People take part in the National march for Palestine in central London organised by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, August 3, 2024
TENS of thousands of Palestine supporters marched in towns and cities across Britain on Saturday in defiance of threats of continuing far-right violence.
In London an estimated 100,000 marched as the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) staged its 17th national demonstration in the capital since Israel began its invasion of Gaza in October last year.
Hundreds turned out in Manchester marking the 300th day of Israel’s genocide in which more than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed including 20,000 children.
Norma Turner, chair of Greater Manchester Friends of Palestine which brings together a dozen Palestine campaign groups in north-west England, said: “Three hundred days — 60 children killed by Israel every day — and we demand our government stops arming Israel.
“We grieve for three children randomly killed in Southport.
“We condemn the fascist thugs trying to cause discord on the back of people’s grief. And we mourn the 40,000 martyrs in Gaza — we will continue to protest and take action until Palestine is free.”
In London PSC coupled its demands for a ceasefire in Gaza and an end to British arms sales to Israel with an appeal for funds to maintain the protests nationwide.
“Saturday’s march cost us over £40,000 to organise. We need to raise more funds to meet this cost and escalate our campaign to end Israel’s genocide in Gaza and system of apartheid across Palestine,” the group said.
PSC also highlighted Israel’s shocking treatment of more than 10,000 Palestinian political prisoners held in its jails.
“Since October Israel has rounded up, detained, stopped and tortured thousands of Palestinians, over 10,000 held in the West Bank alone,” said PSC.
“Last week the UN produced a report which documented the systemic torture and abuse, including rape, of these detainees.
“We also saw a member of the Israeli Knesset claiming that Israeli forces were entitled to use rape against Palestinian detainees and that no action should be taken against those who do. This is the true face of Israel’s genocidal regime.”
PSC will draw up plans to step up its Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign against Israel at a conference in Westminster Central Hall on Saturday August 10.
Prominent Israeli human rights group denounces decision to place victim in a situation where he could face his abusers
Soldiers lock a gate at Sde Teiman detention facility, after Israeli military police arrived as part of an investigation into the suspected abuse of a Palestinian detainee on 29 July (Reuters)
A Palestinian detainee hospitalised in Beersheba after allegedly being raped by Israeli soldiers in Sde Teiman detention centre has been returned to the notorious facility, according to the Israeli news outlet Haaretz.
The prisoner was discharged to a field hospital at Sde Teiman.
He suffered from “a ruptured bowel, a severe injury to his anus, lung damage and broken ribs”, according to Haaretz and Arab48.
On Monday, nine Israeli soldiers at Sde Teiman were arrested on suspicion of raping a Palestinian detainee, sparking a riot when far-right activists and MPs stormed the facility.
The reservists, who are members of Force 100, a unit tasked with guarding the prisoners in Sde Teiman, were brought to the military court at the Beid Lid base for a bail hearing.
They claimed the prisoner attacked them during the search process, according to Haaretz.
Israeli NGO Physicians for Human Rights denounced the prisoner’s return to the facility where he was allegedly abused.
‘Serious ethical and professional failure’
“The return of the detainee to the clinic at Sde Teiman, the facility where he was subjected to torture, is a serious ethical and professional failure of the medical officials and hospital management who were involved in his medical care,” the organisation was quoted as saying in Haaretz.
“Through this decision, the medical teams exposed the detainee to the possibility that he would once again meet the soldiers suspected of raping him, thereby putting his life in danger.”
Yoel Donchin, a doctor at Sde Teiman who has attended the prisoner, was also quoted as saying that he “couldn’t believe an Israeli prison guard could do such a thing”.
He said: “If the state and Knesset [parliament] members think there’s no limit to how much you can abuse prisoners, they should kill them themselves, like the Nazis did, or close the hospitals… If they maintain a hospital only for the sake of defending ourselves at [the International Criminal Court] the Hague, that’s no good.”
About 4,000 Palestinians have been detained from Gaza in Israel since October 2023. Most are detained and interrogated in the enclave but many are brought to Sde Teiman, even if they are a non-combatant.
Torture, rape and murder have all been reported as rife at the facility, one of several facilities where Palestinians have been mistreated for decades.
On 15 July, Israel’s High Court issued a conditional order seeking to close Sde Teiman in response to the reports of abuse there.
The court’s order seeks an explanation as to “why the Sde Teiman detention facility is not operated in accordance with the conditions set forth in the law governing internment of unlawful combatants”.
Twelve US warships are assembled in the region to protect Israel
Dave DeCamp, Antiwar. com, August 1, 2024
President Biden spoke with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday and promised the US would help defend Israel from any reprisal attacks it may face from Iran or its allies in response to recent Israeli escalations.
Iran is vowing revenge for the Israeli assassination of Hamas’s political chief in Tehran, and Hezbollah is warning it will escalate in response to the Israeli strike in Beirut that killed one of its top commanders.
“The President reaffirmed his commitment to Israel’s security against all threats from Iran, including its proxy terrorist groups Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis,” the White House said in a readout of the Biden-Netanyahu call.
Biden also said the US was deploying more military assets to the region. “The President discussed efforts to support Israel’s defense against threats, including against ballistic missiles and drones, to include new defensive US military deployments,” the readout said. The White House said Vice President Kamala Harris was also on the call.
A Pentagon official told The Washington Post that the US had assembled 12 warships in the Middle East that were already in the region to prepare to defend Israel. The aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt and six US Navy destroyers are in the Persian Gulf, while three amphibious ships and two destroyers are in the Eastern Mediterranean.
US officials told Axios that the US is preparing for a direct Iranian attack on Israel and believes it could be bigger than the April 13 missile and drone attack that came in response to the Israeli bombing of the Iranian consulate in Damascus, Syria. The next attack could include Hezbollah and other Iranian allies.
Biden, Harris, and other US officials claim they’re trying to reduce tensions. But unconditional US military aid for Israel and vows to defend Israel no matter what it does in the region only emboldens Netanyahu and leads to more escalations.
Phyllis Bennis says the killing of Haniyeh in Tehran was a deliberate provocation that matches Netanyahu’s longstanding goal of drawing the U.S. into a potential Israel-Iran war.
Ismail Haniyeh speaking in Gaza in April 2012. (Joe Catron, Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0)
A new assassination campaign aimed at Israel’s opponents has erupted across the Middle East, imperiling already shaky Gaza ceasefire talks and threatening an even greater regional expansion of war.
While Israel continues its genocidal attack on desperate Gazans, killing scores, perhaps hundreds just in the last several days, the latest moves were clearly designed to escalate Israel’s war in Gaza and expand the military tensions already simmering on its border with Lebanon, in Syria, Iraq, Yemen and elsewhere into a full-scale war, potentially drawing in both Iran and the United States even more directly.
The lethal attacks on top military and political officials of Hezbollah and Hamas, in Beirut and Tehran respectively within 24 hours, demonstrates the centrality of assassination — and the irrelevance of diplomacy — in Tel Aviv’s strategic calculus.
Tuesday evening in the Lebanese capital, an Israeli airstrike hit the neighborhood of Dahiyeh, destroying a residential building very close to a major hospital, killing and injuring still-unconfirmed numbers of people.
Israel claimed it killed Fuad Shukr, a top military official of Hezbollah, and a close adviser to Hassan Nasrallah, head of the political-military resistance organization in Lebanon. [Hezbollah has confirmed Shukur’s death.]
Just hours before that Israeli strike, U.S. State Department spokesman Vedant Patel said that U.S. officials “do not believe that all-out war is inevitable and we still believe that it can be avoided.” That followed his statement that “our commitment to Israel’s security is ironclad and unwavering against all Iran-backed threats, including Hezbollah, and we are working on a diplomatic solution.”
But the U.S. has made clear by its actions — regardless of some politicians’ rhetorical support for ending the war — that it is not prepared to do the one thing that would result in a permanent ceasefire: stop sending Israel the weapons that enable the war in Gaza.
To the contrary, the possibility of a diplomatic solution was grievously undermined again just hours after the Beirut attack when another airstrike, widely assumed to be Israeli, assassinated the political leader of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, in a guest house in Tehran.
He was visiting the Iranian capital for the inauguration of just-elected Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian. Haniyeh, who had briefly served as prime minister of the Palestinian Authority after Hamas won the 2006 Palestinian elections that were initially welcomed by the United States, lived in exile in Qatar.
In recent months he played a key role in the Qatar-sponsored and U.S.-backed Israeli-Hamas negotiations aimed at ending Israel’s assault on Gaza, ensuring access to humanitarian aid, and releasing illegally held Palestinian prisoners and Israeli hostages.
Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian in 2024. (Khamenei.ir, Wikimedia Commons, C BY 4.0)
All the talk about Washington and Tel Aviv supporting a ceasefire or wanting the hostages returned means little when a top negotiator on the other side can be assassinated with impunity.
Haniyeh was widely recognized as pragmatic and supportive of negotiations; in 2006, just three months after Hamas won the Palestinian election in both Gaza and the West Bank, Haniyeh wrote to then-President George W. Bush urging negotiations between the U.S. and Hamas, and offering acceptance of a two-state solution and a long-term truce with Israel.
The current situation, he wrote, “will encourage violence and chaos in the whole region.” Bush never responded.
The negotiations the Hamas leader was participating in will almost certainly be stalled, if not derailed entirely, as a result of Haniyeh’s killing. The resulting continuation of Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza matches the goal of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has resisted ceasefire efforts and pledged to keep fighting until Hamas is destroyed.
Biden announcing Israel’s three-phase ceasefire proposal for Gaza on May 31. (White House, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)
The likelihood of an expanding regional war is now exponentially higher — with the danger of a much more direct conflict between Israel and Iran, and the possibility of even greater direct U.S. involvement.
The assassination of Haniyeh in Tehran was a deliberate provocation, aimed at forcing an Iranian reaction.
Any government whose intelligence assets were powerful enough to know exactly where the Hamas leader was staying during a temporary visit to the Iranian capital would have known where he lived in Qatar, where an assassination, while of course still illegal, would not have had the same consequences.
Forcing Iran’s hand, particularly at the highly symbolic moment of the inauguration, will severely limit the options for the new president, who has called for renewed negotiations with the United States on nuclear issues and signaled the possibility of reopening the Iran nuclear deal.
Preventing that would match Netanyahu’s longstanding goal of undermining any hint of a U.S.-Iranian rapprochement and bringing the United States directly into a potential Israeli-Iranian war.
While details on the exact nature of the missiles or other kind of projectiles used in the two assassinations have not yet been made public, it is likely that one or both were U.S.-produced and/or U.S.-funded.
In that circumstance, the U.S. complicity in genocide by providing the weapons Israel is using in Gaza, could expand to direct U.S. involvement in what could escalate into a major regional war — exactly the war that U.S. officials claim they are trying to prevent.
The work of the movement for a permanent ceasefire — a ceasefire that includes an end to the killing, the resumption of humanitarian assistance and funding of UNRWA, and an end to U.S. arms transfers to Israel — is about to get a whole lot harder, and a whole lot more urgent.
Phyllis Bennis is a fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies and serves on the national board of Jewish Voice for Peace. Her most recent book is the 7th updated edition of Understanding the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict: A Primer (2018). Her other books include: Understanding the US-Iran Crisis: A Primer (2008) and Challenging Empire: How People, Governments, and the UN Defy US Power (2005).
This article is from Common Dreams and was co-published with Foreign Policy in Focus.
Ignore the sycophants; Joe Biden’s total support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza will define his legacy: a monster with blood on his hands, writes Owen Jones.
Without Joe Biden, one of the worst crimes of our age would not have been possible, writes Owen Jones [photo credit: Lucie Wimetz/TNA]
The response to Joe Biden finally surrendering the Democratic presidential nomination has been instructive.
Since Israel’s genocidal rampage in Gaza began, there has been a common theme in how Western politicians and media outlets have approached the horror: that Palestinian life has little or even no meaningful worth. This has not been subtle.
Sure, this has ranged from the crude — that is, outright genocidal incitement, despite its legal prohibition in the 1948 Genocide Convention — to the lack of concern about tens of thousands slaughtered with Western arms and diplomatic support, not least from the US.
As the farce over Biden’s collapsing mental faculties forced him out, the tributes flooded in. “Having led us out of the worst public health and economic crises in most of our lives, President Joe Biden should be remembered as one of our great leaders,” cooed former US Secretary of State Robert Reich.
“A courageous and selfless decision,” was former Obama official Jon Favreau’s take, in which the President “put the country’s interests ahead of his own” as he had done for the previous four years. “Biden’s legacy as a statesman who defended democracy rather than himself is now cemented”, said one associate professor in global politics at University College London.
Let’s not mince our words: this is nauseating. If you believe that Israel has committed egregious war crimes — those who do not should be regarded as sadistic flat-earthers — then it is not possible to blindly cheer Biden without expressing contempt for Palestinian life.
Without Joe Biden, one of the worst crimes of our age would not have been possible.
Here is a man with a lifelong zealous commitment to Israel: in a fiery speech in 1986, he demanded politicians stop apologising for supporting Israel, and suggested it served US interests so much it would have to be invented if it did not exist.
In the aftermath of the October 7 attacks, Biden used the bully pulpit of the US presidency to spread pro-Israel lies used to build a case for genocide.
There is no dispute that Hamas and other armed groups committed war crimes that day. What Biden specifically claimed was that he saw pictures of children being beheaded. No such pictures exist: the claim that 40 Israeli babies were beheaded spread like wildfire thanks in large part to the US President, and was used to manufacture consent for the genocidal assault which followed.
How Joe Biden bankrolled and incited Israel’s assault on Gaza
While peddling false claims about Hamas atrocities, Biden engaged in atrocity denial in favour of Israel. He told the world in late October: “I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed. I’m sure innocents have been killed, and it’s the price of waging a war.”
As well as dismissing what at the time was over 7,000 killed — including more than 3,000 children — as an inevitable cost of war, he sought to deflect horror at Israel’s butchery.
Gaza’s official statistics had been confirmed in previous Israeli assaults, and in any case, the health ministry released all the names, personal information and Israeli-approved IDs of the killed — but the damage was done.
Here is a man who bypassed Congress twice in the first two months after October 7 to approve emergency weapons sales to Israel. That included 2,000-pound bombs which — as the New York Timesuncovered — had been repeatedly used to slaughter Palestinian civilians in areas designed by Israel as safe zones.
He claimed a major Israeli offensive against Rafah was the red line, but then Israel unleashed it with murderous effect, but Biden judged no red line had been crossed. When dozens of Palestinians were killed in Rafah in May — including children who were burned to death and indeed beheaded by the explosion — the weapons used were US-supplied.
Gaza: We don’t know how, but I know we will rise again
The US has refused to state that a single war crime has been committed by Israel.
Joe Biden’s spokespeople have fallen back on generic responses about asking Israel for further information and even repeatedly expressing confidence in the state’s ability to investigate itself despite all the evidence.
The administration repeatedly echoed Israeli attempts to lie, deflect and muddy the water about atrocities committed by Israel, such as the assault on al-Shifa hospital.
It has taken no action against Israel’s policy of starvation, building a floating pier which repeatedly fell apart and delivered almost no aid before being abandoned, while resisting lawmakers’ demands to make aid conditional on Israel allowing humanitarian aid into Gaza.
Biden ensured the US used its diplomatic power to protect Israel, such as vetoing ceasefire demands from the UN Security Council, while denouncing the attempt by the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, to have arrest warrants issued for Benjamin Netanyahu and his defence minister, Yoav Gallant.
Yes, it would be a reprehensible revision of history to portray this as a Biden-specific problem: the US facilitation of Israel’s bloody dispossession of the Palestinian people is a systemic injustice.
But it is nonetheless notable that Biden has taken a weaker line than right-wing Republican presidents. When Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, Ronald Reagan rang Prime Minister Menachem Begin and condemned a “Holocaust” and demanded the bombing stopped — successfully, as it turned out.
In 2002, George W Bush’s administration condemned Israel for killing Hamas’ most wanted militant, because 14 Palestinian civilians were also killed.
If this world has any justice, Biden will be remembered properly not as a kindly, avuncular if gaffe-prone president, who put his country before his own interests.
Joe Biden is a monster. He has facilitated one of the most obscene crimes of our age. And those blindly praising him are telling the world a message which is loudly received — that they simply do not think Palestinian life matters.
To my surprise, last Thursday morning there was relatively little coverage of the address to the US Congress delivered by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last Wednesday afternoon apart from a critical opinion piece that appeared in the New York Times regarding Israel’s war on the Palestinians. The article, by Megan K. Stack, asserted that “History will cast Mr. Netanyahu’s visit in deservedly ugly tones. He’s not a guest we should aspire to host, but he is a visitor we deserve. Gaza is our war, too, thanks to the indispensable military aid and political cover the US government has lavished on Israel as the death toll climbs… What exploded as a war of retribution against Hamas has looked increasingly like a broader campaign of annihilation — the slaughter of trapped civilians; the excruciating deaths of thousands of children; the destruction of hospitals, schools and much of the civilian infrastructure.”
Polls have shown for months that more Americans disapprove than approve of the Israeli onslaught in Gaza, but Congress and the White House are not interested in the views of the public when they are on the receiving end of hundreds of millions of dollars in “donations” from Jewish billionaires. Much of the coverage of the Netanyahu appearance in the mainstream media was toothless and even adulatory. It generally reflected what was hailed as Bibi’s “fiery speech” that “did not give an inch” which vowed to continue fighting until “total victory” is achieved. There was some coverage of how Netanyahu went so far as to portray the many thousands of demonstrators, some of whom were pepper-sprayed and arrested, who surrounded the Capitol as “useful idiots paid for by Iran.” The jibe, together with other calls to go to war with Iran, produced cheers and other paroxysms of joy among the leaping and waving Congressmen. Bibi might have been particularly personally aggrieved by Pro-Palestinian protesters successfully having released insects into the Watergate Hotel where he was staying. Online video showed maggots running amok on the dinner table.
The Netanyahu speech was light on serious analysis, but heavy on emotional appeals, repeatedly invoking the assertion that he and the United States, in its “ironclad” support of Israel, are fighting to save “civilization” and that “our enemies are your enemies” and “our victory will be your victory.” Predictably, the Congressmen and guests who filled the chamber bobbed up and down applauding wildly after nearly every sentence, producing 53 standing ovations, far exceeding Netanyahu’s record 29 obtained the last time he addressed Congress in 2015.
Notably some Congressmen with active consciences skipped the event, including Nancy Pelosi, who, after the fact, denounced the address in a post on X: “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. Many of us who love Israel spent time today listening to Israeli citizens whose families have suffered in the wake of the October 7th Hamas terror attack and kidnappings. These families are asking for a ceasefire deal that will bring the hostages home – and we hope the Prime Minister would spend his time achieving that goal.” Only one Republican, Tom Massie of Kentucky, did not participate after observing “Today Congress will undertake political theater on behalf of the State Department. The purpose of having Netanyahu address Congress is to bolster his political standing in Israel and to quell int’l opposition to his war. I don’t feel like being a prop so I won’t be attending.” Over 100 Congressional interns also boycotted the speech in a coordinated sick-out. “In an act of protest, many of us have pledged to call in sick today, the day of Netanyahu’s address,” read a statement from boycott participants. “We stand in full solidarity with the victims of Netanyahu’s actions. We call on all members of Congress to boycott the address and take a unified stand against what we believe is a ‘universal evil.’ We urge our representatives to respond to the collective will of the American people and reject any semblance of endorsement of Netanyahu’s actions.”
A substantial number of progressive and moderate Democrats, possibly as many as 136, also did not attend, suggesting that Netanyahu is not well regarded by many in the Democratic Party. Netanyahu spoke for an hour and the over-the-top reception he received from congress suggested that the government’s true loyalty is not to the voters who elected them but rather to a foreign leader who is a war-criminal, implying to some that Bibi is actually de facto the American president and Israel and the US are in practical terms one country, with Israel as the dominant partner in the arrangement. As an American who is deeply concerned about the US collaboration with Israel in what is indisputably a genocide in Gaza, watching this spectacle unfolding before my eyes was probably the most pathetic and humiliating hour which I have experienced in my lifetime. My country has done many bad things in the past century, but this alliance with unmitigated evil is the equivalent of selling one’s soul.
International lawyer John Whitbeck captured the feeling perfectly, writing how “After virtually every sentence uttered by the notorious war-criminal Benjamin Netanyahu, no matter how inane or blatantly false, virtually all the attending political prostitutes infesting the US Congress rose (53 times!) in a loud standing grovel of homage to their puppet-master, most long and loudly when he condemned pro-justice and anti-genocide protestors on American campuses and on the streets of Washington during his speech… Anyone watching this obscene spectacle could only conclude that the United States of America has ceased to be a respectable independent country and is now, as, indeed, it has been for many years already, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the State of Israel, with shared values which are rightfully rejected by the overwhelming majority of mankind. By their venality, cowardice, moral bankruptcy and near-treason, the American political class is flushing a once great country down history’s toilet, and the Global West, if it does not soon liberate itself from domination by the Israeli-American Empire, risks a similar fate.”
My particular gripe was over the fact that Netanyahu’s speech was full of uncontested lies and grossly exaggerated assumptions designed to get his audience roaring. The falsehoods were certainly recognizable as such by much of the audience, but Netanyahu was not challenged by anyone save only Representative Rashida Tlaib, a Democrat of Michigan and the sole Palestinian-American member of Congress, who attended the speech while holding up a sign while many of her colleagues applauded Netanyahu’s comments. One side of Tlaib’s sign read “GUILTY OF GENOCIDE” and the other read “WAR CRIMINAL.” Perhaps some dissidents in the crowd were intimidated by the threat by House Speaker Mike Johnson, who describes support of Israel as “one of America’s founding principles.” Johnson strategically stationed extra sergeants-at-arms in the chamber to arrest anyone who tried to interrupt Bibi. It is a unique and almost certainly illegal expedient to manage any pushback against favored and protected speakers like Netanyahu. Interestingly, Capitol police did forcibly removed from the rear of the chamber six relatives of Israeli hostages who reportedly attempted to disrupt the speech. One said “I couldn’t take it anymore,” and Jon Polin, the father of Israeli American hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin, said to reporters “I came here wanting to hear one sentence: ‘Today I announce that the hostages are coming home,’ and I didn’t hear that once.”
Among the lies propagated by Netanyahu was a longish tirade on how humane the Israeli army has been in its conduct of the war, claiming that Hamas “These monsters raped women, they beheaded men, they burnt babies alive. They killed parents in front of their children and children in front of their parents.” As has been confirmed by reliable independent sources, that is all a lie, a piece of Israeli government generated propaganda. And he also claimed falsely that the famine taking place in Gaza is a myth as his government has been allowing so many relief trucks to go into the strip that the average Palestinian is getting 3,000 calories of food per day. But my favorite line was his pledge to live at peace with the Palestinians when they stop wanting to “kill Jews.” The reality is, of course, it is the Jews who are killing Palestinians in large numbers using American supplied weapons. The highly respectable British medical journal The Lancet estimates that Israel has already killed more than 186,000 Palestinians since last October most of whom are still buried under the rubble of their homes, but for Netanyahu only Jewish lives matter. And the unrelenting savagery of the Israeli soldiers has also been confirmed by multiple independent sources. Bibi would also do well to read the new Knesset law passed last week that completely rejects the idea of a unilaterally declared sovereign Palestinian state side-by-side with Israel, confirming that Israel’s intentions do not include living at peace with its neighbors.
And so ends another exciting week in what once passed for the Capital of the United States of America. The visit by Netanyahu benefited certain politicians since to be qualified as an American presidential or vice-presidential candidate, you need to be photographed embracing a grinning genocidal psychopath from Israel. It keeps the cash flowing and the newspapers are empowered to tell lies on your behalf. Unfortunately, when the Israeli monsters are being received by their groveling hosts it also speaks most clearly to what we have become as a country while serving as the Israeli lapdog. Washington must finally confront the reality that its bloody close embrace of Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza is not advancing any US interests or promoting regional stability. In fact, it is doing the opposite. What has happened to America is the real tragedy.
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.
Few are better qualified to challenge the official orthodoxy that stifles any discussion of this topic
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken (L) is welcomed by Aipac President Michael Tuchin at the committee’s policy summit in Washington on 5 June 2023 (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images/AFP)
No review has yet been published of Professor Ilan Pappe’s magnificent and passionate new book on the Zionist lobby. This silence is no surprise. Even a passing reference to the lobby is liable to lead to charges of antisemitism and potential career destruction.
Faiza Shaheen was dropped like a stone last month as Labour candidate for the London seat of Chingford and Woodford Green. “There have been complaints, allegedly, about her ‘liking’ a tweet that referred to the ‘Israel lobby’ – widely considered an anti-Semitic trope,” reported the New Statesman’s associate political editor, Rachel Cunliffe.
On a now-infamous Newsnight appearance following her defenestration, a tearful Shaheen apologised for liking the tweet and accepted it was a “trope”.
She didn’t have much choice. The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), the statutory regulator, agrees. In 2020, it cited a claim that the “Israel lobby” was behind antisemitism complaints as evidence supporting a finding of unlawful antisemitic harassment.
Pappe has entered perilous territory. Few are better qualified to challenge the official orthodoxy that discussion of the Israel lobby is out of bounds. None are more battle-hardened.
Stay informed with MEE’s newsletters
Sign up to get the latest alerts, insights and analysis, starting with Turkey Unpacked
One of the most eminent of the “new historians” who retold Israel’s foundation story, Pappe was denounced in the Knesset after publication in 2006 of his controversial book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Israel’s education minister called on the University of Haifa to sack him, and one of Israel’s best-selling newspapers pictured him at the centre of a target, next to which a columnist had written: “I’m not telling you to kill this person, but I shouldn’t be surprised if someone did.”
After a slew of death threats, he left Israel, and was lucky to be able to find a billet at the University of Exeter.
Targeting politicians and journalists
The famous French publisher Fayard recently halted distribution of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Last month, Pappe, who remains an Israeli citizen, was interrogated for two hours by federal agents upon arrival in the United States. He was eventually let in, but only after they copied the contents of his phone. This kind of harassment, Pappe later noted, is nothing compared to what Palestinians routinely face.
He has produced a work that needs to be read, and then re-read, by anyone who wishes to understand the international context of the war in Gaza. The book describes how the Israel lobby has targeted both politicians and journalists.
Two British politicians lost out on foreign office jobs amid pressure from the lobby on account of pro-Palestinian sympathies: Alan Duncan in 2016 and Christopher Mayhew in 1964. George Brown, a former Labour foreign secretary, was also targeted in the 1960s.
The lobby has gone after journalists such as Jeremy Bowen, who was forced to endure a long BBC investigation; former Guardian Jerusalem correspondent Suzanne Goldenberg; former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger; and broadcaster Jonathan Dimbleby.
The Israeli government repeatedly complained to the BBC that foreign correspondent Orla Guerin was “antisemitic” and showed “total identification with the goals and methods of Palestinian terror groups”, once even linking her reporting from the Middle East to the rise of antisemitism in Britain – allegations that were as grotesque as they were false.
There are other names on this long list.
In the US, William Fulbright, the longest-serving chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is the earliest and most devastating example. The appalling story of his destruction in 1974 is well told in this book: “Lobby money poured into the campaign coffers of his rival, Arkansas Governor Dale Bumpers … From that time to this day, the road to the Capitol has been scattered with candidates, from the elite of American politics, whose careers have been similarly torpedoed,” Pappe writes.
Fulbright’s crime was to argue that “instead of rearming Israel, we could have peace in the Middle East at once if we just told Tel Aviv to withdraw behind its 1967 borders and guarantee them”.
‘Nothing to touch them’
This merciless treatment of individuals distinguishes the pro-Israel lobby from other lobbies, both foreign and corporate. Michael Mates, a former member of the parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee, once told me (in a quote repeated in Pappe’s book) that “the pro-Israel lobby in our body politic is the most powerful political lobby. There’s nothing to touch them.”
Pappe goes far back into history to sketch the origins of the agitation for the return of the Jewish people to Palestine. This story begins with Christian evangelicals two centuries ago, which might explain Pappe’s employment of the term “Zionist lobby” rather than the standard “pro-Israel lobby”.
In the remote past as much as the present day, this type of support for Israel was animated by antisemitism. In the 1840s, religious scholar George Bush, a direct ancestor of two US presidents, called for a revived Jewish state in Palestine, expressing hope that Jewish people would be offered “the same carnal inducements to remove to Syria as now promote them to emigrate to this country”.
These early Christian supporters of a Jewish Palestine, like later Christian Zionists, were oblivious to the Palestinian presence in what they saw as the Holy Land. For them, Palestine was unchanged since the time of Jesus. In the words of Pappe, “later it was imagined as being organically part of medieval Europe: its people donning medieval dress, roaming a European countryside”.
In Britain, Edwin Montagu, one of the earliest practising Jews to serve in a British cabinet, described Zionism as a “mischievous political creed” – a phrase that would have had him thrown out of Keir Starmer’s Labour Party and pilloried in the media.
He viewed the Balfour Declaration as antisemitic, while warning that “when the Jews are told that Palestine is their national home, every country will immediately desire to get rid of its Jewish citizens, and you will find a population in Palestine driving out its present inhabitants”.
Safeguarding Israel’s legitimacy
After the establishment of Israel, the lobby’s main job became to safeguard the legitimacy of the Israeli state. Pappe shows that the Labour Party was a stronger and more reliable supporter than the Conservatives. He stresses the role of Poale Zion, antecedent to today’s Jewish Labour Movement, which originally sought to reconcile Marxism and Zionism. It convinced the trade unions and Labour that Israel was a socialist project.
Pappe writes that Poale Zion became “part of a lobby meant to arrest any potential anti-Israel orientations in the Labour Party in Britain and strengthen the relationship between the Labour Party and its pro-Israel Jewish constituencies”.
According to Pappe, former Prime Minister Harold Wilson, who led Labour from 1963 to 1976, was “pro-Israel to the bone”. Pappe speculates that Wilson’s admiration for Israel, like David Lloyd George’s in a previous generation, was a product of a nonconformist Christian education. The late politician Roy Jenkins noted that Wilson’s book, The Chariot of Israel, was “one of the most strongly Zionist tracts ever written by a non-Jew”.
This timely book from one of the finest historians of contemporary Israel deserves to become the subject of urgent contemporary debate. So far, it has been ignored
Alec Douglas-Home, foreign secretary in the Edward Heath government that succeeded Wilson’s administration after the 1970 general election, was more friendly to Palestinians. An Old Etonian aristocrat, Douglas-Home is today dismissed as a hopeless old fogey and aberration in postwar Britain.
Today, his views would bring a nod of approbation from the Palestine Solidarity Campaign. According to Pappe, “he was the only British foreign secretary to openly discuss the right of return of the Palestinian refugees that were expelled by Israel in 1948”, and, still more remarkable, “the only British foreign secretary to challenge the dishonest brokery of the Americans”.
In the wake of the 1967 war, Douglas-Home insisted, with Heath’s support, that Britain could no longer ignore the “political aspirations of the Palestinian Arabs”. In government, he infuriated Israel by allowing the Palestine Liberation Organization to set up a London office.
Pappe says that Douglas-Home was the only senior British politician, with the important exception of the hard-drinking George Brown, to interpret UN Resolution 242 as a demand for unconditional Israeli withdrawal to the borders of 5 June 1967. During the 1973 war, the Heath government refused to deliver arms to Israel – though, as Pappe notes, this was mostly due to a fear of the Arab oil embargo.
The Corbyn years
Pappe’s historical perspective enables him to see the Jeremy Corbyn leadership of the Labour Party in a new light. “Corbyn’s views on Palestine were virtually identical to those expressed by most British diplomats and senior politicians ever since 1967; like them he supported a two-state solution and recognised the Palestinian Authority,” Pappe writes. This made him more mainstream than the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, which supported a one-state solution.
In light of this, Pappe reasonably asks: “Why did the lobby see him as such a threat”? He answers: “They suspected, correctly, that he sincerely believed in a just two-state solution and wouldn’t swallow Israel’s excuses for obstructing it.”
In a thought-provoking passage, he adds: “Christopher Mayhew, George Brown and Jeremy Corbyn had much in common. They were in positions of power that could affect British policy towards Israel. They were all totally loyal to the official British policy supporting a two-state solution to the ‘conflict’. None of them denied the right of Israel to exist, none of them had made any anti-Semitic remark in their lifetime and they were not anti-Semitic in any sense of the word.”
Pappe also has harsh words for the EHRC inquiry into Labour antisemitism. “In a more reasonable world, or maybe years from now,” he writes, “if people were asked about what a leading institution for human rights would investigate in relation to Israel and Palestine, they would give the abuse of Palestinians’ human rights as the answer … [in this report], there was no serious discussion of what constitutes anti-Semitism, nor did it make any attempt to differentiate between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism and criticism of Israel.”
In a short conclusion written after the horrors of 7 October, Pappe writes: “Many people in the twenty-first century cannot continue to accept a colonisation project requiring military occupation and discriminatory laws to sustain itself. There is a point at which the lobby cannot endorse this brutal reality and continue to be seen as moral in the eyes of the rest of the world. I believe and hope this point will be reached within our lifetimes.”
This timely book from one of the finest historians of contemporary Israel deserves to become the subject of urgent contemporary debate. So far, it has been ignored in a media and political environment that, as the recent case of Shaheen illustrates, has imposed a system of omerta around any discussion of the Israel lobby.
Lobbing for Zionism on Both Sides of the Atlantic is published by Oneworld.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
Peter Oborne won best commentary/blogging in both 2022 and 2017, and was also named freelancer of the year in 2016 at the Drum Online Media Awards for articles he wrote for Middle East Eye. He was also named as British Press Awards Columnist of the Year in 2013. He resigned as chief political columnist of the Daily Telegraph in 2015. His latest book is The Fate of Abraham: Why the West is Wrong about Islam, published in May by Simon & Schuster. His previous books include The Triumph of the Political Class, The Rise of Political Lying, Why the West is Wrong about Nuclear Iran and The Assault on Truth: Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and the Emergence of a New Moral Barbarism.
Israel ordered the “Hannibal Directive” on October 7 by ordering the killing of captive Israeli soldiers and civilians. But the U.S. media continues to hide the truth.
Three days ago, Israel’s leading newspaper, Haaretz, published the results of its thorough, comprehensive investigation into what actually happened when Hamas attacked on October 7. So far, the U.S. mainstream media has not said a word about the shocking results of that investigation. Critics sometimes use the expression “media malpractice” to describe the American mainstream’s failure to report accurately about Israel/Palestine. This time, though, what’s happening is even worse; it has to be deliberate self-censorship, designed to hide the truth from the U.S. audience.
Haaretz’s long report found that Israel’s army had employed the “Hannibal Directive” on October 7. The Directive is an Israeli policy that instructs the military to open fire on its own soldiers to prevent them from being taken captive. Of course, this site, alongside other alternative media sources, was one of the first to point out the possible role of the Hannibal Directive in Israeli deaths on October 7. But the Haaretz report was significant in the number of military sources it interviewed who confirmed that there were direct orders to implement the Directive.
Haaretz explained that the policy has “the intent of foiling kidnapping even at the expense of the lives of the kidnapped.” At first, the army started deploying “Ziks,” unmanned assault drones. Later, the army fired mortars, and then artillery shells. Haaretz also confirmed that the military did know that Israeli civilians had also been taken hostage, but, nonetheless, at 11:22 a.m. the order came down: “Not a single vehicle can return to Gaza.”
The Haaretz report is cautious, but it still concludes: “[The 11:22 a.m. message] was understood by everyone. . . At this point, the IDF was not aware of the extent of kidnapping along the Gaza border, but it did know that many people were involved. Thus, it was entirely clear what the message meant, and what the fate of some of the kidnapped people would be.”
In other words, some — possibly many — of the Israeli deaths that day, including civilians, were deliberately caused by Israel’s own military. How this is not news is incomprehensible. But, three days later, in the New York Times: not a word. The Washington Post: nothing. CNN: nothing. National Public Radio: nada.
Instead, if you plug “Hannibal” into the search engines at these media sites, the results only mention “Hannibal Lecter,” the fictional serial killer who was the subject of a book and popular film.
But there’s nothing new about the Israeli military’s Hannibal Directive. (The doctrine is probably named for the Carthaginian general who fought Rome in 200 B.C., who said he would swallow poison instead of surrendering. Some Israeli sources claimed that the name was randomly generated, an assertion that prompts skepticism.)
“A growing number of reports indicate Israeli forces responsible for Israeli civilian and military deaths following October 7 attack.”
Then, last March, the estimable Jonathan Ofir also posted here that an actual Israeli soldier, Captain Bar Zonshein, had admitted to “firing tank shells on vehicles carrying Israeli civilians.”
The even more comprehensive Haaretz investigation should have prompted a reaction from the mainstream U.S. reporters who are stationed in Israel. American journalists should have been cultivating their own sources since October 7, and been ready to at least match the Haaretz article. Instead, the only response so far has been a panel hosted by Piers Morgan, and a Mehdi Hasan/Bassem Youssef podcast.
I’ve followed the U.S. media coverage of Israel/Palestine closely for more than a decade now. Continuing to hide Israel’s deployment of the Hannibal Directive on October 7 is one of the most offensive examples of self-censorship that I can recall. The mainstream’s dishonesty is just one more example of why alternative websites are indispensable.
Activists protest as European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen holds a meeting with the members of the Bosnian Presidency in Sarajevo on November 1, 2023 [File: AP/Armin Durgut]
It has been nine months since the start of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, which has killed more than 38,000 Palestinians, injured more than 86,000, and displaced more than 1.9 million. Despite frequent words of condemnation, European leaders have done little to stop it. Worse still, many European countries continue to stand by Israel economically and militarily.
As the United States is considered the biggest backer of the Israeli war machine, it is easy to discount European support. A closer look at the extent of European financial and military assistance for Israel, however, lays bare the EU’s complicity in the continuing genocide in Gaza and various atrocities in the occupied West Bank.
Supplying arms used for genocide
The EU is the second-largest arms supplier to Israel after the US. According to figures from the European External Action Service’s COARM database, between 2018 and 2022, EU member states sold arms worth 1.76 billion euros ($1.9bn) to Israel.
Arms have continued to flow from EU countries to Israel even after the International Court of Justice made an interim ruling in January that the Israeli army was plausibly committing genocide. The EU has a system in place to implement arms embargoes but has refused to apply to Israel, leaving member states to slowly implement measures under pressure from civil society with scant political will to do so and falling far short of what is required.
Some EU countries including Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and Belgium’s Wallonia region, have announced that they would suspend arms transfers to Israel, but some of these statements were not followed up with timely concrete actions, or when they were, these amounted to temporary or partial arms transfer suspensions, which fell far short of a full arms embargo on Israel.
According to SIPRI, Germany is by far the largest European supplier, providing Israel with 30 percent of its weapons between 2019 and 2023. Exports increased tenfold last year from 32.3 million euros ($35m) to 326.5 million euros ($354m) with the majority of licences granted after October 7.
According to EU data, between 2018 and 2022 there were other large European suppliers to Israel. These included Romania which issued export licences worth 314.9 million euro, Italy – with 90.30 million euros ($98m), the Czech Republic – with 81.55 million euros ($88.3m) and Spain – with 62.9 million euros ($68.1m). The EU has not yet released data for arms transfers for 2023.
Beyond supplying Israel directly, EU arms are often indirectly exported to Israel via the US. Although arms exports are subject to end-user agreements, the US refuses to comply with this stipulation and EU countries don’t enforce it. This makes it impossible to track the full extent to which EU arms and components exported to the US eventually end up in weapons systems shipped to Israel.
Nevertheless, known EU military exports to Israel can be directly connected to the genocide in Gaza. Israeli’s Merkava tanks, operating in Gaza since the ground invasion began in late October, are using engine components manufactured by German company MTU (a subsidiary of Rolls Royce), while Sa’ar corvettes, warships built by German company ThyssenKrupp Marine Systems, have been active in the waters surrounding the besieged strip.
British company BAE Systems, in conjunction with German company Rheinmetall, manufactures M109 self-propelled howitzers which have been used to shell densely populated areas in Gaza. Amnesty International has found evidence that these artillery weapons also deployed white phosphorus munitions, which can burn skin down to the bone and cause organ dysfunction; their use in civilian areas is restricted under international law.
Israel’s complete dependence on U.S. support means the Biden administration has all the leverage it needs to force an end to Israel’s aggressions at any time.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem on June 10. (State Department, Chuck Kennedy)
Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has been launching a forceful attack on Benjamin Netanyahu in both U.S. and Israeli media for sabotaging peace in Gaza and pushing Israel to the brink with Hezbollah in Lebanon.
During this he inadvertently made an interesting acknowledgement that flies in the face of the Biden administration’s feigned powerlessness to rein in Israel’s assault on Palestinians.
“I accuse the prime minister of Israel of a deliberate attempt to destroy the political-security-military alliance between Israel and the United States,” Olmert writes in an op-ed for Haaretz titled “I Accuse Netanyahu of Betrayal.”
“For many years, Israel’s political stability in the international arena rested on the absolute support of the United States,” writes Olmert, adding, “The entire Israel Air Force relies completely on American aircraft: fighter planes, transport planes, refueler planes and helicopters. All of Israel’s air power is based on the American commitment to defend Israel. We have no other reliable source for essential supplies of equipment, munitions and advanced weapons that Israel cannot manufacture on its own.”
Olmert’s comments echo those made in November of last year by retired Israeli Major General Yitzhak Brick, who said of the Israeli assault on Gaza,
“All of our missiles, the ammunition, the precision-guided bombs, all the airplanes and bombs, it’s all from the U.S. The minute they turn off the tap, you can’t keep fighting. You have no capability. … Everyone understands that we can’t fight this war without the United States. Period.”
Contrast these frank admissions by longtime Israeli government insiders with the way the Biden administration has been pretending since the early days of this onslaught that there is nothing it can do to force Israel to be less monstrous and murderous in Gaza, constantly posturing as a passive witness to genocidal atrocity after genocidal atrocity while the Western press churn out nonstop anonymously-sourced articles about how secretly upset the president is with the Netanyahu regime.
It’s just a simple fact that Israel’s complete dependence on U.S. support means the Biden administration has all the leverage it needs to force an end to Israel’s aggressions at any time, but instead you’ll get White House officials like John Kirby, national security communications adviser, spouting nonsense about how Israel is a completely independent nation to whom the U.S. is incapable of dictating any terms whatsoever.
Kirby at a press briefing in October 2023. (White House, Oliver Contreras)
When asked by the press back in February if the U.S. was doing anything to deter Israel from its planned assault on Rafah, for example, Kirby replied as follows:
“[Israel] is a sovereign nation. They plan their military operations, and they conduct their military operations, and they make the choices. It’s not like we give them a homework assignment, and they have to then turn in their plan to us for grading. We have said that from our perspective, as a friend of Israel and as a supporter of their efforts to defend themselves, we would expect that any plan for going into Rafah would properly account for the now more than a million civilians that are seeking refuge down there.”
Israel has since launched a brutal assault on Rafah which features regular massacres of civilians, with the Israeli military forces now reportedly working toward the complete capture of the entire city. This despite the White House previously having said that a “major ground operation” in Rafah would be a “red line” for this administration.
The U.S. is just as responsible for what’s happening in Gaza as Israel itself, and will be responsible for everything that happens in Lebanon as well. They could end this at any time, and they choose to keep it going instead. As Noam Chomsky once said during the Second Intifada, “They’re not Israeli helicopters, they’re U.S. helicopters with Israeli pilots.”
Caitlin Johnstone’s work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following her on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud, YouTube, or throwing some money into her tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy her books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff she publishes is to subscribe to the mailing list at her website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything she publishes. For more info on who she is, where she stands and what she’s trying to do with her platform, click here. All works are co-authored with her American husband Tim Foley.
Israeli soldiers sit in a tank near the Israel-Gaza border after the end of a seven-day truce between Israel and Hamas, December 1, 2023, Kibbutz Beeri. (Photo: © Ilia Yefimovich/dpa via ZUMA Press/APA Images)
Peace and Justice Post 
You must be logged in to post a comment.