by Ralph Nader. Counterpunch, Dec 18, 2023

Image by Kim Silverstein. Courtesy JVP.

In the midst of Netanyahu’s annihilation of innocent Palestinian civilians in Gaza, many of them children, women and the elderly, there is a rising urgency from many Israeli and domestic Jewish groups for an immediate ceasefire and greatly increasing the flow of humanitarian aid.

In the U.S. Jewish Voice for Peace and If Not Now have vigorously engaged in public non-violent civil disobedience – an American tradition – to challenge the inhumane unconditional co-belligerency by Congress and Joe Biden of the present extremist regime’s genocidal destruction of Palestinians. Many U.S. Jewish Americans are standing tall either individually or in groups to exclaim “not in our name” to the U.S.-funded civilian slaughter in Gaza.

A most remarkable, little-noticed open letter to President Joe Biden appeared in December 13, 2023, New York Times,paid for by the legendary Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem and signed by 16 other Israeli peace, human rights, veterans and religious associations. (See the letter here).

Titled “The Humanitarian Catastrophe in the Gaza Strip,” the letter condemns the Hamas “horrific and criminal attack on Israeli civilians” and demands the release of the Israelis in Gaza. What follows are excerpts from their message to the White House:

“Since the war began, Israel’s policy has driven the humanitarian crisis in Gaza to the point of catastrophe – not only as an inevitable outcome of war. As part of this policy, soon after the fighting began, Israel stopped selling Gaza electricity and water, closed its crossings and blocked all entry of food, water, fuel and medicine.”

Citing international law and committed war crimes, the signers continue:

“UN agencies and humanitarian organizations report that the situation in Gaza is catastrophic and they have almost no way left to help the population. The few truckloads that are allowed in – a drop in the ocean, according to the reports – cannot be distributed due to the ongoing bombardments, the destruction of infrastructure and restrictions imposed by Israel. This leaves more than two million people hungry and thirsty, without access to proper medical care, and with infectious diseases spreading due to unhygienic overcrowding and lack of water. This inconceivable reality grows worse by the day.”

“You [Biden] have the power to influence our government to change its policy and allow humanitarian aid into Gaza, in accordance with Israel’s legal obligations ….”

“We are in the final throes of an emergency. Many deaths can still be prevented. Israel must change its policy now.”

The estimated death toll in Gaza at “more than 18,000” is a gross undercount. Well over ten times more children in Gaza have been killed in nine weeks than the number of children lost in the Russian war on Ukraine over nearly 22 months. In addition to the unprecedented intense bombing, large numbers of Palestinian infants, children, women, the infirmed, and disabled are homeless, facing the elements, dying by the minute from the homicidal conditions described by these Israeli human rights groups, journalists, and recorded by U.S. drones above Gaza.

Being reduced to rubble, Gaza has no fire trucks or water to put out spreading fires. The Israeli military has destroyed or rendered the vast majority of hospitals and health clinics inoperative. UN relief agencies are shelled and have seen over 130 of their staff slain.

The Israeli war machine has also taken the lives of over 60 Palestinian journalists (many with their families), including three Israeli reporters. Consistent with its long-time exclusion of outside journalists, the Israeli government doesn’t want the world to see and hear from unembedded, mainstream Israeli or foreign journalists.

Day after deadly day, President Biden, Secretary of State Blinken and Secretary of Defense Austin used words to urge minimizing Palestinian casualties while they deploy deeds of massive shipments of bombs, missiles and UN vetoes. Small wonder our government officials are having little restraining influence. The Israeli Air Force even bombs and contaminates the small agricultural areas destroying olive groves and fields growing grain, vegetable and fruit crops. It is even against Israeli law for Palestinians to collect rainwater which is decreed to be the property of the state.

Pope Francis, long a protector of Jewish rights when he was a cleric in Argentina, called Israeli President Isaac Herzog to express his deep concern about the plight of the Palestinians, saying that “it is forbidden to respond to terror with terror.” The Vatican reported that the Holy Father is in constant touch with the “Christian Church” in Gaza and the West Bank. For decades, Christians in the West Bank have been harassed, discriminated against and encroached upon (e.g., Bethlehem) with little media coverage, except for the courageous Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

Oblivious to world opinion, including that of our allies, Biden and the Democrats are pushing for another $14.3 billion in U.S. taxpayer monies to further annihilate the defenseless, now homeless, human beings in Gaza, screaming in pain and fear, sick, starving and dying, unable to bury their kin. Rotting corpses are piling up, and being eaten by stray dogs.

Meanwhile, people in the U.S. who speak out for stopping this brutality are charged with being “antisemitic” – a grotesque cheapening and misuse of a word that was used to describe the savage Russian pogroms and Nazi horrors of extermination. Silencing peaceful criticism with this slander is a conscious tactic. Note the statement by Shulamit Aloni, a former Minister of Education and winner of the Israel Prize:

“It’s a trick. We always use it. When from Europe, somebody criticizes Israel, we bring up the Holocaust. When, in the United States, people are critical of Israel, then they are anti-Semitic.”

It works all too often. Americans are smeared, being suspended or losing their jobs, their careers, and their customers because they oppose the carnage in Gaza. It is a sign of the partisan censorship that incurring such penalties is not experienced by Americans exclaiming their full support for this genocidal obliteration of Gaza – a multiple war crime pointed out by both Jewish and non-Jewish international law scholars here and abroad.

The least that humane citizens can do is to tell their members of Congress to demand a permanent ceasefire, the release of the Israeli hostages and the large number of Palestinian prisoners (children, women and men) in Israeli jails without charges or due process, and serious movement toward a two-state solution.

The switchboard in Congress is 202-224-3121.

Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, lawyer and author of Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us! 

Injured Palestinians are brought to Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital for medical treatment as Israeli attacks continue in Deir al Balah, Gaza on December 11, 2023.

(Photo by Ashraf Amra/Anadolu via Getty Images)

The U.S. is more than a protector of Israel. It is now an accomplice in its genocidal attack on the Palestinian people of Gaza.

Jeffrey D. Sachs, Common Dreams, Dec 11, 2023

The nearly unanimous vote in the UN Security Council on Friday calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza is a moment of honor for the United Nations and shame for the United States. By voting to stop Israel’s war on Gaza by a vote of 13 yes, 1 no (US), and 1 abstention (UK), the vast majority put itself on the side of international law. The US stood alone against international law, with its sidekick and tutor in imperial brutality, the United Kingdom, dutifully abstaining.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres honored the UN and human decency by invoking Article 99 of the UN Charter, calling for the UN Security Council to stop the killing in Gaza as a basic responsibility under the UN Charter. Each day, UN officials on the ground in Gaza heroically struggle to feed, shelter, and protect the population from Israeli bombs. More than 100 UN staff have been killed in the Israeli assault.

The situation in Gaza is as clear as it is brutal. The State of Palestine, recognized by 139 nations, has long suffered from the brutalities of Israeli occupation in Gaza and the West Bank. Gaza has been called the world’s largest open-air prison by Human Rights Watch. After the Hamas-led horrific terrorist attack on October 7, in which 1,200 Israelis died, Israel began to ethnically cleanse Gaza. Legal specialists at the Center for Constitutional Rights regard Israel’s actions as a genocide.

To date, more than 17,400 Gazans have been killed, and an unfathomable 1.8 million Gazans have been displaced. Tens of thousands are at risk of imminent death. Last month, Guterres warned that “Gaza is becoming a graveyard for children.” Israel pushed the population from northern Gaza to the south, and then invaded the south. Israeli authorities told Gazans to flee for their life to zones within the south, and then bombed the places to which the Gazans had been directed.

The killing frenzy is being led by the very same politicians who were responsible for the October 7 security failure and who now manipulate the deepest anxieties of the Israeli population.

The US is more than a protector of Israel. It is an accomplice. The US supplies, in real-time, the munitions Israel uses for mass murder, even as US authorities pay lip-service to Gazan civilian lives.

The President of Israel Isaac Herzog justifies the slaughter by declaring that there are no innocent civilian Gazans: “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible.” The Israeli government’s biggest lie is that Israel has no options other than the mass killing of Gazans, supposedly to defeat Hamas.

The fact that Israel was lulled by its arrogance into letting its guard down on October 7 does not make Hamas an existential threat. Hamas has only a tiny fraction of Israel’s military might. October 7, like 9/11 in the US, was a colossal security blunder that should be immediately corrected by stepped-up border security, not an existential threat that in any remote manner justifies the killing of thousands or tens of thousands of innocent civilians, with women and children constituting 70% of the victims. The killing frenzy is being led by the very same politicians who were responsible for the October 7 security failure and who now manipulate the deepest anxieties of the Israeli population.

There is a larger and far more important point. Hamas can be demobilized through diplomacy, and only through diplomacy. Israel and the United States need finally to abide by international law, accept a sovereign state of Palestine alongside Israel, and welcome Palestine as the 194th member state of the UN. The US needs to stop arming the Israeli operation of ethnic cleansing in Gaza and stop protecting Israel’s rampant violations of basic human rights in the West Bank. Fifty-six years after its illegal occupation of Palestinian lands, and after decades of illegal settlements in the occupied territories, Israel needs finally to withdraw from the occupied Palestinian lands.

With such steps, peace between Israel and the neighboring countries could and would be secured. On that basis, UN peacekeepers, including both Arab and Western troops, would in turn secure the Israel-Palestine border for a needed transition period. At the same time, all international flows of financing to anti-Israel militants would be choked off by joint and coordinated actions of the US, Europe, and Israel’s Arab and Islamic neighbors.

The diplomatic route is open because the Arab and Islamic countries (including Iran) have once again reiterated their long-standing desire for peace with Israel as part of a peace agreement that establishes Palestine along the 1967 borders and its capital in East Jerusalem.

The real reason for Israel’s war in Gaza is that the Government of Israel rejects the two-state solution, and points to extremists on the other side rather than to the Arab and Islamic states, which want peace based on the two-state solution.

For rights to be secured and internationally respected in our day, governments need to abide by the international rule of law.

Israeli zealots, including several in the cabinet, believe that God promised them all of the lands from the Euphrates to the Mediterranean. This belief is fatuous. As Jewish history should make clear to religious Jews, and as all human history should make clear generally, no group, whether Jewish or otherwise, has an unconditional “right” to any land. For rights to be secured and internationally respected in our day, governments need to abide by the international rule of law. In the case of Israel and Palestine, international law, as expressed repeatedly by the UN Security Council, holds that two sovereign states, Israel and Palestine, have both the right and responsibility to live side by side in peace according to the 1967 borders.

Not only Israel, but even perhaps more so the United States, has lost its way. The deep reason was clear to Senator J. William Fulbright sixty years ago, when Fulbright was Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and wrote the magnificent book, The Arrogance of Power. Fulbright pointed to arrogance as the deep cause of America’s reckless war in Vietnam in the 1960s. In its ongoing arrogance, the US military-security state repeatedly ignores the will of the international community and international law because it believes that weapons and power enable it to do so. US foreign policy is based heavily on covert, illegal regime-change operations and on perpetual warfare that caters to the US military-industrial complex.

In its ongoing arrogance, the US military-security state repeatedly ignores the will of the international community and international law because it believes that weapons and power enable it to do so.

We must not become cynical about the UN. It is currently blocked by the US, the country that led its creation under America’s greatest president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The UN is doing its job, building international law, sustainable development, and universal human rights, step by step, with advances and reverses, over the opposition of powerful forces, but with the arc of history on its side. International law is a relatively new human creation, still in the works. It is difficult to achieve in the face of obstreperous imperial power, but we must pursue it. It is important to note that opposing Israel’s war crimes has absolutely nothing to do with antisemitism. This point has been made eloquently in an open letter by dozens of Jewish writers. Netanyahu doesn’t speak for Judaism. The Israeli Government violates the most sacred of all Jewish injunctions, to protect life (Pikuach Nefesh) and to love your neighbor as yourself (Leviticus 19:18). The message of Jewish ethics is found in the words of the Prophet Isaiah (Isaiah 2:4) inscribed on a wall directly facing the United Nations: “They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.”

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

Jeffrey D. Sachs

Jeffrey D. Sachs is a University Professor and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, where he directed The Earth Institute from 2002 until 2016. He is also President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and a commissioner of the UN Broadband Commission for Development. He has been advisor to three United Nations Secretaries-General, and currently serves as an SDG Advocate under Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. Sachs is the author, most recently, of “A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism” (2020). Other books include: “Building the New American Economy: Smart, Fair, and Sustainable” (2017) and “The Age of Sustainable Development,” (2015) with Ban Ki-moon.

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Patrick Martin, WSWS. org, Dec 7, 2023

The US-Israeli propaganda machine has launched a new argument in defense of Israel’s mass slaughter in Gaza: the claim that Hamas, which carried out the October 7 cross-border strike into Israel that preceded the current war, was guilty of mass rape of Israeli women during that uprising.

That there is no direct evidence to support these allegations is irrelevant to the perpetrators and defenders of genocide in Gaza. The claim, suddenly blared out in the media, serves to distract public attention from the catastrophic escalation of Israeli military operations against the population of Gaza since the end of the limited “pause” that accompanied the exchange of hostages held by Hamas for Palestinians held in Israeli jails.

More than 1,000 Palestinians were killed over the weekend by Israeli bombs and missiles. Some 2 million Palestinians have been herded into a tiny corner of Gaza, itself an enclave no larger in area than the cities of Philadelphia or Detroit but with many more people. The purpose of the Israeli military operations has become increasingly clear: to drive the entire population of Gaza across the Egyptian border into the Sinai Desert, emptying Gaza and making it available for Jewish settlers.

On Monday, coinciding with the full-scale ground assault by the Israel Defense Forces on Khan Younis, the largest city in southern Gaza, a group of 150 wealthy and influential supporters of Israel held a rally at the United Nations headquarters in New York City to promote allegations of mass rape by Hamas. Former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton addressed the group remotely, while billionaire former Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg also lent her support, along with Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (Democrat-NY).

In her pre-recorded statement, Clinton, who as secretary of state in the Obama administration spearheaded the brutal US-NATO war against Libya, claimed, “It is outrageous that some who claim to stand for justice are closing their eyes and their hearts to the victims of Hamas.” She said nothing about the tens of thousands of victims of the US war in Libya, including thousands of women sold into sexual slavery under the rival reactionary juntas that have vied for power since the war. Nor did she make mention of the tens of thousands of victims of Israel’s onslaught against Gaza, using US-supplied bombs and missiles.

The event was sponsored by Israel’s Permanent Mission to the UN and brought together alleged testimony and documents, all supplied by the Israeli government and the IDF. While a UN commission of inquiry investigating war crimes in Gaza said it would pass on any evidence of sexual violence to the International Criminal Court, the US government does not recognize that court, for fear of prosecution of US war crimes. Israel does not cooperate with it, claiming it has an anti-Israel bias because the ICC has been open to evidence of Israeli war crimes in the occupied West Bank.

The next day, President Joe Biden took up the allegations of rape at a fundraising event in Boston. “Over the past few weeks, survivors and witnesses of the attacks have shared the horrific accounts of unimaginable cruelty,” Biden told his millionaire backers gathered at the Westin Hotel. The US president previously dismissed accounts by Palestinian “survivors and witnesses” in Gaza, including those of dozens of medical doctors, of mass casualties from Israeli bombing raids, claiming these were unreliable because they came via Hamas.

That night, NBC News broadcast a five-minute report on the rape charges as the lead item in its “Nightly News,” and a media avalanche ensued, with front-page reports in the New York Times and the Washington Post and reports on other television networks. As one historian of CIA media operations once termed it, this was the “mighty Wurlitzer” of American government propaganda at full volume.

What is the actual evidence supporting the highly orchestrated barrage of charges against Hamas? All of it comes from the Israeli government and the IDF; none has any independent confirmation; no testimony from victims or eyewitnesses has been produced. According to Israeli officials, the few rape victims who survived the October 7 attack were too traumatized to speak about it. Israeli police chief Yaakov Shabtai told the British Broadcasting Corporation that “many survivors of the attacks were finding it difficult to talk and that he thought some of them would never testify about what they saw or experienced.”

The women hostages released by Hamas last week have been in good physical condition, except for those who were elderly and frail to begin with. None of them reported sexual assaults during captivity. Several of them, however, reported narrowly escaping Israeli bomb and missile strikes, leading Israeli officials to dismiss their recollections as “unreliable.” Thus, only those witnesses who serve the propaganda interests of the Netanyahu government are to be believed.

According to the pro-Palestinian website Mondoweiss, a November 13 Israeli police briefing, supposedly called to provide new evidence about sexual violence, led to a clash between police officials and journalists because of “the absence of new information and clear evidence.” The police chief refused to answer any questions, and the police media officer, Merit Ben Meir, engaged in a heated discussion with journalists when they made the intended message of the briefing clear, stating: “Based on the circumstances of the bodies, rape occurred, and there’s no room for questioning these events.’”

The allegations of mass rape follow the pattern of previous US government “big lies” to manipulate public opinion under conditions of growing mass opposition to imperialist war. The Bush administration claimed the existence of “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq to justify its decision in invade and destroy that country. Obama and Hillary Clinton promoted charges of imminent mass slaughter in Benghazi as the pretext for the US-NATO bombing of Libya. The leaders of countries targeted by US imperialism—Panama’s Noriega, Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, Syria’s Assad and now Russia’s Putin—have invariably been portrayed in the American media as monsters deserving of the worst.

The rape allegations are being promoted by fascist forces within the Israeli state and taken up by frenzied supporters of imperialist militarism in America. Their sole purpose is to intimidate anyone who would seek to express their heartfelt opposition to Israeli genocide in Gaza. They have no credibility whatever.

And even if it were true that some Hamas fighters committed sexual violence in the course of the October 7 attack, how would this justify the slaughter of thousands of women and children in Gaza by the Israeli military? The claim of mass rape by Hamas is particularly cynical given the unchallenged fact that, as the WSWS declared in an editorial board statement Monday, Israel is engaged in a “war against women and children.”

The claims by Biden, Clinton & Co. to be “horrified” by the events of October 7 likewise have no credibility. Since the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945, no country has slaughtered more men, women and children in war than the United States. As for claims of rape, mass rape was an indelible feature of such atrocities as the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. The war in Iraq produced the memorable images of sexual violence at Abu Ghraib, but thousands of such actions, similar or far worse, went unrecorded, except in the memories of the victims and perpetrators.

The latest effort by the Biden administration and the corporate media to cover up the reality of Israeli genocide in Gaza will prove a dismal failure. It cannot stem the mounting worldwide outrage over the crimes which Israel is committing, acting as the spearhead for American and European imperialism in the Middle East. The central political task of the antiwar movement remains a turn to the international working class, the only social force which can halt the war in Gaza and put an end to the capitalist system which is the source of imperialist war.