Ninety-nine American healthcare workers who volunteered in Gaza over the past year published an open letter to President Biden and Vice President Harris on Thursday that detailed the horrors they witnessed and called for an end to US military support for Israel.
The healthcare workers said they believe the true death toll in Gaza is much higher than what Gazaโs Health Ministry is reporting, estimating it to be over 118,908.
โThis letter and the appendix show probative evidence that the human toll in Gaza since October is far higher than is understood in the United States,โ the letter reads. โIt is likely that the death toll from this conflict is already greater than 118,908, an astonishing 5.4% of Gazaโs population.โ
The latest numbers from Gazaโs Health Ministry put the number of Palestinians killed by Israel in Gaza since October 7, 2023, at 41,788. The ministryโs figures only count the bodies that are brought to hospitals and morgues and donโt account for people missing and presumed dead under the rubble.
The American healthcare workers said that everyone in Gaza is either sick, injured, or both. โWith only marginal exceptions, everyone in Gaza is sick, injured, or both. This includes every national aid worker, every international volunteer, and probably every Israeli hostage: every man, woman, and child,โ the letter says. Palestinians inspect damages at Al Shifa Hospital after Israeli forces withdrew from the hospital and the area around it following a two-week operation in Gaza City on April 1, 2024. REUTERS/Dawoud Abu Alkas
They said that almost every child under five they encountered โhad both a cough and watery diarrhea.โ Each signatory to the letter saw wounds in children that showed they were being purposefully targeted by the Israeli military.
โSpecifically, every one of us who worked in an emergency, intensive care, or surgical setting treated pre-teen children who were shot in the head or chest on a regular or even a daily basis,โ the letter reads. โIt is impossible that such widespread shooting of young children throughout Gaza, sustained over the course of an entire year is accidental or unknown to the highest Israeli civilian and military authorities.โ
Dr. Mark Perlmutter, an orthopedic and hand surgeon, was quoted in the letter saying, โGaza was the first time I held a babyโs brains in my hand. The first of many.โ
The healthcare workers said newborn babies were dying due to the conditions caused by the Israeli siege and attacks on hospitals. Asma Taha, a pediatric nurse practitioner, said, โEvery day, I saw babies die. They had been born healthy. Their mothers were so malnourished that they could not breastfeed, and we lacked formula or clean water to feed them, so they starved.โ
The healthcare workers said their Palestinian colleagues were targeted by Israeli forces and captured during Israeli raids on hospitals. โMany of these colleagues of ours were taken by Israel during the attacks. They all told us a slightly different version of the same story: in captivity, they were barely fed, continuously physically and psychologically abused, and finally dumped naked on the side of a road. Many told us they were subjected to mock executions and other forms of mistreatment and torture,โ the letter reads.
Israel claims Hamas has used hospitals as โcommand centers,โ but the letter said that none of its signatories saw any sign of militant activity. โThe 99 signatories to this letter spent a combined 254 weeks inside Gazaโs largest hospitals and clinics. We wish to be absolutely clear: not once did any of us see any type of Palestinian militant activity in any of Gazaโs hospitals or other healthcare facilities,โ the letter reads.
The letter concludes with a plea for Biden and Harris to end US support for the genocidal war: โEvery day that we continue supplying weapons and munitions to Israel is another day that women are shredded by our bombs and children are murdered with our bullets. President Biden and Vice President Harris, we urge you: end this madness now!โ
Everything is at stake. Everything is at stake with nuclear weapons.
While working as a nuclear war planner for the Kennedy administration, Daniel Ellsberg was shown a document calculating that a U.S. nuclear attack on communist countries would result in 600 million dead. As he put it later: โA hundred Holocausts.โ
That was in 1961.
Today, with nuclear arsenals vastly larger and more powerful, scientists know that a nuclear exchange would cause โnuclear winter.โ And the nearly complete end of agriculture on the planet. Some estimates put the survival rate of humans on Earth at 1 or 2 percent.
No longer 100 Holocausts.
More than 1,000 Holocausts.
What might we Americans say about the actions and inaction of our leaders?
If such a nuclear war happens, of course we wonโt be around for any retrospective analysis. Or regrets. So, candid introspection is in a category of now or never.
What if we did have the opportunity for hindsight? What if we could somehow hover over this planet and see what had become a global crematorium and unspeakable ordeal of human agony? Where, in words attributed to both Nikita Khrushchev and Winston Churchill, โthe living would envy the dead.โ
What might we Americans say about the actions and inaction of our leaders?
In 2023: The nine nuclear-armed countries spent $91 billion on their nuclear weapons. Most of that amount, $51 billion, was the United States. And our country accounted for 80 percent of the increase in nuclear weapons spending.
The United States is leading the way in the nuclear arms race. And weโre encouraged to see that as a good thing. โEscalation dominance.โ
But escalation doesnโt remain unipolar. As time goes on, โDo as we say, not as we doโ isnโt convincing to other nations.
China is now expanding its nuclear arsenal. That escalation does not exist in a vacuum. Official Washington pretends that Chinese policies are shifting without regard to the U.S. pursuit of โescalation dominance.โ But thatโs a disingenuous pretense. What the great critic of Vietnam War escalation during the 1960s, Sen. William Fulbright, called โthe arrogance of power.โ
Of course thereโs plenty to deplore about Russiaโs approach to nuclear weapons. Irresponsible threats about using โtacticalโ ones in Ukraine have come from Moscow. Thereโs now public discussion โ by Russian military and political elites โ of putting nuclear weapons in space.
We should face the realities of the U.S. governmentโs role in fueling such ominous trends, in part by dismantling key arms-control agreements. Among crucial steps, itโs long past time to restore three treaties that the United States abrogated โ ABM, Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces, and Open Skies.
On the non-proliferation front, opportunities are being spurned by Washington. For instance, as former CIA analyst Melvin Goodman wrote in September: โIranโs Ayatollah has indicated a readiness to open discussions with the United States on nuclear matters, but the Biden administration has turned a deaf ear to such a possibility.โ
That deaf ear greatly pleases Israel, the only nuclear-weapons state in the Middle East. On Sept. 22, former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said unequivocally that Israelโs pager attack in Lebanon was โa form of terrorism.โ The United States keeps arming Israel, but wonโt negotiate with Iran.
The U.S. government has a responsibility to follow up on every lead, and respond to every overture. Without communication, we vastly increase the risk of devastation.
We can too easily forget whatโs truly at stake.
We should face the realities of the U.S. governmentโs role in fueling ominous trends, in part by dismantling key arms-control agreements.
Despite diametrical differences in ideologies, in values, in ideals and systems โ programs for extermination are in place at a magnitude dwarfing what occurred during the first half of the 1940s.
Today, Congress and the White House are in the grip of what Martin Luther King Jr. called โthe madness of militarism.โ In a toxic mix with the arrogance of power. Propelling a new and more dangerous Cold War.
And so, at the State Department, the leadership talks about a โrules-based order,โ which all too often actually means: โWe make the rules, we break the rules.โ
Meanwhile, the Doomsday Clock set by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is now just 90 seconds away from apocalyptic midnight.
Six decades ago, the Doomsday Clock was a full 12 minutes away. And President Lyndon Johnson was willing to approach Moscow with the kind of wisdom that is now absent at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.
Hereโs what Johnson said at the end of his extensive summit meeting with Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin in June 1967 in Glassboro, New Jersey: โWe have made further progress in an effort to improve our understanding of each otherโs thinking on a number of questions.โ
Two decades later, President Ronald Reagan โ formerly a supreme cold warrior โ stood next to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and said: โWe decided to talk to each other instead of about each other.โ
But such attitudes would be heresy today.
As each day brings escalation toward a global nuclear inferno, standard-issue legislators on both sides of the aisle keep boosting the Pentagon budget. Huge new appropriations for nuclear weapons are voted under the euphemism of โmodernization.โ
And hereโs a sad irony: The few members of Congress willing to urgently warn about the danger of nuclear war often stoke that danger with calls for โvictoryโ in the Ukraine war. Instead, whatโs urgently needed is a sober push for actual diplomacy to end it.
The United States should not use the Ukraine war as a rationale for pursuing a mutually destructive set of policies toward Russia. Itโs an approach that maintains and worsens the daily reality on the knife-edge of nuclear war.
We donโt know how far negotiations with Russia could get on an array of pivotal issues. But refusing to negotiate is a catastrophic path.
Continuation of the war in Ukraine markedly increases the likelihood of spinning out from a regional to a Europe-wide to a nuclear war. Yet, calls for vigorously pursuing diplomacy to end the Ukraine war are dismissed out of hand as serving Vladimir Putinโs interests.
The world has gotten even closer to the precipice of a military clash between the nuclear superpowers, with a push to greenlight NATO-backed Ukrainian attacks heading deeper into Russia.
At the State Department, the leadership talks about a โrules-based order,โ which all too often actually means: โWe make the rules, we break the rules.โ
Consider what President John Kennedy had to say, eight months after the Cuban Missile Crisis, in his historic speech at American University: โAbove all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy, or of a collective death wish for the world.โ
That crucial insight from Kennedy is currently in the dumpsters at the White House and on Capitol Hill.
And where is this all headed?
Ellsberg tried to alert members of Congress. Five years ago, in a letter that was hand-delivered to every office of Senate and House members, he wrote: โI am concerned that the public, most members of Congress, and possibly even high members of the Executive branch have remained in the dark, or in a state of denial, about the implications of rigorous studies by environmental scientists over the last dozen years.โ Those studies โconfirm that using even a large fraction of the existing U.S. or Russian nuclear weapons that are on high alert would bring about nuclear winter, leading to global famine and near extinction of humanity.โ
In the quest for sanity and survival, isnโt it time for reconstruction of the nuclear arms-control infrastructure? Yes, the Russian war against Ukraine violates international law and โnorms,โ as did U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But real diplomacy with Russia is in the interests of global security.
And some great options donโt depend on what happens at the negotiation table.
Many experts say that the most important initial step our country could take to reduce the chances of nuclear war would be a shutdown of all ICBMs.
The word โdeterrenceโ is often heard. But the land-based part of the triad is actually the opposite of deterrence โ itโs an invitation to be attacked. Thatโs the reality of the 400 intercontinental ballistic missiles that are on hair-trigger alert in five western states
Uniquely, ICBMs invite a counterforce attack. And they allow a president just minutes to determine whether whatโs incoming is actually a set of missiles โ or, as in the past, a flock of geese or a drill message thatโs mistaken for the real thing.
The former Secretary of Defense William Perry wrote that ICBMs are โsome of the most dangerous weapons in the worldโ and โthey could even trigger an accidental nuclear war.โ
And yet, so far, we canโt get anywhere with Congress in order to shut down ICBMs. โOh no,โ weโre told, โthat would be unilateral disarmament.โ
Imagine that youโre standing in a pool of gasoline, with your adversary. Youโre lighting matches, and your adversary is lighting matches. If you stop lighting matches, that could be condemned as โunilateral disarmament.โ It would also be a sane step to reduce the danger โ whether or not the other side follows suit.
The ongoing refusal to shut down the ICBMs is akin to insisting that our side must keep lighting matches while standing in gasoline.
The chances of ICBMs starting a nuclear conflagration have increased with sky-high tensions between the worldโs two nuclear superpowers. Mistaking a false alarm for a nuclear-missile attack becomes more likely amid the stresses, fatigue and paranoia that come with the protracted war in Ukraine and extending war into Russia.
Their unique vulnerability as land-based strategic weapons puts ICBMs in the unique category of โuse them or lose them.โ So, as Perry explained, โIf our sensors indicate that enemy missiles are en route to the United States, the president would have to consider launching ICBMs before the enemy missiles could destroy them. Once they are launched, they cannot be recalled. The president would have less than 30 minutes to make that terrible decision.โ
The United States should dismantle its entire ICBM force. Former ICBM launch officer Bruce Blair and Gen. James Cartwright, former vice chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote in 2016: โBy scrapping the vulnerable land-based missile force, any need for launching on warning disappears.โ
The United States should dismantle its entire ICBM force.
In July, the Union of Concerned Scientists released a letter signed by more than 700 scientists. They not only called for cancelation of the Sentinel program for a new version of ICBMs โ they also called for getting rid of the entire land-based arsenal.
Meanwhile, the current dispute in Congress about ICBMs has focused on whether it would be cheaper to build the cost-overrunning Sentinel system or upgrade the existing Minuteman III missiles. But either way, the matches keep being lit for a global holocaust.
During his Nobel Peace Prize speech, Martin Luther King Jr. declared: โI refuse to accept the cynical notion that nation after nation must spiral down a militaristic stairway into the hell of thermonuclear destruction.โ
I want to close with some words from Ellsbergโs book โThe Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner,โ summing up the preparations for nuclear war. He wrote:
โNo policies in human history have more deserved to be recognized as immoral, or insane. The story of how this calamitous predicament came about, and how and why it has persisted for over half a century is a chronicle of human madness. Whether Americans, Russians and other humans can rise to the challenge of reversing these policies and eliminating the danger of near-term extinction caused by their own inventions and proclivities remains to be seen. I choose to join with others in acting as if that is still possible.โ
This article is adapted from the keynote speech that the author gave at the annual conference of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 24, 2024.
THE Labour government has ordered 100 spy flights over Gaza to aid Israeli intelligence, an investigation by Declassified UK revealed today.
The intelligence-gathering flights began in December under the previous government.
Eleven flights took place in Labourโs first week in power, and during Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmerโs first full month in office in August, the Royal Air Force (RAF) flew 42 flights over Gaza.
Declassified UK found that the flights were departing from Britainโs air base in Cyprus.
The flights may have gathered up to 500 hours of footage of Gaza, Declassified UK said, though it is unclear exactly where the British intelligence is going and what it comprises.
Earlier this month, Liberal Democrat MP Mike Martin, a former British army officer who served in Afghanistan, asked the military whether โUK intelligence is passed to Israel for the purposes of military targeting.โ
Labourโs armed forces minister Luke Pollard responded by saying the surveillance flights were โsolely tasked to support hostage rescue.โ
Britainโs intelligence support to Israel is not limited to aerial missions.
An Israeli official disclosed to the New York Times that a secret British reconnaissance team was deployed to Israel early on in its attack on Gaza.
The British team gives โadded valueโ to its intelligence operations, he said, adding that Britain is providing intelligence that โIsrael cannot collect on its own.โ
There is no evidence the new Labour government has brought this spy team home from Israel.
โโA Ministry of Defence spokesperson told Declassified that Britain is not a participant in the war in Gaza, adding: โOur mandate is narrowly defined to focus on securing the release of the hostages only, including British nationals, with the RAF routinely conducting unarmed flights since December 2023 for this sole purpose.โ
The president previously said he wouldn’t support strikes on nuclear facilities
by Dave DeCamp, Antiwar. com, October 3, 2024
President Biden said Thursday that the US and Israel were discussing the possibility of striking Iranโs oil facilities in retaliation for the Iranian missile barrage that targeted Israel on Tuesday, which was a response to multiple Israeli escalations.
When asked by a reporter if he would support Israeli strikes on Iranian oil sites, Biden said, โWeโre discussing that. I think that would be a littleโฆ anyway.โ The comments sent oil prices spiking.
Striking Iranโs oil facilities is supported by the ultra-hawkish Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC). โThese oil refineries need to be hit and hit hard because that is the source of cash for the regime to perpetrate their terror,โ Graham said in a statement on Tuesday.
On Wednesday, Biden said he wouldnโt support Israeli strikes on Iranian nuclear sites, but the US is vowing to ensure Tehran faces โsevere consequences.โ Israeli officials have told Axios that they plan to hit Iran hard and believe their attack could lead to a major regional war.
Options being considered besides striking oil facilities are targeting Iranโs air defenses or carrying out a targeted assassination inside Iran. Israeli officials have said that if Iran responds to their next attack, then any option is on the table, including strikes on nuclear facilities.
Israel is coordinating its plans to attack Iran with the US because it wants the US to come to its defense in the event of another significant Iranian attack. If Israel wants to carry out a significant strike inside Iran, it may also need support from the US military.
Iran fired about 180 ballistic missiles at Israel in response to the Israeli assassination of Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran and the Israeli killing of Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah and Abbas Nilforoushan, an IRGC commander who was killed alongside Nasrallah.
Today, Iran launched a massive missile attack against Israel, which Tehran billed as a response to Israelโs recent assassinations of leaders of the IRGC, Hezbollah and Hamas. Israel now appears to be mulling a retaliation in turn that could push the sides into all-out war.
When Israel and Iran narrowly avoided a full-blown conflict in April, I warned that we shouldnโt let Bidenโs help in averting escalation overshadow his broader, strategic failure to prevent such a dangerous moment from ever arising. Had the U.S. used its considerable leverage with Israel to end its war in Gaza, the region would not have found itself on the edge of a disastrous war in April; six months later, the Middle East is back at the brink of disaster.
Iran has made it clear that it does not want a regional conflict; Tehran doesnโt seem to believe it can afford such a war. But Netanyahu clearly thinks itโs in his interest to ramp up conflict right now, as Washington stands frozen โ a month out from an election and with a lame duck president who seems incapable of telling Israel โno,โ no matter the costs for American security.
One must hope that somehow, further escalation is avoided. But the risk of just such an outcome is enormous, and if the U.S. finds itself in a new forever war in the Middle East, the buck will stop with Biden. This White House has repeatedly chosen to keep the U.S. on the precipice of war, rather than restrain Israelโs military as its expanding wars killed more and more civilians in Gaza and now Lebanon. The Biden administration has helped bring about this extraordinarily dangerous moment by providing Israel with the weapons, political protection, diplomatic support, and money it requires to pursue the exact escalation that the Biden administration professes it does not want.
Subscribe now to our weekly round-up and don’t miss a beat with your favorite RS contributors and reporters, as well as staff analysis, opinion, and news promoting a positive, non-partisan vision of U.S. foreign policy.
Bidenโs strategy has been to put enormous effort into deterring Iran and its partners from retaliating against Israel, while doing virtually nothing to discourage Israel from escalating in the first place. This lopsided approach has in fact been a recipe for escalation, repeatedly proving to Netanyahu that Washington has no intention of bringing pressure to bear on Israel, no matter its actions.
If Biden enables further escalation from Israel, this could very well lead to a direct U.S.-Iran military confrontation that would be profoundly destabilizing in the region. The consequences for U.S. national security of such a war are hard to quantify โ but itโs easy to imagine consequences on par with the disastrous military adventurism that George W. Bushโs administration pursued in the Middle East.
If U.S. service members find themselves in the line of fire in an expanding Iran-Israel conflict, it will be a direct result of this administrationโs failure to use U.S. leverage to pursue Americaโs most core security interest here โ avoiding war.
Joe Biden came into office promising to end the era of forever wars and the quixotic, costly efforts to transform the Middle East. Now, Biden appears to have fallen into the trap of thinking that U.S. military force will transform the region for good. It is stunning that Washington appears not to have learned this lesson yet.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks at the United General Assembly and shows maps of the Middle East on September 27, 2023.
(Photo: Michael Kappeler/picture alliance via Getty Images)
Israelโs violent extremists now in control of its government believe that Israel has the Biblical license, indeed a religious mandate, to destroy the Palestinian people.
When Israelโs Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took the podium at the U.N. General Assembly last week, dozens of governments walked out of the chamber. The global opprobrium of Netanyahu and his government is due to Israelโs depraved violence against its Arab neighbors. Netanyahu purveys a fundamentalist ideology that has turned Israel into the most violent nation in the world.
Israelโs fundamentalist credo holds that Palestinians have no right whatsoever to their own nation. The Israeli Knesset recently passed a declaration rejecting a Palestinian State in what the Knesset calls The Land of Israel, meaning the land west of the Jordan River.
The Knesset of Israel firmly opposes the establishment of a Palestinian state west of Jordan. The establishment of a Palestinian state in the heart of the Land of Israel will pose an existential danger to the State of Israel and its citizens, perpetuate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and destabilize the region.
To call the land west of the Jordan the โheart of the Land of Israelโ is breathtaking. Israel is one part of the land west of the Jordan, not the entire land. The International Court of Justice has recently ruled that Israelโs occupation of the Palestinian lands (those outside of Israelโs borders as of June 4, 1967, before the June 1967 war) is plainly illegal. The U.N. General Assembly has recently voted overwhelmingly to back the ICJ ruling and called on Israel to withdraw from Palestinian territories within one year.
There are many sources of this Israeli brazenness, the most important being the backing of Israel by U.S. military power.
It is worth recalling that when the British empire promised a Jewish homeland in Ottoman Palestine in 1917, the Palestinian Arabs constituted around 90% of the population. At the time of the 1947 U.N. partition plan, the Palestinian Arab population was approximately 67% of the population, though the partition plan proposed to give the Arabs only 44% of the land. Now Israel asserts the claim to 100% of the land.
There are many sources of this Israeli brazenness, the most important being the backing of Israel by U.S. military power. Without the U.S. military backing, Israel could not possibly rule over an Apartheid regime in which Palestinian Arabs constitute nearly one half of the population yet hold none of the political power. Future generations will look back in amazement at the success of the Israel Lobby in manipulating the U.S. military to the severe detriment of U.S. national security and global peace.
Yet in addition to the U.S. military, there is another source of Israelโs profound injustice to the Palestinian people, and that is the religious fundamentalism purveyed fanatics such as the self-proclaimed fascist Bezalel Smotrich, Israelโs Minister of Finance, and Minister of National Defense Itamar Ben-Gvir. These fanatics hold fast to the biblical Book of Joshua, according to which God promised the Israelites the land “from the Negev wilderness in the south to the Lebanon mountains in the north, from the Euphrates River in the east to the Mediterranean Sea in the west.” (Joshua 1:4).
At the U.N. last week, Netanyahu once again staked Israelโs claim to the land on Biblical grounds: โWhen I spoke here last year, I said we face the same timeless choice that Moses put before the people of Israel thousands of years ago, as we were about to enter the Promised Land. Moses told us that our actions would determine whether we bequeath to future generations a blessing or a curse.โ
What Netanyahu did not tell his fellow leaders (most of whom had in any event vacated the hall), was that Moses laid out a genocidal path to the Promised Land (Deuteronomy 31):
[The LORD] will destroy these nations before you, and you shall dispossess them. Joshua is the one who will cross ahead of you, just as the LORD has spoken. โThe LORD will do to them just as He did to Sihon and Og, the kings of the Amorites, and to their land, when He destroyed them. โThe LORD will deliver them up before you, and you shall do to them according to all the commandments which I have commanded you.โ
Israelโs violent extremists believe that Israel has the Biblical license, indeed a religious mandate, to destroy the Palestinian people. Their Biblical hero is Joshua, the Israelite commander who succeeded Moses, and who led the Israelitesโ genocidal conquests. (Netanyahu has also referred to the Amalekites, another case of a God-ordained genocide of foes of the Israelites, in a clear โdog-whistleโ to his fundamentalist followers.) Here is the Biblical account of Joshuaโs conquest of Hebron (Joshua 10):
Then Joshua and all Israel with him went up from Eglon to Hebron, and they fought against it. They captured it and struck it and its king and all its cities and all the persons who were in it with the edge of the sword. He left no survivor, according to all that he had done to Eglon. And he utterly destroyed it and every person who was in it.
There is a deep irony to this genocidal account. It almost surely is not historically accurate. There is no evidence that the Jewish kingdoms arose from genocides. Most likely they arose from local Canaanite communities adopting early forms of Judaism. Jewish fundamentalists adhere to a 6th century BCE text that is most likely a mythical reconstruction of purported events several centuries earlier, and a form of political bravado that was common in ancient Near Eastern politics. The problem is 21st century Israeli politicians, illegal settlers, and other fundamentalists who propose to live byโand kill byโ6th century BCE political propaganda.
Israelโs violent fundamentalists are some 2,600 years out of step with todayโs acceptable forms of statecraft and international law. Israel is duty bound to the UN Charter and the Geneva Conventions, not to the Book of Joshua. According to the recent ICJ ruling and UN General Assembly resolution backing it up, Israel must withdraw in the coming twelve months from the occupied Palestinian lands. According to international law, Israelโs borders are those of June 4, 1967, not the Euphrates to the Mediterranean Sea.
Israelโs violent fundamentalists are some 2,600 years out of step with todayโs acceptable forms of statecraft and international law.
The ICJ ruling and U.N. General Assembly vote is not a ruling against the state of Israel per se. It is a ruling only against extremism, indeed against extremism and malevolence on both sides of the divide. There are two peoples, each with roughly half the overall population (and with no shortage of internal social, political, and ideological divisions within the two communities). International law calls for two states, living side by side, in peace.
The best solution, which we should strive for and hope for sooner rather than later, is that the two states, and the two peoples, get along, and actually draw strength from each other. Until then, however, the practical solution will be peacekeepers and fortified borders to protect each side from the animosity of the other, but with each having the chance to prosper. The utterly intolerable and illegal situation is the status quo, in which Israel rules brutally over the Palestinian people.
Hopefully, there will soon be a State of Palestine, sovereign and independent, whether the Knesset wants it or not. This is not Israelโs choice, but the mandate of the world community and of international law. The sooner the State of Palestine is welcomed as member state of the U.N., with the security of both Israel and Palestine backed by U.N. peacekeepers, the sooner will peace come to the region.
Common Dreams is powered by optimists who believe in the power of informed and engaged citizens to ignite and enact change to make the world a better place.
We’re hundreds of thousands strong, but every single supporter makes the difference.
Your contribution supports this bold media modelโfree, independent, and dedicated to reporting the facts every day. Stand with us in the fight for economic equality, social justice, human rights, and a more sustainable future. As a people-powered nonprofit news outlet, we cover the issues the corporate media never will.
about:blank
about:blank
Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.
Jeffrey D. Sachs is a University Professor and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, where he directed The Earth Institute from 2002 until 2016. He is also President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and a commissioner of the UN Broadband Commission for Development. He has been advisor to three United Nations Secretaries-General, and currently serves as an SDG Advocate under Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. Sachs is the author, most recently, of “A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism” (2020). Other books include: “Building the New American Economy: Smart, Fair, and Sustainable” (2017) and “The Age of Sustainable Development,” (2015) with Ban Ki-moon.
The deployment includes multiple fighter jet squadrons and personnel to support them
by Dave DeCamp, Antiwar. com, September 30, 2024
The Pentagon said Monday that the US is sending a โfew thousandโ additional troops to the Middle East to bolster security and prepare to defend Israel if needed, The Associated Press has reported.
The deployment will include squadrons of F-15, F-16, F-22, and A-10 fighter jets and the personnel needed to support them. The squadrons were initially set to deploy to the Middle East so that other fighter jets could rotate out, but now they will all stay to increase US air power.
The deployment comes after the Israeli killing of Hassan Nasrallah and the Israeli slaughter of hundreds of Lebanese civilians since Israel dramatically escalated its bombing campaign in Lebanon last week. The US support for Israelโs attacks on Lebanon could provoke attacks on US forces in the region, or the US could directly intervene to defend Israel.
Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh said the deployment is for โthe protection of US forces,โ not to assist in evacuations. Last week, Singh said the US was bolstering its forces in the region โshould we need to come to the defense of Israel.โ
On Sunday, the Pentagon announced Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin ordered an aircraft carrier strike group and an amphibious assault group to stay in the region. The Pentagon also issued a warning to Iran on Sunday, saying Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin โmade clear that should Iran, its partners, or its proxies use this moment to target American personnel or interests in the region, the United States will take every necessary measure to defend our people.โ
Mourners carry the bodies of people killed in Israeli airstrikes on el-Karak in Lebanon’s eastern Bekaa valley, during their funeral on September 27, 2024.
(Photo: Hassan Jarrah/AFP via Getty Images)
“The U.S. government are conspirators to the war criminal Netanyahu’s genocidal plan,” said the Michigan Democrat.
U.S. President Joe Biden and Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib on Saturday had notably different responses to Israel’s intense bombing campaign in Lebanon over the past 24 hours, which killed hundreds of people including key Hezbollah leaders.
“Our country is funding this bloodbath,” Tlaib (D-Mich.) said on social media Saturday morning, sharing a post from Zeteo‘s Prem Thakker with videos of the Israeli assault on Lebanon that began Friday, as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was in New York City to address the United Nations General Assembly.
“Sending more of our troops and bombs to the region is not advancing peace,” added Tlaib, the only Palestinian American in Congress and a leading critic of Israel’s yearlong genocide in the Gaza Strip. “The U.S. government are conspirators to the war criminal Netanyahu’s genocidal plan.”
In the post shared by Tlaib, Thakker noted that “the U.S. was reportedly informed of this mass Israeli attack on Beirut in Lebanon shortly beforehand,” which “comes just one day after [the] U.S. released $8.7 billion more in aid to Israel.”
Tlaib also shared that her office is fielding “desperate calls” from U.S. citizens who are struggling to leave Lebanon. She declared that “the mission of the U.S. Department of State is to protect Americans, and they are failing AGAIN.”
Biden, meanwhile, began his Saturday afternoon statement by noting that Israel killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, which the Iran-backed Lebanese political and paramilitary group confirmed earlier in the dayโa development that elevated fears of a broader regional war.
“Hassan Nasrallah and the terrorist group he led, Hezbollah, were responsible for killing hundreds of Americans over a four-decade reign of terror,” Biden said. “His death from an Israeli airstrike is a measure of justice for his many victims, including thousands of Americans, Israelis, and Lebanese civilians.”
The president continued:
The strike that killed Nasrallah took place in the broader context of the conflict that began with Hamas’ massacre on October 7, 2023. Nasrallah, the next day, made the fateful decision to join hands with Hamas and open what he called a “northern front” against Israel.
The United States fully supports Israel’s right to defend itself against Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and any other Iranian-supported terrorist groups. Just yesterday, I directed my secretary of defense to further enhance the defense posture of U.S. military forces in the Middle East region to deter aggression and reduce the risk of a broader regional war.
Ultimately, our aim is to de-escalate the ongoing conflicts in both Gaza and Lebanon through diplomatic means. In Gaza, we have been pursuing a deal backed by the U.N. Security Council for a ceasefire and the release of hostages. In Lebanon, we have been negotiating a deal that would return people safely to their homes in Israel and southern Lebanon. It is time for these deals to close, for the threats to Israel to be removed, and for the broader Middle East region to gain greater stability.
While the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) thanked Biden “for standing with our democratic ally Israel,” journalists from around the world and other critics highlighted that his statement “has not a word on civilian casualties.”
Ali Abunimah, director of The Electronic Intifada, was among those who pointed out that Biden said the “assassination of Nasrallah, in an Israeli massacre that killed hundreds, ‘is a measure of justice for his many victims.'”
“Utterly depraved, and by this twisted, criminal Biden logic, those who tried to assassinate Trump were also instruments of ‘justice,” Abunimah said, referring to former U.S. President Donald Trump, Republican nominee for the November election.
Middle East expert Assal Rad said: “Biden calls massive bombs in a densely-populated area that leveled six apartment buildings in Lebanon ‘a measure of justice.’ The torching of international law and the precedent that is being set should terrify us all.”
Rad also slammed Biden’s cease-fire call, saying: “This is nonsense. You can’t provide the funding and weapons to continue the conflict *without* conditions, twist humanitarian law to give Israel total impunity, and reject every international institution that seeks accountability, and then say your ‘aim is to de-escalate.'”
Others recalled Israel’s 2004 assassination of Hamas leader Ahmed Yassin, which also killed seven other people. The administration of former Republican U.S. President George W. Bushโwho launched the global War on Terror in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacksโdidn’t issue a forceful condemnation like some European leaders, but a spokesperson for the State Department said at the time that “we are deeply troubled” by the attack.
As’ad Abukhalil, a Lebanese American professor at California State University, Stanislus, declared Saturday that “there has been no U.S. president EVER who has unconditionally allowed unrestrained Israeli savagery in the Middle East as Biden has done.”
Abukhalil warned that “the U.S. will suffer for years to come from the policies of Biden in the Middle East,” which he described as “more far-reaching [than] Bush’s.”
Biden, a Democrat, was initially seeking reelection in November, but after a disastrous summer debate performance against Trump, he passed the torch to Vice President Kamala Harris. After putting out Biden’s Saturday statement, the White House released a similar one from Harrisโwhich was also lauded by AIPAC.
“Hassan Nasrallah was a terrorist with American blood on his hands. Across decades, his leadership of Hezbollah destabilized the Middle East and led to the killing of countless innocent people in Lebanon, Israel, Syria, and around the world. Today, Hezbollah’s victims have a measure of justice,” Harris said. “I have an unwavering commitment to the security of Israel. I will always support Israelโs right to defend itself against Iran and Iran-backed terrorist groups such as Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis.”
“President Biden and I do not want to see conflict in the Middle East escalate into a broader regional war,” she added. “We have been working on a diplomatic solution along the Israel-Lebanon border so that people can safely return home on both sides of that border. Diplomacy remains the best path forward to protect civilians and achieve lasting stability in the region.”
In response, Margaret Zaknoen DeReus, executive director at the California-based Institute for Middle East Understanding, said: “Like Biden, not a word from the VP , from the candidate of joy & freedom, about the 1,000+ Lebanese men, women and children Israel obliterated. Not a word about hundreds of thousands of Lebanese displaced, entire city blocks destroyed. We don’t exist as human beings to this [administration].”
Responding to both statements on social media, the anti-war group CodePink said that the Biden-Harris administration “believes flattening a residential area with… bombs is ‘justice.'”
Julian Assange on board a flight to Bangkok, Thailand, following his release from prison, June 25, 2024
JULIAN ASSANGE will address the Council of Europe next week to give evidence following a report highlighting the implications of his detention on human rights and the freedom of journalism.
The Pace inquiry report found that the WikiLeaks founder qualified as a political prisoner and called on Britain to conduct an independent review into whether he was exposed to inhuman or degrading treatment while incarcerated.
Thorhildur Sunna Avarsdottir, report author and general rapporteur for political prisoners, emphasises how Mr Assangeโs case is a high-profile example of transnational repression.
The report discusses how governments employ legal and extra-legal measures to suppress dissent across borders, posing significant threats to press freedom and human rights.
Mr Assange will give testimony before the Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights on October 1, making it his first since before his imprisonment in 2019.
Campaigners have said that his appearance before Europeโs foremost human rights and treaty-setting body emphasises the broader implications of his case.
President Biden delivered a speech to the UN General Assembly in New York on Tuesday and claimed that he was working to bring a โgreater measure of peace and stability to the Middle Eastโ even though his administration continues to provide full-throated support for Israelโs genocidal war in Gaza and its escalations in Lebanon.
Biden acknowledged that โinnocent civiliansโ in Gaza are โgoing through hell,โ a situation he helped create by providing a constant flow of weapons to Israel since October 7, 2023. An Israeli Air Force official recently said that without US support, Israel could only sustain military operations in Gaza for a few months.
The president said it was time for Hamas and Israel to finalize the terms of a hostage and ceasefire deal, but US officials have admitted that thereโs no chance of an agreement before Bidenโs term ends on January 20, 2025. Biden could force Israel to accept a deal by withholding military aid, but thereโs no sign heโs willing to take that step.
US President Joe Biden delivered remarks at the United Nations (John Wong/EYEPRESS)
Discussing the situation between Israel and Hezbollah, Biden said, โFull-scale war is not in anyoneโs interest. Even as the situation has escalated, a diplomatic solution is still possible.โ His comments came a day after Israel launched a massive bombardment against southern and eastern Lebanon, killing over 500 people, mostly civilians.
Biden claimed that his administration is โworking tirelesslyโ to achieve a diplomatic solution between Israel and Hezbollah. But the US backed the latest Israeli escalation and is deploying more troops to the Middle East as a show of support. US military aid and promises to defend Israel in the event of a major regional war have emboldened Israel to escalate in Lebanon and elsewhere in the Middle East.
Lebanese Foreign Minister Abdallah Bou Habib expressed disappointment with Bidenโs comments about Lebanon and said the US was the only country that could stop the escalations. โIt was not strong. It is not promising and it would not solve this problem,โ Bou Habib said. โI (am) still hoping. The United States is the only country that can really make a difference in the Middle East and with regard to Lebanon.โ
In his address, Biden also called for countries to stop arming the opposing sides in the war in Sudan. โThe world needs to stop arming the generals, to speak with one voice and tell them: Stop tearing your country apart. Stop blocking aid to the Sudanese people. End this war now,โ he said.
A day earlier, the Biden administration named the UAE a โmajor defense partnerโ as Abu Dhabi is funneling weapons into Sudan to arm the Rapid Support Forces and fuel the war. The designation will give the UAE access to more sophisticated US weapons and military technology.
Peace and Justice Post 
You must be logged in to post a comment.