An investigation into 749 Combat Engineering Battalion’s mission to destroy “the symbols of Gaza’s future.”
Graphic: Younis Tirawi.
“Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy everything that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.”
This is what the deputy commander of Israel’s 749 Combat Engineering Battalion, Lieutenant Colonel Adi Bekore, posted on his personal Facebook account on October 9, 2023, just two days after the Hamas attacks of October 7. Numerous soldiers from the battalion he had command over liked the post. It is a quote from a biblical passage in which the biblical nation of Israel is commanded to attack the Amalekites, an ancient biblical nation that was a recurrent enemy of the Israelites. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also invoked this reference early in the war—a moment cited by South Africa in its case to the ICJ as a piece of genocidal rhetoric:
Lieutenant Colonel Adi Bekore’s post to Facebook on October 9, 2023.
Lieutenant Colonel Adi Bekore. Source: @gdud749 on Instagram
Like much of the rhetoric coming from all organs of the Israeli military since its assault on Gaza started, these words served as a stark warning of what was to come. One year later, countless homes, schools, hospitals, and residential buildings have been bombed and destroyed. 42,718 people have been killed, according to the most recent Gaza Health Ministry figures. The actual figure is certain to be a lot higher: An estimated 10,000 people are buried in the rubble, and the official count doesn’t include those indirectly killed by Israel’s assault on Gaza.
Soldiers from Israel’s 749 Battalion planting explosives, September 19, 2024 in south Gaza City. Source: @gdud749 on Instagram
Over the past year, the 749 Battalion has played an indispensable role in Gaza. Its soldiers are reservists—alumni of the combat engineering corps, which trains soldiers in demolition. The battalion comes in after combat units, toppling buildings and homes that managed to survive air strikes.
The 749 Battalion was among the first to enter the strip through the Netzarim corridor, the four-mile-long road separating Gaza City and Deir al-Balah that Israel occupied early in the war in order to divide the north and south of Gaza. After helping to cement control of south Gaza City, including the Netzarim corridor, the battalion later advanced into areas like Shuja’iya in Gaza City, the Bureij Refugee Camp in Central Gaza, and even Rafah.
At the time of writing, the 749 Battalion is operating in northern Gaza and Jabalia, where, even following Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar’s killing in southern Gaza, Israel’s campaign has intensified to the point of executions and depopulation. There, the battalion is seemingly racing to destroy as many buildings as possible. As one soldier put it, “We will leave them nothing!”
The images in this investigation come primarily from the group’s own social media page, which Drop Site News gained access to, as well as the personal accounts of dozens of soldiers from various companies within the battalion. By stitching together the information shared within the battalion, we were able to clearly map out the unit’s organizational structure and identify over a hundred of its members.
Drop Site News was also able to use the videos to determine the areas where the 749 Battalion was operating and document their activities in the Gaza Strip in detail. They are not the only battalion tasked specifically with demolitions—if it was, Gaza wouldn’t look the way it does—but a close examination of its daily activity offers a rare window into the Israeli operation on the ground in Gaza.
749 Battalion’s chain of command. Credit: Drop Site News
The so-called defense system will allow Israel to strike Iran without fear of retaliation, experts say.
By Sharon Zhang, Truthout, October 21, 2024
Lockheed Martin’s Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system is in place in only a few places around the world. Lockheed Martin’s Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system is in place in only a few places around the world. Lockheed Martin
A U.S. weapons system has landed and is “in place” in Israel, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin said on Monday, as the Biden administration beefs up U.S. support of Israel and Israeli forces prepare to attack Iran and continue their bombardments of Lebanon and Gaza.
The Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system, worth between roughly $1 billion to $1.8 billion and made by Lockheed Martin, is an anti-missile system that can intercept ballistic missiles at high altitudes. The powerful weapon, deployed in only a few places around the world, will help bolster Israel’s ability to withstand air attacks after Iran’s missile attack on Israel earlier this month.
Austin said that the THAAD is expected to be operational soon. “We have the ability to put it into operation very quickly and we’re on pace with our expectations,” he said.
The U.S. announced last week that it was sending the THAAD as well as 100 U.S. troops to Israel. This is a significant escalation of the U.S.’s involvement in Israel’s aggression, marking the first time that U.S. troops have been directly deployed to Israel amid its genocide in Gaza and attacks across the Middle East. The U.S. announced last month that it is sending an additional 2,000 to 3,000 troops to the Middle East to bolster the 40,000 troops already stationed in the region.
U.S. officials said that the deployment of THAAD and the troops represent “another visible statement of our commitment” to Israel, per Army Secretary Christine Wormuth.
The deployment comes as a tranche of leaked classified documents reportedly prepared by the U.S. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency, meant to be seen by the “Five Eyes” allies, shows that Israel is preparing to strike Iran. This includes plans to launch ballistic missiles and conduct drone operations.
U.S. officials have said that they are investigating the leak, which initially emerged on Telegram. Officials have reportedly acknowledged that the documents are legitimate, according to The New York Times.
The addition of yet more weapons systems like Israel’s Iron Dome that can intercept missile strikes will give more leeway to Israeli forces to strike other countries in the Middle East without fear of retaliation. These supposed “defensive” weapons, as anti-Zionist advocates have pointed out, make it far easier for Israel to conduct its offensive moves.
Indeed, Haaretz reports that Israel is clearly waiting for the THAAD system to be deployed before it carries out its attack on Israel. Harrison Mann, who resigned from his position as a U.S. Army intelligence officer because of Israel’s genocide, has said that, in fact, the THAAD and troop deployment will only help escalate tensions between Iran and Israel.
“To introduce troops into hostilities, per the 1973 War Powers Act, you either need an authorization from Congress, or there needs to be some urgent and imminent self-defense threat. In this case, the supposed self-defense threat is an Iranian missile attack. But the irony here is the Iranian missile attack is only going to happen if we help Israel strike Iran first,” Mann said to Democracy Now! last week. Join us in defending the truth before it’s too late
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This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license. Sharon Zhang
Sharon Zhang is a news writer at Truthout covering politics, climate and labor. Before coming to Truthout, Sharon had written stories for Pacific Standard, The New Republic, and more. She has a master’s degree in environmental studies. She can be found on Twitter: @zhang_sharon.
“You can cut all the flowers, but you cannot keep Spring from coming.”
—Pablo Neruda
For over a year, the masters of war in Israel and the United States, abetted by the corporate media, have buried truth under the rubble of Gaza. The U.S. mainstream media have acted as the hewers of wood and drawers of water for the empire. To understand how we got here, we need to borrow from the 19th-century Scottish author, Walter Scott, who wrote, “Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.”
Scott’s reflection helps in understanding how the media have turned the horrific suffering of Palestinians and Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza into just another news story—“acceptable” scrim as we go about our daily lives. It also provides insight into how the Israeli regime soaked in blood has been portrayed as the victim, the good soldier, and worthy of defense.
Israel is a veteran of information deception. For a half-century, they have defined the narrative and controlled the information environment in order to hide their brutal apartheid occupation and expansionist goals in Palestine. They have overwhelmed audiences, particularly in the United States, with information favorable to Israel’s cause and suppressed that which has challenged their narrative.
Television anchors, journalists, and the “intelligentsia” in think tanks that dot the nation’s capital have been conditioned to accept and defend Israel’s political trope and to swiftly discredit the arguments of those who challenge its dissembling.
Corporate media self-censorship, underreporting, airbrushing of atrocities, failure to contextualize the Palestinian experience under apartheid rule, and, most egregious, ignoring America’s complicity in constructing and maintaining the Israeli apartheid regime over 76 years, have contributed to an environment that has encouraged Israel to become increasingly violent.
The worst journalistic practices were glaring after the Palestinian offensive of 7 October 2023. The mind managers have allowed Israel to establish the parameters of the message, of what could/ could not be written and said.
Coverage would be done in Israel’s way—through a military lens. All foreign news organizations operating in Israel are subject to the rules of a military censor, with only certain subjects allowed. It is commonplace, for instance, to read or to hear journalists begin their reports with “Israel said.”
There has also been little attention paid to Tel Aviv’s refusal to permit foreign journalists access to Gaza, to the regime’s internal media censorship and bans, and to the 128 Palestinian journalists and media staff in Gaza, who have been targeted and killed by the Israeli military.
Although the media gave an inordinate amount of coverage to the now debunked Israeli stories about mass killings, beheaded babies and allegations of widespread and systematic rape during the October attack, no such attention has been paid to Israel’s “Hannibal Directive” and “Dahiya Doctrine.”
On 7 October, the Israeli military gave its forces permission to execute the Hannibal Directive. Adopted in 1986, the code of conduct allows soldiers to kill their own people if they are going to be taken alive by their perceived enemy. A growing body of evidence has revealed that hundreds of Israelis who died that day were killed, not by Hamas, but by their own soldiers.
The Dahiya doctrine became official military policy after Israel’s devastating attack on Lebanon in 2006. Named after the Dahiya suburb in Beirut, the doctrine —illegal under international law—calls for the use of massive, disproportionate force and deliberate targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure in future wars.
For far too long, deceptive narratives have been used and scant attention paid to Israel’s indefensible policies. This is particularly the case regarding U.N. General Assembly Partition Resolution 181 (1947) that Israel used to declare statehood and in its colonizing of what was left of historic Palestine.
By eschewing years of Israeli apartheid rule and the 16-year siege of the Gaza Strip, the public was left with the impression that the October assault was a random unprovoked act of violence. They heard few details of the crushing siege Israel imposed on Gaza when it withdrew in 2005, leaving behind a restrictive disengagement plan retaining exclusive control over Gaza’s air space, territorial waters, borders, electricity, water supply, and movement of people and goods.
History reveals that there is a direct link between occupation and violence; that occupied people will use whatever means they have to be free, including violence.
International law (Fourth Geneva Convention, 1949) affirms the right of national liberation movements to resist, to use force against military occupation.
Through a more nuanced lens, Hamas’s action on 7 October could be seen as a reasonable and expected reaction to Israel’s violent unending colonizing project.
The media failed to remember that, like Hamas, the African National Congress was labeled a terrorist organization by the United States. And that it was only in 2008, that Nelson Mandela, imprisoned for 27 years for opposing the South African apartheid regime, was removed from the U.S. terror watchlist—transformed from “terrorist” to a celebrated “beacon for freedom and democracy.”
The concocted myth of the noble Israeli, circumspect warrior and “civilized aggressor” do not correspond with the images coming from Gaza and Lebanon. Logic, however, has been turned on its head as the people of Palestine are told to accept that they—the colonized and oppressed—have no right to defend themselves and are to blame for the carnage done by the Israeli colonizer.
English novelist, George Orwell (1903-1950), was correct when he keenly observed that “Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and do give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
Within the corporate media bubble, U.S. scribes have employed political language promotive of Israel. National liberation movements fighting against Israeli genocide and U.S. hegemony are labeled terrorists “backed” by Iran. Whereas, Washington’s “backing” of the genocidal fanatics in Tel Aviv is “helping” an ally. Political leadership in Iran is characterized as a “regime,” while Israel is led by a democratic “government.”
Like terrorism, the term “proxy” is also used repeatedly to characterize allies of Iran. Hamas, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Ansar Allah in Yemen are falsely represented as vassals of Tehran, that they are not indigenous, but foreign impositions without a mass base of support in their own countries.
Israel’s oppressive presence in the West Bank is portrayed as “defensive,” while Jewish colonizers, protected by its military, ransack and help themselves to Palestinian homes, property and bank accounts. According to the Palestinian health ministry, at least 716 Palestinians, including 160 children, have been killed by Israeli army and illegal colonizer attacks in the occupied West Bank since 7 October 2023.
After a year of war, Israel has proven that it is not a democracy, it is an apartheid entity; it is not a promised land, it is a settler-colonial project; it is not a nation under siege, it an aggressor; it is not defending itself, it is conducting a genocidal war in Gaza.
Although there have been a number of significant reports on the reality in Gaza, the media has given little, if any, attention to them. We have been kept largely in the dark. They include:
Brown University, Watson Institute, “United States Spending on Israel’s Military Operations and Related U.S. Operations in the Region, October 7, 2023-September 30, 2024.
Watson Institute, “The Human Toll: Indirect Deaths from War in Gaza and the West Bank, October 7, 2023 Forward.”
Gaza Health Care Letters, October 2, 2024, Open Letter to President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, signed by 99 physicians and other medical professionals who have served in Gaza this past year.
According to the Watson Institute, the Biden administration has spent $22.76 billion financing the genocide in Gaza. In their 2 October letter, one of many addressed to the White House, healthcare workers reported that 62,413 people in Gaza have died of starvation and the death toll is likely greater than 118,908.
It is dangerous and costly to keep “we the people” in the dark. We need to think back on the lies that led us into wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere.
Poignantly, the cautionary words of our discredited 37th president, Richard M. Nixon, are eerily relevant today: “Fundamental to our way of life,” he said on 22 November 1972, “is the belief that when information which properly belongs to the public is systematically withheld by those in power, the people soon become ignorant of their own affairs, distrustful of those who manage them, and —eventually—incapable of determining their own destinies.”
It is disingenuous to attempt to convince the public that the assassination of resistance leaders opposed to U.S.-Israeli hegemony in Palestine and in the region will end their struggle for freedom. The tangled web of deception driven by Washington, Tel Aviv, and the corporate media will not turn back the resisters.
As they have proven for more than seven decades, they are the masters of their own judgments, decisions, and actions.
‘I refuse to play the condemnation game. Let me make myself clear. I do not tell oppressed people how to resist their oppression or who their allies should be.’
Arundhathi Roy accepts the PEN Pinter Prize 2024. She is holding a portrait of Alaa Abd el-Fattah, British-Egyptian writer and activist, named Writer of Courage by her. Photo: http://www.englishpen.org
Writer and activist Arundhati Roy has been awarded the PEN Pinter Prize 2024. This is an annual award set up by English PEN in the memory of playwright Harold Pinter. Shortly after having been named for the prize, Roy announced that her share of the prize money will be donated to the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund. She named Alaa Abd el-Fattah, British-Egyptian writer and activist, a ‘Writer of Courage’ who she would share her award with. The following is her acceptance speech for the prize, delivered on the evening of October 10, 2024, at the British Library.
I thank you, members of English PEN and members of the jury, for honouring me with the PEN Pinter Prize. I would like to begin by announcing the name of this year’s Writer of Courage who I have chosen to share this award with.
My greetings to you, Alaa Abd El-Fattah, writer of courage and my fellow awardee. We hoped and prayed that you would be released in September, but the Egyptian government decided that you were too beautiful a writer and too dangerous a thinker to be freed yet. But you are here in this room with us. You are the most important person here. From prison you wrote, “[M]y words lost any power and yet they continued to pour out of me. I still had a voice, even if only a handful would listen.” We are listening, Alaa. Closely.
Greetings to you, too, my beloved Naomi Klein, friend to both Alaa and me. Thank you for being here tonight. It means the world to me.
Greetings to all of you gathered here, as well to as those who are invisible perhaps to this wonderful audience but as visible to me as anybody else in this room. I am speaking of my friends and comrades in prison in India – lawyers, academics, students, journalists – Umar Khalid, Gulfisha Fatima, Khalid Saifi, Sharjeel Imam, Rona Wilson, Surendra Gadling, Mahesh Raut. I speak to you, my friend Khurram Parvaiz, one of the most remarkable people I know, you’ve been in prison for three years, and to you too Irfan Mehraj and to the thousands incarcerated in Kashmir and across the country whose lives have been devastated.
When Ruth Borthwick, Chair of English PEN and of the Pinter panel first wrote to me about this honour, she said the Pinter Prize is awarded to a writer who has sought to define ‘the real truth of our lives and our societies’ through ‘unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination’. That is a quote from Harold Pinter’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech.
The word ‘unflinching’ made me pause for a moment, because I think of myself as someone who is almost permanently flinching.
I would like to dwell a little on the theme of ‘flinching’ and ‘unflinching’. Which may be best illustrated by Harold Pinter himself:
“I was present at a meeting at the US embassy in London in the late 1980s.
“The United States Congress was about to decide whether to give more money to the Contras in their campaign against the state of Nicaragua. I was a member of a delegation speaking on behalf of Nicaragua but the most important member of this delegation was a Father John Metcalf. The leader of the US body was Raymond Seitz (then number two to the ambassador, later ambassador himself). Father Metcalf said: ‘Sir, I am in charge of a parish in the north of Nicaragua. My parishioners built a school, a health centre, a cultural centre. We have lived in peace. A few months ago a Contra force attacked the parish. They destroyed everything: the school, the health centre, the cultural centre. They raped nurses and teachers, slaughtered doctors, in the most brutal manner. They behaved like savages. Please demand that the US government withdraw its support from this shocking terrorist activity.’
“Raymond Seitz had a very good reputation as a rational, responsible and highly sophisticated man. He was greatly respected in diplomatic circles. He listened, paused and then spoke with some gravity. ‘Father,’ he said, ‘let me tell you something. In war, innocent people always suffer.’ There was a frozen silence. We stared at him. He did not flinch.”
Remember that President Reagan called the Contras “the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers.” A turn of phrase that he was clearly fond of. He also used it to describe the CIA-backed Afghan Mujahideen, who then morphed into the Taliban. And it is the Taliban who rule Afghanistan today after waging a twenty-year-long war against the US invasion and occupation. Before the Contras and the Mujahideen, there was the war in Vietnam and the unflinching US military doctrine that ordered its soldiers to ‘Kill Anything That Moves’. If you read the Pentagon Papers and other documents on US war aims in Vietnam, you can enjoy some lively unflinching discussions about how to commit genocide – is it better to kill people outright or to starve them slowly? Which would look better? The problem that the compassionate mandarins in the Pentagon faced was that, unlike Americans, who, according to them, want ‘life, happiness, wealth, power’, Asians ‘stoically accept…the destruction of wealth and the loss of lives’ – and force America to carry their ‘strategic logic to its conclusion, which is genocide.’ A terrible burden to be borne unflinchingly.
And here we are, all these years later, more than a year into yet another genocide. The US and Israel’s unflinching and ongoing televised genocide in Gaza and now Lebanon in defence of a colonial occupation and an Apartheid state. The death toll so far, is officially 42,000, a majority of them women and children. This does not include those who died screaming under the rubble of buildings, neighbourhoods, whole cities, and those whose bodies have not yet been recovered. A recent study by Oxfam says that more children have been killed by Israel in Gaza than in the equivalent period of any other war in the last twenty years.
To assuage their collective guilt for their early years of indifference towards one genocide – the Nazi extermination of millions of European Jews – the United States and Europe have prepared the grounds for another.
Like every state that has carried out ethnic cleansing and genocide in history, Zionists in Israel – who believe themselves to be “the chosen people” – began by dehumanising Palestinians before driving them off their land and murdering them.
‘What can possibly justify what Israel is doing?’. Photo: X/@UNRWA
Prime Minister Menachem Begin called Palestinians ‘two-legged beasts’, Yitzhak Rabin called them ‘grasshoppers’ who ‘could be crushed’ and Golda Meir said ‘There was no such thing as Palestinians’. Winston Churchill, that famous warrior against fascism, said, ‘I do not admit that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time’ and then went on to declare that a ‘higher race’ had the final right to the manger. Once those two-legged beasts, grasshoppers, dogs and non-existent people were murdered, ethnically cleansed, and ghettoised, a new country was born. It was celebrated as a ‘land without people for people without a land’. The nuclear-armed state of Israel was to serve as a military outpost and gateway to the natural wealth and resources of the Middle East for US and Europe. A lovely coincidence of aims and objectives.
The new state was supported unhesitatingly and unflinchingly, armed and bankrolled, coddled and applauded, no matter what crimes it committed. It grew up like a protected child in a wealthy home whose parents smile proudly as it commits atrocity upon atrocity. No wonder today it feels free to boast openly about committing genocide. (At least The Pentagon Papers were secret. They had to be stolen. And leaked.) No wonder Israeli soldiers seem to have lost all sense of decency. No wonder they flood the social media with depraved videos of themselves wearing the lingerie of women they have killed or displaced, videos of themselves mimicking dying Palestinians and wounded children or raped and tortured prisoners, images of themselves blowing up buildings while they smoke cigarettes or jive to music on their headphones. Who are these people?
What can possibly justify what Israel is doing?
The answer, according to Israel and its allies, as well as the Western media, is the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7th last year. The killing of Israeli civilians and the taking of Israeli hostages. According to them, history only began a year ago.
So, this is the part in my speech where I am expected to equivocate to protect myself, my ‘neutrality’, my intellectual standing. This is the part where I am meant to lapse into moral equivalence and condemn Hamas, the other militant groups in Gaza and their ally Hezbollah, in Lebanon, for killing civilians and taking people hostage. And to condemn the people of Gaza who celebrated the Hamas attack. Once that’s done it all becomes easy, doesn’t it? Ah well. Everybody is terrible, what can one do? Let’s go shopping instead…
I refuse to play the condemnation game. Let me make myself clear. I do not tell oppressed people how to resist their oppression or who their allies should be.
When US President Joe Biden met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli war cabinet during a visit to Israel in October 2023, he said, ‘I don’t believe you have to be a Jew to be a Zionist, and I am a Zionist.’
Unlike President Joe Biden, who calls himself a non-Jewish Zionist and unflinchingly bankrolls and arms Israel while it commits its war crimes, I am not going to declare myself or define myself in any way that is narrower than my writing. I am what I write.
I am acutely aware that being the writer that I am, the non-Muslim that I am and the woman that I am, it would be very difficult, perhaps impossible for me to survive very long under the rule of Hamas, Hezbollah, or the Iranian regime. But that is not the point here. The point is to educate ourselves about the history and the circumstances under which they came to exist. The point is that right now they are fighting against an ongoing genocide. The point is to ask ourselves whether a liberal, secular fighting force can go up against a genocidal war machine. Because, when all the powers of the world are against them, who do they have to turn to but God? I am aware that Hezbollah and the Iranian regime have vocal detractors in their own countries, some who also languish in jails or have faced far worse outcomes. I am aware that some of their actions – the killing of civilians and the taking of hostages on October 7th by Hamas – constitute war crimes. However, there cannot be an equivalence between this and what Israel and the United States are doing in Gaza, in the West Bank and now in Lebanon. The root of all the violence, including the violence of October 7th, is Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land and its subjugation of the Palestinian people. History did not begin on 7 October 2023.
I ask you, which of us sitting in this hall would willingly submit to the indignity that Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank have been subjected to for decades? What peaceful means have the Palestinian people not tried? What compromise have they not accepted—other than the one that requires them to crawl on their knees and eat dirt?
Israel is not fighting a war of self-defence. It is fighting a war of aggression. A war to occupy more territory, to strengthen its Apartheid apparatus and tighten its control on Palestinian people and the region.
‘Polls show that a majority of the citizens in the countries whose governments enable the Israeli genocide have made it clear that they do not agree with this.’ Photo: Ahmed Abu Hameeda/Wikimedia commons
Since October 7th 2023, apart from the tens of thousands of people it has killed, Israel has displaced the majority of Gaza’s population, many times over. It has bombed hospitals. It has deliberately targeted and killed doctors, aid workers and journalists. A whole population is being starved – their history is sought to be erased. All this is supported both morally and materially by the wealthiest, most powerful governments in the world. And their media. (Here I include my country, India, which supplies Israel with weapons, as well as thousands of workers.) There is no daylight between these countries and Israel. In the last year alone, the US has spent 17.9 billion dollars in military aid to Israel. So, let us once and for all dispense with the lie about the US being a mediator, a restraining influence, or as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (considered to be on the extreme Left of mainstream US politics) put it, ‘working tirelessly for a ceasefire’. A party to the genocide cannot be a mediator.
Not all the power and money, not all the weapons and propaganda on earth can any longer hide the wound that is Palestine. The wound through which the whole world, including Israel, bleeds.
Polls show that a majority of the citizens in the countries whose governments enable the Israeli genocide have made it clear that they do not agree with this. We have watched those marches of hundreds of thousands of people – including a young generation of Jews who are tired of being used, tired of being lied to. Who would have imagined that we would live to see the day when German police would arrest Jewish citizens for protesting against Israel and Zionism and accuse them of anti-Semitism? Who would have thought the US government would, in the service of the Israeli state, undermine its cardinal principle of Free Speech by banning pro-Palestine slogans? The so-called moral architecture of western democracies – with a few honourable exceptions – has become a grim laughingstock in the rest of the world.
When Benjamin Netanyahu holds up a map of the Middle East in which Palestine has been erased and Israel stretches from the river to the sea, he is applauded as a visionary who is working to realize the dream of a Jewish homeland.
But when Palestinians and their supporters chant ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’, they are accused of explicitly calling for the genocide of Jews.
Are they really? Or is that a sick imagination projecting its own darkness onto others? An imagination that cannot countenance diversity, cannot countenance the idea of living in a country alongside other people, equally, with equal rights. Like everybody else in the world does. An imagination that cannot afford to acknowledge that Palestinians want to be free, like South Africa is, like India is, like all countries that have thrown off the yoke of colonialism are. Countries that are diverse, deeply, maybe even fatally, flawed, but free. When South Africans were chanting their popular rallying cry, Amandla! Power to the people, were they calling for the genocide of white people? They were not. They were calling for the dismantling of the Apartheid state. Just as the Palestinians are.
‘Neither the ballot boxes not the palaces or the ministries or the prisons or even the graves are big enough for our dreams’. Photo: Shome Basu in Dhaka.
The war that has now begun will be terrible. But it will eventually dismantle Israeli Apartheid. The whole world will be far safer for everyone – including for Jewish people – and far more just. It will be like pulling an arrow from our wounded heart.
If the US government withdrew its support of Israel, the war could stop today. Hostilities could end right this minute. Israeli hostages could be freed, Palestinian prisoners could be released. The negotiations with Hamas and the other Palestinian stakeholders that must inevitably follow the war could instead take place now and prevent the suffering of millions of people. How sad that most people would consider this a naïve, laughable proposition.
As I conclude, let me turn to your words, Alaa Abd El-Fatah, from your book of prison writing, You Have Not Yet Been Defeated. I have rarely read such beautiful words about the meaning of victory and defeat – and the political necessity of honestly looking despair in the eye. I have rarely seen writing in which a citizen separates himself from the state, from the generals and even from the slogans of the Square with such bell-like clarity.
“The centre is treason because there’s room in it only for the General…The centre is treason and I have never been a traitor. They think they’ve pushed us back into the margins. They don’t realize that we never left it, we just got lost for a brief while. Neither the ballot boxes not the palaces or the ministries or the prisons or even the graves are big enough for our dreams. We never sought the centre because it has no room except for those who abandon the dream. Even the square was not big enough for us, so most of the battles of the revolution happened outside it, and most of the heroes remained outside the frame.”
As the horror we are witnessing in Gaza, and now Lebanon, quickly escalates into a regional war, its real heroes remain outside the frame. But they fight on because they know that one day—
From the river to the sea
Palestine will be Free.
It will.
Keep your eye on your calendar. Not on your clock.
That’s how the people – not the generals – the people fighting for their liberation measure time.
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Arundhati Roy (born November 24, 1961) is an Indian novelist, activist and a world citizen. She won the Booker Prize in 1997 for her first novel The God of Small Things. Roy was born in Shillong, Meghalaya to a Keralite Syrian Christian mother and a Bengali Hindu father, a tea planter by profession. She spent her childhood in Aymanam, in Kerala, schooling in Corpus Christi. She left Kerala for Delhi at age 16, and embarked on a homeless lifestyle, staying in a small hut with a tin roof within the walls of Delhi’s Feroz Shah Kotla and making a living selling empty bottles. She then proceeded to study architecture at the Delhi School of Architecture, where she met her first husband, the architect Gerard Da Cunha.The God of Small Things is the only novel written by Roy. Since winning the Booker Prize, she has concentrated her writing on political issues. These include the Narmada Dam project, India’s Nuclear Weapons, corrupt power company Enron’s activities in India. She is a figure-head of the anti-globalization/alter-globalization movement and a vehement critic of neo-imperialism.In response to India’s testing of nuclear weapons in Pokhran, Rajasthan, Roy wrote The End of Imagination, a critique of the Indian government’s nuclear policies. It was published in her collection The Cost of Living, in which she also crusaded against India’s massive hydroelectric dam projects in the central and western states of Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat. She has since devoted herself solely to nonfiction and politics, publishing two more collections of essays as well as working for social causes.Roy was awarded the Sydney Peace Prize in May 2004 for her work in social campaigns and advocacy of non-violence.In June 2005 she took part in the World Tribunal on Iraq. In January 2006 she was awarded the Sahitya Akademi award for her collection of essays, ‘The Algebra of Infinite Justice’, but declined to accept it.
Smoke billows from the site of an Israeli airstrike that targeted the southern Lebanese village of Khiam on October 17, 2024, amid the continuing war between Irsael and Hezbollah. (
(Photo by -/AFP via Getty Images)
Having full U.S. government backing, including weapons and political cover to continue the carnage, Netanyahu knows he has a free hand to attack Iran and drag the U.S. into a regional war.
Biden’s bombs and missiles, dropped daily on Lebanon, a U.S. ally, by his puppet master Netanyahu, is wreaking havoc in this small defenseless country. The Israeli genocidal machine is waging an incinerating assault on fleeing civilians and critical facilities. The scorched-earth Israeli strategy is the same as what we have seen in Gaza. Attack in Lebanon anyone who moves or anything that stands—whether a hospital, a dense residential area, a café, a municipal building, a market, a school, or a Mosque—and allege there was a Hezbollah commander or a Hezbollah site here or there. Two recent New York Times headlines express some of the impact of this latest Israeli war: “In Just a Week, a Million People in Lebanon Have Been Displaced” and “Lebanon’s Hospitals Buckle Amid an Onslaught: ‘Indiscriminate’ Strikes Overwhelm Health System, U.N. Says.”
Historical note: Hezbollah, also a political party and social service organization, was created to defend impoverished Shiite Muslims in southern Lebanon in 1982 right after the Israeli army once again invaded Lebanon and badly mistreated the residents during an 18-year-long military occupation.
No matter what or who the Israeli Air Force’s American F-16 fighter aircraft bomb, no matter the deaths and injuries to thousands of Lebanese families, many of them children and women, Biden keeps unconditionally and savagely shipping weapons of mass destruction. He is violating six federal laws requiring conditions be met—such as not violating human rights or not obstructing U.S. humanitarian aid. Netanyahu is violating these and other conditions and mocking his major benefactor, the United States government.
Israel has long had designs on a slice of Lebanon going up to and including the Litani River area. Water is valuable. Over the years, Israel has routinely violated Lebanese air space, executed incursions into Lebanon and has used forbidden cluster bombs and white phosphorous. According to Aya Majzoub, Deputy Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa at Amnesty International, “It is beyond horrific that the Israeli army has indiscriminately used white phosphorous in violation of international humanitarian law.”
The White House knows all this. It doesn’t care. Wherever Israel invades, bombs, assassinates, or boobytraps pagers and walkie-talkies, Bibi-Biden continues his servility to the Israeli terror regime and its genocidal leader Netanyahu, who is despised by three out of four Israelis for his domestic policies and is under indictment by Israeli prosecutors for corruption.
Despite reports that Biden steams in private against Netanyahu, and considers him a liar and a supporter of Trump’s re-election, Biden knows that that this foreign authoritarian has the big card: CONGRESS. Most of the legislators who attended his noxious address to a joint congressional session last June gave him a record-breaking 52 standing ovations. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said, “Benjamin Netanyahu’s presentation in the House Chamber today was by far the worst presentation of any foreign dignitary invited and honored with the privilege of addressing the Congress of the United States.”
Biden, who is known to conduct foreign and military policy without any authorization by Congress, doesn’t want to offend the powerful “Israel Government Can Do No Wrong” Lobby in the U.S.—to which he has been indentured for his entire 50-year political career. This includes Israel’s current destruction of Lebanon, where tens of thousands of Americans are residing. The Washington Post reports that the Biden White House “has so far given full backing to Israel’s ground operations in Lebanon, even amid a growing international outcry over the civilian toll … and Israeli clashes with United Nations peacekeepers,” who have been assigned there for decades.
Having full U.S. government backing, and now backed by U.S. warships, Marines and logistics, plus 100 U.S. soldiers arriving this week in Israel, Netanyahu knows he has a free hand to attack Iran and drag the U.S. into a regional war.
Both Netanyahu and Bibi-Biden have been briefed about the possibilities of “blowback” (the CIA’s term) against the U.S. These concerns come from U.S. intelligence agencies who study scenarios like future 9/11s or the recent inexpensive armed drones that can be constructed and deployed anywhere. Militarists and corporatists in the U.S. aren’t that concerned because whenever “blowback” occurs they can concentrate more power, with bigger military budgets and profits, in another “war on terror,” silencing dissent and subordinating or sidelining critical domestic priorities.
That is the lethal fix and fate that America has been subjected to by its cowardly, Constitution-violating politicians from both major parties. The power structure—the corporate state—or what Franklin Delano Roosevelt once called in a 1938 message to Congress “fascism,” is telling the American people: “Heads we win, Tails you lose.”
Here is how bad Biden has gotten. Recently, two letters signed by 65 American doctors and health workers back from the horrors, the killing fields of Gaza, to President Joe Biden, have gone unanswered. (See, “65 Doctors, Nurses and Paramedics: What We Saw in Gaza” by Feroze Sidhwa, New York Times on Sunday, October 13, 2024). Their letters plead for a ceasefire and immediate humanitarian aid for the starving, dying people of Gaza. They request a meeting with President Biden, who has often met with the pro-Israeli lobby. Scranton Joe says no way.
These brave physicians and nurses also are requesting that Joe Biden demand that Netanyahu allow children in Gaza who are seriously burned or are amputees be air-lifted to America to be treated by compassionate specialists in ready American hospitals. Biden, a practicing Catholic, has no interest.
President George Washington warned his country about avoiding foreign entanglements in his farewell address. Were he possessed of more prescience; he would have added the word “surrenders.”
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Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate and the author of “The Seventeen Solutions: Bold Ideas for Our American Future” (2012). His new book is, “Wrecking America: How Trump’s Lies and Lawbreaking Betray All” (2020, co-authored with Mark Green).
The latest violence brings the Health Ministry’s death toll to 42,409
by Dave DeCamp, Antiwar. com, October 16, 2024
Gaza’s Health Ministry said Wednesday that Israeli strikes across the Strip killed at least 65 Palestinians and wounded 140 in the previous 24-hour period.
The latest violence brings the ministry’s recorded death toll since October 7, 2023, to 42,409 and the number of wounded to 99,153. “There are still a number of victims under the rubble and on the streets, and ambulance and civil defense crews cannot reach them,” the ministry said.
Ninety-nine American healthcare workers who have volunteered in Gaza recently estimated in an open letter to President Biden and Vice President Harris that over 118,00 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza over the past year, a toll that includes indirect deaths caused by the Israeli siege, such as starvation and disease. People work to recover the dead body of a Palestinian boy from the rubble of a house hit in an Israeli strike in Gaza City on October 16, 2024. REUTERS/Dawoud Abu Alkas
Israeli attacks on Wednesday included a strike on a home in Gaza City that killed at least five Palestinians and injured seven. The Palestinian news agency WAFA also reported a strike on a car in central Gaza that killed at least two Palestinians and injured several others.
The Israeli military has continued its assault and siege on northern Gaza, where it’s attempting to carry out an ethnic cleansing plan to forcibly displace hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians.
Workers at hospitals in the north have refused Israeli orders to evacuate and say they’re running out of food and medicine due to the tightening of the siege. In 12 days, health officials say at least 350 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces in the Jabalia refugee camp, where Israel has focused its attack.
Israel’s bombing of Beirut mirrors its harsh attacks on Gaza and symbolises the disdain for human life that characterises both Israeli and U.S. warfare.
On Oct. 1, U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX), the chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee issued a statement urging U.S. President Joe Biden to “place maximum pressure on Iran and its proxies, rather than pressure Israel for a ceasefire. We need to expedite arms transfers to Israel that this administration has delayed for months, including 2,000-pound bombs, to ensure Israel has all the tools to deter these threats.”
McCaul’s belligerent call came days after Israel used over 80 U.S.-made 2,000-pound bombs and other munitions on Sept. 27, to strike a residential neighbourhood in Beirut and kill – amongst hundreds of civilians – Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah (1960–2024), the leader of Hezbollah. In this one bombing raid, Israel dropped more of these “bunker buster” bombs than the United States military used in its 2003 invasion of Iraq.
A former U.S. aviator, Commander Graham Scarbro of the U.S. Navy, reviewed the evidence of the Israeli strikes for the U.S. Naval Institute. In a very revealing article, Scarbro notes that Israel “seems to have taken a notably different approach to collateral damage than U.S. forces over the past few decades.”
While the U.S. has never demonstrated any significant concern for civilian casualties or “collateral damage,” it is worth noting that even senior U.S. military officials have raised their eyebrows at the degree of Israel’s disregard for human life. Israel’s military, Scarbro writes, “seems to have a higher threshold for collateral damage… meaning they strike even when chances are higher for civilian casualties.”
Bassim al-Shaker, Iraq, “Symphony of Death 1,” 2019.
Despite Washington’s knowledge that the Israelis have been bombing Gaza, and now Lebanon, with complete abandon — and even after the International Court of Justice ruled that it is “plausible” that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza — the United States has continued to arm the Israelis with deadly weaponry.
On Oct. 10, 2023, Biden said, “We’re surging additional military assistance,” which has amounted to a record-level of at least $17.9 billion during the past year of genocide. In March, The Washington Postreported that the U.S. had “quietly approved and delivered more than 100 separate foreign military sales to Israel that amounted to ‘thousands of precision-guided munitions, small-diameter bombs, bunker busters, small arms and other lethal aid.”
These “small” sales fell below the minimum threshold under U.S. law which requires the president to approach Congress for approval (which anyway would not have been denied). These sales amounted to the transfer of at least 14,000 of the 2,000 pound MK-84 bombs and 6,500 500-pound bombs that Israel has used in both Gaza and Lebanon.
In Gaza, the Israelis have routinely used the 2,000-pound bombs to strike areas populated by civilians — who had been told to take refuge at these locations by the Israeli authorities themselves.
“In the first two weeks of the war,” The New York Timesreported, “roughly 90 percent of the munitions Israel dropped in Gaza were satellite-guided bombs of 1,000 or 2,000 pounds.”
In March, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) tweeted,
“The US cannot beg Netanyahu to stop bombing civilians one day and the next send him thousands more 2,000 lb. bombs that can level entire city blocks. This is obscene.”
A 2016 report by Action on Armed Violence offered the following assessment of these weapons of mass destruction:
“These are extremely powerful bombs, with a large destructive capacity when used in populated areas. They can blow apart buildings and kill and injure people hundreds of metres from the point of detonation. The fragmentation pattern and range of a 2,000lb MK 84 bomb are difficult to predict, but it is generally said that this weapon has a ‘lethal radius’ (i.e. the distance in which it is likely to kill people in the vicinity) of up to 360m.
The blast waves of such a weapon can create a great concussive effect; a 2,000lb bomb can be expected to cause severe injury and damage as far as 800 metres from the point of impact.”
Ismail Shammout, Palestine, “Guardian of the Fire,” 1988.
I have several times walked around the Beirut neighbourhood of Haret Hreik in Dahiyeh, which was struck by Israeli bombs in the attack on the Hezbollah leadership. This is a highly congested area, with barely a few metres between high-rise residential buildings. To strike a complex of these buildings with over 80 of these powerful bombs cannot be called “precise.”
Israel’s bombing of Beirut mirrors its harsh attacks on Gaza and symbolises the disdain for human life that characterises both Israeli and U.S. warfare. On Sept. 23, Israel bombarded Lebanon at a rate of more than one airstrike per minute. In days, Israel’s “intense airstrikes” displaced over a million people, a fifth of the entire population of Lebanon.
The first bomb to ever fall from an aircraft was a Haasen hand grenade (Denmark) dropped by Lieutenant Giulio Cavotti of the Italian Air Force on Nov. 1, 1911, onto the town of Tagiura, near Tripoli, Libya. A hundred years later, in a grotesque commemoration of sorts, French and U.S. aircraft bombed Libya once more as part of their war to overthrow the government of Muammar Gaddafi.
The ferocity of aerial bombing was understood from the very outset, as Sven Lindqvist documented in his book, A History of Bombing (2003). In March 1924, U.K. Squadron Leader Arthur “Bomber” Harris authored a report (later expunged) about his bombings in Iraq and the “real” meaning of aerial bombardment:
“Where the Arab and Kurd had just begun to realise that if they could stand a little noise, they could stand bombing … they now know what real bombing means, in casualties and damage; they now know that within forty-five minutes a full-sized village … can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured by four or five machines which offer them no real target, no opportunity for glory as warriors, no effective means of escape.”
A hundred years later, these words of “Bomber” Harris aptly describe the kind of ruthlessness inflicted on both Palestine and Lebanon.
André Masson, France, “There Is No Finished World,” 1942
You might ask: what about the rockets fired on Israel by Hezbollah and Iran? Are they not part of the brutality of war? Certainly, these are part of the ugliness of warfare, but an easy parallel cannot be drawn.
Iran’s ballistic missiles followed Israel’s attack on an Iranian diplomatic facility in Syria in April, the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran following the inauguration of Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian in July, the assassination of Nasrallah in Beirut in September, and the killing of several Iranian military officials.
Significantly, whereas Israel has launched countless strikes targeting civilians, medical personnel, journalists, and aid workers, Iran’s missiles exclusively targeted Israeli military and intelligence facilities and not civilian areas. Hezbollah, meanwhile, targeted Israel’s Ramat David Airbase, east of Haifa, in September.
Neither Iran nor Hezbollah have fired their munitions into congested neighbourhoods of Israeli cities. Since Oct. 8, 2023, Israeli airstrikes against Lebanon have far outnumbered Hezbollah’s strikes against Israel.
Before the current wave of hostilities, by Sept. 10, Israel had killed 137 Lebanese civilians and displaced hundreds of thousands of Lebanese from their homes; meanwhile, Hezbollah rockets had by then killed 14 Israeli civilians, with their rockets leading to the evacuation of 63,000 Israeli civilians.
There has been not only a quantitative difference in the number of strikes and death toll, but a qualitative difference in the use of violence. Violence that is directed largely at military targets, is permissible in certain conditions under international law; violence that is indiscriminate, such as when massive bombs are used against civilians, violates the laws of war.
Etel Adnan, Lebanon, Untitled, 2017.
Etel Adnan (1925–2021), a Lebanese poet and artist, grew up in Beirut after her parents fled the collapsing Ottoman Empire that became modern day Turkey. She dug deep into the soil of conflict and pain, the ingredients for her poetry. Her voice resonated from the balcony of her apartment in Ashrafieh, the “little mountain,” from where she could see the ships come in and out of the port.
When Etel Adnan died, the novelist Elias Khoury (1948–2024), who himself died just before Beirut was again bombarded, wrote that he mourned a woman who would not die, but he feared for his city which was suffering alone. Here are a few extracts from Etel’s poem, “Beirut, 1982,” to remind us that we are as angry as a storm.
I never believed that vengeance would be a tree growing in my garden
*
Trees grow in all directions So do Palestinians:
uprooted and unlike butterflies wingless, earthbound, heavy with love for their borders and their misery,
no people can go forever behind bars or under the rain.
…
We shall never cry with tears but with blood.
…
It is not on cemeteries that we shall plant grain nor in the palm of my hand We are as angry as a storm.
The death toll from Israel’s latest ground and aerial assault on northern Gaza continued to mount on Saturday as the U.S.-armed military targeted the Jabalia refugee camp and other parts of the region, trapping hundreds of thousands of people, firing on those who try to flee, and blocking deliveries of lifesaving humanitarian aid.
Israeli strikes on Jabalia homes and schools housing displaced people killed more than 20 Palestinians and wounded dozens more late Friday. Hours later, the Israeli military issued fresh evacuation orders for northern Gaza, instructing residents to move to a so-called humanitarian zone that Israel has repeatedly attacked.
Many have opted to remain in their homes as Israeli quadcopters and snipers target those attempting to escape the besieged and famine-stricken region. As Al Jazeera‘s Hind Khoudary explained Saturday, “Palestinians say they prefer dying in their homes because they believe that there is no place safe across the Gaza Strip, so even if they evacuate they might get killed on the way.”
Sarah Vuylsteke, project coordinator for Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), said Friday that “nobody is allowed to get in or out, anyone who tries is getting shot.”
MSF said five of its staffers were trapped in Jabalia and “fearing for their lives.” An MSF driver said that they were “staying at the Al-Yemen Al-Saeed Hospital, but [Israeli forces] bombed it,” killing roughly 20 people.
“I don’t know what to do, at any moment we could die,” said the MSF driver, identified as Haydar. “People are starving. I am afraid to stay, and I am also afraid to leave.”
Video footage posted to social media shows the disturbing aftermath of an Israeli strike on a residential block in Jabalia:
One resident of northern Gaza told+972 Magazine that “quadcopter drones are hovering low over the streets, firing at anything that moves.”
“Snipers are positioned on rooftops, targeting anyone who steps outside,” said 27-year-old Mohammed Shehab. “At the same time, soldiers and tanks have pushed into the camp, demolishing homes and bulldozing roads and fields.”
The true death toll from Israel’s latest assault on northern Gaza is impossible to discern, given the difficulty of navigating the area amid relentless airstrikes and gunfire as well as fuel shortages caused by Israel’s siege.
“We are unable to count the number of massacres happening in Jabalia, and ambulances are unable to reach the calls due to the fuel shortage in northern Gaza,” wrote journalist Hossam Shabat, who is on the ground in northern Gaza.
One Palestinian trapped in northern Gaza said there are “dead bodies everywhere, and the wounded lie in the streets with no one able to help them.”
The Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor warned that as the international community looks on—and as U.S. military aid continues to flow—Israel is “accelerating the pace of its genocide against the Palestinians” by “carrying out mass and planned killings, as well as widespread forced displacements,” in northern Gaza.
“The Euro-Med Monitor field team received testimonies from citizens, who were able to reach Gaza City, about witnessing dead bodies lying in the streets,” the group said. “The Israeli army is systematically working to empty northern Gaza of its residents and force them to move to the south, recently issuing several evacuation orders and dropping leaflets demanding their evacuation.”
“The forcible deportation of a population is defined as a crime against humanity under the statute of the International Criminal Court, and the United Nations and the international community must intervene immediately to save tens of thousands of Palestinian residents in northern Gaza who face ethnic cleansing by Israel,” said Euro-Med. “Furthermore, the U.N. and international community have a legal and moral obligation to put an end to the horrific crime of genocide being committed by the Israeli occupation for the second year in a row now.”
It probably would surprise no one to learn that there are several viewpoints among critics of the current wars devastating the Middle East regarding who is actually encouraging a growing bloody conflict which might soon involve at least six countries in the region. In simple terms, there is a school of thought that believes that Israel, backed by its various powerful diaspora lobbies, is defying world opinion to continue its slaughter of its indigenous Palestinians and neighboring Lebanese. In other words, it is all about Israel acting maliciously and badly. However, another viewpoint sees instead a neocon dominated United States foreign policy exploiting Israeli truculence and its hard right wing leadership to carry out American national objectives in the region, in a sense using Israel as its proxy and actually encouraging its bad behavior. Meanwhile, a third plausible examination of developments tends to meld the two approaches, suggesting that the US and Israel are in a conspiratorial cooperative relationship and are in full agreement regarding reducing the power of the Jewish state’s neighbors. That would make Israel the preeminent military power dominating the Persia Gulf and beyond to control a large chunk of the world’s energy resources while also benefiting American weapons manufacturers and other political and Wall Street constituencies.
The problem is that there is sufficient carefully selected evidence to support every point of view including an alternative suggestion that American foreign policy is broken, adrift and does not reflect any US national interest at all, witness the recent $8.7 billion aid package sent to a belligerent Israel when Americans were dying in North Carolina in the wake of a devastating hurricane for which FEMA only provided meager assistance because it claimed it had run out of money. The steady flow of money and weapons from the US to Israel suggests that the United States is for some reason supporting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s expansion of the war against Hamas when the White House could have ended the war in a day by cutting off that support. Alternatively, Israel might be seen as continuing its slaughter in spite of perhaps insincere US objections because it presumes that its powerful Lobby in the US will keep Joe Biden in line with an election coming up lest it weigh in heavily to help Donald Trump. And, of course, if the two nations are acting in collusion it could all be Kabuki with Washington and Tel Aviv cynically intending to do whatever it takes reshape the Middle East to Israel’s benefit. Take your choice of which scenario fits best.
One needs to determine what actually justifies the reality of a multiplicity of fronts, to include providing political cover in the UN, where the United States is interacting to support “greatest ally and best friend” Israel while at the same time constantly verbalizing the apparently false claim that it is trying to avoid the conflict’s expanding into a major conflagration that could engulf the entire region and beyond, driving up energy costs dramatically just for starters. Such a managed co-escalation might also increase the risks and costs geometrically as more players get involved, up to and including the possibility that Israel will opt to use its nuclear weapons to “defend” itself or to attack Iran, which is where both Russia and the United States might become involved in a nuclear exchange to defend their respective “friends.”
So what is the truth and what are the lies and who in Washington and/or Tel Aviv is calling the shots in the Middle East? And what do they really intend and how do they see it all ending? There are four obvious US government players who are on the ground and meeting with the key figures in the nations involved in the fighting as well as with those ostensibly engaged in the what are being called negotiations to put an end to the killing with a ceasefire acceptable to all parties. One must concede that their task is a difficult one at best as all parties to the peace talks recognize that the United States is not an unbiased intermediary given its total commitment to support Israel politically as well as with arms and money while freely labeling the Jewish state’s neighbors and opponents alike as “terrorists” and “autocrats.” The four would be composed of two obvious officials Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director William Burns and Secretary of State Antony Blinken while a third and fourth are not-so-well-known, consisting of special negotiator for the president Amos Hochstein and the White House Coordinator for the Middle East Brett McGurk. Both Burns and Blinken have made numerous trips to the Middle East and Ukraine to convey the views of the president and make their own assessments of the situation on the ground after meeting with local officials. The role is rather unusual for Burns as a CIA Director normally operates behind the scenes and does not get involved in policy making, but Burns is not a typical director in that he has no background in intelligence. He was a highly regarded State Department officer who wound up as the US Ambassador to Russia. He very carefully worked through the nuances of the US-Russian relationship and was highly praised for explaining things from the Kremlin perspective so US planners would be able to understand very clearly the differing perspectives of the two nations. He described, for example, how very sensitive Russia was over the issue of Ukraine becoming part of NATO, a warning which was subsequently ignored by President Biden.
Blinken is, of course, better known as he served as Deputy Secretary of State during the Barack Obama administration and is regarded as a particularly close associate of Joe Biden. As Secretary of State he has been a very active traveler throughout both the Middle East and Ukraine. Blinken is Jewish and is regarded as a protector of Israel, which is, of course, also the President’s frequently enunciated view. After the Israeli assassination of Hezbollah leader Nasrallah he said that the “World is safer without Nasrallah…” whereas most of the world would quite reasonably prefer to see Benjamin Netanyahu removed. Blinken also appears to favor preemptively attacking Iran to eliminate its nuclear energy program even though there is no evidence that it is weapons-development related. He has recently come under pressure for lying about two State Department reports that indicated very clearly that Israel has been deliberately starving and killing the Gazans by blocking US supplied food and medicine supplies at the border. One large convoy of trucks containing enough food to feed most of the local people who were in danger of dying from starvation was deliberately held up at the border until the food became rotten and had to be destroyed. Blinken lied both to Congress and to the American people about the Israeli policy, saying that blocking food supplies by Israel was not taking place. It was a consequential lie as people died and are continuing to die because of it and Blinken has paid no price for what must surely be considered a major war crime.
The third policy planner is an unusual individual Amos Hochstein, who was born in Israel and served in the Israeli Army. He has been designated as Biden’s personal roving ambassador in the Middle East with a particular brief to work to avoid the expansion of the Gaza fighting into Lebanon against Hezbollah. In that effort, he has obviously failed as both Israel and Lebanon now consider themselves to be at war. It is presumed that Hochstein is the “active arm” in the White House campaign to shield Israel from any harm initiated by its much abused neighbors. Why anyone would select an Israeli who is a product of the Israeli Army as a negotiator of some type among the nations that the Israelis have been victimizing for the past seventy-five years has to be considered an enduring mystery. It is perhaps another gimmick move by Biden to pretend that he is neutral in the conflict while doing everything he can to turn Netanyahu free to destroy or subject all his neighbors.
Which brings us to the fourth likely top planner National Security Council Coordinator for Africa and the Middle East Brett McGurk. McGurk has been a bipartisan fixture floating around the national security and diplomatic communities for a number of years with the reputation of being a “hardliner” particularly when dealing with Arabs, which is not to say that he has learned anything beyond the fact that if one wants to survive in Washington it pays to love Israel. It is interesting to note that the Biden Administration claims that it is working hard to achieve a ceasefire in both Lebanon and Gaza but it continues to cover for Israel politically and provide it with the weapons and money to continue it genocidal activities as well as in support of its plan to occupy southern Lebanon to create a “buffer zone.” Israeli media is already reporting that real estate agents are offering attractive properties for Jewish buyers in what is still Lebanon, just as Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner has been peddling exclusive sea front lots in Gaza. In other words, don’t believe anything coming out of the Biden Administration as evidence for anything as it appears that its “policy makers” and press spokesmen have acquired the Israeli tendency to lie about everything.
Politico has a recent piece on both Hochstein and McGurk and it does not make one feel warm and fuzzy about what the Biden administration is up to. The article is entitled: “US officials quietly backed Israel’s military push against Hezbollah -The officials urged caution and stressed the need for diplomacy. But the timing was right for such a military shift, they concluded”. It seems that the guys who are promoted by the Biden administration as peacemakers are anything but. Politico obtained insider information from a number of anonymous sources in both Washington and Israel and learned that Biden’s team has actually agreed with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s broad strategy to shift Israel’s military focus to the north against Hezbollah. This tilt, contrary to what the White House has been preaching, produced a reaction from a number of Pentagon, intelligence and State Department officials that such a move would drag the United States into the war, which is really what Netanyahu intended, but the shift in policy was approved anyway. One senior US official noted but dismissed the flaw in a policy of calling for peace while encouraging war as “Both things can be true — the US can want diplomacy and support Israel’s larger goals against Hezbollah. There’s clearly a line that the administration is toeing, it’s just not clear what that line is.”
In spite of concerns from some in the government that a reckless Israel will go too far and ignite a major regional war that could easily spread beyond the Middle East, Politico reports how Hochstein and McGurk worked “behind the scenes” to encourage Israel and they are now describing Israel’s Lebanon operations likely to include a major land invasion as a “history-defining moment” — one that will “reshape the Middle East for the better for years to come.” That would seem to confirm that the United States and Israel are in fact collaborating and the US is fully complicit and de facto supporting the genocidal intention of Netanyahu to make a new Greater Israel largely free of Arabs. For the US, the extra benefit gained from defeating Hezbollah will be that it ultimately weakens Iran, neocon Washington’s perpetual arch enemy, which relies on Hezbollah as a proxy and a resource for projecting power. Of course, it could all go the other way and the joint American-Israeli plan could come to naught. Hezbollah notably routed invading Israeli forces in south Lebanon back in 2006 and it is better trained and equipped now than it was then. And what happens if Israeli army is in trouble and the US is forced to act on its pledge to “defend” the Jewish state, thereby leading a small war to expand and include Iran and Russia? The ball will be in your court Mr. Biden, or possibly Mr. Trump or Ms. Harris. Consider carefully how you will play it but if you really do want a ceasefire, I wouldn’t send Blinken, Hochstein and McGurk around to do the negotiating.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.
The Biden administration is not only endorsing but also on the verge of actively assisting a new Israeli armed attack on Iran. National security adviser Jake Sullivan says that the United States is working directly with Israel regarding such an attack. “The United States is fully, fully, fully supportive of Israel,” declares President Joe Biden.
The projected attack serves no U.S. interests. The attack perpetuates a broader pattern of escalating violence in the Middle East that also serves no U.S. interests. The Iranian missile salvo to which the coming Israeli attack is ostensible retaliation was itself retaliation for previous Israeli attacks. Retaliation for retaliation is a prescription for an unending cycle of violence.
The United States is facilitating an attack on a nation that does not want war and has been remarkably restrained in trying to avoid it, in the face of repeated Israeli provocations. A sustained Israeli bombing campaign against Iranian-related targets within Syria elicited a response only when it escalated to an attack on a diplomatic compound in Damascus, killing senior Iranian officials. Even then, the Iranian response, in the form of an earlier salvo of missiles and drones in April, was designed and telegraphed in a way to make a show of defiance but — with most of the projectiles certain to be shot down — to cause minimal damage and almost no casualties.
When Israel assassinated visiting Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in a government guest house in Tehran in July — the sort of attack that would elicit a quick and forceful response by the U.S. or Israel if it happened in one of their capitals — Iran did nothing until last week. It finally acted only after yet another Israeli attack— this time an assault on residential buildings in a suburb of Beirut that killed a senior Iranian Revolutionary Guard officer along with Hezbollah secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah. Far from being motivated by any grandiose ambitions of regional dominance or desire to destabilize the region, Iranian leaders believed that they were getting killed by a thousand cuts from Israel and that they had to respond to the repeated Israeli attacks lest they lose the confidence not only of their own people but of regional allies. The missile firings that constituted Iran’s retaliation, like the ones in April, again caused minimal damage or casualties.
By cooperating with Israel in a new attack, the United States is assisting a state that has been responsible for most of the escalation and the vast majority of death and destruction in the Middle East for at least the past year. Although Hamas’ attack on southern Israel last October is commonly seen as the starting point of the subsequent mayhem in the Middle East, the question of who is responding to whom could go back farther than that. For example, the 1,200 deaths from that Hamas attack, horrible to be sure, were fewer than the number of Palestinians that Israel had killed in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip just from the day-to-day operations of the occupying Israeli army, supplemented by settler violence in the West Bank, during the previous eight years.
Since the Hamas attack, the devastating Israeli operation in the Gaza Strip has gone far beyond anything that can be construed as defense, or even as a response to Hamas, and has brought suffering to innocent civilians that is orders of magnitude greater than anything Hamas or any other Palestinian group has ever done. The still-rising official death toll exceeds 41,000, with the actual number of Palestinian deaths probably much higher and likely into six figures. Much of the Strip has been reduced to rubble and rendered unlivable.
After Hezbollah fired rounds into Israel last October in a show of support for the Palestinians in Gaza, the story of conflict along the Israeli-Lebanese frontier has mainly been one of repeated Israeli escalations. Israeli attacks in Lebanon have far exceeded Hezbollah attacks on Israel, in number but especially in physical effects, with almost no casualties within Israel apart from a few military personnel at the border. The rapidly rising toll of deaths in Lebanon from Israeli attacks has now passed 2,000, with about 10,000 injured and about 1.2 million people displaced from their homes. As in the Gaza Strip, civilians constitute much and perhaps most of that toll, including as a result of Israeli airstrikes that have demolished residential buildings in densely populated neighborhoods.
As a growing Israeli ground assault in Lebanon accompanies the aerial bombardment, Israel has told people in almost the entire southern third of Lebanon to move north, even though Israel already has been conducting lethal aerial attacks throughout Lebanon, including as far north as Tripoli. This also is reminiscent of the pattern in Gaza, in which residents are told to move, only to be bombed again in their new location.
The offensive Israeli actions that figure into confrontation with Iran — including the aerial and clandestine assassination operations in Lebanon, Syria, and the heart of Tehran — also have each constituted escalation. Those operations appear designed at least in part to goad Iran into entering a wider war, preferably one that also involves the United States.
Other motives behind the Israeli escalation are multiple and vary with the specific target. The deadly assaults on the Palestinians — in the Gaza Strip and increasingly also in the West Bank— are part of a long-term effort to use force to somehow make Israel’s Palestinian problem go away, through a combination of outright killing, inducing exile by making a homeland unlivable, and intimidation of any who remain.
Israel’s officially declared objective for its attacks in Lebanon is to permit a return home of the 70,000 temporarily displaced residents of northern Israel — whose numbers constitute less than six percent of the Lebanese who have been driven from their homes so far by the Israel offensive. That objective is genuine, but an escalating war along Israel’s northern border only places the objective farther out of reach. The Israeli operations also clearly are designed to cripple Hezbollah as much as possible, although they sustain and heighten the sort of anger that led to Hezbollah’s establishment and growth in the first place.
An Israel that is the strongest military power in the Middle East and is throwing its armed might around in seemingly every direction but the Mediterranean Sea is a nation drunk on the use of force and stumbling into still more use of it with little or no apparent attention to any long-term strategy for achieving an end state, other than living forever by the sword. Each tactical success, including the killing of a prominent adversary such as Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah, only seems to deepen the inebriation.
Beyond this, one gets into a mixture of motivations that are specific to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and ones shared with other Israeli policymakers. It is widely recognized, including by Netanyahu’s domestic opponents, that he has a personal stake in continuing and even escalating Israel’s wars. This is partly because of the usual rally-round-the-flag effect that attenuates the political problems of a wartime leader. It is also more specifically because Netanyahu is dependent on the support of the most extreme members of his right-wing ruling coalition to hold that coalition together, thereby keeping Netanyahu in power and delaying the day he has to confront fully the corruption charges against him.
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An armed attack on Iran would extend the Israeli policy— not unique to Netanyahu, although he has been its most prominent exponent — of stoking maximum hostility toward, and isolation of, Iran. That policy serves to weaken a rival for regional influence, to place blame for everything wrong with the region on someone other than Israel, to inhibit any engagement with Iran by Israel’s patron the United States, and to divert international attention away from Israel’s own actions.
The diversion seems to work. The international attention to what may come next in the confrontation with Iran, in addition to the escalating operations in Lebanon, has meant less attention than would otherwise have been given in newspapers and the airwaves to the continued carnage in the Gaza Strip that claims civilian lives, such as Israeli attacks within the last few days on a girls’ school and an orphanage that several hundred displaced persons were using as shelter.
The U.S. presidential election provides another motivation for the Israeli government to escalate regional warfare. Netanyahu certainly would like to see a second term for Donald Trump, who gave Israel just about anything it wanted during his previous time in office, with nothing in return except political support for Trump. This relationship is part of a broader political alliance between the Republican Party and Netanyahu’s Likud Party. To the extent an escalatory mess in the Middle East causes problems for the Biden administration and thereby hurts the election chances of Vice President Kamala Harris, that is a bonus from Netanyahu’s point of view.
Netanyahu is more likely to enjoy that bonus and the other fruits of ramping up conflict with Iran to the extent that the United States gets directly involved in that conflict. Such involvement not only makes the politically costly mess for the Biden administration all the messier, but also enables Netanyahu to claim credibly that he has the United States fully at his side in his government’s lethal activities.
None of these Israeli objectives are in the interest of the United States. Several of the objectives, such as hamstringing any U.S. diplomacy that involves Iran, are directly and manifestly opposed to U.S. interests.
Israel’s regional warfare — and more specifically a U.S.-backed attack on Iran — would harm U.S. interests in several additional ways.
Closer association with Israel’s lethal operations increases the chance of reprisals, including terrorist reprisals. It also worsens U.S. isolation in international politics.
Supporting or participating in an Israeli attack on Iran would further undermine U.S. claims to be in favor of peace and observance of a rules-based international order. It would mean attacking the country that in this confrontation has exercised restraint in the interest of avoiding war and is firmly in support of ceasefires on each of the fronts seeing combat. It would mean aiding further attacks by the country that in the same confrontation has inflicted far more death and destruction, and done more to promote escalation of the violence, than any other in the region.
An attack on Iran would roil the oil market and cause economic dislocations that would reach the United States, especially but not solely if such an attack targeted Iranian oil facilities.
An attack would set back any chance for fruitful diplomacy involving Iran on matters such as security in the Persian Gulf region.
An attack would increase the chance that the Iranian regime would choose to develop a nuclear weapon. Nothing would be better designed to strengthen the arguments of those in Tehran willing to take that step than armed attacks demonstrating that Iran does not now have a sufficient deterrent.
Israel has already entrapped the United States to a large degree in its lethal ways in the Middle East, and the entrapment threatens to become deeper with the anticipated new attack on Iran. The entrapment would not have been possible without mismanagement of the U.S.-Israeli relationship on the Washington end. President Biden’s approach of holding Netanyahu close in the hope of influencing his policies has failed. It also has been counterproductive. In the absence of any willingness to employ the leverage that U.S. material aid to Israel represents, all the bear-hugging and expressions of support have only reassured Netanyahu that he can continue to prosecute his wars and ignore American calls for restraint without losing that aid.
It is refreshing to see reports that at least within the Department of Defense there is some recognition that the policy has been counterproductive by emboldening Israel to escalate. It is perhaps unsurprising that the department whose personnel would be on the front line of any expanded warfare involving the United States is more willing than others to recognize the nature and sources of the violence plaguing the Middle East and the need to deter or restrain Israel rather than embolden it. One can only hope that this willingness will spread more widely in policymaking circles.
Paul R. Pillar is Non-resident Senior Fellow at the Center for Security Studies of Georgetown University and a non-resident fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He is also an Associate Fellow of the Geneva Center for Security Policy.
The views expressed by authors on Responsible Statecraft do not necessarily reflect those of the Quincy Institute or its associates.
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