The State Department said it had confirmed “individual incidents of gross violations of human rights” against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank before the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on 7 October.
VT Condemns the ETHNIC CLEANSING OF PALESTINIANS by USA/Israel
$ 280 BILLION US TAXPAYER DOLLARS INVESTED since 1948 in US/Israeli Ethnic Cleansing and Occupation Operation; $ 150B direct “aid” and $ 130B in “Offense” contracts Source: Embassy of Israel, Washington, D.C. and US Department of State.
The US has found five Israeli units guilty of gross , the State Department said on Monday.
The State Department said it had confirmed “individual incidents of gross violations of human rights” against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank before the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on 7 October.
“After a careful process, we found five Israeli units responsible for individual incidents of gross violations of human rights. All of these were incidents much before October 7th and none took place in Gaza,” State Department deputy spokesperson Vedant Patel said Monday.
“Four of these units have effectively remediated these violations, which is what we expect partners to do… For a remaining unit, we continue to be in consultations and engagements with the government of Israel.”
Patel said the findings would not impact arms transfers.
US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken had signalled that a review of Israeli military units was underway.
Blinken said last week the State Department was conducting investigations under the Leahy law, which prohibits sending military aid to foreign security forces that violate human rights, adding : “I think it’s fair to say that you’ll see results very soon. I’ve made determinations. You can expect to see them in the days ahead.”
ABC News reported on Friday that the Biden administration had found at least three military units guilty of human rights violations but decided not to withhold military aid to the units because it believed Israel was addressing the findings.
The US has been investigating Netzah Yehuda, an ultra-Orthodox Jewish military battalion in the Israeli army, over human rights violations in the occupied West Bank.
A US State Department panel recommended months ago that Blinken blacklist a number of Israeli military and police units following a review into rights abuses against Palestinians, according to a report last week in ProPublica.
Students and professors, carry on! History will only remember you, and it will have no mention at all of your oppressors. Keep up the fight to make the world a better place for us all.
For over 200 days, we here in the Arab World have been wondering how the so-called civilized world, along with its intellectual system and human rights laws, would allow such a genocide to take place against helpless women, children, and innocent civilians in Gaza and Palestine, without trying the impossible to stop this disgraceful insult against every human life everywhere.
Every day, the Zionists would perpetrate dozens of massacres against hundreds of Palestinians and would kill journalists, medical doctors, nurses, and patients, burying them in a mass grave inside the hospital. And yet the US continues to flood the Zionists with armaments, money, and moral support, enabling the worst genocide and ethnic cleansing that has brought dishonor upon our world and us who live in these times.
All of us here in the Middle East were feeling absolutely helpless, depressed, and utterly betrayed by the Western World, as it not only betrayed us, but also Western values which the West claimed to develop and promote in the interest of humanity. For seven, long, difficult months, we questioned everything the West had said about itself, most notably its propaganda regarding the free press, the rights of women, the rights of children, and human rights in decent and safe lives.
All of this was happening to us as if we lived on an extremely remote island until the students of Columbia University broke this cycle with their brave forthcoming acts to challenge the conspiratory world‘s silence and announce their extremely important call to stop genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza, an act that triggered a worldwide movement by university students, professors, and employees in support of life in Gaza, and against the daily and continued massacres there.
Your movement has restored our faith in human conscience, but your suffering and the way you have been treated proved to us, beyond any doubt, that Western systems leave a lot to be desired. The deep alliance that has surfaced between Zionists everywhere and Western governments has shown the horrifying moral deterioration of Western governments. Just as they spread fear and horror about Covid-19, they also started to fabricate myths about attacks on Jews, although Jewish students and professors were at the forefront of these noble movements, this did not prevent misleading media from accusing the student movement as antisemitic.
Instead of trusting that the movement proved that the issue was not between Muslims and Jews, but one of occupation, racism, and the worst violation of human rights witnessed in modern times, the authorities went on distorting facts and misleading people.
When Jews were persecuted in Europe, they found their haven among the Arabs, and until the creation of the Zionist entity, Jews were citizens in most Arab countries, living amicably with Muslims and Christians and contributing to the prosperity and welfare of their countries. The Middle East is the cradle of the three monotheistic religions, and that is why its people lived together with the church and the mosque side by side, and with the deep-rooted faith that we all worship the same God but in different ways.
The first time we heard a language that divided the Iraqis into Sunnis and Shias was when American forces occupied Iraq and started talking about the Sunni triangle, Kurdish North, and Shia South. This is an alien language to the region’s indigenous Arabs, and this is the language that terrorists attempted to implant among our people.
Antisemitism is a label coined and promoted by those who gave themselves the right to uproot indigenous people and to use their land and resources as their own. The Arabs had never been and cannot be antisemitic, as they themselves are Semites. Those who misused movements to incite hatred against Jews have nothing to do with Islam, as the Quran lauded all prophets and mentioned the followers of all prophets with great respect; “Indeed the faithful, the Jews, the Christians, and the Sabaeans —those of them who have faith in Allah and the Last Day and act righteously— they shall have their reward near their Lord, and they will have no fear, nor will they grieve.”
The Quran stresses the importance of faith rather than religion, and any attempt to generate and spread fear among the followers of other religions is only a very suspicious political tool used for dubious purposes. The Western media that was supposed to facilitate communication among different people on different lands had become an impediment in the way of truth reaching audiences everywhere.
Students and professors paid a heavy price, and some have lost the opportunity to complete their studies, but what you have done is so gracious and so eternal that it restored our confidence in humanity and its ability to strongly object to gross injustice, no matter how powerful and militarized it may seem. In that sense, you restored some of our confidence that the voice of the people will override the voice of governments who cannot get beyond their narrow, material interests, and their deeply rooted and unquestioned prejudices and shallow slogans.
You proved that you do not belong to the hypocrisy of the State, whose current discourse and actions are in total contradiction with its own narrative. Western systems are trying to spread fear: Jews fearing Muslims, Muslims fearing Jews, Christians fearing Muslims, Westerners against Easterners, in order to serve the interests of Zionist dark forces who do not see people with similar hearts and minds, but only see what may divide their ranks and make them weaker: inactive and incapable of undermining the interests of these dark forces.
Our God said in the Quran, “O mankind! Indeed We created you from a male and a female, and made you nations and tribes that you may identify yourselves with one another. Indeed the noblest of you in the sight of Allah is the most Godwary among you. Indeed Allah is all-knowing, all-aware.” Differences in color, origin, religion, or ethnicity, only exist to prove the greatness of the Creator, and not to classify people as superior and inferior. Only the vile racists do that for their own evil purposes, which have nothing to do with the interests of most people on this planet.
Students and professors, carry on! History will only remember you, and it will have no mention at all of your oppressors. Keep up the fight to make the world a better place for us all.
The opinions mentioned in this article do not necessarily reflect the opinion of Al mayadeen, but rather express the opinion of its writer exclusively.
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
The distance between Gaza and Namibia is measured in the thousands of kilometers. But the historical distance is much closer. This is precisely why Namibia was one of the first countries to take a strong stance against the Israeli genocide in Gaza.
Namibia was colonized by the Germans in 1884, while the British colonized Palestine in the 1920s, handing the territory to the Zionist colonizers in 1948.
Though the ethnic and religious fabric of Palestine and Namibia differ, the historical experiences are similar.
It is easy, however, to assume that the history that unifies many countries in the Global South is only that of Western exploitation and victimization. It is also a history of collective struggle and resistance.
Namibia has been inhabited since prehistoric times. This long-rooted history has allowed Namibians, over thousands of years, to establish a sense of belonging to the land and to one another, something that the Germans did not understand or appreciate.
When the Germans colonized Namibia, giving it the name of ‘German Southwest Africa,’’ they did what all other Western colonialists have done, from Palestine to South Africa to Algeria, to virtually all Global South countries. They attempted to divide the people, exploited their resources and butchered those who resisted.
Although a country with a small population, Namibians resisted their colonizers, resulting in the German decision to simply exterminate the natives, literally killing the majority of the population.
Since the start of the Israeli genocide in Gaza, Namibia answered the call of solidarity with the Palestinians, along with many African and South American countries, including Colombia, Nicaragua, Cuba, South Africa, Brazil, China and many others.
Namibia rejects Germany’s Support of the Genocidal Intent of the Racist Israeli State against Innocent Civilians in Gaza
On Namibian soil, #Germany committed the first genocide of the 20th century in 1904-1908, in which tens of thousands of innocent Namibians died in the most… pic.twitter.com/ZxwWxLv8yt
Though intersectionality is a much-celebrated notion in Western academia, no academic theory is needed for oppressed, colonized nations in the Global South to exhibit solidarity with one another.
So when Namibia took a strong stance against Israel’s largest military supporter in Europe – Germany – it did so based on Namibia’s total awareness of its history.
The German genocide of the Nama and Herero people (1904-1907) is known as the “first genocide of the 20th century”. The ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza is the first genocide of the 21st century. The unity between Palestine and Namibia is now cemented through mutual suffering.
However, Namibia did not launch a legal case against Germany at the International Court of Justice (ICJ); it was Nicaragua, a Central American country thousands of miles away from Palestine and Namibia.
The Nicaraguan case accuses Germany of violating the ‘Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.’ It rightly sees Germany as a partner in the ongoing genocide of the Palestinians.
This accusation alone should terrify the German people, in fact, the whole world, as Germany has been affiliated with genocides from its early days as a colonial power. The horrific crime of the Holocaust and other mass killings carried out by the German government against Jews and other minority groups in Europe during WWII is a continuation of other German crimes committed against Africans decades earlier.
The typical analysis of why Germany continues to support Israel is explained based on German guilt over the Holocaust. This explanation, however, is partly illogical and partly erroneous.
It is illogical because if Germany has, indeed, internalized any guilt from its previous mass killings, it would make no sense for Berlin to add yet more guilt by allowing Palestinians to be butchered en masse. If guilt indeed exists, it is not genuine. It is erroneous because it completely overlooks the German genocide in Namibia. It took the German government until 2021 to acknowledge the horrific butchery in that poor African country, ultimately agreeing to pay merely one billion euros in ‘community aid,’ which will be allocated over three decades.
The German government’s support of the Israeli war on Gaza is not motivated by guilt but by a power paradigm that governs the relations among colonial countries. Many countries in the Global South understand this logic very well, thus the growing solidarity with Palestine.
A photo titled “Captured Hereros,” taken circa 1904 by German colonists in Namibia. Photo | German Historical Museum
The Israeli brutality in Gaza, but also the Palestinian sumud, resilience and resistance, are inspiring the Global South to reclaim its centrality in anti-colonial liberation struggles.
The revolution in the Global South’s outlook—culminating in South Africa’s case at the ICJ and the Nicaraguan lawsuit against Germany—indicates that change is not the outcome of a collective emotional reaction. Instead, it is part and parcel of the shifting relationship between the Global South and the Global North.
Africa has been undergoing a process of geopolitical restructuring for years. The anti-French rebellions in West Africa, demanding true independence from the continent’s former colonial masters, and the intense geopolitical competition involving Russia, China and others are all signs of changing times. And with this rapid rearrangement, a new political discourse and popular rhetoric are emerging, often expressed in the revolutionary language emanating from Niger, Burkina Faso, Mali and others.
But the shift is not happening only on the rhetorical front. The rise of BRICS as a powerful new platform for economic integration between Asia and the rest of the Global South has opened up the possibility of alternatives to Western financial and political institutions.
In 2023, it was revealed that BRICS countries hold 32 percent of the world’s total GDP, compared to 30 percent held by the G7 countries. This has much political value, as four of the five original founders of BRICS are strong and unapologetic supporters of the Palestinians.
While South Africa has been championing the legal front against Israel, Russia and China are battling the US at the UN Security Council to institute a ceasefire. Beijing’s Ambassador to The Hague defended the Palestinian armed struggle as legitimate under international law.
Now that global dynamics are working in favor of Palestinians, it is time for the Palestinian struggle to return to the embrace of the Global South, where shared histories will always serve as a foundation for meaningful solidarity.
Feature photo | Hon. Yvonne Dausab, Minister of Justice of Namibia, joined representatives of over 50 nations in presenting testimony to the International Court of Justice on the legality of the Israeli occupation. Photo | International Court of Justice
At the heart of the Axis of Resistance is the struggle for a free Palestine, and all unfolding events are interconnected to serve that larger goal. (Illustrated by Hady Dbouq for Al Mayadeen English)
The escalating confrontations in the West Bank are intricately linked to the ongoing genocide in Gaza, the Axis of Resistance’s support for Palestine, and Iran’s retaliatory operation, True Promise.
In recent months, the West Bank has witnessed a disturbing trend: a surge in attacks by settlers targeting Palestinian individuals and villages. While this pattern of aggression is not novel within the context of “Israel’s” policy of ethnic cleansing, its intensified manifestation, often concealed under the pretext of incidents such as the disappearance of a settler near Ramallah, underscores the volatile aftermath of Operation al-Aqsa Flood.
Amidst this backdrop, the launch of Operation al-Aqsa Flood emerges as a watershed moment that reaffirms the cause of Palestine as a central Arab and Islamic one, especially amid the existing critical juncture on the global scale.
Though carried out by the al-Qassam Brigades, this operation is like a sprout from the deep roots of the ongoing battle for Palestine’s freedom, led by what has become known as the Axis of Resistance.
Spanning from the Mashreq to the Maghreb (Orient to the Occident), across the breadth of the Arab and Islamic worlds, the events unfolding in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and throughout occupied Palestine have ignited a widespread response. These developments have set off a chain reaction, leading to escalations not only within the West Bank but also beyond, fueled by “Israel’s” “campaigns between wars.”
This campaign precipitated Iran’s remarkable retaliation following an Israeli assault on its consulate in Damascus. Understanding these unfolding events requires contextualizing them within the broader geopolitical landscape, where regional power dynamics intersect with longstanding conflicts and resistance movements.
Israeli settlers expelled under Resistance fire
Since October 7, the Israeli government has made public the displacement of over 250,000 Israeli settlers from their settlements. These settlements, largely constructed on land ethnically cleansed of its indigenous Palestinian and Arab communities, have become targets of Resistance operations spanning both northern and southern regions of occupied Palestine.
In the south, particularly in the Gaza envelope, where Palestinians besieged in the Gaza Strip once resided, a comprehensive evacuation has taken place after the Palestinian Resistance breached the Israeli separation walls and entered the settlements before showering its vicinity with missiles that have even reached “Tel Aviv” on multiple occasions.
The evacuation has significantly reduced the presence of settlers along the borders of the besieged Strip. Many settlers have relocated to central “Israel”, while others have scattered throughout the occupied territories. Some have chosen to return to their countries of origin, primarily in Europe or the Americas, based on their nationality prior to settling in “Israel”.
In the north, Resistance operations, spearheaded by Hezbollah and other factions, compelled Israeli settlers to evacuate settlements bordering Lebanon by a depth of 5 to 8 kilometers as reportedly revealed by Israeli journalists and Resistance sources.
While unprecedented since the so-called inception of “Israel”, these evacuations were anticipated. Hezbollah Secretary-General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah previously underscored that in the next war with “Israel”, settlers would be forced to abandon their settlements, and while this is not even a widescale war, his words proved to be true once again. This strategic shift aims to bring the conflict to “Israel” rather than allow “Israel” to instigate hostilities against Lebanon, as it did in 2006 and 2000.
As Israeli deterrence erodes, it becomes increasingly apparent to settlers that they face an irreversible choice: either leave occupied Palestine or occupy another Palestinian home elsewhere in occupied Palestine.
Making up for what was lost on October 7
Israeli settlers faced a new reality following October 7, even vis-a-vis their daily life. Displaced settlers are now facing declining living standards after having initially migrated to “Israel” in pursuit of the material gains they had been promised once they settled in
Instead, settlers are now struggling, not even to preserve their privileges against indigenous Palestinians, but to merely meet their daily needs as they lose their homes and the rest of the material gains they were promised at a time when the IOF has clearly failed to achieve any of its goals in the Strip or across the Northern Front – another issue which eliminates hope for Israeli settlers that things could get better in the foreseeable future.
IOF-backed Israeli settlers attacked several villages and towns in the occupied West Bank on Saturday and opened fire on Palestinians and their properties.
Among the villages targeted by the settlers were Duma, Baytin, Turmusaya, Atara, and Deir Dibwan east of the Ramallah and… pic.twitter.com/s8iawFvFyH
Moreover, with the erosion of Israeli deterrence, settlers, once assured of their superiority over other regional powers such as Hezbollah, Hamas, and Iran, to name a few, now seethe with fury at their expulsion from territories they occupied during the 1948 Nakba and the 1967 Six-Day War. This resentment has boiled over, leading to a surge in attacks on Palestinian residents of the West Bank, surpassing previous levels of violence and reoccurring at a more frequent rate.
Simultaneously, Israeli occupation influencers-turned-government officials like Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich have spearheaded efforts to arm all settlers, going beyond the usual military program enforced upon Israeli settlers. The arming, which came under the guise of “fighting terrorism”, aims to revive historic terrorist Zionist organizations such as the Haganah, which conducted the initial Nakba in 1948, killing hundreds and thousands of Palestinians on purely racist grounds to occupy their homes and lands.
It’s crucial to recognize that “Israel’s” ethnic cleansing policies, which intensified notably after the events of Seif al-Quds in 2021 and further escalated following October 7, have emboldened settlers to perpetrate the same crimes of genocide as the Israeli occupation Forces are conducting the Gaza Strip [Over 33,000 martyrs] and the same crimes as the Haganah did in 1948.
Since Friday evening, Israeli settlers have been storming several towns of the occupied West Bank, vandalizing and setting houses and vehicles on fire and physically assaulting Palestinian civilians. pic.twitter.com/OMFa9ZwP0E
Next stop on the path towards liberation: West Bank, East Bank
Looking for alternatives as the Israeli cities become overcrowded and the economy crumbles, settlers go stealing Palestinian homes and ethnically cleansing entire villages to accommodate their needs. This is not new, as we all remember the Israeli proverb put forward by the settler Yacob: “If I don’t steal it, someone else is gonna steal it.”
The killing of Palestinians and the destruction of their homes by settlers, under the protection of Israeli occupation forces, is fueling anger among the Palestinian people. This anger is exacerbated by the Israeli occupation government’s continuous announcement of new land seizures, extending over dozens of dunums in the West Bank, and even in al-Quds’ Sheikh Jarrah.
Coupled with widespread detention campaigns, assassinations, military raids, and other oppressive practices, this situation is pushing people toward embracing armed Resistance as the only means to achieve a free Palestine and live with dignity.
It is also important to note that in the West Bank, the Resistance has already begun establishing liberated zones, particularly across the triangle of hell: Jenin, Nablus, and Tulkarm. However, recent settler attacks have targeted areas in the Ramallah and Nablus governorates, farther from the refugee camps where the Resistance has garnered strong popular support and found a conducive environment to thrive.
This escalation is likely to ignite a widespread intifada across the West Bank, to expand the operation that was launched on October 7, bringing the war to the heart of occupied Palestine. This is especially likely given that the settler attacks are being conducted under the supervision of the IOF who have besieged multiple cities. These aggressions remain ongoing today, four days on, without stopping except when the Iranian missiles shook “Israel”.
The consequences of such an intifada, given its existential nature, may also provoke unrest across the East Bank of the Jordan River, where approximately 80% of the population is Palestinian.
Iran’s retaliation in context
In turn, Iran’s retaliation can be seen in the context of the West Bank and the historic struggle for the liberation of Palestine and the ending of Western hegemony in the region. This retaliation on Israeli-occupied Palestine consolidated the Axis of Resistance as a series of interconnected rings that had both the military capability and the strategic patience to coordinate operations to achieve a unified goal of an Israeli demise and ultimately US containment in the region.
As such, Iran’s successful cornering of the US and “Israel” in a well-calculated, below-threshold, but fully effective response, has underscored a new era in the struggle for the liberation of Palestine.
This new era grants the Palestinian Resistance a larger margin of operation and limits if not ends “Israel’s” renowned “Campaign Between Wars” which was started in 2013 to “address Iran’s growing threat” following the start of the war on Syria. This means that Israeli deterrence has fallen even deeper than it has on October 7 with Hamas and on October 8 with Hezbollah and later in the face of Yemen and others.
To better understand the depth of that, one must look at Iran’s unprecedented retaliation against “Israel” following an attack on the Iranian consulate in Damascus. The retaliation, in fact, underscored the strategic maneuvering at play within the Axis of Resistance.
It stressed that beyond its primary objective of Palestinian liberation, this coalition seeks to dismantle the enduring legacies of colonialism and imperialism, epitomized by pivotal agreements like the Balfour Declaration, which allowed for the establishment of the Israeli occupation as a barrier “state” on occupied Palestinian soil with the aim of expansion and the Sykes-Picot Accords which partitioned the region into multi-purpose entities that serve colonialism.
Amidst escalating tensions and deepening geopolitical fault lines, it is impossible to understand unfolding events without delving into the complex and multifaceted dynamics of the existential war taking place at the heart of the Arab world; the war of the unmaking of the Sykes-Picot Accords.
In a more simplified way, one can explain the broader situation by saying that the Axis is determined to give the US and “Israel” a run for their money in the region. The Resistance movements in the region, backed by Iran and Syria, have one big mission: free Palestine and take down those pesky imperialist structures that have been causing trouble in the Arab and Islamic worlds.
Keep the big picture ahead, save your rage for the right time
Despite the ongoing genocide in which “Israel” has been targeting unarmed civilians, the Resistance continues to stand strong. It continues to conduct ambushes unimaginable by the Israeli occupation forces claiming their lives a dozen at a time.
As the leaders of the Palestinian Resistance have reportedly underscored, be it al-Qassam Brigades or al-Quds Brigades or others, Iran and the Axis of Resistance, especially Syria and Hezbollah, have played a key role in strengthening and transferring expertise to the Strip.
Much like in the Strip, the Axis of Resistance has no intention of allowing the West Bank and its Resistance to be wiped out and has a few tricks up its sleeve to turn the table on “Israel” and the West.
In this context, it must be remembered that the struggle to liberate Palestine extends beyond the entity of Palestine as drawn by the Sykes-Picot Accords but involves the re-emergence of the historic Arab world with Palestine as the compass that has the ability to achieve that through the demise of the barrier “state” otherwise known as “Israel”.
In such situations, events unfold relatively quickly; however, there is no benefit in rushing liberation. Rather it is required to mature slowly in the sense that it becomes inevitable.
The genocide in Gaza is the final stage of a process begun by Israel decades ago. Anyone who did not see this coming blinded themselves to the character and ultimate goals of the apartheid state.
There are no surprises in Gaza. Every horrifying act of Israel’s genocide has been telegraphed in advance. It has been for decades. The dispossession of Palestinians of their land is the beating heart of Israel’s settler colonial project. This dispossession has had dramatic historical moments — 1948 and 1967 — when huge parts of historic Palestine were seized and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were ethnically cleansed. Dispossession has also occurred in increments — the slow-motion theft of land and steady ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.
The incursion on Oct. 7 into Israel by Hamas and other resistance groups, which left 1,154 Israelis, tourists and migrant workers dead and saw about 240 people taken hostage, gave Israel the pretext for what it has long craved — the total erasure of Palestinians.
Israel has razed 77 percent of healthcare facilities in Gaza, 68 percent of telecommunication infrastructure, nearly all municipal and governmental buildings, commercial, industrial and agricultural centers, almost half of all roads, over 60 percent of Gaza’s 439,000 homes, 68 percent of residential buildings — the bombing of the Al-Taj tower in Gaza City on Oct. 25, killed 101 people, including 44 children and 37 women, and injured hundreds — and obliterated refugee camps. The attack on the Jabalia refugee camp on Oct. 25 killed at least 126 civilians, including 69 children, and injured 280. Israel has damaged or destroyed Gaza’s universities, all of which are now closed, and 60 percent of other educational facilities, including 13 libraries. It has also destroyed at least 195 heritage sites, including 208 mosques, churches, and Gaza’s Central Archives that held 150 years of historical records and documents.
Israel’s warplanes, missiles, drones, tanks, artillery shells and naval guns daily pulverize Gaza — which is only 20 miles long and five miles wide — in a scorched earth campaign unlike anything seen since the war in Vietnam. It has dropped 25,000 tons of explosives — equivalent to two nuclear bombs — on Gaza, many targets selected by Artificial Intelligence. It drops unguided munitions (“dumb bombs”) and 2000-pound “bunker buster” bombs on refugee camps and densely packed urban centers as well as the so-called “safe zones” — 42 percent of Palestinians killed have been in these “safe zones” where they were instructed by Israel to flee. Over 1.7 million Palestinians have been displaced from their homes, forced to find refuge in overcrowded UNRWA shelters, hospital corridors and courtyards, schools, tents or the open air in south Gaza, often living next to fetid pools of raw sewage.
Israel has killed at least 32,705 Palestinians in Gaza, including 13,000 children and 9,000 women. This means Israel is slaughtering as many as 187 people a day including 75 children. It has killed 136 journalists, many, if not most of them deliberately targeted. It has killed 340 doctors, nurses and other health workers — four percent of Gaza’s healthcare personnel. These numbers do not begin to reflect the actual death toll since only those dead registered in morgues and hospitals, most of which no longer function, are counted. The death toll, when those who are missing are counted, is well over 40,000.
Doctors are forced to amputate limbs without anesthetic. Those with severe medical conditions — cancer, diabetes, heart disease, kidney disease — have died from lack of treatment or will die soon. Over a hundred women give birth every day, with little to no medical care. Miscarriages are up by 300 percent. Over 90 percent of the Palestinians in Gaza suffer from severe food insecurity with people eating animal feed and grass. Children are dying of starvation. Palestinian writers, academics, scientists and their family members have been tracked and assassinated. Over 75,000 Palestinians have been wounded, many of whom will be crippled for life.
“Seventy percent of recorded deaths have consistently been women and children,” writes Francesca Albanese, the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967, in her report issued on March 25. “Israel failed to prove that the remaining 30 percent, i.e. adult males, were active Hamas combatants — a necessary condition for them to be lawfully targeted. By early-December, Israel’s security advisors claimed the killing of ‘7,000 terrorists’ in a stage of the campaign when less than 5,000 adult males in total had been identified among the casualties, thus implying that all adult males killed were ‘terrorists.’”
Israel plays linguistic tricks to deny anyone in Gaza the status of civilians and any building – including mosques, hospitals and schools – protected status. Palestinians are all branded as responsible for the attack on Oct. 7 or written off as human shields for Hamas. All structures are considered legitimate targets by Israel because they are allegedly Hamas command centers or said to harbor Hamas fighters.
These accusations, Albanese writes, are a “pretext” used to justify “the killing of civilians under a cloak of purported legality, whose all-enveloping pervasiveness admits only of genocidal intent.”
In scale we have not seen an assault on the Palestinians of this magnitude, but all these measures – the killing of civlians, dispossession of land, arbitrary detention, torture, disappearances, closures imposed on Palestinians towns and villages, house demolitions, revoking residence permits, deportation, destruction of the infrastructure that maintains civil society, military occupation, dehumanizing language, theft of natural resources, especially aquifers — have long defined Israel’s campaign to eradicate Palestinians.
The occupation and genocide would not be possible without the U.S. which gives Israel $3.8 billion in annual military assistance and is now sending another $2.5 billion in bombs, including 1,800 MK84 2,000-pound bombs, 500 MK82 500-pound bombs and fighter jets to Israel. This, too, is our genocide.
The genocide in Gaza is the culmination of a process. It is not an act. The genocide is the predictable denouement of Israel’s settler colonial project. It is coded within the DNA of the Israeli apartheid state. It is where Israel had to end up.
Zionist leaders are open about their goals.
Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant, after Oct. 7, announced that Gaza would receive “no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel.” Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs Israel Katz said: “Humanitarian aid to Gaza? No electrical switch will be turned on, no water hydrant will be opened.” Avi Dichter, the Minister of Agriculture, referred to Israel’s military assault as “the Gaza Nakba,” referencing the Nakba, or “catastrophe”, which between 1947 and 1949, drove 750,000 Palestinians from their land and saw thousands massacred by Zionist militias. Likud member of the Israeli Knesset Revital Gottlieb posted on her social media account: “Bring down buildings!! Bomb without distinction!!…Flatten Gaza. Without mercy! This time, there is no room for mercy!” Not to be outdone, Minister of Heritage Amichai Eliyahu supported using nuclear weapons on Gaza as “one of the possibilities.”
The message from the Israeli leadership is unequivocal. Annihilate the Palestinians the same way we annihilated Native Americans, the Australians annihilated the First Nations peoples, the Germans annihilated the Herero in Namibia, the Turks annihilated Armenians and the Nazis annihilated the Jews.
The specifics are different. The process is the same.
We cannot plead ignorance. We know what happened to the Palestinians. We know what is happening to the Palestinians. We know what will happen to the Palestinians.
But it is easier to pretend. Pretend Israel will allow in humanitarian aid. Pretend there will be a ceasefire. Pretend Palestinians will return to their destroyed homes in Gaza. Pretend Gaza will be rebuilt. Pretend the Palestinian Authority will administer Gaza. Pretend there will be a two-state solution. Pretend there is no genocide.
The genocide, which the U.S. is funding and sustaining with weapons shipments, says something not only about Israel, but about us, about Western civilization, about who we are as a people, where we came from and what defines us. It says that all our vaunted morality and respect for human rights is a lie. It says that people of color, especially when they are poor and vulnerable, do not count. It says their hopes, dreams, dignity and aspirations for freedom are worthless. It says we will ensure global domination through racialized violence.
This lie — that Western civilization is predicated on “values” such as respect for human rights and the rule of law — is one the Palestinians, and all those in the Global South, as well as Native Americans and Black and Brown Americans have known for centuries. But, with the Gaza genocide live streamed, this lie is impossible to sustain.
We do not halt Israel’s genocide because we are Israel, infected with white supremacy and intoxicated by our domination of the globe’s wealth and the power to obliterate others with our industrial weapons. Remember The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman telling Charlie Rose on the eve of the war in Iraq that American soldiers should go house to house from Basra to Baghdad and say to Iraqis “suck on this?” That is the real credo of the U.S. empire.
The world outside of the industrialized fortresses in the Global North is acutely aware that the fate of the Palestinians is their fate. As climate change imperils survival, as resources become scarce, as migration becomes an imperative for millions, as agricultural yields decline, as costal areas are flooded, as droughts and wild fires proliferate, as states fail, as armed resistance movements rise to battle their oppressors along with their proxies, genocide will not be an anomaly. It will be the norm. The earth’s vulnerable and poor, those Frantz Fanon called “the wretched of the earth,” will be the next Palestinians.
(Republished from Scheerpost by permission of author or representative)
The French daily newspaper Liberation has come under fire for publishing a cartoon that mocks fasting Palestinians in Gaza searching for food.
The cartoon by artist Corinne Rey depicts an emaciated Palestinian man chasing after rats and cockroaches amid rubble and destroyed buildings. A woman in the cartoon slaps his hands and admonishes him, stating: “Not before sunset.”
It was shared on X on Monday, with the caption: “Ramadan in Gaza,” referring to the Muslim holy month during which worshippers abstain from all forms of food and drink during the daylight hours.
Social media users slammed the illustration as “racist”, “dehumanising” and a “nauseating” example of public expression as hundreds of thousands of Palestinians face starvation due to Israel’s prevention of aid into the war-battered enclave.
“A prime example of how western and French media dehumanise Palestinians and disregard the current process of genocide and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip,” stated one user on social media.
Another critic of the cartoon wrote that the centre-left paper satirised “the fastest, most catastrophic, deliberate starvation of a population ever… mocking 2.3 million famished Palestinians under US-UK-EU-armed Israeli bombardment, half of which are children”.
The editor-in-chief of Libération is Dov Alfon, formerly of Israeli military intelligence Unit 8200.
Israel cut off all fuel, food, water, aid and electricity to Gaza on 9 October. Its relentless bombing of hospitals bakeries, supermarkets and pharmacies in the besieged strip has led to the complete collapse of the medical sector and forced people to find scraps of food in order to survive.
The UN and several aid agencies have repeatedly warned that Gaza is on the brink of famine, calling for Israel to allow in aid immediately.
At least 27 people have died from malnutrition and dehydration since the start of the war, including a 10-year-old child with cerebral palsy.
‘Repugnant example’
Rey took to X on Tuesday to defend her work, asserting that her drawing aimed to shed light on the despair experienced by Palestinians, “denounce the famine in Gaza”, and also offer a critique of religion.
Petit florilège (tout petit hein) de conneries, menaces et messages antisémites reçus suite à ce dessin publié hier dans Libé. Un dessin (que j’assume parfaitement!) qui souligne le désespoir des palestiniens, dénonce la famine à Gaza et moque aussi l’absurdité de la religion. pic.twitter.com/b3fRwQxyJj
Translation: Small anthology (very small eh) of bullshit, threats and antisemitic messages received following this drawing published yesterday in Libé. A drawing (which I fully take responsibilty for!) which highlights the despair of the Palestinians, denounces the famine in Gaza and also mocks the absurdity of religion.
While some users defended Rey’s cartoon as freedom of expression, others expressed dissatisfaction with what they called a misplaced priority amid the ongoing war.
“A population has been massacred for 4 months and those who are still alive are starving and this bourgeoisie finds it urgent to ‘criticise religion,'” said one user.
Several users also said the illustration was merely another example of systemic discrimation against Muslims and Arabs in French society, which many Muslims say has only increased with start of the war in Gaza.
The cartoon is a “repugnant example of how anti-Palestinian racism and anti-Muslim bigotry has infested large swathes of the left in French society,” one user said.
In February 2023, controversial French satire magazine Charlie Hebdofaced criticism for mocking victims of the Turkey-Syria earthquake, which claimed the lives of over 55,000 people and left tens of thousands injured.
Middle East Eye delivers independent and unrivalled coverage and analysis of the Middle East, North Africa and beyond. To learn more about republishing this content and the associated fees, please fill out this form. More about MEE can be found here.
Despite public protestations, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi is helping Israel transfer 1.4 million Palestinians from Rafah to tent cities in the Sinia Desert
On Saturday, western news agencies reported that closed-door negotiations took place in Paris that were aimed at reaching an agreement on a ceasefire in Gaza. According to Reuters the talks represented “the most serious push for weeks to halt the fighting in the battered Palestinian enclave and see Israeli and foreign hostages released.” Regrettably, the reports from Paris were largely a media-engineered deception intended to divert attention from the real purpose of the confab. Keep in mind, the primary attendees of the gathering were not senior-level diplomats or trained negotiators, but the directors of the Intelligence services including the head of Israel’s Mossad, David Barnea, Egyptian spy-chief Abbas Kamel, and CIA Director William Burns. These are not the men one would choose to hammer-out a hostage exchange or a ceasefire deal, but to implement electronic surveillance, espionage or black ops. Thus, it is extremely unlikely that they met in Paris to settle on a plan for the cessation of hostilities. The more probable explanation is that the respective spy-chiefs are putting the finishing touches on a collaborative plan to breach the Egyptian border wall so that one and a half million severely-traumatized Palestinians can flee into Egypt without any serious opposition from the Egyptian army.
Such an operation would require considerable coordination in order to minimize the casualties while, at the same time, achieving its overall objective. Naturally, any breach would have to be blamed on Hamas who will undoubtedly be the convenient scapegoat for blowing up a section of the wall creating an opening for thousands of stampeding Palestinians. In this way, Israel could characterize the mass expulsion as a “voluntary migration” which is the cheery-sounding Zionist sobriquet for ethnic cleansing. In any event, the bulk of Gaza’s Moslem population will have been evicted from their historic homeland and forced into refugee camps scattered across the Sinai Desert. This is Netanyahu’s endgame which could take place at any time.
There is some doubt as to whether Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi will cooperate with Israel and allow the Palestinians to enter Egypt en masse, but those doubts are based on speculation not fact. For those who care to dig a bit deeper, there’s a clear money-trail connecting the dodgy Egyptian president to a policy-change that will more than accommodate Netanyahu’s ambitious ethnic cleansing plan. In other words, the fix is already in. This is from Reuters:
Talks with Egypt to boost its International Monetary Fund loan program are making excellent progress, the IMF said on Thursday, saying that Egypt needs a “very comprehensive support package” to deal with economic challenges, including pressures from the war in Gaza….
Asked about the impact on the talks from challenges posed by the expected entry of Gaza refugees into Egypt, Kozack said: “There is a need to have a very comprehensive support package for Egypt, and we’re working very closely with both the Egyptian authorities and their partners to ensure that Egypt does not have any residual financing needs and also to ensure that the program is able to ensure macroeconomic and financial stability in Egypt.” IMF sees progress on Egypt loan program amid Gaza pressures, Reuters
Repeat: “to ensure that Egypt does not have any residual financing needs”??
WTF? So the IMF now provides financial support for ethnic cleansing?
It certainly looks that way. The IMF wants to make sure that el-Sisi has sufficient money to cover the costs of feeding and housing one and a half million refugees. But is that where those billions of dollars will actually go; to the starving Palestinians who have lost their homes and all their material possessions, or will it vanish into the offshore accounts of corrupt Egyptian politicians just as it has in Ukraine. We’ve all seen this movie many times before and it doesn’t end well. Here’s more from the Financial Times:
Let me get this straight: The IMF halted payouts on a $3 billion loan to Egypt, but now they are prepared to hand-over $10 billion to a debt-ridden, credit risk nation whose currency suffered a 40% devaluation last year and whose economy is presently in the dumps? Does that make sense? Of course, not. Here’s more from The Cradle:
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) says there is “excellent progress” in talks with Egypt over a loan program that seeks to “support” the country in weathering its financial woes and handling a potential deluge of Palestinian refugees that Israel seeks to ethnically cleanse from Gaza.
So, someone finally has the courage to say what everyone knows to be true already, that the IMF is financing the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. Here’s more from the same article:
IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said in November that the agency was “seriously considering” a possible augmentation of Egypt’s loan program due to “economic difficulties posed by the Israel–Gaza war.”
“The loan could reach up to $10 billion to help the Egyptian economy survive amid local and external factors, including the Israeli onslaught on the neighboring Gaza Strip and tensions in the Red Sea…
This coincided with the start of construction work on an “isolated security zone” in the eastern Sinai Desert on the border with the Gaza Strip, which many expect will serve as a buffer zone for displaced Palestinians.
“The construction work seen in Sinai along the border with Gaza – the establishment of a reinforced security perimeter around a specific, open area of land – are serious signs that Egypt may be preparing to accept and allow the displacement of Gazans to Sinai, in coordination with Israel and the United States.” IMF vows to support Egypt as nation braces for mass displacement of Gazans, The Cradle
It’s worth noting, that by accepting the IMF loan of $10 billion, el-Sisi has agreed to peg Egypt’s currency to black market rates, which means its value will be cut in half on the day the deal is consummated. Egyptian working people—half of who already live below the poverty line—will be severely hurt by the bailout although not nearly as much as the Palestinians who be left to rot in tent cities in the desert.
Also, it appears that the IMF will continue to dangle the $10 billion loan(bribe?) beneath el-Sisi’s nose until the Palestinians finally cross-over into Egypt and the operation is concluded. This is how western oligarchs use international institutions like the IMF to coerce their puppets to do what they want. In this case, they needed a pliable Judas who would be willing to double-cross his fellow Muslims in order to line his pockets and those of his closest allies. They apparently found their man in el-Sisi.
This may also help to explain why Egypt is currently clearing a vast track of land just a stone’s throw from the Gaza border. Cairo is preparing the land to accommodate the burgeoning flow of refugees who will soon be pouring into the country. This is from Forbes:
Egypt is setting up a camp near its border with Gaza as a contingency for a potential exodus of Palestinians from the enclave if Israel goes ahead with a ground offensive on Rafah, the border region where more than half of Gaza’s population is taking refuge, Reuters reported….
Citing four unnamed sources, Reuters reported Egypt is preparing a “desert area with some basic facilities” to shelter potential refugees as a “temporary and precautionary measure,”
The human rights group, the Sinai Foundation, has shared images of the purported camps, showing trucks and cranes in the area setting up a “high-security area” surrounded by concrete fences.
Israeli, American and Egyptian Intel chiefs met in Paris (IMO) to put the finishing touches on a plan to expel the Palestinians from Gaza.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is about to provide Egypt with a $10 billion loan for “handling a potential deluge of Palestinian refugees that Israel seeks to ethnically cleanse from Gaza.” (The Cradle)
Egypt is preparing a “desert area with some basic facilities” to shelter potential refugees” in the near future.
The IDF has continued its daily airstrikes on civilian sites in Rafah in order to intensify feelings of high-anxiety and panic that will help to trigger a stampede into Egypt.
Food trucks are prevented from entering Gaza. Israel is deliberately starving the Palestinians so they will flee their homeland as soon as there is an opening at the border.
All of these measures are aimed at one objective alone, the complete eradication of the Palestinian population. And, now—after a bloody four month-long military campaign—Israel’s goal is clearly in sight.
It will take a monumental effort to stop this evil plan from going forward.
There is a fundamental contradiction between the goals of KSA and “Israel” and the end that each of them seeks for this genocide despite their opposition to the aspirations of the Palestinian people (Illustrated by Mahdi Rteil to Al Mayadeen English)
A realist analysis attempting to shed light on the complications of Israeli-Saudi normalization in light of the Israeli genocide in Gaza, and the discrepancies in the aims of each party.
The Israeli war on Gaza has entered its fourth month. The occupation regime faces an open case in the International Court of Justice for carrying out genocide on the one hand and is exposed to activism against the crimes it is committing by all humanitarian organizations around the world, as well as many countries. Despite all of this, and in contradiction to all logic, there is still strong talk about normalizing the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia with the Israeli regime.
This may seem utterly illogical at first glance, given that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia markets itself as one of the most important Arab and Islamic powers, and thus positions itself as a defender of the interests of this group. How, then, does it extend its hand to those who not only commit these crimes against humanity but also those whose leaders make genocidal statements? This in addition to a clear and unequivocal rejection of the two-state solution that Saudi Arabia has set as a condition for normalizing relations makes the situation more bizarre.
Answering these questions requires an analysis of the geopolitical reality in the region, alongside a short historical overview, and a presentation of the interests and concerns of each party, as well as their political and security goals.
US hegemony and its goals in the war in Gaza
Despite the sharp transformations that have affected the international system in the recent period, which mainly affected the unilateral dominance of the United States after the Cold War, Washington still maintains the role of the primary hegemon who is trying to prevent the system from turning into fully multipolar.
US hegemony depends on a military power represented by the world’s first military budget, which is equivalent to about 40% of all global military spending, as well as a large number of military bases around the planet. In addition to military power, the United States has an unparalleled ability to influence the global economy due to countries using the US dollar as a trusted currency for exchange. US military power punishes countries that do not respect its hegemony, or in most cases use sanctions linked to its banking and monetary system.
As a hegemon, the United States works to prevent the formation of regional powers that oppose it, whether alliances or sovereign states. Here we turn to the series of alliances undertaken by the United States, which rely mainly on focal points around the planet to prevent powerful countries from challenging its hegemony. Former US State Secretary Mike Pompeo defines these entities or states as “beacons of democracy,” although they are more akin to land-based aircraft carriers. These entities are Taiwan, “Israel” and Ukraine.
The United States is using Taiwan, in addition to Japan and South Korea, mainly to prevent China from becoming an absolute regional hegemon in East Asia or as a method to contain its power projection. It is using Ukraine in Europe to prevent Russia from becoming a hegemon in Eastern Europe and to also prevent Germany from becoming a hegemon in Western Europe. On the other hand, “Israel” represents an exception to American policy. Aside from the ideological aspect, “Israel” plays the role of the region’s policeman par excellence for the United States either by destroying or deterring all countries with sovereign national projects. “Israel” here is the focus of the fight against the axis of resistance in West Asia, led by Iran, to prevent this axis from turning into a regional hegemon and anti-American force.
In light of this, any weakening of the Israelis, or threat to them, from a geopolitical standpoint poses a risk to the hegemony of the United States in one of the most important spots in the world from a geographical standpoint, as well as the one richest in fossil energy resources. In this context, the United States is more concerned about “Israel’s” security than “Israel” itself. But, as an absolute hegemon, it faces dilemmas that are radically different from those faced by “Israel”. Such discrepancy is what is putting the two parties on opposite sides with time, and this is what we will discuss in more detail in the section related to the Israelis of the article.
Balance of power in the Middle East
“Israel”, Saudi Arabia, and most of the Gulf states belong to the American axis in the West Asia region, and despite the Chinese breakthrough in economic investment, US-Western hegemony over these countries is still at its height. Because of Saudi Arabia’s self-proclaimed Islamic authority, it faces difficulty in normalizing its relations with the Israeli entity due to the so-called “Arab street’s” continued opposition to such a step, and the genocide in Gaza has contributed to reviving the Palestinian cause in an important part of this street.
From its inception, Saudi Arabia has primarily benefited from or fought national states in traditional centers of power, such as Nasser’s Egypt, or initially cooperated with Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq before sacrificing him in the US-led coalition invasion in 1991. Finally, it financed the destruction of Syria and added fuel to the fire of the war that has been raging since 2011. As a non-traditional power with fewer population that only owns holy places and oil wealth, it benefits mainly from neutralizing the positions of traditional powers in the region, which has a larger population. Without absolute American protection for the Gulf states, and an Israeli military role in the subjugation process, Saudi Arabia’s role will be incomplete or unachievable.
Since the victory of the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979, Saudi Arabia has been hostile to it, not only because it was presenting an Islamic sovereign counterweight that was exclusive to Saudi Arabia in the previous stage, but because it threatens the existing dependency structure in the region as it is the main element in the axis of resistance.
Following Yemen entering the Resistance Axis, the war on Syria’s failure to change the regime, and the loss of Israeli deterrence on October 7, normalization and direct military cooperation became more necessary for the American Axis members to confront the dangers of the liberation process led by the Resistance Axis. “Israel”, which was supposed to be the leader of this axis militarily, technologically, and financially, is still reeling from the wounds of October 7. What makes matters worse nowadays is that the United States is facing a crisis in Ukraine, and it needs to move to confront China in East Asia as quickly as possible.
Why does Saudi Arabia act the way it does?
At a point before October 7, and according to press leaks, one of Saudi Arabia’s conditions for normalizing relations with “Israel” was its direct association with the United States through a defense treaty similar to Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. This condition indicates the primacy of security for Saudi Arabia. The primacy of security has been greatly enhanced after the failure of the Saudi coalition to impose its will on Yemen, and Yemen has turned into an essential and effective pillar in the current war in support of Gaza.
Normalization in this context was a necessity for Gulf security, which since 1991 has been closely linked to the Western security concept through the stationing of more than 40,000 American soldiers in the region. Normalization, then, was not a transitional and pivotal point as former US President Trump tried to market, but merely a shift in the level of security and military relations that already existed, even if no direct diplomatic and trade relations existed.
Both Saudi Arabia and the United States here are accelerating toward normalization while the blood has not yet dried in Gaza, as each of them is aware of the problem that may be imposed by the shift of hegemonic focus from West Asia to East Asia. Normalization between Saudi Arabia and “Israel” here aims primarily to bridge any potential gap in military power to confront the axis of resistance in the future.
The problem here is that Saudi Arabia stipulated a two-state solution as the condition for the peace and normalization process. US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken exposed the Saudis when he announced that a mere commitment to this solution by the Israelis is sufficient and not its immediate implementation. The Saudis certainly objected and denied the announcement, but based on the course of events, it would not be unlikely that they made such a pledge.
The two-state solution here is not presented by Saudi Arabia because it embraces the Palestinian issue nor that it is particularly fond of the Palestinian people and its ambitions, but in an attempt to bury the main point of conflict between the Arabs and the Zionists, in preparation for its leadership of this future Arab-Israeli alliance.
The two-state solution proposed by Saudi Arabia, despite its meager demands, and even though it is giving up most of historical Palestine, is rejected by the Israeli entity in all its sects, right, and left, above and below.
Saudi Arabia, then, faces a major dilemma. On the one hand, it sees normalization as a future security necessity, since there are no guarantees about the future of the region after the Arab uprisings in 2011 if they are to occur again in the context of the massacre taking place in Gaza. In other words, no one can guarantee that the normalization will not be rejected by the Arab street and lead to the situation exploding in the region if the Saudis are unable to obtain something that they can market as a solution to the Palestinian issue.
In conclusion, normalizing relations with the Zionists who insist on ethnic cleansing and the policy of apartheid and treating the Palestinians as if they were sub-humans may be a step that carries dangers to Saudi Arabia and its Axis that are greater than the danger of the Axis of resistance. Here, Saudi Arabia, led by Mohammed bin Salman, sees itself as being forced to bet on one of two losing horses.
An Israeli checkmate
The Zionist project, as the last settler colonial project, depends on many ideological foundations supported by material strength for survival. The Al-Aqsa flood operation on October 7 demonstrated the extent of the Israelis’ fateful dependence on American support, not only in terms of weapons, technology, and international diplomatic backing in the UNSC, but also through the presence of Direct military action for the first time, represented by sending two aircraft carriers and a nuclear submarine.
“Israel” in this context is a land-based aircraft carrier for the US hegemon in the region. On another note, “Israel” must show the Arabs surrounding it that it is omnipotent. Most of these Arabs have come under states ruled by elites who marketed their legitimacy through some sort of a liberal dream and the absurdity of resistance to the US. Therefore, these elites also derive their legitimacy from “Israel” itself, in one way or another, and from its chieftain, the United States. “Israel” must also convince the settlers to reside by planting the idea of its invincibility and its capability to deter everyone at the same time at all spectrums through disproportionate punishment.
Any shaking of these concepts exposes this Western fortress in West Asia to the dangers of collapse, disintegration, or rolling a downhill path. Internally, the combination of the extremism and racism of the Zionist doctrine and the settlers’ belief in “Israel’s” invincibility succeeded in greatly complicating the scene. Due to the continuous pivoting of Israeli politics towards the extreme right, it is natural that exaggeration in setting and inflating war goals is the daily bread of politicians. This means that achieving a total and comprehensive victory becomes not an option, but rather a necessity to preserve this mythical self-image that Israeli society has, or it will simply disintegrate and enter into an internal conflict that unleashes reverse migration.
As a result, most Israelis believe, according to opinion polls, that some sort of complete victory over the resistance in Palestine should be the goal, as crazy and unachievable as this goal is. Most Israelis believe that “voluntary migration” a.k.a ethnic cleansing is something that should be encouraged and carried out in Gaza, not to mention the genocidal statements made by Israeli officials, which alerted them to one of the most clear genocides in history, not only in action but in intent. Which is unambiguous.
In light of the above, the goals of Israeli politics and society here contradict those of Saudi Arabia. Here Israeli exceptionalism appears. There is no one like “Israel”. Normal countries win without having absurd conditions of their victory being the genocide of the other party. Racist colonial entities on the other hand need that.
Because of the high and unachievable conditions for victory, “Israel” has placed itself in a checkmate, either an internal conflict, or destruction that will have a disastrous impact not only on its international reputation and relations, but at the expense of sabotaging the path of normalization and its law, and even the risk of revolutions erupting in the Arab world, endangering the pro-US Saudi leadership.
US-sponsored Israeli-KSA ties between a rock and a hard place
Although Saudi Arabia and “Israel” largely agree on the goal of eliminating resistance in Gaza, they differ sharply in the way and outcome each side prefers for the war to lead to.
Given the primacy of the Chinese challenge to American hegemony, the United States wants, in any way, to freeze the current situation in West Asia and maintain its policeman there, i.e. Israel, as it pivots east. The failure to weaken Russia and push its political system to collapse has strengthened the United States’ desire to avoid a war that it sees as secondary in West Asia while China grows stronger.
There is no doubt that America wants to eliminate the resistance movements, thus a victory of the Israelis in Gaza is essential to the US more than “Israel” itself, but it fears that the genocide in Gaza will lead to the eruption of a war in the region led by the resistance axis on the one hand, and on the other hand, it fears a political collapse and revolutions in the fabric of its allied countries. Its allies in the region are mainly Jordan, Egypt, and then Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. Therefore, the ideal outcome is a two-state solution, and an alliance of Arab-Israeli regimes to confront the axis of resistance while reducing the cost of US presence in the region.
The Saudi view here is very close to the American one, as it wants to end the resistance movements in the Arab world as a continuation of its victory over the national projects of the last century, but it fears that the shedding of Palestinian blood might push its current leadership of the Arab world, ensured by subjugating Egypt and destroying Iraq and Syria, to the abyss. Therefore, it prefers to end the Palestinian cause through a two-state solution, establish a Saudi-Israeli alliance with US support, and deter the Axis of resistance.
The Israelis, based on the above, are in a completely different place. They want to ethnically cleanse Gaza and eliminate the resistance, no matter how much it costs in human losses, and they do not intend to back down, even if it means dragging the United States into a regional war that is not one of its current priorities.
Indeed, the dog is following here and not the opposite. It is not that the Israelis are craving for a regional war for their own sake, but rather because they, as the last settler colonial entity and the last of the “exceptional peoples” in the international system, believe that they are entitled to what no one else is entitled to, to ensure the survival of their racist regime.
In light of the racist and superior nature of their regime, they are forced to show those whom they see and treat as sub-human who are the bosses here, otherwise, the social and political cohesion of the Israeli colonial entity will be in danger.
Conclusion
There is a fundamental contradiction between the goals of each party and the end that each of them seeks for this genocide despite their opposition to the aspirations of the Palestinian people. These differences appear incompatible, even if the interest is common, as any concession from any party here means that it exposes its other future ally to a future existential threat.
It is unlikely that the United States will be able to reconcile the two parties without one of them giving up what it declares to be its core interests and putting its fate in jeopardy. Another option would be that the already existing war expands and blows the chessboard and all the pieces away. What is certain is that the coming days will bring radical and pivotal changes to the nature of international and regional relations in West Asia, if they do not lead to the collapse of some states and regimes.
As Vladimir Lenin said: “There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen,” and it appears we are living such an era.
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Evening | Netanyahu’s plans for the post-war…or war 02-23-2024
As the world increasingly reacts with alarm at Israeli Premier Benjamin Netanyahu’s declared goal of leveling the southern Gaza city of Rafah to the ground, the spotlight has fallen on Egypt.
Will the North African heavyweight stand idly by, allowing the Tel Aviv regime to intensify its ongoing genocide in Gaza, or make good its threat to annul the so-called “peace treaty”?
Authorities in Cairo would know that plans by Israel to populate Gaza with Jewish settlements require Egypt’s collaboration to absorb Palestinian refugees into parts of the Sinai.
What it translates to is that Gaza is ethnically cleansed of 2.3 million Palestinians and replaced with an exclusively Jewish settler colony.
However, the sticky point is Rafah, where more than a million and a half Palestinians who were violently forced to evacuate their homes in the North are huddled in tents and makeshift shelters, facing death from relentless air strikes, hunger, cold and thirst.
In addition, the dire need for essential medical supplies has spawned the worst humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, something the world has never seen in the modern era.
So, the big question is, how will Egypt respond to these developments?
Egypt, of today, under the military rule of General Abdel Fateh el-Sisi, is a far cry from the leadership of Mohamed Morsi.
During the exciting but short-lived era of the Arab Spring, tens of thousands of protesters across Cairo flooded Tahrir Square demanding the removal of Hosni Mubarak from his thirty-year reign.
Following the popular mass revolt against his brutal dictatorship, Mubarak was forced to resign. It marked a period that saw the country transitioning from tyranny to democracy when Morsi was elected to lead Egypt in its first free and fair democratic election.
The change of fortunes did not sit well with Western powers that began a series of dirty tricks to oust him, notwithstanding the fact that Morsi had acquired a comfortable majority during the elections.
A classic case of a regime-change plot began to be engineered when a number of countries connived to unseat him through a bloody military coup.
America, Israel, UAE and Saudi Arabia’s candidate for regime change was the head of Egypt’s notorious secret service/intelligence unit – el-Sisi – who was also in charge of the military.
In an elaborate scheme, a rebellion against Morsi was orchestrated as a prelude to the coup. Reports subsequently revealed that the UAE government funded the uprising.
These regimes shared common misgivings about Morsi’s ties to the Muslim Brotherhood (Al Ikhwan Al Muslimeen) and were reluctant to have the Arab world’s most powerful nation-state in the hands of the Ikhwan.
Chatham House reported that recordings leaked from the Egyptian Ministry of Defence and confidential testimony from US officials fingered the UAE as having provided funds to support the activity of Tamarrod, the movement that organized the rebellion against Morsi.
As soon as el-Sisi stepped in to take Morsi’s seat, Saudi Arabia and the UAE made no effort to conceal their approval. Both Western-backed oligarchs gleefully displayed their support with transfers of huge chunks of money.
The background to the massacre is well documented. According to media reports, tens of thousands of Egyptians were out in the streets and city squares to demand the reinstatement of Morsi.
To illustrate the brazeness of the UAE, its Crown Prince Mohamed bin Zayed led a delegation to Cairo in solidarity with coup leader el-Sisi, less than a fortnight after the horror of the Muslim Brotherhood, when around a thousand people were mowed down.
On August 14, 2013, as the protests had entered their sixth consecutive week, thousands staged a sit-in at the Rabaa al-Adawiya Square, one of Cairo’s busiest thoroughfares, as they had for more than a month.
Sisi’s forces moved in using armored vehicles and bulldozers, in addition to ground troops and snipers on rooftops carrying live ammunition, to attack the square from all sides and close off safe exits, according to witnesses and human rights organizations, as reported in media.
Morsi, the elected president, was jailed where he subsequently died, while el-Sisi has now been in power for just over a decade. To date, there has been no accountability for the Rabaa massacre.
From Rabaa to Rafah, el-Sisi’s dismal human rights record does not hold any promise that he will deter Netanyahu’s planned incursion into Rafah or stop him from expelling Palestinians from there.
Egypt under el-Sisi has been reduced to a mere spectator, observing the slaughter of thousands of innocent Palestinians as the genocide intensifies in Gaza without any effort to flex its muscles.
Iqbal Jassat is an executive member of Media Review Network, Johannesburg, South Africa.
(The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of Press TV)
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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.
In the UN’s top court hearing, the World Court stated that it would not dismiss the case despite the Israeli request, calling on the occupation to halt all military action that aligns with genocide.
The United Nations’ highest court meets on Friday to announce its decision on the request presented by South Africa to enforce emergency measures against “Israel” for its war on Gaza, on January 26, 2024. (Illustrated by Arwa Makki; Al Mayadeen English)
The United Nations’ highest court asserted its jurisdiction to act on the emergency measures sought by South Africa in its lawsuit against “Israel’s” actions in the Gaza war.
Despite the Israeli request for dismissal, the World Court stated that it would not dismiss the case.
On Friday, the UN’s top court ordered that some rights presented by South Africa in its genocide case against the Israeli war on Gaza are plausible.
As the reading proceeded, the court recognized the right of Palestinians in Gaza to be protected from acts of genocide, adding that the Palestinians are a protected group under the genocide convention. However, the ruling does not deal with the core accusation of the case – whether genocide occurred – but focuses on the urgent intervention sought by South Africa.
Among the measures South Africa requested was an immediate halt to the Israeli military operation, which has laid waste to much of the enclave and killed more than 26,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza health authorities.
‘Israel’ expected to take measures against genocide acts
The Court ordered “Israel” to take all measures to prevent genocide acts in Gaza, ensure its forces do not commit genocide, and take measures to improve the humanitarian situation.
“Israel” is required to submit a report to the court within a month, detailing its actions to comply with the order. Furthermore, it must implement measures to prevent and punish direct incitement of genocide in the context of its war on Gaza.
“The state of Israel shall…. take all measures within its power to prevent the commission of all acts within the scope of Article II of the Genocide Convention,” the court said.
In a comprehensive decision, 15 of the 17-judge panel of the ICJ voted in favor of urgent measures, addressing most of South Africa’s requests, though notably excluding an order for “Israel” to cease military actions in Gaza.
S. Africa takes ‘Israel’ to court
Last year, South Africa submitted a motion to the International Court of Justice on December 29, 2023, accusing Israeli forces of violating the UN’s Genocide Convention. South Africa’s submission to the Hague-based court reads that the Israeli occupation forces [IOF] operations “are genocidal in character, as they are committed with the requisite specific intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza as a part of the broader Palestinian national, racial, and ethnical group.”
The International Court of Justice has the authority to issue “provisional measures,” emergency orders aimed at safeguarding Palestinians in Gaza from potential breaches of the convention. These orders are legally binding and cannot be appealed, though enforcing them poses a challenge.
On December 29, “Israel” rejected South Africa’s launch of a genocide case against it at the ICJ. Despite the sea of war crime evidence, the occupation labeled the case as groundless blood libel lacking legal merit and asserted that its army was adhering to international humanitarian law.
On that note, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has hinted that his government might not adhere to any ICJ order, stating, “No one will stop us – not The Hague, not the Axis of Evil, and no one else,” in reference to the Axis of Resistance.
First ICJ hearing
South Africa’s legal team stated on January 11th – in its opening statement at The Hague – that South Africa has recognized the ongoing Nakba of the Palestinian people through “Israel’s” colonization since 1948, “which has systematically and forcibly dispossessed, displaced, and fragmented the Palestinian people, deliberately denying them the internationally recognized inalienable right to self-determination and their internationally recognized rights of return as refugees to their towns and villages in what is now the state of Israel.”
The team emphasized that South Africa is particularly mindful of “Israel’s” “institutionalized regime of discriminatory laws, policies, and practices designed and maintained to establish domination, subjecting the Palestinian people to apartheid on both sides of the Green Line.”
They also pointed out that the decade-long impunity for widespread and systematic human rights violations has emboldened “Israel” in its recurrence and intensification of humanitarian crimes in Palestine, while simultaneously acknowledging that “the genocidal acts and omissions” by “Israel” “inevitably form part of a continuum of illegal acts perpetrated against the Palestinian people since 1948.”
The ICJ’s limited enforcement capabilities were exemplified when it ordered Russia to halt its invasion of Ukraine, a directive that went unheeded. If the court rules against “Israel”, it could intensify political pressure, potentially leading to sanctions.
“Israel’s” legal adviser argued that halting the genocidal campaign would leave the regime defenseless, citing a cross-border raid by the Palestinian resistance on October 7.
Minister Lamola countered, stating that self-defense is not a valid response to genocide.
Despite South Africa presenting a comprehensive document citing Israeli top military and political officials calling directly or indirectly for genocide in Gaza, “Israel” urged judges to dismiss the case, claiming that the calls to cease its aggression lacked merit.
The Israeli position was aggressively backed by the United States, which was later joined by Germany which announced it would get involved as a third party in favor of “Israel.”
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
Thousands of miles separate Uganda and Congo from the Gaza Strip, but these places are connected to Palestine in ways that traditional geopolitical analyses would fail to explain.
On January 3, it was revealed that the far-right Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu is actively discussing proposals to expel millions of Palestinians to African countries in exchange for a fixed price.
The discussion on expelling millions of Gazans has supposedly entered the mainstream thinking in Israel starting on October 7. However, the fact that this discussion remains active over three months since the start of the Israeli war on Gaza indicates that the Israeli proposals are not an outcome of a specific historical moment, for example, the Al-Aqsa Flood operation.
Even a glance at Israeli historical records points to the fact that the mass expulsion of Palestinians – known in Israel as ‘Transfer’ – was, and remains, a primary Israeli strategy that aims at fixing Israel’s so-called ‘demographic problem.’
Long before fighters from the Al-Qassam Brigades and other Palestinian movements stormed the fence separating besieged Gaza from Israel on October 7, Israeli politicians discussed, in fact, on many occasions, how to reduce the overall Palestinian population to maintain the demographic Jewish majority in historic Palestine.
The idea was not only confined to Israel’s extremists; it was even discussed by the likes of former Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman when he suggested in 2014 a proposal for a ‘population exchange plan.’
Even supposedly liberal intellectuals and historians have supported this idea in principle and practice.
A top Israeli historian, Benny Morris, regretted in an interview with the liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz in January 2004 that Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, failed to expel all Palestinians during the Nakba – the catastrophic event of murder and ethnic cleansing that led to the creation of the state of Israel on top of Palestinian towns and villages.
Another proof that the idea of ‘Transfer’ was not concocted on the spur of the moment is that comprehensive plans were immediately produced after October 7. They include a position paper published by the Israeli think tank the ‘Misgav Institute for National Security & Zionist Strategy’ on October 17 and a report released three days later by the Israeli news outlet Calcalist, which outlined a document proposing the same strategy.
The fact that Egypt, Jordan and other Arab countries openly and immediately declared their total rejection of expelling Palestinians indicates the degree of seriousness of those official Israeli proposals.
“Our problem is (finding) countries that are willing to absorb Gazans, and we are working on it,” Netanyahu said on January 2.
These comments were followed by others, including a statement by Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich when he said, “What needs to be done in the Gaza Strip is to encourage emigration.”
It was then that the Israeli official discourse adopted the term ‘voluntary migration.’ But there is nothing voluntary about the starvation of 2.3 million Palestinians, who continue to face an ongoing genocide and are being pushed systematically toward the border region between Gaza and Egypt.
In its legal case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the government of South Africa included the planned ethnic cleansing of Gaza by Tel Aviv as one of the main points listed by Pretoria, accusing Israel of genocide.
Due to the lack of enthusiasm on the part of pro-Israel Western countries, Israeli diplomats are circumnavigating the globe, looking for governments that are willing to accept ethnically cleansed Palestinians.
Imagine if this behavior stemmed from any other country in the world: a country that murders people en masse yet shops around looking for other states to accept the expelled survivors in exchange for cash.
Not only has Israel made a mockery of international law, but they have also set whole new standards of despicable behavior by any state, anywhere in the world, at any time in history, ancient or modern.
And yet, the world continues to watch, support, as in the case of the US, or gently or vehemently protest, but without taking a single meaningful action to stop the bloodbath in Gaza or to block the terrifying scenarios that could indeed follow if the war does not end.
But there is one thing that many people might not know: the Zionist movement, the very ideological institution that established Israel, had attempted to move the world’s Jewry to Africa to select a state before the choice of Palestine as the ‘Jewish homeland.’
This was called the ‘Uganda Scheme’ of 1903. It was raised by Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, at the Sixth Zionist Congress. It was based on a proposal by British Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain.
Declaration of the British Government allocating a “Jewish Territory” in East Africa, August 29, 1903
The Uganda Scheme eventually fell through, but the Zionists continued to shop for some other place, finally, to the misfortune of the Palestinians, settling on Palestine.
Suppose one compares the genocidal language of Israeli leaders of today and studies their racist references to Palestinians. They would find a significant overlap between their collective perception and how Europeans perceived Jewish communities for hundreds of years.
The sudden Zionist interest in Congo as a potential ‘homeland’ for Palestinians further illustrates the point that the Zionist movement continues to live in the shadow of its history, projecting the racism practiced against Jews on Israel’s racism against innocent Palestinians.
On January 5, Israel’s Minister of Heritage Amihai Eliyahu proposed that Israelis “must find ways for Gazans that are more painful than death.” One does not need to struggle to find historical references of similar language used by German Nazis in their depiction of Jews in the early half of the 20th century.
If history does repeat itself, it has an odd and unkind way of doing so.
We have been told that the world has learned from the mass killings of previous wars, including the Holocaust and other WWII atrocities. Yet, it seems that the lessons have largely gone unlearned. Not only is Israel now assuming the role of the mass killer, but the rest of the Western world continues to play the role assigned to them in this historical tragedy. They are either cheering, politely protesting, or doing nothing at all.
Feature photo | Theodor Herzl with a Zionist delegation in Alexandria, Egypt in 1898. Photo | Public Domain
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect MintPress News editorial policy.
It seems like the law is finally catching up with the Israeli occupation as its atrocities are so flagrant that they cannot be ignored anymore.
For the first time since “Israel” occupied Palestine in 1948, the world is witnessing a historical legal event. South Africa, supported by many countries around the world, from Ireland to Venezuela, has filed a lawsuit against “Israel” before the International Court of Justice in The Hague, Netherlands. “Israel has been committing genocide in Gaza,” states the lawsuit of 84 pages and a variety of evidence; to be accurate, strong incriminating evidence the least of which are 200 statements made by Israeli officials from both political and military levels. Right now, the first hearing is taking place in the presence of a South African legal team led by John Dugard, a former UN special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, on the one hand, and a legal team for the occupation, on the other, represented by Malcolm Shaw, a 76-year-old British-Zionist legal expert, who is considered one of the world’s leading experts on international law and has appeared before the ICJ in the past.
Meet the International Court of Justice
The International Court of Justice is the principal judicial organ of the UN established in 1945 by the Charter of the United Nations. Its role is to settle legal disputes submitted by states and to give advisory opinions on legal questions referred by authorized UN organs and specialized agencies. The court settles two types of legal disputes: Contentious cases and advisory proceedings.
It is important to note that the rulings of the ICJ are final and legally binding as they aren’t subject to appeal.
Can ‘Israel’ be tried before the ICJ?
Contentious cases, as per the ICJ Statute, are “cases limited to States.” The Statute of the Court defines States as State Members of the UN, other States that have become parties to the Statute of the Court, or States that have accepted its jurisdiction under certain conditions. These conditions are met either by entering into a special agreement to submit the dispute to the Court, including a jurisdiction clause that permits the parties or one of them to refer to the Court, or through declarations made by the two states involved under the Statute accepting the jurisdiction of the court as compulsory.
To answer the question, we need to look into how proceedings may be instituted before the Court in one of these two ways: either through the notification of a special agreement, a bilateral document lodged to the Court by either or both State parties to the proceedings or using a unilateral application, submitted by an applicant State against a respondent State.
To begin with, South Africa and “Israel” are both members of the United Nations, which makes them both bound by the Statute of the Court specifically Article 36(1), stating that the Court’s jurisdiction “comprises…. all matters specially provided for…. In treaties and conventions in force.”
To avoid any legal loopholes, South Africa is building its lawsuit on the 1948 UN Genocide Convention as a jurisdictional basis. Article 9 of the Convention states: “Disputes between the Contracting Parties relating to the interpretation, application or fulfilment of the present Convention, including those relating to the responsibility of a State for genocide or for any of the other acts enumerated in article III, shall be submitted to the International Court of Justice at the request of any of the parties to the dispute.”
Hence, as both South Africa and “Israel” are signatories to the mentioned convention, article 9 serves as the provision that allows either party to refer to the court.
Provisional measures vs. a state’s right to self-defense
Knowing that the ruling of the lawsuit might take several years, South Africa requested the Court to order provisional measures to “order Israel to cease killing and causing serious mental and bodily harm to Palestinian people in Gaza, to cease the deliberate infliction of conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction as a group, to prevent and punish direct and public incitement to genocide, and to rescind related policies and practices, including regarding the restriction on aid and the issuing of evacuation directives.”
The Court can take provisional measures without determining whether any Israeli violation of obligations under the Genocide Convention has occurred. Thus, there is no need to wait for the ruling of the lawsuit. What the court is required to do at the stage of making an order on provisional measures is to establish whether the acts complained of are capable of falling within the provisions of the Genocide Convention without the need to determine that all such acts are capable of falling under it, thus making South Africa’s claim a solid one for at least some of the acts South Africa says are capable of falling under the Convention. This is known as “prima facie”; a Latin expression meaning “at first sight,” “at first view,” or “based on first impression.” It denotes that, upon initial examination, a legal claim has sufficient evidence to proceed to trial or judgment. It is important to note that the claim presented to the Court extensively and accurately backed the argument of the Court’s jurisdiction on the provisional measures.
Unfortunately, once again, those who happen to support occupation and genocide in this world are using “a state’s right to self-defense” as a counter-argument to hinder the one presented regarding provisional measures. But how?
Article 51 of the UN Charter states: “Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security.”
They are claiming that the jurisdiction basis for the provisional measures by South Africa does not rise from the Genocide Convention itself but rather from what South Africa stated regarding the “prima facie” above. In that case, it only has to appear that a “jurisdiction could be founded,” prompting pro-occupation and genocide advocates to claim that the Court may act based on the possibility of jurisdiction that violates “Israel’s” right to “self-defense”.
In 2004, an advisory opinion from the ICJ itself denied that Article 51 was relevant to “Israel’s” construction of a wall in the West Bank allegedly meant to stop what ‘Israel” dubbed “terror attacks”. The Court declared that the attacks against “Israel” did not come from a foreign state as it exercises control in that territory and the threat “Israel” claimed originated from within the territory occupied by “Israel”. In addition, it is highly important to shed light on the fact that the right to “self-defense” only works against states, and Hamas is not a state. Some legal scholars have been trying to argue differently, but as of today, no court or legal precedent has ever given a contradictory opinion.
He who digs a pit for his brother falls into it
Recently in Ukraine v. Russia (2022) and under the same Convention in the South Africa v. “Israel” case, the ICJ approved provisional measures and ordered Russia to “immediately suspend the military operations that commenced on 24 February 2022 in the territory of Ukraine.” This will serve as a very important precedent that can be used in the lawsuit by South Africa cornering the Court into accepting the claim or showing the world that the most important court in the world is biased if it refuses to. Who would actually still respect the law after that?
The oppressed of the world unite
South Africa stated in its case presented to the ICJ that “Israel” is built on a “background of apartheid, expulsion, ethnic cleansing, annexation, occupation, discrimination and the ongoing denial of the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination.”
Twenty- five countries and an organization of 57 states have shown support for South Africa in this case, several of which had to deal with the terror of imperialism. We can’t know where this case will lead us or if history is going to be made, but one thing is for sure, none of what is happening looks good for the occupation or its allies.
Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist. He was based in Nazareth, Israel, for 20 years. He returned to the UK in 2021. He is the author of three books on the Israel-Palestine conflict: Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish State (2006) Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (2008) Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (2008) He has also contributed chapters and essays to several edited volumes on Israel-Palestine. In 2011 Jonathan was awarded the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. The judges’ citation reads: “Jonathan Cook’s work on Palestine and Israel, especially his de-coding of official propaganda and his outstanding analysis of events often obfuscated in the mainstream, has made him one of the reliable truth-tellers in the Middle East.” The same year, Project Censored voted a report by Jonathan, “Israel brings Gaza entry restrictions to West Bank“, one of the most important stories censored in 2009-10. Jonathan’s reports and commentaries have appeared in the Guardian, the Observer, the Times and the New Statesman (London); The International Herald Tribune and Le Monde diplomatique (Paris); Al-Ahram Weekly (Cairo); The National (Abu Dhabi); The Daily Star (Beirut); The Middle East Report and Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (Washington); and The Irish Times (Dublin). He has contributed to many online sites, such as Middle East Eye, CounterPunch, Al-Jazeera and Electronic Intifada. He has been a senior consultant and lead writer on two major reports by the International Crisis Group, a leading think-tank based in Washington and Brussels dealing with conflict resolution. Back to Basics: Israel’s Arab Minority and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Extreme Makeover? (II): The Withering of Arab Jerusalem There is a Wikipedia page about Jonathan. Today he provides regular commentary and analysis on the Middle East, and blogs about the media, propaganda, corporate malfeasance, the environment and global politics. Experience and qualifications Jonathan graduated from Southampton University in 1987 with a degree in philosophy and politics, and then earnt a postgraduate diploma in journalism from Cardiff University in 1989. He gained a masters degree in Middle Eastern studies, with distinction, from the School of Oriental and African Studies, London University, in 2000. He worked on regional newspapers before becoming a staff journalist at the Guardian in 1994. He later joined the Observer newspaper. He has been an independent journalist since 2001.
The BBC and others keep revisiting Hamas crimes that day, but fail to report on growing evidence that Israel killed its own citizens, often in grotesque fashion
Middle East Eye – 15 December 2023
Barely a day has passed since the 7 October attack by Hamas when the western media has not revisited those events, often to reveal what it claims are new details of astonishing atrocities carried out by the Palestinian group.
These disclosures have served to sustain public indignation in the West, and kept Palestinian solidarity activists on the back foot.
In turn, the outrage has smoothed Israel’s path as it has levelled vast swaths of Gaza; killed more than 18,700 Palestinians, most of them women and children; and denied the enclave’s population of 2.3 million access to food, water and fuel.
Critically, it has also made it far easier for western governments to throw their weight behind Israel – and arm it – even as Israeli leaders have repeatedly engaged in genocidal talk and carried out ethnic cleansing operations.
Israel’s intense bombing campaigns have herded nearly two million Palestinians into a small section of Gaza, pressed up against its short border with Egypt, while starvation and fatal disease start to take their toll.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken even described in graphic detail – and wholly falsely – a Hamas attack on an Israeli family: “The father’s eye gouged out in front of his kids. The mother’s breast cut off, the girl’s foot amputated, the boy’s fingers cut off before they were executed.”
Little evidence
Atrocities were undoubtedly committed that day by Hamas and other gunmen in Israel, as groups like Human Rights Watch have been documenting.
They have continued to occur in Gaza every day since, not least through Israel’s continuing and relentless bombing of civilians, and through Hamas’ refusal to free the remaining Israeli hostages without an exchange of Palestinians held in Israeli prisons.
But in respect of the more shocking allegations against Hamas promoted by the western media – which have bolstered the case for Israel’s two-month rampage in Gaza – often little or no evidence has been forthcoming beyond claims made by Israeli officials and highly partisan and unreliable first responders.
Nonetheless, once more, coverage of the growing devastation in Gaza was sidelined.
Media readiness to re-examine 7 October long after those events took place has operated within strict limits, however. Only claims that support Israel’s narrative about what happened that day are being aired.
A growing body of evidence suggesting a far more complex reality, one that paints Israel’s own actions in a far more troubling light, is being ignored or suppressed.
This deeply dishonest approach from the western media indicates that they are not, as they declare, fearlessly pursuing the truth. Rather, they are regurgitating talking points being fed to them by Israel.
An Israeli man whose cousin was taken hostage during the 7 October attack visits the family’s house in Kibbutz Nir Oz on 5 December 2023.
That is not only unconscionable – particularly given Israel’s long track record of promoting lies, both small and large – but it violates all basic journalistic codes.
And, worse still, the media’s credulous amplification of Israel’s version of 7 October continues to breathe life into the Israeli case that wrecking Gaza to eliminate Hamas is morally justified.
Active cheerleaders
Unknown to most western audiences, there has been a steady trickle of evidence from Israeli sources over the past two months implicating Israel’s own military in at least some of the killings attributed to Hamas.
This week the Israeli military finally conceded that it had killed Israelis on October 7 in incidents of an “immense and complex quantity”. Given this, it added with transparent non-logic: “It would not be morally sound to investigate these incidents.”
How is it possible, given their continuing interest in scrutinising the events of 7 October, that none of the western media has picked up on any of this distressing evidence, let alone investigated it?
It is hard not to conclude that the western media are only interested in stories – and largely indifferent to whether they are true or false – that portray Hamas, but not Israel, as the bad guys. That would mean the media are not dispassionate reporters, but have been recruited by Israel as its active cheerleaders.
Israel’s official story, echoed by the western media, is that Hamas had long planned a crazed, barbaric rampage through communities in Israel – driven by a mix of primitive, religious bloodlust and Jew hatred.
The group’s chance to realise this goal came on 7 October, according to the Israeli narrative, when Israel let down its guard momentarily and Hamas broke through the hi-tech fence meant to keep it and Gaza’s other 2.3 million inhabitants permanently imprisoned.
During the breakout, Hamas focused on the slaughter of civilians, killing babies by beheading them and using rape as a weapon of war and defilement. They fired into the homes of neighbouring Israeli communities, often leaving them in ruins and burning their victims alive.
Admittedly, the claim about 40 beheaded babies has been quietly shelved, because there is precisely zero evidence for it. According to Israel’s own published figures, only two infants died that day.
Nonetheless, the media rarely challenge Israeli spokespeople, or western politicians, when they make this long-discredited allegation.
But many of these other allegations are no less evidence-free and need scrutiny too.
Although they are rarely given a voice, Palestinians have their own, alternative narrative of what happened that day – and parts of it are being bolstered by accounts from Israeli sources.
Challenge to official story
In this telling, Hamas long trained for its breakout, and with a strategic aim in mind. The goal was to launch a commando-style assault on four military bases surrounding Gaza to kill or take hostage as many Israeli soldiers as possible, and a similar assault on local Israeli communities to seize civilian hostages.
The aim, according to this narrative, was to trade the hostages for Palestinian prisoners, thousands of whom are in Israeli jails, including women and children, often held without a military trial or even charges.
To the Palestinian public, these prisoners are no less hostages than the Israelis held in Gaza.
Hamas stormed military bases and the Israeli communities of Be’eri and Kfar Azza. That is why about a third of the 1,200 Israelis killed that day were soldiers, police or armed guards – and why many of the 240 hostages were serving in the Israeli military too.
According to most accounts, even Israeli ones, Hamas accidentally stumbled on to the Nova music festival, which had been relocated to an area close to the fence with Gaza. There were unexpected clashes with security guards, while the attack on festivalgoers turned especially chaotic and gruesome.
So why did Hamas depart from its plan by killing so many civilians? And why did it do so in such a savage, gratuitous and time-consuming fashion that involved burning Israelis alive, using its firepower to blast their homes into ruins, and setting fire to hundreds of cars on the highway near the music festival?
What did Hamas have to gain from expending so much energy and ammunition on horror-show theatrics rather than its plan to seize hostages?
For many western leaders and journalists, it appears no rational answer is needed. Hamas – and possibly all Palestinians – are simply barbarians for whom murdering Israelis, Jews or maybe all non-Muslims comes as second nature.
But for those whose minds are less bent by racist assumptions, an alternative picture of events has been steadily cohering, prompted by the testimonies of Israeli survivors and officials, as well as reporting from the Israeli media. Much of the evidence has been collected by the independent journalist Max Blumenthal and the Electronic Intifada website.
Because they contradict Israel’s official story, these testimonies have been studiously ignored by the western media.
Burned alive
Surprisingly, the person whose statements have most confounded the official narrative is Mark Regev, the spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
In an interview on MSNBC on 16 November, Regev noted that Israel had reduced the official death toll by 200 after its investigations had shown that the charred remains it had counted included not just Israelis but Hamas fighters too. The fighters, burned alive, had been too disfigured to easily identify.
Regev told MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan: “There were actually bodies that were so badly burned we thought they were ours. In the end, apparently, they were Hamas terrorists.”
There was an obvious problem with Regev’s disclosure that went unchallenged by the MSNBC interviewer, and has been ignored by the media since. How did so many Hamas fighters end up burned – and in exactly the same locations as Israelis, meaning their remains could not be identified separately for many weeks?
Did Hamas fighters carry out some strange ritual, self-immolating in cars and homes alongside their hostages? And if so, why?
There is a likely explanation, confirmed by an Israeli survivor of the 7 October events, as well as by a security guard, and a variety of military personnel. But these accounts starkly undermine the official narrative.
Shelled by Israel
Yasmin Porat, who fled the Nova festival and ended up hiding in Be’eri, was one of the few to survive that day. Her partner, Tal Katz, was killed.
She has repeatedly explained to the Israeli media what happened.
According to Porat’s account to Kan radio on 15 November, the Hamas fighters in Be’eri barricaded themselves into a house with a group of a dozen or so Israeli hostages – either planning to use them as human shields or as bargaining chips for an exit.
The Israeli military, however, was in no mood for bargaining. Porat escaped only because one of the Hamas fighters vacated the house early on, using her as a human shield, before giving himself up.
Porat describes Israeli soldiers engaging in a four-hour firefight with the Hamas gunmen, despite the presence of Israeli civilians. But not all of the hostages were killed in the crossfire. Israel ended the clash with an Israeli tank firing two shells into the house.
In Porat’s account, when she asked why this had been done, “they explained to me that it was to break the walls, in order to help purify the house”.
The only other survivor, Hadas Dagan, who was lying face down on the lawn in front of the house during the firefight, reported to Porat what happened after the two shells hit the house. Dagan saw both of their partners lying near her, killed by shrapnel from the explosions.
A 12-year-old girl, Liel Hatsroni, who had been screaming inside the house throughout the firefight, also fell silent.
Hatsroni and her aunt, Ayalan, were both incinerated. It took weeks to identify their bodies.
Notably, Liel Hatsroni’s charred remains have been one of the emotive pieces of evidence cited by Israel for accusing Hamas of killing and burning Israelis.
This little girl’s body was burned so badly that it look forensic archeologists more than six weeks to identify her.
All that remains of 12 year old Liel Hetzroni is ash and bone fragments.
In reporting the deaths of Liel, her aunt, her twin brother and her grandfather, the Israeli news website Ynet stated that Hamas fighters “murdered them all. Afterwards, they set the house alight”.
Confused pilots
Porat’s testimony is far from the only source showing that Israel is likely to have been responsible for a significant proportion of the civilian deaths that day – and for the burned bodies.
The security coordinator at Be’eri, Tuval Escapa, effectively confirmed Porat’s account to the Haaretz newspaper. He said: “Commanders in the field made difficult decisions – including shelling houses on their occupants in order to eliminate the terrorists along with the hostages.”
The burnt-out cars at the Nova festival and their occupants appear to have suffered a similar fate. Worried that Hamas gunmen were fleeing the area with hostages in cars, it seems, helicopter pilots were told to open fire, incinerating the cars and all the occupants.
There is a likely explanation for this. The Israeli army has long had a secret protocol – known as the Hannibal directive – in which soldiers are instructed to kill any captured comrades to avoid their being taken hostage. It is less clear how this directive applies to Israeli civilians, though it appears to have been used in the past.
The goal is to prevent Israel from facing demands to release prisoners.
In at least one case, an Israeli military official, Col Nof Erez, has stated that “the Hannibal directive was apparently applied”. He called the Israeli air strikes on 7 October “a mass Hannibal”.
Haaretz has reported that police investigators concluded that “an IDF combat helicopter that arrived at the scene and fired at terrorists there apparently also hit some festival participants”.
In a video released by the Israeli military, Apache helicopters are shown randomly firing missiles at cars leaving the area, presumably on the assumption that they contained Hamas fighters trying to smuggle hostages back into Gaza.
The Ynet news website cited an Israeli air force assessment of its two dozen attack helicopters in the skies above the Nova festival: “It was very difficult to distinguish between terrorists and [Israeli] soldiers or civilians.” Nonetheless, pilots were instructed “to shoot at everything they see in the area of the fence” with Gaza.
“Only at a certain point did the pilots begin to slow their attacks and carefully choose the targets,” the outlet reported.
Another Israeli publication, Mako, noted that “there was almost no intelligence to assist in making fateful decisions”, adding that the pilots “emptied the ‘belly of the helicopter’ in minutes, flew to re-arm and returned to the air, again and again”.
In another Mako report, the commander of an Apache unit is quoted stating: “Shooting at people in our territory – this is something I never thought I would do.” Another pilot recalled of the attack: “I find myself in a dilemma as to what to shoot at.”
Secrets to the grave
Quite extraordinarily, in reporting the devastation of ravaged houses and burnt and crumpled cars, reporters have completely ignored the visual evidence staring them in the face, and simply amplified the official Israeli narrative.
There are plenty of more-than-obvious questions no one is asking – and for which no answers are ever likely to be forthcoming.
How did Hamas wreak such widescale and intense devastation when its fighters’ own videos show them mostly bearing light arms?
Were those carrying basic RPGs capable of accurately tracking and hitting hundreds of fast-moving vehicles fleeing the festival – and doing so from ground level?
Video footage from Hamas body-cams shows cars leaving the Nova festival with both gunmen and hostages inside. Why would Hamas risk incinerating its own people?
Given Hamas’ keenness to film its triumphs, why is there no footage of such actions? And why would Hamas waste its most prized ammunition on random attacks on cars rather than save it for the far more difficult task of attacking Israeli military bases?
Israel appears not to be interested in investigating the burnt-out cars and wrecked homes, possibly because it already knows the answers and fears that others may one day find out the truth too.
With religious organisations demanding that the cars be hurriedly buried to preserve the sanctity of the dead, the metal skeletons will take their secrets to the grave.
Grotesque fables
What seems certain from this growing body of evidence – and from the trail of visual clues – is that on 7 October many Israeli civilians were killed either in the crossfire of gun battles between Israel and Hamas or by Israeli military directives to stop Hamas fighters returning to Gaza and taking hostages with them.
This week, an Israeli commentator in the Haaretz newspaper called the testimonies “earth-shattering”, and added: “Was the Hannibal directive applied to civilians? An investigation and public debate need to happen now, no matter how difficult they are.”
But as the army has made clear, it has no intention to investigate when its whole genocidal campaign against Gaza is premised on lurid claims that appear to bear a limited relationship to reality.
None of that justifies Hamas’ atrocities, especially the killing and taking hostage of civilians. But it does paint a very different picture of that day’s events.
Remember, Israel and its supporters have sought to compare the Hamas attack on 7 October with the Nazi Holocaust. They have concocted grotesque fables to present Palestinians as bloodthirsty savages deserving of any fate that befalls them.
And those fables have served as the basis for western indulgence and sympathy for Israel as it has carried out ethnic cleansing and genocide in Gaza.
The truth is it would have been much harder for western governments to sell Israel’s rampage in Gaza to their publics had Hamas’ crimes been seen, sadly, as all too typical of modern militarised confrontations in which civilians become collateral damage.
What western governments and institutions should have done is demand an independent investigation to clarify the extent of Hamas atrocities that day rather than echo Israeli officials who wanted an excuse to trash Gaza and drive its inhabitants into neighbouring Sinai.
The western media’s performance has been even more dismal – and dangerous. It professes to be a watchdog on power. But it has repeatedly amplified the Israeli occupier’s evidence-free claims, peddled libels against Palestinians with little or no scrutiny, and actively suppressed evidence challenging Israel’s official narrative.
For that reason alone, western journalists are entirely complicit in the crimes against humanity currently being perpetrated in Gaza – crimes being committed right now, not two months ago.
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Deporting all Gazans is the joint plan of the US and Israel. According to the plan, the Palestinians will be ‘relocated’ to Egypt, Iraq, Turkey, and Yemen. This large-scale ethnic cleansing is cynically presented as a “moral and humanitarian” aid plan.
*
Murderous
In recent war history, there has rarely been such an intensive and massive slaughter of civilians and children as in Gaza, one of the most densely populated places in the world. The destruction of northern Gaza in less than seven weeks approaches the devastation caused by the years of carpet bombing of German cities during World War II.
According to the World Health Organization, a child is killed every ten minutes.
More than half of Gaza City has now been destroyed, including schools and mosques. Hospitals can no longer function. Bakeries are closed and there is almost no drinking water left. Destruction and slaughter are happening on an industrial scale, with the help of Artificial Intelligence.
People were first driven out of the north, but now the south is attacked with heavy bombing and a ground offensive against the town of Khan Younis. According to a top official of the UN humanitarian aid agency, conditions there are now apocalyptic.
No child still has unlimited access to care, food or water. Famine is looming. And because sewers no longer work, there will be mass outbreaks of disease.
Gazans are now being urged to leave for Rafah, the southernmost point of Gaza, where the border post with Egypt is also located.
Officially, Israel’s goal is to eliminate Hamas. But the intensity and ruthlessness with which the Israeli army is acting reveals that this is an excuse for another goal: the complete expulsion of the population from Palestine, starting with Gaza.
According to the Jewish philosopher Moshé Machover, this plan has been in existence for a long time: “We are actually waiting for a time when they can be permanently expelled to neighbouring countries. That will only be possible during a full-scale war and I fear that Israel is prepared to provoke it.” He said this in 2017.
New Deportation Plan
Israel wants to increase the level of inhumanity to such an extent that the residents of Gaza will ultimately have no choice but to leave. That seems to be the hidden plan, although that plan is getting clearer by the day.
A plan, from the Israeli Intelligence Ministry was already leaked in late October. That plan envisaged a final deportation of Gaza’s population to Egypt’s Sinai desert. That was met with a resounding refusal from Cairo.
But Israel is determined to continue this large-scale ethnic cleansing. In a recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, two Israeli members of the Knesset called on Western countries to accept Palestinian refugees. Gila Gamliel, intelligence minister wrote a similar op-ed in the Jerusalem Post, proposing the “voluntary resettlement” of Palestinians in Gaza to other countries around the world.
Minister of Agriculture Avi Dichter does not hesitate to call the current war a ‘Nakba 2023’, referring to the mass expulsion of Palestinians from Palestine at the founding of the Jewish state in 1948.
“We are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba. From an operational point of view, there is no way to wage a war – as the IDF seeks to do in Gaza – with masses between the tanks and the soldiers. (…) Gaza Nakba 2023. That’s how it’ll end.”
And it is not just words. A new joint US-Israeli plan has now surfaced in which they want to deport the population of Gaza to four countries: Turkey, Egypt, Iraq and Yemen. In this new plan, Egypt should no longer bear the burden alone.
The numbers per country are already known too: a million Palestinians would go to Egypt, half a million to Turkey, 250,000 to Iraq and another 250,000 to Yemen.
The four countries referred to are receiving generous aid from Washington. The plan states that this support will be linked to a willingness to receive Gazans. In other words, the four countries will be put under serious financial and perhaps diplomatic pressure to ‘harbour’ the Gazans.
The key country is Egypt, which must open its border. Joe Wilson, former Republican MP and one of the initiators of this plan, is very clear about this. According to him, “the only moral way [to solve the Gaza problem] is to ensure that Egypt opens its borders”.
“Israel is trying to keep civilian casualties in the Gaza Strip as low as possible, but Hamas is not allowing the refugees to leave and Egypt is unwilling to open its borders,” the authors of the plan write in the opening paragraph. Meanwhile, six children are being slaughtered every hour…
For its planned population move, the plan refers to other recent conflict hotspots. “It would not be the first time other countries have accepted refugees,” the plan says. Here, the authors refer to the six million Ukrainians who fled the country to Poland, Germany and the Czech Republic, among others. Nearly five million Syrians have also “moved” to Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan, while other Middle Eastern and European countries have taken in hundreds of thousands of Syrians.
The plan has been submitted to key figures in the US House of Representatives and Congress and has the support of both Democrats and Republicans. The planned large-scale ethnic cleansing is cynically presented as a “moral and humanitarian” aid plan:
“The neighbouring borders have been closed for too long, but it is now clear that in order to free the Gazan population from the tyrannical oppression of Hamas and to allow them to live free of war and bloodshed, Israel must encourage the international community to find the correct, moral and humane avenues for the relocation of the Gazan population.”
Truly a fine piece of newspeak.
The plan also firmly lashes out at UNRWA, the UN refugee agency dedicated to aid and development for Palestinian refugees in the Middle East. US lawmakers blame the agency of “propagating the refugee narrative” and “inhibiting the rehabilitation of Palestinian refugees for over seventy years and has in fact deepened the refugee crisis”. That’s why they want the agency to be closed down.
*
We may be on the eve of a mass deportation of Palestinians, a second Nakba. If Western countries want to retain any shred of credibility, they must take action immediately.
They must immediately impose economic and diplomatic sanctions against Israel and also convene the Security Council to condemn and thwart the sinister plan of the US and Israel. If not, they are complicit in this declared humanitarian disaster.
*
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Marc Vandepitte is a Belgian economist and philosopher. He writes on North-South relations, Latin America, Cuba, and China. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Featured image: Girl holds improvised white flag, to tell Israel to respect Geneva Conventions and spare her fleeing family. Photo credit: Yasser Qudih
Once viewed as a fringe group, Israel’s messianic settler movement holds the reins of power today. Their plans for the ethnic cleansing and resettlement of Gaza needed only two things: a big war and an extremist government.
Almost three weeks into Israel’s bloody ground invasion of Gaza, an Israeli soldier filmed a video from inside the bombed and besieged enclave exclaiming, “We will complete the mission we have been assigned. Conquer, expel and settle. You hear that, Bibi?”
Two months into Tel Aviv’s aerial assault of Gaza, its end goals are still unclear. CNNhas revealed that Israel’s “original plan” for the war was to “level Gaza.” And Israeli minister Ron Dermer proposed a plan to “thin out” the Gaza population by forcing civilians to flee to Egypt by land, or to other parts of Africa and Europe by boat, because the “sea is open to them.”
What is certain is that this is like no other Israeli bombing spree on Gaza. In past campaigns, the Israelis sought out international mediators “from the first day” to broker a ceasefire within days or weeks.
This time, however, the Israelis and their American supporters most decidedly do not want a ceasefire. While their end goals for Gaza have shifted in this conflict, it is equally important to note that Tel Aviv’s plans for that future may be entirely different from Washington’s. Simply, Israel has never had a government as right-wing as the current one cobbled together by its Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu; a cabinet heaving with religious fundamentalists and messianic fervor.
Plans to ‘reclaim’ Gaza
The roots of Israel’s current campaign to conquer Gaza and ethnically cleanse its 2.3 million Palestinian inhabitants trace back almost two decades, originating with the evacuation of the Gush Katif settlement bloc in 2005.
This move, orchestrated by then-prime minister Ariel Sharon, aimed at continued Jewish settlement and military occupation in the occupied West Bank, but was deemed treacherous by Israel’s uber right-wing, religious settler movement.
It was Ariel Sharon, “the father of settlements,” who designed the Gaza disengagement to ensure continued Jewish settlement and military occupation of the West Bank, but the religious settler movement viewed him as a traitor for giving up “Jewish land,” just as they viewed former prime minister Yitzhak Rabin as a traitor for signing the Oslo Accords to eventually establish a Palestinian state.
Rabin was murdered by Jewish extremist Yigal Amir in 1995, in an act publicly encouraged by a young but prominent religious settler activist, Itamar Ben Gvir.
Another young religious settler, Bezalel Smotrich, was arrested for opposing Sharon’s disengagement policy. To stop Gaza disengagement, Smotrich wanted to blow up cars on the Ayalon highway, at rush hour, using 700 liters of gasoline.
Both men are today allies and prominent ideologues in Netanyahu’s extremist coalition government.
Over the next 18 years, the Likud Party and the religious settler movement, led by figures such as Ben Gvir and Smotrich, harbored dreams of reconquering Gaza to reconstruct Gush Katif. This undertaking would entail completing the expulsion initiated by Zionist militias in 1948, as noted by Israeli historian Benny Morris, by forcing Gazans into exile and preventing their return.
In 2010, then Prime Minister Netanyahu and Knesset member (MK) Gila Gamliel, both Likud members, proposed to the late Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak the settlement of Palestinians in the Sinai peninsula as part of a peace deal-related land swap.
After insisting, “I’m not even willing to listen to those kinds of proposals,” Mubarak was toppled in a US-orchestrated color revolution, part of the region-wide ‘Arab Spring,’ as it was known.
Netanyahu proposed a similar deal to Mubarak’s successor Mohammad Morsi in 2012, and to Morsi’s successor, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi in 2014, but these yielded the same outcomes.
In 2014, during Israel’s brutal 51-day assault on Gaza, Netanyahu sought US intervention with Sisi to propose settling Palestinians in Sinai, but got nowhere. Over 2,300 civilians were killed in that military operation – yet another of Israel’s “mowing the grass” campaigns to inflict setbacks for the resistance, without making any meaningful gains against Hamas.
The plan takes shape
By June 2018, reports surfaced of a new Israeli army plan to “create a considerable change in the situation if it is required to launch a major campaign in Gaza.” This would involve moving beyond temporary bombardment to offensive missions involving elite units who “will enter Gaza and dissect it in two, and even occupy significant parts of it.”
Meanwhile, in 2019, fundamentalist settlers like Ben Gvir continued to express a fervent desire to level Gaza and return to rebuild Gush Katif.
Ahead of the 2022 Knesset elections, three extreme right-wing political parties united to form the Religious Zionism Coalition. These included the Religious Zionism party, headed by Smotrich, the Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) party, headed by Ben Gvir, and Noam, a small ultra-orthodox party.
In July 2022, Religious Zionist candidate Arnon Segal wrote during his campaign announcement: “It is time to begin to plan a return to Gush Katif.”
“Yes,” he wrote, “to physically return and rebuild it.”
That September, as the elections drew closer, i24 News, an outlet close to Netanyahu, addressed the issue of Gush Katif, calling it a “lingering wound,” one still open and fresh for Israelis.
“It’s a trauma,” an Israeli named Hillel quoted by i24 News said. “The whole country was hurting.”
The ‘legality’ of the settlers’ return
The effort to rebuild Gush Katif converged with a significant shift in the situation in Gaza when Netanyahu became prime minister for the sixth time after the December 2022 elections. Following a year out of power, Netanyahu formed a coalition between his Likud party and the Religious Zionism Coalition.
The deal with Netanyahu allowed Ben Gvir to become national security minister, while Smotrich was made both finance minister and a minister in Israel’s Defense Ministry, responsible for civil administration in the occupied West Bank.
Under their direction, the occupation state quickly stepped-up military raids against Palestinian resistance groups, accelerated Jewish settlement building, and issued calls for annexing the West Bank.
As violence intensified in March 2023, the Likud-Religious Zionism coalition quietly reversed a crucial aspect of the 2005 Gaza Disengagement. Sharon’s original withdrawal plan involved abandoning four small settlements in the northern West Bank due to security challenges.
However, the Knesset passed an amendment to the disengagement legislation on 21 March, which enabled Jewish settlers to return to these evacuated settlements and paved the way for their reconstruction.
Following the vote, MK Limor Son Har-Melech of the Jewish Power party stated: “We must not rest on our laurels or the euphoria of the moment.” We must also galvanize to “return home to the region of Gush Katif, which was abandoned [in 2005] in an act of terrible folly.”
Minister of National Missions Orit Strock of the Religious Zionism party made a similar call, telling Israel’s Channel 7:
“I believe that, at the end of the day, the sin of the disengagement will be reversed.”
She suggested this would require going to war, adding that “Sadly, a return to the Gaza Strip will nvolve many casualties.” In response, the left-wing Peace Now NGO warned that:
“A messianic revolution is taking place. This government will inevitably destroy our country. They will also deepen the occupation, ignite the region, and establish a Jewish supremacist regime from the river to the sea.”
The Gazan Nakba
In the aftermath of the Palestinian resistance operation of Al-Aqsa Flood on 7 October, a slew of propaganda and fake news created the public outrage needed to justify using overwhelming violence against not only Hamas, but all Gazans, and to implement plans to return to Gush Katif.
Public calls to commit genocide against Gazans became widespread among Israeli politicians, journalists and celebrities.
Israel seized the opportunity and initiated a massive bombing campaign on Gaza, accompanied by demands that Palestinians evacuate the northern half of the besieged enclave, a region home to 1.1 million people — about half of the territory’s population — within 24 hours.
Ex-Israeli Deputy Foreign minister and senior diplomat Danny Ayalon wrote on social media that Gazans must not only go to southern Gaza, but flee to Egypt:
“We don’t tell Gazans to go to the beaches or drown themselves … No God forbid … Go to the Sinai Desert … the international community will build them cities and give them food … Egypt ought to play ball with it.”
Israeli demands that Palestinians flee to Egypt were accompanied by the release on 13 October of a report from Israel’s Ministry of Intelligence, led by Likud MK Gamliel.
Clearly prepared before the events of 7 October, the report recommended the occupation of Gaza and total transfer of its 2.3 million inhabitants to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, while insisting they never be allowed to return.
Further, the plan stated the government should launch a public relations campaign directed toward the west that will promote the ethnic cleansing in a way that does not foster international hostility to Israel or damage its already tarnished reputation.
The mass deportation of the population from Gaza must be presented as a necessary humanitarian measure to receive international support, the report stated. Such a deportation could be justified if it will lead to “fewer casualties among the civilian population compared to the expected number of casualties if they remain.”
Israel’s horrific bombing campaign continued, ensuring that the number of casualties would indeed be massive.
On 27 October, after 7,028 Palestinians – including 2,913 children – had been killed, Israel launched its long-anticipated ground invasion of Gaza.
A week later, the rabbi of an Israeli army unit gave a rousing speech to the troops declaring:
“This land is ours … the entire land, including Gaza, including Lebanon, including all of the promised land! … Gush Katif is tiny compared to what we will achieve with God’s help!”
As outlined in the 2018 plan by the military leadership, invading Israeli troops quickly cut the Gaza strip in two, while also invading from the north along the coast.
After planting an Israeli flag in the sand on Gaza’s beach, one Israeli commander told his troops: “We returned, we were expelled from here almost 20 years ago … This is our land! And that is the victory, to return to our lands.”
As Israeli soldiers were celebrating in Gaza, MKs from the Likud party submitted a bill on 8 November to again amend the 2005 Disengagement Law – this time to “repeal the law that bars Jews from entering the Gaza Strip.”
Three days later, Danny Danon, Israel’s former ambassador to the UN, and Ram Ben Barak, a former deputy director of the Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence service, published an article in the Wall Street Journal advocating the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza, while feigning humanitarian motivations, as outlined in the ministry of intelligence plan.
Sensing that his dream of ethnically cleansing Gaza and rebuilding Gush Katif on the corpses of dead Palestinian children was about to be realized, Bezalel Smotrich welcomed the proposal, stating that “this is the humanitarian solution.”
Former Minister of Justice Ayelet Shaked also welcomed the move, but was less diplomatic, exclaiming on Israeli TV:
“After we turn Khan Yunis into a soccer field … we need to take advantage of the destruction [to tell] the countries that each of them should take a quota, it can be 20,000 or 50,000 … We need 2 million to leave. That’s the solution for Gaza.”
Faced with the monumental task of resistance against US-backed occupation forces, the onus is on Hamas and the other Palestinian resistance factions to thwart any progress made on Israel’s “messianic revolution” in Gaza.
The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of The Cradle.
Illustrative photo shared on social media symbolizes united stance in solidarity with Gaza.
Activists in Palestine and across the world have called for a global strike on Monday to demand an immediate ceasefire as the Israeli occupation continues its aggression on Gaza.
The objective of the campaign, entitled “Strike for Gaza”, is to put pressure on governments throughout the world to take meaningful action to stop the ongoing Israeli massacres, which largely target civilians, especially children and women in the besieged enclave.
The call for the strike has been given by the National and Islamic Forces, a coalition of major Palestinian factions, to Palestinians across the occupied West Bank and supporters across the world to participate in a strike that would include “all aspects of public life” in a show of solidarity amid relentless Israeli attacks.
“We expect the entire globe to join the strike, which comes in the context of a broad international movement involving influential figures. This movement stands against the open genocide in Gaza, the ethnic cleansing and the colonial settlement in the West Bank,” said a statement released by the coalition.
The strike is intended to halt the flow of life and economic activity in all countries through urging people to shut educational facilities, commercial businesses, and various workplaces. This may contribute to everyone feeling personally harmed by the war.
Nationwide Strike in Lebanon
Lebanon was among the Arab countries which swiftly responded to the strike call on Sunday. Prime Minister Najib Mikati made the decision in response to a global call for a strike “in solidarity with Gaza and the Palestinian people, including our fellow citizens in Gaza and the border villages of Lebanon,” secretary-general of Lebanon’s Council of Ministers, Mahmoud Mekkiya announced in a statement.
For his part, Minister of Education Abbas Halabi said that the private and public schools, technical institutes, and universities would close “to express solidarity with the Palestinian people, who are facing extermination, displacement, and murder.”
Talking to Al-Manar on Monday morning, Hasan Hijazi, Head of Hezbollah’s Liberal Professions Unit, said that most of the syndicates across Lebanon have called on its members to abide by the strike.
Hijazi affirmed the important role of the liberal professions in pressing the public opinion over a certain cause or affair.
Photos and videos circulated on social media showed several cities across Lebanon, including the capital, Beirut, and the southern port city of Sidon observing the general strike in solidarity with Palestinian people.
West Bank
Palestinian cities including Al-Quds, as well as West Bank cities: Ramallah, Nablus, Jenin, Al-Khalil (Hebron), have observed the strike, with streets being empty and shops being shut.
تغطية صحفية: "التزام كامل بالإضراب في بلدة العيزرية شرقي القدس المحتلَّة بالإضراب الشامل". pic.twitter.com/pKzszKdWVw
Meanwhile, Famous groups such as the ‘Palestinian Youth Movement Worldwide,’ ‘Sumoud Palestinian Movement,’ and the ‘Palestinian Activism Group in America’ have joined the campaign. Participants stress the importance of mobilizing supporters for the Palestinian cause and taking serious action to halt the unprecedented tragedy.
تغطية صحفية: "جانب من الالتزام بالإضراب الشامل في البلدة القديمة، بمدينة نابلس". pic.twitter.com/8mzByX1a05
Shops inthe Turkey’s Istanbul also heeded the call for a global strike in protest against the ongoing Israeli genocidal war on Gaza.
The Esenyurt district in Istanbul, Turkey, is currently experiencing a widespread strike in opposition to the continuing Israeli genocide campaign in #Gaza. #StrikeForGazapic.twitter.com/HXly0dUl1H
Meanwhile, activists in the US and Canada have called for general strike to protest the Israeli aggression which has killed so far nearly 18,000 Gazans and injured more than 49,200 others.
The Canadian activist, Cheryl Benson, emphasized the importance of committing to the strike, stating as reported by media outlets: ‘We need a global strike. Everyone will leave work until the ceasefire is achieved,’ adding, ‘That will affect their pockets.’
The Palestinian people have the right, given 75 years of massacres, ethnic cleansing, land theft, torture, and abuse, to fight their occupier through any means necessary.
Palestinians should enjoy the same rights and standards as the rest of humanity. This statement seems self-evident, but many who would proclaim to believe in just that, in reality, do not actually support this notion. The Palestinian people refuse to remain as victims, and the only way for them to achieve justice is through armed struggle.
In the West, the Hamas-led operation of October 7 has been presented as an act of unjustified terroristic violence, one that happened in a complete vacuum. The shock of what occurred had even put many well-meaning people who have campaigned for Palestinian rights into a trance, one where they allow the event to be analyzed as a stand-alone atrocity and something to be condemned. Others have scrambled to condemn the Palestinian Resistance for its actions on that day, while concocting a narrative to try and work to maintain the popular idea of Palestinians, that they are the eternal victim, one that should always be treated as a victim and remain as such. This idea, while it may come from well-intentioned people in the West, is inherently racist, patronizing, and fits into a Western-savior complex.
The Palestinian people have the right, given 75 years of massacres, ethnic cleansing, land theft, torture, and abuse, to fight their occupier through any means necessary. Although an argument can be made to justify this notion, using international law, I will argue this through common sense and an appeal to the humanity of all people.
Throughout history, oppressed groups, whether suffering under settler colonialism, systems of enslavement, apartheid, or colonial domination, have used armed struggle as a strategy to free themselves and restore their human dignity. Often, after failing to make an impact with non-violent strategies, such as boycotts, general strikes, and appeals to the goodwill of their oppressors, violence becomes the natural tool of the oppressed.
Western media pundits pose the question of a need for a Palestinian Nelson Mandela. Although this question is often asked in bad faith, it is a great place to begin explaining the predicament of Palestine. Just like in South Africa, Palestine is under a system of apartheid, a form of injustice that the African National Congress (ANC) fought against using various forms of struggle, including armed resistance. Nelson Mandela, who is widely praised across the Western world today, was considered for some time a “terrorist” in most Western capitals. Why was Mandela considered as such? Because the ANC, of which he was an active member, used armed struggle and killed South African Whites who were indeed unarmed. In fact, when Mandela was arrested by the apartheid authorities, he had just arrived back in his homeland after traveling to receive military training.
Despite it being a somewhat hidden event, the Haitian revolution, which led to the abolishment of slavery on the island nation, was not free of violence and indiscriminate killings. In fact, when the French deposed and arrested the Haitian leader Toussaint Louverture in 1802, the revolutionary stated the following, “In overthrowing me you have cut down in Saint-Domingue only the trunk of the tree of liberty; it will spring up again from the roots, for they are numerous and they are deep.” Less than two years later, Jean-Jacques Dessalines had taken over the revolution and signed a decree for all whites to be put to death; this was only months after Dessalines had declared Haiti an independent nation on January 1, 1804. Although there were moments when peace prevailed and the Haitian people, who had revolted violently to end slavery, spared the lives of non-combatant whites, there were also times of great bloodshed.
In the case of the Algerian struggle for independence, it is also true that the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) used violent tactics that directly targeted the European settlers, who were known as the Pieds-noirs. Thousands of settlers were killed in a variety of attacks, leading to around 1 million of these Europeans fleeing the country, following the war of independence. Although tactics like shooting at settlers in their privileged communities and planting bombs in packed areas are objectively unpleasant, they were not committed without reason and in a vacuum.
The immense suffering of the Algerian people had pushed them toward the only options that were available to free themselves of French occupation.
Violent Resistance in Palestine
To go through the entire historical record at this point would be too steep of a task for a singular article, however, we need to understand the historical legitimacy of the armed struggle against the Zionist entity.
Dating back to the days of the British Mandate in Palestine, the only times that the Palestinian people were able to sway the UK toward granting them any favorable solutions was through violent uprisings. The British Mandate authority encouraged Jewish settler immigration from Europe, and the leadership in London was clearly committed to upholding the promise that was issued, through the Balfour Declaration of 1917, to create a so-called “Jewish State” on the land of Palestine. It was therefore necessary for the Palestinians to organize, educate, and push for strike action that would pressure the Mandate authorities into adopting a more favorable position to their plight. In the end, the violent uprising of 1929, and later the Arab Revolt of 1936-9, proved enough for the British to cede ground on their previously held solutions for the Zionist-Palestinian struggle.
Despite the British having inflicted a brutal defeat against the Palestinian Resistance by the end of the Arab Revolt, the White Paper of 1939 was issued, a document that pledged to limit the number of Jewish settlers to Palestine, along with reneging on the idea of partitioning the land or creating an exclusively “Jewish State” in all of Palestine. This document is what inspired Zionist terrorists to begin committing attacks against civilian targets affiliated with the UK, which again swayed Britain’s stance on the future of Palestine.
After 78% of historic Palestine was occupied and what was left of the Arab Resistance was defeated in 1948, the Palestinian cause was in a state of disarray, before it was re-ignited through the Battle of Karameh in 1968. This battle was technically a military defeat for both the Palestinian resistance parties – most prominently Fatah – and the Jordanian army that had joined the fight, yet it inflicted damage on the Israelis in a way that no one could have believed would be possible. Throughout history, the Palestinian Resistance, whether it be the Arab Nationalist Movement, Fatah, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), or others, has all been labeled “terrorist” by the Israelis and their Western backers. The above-mentioned groups are all secular nationalist, or Marxist groups, while the Palestinian Islamic resistance groups didn’t become a major factor until the 1990s.
When Egypt gained back the Sinai Peninsula from the Israeli entity, it only did so following the October War of 1973. When South Lebanon was liberated from Zionist occupation in 2000, this was because of the Lebanese Resistance’s decades-long armed struggle. Even when the Gaza disengagement occurred in 2005, this was because the Palestinian Resistance was relentless in its attacks on soldiers and settlers, making the Zionist entity fed up. The Israeli entity has never given back land out of the good of their hearts, never made an agreement that hasn’t been driven by violence, and always worked in their best interests to manage that violence. There is no reasoning for this racist settler-colonial apartheid entity.
The people of Gaza rose non-violently in 2018-19 in what was known as the Great March of Return, where hundreds of thousands of unarmed civilians protested for their rights under international law; their right to return and to the end of the illegal siege. The answer from the Israeli army was to slaughter 310 innocent people, while the Western leadership claimed that the Zionists were “defending themselves”.
On the question of violence: Everyone is a supporter of violence, even the most devout preacher of non-violence and pacifism will make exceptions. If you disagree, imagine the following scenario: An Al-Qaeda suicide bomber is preparing to detonate himself in a packed crowd of innocent civilians. There is a police officer with a gun who can shoot the would-be attacker in the head and save hundreds of lives, is the officer justified in using a firearm?
Another thought experiment is this: If you see a man beating a woman profusely, is it justified to hit him in response? And if the woman who is being battered fights back and severely hurts her attacker, is she without justification?
The above-noted questions will demonstrate that the majority of people do support some form of violence but only in limited and defensive manners. When we observe the plight of the Palestinians, why is it that they overwhelmingly support armed struggle against their occupier? Is it because they are savages who love blood and violence, or is it because they see armed struggle as a legitimate form of self-defense and a tool with which they can restore their dignity and attain freedom? Any fair-minded person who takes the time to study the struggle would conclude the latter.
Palestinians should not be obligated to sit down and take their suffering so that they can be viewed as victims. This may make some Westerners more comfortable with supporting their plight but will ultimately lead to their complete elimination as a people. The Zionist entity is predicated on Jewish supremacy and creating a “state” that only serves Jews, meaning that the ethnic cleansing and/or genocide of Palestinians is an inevitable by-product of their ideology as a regime. Unless you are a Palestinian that is suffering under the Apartheid regime, you are not in the position to lecture them on how they fight back against their oppressor. Like all oppressed peoples, the Palestinians will use all means necessary to achieve the right to live in dignity and to be free. You are not obligated to agree with every tactic, but there is no moral equivalence that can be drawn between the reactionary violence of the oppressed and the violence of the oppressor.
The opinions mentioned in this article do not necessarily reflect the opinion of Al mayadeen, but rather express the opinion of its writer exclusively.
Will Israel succeed in displacing Palestinians out of the Gaza Strip? The Palestine Chronicle spoke to Palestinians on the ground.
Will Israel succeed in displacing Palestinians out of the Gaza Strip?
This question has dominated much of the discussion following the Israeli war on Gaza which has killed, to this date, nearly 5,000 Palestinians, mostly civilians, and wounded over 14,000 more.
The Israeli war on the Gaza population followed a daring attack by Hamas fighters at Israeli targets, which killed, according to Israeli sources, over 1,400 people, including hundreds of soldiers and also civilians.
The war on Gaza was ultimately the war on the Gaza population, especially as news began emerging since the start of the war that Israel intends to forcefully displace Palestinians from their homeland, particularly into the Egyptian desert.
On October 8, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asked Palestinians to leave the Gaza Strip, saying that the Israeli army would turn the region “into rubble”, the Turkish Anadolu agency reported.
Egypt, along with other Arab countries, strongly opposed the dispossession of Palestinians, mostly for their own national security, as clearly conveyed by Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.
But little media coverage has been given to the population of Gaza, which told the Palestine Chronicle that they have no intention to leave their homes, no matter the consequences.
The steadfastness of Gazans was communicated best by Gazan intellectual Hibah Abu Nada, who was killed on October 20 by an Israeli shelling of Al-Zahra, in the central Gaza Strip.
“In heaven, there is a new Gaza, without siege, which is being built right now,” she wrote on Facebook.
“If we die, please know that we are contented, and steadfast. Convey to the world that we are a people of justice, whether those who die or those who wait for liberation.”
This sentiment is being felt all across the devastated Strip.
Mohammed Ismail, a young refugee in his 20s, from the Nuseirat refugee camp, was ready to get married to the love of his life, a refugee girl from the same overcrowded camp in central Gaza.
His fiancée was killed by Israel, but Ismail told the Palestine Chronicle that he will remain steadfast, as all the people of Gaza.
Baha’ al-Din Adnan is a Gaza lawyer, who has lost nine members of his family, and 20 members of his wife’s family.
“Even then, we will never leave Gaza. Our generation will not go down in history as the one who left the land of their birth,” he told the Palestine Chronicle.
“For us, Gaza is everything, and we will only leave it to go back to our original towns and villages that the (Israeli) occupation has stolen in 1948.”
Sumiya al-Jamal, 57, knows too well what happens to Palestinians who are forced to leave their land, they are never allowed to return.
Her family originally came from Aqer, a Palestinian village that was destroyed by Israel in 1948.
“My father told me how my grandfather, Ahmed, refused to leave Aqer,” when Zionist militia attacked the village 75 years ago.
“He refused to leave, remained committed to his land, fought the occupation until he was killed in the village’s school,” she said.
“In this war, I lost my brother, and his whole family. My childhood home, filled with memories, was destroyed, but I will take the same path as my grandfather. I will not leave Gaza. If I do, it is only to Aqer.”
Mohammed Abu ‘Oun is an English teacher in the Bureij refugee camp. He lost his son and daughter in an Israeli strike at their home.
“The thing that hurts me most is that I cannot retrieve their bodies, still trapped under the rubble. They have been there for days,” he told the Palestine Chronicle.
Yet, Abu ‘Oun vehemently rejected the idea of leaving Gaza under any circumstances.
Here in Gaza, no one is even entertaining the idea of leaving, and the more civilians are killed in Israeli attacks, the more rooted people become.
Leaving means betraying the legacy of those who died, those who are fighting, and those whose bodies are yet to be recovered from underneath the rubble.
The Rafah border crossing remains shut with nothing but a few trucks going through it while the Western world, complicit in Israeli war crimes, plays diplomacy while greenlighting air raids on Rafah making transport agreements less likely.
Over 436 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli airstrikes in the past 24 hours, among which were 182 children, according to Iyad Al-Bazm, the spokesperson for the Ministry of Interior and National Security in Gaza.
This brings the number of martyrs, killed by the Israeli genocidal attempt to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip, to over 5,000 with a total of 1.4 million people displaced after 181,000 homes were severely damaged.
This meant that as of now about 70% of the people of Gaza are displaced and about 1500 remain missing given that the means used to conduct search and rescue missions for Palestinians who remained under the rubble become very scarce.
In numbers, the Israelis have destroyed and damaged 177 schools, putting 32 out of service. 72 governmental facilities were severely damaged, 33 mosques were completely leveled and 3 churches were severely damaged.
In a clear attempt to hinder and choke aid deliveries, the Israeli prime minister’s office declared on Sunday that the Israeli regime would not send any humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip and would also stop any unauthorized deliveries from other nations.
“Israel will not provide any humanitarian aid to Gaza and will prevent any unsupervised supply from others,” the office was quoted as saying by the Haaretz newspaper.
According to people involved with the discussions that were cited by WSJ, negotiations to potentially release 50 other captives broke down because the authorities in Gaza insisted that the Israelis permit fuel deliveries into Gaza.
The main hospital in Gaza City, Al-Shifa Hospital, is set to exhaust its electricity supply in the next 24 hours, as reported by Guillemette Thomas, the medical coordinator for Palestine at Doctors Without Borders, on Friday.
Where patient care is already deteriorating, the hospital stands out as one of the few places still equipped with electricity in war-torn Gaza, she added.
The lack of power poses a critical threat to patients, especially those in intensive care, neonatology, and life support machines.
“Israel” said Wednesday that it will allow Egypt to deliver only “limited humanitarian aid” to the Gaza Strip, according to AP.
The Israeli occupation imposed an inhumane siege on #Gaza, forcing Palestinians to stand in queues for hours to get fresh water and bread.
This has been the case for almost 2 weeks, all while the Israeli war machines level residential neighborhoods non-stop, killing thousands of… pic.twitter.com/T8GwMgfPb9— Al Mayadeen English (@MayadeenEnglish) October 23, 2023
With all of that being said, it is important to note that after lengthy negotiations, only 37 trucks loaded with aid and goods were allowed to go through the Rafah border crossing into the besieged Gaza Strip while data from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reveal that within that same time period, approximately 5,400 truck would cross over into the Gaza Strip. So far, the world combined has only succeeded in getting 37 out of 5,400 trucks through the crossing despite severely deteriorating circumstances.
Supplies, including food, medication, water purification equipment, hygiene items, and blankets, have been accumulating at El Arish airport in Egypt’s Sinai region. The airport expanded its capacity by opening an additional landing strip to manage the influx of aid deliveries.
The aid being allowed through the crossing is merely a media stunt until now. However, this is not due to the lack of aid being sent to Gaza, for at the Egyptian side of the Rafah crossing await hundreds of trucks loaded with medical aid, goods, and fuel.
There were no Israeli guarantees that the aid convoys would be safe to pass, as police minister Itamar Ben Gvir was quoted by Israeli media as saying: “We must not allow any humanitarian assistance to the residents of Gaza.”
The statement highlighted that the number of martyrs in the southern Gaza Strip reached 1,652, despite the fact that the Israeli occupation claimed that the areas of southern Gaza were considered safe and not targeted. Such numbers highlight the impossibility of aid access under constant bombardment.
Despite all diplomatic efforts being funneled to allow for a humanitarian corridor to transport aid into the besieged Strip, the Israeli warplanes continue to carry out aggressive and periodical raids against the Palestinian side of Rafah.
Since the beginning of the Israeli aggression, “Israel” had targeted the main road from the Egyptian border over to southern Gaza making it very difficult and even sometimes impossible for trucks to drive through it.
Palestinians had to conduct quick fixes allowing for the road to be drivable but there was no way to eliminate the risk of the road getting bombed again or the convoys getting targeted beyond a few guarantees that “Israel” was never known to necessarily keep.
The Israeli occupation has failed to honor international rules of war and has targeted places of worship, hospitals, UNRWA locations, and various schools where displaced Palestinians, most of whom were children, were taking refuge.
The siege on Gaza has tightened since the start of the ethnic cleansing plot of “Israel”. It has even tightened in the face of hospitals whose doctors now operate without any anesthesia and using phone lights as the hospitals have been running out of fuel. Whatever fuel remains has been getting rationed for incubators, oxygen machines, and ambulances.
A DOCTOR IN GAZA OPERATING WITHOUT A LIGHT – HAS TO USE A MOBILE PHONE.
In that regard, Abed, who works with Doctors Without Borders, told The Associated Press from Al Quds Hospital “We have a shortage of everything, and we are dealing with very complex surgeries.”
While the world watches, and the genocide gets aired on TV in 2023, “Israel” continues to indiscriminately break all international rules, commit war crimes, and forbid anyone from offering Gaza a helping hand in aid. Once again reaffirm that the decision of Resistance has always been the only option for the occupied people.
Israeli Energy Minister Israel Katz pledged on Friday that no electricity, water, or fuel would enter Gaza until captives are returned home.
Cairo is facing increased pressure from the Israelis and Western countries to allow Palestinians to flee into Egypt, to fulfill Israeli goals of ethnic cleansing, while Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas warned Blinken on Friday that the forced displacement of the Gazans would lead to a “second Nakba”.
Israeli “evacuation orders” have fueled worries that “Israel” is attempting to forcibly displace Gazans to Egypt’s Sinai peninsula, particularly after “Israel’s” former Deputy Foreign Minister Daniel Ayalon claimed that Cairo “will have to play ball” and allow “temporary” settlement in the “almost endless space” of Sinai, a large desert territory.
Cairo’s National Security Council said Sunday that “Egypt’s national security is a red line and there will be no complacency in protecting it.”
UPROOTED PALESTINIANS: SALAM ALQUDS ALAYKUM 
