The ‘Genocide Moment’

Gaza’s utter devastation and masses of civilians facing death from bombardment and deliberate starvation already presents the world with a spectacle of mass murder of unspeakable proportions

by Gareth Porter Posted on October 31, 2023

Reprinted from Consortium News with the author’s permission.

https://original.antiwar.com/porter/2023/10/30/the-genocide-moment/

Israel’s systematic and wanton destruction of Gaza has raised long-standing issues of its political and legal culpability over the treatment of Palestinians to a new level of seriousness.

It obviously poses familiar issues of Israeli war crimes, and Amnesty International had already clearly designated it as such after just the first week. The human rights organization also asked the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court to “urgently expedite” its investigation of the aims of all parties.

But this Israeli campaign now poses the even graver issue of genocide of Palestinians as a nation. The utter devastation of Gaza and the vast numbers of civilians facing death from bombardment and from deliberately engineered starvation and sickness already presents the world with a spectacle of mass murder of unspeakable proportions. 

The Israelis should face accountability for its crimes.

A panel of nine distinguished independent experts on human rights who investigated the Gaza emergency for the United Nations’ Human Rights Council has just warned that the Israeli campaign of destruction of Gaza poses “a risk of genocide against the Palestinian people.”

And there is a long history of genocidal thinking and action behind this “genocidal moment”.  It should be recalled that during the previous Gaza crisis in 2014, an equally extremist Israeli government openly threatened genocide against the Palestinians.

Israeli Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked declared on Facebook that “the entire Palestinian people is the enemy” and  said:

“All of them are enemy fighters and all of them are bleeding from the head. Now it also includes the mothers of the martyrs, who send them to hell with flowers and kisses. They should follow in the footsteps of their sons, there is nothing fair about that. They have to go, and so does the physical house where they raised the snake. Otherwise, more small snakes will grow there.”

That same year, the Likud deputy speaker of the Israeli Knesset, Moshe  Feiglin said:

“Gaza is part of our Land and we will remain there forever. Subsequent to the elimination of terror from Gaza, it will become part of sovereign Israel and will be populated by Jews. This will also serve to ease the housing crisis in Israel.”

The present Israeli government — whose extremist right-wing politics resemble those of the 2014 government — has made no effort to hide its political, genocidal contempt for the 2.3 million Palestinians living in Gaza.

Nor has it hidden the proximate objective of the present campaign, which is to eliminate Palestinians entirely from Gaza.

Al Aqsa Flood

The official reason for the murderous new Israeli campaign against Gaza Palestinians was Hamas’s “Al Aqsa Flood” operation of Oct. 7, in which Palestinian commandos invaded kibbutzim near Gaza for the first time, taking the Israeli security system completely by surprise and inflicting a humiliating defeat on the government in the eyes of its own citizens.

Hamas said it was retaliating for hundreds of Israeli settlers who three days earlier had stormed the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem/al-Quds, the third holiest site in Islam.  Ultranationalist Jews want to rebuild the Roman-era Jewish temple, destroyed around 70 AD,  on the mosque’s site. 

The Hamas operation clearly resulted in the deliberate killing of innocent civilians by Hamas. But surviving residents say it was the police  — not the Hamas raiders — who destroyed many houses to ensure that everyone inside, both Hamas gunmen and hostages, would be killed, according to a standard Israeli procedure. 

So the Israeli claim that Hamas killed more than 1,400 civilians in the operation must now be regarded with skepticism as part of the preparation for the massive murder to be inflicted on innocent Palestinian civilians in the weeks that followed.

The Israeli initial strategy for accomplishing its objective in Gaza appeared to be to carry out such heavy bombing on civilian targets throughout Gaza that the Palestinian population would be forced to leave Gaza for Egypt through the Rafah exit. 

But that plan quickly ran into a serious obstacle that the Israelis apparently had not anticipated: the Egyptians have adamantly refused to open the exit for a Palestinian exodus.

The primary reason for this Egyptian resistance to the Israeli plan is that appearing to collaborate with an Israeli policy of pushing the entire Palestinian population out of Gaza would be extremely unpopular with the Egyptian public, which passionately supports the Palestinian cause.

Egyptian leader Abdel Fattah el-Sisi was extremely harsh in his denunciation of the Israeli Gaza strategy in his joint press appearance with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Oct. 15, declaring that the Israeli air war “went beyond the right to self-defence, turning into collective punishment for 2.3 million people in Gaza.”

Meanwhile, el-Sisi was insisting that the Israelis allow the trucks containing international assistance for displaced Palestinian families to enter the war zone, while Israel continued to delayed approval for any humanitarian assistance day after day and to allow only a trickle to enter Gaza.

At the same time, the Israeli government took the position that Palestinian civilians have no legal right to protection whatsoever, on the ground that Hamas is a terrorist organization.  That was the import of remarks by former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett in an interview with Britain’s Sky News Oct. 12.

When asked by a journalist what Israel planned to do about the Palestinian civilians in Gaza hospitals after it had cut off all fuel supplies on which the hospitals depended for power, Bennet shouted angrily, “Are you seriously asking me about Palestinian civilians?  What is wrong with you?  Have you not seen what’s happened?  We’re fighting Nazis.”

No Legal Limits

By reducing the issue to Israel vs. “Nazis”, the Israeli government has sought to reject its legal and moral responsibility for humane treatment of civilians, or to abide by international law regarding its conduct of a war.

Seizing on the Hamas raid on the kibbutzim, the Israelis hoped to convince their key foreign allies  — the United States and the major European states — that the Palestinian civilian population has forfeited all right to protection from Israeli bombing. 

Thus it has made no commitment whatever to any such legal or ethical limits on its war in Gaza, which should have been recognized immediately as a threat to the entire civilian population there.

The Israeli government has not uttered the phrase “collective punishment” in this phase of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  Nevertheless Israel has carried out systematic punitive home demolitions as a means of punishing entire communities because of individuals who were involved in resistance activities. 

That has long been the central Israeli method for dealing with Palestinian resistance activities, as Human Rights Watch concluded last February.

Israeli leaders have presented their current war of destruction as a further application of the same principle, aimed at punishing the Palestinian population in Gaza for the military operation by Hamas on Oct. 7. 

Blaming that operation on the entire Palestinian population on Oct. 12, the president of Israel, Isaac Herzog, declared,

“It is an entire nation out there that is responsible. It is not true this rhetoric about civilians not being aware, not involved. … They could have fought against that evil regime which took over Gaza in a coup d’etat.” 

When a reporter asked Herzog if he was arguing that the failure of the civilian population to overthrow the Hamas government made them “legitimate targets”, he answered, “No, I didn’t say that.” But then he clearly contradicted the denial by arguing, “When you have a missile in your goddam kitchen and you want to shoot it at me, am I allowed to defend myself?”

There has never been any evidence, of course, that Hamas missiles have been hidden in civilian dwellings, nor would it make any military sense for Hamas to do so under the present circumstances.

The constant Israeli invocation of “the right to defend ourselves” is obviously paired silently with the unspoken belief in the right to inflict suffering and even genocide on the Palestinians. Israel has also been dropping leaflets in the northern Gaza Strip warning the population.

“Whoever chooses not to leave north Gaza to the south of Wadi Gaza might be identified as an accomplice in a terrorist organization”  clearly implies that they are indeed being treated as legitimate targets for bombing as punishment for the actions of Hamas. 

No less than the former attorney general of Israel has declared unequivocally that in order to destroy Hamas, “you have to destroy Gaza, because almost every building there, is a stronghold of Hamas.”

Targeting hospitals in Gaza poses additional political risks of provoking media and even potentially U.S. government censure, so Israel has turned to an obvious disinformation operation to smooth the way. 

When a missile struck the parking lot of the al-Ahli Arab Baptist Hospital, causing casualties among some of the more than 3,000 people who had sought refuge in that area, the IDF quickly blamed the explosion on a Hamas rocket that it claimed had misfired.

The IDF cited a video supposedly showing the misfired rocket exploding at the Baptist hospital, as well as what it called an intercepted conversation between a “former Hamas operative” and a Gaza resident that acknowledging that a misfired Hamas rocket had landed on the hospital grounds. 

Counting on the US

The U.S. National Security Council announced its official position that Israel was innocent of the rocket attack, and the intelligence community obliged by expressing “high confidence” that it was an errant Palestinian rocket that had caused the blast.

But then the Israeli case began to fall apart. BBC reported they could find no cemetery anywhere near the location from which the IDF claimed the errant rocket had been fired. 

And The New York Times reported that its own more thorough study of the relevant videos did not support the U.S.-Israeli case.  Instead it showed that the Palestinian rocket that misfired was “most likely not what caused the explosion at the hospital,” because it had “actually detonated in the sky roughly two miles away.”

Nevertheless, Israel could count on the backing of the Biden administration, which has provided political-diplomatic cover for Israel to carry out its scorched earth policy in Gaza since before the visit of President Joe Biden in mid-October.

Biden and Blinken were reduced to the role of  virtual appendages to the Israel government mouthing the Israeli propaganda slogan that Israel has “the right to defend itself”, while adding a reference to the “laws of war” to which the visitors from Washington should have known perfectly well the Israelis were not paying the least attention.

That Biden administration’s craven support for the Israeli destruction of Gaza makes the U.S. complicit not only in Israeli crimes in Gaza but in the crime of genocide.  

Although the genocide issue has not surfaced yet in the international politics of the Palestine issue, there is now good reason to expect that it will be raised both by Arab governments and by human rights organizations in the coming months.

This is certainly the historical moment to press the case against Israel genocide as called for by the Genocide Convention itself. The legal requirement for such an accusation is not proof of the mass murder of millions as was carried out by Hitler.

It is sufficient to prove that a state has the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group…” and that it is

“[d]eliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”  

The war imposed on the Gaza population by Israel obviously qualifies under those two crucial provisions of the convention.

The Genocide Convention also provides for finding that a state is guilty of the crime of “complicity” in genocide, which accurately describes the behavior of the U.S. government under the Biden administration. 

Again it is not necessary to show that the complicity was motivated by the desire for the genocide in question but only that genocide could be a foreseeable result of the  actions in question.

The legal question of genocide will ultimately be decided by the International Criminal Court or a national court with universal jurisdiction, such as Spanish courts have assumed in the past. The ICC would no doubt also investigate Hamas’ actions on Oct. 7. The Observer State of Palestine is a member of the ICC and the prosecutor of that court has an open file on Israel and Palestine.

Both the United States and Israel are parties to the Genocide Convention, which makes a campaign to hold them accountable for their respective roles in the present genocide even more of an urgent moral obligation for people and organizations of good will.

Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist and historian writing on U.S. national security policy. His latest book, Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare, was published in February of 2014. Follow him on Twitter: @GarethPorter.

Leaked Israeli Intelligence Ministry Document Proposes Complete Ethnic Cleansing of Gaza

The document proposes pushing Gaza's 2.3 million residents into Egypt's Sinai Peninsula

by Dave DeCamp Posted on October 30, 2023

https://news.antiwar.com/2023/10/30/leaked-israeli-intelligence-ministry-document-proposes-complete-ethnic-cleansing-of-gaza/

A leaked document drafted by Israel’s Intelligence Ministry proposes the ethnic cleansing of the approximately 2.3 million Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip as a potential solution to Israel’s war against Hamas.

The document, dated October 13, was published by the Hebrew language website Sicha Mekomit, and the Israeli government has confirmed its authenticity. According to The Times of Israel, Israeli government officials are downplaying the document, saying it only represents “initial thoughts” and that they are currently focused on the war effort.

The proposed plan would involve pushing the Palestinians out of Gaza into Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. They would first live in tent cities until permanent structures are built. The plan also includes a several-kilometer-wide “sterile” buffer zone inside Egypt so the Palestinians could not live on the border.

The document proposes two other potential plans, including handing Gaza over to the Palestinian Authority once Hamas is defeated. Another proposal would involve Israel propping up a new Arab regime in Gaza. But the document says these two proposals would not sufficiently deter future attacks and that the preferred option is cleansing Gaza of Palestinians.

The writers of the document said allowing the PA to administer Gaza is the “most dangerous alternative” of the three options because it could lead to the establishment of a Palestinian state.

While Israeli government officials are downplaying the document and its existence does not mean it’s a policy Israel will implement, some parts of the proposal are being carried out. The document says the first phase of the plan would be to evacuate the northern Gaza Strip, which Israel has ordered, and to focus airstrikes on the north before a ground invasion.

The biggest impediment to Israel cleansing Gaza of Palestinians is opposition from Egypt and Arab and international pressure. The document says that part of the plan is for the US to exert “pressure on Egypt, Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the [UAE] to contribute to the initiative either in resources or in accepting displaced persons.”

So far, the US has expressed opposition to the idea of kicking Palestinians out of Gaza. President Biden spoke with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi on Sunday, and according to the White House, the two leaders discussed the importance of “ensuring that Palestinians in Gaza are not displaced to Egypt or any other nation.”

However, there are indications the US might be preparing for the possibility of an influx of Palestinian refugees leaving Gaza. In a letter to Congress requesting $105 billion to spend on the Gaza war, Ukraine, Taiwan, and other areas, the White House said some of the funding would be needed for the “potential needs of Gazans fleeing to neighboring countries.”

 

Polarización, centralización, militarismo y clientelismo

 

Leo Zuckermann

https://www.excelsior.com.mx/opinion/leo-zuckermann/polarizacion-centralizacion-militarismo-y-clientelismo/1616780

La crisis humanitaria en Acapulco pinta de cuerpo entero al gobierno de López Obrador. El retrato perfecto de la polarización, centralización, militarismo y clientelismo que lo ha caracterizado.

•  

Para empezar, la división como consigna.

Lejos de unir al país para atender la emergencia, nuestro jefe de Estado aprovecha la oportunidad para, una vez más, polarizar. Reconozco que del lado opositor no han faltado las voces que también hacen lo mismo. Pero al Presidente, por la investidura que tiene, le corresponde ponerse por arriba de la política partidista y liderar al país uniendo a todos los mexicanos en torno a la crisis en Guerrero.

Pues no lo ha hecho. Ha salido el mismo López Obrador de siempre.

Irascible, se lanza en contra de los medios de comunicación por reportar lo que está ocurriendo en Acapulco. ¿Pues qué quería el Presidente?, ¿que los reporteros no dijeran lo que estaban observando en una ciudad devastada por el huracán?, ¿que se callaran frente a los reclamos ciudadanos de más ayuda?

Pues claro que no.

Y ante esto, viene la típica fórmula de este sexenio: desacreditar al mensajero y culparlo de lo sucedido.

Añádase la retahíla presidencial en contra de adversarios reales o ficticios: los conservadores, reaccionarios, materialistas, etcétera. El discurso maniqueísta de Disney: la lucha de nosotros los buenos contra ellos los malos.

Lamentable es que el Presidente polarice hasta en los momentos más críticos de la República. 

¿De qué les sirven a los guerrerenses los arrebatos de AMLO?

¿Acaso los reconforta cuando lo que requieren son soluciones a sus problemas apremiantes?

Triste, muy triste, observar que los políticos, comenzando por el Presidente, no puedan dejar a un lado sus diferencias y trabajar por el bien común después de una tragedia. Son momentos de unidad, no de división. Pero este gobierno no parece entender el concepto.

De cuerpo entero se observa, también, su obsesión por centralizar y controlar todo.

AMLO no cree ni en los otros niveles de gobierno y, menos aún, en las organizaciones de la sociedad civil. Éstas le sacan erisipela. Sólo el gobierno federal, es decir, él es quien debe intervenir para resolver una crisis tan complicada como la de Acapulco y otros poblados que quedaron devastados por Otis. 

Dentro del Estado todo, fuera del Estado nada. Y dentro del Estado, todo para el gobierno federal, nada para los demás. Es parte de la doctrina del lopezobradorismo lo que estamos viendo en esta crisis humanitaria.

Sí, centralización, pero acompañada de militarismo. AMLO ordena que las Fuerzas Armadas se encarguen de todo. No sólo de restablecer el orden social, sino también de lo demás.

La ayuda que se envía debe canalizarse a través del Ejército y la Marina. El Presidente prohíbe que cualquier individuo, empresa u organización no gubernamental distribuya víveres o enseres. Eso sólo le corresponde a soldados y marinos, los consentidos de López Obrador.

Las Fuerzas Armadas, efectivamente, tienen mucha experiencia en este tipo de situaciones de emergencia, y generalmente lo hacen bien. Pero de ahí a darles el monopolio de toda la ayuda, pues es una exageración típicamente militarista propia de este sexenio.

Y no podemos dejar afuera al clientelismo.

Inmediatamente trasladaron a mil “servidores de la nación” para realizar los censos de ayuda en Acapulco y alrededores. Se trata de los empleados de la Secretaría de Bienestar con los que este gobierno reparte los programas sociales que luego Morena capitaliza electoralmente a su favor. Una burocracia que va uniformada con camisetas y chalecos con el color guinda del partido gobernante.

La maquinaria clientelista puesta en acción.

Para los que tengan dudas, vean las fotos de las despensas que está entregando el Ejército. Vienen empacadas en cajas con los emblemas del actual gobierno incluyendo, por supuesto, el color guinda de Morena. Perdón, pero no hay que ser un genio para darse cuenta que esto tiene un claro interés electoral.

Sí: están medrando con el sufrimiento de la gente, que está desesperada después del huracán.

Polarización, centralización, militarismo y clientelismo: el gobierno de López Obrador pintado de cuerpo entero en la tragedia de Acapulco y sus alrededores. Uno de los mejores retratos de la 4T.

Iran-Russia set a western trap in Palestine

The only country that could possibly distract the west from Ukraine is Israel. But the US and its allies are walking into an existential trap if they think a West Asian victory will be more easily won than a European one.

Pepe Escobar

OCT 27, 2023

https://new.thecradle.co/articles/iran-russia-set-a-western-trap-in-palestine

The Russia-Iran strategic partnership - with China in the wings - is laying an elaborate, Sun Tzu-tinged trap for the Hegemon in West Asia. 

Apart from Israel, there is no entity on the planet capable of switching the focus, in a flash, away from the west's spectacular debacle in Ukraine. 

The warmongers in charge of US foreign policy, not exactly Bismarckian stalwarts, believe that if Project Ukraine is unattainable, Project Final Solution in Palestine could instead be a - ethnic cleansing - cakewalk. 

A more plausible scenario, though is that Iran-Russia – and the new “axis of evil” Russia-China-Iran – have all it takes to drag the Hegemon into a second quagmire. It’s all about using the enemy’s own, discombobulated flip-flapping to unbalance him and disorient him to oblivion.

The White House’s wishful thinking that the Forever Wars in Ukraine and Israel are inscribed in the same lofty “democracy” drive and essential to US national interests, has already backfired – even among American public opinion. 

That does not prevent cries and whispers along the Beltway revealing Israel-allied US neocons increasing the tempo to provoke Iran – via a proverbial false flag that would lead to an American attack. That Armageddon scenario neatly fits Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s biblical psychopathy. 

Vassals would be forced to meekly comply. NATO heads of state have made a beeline to visit Israel to demonstrate their unconditional support for Tel Aviv - including Greece’s Kyriakos Mitsotakis, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, Britain’s Rishi Sunak, Germany’s Olaf Scholz, the senile lodger at the White House, and France’s Emmanuel Macron. 

Avenging the Arab “century of humiliation” 

So far, Lebanese resistance movement Hezbollah has shown extraordinary restraint by not taking any bait. Hezbollah supports the Palestinian resistance as a whole – and until a few years back, had serious issues with Hamas, with which it clashed in Syria. Hamas, incidentally, while partially funded by Iran, is not run by Iran. As much as Tehran supports the Palestinian cause, Palestinian resistance groups make their own decisions. 

The big news is that all these issues are now dissolving. Both Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) went to Lebanon to visit Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah in person this week. That spells out unity of purpose – or what the region's Axis of Resistance calls the “Unity of Fronts.”   

Even more eye-opening was Hamas' visit to Moscow this week, which was met with impotent Israeli fury. The Hamas delegation was headed by a member of its Politburo, Abu Marzouk. Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Ali Bagheri came especially from Tehran and met two of Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov’s key deputies, Sergei Ryabkov and Mikhail Galuzin.  

That spells out Hamas, Iran, and Russia negotiating at the same table. 

Hamas has called on the millions of Palestinians in the diaspora, as well as the whole Arab world and all lands of Islam, to unite. Slowly but surely, a pattern may be discerned: could the Arab world – and great swathes of Islam - be on the verge of significantly uniting to avenge their own “century of humiliation” – much as the Chinese did after WWII with Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping? 

Beijing, via its sophisticated diplomacy, is certainly hinting at it to key players, even before the ground-breaking, Russia-China brokered Iran-Saudi rapprochement was struck earlier this year. 

That by itself won’t thwart the perpetual US neocon obsession to bomb critical infrastructure in Iran. Worth less than zero when it comes to military science, these neocons ignore how Iranian retaliation would - accurately – target each and every US base in Iraq and Syria, with the Persian Gulf an open case. 

Peerless Russian military analyst Andrei Martyanov has shown what could happen to those expensive American iron bathtubs in the Eastern Mediterranean in case of an Israeli-threatened attack on Iran.   

Moreover, there are at least 1,000 US troops in northern Syria stealing the country's oil – which would also become an instant target. 

Ali Fadavi, IRGC’s deputy commander-in-chief, cut to the chase: “We have technologies in the military field that no one knows about, and the Americans will know about them when we use them.”

Cue to Iranian hypersonic Fattah missiles – cousins to the Khinzal and the DF-27 - traveling at Mach 15, and able to reach any target in Israel in 400 seconds.  

And add to it sophisticated Russian electronic warfare (EW). As confirmed in Moscow six months ago, when it comes to military interconnection, the Iranians told the Russians at the same table, “whatever you need, just ask.” The same applies vice-versa, because the mutual enemy is one and the same.

t’s all about the Strait of Hormuz 

The heart of the matter in any Russian-Iran strategy is the Strait of Hormuz, through which transits at least 20 percent of the world’s oil (nearly 17 million barrels a day) plus 18 percent of liquified natural gas (LNG), which amounts to at least 3.5 billion cubic feet a day.  

Iran is able to block the Strait of Hormuz in a flash. For starters, that would be some sort of poetic justice retribution for Israel aiming to gobble up, illegally, all the multibillion-dollar natural gas discovered offshore Gaza: this is, incidentally, one of the absolutely key reasons for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. 

Yet the real deal will be to bring down the Wall Street-engineered $618 trillion derivative structure, as confirmed for years by analysts at Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan, as well as independent Persian Gulf energy traders. 

So when push comes to shove - and way beyond the defense of Palestine and in a scenario of Total War - not only Russia-Iran but key players of the Arab world about to become members of BRICS 11 - such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE - do have what it takes to bring down the US financial system anytime they choose.  

As an old school Deep State higher up, now in business in Central Europe, stresses: 

 

“The Islamic nations have the economic advantage. They can blow up the international financial system by cutting off the oil. They do not have to fire a single shot. Iran and Saudi Arabia are allying together. The 2008 crisis took 29 trillion dollars to solve but this one, should it happen, could not be solved even with 100 trillion dollars of fiat instruments.”

As Persian Gulf traders told me, one possible scenario is OPEC starting to sanction Europe, first from Kuwait and then spreading from one OPEC country to another and to all countries that are treating the Muslim world as enemies and war fodder. 

Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani has already warned that oil to western markets could be put off because of what Israel is perpetrating in Gaza. Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian has already called, on the record, for a total oil and gas embargo by Islamic countries against nations – essentially NATO vassals - that support Israel.

So Christian Zionists in the US allied with neocon asset Netanyahu threatening to attack Iran have the potential to pull down the entire world financial system.

Forever War on Syria, remixed  

Under the current volcano, the Russia-China strategic partnership has been extremely cautious. To the outside world, their mutual official position is to refuse to side with either Palestine or Israel; call for a ceasefire on humanitarian grounds; call for a two-state solution; and respect international law. All their initiatives at the UN have been duly sabotaged by the Hegemon. 

As it stands, Washington has refused the green light for the Israeli ground invasion of Gaza. The main reason is the immediate US priority: buy some time to expand the war to Syria, “accused” of being the key transit point for Iranian weapons to Hezbollah. That also doubles as re-opening the same old war front against Russia. 

There are no illusions in Moscow. The intel apparatus knows well that Israeli Mossad agents have been advising Kiev while Tel Aviv was supplying weapons to Ukraine under serious US pressure.  That infuriated the siloviki, and may have constituted a fatal Israeli mistake.

The neocons, for their part, never stop. They are advancing a parallel threat: if Hezbollah attacks Israel with something else than a few sparse rockets – and that simply won’t happen - the Hmeimim Russian Air Base in Latakia will be “eliminated” as a “warning” to Iran.

This does not even qualify as children playing in the sandbox. After the serial Israeli attacks on the civilian Damascus and Aleppo airports, Moscow did not even blink before offering its Hmeimim facilities to Syria – complete with clearance for Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) cargo flights, according to some Russian intel sources. Netanyahu will not exactly harbor a death wish by bombing a fully A2/AD (anti-access/area denial) Russian Air Base.  

Moscow also clearly sees what those expensive American iron bathtubs in the Eastern Mediterranean might be up to. The response has been swift: Mig-31Ks are patrolling neutral air space over the Black Sea 24/7, equipped with hypersonic Khinzals, which would take only six minutes to visit the Mediterranean.   

Amidst all this neocon-drenched madness, with the Pentagon deploying a formidable array of weaponry plus “undisclosed” assets to the Eastern Mediterranean, whether the target is Hezbollah, Syria, Iran, Russia, or all of the above, both China and North Korea – part of the new American-concocted “axis of evil” - have indicated they will not be mere bystanders. 

The Chinese Navy is for all practical purposes shielding Iran from a distance. Yet even more forceful has been a statement by Premier Li Qiang - something unusually blunt and rare in Chinese diplomacy: 

"China will continue to firmly support Iran in safeguarding its national sovereignty, territorial integrity, and national dignity, and will strongly oppose any external forces interfering in Iran's internal affairs.”

Never forget that China and Iran are linked by a comprehensive strategic partnership. Meanwhile, Russian Premier Mikhail Mishustin has reinforced the Russia-Iran strategic partnership in a meeting with Iran's First Vice-President Mohammad Mokhber.

Remember those rice eaters from Korea 

Pro-Iran militias across the Axis of Resistance, are keeping a carefully tempered degree of confrontation against Israel, close to guerrilla hit-and-run. They won’t be engaged in massive attacks yet. But all bets are off if Israel invades Gaza. It’s clear the Arab world, for all its massive internal contradictions, will simply not tolerate the civilian massacre. 

Bluntly, at the current incendiary juncture, the Hegemon has found the offramp from its Project Ukraine humiliation. They erroneously believe that the same old Forever War rekindled in West Asia can be “modulated” at will. And if two wars turn into an immense political albatross, as they will, what else is new? They will simply start a new war in the “Indo-Pacific.” 

None of that fools Russia-Iran and their ice-cold monitoring of the flipping and flapping Hegemon every step of the way. It’s enlightening to remember what Malcolm X was already predicting in 1964:

“Some rice eaters ran him out of Korea. Yes, they ran him out of Korea. Rice eaters with nothing but gym shoes, and a rifle, and a bowl of rice took him and his tanks and his napalm, and all that other action he’s supposed to have and ran him across the Yalu. Why? Cause the day that he can win on the ground has passed.” 

Netanyahu’s Support for Hamas Backfired

by Connor Freeman and Scott Horton Posted on October 27, 2023

https://original.antiwar.com/Connor_Freeman/2023/10/26/netanyahus-support-for-hamas-backfired/

On October 7th, a large group of armed fighters broke out of the Gaza Strip to launch an unprecedented attack – by air, land, and sea – in southern Israel, thousands of rockets were launched, military bases as well as kibbutzim were targeted and briefly seized.

During the operation, dubbed Al-Aqsa Flood, over a thousand people were slaughtered, including hundreds of military personnel and innocent civilians. In order to secure concessions such as the release of thousands of Palestinian prisoners held by the Israeli authorities, more than 200 prisoners including some soldiers were taken back to Gaza to be used as bargaining chips amid Israel’s ongoing relentless airstrikes.

Israel has occupied Palestine longer than the Soviet Union occupied Eastern Europe. The so-called “Palestinian Authority” (PA) is trained and supported by the Tel Aviv, London, and Washington, not the people. Essentially trustees in an Israeli prison, the PA is not a sovereign state of any kind. The people of Palestine live under a foreign military occupation.

Gaza, on the other hand, is a concentration camp which measures only 25 miles in length and five miles in width making it one of the most densely populated areas in the world. Crammed inside the camp are 2.3 million Palestinians, refugees in their own ancestral lands along with their descendants.

Since 2007, Israel has imposed a full blockade on Gaza from the air, land, and sea. Gaza is completely controlled by the Israeli military. For more than 15 years, food, potable water, electricity, medicine, building materials, etc. have been severely restricted by Tel Aviv. All the while, Palestinians besieged in the coastal enclave are routinely subjected to small as well as large-scale indiscriminate bombing campaigns.

This recent terrorist attack in Israel which saw so many civilians killed – including in crossfire with Israeli forces – was in fact a prison break led by Hamas, the armed militia which rules the Strip.

This horrible attack was blatantly, if unintentionally, provoked by Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud party and his ruling coalition full of extremist settlers and Jewish supremacists bent on the de jure annexation of the entire West Bank, or “Judea and Samaria” as they call it.

It does not have to be this way at all.

Killing the Peace Process

Beginning in 1979 at Camp David, Israel promised to let the Palestinians have a sovereign state on the 22 percent of Palestine left after Zionist forces ethnically cleansed 750,000 Palestinian Muslims and Christians off their land in 1948, this was known as the “Nakba” or catastrophe. What remained was the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip illegally occupied by Tel Aviv since 1967.

By 1988, Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Leader Yasser Arafat, who headed the Fatah party, had recognized Israel within its 1967 borders. The Oslo Accords “peace process” began in 1993 and was supposed to implement this two-state reality.

It was a sham. All the while, even though the Fourth Geneva Convention says that it is illegal for one nation to transfer their own civilian populations into land seized in war and United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 says that Israel must withdraw from the occupied territories, hundreds of thousands of the Israeli Jewish colonists or “settlers” moved to the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, which they consider part of greater Israel. This has effectively made a sovereign state there impossible.

The Israeli government under Netanyahu, who used to play along with the narrative of an eventual two-state solution, in the last decade officially canceled the illusion that he would ever let this occur.

In fact, Netanyahu said in 2015 that, “I think that anyone who is going to establish a Palestinian state today and evacuate lands is giving attack grounds to radical Islam against the state of Israel. Anyone who ignores this is sticking his head in the sand. The left does this time and time again. We are realistic and understand.”

Netanyahu was then asked specifically whether he meant that a Palestinian state would not be established if he were reelected prime minister. He answered, “correct.”

Even though he temporarily relented on official annexation of the Jordan river valley, Netanyahu still vowed in 2020 that “Israel will retain security control on the entire area west of the Jordan River.” In other words, from the River to the Mediterranean Sea, Palestine will never be free.

So this is why B’Tselem, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International all finally came out in 2021–2022, after the 40-year illusion of “independence someday instead of freedom today” had finally crumbled, and officially declared that Israel was an “apartheid state.”

Jimmy Carter warned that if Israel did not let the Palestinians go, they would be stuck in this apartheid corner. So did former Prime Minister and Defense Minister Ehud Barak and former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

If the whites of 1920s Jim Crow Mississippi had said, “we will not end segregation and our two-tiered ‘rule of law,’ but we will let northern Mississippi become an independent black nation someday instead,” but then they never did that, that would be where Israel-Palestine is right now.

Ever since then, Western liberals – regulated by the Israel lobby – have only paid lip service to the two-state solution while Israel created “facts on the ground,” with the ever expanding settlements relegating Palestinians to noncontiguous Bantustans cut off from each other with the separation wall and networks of checkpoints run by Israeli occupation forces.

Imagine if someone said about South Africa in 1983 that, “DeClerk and the whites of South Africa have a right to exist. And they have the right to defend themselves. And the blacks, well they have the right to aspirations of having those rights.” This simply will not do.

Hamas Is the Likud’s Strategic Ally

That is not to say that Hamas is secretly controlled by Israel, but their seemingly antithetical interests are in fact closely aligned and serve each other’s purposes. As Brian McGlinchey, Andrew Higgins, Robert Sale, and others have exhaustively detailed, for decades, Israel has provided Hamas and its precursors with both direct and indirect financial support.

The day after the October 7^th attack, Tal Schneider railed against this policy in Times Of Israel,

For years, the various governments led by [Netanyahu] took an approach that divided power between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank – bringing [PA] President Mahmoud Abbas to his knees while making moves that propped up the Hamas terror group.

The idea was to prevent Abbas – or anyone else in the [PA’s] West Bank government – from advancing toward the establishment of a Palestinian state.

Originally borne out of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, the right-wing Islamist movement was seen by Israeli leadership as an instrument to undercut the dominant opposition to the occupation, Arafat’s secular leftist PLO.

Beginning in the 1970s, Israel’s backing of Hamas and its predecessor, Mujama Al-Islamiya, or the Islamic Center, “was a direct attempt to divide and dilute support for a strong, secular PLO by using a competing religious alternative,” a former senior CIA official told Sale.

According to U.S. intelligence officials speaking with Sale, “funds for the movement came from the oil-producing states and directly and indirectly from Israel.”

In the early 1980s, the Islamist movement began radicalizing. This was precipitated by the rise of Hezbollah in opposition to the Israeli invasion and nearly two decade occupation of southern Lebanon, as well as the overthrow of the Shah Reza Pahlavi, the CIA-installed dictator in Iran, and the subsequent founding of the Islamic Republic.

The group known today as Hamas, or the Islamic Resistance Movement, was officially founded in 1987 and flourished during the First Intifada, or violent uprising against the occupation in Palestine.

Despite the group’s refusal for many years to ever recognize Israel’s “right to exist,” along with the PLO dropping that maximalist demand themselves, Israeli aid to Hamas continued apace.

This is because “the thinking on the part of some of the right-wing Israeli establishment was that Hamas and the other groups, if they gained control, would refuse to have anything to do with the peace process and would torpedo any agreements put in place,” a U.S. official told Sale. Indeed, Hamas condemned the PLO as traitors for going to the negotiating table with Tel Aviv in an attempt to work out a two-state solution.

As Higgins later wrote in the Wall Street Journal,

When it became clear in the early 1990s that Gaza’s Islamists had mutated from a religious group into a fighting force aimed at Israel – particularly after they turned to suicide bombings in 1994 – Israel cracked down with ferocious force. But each military assault only increased Hamas’s appeal to ordinary Palestinians.

Fatah also cracked down on Hamas during the 1990s over their tactics including suicide bombings, which led to further clashes and bad blood.

Following the Second Intifada, in which over 1,000 Israelis and 4,500 Palestinians were killed, Likudnik Prime Minister Ariel Sharon initiated a policy known as “disengagement” in the Gaza Strip. In the summer of 2005, Tel Aviv set about removing thousands of settlers and occupying forces.

The Israeli army was redeployed in the areas surrounding Gaza instead. On the surface, this may look like a concession, but Likud’s goal was to decisively kill the peace process and with it any hopes Palestinians had for their right of return or a future state.

As Dov Weissglass, Sharon’s senior adviser, bluntly told Haaretz almost two decades ago,

The significance of the disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process. And when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda. And all this with authority and permission. All with a presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress.

The disengagement is actually formaldehyde. It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians.

The disengagement plan makes it possible for Israel to park conveniently in an interim situation that distances us as far as possible from political pressure. It legitimizes our contention that there is no negotiating with the Palestinians.

And we educated the world to understand that there is no one to talk to. And we received a no-one-to-talk-to certificate. That certificate says: (1) There is no one to talk to. (2) As long as there is no one to talk to, the geographic status quo remains intact. (3) The certificate will be revoked only when this-and-this happens – when Palestine becomes Finland. (4) See you then, and shalom.

Hamas achieved a plurality victory against Fatah – now led by Abbas in the wake of Arafat’s death – in the Palestinian territories’ 2006 parliamentary elections. But before a coalition government could be instituted based on the results, George W. Bush and his neocon retinue – displeased with the results of the democratic election they had encouraged – attempted a coup, supporting Fatah against Hamas.

As David Rose reported in Vanity Fair,

[This outlet] has obtained confidential documents, since corroborated by sources in the U.S. and Palestine, which lay bare a covert initiative, approved by Bush and implemented by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Deputy National Security Adviser Elliott Abrams, to provoke a Palestinian civil war. The plan was for forces led by [Muhammad Dahlan, Fatah’s long-time resident strongman in Gaza], and armed with new weapons supplied at America’s behest, to give Fatah the muscle it needed to remove the democratically elected Hamas-led government from power…

But the secret plan backfired, resulting in a further setback for American foreign policy under Bush. Instead of driving its enemies out of power, the U.S.-backed Fatah fighters inadvertently provoked Hamas to seize total control of Gaza.

As a result of this proxy war, came Hamas’ complete takeover in Gaza which has been used to justify the blockade and the rest of Tel Aviv’s illegal collective punishment policies.

Ever since the siege was imposed, the fact that the Palestinians in Gaza voted for Hamas years ago is predictably trotted to justify Israel’s wars against the Palestinians trapped in the enclave. Gaza has no air defense, army, navy, or air force to speak of, but thousands of Palestinian civilians have been killed amid these canned hunts.

Half of the population in Gaza – approximately 1.15 million people – are children who were not even alive when Hamas won in 2006, and there was never another election.

As Israeli journalist Meron Rapaport has extensively chronicled, this is exactly what Likud wanted.

“The split between Abbas’ Judea and Samaria and Hamas’ Gaza is optimal for Israel. When necessary, we can strike Hamas in Gaza and not be forced to withdraw to the Auschwitz borders in Judea and Samaria,” Erez Tadmor, a former head of Likud information campaigns, posted on Twitter.

“[Netanyahu] succeeded in disconnecting between Gaza and Judea and Samaria, and effectively shattered the vision of a Palestinian state in these two areas. Part of the achievement is linked to the Qatari money that comes to Hamas every month,” said Yonatana Orich, one of Netanyahu’s advisers and another Likudnik campaign manager.

Distal Abtaryan, former minister of information and current Likudnik member of the Knesset, put it this way,

Every home needs a balcony, and Israel is a home. The balcony of this home is Samaria… if Hamas crumbles, Mahmoud Abbas may rule [Gaza]. If he rules it, voices on the left will encourage negotiations, a political settlement, and a Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria as well… this is the real reason Netanyahu doesn’t annihilate Hamas, everything else is bullshit.

In 2019, Gershon Hacohen, a major general in reserves and an associate of Netanyahu, said, “We need to tell the truth. Netanyahu’s strategy is to prevent the option of two states, so he is turning Hamas into his closest partner. Openly Hamas is an enemy. Covertly, it’s an ally.”

That same year, Netanyahu boasted to members of his party in the Knesset,

Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas… This is part of our strategy – to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.

Bezalel Smotrich, leader of Israel’s Religious Zionist Party and the current Finance Minister was even more explicit,

The [PA] is a burden and Hamas is an asset. On the same international field, in this game of delegitimization, and think about it for a moment, the [PA] is a burden and Hamas is an asset. It’s a terrorist organization. No one will recognize it. No one will give it status at the [International Criminal Court]. No one will let it put forth a resolution at the UN security council. Then would we need an American veto? Or would we not need an American veto? … Given that the main game, the central court, where we play now, is the international delegitimization, there [Abbas] is beating us in significant spaces. And Hamas, at this point in my opinion, will be an asset. I don’t think I have to worry about [Hamas].

The Netanyahu Doctrine

They thought it would work so well. In March, Smotrich proclaimed that there is “no such thing as a Palestinian people.” Last month, Netanyahu even presented a map of “The New Middle East” to the UN General Assembly with Palestine, from the river to the sea, completely erased.

“There’s no question: the Abraham Accords heralded the dawn of a new age of peace,” Netanyahu announced. “I believe we’re on the cusp of a more dramatic breakthrough: a historic peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia.”He continued, emphasizing “we must not give the Palestinians a veto over new peace treaties with Arab states.”

The Donald Trump and Joe Biden administrations, along with Netanyahu, also believed the Palestinians could be erased. They envisioned a Middle East where Washington’s long-time Arab dictatorship vassals would finally plant the Palestinians firmly under the bus, recognize Israel, and sign phony peace deals in exchange for American arms as well as other favors.

For instance, in 2020, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain became signatories of the Abraham Accords which is a thinly veiled foundation for a regional military coalition led by the US and Israel eyeing Iran.

Under the accords, Gulf capitals such as Abu Dhabi or Manama recognize Israel – absent a Palestinian state or end to the apartheid regime – so they can receive increased access to advanced weapon systems manufactured by the US military-industrial complex.

Before Israel began its latest war on Gaza, killing hundreds of Palestinians every day, recent polling had already shown that as a result of Israeli massacres and war crimes committed against the Palestinians, the Abraham Accords have become increasingly unpopular among the populace in Bahrain and the UAE.

In July, with the support of the Joe Biden administration, Israel’s security forces invaded and bombed the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank, killing a dozen people including five children. Israeli bulldozers tore up the camp’s roads, electricity, and water networks. 1,000 troops participated in the raid, along with Apache helicopters, drones, and 150 armored vehicles.

Another point of contention in the region is Netanyahu’s policies of setting records this year for settlement expansion and construction in illegal Jewish-only colonies, further eviscerating even the pretense of a future Palestinian state.

Israeli forces and settlers have repeatedly desecrated, the Al-Aqsa Mosque this year. During the holy month of Ramadan, worshipers within, including women and children, were viciously beaten. Members of Netanyahu’s cabinet have also encouraged attacks against Palestinian Christians, which have escalated substantially.

For Palestinians, prior to this month, this year was already one of the deadliest on record. Before the end of September, more than 220 Palestinians had been killed by Israeli forces, including over three dozen children. That figure included 187 people who were murdered in the occupied territories and another 37 killed – mostly amidst a smaller bombing campaign – in the Gaza Strip.

Netanyahu and Biden were dead wrong. Peace in the region must be made with the Palestinians. But never again will any heads of state be foolish enough to believe Palestine and its people can be circumvented, erased, or ignored.

Slaughtering “Human Animals”

Since the October 7^th attack led by Hamas, Israel has pummeled Gaza indiscriminately with thousands of bombs so far killing more than 7,000 Palestinians, including nearly 3,000 children. Concurrently, in the West Bank, over 100 Palestinians have been killed by settlers and Israeli occupation forces.

Foreign ministers from Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar, Kuwait, Egypt along with Abraham Accords signatory states the UAE, Bahrain, and Morocco published a joint statement condemning Israel’s collective punishment against the Palestinians in Gaza. The diplomats implored the UN Security Council to implement a ceasefire immediately, as almost half of all residential units in the enclave are said to have been obliterated.

After 20 straight days of bombing, Mondoweiss reported,

• Around 219 educational facilities have been hit by Israeli bombardment, including at least 29 UNRWA schools.
• Approximately 1.4 million people in Gaza are internally displaced.
• 24 hospitals have received evacuation notices from Israel in northern Gaza.
• Hospitals are operating at more than 150 percent of their capacity.
• At least 130 neonatal babies dependent on incubators are at risk of death due to lack of electricity.
• There are approximately 166 unsafe births taking place per day in Gaza.
• 101 health personnel have been killed by Israeli strikes, over 100 others wounded.
• Gaza’s population of over 2 million, which continues to be carpet bombed, is still being denied fuel, clean water, and adequate food supply by Israel’s ongoing siege on the enclave.

The death toll of Palestinian civilians in Gaza may soon skyrocket, as Tel Aviv has cut off Gaza’s food, water, electricity, and medicine. William Schomburg, the head of the Gaza mission for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), has warned the al-Quds and al-Shifa hospitals, the Strip’s main medical centers, are “rapidly running out of fuel and medical supplies.”

He added, “during our visit to al-Quds hospital there were heavy airstrikes all around us and the entire hospital shook.” A third of Gaza’s hospitals are no longer functioning. The dire lack of fuel, water, and sanitation will soon break the back of Gaza’s healthcare system and may lead to outbreaks of infectious diseases like cholera.

The White House’s unconditional backing of this unprecedented Israeli onslaught against Gaza  threatens to drag Americans into a regional war with Hezbollah, Iran, and their Resistance Axis allies including in Iraq and Syria, where U.S. forces illegally occupy a third of the war-torn country.

The destruction of Washington’s Global War on Terror and regime change wars of the last 20 years will likely be dwarfed by such a conflict.

To put this in perspective, the American government’s wars in the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia during this century killed and caused the deaths of well over four million people.

Washington should immediately cut all military aid and ties with Tel Aviv, as well as cease its disgraceful diplomatic cover. American forces should not be in harm’s way to “deter” other actors from getting involved, nor to defend this merciless regime. The Israeli government, currently waging siege warfare against Gaza, has declared the Strip is populated by “human animals.”

Tel Aviv is now readying for its ground invasion, the American people must swiftly demand a lifting of the siege and a ceasefire.

Connor Freeman is the assistant editor and a writer at the Libertarian Institute, primarily covering foreign policy. He is a co-host on the Conflicts of Interest podcast. His writing has been featured in media outlets such as Antiwar.com, Counterpunch, and the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity. He has also appeared on Liberty Weekly, Around the Empire, and Parallax Views. You can follow him on Twitter@FreemansMind96.

Scott Horton is director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of Antiwar.com, host of Antiwar Radio on Pacifica, 90.7 FM KPFK in Los Angeles, California and podcasts the Scott Horton Show from ScottHorton.org. He’s the author of the 2021 book Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism, the 2017 book, Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan, editor of the 2019 book The Great Ron Paul: The Scott Horton Show Interviews 2004–2019 and the 2022 book Hotter Than The Sun: Time to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. He’s conducted more than 5,800 interviews since 2003. Scott lives in Austin, Texas with his wife, Larisa Alexandrovna Horton.