Rogue Apartheid State of Israel: Pure Evil unpunished?

It feels like déjà vu.

Israel launching forced evictions, raids of Al Aqsa Mosque, and persecution of Palestinians. Hamas firing rockets into Israel. Israel bombing densely populated areas of Gaza, claiming that Hamas uses civilians as “human shields”. Palestinians saying that they have nowhere to hide from the air raids. Populated towers bombed by Israeli forces into rubble. Mothers mourning the loss of their children.

2021 Massacre – 67 Gazan children killed and 2 Israeli children.

2014 Massacre – 582 Gazan children killed and 1 Israeli child.

2009 Massacre 345 Palestinian children, 0 Israeli.

2006 Massacre – high accuracy missiles killed 56 Gazan children, 0 Israeli.

Is a Jewish child 350 times more valuable than a Palestinian child?

“After the first death, there is no other” if you feel “The majesty and burning of the child’s death” *

In 2021 it should be obvious what needs to be done immediately to prevent more death.

“And the bare minimum of what an international community watching now, that just cares about the violence during these spectacular moments — if you really, really sincerely care about the violence, you must place sanctions on Israel. You must demilitarize Israel. You must force Israel to sign the Non-Nuclear Proliferation Treaty. You must hold Israel to account. Otherwise, you are only asking Palestinians to die quietly.” Noura Erakat, speaking on Democracy Now.

Additional bare minimum demands: Stop all arms shipments to Israel. UN observers and peacekeepers must stop all IDF incursions into Gaza and the West Bank. Open Gaza borders and dismantle West Bank checkpoints: this is urgent for Palestinians requiring emergency medical treatment.
Immediately provide essential medications including Covid-19 vaccines, diagnostic tests, Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), ICU beds, oxygen, emergency field hospitals. Immediately restore 100% electrical power to Gaza to ensure electricity, water purification and sanitation. Allow essential building supplies into Gaza so that bombed medical facilities, ambulances, schools, housing can be repaired or replaced.

Dispelling Lies: It is not antisemitic to abhor Israel’s violence. Israeli poet Aharon Shabtai, in his 2003 poem J’Accuse about the targeted killing of a Palestinian child hiding behind his father’s arm, writes that Israeli society is organized to exterminate “a population of a certain size,/Which needs to be pounded and ground/Then shipped off as human powder”. The 2004 Olga Document uses the same words and was signed by 142 Israeli Jews including founder of Physicians for Human Rights/Israel Dr. Ruchama Marton, former deputy mayor of Jerusalem Meron Benvenisti, Sakharov Peace Prize winner Professor Nurit Peled-Elhanan who lost her daughter in a suicide bomber attack: “Israel is amplifying the devastation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, as if determined to pulverize the Palestinian people to dust.” These words were written before the five massacres against Gaza (2006, 2008/9, 2012, 2014, 2021). Henry Siegman’s Israel’s Lies. documents Israel’s repeated strategy of subtly provoking a reaction in Gaza that justifies its wars as “self-defense”, now seen in an even more ominous way in its provocations of Iran, represented as “existential” threat to Israel.

Shabtai’s “J’Accuse” continues: “the sniper wasn’t acting alone…Many wrinkled brows leaned over the plans.” Israeli journalist Amira Hass reported on May 18 the numerous incidents of intentionally killing entire families in Israel’s bombings in Gaza. “The bombings follow a decision from higher up, backed by the approval of military jurists.” Precision air strikes kill a handful of Hamas leaders but mainly strike hospitals, schools, power stations, the building housing the press, kill Dr. Ayman Abu al-Ouf who headed the coronavirus response at Shifa Hospital, and two of his teenage children. Precision air strikes have damaged 18 hospitals and clinics including the only Covid-19 laboratory able to carry out testing.

Israel controls all supplies to Palestinians through military orders, checkpoints, laws, tax revenues and closures of land/sea/air borders (Gaza). As of March 2020 in Gaza, there was a deficit of oxygen, of 45% essential drugs, 31% medical supplies, 65% lab equipment and blood bank, and PPE (Personal Protective Equipment). Gaza had its highest daily number of Covid infections since the start of the pandemic with a positivity rate as of 4/24 at 43%.

Mona al-Farra M.D. and Yara Hawari, Ph.D., among others, provide details about Israel’s intentional and ongoing destruction of Gaza’s health infrastructure even before the apartheid withholding of Covid-19 vaccines from Palestinians, and ostensibly during times of peace. Between 2008 and 2014, 147 hospitals and primary health clinics and 80 ambulances were damaged or destroyed and 125 medical workers injured or killed. ICU beds in Gaza after 2000 decreased from 56 to 49 although the population doubled. At present, there are 255 intensive care beds in the West Bank for a population of 3 million people, and 180 in Gaza for over 2 million people.

Shabtai writes of the “technicians of slaughter”. Israel deploys non-conventional (outlawed) weapons against Gazan civilians, including white phosphorus, DIME, flechettes. According to the Goldstone Report about the 2008/9 war, Israel used civilians as human shields, not Hamas. Israel never signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty and is the only nuclear-armed state in the Middle East. Its “Samson Option”, i.e.”all options are on the table”, is a thinly-veiled threat against Iran. Israel’s delivery system includes submarines donated by Germany as Holocaust reparation, capable of carrying 144 nuclear warheads. Even making this threat is against international law.

A 15 year old Gazan child will have experienced 5 terrifying wars, the random killing and maiming in the Great March of Return, the killing on the aid flotilla Mavi Marmara. At the time of 2009 Operation Cast Lead assault, 85% of Gaza’s 1.5 million people depended on humanitarian aid for securing their basic needs, 80% lived below the poverty line, 70% of infants aged nine months suffered from anemia, and 13% to 15% of Gaza’s children were stunted in growth due to malnutrition. Amnesty International reported that Israel even barred infants from leaving Gaza to receive life-saving cardiovascular surgery. At checkpoints, Israeli soldiers show Palestinian children they are in full control over their lives as they arbitrarily decide how long to keep children from home and school. Palestinian youth are arrested in the middle of the night and indefinitely detained in military prisons where they are often tortured. The sonic booms from low altitude Israeli aircraft in the middle of the night over Gaza intentionally cause childhood night terror, bedwetting and hearing loss. Nurit Peled-Elhanan and the late Dr. Eyad El-Sarraj, director of the Gaza Community Health Programme, both said that the cruelest psychological effect on children is seeing their parents humiliated and debased by Israeli soldiers.

The late Israeli scholar Tanya Reinhart identified Israel’s “slow ethnic cleansing” strategy of killing a small number of Palestinians every day and of inflicting devastating injuries on children’s eyes, head, or knees. For example, on October 11, 2000, 16 people in Gaza were treated for eye injuries including 13 children, in Hebron 11 Palestinians including 3 children were treated for eye injuries, and 50 Palestinians were treated for eye injuries in Jerusalem. For the blind, crippled, and maimed, she writes that ‘their fate is to die slowly, far away from the cameras….[many] because they cannot survive crippled amidst the near starvation and infrastructure destruction that is inflicted on their communities.” The incremental killing is “not yet an atrocity” and the “’injured’ are hardly reported; they ‘do not count’ in the dry statistics of tragedy.” [2] Israeli prime ministers Netanyahu and Golda Meir have blamed Palestinian parents for Israel’s killing their children and for making Israel feel guilty about it. Silent daily crimes: Israeli soldiers raid Palestinian hospitals, injure patients including pregnant women.

If the “incremental genocide” is to be “never again”, past failures to fix anything must be a warning. In the 2014 massacre, ½ million people in Gaza lost their homes and after there was no money for reconstruction. (p.199 Rothchild) Oxfam reporting on the 2014 aftermath: “at current rates it could take more than 100 years to complete essential building of homes, schools and health facilities unless the Israeli blockade is lifted…. Less that 0.25 percent of the truckloads of essential construction materials needed have entered Gaza in the past three months. Six months since the end of the conflict, the situation in Gaza is becoming increasingly desperate. Gaza needs more than 800,000 truckloads of construction materials to build homes, schools, health facilities and other infrastructure required after repeated conflicts and years of blockade, according to aid agencies on the ground. Yet, in January only 579 such trucks entered Gaza.”

Oxfam report about the aftermath of the 2009 war, Cast Lead: “Despite the international community’s pledging billions to reconstruct the Gaza Strip after Israel razed much of it to the ground during its January offensive, donations have proved futile in the face of Israel’s persistent blockade that has prevented key building material from entering the Strip for security reasons. “Having a roof over one’s head is basic humanitarian need. The narrowest definition of humanitarian aid is food, water and shelter. The last necessitates the rebuilding of infrastructure, not just pitching tents amid the ruins.”

Israel took full control over Palestinian water days after the 1967 war. In the West Bank, industrial parks allow Israel’s most polluting and least profitable industries to dump waste on Palestinian land and water. Israel takes 30% of its water from the West Bank and Gaza aquifers, with 80% of the West Bank aquifer going to Jewish settlements.

Killing children with impunity is not unique to Israel. U.S. in 1991 and 2003 strategically bombed Baghdad’s electrical power station, knowing its effect on water and sanitation. The US Defense Intelligence Agency predicted that failure to secure supplies of clean water for much of the population” would lead to “increased incidences, if not epidemics of disease” and that the “United States knew sanctions had the capacity to devastate the water treatment system of Iraq. It knew what the consequences would be: increased outbreaks of disease and high rates of child mortality….The United States has deliberately pursued a policy of destroying the water treatment system of Iraq, knowing full well the cost in Iraqi lives.” [3] One-half million Iraqi children died in the 1990s as a result of UN sanctions and the destroyed infrastructure. According to the Lancet [4], between May 2003 and June 2008, 50% of Iraqi children under fifteen years of age were killed by coalition air strikes.

In drought-ridden and war-torn Yemen, devastated by American and Canadian weapons wielded by Saudi Arabia, the World Food Programme estimates that it would take an estimated $1.9b to save 400,000 children under five from dying of starvation in the next year but that it is facing a significant shortfall. Shameless: in the U.S., four white men’s personal wealth has increased by $129b in the last year. Action on Armed Violence estimates that the U.S. and Afghan airstrikes have killed 785 children and injured 813 since 2016. 40% of all civilian casualties from airstrikes in Afghanistan in the last five years were children.

The Biden administration is currently detaining over 20,000 unaccompanied migrant children — including toddlers — across more than 200 facilities in two dozen states with little to no oversight.

The recently disclosed information about Iranian weapons technology in the hands of Hamas and Hezbollah is of great concern: did Israel previously know the details about Iranian weapons in Gaza and Lebanon? How does the Iranian threat serve Israel and the U.S./NATO (including Canada) and their nuclear weapons policy, their opposition to the nuclear ban treaty, their first-strike option? There has been a series of Israeli provocations: Israel’s role in the assassination of Major General Soleimani; the assassinations of nuclear physicists most recently in November 2020; Israel’s opposition to the Iran nuclear deal (JCPOA), pressure on Biden to not re-open negotiations; the attack on the Natanz nuclear site. Israel is the only nuclear weapons power in the Middle East and its arsenal is aimed at Iran. It is urgent to demand inspection and dismantling of Israel’s nuclear arsenal. 

Israeli brazen violence against the Palestinians is outrageous. Except for evil or ignorant Zionists, everybody agrees with that. The latest round of this deeply asymmetric conflict has cost at least 254 Palestinians lives (including 66 children and 39 women) and 13 people in Israel (including two children and soldiers). Once more, senior UN officials have declared that the Israeli bombing of Gaza, if found to be disproportionate, would constitute war crimes.

The situation is on a “doom loop” from which there appears to be no escape. This time, however, is different. This time, the International Criminal Court (ICC) is watching.

The ICC currently has a live investigation into the situation in Palestine. While some insist that the ICC cannot investigate Palestine because it is not a state, this is not a view shared by the court or the majority of its members. It was also made moot when ICC judges gave the green light for an official probe into alleged atrocities committed in Palestine earlier this year.

It is not yet clear which acts or actors might be targeted by the ICC. But all signs point to Hamas leaders and Israeli government officials facing scrutiny. Hamas is accused of war crimes, including for intentionally firing rockets at civilian areas in Israel. The Israeli government is accused of war crimes for its repeated and disproportionate bombing of Gaza as well as establishing and expanding Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.

Israel has rejected any ICC investigation, claiming that the court – an institution that came into existence in 2002 to investigate and prosecute mass atrocities – is illegitimate and emboldens “terrorist groups”. Israel loudly supported and coordinated an anti-ICC misinformation campaign with the administration of US President Donald Trump, even endorsing sanctions against senior ICC staff. Israeli Prime Minister Binyjamin Netanyahu went so far as to insist that the court represented “pure anti-Semitism” for investigating war crimes in Palestine and to woo right-wing governments – including those that hold openly anti-Semitic positions – into criticising the court.

This hysterical opprobrium comes despite the fact that some experts believe that the ICC is more likely to first start looking into accusations against Hamas because Israel would gladly cooperate with such an investigation and give investigators access to the occupied Palestinian territories. The Israeli government, however, has made it clear it will not cooperate with an ICC probe into its own crimes and that the Israeli courts would not prosecute alleged Israeli war criminals either.

In the eyes of many, the Israeli government’s radical, anti-ICC rhetoric makes the state look more responsible for the atrocities that the court is investigating. So too does Netanyahu telling Israeli soldiers not to “be afraid” of “commissions of inquiry, investigations, [and] inspections” over war crimes. In the midst of a military conflict, Netanyahu effectively told soldiers that the Geneva Conventions were not their concern.

Still, Israel – and Hamas – are undeterred. As the recent violence has shown, neither appears interested in mitigating their behaviours just because the ICC is watching. This is unsurprising. A litany of UN reports, independent investigations, and commissions of inquiry have claimed that Hamas has committed war crimes and Israel – war crimes and crimes against humanity, while recommending that they be investigated by the ICC. Israel has dismissed each and every one, with state officials viciously attacking their authors.

Some might therefore conclude that the ICC is an irrelevant player right now. Far from it.

With the world watching as apparent war crimes were livestreamed on social media, the ICC’s chief Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda stated that she is looking at ongoing violence “very seriously”, adding that “[w]e are monitoring very closely and I remind that an investigation has opened and the evolution of these events could also be something we look at”.

Bensouda will be replaced at the ICC this summer by British barrister Karim Khan. The atrocities of this week will make it effectively impossible for him not to proceed with the ICC investigation. It would be too humiliating for the institution to pull its punches in the wake of such callous disregard for international humanitarian law.

Likewise, the eviction of civilians from Sheikh Jarrah in Jerusalem and Israel’s mass bombardment of civilian homes and infrastructure in response to Hamas’ rockets will only convince more people that the court must intervene and hold perpetrators to account.

The situation will push more people to consume and convince themselves that respected human rights institutions like B’Tselem and Human Rights Watch are correct in finding that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians amounts to persecution and apartheid. Current events are taking the edge of controversy off of the term apartheid, as applied to Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. Mainstream journalists and political figures are even using the term to describe the plight of Palestine.

People will thus be more convinced that the ICC should intervene. It is becoming only clearer that the status quo for Palestinians and Israelis is driven by impunity for atrocities, persecution, and the oppressive conditions that Palestinians find themselves in the occupied West Bank, Gaza, and Israel.

The ICC cannot bring peace to Israel-Palestine. It cannot end apartheid. It is not the solution. But it should be part of it. Every hour that passes offers only more evidence that the ICC should continue its investigation and, ultimately, issue warrants for those responsible for international crimes in Palestine.

The court is watching. Perpetrators ignore this fact at their peril.

 The Listening Post

PALESTINA

The ‘Palestinian Revolt of 2021’ will go down in history as one of the most influential events that irreversibly shaped collective thinking in and around Palestine. Only two other events can be compared with what has just transpired in Palestine: the revolt of 1936 and the First Intifada of 1987.

The general strike and rebellion of 1936-39 were momentous because they represented the first unmistakable expression of collective Palestinian political agency. Despite their isolation and humble tools of resistance, the Palestinian people rose across Palestine to challenge British and Zionist colonialism, combined.

The Intifada of 1987 was also historic. It was the unprecedented sustainable collective action that unified the occupied West Bank and Gaza after the Israeli occupation of what remained of historic Palestine in 1967. That legendary popular revolt, though costly in blood and sacrifices, allowed Palestinians to regain the political initiative and to, once more, speak as one people.

That Intifada was eventually thwarted after the signing of the Oslo accords in 1993. For Israel, Oslo was a gift from the Palestinian leadership that allowed it to suppress the Intifada and use the then newly invented Palestinian Authority (PA) to serve as a buffer between the Israeli military and occupied, oppressed Palestinians.

Since those years, the history of Palestine has taken on a dismal trajectory, one of disunity, factionalism, political rivalry and, for the privileged few, massive wealth. Nearly four decades have been wasted on a self-defeating political discourse centered on American-Israeli priorities, mostly concerned with ‘Israeli security’ and ‘Palestinian terrorism’.

Old but befitting terminologies such as ‘liberation’, ‘resistance’ and ‘popular struggle’, were replaced with more ‘pragmatic’ language of ‘peace process’, ‘negotiation table’ and ‘shuttle diplomacy’. The Israeli occupation of Palestine, according to this misleading discourse, was depicted as a ‘conflict’ and ‘dispute’, as if basic human rights were the subject of political interpretation.

Predictably, the already powerful Israel became more emboldened, tripling the number of its illegal colonies in the West Bank along with the population of its illegal settlers. Palestine was segmented into tiny, isolated South-African-styled Bantustans, each carrying a code – Areas, A, B, C – and the movement of Palestinians within their own homeland became conditioned on obtaining various colored permits from the Israeli military. Women giving birth at military checkpoints in the West Bank, cancer patients dying in Gaza while waiting for permission to cross to hospitals, and more, became the everyday reality of Palestine and the Palestinians.

With time, the Israeli occupation of Palestine became a marginal issue on the agenda of international diplomacy. Meanwhile, Israel cemented its relationship with numerous countries around the world, including countries in the Southern hemisphere which have historically stood beside Palestine.

Even the international solidarity movement for Palestinian rights became confused and fragmented, itself a direct expression of Palestinian confusion and fragmentation. In the absence of a unified Palestinian voice amid Palestine’s prolonged political feud, many took the liberty of lecturing Palestinians on how to resist, what ‘solutions’ to fight for and how to conduct themselves politically.

It seemed that Israel had finally gained the upper hand and, this time, for good.

Desperate to see Palestinians rise again, many called for a third Intifada. Indeed, for many years, intellectuals and political leaders called for a third Palestinian Intifada, as if the flow of history, in Palestine – or elsewhere – adheres to fixed academic notions or is compelled by the urging of some individual or organization.

The rational answer was, and remains, that only the Palestinian people will determine the nature, scope and direction of their collective action. Popular revolts are not the outcome of wishful thinking but of circumstances, the tipping point of which can only be decided by the people themselves.

May 2021 was that very tipping point. Palestinians rose in unison from Jerusalem to Gaza, to every inch of occupied Palestine, including Palestinian refugee communities throughout the Middle East and, by doing so, they also resolved an impossible political equation. The Palestinian ‘problem’ was no longer that of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem alone, but also of Israeli racism and apartheid which have targeted the Palestinian communities inside Israel. Further, it was also the crisis of leadership and the deep-seated factionalism and political corruption.

When Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, decided on May 8 to unleash the hordes of police and Jewish extremists on Palestinian worshippers at Al-Aqsa Mosque, who were protesting the ethnic cleansing of the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in East Jerusalem, he was merely attempting to score a few political points among Israel’s most chauvinist right-wing constituencies. He also wanted to remain in power or, at least, to avoid prison as a result of his corruption trial.

He did not anticipate, however, that he was unleashing one of the most historic events in Palestine, one that would ultimately resolve a seemingly impossible Palestinian quandary. True, Netanyahu’s war on Gaza killed hundreds and wounded thousands. The violence he perpetrated in the West Bank and in Arab neighborhoods in Israel killed scores. But, on May 20, it was the Palestinians who claimed victory, as hundreds of thousands of people rushed to the streets to declare their triumph as one unified, proud nation.

Winning and losing wars of national liberation cannot be measured by gruesome comparisons between the number of dead or the degree of destruction inflicted on each side. If this was the case, no colonized nation would have ever won its freedom.

Palestinians won because, once more, they emerged from the rubble of Israeli bombs as a whole, a nation so determined to win its freedom at any cost. This realization was symbolized in the many scenes of Palestinian crowds celebrating while waving the banners of all Palestinian factions, without prejudice and without exception.

Finally, it can unequivocally be asserted that the Palestinian resistance scored a major victory, arguably unprecedented in its proud history. This is the first time that Israel is forced to accept that the rules of the game have changed, likely forever. It is no longer the only party that determines political outcomes in occupied Palestine, because the Palestinian people are finally a force to be reckoned with.

 

INTERACTIVE: Palestinian Remix

Addameer

OCHA

Palestinian Center for Human Rights

B'Tselem 

International Solidarity Movement – Nonviolence. Justice. Freedom

Defense for Children 
Breaking the Silence

BRASIL

https://youtu.be/V4mVXJiGVQI

Carlos Latuff Twitter

The Intercept Brasil

AOS FATOS: As declarações de Bolsonaro, checadas

 

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Rogue Evil Apartheid State of Israel vs Palestine

Israeli military operation in Gaza killed, to this day, at least 253 Palestinians, including 66 children and 39 women, and seriously injured around 2,000 others. Health authorities in the occupied West Bank have separately confirmed 31 killed in that region, bringing the total to 279 across all Palestinian territories. Israel said it launched a bombing campaign in Gaza following rocket attacks from Palestinian factions.

On the Israeli side, 12 people were killed, including two children and soldiers, in rocket fire from the Gaza Strip. The fighting, the fiercest in years, came to a halt on Friday under a Qatar-Egypt-brokered ceasefire.

As we know. Under pressure and fearing a civil war inside its official borders, Israel  agreed to halt its 11-day bombardments of Gaza. The ceasefire was brokered by Qatar and Egypt, under pressur from Russia and China. But even before the shooting stopped it had transformed the political landscape. The Israel/Palestinian « confrontation » has shifted away from focusing solely on Gaza to multiple fronts – Jerusalem, the occupied West Bank , Israel itself– and an upsurge in any one of them could start a new round of violence, as Israeli occupation navy is back to it’s favourite daily hobby terrorizind fishermen in Gaza. Since yesterday morning, thier ships of terror have been firin g voileys of bullets to keep fishermen from trying to put bread on their families tables. This is a common daily practice by the IDF, the Israeli Forces of Occupation. Meanwhile, in the occupied West Bank, Israel has been arresting Palestinian youngsters for « activism » on social media. Israeli police said that more than 1,550 have been arrested so far.

Events in Jerusalem ignited the present crisis and there is every chance that they will do so again. Far-right Israeli groups, with the help of Israeli occupying military police, are intent on tightening their grip on the city and eliminating the Palestinian presence wherever they can. The political temperature will stay high, simmering just below boiling point. Another flare-up in Jerusalem would make it boil over.

Israeli leaders had hoped that the cantonisation of the Palestinians – three million on the West Bank, two million each in Israel and Gaza, 300,000 in Jerusalem – would fragment them politically as well as geographically. For a time, this strategy appeared to work, but over the last two weeks the crisis in one Palestinian canton has swiftly spread to the three others.

Israeli police efforts to evict Palestinians from the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood of occupied Jerusalem and their use of stun grenades and teargas in al-Aqsa mosque led to Hamas reaction firing rocket barrages from Gaza. Followed, the harassment of Israeli-Palestinians inside Israel by Jewish Supremacists, which, in turn provoked protests by Palestinians on  a larger scale than anything seen since the second intifada 20 years ago. On the occupied West Bank, protesters poured into the streets in every town and the internationally recognised Palestinian Authority was mocked and marginalised.

For all the empty talk about one- and two-state solutions to the Israel/Palestine problem, the outcome of the fourth war centred on Gaza proves that the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean is a single political unit. What affects one part of it affects all the rest.

The latest Gaza war showed that Israel does not have a viable military or political strategy for fighting or engaging with the Palestinians other than the ethnical cleansing. Israeli generals and officials claim to have degraded the military infrastructure of Hamas, killed some of its commanders and destroyed part of its tunnel system. Israel was certainly surprised by Hamas firing 3,700 homemade rockets into Israel, despite being isolated in Gaza for 15 years.

Even if Hamas proved to have a little more military muscle than expected, though, there is no doubting Israel’s superiority over the ill-equipped paramilitary force it faces in Gaza. But this superiority stubbornly refuses to produce victory or rather that Israel knows what such a victory would look like. It cannot realistically expect to eliminate Hamas and carry out regime change in Gaza without reoccupation, which would provoke even stronger Palestinian resistance ; mostly because more and more Palestinians see Mahmoud Abbas as Vichy and the Hamas as the only Resistance. Keeping the Palestinians there imprisoned under a state of permanent siege, the status quo for the last 15 years, has just been shown not to work.

Claims of Israeli military success as justification for agreeing to a ceasefire are a smokescreen concealing Israeli failure to gain any real advantage from a bombardment that killed 232 Palestinians, including 65 children, but did little else. Israeli commentators are franker and better informed about this lack of success than their western counterparts. The editor-in-chief of the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, Aluf Benn, calls the conflict just ended “Israel’s most failed and pointless Gaza operation ever”.

He says that all the PR of the Israeli army cannot “cover up the truth: the military has no idea how to paralyse Hamas’s forces and throw it off balance. Destroying its tunnels with powerful bombs revealed Israel’s strategic capabilities without causing any substantive damage to the enemy’s fighting abilities.”

Many states have faced similar frustration when fighting an asymmetric war against a militarily inferior but undefeatable opponent that has the resolve of Justice on their side. This happened to Britain in Northern Ireland between 1968 and 1998. The sensible response of a government that fails to get its way by physical force is to seek political engagement with the other side to work out a compromise.

But this is precisely what the Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu and his political partners cannot do. For almost a quarter of a century, his strategy since he was first elected Israeli leader in 1997 has been to argue that Israel can have a permanent peace without compromising with the Palestinians. This view, dominant from the centre left to the hard right, held that the Palestinians had been decisively defeated and there was no need to concede anything to them. With all American Presidents, mainly Donald Trump giving total support to this maximalist position during his four years in the White House, many Israelis were persuaded that Netanyahu had been right.

Gaza looked as if it had been successfully sealed off, the occupied West Bank broken up into Palestinian Bantustans and expanding Israeli settlements, Jerusalem was encircled from without and increasingly de-Palestinianised from within, while the Palestinians in Israel remained an embittered but impotent minority. Arab states were normalising relations with Israel and the Palestinian Question no longer figured on the international agenda.

It was all a mirage. The latest bombardment of Gaza may look like the three previous ones in 2008-09, 2012 and 2014, but it is far more important because the Netanyahu/Washington policy has collapsed and there is nothing much to put in its place. The old Israel/Palestinian crisis is back and is more envenomed and widespread than before. An ominous new feature of it is Palestinians in Israel taking to the streets to demand equality and an end to discrimination. Israeli illegal settlers from the West Bank have been coming back to Israel to lead anti-Palestinian demonstrations within mixed Jewish/Palestinian towns and cities.

Such developments do not mean that the balance of power between Israel and the Palestinians has abruptly skewed in favour of the latter. On the contrary, one of the problems in convincing Israelis at every level that they should engage with the Palestinians is that they do not believe they need to. Hamas have been energised and the Palestinian Authority further discredited by the latest resistance of the former and coward compliance of the latter. The fact is that there is an overall vacuum of Palestinian leadership and organisation. This is not quite such a crippling disadvantage as it might appear since Palestinian political movements have a long tradition of prioritising their grip on power over everything else.

The ceasefire that came into force between Israel and Hamas early on Friday morning ushers in a period of enhanced instability. Israel is in a state of permanent crisis because it has no military solution to Gaza/Hamas while its right-wing leaders are blocked off by ideological fixations of ethnic cleansing, which keeps them from seeking to open up diplomatic and political options.

The idea of weakening the Palestinians by fragmenting them has turned out to be counterproductive. Israeli leaders will now have to cope with four different variants of the Israel/Palestinian crisis, each of which may, like the coronavirus, become the dominant strain and detonate a new explosion. As the Palestinians have nowhere to go and nothing else to do but to fight for survival, in their own historical land.

Inside Story

Outraged at Rogue Apartheid State of Isarel's crimes against the Palestinians?

Here are 5 things you can do. 

Israel & USA vs Palestine : Endless Nakba

How all the presidents of the United States have unconditionally and systematically defended Israel’s evil project of ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

As the palestinian death toll from Israel’s continuing bombardment of Gaza mounts, anger with US President Joe Biden’s handling of the situation is growing.

On the same day that Israeli air raids killed 10 members of a single family and levelled an 11-storey building housing the media offices of Al Jazeera and The Associated Press, as well as residential apartments, Biden reasserted his unequivocal support for Israel.

Here is how Biden and past US presidents have defended Israel over decades: May 2021

Biden has twice issued statetements reaffirming his commitment to Israel’s “right to defend itself” against rockets fired from Gaza during Israel’s ongoing offensive on the occupied territory.

Israeli officials say thousands (hundreds, actually) of rockets have been fired from Gaza towards Israel, where 12 people have been killed, while a barrage of Israeli air strikes on the besieged territory have killed at least 248 Palestinians and injured hundreds more.

Top Biden administration officials have stressed their “strong support for Israel’s right to defend itself” while saying the US is pushing for a “de-escalation”. The US also blocked a United Nations Security Council statement that would have called for an end to the violence until it finally let the UN, Qatar and Egypt reach a deal with both parties.

 May 2018 : Former US President Donald Trump – a staunch defender of Israel and the country’s prime minister, Netanyahu – rejected any attempts to criticise Israel for the killing of dozens of protesters in Gaza in May 2018.

Palestinians were participating in a “Great March of Return” rally when Israeli forces opened fire on the crowd. The deadly violence coincided with the opening of the US Embassy in Jerusalem, after the Trump administration moved it from Tel Aviv in a move that drew the ire of Palestinians.

“The responsibility for these tragic deaths rests squarely with Hamas. Hamas is intentionally and cynically provoking this response, and as the Secretary of State said, Israel has the right to defend itself,” White House deputy press secretary Raj Shah said at the time.

July-August 2014 : Israel carried out 10 days of aerial bombardments of the Gaza Strip in July 2014 before launching a ground offensive into the territory. On July 18, then-US President Barack Obama told reporters he had “reaffirmed [his] strong support for Israel’s right to defend itself” in a call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “No nation should accept rockets being fired into its borders, or terrorists tunnelling into its territory,” Obama said.

“I also made clear that the United States, and our friends and allies, are deeply concerned about the risks of further escalation and the loss of more innocent life,” said Obama. More than 1,500 Palestinian civilians, including more than 500 children, were killed in that Israeli military operation in Gaza, according to the UN.

November 2012: More than 100 Palestinian civilians were killed when Israel launched a military offensive on Gaza in November 2012after i assassinaed Hamas military commander Ahmed Jabari.

Obama once more defended Israel’s actions: “There is no country on earth that would tolerate missiles raining down on its citizens from outside its borders. So we are fully supportive of Israel’s right to defend itself from missiles landing on peoples’ homes.”

December 2008-January 2009: Israel’s offensive in Gaza, dubbed “Operation Cast Lead”, began in the morning of December 27, 2008. When it was declared over 22 days later, Israeli fire had killed about 1,400 Palestinians, mostly civilians, and razed much of the territory to the ground, Amnesty International says.

But on January 2, then-US President George W Bush – who was in the final weeks of his time in the White House – placed sole blame for the situation on Hamas. “This recent outburst of violence was instigated by Hamas – a Palestinian terrorist group supported by Iran and Syria that calls for Israel’s destruction,” Bush said, as reported by NBC News at the time. He also said any ceasefire “that leads to rocket attacks on Israel is not acceptable”.

2000-2005 : An incendiary visit by Israeli politician Ariel Sharon to Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque in September 2000 led to mass Palestinian protests and confrontations with Israeli security forces that left seven Palestinians dead. The Second Intifada, also known as the Al-Aqsa Intifada, was launched.

Both Palestinian armed groups – which began deploying suicide bombings – and Israel were accused of war crimes and the indiscriminate killing of civilians during the uprising. Israel launched air raids and incursions into Gaza and the West Bank. At least 3,000 Palestinians and 1,000 Israelis were killed in the fighting.

Newly elected President George W Bush did not approve of early Israeli operations, but closely aligned with Sharon in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and subsequent “War on Terror”. The alliance was seen as giving Israel a wide berth for military actions, while disproportionately blaming Palestinians for any violence. Bush also supported Sharon’s refusal to engage with Palestinian President Yasir Arafat.

In a 2002 speech, Bush became the first US president to publicly support a Palestinian state, but he said such support was conditional on a complete Palestinian overhaul of its leadership, institutions, and security arrangements. “Today, Palestinian authorities are encouraging, not opposing, terrorism,” he said. “This is unacceptable. And the United States will not support the establishment of a Palestinian state until its leaders engage in a sustained fight against the terrorists and dismantle their infrastructure.”

1996 : US President Bill Clinton defended Israel after its military launched an attack on a UN compound in Qana, in southern Lebanon, where hundreds of civilians had been sheltering in April 1996. The attack killed more than 100 civilians and injured hundreds of others.

Israel said the attack was carried out in error, but a report to the UN Security Council found that “while the possibility cannot be ruled out completely, the pattern of impacts in the Qana area makes it unlikely that the shelling of the United Nations compound was the result of technical and/or procedural errors”.

Tens days after the massacre, in a speech to pro-Israel lobby group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Clinton said Lebanese children in Qana “were caught between – make no mistake about it – the deliberate tactics of Hezbollah in their positioning and firing and the tragic misfiring in Israel’s legitimate exercise of its right to self-defense”.

1987-1991: A series of protests, strikes, and boycotts defined the First Intifada, with Israeli security forces criticised for disproportionate crackdowns, including the use of live fire against Palestinians.

The uprising erupted as US President Ronald Reagan had begun to bolster Israel’s role as a “unique strategic asset”, making aid to Israel more readily available and giving the country special access to US military technology. While generally adverse to criticising Israel, the Reagan administration in 1987 condemned Israel security forces for “harsh security measures and excessive use of live ammunition”.

His successor, George HW Bush, took a relatively firmer stance with Israel, pushing a delay of loan guarantees in exchange for a halt to the building of settlements in the occupied West Bank and participation in the 1991 Madrid Peace Conference.

1982 : Reagan admitted that Israel gave no warning when its military invaded southern Lebanon in June of 1982 amid cross-border fighting. When asked about the US’s failure to condemn the action, or cut off arms sales to Israel, Reagan told reporters, “The situation is so complicated and the goals that we would like to pursue are what are dictating our conduct right now.”

Still, he denied giving Israel the “green light” for the invasion, saying, “We were caught as much by surprise as anyone, and we wanted a diplomatic solution and believe there could have been one.”

1973 : In October 1973, several Arab nations led by Egypt and Syria launched a military offensive in an attempt to regain the Sinai peninsula and Golan Heights, which Israel had captured during the 1967 war and continued to occupy.

Following a failed counterattack, the US began airlifting weapons to Israel, with US President Richard Nixon credited by then-Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir as expediting the transfer. The weapons are widely seen as turning the tide of the conflict, which Nixon told Congress was significant in a wider Cold War confrontation with the Soviet Union, which supported the Arab countries.

1967 : In June of 1967, Israel launched an air assault on Egypt that began the so-called Six-Day War. The conflict, which also involved Jordan and Syria, saw Israel take large swaths of land including the West Bank and Gaza, and the Syrian Golan Heights.

US President Lyndon B Johnson recounted in a 1971 New York Times piece, “I can understand that men might decide to act on their own when hostile forces gather on their frontiers and cut off a major port, and when antagonistic political leaders fill the air with threats to destroy their nation.”

“Nonetheless, I have never concealed my regret that Israel decided to move when it did. I always made it equally clear, however, to the Russians and to every other nation, that I did not accept the oversimplified charge of Israeli aggression. Arab actions in the weeks before the war started – forcing UN troops out, closing the port of Aqaba and assembling forces on the Israeli border – made that charge ridiculous.”

On May 14, 1948, the head of the Jewish Agen proclaimed the creation of the independent state of Israel as the United Kingdom’s colonial mandate over the territory ended. US President Harry S Truman immediately recognised the new sovereign nation.

“This government has been informed that a Jewish state has been proclaimed in Palestine, and recognition has been requested by the provisional government thereof,” read a statement signed by Truman. “The United States recognizes the provisional government as the de facto authority of the new State of Israel.”

 1948 : On May 14, 1948, the head of the Jewish Agency proclaimed the creation of the independent state of Israel as the United Kingdom’s colonial mandate over the territory ended. US President Harry S Truman immediately recognised the new sovereign nation.

“This government has been informed that a Jewish state has been proclaimed in Palestine, and recognition has been requested by the provisional government thereof,” read a statement signed by Truman. “The United States recognizes the provisional government as the de facto authority of the new State of Israel.”

Al Naqba (The Catastrophe)

A letter to Joe Biden from Gaza

“Dear President Biden,

I am writing to you about Gaza, a place that I have studied and written about for the last 35 years, a place that I consider another home, filled with the kindest and most generous people you will ever meet—have you ever been there? But I am writing not only as a scholar of the region but as a Jew and one whose parents survived Auschwitz.

I have a question for you, Mr. President: When is the death of a child acceptable? Or perhaps I should ask the question this way: When does the death of a Palestinian child become unacceptable? You have experienced the unspeakable loss of your own children so you are better placed than most to answer my questions.

Last week after 87 Palestinians in Gaza were killed and over 500 wounded you stated that you had not seen a “significant overreaction” on Israel’s part to Hamas’s rocket attacks.  Among the dead at that time were 18 children. I did not know any of them but I know people who do. Would you please help me explain to my friends why the death of these 18 children does not constitute an overreaction?  This brings up another question I have for you, Mr. President: How many children must die in Gaza before you would consider Israel’s response excessive particularly since you have made human rights the center of your foreign policy? I need to know so that I can explain it to my friends. As I write this, over 60 Palestinian children have been killed by the government of Israel. Is that enough to qualify?

I know people inside our government who work on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I need to tell you something I heard from one of them about the death of Gaza’s children. This individual implied that some of the dead were likely the children of Hamas officials so their deaths don’t really matter, that is, their deaths are acceptable. Is this the answer to my first question? Should this be the way I explain it to my friends? Please help me out here.

It is tragic that after more than three decades of research and writing, I still find it necessary to argue for the humanity of Palestinians, even to you.

One more thing before I end this letter if you’ll indulge me. It is about my mom. When she was imprisoned in the Lodz ghetto during the Holocaust, she risked her life hiding children who were chosen for deportation to Auschwitz and other extermination camps. The Nazis eventually found the children and sent them to their deaths.  But my mom tried to save them even though she knew she was powerless to do so. And I can assure you, knowing her and learning from her as I did throughout my life, she would have done the same for any child under threat, Jewish or Christian or Muslim. She would have been horrified by the senseless killing of children in this terrible conflict, both Palestinian and Israeli, and she would have railed at the injustice of it all. And this is my last question for you: Why haven’t you done the same?

Sincerely, » Dr. Sara Roy

Palestinian Lives Matter, Too.

"I believe that all people share a common cause for basic freedoms.

Yet whenever I speak out about the conflict between Israel and Palestine, I’m cautioned to “be careful” — that I’ll only be able to have a fruitful dialogue by recognizing grievances on “both sides.”

Well, I recognize a few things.

I recognize that any loss of life, whether Israeli or Palestinian, is a loss to be grieved. I recognize that both Israelis and Palestinians have a right to self-determination, and that neither side should be subjected to violence.

I also recognize that this latest conflict on the ground reveals a huge power imbalance that gives Israel the upper hand — thanks in no small part to the $3.8 billion that U.S. taxpayers spend on Israel’s military every year. As of May 17, about a dozen Israelis had died, while the toll for Palestinians had reached over 200 — including over 60 children.

Finally, as a Black American, I recognize that Palestinians are fighting for the same basic human rights as Black people, Indigenous people, and other people of color right here in this country.

When I traveled to the region five years ago, I was horrified by what I saw. Turnstile check points managed by Israeli Defense Forces that Palestinians had to travel through daily. Entire villages without running water and electricity living across from Israeli settlers with every amenity imaginable.

I watched Israeli soldiers raid a refugee camp in the middle of the night across the street from the hotel where I stayed in Ramallah. It made me nauseous — and I was further appalled to learn about the hundreds of Palestinian minors imprisonedand tried in Israeli military courts.

I left the place feeling like I had left the twilight zone. As Israel’s right-wing government — which rules over millions of Arab Palestinians — moves to explicitly establish Israel as a Jewish-only state, the parallels between Jewish nationalism in Israel and white supremacy in the United States have grown ever clearer.

What’s worse, Israel’s efforts to create a Jewish-only state have been strongly and historically supported by the United States.

Like previous administrations, the Biden administration has followed the same script, vocally supporting Israel. The White House has exclusively supported Israel’s “right to self-defense” — but not that of the Palestinians living under occupation.

This inequality often extends to media coverage as well. Israeli forces blew up the offices of Western journalists in Gaza yet still receive more sympathetic coverage in the U.S. press than the Palestinians those bombs fall on.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose government has been accused of crimes against humanity, just got 10 minutes of airtime on Face the Nation to defend his actions. Palestinians rarely get that kind of exposure.

But hopefully, things may be changing.

Two-dozen members of Congress sent a letter urging Israel to halt its evictions of Palestinians in East Jerusalem. Others are calling on the U.S. to attach human rights conditions to its aid to Israel.

Meanwhile people around the globe are marching, like we saw last summer after the murder of George Floyd, to #FreePalestine.

“If we are to make good on our promises to support equal human rights for all, it is our duty to end the apartheid system that for decades has subjected Palestinians to inhumane treatment and racism,” said Rep. Rashida Tlaib, the first Palestinian American to serve in Congress.

Just as Black Lives Matter, so do Palestinian Lives Matter. We cannot campaign for racial healing and justice on stolen land in our own country while simultaneously backing a campaign to occupy and displace people abroad.

U.S. foreign policy on Israel-Palestine currently makes all of us complicit in crimes against humanity. That must change, now." By Tracey L; Rogers 

Outraged at Rogue Apartheid State of Isarel's crimes against the Palestinians?

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