Peter Oborne, Midddle East Eye, 24 June 2024

Few are better qualified to challenge the official orthodoxy that stifles any discussion of this topic

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken (L) is welcomed by Aipac President Michael Tuchin at the committee’s policy summit in Washington on 5 June 2023 (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images/AFP)

No review has yet been published of Professor Ilan Pappe’s magnificent and passionate new book on the Zionist lobby. This silence is no surprise. Even a passing reference to the lobby is liable to lead to charges of antisemitism and potential career destruction.

Faiza Shaheen was dropped like a stone last month as Labour candidate for the London seat of Chingford and Woodford Green. “There have been complaints, allegedly, about her ‘liking’ a tweet that referred to the ‘Israel lobby’ – widely considered an anti-Semitic trope,” reported the New Statesman’s associate political editor, Rachel Cunliffe.

On a now-infamous Newsnight appearance following her defenestration, a tearful Shaheen apologised for liking the tweet and accepted it was a “trope”.

She didn’t have much choice. The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), the statutory regulator, agrees. In 2020, it cited a claim that the “Israel lobby” was behind antisemitism complaints as evidence supporting a finding of unlawful antisemitic harassment.

Pappe has entered perilous territory. Few are better qualified to challenge the official orthodoxy that discussion of the Israel lobby is out of bounds. None are more battle-hardened.

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One of the most eminent of the “new historians” who retold Israel’s foundation story, Pappe was denounced in the Knesset after publication in 2006 of his controversial book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Israel’s education minister called on the University of Haifa to sack him, and one of Israel’s best-selling newspapers pictured him at the centre of a target, next to which a columnist had written: “I’m not telling you to kill this person, but I shouldn’t be surprised if someone did.” 

After a slew of death threats, he left Israel, and was lucky to be able to find a billet at the University of Exeter. 

Targeting politicians and journalists

The famous French publisher Fayard recently halted distribution of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Last month, Pappe, who remains an Israeli citizen, was interrogated for two hours by federal agents upon arrival in the United States. He was eventually let in, but only after they copied the contents of his phone. This kind of harassment, Pappe later noted, is nothing compared to what Palestinians routinely face. 

He has produced a work that needs to be read, and then re-read, by anyone who wishes to understand the international context of the war in Gaza. The book describes how the Israel lobby has targeted both politicians and journalists.

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Two British politicians lost out on foreign office jobs amid pressure from the lobby on account of pro-Palestinian sympathies: Alan Duncan in 2016 and Christopher Mayhew in 1964. George Brown, a former Labour foreign secretary, was also targeted in the 1960s. 

The lobby has gone after journalists such as Jeremy Bowen, who was forced to endure a long BBC investigation; former Guardian Jerusalem correspondent Suzanne Goldenberg; former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger; and broadcaster Jonathan Dimbleby. 

The Israeli government repeatedly complained to the BBC that foreign correspondent Orla Guerin was “antisemitic” and showed “total identification with the goals and methods of Palestinian terror groups”, once even linking her reporting from the Middle East to the rise of antisemitism in Britain – allegations that were as grotesque as they were false. 

There are other names on this long list.

In the US, William Fulbright, the longest-serving chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is the earliest and most devastating example. The appalling story of his destruction in 1974 is well told in this book: “Lobby money poured into the campaign coffers of his rival, Arkansas Governor Dale Bumpers … From that time to this day, the road to the Capitol has been scattered with candidates, from the elite of American politics, whose careers have been similarly torpedoed,” Pappe writes. 

Fulbright’s crime was to argue that “instead of rearming Israel, we could have peace in the Middle East at once if we just told Tel Aviv to withdraw behind its 1967 borders and guarantee them”.

‘Nothing to touch them’

This merciless treatment of individuals distinguishes the pro-Israel lobby from other lobbies, both foreign and corporate. Michael Mates, a former member of the parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee, once told me (in a quote repeated in Pappe’s book) that “the pro-Israel lobby in our body politic is the most powerful political lobby. There’s nothing to touch them.” 

Pappe goes far back into history to sketch the origins of the agitation for the return of the Jewish people to Palestine. This story begins with Christian evangelicals two centuries ago, which might explain Pappe’s employment of the term “Zionist lobby” rather than the standard “pro-Israel lobby”.

In the remote past as much as the present day, this type of support for Israel was animated by antisemitism. In the 1840s, religious scholar George Bush, a direct ancestor of two US presidents, called for a revived Jewish state in Palestine, expressing hope that Jewish people would be offered “the same carnal inducements to remove to Syria as now promote them to emigrate to this country”.

These early Christian supporters of a Jewish Palestine, like later Christian Zionists, were oblivious to the Palestinian presence in what they saw as the Holy Land. For them, Palestine was unchanged since the time of Jesus. In the words of Pappe, “later it was imagined as being organically part of medieval Europe: its people donning medieval dress, roaming a European countryside”.

In Britain, Edwin Montagu, one of the earliest practising Jews to serve in a British cabinet, described Zionism as a “mischievous political creed” – a phrase that would have had him thrown out of Keir Starmer’s Labour Party and pilloried in the media. 

He viewed the Balfour Declaration as antisemitic, while warning that “when the Jews are told that Palestine is their national home, every country will immediately desire to get rid of its Jewish citizens, and you will find a population in Palestine driving out its present inhabitants”. 

Safeguarding Israel’s legitimacy

After the establishment of Israel, the lobby’s main job became to safeguard the legitimacy of the Israeli state. Pappe shows that the Labour Party was a stronger and more reliable supporter than the Conservatives. He stresses the role of Poale Zion, antecedent to today’s Jewish Labour Movement, which originally sought to reconcile Marxism and Zionism. It convinced the trade unions and Labour that Israel was a socialist project. 

Pappe writes that Poale Zion became “part of a lobby meant to arrest any potential anti-Israel orientations in the Labour Party in Britain and strengthen the relationship between the Labour Party and its pro-Israel Jewish constituencies”. 

According to Pappe, former Prime Minister Harold Wilson, who led Labour from 1963 to 1976, was “pro-Israel to the bone”. Pappe speculates that Wilson’s admiration for Israel, like David Lloyd George’s in a previous generation, was a product of a nonconformist Christian education. The late politician Roy Jenkins noted that Wilson’s book, The Chariot of Israel, was “one of the most strongly Zionist tracts ever written by a non-Jew”.

This timely book from one of the finest historians of contemporary Israel deserves to become the subject of urgent contemporary debate. So far, it has been ignored

Alec Douglas-Home, foreign secretary in the Edward Heath government that succeeded Wilson’s administration after the 1970 general election, was more friendly to Palestinians. An Old Etonian aristocrat, Douglas-Home is today dismissed as a hopeless old fogey and aberration in postwar Britain. 

Today, his views would bring a nod of approbation from the Palestine Solidarity Campaign. According to Pappe, “he was the only British foreign secretary to openly discuss the right of return of the Palestinian refugees that were expelled by Israel in 1948”, and, still more remarkable, “the only British foreign secretary to challenge the dishonest brokery of the Americans”. 

In the wake of the 1967 war, Douglas-Home insisted, with Heath’s support, that Britain could no longer ignore the “political aspirations of the Palestinian Arabs”. In government, he infuriated Israel by allowing the Palestine Liberation Organization to set up a London office. 

Pappe says that Douglas-Home was the only senior British politician, with the important exception of the hard-drinking George Brown, to interpret UN Resolution 242 as a demand for unconditional Israeli withdrawal to the borders of 5 June 1967. During the 1973 war, the Heath government refused to deliver arms to Israel – though, as Pappe notes, this was mostly due to a fear of the Arab oil embargo.

The Corbyn years

Pappe’s historical perspective enables him to see the Jeremy Corbyn leadership of the Labour Party in a new light. “Corbyn’s views on Palestine were virtually identical to those expressed by most British diplomats and senior politicians ever since 1967; like them he supported a two-state solution and recognised the Palestinian Authority,” Pappe writes. This made him more mainstream than the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, which supported a one-state solution. 

In light of this, Pappe reasonably asks: “Why did the lobby see him as such a threat”? He answers: “They suspected, correctly, that he sincerely believed in a just two-state solution and wouldn’t swallow Israel’s excuses for obstructing it.” 

The killing of Jeremy Corbyn

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In a thought-provoking passage, he adds: “Christopher Mayhew, George Brown and Jeremy Corbyn had much in common. They were in positions of power that could affect British policy towards Israel. They were all totally loyal to the official British policy supporting a two-state solution to the ‘conflict’. None of them denied the right of Israel to exist, none of them had made any anti-Semitic remark in their lifetime and they were not anti-Semitic in any sense of the word.”  

Pappe also has harsh words for the EHRC inquiry into Labour antisemitism. “In a more reasonable world, or maybe years from now,” he writes, “if people were asked about what a leading institution for human rights would investigate in relation to Israel and Palestine, they would give the abuse of Palestinians’ human rights as the answer … [in this report], there was no serious discussion of what constitutes anti-Semitism, nor did it make any attempt to differentiate between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism and criticism of Israel.” 

In a short conclusion written after the horrors of 7 October, Pappe writes: “Many people in the twenty-first century cannot continue to accept a colonisation project requiring military occupation and discriminatory laws to sustain itself. There is a point at which the lobby cannot endorse this brutal reality and continue to be seen as moral in the eyes of the rest of the world. I believe and hope this point will be reached within our lifetimes.”

This timely book from one of the finest historians of contemporary Israel deserves to become the subject of urgent contemporary debate. So far, it has been ignored in a media and political environment that, as the recent case of Shaheen illustrates, has imposed a system of omerta around any discussion of the Israel lobby.

Lobbing for Zionism on Both Sides of the Atlantic is published by Oneworld.

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

Peter Oborne won best commentary/blogging in both 2022 and 2017, and was also named freelancer of the year in 2016 at the Drum Online Media Awards for articles he wrote for Middle East Eye. He was also named as British Press Awards Columnist of the Year in 2013. He resigned as chief political columnist of the Daily Telegraph in 2015. His latest book is The Fate of Abraham: Why the West is Wrong about Islam, published in May by Simon & Schuster. His previous books include The Triumph of the Political Class, The Rise of Political Lying, Why the West is Wrong about Nuclear Iran and The Assault on Truth: Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and the Emergence of a New Moral Barbarism.

Israel ordered the “Hannibal Directive” on October 7 by ordering the killing of captive Israeli soldiers and civilians. But the U.S. media continues to hide the truth.

By James North, Mondoweiss, July 10, 202420

Israeli soldiers sit in a tank near the Israel-Gaza border after the end of a seven-day truce between Israel and Hamas, December 1, 2023, Kibbutz Beeri. (Photo: © Ilia Yefimovich/dpa via ZUMA Press/APA Images)

Three days ago, Israel’s leading newspaper, Haaretz, published the results of its thorough, comprehensive investigation into what actually happened when Hamas attacked on October 7. So far, the U.S. mainstream media has not said a word about the shocking results of that investigation. Critics sometimes use the expression “media malpractice” to describe the American mainstream’s failure to report accurately about Israel/Palestine. This time, though, what’s happening is even worse; it has to be deliberate self-censorship, designed to hide the truth from the U.S. audience.

Haaretz’s long report found that Israel’s army had employed the “Hannibal Directive” on October 7. The Directive is an Israeli policy that instructs the military to open fire on its own soldiers to prevent them from being taken captive. Of course, this site, alongside other alternative media sources, was one of the first to point out the possible role of the Hannibal Directive in Israeli deaths on October 7. But the Haaretz report was significant in the number of military sources it interviewed who confirmed that there were direct orders to implement the Directive.

Haaretz explained that the policy has “the intent of foiling kidnapping even at the expense of the lives of the kidnapped.” At first, the army started deploying “Ziks,” unmanned assault drones. Later, the army fired mortars, and then artillery shells. Haaretz also confirmed that the military did know that Israeli civilians had also been taken hostage, but, nonetheless, at 11:22 a.m. the order came down: “Not a single vehicle can return to Gaza.”

The Haaretz report is cautious, but it still concludes: “[The 11:22 a.m. message] was understood by everyone. . .  At this point, the IDF was not aware of the extent of kidnapping along the Gaza border, but it did know that many people were involved. Thus, it was entirely clear what the message meant, and what the fate of some of the kidnapped people would be.” 

In other words, some — possibly many —  of the Israeli deaths that day, including civilians, were deliberately caused by Israel’s own military. How this is not news is incomprehensible. But, three days later, in the New York Times: not a word. The Washington Post: nothing. CNN: nothing. National Public Radio: nada.  

Instead, if you plug “Hannibal” into the search engines at these media sites, the results only mention “Hannibal Lecter,” the fictional serial killer who was the subject of a book and popular film.

But there’s nothing new about the Israeli military’s Hannibal Directive. (The doctrine is probably named for the Carthaginian general who fought Rome in 200 B.C., who said he would swallow poison instead of surrendering. Some Israeli sources claimed that the name was randomly generated, an assertion that prompts skepticism.) 

Way back on October 22, this site reported :

“A growing number of reports indicate Israeli forces responsible for Israeli civilian and military deaths following October 7 attack.”

Then, last March, the estimable Jonathan Ofir also posted here that an actual Israeli soldier, Captain Bar Zonshein, had admitted to “firing tank shells on vehicles carrying Israeli civilians.”  

The even more comprehensive Haaretz investigation should have prompted a reaction from the mainstream U.S. reporters who are stationed in Israel. American journalists should have been cultivating their own sources since October 7, and been ready to at least match the Haaretz article. Instead, the only response so far has been a panel hosted by Piers Morgan, and a Mehdi Hasan/Bassem Youssef podcast. 

I’ve followed the U.S. media coverage of Israel/Palestine closely for more than a decade now. Continuing to hide Israel’s deployment of the Hannibal Directive on October 7 is one of the most offensive examples of self-censorship that I can recall. The mainstream’s dishonesty is just one more example of why alternative websites are indispensable. 

GazaGaza genocideHannibal DirectiveOctober 7Top Headlines

The EU continues to export weapons to Israel and provide funding to various Israeli entities.

By Niamh Ni Bhriain and Mark Akkerman

Aljazeera, 6 Jul 2024

It has been nine months since the start of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, which has killed more than 38,000 Palestinians, injured more than 86,000, and displaced more than 1.9 million. Despite frequent words of condemnation, European leaders have done little to stop it. Worse still, many European countries continue to stand by Israel economically and militarily.

As the United States is considered the biggest backer of the Israeli war machine, it is easy to discount European support. A closer look at the extent of European financial and military assistance for Israel, however, lays bare the EU’s complicity in the continuing genocide in Gaza and various atrocities in the occupied West Bank.

Supplying arms used for genocide

The EU is the second-largest arms supplier to Israel after the US. According to figures from the European External Action Service’s COARM database, between 2018 and 2022, EU member states sold arms worth 1.76 billion euros ($1.9bn) to Israel.

Arms have continued to flow from EU countries to Israel even after the International Court of Justice made an interim ruling in January that the Israeli army was plausibly committing genocide. The EU has a system in place to implement arms embargoes but has refused to apply to Israel, leaving member states to slowly implement measures under pressure from civil society with scant political will to do so and falling far short of what is required.

Some EU countries including Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and Belgium’s Wallonia region, have announced that they would suspend arms transfers to Israel, but some of these statements were not followed up with timely concrete actions, or when they were, these amounted to temporary or partial arms transfer suspensions, which fell far short of a full arms embargo on Israel.

According to SIPRI, Germany is by far the largest European supplier, providing Israel with 30 percent of its weapons between 2019 and 2023. Exports increased tenfold last year from 32.3 million euros ($35m) to 326.5 million euros ($354m) with the majority of licences granted after October 7.

According to EU data, between 2018 and 2022 there were other large European suppliers to Israel. These included Romania which issued export licences worth 314.9 million euro, Italy – with 90.30 million euros ($98m), the Czech Republic – with 81.55 million euros ($88.3m) and Spain – with 62.9 million euros ($68.1m). The EU has not yet released data for arms transfers for 2023.

Beyond supplying Israel directly, EU arms are often indirectly exported to Israel via the US. Although arms exports are subject to end-user agreements, the US refuses to comply with this stipulation and EU countries don’t enforce it. This makes it impossible to track the full extent to which EU arms and components exported to the US eventually end up in weapons systems shipped to Israel.

Nevertheless, known EU military exports to Israel can be directly connected to the genocide in Gaza. Israeli’s Merkava tanks, operating in Gaza since the ground invasion began in late October, are using engine components manufactured by German company MTU  (a subsidiary of Rolls Royce), while Sa’ar corvettes, warships built by German company ThyssenKrupp Marine Systems, have been active in the waters surrounding the besieged strip.

British company BAE Systems, in conjunction with German company Rheinmetall, manufactures M109 self-propelled howitzers which have been used to shell densely populated areas in Gaza. Amnesty International has found evidence that these artillery weapons also deployed white phosphorus munitions, which can burn skin down to the bone and cause organ dysfunction; their use in civilian areas is restricted under international law.

Consortium News, July 3, 2024

Israel’s complete dependence on U.S. support means the Biden administration has all the leverage it needs to force an end to Israel’s aggressions at any time.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem on June 10. (State Department, Chuck Kennedy)

By Caitlin Johnstone
CaitlinJohnstone.com.au

Listen to Tim Foley reading this article.

Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has been launching a forceful attack on Benjamin Netanyahu in both U.S. and Israeli media for sabotaging peace in Gaza and pushing Israel to the brink with Hezbollah in Lebanon.

During this he inadvertently made an interesting acknowledgement that flies in the face of the Biden administration’s feigned powerlessness to rein in Israel’s assault on Palestinians. 

“I accuse the prime minister of Israel of a deliberate attempt to destroy the political-security-military alliance between Israel and the United States,” Olmert writes in an op-ed for Haaretz titled “I Accuse Netanyahu of Betrayal.”

“For many years, Israel’s political stability in the international arena rested on the absolute support of the United States,” writes Olmert, adding,  “The entire Israel Air Force relies completely on American aircraft: fighter planes, transport planes, refueler planes and helicopters. All of Israel’s air power is based on the American commitment to defend Israel. We have no other reliable source for essential supplies of equipment, munitions and advanced weapons that Israel cannot manufacture on its own.”

Olmert’s comments echo those made in November of last year by retired Israeli Major General Yitzhak Brick, who said of the Israeli assault on Gaza, 

“All of our missiles, the ammunition, the precision-guided bombs, all the airplanes and bombs, it’s all from the U.S. The minute they turn off the tap, you can’t keep fighting. You have no capability. … Everyone understands that we can’t fight this war without the United States. Period.”

Contrast these frank admissions by longtime Israeli government insiders with the way the Biden administration has been pretending since the early days of this onslaught that there is nothing it can do to force Israel to be less monstrous and murderous in Gaza, constantly posturing as a passive witness to genocidal atrocity after genocidal atrocity while the Western press churn out nonstop anonymously-sourced articles about how secretly upset the president is with the Netanyahu regime.

It’s just a simple fact that Israel’s complete dependence on U.S. support means the Biden administration has all the leverage it needs to force an end to Israel’s aggressions at any time, but instead you’ll get White House officials like John Kirby, national security communications adviser, spouting nonsense about how Israel is a completely independent nation to whom the U.S. is incapable of dictating any terms whatsoever.

Kirby at a press briefing in October 2023. (White House, Oliver Contreras)

When asked by the press back in February if the U.S. was doing anything to deter Israel from its planned assault on Rafah, for example, Kirby replied as follows:

“[Israel] is a sovereign nation. They plan their military operations, and they conduct their military operations, and they make the choices. It’s not like we give them a homework assignment, and they have to then turn in their plan to us for grading. We have said that from our perspective, as a friend of Israel and as a supporter of their efforts to defend themselves, we would expect that any plan for going into Rafah would properly account for the now more than a million civilians that are seeking refuge down there.”

Israel has since launched a brutal assault on Rafah which features regular massacres of civilians, with the Israeli military forces now reportedly working toward the complete capture of the entire city. This despite the White House previously having said that a “major ground operation” in Rafah would be a “red line” for this administration.

The U.S. is just as responsible for what’s happening in Gaza as Israel itself, and will be responsible for everything that happens in Lebanon as well. They could end this at any time, and they choose to keep it going instead. As Noam Chomsky once said during the Second Intifada, “They’re not Israeli helicopters, they’re U.S. helicopters with Israeli pilots.”

Caitlin Johnstone’s work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following her on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud, YouTube, or throwing some money into her tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy her books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff she publishes is to subscribe to the mailing list at her website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything she publishes.  For more info on who she is, where she stands and what she’s trying to do with her platform, click here. All works are co-authored with her American husband Tim Foley.

This article is from CaitlinJohnstone.com.au and re-published with permission.

Andre Damon, WSWS.ORG, July 3, 2024

@Andre__Damon

Israel ordered the mass displacement of another 250,000 people from the city of Khan Younis in Gaza on Monday, in the latest stage of its genocide against the population of the narrow Palestinian enclave.

The ongoing bloodbath has the full approval of the Biden administration in the United States which is funding, arming and politically supporting Israel’s policy of genocide ethnic cleansing. Last week, Reuters reported that the US government has provided Israel with 14,000 massive 2,000-pound bombs—more than any other type—making clear that the destruction of Gaza and the massacre of its population is the intended US policy.

The United Nations condemned the latest mass displacement. “Yesterday’s order for evacuation of 117 square kilometers in Khan Younis and Rafah governorates applies to about a third of the Gaza Strip—making it the largest such order since October, when residents were ordered to evacuate northern Gaza,” said a spokesperson for UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.

Those fleeing the city were forced to set up temporary shelters “at the water’s edge because displacement camps are already packed at the coast,” the UN said.

Khan Younis had been largely abandoned weeks ago following earlier evacuation orders, with most of the population pushed into Gaza’s southernmost city of Rafah. But with Israeli forces launching an attack on Rafah, those seeking shelter there were once again forced into Khan Younis. On Monday, they were forced to flee again.

“It’s another devastating blow to the humanitarian response here, it’s another devastating blow to the people, the families on the ground. It seems that they’ve been forcibly displaced again and again,” UNRWA Senior Communications Officer Louise Wateridge said.

She continued, “How do parents decide where to go? Where is there to go? Already by this morning, just to the middle Gaza area, along the coastal road, you can see the makeshift shelters right up to the shoreline, right up to the water coming in. It is absolutely packed with families who have already had to move.”

She added, “In the north, middle and south areas of the Gaza Strip, no place is safe. Already on the ground, we are seeing families move away from this area. There is more chaos and panic spreading on the ground.”

Al Jazeera reported that 12 members of a single family were killed by an Israeli airstrike Tuesday after evacuating from Khan Younis to a supposed “safe zone.”

One displaced man, Bakri Bakri, told AFP News agency, “There is no room for us or any of the displaced.” He added, “We have left again, and we do not know where to go. We went back to our place in al-Mawasi, but we could not find it because there are so many displaced. We slept in the street without shelter, without food, without water.”

Israel’s assault on Rafah has largely shut the border crossing with Egypt, cutting the flow of food and energy into Gaza to a trickle. Hospitals are forced to ration power and cannot provide normal levels of care, much less enough to deal with the hundreds of people being wounded by Israeli bullets and bombs each day.

“Hospitals are once again short on fuel, risking disruption to critical services as injured people are dying because ambulance services are facing delays due to a shortage of fuel,” World Health Organization Regional Director Dr. Hanan Balkhy told UN News.

The lack of clean and potable water is leading to a surge of disease, which hospitals are simply not equipped to deal with.

The daily Israeli bombardment continues throughout the Gaza Strip. Between June 27 and July 1, 135 Gazans were killed and 631 were injured. The official death toll stands at 37,900, but there has been widespread speculation that the real death toll could be in the hundreds of thousands.

A report by UN Women last month noted that 557,000 women in Gaza are facing food insecurity, “leading many to skip meals or reduce their intake to ensure their children are fed.” A recent UN survey found that 76 percent of pregnant women were suffering from anemia, while “99 percent reported facing challenges in accessing necessary nutritional supplies and supplements.” The UN noted, “Faced with no alternatives, women are also largely relying on burning wood, plastic, and other waste materials to cook, being particularly exposed to hazardous smoke and pollutants that cause respiratory and other health issues, the survey found.”

Gaza’s Health Ministry noted that hospitals are facing “rampant” skin infections and lice outbreaks, as well as 880,000 cases of respiratory diseases.

In a statement to the United Nations Security Council, UN Coordinator for Gaza Sigrid Kaag declared, “Over one million people have been displaced once again, desperately seeking shelter and safety. 1.9 million people are now displaced across Gaza.” She said, “The war has not merely created the most profound of humanitarian crises. It has unleashed a maelstrom of human misery.”

Meanwhile, Israeli officials have announced that they are implementing a plan for creating what they call “humanitarian bubbles” throughout Gaza, a euphemistic term for what will effectively be concentration camps.

In an article titled “The Postwar Vision That Sees Gaza Sliced Into Security Zones,” the Wall Street Journal reported over the weekend a US-Israeli plan to create “temporary shelters” in the form of “fenced-off geographic islands located next to their neighborhoods and guarded by the Israeli military.”

This plan is being put into effect, the Financial Times reported, in a series of camps throughout Northern Gaza. The camps “will soon be launched in the northern Gaza neighborhoods of Atatra, Beit Hanoun, and Beit Lahia, according to six people with knowledge of the plan,” the FT reported.

Israeli officials, meanwhile, are pledging even more barbaric treatment of the Palestinian people. In a post on Twitter, Israeli National Security Minister Ben Gvir declared, “Since I assumed the position of Minister of National Security, one of the highest goals I have set for myself is to worsen the conditions of the terrorists in the prisons, and to reduce their rights to the minimum required by law.”

He declared, “It is very possible that even after the addition of the new prisons is completed, the many terrorists will still be overcrowded in prison. I have already proposed a much simpler solution, of enacting the death penalty for terrorists, which would solve the overcrowding issue.”

Demonstrate in Washington D.C. · July 24

Sign up to get involved

On July 24th, Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu will address a joint session of the U.S. Congress, invited by Democratic and Republican leaders. Netanyahu is prosecuting genocidal war resulting in over 40,000 Palestinian deaths, mostly women and children. He is being welcomed not in spite of, but because of these crimes. As a political agent of U.S. imperialism, his speech will serve as a progress report on how this war advances American capitalist interests globally.

On the same day, thousands will demonstrate in Washington against this war. The Socialist Equality Party, International Youth and Students for Social Equality, and International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees call for widespread participation in this protest. This demonstration aims to ignite a mass movement against the Gaza genocide and U.S. imperialism, rejecting any illusion that Congress might change its policies. Instead, it seeks a new political orientation and strategy.

Following the demonstration, there will be a meeting to assess the events of the day and discuss and elaborate the socialist strategy to advance the fight against genocide and war.

The Gaza genocide is part of a broader global conflict instigated by U.S. imperialism, threatening nuclear escalation. The same governments supplying Israel are also intensifying proxy wars, including the US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine, and escalating tensions with China. Recognizing this interconnected imperialist aggression is crucial for developing a powerful mass movement against war, genocide, and fascism.

The demonstration and meeting are based on three strategic principles:

1. The struggle against war requires an unconditional break from the Democratic and Republican parties, establishing the political independence of the working class.
2. The movement against genocide and war must be international, uniting workers globally based on their common class interests.
3. The fight against war must be anti-capitalist and socialist, targeting the economic system that fundamentally causes war.

Join the demonstration and meeting in Washington, D.C. on July 24th! Mobilize your co-workers, friends, and communities. Distribute this message widely. Stop the genocide and declare war on war.

Haidar Eid

Middle East Eye, published date: 28 June 2024

Palestinians must start discussing radical solutions to end Israeli occupation, apartheid and settler-colonialism

Relatives of Eyad Hegazi, a 10-year-old Palestinian child who died of malnutrition as a result of Israel’s siege on Gaza, mourn outside the Aqsa Martyrs hospita in Gaza on 14 June, 2024 (AFP)

The bitter reality for Palestinians in Gaza is that we are alone, beleaguered, under siege, and abandoned even by those who are supposed to be our brethren. 

Nearly nine months of barbaric massacres have claimed the lives of more than 37,000 Palestinians, many of whom are women and children. The victims have included doctors and nurses on duty in hospitals, university students, and people doing household chores. 

Entire families have been slaughtered in broad daylight, amid Israel’s systematic destruction of thousands of homes in Gaza. Another 10,000 people are missing, believed to be dead and buried under the rubble.

And yet, the US still blames Palestinians, while criticising international courts for trying to hold Israel to account for its ongoing genocide.  

Palestinians have been left alone to defend themselves against the onslaught of a state backed by the world’s biggest army. The US has supplied Israel with billions of dollars in weaponry, including bombs and fighter jets, to prolong its war. 

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Meanwhile, the humanitarian tragedy in Gaza has reached unimaginable levels. The few remaining hospitals are struggling to cope with the influx of injured civilians. Neighbouring Arab regimes have done nothing more than issue timid statements of condemnation, while mediating between oppressor and oppressed. 

Indeed, Arab regimes have let Palestinians down since 1948, through a combination of cowardice and hypocrisy. They have failed to bring an end to Israel’s 17-year siege on Gaza, or even to offer meaningful solidarity with the Palestinian people, who are at the receiving end of Israel’s brutal military offensive.

Aiding the oppressor

From Gaza, we wonder how, in the absence of democracy, the timid expressions of support in the streets and capitals of Arab nations can be turned into concrete action. We wonder whether the Arab peoples living under the rule of authoritarian regimes can change those regimes in nonviolent ways. 

We have exhausted ourselves trying to figure out the possible ways of achieving democratic political change. As the Gaza genocide drags on, we have not seen any practical translation by Arab states of the solidarity shown by some of their peoples with Palestine.

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South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu once said: “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” 

Once again, the international community, United Nations, European Union and Arab leaders have remained largely silent about Israel’s ongoing atrocities. This puts them on Israel’s side. 

From Rafah, to Nuseirat, to Jabalia … we have reached a pivotal moment in Palestinian history. Gaza yearns for a leadership that rises to the occasion

Thousands of corpses of women and children have failed to convince them of the need to act. Palestinians have realised that they have only one tenable option: popular power, which is the only force capable of tackling the huge asymmetry of power in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. 

For the past 17 years, the two choices for Palestinians in Gaza have been to die slowly amid Israel’s suffocating blockade, or to fight for dignity – their own and that of future generations. Many have chosen to fight, departing from years of self-deception that portrayed subjugation to the occupier as a fait accompli.

In this context, proposed ceasefire initiatives do not take into account Israel’s objectives in the Gaza war: eliminating the largest number of Palestinians possible by targeting civilian homes and infrastructure, and removing any potential source of resistance to Israeli occupation in the open-air extermination camp we know as Gaza.

Root causes

Instead, the initiatives that have been put forward equate Palestinian resistance with the Israeli regime of systematic oppression, apartheid and settler-colonialism. It seems as though the world expects Palestinians to simply accept their slow death without any form of rebellion.

But Palestinians, in Gaza and elsewhere, will not oblige.

Any agreement that does not lead to an immediate ceasefire, the lifting of Israel’s devastating blockade, and the permanent reopening of all border crossings in a manner that allows the entry of fuel, medicine and other basic goods, will not be acceptable to the people of Gaza. The deal must also provide for the withdrawal of Israeli forces without delay.

War on Gaza: Why Arab states are failing the Palestinian people

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The current war cannot be seen in isolation from the root causes of the situation in Gaza: Israel’s settler-colonial enterprise, occupation, apartheid and ethnic cleansing. This conflict must be situated within our demand for the Palestinian right of return to the lands from which hundreds of thousands were driven out in 1948. Two-thirds of the people of Gaza are refugees who have this right under international law.

From Rafah, to Nuseirat, to Jabalia and the rest of Gaza, we have reached a pivotal moment in Palestinian history. Gaza yearns for a leadership that rises to the occasion, recognising the idea of Palestine from the river to the sea. 

Any talk of improving our conditions of oppression – and even this is seen as too much for us – in light of the great sacrifices that have been made, is a betrayal of Gaza’s martyrs. We need to start discussing radical solutions to move beyond the status quo, and adopt a clear slogan: End the occupation, end apartheid, and end settler-colonialism. If this happens, all the lives lost in Gaza would not have been lost in vain.

Tom Mackaman, WSWS. org, 29 June 2024

Even by the standards of American “political culture,” Thursday night’s presidential debate between US President Joseph Biden and former President Donald Trump was a spectacle of degradation, reaction and stupidity.

It is not simply an issue of Biden’s dementia, which can no longer be denied. Nor of Trump’s thuggish persona, which has never been in doubt. Exposed before the entire world on the evening of June 27, 2024 was the far-advanced decline of the entire ruling class.

American capitalism placed on stage its two leading spokesmen—the senile warmonger Biden, whose overriding policy is limitless war against Russia, and the fascist blowhard Trump, who used the debate to defend his January 6, 2021 attempted coup d’etat.

This is the “choice” American politics has on offer in 2024.

The media has focused in almost choreographic unison on Biden’s catastrophic debate performance, with several major outlets, led by the New York Times, calling for him to step aside. Coverage has been peppered with words like “unintelligible,” “incomprehensible,” “stumbling” and “incoherent.” Biden struggled to speak in whole sentences, think in whole thoughts, hold the thread of any subject or offer a single new idea—a fitting epithet for American liberalism as a whole.

Biden, indeed, is the perfect embodiment of an American political system that is rotting on its feet. The president, it is true, is not able to speak clearly, and may well be non compos mentis. But just what would the Times have him say? What policies should he be elaborating? What accomplishments can he point to? Where does he propose to lead the country as president and self-proclaimed “leader of the free world?” The answer to each question is the same—war.

Biden’s few moments of semi-clarity revealed him to be the creature of the military-intelligence apparatus that he has always been. Like the bed-ridden patient who perks up when nurses bring the medication, Biden was finally able to say something intelligible when prompted by the CNN debate hosts to restate his unstinting support for Israel’s mass murder of the Palestinians of Gaza.

“We are providing Israel with all the weapons they need and when they need them,” Biden declared.

With this policy, some 40,000 civilians have been slaughtered in nine months of merciless bombardment. But Biden’s “clarity” on this subject will hardly win him support among the masses of workers and youth who hate the genocide.

Biden was similarly lucid in his demand for an escalation of the NATO war against Russia in Ukraine, which threatens the planet with a nuclear holocaust. Of the Russian president, Biden said:

Putin has made one thing clear: He wants to reestablish what was part of the Soviet Empire, not just a piece, he wants all of Ukraine. That’s what he wants. And then do you think he’ll stop there? Do you think he’ll stop when he – if he takes Ukraine? What do you think happens to Poland? What do you think of Belarus? What do you think happens to those NATO countries?

Biden’s position is that Russia must be militarily defeated, “as long as it takes” and “as much as it costs,” as he has said many times. This war-mongering threat is a matter of pressing urgency for every person on the planet. It is clear for all those with eyes to see that Washington, along with its NATO allies, is already deep into an undeclared war with nuclear-armed Russia.

To their shame, CNN hosts Jake Tapper and Dana Bash did not offer a follow-up on this momentous question. Likewise, the moderators asked nothing about the COVID-19 pandemic, whose unchecked spread was encouraged by both Trump and Biden, killing millions, much less the newly emerging H5N1 bird flu virus, even as epidemiologists and public health experts desperately sound warning alarms. The “Fourth Estate,” the media, is also far, far gone.

It is not only because of his age and senility that Biden could not effectively answer a single one of Trump’s fascist threats, let alone his moonshot lies. It is because, fundamentally, he offers no alternative to the presumptive Republican nominee.

Trump spent much of the debate fulminating against immigrants, repeating the demonstrably false assertion that migrant workers are responsible for a crime wave (data show that immigrants are less likely to commit violent crimes than native-born Americans) and that immigrants “are taking over our schools, our hospitals, and they’re going to be taking over Social Security.” (Immigrants are net contributors to the American tax base, as recently spelled out once again by the Congressional Budget Office. It is Trump’s brethren among the superrich who are bleeding the country dry).

Trump dodged the only challenging question of the evening, from Tapper, who asked:

President Trump, staying on the topic of immigration, you’ve said that you’re going to carry out “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” Does that mean that you will deport every undocumented immigrant in America, including those who have jobs, including those whose spouses are citizens, and including those who have lived here for decades? And if so, how will you do it?

Trump did not explain how he would sweep up millions of immigrants—working class men, women and children. But it is obvious he could only carry out such a massive deportation by violent police state methods, which would very quickly be directed against the entire working class. Such a policy entails the destruction of what remains of American democracy and the complete inversion of the national credo of America as a nation of immigrants and “an asylum for mankind,” as Tom Paine put it.

Biden did not, or could not, challenge Trump on immigration, perhaps because he and his Democratic predecessor, Barack Obama, bear responsibility for the creation of the very police state infrastructure that Trump now threatens to mobilize. The Biden administration openly boasts that it has deported “more people than in all four years of the prior administration,” in the words of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Obama, for his part, deported more immigrants than all previous administrations combined. Only last week, Biden won a Supreme Court case that asserted the untrammeled right of the executive branch to prevent American citizens from living with their immigrant husbands and wives.

But it is not Biden’s right-wing politics that has stunned the Democratic Party establishment and the factions of the ruling class that tend to orient to it—Wall Street, the intelligence apparatus, the upper military brass, and Silicon Valley, among others. What these layers fear above all else is that a Biden collapse and a Trump victory will alter the war policy against Russia, though Trump makes no bones about his readiness to unleash the American military, including its nuclear arsenal.

Biden’s debacle comes at a moment of mounting crisis for the American ruling class. Washington’s Ukrainian puppet regime is losing the war, at a cost of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian and Russian lives. Elections will soon take place in Britain and France, whose leaders, key Washington allies, are, if anything, more discredited than Biden. And on July 9-11, Biden is slated to oversee a NATO war council in Washington that will push for direct involvement in Ukraine.

Meanwhile, US sovereign debt stands at nearly $35 trillion and is rapidly growing, owing to the endless funding for the wars in Ukraine and Israel and to the high interest rates imposed to punish the American working class in the name of fighting inflation, which has the effect of making debt more expensive. The political bankruptcy of American capitalism, indeed, reflects its financial bankruptcy.

It is under these conditions that the Times is spearheading a campaign to remove Biden from the ticket. Such a move has dangers of its own. There are no politicians in the Democratic Party of genuinely national stature who are not despised (a similar problem confronts the Republicans should Trump be removed). And the upper-middle class base of the Democratic Party is cobbled together from various identity-based constituencies, which will demand that their “own” be put forward in lieu of Biden, threatening a faction war among the Democrats. This would have nothing to do with political differences. Any replacement would only mean a repackaging of Biden’s war policies behind a new face and name.

In the final analysis, Biden’s decline represents that of a political order and the capitalist ruling class it represents. It is a sclerotic regime that can brook no challenge to its authority.

Under these conditions, vast political possibilities open up, especially to the working class. This is why Biden has cracked down on campus protests against the Gaza genocide and why the Democratic Party is desperately seeking to exclude third parties from the ballot. Among those parties is the Socialist Equality Party (SEP).

In a statement, SEP presidential candidate Joe Kishore commented:

The debate gave expression to the political rot in the United States, the center of finance capital and the cockpit of imperialist war planning. This crisis must be understood as an expression of profound objective factors.

While the exact course of events cannot be predicted, one thing is absolutely certain. There will be no progressive resolution to this crisis until the working class, on a world scale, comes together as an international force on the basis of a socialist program.

Andre Damon, WSWS.org

@Andre__Damon

27 June 2024

The United States has provided Israel with more than $6.5 billion in weapons since October 7, the White House said Wednesday, underscoring the scale of the Biden administration’s support for the continuing genocide in Gaza.

Doled out over just nine months, this figure is nearly double the US’s typical annual Israel military aid budget of $3.4 billion and will be further supplemented by $14 billion in weapons funding allocated by Congress this year.

The White House admitted the scale of its arms shipments to Israel in a closed briefing to reporters, with neither a video nor transcript made available to the public.

Washington Post reporter John Hudson described the content of the briefing on X: “The US has flooded Israel with more than $6.5 billion in security assistance since Oct. 7, said a senior administration official, a massive transfer of equipment and firepower despite recurring disagreements between the two nations over civilian casualties and aid access.”

The US official declared, “This is a massive, massive undertaking, and nothing is paused other than that one shipment” of 2,000-pound bombs.

Amid continuing mass protests against the Biden administration’s complicity in the Gaza bloodbath, the White House has sought to keep the scale of its arms transfers a secret. For this reason, it has broken up its arms shipments into more than 100 chunks in order to bypass congressional reporting requirements.

The announcement came the same day that Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant met with senior White House officials.

Gallant was welcomed by senior White House officials Wednesday, after the lead prosecutor of the International Criminal Court applied for charges against him last month, accusing the Israeli defense minister, alongside Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, of “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity.”

The visit follows last week’s assertion by a UN investigative committee that the Israeli government is responsible for the “extermination” of the Palestinian population, with commission member Chris Sidoti declaring that the “Israeli army is one of the most criminal armies in the world.”

Gallant’s trip sets the stage for the visit by Netanyahu to Washington on July 24, when he is set to address both houses of Congress.

In a readout of the meeting between Gallant and US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, the White House wrote, “Mr. Sullivan reaffirmed the United States’ ironclad commitment to Israel’s security, including in the face of threats from Iranian-backed terrorist groups such as Lebanese Hezbollah.”

The statement continued, “The two also discussed President Biden’s unprecedented support for Israel since the Hamas attacks of October 7th. Mr. Sullivan reaffirmed President Biden’s commitment to ensure that Israel has all it needs to defend itself militarily and confront its Iranian-backed adversaries.”

The White House praised the purported humanitarian efforts of Gallant, the man who has pushed the population of the narrow enclave to the brink of starvation by declaring a “complete blockade” of food into Gaza because the Palestinians are, in his words, “human animals.”

The readout declared:

Mr. Sullivan and Minister Gallant discussed the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, and the need to increase and sustain the flow of humanitarian assistance into Gaza. Mr. Sullivan recognized Minister Gallant’s personal efforts and leadership to support these efforts.

In a separate meeting with US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, the defense secretary “underscored the ironclad US commitment to Israel, as evidenced in part by the extraordinary defense of Israel against an unprecedented Iranian attack on April 13 and by the more than $14 billion in assistance in the Bipartisan National Security Supplemental that President Biden signed on April 24.”

Gallant, for his part, responded to the meetings by threatening war against Lebanon, declaring that Israel is “preparing for every scenario” and threatening to send Lebanon “back to the Stone Age.”

Israeli massacres of civilians in Gaza continued Wednesday, with 15 Palestinian civilians killed in a strike on a home in northern Gaza.

Israeli forces killed Fadi Al-Wadiya, a doctor and member of Doctors Without Borders, while he was on his way to work in Gaza City.

MSF reported:

The attack killed Fadi, along with five other people including three children, while he was cycling to work, near the MSF clinic where he was providing care.

Fadi was a 33-year-old physiotherapist and father of three. He joined MSF in 2018. Our thoughts are with his family and loved ones. Fadi’s loss marks the sixth killing of an MSF staff member in Gaza since October 7, 2023.

Meanwhile, famine is worsening in Gaza. In a Twitter statement, the United Nations Children’s Fund wrote, “Malnutrition in Gaza is wreaking havoc on children” and “Lack of food, water, and medical supplies is worsening the already desperate situation for Gaza’s children.”

Mass starvation and hunger in Gaza have been massively intensified by the closure of the Rafah border crossing, as part of the US-backed Israeli attack on Rafah. In a statement Wednesday, the World Health Organization said that no medical evacuations had taken place from Gaza since May.

Before the closure of the border, “approximately 50 critical patients a day left Gaza. … It means that since the 7th of May at least 2,000 people have been unable to leave Gaza to receive medical care,” said World Health Organization representative Rik Peeperkorn.

Separately, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) reported that at least 508 internally displaced people had been killed at its shelters in October.

Morning Star, Monday, June 24, 2024

JIM JUMP welcomes the new booklet published by the RMT and International Brigade Memorial Trust about the seafarers and rail workers who fought Franco’s fascism in Spain

WORKING CLASS HEROES: Detail from the mural tribute to the International Brigades held in the Marx Memorial Library

THEY SAY the past never goes away and is still with us. That couldn’t be more true of the rise of fascism in the last century.

Everyone hoped this evil creed had been stamped out for good with the defeat of the Nazi war machine in 1945. But the fascist beast and its toxic ideology of race hate, militarism and hostility to organised labour have not gone away.

Sadly, this makes a new booklet jointly published by RMT and the International Brigade Memorial Trust, They Shall Not Pass, all the more relevant and important today.

It tells the story of the railway workers and seafarers who in the 1930s resisted fascism at home and, in the case of the Spanish civil war, took up arms to stop Hitler, Mussolini and General Franco from crushing the elected government of Spain.

What stands out is that these workers recognised the true threat of fascism well before their political masters did.

It was ordinary people who stopped the British Union of Fascists (BUF) from marching through our towns and cities.

And it was ordinary people, including scores of members of the National Union of Railwaymen (NUR) and the National Union of Seafarers, who joined the International Brigades to fight the fascists in Spain. There’s a plaque dedicated to them proudly on display at RMT’s head office.

Within the British Establishment, there was considerable sympathy for the way Europe’s fascist dictators banned trade unions and violently suppressed political parties of the left.

BUF leader Sir Oswald Mosley was an aristocratic former Cabinet minister with rich and powerful friends.

As They Shall Not Pass reveals, Britain’s would-be fuhrer came unstuck when he sued NUR general secretary John Marchbank for slander. The BUF leader won a technical victory but was awarded a laughable farthing (a quarter of a penny) in damages.

Mosley’s High Court humiliation came in 1936. Things got worse in October of that year at the Battle of Cable Street. This was when the Jewish population of Whitechapel joined forces with local dockers, trade unionists, communists and socialists to prevent the BUF’s anti-semitic Blackshirts from parading through London’s East End.

The cry of the anti-fascists was “They shall not pass,” the same one used by the defenders of Madrid — “No pasaran!” Many of the protesters at Cable Street were among more than 2,000 volunteers from Britain who joined the International Brigades to fight in Spain.

This was no gap-year jaunt. More than 500 of them made the ultimate sacrifice. NUR member Ginger McElroy from Wishaw was killed at the Battle of Jarama in February 1937 after being hit by a dum-dum bullet. The bloody battle saw the British Battalion lose more than 150 men. But they held the line to stop Franco from taking Madrid.

Fellow railwayman Alwyn Skinner from Neath lost his life in the Battle of the Ebro in the summer of 1938, when Hitler’s bombers pummelled the British Battalion on the rocky slopes around Gandesa. The battalion suffered 90 fatalities.

Readers of the booklet will be moved and inspired by the exploits of many individuals described in it.

Jimmy Prendergast, one of the leaders of the Irish contingent in the International Brigades, fought bravely at Cordoba, Jarama and Brunete. In the 1960s he was the NUR’s Marylebone branch secretary and led the campaign that broke British Rail’s colour bar that excluded black workers from senior posts.

Jack Coward, one of several Liverpool seamen to fight in Spain, was captured at Calaceite in 1938 but escaped and fought behind the lines with Spanish guerillas. When he was recaptured, he pretended to be deaf and dumb and eventually made his way home from enemy Spain on a British ship.

Spike Robson, a ship’s fireman from South Shields, led the NUS crew of the Linaria on strike in Boston, Massachusetts, to stop explosive materials being shipped to Franco’s Spain. Arrested on their return home, the men ended up in court, charged under the Merchant Shipping Act and facing prison sentences. Robson was blacklisted from the shipping industry as a result.

It’s often said that union members “stand on the shoulders of giants” — in other words, our predecessors, who fought for the rights we enjoy today and the principles that still guide us. Delve into this booklet and meet some of those giants from the union’s past.

Jim Jump is the chair of the International Brigade Memorial Trust and a former editor of the NUS journal, the Seaman.