan, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oregon, South Dakota, Texas, Virginia and Wisconsin. What a surprise!
And responding to this upsurge, in 2021 President Joe Biden signed a proclamation in support of Indigenous Peoples Day.
There’s an awful lot of reasons to be anxious or depressed right now, but it is a very positive thing, something for which to be thankful, that Indigenous peoples throughout the Americas and elsewhere in the world continue to survive. Even more, they continue to give leadership in the existential battle to prevent cascading ecological and societal devastation and for a very different future in the years to come. La lucha continua!FacebookReddit
Ted Glick works ith Beyond Extreme Energy and is president of 350NJ-Rockland. Past writings and other information, including about Burglar for Peace and 21st Century Revolution, two books published by him in 2020 and 2021, can be found at https://tedglick.com. He can be followed on Twitter at twitter.com/jtglick. Read other articles by Ted.
