It’s not clear when the ground incursion will happen

by Dave DeCamp, Antiwar. com, October 18, 2023

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu won President Biden’s “private backing” for a ground invasion of Gaza during talks in Israel on Wednesday, The Times of London reported.

The report said Biden told Netanyahu that he remained “fully in support” of Israel’s plans to launch a ground incursion to “eliminate Hamas” despite outrage over the bombing of the Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City that Israel is blaming on an errant Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket. The US is backing Israel’s side of the story, while Palestinian officials insist an Israeli airstrike hit the hospital.

According to a report from Axios on Wednesday’s talks between Biden and Netanyahu, the primary message Israeli officials expressed to President Biden was that the war in Gaza will take time and will test US support for Israel. Over 3,000 Palestinians have already been killed in Israel’s onslaught on Gaza that started on October 7, and any ground invasion will incur huge civilian casualties.

An Israeli ground invasion of Gaza appeared imminent toward the end of last week when Israel ordered the evacuation of northern Gaza, an area where 1.1 million people live. The Jerusalem Post reported that the incursion was delayed over concerns Hezbollah would open a second front in the north.

The US has deployed two aircraft carrier strike groups and other military assets to “deter” other actors from joining the war, and the White House has discussed the possibility of using military force against Hezbollah if it launches a significant attack on Israel.

The Axios report said that Biden expressed concern to Netanyahu that Hezbollah might join the war beyond the cross-border rocket strikes it has been exchanging with Israel in the north.

–Nasir Khan, October 16, 2023

When ordinary Arabs are appalled by the genocidal war of Israel and the barbarous destruction of Gaza by heavy aerial bombardment, one rarely hears from the rulers of the Arab region or of any concrete steps they may take to help the besieged Palestinians of Gaza. But we can ask why are they so insensitive, and indifferent towards Israel’s ethnic cleansing on a large scale once again?

The answer is simple. Most of the Arab regimes are in the hands of dictators, dynastic kings and emirs, who have little or no sense of honour, or of right and wrong. They are isolated from their subjects, and their subjects have no voice. If they speak up, they are put in prison, or even killed, as happened with Khashoggi. There is no freedom of press and any criticism of the policies of any such anti-democratic regimes is totally forbidden. Many of these despotic regimes are under the domination of America, Britain and Israel.

Unlike the servile Arab regimes that collaborate with Israel, Iran, a non-Arab nation, has adopted a distinct policy. According to the foreign minister, Iran will not remain a spectator when Israel is destroying Gaza. Iran is the only country in the region that has fully supported the Palestinian cause over the years, despite its both internal and external political problems since the overthrow of the US puppet regime of the Shah in 1979.

The Pentagon has chosen 2,000 US troops for possible deployment to non-combat roles in Israel’s war. The deployment of US forces for helping the Israeli war in Gaza is a continuation of the US policy towards the Palestinians and a determined effort to stop Palestinians from getting liberation from Israeli occupation. If anyone was in doubt, what the United States is doing reveals the true nature of American imperialism.

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By James Meyers

The Pentagon has reportedly selected 2,000 U.S. troops to be prepared for deployment to help Israel in the nation’s ongoing war with Hamas. 

Officials stated the selected troops will not serve in a combat role, but would instead be assigned to “medical support or advisory duties.”

2,000 personnel are stationed in other regions of the Middle East and Europe as well. However, it has not yet been determined what needs to happen in order for the group to be deployed, the Journal reported. 

The announcement comes after the Pentagon revealed a second aircraft carrier, the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower Carrier Strike Group, will be placed in the eastern Mediterranean. 

Meanwhile, Israel continues to send airstrikes into Gaza after Hamas launched a surprise terrorist attack on the Jewish State, killing over 1,200 Israelis. 

President Joe Biden was set to deliver a speech in Colorado regarding “Bidenomics” on Monday, however, he met with officials to discuss the efforts on the war in Israel instead.

“This morning, President Biden and Vice President Harris were briefed by their national security team on the latest updates in the wake of Hamas’s abhorrent attack in Israel and the resulting conflict in Gaza,” said a White House official.

Sources told the news outlet Axios that while Iran does not want the conflict to escalate, it is prepared to intervene either directly or indirectly, with a possible military group in Syria or Lebanon. 

Since the war began, Israel has called up around 360,000 reservists as it prepares for a ground invasion into Gaza.

The directive was given after Israel told 1.1 million Palestinians to evacuate northern Gaza

by Dave DeCamp, Antiwar. com, October 15, 2023

The State Department has warned its diplomats not to call for de-escalation or an end to the violence as Israeli airstrikes relentlessly hit Gaza, killing hundreds of children.

In a message circulated Friday in emails viewed by HuffPost, the State Department said that high-level officials do not want these three phrases in press materials: “de-escalation/ceasefire,” “end to violence/bloodshed,” and “restoring calm.”

The State Department’s orders demonstrate how strongly the US is backing Israel’s onslaught on Gaza despite the massive civilian death toll. The White House has also disparaged calls for de-escalation.

When asked about calls for a ceasefire made by some progressive Democrats, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said, “We believe they are wrong, we believe they’re repugnant, and we believe they’re disgraceful.”

The State Department directive was given after Israel told 1.1 million Palestinians in north Gaza to evacuate to the south. Some Palestinians who attempted to flee the north were hit by Israeli airstrikes.

— Nasir Khan, Oct 15, 2023

Today I received a notice from Facebook that they have removed my post from my Timeline and a group I administer, which was from WSWS informing about the large protests in the US against the war in Gaza. There was also a warning that my account could be restricted if I continued to go ‘against the Community Standards’.

This is an important video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h739EMda8Ag), but I won’t be able to share it for the stated reason. I must point out that some articles and videos do get through, but the official policy Facebook follows is to stop people from telling the truth about what Israel is doing. That is a sad state of affairs because we are hindered from our work as political activists who stand for truth and justice for the Palestinians and other victims of imperialist powers.

• Andrew Mitrovica, Al Jazeera columnist, Published On 14 Oct 202314 Oct 2023

This dystopian-like horror has been Israel’s ‘end game’ all along: pulverise every square inch of Gaza and its people into dust and memory.

The cataclysm that you and I are witnessing in Gaza is a genocide in the awful making.

It is not an “onslaught”. It is not an “invasion”. It is not even a “war”. It is a genocide.

The apocalyptic scenes and sounds in Gaza are proof that a cruel, occupying army is intent on achieving its overarching aim: the annihilation of what remains of an already shattered slice of land and the indiscriminate killing of helpless, exhausted children, women and men.

Over decades, a succession of immune Israeli governments and their useful proxies, the rampaging settler militias, have waged incremental genocide, bit by bit, with the explicit approval, consent, and encouragement of Western governments – who, in a predictable show of performative solidarity with a ruthless ally – have bathed their tourist attractions in blue and white or the Star of David.

Go ahead, you craven enablers, show the world your true and rank colours. We will remember.

Make no mistake: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – along with his racist gang of brutish (by nature, temperament, and vernacular) cabinet ministers – have been aching, for a long, frustrating time, to abandon the let’s-teach-Palestinians-a-lethal-lesson spasms of violence in favour of the much more satisfying wholesale destruction of the Gaza Strip.

The monstrous plan is as plain as Netanyahu’s wretched character: Be done with Gaza by erasing Gaza.

Anyone, anywhere, in any forum who denies this fact is either a liar, blind – or willfully, happily, and comfortably both.

This is not “righteous” payback or vengeance. It is – I repeat, for the legion of complicit hacks and stenographers who, remarkably, have never noticed, let alone given a damn, about the perpetual suffering and trauma of Palestinians – a genocide.

If my blunt indictment stings, I challenge any of the historically illiterate columnists and American TV news celebrities who have rushed to Israel to burnish their credentials as “foreign correspondents” – with their hairstylists, makeup artists and writers in tow – to disabuse me, and much more importantly, the Palestinian diaspora and their allies, of our belief that a murderous genocide is unfolding in that besieged enclave.

These insufferable hypocrites are again tarring Palestinians as “evil predators” while praising Israelis as “solicitous saints” for warning grateful Palestinians in Gaza that they’re going to kill them en masse.

These fawning Israel loyalists have likely not once stepped inside the barbed-wired walls and fences that encircle Gaza or interviewed any of the millions of human beings who, for generations, have endured the loss, theft, deprivations, indignities, humiliations, and, of course, lethal ferocity committed by an apartheid state.

It is a familiar, surreal minstrel show that reduces an old, complex story into a pat, easy-to-digest clash between black and white for countless equally callow, geography-allergic Americans who are convinced that carrying a passport is “woke”.

The white hats – the Israelis – are always the innocent victims. The black hats – the Palestinians – are always the guilty perpetrators.

Hence, the cavalier disregard for the almost incomprehensible human consequences of Israel’s blatant annulment of that, by now, silly, anachronistic term: international law.

Stop the stuff of life – food and water – from getting into captive Gaza. Fine.

Stop fuel and electricity from being delivered to homes and hospitals. Fine.

Bomb United Nations schools sheltering desperate Palestinian families from the incessant carpet bombing. Fine.

Attack ambulances to bar them from ferrying mangled children to darkened hospitals where they require urgent care. Fine.

Unleash white phosphorous to burn Palestinians to the bone. Fine.

Dispense with the canard of “precision strikes” to prevent “civilian casualties” and revel, instead, in turning Gaza into Fallujah, circa 2005. Fine.

Seal the prison that is Gaza tighter to make escape and hope impossible. Fine.

Then demand that 1.1 million people move to nowhere within hours or face, in all likelihood, a certain death. Fine.

On appalling cue, the usual gallery of preening presidents and prime ministers has deplored the atrocities committed by the black hats – while applauding, as a necessary and welcomed rebuttal, the atrocities committed by the white hats.

So please, would fantasists stop imploring the International Criminal Court (ICC) at The Hague to do something, anything, to hold “both parties”, including, Israel, to account?

It has not happened and will not happen because the ever-compliant ICC knows that it must not offend, and will not offend, the powers that be in Washington, DC who run the whole fraudulent farce.

Meanwhile, Netanyahu – who, just a few weeks ago, was excoriated for being an indicted crook facing a corruption trial on a slew of fraud, bribery, and breach of trust charges as well as having an authoritarian’s DNA – has been rehabilitated by US President Joe Biden and obsequious company as the Middle East’s shining avatar of resolve, resilience and morality.

Such is the diseased “moral” compass of Biden and his pedestrian confederates in London, Paris, Berlin, Brussels, Canberra and Ottawa.

Still, it’s hardly surprising that feral colonial powers – given their hideous record of killing and disfiguring so many innocents, in so many scarred places – would offer their blanket endorsement to another colonial power responsible for killing and disfiguring so many innocent Palestinians in Gaza and beyond yesterday, today and tomorrow.

But know this: Biden et al do not speak for millions of citizens who they purport to represent, but who will continue to stand steadfast with unbowed Palestinians and their just and humane cause.

Despite all the nonsense and posturing by the “international community” about “resolving the crisis through diplomacy”, this dystopian-like horror has been the “end game” all along: pulverise every square inch of Gaza and its people into dust and memory.

The risible “two-state” solution is a sick illusion promoted by slick, Ivy-league-educated diplomats like US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the other Israeli war-crime apologists who preceded him – fused, as they were and are, to their “partners” in Tel Aviv like conjoined twins.

Blinken has travelled to Israel at the behest of his boss to “greenlight” genocide. We will remember that, too.

A malignant regime, motivated by a poisonous combination of ultra-nationalism and fanaticism, knows that its sinister goal is in tantalizing sight.

There will be more horrors to come. But Palestinians will not be broken. They will persevere and prevail. It will be hard and take time, but they will rebuild.

Blinken expressed full-throated support for Israel while meeting Netanyahu in Tel Aviv amid the bombardment of Gaza

by Dave DeCamp, Antiwar. com, October 12, 2023

Secretary of State Antony Blinken declared in Tel Aviv on Thursday that “as long as America exists,” it will support Israel, a pledge that came amid a relentless Israeli bombardment of Gaza.

“The message that I bring to Israel is this: You may be strong enough on your own to defend yourself – but as long as America exists, you will never, ever have to. We will always be there, by your side,” Blinken said alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Since Hamas launched an unprecedented attack on southern Israel on October 7, the US has shipped more military equipment to Israel, deployed an aircraft carrier strike group, and augmented its fighter jets in the region. Congress is poised to authorize more military aid on top of the $3.8 billion Israel receives each year.

“We’re delivering on our word — supplying ammunition, interceptors to replenish Israel’s Iron Dome, alongside other defense materiel. The first shipments of US military support have already arrived in Israel, and more is on the way,” Blinken said.

“As Israel’s defense needs evolve, we will work with Congress to make sure that they’re met. And I can tell you there is overwhelming — overwhelming — bipartisan support in our Congress for Israel’s security,” he added.

Blinken said it’s “important to take every possible precaution to avoid harming civilians” but did not mention the hundreds of children who have been killed by Israel’s onslaught on Gaza.

Also on Thursday, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said the new aid for Israel was unconditional. “In terms of conditions that we would place on the security assistance that we’re providing to Israel, we have not placed any conditions on the provision of this equipment,” he said.

According to Gaza’s Health Ministry, at least 1,537 Palestinians — including 500 children and 276 women — have been killed and 6,612 wounded in Israel’s airstrikes on the besieged enclave since Saturday. On the Israeli side, at least 1,300 people have been killed and 3,200 wounded. Israeli officials have also said 1,500 Hamas militants were killed in southern Israel, but the death toll hasn’t been confirmed.

WSWS International Editorial Board

The World Socialist Web Site International Editorial Board condemns the war crimes conducted by the Israeli regime’s homicidal rampage in Gaza, which is being carried out with the full support of the United States and all the imperialist powers. We call on workers and youth throughout the world to mobilize protests to demand these war crimes be stopped.

The aim of the Israeli onslaught is to kill as many Palestinians as possible and to render Gaza dysfunctional and uninhabitable. The Netanyahu regime intends to wipe Gaza off the face of the earth, a fact that is confirmed by the announcement late Thursday that Israel is demanding that the 1.1 million people living in northern Gaza evacuate within 24 hours. It is, in effect, sending Gazans on a death march.

This is a genocidal project. There are 2.2 million people in Gaza, which has one of the highest population densities in the world. Half of the population, some one million people, are younger than the age of 18. Trapped from leaving with the closure of border crossings into Israel and Egypt, they face systematic starvation, constant bombardment, and the prospect of an imminent invasion.

Since launching its savage onslaught on Gaza Saturday, the Israeli Defense Forces have dropped 6,000 bombs weighing some 4,000 tons on the enclave. According to Palestinian health authorities, 1,417 people have been killed, half of whom are women and children, but the death toll is undoubtedly far higher. The AP released video of the Jabalia refugee camp, in northern Gaza, with a population of 116,000 packed into 1.4 square kilometers. The AP noted that the camp had been “razed to the ground” by Israeli airstrikes.

The Netanyahu regime has cut all electricity, water, and fuel supplies to Gaza, an act of collective punishment that is itself a war crime. The International Committee of the Red Cross warned Thursday that “hospitals risk turning into morgues” as their fuel-powered generators run out and Israel refuses to open humanitarian corridors to evacuate the seriously ill and injured. Life support for babies in incubators and elderly patients has been turned off.

Chilling remarks from across the Israeli political establishment make clear that these horrendous acts are just the beginning of what can best be described as Operation Mass Murder.

Speaking Wednesday after the confirmation of an emergency government with opposition leader Benny Gantz, Netanyahu stated that “every Hamas man is a dead man.” The militant nationalist group that led Saturday’s assault on Israel won the support of over 400,000 Gazans in the 2006 election, underscoring that Netanyahu would have to order the slaughter of hundreds of thousands to carry out his threat. Gantz was no less bloodthirsty, declaring that it was “time for war” and that Israel intends to “wipe Hamas off the face of the earth.”

These are statements that echo those of the Nazi regime in Germany, whose leaders were hanged at Nuremberg. When the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto rose up in early 1943 against Nazi occupation, followed one year later by the Polish resistance, Hitler’s regime flattened the city in a manner comparable with the destruction of Gaza that is now in its early stages.

The Biden administration and the media, justifying the slaughter, attempt to portray Hamas’ attack on Israeli civilians as an inexplicable outrage, expressing nothing else than “pure evil.” But the fact is that the rebellion was provoked by decades of relentless oppression by the Israeli government against the Palestinians.

Just two months ago, nearly three thousand, predominantly Jewish public intellectuals from all over the world signed a letter under the headline, “Elephant in the Room,” which described the conditions that preceded the attack from Hamas. They referred to “the direct link between Israel’s recent attack on the judiciary and its illegal occupation of Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. Palestinian people lack almost all basic rights, including the right to vote and protest. They face constant violence: this year alone, Israeli forces have killed over 190 Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and demolished over 590 structures. Settler vigilantes burn, loot, and kill with impunity.”

The letter continued, “There cannot be democracy for Jews in Israel as long as Palestinians live under a regime of apartheid, as Israeli legal experts have described it. Indeed, the ultimate purpose of the judicial overhaul is to tighten restrictions on Gaza, deprive Palestinians of equal rights both beyond the Green Line and within it, annex more land, and ethnically cleanse all territories under Israeli rule of their Palestinian population.”

All of this is now being deliberately suppressed. A totally false, lying narrative is being concocted, according to which Israel is the victim of Nazi-style attacks from the Palestinians, who in fact have been oppressed and subjected to repeated bombardments and massacres for decades. The Israeli government and its supporters are seeking to exploit the Holocaust to justify their own genocidal crimes.

The Israeli massacre has the full support and encouragement of the imperialist powers in Europe and the United States. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with Netanyahu Thursday, as the invasion is being planned, to declare his full support for Israel. Asked in an interview with NBC News whether there were any “red lines” that Israel might cross, Blinken responded that he was “not going to get into any of the operational details, and again, we’re determined to support them.”

In other words, Israel has a blank check for anything it does. In a joint press conference with Netanyahu in Jerusalem, Blinken declared: “I come before you not only as the United States Secretary of State, but also as a Jew.” Blinken’s explicit association of his personal religion with his official role as a representative of the US government exposes his indifference to and ignorance of the constitution-based separation of church and state. His statement provides grist for antisemitic propaganda, as it falsely associates all Jewish people with the crimes of the Netanyahu regime.

If he were speaking honestly, Blinken would have said, “I come to Israel not only as US Secretary of State, but also as an accomplice in the destruction of Gaza and the mass murder of Palestinians.”

Blinken’s trip followed US President Joe Biden’s speech Tuesday, denouncing the Palestinian uprising as the expression of “pure unadulterated evil.” Speaking Thursday on the sidelines of the NATO Defense Ministers Summit in Brussels, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin confirmed that “no conditions” would be placed on how weapons supplied to Israel by the US are used.

As the imperialist powers wage ever more openly a war against the world, even the remnants of bourgeois democracy are being dispensed with. Protests in support of the Palestinians were banned this week across Europe and North America, with participants demonized by the authorities as supporters of “terrorism.”

On the college campuses, right-wing Zionists are attempting to create an atmosphere of terror and threats. Student groups and individuals who have spoken out against Israeli crimes have had their names and personal information released and publicized. At a rally at Brooklyn College yesterday, a member of the New York City Council, Inna Vernikov, showed up brandishing a firearm to intimidate students.

To those who accuse opponents of Israeli crimes of being antisemitic, we say that the Israeli government consists of a pack of fascists. This includes Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir, who has ordered his ministry to purchase 10,000 assault rifles to arm right-wing settler militias. Ben-Gvir had previously been convicted of racist incitement for chanting “Death to Arabs” and for supporting a terrorist group.

As for the US and European powers, they are aligned with fascists in Ukraine, exemplified in the standing ovation given last month by the Canadian Parliament, along with representatives from all the G7 countries, for Yaroslav Hunka, a veteran of the Ukrainian Waffen-SS, which was responsible for the massacre of Jews under the direction of Nazi Germany.

The Israeli onslaught on Gaza must be seen in the context of the escalating US-NATO war against Russia, the initial stage of world war. The imperialist redivision of the world will assume the form not just of conflicts between countries, but an ever more direct and violent war against masses of people. The ruling elites in all the capitalist countries, moreover, face an intersecting series of economic, social and political crises which they are seeking to divert through an explosion of military violence.

The ruling class believes that the media is presenting public opinion, but support for the Palestinians is widespread among the population throughout the world, and strikes and protests by workers are on the rise in every country. Within Israel, the Netanyahu regime has confronted sustained opposition from the working class over the past year to its drive to gut democratic rights and establish an authoritarian regime.

The working class must intervene to stop the massacre by demanding an immediate halt to the supply of weapons to Israel. Mass protests and demonstrations should be organized in every city and college campus to demand an end to the murderous onslaught.

These demands are inseparable from the broader struggle to put an end to the intolerable conditions faced by the Palestinians and all forms of oppression around the world, which requires the development of a mass movement in the international working class for socialism.

The political class internationally, with one voice, put out statements supporting “Israel’s right to self-defence,” a right they grant to the oppressor but deny to the oppressed.

A Palestinian boy and Israeli soldier in front of the Israeli West Bank Barrier. August, 2004. (Justin McIntosh, Wikipedia, CC BY 2.0)

By Craig Murray
CraigMurray.org.uk

There have been decades of photos of dead Palestinian women and children, and kids being beaten, humiliated and imprisoned by Israeli soldiers. The historic killing rate in this “conflict” has been fairly consistent at about 40:1. 

None of this ever caused more than a raised eyebrow and a mild tut-tut from the western “liberal” Establishment. I can’t recall camera crews ever pursuing any Zionist politicians down the street demanding that they use the word “condemn” of the latest Israeli atrocity.

The paroxysm of hatred in the political and media class, unleashed by a single day of the boot being on the other foot is instructive. It is particularly instructive in their near complete unanimity — what percentage of the discussion on broadcast TV or radio have you heard this last 48 hours given over to Palestinian or pro-Palestinian voices?

Yet it is very plain from social media that the public is by no means as unanimous in their support of Israel as are the political and media class. 

But then the public are not bought and paid for.

Asymmetric warfare tends to be vile. Oppressed and colonised peoples don’t have the luxury of lining up soldiers in neatly pressed uniforms and polished boots, to face off against the opposing army in an equality of arms.

Demonstration in support of Palestinian resistance, Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Oct. 10. (Corinna Barnard)

A colonised and oppressed people tends, given the chance, to mirror the atrocities perpetrated on them by their oppressor.

This of course feeds in, always, to the propaganda of the Imperialist. A paroxysm of resistance by the oppressed always ends up portrayed by the Imperialist as evidence of the bestiality of the colonised people and in itself justifying the “civilising mission” of the coloniser.

Thus the “Indian Mutiny” became a Victorian tale of rape and murder of British women and of the Black Hole of Calcutta. Thus the Mau Mau were evil butchers and the IRA were terrorists, which is the modern term of art for those resisting evil and foreign rule.

The Israeli ambassador to the U.N. on Monday described the Hamas fighters as “animal like.” This of course is not true. They are people, but people who have been crazed by unbearable levels of injustice and oppression.

I am extremely sorry for all those who die, as in all wars. I am sorry even for the deaths of individual Israeli soldiers, and more so for all the innocents who died and are now dying. 

But I will not condemn Hamas. 

For this I do not even need to delve into the backstory of Hamas’ initial sponsoring by Israel to split Fatah. They have grown well past that. I do not condemn Hamas because the resistance of the Palestinian people is a reflex response to their slow genocide.

Yes it is an inchoate and violent response. Of course I wish it did not harm innocent victims.

The people I do condemn are the political class internationally who, with one voice, put out statements supporting “Israel’s right to self-defence,” a right they grant to the oppressor but deny to the oppressed. 

Those are the people who need to be condemned.

Craig Murray is an author, broadcaster and human rights activist. He was British ambassador to Uzbekistan from August 2002 to October 2004 and rector of the University of Dundee from 2007 to 2010. His coverage is entirely dependent on reader support. Subscriptions to keep this blog going are gratefully received.