Craig Murray; May 13, 2024  

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Incredibly the Israeli genocide in Gaza is now reaching new heights of violence. Casualty figures are not coming in, as the attacks are so bad that bodies cannot be recovered, medics cannot travel and there are almost no medical facilities operational now anyway.

We now see that the Western injunctions not to attack Rafah were a smokescreen of lies to mask complicity. The final pocket of Gaza is being ruthlessly ethnically cleansed and its infrastructure will be destroyed like all the rest.

It is striking that this is accompanied by an absolutely shameless doubling down of support for Israel by the Western political and media classes. Any thought that their isolation from the vast breadth of public opinion would give them pause, must be abandoned. Their Zionist lobby paymasters have jerked the chain, and rather than rowing back, we are seeing a redoubling of their efforts to suppress dissent and obscure the truth.

Some of this shameless distortion is so dissonant with the alleged norms of Western society it is almost impossible to believe it is happening. Here are a few examples.

1) Dr Ghassan Abu Sitta is a highly respected reconstructive surgeon who continued to work heroically and tirelessly in Al Shifa hospital, carrying out operation after operation, mostly on women and children, as the hospital was shelled, strafed and machine gunned around him.

He was already a surgeon of great distinction, based in Glasgow where he is now Rector of Glasgow University.

When Germany banned him from entering to address the conference on Palestine from which Yanis Varoufakis and others were also barred, it appeared perhaps as a one-off action as part of Germany’s extreme and panicked reaction to pro-Palestinian expression.

We have come to understand that Germany has a vicious hatred of Palestinians, remarkably based on the psychological trauma of inherited guilt from the Holocaust. While this is a muddled national psychosis that is plainly immoral and wrongheaded, at least it is possible to have some understanding of how it occurred.

But it then turned out that the travel ban slapped on Dr Abu Sitta by Germany has a Schengen-wide effect as he was also banned from France. That appeared again something that was almost a technical accident as regards the rest of Europe.

But the Western political establishment has now doubled down again by banning him from the Netherlands, and this time the Dutch government has made it clear that it supports the ban, and is not just caught by a Schengen restriction.

So the major governments of the European Union are forbidding a distinguished surgeon from giving first-hand medical evidence of the genocide taking place. I cannot think of anything that more sharply exposes the willingness of the Western political class to abandon the most basic tenets of supposed “Western democracy” in the interests of Israel.

2) The willingness of the United States to use extreme violence against pro-Palestinian students on college campuses is another demonstration of the same abandonment of the pretence of democracy when it comes to Israel. It also illustrates what has come to be a serious generational divide in Western public opinion, with young people very strongly motivated to oppose the genocide (which is not to say that older people are pro-genocide, just that they are more split, particularly in the USA).

This is being followed up with yet more crazed pro-Israeli legislation in the United States, seeking to designate anti-genocide and pro-Palestinian expression on campuses as anti-semitic and thus illegal.

In many ways this typifies the reaction of the ruling class across the West. Their reaction to suddenly being exposed as the paid servants of an Israel which no longer has popular support and now causes public revulsion, is simply to attempt to ban free expression and make it specifically illegal to disagree with them.

3) The British Labour Party has gone even madder. Keir Starmer’s Genocide Party is an outstanding example of the success of the Israeli lobby in buying up both sides of the aisle and controlling the entire neoliberal uniparty that poses as the repository of democratic “choice” in the West.

Starmer had been doing his best to conceal his explicitly expressed “unequivocal support for Israel” lately, and to row back from his straightforward assertion that Israel has the right to cut off food and water from the population of Gaza. There had been a fake shift, from refusing to countenance the word “ceasefire” to supporting a temporary ceasefire or a “sustainable” ceasefire – the latter being code for a ceasefire after Israel had achieved all its ethnic cleansing objectives.

But then David Lammy blew this out of the water with an address to US Republican senators in which he made the totally bonkers assertion that Nelson Mandela would have opposed the college protests for Palestine. Lammy is a truly despicable individual, one of the ultimate examples of the corrupt politician whose voice is bought. But this was a move far beyond the pale.

4) Even today, the Western media continues to spout out Israeli propaganda at mains pressure. The Guardian, despite the thousands and thousands of dead women and children we have seen on our mobile phones this past seven months, continues to pretend that the genocidal attack is on “Hamas militants”.

The bombing and shelling of civilians in tents is still described as “clashes”. This propaganda really does not wash any more, though it may reinforce the morale of hardened Zionists. Everybody else has seen through it months ago. Yet still they persist.

5) The endgame is becoming very apparent. The United States is completing its floating harbour for Gaza, and Israel has gained control of the Rafah crossing into Egypt, giving the US and Israel total control of entry points into Gaza. Israel has announced that the Rafah crossing is to be handed over to a US mercenary force. The US can then say it is complying with Biden’s pledge not to put US forces’ boots on the ground in Gaza, while actually taking control.

The Israeli attack on Rafah has been justified by the USA as a “limited military operation”, thus claiming it does not violate Biden’s purported “red line”, even though Israel has ordered over a million displaced people in Rafah to evacuate again, to nowhere.

Conclusion:

The only possible conclusion from all of the above is to reinforce my analysis that the Zionist political and media classes in the West, including Biden, Blinken, Trudeau, Macron, Sunak, Starmer, Scholtz, von der Leyen and all, are active and willing participants in a programme of genocide.

They had numerous opportunities to turn back. We all saw what is happening months ago. They did not take them.

The endgame remains the processing of the remaining Palestinian population out of Gaza through the US-controlled points of the Rafah crossing and the floating harbour, primarily into camps in the Sinai desert. The Western powers are doubling down on their genocide and on their colonial project.

I see nothing whatsoever that indicates they can have any other long-term objective in mind than the complete Israeli annexation of Gaza minus its civilian population. What do you see?

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— Nasir Khan

Today Norway is celebrating its Constitution Day, commonly called in this country, ‘The 17th of May’.

My hearty congratulations to the people of this beautiful country on their national day!

At present, Norway has become a multicultural, multi-ethnic, and multi-religious country. Despite many social changes, all people living in this beautiful, Nordic country have complete freedom to believe in any religion or reject religions and religious dogmas without any intervention, coercion or discrimination by the state authorities, unlike some countries like Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, etc., where discrimination and victimization of religious minorities on sectarian grounds is a common norm.

The people also have complete freedom to choose any political party they want to without any dictate from any state organ.

Norway’s democratic traditions and its welfare system are a model of a modern egalitarian state.

There is no razzmatazz of military hardware, tanks and missiles or military parades on this occasion. On the other hand, Norwegians’ focus is on the joyous participation of school children and young people in the processions, to the great happiness of the enthusiastic onlookers who throng the streets of Norway’s capital, Oslo. But the celebration of the 17th of May takes place everywhere in this beautiful country.

“Hurrah” for Norway!

Jordan Shilton, WSWS, 15 May 2024

The Biden administration intends to dispatch more than $1 billion of military equipment to Israel so that it can continue the genocide against the Palestinians. The military package will include $700 million for tank ammunition, $500 million in tactical vehicles and $60 million for mortar shells. Its unveiling coincided with UN figures showing that 600,000 people, or more than a quarter of Gaza’s total population, have fled Rafah since Israel’s ground operation began on May 6.

The UN noted that 150,000 people have fled Gaza’s southernmost city in the past 48 hours. Evacuation orders have also been issued by Israel for around 100,000 residents in northern Gaza. At least 10 Palestinians were killed in Gaza City on Wednesday in an attack on a group of people trying to use a public internet connection. In the city’s Sabra neighbourhood, a United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) hospital was the target of an air strike, killing at least 10 displaced people.

Most of those fleeing Rafah have fled many times before in the past seven months. They lack not only access to food, water and medical treatment, but also almost all civil infrastructure to support human life. The UN Development Programme estimates that 270,000 tons of solid waste have accumulated in temporary dumps throughout Gaza because the means to dispose of it have been destroyed by Israel’s onslaught.

The UN wrote in its May 15 flash update:

Rising temperatures are exacerbating the impact solid waste accumulation is having on people, such as generating insects and attracting wild animals, which is particularly severe at IDP sites. UNDP warns: “If the issue of solid waste, including medical waste, is not adequately addressed and resolved, it will exacerbate the suffering of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip … and severely impact public health, particularly with limited access to healthcare services.”

According to OXFAM, the “lethal cocktail” of overcrowding, waste and sewage accumulation, malnutrition and heat is creating ideal conditions for the spread of infectious diseases like cholera.

Amid this human misery, the Biden administration’s military package would aim to replenish the weaponry used by Israel since its onslaught began and could take years to complete, according to the Wall Street Journal. The Biden administration has been by far Israel’s largest supplier of high-powered bombs, which have been used to flatten entire neighbourhoods, and other military equipment.

As part of a supplemental military spending package adopted late last month, Washington set aside some $26 billion to support Israel’s military. In comments made last week as the long-planned onslaught on Rafah began, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby insisted that every dollar would be spent.

The uninterrupted flow of weaponry from the US to Israel underscores Washington’s responsibility for the Gaza genocide. As the official death toll since October 7 rises to over 35,200 Palestinians—with well over 40,000 dead when those unaccounted for under the rubble are taken into account, the vast majority being women and children—Washington’s response is to double down on its support for the far-right Zionist regime and accelerate the shipment of arms.

There is only one place suitable for the individuals responsible for such inhuman decisions: the defendants’ bench of a war crimes tribunal.

This was underscored in a report released by the University Network for Human Rights Wednesday accusing Israel of genocide in the Gaza Strip. The Network consists of leading law schools at universities in the United States and South Africa, including Yale, Cornell, Boston University and the University of Pretoria.

The report declares in its executive summary:

[W]e conclude that Israel’s actions in and regarding Gaza since October 7, 2023 violate the Genocide Convention. Specifically, Israel has committed genocidal acts of killing, causing serious harm to, and inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction of Palestinians in Gaza, a protected group that forms a substantial part of the Palestinian people.

The report notes that the total number of Palestinians killed or wounded between October 7 and May 1—34,568 and 77,765, respectively—accounts for more than 5 percent of Gaza’s population. Two percent of children in Gaza have either been killed or injured. Israel killed more children during the first four months of its bloody onslaught than all of the child deaths in all of the world’s conflicts over the past four years.

The report continues:

Israel’s genocidal acts in Gaza have been motivated by the requisite genocidal intent, as evidenced in this report by the statements of Israeli leaders, the character of the State and its military forces’ conduct against and relating to Palestinians in Gaza, and the direct nexus between them. As this  report details,13 officials at all levels of Israeli government, up to and including the Prime Minister, have made remarks that not only express blatant and unequivocal dehumanization and cruelty against Palestinians in Gaza and elsewhere, but also explicitly reflect intentions to destroy and exterminate Palestinians as such. The patterns of conduct of Israeli military forces in Gaza further reinforce the finding of Israel’s genocidal intent.

The report explains that its findings will strengthen the cases at the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of genocide and in US federal court against the Biden administration. The authors write:

Israel’s violations of the international legal prohibition of genocide amount to grave breaches of peremptory norms of international law that must cease immediately. These violations also give rise to obligations by all other States: to refrain from recognizing Israel’s breaches as legal or taking any actions that may constitute complicity in these breaches; and to take positive steps to suppress, prevent, and punish the commission by Israel of further genocidal acts against the Palestinian people in Gaza.

These appeals have fallen and will continue to fall on deaf ears. US imperialism and its allies in Canada and Europe are up to their necks in the blood of Gaza’s Palestinians.

The only steps these governments take to suppress, prevent and punish are against the opponents of the genocide, who face the full force of the repressive state apparatus as police tear down protest camps and carry out mass arrests, amid a vicious smear campaign slandering them as “antisemites.”

Over 3,000 anti-genocide protesters have been detained in the US over recent weeks, while in Germany opponents of the Israeli regime’s crimes have been barred from entering the country and speaking at public events. The Palestine Congress in Berlin, where eye-witness accounts of the devastation in Gaza were to be heard, and encampments outside the Bundestag and at the Free University and Humboldt University in Berlin, were violently dispersed in state-orchestrated police raids.

The University Network for Human Rights’ report was released on May 15, which Palestinians commemorate each year as Nakba Day. The expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians from their homes in a deliberate campaign of ethnic cleansing that led to the founding of Israel on May 14, 1948, with the backing of the imperialist powers, was one of the 20th century’s great crimes.

It is a measure of the barbarism of Israel and its imperialist backers in Gaza that the Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, could state in an interview with Al Jazeera that the Western powers’ enabling of the Gaza genocide is “even worse” than the role they played in 1948.

Pappe said:

At the time in 1948, there was no television. People did not have smartphones, and it was relatively easy to cover up the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing, and to claim that it didn’t exist. It is impossible to say now that people cannot know what is going on when it appears on our screens. So I think the level of denial today is far more sinister, far more outraging…

Remarking that massacres were used by the Zionists in 1948 to force Palestinians out of areas claimed for an Israeli state, he added, “What we see now are massacres which are part of the genocidal impulse, namely to kill people in order to downsize the number of people living in Gaza.”

Consortium News, May 10, 2024

The details provided to CNN are consistent with those that a doctor at the field hospital of the Sde Teiman prison camp included in a recent letter to top Israeli officials.

(Josh Hallett, Flickr, CC BY 2.0)

By Jake JohnsonCommon Dreams

Three Israeli whistleblowers who worked at the notorious Sde Teiman prison camp in the Negev desert offered horrifying accounts of the treatment of Palestinians held there, telling CNN that the facility’s doctors have amputated limbs due to handcuffing injuries, allowed detainees’ wounds to rot, and carried out vicious beatings.

A medic who worked at Sde Teiman’s field hospital said that Palestinian detainees there are stripped “of anything that resembles human beings” and that the harassment and torture are done not to “gather intelligence” but “out of revenge” for the Oct. 7 attacks.

Israel has detained thousands of Gaza residents since October, with many of them held under a recently amended law that empowers Israeli authorities to imprison people indefinitely without charge or due process. 

Human rights organizations have documented Israeli forces’ brutal and degrading treatment of Palestinian detainees, including women and children.

At the field hospital, CNN reported, “wounded detainees are strapped to their beds, wearing diapers and fed through straws.”

One Israeli whistleblower took a photograph of a room at the facility, which the person said was filled with a “putrid stench” and the sound of “men’s murmurs” as they were “forbidden from speaking to each other.”

“We were told they were not allowed to move,” the whistleblower said. “They should sit upright. They’re not allowed to talk. Not allowed to peek under their blindfold.”

The whistleblower accounts, according to CNN,

“paint a picture of a facility where doctors sometimes amputated prisoners’ limbs due to injuries sustained from constant handcuffing; of medical procedures sometimes performed by underqualified medics earning it a reputation for being ‘a paradise for interns’; and where the air is filled with the smell of neglected wounds left to rot.”

The testimony provided to CNN is consistent with details that a doctor at the camp’s field hospital included in a recent letter to top Israeli officials. The doctor described unlawful and inhumane conditions; in a single week, the person said, “two prisoners had their legs amputated due to handcuff injuries, which unfortunately is a routine event.”

A report published last month by Al Mezan, a Palestinian human rights organization, also documented “harrowing accounts of torture and inhumane treatment” of people detained by the Israeli military.

“A 19-year-old detainee told an Al Mezan lawyer that he was tortured from the moment he was arrested,” the group said.

“He described how three of his fingernails were removed with pliers during interrogation. He also stated that investigators unleashed a dog on him and subjected him to shabeh — a form of torture which involves detainees being handcuffed and bound in stress positions for long periods — three times over three days of interrogation. He was then placed in a cell for 70 days, where he experienced starvation and extreme fatigue.”

Mohammed Al-Ran, a Palestinian doctor who was arrested by Israeli forces in December, told CNN that he was

“stripped down to his underwear, blindfolded and his wrists tied, then dumped in the back of a truck where … the near-naked detainees were piled on top of one another as they were shuttled to a detention camp in the middle of the desert.”

Al-Ran was held by Israeli forces for 44 days. Just before his release, he told CNN, “a fellow prisoner had called out to him, his voice barely rising above a whisper.”

According to CNN: “He asked the doctor to find his wife and kids in Gaza. ‘He asked me to tell them that it is better for them to be martyrs,’ said al-Ran. ‘It is better for them to die than to be captured and held here.’”

Omar Shakir, Israel and Palestine director of Human Rights Watch, said in response to the new reporting that “what we know about Gaza is only tip of the atrocity iceberg.”

Jake Johnson is a staff writer for Common Dreams.

This article is from  Common Dreams.

Displaced Palestinians in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip carry their belongings as they leave following an evacuation order by the Israeli army on May 6, 2024, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Hamas movement.

(Photo by AFP via Getty Images)

Now that the Biden administration has established that it will not tolerate any criticism of Israel, the siege of Gaza is likely to continue.

Edward Hunt, Common Dreams, May 08, 2024

Violent crackdowns on student protesters across the United States have brought to light an uncomfortable truth that goes unacknowledged by universities, the White House, and the mass media: the United States is an obstacle to peace in Gaza.

As Israel has directed an unrelenting military assault against Gaza, the United States has enabled it every step of the way. Among its most significant moves, the United States has provided Israel with offensive weapons, opposed a permanent ceasefire, and cracked down on student protesters.

“What we are doing today is very bad policy,” Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) said on April 23. “We are aiding and abetting the destruction of the Palestinian people.”

Since October 2023, Israel has been directing a military siege of Gaza. Israel began its operations in response to a terrorist attack on October 7, when Hamas militants crossed into Israel, killed 1,200 people, and took 250 people hostage. Hamas, the militant group that controls Gaza, is still holding an estimated 100 people hostage.

Not only has the Biden administration regularly approved weapons transfers to Israel, but it has also worked with Congress to secure billions of dollars of additional military assistance.

Although Israeli officials have insisted that their goal is to destroy Hamas, their military campaign has devastated Gaza. The Israeli siege has killed more than 34,000 people and displaced most of Gaza’s 2 million people. There is now “full-blown famine” in northern Gaza, according to the head of the World Food Program. The World Court is investigating whether Israel has committed genocide.

Over the course of Israel’s military offensive, the United States has provided Israel with diplomatic and military support. Although President Joe Biden has criticized Israel’s military campaign as “over the top” and Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has identified Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a “major obstacle to peace,” both the White House and Congress have worked together to help Israel continue its siege.

“This is not an Israeli war,” Senator Sanders said. “This is an Israeli-American war. Most of the bombs and most of the military equipment the Israeli government is using in Gaza is provided by the United States and subsidized by American taxpayers.”

Arming Israel

The primary way in which the United States has intervened in Gaza is by arming Israel, just as Senator Sanders noted. Not only has the Biden administration regularly approved weapons transfers to Israel, but it has also worked with Congress to secure billions of dollars of additional military assistance.

This past April, a large majority of elected officials in both the Democratic and Republican Parties voted to send more weapons to Israel. On April 20, the House of Representatives approved a bill to provide more arms to Israel by a vote of 366 to 58. On April 23, the Senate granted its approval as part of a broader package with a vote of 79 to 18.

“It’s a good day for world peace, for real,” President Biden said, shortly after signing the legislation into law.

Regardless of the president’s efforts to frame the legislation as a victory for world peace, several U.S. officials expressed dismay. Nearly 20 representatives issued a joint statement in which they warned that the approval of additional military assistance to Israel made the United States complicit in the destruction of Gaza.

“Are we going to participate in that carnage or not?” Representative Joaquin Castro (D-TX) asked. “I choose not to.”

When Senator Sanders spoke against the additional military assistance, he argued that the United States was violating the Foreign Assistance Act, which forbids the United States from providing military assistance to countries that are blocking the delivery of U.S. humanitarian assistance, just as Israel has been doing in Gaza.

“It’s illegal to continue current military aid to Israel,” Sanders said.

Regardless, only a minority of officials in Washington cared about the legality of sending additional arms to Israel. Their priority has been to ensure that Israel can continue its siege, just as several U.S. officials have acknowledged.

“If you don’t help Israel replenish their conventional weapons, there will be a day when Israel, if they have to, will play the nuclear card,” Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) warned.

Opposing a Permanent Ceasefire

Another way in which the United States has empowered Israel is by preventing a permanent ceasefire. At the United Nations, the United States has repeatedly thwarted diplomatic efforts to bring Israel’s military offensive to an end.

When the UN Security Council crafted a resolution for an immediate ceasefire in December 2023, the United States vetoed the resolution. After the Security Council moved forward with another attempt in February 2024, the United States vetoed that resolution as well.

In March 2024, the United States allowed the Security Council to pass a ceasefire resolution, as it abstained from voting, but U.S. officials made no effort to follow up on the resolution or enforce it. Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. Ambassador to the UN, falsely claimed that the resolution was “nonbinding,” meaning that countries were not required to follow it.

Growing international pressure has had some effect, however. The same month that the Security Council passed its ceasefire resolution, the Biden administration began claiming that it wanted to see a ceasefire in Gaza. Administration officials took the position that a ceasefire would be beneficial to Gaza and Israel by halting the fighting and creating the conditions for the release of hostages.

The actions of the United States are ensuring that Israel’s siege of Gaza will continue.

As administration officials changed their public diplomacy, however, they framed their demands in ways that made it difficult to achieve a ceasefire. For starters, the White House refused to call for a permanent ceasefire. Instead, administration officials said that they favored a temporary ceasefire that would enable Israel to continue its military operations at a later date.

At the same time, the White House portrayed Hamas as the main obstacle to a ceasefire, even after Hamas indicated that it would accept a permanent ceasefire and Israel insisted that it would continue with its military offensive, “with or without a deal,” as Prime Minister Netanyahu put it.

Indeed, the main priority of the Biden administration has been to enable Israel to continue its siege of Gaza, just as Secretary of State Antony Blinken acknowledged earlier this year.

“Israel has made good progress in doing to Hamas what needs to be done so that it can’t do October 7 again,” Blinken said. “That’s what Israel should be focused on. That’s what we are focused on.”

Cracking Down on Protesters

More recently, forces within the United States have made another major move in opposition to peace. Across the United States, police have been cracking down on student protesters who have been calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and divestment from Israel.

Elected officials in Washington have been behind the crackdowns. Not only have they worked to destroy the careers of university leaders by calling on them to testify before Congress, but they have pressured university leaders to call in police forces to arrest students and eliminate their encampments.

“Administrators must take charge of their institutions,” Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) demanded on April 30. “Clear the encampments.”

So far, police forces have dismantled several encampments and arrested or detained more than 2,500 people.

As legislators have pushed for the crackdowns, many of them have justified their demands by portraying student protesters as anti-Semitic. Essentially, they have weaponized anti-Semitism, meaning that they have accused the protesters of being racists for the purposes of silencing them, destroying their reputations, and undermining the broader antiwar movement.

Amid the crackdowns, legislators have increased the pressure on universities. On April 30, House Republicans announced that they are starting to investigate whether universities that have experienced student protests should continue to receive federal funding.

“The Congress has two really important responsibilities that will be fulfilled in this exercise,” Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) explained. “One is oversight,” and the other is “the use of the power of the purse.”

A day after House Republicans threatened to defund universities, the House of Representatives passed a bill to broaden the definition of anti-Semitism so that it would include criticism of Israel. Although its fate is uncertain in the Senate, the bill puts tremendous pressure on universities to silence members of their communities who are continuing to protest Israel’s siege of Gaza.

Still, a small but not insignificant number of legislators have come to the defense of student protesters. The country’s most progressive lawmakers have consistently supported the protesters, even visiting their encampments and providing messages of support.

After police violently cleared an encampment at Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts, Representative Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) issued a statement in which she praised the students for “raising their voices and putting their bodies on the line to press for action to save lives in Gaza.”

Following similar crackdowns at other colleges, Senator Sanders delivered a speech from the Senate floor in which he defended the students. Putting their actions into context, the senator linked the protesters’ actions to major movements for social justice in U.S. history, including the civil rights movement and the movements against the U.S. wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

“It is outrageous and it is disgraceful to use that charge of anti-Semitism to distract us from the immoral and illegal war policies that Netanyahu’s extremist and racist government is pursuing,” Senator Sanders said.

Regardless, there is little interest in Washington in taking the protesters seriously, even among officials in the Biden administration who have acknowledged that “the protests in and of themselves are not anti-Semitic.” Facing growing pressure from both Democrats and Republicans to take action, the White House has denounced the protesters.

On May 2, President Biden gave a speech in which he claimed that the student protesters are spreading chaos, violence, and anti-Semitism. Just as the Republicans have been doing, he weaponized anti-Semitism in an effort to delegitimize the antiwar movement.

“Order must prevail,” the president insisted.

Suppressing the Truth

Now that the Biden administration has established that it will not tolerate any criticism of Israel, the siege of Gaza is likely to continue. Even if some kind of deal is forged to establish a temporary ceasefire between Hamas and Israel, there is no guarantee that Israel won’t renew its military operations at a later date, just as it did after a previous pause in fighting in November 2023.

What is perhaps most remarkable, however, is how the United States has suppressed one of the key truths about the destruction of Gaza. Across elite institutions of American society, people in leadership positions remain largely silent about what student protesters have been trying to bring to the attention of the public: the United States is an obstacle to peace in Gaza.

“This is not just an Israeli war,” Senator Sanders insisted, in one of the few exceptions to the silence in Washington. “This is an American war as well.”

Indeed, the actions of the United States are ensuring that Israel’s siege of Gaza will continue. Not until the United States changes its approach will it become possible to bring an end to the destruction.

Axios reports that Biden and Netanyahu discussed the plan on Monday

by Dave DeCamp, Antiwar. com, May 7, 2024

President Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu discussed Israel’s plans to capture the Rafah border crossing in southern Gaza before the Israeli military launched the operation, Axios reported on Tuesday.

The report said that the operation didn’t cross Biden’s “red line,” although it’s unclear if the US has actually set red lines for Israel. US officials have said they’re opposed to a “major operation” in Rafah since it would incur huge civilian casualties. But the capturing of the border crossing will have a devastating impact on civilians since it cut off vital aid deliveries, and it’s unclear when or if they will resume.

A senior Israeli official told Axios that during the call with Netanyahu, Biden didn’t “didn’t pull the hand break on the capture of the Rafah crossing during the call.” Two US officials said Biden didn’t view the current Israeli operations as a “breaking point” in relations.

On Tuesday, White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said that the US was not opposed to the operation.

“We’ve been very consistent about our concerns of a major ground operation in Gaza that would put at great risk the refugees that are still there, and nothing’s changed about that,” Kirby said. “The Israelis have told us … that that’s not what this is.”

He said that Israel assured the US that the operation was “of limited scope, scale, and duration, and aimed at cutting off Hamas’ ability to ship arms across the Rafah border.”

Israeli tanks and soldiers took the border crossing as Israeli strikes pounded the city of Rafah, killing at least 23 Palestinians, including five women and six children.

Andre Damon

@Andre__Damon, WSWS, May 7, 2024

Israel launched its long-planned genocidal assault on Rafah on Monday, issuing orders for the population of the city to evacuate and launching an intense bombardment.

More than 1.2 million refugees, over 600,000 of whom are children, are currently sheltering in Rafah, under squalid conditions, without adequate food, water, hygiene or medicine. The majority of the children, in the words of the Euro-Med monitor, are “either injured, ill, and/or malnourished.”

Israel bombed residential homes throughout Gaza Monday, leaving at least 26 people dead—mostly women and children—and dozens more wounded and buried under the rubble. Israeli tanks have approached within 200 meters of the Rafah crossing with Egypt, the Associated Press reported.

“The War Cabinet unanimously decided this evening that Israel will continue its operation in Rafah,” the Netanyahu government said in a statement Monday.

The assault on Rafah comes despite the acceptance by Hamas Monday of a proposal for a temporary cessation of hostilities in exchange for the release of hostages. But after spending weeks attempting to blame the Palestinians for the ongoing war, Israeli officials flatly rejected the proposal.

National Security Minister Ben-Gvir replied in a post on X, “Hamas’ exercises and games have only one answer: an immediate order to occupy Rafah!”

In response to the murderous Israeli onslaught, multiple US officials reiterated their unlimited support for Israel. “We have always made clear that we are committed to Israel’s defense,” said State Department spokesman Vedant Patel Monday. “That commitment to Israel’s security remains ironclad.”

“Our support for Israel’s security remains ironclad,” said State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller. “The President pushed very hard … so that we can continue to help Israel with its security needs…”

“Israel has a right and a responsibility to defend itself,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said. “And we’re going to continue to provide for their security.”

Absurdly, Kirby denied that an assault on Rafah had begun, declaring, “There hasn’t been an assault or an attack” on the city.

In a cynical exercise in deceptive wordplay, Kirby said, “The president doesn’t want to see operations in Rafah that put at greater risk the more than a million people that are seeking refuge there.”

This statement seeks to suggest that the White House opposes Israel’s assault on the city, despite the announcement by the White House last month, “The two sides agreed on the shared objective to see Hamas defeated in Rafah.”

The Wall Street Journal, speaking for a faction of the US political establishment that openly proclaims its homicidal aims instead of trying to cover them up it with transparent lies, declared, “The battle for Rafah has begun in Gaza, and it’s an essential part of Israel’s war of self-defense against Hamas.”

In a blunt assessment of the situation on the ground, the Journal wrote, “Early Monday morning Israel ordered the evacuation of eastern Rafah, directing civilians to safety. In the afternoon Israeli tanks advanced. The plan is to evacuate and fight in the city piece by piece, swiftly moving civilians north and west.”

In reality, the evacuation of Rafah is being conducted just as the previous evacuations were, with Israel demanding that civilians move to areas under active bombardment and targeting people as they are fleeing. The evacuation orders included no promise of safe passage or that those displaced will be safe once they arrive.

“Through written leaflets, text messages, and recorded phone calls, the Israeli army has ordered Rafah’s civilian population to move out of the city’s eastern neighborhoods, particularly the area of Al-Shouka as well as Al-Salam, Al-Geneina, and Al-Byouk, toward the area of Al-Mawasi,” wrote the Euro-Med monitor in a statement. “However, Israel provided no explanation as to how the civilian population would be safely transported to Al-Mawasi, which is west of the nearby city of Khan Yunis, or how they would be organized upon their arrival.”

Euro-med noted, “More than 200,000 people may be targeted by the displacement orders, which also affect the Abu Youssef Al-Najjar Hospital, Rafah’s main hospital, as well as the Rafah and Kerem Shalom crossings. It should be noted that humanitarian aid access through these crossings has been stopped since yesterday afternoon.”

To date, Israel has ordered the evacuation of—i.e., ethnically cleansed—more than two-thirds of Gaza.

The Euro-Med monitor warned, “A larger wave of displacement, increased overcrowding, and the elimination of opportunities to obtain basic food and water will result from the impending Israeli ground attack on Rafah, which may be the deadliest point of escalation against Palestinian civilians. The Strip’s health system, which is already nearly destroyed, would likely collapse completely.”

Palestinian journalist Bisan Owda, who is currently living in a refugee camp in Rafah, said in an Instagram posting, “If Rafah is invaded, that means the largest and the only crossing, Rafah Crossing, will be closed. And that means no humanitarian aid trucks are entering, those who are in need for treatment outside Gaza cannot travel, those who are in need to evacuate their families to find any safe places outside Gaza cannot travel, the international humanitarian workers, doctors, activists cannot get inside Gaza.”

In a statement on X, Socialist Equality Party presidential candidate Joe Kishore wrote,

The development of a movement in the working class against the war of the capitalist class at home has to be connected to a fight against the capitalist war abroad. It is, in reality, one war.

It is by mobilizing the working class on a socialist program, independent of the parties of the ruling class, that the genocide in #Gaza can be stopped as part of a fight against the imperialist-capitalist system as a whole. http://socialism2024.org #socialism2024

Since the start of the genocide nearly seven months ago, 34,622 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza according to health officials, with thousands more buried under the rubble of buildings, meaning that the real death toll is greater than 40,000. At least 254 aid workers, 492 health workers and 141 journalists have been killed by Israeli bombs or bullets.

Axios reported that a US ammunition shipment was put on hold, but US military aid continues to flow

by Dave DeCamp, Antiwar. com, May 5, 2024

Israeli officials said on Sunday that the overall flow of US weapons shipments to Israel is “uninterrupted” despite a report from Axios that said the Biden administration put a hold on an ammunition shipment.

The Axios report cited two Israeli officials who said the hold on the ammunition raised “serious concerns” in the Israeli government, but the sources did not give a reason why the US delayed the shipment. CNN later reported that the pause had nothing to do with Israel’s plans to invade Rafah and wouldn’t impact future weapons shipments, meaning it doesn’t reflect a change in US policy.

“The stream of security shipments from the US to Israel is ongoing. While individual shipments might be delayed, the overall flow remains uninterrupted, and we are not aware of any policy suspending it,” an Israeli official told Ynet.

Israel’s public broadcaster Kan cited a political source who said Israel “is not aware of any US decision regarding stopping or reducing military support to Israel.” The source added that it was “possible that one shipment or another will be delayed, but the flow continues, and we are not aware of a political decision to stop it.”

When asked about the paused ammunition shipment, a National Security Council spokesperson vowed the US would continue arming Israel. “The United States has surged billions of dollars in security assistance to Israel since the October 7 attacks, passed the largest ever supplemental appropriation for emergency assistance to Israel, led an unprecedented coalition to defend Israel against Iranian attacks, and will continue to do what is necessary to ensure Israel can defend itself from the threats it faces,” the spokesperson told CNN.

The delay could be related to new US aid shipments to Ukraine. Back in October, Axios reported that the US diverted artillery shells initially bound for Ukraine to Israel. Something similar could have happened in reverse as President Biden recently signed a bill into law authorizing $61 billion in spending for the proxy war in Ukraine.

Throughout Israel’s campaign in Gaza, US and Israeli officials leaked stories to the press that portrayed the Biden administration and the Netanyahu government as at odds with each other. But Biden has continued to provide full-throated military and political support for Israel’s genocidal war.

–Nasir Khan

“All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice.”

― Karl Marx

Karl Marx was born on May 5, 1818, in the Prussian province of the Rhine, and died in London on March 14, 1883, at the age of 65. He was the most influential socialist philosopher and revolutionary thinker, whose ideas have deeply influenced the course of human history and human thought.

His writings cover philosophy, history, political economy, anthropology, social criticism, history, theory of revolutionary practice, and he himself participated in revolutionary activities. When he was a student at the university, he was deeply involved in the Young Hegelian movement. The members of this group in their articles and pamphlets criticized Christian culture. Feuerbach’s materialism was opposed to Hegel’s idealism. He reduced Hegel’s ‘Absolute Spirit’ to human ‘species being’.

Because of Marx’s critical articles in the Rheinische Zeitung, the government closed this paper. He went to Paris in 1843 where he made contacts with French socialist groups and émigré German workers. Here he met Frederick Engels, and the two became friends for the rest of their lives. But his stay there was short. He was expelled from Paris in 1844.

After his expulsion from Paris, Marx, along with Engels, moved to Brussels, where they lived for three years. After an intensive study of history, he formulated the theory of history commonly known as historical materialism.

In his theory of history, Marx accepted Hegel’s idea that the world develops according to dialectical process. But the two had different ideas about what the dialectic process entails. For Hegel, historical developments take place through the mystical entity called Absolute Spirit. Marx rejected the notion of Absolute Spirit, and said what moved society was not the Absolute Spirit, but man’s relation to matter, of which the most important part was played by the mode of production.

In this way, Marx’s materialism becomes closely related to economics. Human labour shaped society, and material conditions determined the superstructures. The part played by labour, not some mystical Absolute Spirit, formed the basis of social life. Marx’s dialectal view of social change is shorn of Hegel’s idealist dialectics. The two stand on different levels, and their philosophies of history differ.

For Marx, man working on nature remakes the world and in doing so he also remakes himself by increasing his powers. Marx wrote in the German Ideology, ‘Men have history because they must produce their life.’

Marx went to Paris in 1848 where the revolution first took place and then to Germany. But the failure of the revolutions forced him to seek refuge in London in 1849, where he spent the rest of his life.

He and his family had to face many economic hardships in London. His friend Engels helped him economically, and he also wrote articles as a foreign correspondent for the New York Daily Tribune. However, he and his family lived in London, plagued by unending economic woes.

However, the revolutionary thinker devoted much time to the First International and its annual Congresses. The rest of the time, he spent in the British Museum library, collecting material and taking notes and analysing the material for studies of political economy. In 1867, he published the first volume of Capital, in which he discussed the capitalist mode of production. He explained his views on the labour theory of value, conception of surplus value, accumulation of capital and the ‘so-called primitive accumulation’ in the final part of the book. He had completed the volumes II and II in the 1860s, which Engels published after the death of Marx in 1883.

The profound analysis of capital, Marx undertook in the nineteenth century, is still relevant to our understanding of the global capitalism and the forces that control it. He had shown the tendency of capital under the general law of capitalist accumulation. A few own more wealth, but others have little to live on. A recent Oxfam report says that eight men own the same wealth as the 3.6 billion people who constitute the poorest half of humanity. In the global economy, rich industrialists and producers take advantage of the global workforce that mostly lives in the global South. The abundant cheap labour from the poor countries is used to produce goods that are sold at high prices in the industrialized western countries.

The problem of ending the exploitation of the working-class people was a core issue for Marx, and his theory to end this exploitation can only take place when a more equitable form of society is created that stands opposed to the accumulation of capital by a few and the poverty or meagre existence of the majority. That objective of a just and humane society is not possible under capitalism.

NYPD officers arrest a student as they evict a building that had been barricaded by pro-Palestinian student protesters at Columbia University, in New York City on April 30, 2024.

(Photo by Charly Triballeau/AFP via Getty Images)

Rashid Khalidi, Common Dreams, May 3, 2024

Common Dreams Editor’s Note: This is a transcript of remarks made by Professor Rashid Khalidi just outside the gates of Columbia University on Wednesday, May 1, 2024, just hours after NYPD officers raided Hamilton Hall to remove demonstrators who had occupied the building in protest of Israel’s ongoing military assault on the people of Gaza.

My name is Rashid Khalidi. I am the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University. I’ve been teaching here for a total of 22 years.

When I was a student back in the 60s, we were told we were “led by a bunch of outside agitators” by politicians nobody remembers the name of today. We were the conscience of this nation when we opposed the Vietnam War and racism back in 1968 and 1969 and 1970. The Vietnam War stopped because the people opposed it, and the people who led that were students, and the students who led that were here at Columbia and at Berkeley and a few other campuses on this fair Turtle Island.

This is not about Columbia or CCNY or Berkeley or UCLA or any other place where the students have risen up. This is the conscience of a nation speaking through your kids—through young people who are risking their futures, who are risking suspension, expulsion, and criminal arrest in order to wake people up in this country.

Students have been on the right side of history at Columbia and at other universities ever since the 1960s. We today honor the students who in 1968 opposed a genocidal, illegal, shameful war. Columbia University honors them. They’re on the Columbia website; you can check it out yourself—1968 is commemorated. And one day what our students did here will be commemorated in the same way.

They are—and they were—on the right side of history, and that will go down in history, that when the change finally came and finally the American people who have already opposed this war—who’ve already opposed this genocide—are able to force their craven politicians to stop it, which we can do.

The United States is part of this war. Every plane bombing Gaza is an American plane: F-16s, F-15s, F-35s. Every Apache helicopter is American. Every bomb dropped is American. Those are our taxes. Those are our representatives. Shame on them and shame on the administration of this university. They will go down in infamy for having done what they did the other night.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/Vw0NV19qfqc?rel=0Columbia Prof’s Fiery Speech—Students opposed Vietnam War in ’68, fighting against Gaza genocide nowwww.youtube.com

Today, nobody remembers the names of the administrators and the trustees who ordered the police onto the Columbia campus in 1968. They have gone down in ignominy and so will these leaders, President [Minouche] Shafik and the Board of Trustees.

And the students will be remembered one day on a Columbia website as the people who helped change the course of this country, together with the brave students up at CCNY. We should shout out to them—together with the students at NYU, FIT, and all over this country.

What we are witnessing in terms of police repression is a tiny fraction of what people under occupation in Palestine have been experiencing for 56 years: the kettling, the checkpoints, the blockades, the police dragging students out (many of them were injured last night), the lies [about] outside agitators. Wait until the numbers come out from One Police Plaza. They were all students. They were our students. And we are ashamed of our university for instead of continuing the negotiations—that many faculty were happy to be part of—decided to bring in the NYPD.

This administration has brought disgrace on Columbia University. Shame on them. Shame on them.

This is not and was not about safety and comfort, which is what they claimed. Do we feel safer today now that 100 of our students have been processed down at One Police Plaza? Do we feel safer today that faculty and students cannot get onto their own campus? Of course not.

Public opinion is already with us. It’s just the politicians, the media, and the trustees and administration of this university who are blind, death, and dumb to the demand of a moral imperative coming from our students.

This was a craven capitulation to external pressure. The students didn’t want it. The faculty didn’t want it. Outside forces wanted it: the politicians; the media—which has shamefully failed to report so much of what’s actually happening here and which has exaggerated incidents instead of looking at the whole picture.

I don’t want to talk more about the media. This is not about safety and comfort. This is about a genocide being carried out with American money and with American weapons against a people that has been living under occupation for generation after generation after generation. That’s what it’s really about. That’s what the students were about and that’s what Faculty and Staff for justice in Palestine are about.

What we are witnessing in terms of police repression is a tiny fraction of what people under occupation in Palestine have been experiencing for 56 years.

We are faculty and staff who believe that our students should be safe—all of our students should be safe. But the right to protest, the right to free speech, and academic freedom—which is being infringed as we speak. University protocols, the arrangements that this university made since 1968 to deal with these things, have been swept aside in an arbitrary fashion by this administration in response to external pressure. Shame on this administration.

I repeat one more time: This is not about Columbia or CCNY or Berkeley or UCLA or any other place where the students have risen up. This is the conscience of a nation speaking through your kids—through young people who are risking their futures, who are risking suspension, expulsion, and criminal arrest in order to wake people up in this country. It’s absolutely essential.

Public opinion is already with us. It’s just the politicians, the media, and the trustees and administration of this university who are blind, death, and dumb to the demand of a moral imperative coming from our students. Thank you very much.