In a clear rejection of US policies and leadership in the Middle East, the UN general assembly voted overwhelmingly to back the Palestinian bid for full UN membership. The western media have mostly ignored Friday’s balloting since the widely-anticipated results represent another black eye for Washington. But the outcome of the vote is a blow to the Biden administration’s failed Gaza policy as well as a clear indication that America’s blanket support for Israel’s genocide is increasing Washington’s isolation and irrelevance.
The assembly vote was 143 to 9, which means that US diplomatic influence has eroded to the point where the White House could barely coerce 9 of their most-loyal vassal states to reject the motion. It is imperative that people fully grasp the meaning of this vote, which suggests that the so-called “Rules-Based Order” is a withering fraud that grows more anemic by the day. Additionally, the vote provides compelling evidence that the American Century is officially over and that the vast majority of the world’s nations are no longer willing to comply with Washington’s self-serving edicts.
Naturally, Israel’s envoy to the UN, Gilad Erdan, used the opportunity—not to express his remorse at being a participant in his nation’s sadistic rampage in Gaza—but to scold the other members of the assembly for acting courageously on a matter of principle. Without a trace of irony, Erdan accused the other members of “shredding the UN charter with your own hands. Yes, yes, that’s what you’re doing. Shredding the UN charter.”
What Erdan failed to mention is that Israel holds the world’s record for breaking UN resolutions and has yet to encounter an international law that it won’t break with impunity. Israel decided long-ago that its future depended on its ability to use the world’s biggest bully as its personal bodyguard thus allowing it to ignore any legal or moral restraints on its behavior. This is an excerpt from an article at the UK Guardian:
Friday’s resolution …. does not make Palestine a full member, or give it voting rights in the assembly, or the right to stand for membership of the security council, but the vote was a resounding expression of world opinion in favour of Palestinian statehood, galvanized by the continuing bloodshed and famine caused by Israel’s war in Gaza.
Even before the vote in the assembly on Friday morning, Israel and a group of leading Republicans urged US funding be cut anyway because of the new privileges the resolution granted to the Palestinian mission.
The US mission to the UN, which voted against the resolution, warned that it would also use its veto again if the question of Palestinian membership returned to the security council for another vote.
“Efforts to advance this resolution do not change the reality that the Palestinian Authority does not currently meet the criteria for UN membership under the UN charter,” the mission’s spokesperson, Nathan Evans, said. “Additionally, the draft resolution does not alter the status of the Palestinians as a “non-member state observer mission”. UN general assembly votes to back Palestinian bid for membership, The Guardian
Try to appreciate how hypocritical and morally bankrupt the US position really is. For the last 57 years, Republicans and Democrats alike, have paid lip-service to a two-state solution based on UN Resolution 242 which requires Israel to remove its settlements from Palestinian land in occupied Gaza and the West Bank. “Get off Palestinian land and there will be peace.” That is US policy which is backed-up by international law. But, now, under Biden, the US not only opposes Palestinian statehood (which would improve their chances of getting a fair deal.) but is also providing the money, bombs and logistical support for blowing 2 million Palestinians to smithereens. This is the Biden policy in a nutshell, and—in case you hadn’t noticed—it is a clear departure from more than a half century of US foreign policy. The reason Biden is now commonly referred to as “Genocide Joe” is because he is unilaterally breaking international law by providing material support to Israeli barbarism which makes him—and the United States—equally culpable in the premeditated annihilation of the Palestinian people. Here’s more from the Guardian:
…the resolution also makes plain that “the state of Palestine, in its capacity as an observer state, does not have the right to vote in the general assembly or to put forward its candidature to United Nations organs.”
…. “In essence, it gives the Palestinians the airs and graces of a UN member, but without the fundamental attributes of a real member, which are voting power and the right to run for the security council.”….
Despite the wording in the resolution making clear Palestine would not have a vote, Israel called on the US to cut funding for the UN because of the resolution, and a group of Republican senators announced they were introducing legislation to do that.
…. Senator Mitt Romney said in a written statement. “Our legislation would cut off US taxpayer funding to the UN if it gives additional rights and privileges to the Palestinian Authority and the PLO.” The Guardian
Nice, eh? So, the vote didn’t turn out the way Uncle Sam wanted, so now he’s going to “take his ball and go home.” That’s called, ‘being a crybaby,’ and it helps to explain why more and more leaders are joining an alternate bloc of nations called the BRICS. There’s simply no reason to align oneself with a waning superpower that is so morally corrupted that it believes that mass murder is an acceptable foreign policy. (Note: The other countries that opposed Palestine’s bid for membership were Micronesia, Argentina, Hungary, Nauru, Palau, Papua New Guinea and Israel. The list helps to illustrate the ineffectiveness of US diplomacy which has virtually collapsed under Anthony Blinken.)
Not surprisingly, Russia’s Permanent Representative Vassily Nebenzia offered the most intelligent analysis. Here’s what he said just prior to the vote:
It is our common duty to correct the historical injustice regarding Palestinian aspirations for their own sovereign unified state, which should have been admitted to the United Nations as early as 1948. We are convinced that Palestine’s full UN membership would help to equalize the starting negotiating positions with Israel, which received is status as a UN member state more than 75 years ago.
Admission of the State of Palestine to the UN would be the first practical step towards a just solution of the Palestinian question on the UN-approved platform and within the universally recognized international legal framework. …..
This process should result in the implementation of the internationally recognized two-state solution providing for Israel coexisting in peace and security with Palestine in the 1967 borders and with the capital in East Jerusalem. For this dialogue to succeed, Israel and Palestine must be on an equal footing in accordance with the decisions of the UN Security Council….
….When this draft resolution is adopted, Palestine… will receive a number of additional opportunities for more effective work in the United Nations General Assembly and at the meetings held under UNGA’s auspices. We see this as an opportunity to at least partially correct the historical injustice against the long-suffering Palestinian people, who have lost an unprecedented number of peaceful lives over the past seven months…
… Palestine must become a full member of the UN…. We believe that the most important element of this draft is contained in its recommendation to the UN Security Council to reconsider Palestine’s application for UN membership. It is a moral obligation for all of us. Only full membership will allow Palestine to join the ranks of other members of the Organization and fully exercise the rights that this status implies. ….The Palestinian people have long deserved it. Statement by Permanent Representative Vassily Nebenzia at the 10th Emergency Special Session of the General Assembly
Well said.
Bottom line: Biden and his handlers do not want the Palestinians to have their own state which is why he is assisting Israel in annihilating the native population and replacing them with Jewish settlers. Fortunately, under international law the Occupied Territories will be Palestinian land into perpetuity and there’s nothing the United States or Israel can do about it.
The Europeans will never be able to replicate the time-tested Hegemon money laundering machine
The awful shadow of some unseen Power Floats tho’ unseen amongst us, -visiting This various world with as inconstant wing As summer winds that creep from flower to flower.- Like moonbeams that behind some piny mountain shower, It visits with inconstant glance Each human heart and countenance; Like hues and harmonies of evening,- Like clouds in starlight widely spread,- Like memory of music fled,- Like aught that for its grace may be Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery. Shelley, Hymn to Intellectual Beauty
As the de facto North Atlantic Terror Organization celebrates its 75th birthday, taking Lord Ismay’s motto to ever soaring heights (“keep the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down”), that thick slab of Norwegian wood posing as Secretary-General came up with a merry “initiative” to create a 100 billion euro fund to weaponize Ukraine for the next five years.
Translation, regarding the crucial money front in the NATO-Russia clash: partial exit of the Hegemon – already obsessing with The Next Forever War, against China; enter the motley crew of ragged, de-industrialized European chihuahuas, all in deep debt and most mired in recession.
A few IQs over average room temperature at NATO’s HQ in Haren, in Brussels, had the temerity to wonder how to come up with such a fortune, as NATO has zero leverage to raise money among member states.
After all, the Europeans will never be able to replicate the time-tested Hegemon money laundering machine. For instance, assuming the White House-proposed $60 billion package to Ukraine would be approved by the U.S. Congress – and it won’t – no less than 64% of the total will never reach Kiev: it will be laundered within the industrial-military complex.
Yet it gets even more dystopic: Norwegian Wood, robotic stare, arms flailing, actually believes his proposed move will not imply a direct NATO military presence in Ukraine – or country 404; something that is already a fact on the ground for quite a while, irrespective of the warmongering hissy fits by Le Petit Roi in Paris (Peskov: “Russia-NATO relations have descended into direct confrontation”).
Now couple the Lethal Looney Tunes spectacle along the NATOstan front with the Hegemon’s aircraft carrier performance in West Asia, consistently taking its industrial-scale slaughter/starvation Genocide Project in Gaza to indescribable heights – the meticulously documented holocaust watched in contorted silence by the “leaders” of the Global North.
UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese correctly summed it all up: the biblical psychopathology entity “intentionally killed the WCK workers so that donors would pull out and civilians in Gaza could continue to be starved quietly. Israel knows Western countries and most Arab countries won’t move a finger for the Palestinians.”
The “logic” behind the deliberate three tap strike on the clearly signed humanitarian convoy of famine-alleviating workers in Gaza was to eviscerate from the news an even more horrendous episode: the genocide-within-a-genocide of al-Shifa hospital, responsible for at least 30% of all health services in Gaza. Al-Shifa was bombed, incinerated and had over 400 civilians killed in cold blood, in several cases literally smashed by bulldozers, including medical doctors, patients and dozens of children.
Nearly simultaneously, the biblical psychopathology gang completely eviscerated the Vienna convention – something that even the historical Nazis never did – striking Iran’s consular mission/ambassador’s residence in Damascus.
This was a missile attack on a diplomatic mission, enjoying immunity, on the territory of a third country, against which the gang is not at war. And on top of it, killing General Mohammad Reza Zahedi, commander of the IRGC’s Quds Force in Syria and Lebanon, his deputy Mohammad Hadi Hajizadeh, another five officers, and a total of 10 people.
Translation: an act of terror, against two sovereign states, Syria and Iran. Equivalent to the recent terror attack on Crocus City Hall in Moscow.
The inevitable question rings around all corners of the lands of the Global Majority: how can these de facto terrorists possibly get away with all this, over and over again?
The sinews of Liberal Totalitarianism
Four years ago, at the start of what I later qualified as the Raging Twenties, we were beginning to watch the consolidation of an intertwined series of concepts defining a new paradigm. We were becoming familiar with notions such as circuit breaker; negative feedback loop; state of exception; necropolitics; and hybrid neofascism.
As the decade marches on, our plight may at least have been alleviated by a twin glimmer of hope: the drive towards multipolarity, led by the Russia-China strategic partnership, with Iran playing a key part, and all that coupled with the total breakdown, live, of the “rules-based international order”.
Yet to affirm there will be a long and winding road ahead is the Mother of All Euphemisms.
So, to quote Bowie, the ultimate late, great aesthete: Where Are We Now? Let’s take this very sharp analysis by the always engaging Fabio Vighi at Cardiff University and tweak it a little further.
Anyone applying critical thinking to the world around us can feel the collapse of the system. It’s a closed system alright, easily definable as Liberal Totalitarianism. Cui bono? The 0.0001%.
Nothing ideological about that. Follow the money. The defining negative feedback loop is actually the debt loop. A criminally anti-social mechanism kept in place by – what else – a psychopathology, as acute as the one exhibited by the biblical genocidals in West Asia.
The Mechanism is enforced by a triad.
The transnational financial elite, the superstars of the 0.0001%.
Right beneath it, the politico-institutional layer, from the U.S. Congress to the European Commission (EC) in Brussels, as well as comprador elite “leaders” across the Global North and South.
The former “intelligentsia”, now essentially hacks for hire from media to academia.
This institutionalized hyper-mediatization of reality is (italics mine), in fact, The Mechanism.
It’s this mechanism that controlled the merging of the pre-fabricated “pandemic” – complete with hardcore social engineering sold as “humanitarian lockdowns” – into, once again, Forever Wars, from Project Genocide in Gaza to the Russophobia/cancel culture obsession inbuilt in Project Proxy War in Ukraine.
That’s the essence of Totalitarian Normality: the Project for Humanity by the appallingly mediocre, self-appointed Great Reset “elites” of the collective West.
Killing them softly with AI
A key vector of the whole mechanism is the direct, vicious interconnection between a tecno-military euphoria and the hyper-inflationary financial sector, now in thrall with AI.
Enter, for instance, AI models such as ‘Lavender’, tested on the ground in the Gaza killing field lab. Literally: artificial intelligence programming the extermination of humans. And it’s happening, in real time. Call it Project AI Genocide.
Another vector, already experimented, is inbuilt in the indirect assertion by toxic EC Medusa Ursula von der Lugen: essentially, the need to produce weapons as Covid vaccines.
That’s at the core of a plan to use funding of the EU by European taxpayers to “increase financing” of “joint contracts for weapons”. That’s an offspring of von der Lugen’s push to roll out Covid vaccines – a gigantic Pfizer-linked scam for which she is about to be investigated and arguably exposed by the EU’s Public Prosecutor Office. In her own words, addressing the proposed weapons scam: “We did this for vaccines and gas.”
Call it Weaponization of Social Engineering 2.0.
Amidst all the action in this vast corruption swamp, the Hegemon agenda remains quite blatant: to keep its – dwindling – predominantly thalassocratic, military hegemony, no matter what, as the basis for its financial hegemony; protect the U.S. dollar; and protect those unmeasurable, unpayable debts in U.S. dollars.
And that brings us to the tawdry economic model of turbo-capitalism, as sold by collective West media hacks: the debt loop, virtual money, borrowed non-stop to deal with “autocrat” Putin and “Russian aggression”. That’s a key by-product of Michael Hudson’s searing analysis of the FIRE (Finance-Insurance-Real Estate) syndrome.
Ouroboros intervenes: the serpent bites its own tail. Now the inherent folly of The Mechanism is inevitably leading casino capitalism to resort to barbarism. Undiluted savagery – of the Crocus City Hall kind and of the Project Gaza Genocide kind.
And that’s how The Mechanism engenders institutions – from Washington to Brussels to hubs across the Global North to genocidal Tel Aviv – stripped down to the status of psychotic killers, at the mercy of Big Finance/FIRE (oh, such fabulous seafront real estate opportunities available in “vacant” Gaza.)
How can we possibly escape such folly? Will we have the will and the discipline to follow Shelley’s vision and, in “this dim vast vale of tears”, summon the transcending Spirit of Beauty – and harmony, equanimity and justice?
US President Joe Biden’s goals in Gaza align with Tel Aviv’s. But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s execution of these objectives is heavily clashing with US interests, undermining its soft power elsewhere in the region.
In an interview with MSNBC last month, US President Joe Biden took a rare firm stance against his staunch Israeli ally, insisting that an invasion of Rafah by the occupation army – devoid of a civilian-focused plan – would cross a “red line.” He then countered his warning by affirming Washington’s unwavering support of Tel Aviv and promising that he would never “leave Israel.” The Israeli Broadcasting Corporation, citing unnamed political sources, said that the phone call between Biden and Netanyahu on 4 April was “more difficult than expected.” The White House said that Biden’s tough tone during the call reflected “growing frustration” over Tel Aviv’s lack of cooperation in protecting civilians.
This contradiction in words and behavior highlights the dilemma the White House faces in its interactions with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. You can’t have it both ways. While the US aims to temper Netanyahu’s aggressive policies – at least for public consumption – it seeks to do so without undermining the stability of his extremist coalition government.
In short, every word is weighed in public US announcements to balance that fine line. Following a virtual meeting between National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and Israeli officials on 1 April, which included talks on the proposed Israeli incursion in Rafah, a statement from the White House merely noted: “The two sides, over the course of two hours, had a constructive engagement on Rafah. They agreed that they share the objective to see Hamas defeated in Rafah.”
On 26 March, an Israeli Defense Ministry briefing revealed that US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin “expressed the view that Hamas’ remaining battalions in Rafah must be dismantled, that that’s a legitimate goal that we share.” He added that “Rafah should not be a safe haven for Hamas. Nowhere in Gaza should be.”
It is safe to conclude from these bland statements that there is a meeting of the minds between the Biden administration and the Netanyahu government over the war’s objectives. From the onset of hostilities, the US has actively collaborated with Israeli decision-making processes, ensuring alignment with strategic goals. High-ranking US officials, including Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Secretary Austin, have participated in Israeli War Cabinet meetings.
Three days after the launch of Al-Aqsa Flood, Biden made it “crystal clear” that “We stand with Israel. We stand with Israel. And we will make sure Israel has what it needs to take care of its citizens, defend itself, and respond to this attack.”
Tensions grow with Tel Aviv
Despite this shared strategic vision, recent developments have highlighted emerging disagreements between Netanyahu and Biden. The differences revolve around the methodologies used to safeguard Israel’s security and future. The core of the dispute can be summarized as follows:
The Biden administration views the path to normalization, as set out in the Trump-era Abraham Accords of 2020, as a historic opportunity to strengthen regional peace, with the jewel in the crown being a Saudi–Israeli normalization deal.
Blinken, during a visit to Saudi Arabia, warned that ongoing military operations in Gaza might jeopardize the Saudi–Israeli normalization prospects, which is a major strategic interest for Tel Aviv at the regional level:
“Almost every country in the region wants to integrate Israel, to normalize relations with it, and to “The reality is to help Israel provide protection for it. But this requires in particular the establishment of a Palestinian state, and it also naturally requires ending military operations in Gaza.”
A Palestinian state is, of course, anathema to Netanyahu’s coalition, the most extremist government in Israel’s short history. But US concerns are also growing over the possibility of the war in Gaza leading to a broader regional war, one which the US will be forced into to protect its settler-colonial ally.
From Washington’s perspective, Israel’s identity as a “functional entity” is significant because it fulfills US geopolitical objectives in the region. Conversely, Netanyahu and the Israeli right prioritize Israel’s identity as a Jewish nation-state. This divergence becomes pronounced in the face of existential threats when national identity overshadows functional roles, posing greater risks to Israel than to the United States.
Regional interests and domestic politics
But the catastrophic humanitarian crisis in Gaza is now limiting the US’s ability to provide international support for Israel’s continued warfare, with Netanyahu’s actions exacerbating the situation and destroying the US’ human rights ’advocacy’ reputation across the globe.
In recent months, Washington has been forced to adopt rhetoric stressing the need for Israel to abide by international laws and protect civilians. At the same time, however, it continues to support the occupation state with all the tools necessary to kill the population of Gaza.
US public opinion reflects growing opposition to Israel’s war crimes in Gaza, with recent polls showing a majority of Americans against the occupation army’s brutalities. A Gallup poll conducted between 1 and 20 March shows that 55 percent of US respondents oppose Israeli military action in the Gaza Strip, a 10 percent rise from November polls.
Crucially, this public sentiment suggests a growing dissonance between US government actions and voter preferences, with Biden’s popularity plummeting in domestic polls.
Concurrently, the US-dominated global “rules-based” order is coming under sharp fire from peer adversaries like Russia and China, which advocate for a return to international law. Israel’s brutal Gaza assault contradicts everything Washington has preached for decades about its ‘rules.’
Tel Aviv has blanketly ignored the binding UN Security Council Resolution 2728, which stipulates a ceasefire during the holy Muslim month of Ramadan, and stands accused of violating all respects of international humanitarian law.
Netanyahu’s government is responsible for the mass murder of tens of thousands of civilians in Gaza – two-thirds of them women and children – which saw Israel dragged for the first time to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on charges of genocide. He then proceeded to violate the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations by targeting the Iranian consulate in Damascus, Syria, on 1 April.
Netanyahu’s fight for survival
Several fundamental reasons drive Netanyahu to support, confront, and even ignore Biden’s stances. At the core is the Israeli premier’s uncertain political future: He is acutely aware that halting the war without securing strategic victories that translate into political capital will devastate his political legacy, making him bear the brunt of all outcomes since 7 October.
Faced with limited alternatives, Netanyahu opts for confrontation, banking on enduring until the upcoming US elections in November.
For Israel, the stakes in the ongoing war are significantly higher than for the US because Tel Aviv’s top brass widely views it as an existential threat. This perspective galvanizes even those within Israeli society and its hawkish military who might not necessarily align with Netanyahu’s policies.
Central to Netanyahu’s resistance is his rejection of a two-state solution. He perceives the invasion of Rafah as a tactic to either circumvent negotiations with Hamas or to weaken the movement’s bargaining position. Importantly, Netanyahu aims to prevent the war’s conclusion from being interpreted as a step towards Palestinian statehood, rightly framing the conflict as a Palestinian liberation struggle.
Meanwhile, the White House continues on its impossible trajectory to balance pressure on Netanyahu with a clear commitment to Israeli security interests, including defeating Hamas. Netanyahu does not miss a beat in manipulating this situation to his advantage, twisting the narrative to ensure Israel’s interests are met, with a keen eye on how this plays out for him politically at home.
Re-evaluating relations
Commentary from both Israeli and US corners is starting to shine a light on the potentially thorny path ahead.
As Doron Matza recently wrote in the Israeli newspaper Maariv:
In the near future, the aid directed to Israel will decrease and be limited, and with it international legitimacy, not to mention the erosion of the Abraham Accords and the challenges represented by additional enemies waiting for the zero hour to turn the 7 October flood into a broader and greater catastrophe.
John Hoffman in Foreign Policy adds a scathing critique, questioning the very fabric of the US–Israel relationship: “The special relationship does not benefit Washington and is endangering US interests across the globe.”
It is time for the US to recalibrate its relationship with Israel. This isn’t about turning Israel into an adversary but about interacting with it as Washington does with any other state – with a measured distance and pragmatism.
The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of The Cradle.
After years of accusing Russia of using food as a weapon in its conflict with Ukraine, State Department “culinary ambassador” José Andrés is working with the Israeli government to supplant UNRWA as the main supplier of aid to northern Gaza.
State Department-linked Spanish celebrity chef José Andrés has emerged as the US government’s preferred conduit for aid to enter Gaza, following the Biden administration’s decision to suspend funding to the enclave’s main supplier of food, aid and education, the UNRWA.
The operation appears designed to serve as a stopgap measure to provide minimal quantities of food to Gaza’s famine-stricken population until the US military finishes building a pier in the Mediterranean Sea, and a shadowy contractor run by former US Marines and CIA officials is able to implement an aid program called “Blue Beach Plan.”
Andrés’ organization, World Central Kitchen, has already finished constructing its own jetty, which was made from the rubble heaps in Gaza — a decision that virtually guaranteed the building materials contain the remains of humans killed by Israeli bombing.
US State Dept asset Jose Andres and his World Central Kitchen are building a makeshift aid dock in northern Gaza from the rubble of destroyed Palestinian homes, all in coordination with the Israeli military
The use of genocidal biomatter in the construction of the pier has been roundly ignored by legacy media outlets, whose fawning coverage of the plans has instead cast Andrés as a kind of maverick “superhero” fighting to protect Palestinian civilians in the face of international indifference.
In their rush to lionize the shady chef, the Washington Post falsely claimed, “The first ship bearing aid to Gaza since 2005… was spearheaded not by the United Nations or a world leader but by a celebrity chef, José Andrés.” In 2008, activists succeeded in using boats to deliver aid to Gaza six times before Israel began sinking the ships and killing members of their crew.
Strangely, these English-language outlets have generally neglected to mention that WCK is only able to operate in Gaza with the explicit permission of the Israeli military. The New York Times was an exception, noting in a glowing profile of Andrés’ group that “the Israeli military helped World Central Kitchen’s operation, providing security and coordination” and that “every step was carried out with permission from the Israeli military.”
“Nothing goes in without Israel’s permission,” Andrés himself conceded in an interview with NBC News. The chef claimed Israel’s COGAT unit which controls aid to the besieged enclave is “doing everything at its disposal to help the people of Gaza,” but that its “hands are tied” by the military operation.
Immediately before their recent pivot to Gaza, Andrés’ WCK spent several weeks providing meals to Israeli soldiers following Hamas’ October 7 attack.
On October 16, when Spain’s then-Minister for Social Rights, Ione Belarra, condemned Israel for conducting a “genocide” in Gaza, Andrés immediately jumped to Tel Aviv’s defense and demanded her resignation:
“You as Minister have to first recognize that the Hamas attack against civilians is a terrorist act… and that Israel @IsraelinSpain is defending its citizens… then you can ask for restraint and respect for the lives of civilians in Gaza,” the US government-aligned chef bellowed.
“Do you also support Russia? Who has killed children and women and old people and civilians?” Andrés continued. “Are you Pro @KremlinRussia_E and Pro Hamas? You do not represent me or Spain. She does not deserve to be a minister…. President [Sanchez] should remove her from her position…”
State Department asset Jose Andrés likens Blinken to Thomas Jefferson
Andrés has collaborated closely with the US government. Since early 2023, the celebrity chef has worked with the US State Department as a member of the so-called “American Culinary Corps,” a new partnership between Foggy Bottom and the James Beard Foundation.
When Andrés gave a softball interview to US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on his podcast that February, their warm and comfortable relationship was on full display.
“You are this fascinating man, who graduated at Harvard… you even play guitar, you have three songs on Spotify,” Andrés gushed, during his first question to the top American diplomat. “You grew up in New York, in Paris, you are fluent in French… What do you remember eating as a young man growing up in Paris?”
When Blinken responded that “for me, going to the McDonald’s… that was the culinary experience,” and said his most cherished foods in France were “English muffins and Bumblebee tuna fish,” the world-renowned chef generously compared him to America’s second Minister to France, Thomas Jefferson, who famously grew his own crops and had various foods shipped from his Virginia slave plantation while stationed in Paris.
But the real purpose of the conversation quickly revealed itself when Andrés asked his follow-up question: “What else US and international community can be doing to keep putting pressure on Russia to make sure that grain has not become another form of weapon?”
Andrés serves not only as a semi-official emissary of the US government, but as a representative of one of its top client states. In September of 2023, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky personally welcomed Andrés to the country, describing the chef as an “ambassador” of Ukraine’s official aid collection agency, whose “strong voice helps us maintain global support.”
— Volodymyr Zelenskyy / Володимир Зеленський (@ZelenskyyUa) September 14, 2023
The chef’s intimate relationship with the US predates the current conflict in Ukraine. In 2020, he was honored at an event by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he was warmly introduced by now-CIA chief Bill Burns, who called it a “special pleasure” to bring Andrés onstage.
The result of this collusion appears to be a series of double standards that treats the lives of Palestinian as secondary to those living under the US government’s preferred regimes – a disparity which was unintentionally highlighted by recent headlines from US outlets who conducted interviews with the chef.
In April 2022, Axios wrote: “José Andrés: Russia is ‘totally’ using starvation as a weapon of war.” When speaking about Israel two years later, he displayed a significantly milder tone. According to NBC’s Meet the Press, “José Andrés says Israel should ‘totally’ be doing more to get aid into Gaza.”
Ansarallah has single-handedly disrupted global shipping power dynamics. Yemen is launching attacks against Israeli-linked vessels deep into the Indian Ocean to cut off the last waterway route to the occupation state.
Our people are ready to send hundreds of thousands of mujahideen to Palestine. Okay, geography might pose a problem. It could be a problem for our people to go there in large numbers. Nevertheless, and despite all the obstacles, we will not hesitate to do whatever we can. We are completely coordinated with our brothers in the Jihad and resistance front to do anything and everything that we can do. (Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, 10 October 2023)
Since Abdul-Malik al-Houthi’s proclamation three days after the launch of the Palestinian resistance’s 7 October Al-Aqsa Flood Operation, Yemen’s Ansarallah movement, under his leadership, has undergone a remarkable transformation.
Ansarallah’s maritime reach has surpassed all initial expectations, now extending to the distant shores of the Indian Ocean in its ambitious plan to besiege Israel by targeting the occupation state’s shipping interests.
Yemen’s strategic position not only serves as a beacon of hope for Palestinians enduring Israel’s brutal military assault on their lives, homes, and livelihoods but has also become a crucial pillar in the Axis of Resistance’s fight against US hegemonic machinations in West Asia.
In late February, al-Houthi vowed to expand the scope of attacks against Israel-linked vessels, stating, “We have surprises that the enemies do not expect at all,” before announcing the successful testing of a new hypersonic missile.
This stands in stark contradiction to western narratives trumpeting their own containment efforts to encircle Yemen and thwart its ability to intercept Israel-bound vessels. If anything, the naval operations undertaken by the Ansarallah-aligned armed forces are instead rippling outward, spanning a remarkable distance of over 6,000 kilometers from the Yemeni coast to the Indian Ocean.
Failure of ‘Prosperity Guardian’
Crucially, Yemen’s defiance has drawn widespread, popular support from its once-warring nationals, not just in support of Gaza and the Israeli blockade but also against the relentless US and British airstrikes launched under the fig leaf of Operation ‘Prosperity Guardian‘ – an extrajudicial imperial project which aims to cripple Ansarallah’s military capabilities under the guise of securing international shipping and trade routes.
Yet al-Houthi’s unequivocal declaration on barring the passage of ships associated with Israel, or those engaged in commercial ties with it, from traversing the Indian Ocean and the Cape of Good Hope shows that Washington and London have been dealt a resounding strategic defeat.
By targeting these two new critical waterway passages, Yemen imposes a new reality on global shipping routes. This phase of the naval battle presents a significant threat to the world’s established maritime corridors, compelling commercial vessels traveling to and from Southeast Asia to navigate lengthier and more costly routes around the southern tip of Africa to reach the Mediterranean Sea.
Iran’s partner, not a proxy
Al-Houthi’s message is clear: “Do the Americans, British, and the Zionists expect that any aggressive act against Yemen will distract us from defending Gaza?” Ansarallah recently announced the targeting of over 70 commercial ships with ties to Israel, alongside military battleships across the Red Sea, Arabian Sea, Gulf of Aden, and the Indian Ocean.
Moreover, Yemen’s stance challenges western reports of secret talks brokered by Oman between the US and Iran, purportedly aimed at containing the conflict, preventing it from spreading further from the ‘Yemeni front.’
Despite Washington’s announcement that it has released $10 billion in frozen Iranian funds and its ferocious intimidation and enticement maneuvers behind the scenes, Sanaa’s strategic move towards the Indian Ocean should dismiss any rumors about an impending ‘US–Iran deal.’
Instead of acquiescing to US pressure, Tehran is working to maintain stability and avert all-out war through its ‘support fronts’ in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen. The escalation in Yemen poses a greater regional challenge, overshadowing any temporary truces in Iraq by some factions.
While the Biden administration attempts to portray its diplomatic efforts as successes, particularly through indirect negotiations with Tehran and plans to build a temporary pier off the coast of Gaza, the situation in Yemen remains a humiliating inconvenience for a White House heading into an election cycle. This comes against the backdrop of a White House also frantically trying to manage the Iraqi and Lebanese arenas, which are equally pushing back against US hegemonic interests.
As the spokesman for the Iraqi resistance Al-Nujaba movement, Dr Hussein al-Musawi, tells The Cradle:
“Our principles are clear and firm regarding the American presence on Iraqi soil, which is a complete exit without any interference in our political, economic, and other affairs; ending its control over the aspects of Iraq’s politics; and liberating its land and wealth; and political and economic independence.“
Economic ramifications for Israel
Sanaa’s strategic maneuvering in the Red Sea–Gulf of Aden–Indian Ocean corridor not only poses a distraction for US and British naval forces but also presents unforeseen challenges. While US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was in Israel after announcing his ‘Guardian of Prosperity’ operation, the Yemeni resistance was busy adding millions of square kilometers to their area of missile confrontation.
The 12 percent of global trade passing through the Bab al-Mandeb Strait has already suffered a blow to the core. The resulting disruptions, including increased shipping costs and insurance premiums, are anticipated to fuel inflation and potentially paralyze Israeli ports such as Eilat and decrease traffic in Haifa.
While the full extent of damage to Israel’s foreign trade remains unclear, initial estimates suggested losses exceeding $180 billion, considering pre-existing trade figures from 2022.
Yemen’s growing naval capabilities
Simultaneously, the question arises: how will the ‘Guardian of Prosperity’ forces, previously tasked with monitoring just the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden to counter Yemeni missile threats, manage the vast expansion required to monitor the thousands of ships traversing to and from the Cape of Good Hope across the Indian Ocean?
While the US and UK do not reveal the number of naval vessels assigned to their almost impossible mission, numbers circulating claim the participation of several US battleships, including the USS Laboon, USS Carney, and USS Mason – and from the British, the destroyer HM Diamond. Greece is estimated to have one frigate involved, France contributes naval vessels under US command, and Italy claims to have a frigate that operates outside the operation’s banner. Although the coalition publicly announced the inclusion of more than twenty countries in its mission, the actual naval commitment from its members appears negligible.
Furthermore, it’s hard not to notice the fundamental inefficiencies inherent to the western naval operation: the US “is launching $2 million defense missiles to stop $2,000 Houthi drones.” It was no surprise then when a Pentagon spokesman acknowledged a few days ago that despite ongoing western strikes on Yemen, Ansarallah’s capabilities have not been undermined.
And then Abdul-Malik al-Houthi comes along and adds the Indian Ocean to the US’ horror scenario with an area exceeding 70 million square kilometers.
Ali al-Qahum of Ansarallah’s Political Bureau characterizes this expansion as a “shocking and unexpected surprise” for the resistance’s adversaries. At the same time, it amplifies Yemen’s globally strategic significance as a military force – one that can successfully execute a comprehensive siege on Israel.
It is not clear whether the announcement of including the Indian Ocean in the Yemeni naval operations is related to the tests of the hypersonic missile. It would make Yemen one of only a small handful of nations to possess this unique military capability – Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea.
Regardless, Abdul-Malik al-Houthi’s ability to take the enemy by surprise showcases Yemen’s capacity to disrupt established power dynamics, particularly in the West Asian region. By supporting Gaza unequivocally, the Yemeni front within the Resistance Axis is further diminishing US influence amid the waves of the Indian Ocean, unless a lasting ceasefire is imposed in Gaza.
The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of The Cradle.
Tel Aviv’s dubious rape allegations against Hamas conceal Israel’s own shocking domestic sexual violence crisis, in which 260 Israeli women and minors are raped each day.
While Israel’s unsubstantiated claims of rape on 7 October have dominated western media headlines, credible documented cases of rape against Palestinians and Israeli-on-Israeli sexual assault have received far less attention.
Israel’s scourge of sexual violence and rape incidents did not originate five months ago – its roots go deeper and farther back than that, and there is a crucial context essential for understanding the country’s domestic environment of abuse.
Israel’s massive sexual violence problem
On 8 February, Haaretz brought to light a harrowing revelation: 116 separate files detailing instances of sexual assault and domestic violence against women and minors among Israelis ‘displaced’ from their illegal settlements due to the ongoing military conflicts with Gaza and Lebanon.
The cases surfaced during a special Knesset committee on the Status of Women and Gender Equality, where “committee chair MK Pnina Tamano-Shata [National Unity Party] chastised police representatives for failing to collect accurate data from each hotel regarding violence and sexual attacks.”
Although there were disputes over a lack of complete data, disturbing incidents were highlighted, including a case of pedophilia involving a 23-year-old establishing a “relationship with a 13-year-old girl, both living in the same hotel” and a rape committed after a man followed a woman to her room. It also noted that elevators were places of particular vulnerability for sexual assault and violence.
Sexual harassment and violence are nothing new among Israel’s armed forces. According to a Haaretz report, “a third of female conscripts in the military had suffered sexual harassment at least once in the previous year [2022].”
Haaretz noted that most victims avoid reporting what happened to them and that “70 percent of those young women who did report what happened to them stated that their report was not handled at all, or not handled sufficiently.”
In 2020, the Israeli army’s sexual violence crisis was recognized after only 31 indictments were filed out of 1,542 sexual assault complaints registered within the military establishment.
That’s a stunning indictment of the ‘world’s most moral army.’ And it isn’t just Israel’s war establishment afflicted with the rape bug.
Rape, normalized in Israel
In addition to being a regional hub for human trafficking and a haven for pedophiles, Israel consistently ranks the highest in West Asia for documented cases of rape and sexual assaults.
In 2020, protests erupted across Israel after 30 men gang-raped an intoxicated 16-year-old girl, which prompted Ilana Weizman, of the Israeli women’s rights group HaStickeriot, to disclose that a shocking one in five Israeli women was raped during her lifetime, with 260 cases reported every day.
In March 2021, a series of gang rapes against minors, with the youngest victim being just 10-years-old, sparked widespread concern in Israel over the prevalence of sexual assault. APCCI said that the rate of violent sexual offenses in Israel was 10 percent higher than the average for Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, labeling it as an “epidemic.” A Knesset report from the same year revealed that nearly half of the sexual abuse cases between 2019 and 2020 involved underage girls.
Back in 2016, activists from Jewish Community Watch warned that Israel was becoming a “safe haven for pedophiles,” noting that sexual offenders were using the Israeli Law of Return, which allows any Jew to claim citizenship and live in occupied Palestine. Years later, in 2020, CBS News released a report entitled ‘How Jewish American pedophiles hide from justice in Israel,’ which demonstrated how wanted individuals were walking free in Israel, leaving behind a spate of unresolved criminal cases.
To add insult to injury, Hebrew media reported that 92 percent of civil rape investigations were closed without charges in Israel.
According to the Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel (ARCCI), despite the country’s ‘good laws’ on sexual assault, inadequate enforcement of these laws means that people use “legal tricks” to avoid retribution for assaults, with many assailants avoiding prosecution. In short, “people are not afraid to hurt. There is no fear or retribution.”
Occasionally, in high-profile cases of rape and sexual assault, the Israeli judicial system has been known to act, as evidenced by the conviction of former Israeli president Moshe Katsav in 2010 for raping an aide and sexually harassing two other women.
However, Katsav’s release after serving just five years of a seven-year sentence ignited a debate on the early release of sex offenders. In 2022, APCCI reported that 75 percent of sexual offenders in Israel are released before completing their full sentence.
Israel, weaponizing rape against Palestinians
From the time of Israel’s founding, rape has been extensively documented in its use as a weapon of war against Palestinians. In a 2022 documentary named after the Israeli massacre in the Palestinian village of Tantura, horrific admissions of rape committed by the Alexandroni Brigade were acknowledged for the first time on camera.
There are also various other reported cases of rape from that period: at least three rapes, one committed against a 14-year-old Palestinian girl, that occurred during the Safsaf massacre in October of 1948.
Because rape and other forms of sexual violence are often difficult to prove conclusively, it is essential to note that early Zionists also weaponized the threat of sexual violence, especially surrounding the massacre of Deir Yassin in 1948.
As documented by Israeli historian Ilan Pappe in his book “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine,” stories of explicit gendered atrocities were deliberately spread to encourage residents of other villages to flee. In a recent series of interviews conducted with two Nakba survivors, both revealed that they fled their villages specifically due to the rape atrocities in the village of Deir Yassin.
Today, that same attitude of sexualizing vulnerable Palestinians is apparent in the countless snuff films published widely on social media with the approval of the Israeli military, featuring male Israeli soldiers going through the underwear drawers of Palestinian women and even mockingly wearing their lingerie.
This, coupled with what a UN panel of experts recently said were “credible allegations” of sexual assault against Palestinian women by Israeli soldiers operating in Gaza, indicate a clear pattern of gendered violence taking place in the war.
At least two cases of rape, along with numerous cases of sexual humiliation and threats of rape, have also been recorded. Reem Alsalem, the UN special rapporteur on violence against women and girls, has noted that “We might not know for a long time what the actual number of victims are.”
Systematic sexual humiliation
In 2002, during the Second Intifada, Israeli occupation soldiers took control of Palestinian TV networks in the West Bank city of Ramallah to broadcast pornography on several channels. Knowing that Palestinian society is a socially conservative one, it is clear that this was done with the intent of humiliation.
A prominent case of recent sexual humiliation in the West Bank occurred just last year near the city of Al-Khalil (Hebron) and was investigated in a joint Haaretz-B’Tselem report. On 10 July, between 25–30 Israeli soldiers burst into the Ajluni family’s home, forcing five Palestinian women to strip naked at gunpoint and threatening to unleash army attack dogs on them.
One woman named Amal was taken into a private room with her children and forced to take off her clothes. The report states: “the children also had to witness their mother being ordered to turn around while naked as she sobbed over the humiliation. About 10 minutes later she and the children were taken out of the room pale and trembling.”
While it is not possible to note every single case of sexual violence perpetrated against Palestinian women by Israeli forces, it is well documented that female prisoners have been subjected to some of the worst forms of it.
During the Second Intifada, there were countless allegations of sexual violence against women and girls in Israeli military detention, a trend which Israeli human rights group B’Tselem reports is again on the rise. The rights group said that the Palestinian female detainees recently released in the Hamas–Israel prisoner exchange were subjected to “threats of rape” and “were humiliatingly strip-searched several times” after their violent arrests.
An interrogator came in and asked me in English what I thought about what Hamas did. He swore at me and called me a ‘whore.’ He said there were 20 soldiers in the room and that they would rape me like Hamas–ISIS raped Jewish women in southern Israel. He kept swearing at me and threatening me and my family. Then, a female soldier came and took me to another room with more female soldiers, who told me: ‘Welcome to hell.’ They sat me in a chair and started laughing at me and calling me ‘whore’ again and again.
Speaking to the media following her release from Israeli detention late last year, Baraah Abo Ramouz said the following about the “devastating” conditions faced by female Palestinian prisoners:
They are being constantly beaten. They’re being sexually assaulted. They are being raped. I’m not exaggerating. The prisoners are being raped.
In 2022, the Shin Bet dropped a case of sexual assault against a Palestinian woman detained in 2015 over “lack of evidence.” This is despite the fact that a doctor and female soldiers had admitted to inappropriately touching the woman’s private parts, while the company commander in control admitted to giving the order. The victim’s filed appeal states:
In a situation in which there is no dispute that acts that constitute rape and sodomy were committed, [in which] there is sufficient evidence, and when no one is punished, it’s outrageous and unbearable.
According to former US State Department official Josh Paul, after he and his colleagues received credible evidence that Israeli forces had raped a 14-year-old Palestinian boy in Al-Moskibiyya detention center, Israel raided the offices of the human rights group that passed the information on to the State Department, later declaring it a terrorist organization.
False narratives fueling war crimes
While the Israeli government pushes the story that Hamas implemented a pre-planned systematic rape campaign on 7 October, for which there has been no independent investigation or evidence produced, documented cases of sexual violence are undermined and ignored.
The mere fact that Israel’s notorious ZAKA rescue service relied upon heavily for testimonies of rape on 7 October, was founded by serial rapist Yehuda Meshi-Zahav, nicknamed the ‘Haredi Jeffrey Epstein,’ is telling.
The wholly unsubstantiated rape claims of the Israeli government – widely amplified and parroted by western media – are impossible to take seriously when a known propaganda outfit like ZAKA is the source.
The UN Office of the Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict recently released a report after its Special Representative Pramila Patten completed an eight-day trip requested by the Israeli government.
The report on sexual violenceallegations was produced by a team of nine UN experts and had no investigative mandate. Yet statements from it made headlines in western media, suggesting that the UN had confirmed Israel’s narrative, although the report in no way substantiated it.
In the case of sexual violence allegations made about Kibbutz Be’eri, from where the majority of the allegations emerged, there was no evidence found. Two cases were debunked by the UN team as having been “unfounded.”
In one, widely cited as proof of rape, a woman was found separated from her family with her underwear pulled down. The UN team said that the “crime scene had been altered by a bomb squad, and the bodies moved.”
The UN report also noted that the interrogations of alleged participants in Operation Al-Aqsa Flood by Israeli intelligence agencies were not considered as evidence, another major blow to Israel’s body of claims.
In Kibbutz Kfar Aza, where the report concluded “the recurring pattern of female victims found undressed, 18 bound, and shot – indicates that sexual violence, including potential sexualized torture, or cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, may have occurred,” it also notes that “verification of sexual violence against these victims was not possible at this point.”
Given that the UN team found that Israelis had altered other crime scenes, an independent investigation would be needed to confirm that the crime scenes weren’t equally compromised.
The human cost of Israel’s lies
It should also be noted that the recent New York Times scandal – where its investigation into sexual violence on 7 October was directly discredited by the family members of a woman they tried to claim was raped – dealt a massive blow to the credibility of Israel’s narrative.
During Primila Patten’s press conference, in which she addressed the findings of her UN mission, she admitted that they had not interviewed any victims and did not find a systematic campaign of sexual violence, nor was the team able to attribute sexual violence to any specific Palestinian resistance group.
Amidst the recurrent circulation of unverified claims lacking independent investigation, these graphic and unsubstantiated allegations fuel widespread sexual violence against vulnerable Palestinians.
Israel, grappling with its own internal sexual assault issues, has a troubling history of utilizing gender-based violence within its military jurisdiction. The disproportionate lack of attention towards the ongoing atrocities perpetrated by the occupation state illustrates a clear double standard perpetuated by western mainstream media.
Dr. Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of six books. His latest book, co-edited with Ilan Pappé, is ‘Our Vision for Liberation: Engaged Palestinian Leaders and Intellectuals Speak Out.’ His other books include ‘My Father Was a Freedom Fighter’ and ‘The Last Earth.’ Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA). His website is www.ramzybaroud.net
Ramzy Baroud
The Palestinian city of Rafah is not just older than Israel; it is as old as civilization itself.
It has existed for thousands of years. The Canaanites referred to it as Rafia, and Rafia has been almost always there, guarding the southern frontiers of Palestine, ancient and modern.
As the gateway between two continents and two worlds, Rafah has been at the forefront of many wars and foreign invasions, from ancient Egyptians to the Romans to Napoleon and his eventually vanquished army.
Now, it is Benjamin Netanyahu’s turn. The Israeli Prime Minister has made Rafah the jewel of his crown of shame, the battle that would determine the fate of his genocidal war in Gaza – in fact, the very future of his country. “Those who want to prevent us from operating in Rafah are essentially telling us: ‘Lose the war,’” he said at a press conference on February 17.
There are around 1.3 to 1.5 million people in Rafah, an area that, before the war started, had a population of merely 200 thousand people.
Even before the start of this genocidal war, Rafah was still considered crowded. We can only imagine what the situation is right now, where hundreds of thousands of people are scattered in muddy refugee camps, subsisting in makeshift tents that are unable to withstand the elements of a harsh winter.
The Mayor of Rafah says that only 10 percent of the needed food and water is reaching the population in the camps, where the people are suffering from extreme hunger, if not outright starvation.
These families are beyond traumatized as they have lost loved ones and homes and have no access to any medical care. They are trapped between high walls, the sea and a murderous military.
An Israeli invasion of Rafah will not alter the battlefield in favor of the Israeli army, but it will be horrific for the displaced Palestinians. The slaughter will go beyond everything we have seen so far anywhere in Gaza.
A child wounded in an Israeli bombing is brought to Al Najjar hospital in Rafah, Feb. 24, 2024. Fatima Shbair | AP
Where will up to 1.5 million people go when the Israeli tanks arrive? The closest so-called safe area is al-Mawasi, which is already overcrowded and too small to begin with. The displaced refugees there are also experiencing starvation due to Israel’s prevention of aid and constant bombing of convoys.
Then, there is northern Gaza, which is mostly in ruins; it has no food to the extent that, in some areas, even animal feed, which humans are now consuming, is no longer accessible.
Suppose the international community does not finally develop the will to stop Israel. In that case, this horrific crime will, by far, prove worse than all the crimes that have already been committed, resulting in the death and wounding of over 100,000 people.
Even with the invasion of Rafah, Israel would achieve no military or strategic victory. Netanyahu wants to satisfy the calls for blood emanating from throughout Israel. After all of this, they are still seeking revenge. “I am personally proud of the ruins of Gaza,” Israel’s Minister of Social Equality, May Golan, said at a Knesset session on February 21.
But, still, there will be no victory in Rafah, either.
At the start of the war, Israel said Hamas was primarily concentrated in the north. The north was duly destroyed, though the Resistance carried on unabated. Then they claimed that the Resistance headquarters was under Shifa Hospital, which was bombed, raided and destroyed. Then they claimed Bureij, Maghazi and central Gaza were the main prize of the war. Then, Khan Younis was declared the ‘capital of Hamas’. And on and on…
Aside from the mass destruction and the killing of hundreds of civilians daily, Israel has won nothing; the Resistance has not been defeated, and the alleged ‘Hamas capital’ has conveniently shifted from one city to another, even from one neighborhood to another.
Now, the same ridiculous claims and unsubstantiated allegations are being made and leveled against Rafah, where most of Gaza’s population ran to, in total despair, to survive the onslaught.
Children desperately clamor for food in Rafah, Feb. 23, 2024. Fatima Shbair | AP
Israel had initially hoped that Gazans would rush in their hundreds of thousands to the Sinai Desert. They did not. Then Israeli leaders, like far-right Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, began speaking of “voluntary migration” as the “right humanitarian solution.” Still, the Palestinians stayed. Now, they have all agreed on the invasion of Rafah, a last-ditch effort to orchestrate another Palestinian Nakba.
But another Nakba will not happen. Palestinians will not allow it to happen.
Ultimately, Netanyahu’s and Israel’s political madness must come to an end.
The world cannot persist in this cowardly inaction.
The lives of millions of Palestinians are dependent on our collective push to bring this genocide to an immediate end.
The visit of former Lebanese PM Saad Hariri to Beirut has tongues wagging. Will the impetus of the expanding Gaza war force a Saudi–Syrian settlement that can once more impose stability in Lebanon?
The visit of former Lebanese PM Saad Hariri to Beirut has tongues wagging. Will the impetus of the expanding Gaza war force a Saudi–Syrian settlement that can once more impose stability in Lebanon?
On 21 February, a Syrian website, citing sources in Damascus, broadcasted news that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) would shortly pay a visit to Syria, causing an uproar in regional political circles. Despite government-aligned newspaper Al-Watan denying the report, the prospect of a top Saudi visit evoked memories of an era past when Syrian–Saudi understanding secured Lebanon’s internal balances, which are shaken or resolved based on the tempo of West Asia’s hegemons and the status of their relations with one another.
عاجل – مصدر سوري مطلع لـ"الوطن": لا يوجد أي شيء رسمي حول زيارة محتملة لولي العهد السعودي الأمير محمد بن سلمان إلى سورية.
A decisive response to rumors of an impending MbS visit remains elusive. A Syrian diplomatic source would only confirm to The Cradle that “Syrian–Saudi communication is gradually developing, and the discussions have become more detailed about the mutual common interests of the two countries” concerning the “post-war scene in Gaza.”
While the source did not deny or confirm Bin Salman’s visit, he suggested that the development of communications might reach the stage of “mutual visits” not only with Saudi Arabia “but also with Egypt.”
While the improvement in relations between Syria and Arab states is not limited to Saudi Arabia, discussions with Riyadh have become more significant recently – to the extent that an Arab foreign minister, believed to be the Emirati FM, made an effort in mid-February to persuade members of the US Congress to retract its Syrian boycott law, which US-based anti-Syria activists insist on upholding. A source tells The Cradle that these activists “train with a US agency, alongside the Iranian opposition, on formulating and marketing these lobbying projects and forming pressure groups” to halt any policy reversals in Washington.
But the discussion about reopening relations with Damascus is no longer only taking place in Arab corridors. Cypriot President Nikos Christodoulides, in an announcement following talks last week with his German counterpart Frank-Walter Steinmeier, revealed “the work of the Republic of Cyprus in cooperation with other member states” to advance European–Syrian ties.
The EU, in general, shares that view about opening up member-states’ relations with Damascus, in discussionswhich the Syrian source says are also progressing, especially in the matter of identifying “the parts of Syria that are sufficiently safe” for the return of refugee populations.
On 16 February, on the sidelines of the 60th Munich Security Conference in Germany, Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan met with EU Foreign Affairs Chief Josep Borrell to discuss several regional issues, including Syria, reports Anadolu Agency, which quotes Turkish Foreign Ministry sources as saying “both sides” stressed the need to involve Damascus “in the political process.”
As for the Americans, the White House is engaged in difficult negotiations with many Arab states “in search of a diplomatic achievement” for the Joe Biden administration as his re-election campaign heats up. Washington is busy seeking mechanisms to consolidate its interests in West Asia within the significant barriers created by the Chinese-brokered Saudi–Iranian rapprochement agreement, which, for the US, has been maddeningly stable thus far. Indeed, Saudi Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan went to bat in Munich for his “Iranian neighbors,” saying the Iranians “do not want escalation in the region.”
As US–Iraqi negotiations over US troop withdrawal pick up pace, a Syrian source tells The Cradle that an American delegation “visited northeastern Syria, to discuss the possibilities of maintaining a US presence there in the event of withdrawal from Iraq.” Interestingly, the head of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Units, Faleh al-Fayyad, visited Turkiye on 20 February to discuss “the future of the process of securing the borders from Kurdish organizations in the event that the US–Iraqi negotiations lead to the dismantling of the US military bases and the retention of officers as advisors only,” according to an Iraqi journalist source.
Where does this leave Lebanon?
There is no doubt that the recent Beirut visit of former Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri – who currently resides in Abu Dhabi, which enjoys friendly relations with Syria – resonated deeply in Lebanon. It was viewed as a harbinger of the return of “Hariri-ism,” which comes laden with regional political settlements and top-level shuttle diplomacy – and reflected a tacit sign of new Saudi approval.
During his visit, Hariri spoke in the language of his father – former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, assassinated in Beirut on 14 February 2005 – about “peace and stability” in Lebanon and its neighborhood, and even invoked, during an interview with Saudi news channel Al-Hadath, his father’s key political role in Lebanon’s civil war in paving the way to the Saudi-brokered Taif Agreement that settled the 15-year conflict.
It is important to note that Riyadh–Hariri relations have been estranged for years – unlike the close Saudi relations his father enjoyed. Tensions between them grew during the war in Syria, with Hariri’s inability or unwillingness to curb Lebanon’s Hezbollah from defending the Syrian state from a Saudi-backed war.
While Hariri said during his Beirut stopover that the time was not yet ripe for him to return to Lebanon’s muddy political arena, he offered his “intervention” if he “felt that the Sunni community in Lebanon was leaning toward extremism.” Many have linked his comments to the trial of 84 civilians in the UAE last week, charged with membership in “Muslim Brotherhood” (MB) organizations – a group banned in the UAE – as well as Turkiye’s remarkable withdrawal of MB leading figure Mahmoud Hussein’s citizenship amidst Ankara’s thrust to mend ties with Abu Dhabi.
A Lebanese source who accompanied Hariri on his visit hints to The Cradle that “concern over the Muslim Brotherhood may pave the way for the return of Hariri’s relations with Syria.” In other words, the former PM could gain support from the anti-MB Saudis, Emiratis, and Syrians if he toes this political line within Lebanon. Interestingly,a Lebanese figure close to pro-MB Qatar attacked Hariri immediately upon his arrival at the airport via X (formerly known as Twitter).
Regional winds appear to be shifting direction, in large part because the Gulf’s traditional “guarantor” of security, the United States, is knee-deep in fanning an untenable crisis by unconditionally supporting Israel’s assault on Gaza. In Munich, Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry sought a “Palestinian consensus” that would pave the way for a “two-state” settlement, in which, according to him, Hamas is excluded. The Arab–Islamic consensus is currently seeking a long-term Palestinian solution after the dust in Gaza settles, which would necessarily include luring “Hamas” and “Fatah” into a national consensus government.
In Beirut, former President Michel Aoun senses this consensus and has made a show of opposing any links of “Lebanon’s fate to Gaza.” Aoun, who once opposed the Taif Agreement, awaits the opportunity to oppose it again. This is, of course, a domestic play mainly to ensure the country’s minority Christian voice is heard in whatever political arrangements lie over the horizon.
But Gaza remains unavoidable in Lebanon, with Israel waging war against Hezbollah on the country’s southern border, which reached 45 kilometers into the country this week when Tel Aviv struck civilian sites near Sidon. The Gaza war is now being played out in multiple theaters – in Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Iraq, and Yemen – and has the potential to expand and deepen further. It is this war waged by Israel and its US ally that is rapidly drawing Arab states to recalibrate the region’s direction from within and amongst themselves.
This begs the question now frequently heard in Beirut: What if Damascus, Riyadh, and Tehran agree this time? Everyone is waiting for that moment to reserve their seats in West Asia’s latest theater.
The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of The Cradle.
We have entered a period of breakdown and violence, as the forces pulling apart the old status quo cascade and mutually reinforce one another.
In a speech on Tuesday, Hizbullah leader Seyed Nasrallah said that the Party will continue the border offensive until at least the Gaza massacre stops. The war in Gaza however, is far from over. And Nasrallah warned that even were a ceasefire to be reached in Gaza, “should the enemy perform any action, we will return to operating according to the rules and formulas that existed before. The purpose of the resistance is to deter the enemy, and we will react accordingly”.
Israel’s Defence Secretary Gallant has underlined that contrary to international consensus expectations, he too expects the war in Lebanon to continue. Gallant said the military has stepped up its attacks against Hizbullah by one level out of ten:
“The Air Force planes flying currently in the skies of Lebanon have heavier bombs for more distant targets. Hizbullah went up half a step, whilst we, a full one … We can attack not only at 20 kilometres [from the border], but also at 50 kilometres, and in Beirut and anywhere else”.
It is not clear what ‘red line’ Hizbullah would have to cross for Israel to significantly escalate its response to much higher levels; Israeli leaders have suggested that an attack on a strategic site; or an attack leading to major civilian casualties; or a substantive barrage on Haifa might constitute the breaking point.
Nonetheless, with three military divisions rather than the usual one now deployed in the north of Israel, the IDF has more forces poised for action on the northern border than it has preparing for an incursion into Rafah – at this point. It is clear, as Chief of Staff Halevy has specified, that Israel is “preparing for war” against Hizbullah (more than preparing for Rafah).
Is the threat to Rafah a bluff to put pressure on Hamas to concede on the deal and hostages? One way or another, both Israel’s political and military chiefs are adamant: The IDF will incurse into Rafah – ‘at some point’.
The qualitatively different Hizbullah’s strike on Safed on Israel’s northern regional command HQ on Wednesday – which that resulted in 2 dead and 7 further casualties – is being treating in Israel as the gravest attack since the start of the war, with Ben Gvir calling it a “declaration of war”. Subsequent Israeli attacks killed 11 people, including six children, in a barrage of strikes on villages across southern Lebanon, in retribution for the Safed blitz – with the fierce exchange of fire still continuing.
The ‘Safed Strike’ deep into the Galilee very likely was intended to signal that Hizbullah is not about to capitulate to western demands that it provide Israel with a ceasefire that is intended to facilitate evacuated Israelis to return to their homes in the north. As Nasrallah confirmed in a scathing attack on those external (Western) mediators who serve only as Israel’s lawyers, and neglect to address the massacres in Gaza:
“It is easier to move the Litani River forward to the borders, than to push back Hezbollah fighters from the borders, to behind the Litani River … They want us to pay a price without Israel committing to a thing”.
In these circumstances, Nasrallah clarified that residents of northern Israel will not return to their homes – warning that even more Israelis risk being displaced:
“‘Israel’ must prepare shelters, basements, hotels and schools to house two million settlers who will be evacuated from northern Palestine, [were Israel to expand the war zone].”
Nasrallah outlined what is clearly the agreed Axis of resistance’s overarching strategic plan. (There has been a flurry of meetings between senior Axis principals over the last week, across the region, for which Nasrallah is speaking):
“We are committed to fighting Israel until it is off the map. A strong Israel is dangerous to Lebanon; but a deterred Israel, defeated and exhausted, is less of a danger to Lebanon”.
“The national interest of Lebanon, the Palestinians, and the Arab world is that Israel leaves this battle defeated: Therefore, we are committed to Israel’s defeat”.
Put bluntly, the Axis has its vision of the conflict’s outcome. And it is a “deterred, defeated and exhausted” Israeli State. By implication, it is an Israel that has relinquished the Zionist project – one that is reconciled to the notion of living as Jews between the River and the Sea – albeit with rights no different to others living there (i.e. Palestinians).
On the other side, the western strategic plan, as the Washington Postreports – which the U.S. and several Arab countries hope to present within a few weeks – is a long-term plan for peace between Israel and the Palestinians, including a “time frame” for the establishment of a provisional de-militarized Palestinian “state”:
“Imperatively, it begins with a hostage deal accompanied by a six-week cease-fire between Israel and Hamas. While it may be termed “cessation of hostilities” or an “extended humanitarian pause,” such a cease-fire will signal the de facto end of the war along the lines and scale that it has been fought since 7 Oct.”
The plan addresses “Post-war Gaza”, in terms already well-known. As senior Israeli commentator, Alon Pinkas, affirms:
“Parallel to the announcement U.S., Britain and possibly other countries will consider and eventually make a joint statement of intent by recognizing a provisional, demilitarized and future Palestinian state – without delineating or specifying its borders”.
“Such a recognition does not necessarily contradict Israel’s legitimate and reasonable demand to have overriding security control over the area west of the Jordan River in the foreseeable future … [it constitutes] a practical, timebound, irreversible path to a Palestinian state living side-by-side in peace with Israel … whose recognition could also be submitted to the UN Security Council – as a binding resolution. Once the Arab countries sign off on such a framework, the U.S. believes that neither Russia nor China would veto it …
“Within the “regionalization” phase however, the Americans will craft a regional security cooperation mechanism. Some in Washington imagine a reconfigured region with a new “security architecture” as a harbinger to a gradual Mideast version of the European Union, with greater economic and infrastructure integration”.
Even Alon Pinkas, an experienced former Israeli diplomat, concedes: “If the plan seems too fantastical to you: You’re not alone”.
The basic improbabilities to this plan simply are disregarded. Firstly, Israel’s Finance Minister Smotrich responded to the reported American-Arab plan, saying: “there’s a joint American, British and Arab effort to establish a terrorist state” next to Israel. Second, (as Smotrich further notes): “They see the polls. They see how the absolute majority of Israelis oppose this idea [of a Palestinian State]”; and thirdly, some 700,000 settlers were installed in the West Bank – precisely to block any Palestinian State.
Is the U.S. really going to impose this onto a hostile Israel? How?
And, from the Resistance perspective, ‘a provisional, demilitarized and future Palestinian ‘state’, without delineated or specified borders, is not a state. It is truly a Bantustan.
The reality is that when a Palestinian State might have been a real prospect (two decades ago), the international community turned a willing ‘blind eye’ – for decades – to Israel’s successful and complete sabotage of the project. Today, circumstances are much changed: Israel has moved far to the Right and is in the grip of an eschatological passion to establish Israel on the entire “Land of Israel”.
The U.S. and Europe have only themselves to blame for the dilemma in which they now find themselves. And a policy stance – such as outlined by Biden – plainly said is doing untold strategic damage to the U.S. and its compliant European allies.
Even on the Lebanon track, let us be plain too, Israel’s demands from Lebanon go far beyond a mutual ceasefire. There is no guarantee, even should a ceasefire be reached in Gaza as part of a comprehensive hostage/end-of-war deal, that Nasrallah will agree to withdraw all his forces from the border with Israel, or conversely, that Israel will comply with its commitments.
And with the U.S. defining its Palestinian ‘solution’ as an improbable, provisional, disarmed and wholly impotent Palestinian entity, nestled within a fully militarised Israel, exercising ‘full security overlordship from the River to the Sea’, it would not be surprising were Hizbullah rather, to opt to pursue the Axis’ plan of a defeated, exhausted post-Zionism.
“Even were the American assumptions to become a working plan, it is still unclear what policy Israel will adopt on Lebanon. Even pushing Hezbollah back so that Israeli communities are no longer within the range of its anti-tank missiles does not remove the threat of tens of thousands of medium and long-range missiles. The deterrence equation between Israel and Hezbollah will continue to determine [the true] reality along the border”.
[The current U.S. working assumption, as presented by the Administration’s special envoy Amos Hochstein in his previous visits to Lebanon], “is that a border demarcation agreement between Israel and Lebanon will result in final and full recognition of the international border and thus deny Hezbollah the formal basis for justifying its continued fight against Israel to liberate occupied Lebanese territories. At the same time, it allows the Lebanese government to order its army to deploy its forces along the border in order to assert its sovereignty over its entire territory and demand that Hezbollah forces pull back from the border”.
This is just more wishful, ‘fantastical’ thinking. And it contains a flaw: Hochstein’s work plan does not include an agreement on the Sheba’a Farms, but only on the ‘Blue Line’ – the border agreed in 2000, but which is not recognized by Lebanon as an international border. If the issue of the Sheba’a Farms is not settled, Hezbollah will not be bound by a limited demarcation accord that omits the Sheba’a area.
Since Hamas’s attack on Israel on 7 October, every stratagem and protocol, dug from some musty West Wing cupboard, and upon which the U.S. leant, has failed. What was supposed to be a limited and compartmentalized military operation in Gaza by the IDF has turned into a regional firestorm. Aircraft carriers sent to deter other actors from getting involved failed with the Houthis; U.S. bases in Iraq and Syria became targets, with attacks on U.S. bases continuing, despite U.S. attempts at delivering deterrent ‘punches’.
Quite clearly, Netanyahu is ignoring Biden, and ‘defying the world’ – as this week’s headlines attest:
“Defying Biden, Netanyahu Doubles Down on Plans to Fight in Rafah” (Wall Street Journal)
“As Israel corners Rafah, Netanyahu defies the world” (Washington Post)
“U.S. won’t punish Israel for Rafah op that doesn’t protect civilians” (Politico)
“Egypt Builds Walled Enclosure on Border as Israeli Offensive Looms: Authorities are surrounding an area in the desert with concrete walls as a contingency for possible influx of Palestinian refugees” (Wall Street Journal).
Netanyahu has vowed to forge ahead, saying on Wednesday that Israel would mount a “powerful” operation in the city of Rafah, once residents have been “evacuated”. Israelis explicitly say the White House is not opposed to the Rafah blitz, provided Palestinians are given the opportunity to “evacuate” (to where, is left unsaid). (Meanwhile, Egypt is building a refugee camp inside its border, surrounded by concrete walls …).
At this point, all of the U.S.’ various problems – the political polarization, widening war, funding for wars, the alienation amongst the swing-state Arab constituencies and Biden’s sinking ratings – are beginning to feed into, and reinforce, each other. What began as a foreign-policy issue – Israel defeating Hamas – has become a significant domestic crisis. Dissatisfaction within the U.S. at Israel’s conduct of the war is fuelling the growth of significant protest movements. Who can truly believe that yet another trip by Blinken to the region will solve anything at this point, asks Malcom Kyeyune?
It is hard to say where things in the region will stand, a couple of months from now. We have entered a period of breakdown and violence, as the forces pulling apart the old status quo cascade and mutually reinforce one another.
Ahmed AbdulKareem is a Yemeni journalist based in Sana’a. He covers the war in Yemen for MintPress News as well as local Yemeni media.
Ahmed AbdulKareem
In the courtyard of Yemen’s famous Al Shaeb Mosque, guards of honor stood at attention accompanied by the melody of military music as the funeral ceremony of Yemeni marines killed in the latest round of U.S. and UK strikes commenced. The mourners, many of whom traveled from the countryside to attend, walked alongside a long convoy carrying the bodies of 17 victims as it made its way through the streets of Sana’a. Mourners held aloft photos of the deceased or thrust their rifles into the air while chanting slogans condemning the United States. Several banners peppered the crowd, emblazoned with the label given to those who gave their lives in what many view as a struggle in defense of Palestine: “Martyrs on the road to al-Quds (Jerusalem).”
Seventeen pickup trucks ensconced in green drapes bore the bodies. They were escorted by family members alongside thousands of mourners leaving Sana’a for the hometowns of the victims who hailed from various regions of Yemen. The scene unfolded last Sunday when thousands of angry Yemenis took to the streets of Sana’a and other cities to hold a funeral for those killed by the attacks. “Retribution against American soldiers… We will not abandon our revenge,” some mourners proclaimed.
In Bani Matar, 70 kilometers west of Sanaa towards the Hodeida Road, the mothers of Ziad Ajlan and Hashem Al-Sawari watched the convoy from a rooftop as it carried along the bodies of their sons. Ziad and Hashem were not involved in the fighting; they were among a number of civilians killed in attacks launched by the U.S. Navy on the Yemeni mainland one week ago. My son was martyred on the road to al-Quds,” Ziad’s mother said proudly. “We will not be broken, and we will not abandon Gaza.”
U.S. and British officials maintain that their attacks target “Houthi” military positions – ammunition stores and missile launch sites, but the reality of the ground tells a different story. Yemeni civilians say they are blind and indiscriminate and often leave civilians maimed or killed. Assuming the U.S. and UK are acting in good faith, it is clear that their intelligence information is lacking. A truck belonging to a farmer carrying plastic pipes was targeted in an airstrike outside the city of Saada last week. It is believed that the pipes were mistaken for missiles.
This story has repeated itself ad nauseam throughout Yemen since the end of December when the multinational “Operation Prosperity Guardian” (OIR) was launched in a thus-far failed attempt to protect ships linked with Israel from Ansar Allah. This week alone, as many as 40 strikes were launched by the U.S. and the UK, most targeting the coastal city of Hodeida.
Coffins of Asnar Allah fighters killed in the U.S.-led strikes on Yemen are transported during a mass funeral in Sanaa, Yemen, Feb. 10, 2024. Osamah Abdulrahman | AP
THE FOG OF WAR
The danger of Washington’s attacks on Yemen’s mainland lies not only in exposing civilians to danger but has the potential to spark retaliatory measures taken by Ansar Allah should pressure from the public and family members of victims continue to mount.
On December 29, when U.S. forces killed 10 Yemeni sailors aboard three ships in the Red Sea, Ansar Allah refrained from retaliating. But when American and British bombs peppered mainland Yemen the next month, striking major cities with over 100 precision-guided missiles, leaving civilians dead and maimed, Ansar Allah reacted, carrying out a barrage of retaliatory attacks.
Some Yemeni officials have even hinted that two U.S. Navy Seals that the U.S. government claims drowned while boarding a boat smuggling weapons into Yemen were actually killed in combat. It is not known whether the soldiers were killed in attacks by Ansar Allah ballistic missiles or drones or during a failed commando operation as the U.S. claims, but what is clear is that the U.S. is covering its losses and information about the deaths of the Seals has been highly politicized.
In fact, many of the details surrounding hostilities between the U.S. and Ansar Allah have been cast in a heavy fog of war, and it will likely be years before the truth is revealed. What is certain is that Ansar Allah has caused direct material damage to U.S. military vessels, targeting numerous times with advanced missiles and drones launched. In the wake of every such attack, a statement was issued, reaffirming Ansar Allah’s right to take revenge for those killed in American and British bombing raids.
On January 31, the Ansar Allah announced that the American destroyer, the USS Gravely, was hit by several anti-ship missiles. In the wake of the attack, US Central Command (CENTCOM) announced that the Gravely had shot down an advanced anti-ship cruise missile. Later, reports emerged that the destroyer in question and other Western military assets in the area had failed to intercept the missile until it got within “4 seconds from hitting the U.S. warship.”
On January 25, Ansar Allah said that it had clashed with American destroyers in the Gulf of Aden and Bab al-Mandab for two hours. One U.S. Navy vessel was directly hit after a failed interception attempt, according to Ansar Allah, who have been improving their capabilities since 2014, after a failed Saudi-led and U.S.-backed bombing campaign left the country in tatters.
This undated photograph released by CENTCOM shows the vessel that was being boarded by US Navy Seals near Yemen in a raid that saw two commandos go missing
MANUFACTURING CONSENT
Although President Joe Biden has repeatedly claimed that the United States does not seek to expand the war in the Middle East, the actions of the US military are undoubtedly making the situation in the Red Sea more tense. In the wake of American airstrikes targeting Hodeida on Thursday – for the ninth time that day alone, Ansar Allah Armed Forces spokesperson Brigadier Yahya Saree revealed that the group would take “further measures” within its legitimate right to self-defense in response to the repeated U.S.-UK aggression. In the same statement, Saree announced that the Barbados-flagged British Bulk Carrier ship, the LYCAVITOS, was targeted by naval missiles while sailing in the Gulf of Aden, raising questions about the actual deterrence factor of America’s escalatory approach.
Prior to that, the leader of Ansar Allah, Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, the leader of the revolution that the U.S.-backed Yemeni government in 2014, confirmed that any escalation on Ansar Allah’s part would be against Israel and to confront American and British aggression and would not target the interests of ordinary Westerners. The comment came in response to claims circulated in the media that Ansar Allah could sabotage a network of underwater internet cables that run through the Red Sea. “We do not plan to target submarine cables, and we have no intention of doing so, and what is reported in the media is a lie aimed at distorting our humanitarian position on the war on Gaza,” he said. Many Western media outlets promoted the claim, raising fears over the safety of infrastructure critical to the functioning of the Western Internet and the transmission of financial data. Yemen is strategically located, as internet lines connecting entire continents pass near it.
Airstrikes and claims that internet access may be cut off may be the tip of the escalatory iceberg, according to the government of Sana’a. The Minister of Information, Daifallah al-Shami, held a press conference on Thursday announcing that they have information that the UAE is seeking to recruit agents from multiple foreign nationalities in cooperation with Al-Qaeda and ISIS to target ships in the Red Sea and the Arabian Sea in order to confuse and distort operations carried out by Ansar Allah in support of Gaza. According to al-Shami, the move is supported by the U.S.
“WE WILL NOT ABANDON GAZA”
Contrary to what is being promoted in much of the Western media, which has taken the line that Ansar Allah’s Red Sea blockade has nothing to do with the ongoing genocide in Gaza, a review of the targets of Ansar Allah’s attacks makes their motivations clear. On October 19, Ansar Allah fired drones and missiles at Israel’s southern Eliat Port. In mid-November, the naval forces seized an Israeli ship headed towards occupied Palestine. Shortly after, Ansar Allah publically announced that the Israeli-linked ship would not be allowed to pass through the Baba al-Mandab Strait. Later, they announced that the ban on shipping would extend to all vessels attempting to reach Eliat Port. All of these measures were in support of a single, repeatedly declared goal, which was to pressure Israel to stop its war on Gaza and allow food and water to enter the besieged strip.
With visible sadness and anger, Abdul-Malik al-Houthi enumerated in a televised speech on Tuesday the reasons that motivate Yemen to continue operations to prevent international navigation supporting Israel in the Red Sea – the continued mass killing of the Gazans, renewed American support for Israel, including with lethal weapons and the use of internationally banned weapons against civilians in Gaza, including white phosphorus.
Al-Houthi said that “the Yemeni military’s retaliatory strikes in the Red Sea had proven to be effective as it led to the almost complete closure of the port of Umm al-Rashrash (the name of Eliat before Israel annexed it), and all food supply chains to Israel that were passing through the Red Sea and Bab al-Mandab stopped by 70%, and prices in the Israeli market rose by 30-50% after ships were forced to divert course through the Cape of Good Hope.” Israel, he noted, was one of the largest beneficiaries of maritime trade, with imports in 2022 reaching to $133 billion “thanks to the Red Sea.”
Responding to those who question the feasibility of Ansar Allah’s position, Al-Houthi said that “Yemeni operations have caused repercussions for ship insurance,” noting that insurers are now refusing to insure ships heading towards the ports of occupied Palestine. “Not only that,” he added, “but insurance companies require Israeli and American ships to pay additional amounts of up to 50%.”
“Our operations at sea led to a decline in Israel’s total imports of products by 25% during the past months,” Al-Houthi said, “The Israeli Ministry of Economy and Industry admitted that the Red Sea operations harmed its trade relations with 14 countries.”
Amid threats of escalation and even whispers of a Western-led ground invasion of Yemen, Ansar Allah has reiterated its commitment to its mission. Mobilization, military training, demonstrations, and other activities will be continued as long as the aggression against Gaza continues, it has reaffirmed, saying that operations at sea will continue until Israel “allows food and medical supplies and the delivery of basic needs into Gaza.” “The U.S. and UK will not achieve their goals through aggression against our country, and the only solution is to stop the aggression and deliver food and medicine to the people of Gaza,” Al-Houthi vowed.
1.4 million desperate women and children living in tents as refugees in Rafah are being indiscriminately killed by the Jewish army as this is being written.
The IDF has failed against Hamas in Gaza and the Netanyahu government has rejected the Palestinian proposal for a ceasefire. Their final gambit appears to be to eliminate the existence of the Palestinian people from Israeli occupied territory.
Many left-leaning and Muslim commentators have responded to Israel’s plan to “destroy Hamas,” as in the political organization, by stating that it would be futile. Palestinian liberation movements since 1948 have taken on the lacquer of Marxism-Leninism, secular nationalism, and now an Islam-centered ideology, but in the end, the yearning for a homeland guarantees that resistance will be eternal as long as the Palestinian people exist, regardless if Hamas survives the war or not.
This view is correct, and under normal circumstances, a negotiated settlement would’ve remedied this issue by now. What these critics miss, however, is that while many believe mass racial expulsions of native people are impossible in the 21st century due to supposed enlightened liberal norms and humanitarian laws, Israel and nations with ethnically Jewish elites are working to prove this assumption wrong.
The Jewish campaign to destroy the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) aiding Palestinians is the first step in this ethnic cleansing campaign. This has long been an agenda item for the Israeli state, which has opposed UNRWA since its founding in 1949. This entity exists to serve Palestinians expelled by Jewish forces during the Nakba and subsequent assaults.
The Israeli state’s hostility towards UNRWA is centered around the legal protection Palestinians enjoy as refugees, primarily the promise of the Right of Return. This has been portrayed by Zionists as an extremist and anti-Semitic demand, but it is a right all refugees enjoy. UN protected refugees have a high rate of success when returning to their homelands, as recently seen with the case of Afghans, Somalis and others previously forced out of their countries of origin.
The second complaint from the Israelis is that the medical, food and educational services provided to Palestinians in and around Israeli occupied territories discourages them from emigrating and settling down somewhere else.
On the other hand, the counter-argument within the Jewish community on UNRWA was that Europe and America effectively financed Israel’s occupation of Palestinians. By offering humanitarian assistance, some Israelis believed this would fill a vacuum that would otherwise be met by services provided by groups like Hamas or nations like Iran. Under the terms of agreement with UNRWA, Israel was allowed to inspect everything without conditions and supervise the use of resources such as concrete. There was even a deliberate “DeNazification” angle to UNRWA’s work, as trans-national Jewry was even able to micromanage the textbooks Palestinian children in refugee camps were allowed to read, often threatening defunding if messages critical of Jews and Zionism were being taught.
Yet this was not enough to destroy the Palestinian people’s will to resist. On January 4th, Israeli policy wonk Noga Arbell — frustrated with lack of military success in combating Hamas — proposed to the Knesset that they could only “eliminate the terrorists” by destroying the “idea” of a Palestinian state, an idea she asserted was nurtured by UNRWA.
Weeks later, the United States and its subjects Canada, Australia, Britain, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Finland, Estonia, Japan, Austria and Romania announced without warning that they would be defunding UNRWA, causing the organization to suddenly teeter on brink of financial collapse. Arab, European Union and UN leadership have condemned the decision as “collective punishment,” but Washington has ignored these complaints.
The excuse presented for cutting off money for UNRWA in the midst of one of the most brutal wars on a civilian population in history was the circulation of Israeli intelligence claiming a dozen or so aid workers (over 100 who have been killed in the war so far) were secret Hamas agents.
This intelligence appears to be an unfounded hoax. The American head of UNRWA, William Deere, has stated that every single employee of the organization is subjected to a background check and vetted by the Israeli state itself. The Israeli government has long been given the right to order the firing of UNRWA workers at will, as seen with the dozen or so employees accused of being Hamas-sympathizers being fired (or killed) despite a lack of evidence behind the charges against them. Western leaders have been tight-lipped on declaring faith in the Israeli intelligence in question. Recently, Foreign Minister Penny Wong said she doesn’t even know the real reason for why she voted to end Australia’s support for UNRWA.
How a desperate genocidal proposal travels from the Israeli parliament to become the consensus in all of the major capitals of the West in less than a month remains a mystery among those not familiar with how power is really brokered in the Washington-led liberal plutocracies.
Mass Expulsion Of All Arabs Is The End Goal
The core tenet of Zionism has always been to expel native Arabs. In 1940, Jewish National Fund leader Yosef Weitz privately plotted the subsequent ethnic cleansing of 750,000 Palestinians in 1948,
“The only solution is a Land of Israel devoid of Arabs. There is no room here for compromise. They all must be moved. Not one village can remain, and not one tribe. Only through this transfer of the Arabs living in the Land of Israel will redemption come.”
In 1969, the Israeli state brokered a deal with CIA-backed Paraguayan dictator Alfredo Stroessner to pay 60,000 Gazans to move to South America, though few appear to have taken the offer.
Following the October 7th incursion, the Misgav Institute for National Security and Zionist Strategy released a white paper calling for the “final resettlement” of the Palestinians.
Today, Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and senior official Bezalel Smotrich openly tell the Jewish public (83% of which openly support ethnically cleansing Gaza) they are actively conspiring to send Palestinians to a different country and replace them with Jews, even as figures in Washington pretend to protest.
Netanyahu withholds comments on this matter in public, but Israeli media has reported that in late December, the Prime Minister told Likud Party members that their strategy of bombing civilians and man-made famine was a deliberate tactic to terrorize Arabs into “voluntary emigration.”
At the same meeting, Netanyahu promised that his people were privately working on convincing other nations to accept millions of displaced Palestinians. The obvious destination appears to be Egypt, since it is nearby, but we should not discount the prospect of Europe as a final destination.
In late October, the Financial Times reported that the Israeli government was using the European Union to pressure Egypt into taking expelled Palestinians. Egypt has continued to insist that it will not be a party to this arrangement, not because it is against refugees (the country already hosts millions from Syria and elsewhere), but because the Arab world will perceive them as collaborators in the final destruction of the Palestinian people.
Despite early reports that Egypt was considering military action over Israel’s brazen attacks in Rafah, Fattah al-Sisi is expected to cave. In an amazing coincidence, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) — which previously ceased loaning money to Egypt — has recently “reconsidered” the offer, generically citing the Gaza war as the reason. The global finance organization has yet to make a final decision on whether to disperse the promised funds.
Arab media is pulling no punches on this development. Middle Eastern journalists have concluded that Jewish world finance is privately dangling up to $12 billion dollars in loan forgiveness from American and European banks in exchange for Egypt taking in the Palestinians Israel is pushing into Sinai. Once al-Sisi agrees to go along with the plan, the credit will flow.
If Egypt accepts “money” over “lead” in this scenario, there will likely be blowback for Europe. Prior to the conflict, the Israeli government was working with the Turkish consulate to enable Palestinians to travel to Southeastern Europe, where they became the top asylum-seeking population in Greece by mid 2023. Israel uses its bureaucracy strategically to ensure that once a Palestinian agrees to leave Israeli territory, it is very difficult, if not impossible, for them to return.
The EU has been offering to bribe the Egyptian regime since the beginning of hostilities between Israel and Palestine. The EU has gone out of its way to keep resettling potential Palestinian refugees to Europe on the table during these secret negotiations, even as it pays Arab leaders elsewhere to keep some immigrants away. The Financial Times reported on this glaring omission, stating that the arrangement, “will not specifically link EU cash to Egypt’s commitment to prevent any onward migration to Europe or a possible influx of Palestinians.”
Egyptian leadership has shown exasperation with Brussels, even declaring that they would send one million Palestinians to Europe if the aggressive lobbying continues.
The Israeli government is not so subtle. Danny Danon, the lead figure working closely with Netanyahu on the Gaza expulsion plan, took to the Wall Street Journal in November to declare, “The West Should Welcome Gaza Refugees.”
This plan has been endorsed by some of the West’s most prominent anti-Muslim Zionist voices. On the idea, Breitbart editor Joel Pollak wrote, “We [America] should give civilians from Gaza temporary refuge during the war, as long as they are not a threat, and encourage regional Arab states to do the same.”
Zionist hawk Nikki Haley has also hinted at support for this idea.
In other words, the people deemed too dangerous to live in their own homes are being welcomed by the same Zionists to the West.
But the Palestinians don’t want to leave. They are fighting to the last man to stay in their land.
Ultimately, the only check that could prevent this refugee catastrophe from going according to the Zionist plan is a victory by the Axis of Resistance.
Since the establishment of a Zionist home in Palestine in the early 20th century, Jewish settlers have massacred tens of thousands of Palestinians – mainly women, children and the elderly – whose lands and homes they have plundered and robbed with impunity.
Never in the history of mankind has a race of people gone so quickly from being exceptional victims to exceptional murderers determined to exterminate the Palestinians under the pretext of recreating their homeland, the biblical Israel.
But Palestine was never the homeland of the Jews. Biblical accounts are not supported by historical or archaeological discoveries. “It’s a romantic fantasy,” admits Jewish historian Norman F. Cantor in his book on Jewish history, The Sacred Chain. “The whole notion of Israel and its history is a literary fiction,” says Professor Thomas Thompson in his book The Mythic Past: Biblical Archeology and the Myth of Israel.
The glorious kingdom of David and Solomon, the promised land stretching from the Euphrates to the Nile that Zionists claim to want to recreate, is a total fabrication. Solomon and his kingdom never existed. Jerusalem was never the capital of Israel. Modern archaeology has completely demolished these myths.As Laurent Guyénot says in his book Our God is your God too, but he Has chosen us. Essays on Jewish Power,
When Ben-Gurion declared before the Knesset, three days after invading the Sinai in 1956, that what was at stake was “the restoration of the kingdom of David and Solomon,” and when Israeli leaders continue to dream of a Greater Israel of biblical proportions, they are merely perpetuating a two-thousand-year-old deception – a self-deception perhaps, but a deception nonetheless.
Under the mantle of religion and the false biblical prophecy of a Greater Israel stretching from the Euphrates to the Nile, the Zionists are constantly seeking to expand their territory – Israel being the only country in the world with no fixed borders. They follow and respect no convention, no treaty, no resolution; lie about everything and nothing; do whatever they please; practice torture, apartheid, racial nationalism, terrorism, slavery, and genocide; kill babies, pregnant women, the elderly, rape young girls, break the bones of kids with an obvious pleasure, in front of the whole world; start color revolutions and wars in neighboring countries in order to expand their territory; commit false-flag attacks; accumulate nuclear warheads which they threaten to use against the whole world if their Zionist project fails.
And if anyone dares to complain, they use the Holocaust and anti-Semitism arguments to shut them down. But make no mistake about it, according to Shulamit Aloni, a former member of the Israeli government, these all-purpose accusations which are the keystones of their hegemonic ambitions are a ruse:
When someone in Europe criticizes Israel, we bring up the Holocaust. When someone in this country [the United States] criticizes Israel, they are anti-Semites… We use the Holocaust, anti-Semitism and Jewish suffering to justify everything we do to the Palestinians.
Wherever you are on this earth, beware! if you don’t believe in the Holocaust, you will be chastised, crushed, ostracized, and even jailed. In fact, at the end of July 2004, “Israel’s parliament (the Knesset) unanimously passed a law making it possible to demand the extradition to Israel of anyone guilty, anywhere in the world, of Holocaust denial”.
To add insult to injury, on January 20, 2022, the United Nations (UN) adopted a resolution tabled by Israel and Germany calling on all nations of the world to take active steps to combat all unwanted skeptical research into the National Socialist persecution of the Jews, and the popular social chatter that ensues. After a propaganda speech by Gilad Erdon, Israel’s representative at the UN, the UN passed the resolution without a vote.
Teaching about the Holocaust is now compulsory in almost all Western schools. Everyone is obliged not only to learn, but also to believe, on pain of prosecution, the official account of the Holocaust.
It’s a rather strange situation. Eighty years on, we should be able to discuss the subject freely, seeking contradiction as we do with the great Judeo-Bolshevik terror of 1937-1938, the Judeo-Bolshevik gulags and the Judeo-Bolshevik famine of the Holodomor, three crimes against humanity that caused the death of some 66 million Russians, according to Nobel Prize winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn, author of one of the most censored books in modern history, Two Hundred Years Together.
Why should the suffering of the Jews be more important than that of others? “Jewish death and suffering,” says Marc Weber of the Institute of Historical Revision “do not deserve to be venerated more than the death and suffering of non-Jews.” Human history has witnessed many genocides far more serious in scale than the Jewish genocide. Why is the Jewish genocide the only one that counts? Well, according to historian of religion Youssef Hindi:
The ongoing sacralization of the Hebrew state required the prior sacralization of the Jewish people. In contemporary times, when atheism reigns, at least in appearance, it was necessary to invent a “profane” cult, or more precisely, a cult devoid of transcendence, in order to make Western goyim (non-Jews) accept the idea of the sacredness of the Jews.
Why make the Jews and the State of Israel sacred? In order to achieve what many Jewish and non-Jewish authors, journalists, historians and philosophers have identified as the ultimate Jewish domination of the Earth and its peoples, it is vital that Jews and the State of Israel are protected from criticism and given preferential treatment.
Jews are a tiny minority, the scum of the earth according to some, expelled from 109 countries since the year 250. Their predominant role in numerous crimes against humanity is an existential threat to them. How can they find friends if they fail to erase their role in these abominable crimes with alacrity and firmness?
In other words, how can they conquer the world if they fail to restore their image as the powerless innocent victims of human vindictiveness and jealousy? No one would cooperate with them if they were seen for what they really are, the greatest criminals of the 20th century, according to Ron Unz, the Jewish editor and owner of one of America’s leading conservative websites, The Unz Review:
But add to this the relatively small size of the world’s Jewish community, some 16 million before the Second World War, and the conclusion is that, per capita, Jews were the greatest mass murderers of the 20th century. And by a huge margin, with no other nationality even remotely close. And yet, through the astonishing alchemy of Hollywood, the greatest killers of the last hundred years have been magically transformed into the greatest victims, a transformation so seemingly implausible that future generations will surely be left speechless.
The cult of the Holocaust, along with accusations of anti-Semitism and incitement to hatred, are both the sword and the shield with which the Jews and the State of Israel, with the help of their non-Jewish allies such as Elon Musk and their insufferable thought police – in France, the Ligue internationale contre le racisme et l’antisémitisme (International League Against Racism and Antisemitism) (LICRA) and in the USA, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) – obtain financial reparations, censor and persecute their opponents, protect themselves from all criticism, unite and mobilize their community and realize their hegemonic ambitions over the world.
“It’s an instrument that we use a lot,” points out Israeli historian Moshe Zimmerman; “in a cynical way, you could say that the Holocaust is one of the objects that lends itself best to manipulating the public, the Jewish people in particular, in Israel and abroad.” Indeed, as Jewish writer Philip Roth puts it,
Auschwitz is one of the reasons why Israel is pushing back its borders. It is Auschwitz that justifies the bombing of civilians in neighboring countries. It is Auschwitz that justifies the breaking of Palestinian children’s bones and the mutilation of Arab mothers. Power-mad Jews, that’s what they are, no different from any other power-mad of their kind, except that they use the myth of the Shoah to justify their mad desire for power and the fact that they victimize us.
It’s also Auschwitz that justifies freedom-destroying laws worthy of the worst dystopian novels. It is Auschwitz that is blocking the resurgence of nationalism everywhere in the West, except in Israel. Ultimately, Auschwitz is the cornerstone of the borderless world that the globalists are trying to impose on the whole world through lies, manipulation. and force. As Ian Kagedan, spokesman for the Canadian Jewish Congress and the Canadian branch of B’nai B’rith, puts it: “The memory of the Holocaust is at the heart of the new world order.“
In short, the Holocaust has evolved over the years to become the national myth not only of the Jewish people, but of the globalists in general. It now has all the characteristics of a religion, with its own Satan, Hitler, and its own saint, the Jewish nation.
In this version of things, Christ crucified on the cross is replaced by the Jewish nation crucified in the gas chambers. Through this substitution, this “martyred” people is trying to plagiarize Christian Christology and to appropriate the title of Messiah for itself, in order to push Catholics and Christians in general to “Judaize” and accept their globalist project without reluctance. This religion of the Holocaust is also the glue that holds the Jewish people together as a distinct nationality, because there’s nothing like persecution and victimization to rally your troops.
It is for these reasons above all that Jews and their non-Jewish allies maintain and protect it so carefully.
Without the Holocaust, there would be no anti-racism, no replacement immigration, no positive discrimination, no egalitarianism, no borderless world, no plutocracy, no censorship, no take-over of X, no world government, no consumerism, no sexual dystopia, no critical race theory, and no Gaza genocide.
In the end, whether the Holocaust is true or not matters quite a bit. If it did not exist, like many people believe, the whole castle of cards just described would come tumbling down in no time.
In the end, even if the holocaust was true, and there are plenty of reasons to think it is not true, Israel should not think for one second that the suffering of the Jews during the Second World War gives them every right, “especially with regard to the hostilities in Gaza,” says Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. The Russians, for example, lost 27 million people in the Second World War, two-thirds of them civilians, many of them Jews, but that doesn’t give them the right to do as they please, says Lavrov.
The final stage of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, an orchestrated mass starvation, has begun. The international community does not intend to stop it.
The final stage of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, an orchestrated mass starvation, has begun. The international community does not intend to stop it.
There was never any possibility that the Israeli government would agree to a pause in the fighting proposed by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, much less a ceasefire. Israel is on the verge of delivering the coup de grâce in its war on Palestinians in Gaza – mass starvation. When Israeli leaders use the term “absolute victory,” they mean total decimation, total elimination. The Nazis in 1942 systematically starved the 500,000 men, women and children in the Warsaw Ghetto. This is a number Israel intends to exceed.
Israel, and its chief patron the United States, by attempting to shut down the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), which provides food and aid to Gaza, is not only committing a war crime, but is in flagrant defiance of the International Court of Justice (ICJ). The court found the charges of genocide brought by South Africa, which included statements and facts gathered by UNWRA, plausible. It ordered Israel to abide by six provisional measures to prevent genocide and alleviate the humanitarian catastrophe. The fourth provisional measure calls on Israel to secure immediate and effective steps to provide humanitarian assistance and essential services in Gaza.
UNRWA’s reports on conditions in Gaza, which I covered as a reporter for seven years, and its documentation of indiscriminate Israeli attacks illustrate that, as UNRWA said, “unilaterally declared ‘safe zones’ are not safe at all. Nowhere in Gaza is safe.”
UNRWA’s role in documenting the genocide, as well as providing food and aid to the Palestinians, infuriates the Israeli government. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused UNRWA after the ruling of providing false information to the ICJ. Already an Israeli target for decades, Israel decided that UNRWA, which supports 5.9 million Palestinian refugees across the Middle East with clinics, schools and food, had to be eliminated. Israel’s destruction of UNRWA serves a political as well as material objective.
The evidence-free Israeli accusations against UNRWA that a dozen of the 13,000 employees had links to those who carried out the attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, which saw some 1,200 Israelis killed, did the trick. It led 16 major donors, including the United States, the U.K., Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland, Finland, Australia, Canada, Sweden, Estonia and Japan, to suspend financial support for the relief agency on which nearly every Palestinian in Gaza depends for food. Israel has killed 152 UNRWA workers and damaged 147 UNRWA installations since Oct. 7. Israel has also bombed UNRWA relief trucks.
More than 27,708 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, some 67,000 have been wounded and at least 7,000 are missing, most likely dead and buried under the rubble.
More than half a million Palestinians – one in four – are starving in Gaza, according to the U.N. Starvation will soon be ubiquitous. Palestinians in Gaza, at least 1.9 million of whom have been internally displaced, lack not only sufficient food, but clean water, shelter and medicine. There are few fruits or vegetables. There is little flour to make bread. Pasta, along with meat, cheese and eggs, have disappeared. Black market prices for dry goods such as lentils and beans have increased 25 times from pre-war prices. A bag of flour on the black market has risen from $8.00 to $200 dollars. The healthcare system in Gaza, with only three of Gaza’s 36 hospitals left partially functioning, has largely collapsed. Some 1.3 million displaced Palestinians live on the streets of the southern city of Rafah, which Israel designated a “safe zone,” but has begun to bomb. Families shiver in the winter rains under flimsy tarps amid pools of raw sewage. An estimated 90 percent of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been driven from their homes.
“There is no instance since the Second World War in which an entire population has been reduced to extreme hunger and destitution with such speed,” writes Alex de Waal, executive director of the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University and the author of “Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine,” in the Guardian. “And there’s no case in which the international obligation to stop it has been so clear.”
The United States, formerly UNRWA’s largest contributor, provided $422 million to the agency in 2023. The severance of funds ensures that UNRWA food deliveries, already in very short supply because of blockages by Israel, will largely come to a halt by the end of February or the beginning of March.
Israel has given the Palestinians in Gaza two choices. Leave or die.
I covered the famine in Sudan in 1988 that took 250,000 lives. There are streaks in my lungs, scars from standing amid hundreds of Sudanese who were dying of tuberculosis. I was strong and healthy and fought off the contagion. They were weak and emaciated and did not. The international community, as is in Gaza, did little to intervene.
The precursor to starvation – undernourishment – already affects most Palestinians in Gaza. Those who starve lack enough calories to sustain themselves. In desperation people begin to eat animal fodder, grass, leaves, insects, rodents, even dirt. They suffer from diarrhea and respiratory infections. They rip up tiny bits of food, often spoiled, and ration it.
Soon, lacking enough iron to produce hemoglobin, a protein in red blood cells that carries oxygen from the lungs to the body, and myoglobin, a protein that provides oxygen to muscles, coupled with a lack of vitamin B1 , they become anemic. The body feeds on itself. Tissue and muscle waste away. It is impossible to regulate body temperature. Kidneys shut down. Immune systems crash. Vital organs – brain, heart, lungs, ovaries and testes — atrophy. Blood circulation slows. The volume of blood decreases. Infectious diseases such as typhoid, tuberculosis and cholera become an epidemic, killing people by the thousands.
It is impossible to concentrate. Emaciated victims succumb to mental and emotional withdrawal and apathy. They do not want to be touched or moved. The heart muscle is weakened. Victims, even at rest, are in a state of virtual heart failure. Wounds do not heal. Vision is impaired with cataracts, even among the young. Finally, wracked by convulsions and hallucinations, the heart stops. This process can last up to 40 days for an adult. Children, the elderly and the sick expire at faster rates.
I saw hundreds of skeletal figures, specters of human beings, moving forlornly at a glacial pace across the barren Sudanese landscape. Hyenas, accustomed to eating human flesh, routinely picked off small children. I stood over clusters of bleached human bones on the outskirts of villages where dozens of people, too weak to walk, had laid down in a group and never gotten up. Many were the remains of entire families.
In the abandoned town of Maya Abun bats dangled from the rafters of the gutted Italian mission church. The streets were overgrown with tussocks of grass. The dirt airstrip was flanked by hundreds of human bones, skulls and the remnants of iron bracelets, colored beads, baskets and tattering strips of clothing. The palm trees had been cut in half. People had eaten the leaves and the pulp inside. There had been a rumor that food would be delivered by plane. People had walked for days to the airstrip. They waited and waited and waited. No plane arrived. No one buried the dead.
Now, from a distance, I watch this happen in another land in another time. I know the indifference that doomed the Sudanese, mostly Dinkas, and today dooms the Palestinians. The poor, especially when they are of color, do not count. They can be killed like flies. The starvation in Gaza is not a natural disaster. It is Israel’s masterplan.
There will be scholars and historians who will write of this genocide, falsely believing that we can learn from the past, that we are different, that history can prevent us from being, once again, barbarians. They will hold academic conferences. They will say “Never again!” They will praise themselves for being more humane and civilized. But when it comes time to speak out with each new genocide, fearful of losing their status or academic positions, they will scurry like rats into their holes. Human history is one long atrocity for the world’s poor and vulnerable. Gaza is another chapter.
MintPress study of major U.S. media outlets’ coverage of the Yemeni Red Sea blockade has found an overwhelming bias in the press, which presented the event as an aggressive, hostile act of terrorism by Ansar Allah (a.k.a. the Houthis), who were presented as pawns of the Iranian government. While constantly putting forward pro-war talking points, the U.S. was portrayed as a good faith, neutral actor being “dragged” into another Middle Eastern conflict against its will.
Since November, Ansar Allah has been conducting a blockade of Israeli ships entering the Red Sea in an attempt to force Israel to stop its attack on the people of Gaza. The U.S. government, which has refused to act to stop a genocide, sprang into action to prevent damage to private property, leading an international coalition to bomb targets in Yemen.
The effect of the blockade has been substantial. With hundreds of vessels taking the detour around Africa, big businesses like Tesla and Volvo have announced they have suspended European production. Ikea has warned that it is running low on supplies, and the price of a standard shipping container between China and Europe has more than doubled. Ansar Allah, evidently, has been able to target a weak spot of global capitalism.
Western airstrikes on Yemen, however, according to Ansar Allah spokesperson Mohammed al-Bukhaiti, at least, said that they have had only a “very limited” impact so far. Al-Bukhaiti made these comments in a recent interview with MintPress News.
BIASED REPORTING
MintPress conducted a study of four leading American outlets: The New York Times, CNN, Fox News and NBC News. Together, these outlets often set the agenda for the rest of the media system and could be said to be a reasonable representation of the corporate media spectrum as a whole.
Using the search term “Yemen” in the Dow Jones Factiva global news database, the fifteen most recent relevant articles from each outlet were read and studied, giving a total sample of 60 articles. All articles were published in January 2024 or December 2023.
For full information and coding, see the attached viewable spreadsheet.
The study found the media wildly distorted reality, presenting a skewed picture that aided U.S. imperial ambitions. For one, every article in the study (60 out of 60) used the word “Houthis” rather than “Ansar Allah” to describe the movement which took part in the Yemeni Revolution of 2011 and rose up against the government in 2014, taking control of the capital Sanaa, becoming the new de facto government. Many in Yemen consider the term “Houthi” to be a derogatory term for an umbrella movement of people. As Mohammed Ali al-Houthi, Head of Yemen’s Supreme Revolutionary Committee, told MintPress:
“Houthis’ is not a name we apply to ourselves. We refuse to be called Houthis. It is not from us. It is a name given to us by our enemies in an attempt to frame the broad masses in Yemeni society that belong to our project.“
Yet only two articles even mentioned the name “Ansar Allah” at all.
Since 2014, Ansar Allah has been in control of the vast majority of Yemen, despite a U.S.-backed Saudi coalition attempting to beat them back and restore the previous administration.
Many of the articles studied, however (22 of the 60 in total), did not present Ansar Allah as a governmental force but rather as a “tribal group” (the New York Times), a “ragtag but effective” rebel organization (CNN), or a “large clan” of “extremists” (NBC News). Fourteen articles went further, using the word “terrorist” in reference to Ansar Allah, usually in the context of the U.S. government or American officials calling them such.
Some, however, used it as a supposedly uncontroversial descriptor. One Fox article, for example, read: “For weeks, the Yemeni terrorist group’s actions have been disrupting maritime traffic, while the U.S. military has been responding with strikes.” And a CNN caption noted that U.S. forces “conducted strikes on 8 Houthi targets in Iranian-backed Houthi terrorist-controlled areas of Yemen on January 22.”
Ansar Allah is responding to an Israeli onslaught that has killed tens of thousands of civilians and displaced around 1.9 million Gazans. Yet Israel and its actions were almost never described as “terrorism,” despite arguably fitting the definition far better than the Yemeni movement. The sole exception to this was a comment from al-Houthi, whom CNN quoted as calling Israel a “terrorist state.” Neither the United States nor its actions were ever described using such language.
EYES ON IRAN
Although the perpetrator of the attacks on shipping is unquestionably Ansar Allah, corporate media had another culprit in mind: Iran. Fifty-nine of the 60 articles studied reminded readers that the Yemeni group is supported by the Islamic Republic, thereby directly pointing the finger at Tehran.
It is indeed true that Iran supports Ansar Allah politically and militarily. When directly asked by MintPress if Tehran supplies it with weapons, al-Bukhaiti dodged the question, calling it a “marginal issue.” Why this facet of the story needed to be repeated literally hundreds of times is unclear. Often, the media studied would repeat it ad nauseam, to the point where a reader would be forgiven for thinking Ansar Allah’s official name was the “Iran-backed Houthis.” One CNN round-up used the phrase (or similar) seven times, a Fox News article six times, and an NBC News report five times.
Not only was the “Iran-backed” factoid used constantly, but it was also made a prominent part of how the issue was framed to the American public. The title of one Fox News report, for instance, read (emphasis added throughout): “U.S.-U.K. coalition strike Iran-backed Houthi targets in Yemen after spate of ship attacks in Red Sea,” its subheadline stated that: “Yemen’s Iranian-backed Houthi militants have stepped up attacks on commercial vessels in the Red Sea in recent weeks,” and its first sentence read: “The United States and Britain carried out a series of airstrikes on military locations belonging to Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen early Friday in response to the militant group’s ongoing attacks on vessels traveling through the Red Sea.”
From a stylistic point of view, repeating the same phrase continuously is very poor form. It does, however, drive the point home, suggesting perhaps that this was an inorganic directive from above.
This is far from an unlikely event. We know, for example, that in October, new CNN CEO Mark Thompson sent out a memo to staff instructing them to always use the moniker “Hamas-controlled” when discussing the Gazan Health Ministry and their figures for deaths from Israeli bombardment. This was done with the clear intent to undermine the Palestinian side of the story.
Not only did the four outlets studied constantly remind readers that Ansar Allah is supported by Iran, but they also regularly framed the violence as orchestrated by Tehran and that Ansar Allah is little more than a group of mindless, unthinking pawns of Ayatollah Khamenei. As the New York Times wrote:
“Investing in proxy forces — fellow Shiites in Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen, and the Sunni Hamas in the Gaza Strip — allows Iran to cause trouble for its enemies, and to raise the prospect of causing more if attacked…The Houthi movement in Yemen launched an insurgency against the government two decades ago. What was once a ragtag rebel force gained power thanks at least in part to covert military aid from Iran, according to American and Middle Eastern officials and analysts.”
This “Iran is masterfully pulling all the strings” framing was present in 21 of the 60 articles.
The fearmongering about Iran did not stop there, however, with some outlets suggesting Tehran is building an international terror network or constructing an atomic bomb. The New York Times quoted one analyst who said:
Iran is really pushing it…It’s another reason they don’t want a war now: They want their centrifuges to run peacefully.” The Iranians do not have a nuclear weapon but could enrich enough uranium to weapons-grade in a few weeks, from the current 60 percent enrichment to 90 percent, he said. ”They’ve done 95 percent of the work.’”
The point of all this was to demonize Ansar Allah and ramp up tensions with Iran, leading to the inevitable calls for war. “The U.S. needs to strike Iran, and make it smart,” ran the (since changed) title of a Washington Post editorial. “The West may now have no option but to attack Iran,” wrote neoconservative Iran hawk John Bolton in the pages of The Daily Telegraph. Bolton, of course, is part of a group called United Against Nuclear Iran that, since its inception, has been attempting to convince the U.S. to bomb Iran. Earlier this year, MintPress News profiled the shady think tank.
While the media in the sample reminded us literally hundreds of times that Ansar Allah is Iran-backed, similar phrases such as “U.S.-backed Saudi Arabia” or “America-backed Israel” were never used, despite the fact that Washington props both those countries up, with diplomatic, military and economic support. The Biden administration has rushed more than $14 billion in military aid to Israel since October 7, sent a fleet of warships to the region, and blocked diplomatic efforts to stop Israel’s attack on Gaza.
Meanwhile, it is doubtful whether Saudi Arabia would exist in its current form without U.S. support. Militarily alone, the U.S. has sold tens of billions of dollars worth of weaponry to Riyadh, helping the petro-state to convert its oil profits into security. From 2014 to 2023, Saudi Arabia led a U.S.-backed coalition force attempting to remove Ansar Allah from power. This consisted primarily of a massive bombing campaign against civilian targets in Yemen, including farms, hospitals and sanitation infrastructure. The violence turned Yemen into what the United Nations regularly called the “world’s worst humanitarian crisis,” with around 400,000 people dying and tens of millions going hungry and lacking even basic healthcare.
The U.S. backed Saudi Arabia the whole way, selling the government at least $28.4 billion worth of arms, according to a MintPress study. In 2021, the Biden administration announced it would only sell the kingdom “defensive” technology. However, this has included shipments of cruise missiles, attack helicopters, and support for gunships.
Both Saudi Arabia and Israel featured prominently in the articles studied. But only five of the 60 mentioned U.S. support for Saudi Arabia, and none at all for Israel. This context is extremely important for American audiences to know. Without their government’s political, military, economic and diplomatic support, none of this would be possible, and the current situation would be radically different. Only six articles mentioned U.S. support for the Saudi onslaught against Yemen – and none featured the fact prominently as they did with Iranian support for Ansar Allah.
Only one article in the sample suggested that Ansar Allah might not simply be an Iranian cat’s paw. The New York Times wrote that: “The Houthis are an important arm of Iran’s so-called ‘axis of resistance,’ which includes armed groups across the Middle East. But Yemeni analysts say they view the militia as a complex Yemeni group, rather than just an Iranian proxy.” This was the sum total of information given suggesting Ansar Allah is an independent actor.
A HUMANITARIAN BLOCKADE?
Yemen considers its actions in blocking Israeli traffic from the Red Sea as a humanitarian gesture, similar to the “right to protect” concept the U.S. frequently invokes to justify what it sees as humanitarian interventions across the world. As al-Houthi toldMintPress:
“First, our position is religious and humanitarian, and we see a tremendous injustice. We know the size and severity of these massacres committed against the people of Gaza. We have suffered from American-Saudi-Emirati terrorism in a coalition that has launched a war and imposed a blockade against us that is still ongoing. Therefore, we move from this standpoint and do not want the same crime to be repeated.“
Al-Bukhati said that Ansar Allah did not intend to kill anyone with their actions and that they would stop if Israel ceased its attack on Gaza, telling MintCast host Mnar Adley that:
We affirm to everyone that we only target ships associated with the Zionist entity [Israel], not with the intention of sinking or seizing them, but rather to divert them from their course in order to increase the economic cost on the Zionist entity [Israel] as a pressure tactic to stop the crimes of genocide in Gaza.”
However, this “humanitarian” framing of Yemen’s actions was not prominently used and was only introduced by identifying it as a Houthi claim. Many articles only alluded to the position of Ansar Allah. CNN wrote that “The Iran-backed Houthis have said they won’t stop their attacks on commercial shipping in the Red Sea until the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza ends.” Meanwhile, NBC News and Fox News frequently presented Ansar Allah’s actions as purely in support of their ally, Hamas, as the following two examples illustrate:
“The Iran-backed militants, who say their actions are aimed at supporting Hamas, vowed retaliation and said the attacks had killed at least 5 fighters at multiple rebel-held sites” (NBC News).
“Houthi forces have taken credit for continued attacks on merchant vessels and threatened to expand their targets to include U.S. and British vessels — all in a campaign to support Hamas in its war against Israel” (Fox News).
Therefore, humanitarian action was refashioned into support for terrorism.
Other articles also suggested a wide range of reasons for the blockade, including to “expand a regional war” and “distract the [Yemeni] public” from their “failing…governance” (New York Times), to “attempt to gain legitimacy at home,” (CNN), and “revenge against the U.S. for supporting Saudi Arabia,” (NBC News). Many offered no explanation for the blockade whatsoever.
A WAR “NOBODY WANTS”
As al-Bukhaiti’s comments suggest, there would be a very easy way to end the blockade: get Israel to end its operations in Gaza. But only twice in 60 articles was this reality even mentioned; one noting that Omani and Qatari officials advised that “reaching a cease-fire in Gaza would remove the Houthis’ stated impetus for the attacks,” and once in the final sentence of an NBC News article quoting al-Bukhaiti himself saying exactly as much. However, due to the placement of the information and the fact that it came from an organization regularly described as an Iran-backed extremist terrorist group, that idea likely held little weight with readers. Instead, military solutions (i.e., bombing Yemen) were the overwhelming response offered by the corporate press in their reporting.
Despite this, the media consistently presented the United States as a neutral and honest actor in the Middle East, on the verge of being “sucked” into another war against its will. As the New York Times wrote, “President Biden and his aides have struggled to keep the war contained, fearful that a regional escalation could quickly draw in American forces.” There was a profound “reluctance,” the Times told readers, from Biden to strike Yemen, but he had been left with “no real choice” but to do so.
This framing follows the classic trope of the bumbling empire “stumbling” into war that media watchdog Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting has documented, where the United States is always “responding” to crises and is never the aggressor. “How America Could Stumble Into War With Iran,” wrote The Atlantic; “Trump could easily get us sucked into Afghanistan again,” Slate worried; “What It Would Take to Pull the US Into a War in Asia,” Quartz told readers.
None of the journalists writing about the U.S.’ frequent misfortune with war ever seem to contemplate why China, Brazil, Indonesia, or any other similarly large country do not get pulled into wars of their own volition as the United States does.
The four media outlets studied regularly presented the U.S. bombing one of the world’s poorest countries as a method of defending itself. CNN wrote that “Administration officials have repeatedly said that they see these actions as defensive rather than escalatory,” without comment. And Fox News ran with the extraordinary headline, “U.S. carries out ‘self-defense’ strike in Yemen against Iran-backed Houthi missiles” – a framing which could surely only fly in a deeply propagandized nation.
In reality, the United States’ military meddling in Yemen did not start this winter. Biden is the fourth successive U.S. president to bomb the country. In December, the White House confirmed that there are already American troops in Yemen, though what their precise focus is remains unclear.
HOW PROPAGANDA WORKS
This sort of wildly skewed coverage does not happen by accident. Rather, it is the outcome of structural and ideological factors inherent within corporate media. The New York Times is committed to Zionism as an ideology, and its writers on the Middle East are not neutral actors but protagonists in the ongoing displacement of Palestinians. The newspaper owns property in West Jerusalem that was seized from the family of writer Ghada Kharmi during the 1948 ethnic cleansing. And while many Times writers are openly supportive of the Israeli project and have family members serving in the Israeli Defense Forces, staff who speak out against the ongoing genocide are promptly shown the door.
Fox News is no less complicit in the Israeli project. Its owner, Rupert Murdoch, is a major owner in Genie Energy, a company profiting from oil drilling in the illegally occupied Golan Heights region. Murdoch is famously hands-on as a boss and makes sure all of his media outlets follow his line on major issues. And on Israel, the Australian billionaire is explicit: “Israel is the greatest ally of democracy in a region beset with turmoil and radicalism,” he said in 2013. The network’s massive Evangelical Christian viewership would expect little else than strong support for the U.S.-Israeli position, either.
CNN, meanwhile, operates a strict, censorious, top-down approach to its Middle East coverage, with everything the outlet prints having to go through its notoriously pro-Israel Jerusalem bureau before publishing. Senior executives send out directives instructing staff to make sure that Hamas (not Israel) is always presented as responsible for the current violence while, at the same time, barring any reporting of Hamas’ viewpoint, which its senior director of news standards and practices told staff was “not newsworthy” and amounted to “inflammatory rhetoric and propaganda.”
Therefore, the results of this study, while shocking, should not be surprising, given this context. Through examining the coverage of Yemen in four leading U.S. outlets, it is clear that corporate media are failing to inform the public of many of the basic realities of who Ansar Allah is, why they are carrying out their campaign, and what it would take to end the hostilities, they are perpetuating this war, and therefore are every bit as responsible as the politicians and military commanders who keep the bloodshed going.
In the wake of the International Court of Justice’s (ICJ) landmark ruling in a case brought by South Africa against Israel, which found the Jewish state could be committing genocide in Gaza and must immediately cease its indiscriminate, industrial-scale slaughter of unarmed, innocent Palestinians of all ages, many Western journalists, politicians, pundits and influencers have changed their tune on the savagery. Or at least gone eerily silent, having previously whitewashed, legitimized, or even outright endorsed a twenty-first-century Holocaust.
This abrupt volte-face cannot be attributed to any moral qualms about Zionist actions since October 7. A far more likely explanation is that, given numerous statements of Israeli officials that the ICJ has found to indicate genocidal intent, they are worried their past advocacy and amplification of as yet unindicted war criminals could, in the future, be in itself legally actionable. Yet, some Zionist propagandists and apologists have not been deterred by the ruling’s ramifications.
Among the most vocal figures continuing to celebrate and encourage the Gaza genocide is Lee Kern, a self-described comedian who served as the lead writer for numerous high-profile cinema and TV projects led by Sacha Baron Cohen, including the sequel to “Borat,” and “Who Is America?” On a daily basis, since the Israeli Occupation Force carnage erupted, he has posted disgustingly Islamophobic statements while cheering and justifying Zionist bloodshed.
An Instagram post by Lee Kern, lead writer for multiple Sacha Baron Cohen films during his “Israel we F*cking Love You,” tour
At the end of 2023, Kern also visited Tel Aviv to co-host an event, “Israel we F*cking Love You,” alongside Michael Rapaport, a failed actor and convicted harasser turned wannabe culture warrior. The Zionist entity has attracted numerous Z-list celebrities to its stolen land in recent months, including unrepentant pedophile Jerry Seinfeld, in a lame attempt to boost its PR. Given Cohen’s ardent Zionism, it is rather conspicuous he has not made the journey.
Nonetheless, Cohen has been playing an active role behind the scenes in the genocide. In November 2023, he was among several high-profile figures who lobbied TikTok in private to block content and comments critical of Israel. He had good reason to believe this intervention would be decisive. In September 2020, he suspended his Instagram account to protest purported “hate speech” on the platform and Facebook. The Anti-Defamation League-sponsored action prompted over 1,000 businesses to suspend their Facebook ads for a month.
Cohen has, in recent years, significantly upped the ante of his public Zionist activism under the aegis of fighting anti-Semitism. He has claimed his “comedy” output, often coordinated with the CIA and Pentagon, is concerned with the same objective. This work almost universally features racist, crude stereotypes of Muslims, whom he portrays wearing makeup and wigs reminiscent of blackface. One might reasonably ask whether his true purpose all along has been to dehumanize Muslims everywhere in order to justify Israel’s genocide.
‘KAZAKH CENSORS’
Perhaps the most well-known – or infamous – segment of Cohen’s 2006 smash hit movie Borat is a scene very early on, in which he and a vast crowd spectate “the running of the Jew,” a purported annual Kazakhstan tradition. Easily the movie’s most impactful and memorable visual setpiece, standalone clips have garnered millions of views online since 2006. A virtually unique example of the film not featuring an “undercover” stunt, who were Cohen’s ultimate intended victims and audience here?
Giant, grotesque constructions of a Jewish man and woman replete with green skin, claws, devil horns, and pronounced hooked noses race down a dirt track after Kazakhs waving wads of money. When the female “Jew” stops mid-chase to spawn a gigantic “Jew egg,” Borat cheers on a gaggle of children who abruptly arrive to “crush that Jew chick before it hatches!” This scene is central to the film’s plot – if one can even refer to it as such.
A scene from “Borat” portrays a Muslim caricature cheering on a crowd at a fictional “A Running of the Jew” festival
Innate Kazakh anti-Semitism is the very inspiration for Borat’s “cultural learnings” tour around the U.S. As he explains immediately after the scene, his country faces three major problems – “social, economic, and Jew.” Throughout the movie, Borat invokes numerous hideous anti-Semitic tropes – Jews are greedy, secretly control international finance, governments and the media, and were responsible for 9/11. At one point, he even sings a supposedly popular Kazakh folk song titled “Throw the Jew down the Well.”
In all of Cohen’s in-character public appearances at the time, Borat made his visceral loathing of Jews abundantly clear. In November 2006, he was a guest on “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno,” an interview subsequently included on the film’s DVD edition. When asked by the host whether he thought his film was homophobic and anti-Semitic, Borat gleefully replied, “Thank you very much!” Meanwhile, at an advance screening of the movie in Manhattan, he declared to the assembled press and paparazzi:
At first, Kazakh censors wouldn’t let me release this movie because of anti-Semitism. But then they decided that there was just enough.”
The Amazon-produced “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm” in 2020 dialed up the main character’s rabid anti-Semitism even further. In one scene, he attends a synagogue dressed in anti-Semitic clothing, including a giant fake nose, and announces he saw a Facebook post claiming the Holocaust never happened. Judith Dim Evans, a Holocaust survivor present, greets him warmly, invites him to touch her own “Jewish nose,” and then proceeds to politely educate him about the realities of Nazi genocide while highlighting her personal history.
Understandably, many viewers effusively praised Evans’ dignity and grace. Cohen has claimed that before filming the scene, he broke character in private with her to explain he was himself Jewish, and his objective was to highlight anti-Semitic attitudes and the correct way of challenging them – supposedly the very first time one of his “victims” had been in on the gag all along. Evans herself was unable to confirm this version of events, as she sadly passed away before the film’s release.
Her daughter begged to differ, however, and filed a lawsuit against Amazon, seeking an injunction to remove the scene from the film. She contended her mother was duped into appearing in the movie and pointed to a release form allegedly signed by Evans featuring a “scribbled line” that did not match her actual signature. Amazon’s lawyers successfully argued this was a simple accident and that her signing of the document had been independently witnessed.
‘VIBRANT JEWISH COMMUNITY’
Whatever the truth of the matter, clearly, Cohen is extremely keen for his creation to be perceived by the everyday people he meets and global film audiences alike as a raging anti-Semite. This has prompted some observers to question whether, in attempting to highlight and challenge anti-Semitism, Borat might, in fact, inadvertently reinforce anti-Semitic public attitudes. A far more prescient question is whether Borat consciously legitimizes Islamophobic perspectives globally in service of the Zionist cause.
The release of the first “Borat” movie sparked public and state-level outrage in Kazakhstan for its portrayal of the country and its people. Ironically enough, a common grievance was the character’s anti-Semitism – for Kazakh Jews have a long and rich history, and Almaty has no record of religious strife or discrimination towards Jews whatsoever. During World War II, Joseph Stalin created a haven for Jews there, evacuating thousands from other parts of the Soviet Union to prevent their slaughter by the Nazis.
While Kazakhstan’s Jewish population was much reduced by emigration following the Soviet Union’s collapse, thousands still live in peace and harmony there today. A Hasidic synagogue in Almaty, named after widely respected Rabbi Levi Yitzchak Schneerson, buried at a nearby cemetery, attracts Jewish visitors from all over the world, who come to pray at his grave. Anti-Semitic incidents of any kind are vanishingly rare; the country is home to over a dozen Jewish schools, and the government electively provides land and buildings for creating new synagogues.
As a National Coalition Supporting Eurasian Jewry factsheet notes, “Kazakhstan has long embraced its Jewish community.” During “Borat’s” year of release alone, a new synagogue big enough to accommodate the capital’s entire Jewish population – and also Central Asia’s largest – was opened, Almaty’s first-ever Association for Hebrew Speakers formed, and the Kazakh government issued a postage stamp featuring a historic local synagogue. The factsheet went on to record:
In the wake of the widely released and successful 2006 comedy film Borat, which portrays Kazakhstan as a hot-bed of anti-Semitism, Kazakh officials are expanding outreach efforts to explain to the world that Kazakhs are in fact very tolerant of Jews.
As part of these “outreach efforts,” prior to the release of “Borat,” the government of Kazakhstan took out full-page ads in major U.S. newspapers such as The New York Times, and placed commercials on CNN and other mainstream news channels, at some expense. They sought to challenge and debunk the movie’s misrepresentations of Kazakhs, and Borat’s anti-Semitism loomed large. As a spokesperson for Almaty’s Washington D.C. embassy said at the time:
[Borat] claims the Kazakhs are very anti-Semitic people and running of the Jews is the famous pastime. That is, of course, ridiculous. Kazakhstan has a very vibrant Jewish community.”
AN ‘ALREADY ISLAMOPHOBIC CLIMATE’
The lack of wider pushback against Borat from the world’s Islamic community almost two decades ago surely reflects how the film was released at a time when Islamophobia was rife in the West due to the then-ongoing War on Terror. Systematic, institutionalized discrimination against and demonization of Muslims was unashamedly and openly normalized, advocated, and practiced by European and North American governments under the aegis of battling “extremism.” Muslim civil society voices were thus very effectively silenced in the mainstream.
Fast forward to the sequel’s release, and Cohen’s victims were finally positioned to fight back. In November 2020, the Council on American-Islamic Relations and Kazakh American Association fired off strongly worded letters to the Directors Guild of America, Oscars, Golden Globes, and British Academy of Film and Television Arts, demanding they bar Cohen, his movie and its cast and crew, from consideration for awards that year.
Sacha Baron Cohen dressed as a Gaddafi-esque caricature in the film, “The Dictator”
Commenting, Kazakh-American film professional and Hollywood Film Academy CEO Gia Noortas said:
“The Kazakh community worldwide is underrepresented and inherently vulnerable. Sacha Baron Cohen understands this fact and exploits the Kazakh people by hijacking our ethnic identity, whitewashing us, and inciting harassment toward us. Considering today’s socially aware political climate and the new diversity policies adopted by film associations worldwide, it is unbelievable that a film which openly berates, bullies, and traumatizes a nation of people of color is still an acceptable form of entertainment.“
As a fiery contemporary op-ed in The New Arab noted via “Borat,” “Cohen racially abuses, culturally appropriates, and mocks the Kazakh culture, traditions, and people for the purpose of crude laughter and monetary gain” – actions “not only offensive,” but directly harmful, as “Kazakhs know from personal experience.” It went on to record how since the release of the first movie:
“Many Kazakhs have experienced psychological turmoil and ethnic-based humiliation. Many Kazakhs have had to explain to others that Cohen’s portrayal of Kazakhstan and its people as bigoted and backwards is a vile misrepresentation. Many Kazakh children have been bullied at school, and Kazakh women have been exposed to distasteful sexual jokes or harassment.“
Again, we are left to ponder if Cohen explicitly intended these dire consequences. A 2016 academic paper published by Brunel University explored how audiences perceived the portrayal of Muslims across his oeuvre based on an extensive focus group study. Overwhelmingly, respondents expressed dismay at the content and volunteered their view that the assorted movies and TV shows Cohen produced throughout his three-decade-long career are, universally, intensely Islamophobic.
For example, one respondent asked to comment on the “Running of the Jew” clip, said it “enforces this opinion that Muslims are anti-Semites.” The study noted that “The Dictator” was “replete with signifiers that are stereotypic of Islam and Muslims – from the name ‘Aladeen,’ his long beard, misogyny, anti-Semitism, and anti-Americanism,” and “the film also displays minarets and thus typical Islamic architecture.” Another respondent observed:
“If you look at all his movies, he does portray himself as a Muslim. So, I think there is an element of Islamophobia. The Dictator, Ali G, these are all Muslims and so he’s portraying them in a bad light, in an already Islamophobic climate.”
AN UNSAFE SPACE
Such adverse reactions are striking, for they would be music to the proverbial ears of Israel and the international Zionist lobby’s countless assorted components. Perpetuating the narrative that all Muslims worldwide are possessed of virulent anti-Jewish hatred has been a core Zionist propaganda objective since before Israel’s 1948 founding.
The purpose is to frame Palestinian opposition to Zionist oppression, and anyone Muslim or otherwise united in solidarity with them, as motivated by surging anti-Semitism rather than reasonable and legitimate condemnation of oppression, brutality, and mass slaughter in service of a fundamentally colonialist, genocidal, and deeply anti-Semitic endeavor. Accordingly, Israel has, ever since its founding, actively sought to create a hostile environment for Jews elsewhere in order to cynically cement itself as the world’s exclusive safe space for Jews.
Following Israel’s creation, a Mephistophelian feat achieved by murderous conquest, land theft, and the clandestine use of chemical and biological weapons, Zionists engaged in wide-ranging efforts to compel Jews elsewhere to migrate to Tel Aviv. This effort included covertly bombing synagogues throughout West Asia, encouraging anti-Semitism the world over through a variety of means, and infiltrating and funding Amnesty International to amplify and exaggerate anti-Semitism in Muslim lands from the 1970s onwards while concealing its criminal erasure of Palestine and its indigenous people.
The necessity of such actions from Israel’s perspective couldn’t be clearer. It is barely known today that a majority of world Jewish opinion actively opposed Israel’s creation. The 1917 Balfour Declaration, which pledged London’s commitment to creating a “national home for the Jewish people” and is widely considered the Zionist state’s foundational document, was vigorously condemned by Edwin Montagu, the only Jew in a senior British government position at the time:
“The policy of His Majesty’s Government is anti-Semitic in result and will prove a rallying ground for anti-Semites in every country of the world.”
Montagu’s concerns were well-founded. Zionists, professing to be inspired by ubiquitous Western anti-Semitism, were and remain committed to building an ethnonationalist homeland for Jews in the Arab and Muslim world – the one place on Earth where Jews have always been safest. It is widely unknown that the only European country, bar Britain, to boast a bigger Jewish population following World War II than before was Muslim-majority Albania. It provided a sanctuary for Jews fleeing the Holocaust elsewhere in Europe.
Many Albanians are considered “Righteous Among Nations” for risking their lives to protect Jews during the genocidal Axis occupation of the Balkans, 1941 – 1944. A great many Jews had for centuries resided in the region by that point, having been invited to relocate there under Ottoman Sultan Bayezid II’s personal protection following the fall of Al Andalus to Christian crusaders in 1492. They flourished, free from the routine pogroms, discrimination, and punitive taxes inflicted upon them everywhere else in Europe.
Since the Gaza genocide began, shocking scenes reminiscent of 1930s Germany, in which Israeli security forces storm areas of Jerusalem, physically attacking Hasidic Jews and tearing down Palestine flags, have spread like wildfire on social media. Meanwhile, Jews can consistently be found in profusion at every major anti-Israel protest in Europe and North America, very vocally denouncing not only Tel Aviv’s relentless atrocities but the entire “Godless and merciless” ideology of Zionism.
Sacha Baron Cohen’s canon should be viewed as a modern-day manifestation of the perpetual Zionist drive to distort and conceal reality and turn Jews and Muslims, natural and historic comrades, against one another. Now that he and close collaborator Lee Kern have so amply exposed their guiding mission quite so publicly, a liberal media apparatus that enthusiastically promoted them and their repulsively racist, genocidal output must not be forgiven or trusted ever again.
The death and destruction caused in Gaza is almost beyond comprehension. Over 25,000 people have died at the hands of the Israeli air and ground assault, and virtually the entire population of the densely populated strip has been forced to flee their homes.
Few governments have been willing to put up meaningful resistance to Israeli aggression. One exception is Yemen, whose de-facto government Ansar Allah (often referred to as the Houthis) has engaged in a blockade of the Red Sea in an attempt to halt the onslaught.
In response, the U.S. is leading a Western alliance of nations to break the blockade and support the genocide. Yet joining the “MintCast” today is a guest who claims that, for all the destruction, Israel’s war in Gaza is failing. Greg Stoker is a former U.S. Army Special Operations member who left the military and became a committed anti-imperialist. Greg producescontent analyzing Western imperialism and the current wars in the Middle East, and his videos explaining the situation regularly go viral, attracting an audience of millions of people.
Today, he sat down with “MintCast” host Mnar Adley to discuss Israel, Yemen and the U.S. role in the chaos. He explained how the IDF is losing the ground war based upon a number of factors, errors and assumptions it made, including an overreliance on air superiority and bombing, the assumption that collective punishment would be an effective deterrent, a shocking lack of training for Israeli ground forces, perilously little infantry cover for Israeli armor making their tanks sitting ducks, and an inability to set realistic goals and targets in the war.
While the Israelis might have all the technology, money and Western backing, they are fighting a close-quarters ground war with a guerilla foe – a sort of war they are woefully unsuited for. With no aircraft or even vehicles of any note, Hamas’ focus is hand-to-hand fighting and hit-and-run skirmishes. Once they hit the Israelis, they can immediately disappear into a myriad of tunnels or bombed-out ruins, making them extremely difficult to pin down. The IDF has been unable to deal Hamas a serious blow despite confidently predicting that it would destroy the group altogether by the end of the fighting.
Meanwhile, the United States continues to escalate its attacks against Yemen. President Biden is the fourth consecutive president to bomb the country. It remains to be seen whether the U.S. will make the same mistakes the IDF has been making, but the threat of a new global conflict is on the horizon, even though the White House refuses to describe what it is currently doing as a “war.”
While China-led multipolarity has accelerated the decline of the American era, the war in Gaza may end it altogether.
What is unfolding today in West Asia — the Gaza war and its regional expansion — cannot be viewed separately from the international transformations that have grown in momentum over the past few years. Today, the transition to multipolarity is the underlying factor shaping the decisions and policies of most countries, particularly those of the great powers.
The timing of Israel’s devastating military assault on Gaza coincides with heightened US attention on its great power competition for Washington, this conflict has much wider geopolitical significance beyond West Asia. In this context, the US has assumed, and will continue to play, a pivotal role in Gaza and its environs, unlike its powerful peers in China and Russia.
According to statistics published by the China Society for Human Rights Studies, the US initiated 201 of the 248 armed conflicts that took place since the end of World War II, often engaging in these wars via US-led alliances and/or proxies.
Number of Coalition Countries
Year
War
38 countries including 9 in West Asia
1990
Gulf War
42 countries including 2 in West Asia
2001
Afghanistan War
48 countries
2003
Iraq War
13 countries including 4 in West Asia
2014
Syria War
9 countries majority in West Asia
2015
US-backed Yemen War
The most prominent wars led or supported by the United States in West Asia since 1990
For decades, Washington has led these conflicts by very ably forming, then leading, and directing broad alliances to achieve its political and military objectives. But that ability notably shifted in December 2023, signaling a sharp decline in this capability.
In response to Yemen’s Ansarallah-aligned armed forces’ Red Sea blockade of Israeli-linked vessels, the US Department of Defense announced the formation of “Operation Guardian of Prosperity … to uphold the foundational principle of freedom of navigation” in those waters, initially consisting of a coalition of ten countries, most of them insignificant partners.
Protecting Israel or maintaining maritime dominance?
The coalition proved shaky from the get-go, with only the US and Britain actively involved in military strikes on Yemen. The reluctance of key European countries France, Spain, and Italy to join the naval alliance indicated a growing skepticism among the US’s traditional partners — both western and West Asian — about Washington’s commitment and capability to defend its allies in any impactful way.
Interestingly, more than eight further countries reportedly joined the coalition, but demanded anonymity, given the potential political fallout from associating with Washington and Tel Aviv.
Crucially, the Pentagon’s stated purpose of securing navigation in the Red Sea does not align with the actual threat presented, revealing ulterior motives behind US actions. The Yemenis have repeatedly confirmed that they only intend to inhibit the passage of Israeli-owned or destined vessels — and that all other ships are free to pass.
In short, the US/UK-led coalition is acting as a naval arm for Israeli military forces, seeking specifically to ensure unimpeded access for ships heading to Israeli ports via the Bab al-Mandab Strait. That’s not a position many other states will get behind if they want to maintain freedom of transport for their own shipping vessels.
Ultimately, the American show of force in these waterways seeks to consolidate US naval dominance, which war-torn Yemen, West Asia’s poorest country, has contested.
The US “will not allow foreign or regional powers to jeopardize freedom of navigation through the Middle East’s (West Asia) waterways, including the Strait of Hormuz and the Bab al Mandab, nor tolerate efforts by any country to dominate another — or the region — through military buildups, incursions, or threats.”
According to media reports following massive US airstrikes against Iraqi targets on 23 January, Iraqi resistance factions will now also follow Yemen’s suit by implementing a blockade of Israeli ports in the Mediterranean Sea.
Current events are spiraling out of Washington’s control as onlookers increasingly question the utility and competence of US naval leadership in the world’s important waterways. Equally, there is recognition that other formidable forces and states have emerged, challenging US control over key global straits. In the words of British politician and writer Walter Raleigh, “Who rules the seas rules the world.” Under Sanaa’s watch, the US no longer can claim rule over the Red Sea or even its adjacent waterways.
Great power competition amid the Gaza war
The current scenario in West Asia, particularly post-Al-Aqsa Flood and the Gaza war that followed, coincides with a shift in Washington’s focus toward competition with China and its proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. As outlined in the US intelligence community’s annual threat assessment last year, this transition has already affected strategic goals, leading to a sharp decline in western support, especially from the US, for Ukraine. The Biden administration faced challenges in securing Congressional approval for a new aid package for Kiev, which directly competed for dollars against Tel Aviv’s military campaign in Gaza.
Money Spent (million dollars)
Year 2023
6975
First Quarter
2625
Second Quarter
2150
Third Quarter
1200*
Fourth Quarter
*Aid paid to Ukraine in 2023 under presidential withdrawal powers.
Despite assurances from western leaders during visits to Ukraine in October, their statements came without tangible material support, leaving President Volodymyr Zelensky in the proverbial dust. Quite unexpectedly, China has emerged as a potential peacemaker in this European conflict, with Kiev openly requesting Beijing’s involvement in mediation talks, and the US itself open to Chinese mediation to mitigate the escalation in West Asia.
The Chinese are well aware that there are no simple, face-saving exits for the US from the Gaza war it has championed and that the conflict’s metamorphosis into a regional one mires the US deeper into West Asia — and away from the Asia-Pacific.
Although China seeks to increase its presence in West Asia, it is very careful not to bog itself down in the region’s many issues. But Washington’s request that Beijing use its influence to sway Iran from conflict escalation makes clear that the US is no longer “the biggest power” in the region.
Why Israel opposes multipolarity
Following Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, US financial and military support for Israel has reached a critical stage, presenting two options for Washington. The first involves imposing some control on Israeli actions, given that the war’s timing has been unfavorable to US strategic interests, particularly in a critical election year. The second option, favored by the Washington elite, is to continue its unwavering support to Tel Aviv, even at the risk of damage to its global image.
Sustained global outrage over the Gaza war, coupled with the landmark genocide case filed against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), shows that Washington’s ability to cover for Israel is diminishing rapidly. Again, this reflects the global shift in the balance of power toward multipolarity, which is marked by the widespread decline of American influence.
But the US support for the Gaza genocide has had dramatic domestic repercussions, too. Polls show a major shift in the attitudes of young Americans, especially university youth, who will make up the ranks of America’s future leaders.
A Harvard-Harris poll published on 17 January reveals that 46 percent of respondents aged 18-24 believe that Hamas’ actions on 7 October can be justified because of the injustice to which the Palestinians are subjected. The same poll shows that 43 percent of the same group support Hamas in this war, and that 57 percent believe that Israel is carrying out massacres in Gaza. The most staggering poll result of all, though, has to be the one in December (conducted by the same pollsters) in which 51 percent of young Americans believe a final solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is for Israel to end and be given to Hamas and the Palestinians.
While Israel remains a direct US interest in West Asia, Washington’s commitment to Tel Aviv’s security has already become a growing burden and increasingly difficult to justify. As the region’s Axis of Resistance expands its battle with Israel on new, multiple frontlines, the US will need to reallocate ever-expanding resources and focus on matching its international rivals in further-flung geographies.
Ukraine was a test run compared to this Gaza war and the immense, direct toll it is taking on US alliances, domestic politics, and the American image globally. For Israel, this presents an existential crisis beyond measure, as Washington is forced to compete with other great powers, none of whom are ideologically driven to support Zionism as part of their foreign policies.
Mohammed Al-Bukhaiti, senior political officer and spokesman for Yemen’s Ansarallah movement, explains the objectives behind his movement’s naval blockade of the Red Sea in this interview with The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal. Al-Bukhaiti also responds to military threats from the Biden administration and allegations that Ansarallah is controlled by Iran’s IRGC.
While Israel’s starvation siege of Gaza is well-known, Egypt helps maintain the status quo, quietly profiting from life-or-death border crossing operations.
On a rainy morning, a group of Palestinian children gathered in the city of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip. The gathering was not spontaneous, as children quickly began holding signs reading “Open the crossing.” Their plea was directed towards international organizations across the border in Egypt, conveyed through the signs as aid trucks stacked up, awaiting Egyptian permission to cross.
As the kids roamed around the border fence, lunch was provided to EU observers and civil society staff, who gave up their meals to the children of Rafah. Now here’s the rub. Those placards were not addressed to Egypt. The crossing was not Rafah, but Gaza’s north-eastern Karni border point with Israel. And the incident took place in 2006, not in 2024.
Agreements to ensure control
In 2006, Israel’s punishment to Palestinians for voting in Hamas during free and fair elections was starvation. This is Tel Aviv’s silent war, a siege that slowly claims its victims, depriving Gaza’s 2.3 million civilians of nourishment and medical relief.
Since the Israeli forces withdrew from Gaza in 2005, the Strip found itself under a tight blockade, transforming it into a massive open-air prison surrounded by wires and checkpoints.
Eight crossings were controlled – six of these by Israel – connecting Gaza to the Palestinian territories occupied in 1948. Four of these crossings remained completely closed, and two were opened intermittently: “Beit Hanoun” and “Kerem Shalom.”
Since Israel’s military withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, Tel Aviv has had a singular goal: to establish total hegemony over Gaza by land, air, and sea. To achieve its aims, three agreements were signed to regulate movement at the crossings: the Crossings Agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority (2005), the Palestinian-European-Israeli border control agreement, and the Philadelphi Protocol between Egypt and Israel.
The latter deal established a 14 km buffer strip along the Egypt-Gaza border and required Israeli–Egyptian security coordination, the presence of Egyptian border guards along the Philadelphi corridor, and security patrols from both sides.
Map of the Gaza Strip crossings
Rafah as the sole lifeline for Gazans
The Rafah crossing was restricted to Palestinian ID card holders, with exceptions requiring prior notice to the Israeli government and approval from the highest PA authorities.
The General Authority for Crossings in Gaza, under the PA, handled approvals and objections, with strict timelines set by the crossings agreement. However, tensions rose when Hamas took control of the crossing in 2007, leading to shifts in operations and closures based on the evolving relations between Egypt and Hamas.
The dynamic changed in 2017 when rivals Fatah and Hamas signed a reconciliation agreement, aiming to end the persistent internal division. However Israel’s complete blockade on the Gaza Strip after the 7 October Hamas-led resistance operation elevated the significance of the Strip’s border crossings with Egypt.
Just a year earlier, the Rafah crossing had been open for 245 days and facilitated the passage of over 140,000 people and numerous essential goods such as diesel, cooking gas, and construction materials.
Alongside its brutal, unprecedented, military assault on Gaza, Tel Aviv has instituted a draconian siege on Palestinians in the Strip, cutting off access to water, electricity, and communications – and the essential crossings – for over 100 days now.
The Rafah crossing has become the sole lifeline for civilians seeking refuge from shelling, or receiving medical treatment or even a meal. While International organizations have flocked to provide aid through the crossing, mass displacement caused by indiscriminate Israeli bombardment – and Egyptian opposition to a resettlement plan in Sinai – have worsened the situation, leading to the emergence of a class of beneficiaries.
Three ways out of Gaza
Before the war, there were three routes for exiting the Gaza Strip. The official route involved submitting lists of names for approval from the Israeli side, a process often taking several months. Accepted individuals faced additional obstacles on the Egyptian side, including inspections and transport to Cairo airport in a “deportation caravan.”
The unofficial track, managed by brokerage offices, offered faster passage for fees ranging from $300 to $500 or even up to $10,000.
The third track, linked to the Egyptian intelligence services is exclusively run by travel company Hala, which a source tells The Cradle is connected to notorious Sinai businessman and warlord Ibrahim al-Arjani.
This “VIP” route, established in 2021, allows for swift transit, exemption from inspections, and the option for travelers to stay in Egypt before heading to the airport, with costs ranging from $500 to $700 per person.
Egypt’s profit from Palestinian pain
Amid the latest Israeli atrocities, the occupation state has permanently barred the exit of individuals not on approved lists, with the exception of dual nationals following foreign embassy interventions. However, some Egyptian officers at the crossing have exploited a loophole known as “security exclusion.” This involves refusing exit for reasons related to the traveler’s perceived association with Hamas, leading to negotiations for substantial sums for exit.
Despite Gaza’s military and humanitarian devastation and urgent demands by global NGOs to allow aid to enter the Strip, Israel turns a deaf ear. In the International Court of Justice (ICJ) defense argument, Israeli lawyer Christopher Stacker has pointed the finger of blame elsewhere, saying bluntly that “access to the Gaza Strip through the Rafah crossing is controlled by Egypt.”
It was a feeble attempt to absolve Israel from its international law obligations: the Egyptian government promptly denied the allegations, with the head of the State Information Service (SIS), Diaa Rashwan, dismissing them as “lies.”
Cairo not only denied Israel’s claims but also submitted a comment to the ICJ, clarifying that Egypt did not close the Rafah crossing. While Egypt controls the crossing by land, it is Israel that maintains control from the air. It was Israeli airstrikes at the Rafah crossing and in the nearby town of Khan Yunis where at least 49 people were killed late last year.
The threat looms large. If approval from Israel is not received for the passage of a “deportation convoy” or aid truck, Tel Aviv may revert with further bombings of Rafah.
But Cairo is not off the hook either. Even if Egypt is held blameless for the primary blockade of Gaza, it unquestionably benefits from it too.
You have to hand it to the U.S. and its henchmen for brazenness. In order to protect their client state Israel and its genocide in Gaza, the U.S., together with the UK, have in one week launched air and sea attacks on the Houthis in Yemen five times, referring to it as “self-defense” in their Orwellian lingo. The ostensible reason being Yemen’s refusal to allow ships bound for Israel, which is committing genocide in Gaza, to enter the Red Sea, while permitting other ships to pass freely.
To any impartial observer, the Houthis should be lauded. Yet, while the International Court of Justice considers the South African charge of genocide against Israel that is supported by overwhelming evidence, the U.S. and its allies have instigated a wider war throughout the Middle East while claiming they do not want such a war. These settler colonial states want genocide and a much wider war because they have been set back on their heels by those they have mocked, provoked, and attacked – notably the Palestinians, Syrians, and Russians, among others.
While the criminalization of international law does not bode well for the ICJ’s upcoming ruling or its ability to stop Israeli’s genocide in Gaza, Michel Chossudovsky, of Global Research, as is his wont, has offered a superb analysis and suggestion for those who oppose such crimes: that Principle IV of the Nuremberg Charter – “The fact that a person [e.g. Israeli, U.S. soldiers, pilots] acted pursuant to order of his [her] Government or of a superior does not relieve him [her] from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.” – should be used to supplement the South African charges and appeal directly to the moral consciences of those asked to carry out acts of genocide. He writes:
Let us call upon Israeli and American soldiers and pilots “to abandon the battlefield”, as an act of refusal to participate in a criminal undertaking against the People of Gaza. South Africa’s legal procedure at the ICJ should be endorsed Worldwide. While it cannot be relied upon to put a rapid end to the genocide, it provides support and legitimacy to the “Disobey Unlawful Orders, Abandon the Battlefield” campaign under Nuremberg Charter Principle IV.
While such an approach will not stop the continuing slaughter, it would remind the world that each person who participates in and supports it bears a heavy burden of guilt for their actions; that they are morally and legally culpable. This appeal to the human heart and conscience, no matter what its practical effect, will at least add to the condemnation of a genocide happening in real time and full view of the world, even though no one will ever be prosecuted for such crimes since any real just use of international law has long disappeared. Yet there is a edifying history of such conscientious objection to immoral war making, and though each person makes the decision in solitary witness, individual choices can inspire others and the solitary become solidary, as Albert Camus reminded us at the end of his short story, “The Artist at Work.”
With each passing day, it becomes more and more evident that Israel/U.S.A. and their allies do want a wider war. Iran is their special focus, with Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen targets on the way. Anyone who supports the genocide in Gaza, explicitly or through silence, bears responsibility for the conflagration to come. There are no excuses.
And the facts show that it is axiomatic that waging war has been the modus operandi of the U.S./Israeli alliance for a long time. Just as in early 2003 when the Bush administration said they were looking for a peaceful solution to their fake charges against Sadam Hussein with his alleged “weapons of mass destruction,” the Biden administration is lying, as the Bush administration lied about September 11, 2001 to launch its ongoing war on terror, starting in Afghanistan. Without an expanded war, President Biden – aka the Democrats, since he will most probably not be the candidate – and his psychopathic partner Benjamin Netanyahu, will not survive. It is bi-partisan war-mongering, of course, internationally and intramurally, since both U.S. political parties are controlled by the Israel Lobby and billionaire class that owns Congress and the “defense” industry that thrives on never-ending war to such an extent that even the notable independent candidate for the presidency, Robert Kennedy, Jr., who is running as an anti-war candidate, fully supports Israel which is tantamount to supporting Biden’s expanding war policy.
Biden and Netanyahu, who are always claiming after the fact that they were surprised by events or were fed bad advice by their underlings, are dumb scorpions. They are stupid but deadly. And many people in the West, while perhaps decent people in their personal lives, are living in a fantasy world of “sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity,” in MLK, Jr.’s words, as the growing threat of a world war increases and insouciance reigns.
Neither the Israeli nor American government can allow themselves to be humiliated, U.S./NATO by the Russians in Ukraine and the Israelis by the Palestinians. Like cornered criminals with lethal weapons, they will kill as many as they can on their way down, taking their revenge on the weakest first.
Their “mistakes” are always well intentioned. They stumble into wars through faulty intelligence. They drop the ball because of bureaucratic mix-ups. They miscalculate the perfidy of the moneyed elites whom allegedly they oppose while pocketing their cash and ushering them into the national coffers out of necessity since they are too big to fail. They never see the storm coming, even as they create it. Their incompetence or the perfidy of their enemies is the retort to all those “nut cases” who conjure up conspiracy theories or plain facts to explain their actions or lack thereof. They are innocent. Always innocent. And they can’t understand why those they have long abused reach a point when they will no longer impetrate for mercy but will fight fiercely for their freedom.
All signs point to a major war on the horizon. Both the U.S.A. and Israel have been shown to be rogue states with no desire to negotiate a peaceful world. Believing in high-tech weapons and massive firepower, neither has learned the hard lesson that anti-colonial wars have historically been won by those with far less weapons but with a passionate desire to throw off the chains of their oppressors. Vietnam is the text-book case, and there are many others. Failure to learn is the name of their game.
The Zionist project for a Greater Israel is doomed to fail, but as it does, desperate men like Biden and Netanyahu are intent on launching desperate acts of war. Exactly when and how this expanded war will blaze across the headlines is the question. It has started, but I think it prudent to expect a black swan event sometime this year when all hell will break loose. The genocide in Gaza is the first step, and the U.S./Israel, “not wanting” a wider war, have already started one.
(For an excellent history lesson on the Zionist oppression of Palestinians and the current genocide, listen to Max Blumenthal’s and Miko Peled’s impassioned talk – “Where is the War in Gaza Going? – delivered from the heart of darkness, Washington D.C. Two Jewish men who know the difference between Zionism and Judaism and whose consciences are aflame with justice for the oppressed Palestinians.)
UPROOTED PALESTINIANS: SALAM ALQUDS ALAYKUM 