by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies Posted on June 18, 2024

On June 13, Hamas responded to persistent needling by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken over the U.S. proposal for a pause in the Israeli massacre in Gaza. The group said it has “dealt positively… with the latest proposal and all proposals to reach a cease-fire agreement.” Hamas added, by contrast, that, “while Blinken continues to talk about ‘Israel’s approval of the latest proposal, we have not heard any Israeli official voicing approval.”

The full details of the U.S. proposal have yet to be made public, but the pause in Israeli attacks and release of hostages in the first phase would reportedly lead to further negotiations for a more lasting cease-fire and the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in the second phase. But there is no guarantee that the second round of negotiations would succeed.

As former Israeli Labor Party prime minister Ehud Barak told Israel Radio on June 3rd, “How do you think [Gaza military commander] Sinwar will react when he is told: but be quick, because we still have to kill you, after you return all the hostages?”

Meanwhile, as Hamas pointed out, Israel has not publicly accepted the terms of the latest U.S. cease-fire proposal, so it has only the word of U.S. officials that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has privately agreed to it. In public, Netanyahu still insists that he is committed to the complete destruction of Hamas and its governing authority in Gaza, and has actually stepped up Israel’s vicious attacks in central and southern Gaza.

The basic disagreement that President Joe Biden and Secretary Blinken’s smoke and mirrors cannot hide is that Hamas, like every Palestinian, wants a real end to the genocide, while the Israeli and U.S. governments do not.

Biden or Netanyahu could end the slaughter very quickly if they wanted to – Netanyahu by agreeing to a permanent cease-fire, or Biden by ending or suspending U.S. weapons deliveries to Israel. Israel could not carry out this war without U.S. military and diplomatic support. But Biden refuses to use his leverage, even though he has admitted in an interview that it was “reasonable” to conclude that Netanyahu is prolonging the war for his own political benefit.

The U.S. is still sending weapons to Israel to continue the massacre in violation of a cease-fire order by the International Court of Justice. Bipartisan U.S. leaders have invited Netanyahu to address a joint session of the U.S. Congress on July 24, even as the International Criminal Court reviews a request by its chief prosecutor for an arrest warrant for Netanyahu for war crimes, crimes against humanity and murder.

The United States seems determined to share Israel’s self-inflicted isolation from voices calling for peace from all over the world, including large majorities of countries in the UN General Assembly and Security Council.

But perhaps this is appropriate, as the United States bears a great deal of responsibility for that isolation. By its decades of unconditional support for Israel, and by using its UN Security Council veto dozens of times to shield Israel from international accountability, the United States has enabled successive Israeli governments to pursue flagrantly criminal policies and to thumb their noses at the growing outrage of people and countries across the world.

This pattern of U.S. support for Israel goes all the way back to its founding, when Zionist leaders in Palestine unleashed a well-planned operation to seize much more territory than the UN allocated to their new state in its partition plan, which the Palestinians and neighboring countries already firmly opposed.

The massacres, the bulldozed villages and the ethnic cleansing of 750,000 to a million people in the Nakba have been meticulously documented, despite an extraordinary propaganda campaign to persuade two generations of Israelis, Americans and Europeans that they never happened.

The U.S. was the first country to grant Israel de facto recognition on May 14, 1948, and played a leading role in the 1949 UN votes to recognize the new state of Israel within its illegally seized borders. President Eisenhower had the wisdom to oppose Britain, France and Israel in their war to capture the Suez Canal in 1956, but Israel’s seizure of the Occupied Palestinian Territories in 1967 persuaded U.S. leaders that it could be a valuable military ally in the Middle East.

Unconditional U.S. support for Israel’s illegal occupation and annexation of more and more territory over the past 57 years has corrupted Israeli politics and encouraged increasingly extreme and racist Israeli governments to keep expanding their genocidal territorial ambitions. Netanyahu’s Likud party and government now fully embrace their Greater Israel plan to annex all of occupied Palestine and parts of other countries, wherever and whenever new opportunities for expansion present themselves.

Israel’s de facto expansion has been facilitated by the United States’ monopoly over mediation between Israel and Palestine, which it has aggressively staked out and defended against the UN and other countries. The irreconcilable contradiction between the U.S.’s conflicting roles as Israel’s most powerful military ally and the principal mediator between Israel and Palestine is obvious to the whole world.

But as we see even in the midst of the genocide in Gaza, the rest of the world and the UN have failed to break this U.S. monopoly and establish legitimate, impartial mediation by the UN or neutral countries that respect the lives of Palestinians and their human and civil rights.

Qatar mediated a temporary cease-fire between Israel and Hamas in November 2023, but it has since been upstaged by U.S. moves to prolong the massacre through deceptive proposals, cynical posturing and Security Council vetoes. The U.S. consistently vetoes all but its own proposals on Israel and Palestine in the UN Security Council, even when its own proposals are deliberately meaningless, ineffective or counterproductive.

The UN General Assembly is united in support of Palestine, voting almost unanimously year after year to demand an end to the Israeli occupation. A hundred and forty-four countries have recognized Palestine as a country, and only the U.S. veto denies it full UN membership. The Israeli genocide in Gaza has even shamed the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC) into suspending their ingrained pro-Western bias and pursuing cases against Israel.

One way that the nations of the world could come together to apply greater pressure on Israel to end its assault on Gaza would be a “Uniting for Peace” resolution in the UN General Assembly. This is a measure the General Assembly can take when the Security Council is prevented from acting to restore peace and security by the veto of a permanent member.

Israel has demonstrated that it is prepared to ignore cease-fire resolutions by the General Assembly and the Security Council, and an order by the ICJ, but a Uniting for Peace resolution could impose penalties on Israel for its actions, such as an arms embargo or an economic boycott. If the United States still insists on continuing its complicity in Israel’s international crimes, the General Assembly could take action against the U.S. too.

A General Assembly resolution would change the terms of the international debate and shift the focus back from Biden and Blinken’s diversionary tactics to the urgency of enforcing the lasting cease-fire that the whole world is calling for.

It is time for the United Nations and neutral countries to push Israel’s U.S. partner in genocide to the side, and for legitimate international authorities and mediators to take responsibility for enforcing international law, ending the Israeli occupation of Palestine and bringing peace to the Middle East.

Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies are the authors of War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, published by OR Books in November 2022.

Medea Benjamin is the cofounder of CODEPINK for Peace, and the author of several books, including Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher for CODEPINK and the author of Blood on Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.

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Author: Medea Benjamin

Medea Benjamin (medea@globalexchange.org) is cofounder of CODEPINK: Women for Peace and Global Exchange. View all posts by Medea Benjamin

International criminal court

Joint statement of support for international criminal court issued following revelations of Israeli interference

Harry Davies, Guardian, Sat 15 Jun 2024

The international criminal court must be allowed to carry out its work “without intimidation”, a group of 93 states has said in a significant public intervention intended to reinforce support for the judicial body.

In a joint statement issued late on Friday, the large group of ICC member states vowed to defend the institution and “preserve its integrity from any political interference and pressure against the court, its officials and those cooperating with it”.

The show of unity for the court and its staff comes in the wake of revelations published by the Guardian about efforts by Israel and its intelligence agencies to undermine, influence and intimidate the court as part of a nine-year campaign of surveillance and espionage.

It also follows recent warnings by the office of the ICC’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, that it has been subjected to “several forms of threats” and hostile intelligence activity apparently intended to interfere with and improperly influence the prosecutor’s work.

Last month, Khan announced that he has filed applications for arrest warrants against senior Hamas and Israeli officials for war crimes and crimes against humanity, which he alleged had been committed during Hamas’s 7 October attack and the ensuing war in Gaza.

Khan’s decision to seek arrest warrants against Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and defence minister, Yoav Gallant, is the first time an ICC prosecutor has taken such action against the leaders of a close western ally. The move provoked a fierce response from Israel and its allies in the US.

The statement supporting the ICC was drafted by five of the court’s member states – Belgium, Chile, Jordan, Senegal and Slovenia – and is understood to have been presented to the rest of the court’s state parties last week for their endorsement.

A diplomatic source familiar with the effort said the disclosures about Israeli intelligence operations against the court had been “really eye-opening for a lot of diplomats” and “made some realise that it’s time to put out some sort of statement from the states that belong to the court responding to what has now come to light”.

However, they said the statement was also a response to other recent forms of hostile activity against the ICC, such as a cyber-attack last year, and came as the prosecutor is conducting an investigation into senior Russian political and military figures allegedly involved in war crimes and crimes against humanity in Ukraine.

“The court is going after some very powerful people, not just in the Palestine investigation, and it’s time to send a message that the state parties are there to defend it,” the source said.

Longtime ICC observers said it was notable that major western powers such as Germany, France, Canada and the UK had supported the statement, which called on “all states to ensure full cooperation with the court for it to carry out its important mandate”.

They also pointed to the large number of endorsing states – 93 of the ICC’s 124 members – and noted that previous statements rallying around the court had not garnered as much support. Other signatories included Australia, South Africa, Spain, Brazil and Japan.

“This is a unique moment of international solidarity, with 93 ICC states parties standing up for global justice and accountability for mass atrocities,” Danya Chaikel, the International Federation for Human Rights’s representative to the ICC, said.

“They are collectively opposing the egregious threats to the court from powerful countries including Israel, the US and Russia, and strongly rejecting their efforts to manipulate the rule of law for political gains,” she added.

David Hearst, Middle East Eye, 14 June 2024

Hamas is willing to commit to the ‘full and complete ceasefire’ touted by Biden – but Washington continues to throw its full support behind an intransigent Tel Aviv

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken speaks to the media in Dubai, on 1 December, 2023 (Saul Loeb/AFP)

It takes a lot to get the diplomats of the Middle East to agree on anything. The behaviour of one man over the last eight months of the war in Gaza has, however, forged a consensus rare among such a group: Antony Blinken cannot be trusted. 

The US secretary of state’s powers of turning reality on its head have raised the eyebrows of even practised cynics. It is a complaint that resounds from Doha to Amman, Cairo, Tel Aviv and Ankara. 

Blinken is currently engaged in what one of his predecessors, James Baker, called “dead cat diplomacy”. Baker’s pupil, Aaron David Miller, wrote on X (formerly Twitter): “The objective is not to reach a deal but to ensure if it fails, the dead cat is on other’s doorstep.”

The dead, or dying, cat of the moment is a ceasefire deal in Gaza that holds. 

Indisputably, Hamas is closer to accepting this deal than Israel is. The evidence for this is mounting. Hamas signed a ceasefire deal presented by Egypt and Qatar, under the gaze of CIA Director Bill Burns, which would have ensured a permanent halt to the war. 

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When Israel and the US walked away from it, Hamas welcomed the principles declared in President Joe Biden’s speech, in which he urged Israel to accept a “full and complete ceasefire”. It had the same reaction to the US-sponsored UN resolution. 

Those principles are clear: that a permanent ceasefire should exist after an initial exchange of hostages; that there should be a full withdrawal of Israeli troops; that the people of Gaza should be free to return to their homes; that there should be no change in the territory or demography of Gaza; and that its people should have full access to humanitarian aid, alongside reconstruction efforts.

Sticking point

Israel disagrees with each and every one of these principles. It has said consistently that no ceasefire should prevent the achievement of its war aims, which include the dismantlement of Hamas as a military power and as a government of Gaza. It continues to block aid through its land border crossings and has no intention of lifting the siege, especially after the war ends.

More critically, it has made no commitment to sticking to a ceasefire should negotiations between the first and second phases of the prisoner and hostage exchange fail. 

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This is the crux of the matter. There has been only one substantive issue preventing a ceasefire deal since the first exchange of prisoners and hostages last November.

Israel has yet to give any official response to either Biden’s speech or the UN resolution. Blinken is doing all the talking for it. How curious, then, that Blinken, on his latest Middle East tour, placed all the blame on Hamas for not yet accepting the deal. 

The talks are stuck on Israel’s refusal to accept an upfront commitment to a permanent ceasefire. It is on Israel that Blinken should be applying all of Washington’s pressure.

This is not in US interests. Netanyahu is perfectly logical in his conclusion that Biden is weak and getting weaker by the month

And yet, Blinken declared: “Israel accepted the proposal as it was” – a comment that flies in the face of repeated public statements from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu casting doubt on the deal, in addition to recent remarks from National Security Adviser Tzachi Hanegbi, who said it would take another seven months to destroy the military and governing capabilities of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

“Hamas could have answered with a single word – yes,” Blinken said, surpassing himself in a brazen attempt to turn the truth on its head. 

Hamas has now given its formal response, and Middle East Eye has seen a copy of that reply.

There are changes to the document, which are not, as it claims, minor – although they are more compatible with what Biden and the UN resolution said, than the Israeli position is. Hamas has included the Philadelphi Corridor in the list of areas that Israeli forces should withdraw from in the first 42-day stage of the deal. It also insists that prisoners to be released by Israel are in accordance with Hamas’s list, which includes high-profile resistance leaders such as Marwan Barghouti.

Shielding Israel

The most substantial change is to the wording of paragraph 14, which deals crucially with the transition from stage one to stage two, and the key question of whether any party can withdraw unilaterally from this process and go back to war. 

Paragraph 14 used to say that the temporary cessation of violence would continue into stage two “so long as the negotiations on the conditions for implementing stage 2 of this agreement are ongoing”, and that the guarantors of the deal would make “every effort to ensure that those indirect negotiations continue until both sides are able to reach agreement”.

The revised version from Hamas says the temporary ceasefire would continue “until a sustainable calm” is announced, by which is meant a full cessation of military activities on both sides, and that negotiations would continue until the two parties reach an agreement on an exchange of prisoners. 

War on Gaza: Why Hamas cannot accept Israel’s ceasefire proposal

Read More »

In addition, Hamas now demands that Israel lift its 17-year siege of Gaza and withdraw all its forces in the initial stage of the ceasefire deal.

These key changes address the meaning and substance of Biden’s speech and the UN resolution. But Israel will be implacably opposed to them, as they mean that once the first set of hostages and prisoners has been released, Israel will not be able to back out of a permanent ceasefire. 

It does not take a genius to see that shielding an Israel that has no intention of abiding by Biden’s words, let alone the UN’s, is not doing anything to advance US goals. 

These are clear: Biden’s overwhelming personal political interest as an ageing president, seeking re-election while not always being able to read his teleprompter, is to shut this war down as soon as possible. He has even more interest in doing so before it spreads, as it shows every sign of doing, to Lebanon and then the wider region. 

Blinken is doing the opposite. He is letting Washington get dragged ever deeper, and with more direct military involvement, into a regional quagmire of Netanyahu’s creation. 

Only one party benefits from a continuous war in Gaza and a new front opening up in Lebanon, and that is the Religious Zionist extreme right. Netanyahu cannot abandon that party. Benny Gantz’s defection from the war cabinet would be nothing politically next to Itamar Ben Gvir’s exit. The moment that happens, Netanyahu knows he has a challenger for the leadership of the ruling right-wing coalition.

That sinking feeling

Accordingly, Netanyahu has responded to every failed round of negotiations by going on the military offensive. 

After his rejection of the ceasefire deal hammered out during the debacle in Cairo and Doha, and amid the increasing possibility of being served with an international arrest warrant for war crimes, his response was to launch the offensive on Rafah.

Here again, the Israeli national interest called for caution. He showed no hesitation in jettisoning the support of the Egyptian army, which if he thought about things strategically, as a real leader should, he would realise that Israel will need after this conflict is over.

Egypt’s generals could make life painful along Israel’s eminently porous 200-kilometre border with Sinai, by releasing the brakes they apply on the drug smugglers and warlords who roam the desert. 

Instead, Netanyahu has humiliated them – and adding insult to injury, deprived them of a personal source of hard currency by closing the Rafah border and occupying the Philadelphi corridor.

The unwritten understanding between them was that any such closure would be temporary. But Netanyahu has now broken that understanding too, leaving the generals with egg on their face. Not a wise thing to do, in this region. 

Similarly, Netanyahu’s response to Biden’s speech was to launch a hostage rescue in Nuseirat camp, whose beneficial effects on domestic public opinion lasted all of 24 hours. 

Wild jubilation at the release of four hostages – Israeli networks interrupted their recorded programmes on Shabbat to go live – gave way to sober reflection on the total cost of this operation.

It was not repeatable. It was not a replacement for negotiations. Israel lost a special forces police officer in the extraction, and if Hamas is to be believed, three other hostages as well.

State of chaos

But more puzzling still was the US claiming a decisive role in the hostage release. As the Palestinian death toll soared past 270, you might have expected National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan to distance himself from such a disaster. He did the opposite, taking credit for what he termed a “daring operation”.

The exact part that US intelligence or their hostage release team played in this operation is not known. Israeli helicopters were, however, captured on camera taking off and landing on the beach, a few metres from the pier the US Navy built to provide aid for Gaza. 

Centcom, the US military command that oversees the Middle East, said that while Israel used an area south of the US-built pier as a landing zone, “the humanitarian pier facility, including its equipment, personnel, and assets were not used in the operation to rescue hostages”.

As things stand, and with the active complicity of Blinken, the gap between Israel and Hamas will not be bridged

But a US defence official, speaking with Middle East Eye, said Israel’s use of the beach, with the pier a stone’s throw away, “implies we were part of it”.

Furthermore, the US would have been notified of Israel’s exfiltration plan via the beach because it maintains an air defence system at the pier.

US cooperation with a hostage release operation that killed more than 270 Palestinians, and possibly also a further group of hostages, puts US policy on hostage release in a state of total chaos. 

Its policy goal is to persuade Israel of the obvious truth that the hostages themselves, and their families, scream often and loudly about: the only killer of hostages is Israel’s continuing bombardment. 

US military involvement in such a murderous operation does the opposite. “Israel’s argument has always been that it doesn’t need a ceasefire to rescue hostages,” Frank Lowenstein, the former special envoy for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations in the Obama administration, told MEE. “The rescue operation is likely to deepen Israel’s resolve on that.”

US weakness

This is not in US interests. Netanyahu is perfectly logical in his conclusion that Biden is weak and getting weaker by the month.

He is fundamentally unable or unwilling to apply a brake to Israel’s offensive. He threatened very publicly to withhold heavy bombs for Netanyahu’s offensive on Rafah. Netanyahu went ahead with it anyway, and Biden backed down.

Channel 13 recently reported that “significant progress” had been reached towards “understandings” that would allow the suspended shipment to arrive in Israel in the near future: “Within the framework of the understandings being developed between Washington and Tel Aviv, Israel will be forced to make commitments to Washington that it will not attack with certain bombs that will be supplied by the Biden administration, in populated areas, including populated areas in Rafah.”

War on Gaza: The day the West defined ‘success’ as a massacre of 270 Palestinians

Read More »

So Israel can have the heavy bombs Biden promised to withhold, and continue with the operation in Rafah that Biden warned it not to proceed with.

At every stage in this eight-month war, US diplomacy has showed its weakness, and it bears a heavy responsibility for where this has now landed both Israel and US forces in the region. 

As things stand, and with the activecomplicity of Blinken, the gap betweenIsrael and Hamas will not be bridged, even though the truth is that that the gap between the US and Israel is much larger than that between the US or the UNand Hamas.

Both Hamas and the US, and the 13 other members of the UN Security Council that voted for the resolution, want an immediate and permanent ceasefire. Israel is in a minority of one in making sure that does not happen, knowing that neither Blinken nor Biden has the political capital left to stop it. 

A new low

To carry on the war in Gaza is to ensure that the escalation of the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah will continue, with each side striking deeper into each other’s territory. The surest method of de-escalation on the northern border is to secure an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.

I cannot think of any other time during the 76 years of this bitter conflict, when an Israeli leadership has been so obdurate in pursuing war aims that are unachievable – and a US president so weak and powerless to stop it.

James Baker or George Shultz were giants of diplomacy and resolve compared with the likes of Blinken. 

I previously thought that the combination of Netanyahu and former President Donald Trump had brought the situation to an all-time low. But I was proved wrong; worse was to come.

All the concessions Israel got during Trump’s presidency – the Golan Heights, the moving of the US embassy to Jerusalem, the Abraham Accords – pale into insignificance compared with the backing Biden has given Israel to pursue and continue its war on Gaza with this savagery, and for this long. 

It proved to be the combination of Netanyahu and a Democratic president that led this conflict to its most dangerous and murderous moment.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

David Hearst is co-founder and editor-in-chief of Middle East Eye. He is a commentator and speaker on the region and analyst on Saudi Arabia. He was the Guardian’s foreign leader writer, and was correspondent in Russia, Europe, and Belfast. He joined the Guardian from The Scotsman, where he was education correspondent.

After the US Secretary of State Blinken’s misleading press conference on Wednesday in Doha, there is a need to correct the record.

• Professor Mohamad Elmasry, Aljazeera, 14 Jun 2024

During a Wednesday press conference in Doha, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken was less than honest about a United States-proposed Gaza ceasefire deal.

During his opening remarks and the question and answer session, Blinken made several statements that were either transparently untrue or deeply misleading.

First, Blinken insisted that the three-phased ceasefire deal announced by US President Joe Biden on May 31 was an “Israeli proposal” and that Israel fully backs it.

When asked during the question and answer session whether the US was attempting to put pressure on Israel to accept the proposal, Blinken said there was no need to do so because Israel had already accepted it.

But Blinken was being untruthful.

Biden proposed the deal because he is desperate to get out from under his disastrous Gaza policy before the start of the Democratic National Convention, which is scheduled for August.

Biden’s proclamation that it was an “Israeli proposal” simply isn’t true.

In the two weeks since Biden made his announcement, Israeli officials have not come forward and announced their acceptance of the deal.

In fact, they’ve done the opposite.

Over the past two weeks, Israeli officials have made clear that they oppose the Biden draft proposal.

Moreover, Netanyahu and other officials have made clear that Israel intends to continue its war on Gaza, an aim which contradicts the basic terms of Biden’s proposal.

On Monday at the United Nations, Israeli representative Reut Shapir Ben-Naftaly could not have been clearer about Israel’s position.

She said that Israel’s war aims “have not changed” and that the war “will continue … until Hamas military and governing capabilities are dismantled”.

She also said that Israel would not “engage in meaningless and endless negotiations” about a permanent ceasefire.

Israel’s public positions caused a former top Israeli diplomat, Alon Liel, to proclaim that Israel has “definitely not” accepted the “proposal submitted by the Americans”.

Indeed, Israel continues to say it is pursuing the “total victory” it has sought since the start of the war.

Although Israel claims “total victory” involves the elimination of Hamas, a more realistic interpretation is that Israel seeks the complete destruction of Gaza and the forced transfer of Palestinians there to Egypt and/or Jordan.

In any case, what is clear is that Israel has no intention of honouring phase two of Biden’s agreement, which calls for a permanent end to fighting.

Here, the devil is in the details.

The wording in Biden’s proposal gives Israel a way out after phase one.

The Biden proposal stipulates that phase two can only be reached upon Israel’s agreement at the end of phase one.

If Israel doesn’t agree to move to phase two and chooses to end negotiations, then the ceasefire is off.

But, as Israeli officials have made clear, Israel hasn’t agreed even to these very watered down ceasefire terms.

Blinken’s second lie pertains to Hamas and its position on the proposal.

During the press conference, Blinken indicated that the Biden proposal was “virtually identical” to the deal Hamas proposed on May 6.

Blinken went on to blame Hamas for being insincere and “continuing to try to change the terms,” including terms that “Hamas had previously accepted”.

But all of this is also untrue.

First, Hamas’s May 6 proposal was quite different from the Biden proposal. It did not give Israel wiggle room to easily exit the agreement after phase one. Also, and importantly, the Hamas proposal called for an end to Israel’s illegal, suffocating blockade on Gaza.

Blinken said that Hamas had proposed “numerous changes” to Biden’s proposal.

All Hamas did, however, was attempt to move things closer towards its May 6 proposal, which would lead to an actual end to the war.

One significant change that Hamas did introduce – an Israeli troop withdrawal – was necessitated by Israel’s taking over of the Philadelphi Corridor on May 30.

This is an important fact that Blinken conveniently decided to omit.

Third, Blinken said the “whole world” supports the proposal and that Hamas is the only entity to avoid getting behind it.

This is highly misleading.

Over the past several months, the US and Israel have rejected and obstructed several serious ceasefire proposals, all of which have been backed by Hamas and the global community.

After engaging in this obstruction, the US made its very imperfect proposal on May 31.

Countries in the United Nations Security Council voted for it not because it was a great proposal, nor because they thought it was better than previous proposals which they had also voted for.

They voted for this proposal precisely because of US obstructionism. Countries know that this proposal is the only game in town, the only opportunity that the US and Israel will allow for at least a temporary cessation.

Several countries made their reservations known on Monday. Russia, China, Malta and Algeria, among other global actors, have expressed their reservations.

Blinken’s statement that the “entire world” stands behind the Biden proposal is deeply misleading.

Fourth, Blinken blamed Hamas for holding up the ceasefire for 12 days.

During his Wednesday remarks, Blinken mentioned the “12 days” – which is the time elapsed between Biden’s announcement and Hamas’s response – a total of five times.

Each mention was an attempt by Blinken to blame Hamas for the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza.

For example, Blinken said, “the reality is as this negotiation is going on, during the 12 days that it took Hamas to respond, the world wasn’t standing still. Gaza wasn’t standing still. People were suffering every single day.”

But Blinken is again being untruthful.

Biden announced the deal on May 31, but, as Sami Al-Arian and other analysts have noted, didn’t present a written, detailed draft to Hamas until much later.

The exact date is unclear, but based on news reports, it appears that as of June 5, Hamas still hadn’t received anything in writing from Biden.

It appears they may have finally received a written draft by June 6.

The group responded on June 11. That would mean a five-day gap, not the 12 that Blinken misleadingly claimed.

Given the apparently significant discrepancies between what Biden announced on May 31 and what he submitted to Hamas in writing, it is not unusual that Hamas needed five days to respond.

In any case, attempting to blame Hamas for Palestinian suffering constitutes another US attempt to shield Israel from blame over its mass killings in Gaza.

That Blinken would lie is not surprising. Indeed, in the context of Israel, the Palestinians, and Gaza, the Biden administration has a history of untruths.

But the sheer amount of lies that Blinken was able to pack into a short press conference is nonetheless astonishing.

Recent diplomatic manoeuvring isn’t likely to end the war on Gaza, but it will serve Biden’s domestic aims.

At the end of all this posturing, Biden will be able to tell US voters that he tried his best to end the war but that Hamas didn’t allow him to.

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• Mohamad Elmasry is a professor in the Media Studies program at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies.

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— Nasir Khan

Today is the birthday anniversary of Che Guevara (June 14, 1928 – October 9, 1967).

Che Guevara was and is an inspiration to all those who fight against and oppose imperialists and their lackeys throughout the world. The centre of that power was and still is the United States, the ‘leader’ of the warmongers, war criminals, weapon industries and its allies who further the cause of American hegemony and perpetuate the power of colonial powers like Israel.

Che Guevara and Fidel Castro stood against the gangster policies of the United States and its wars of aggression. For instance, the ethnic cleansing in Palestine that is still going on is because of the power Zionists wield in America and direct the course of US foreign policies.

In Iran, America and Britain toppled the democratic government of Dr Mossadegh in 1953 and reinstated the pliant regime of the Shah. The Washington rulers did the same with the socialist-democratic government of Allende in Chile. America has been the patron of all the right-wing dictatorships in Latin America.

The people who stood up against the American domination in the western hemisphere were Fidel Castro and his comrades like Che. They were the people who liberated Cuba from the Batista dictatorship and heroically upheld the cause of freedom and independence of the island nation despite all the efforts of the US to destroy the Cuban revolution and the CIA’s hundreds of secret plans and attempts to kill Fidel Castro.

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“Whenever death may surprise us, let it be welcome if our battle cry has reached even one receptive ear and another hand reaches out to take up our arms.”

—Che Guevara

Prof. John Mearsheimer On World War III, Russia & Israel

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_YZB2HpqDc

—Nasir Khan

The right-wing and far-right parties are on the victory march. The facade of social democracy is becoming obvious, and social democrats have become indistinguishable from conservatives. That is true of the most powerful Western countries, the UK, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Italy, etc. They supported old colonial powers earlier, and now they have only anti-Russia mantras to offer to their public whereas during the Soviet era, they were united against the S.U.

What is almost comical is Sweden’s role, which has joined NATO and will play as Washington says or presents as ‘the defence policy’ for the West. NATO led by war hawks, weapons producers and war profiteers are pushing the world to a nuclear Armageddon. Ordinary people have no say or influence. The powerful political and economic interests that rule Europe, North America, and the rest of the world have marginalized socialist parties and revolutionary groups. Sad times for the thinking people.

Imperialism and colonialism devalue and dehumanise the colonised, which enables the Israeli genocide of Palestinians

By Charlie Kimber, Socialist Worker, Monday 10 June 2024

Gaza has been decimated by Israeli colonialism (Photo: wikimedia commons)

It is central to imperialism and colonialism that the lives of colonisers are worth far, far more than the lives of those they oppress and eliminate.

That murderous arrogance is allied with racism—the white invader is more human, more advanced than the black and brown people he rules.

That disgusting calculus is not some ancient prejudice. It is as modern as this weekend’s news of the Israel’s massacre at the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza.

An Israeli bombardment killed at least 210 Palestinians and wounded more than 400. But this led to celebrations across Israel and in Western political circles because it saw four Israelis detainees freed.

One Israeli equals 50 or more Palestinians.

Nidal Abdo was in Nuseirat last Saturday when he described “something we never witnessed before, maybe 150 rockets fell in less than ten minutes, while we were running away more fell on the market”.

“There are children torn apart and scattered in the streets, they wiped out Nuseirat, it is hell on earth.”

The four who Israel seized back could have been freed without any violence if Binyamin Netanyahu’s regime had accepted one of the ceasefire deals.

Instead the Zionists chose murder—and the deaths of more detainees.

Abu Obeida, spokesperson for the Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas, said that some captives were killed during the Nuseirat operation. “By committing horrifying massacres the enemy was able to liberate a few of its prisoners but at the same time it killed some of them during the operation,” Obeida said.

There are many unanswered questions about the raid. Video footage obtained by Al-Jazeera showed Israeli special forces using an aid truck and a civilian car to carry out the operation.

An eyewitness described seeing what he thought was a truck carrying humanitarian aid before armed forces emerged from the vehicle and shot him.

Israel justifies its murder of civilians by saying Hamas shelters among humanitarian infrastructure.

The Nuseirat murders saw Israel use such a tactic. The US military provided “intelligence support” to Israel in the raid, according to the mainstream CBS News which cited two American officials.

Some reports claimed that US forces were involved in the operation on the ground, and the fake aid trucks left from the US-built pier.

Videos circulating on social media showed helicopters that were used in the operation to evacuate the Israeli captives taking off from near the US “humanitarian” pier.

There is a direct ideological line from the mass “elimination of the natives” in Australia, Canada and the Americas to imperialist- backed murder in Israel today.

This is how imperialism and colonialism have always behaved, and this won’t stop until revolution destroys the system that spawned such vile actions.

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Hundreds murdered in ravaged West Bank

“Unprecedented bloodshed”. This is how Volker Turk, the United Nations (UN) high commissioner for human rights, described the West Bank.

Israeli soldiers and settlers have murdered over 500 people in the West Bank since 7 October.

Last Friday Israeli soldiers invaded the West Bank city of Jenin, murdering three Palestinians.

They wounded at least 13 others. Jenin has been a particular target of the Israeli state because it is a stronghold for the resistance.

Israeli forces also murdered a child in the Far’a Camp, and a student was also murdered in the Dhanaba suburb, east of the city of Tulkarm, on Monday.

Israeli forces rounded up another 30 Palestinians on Monday, including a child and a woman, and detained them in Israeli jails.

A team of US special operations soldiers and intelligence personnel based in Israel assisted in the operation

by Dave DeCamp, Antiwar. com, June 9, 2024 Categories

NewsTags Gaza, Israel, Palestine

Israel received intelligence support from the US in its Saturday operation in central Gaza’s Nuseirat camp that killed over 200 Palestinians and freed four Israeli hostages.

The intelligence support included information provided by US drone flights over Gaza. The US began flying MQ-9 Reaper drones over Gaza days after October 7 and deployed special operations forces to Israel, demonstrating that US military support for Israel goes beyond providing weapons.

The Washington Post reported that a team of US special operations soldiers and intelligence personnel based at the US Embassy in Jerusalem provided the intelligence support. Besides the drone flights, the US provided communications intercepts, and Israel also received intelligence support from the UK.

Local residents said the Israeli special forces who carried out the raid were disguised as displaced Palestinians from Rafah, and others entered the camp in an aid truck. The Israeli military denied it used an aid truck, but Israeli media reported Israeli soldiers meant to blend in as Arabs were part of the attack. Israeli warplanes pounded Nuseirat as the Israeli commandos on the ground moved to locate the hostages.

According to Gaza’s Health Ministry, 274 Palestinians were killed in the attack on Nuseirat, and 678 were wounded. Gaza’s Media Office said 64 of the dead were children, and 57 were women. The total death toll in Gaza since October 7 has surpassed 37,000.

Israel claimed it killed less than 100 people in the assault, while the US said it didn’t know how many people died. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan celebrated the assault and also acknowledged that “innocent people” were killed.

“We, the United States, are not in a position today to make a definitive statement about that. The Israeli defense forces have put out one number. The Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry has put out another number,” Sullivan said. “But we do know this … Innocent people were tragically killed in this operation.”

Hamas alleged that the Israeli attack killed three other Israeli hostages, including an American citizen. The Palestinian group released a video of three corpses, but they were unidentifiable.

H. Scott Prosterman 06/06/2024

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Oakland, Ca. (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – President Joe Biden has proposed a new peace plan for Gaza, which is provisionally accepted by Hamas. Israeli cooperation is harder to come by, as Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu (Bibi) has made it clear he’s only interested in prosecuting the war in Gaza to exterminate Hamas, even if it means killing 30 innocents for every real terrorist. It’s particularly disturbing to hear the IDF spokesman say in essence, “It was a success because we killed two leaders of Oct. 7, even though 35 innocents were killed in the operation.” That’s a sociopathic approach, and cavalier attitude about murdering innocent people. Biden’s plan calls for:

• A six-week ceasefire with Israeli forces withdrawing from “all populated areas” of Gaza. Some elderly and women hostages would be freed, in exchange for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners. Then, Palestinian civilians could return to what’s left of their homes (if any), and 600 trucks a day would be allowed in with humanitarian aid. Hamas and Israel would negotiate a permanent ceasefire, which that Biden said would last “as long has Hamas lives up to its commitments.” If negotiations take more than six weeks, the temporary ceasefire would extend while they are at the table.
• There will be an exchange for all remaining living hostages, including male soldiers. Israeli forces will withdraw from Gaza,and the permanent ceasefire would begin.
• A major reconstruction plan for Gaza, and the return of the “final remains” of hostages to their families.

Joe Biden has become an embattled president for his continued support of the Israeli genocide in Gaza. Let’s call it what it is. Biden has paid lip service to the realities, but done nothing to withhold the US financial support that makes the assaults possible. Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu (Bibi) has already expressed intent to defy any US-led plans for a cease fire in Gaza, and he is held hostage from participating by his far-right government, who would quit if he went along. His right-wing coalition, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich have already threatened to collapse the government if the proposals are accepted.

Considering the way Bibi undermined Democratic President Barack Obama in 2015, it’s surprising that Democrats Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries signed on to the invitation to have Bibi address a joint session of Congress again. But this is a genuine bi-partisanship effort to keep hope alive. Consider also that eight Republican senators vowed to oppose any affirmative appointments or legislation, in retaliation for Donald Trump’s conviction in New York State Court, where there is NO federal authority or reach. But they blame Biden! They promise a sequel of Sen. Mitch McConnell’s vow to prevent President Obama from accomplishing anything.

As with Bibi, Donald Trump is running for president to stay out of jail. While Trump is now a convicted felon, and Bibi uses legislative Voodoo to delay facing his own criminal charges go away for bribery, corruption and breach of trust along with attacks on his own legal system. The parallels of their political careers, and swamping of their country’s political systems has become a threat to world stability. For now, Gaza is the fuse of the global tinderbox. Before these men served, no Israeli leader had ever dared to interfere in US electoral politics. Trump openly campaigned for Bibi. It’s almost as if they ran on the same ticket in 2020. The political survival of both men is dependent on generating political outrage among their bases, because they have nothing else to run on.

The latest fresh outrage is the most vivid illustration yet of Republican efforts to defy centuries of US Government customs and boundaries, in fealty to Trump. Senate Republicans are violating Separation of Powers boundaries, by pressuring Judge Juan Merchan to NOT sentence former President Trump to prison, because “that could disrupt the likely GOP nominee’s ability to campaign ahead of the November election.”  Excuse me, but campaigning is a privilege, not a natural or Constitutional right. Senator Thom Tillis argued, “Now he looks like he truly is being treated in a punitive way by the courts.” Don’t multiple felony convictions usually result in “punitive” sanctions? Not surprisingly, Sens. Ted Cruz and Rand Paul now expect the Supreme Court to overturn any conviction. That’s pure fantasy in the legal realm, because the SCOTUS does not get involved in state criminal cases, where no constitutional issues have been raised at trial. Ilya Somin, a George Mason University law professor said, “There is no procedure for a case like this to go directly from a state trial court to the federal Supreme Court. There just isn’t.”

NBC News Video: “New signs of tension between Biden and Israel’s Netanyahu over war”

While it would be unusual for Trump, or any defendant, to receive a prison sentence for a class E felony (1 in 10), his arrogant violations of numerous gag orders are part of the equation, and attacks on Court personnel would bring punitive sanctions against any citizen. These senators are engaging in unlawful intimidation of a judge when they say, “it would be an abuse of power,” and characterizing a valid legal decision as “weaponizing the Justice Department,” as Sen. John Cornyn claimed. Their arguments that, “any sentence that would impact Trump’s mobility or ability to communicate with voters could seriously undermine voters’ confidence in the fairness of the 2024 election,” is an act of intimidation, and a veiled threat of more widespread January 6 riots. Their argument rests on the fiction that Trump running for president affords him special protections, not available to other citizens. This ignores the fact that Trump has demonstrated a sense of imperial entitlement to break laws as it suits his authoritarian ambitions. By presuming to “instruct” a judge how to manage Trump’s case, these senators, who voted to overturn the 2020 Election; are openly promoting an end to our democratic system, and embrace of an openly Fascist authoritarian.

            Trump and Bibi have undermined their nation’s judicial systems with their paranoid “deep state conspiracy” claims. They behave like Fascist, and accuse their opponents of their own sins, just as Ronald Reagan taught them.  At the same time, Trump has destroyed confidence is the US Court system, by stacking the courts with far-right ideologues, in fealty to him. Judge Aileen Cannon in Florida is a destructive example, having “spent so much time puzzling over minor issues that the trial would almost certainly be delayed beyond the presidential election in November.” It’s hard to know if she really believes there’s any valid legal reasoning for delaying his date with Justice in the Florida documents case, or is fearful for her life and family as many Trump turncoat-patriots have been. Now the guilty verdict is being spun to his political advantage, and immediately yielded an additional $34.8M for his campaign.

Vladimir Putin and Bibi are waiting for Trump to return to office, to better consolidate their respective authoritarian regimes and war campaigns. After all, he gave both everything they wanted when he was president. Bibi’s plan is to prosecute the war until the November election, betting on Trump’s return, and approval to consolidate his hold on Gaza. But whereas Bibi has empowered and enabled the worst settler elements of Israeli society to ramp up the violence against West Bank Palestinians, by elevating Israeli “Proud Boys” to cabinet positions; Trump has shot steroids into the Christian Nationalist movement in the US, with brazen Fascist underpinnings. Both leaders made Faustian bargains with the most extreme elements of their political bases for political survival. But neither learned to play guitar like Robert Johnson.

Biden’s passive-aggressive approach to Gaza is working against him on two fronts. His unqualified support for Israel alienates many progressive voters in the US (including Jews), who recognize the atrocity at hand. Yet he is so patronizing towards Jews that his policies prompted a Jewish employee of the Interior Dept. to resign in protest. In a column in The Guardian, Lily Greenberg Call said, “The president has weaponized the idea of Jewish safety to justify the atrocity in Gaza. I could no longer stand by. I resigned on Wednesday, 15 May – the 76th anniversary of the Nakba – because I could no longer serve at the pleasure of a president who refuses to stop another catastrophe.” She added, “Each day, I see photos of those displaced in Gaza, and I am reminded of my own family’s memory of loved ones killed in the Shoah – which, in turn, reminds me of the Nakba: the tragedy that occurred in 1948 when  . . . 700,000 Palestinians were displaced from their homeland for the formation of today’s modern Israel. Shoah and Nakba mean the same thing in Hebrew and Arabic: catastrophe.” Meanwhile, the current Israeli offensive has displaced over 1 million people. This podcast of Lily Greenberg Call encapsulates many of the objections to Biden’s management of the crisis. She said, “We’ve seen the president continue to express unconditional support for Israel in Gaza, and using my community, the Jewish community as the justification for that – saying, ‘what’s happening to Palestinians in Gaza is necessary to keep the Jewish community safe. . . . It’s also disastrous for the Jewish communities around the world.”

But consider that Trump has weaponized his phony concern for Jews far worse than Biden has; and that fueled his disastrous Abraham Accords, the US Embassy move to Jerusalem, and appointment of David Friedman as Ambassador to Israel. Republicans have become so emboldened, they assume that a man who could “shoot somebody on 5^th Ave. and still be elected,” could be elected president from Riker’s Island.

Filed Under: Donald Trump, Featured, Israel/ Palestine, Joe Biden, US politics

About the Author

H. Scott Prosterman is a writer and communications consultant in the San Francisco Bay Area, and holds an M.A. in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Michigan