Adm. Rob Bauer previously said NATO countries should consider shifting to a ‘war economy‘
by Dave DeCamp, Antiwar. com, November 25, 2024
The head of NATO’s Military Committee has called on European businesses to prepare for a “wartime scenario” amid soaring tensions between the Western military alliance and Russia.
Dutch Adm. Rob Bauer said Western businesses must adjust to become less vulnerable to both Russia and China. “If we can make sure that all crucial services and goods can be delivered no matter what, then that is a key part of our deterrence,” Bauer said at a European Policy Centre event in Brussels, according to Reuters.
Bauer said energy supplies could be targeted or used as weapons of war. “We’re seeing that with the growing number of sabotage acts, and Europe has seen that with energy supply,” he said. “We thought we had a deal with Gazprom, but we actually had a deal with Mr Putin. And the same goes for Chinese-owned infrastructure and goods. We actually have a deal with (Chinese President) Xi (Jinping).”
US and European officials have accused Russia of weaponizing energy, but Moscow began reducing gas shipments to Europe in 2022 in response to Western sanctions meant to destroy the Russian economy.
Bauer also said Western economies were too dependent on China. “We are naive if we think the Communist Party will never use that power. Business leaders in Europe and America need to realize that the commercial decisions they make have strategic consequences for the security of their nation,” he said. “Businesses need to be prepared for a wartime scenario and adjust their production and distribution lines accordingly. Because while it may be the military who wins battles, it’s the economies that win wars.”
Last year, Bauer called for NATO countries to consider shifting to a “war economy” where civilian factories would begin producing military goods, similar to what the US did during World War II. “Those priorities should be discussed about, partially, a war economy in peacetime,” he said in January 2023.
Bauer also said at the time that NATO was “ready” for a direct confrontation with Russia. Today, that confrontation is much more likely following the US authorization of long-range strikes on Russian territory with NATO missiles, a step Moscow has made clear risks a nuclear escalation.
U.S. President Joe Biden shakes hands with President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky after a meeting in the East Room of the White House September 21, 2023 in Washington, D.C.
(Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Whether heralded or reviled, Biden’s supposed restraint during the Ukraine war has steadily faded, with more and more dangerous escalation in its place.
President Biden has never wavered from approving huge arms shipments to Israel during more than 13 months of mass murder and deliberate starvation of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Biden’s crucial role earned him the name “Genocide Joe.”
That nickname might seem shrill, but it’s valid. Although Biden will not be brought to justice for serving as a key accomplice to the horrific crimes against humanity that continue in Gaza, the label sticks—and candid historians will condemn him as a direct enabler of genocide.
Biden could also qualify for another nickname, which according to Google was never published before this article: “Omnicide Joe.”
In contrast to the Genocide Joe sobriquet, which events have already proven apt, Omnicide Joe is a bit anticipatory. That’s inevitable, because if the cascading effects of his foreign policy end up as key factors in nuclear annihilation, historians will not be around to assess his culpability for omnicide—defined as “the destruction of all life or all human life.”
That definition scarcely overstates what scientists tell us would result from an exchange of nuclear weapons. Researchers have discovered that “nuclear winter” would quickly set in across the globe, blotting out sunlight and wiping out agriculture, with a human survival rate of perhaps 1 or 2 percent.
While Russia’s invasion and horrible war in Ukraine should be condemned, Biden has compounded Putin’s crimes by giving much higher priority to Washington’s cold-war mania than to negotiation for peace—or to mitigation of escalating risks of nuclear war.
With everything—literally everything—at stake, you might think that averting thermonuclear war between the world’s two nuclear superpowers, Russia and the United States, would be high on a president’s to-do list. But that hardly has been the case with Joe Biden since he first pulled up a chair at the Oval Office desk.
In fact, Biden has done a lot during the first years of this decade to inflame the realistic fears of nuclear war. His immediate predecessor Donald Trump pulled the U.S. out of two vital treaties — Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces and Open Skies — and Biden did nothing to reinstate them. Likewise, Trump killed the Iran nuclear deal negotiated during the Obama administration, and Biden let itstay dead.
Instead of fulfilling his 2020 campaign promise to adopt a U.S. policy of no-first-use of nuclear weapons, two years ago Biden signed off on the Nuclear Posture Review policy document that explicitly declares the opposite. Last year, under the euphemism of “modernization,” the U.S. government spent $51 billion — more than every other nuclear-armed country combined — updating and sustaining its nuclear arsenal, gaining profligate momentum in a process that’s set to continue for decades to come.
Before and after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in late February 2022, Biden showed a distinct lack of interest in actual diplomacy to prevent the war or to end it. Three days before the invasion, writing in the Financial Times, Jeffrey Sachs pointed out: “Biden has said repeatedly that the U.S. is open to diplomacy with Russia, but on the issue that Moscow has most emphasized—NATO enlargement—there has been no American diplomacy at all. [Russian President Vladimir] Putin has repeatedly demanded that the U.S. forswear NATO’s enlargement into Ukraine, while Biden has repeatedly asserted that membership of the alliance is Ukraine’s choice.”
While Russia’s invasion and horrible war in Ukraine should be condemned, Biden has compounded Putin’s crimes by giving much higher priority to Washington’s cold-war mania than to negotiation for peace—or to mitigation of escalating risks of nuclear war.
From the outset, Biden scarcely acknowledged that the survival of humanity was put at higher risk by the Ukraine war. In his first State of the Union speech, a week after the invasion, Biden devoted much of his oratory to the Ukraine conflict without saying a word about the heightened danger that it might trigger the use of nuclear weapons.
During the next three months, the White House posted more than 60 presidential statements, documents and communiques about the war in Ukraine. They all shared with his State of the Union address a stunning characteristic — the complete absence of any mention of nuclear weapons or nuclear war dangers—even though many experts gauged those dangers as being the worst they’d been since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
With everything—literally everything—at stake, you might think that averting thermonuclear war between the world’s two nuclear superpowers, Russia and the United States, would be high on a president’s to-do list.
With occasional muted references to not wanting a U.S. military clash with nuclear-armed Russia, during the last 33 months the Biden administration has said it did not want to cross its own red lines—and then has repeatedly proceeded to do so.
A week ago superhawk John Bolton, a former national security advisor to President Trump, summarized the process on CNN while bemoaning that Biden’s reckless escalation hasn’t been even more reckless: “It’s been one long public debate after another, going back to ‘Shall we supply ATACMS [ballistic missiles] to the Ukrainians at all?’ First it’s no, then there’s a debate, then there’s yes. ‘Should we supply the Ukrainians Abrams tanks?’ First it’s no, then there’s a long debate, then it’s yes. ‘Should we supply the Ukrainians with F-16s?’ First it’s no, then there’s a long debate, and it’s yes. Now, ‘Can we allow the Ukrainians to use ATACMS inside Russia?’ After a long debate, now it’s yes.”
Whether heralded or reviled, Biden’s supposed restraint during the Ukraine war has steadily faded, with more and more dangerous escalation in its place.
Biden’s recent green light for Ukraine to launch longer-range missiles into Russia is another jump toward nuclear warfare. As a Quincy Institute analyst wrote, “the stakes, and escalatory risks, have steadily crept up.” In an ominous direction, “this needlessly escalatory step has put Russia and NATO one step closer to a direct confrontation—the window to avert catastrophic miscalculation is now that much narrower.”
Like Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken as well as the Democratic and Republican phalanx of Ukraine war cheerleaders on Capitol Hill, Bolton doesn’t mention that recent polling shows strong support among Ukrainian people for negotiations to put a stop to the war. “An average of 52 percent of Ukrainians would like to see their country negotiate an end to the war as soon as possible,” Gallup reported last week, compared to only 38 percent who say “their country should keep fighting until victory.”
Biden and other war boosters have continued to scorn, as capitulation and accommodation to aggression, what so much of the Ukrainian population now says it wants—a negotiated settlement. Instead, top administration officials and laptop-warrior pundits in the press corps are eager to tout their own mettle by insisting that Ukrainians and Russians must keep killing and dying.
Last week, Putin “lowered the threshold for a nuclear strike in response to a broader range of conventional attacks,” Reuters reported, “and Moscow said Ukraine had struck deep inside Russia with U.S.-made ATACMS missiles…. Russia had been warning the West for months that if Washington allowed Ukraine to fire U.S., British and French missiles deep into Russia, Moscow would consider those NATO members to be directly involved in the war in Ukraine.”
For President Biden, the verdict of Genocide Joe is already in. But if, despite pleas for sanity, he turns out to fully deserve the name Omnicide Joe, none of us will be around to read about it.
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President Joe Biden talks with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, July 25, 2024.(Susan Walsh, File / AP Photo)
Past the 20-foot-high aluminum doors of the Justice Department’s Robert F. Kennedy Building, and down a long limestone hallway lined with art deco accents, Room B-206 has long served as the epicenter of the Biden administration’s prosecutorial war against former president Donald Trump. Behind the heavy wooden door is the office of special counsel Jack Smith, a highly secure redoubt where attorneys spent years building criminal cases against Trump for allegedly attempting to overturn the outcome of the 2020 election, as well as for his alleged improper handling of classified documents after leaving the White House.
But now, instead of heading to trial, the prosecutors are scrambling to empty file cabinets and stuff their contents into cardboard storage boxes. As a result of Trump’s election win, the prosecution is officially halted by the Justice Department’s policy prohibiting the filing of criminal cases against a sitting president. But while President-elect Trump will likely never face the consequences of his alleged criminal actions, President Biden may one day face trial for his, albeit in a far different courtroom in The Hague.
Three thousand eight hundred miles to the east from Washington sits the International Criminal Court (ICC), a complex of six modern towers in the Netherlands not far from Peace Palace and Europol in The Hague. In the largest building, Court Tower, are three courtrooms that carry out the institution’s mandate: to prosecute perpetrators of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes, thereby providing justice to victims.
According to Article 1 of the Genocide Convention, the Contracting Parties, including the United States and Israel, must prevent and punish acts of genocide. Under Article III, those punishable acts include “Complicity in genocide,” such as by knowingly providing the deadly weapons used to carry it out. In 2007, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), in a case involving Bosnia and Serbia, established that the obligation to refrain from providing weapons or other assistance begins the moment a state becomes aware of the existence of a serious risk that genocide may be committed.
For the Biden administration, that moment came in January, when the ICJ found that there was a “plausible” risk of genocide being committed in Gaza against the Palestinian people by Israel. Shortly after, in February, the Dutch Appeals Court halted the transfer of F-35 munition parts to Israel on account of the serious risk of International Humanitarian Law violations. Further notice came in May with the applications for arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and others by the chief prosecutor of the ICC, Kharim Khan. Among the charges against Netanyahu related to Gaza were crimes against humanity, including extermination, murder, starvation of civilians as a method of warfare, intentional attacks against a civilian population, and “other inhumane acts.” It was the first potential ICC arrest warrant issued for the leader of a Western-style democracy. Nevertheless, European countries including France and Germany issued statements affirming their support for the legitimacy of the ICC.
Despite the clear indication that American weapons were being used to carry out an alleged Israeli genocide, the bombs continued to flow and the wholesale massacres never stopped. According to a report last week by the UN Human Rights Office, close to 70 percent of the fatalities in Gaza have been children and women, “indicating a systematic violation of the fundamental principles of international humanitarian law,” said the report. Nizam Mamode, a retired surgeon with Britain’s National Health Service who recently returned from working at a hospital in Gaza, testified last week to members of Parliament that he treated children “day after day after day” who had been deliberately targeted by Israeli drones following bomb attacks.
In July, an analysis published by the medical journal The Lancet estimated that the actual number of Palestinian deaths in Gaza, including those decomposing beneath the rubble of bombed-out hospitals, schools, and densely packed refugee camps, is likely more than 186,000. And if the deaths continue at the same rate, said Devi Sridhar, chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, the estimated deaths by the end of the year would total 335,500.
In spite of those grim statistics, the Biden administration last month decided to play politics with the lives of the desperate and starving survivors in Gaza, most of whom had been forced to flee from multiple Israeli evacuation orders. To help the Harris campaign with pro-Palestinian voters, Biden pretended to turn tough and issued a highly publicized letter giving Netanyahu a 30-day deadline to increase the flow of food and other aid to Gaza or face a potential cutoff in military support. But it was simply a scam, since the deadline would fall after the election was over. When the time limit expired last week, there was no longer a need for Biden to pretend that the United States would take action. Instead, his administration continued to deceive the American public by falsely claiming that it found no evidence that Israel was obstructing shipments of food and other aid into Gaza.
The announcement was greeted with disbelief and anger by aid groups, including Save the Children, Oxfam, Refugees International, and Mercy Corps. “Israel’s actions failed to meet any of the specific criteria set out in the U.S. letter,” said a joint statement. “Israel not only failed to meet the U.S. criteria that would indicate support to the humanitarian response, but concurrently took actions that dramatically worsened the situation on the ground, particularly in Northern Gaza. That situation is in an even more dire state today than a month ago. The principals of the Inter-Agency Standing Committee now assess that ‘the entire Palestinian population in North Gaza is at imminent risk of dying from disease, famine and violence.’” According to an editorial in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, “Israel is unleashing an apocalypse in Northern Gaza.”
Further evidence of the Biden administration’s deliberate cover-up of the ongoing genocide came days after the administration’s announcement when a UN special committee released a report that said, “The policies and practices of Israel during the reporting period [the past year] are consistent with the characteristics of genocide” and “Civilians have been indiscriminately and disproportionally killed en masse in Gaza.” The report went on to say that there were also serious concerns that Israel was “using starvation as a weapon of war”—a fact made clear by numerous reports of humanitarian aid convoys being looted right next to the Israeli troops, who stand by and do nothing to stop it. Israel’s decision to stop cooperating with UNRWA, the critical relief agency providing welfare services to Palestinians, is another clear war crime. “Since the beginning of the war,” the report concluded, “Israeli officials have publicly supported policies that strip Palestinians of the very necessities required to sustain life—food, water, and fuel.” The very definition of genocide.
Also last week, Human Rights Watch issued a report charging that Israel is using its frequent evacuation orders to cause the “deliberate and massive forced displacement” of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, actions that appear to “meet the definition of ethnic cleansing” as well as crimes against humanity. The report, entitled “Hopeless, Starving, and Besieged: Israel’s Forced Displacement of Palestinians in Gaza,” went on to say that the group has collected clear evidence pointing to “the war crime of forcible transfer [of the civilian population].” They described these actions as “a grave breach of the Geneva conventions and a crime under the Rome statute of the international criminal court.”
That same evidence of genocide, starvation, ethnic cleansing, and forced displacement was clearly available to the Biden administration, yet it lied to the American public to hide its own criminal culpability in the war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.
There is no statute of limitations when it comes to support for genocide, nor does it make a difference whether an individual is in or out of office. What matters is evidence of the crime, and there is more than enough for the ICC’s chief prosecutor to issue an application for an arrest warrant for Biden, just as it did for Netanyahu. After all, it’s the United States that builds the bombs, pays for them, ships them to Israel, provides intelligence on targets in Gaza, and supplies the planes that carry them. All Israel does is drop them, with US approval, on the tens of thousands of innocent civilians.
By June, the Biden administration had sent Israel at least 14,000 massively deadly 2,000-pound MK-84 bombs, made in Oklahoma and dropped on hospitals, apartment blocks, and crowded refugee camps. In addition, it sent 6,500 500-pound bombs, 3,000 Hellfire precision-guided air-to-ground missiles, 1,000 bunker-buster bombs, 2,600 air-dropped small-diameter bombs, and other munitions. Added to that is the approval of additional ground attack aircraft to Israel’s existing American-made F-15s, F-16s and F-35s and Apache helicopters. And in January, following a visit to Washington by Eyal Zamir, Israel’s Defense Ministry director-general, defense sources told the Times of Israel that Israel plans to procure a new squadron of 25 F35i stealth fighter jets, a squadron of 25 F-151A fighter jets, and a new squadron of 12 Apache helicopters.
In the end, it’s the American taxpayers who are financing the genocide. According to Bruce Fein, an expert in international law, “The United States has clearly become a co-belligerent with Israel in its war against Hamas-Gaza Palestinians by systematically supplying the IDF with weapons and intelligence without conditions.”
If the ICC were to seek an arrest warrant for Biden before he leaves office or shortly thereafter, it would also serve as a warning to his successor, President-elect Donald Trump, who appears to have even less regard for the Palestinians. And his return to the White House will allow Netanyahu to not only speed up the genocide, but also to achieve his ultimate goal: the annexation of Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem, illegal actions under international law.
“Netanyahu has stalled until Trump’s election, and it paid off. Now there’s nothing standing in his way,” Palestinian political scientist Nour Odeh told Le Monde. He added: “He can wage his war as he sees fit, especially as he has just sacked his defense minister, Yoav Gallant, who had opposed him. As for Trump, he’s not interested in the Palestinian Authority, the state of which is getting worse all the time, nor in a dialogue with Mahmoud Abbas, because they’ve already fallen out. He’s going to do whatever Israel wants. And international law won’t hold him back any more than American law will.”
Among those overjoyed by Trump’s triumph is far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich. “Trump’s victory brings an important opportunity for the State of Israel,” he told supporters at a conference of his Religious Zionist Party. During Trump’s first term, he said, “we were on the verge of applying sovereignty over the settlements” in the West Bank. “Now,” he said, “the time has come to make it a reality.”
And on November 12, Trump sent the same signal back to Smotrich and Netanyahu by naming as his new ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, an evangelical Christian. Shortly afterward, Huckabee said in an Israeli radio interview that “of course” annexation of the West Bank is possible in the next administration, but the policy hasn’t been set. And in 2017, he claimed, “There is no such thing as a West Bank. It’s Judea and Samaria. There’s no such thing as a settlement. They’re communities, they’re neighborhoods, they’re cities. There’s no such thing as an occupation.” He went even further in a statement during his 2008 presidential campaign. “Basically, there really is no such thing as—I need to be careful about saying this, because people will really get upset—there’s really no such thing as a Palestinian,” he said. “There’s not.”
Although neither the United States nor Israel recognizes the jurisdiction of the ICC, most other countries of the world, including in Europe, do. So, should Biden join Netanyahu on the ICC’s wanted list, he would remain safe as long as he never leaves the country. But if he were to give a speech or attend a ceremony outside the country, an Interpol Red Notice would likely be waiting for him, followed by a quick trip to the ICC’s Court Tower in The Hague. According to The Architectural Review, those awaiting trial at the ICC are confined in a “dark gray holding cell complete with steel table and chair bolted to the floor, a slab for a bed, seatless stainless-steel prison toilet and sink.” And there is plenty of room for both Netanyahu and Biden.
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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addresses a joint meeting of the United States Congress in the House chamber at the U.S. Capitol March 3, 2015 in Washington, D.C.
(Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images)
Ultimately, this is the story of how the Israel lobby undermined America, wrecked the Middle East, and set a series of international crimes against humanity in motion.
It’s official now. America’s closest ally, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the one accorded more than 50 standing ovations in Congress just months ago, is under indictment by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity and war crimes. America must take note: the U.S. Government is complicit in Netanyahu’s war crimes and has fully partnered in Netanyahu’s violent rampage across the Middle East.
For 30 years the Israel Lobby has induced the U.S. to fight wars on Israel’s behalf designed to prevent the emergence of a Palestinian State. Netanyahu, who first came to power in 1996, and has been prime minister for 17 years since then, has been the main cheerleader for U.S.-backed wars in the Middle East. The result has been a disaster for the U.S. and a bloody catastrophe not only for the Palestinian people but for the entire Middle East.
These have not been wars to defend Israel, but rather wars to topple governments that oppose Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people. Israel viciously opposes the two-state solution called for by international law, the Arab Peace Initiative, the G20, the BRICS, the OIC, and the UN General Assembly. Israel’s intransigence, and its brutal suppression of the Palestinian people, has given rise to several militant resistance movements since the beginning of the occupation. These movements are backed by several countries in the region.
The obvious solution to the Israel-Palestine crisis is to implement the two-state solution and to demilitarize the militant groups as part of the implementation process.
Israel’s approach, especially under Netanyahu, is to overthrow foreign governments that oppose Israel’s domination, and recreate the map of a “New Middle East” without a Palestinian State. Rather than making peace, Netanyahu makes endless war.
What is shocking is that Washington has turned the U.S. military and federal budget over to Netanyahu for his disastrous wars. The history of the Israel lobby’s complete takeover of Washington can be found in the remarkable new book by Ilan Pappé, Lobbying for Zionism on Both Sides of the Atlantic (2024).
Rather than making peace, Netanyahu makes endless war.
Netanyahu repeatedly told the American people that they would be the beneficiaries of his policies. In fact, Netanyahu has been an unmitigated disaster for the American people, bleeding the U.S. Treasury of trillions of dollars, squandering America’s standing in the world, making the U.S. complicit in his genocidal policies, and bringing the world closer to World War III.
If Trump wants to make America great again, the first thing he should do is to make America sovereign again, by ending Washington’s subservience to the Israel Lobby.
The Israel Lobby not only controls the votes in Congress but places hardline backers of Israel into key national security posts. These have included Madeleine Albright (Secretary of State for Clinton), Lewis Libby (Chief of Staff of Vice President Cheney), Victoria Nuland (Deputy National Security Advisor of Cheney, NATO Ambassador of Bush Jr., Assistant Secretary of State for Obama, Under-Secretary of State for Biden), Paul Wolfowitz (Under-Secretary of Defense for Bush Sr., Deputy Secretary of Defense for Bush Jr.), Douglas Feith (Under-Secretary of Defense for Bush Jr.), Abram Shulsky (Director of the Office of Special Plans, Department of Defense for Bush Jr.), Elliott Abrams (Deputy National Security Advisor for Bush Jr.), Richard Perle (Chairman of the Defense National Policy Board for Bush Jr.), Amos Hochstein (Senior Advisor to the Secretary of State for Biden), and Antony Blinken (Secretary of State for Biden).
Netanyahu has been an unmitigated disaster for the American people, bleeding the U.S. Treasury of trillions of dollars, squandering America’s standing in the world, making the U.S. complicit in his genocidal policies, and bringing the world closer to World War III.
In 1995, Netanyahu described his plan of action in his book Fighting Terrorism. To control terrorists (Netanyahu’s characterization of militant groups fighting Israel’s illegal rule over the Palestinians), it’s not enough to fight the terrorists. Instead, it’s necessary to fight the “terrorist regimes” that support such groups. And the U.S. must be the one to lead:
The cessation of terrorism must therefore be a clear-cut demand, backed up by sanctions and with no prizes attached. As with all international efforts, the vigorous application of sanctions to terrorist states must be led by the United States, whose leaders must choose the correct sequence, timing, and circumstances for these actions.
As Netanyahu told the American people in 2001 (reprinted as the 2001 foreword to Fighting Terrorism):
The first and most crucial thing to understand is this: There is no international terrorism without the support of sovereign states. International terrorism simply cannot be sustained for long without the regimes that aid and abet it… Take away all this state support, and the entire scaffolding of international terrorism will collapse into dust. The international terrorist network is thus based on regimes—Iran, Iraq, Syria, Taliban Afghanistan, Yasir Arafat’s Palestinian Authority, and several other Arab regimes, such as the Sudan.
All of this was music to the ears of the neocons in Washington, who similarly subscribed to U.S.-led regime change operations (through wars, covert subversion, U.S.-led color revolutions, violent coups, etc.) as the main way to deal with perceived U.S. adversaries.
After 9/11, the Bush Jr. neocons (led by Cheney and Rumsfeld) and the Bush Jr. insiders of the Israel Lobby (led by Wolfowitz and Feith), teamed up to remake the Middle East through a series of U.S.-led wars on Netanyahu’s targets in the Middle East (Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Syria) and Islamic East Africa (Libya, Somalia, and Sudan). The role of the Israel Lobby in stoking these wars of choice is described in detail in Pappe’s new book.
The neocon-Israel Lobby war plan was shown to General Wesley Clark on a visit to the Pentagon soon after 9/11. An officer pulled a paper from his desk and told Clark: “I just got this memo from the Secretary of Defense’s office. It says we’re going to attack and destroy the governments in 7 countries in five years—we’re going to start with Iraq, and then we’re going to move to Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran.”
In 2002, Netanyahu pitched the war with Iraq to the American people and Congress by promising them that “If you take out Saddam, Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region[…] People sitting right next door in Iran, young people, and many others, will say the time of such regimes, of such despots is gone.”
A remarkable new insider account of Netanyahu’s role in spearheading the Iraq War also comes from retired Marine Command Chief Master Sargent Dennis Fritz, in his book Deadly Betrayal (2024). When Fritz was called to deploy to Iraq in early 2002, he asked senior military officials why the U.S. was deploying to Iraq, but he got no clear answer. Rather than lead soldiers into a battle he could not explain or justify, he left the service.
The neocon-Israel Lobby teamwork has marked one of the greatest global calamities of the 21st century.
In 2005, Fritz was invited back to the Pentagon, now as a civilian, to assist Under-Secretary Douglas Feith in the declassification of documents about the war, so that Feith could use them to write a book about the war. Fritz discovered in the process that the Iraq War had been spurred by Netanyahu in close coordination with Wolfowitz and Feith. He learned that the purported U.S. war aim, to counter Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, was a cynical public relations gimmick led by an Israel Lobby insider, Abram Shulsky, to garner U.S. public support for the war.
Iraq was to be the first of the seven wars in five years, but as Fritz explains, that follow-up wars were delayed by the anti-U.S. Iraqi insurgency. Nonetheless, the U.S. eventually went to war or backed wars against Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Lebanon. In other words, the U.S. carried out Netanyahu’s plans—except for Iran. To this day, indeed to this hour, Netanyahu works to stoke a U.S. war on Iran, one that could open World War III, either by Iran making the breakthrough to nuclear weapons, or by Iran’s ally, Russia, joining such a war on Iran’s side.
The neocon-Israel Lobby teamwork has marked one of the greatest global calamities of the 21st century. All of the countries attacked by the U.S. or its proxies—Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Syria—now lie in ruins. Meanwhile, Netanyahu’s genocide in Gaza continues apace, and yet again the U.S. has opposed the unanimous will of the world (other than Israel) this week by vetoing a UN Security Council ceasefire resolution that was backed by the other 14 members of the U.N. Security Council.
The real issue facing the Trump Administration is not defending Israel from its neighbors, who call repeatedly, almost daily, for peace based on the two-state solution. The real issue is defending the U.S. from the Israel Lobby.
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Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.
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.
Zarah Sultana, thank you for highlighting what PM Starmer said about Gaza in October and what he says now. Suppose a responsible public official is not totally indifferent to how Israel has been busy ethnically cleansing Gazans by killing innocent civilian population, mainly children and women, and is systematically destroying the infrastructure of Gaza, then how can anyone say that Israel has a right to do this?
But there are some in the ruling elites of the United States, Canada, Australia, Britain, Germany, France, etc. etc. who openly support the destruction of a captive population. They do not name it ethnic cleansing, genocide or large-scale slaughter of Palestinians. Instead, they justify what Israel does by repeating the mouldy mantra that ‘Israel has a right to defend itself’ and thus the crimes against humanity by Israel are brushed aside.
Let us not forget that, apart from the rulers of the countries just mentioned, vast numbers of the people of these countries are against the genocidal war in Gaza, and they strongly oppose what Israel has been doing. They show their solidarity with the victims of the Israeli war on the people of Gaza and the rest of the occupied territories.
In his recent response, Prime Minister Starmer expressed his knowledge of the concept of genocide, which he is unwilling to apply to Gaza. But the lives of millions of Palestinians are not a question of some definition, which he, President Biden and Antony Blinken will not use. But what stops them from using other words like mass slaughter, ethnic cleansing and killing fields of Gaza, for instance?
Lastly, I wonder if Prime Minister Starmer will be generous enough to admit that over 45 thousand Palestinians in Gaza have been mercilessly slaughtered by Israel’s army and air force and what steps he has taken to stop the ongoing carnage and destruction. Has he done anything to stop the killings and destruction or not?
As residents of the north are forced to flee, the Knesset has passed a law allowing Arab citizens of Israel to be deported to the besieged enclave
Mourners react next to the body of a Palestinian killed in an Israeli strike, at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir Al-Balah, in the central Gaza Strip on 13 November 2024 (Reuters)
The Israeli Knesset recently passed a law allowing the state to deport the families of Palestinian attackers from within Israel or occupied East Jerusalem.
Under the legislation, family members accused of having advance knowledge of such an attack, or who express “support or identification with the act of terrorism”, could be deported to Gaza or elsewhere, depending on the circumstances.
This new law appears to fit with Israel’s overarching goals in Gaza and Palestine more generally. The situation in Gaza, particularly in the north, provides a clearer picture of these plans.
After more than 55,000 Palestinians from Jabalia reportedly fled south, Israeli army general Itzik Cohen told reporters that “there is no intention of allowing the residents of the northern Gaza Strip to return to their homes”.
Cohen added that humanitarian aid would only be made available in the south, as there were “no more civilians left” in the north. (An Israeli army spokesperson subsequently said his words had been taken out of context and did not reflect the military’s “objectives and values”.)
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The mass expulsion of residents from Jabalia has been accompanied by Israel’s widespread destruction of buildings and infrastructure throughout northern Gaza, and the killing of at least 2,000 people. Across the besieged territory, the damage is so severe that aid agencies have warned it could take centuries to rebuild.
A detailed operations map, which covers the northern areas of Beit Lahia, Beit Hanoun and Jabalia, suggests that Israel is effectively – but quietly – implementing the Generals’ Plan, a genocidal strategy to ethnically cleanse Gaza that has faced widespread international condemnation.
Genocide and permanent occupation
Israel’s recent creation of the Netzarim Corridor sliced Gaza in half, and as the army has zoned in on the north, most Palestinians have been pushed south of the corridor. The ultimate aim appears to be the annexation of the entirety of northern Gaza, creating space for Israel to expand its settlements and deepen its control over vital trade projects in the Mediterranean.
In addition, the recent appointment of Israel Katz as defence minister raises the possibility of reviving a project he has long promoted: the creation of an artificial island that Israel would use to control and monitor aid to Gaza.
Amid the challenges of implementing a mass displacement from Gaza to Egypt’s Sinai – a notion Cairo has refused to entertain – it appears Israel is settling instead on a project to ethnically cleanse and annex the northern part of the enclave, barring displaced people from returning north of the Netzarim Corridor.
The new law enabling the deportation of families of Palestinian citizens of Israel and residents of occupied East Jerusalem is further evidence of Tel Aviv’s resolve to maintain its annexation and occupation of northern Gaza.
Israel’s actions point to a broader, emerging strategy that aims not only to reoccupy Gaza and sever it geographically, but also to reshape Palestine as a whole
By specifying Gaza as a potential destination for those being deported, the legislation suggests that the territory will remain under Israeli control. International law prohibits deportation or the revocation of citizenship without the prior agreement of the state to which the deportee is being sent – although Israel is a habitual violator of international law.
The Generals’ Plan was not the initiative of a rogue Israeli official, but rather appears to reflect a broad consensus and the coordination of high-ranking government circles.
Amid international legal constraints, the Israeli government cannot officially declare policies of genocide, ethnic cleansing, permanent occupation and annexation – but on the ground, this is what has been happening. At its core, the Generals’ Plan is no different than former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant’s declaration last year that Gaza would receive “no electricity, no food, no fuel” after the 7 October Hamas attack.
Israel’s actions point to a broader, emerging strategy that aims not only to reoccupy Gaza and sever it geographically, but also to reshape Palestine as a whole. In this context, northern Gaza would be annexed, while the south would become an enclave for displaced Palestinians – whether from the north, or those deported from within Israel or East Jerusalem.
Effectively, the southern Gaza Strip would serve as a barren point of exile for an increasingly dense population, devoid of livable conditions.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
Ameer Makhoul is a leading Palestinian activist and writer in the 48 Palestinians community. He is the former director of Ittijah, a Palestinian NGO in Israel. He was detained by Israel for ten years.
Gaza’s Health Ministry said Thursday that Israeli forces killed 78 Palestinians and injured 214 in the previous 48-hour period as Israeli strikes continued across the Gaza Strip.
One strike on Thursday targeted a school-turned-shelter in the Shati refugee camp in northern Gaza. At least 12 Palestinians were killed and 30 were wounded in the attack on the Shati Elementary Boys School, which is affiliated with the UN’s Palestinian relief agency, UNRWA.
Palestinians react after a school sheltering displaced people was hit by an Israeli strike in Shati camp in Gaza City November 7, 2024 (REUTERS/Mahmoud Issa)
Reutersreported that dozens of Palestinian families were pushed out of Beit Lahia, one of the cities where the ethnic cleansing campaign has been focused. Israeli forces have been destroying homes in Beit Lahia to ensure Palestinians don’t return.
“After they displaced most or all of the people in Jabalia, now they are bombing everywhere, killing people on the roads and inside their houses to force everyone out,” a displaced Palestinian man told Reuters.
In southern Gaza, the Palestinian news agency WAFA reported three children were killed by an Israeli strike in Rafah.
Gaza’s Health Ministry said that the latest violence brought its death toll since October 2023 to 43,469 and the number of wounded to 102,561. The ministry only counts bodies brought to hospitals and morgues. “There are still a number of victims under the rubble and on the streets, and ambulance and civil defense crews cannot reach them,” the ministry said.
A group of American healthcare workers who volunteered in Gaza have estimated the US-backed Israeli bombing campaign and siege has killed at least 118,908 Palestinians, including over 60,000 who have starved to death.
The election of Donald Trump is a critical event in the protracted crisis of American democracy, whose shattering repercussions will be felt throughout the world. A fascist demagogue—who attempted in January 2021 to violently overthrow the last presidential election—has decisively won the 2024 election with both an electoral and popular vote majority. He will be re-installed in the White House in little more than 70 days.
Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump gestures at a campaign rally at the Santander Arena, Wednesday, Oct. 9, 2024, in Reading, Pa. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
Trump owes his political triumph to the bankruptcy of the Democratic Party, whose fixation with the identity politics of the affluent middle class, arrogant indifference to the devastating impact of inflation on workers’ living standards, and unrelenting support for war in Ukraine and genocide in Gaza prepared the ground for the election debacle.
The major pillars of the capitalist press are already attempting to downplay the political implications of Trump’s victory. “Mr. Trump’s election poses a grave threat,” writes the New York Times, “but he will not determine the long-term fate of American democracy.” The Times reassures its readers that Trump will be a lame-duck president because he is barred by the Constitution from seeking another term.
This is wishful thinking. Trump openly proclaimed that this would be the last election, and that his supporters would not have to vote again. The political reality is that the election of Trump sets the stage for an unprecedented wave of social counterrevolution, which he plans to enforce with an iron heel.
Trump has pledged to become “dictator” and deploy the military to crush “the enemy within.” He plans to deport 11 million undocumented immigrants, an operation that would require placing major American cities under martial law. He has floated eliminating the income tax and promises to slash taxes for the rich and end corporate regulations. The devastating impact that these policies will have on the working class cannot be overstated.
He is not a political accident. However it was achieved—and this is not to minimize the political complicity of the Democratic Party—the coming to power of a second Trump administration represents the violent realignment of the American political superstructure to correspond with the real social relations that exist in the United States.
Donald Trump speaks not simply as one criminal individual but as the representative of a powerful capitalist oligarchy that has taken shape over the last three to four decades. Mega-millionaires and billionaires—led by the likes of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel and Larry Ellison—are utilizing Trump to effect in their interests a reactionary restructuring of American society. They will use the time leading up to the January 20 inauguration to prepare the barrage of repressive and socially reactionary measures that will be unleashed as soon as Trump is once again ensconced in the White House.
He was able to exploit the absence within the political establishment of any articulation of the interests of the vast majority of the population. The Harris campaign was opposed to making any social appeal to the working class. They pitched their campaign to the most affluent voters, promoting hated warmongers like Liz Cheney and promising to place Republicans in the cabinet.
Harris, Barack Obama and other Democratic surrogates traveled the country haranguing voters that a failure to turn out for Harris would be proof of misogyny or racism. They combined incessant appeals to racial and gender identity with full-throated endorsement of war abroad. The Democrats pledged further support for Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza and called for an escalation of the US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine.
The Democrats offered nothing to address the escalating social crisis in the United States, instead presenting the country as “on the right track” to a population which almost unanimously believes the opposite. Figures like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez presented the absurd lie that the Biden-Harris administration had improved conditions for working people and that Harris would challenge the domination of “the billionaire class.” Mimicking Hillary Clinton’s 2016 claim that the working class consists of “a basket of deplorables,” Biden called Trump’s supporters “garbage” in the final days of the election.
The vote totals show not a surge in support for Trump, who appears to have lost votes compared to his 2020 totals, but a staggering collapse in support for the Democrats, with Harris winning somewhere between 10 and 15 million fewer votes than Joe Biden in 2020.
Harris underperformed Biden in every single region of the country. The Democratic Party’s efforts to cajole various racial and gender groups behind the Harris campaign on the basis of an appeal to identity fell completely flat. Trump saw the largest increase in vote margins in counties where over 50 percent of the population is non-white, and exit poll data shows that Harris lost Latino men nationally by a 54-44 percent margin, a reversal from 2020, when Biden won that demographic by a 59-39 percent margin.
The margin by which the Democrats won young voters also fell substantially from 2020, as countless young people refused to vote for the candidate complicit in the genocide in Gaza. Harris won the youngest voters by only 56-41 percent versus Biden’s 65-31 percent margin. Trump won a majority of votes among first-time voters, a sign that the Democrats were unable to activate voters beyond the affluent upper-middle class.
In fact, Harris improved only among the affluent. Among voters with an income of $200,000 or more, she won 52-44 percent, reversing a narrow Trump win in that income bracket in 2020. Trump won voters with an income between $100,000 and $200,000 in 2020 by a 58-41 percent margin, but Harris won by 53-45 percent. Democrats simultaneously saw a collapse in support from working people, with Harris losing those making between $30,000 and $100,000, a wide swath of the population which Biden won by a roughly 57-43 percent margin in 2020.
The electorate was driven by deep social anger. Among the 43 percent of voters who said they were “dissatisfied” with “the way things are going in the country today,” Trump won 54-44 percent. Among the 29 percent who answered that they were “angry,” Trump won 71-27 percent. Harris won 89-10 percent among the tiny sliver of the population who are “enthusiastic” about economic and social conditions today. The total percentage of the population who said their financial situation is “worse” today versus four years ago more than doubled to 45 percent, with Trump winning those voters by an 80-17 percent margin.
Trump and the Republicans are well aware that they will preside over a social powder keg, and that the right-wing policies they plan to implement will only deepen the social anger. Their strategy is to combine massive police state repression with a fascist campaign to scapegoat immigrants for all social ills. Though exit polling does not suggest that voters were taken in by Trump’s vile attacks on immigrants, and though large majorities say they believe immigrants deserve a pathway to citizenship rather than face mass deportation, the stage is set for a massive and violent attack on immigrant workers on a scale that will make even his first administration appear like child’s play.
And while Trump’s demagogic claims to oppose war might have won votes away from the inveterate warmongers in the Democratic Party, Trump is himself a ruthless imperialist politician who advocates escalatory confrontation with China, Iran and North Korea.
The response of the Democrats to Trump’s electoral victory will be to seek compromise and coalition, already evident in Harris’ capitulatory statement Wednesday afternoon. She made no warnings about the dictatorial character of the incoming Trump regime and pledged to cooperate with the transition to the would-be American Führer. The Democrats will shift even further to the right, while seeking to forge an agreement with the Republicans on their central priority, the escalation of war.
The reactionary character of Trump’s political and social program will become clear enough. As the ruling class seeks to restructure the state, there has to be a restructuring of politics, along class lines. As WSWS International Editorial Board Chairman David North wrote, Trump’s election “is the disastrous outcome of the long-term and very deliberate repudiation by the Democratic Party of any programmatic orientation to the working class…
In the United States, the new anti-Marxism blended with the longstanding tradition of anti-communism. Left-wing politics, of the sort connected to working class militancy, disappeared. The grievances related to identity displaced any serious concern with the massive concentration of wealth in a small segment of society at the expense of the working class.
Those who have promoted this form of right-wing politics, promoted by the Democratic Party, now resort to the most bankrupt of all responses to the election: blaming the population.
In fact, the past year has seen an explosive growth of political and social opposition, from the mass protests against the genocide in Gaza to a steady growth of strike action by workers, who are striving to break free from the control of the corporatist trade union apparatus. Immense social struggles are on the horizon.
These struggles must be politically directed, and they must be guided by an understanding that fascism can only be stopped by the development of an independent movement of the working class against the source of political reaction and oligarchy: the capitalist system. There must be “a new birth” of genuinely socialist politics, based on the working class and animated by an international strategy.
The Socialist Equality Party, through its presidential election campaign of Joseph Kishore and Jerry White, set out to mobilize the working class on an international, socialist program in opposition to war, inequality and the capitalist system that produces them. This program now takes on an even greater urgency. In the period ahead, the Socialist Equality Party and International Committee of the Fourth International will fight to win the leadership of a growing movement of workers and youth against war, dictatorship and inequality and for the socialist transformation of society.
Defeating the Arab democracy movement left autocratic states hollowed out and often reliant on US and Israeli support to survive. Palestinians cannot expect help anytime soon
Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi (R) meets with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Alamein in northern Egypt on 20 August 2024 (AFP)
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As Israel continues its genocidal war in Gaza, and expands it to Lebanon, most Arab countries appear to be mere observers or enablers of the massacre of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians on an unprecedented scale.
Even with the threat of a large-scale regional war looming, which could have extremely destabilising effects on the entire region, the ability and desire of Arab states to restrain Israeli imperial hubris appears to be non-existent.
There is good reason to argue that the main enabler of the current crisis engulfing the Middle East is none other than the United States, which has effectively funded the Israeli wars on Gaza and Lebanon, with aid topping $17.9bn since 7 October 2023. It has also provided diplomatic cover to Israel and given its far-right government the green light to expand the war into Lebanon.
This, however, misses an important aspect of the dynamic. Namely, Israel’s colonial hubris regards having the ability to reshape the Middle East through mass violence being fed by the autocratic nature of the Arab states and the failure of the democratic movement in the region.
More than a decade after the mass revolts that swept the region, the result is weak states, with contested legitimacy, only able to exercise power over their own citizens through mass violence – not dissimilar to the way that Israel is treating the Palestinians.
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In many ways, the logic of regime survival at any cost has eroded the ability of these states to influence events in the region – and, in some cases, the social foundation of the national state itself.
Flow of US aid
A notable example of this is Egypt, the most populous Arab state and the only one to have a border with the Gaza Strip, making it, theoretically, one of the Arab states with the most potential to influence the conflict and restrain Israeli aggression.
Egypt is also a close ally of the US, receiving a whopping $183.5bn in aid since the end of the Second World War, positioning it as a possible interlocutor with Israel’s patron.
This strategic positioning, however, was overridden by the Sisi government’s obsession with survival, which placed it in a dependent relationship with Israel, even as Israel threatens the very stability that Sisi covets.
Indeed, Israel played a not insignificant role in the consolidation of the Sisi government after the 2013 coup, offering political support, security cooperation and deeper economic ties to the direct benefit of the Egyptian elites.
War on Gaza: Arab despots’ failure to stand up to Israel could fuel an explosion
For example, during the summer of 2013, after the coup that overthrew the elected president, Mohamed Morsi, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) was lobbying on behalf of the fledgling military autocracy to ensure the continued flow of American aid.
The close relationship between President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and the Zionist lobbying groups continued, with reports emerging in February 2017 that Sisi met representatives of the most influential pro-Israel groups, including Aipac, Friends of the Israel Defense Forces (FIDF) and the Zionist Organization of America (Zoa) five times in 20 months.
The relationship between Sisi and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been described as the closest between any leaders from the two nations since the peace treaty of 1979.
This apparent closeness was anchored in close security cooperation between the countries, with reports emerging in 2018 that, in the preceding two years, Israel had conducted over 100 air strikes against militants in Sinai, with Cairo’s approval.
This security cooperation was extended to include direct repression of peaceful dissent in Egypt, with the sale of Israeli spyware to Sisi’s government, which was used to hack into the phone of Ahmed Tantawy, a prominent member of the secular opposition.
The depth of the alliance extended to the energy sector, with a $15bn deal signed in 2018 between the two countries to import Israeli gas for re-export in liquid form.
An investigation by human rights campaigner Hossam Bahgat revealed that the Egyptian private company responsible for the deal was managed by Egypt’s General Intelligence Services (GIS), allowing the country’s security elites to profit from the deal directly.
Egypt’s debt crisis
These deep structural dependencies placed Sisi’s government in an extremely vulnerable position, unable to restrain Israel, even when the idea of the ethnic cleansing of Gaza was floated by Netanyahu, with its highly destabilising effects on the government and the country.
Indeed, beyond rhetorical condemnation, Egypt has done little to impact the dynamic on the ground. The most notable example of a critical public stance was the Egyptian declaration in May that it would join the International Court of Justice case against Israel.
At the time of writing, there is no evidence of it doing so. But there is evidence of deepening economic ties, with Egypt in September signing another deal with Israel, to increase its imports of natural gas by 20 percent.
More than a decade after the coup, with the Sisi government facing a grinding debt crisis and following a logic of power consolidation at any cost, it finds itself at the mercy of Israel and its colonial hubris, unable to exert influence on one of its closest allies.
Syria in shambles
The enabling of Israel’s colonial ambitions is not limited to Israel’s Arab allies, but also extends to Syria, where the logic of government survival above all else is at its most extreme.
More than a decade after the start of the Syrian uprising, the Assad government has survived, albeit at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives, high levels of foreign interference and the loss of large swathes of territory. The Syrian economy is decimated, the state’s monopoly on violence is now completely eroded, and the social foundations of the state have been eviscerated.
The post-colonial state has failed to meet its raison d’etre, namely to empower the people of the Middle East, and confront the old imperial powers, including Israel
The Syrian government has reduced the country to a narco state, blackmailing the Gulf states into reintegrating it into the Arab fold in exchange for stopping the flow of illicit drugs.
In essence, Assad decided to sacrifice the Syrian state on the altar of his survival, leaving behind a state in shambles – unable to assert control within its own borders, let alone restrain Israeli aggression that could spiral to engulf Syria as well, whose territory it already occupies.
The horrors that we are witnessing in Gaza and Lebanon are as much the result of an Israeli colonist mania, and western support for it, as it is also a direct result of the nature of the Arab political landscape that emerged from the failed Arab spring.
The post-colonial state has failed to meet its raison d’etre, namely to empower the people of the Middle East, and confront the old imperial powers, including Israel. Any pretences of this have now completely disappeared, with a new raison d’etre emerging, namely the domination of their own citizens at any cost.
This is not to argue that these states were not repressive before, but there is not now even a pretence of confronting a dangerous external enemy, now that said enemy is internal.
The dissident has now come to replace colonists and the occupier as the number one enemy of the Arab states, with the mass slaughter of the Palestinians, Lebanese and whoever dares to challenge the Israeli vision of the new Middle East standing as a testament to a new Arab autocratic political order.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
Maged Mandour is a political analyst who is a regular contributor to the Arab Digest, Middle East Eye, and Open Democracy. He is the author of an upcoming book entitled Egypt Under Sisi, to be published by IB Tauris. The book will examine the social and political developments in Egypt since the 2013 coup.
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