There are great jubilations in Syria and the Syrian diaspora in the world on the fall of Bashar al-Assad and his oppressive regime. However, many people are not aware of the implications of the new ‘Mujahideen’ regime in Damascus and its unknown course in the time to come. What role did the United States and Israel play in bringing down the al-Assad regime and its long-term implications for Syria and the Middle East? There are many questions that need clarifications and answers. In this article, Kyle Anzalone, a political analyst, discusses the imperial role of the United States in Syria, a role about which many ordinary readers don’t hear much in the mainstream media.
by Michael Brenner, Dissident Voice, December 2nd, 2024
Racism is at the core of Western societies complicity in Israeliโs genocide against the Arab Palestinians. That is self-evident. The United States and Britain are more than accomplices; they are co-belligerents. The behavior of all has been constant over 14 months of graphic depiction day-by-day of atrocities of the most heinous kinds.
Racism, though, is a multifaceted phenomenon. It encompasses a wide range of attitudes and actions. They should be parsed as a precondition for analyzing which have been operative in this case, how they shaped policies and interventions, how reconciled with the values of liberal democracies, and how sustained in the face of such glaring criminal abuses of humanity.
Nazi extermination of Jews is at one extreme of racism. The negative weighing of ethnic identity in vetting candidates for a position of town supervisor also is racism. Using disparaging terms about a particular ascriptive group in casual conversation is racism. Apartheid is racism โ whether in the form of ghettoes, Bantustans, or the Gaza concentration camps. Thoughts can be racist, words can be racist, actions can be racist. There are connections among these three expressions of racism โ but to varying degrees and not always.
Let us take a look at these ambiguities and discontinuities with a view to getting a better fix on the ways that racism has driven Western countriesโ involvement in the Palestine genocide.
It is normal for social groupings to differentiate themselves. This is an affirmation of solidarity. It need not be accompanied by an ascription of the otherโs intrinsic inferiority. Nor be hostile and aggressive.)
The diversity among larger, more organized societies changes things in two respects: variations in race, color, language, ethnicity are frequently encountered; the capacity for stereotyping grows along with interactions that can lead to contention and rivalry.
Competition and conflict generate a need for justification of โwinnersโ exploiting/subordinating/abusing losers. Prejudice serves this person.
That experience once institutionalized, as it was historically in Western societiesโ domination of non-Western peoples, leaves an enduring residue of prejudicial feelings among both parties in the relationship.
Those feelings can fade over time while remaining dormant with the latent potential to resurface.
A dramatic event instigated by a formerly subordinate/inferior that inflicts pain is the surest catalyst for that recrudescence โ for it is acutely humiliating as well as painful. The intensity of the reaction (emotional, physical) to such an offense can be commensurate with the sublimated guilt one feels about past abuse of the perpetrator.
Back to the contemporary situation. The facilitating, background factors that help explain Western elitesโ willing embrace of the Palestinian genocide are easy to identify. The long history of colonial domination of โinferiorโ peoples; their systematic exploitation; a widespread sense of diminishing status relative to emerging new centers of strength and influence โ as punctuated by the 1973 oil crisis and ensuing dependency on the โhajjisโ; a reflexive disposition to perform penance for historical sins committed against Jews in Europe by turning a blind eye to the sins of the previously sinned against; 75 years of painting the Arabs as the โblack hatsโ in their struggle against the Israeli settler state; revulsion at earlier acts of terror abroad by PLO and PFLP.
Stunning events over the past two decades have stirred a potent mix of negative emotions about Arabs. 9/11 punctuated the opening of the Terrorism Era. Reciprocation of violent acts on Western soil and the brutal, indiscriminate retaliation of the so-called War on Terror drew a line of blood not only between the Westerners on the one side, and terrorist groups along with their perceived state โsponsorsโ, on the other. It also imprinted powerful images of Arabs/Muslims as fanatics, as a menace to their comfortable social order, as people โbeyond the paleโ โ to coin a phrase โ who can be dealt with only through strength and a readiness to follow the admonition of โan eye for an eye.โ
This depiction of the ingredients that have formed the psyche of our political class in regard to Arabs, and the Palestinians in particular, goes aways toward explaining the Westโs current abhorrent behavior. The extremity of their actions and inactions could be seen as the outcome of a dynamic wherein enmity turns into hatred (albeit expressed in the quiet tones of normality) and dehumanization of the โother.โ A paradoxical feature of this dynamic is that as past shameful abuses of the โotherโ are aggravated by new ones, there is a compulsion to continue farther down that path. For doing provides a perverse form of reassurance that somehow they must have deserved such extreme ill treatment. This relentless punishment of our victims becomes a displacement of suppressed self-hatred โ among a few.
Suppose that the analysis offered above makes sense. That still leaves us with an inadequate understanding of what is happening. We should bear in mind the unprecedented features of the present situation. One, Western governments have no strategic interest in supporting Jerusalemโs project of creating a Greater Israel by eliminating the Palestinians. No security or economic stakes encourage that. On the contrary, Western interests in the region, and in the wider world, manifestly have been seriously damaged by their close association with all parts of the Israeli campaign. Two, there is no uncertainly about the gross crimes against humanity being committed before our eyes daily or the genocidal intent of the Israeli government. Indeed, cabinet ministers advertise what their plans are. Three, the means to prevent the bloody onslaught existed at the outset, and have been available throughout. Without abundant provision of arms and money from the United States and allies, Israel could not have prosecuted its diabolical strategy. Sanctions are also an available option, although unnecessary. Four, Western societies โ particularly the European โ are timorous, complacent and risk averse; therefore, to act in a manner that erodes their legitimizing foundations is incongruous, and needs explanation.
Conclusion: the behavior of Western societies is pathological โ that is to say, abnormal. It is perverse. We all share the natural instinct to protect the young of the species, and โ to a somewhat lesser extent โ the vulnerable aged and infirmed. This instinct, in fact, can be observed in the behavior of all mammals. Our supposedly enlightened societies go well beyond instinct to proclaim our dedication to those humane values, and to stipulate them in laws and conventions. This instinct/principle normally overrides prejudice when confronted, in the mortified flesh, with the realities of atrocity. Yet, we are acting in the diametrically opposite manner. And we ruthlessly repress those among us who point out that contradiction because their witness to our perfidy is intolerable.
Therein lies a great puzzle. No conventional political or sociological analysis can solve it. Filling that void is the compelling challenge โ and precondition for restoring a collective ethical sense that abhors rather than embraces evil. There is no scarcity of anthropologists, psychiatrists and psychologists. With luck, a few talented and motivated persons among them might step forward.
Michael Brenner is Professor Emeritus of International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh and a Fellow of the Center for Transatlantic Relations at SAIS/Johns Hopkins. He was the Director of the International Relations & Global Studies Program at the University of Texas. Brenner is the author of numerous books, and over 80 articles and published papers. His most recent works are: Democracy Promotion and Islam; Fear and Dread In The Middle East; Toward A More Independent Europe ; Narcissistic Public Personalities & Our Times. Read other articles by Michael.
This article was posted on Monday, December 2nd, 2024 at 8:50am and is filed under Genocide, Palestine, Racism.
On Tuesday, a Hamas official responded to President-elect Donald Trumpโs warning that there would be โall hell to payโ if Israeli hostages in Gaza werenโt released by his inauguration on January 20, 2025.
Trump didnโt mention Hamas by name in his warning but appeared to threaten US strikes on the Palestinian group, saying, โThose responsible will be hit harder than anybody has been hit in the long and storied History of the United States of America.โ
Basem Naim, a senior member of Hamasโs political bureau, said Trumpโs threat should be directed at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, citing his efforts to sabotage a hostage and ceasefire deal. Israeli officials and media reports have also blamed Netanyahu for the lack of a deal.
โHamas understands that Trumpโs message is, in fact, directed primarily at Netanyahu and his government,โ Naim said, according to The Palestine Chronicle.
Naim said the Netanyahu government had been using negotiations as a cover to advance its own agenda. โNetanyahuโs government must put an end to this deceptive charade,โ he said.
Former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, who was recently fired by Netanyahu, said that the prime minister sabotaged the chances of a hostage deal by demanding Israel maintain control of the Philadelphi Corridor on the Gaza-Egypt border.
โI can tell you what there was not, security considerations. The IDF chief and I said there was no security reason for remaining in the Philadelphi Corridor,โ Gallant told hostage families on November 7. โNetanyahu said that it was a diplomatic consideration, Iโm telling you there was no diplomatic consideration.โ
There are believed to be 97 Israeli hostages remaining in Gaza, and Israeli media reported back in September that Netanyahu told a Knesset committee that only half of the hostages were believed to be alive.
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported in October that the Israeli government was done with ceasefire talks and was instead focused on annexing portions of the Gaza Strip. Thereโs been some recent efforts by mediators to restart talks, but thereโs no sign the effort is going anywhere, and thereโs no end in sight to the daily slaughter in Gaza.
Moshe Yaalon, a former member of the ruling Likud party, was defense minister under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from 2013 to 2016 during the 2014 Gaza War. In comments on Saturday, Yaalon criticized the current Netanyahu government.
โThe path theyโre dragging us down is to occupy, annex, and ethnically cleanse โ look at the northern strip,โ Yaalon said.
When asked to clarify if he meant Israel is currently conducting ethnic cleansing or is headed in that direction, Yaalon pointed to what is happening on the ground in northern Gaza today.
โThereโs no Beit Lahia. Thereโs no Beit Hanoun. Theyโre now operating in Jabalia. Theyโre basically cleaning the territory of Arabs,โ he said.
The northern cities of Beit Lahia, Beit Hanoun, and Jabalia have been under a total siege since early October as part of an ethnic cleansing campaign thatโs following an outline known as the โgeneralโs plan.โ In those areas, Israeli troops are demolishing homes, so Palestinian civilians have nowhere to return.
Yaalonโs comments sparked a strong backlash in Israel, but he doubled down on Sunday. In another interview, the former defense minister said the term ethnic cleansing was โaccurateโ and asked โno other word for it.โ
He pointed to Israeli ministers who openly call for the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza and the establishment of Jewish settlements. Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich recently said that it may be possible to cut the population of Gaza in half within two years through โvoluntary emigration,โ though there is nothing voluntary about the displacement in Gaza thatโs happening today.
This is the keynote talk I gave on Nov. 1 at the conference, The End of Empire, at University of California Santa Barbara. The conference was organized by Professor Butch Ware, who is also the Green Partyโs vice-presidential candidate. University administrators banned all publicity about the talk on university social media accounts.
NOTE TO SCHEERPOST READERS FROM CHRIS HEDGES: There is now no way left for me to continue to write a weekly column for ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show without your help. The walls are closing in, with startling rapidity, on independent journalism, with the elites, including the Democratic Party elites, clamoring for more and more censorship. Bob Scheer, who runs ScheerPost on a shoestring budget, and I will not waver in our commitment to independent and honest journalism, and we will never put ScheerPost behind a paywall, charge a subscription for it, sell your data or accept advertising. Please, if you can, sign up at chrishedges.substack.com so I can continue to post my now weekly Monday column on ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show, The Chris Hedges Report.
Transcript
Extermination works. At first. This is the terrible lesson of history. If Israel is not stopped โ and no outside power appears willing to halt the genocide in Gaza or the destruction of Lebanon โ it will achieve its goals of depopulating and annexing northern Gaza. It will turn southern Gaza into a charnel house where Palestinians are burned alive, decimated by bombs and die from starvation and infectious diseases, until they are driven out. It will achieve its goal of destroying Lebanon โ 2,400 people have been killed and over 1.2 Lebanese have been displaced โ in an attempt to turn it into a failed state. It is already turning its genocidal fury on the West Bank. And, it may soon realize its long cherished dream of forcing the United States into war with Iran. Israeli leaders are publicly salivating over proposals to assassinate Iranian leader Ayatollah Ali Hosseini Khamenei and carry out airstrikes on Iranโs nuclear installations and oil facilities.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his cabinet, like those driving Middle East policy in the White House โ Antony Blinken, raised in a staunch Zionist family, Brett McGurk, Amos Hochstein, who was born in Israel and served in the Israeli military, and Jake Sullivan โ are true believers in the doctrine that violence can mold the world to fit their demented vision. That this doctrine has been a spectacular failure in Israelโs occupied territories, and did not work in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya, and a generation earlier in Vietnam, does not deter them. This time, they assure us, it will succeed.
In the short term they are right. This is not good news for Palestinians or the Lebanese. The U.S. and Israel will continue to use their arsenal of industrial weapons to kill huge numbers of people and turn cities into rubble. But in the long term, this indiscriminate violence sows dragonโs teeth. It creates adversaries that, sometimes a generation later, outdo in savagery โ we call it terrorism โ what was done to those slain in the previous generation.
Hate and a lust of vengeance, as I learned covering the war in the former Yugoslavia, are passed down like a poisonous elixir from one generation to the next. Our disastrous interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen, along with Israelโs invasion of Lebanon in 1982, which created Hezbollah, should have taught us this.
But this is a lesson that is nevr learned.
How could the Bush administration imagine it would be greeted as liberators in Iraq when the U.S. had spent over a decade imposing sanctions that resulted in severe shortages of food and medicine, causing the deaths of at least one million Iraqis, including 500,000 children.
Israelโs occupation of Palestine and its saturation bombing of Lebanon in 1982, were the catalyst for Osama bin Ladenโs attack on the Twin Towers in New York City in 2001, along with U.S. support for attacks on Muslims in Somalia, Chechnya, Kashmir and the South of the Philippines, U.S. military assistance to Israel and the sanctions on Iraq.
I see nothing to alt Israel, especially since the Israel lobby has bought and paid for Congress and the two ruling parties and cowed the media and universities. There is money to be made in war. A lot of it. And the influence of the war industry, buttressed by hundreds of millions of dollars spent on political campaigns by the Zionists, will be a formidable barrier to peace, not to mention sanity.
Israel has been poisoned by the psychosis of permanent war. It has been morally bankrupted by the sanctification of victimhood, which it uses to justify an occupation that is even more savage than that of apartheid South Africa. Its โdemocracyโ โ which was always exclusively for Jews โ has been hijacked by extremists who are pushing the country towards fascism. Human rights campaigners, intellectuals and journalists โ Israeli and Palestinian โ are subject to constant state surveillance, arbitrary arrests and government-run smear campaigns. Its educational system, starting in primary school, is an indoctrination machine for the military. And the greed and corruption of its venal political and economic elite have created vast income disparities, a mirror of the decay within Americaโs democracy, along with a culture of anti-Arab and anti-Black racism.
By the time Israel achieves its decimation of Gaza โ Israel istalking about months more of warfare โ its facade of civility, its supposed vaunted respect for the rule of law and democracy, its mythical story of the courageous Israeli military and miraculous birth of the Jewish nation โ which it successfully sold to its western audiences โ will lie in ash heaps. Israelโs social capital will be spent. It will be revealed as the ugly, repressive, hate-filled apartheid regime it always has been, alienating younger generations of American Jews. Its patron, the United States, as new generations come into power, will distance itself from Israel. Its popular support will come from reactionary Zionists and Americaโs Christianized fascists who see Israelโs domination of ancient Biblical land as a harbinger of the Second Coming and in its subjugation of Arabs a kindred racism and celebration of white supremacy.
Israel will become synonymous with its victims the way Turks are synonymous with the Armenians, Germans are with the Namibians and later the Jews, and Serbs are with the Bosniaks. Israelโs cultural, artistic, journalistic and intellectual life will atrophy. Israel will be a stagnant nation where the religious fanatics, bigots and Jewish extremists who have seized power will dominate public discourse. It will join the club of the globeโs most despotic regimes.
Despotisms can exist long after their past due date. But they are terminal.
Nations need more than force to survive. They need a mystique. This mystique provides purpose, civility and even nobility to inspire citizens to sacrifice for the nation. The mystique offers hope for the future. It provides meaning. It provides national identity. When mystiques implode, when they are exposed as lies, a central foundation of state power collapses.
All Israel has left is escalating savagery, including torture and lethal violence against unarmed civilians, which accelerates the decline. The Israeli military has carred out 93 massacres in Gaza in the last year. This wholesale violence works in the short term, as it did in the war waged by the French in Algeria, the Dirty War waged by Argentinaโs military dictatorship, the British occupation of India, Egypt, Kenya and Northern Ireland and the American occupations of Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. But in the long term, it is suicidal.
The genocide in Gaza has turned Hamasโ resistance fighters into heroes in the Global South. Israel has killed hundreds of Palestinian leaders, including Yahya Sinwar. It assassinated Dr. Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, one of the founders of Hamas, who I knew, and Khalil al-Wazir, known as Abu Jihad, and who founded the PLO with Yasser Arafat, who I also knew. But the daily humiliation, forced impoverishment, indiscriminate violence, long prison terms and torture is fertile training ground for resistance leaders. There is no shortage of radicalized Palestinians who can take Sinwarโs place. The long struggle for freedom by Palestinians has made this point over and over and over.
Run, the Israelis demand of the Palestiniansin Gaza, run for your lives. Run from Rafah the way you ran from Gaza City, the way you ran from Jabalia, the way you ran from Deir al-Balah, the way you ran from Beit Hanoun, the way you ran from Bani Suheila, the way you ran from Khan Yunis. Run or we will kill you. We will drop GBU-39 bombs on your tent encampments and set them ablaze. We will spray you with bullets from our machine-gun-equipped drones. We will pound you with artillery and tank shells. We will shoot you down with snipers. We will decimate your tents, your refugee camps, your cities and towns, your homes, your schools, your hospitals and your water purification plants. We will rain death from the sky.
Run for your lives. Again and again and again. Pack up the few belongings you have left. Blankets. A couple of pots. Some clothes. We donโt care how exhausted you are, how hungry you are, how terrified you are, how sick you are, how old, or how young you are. Run. Run. Run. And when you run in terror to one part of Gaza, we will make you turn around and run to another. Trapped in a labyrinth of death. Back and forth. Up and down. Side to side. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten times. We toy with you like mice in a trap. Then we deport you so you can never return. Or we kill you.
Let the world denounce our genocide. What do we care? The billions in military aid flows unchecked from our American ally. The fighter jets. The artillery shells. The tanks. The bombs. An endless supply. We kill children by the thousands. We kill women and the elderly by the thousands. The sick and injured, without medicine and hospitals die. We poison the water. We cut off the food. We make you starve. We created this hell. We are the masters. Law. Duty. A code of conduct. They do not exist for us.
But first we toy with you. We humiliate you. We terrorize you. We revel in your fear. We are amused by your pathetic attempts to survive. You are not human. You are creatures. Untermensch. We feed our lust for domination. Look at our posts on social media. They have gone viral. One shows soldiers grinning in a Palestinian home with the owners tied up and blindfolded in the background. We loot. Rugs. Cosmetics. Motorbikes. Jewelry. Watches. Cash. Gold. Antiquities. We mock your misery. We cheer your death. We celebrate our religion, our nation, our identity, our superiority, by negating and erasing yours.
Depravity is moral. Atrocity is heroism. Genocide is redemption.
This is the game of terror played by Israel in Gaza. It was the game played during the Dirty War in Argentina, which I covered as a reporter, when the military junta โdisappearedโ 30,000 of its own citizens. The โdisappearedโ were subjected to torture โ who cannot call what is happening to Palestinians in Gaza torture? โ and humiliated before they were murdered. It was the game played in the clandestine torture centers and prisons I reported on in El Salvador and Iraq. It is what I saw in the Serbian concentration camps in Bosnia.
Israeli journalist Yinon Magal on the show โHapatriotimโ on Israelโs Channel 14, joked that Joe Bidenโs red line was the killing of 30,000 Palestinians. The singer Kobi Peretz asked if that was the number of dead for a day. The audience erupted in applause and laughter.
We know Israelโs intent. Annihilate the Palestinians the same way the United States annihilated Native Americans, the Australians annihilated the First Nations peoples, the Germans annihilated the Herero in Namibia, the Turks annihilated Armenians and the Nazis annihilated the Jews. The specifics are different. The goal is the same. Erasure.
We cannot plead ignorance.
But it is easier to pretend. Pretend Israel will allow humanitarian aid. Pretend there will be a permanent ceasefire. Pretend Palestinians will return to their destroyed homes in Gaza. Pretend Gaza will be rebuilt โ the hospitals, the universities, the mosques, the housing. Pretend the Palestinian Authority will administer Gaza. Pretend there will be a two-state solution. Pretend there is no genocide.
The vaunted democratic values, morality and respect for human rights, claimed by Israel and the United States, has always been a lie. The real credo is this โ we have everything and if you try and take it away from us we will kill you. People of color, especially when they are poor and vulnerable, do not count. The hopes, dreams, dignity and aspirations for freedom of those outside the empire are worthless. Global domination will be sustained through racialized violence.
This lie โ that the American empire is predicated on democracy and liberty โ is one the Palestinians, and those in the Global South, as well as Native Americans and Black and Brown Americans, not to mention those who live in the Middle East, have known for decades. But it is a lie that still has currency in the United States and Israel, a lie used to justify the unjustifiable.
We do not halt Israelโs genocide because we, as Americans, are Israel, infected with the same white supremacy, and intoxicated by our domination of the globeโs wealth and the power to obliterate others with our advanced weaponry.
The U.S. occupation forces in Iraq and Afgnaistan, replicating what they did in Vietnam, deliberately maimed, abused, beat, tortured, raped, wounded and killed hundreds of thousands of unarmed civilians, including children.
โAfter the war,โ Nick Turse writes, โmost scholars wrote off the accounts of widespread war crimes that recur throughout Vietnamese revolutionary publications and American antiwar literature as merely so much propaganda. Few academic historians even thought to cite such sources, and almost none did so extensively. Meanwhile, My Lai came to stand for โ and thus blot out โ all other American atrocities. Vietnam War bookshelves are now filled with big-picture histories, sober studies of diplomacy and military tactics, and combat memoirs told from the soldiersโ perspective. Buried in forgotten U.S. government archives, locked away in the memories of atrocity survivors, the real American war in Vietnam has all but vanished from public consciousness.โ
Historical amnesia is a vital part of extermination campaigns once they end, at least for the victors. But for the victims, the memory of genocide, along with a yearning for retribution, is a sacred calling. The vanquished reappear in ways the genocidal killers cannot predict, fueling new conflicts and new animosities. The physical eradication of all Palestinians, the only way genocide works, is an impossibility given that six million Palestinians alone live in the diaspora. Over five million live in Gaza and the West Bank.
Israelโs genocide has enraged the 1.9 billion Muslims worldwide, as well as most of the Global South. It has discredited and weakened the corrupt and fragile regimes of the dictatorships and monarchies in the Arab world, home to 456 million Muslims, who collaborate with the U.S. and Israel. It has fueled the ranks of the Palestinian resistance.
What is happening in Gaza is not unprecedented. Indonesiaโs military, backed by the U.S., carried out a year-long campaign in 1965 to exterminate those accused of being communist leaders, functionaries, party members and sympathizers. The bloodbath โ much of it carried out by rogue death squads and paramilitary gangs โ decimated the labor union movement along with the intellectual and artistic class, opposition parties, university student leaders, journalists and ethnic Chinese. A million people were slaughtered. Many of the bodies were dumped into rivers, hastily buried or left to rot on roadsides.
This campaign of mass murder is today mythologized in Indonesia, as it will be in Israel. It is portrayed as an epic battle against the forces of evil, just as Israel equates the Palestinians with Nazis.
The killers in the Indonesian war against โcommunismโ are cheered at political rallies. They are lionized for saving the country. They are interviewed on television about their โheroicโ battles. The three-million-strong Pancasila Youth โ Indonesiaโs equivalent of the โBrownshirtsโ or the Hitler Youth โ in 1965, joined in the genocidal mayhem and are held up as the pillars of the nation.
We mythologize our genocide of Native Americans, romanticizing our killers, gunmen, outlaws, militias and cavalry units. We, like Israel, fetishize the military.
Industrail slaughter โ what the sociologist James William Gibson calls โtechnowarโโ defines Israelโs assault on Gaza and Lebanon. Technowar is centered on the concept of โoverkill.โ Overkill, with its intentionally large numbers of civilian casualties, is justified as an effective form of deternece. It is what Israel, cyniucally, calls โmowing the lawn.โ
The incursion on Oct. 7 into Israel by Hamas and other resistance groups, which left 1,154 Israelis, tourists and migrant workers dead and saw about 240 people taken hostage, gave Israel the pretext for what it has long craved โ the total erasure of Palestinians.
Israel has damaged or destroyed Gazaโs universities, all of which are now closed, and 60 percent of other educational facilities, including 13 libraries. It has also destroyed at least 195 heritage sites, including 208 mosques, churches, and Gazaโs Central Archives that held 150 years of historical records and documents. Israelโs warplanes, missiles, drones, tanks, artillery shells and naval guns daily pulverize Gaza โ which is only 20 miles long and five miles wide โ in a scorched earth campaign unlike anything seen since the war in Vietnam. It has dropped 25,000 tons of explosives โ equivalent to two nuclear bombs โ on Gaza, many targets selected by Artificial Intelligence. It drops unguided munitions (โdumb bombsโ) and 2000-pound โbunker busterโ bombs on refugee camps and densely packed urban centers as well as the so-called โsafe zonesโ โ 42 percent of Palestinians killed have been in these โsafe zonesโ where they were instructed by Israel to flee. Over 1.9 million Palestinians have been displaced from their homes, forced to find refuge in overcrowded UNRWA shelters, hospital corridors and courtyards, schools, tents or the open air in south Gaza, often living next to fetid pools of raw sewage.
The Israeli blockade of northern Gaza has left over 400,000 Palestinians are enduring a starvation siege and constant airstrikes in an attempt to depopulate the north. Israeli forces have killed 1,250 Palestinians in the assault, launched on October 5, a medical source told Al Jazeera. Reports from northern Gaza are difficult to obtain as internet and phone services have been cut and the few journalists on the ground continue to bekilled. Civil defense units say they have been barred by Israeli forces from reaching the sites of strikes and their crews have been attacked.
Israel has ordered Palestinians to flee to designated โsafe zones,โ but once in these โsafe zonesโ they have been attacked and ordered to move to new โsafe zones.โ
Israel has killed at least 42,600 Palestinians in Gaza, including 13,000 children and 9,000 women. It has wounded 99,800 others, many with life crippling injuries. It has killed at least 136 journalists, many, if not most of them deliberately targeted. It has killed 340 doctors, nurses and other health workers โ four percent of Gazaโs healthcare personnel. Two-hundred and thirty-three UNRWA workers have been killed in Gaza since Oct. 7, 2023, the highest death toll in U.N. history. These numbers do not begin to reflect the actual death toll since only those dead registered in morgues and hospitals, most of which no longer function, are counted. The death toll, when those who are missing are counted, is well over 40,000.
At the same time, Israel has turned Gaza inrto a toxic wasteland.
โNearly 40 million tons of debris, including unexploded ordnance and human remains, contaminate the ecosystem,โ the U.N. reports. โMore than 140 temporary waste sites and 340,000 tons of waste, untreated wastewater and sewage overflow contribute to the spread of diseases such as hepatitis A, respiratory infections, diarrhea and skin diseases.โ
In a further blow, the Israeli parliament approved a bill to ban UNRWA, a lifeline for Palestinians in Gaza, from operating on Israeli territory and areas under Israelโs control. The ban almost certainly ensures the collapse of aid distribution, already crippled, in Gaza.
Israel has expanded its โbuffer zoneโ along the Gaza perimeter to 16 percent of the territory, in the process leveling homes, apartment blocks and farms. It has pushed over 84 percent of the 2.3 million people in Gaza into โa shrinking, unsafe โhumanitarian zoneโ covering 12.6 percentof a territory now reconfigured in preparation for annexation.โ Satellite imagery indicates that the Israeli military has built roads and military bases in over 26 percent of Gaza, โsuggesting the aim of a permanent presence.โ
Doctors are forced to amputate limbs without anesthetic. Those with severe medical conditions โ cancer, diabetes, heart disease, kidney disease โ have died from lack of treatment or will die soon. Over a hundred women give birth every day, with little to no medical care. Miscarriages are up by 300 percent. Over 90 percent of the Palestinians in Gaza suffer from severe food insecurity with people eating animal feed and grass. Children are dying of starvation. Palestinian writers, academics, scientists and their family members have been tracked and assassinated.
Seventy percent of recorded deaths have consistently been women and children.
Israel plays linguistic tricks to deny anyone in Gaza the status of civilians and any building โ including mosques, hospitals and schools โ protected status. Palestinians are all branded as responsible for the attack on Oct. 7 or written off as human shields for Hamas. All structures are considered legitimate targets by Israel because they are allegedly Hamas command centers or said to harbor Hamas fighters.
These accusations, Francesca Albanese, the U.N. Rappatour for the Palestinian territories, writes, are a โpretextโ used to justify โthe killing of civilians under a cloak of purported legality, whose all-enveloping pervasiveness admits only of genocidal intent.โ
โIn August,โ Albanes writes in her most recent report, โentry permits for humanitarian organizations nearly halved. Access to water has been restricted to a quarter of pre-7 October levels. Approximately 93 per cent of the agricultural, forestry and fishing economies has been destroyed; 95 per cent of Palestinians face high levels of acute food insecurity, and deprivation for decades to come.โ
โIn recent months, 83 percent of food aid was prevented from entering Gaza, and the civilian police in Rafah were repeatedly targeted, impairing distribution,โ the report notes. โAt least 34 deaths from malnutrition were recorded by 14 September 2024.โ
These measures, sh noters, โindicate an intent to destroy its population through starvation.โ
The occupation and genocide would not be sustained without the U.S. which gives Israel $3.8 billion in annual military assistance. The U.S. has spent $ 17.9 billion on military aid to Israel in the last 12 months, including providing 1,800 MK84 2,000-pound bombs, 500 MK82 500-pound bombs and fighter jets to Israel. This, too, is our genocide.
The genocide in Gaza is the culmination of a process. It is not an act. The genocide is the predictable denouement of Israelโs settler colonial project. It is coded within the DNA of the Israeli apartheid state. It is where Israel had to end up. And Zionist leaders are open about their goals.
We do not halt Israelโs genocide because we are Israel, infected with white supremacy and intoxicated by our domination of the globeโs wealth and the power to obliterate others with our industrial weapons. Remember The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman telling Charlie Rose on the eve of the war in Iraq that American soldiers should go house to house from Basra to Baghdad and say to Iraqis โsuck on this?โ That is the real credo of the U.S. empire.
As climate change imperils survival, as resources become scarce, as migration becomes an imperative for millions, as agricultural yields decline, as costal areas are flooded, as droughts and wilfires proliferate, as states fail, as armed resistance movements rise to battle their oppressors along with their proxies, genocide will not be an anomaly. It will be the norm. The earthโs vulnerable and poor, those Frantz Fanon called โthe wretched of the earth,โ will be the next Palestinians.
The scorched earth tactics in Gaza and Lebanon are becoming common in the West Bank
Thousands of Palestinians in the West Bank towns of Jenin, Nablus, Qalqilya, Tubas and Tulkarem live for days under curfew, making it difficult to access food and water. As in Gaza, the Israeli army targets ambulances, blocks entrances to hospitals and bulldozes streets, electricity and public health infrastructure.
Drones and war planes carry out airstrikes. Israeli roadblocks, checkpoints and blockades make travel difficult or impossible. Israel has suspended financial transfers to the Palestinian Authority, which nominally governs the West Bank in collaboration with Israel. It has revoked 148,000 work permits for those who had jobs in Israel.
โThe gross domestic product (GDP) of the West Bank contracted by 22.7 percent,nearly 30 percent of businesses have closed, and 292,000 jobs have been lost,โ the report reads. Over 692 Palestinians โ โ10 times the previous 14 yearsโ annual average of 69 fatalities,โ have been killed and more than 5,000 have been injured. Of the 169 Palestinian children who have been killed, โnearly 80 percent were shot in the head or the torso.โ
Albaneseโs report dismisses the claim that Israel is carrying out the assault in Gaza and the West Bank to โdefend itself,โ โeradicate Hamasโ or โbring the hostages home,โ charging that these claims are โcamouflage,โ a way of โinvisibilizing the crime.โ Genocidal intent, as Judge Dalveer Bhandari from the ICJ points out, โmay exist simultaneously with other, ulterior motives.โ
Rather, the incursion into Israel by Hamas and other resistance fighters on Oct. 7 โprovided the impetus to advance towards the goal of a โGreater Israel.โโ
Egypt and the other Arab states have refused to consider accepting Palestinian refugees. But Israel is banking on creating a humanitarian disaster of such catastrophic proportions that these countries, or other countries, will relent so they can depopulate Gaza and turn their attention to ethnically cleansing the West Bank. That is the plan, although no one, including Israel, knows if it will work.
There is only one way to end the ongoing genocide in Gaza. It is not through bilateral negotiations. Israel has amply demonstrated, including with the assassination of the lead Hamas negotiator, Ismail Haniyeh, that it has no interest in a permanent ceasefire. The only way for Israelโs genocide of the Palestinians to be halted is for the U.S. to end all weapons shipments to Israel. And the only way this will take place is if enough Americans make clear they have no intention of supporting any presidential ticket or any political party that fuels this genocide.
The arguments against a boycott of the two ruling parties are familiar: It will ensure the election of Donald Trump. Kamala Harris has rhetorically shown more compassion than Joe Biden. There are not enough of us to have an impact. We can work within the Democratic Party. The Israel lobby, especially the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which owns most members of Congress, is too powerful. Negotiations will eventually achieve a cessation of the slaughter.
In short, we are impotent and must surrender our agency to sustain a project of mass killing. We must accept as normal governance the shipment of billions of dollars in military aid to an apartheid state, the use of vetoes at the U.N. Security Council to protect Israel and the active obstruction of international efforts to end mass murder. We have no choice.
Genocide, the internationally recognized crime of crimes, is not a policy issue. It cannot be equated with trade deals, infrastructure bills, charter schools or immigration. It is a moral issue. It is about the eradication of a people. Any surrender to genocide condemns us as a nation and as a species. It plunges the global society one step closer to barbarity. It eviscerates the rule of law and mocks every fundamental value we claim to honor. It is in a category by itself. And to not, with every fiber of our being, combat genocide is to be complicit in what Hannah Arendt defines as โradical evil,โ the evil where human beings, as human beings, are rendered superfluous.
The fundamental lesson of the Holocaust, which writers such as Primo Levi stress, is that we can all become willing executioners. It takes very little. We can all become complicit, if only through indifference and apathy, in evil.
โMonsters exist,โ Levi, who survived Auschwitz, writes, โbut they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.โ
To confront evil โ even if there is no chance of success โ keeps alive our humanity and dignity. It allows us, as Vaclav Havel writes in โThe Power of the Powerless,โ to live in truth, a truth the powerful do not want spoken and seek to suppress. It provides a guiding light to those who come after us. It tells the victims they are not alone. It is โhumanityโs revolt against an enforced positionโ and an โattempt to regain control over oneโs sense of responsibility.โ
What does it say about us if we accept a world where we arm and fund a nation that kills and wounds hundreds of innocents a day?
What does it say about us if we support an orchestrated famine and the poisoning of the water supply where the polio virus has been detected, meaning tens of thousands will get sick and many will die?
What does it say about us if we permit for over 12 months the bombing of refugee camps, hospitals, villages and cities to wipe out families and force survivors to camp out in the open or find shelter in crude tents?
What does it say about us when we accept the murder of 11,000 children, although this is surely an undercount?
What does it say about us when we watch Israel escalate attacks on United Nations facilities, schools โ including the Al-Tabaeen school in Gaza City, where over 100 Palestinians were killed while performing the Fajr, or dawn prayers โ and other emergency shelters?
What does it say about us when we permit Israel to use Palestinians as human shields by forcing handcuffed civilians, including children and the elderly, to enter potentially booby-trapped tunnels and buildings in advance of Israeli troops, at times dressed in Israeli military uniforms?
What does it say about us when we support politicians and soldiers who defend the rape and torture of prisoners?
Are these the kinds of allies we want to empower? Is this behavior we want to embrace? What message does this send to the rest of the world?
If we do not hold fast to moral imperatives, we are doomed. Evil will triumph. It means there is no right and wrong. It means anything, including mass murder, is permissible. Hope lies in the university encampments, in the occupation of buildings, in the hunger strikes, in the streets, and of course, in third parties that defy the empire. These people, who march to the beat of a different drummer, are the nationโs conscience.
A moral stance always has a cost. If there is no cost, it is not moral. It is merely conventional belief.
โBut what of the price of peace?โ the radical Catholic priest Daniel Berrigan, who was sent to federal prison for burning draft records during the war in Vietnam, asks in his book โNo Bars to Manhood:โ
I think of the good, decent, peace-loving people I have known by the thousands, and I wonder. How many of them are so afflicted with the wasting disease of normalcy that, even as they declare for the peace, their hands reach out with an instinctive spasm in the direction of their comforts, their home, their security, their income, their future, their plans โ that five-year plan of studies, that ten-year plan of professional status, that twenty-year plan of family growth and unity, that fifty-year plan of decent life and honorable natural demise. โOf course, let us have the peace,โ we cry, โbut at the same time let us have normalcy, let us lose nothing, let our lives stand intact, let us know neither prison nor ill repute nor disruption of ties.โ And because we must encompass this and protect that, and because at all costs โ at all costs โ our hopes must march on schedule, and because it is unheard of that in the name of peace a sword should fall, disjoining that fine and cunning web that our lives have woven, because it is unheard of that good men should suffer injustice or families be sundered or good repute be lost โ because of this we cry peace and cry peace, and there is no peace. There is no peace because there are no peacemakers. There are no makers of peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war โ at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake.
The question is not whether resistance is practical. It is whether resistance is right. We are enjoined to love our neighbor, not our tribe. We must have faith that the good draws to it the good, even if the empirical evidence around us is bleak. The good is always embodied in action. It must be seen. It does not matter if the wider society is censorious. We are called to defy โ through acts of civil disobedience and noncompliance โ the laws of the state, when these laws, as they often do, conflict with moral law. We must stand, no matter the cost, with the crucified of the earth. If we fail to take this stand, whether against the abuses of militarized police, the inhumanity of our vast prison system or the genocide in Gaza, we become the crucifiers.
โMockery of every sort was added to their deaths,โ the Roman historian Tacitus wrote of those the emperor Nero singled out for torture and death. โCovered with the skins of beasts, they were torn by dogs and perished, or were nailed to crosses, or were doomed to the flames and burnt, to serve as a nightly illumination, when daylight had expired.โ
Sadism by the powerful is the curse of the human condition. It was as prevalent in ancient Rome as it is in Israel.
We know the modern face of Nero, who illuminated his opulent garden parties by burning to death captives tied to stakes. That is not in dispute.
But who were Neroโs guests? Who wandered through the emperorโs grounds as human beings, as in Rafah, were burned alive? How could these guests see, and no doubt hear, such horrendous suffering and witness such appalling torture and be indifferent, even content?
Who were Neroโs guests?
We are Neroโs guests.
History will judge Israel for this genocide. But it will also judge us. It will ask why we did not do more, why we did not sever all agreements, all trade deals, all accords, all cooperation with the apartheid state, why we did not halt weapons shipments to Israel, why we did not recall our ambassadors, why when the maritime trade in the Red Sea was disrupted by Yemen an alternative overland route into Israel was set up by Saudi Arabia and Jordan, why we did not do everything in our power to end the slaughter. It will condemn us for not heeding the fundamental lesson of the Holocaust, which is not that Jews are eternal victims, but that when you have the capacity to stop genocide and you do not, you are culpable.
โThe opposite of good is not evil,โ Samuel Johnson wrote. โThe opposite of good is indifference.โ
The Palestinian resistance is our resistance. The Palestinian struggle for dignity, freedom and independence is our struggle. The Palestinian cause is our cause. For, as history has also shown, those who were once Neroโs guests soon became Neroโs victims.
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Chris Hedges
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prizeโwinning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor, and NPR. He is the host of show The Chris Hedges Report.
He was a member of the team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for The New York Times coverage of global terrorism, and he received the 2002 Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism. Hedges, who holds a Master of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School, is the author of the bestsellers American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle and was a National Book Critics Circle finalist for his book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. He writes an online column for the website ScheerPost. He has taught at Columbia University, New York University, Princeton University and the University of Toronto.
Adm. Rob Bauer previously said NATO countries should consider shifting to a ‘war economy‘
by Dave DeCamp, Antiwar. com, November 25, 2024
The head of NATOโs Military Committee has called on European businesses to prepare for a โwartime scenarioโ amid soaring tensions between the Western military alliance and Russia.
Dutch Adm. Rob Bauer said Western businesses must adjust to become less vulnerable to both Russia and China. โIf we can make sure that all crucial services and goods can be delivered no matter what, then that is a key part of our deterrence,โ Bauer said at a European Policy Centre event in Brussels, according to Reuters.
Bauer said energy supplies could be targeted or used as weapons of war. โWeโre seeing that with the growing number of sabotage acts, and Europe has seen that with energy supply,โ he said. โWe thought we had a deal with Gazprom, but we actually had a deal with Mr Putin. And the same goes for Chinese-owned infrastructure and goods. We actually have a deal with (Chinese President) Xi (Jinping).โ
US and European officials have accused Russia of weaponizing energy, but Moscow began reducing gas shipments to Europe in 2022 in response to Western sanctions meant to destroy the Russian economy.
Bauer also said Western economies were too dependent on China. โWe are naive if we think the Communist Party will never use that power. Business leaders in Europe and America need to realize that the commercial decisions they make have strategic consequences for the security of their nation,โ he said. โBusinesses need to be prepared for a wartime scenario and adjust their production and distribution lines accordingly. Because while it may be the military who wins battles, itโs the economies that win wars.โ
Last year, Bauer called for NATO countries to consider shifting to a โwar economyโ where civilian factories would begin producing military goods, similar to what the US did during World War II. โThose priorities should be discussed about, partially, a war economy in peacetime,โ he said in January 2023.
Bauer also said at the time that NATO was โreadyโ for a direct confrontation with Russia. Today, that confrontation is much more likely following the US authorization of long-range strikes on Russian territory with NATO missiles, a step Moscow has made clear risks a nuclear escalation.
U.S. President Joe Biden shakes hands with President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky after a meeting in the East Room of the White House September 21, 2023 in Washington, D.C.
(Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Whether heralded or reviled, Bidenโs supposed restraint during the Ukraine war has steadily faded, with more and more dangerous escalation in its place.
President Biden has never wavered from approving huge arms shipments to Israel during more than 13 months of mass murder and deliberate starvation of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Bidenโs crucial role earned him the name โGenocide Joe.โ
That nickname might seem shrill, but itโs valid. Although Biden will not be brought to justice for serving as a key accomplice to the horrific crimes against humanity that continue in Gaza, the label sticksโand candid historians will condemn him as a direct enabler of genocide.
Biden could also qualify for another nickname, which according to Google was never published before this article: โOmnicide Joe.โ
In contrast to the Genocide Joe sobriquet, which events have already proven apt, Omnicide Joe is a bit anticipatory. Thatโs inevitable, because if the cascading effects of his foreign policy end up as key factors in nuclear annihilation, historians will not be around to assess his culpability for omnicideโdefined as โthe destruction of all life or all human life.โ
That definition scarcely overstates what scientists tell us would result from an exchange of nuclear weapons. Researchers have discovered that โnuclear winterโ would quickly set in across the globe, blotting out sunlight and wiping out agriculture, with a human survival rate of perhaps 1 or 2 percent.
While Russiaโs invasion and horrible war in Ukraine should be condemned, Biden has compounded Putinโs crimes by giving much higher priority to Washingtonโs cold-war mania than to negotiation for peaceโor to mitigation of escalating risks of nuclear war.
With everythingโliterally everythingโat stake, you might think that averting thermonuclear war between the worldโs two nuclear superpowers, Russia and the United States, would be high on a presidentโs to-do list. But that hardly has been the case with Joe Biden since he first pulled up a chair at the Oval Office desk.
In fact, Biden has done a lot during the first years of this decade to inflame the realistic fears of nuclear war. His immediate predecessor Donald Trump pulled the U.S. out of two vital treaties — Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces and Open Skies — and Biden did nothing to reinstate them. Likewise, Trump killed the Iran nuclear deal negotiated during the Obama administration, and Biden let itstay dead.
Instead of fulfilling his 2020 campaign promise to adopt a U.S. policy of no-first-use of nuclear weapons, two years ago Biden signed off on the Nuclear Posture Review policy document that explicitly declares the opposite. Last year, under the euphemism of โmodernization,โ the U.S. government spent $51 billion — more than every other nuclear-armed country combined — updating and sustaining its nuclear arsenal, gaining profligate momentum in a process thatโs set to continue for decades to come.
Before and after Russiaโs invasion of Ukraine in late February 2022, Biden showed a distinct lack of interest in actual diplomacy to prevent the war or to end it. Three days before the invasion, writing in the Financial Times, Jeffrey Sachs pointed out: โBiden has said repeatedly that the U.S. is open to diplomacy with Russia, but on the issue that Moscow has most emphasizedโNATO enlargementโthere has been no American diplomacy at all. [Russian President Vladimir] Putin has repeatedly demanded that the U.S. forswear NATOโs enlargement into Ukraine, while Biden has repeatedly asserted that membership of the alliance is Ukraineโs choice.โ
While Russiaโs invasion and horrible war in Ukraine should be condemned, Biden has compounded Putinโs crimes by giving much higher priority to Washingtonโs cold-war mania than to negotiation for peaceโor to mitigation of escalating risks of nuclear war.
From the outset, Biden scarcely acknowledged that the survival of humanity was put at higher risk by the Ukraine war. In his first State of the Union speech, a week after the invasion, Biden devoted much of his oratory to the Ukraine conflict without saying a word about the heightened danger that it might trigger the use of nuclear weapons.
During the next three months, the White House posted more than 60 presidential statements, documents and communiques about the war in Ukraine. They all shared with his State of the Union address a stunning characteristic — the complete absence of any mention of nuclear weapons or nuclear war dangersโeven though many experts gauged those dangers as being the worst theyโd been since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
With everythingโliterally everythingโat stake, you might think that averting thermonuclear war between the worldโs two nuclear superpowers, Russia and the United States, would be high on a presidentโs to-do list.
With occasional muted references to not wanting a U.S. military clash with nuclear-armed Russia, during the last 33 months the Biden administration has said it did not want to cross its own red linesโand then has repeatedly proceeded to do so.
A week ago superhawk John Bolton, a former national security advisor to President Trump, summarized the process on CNN while bemoaning that Bidenโs reckless escalation hasnโt been even more reckless: โItโs been one long public debate after another, going back to โShall we supply ATACMS [ballistic missiles] to the Ukrainians at all?โ First itโs no, then thereโs a debate, then thereโs yes. โShould we supply the Ukrainians Abrams tanks?โ First itโs no, then thereโs a long debate, then itโs yes. โShould we supply the Ukrainians with F-16s?โ First itโs no, then thereโs a long debate, and itโs yes. Now, โCan we allow the Ukrainians to use ATACMS inside Russia?โ After a long debate, now itโs yes.โ
Whether heralded or reviled, Bidenโs supposed restraint during the Ukraine war has steadily faded, with more and more dangerous escalation in its place.
Bidenโs recent green light for Ukraine to launch longer-range missiles into Russia is another jump toward nuclear warfare. As a Quincy Institute analyst wrote, โthe stakes, and escalatory risks, have steadily crept up.โ In an ominous direction, โthis needlessly escalatory step has put Russia and NATO one step closer to a direct confrontationโthe window to avert catastrophic miscalculation is now that much narrower.โ
Like Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken as well as the Democratic and Republican phalanx of Ukraine war cheerleaders on Capitol Hill, Bolton doesnโt mention that recent polling shows strong support among Ukrainian people for negotiations to put a stop to the war. โAn average of 52 percent of Ukrainians would like to see their country negotiate an end to the war as soon as possible,โ Gallup reported last week, compared to only 38 percent who say โtheir country should keep fighting until victory.โ
Biden and other war boosters have continued to scorn, as capitulation and accommodation to aggression, what so much of the Ukrainian population now says it wantsโa negotiated settlement. Instead, top administration officials and laptop-warrior pundits in the press corps are eager to tout their own mettle by insisting that Ukrainians and Russians must keep killing and dying.
Last week, Putin โlowered the threshold for a nuclear strike in response to a broader range of conventional attacks,โ Reuters reported, โand Moscow said Ukraine had struck deep inside Russia with U.S.-made ATACMS missilesโฆ. Russia had been warning the West for months that if Washington allowed Ukraine to fire U.S., British and French missiles deep into Russia, Moscow would consider those NATO members to be directly involved in the war in Ukraine.โ
For President Biden, the verdict of Genocide Joe is already in. But if, despite pleas for sanity, he turns out to fully deserve the name Omnicide Joe, none of us will be around to read about it.
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President Joe Biden talks with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, July 25, 2024.(Susan Walsh, File / AP Photo)
Past the 20-foot-high aluminum doors of the Justice Departmentโs Robert F. Kennedy Building, and down a long limestone hallway lined with art deco accents, Room B-206 has long served as the epicenter of the Biden administrationโs prosecutorial war against former president Donald Trump. Behind the heavy wooden door is the office of special counsel Jack Smith, a highly secure redoubt where attorneys spent years building criminal cases against Trump for allegedly attempting to overturn the outcome of the 2020 election, as well as for his alleged improper handling of classified documents after leaving the White House.
But now, instead of heading to trial, the prosecutors are scrambling to empty file cabinets and stuff their contents into cardboard storage boxes. As a result of Trumpโs election win, the prosecution is officially halted by the Justice Departmentโs policy prohibiting the filing of criminal cases against a sitting president. But while President-elect Trump will likely never face the consequences of his alleged criminal actions, President Biden may one day face trial for his, albeit in a far different courtroom in The Hague.
Three thousand eight hundred miles to the east from Washington sits the International Criminal Court (ICC), a complex of six modern towers in the Netherlands not far from Peace Palace and Europol in The Hague. In the largest building, Court Tower, are three courtrooms that carry out the institutionโs mandate: to prosecute perpetrators of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes, thereby providing justice to victims.
According to Article 1 of the Genocide Convention, the Contracting Parties, including the United States and Israel, must prevent and punish acts of genocide. Under Article III, those punishable acts include โComplicity in genocide,โ such as by knowingly providing the deadly weapons used to carry it out. In 2007, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), in a case involving Bosnia and Serbia, established that the obligation to refrain from providing weapons or other assistance begins the moment a state becomes aware of the existence of a serious risk that genocide may be committed.
For the Biden administration, that moment came in January, when the ICJ found that there was a โplausibleโ risk of genocide being committed in Gaza against the Palestinian people by Israel. Shortly after, in February, the Dutch Appeals Court halted the transfer of F-35 munition parts to Israel on account of the serious risk of International Humanitarian Law violations. Further notice came in May with the applications for arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and others by the chief prosecutor of the ICC, Kharim Khan. Among the charges against Netanyahu related to Gaza were crimes against humanity, including extermination, murder, starvation of civilians as a method of warfare, intentional attacks against a civilian population, and โother inhumane acts.โ It was the first potential ICC arrest warrant issued for the leader of a Western-style democracy. Nevertheless, European countries including France and Germany issued statements affirming their support for the legitimacy of the ICC.
Despite the clear indication that American weapons were being used to carry out an alleged Israeli genocide, the bombs continued to flow and the wholesale massacres never stopped. According to a report last week by the UN Human Rights Office, close to 70 percent of the fatalities in Gaza have been children and women, โindicating a systematic violation of the fundamental principles of international humanitarian law,โ said the report. Nizam Mamode, a retired surgeon with Britainโs National Health Service who recently returned from working at a hospital in Gaza, testified last week to members of Parliament that he treated children โday after day after dayโ who had been deliberately targeted by Israeli drones following bomb attacks.
In July, an analysis published by the medical journal The Lancet estimated that the actual number of Palestinian deaths in Gaza, including those decomposing beneath the rubble of bombed-out hospitals, schools, and densely packed refugee camps, is likely more than 186,000. And if the deaths continue at the same rate, said Devi Sridhar, chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, the estimated deaths by the end of the year would total 335,500.
In spite of those grim statistics, the Biden administration last month decided to play politics with the lives of the desperate and starving survivors in Gaza, most of whom had been forced to flee from multiple Israeli evacuation orders. To help the Harris campaign with pro-Palestinian voters, Biden pretended to turn tough and issued a highly publicized letter giving Netanyahu a 30-day deadline to increase the flow of food and other aid to Gaza or face a potential cutoff in military support. But it was simply a scam, since the deadline would fall after the election was over. When the time limit expired last week, there was no longer a need for Biden to pretend that the United States would take action. Instead, his administration continued to deceive the American public by falsely claiming that it found no evidence that Israel was obstructing shipments of food and other aid into Gaza.
The announcement was greeted with disbelief and anger by aid groups, including Save the Children, Oxfam, Refugees International, and Mercy Corps. โIsraelโs actions failed to meet any of the specific criteria set out in the U.S. letter,โ said a joint statement. โIsrael not only failed to meet the U.S. criteria that would indicate support to the humanitarian response, but concurrently took actions that dramatically worsened the situation on the ground, particularly in Northern Gaza. That situation is in an even more dire state today than a month ago. The principals of the Inter-Agency Standing Committee now assess that โthe entire Palestinian population in North Gaza is at imminent risk of dying from disease, famine and violence.โโ According to an editorial in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, โIsrael is unleashing an apocalypse in Northern Gaza.โ
Further evidence of the Biden administrationโs deliberate cover-up of the ongoing genocide came days after the administrationโs announcement when a UN special committee released a report that said, โThe policies and practices of Israel during the reporting period [the past year] are consistent with the characteristics of genocideโ and โCivilians have been indiscriminately and disproportionally killed en masse in Gaza.โ The report went on to say that there were also serious concerns that Israel was โusing starvation as a weapon of warโโa fact made clear by numerous reports of humanitarian aid convoys being looted right next to the Israeli troops, who stand by and do nothing to stop it. Israelโs decision to stop cooperating with UNRWA, the critical relief agency providing welfare services to Palestinians, is another clear war crime. โSince the beginning of the war,โ the report concluded, โIsraeli officials have publicly supported policies that strip Palestinians of the very necessities required to sustain lifeโfood, water, and fuel.โ The very definition of genocide.
Also last week, Human Rights Watch issued a report charging that Israel is using its frequent evacuation orders to cause the โdeliberate and massive forced displacementโ of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, actions that appear to โmeet the definition of ethnic cleansingโ as well as crimes against humanity. The report, entitled โHopeless, Starving, and Besieged: Israelโs Forced Displacement of Palestinians in Gaza,โ went on to say that the group has collected clear evidence pointing to โthe war crime of forcible transfer [of the civilian population].โ They described these actions as โa grave breach of the Geneva conventions and a crime under the Rome statute of the international criminal court.โ
That same evidence of genocide, starvation, ethnic cleansing, and forced displacement was clearly available to the Biden administration, yet it lied to the American public to hide its own criminal culpability in the war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.
There is no statute of limitations when it comes to support for genocide, nor does it make a difference whether an individual is in or out of office. What matters is evidence of the crime, and there is more than enough for the ICCโs chief prosecutor to issue an application for an arrest warrant for Biden, just as it did for Netanyahu. After all, itโs the United States that builds the bombs, pays for them, ships them to Israel, provides intelligence on targets in Gaza, and supplies the planes that carry them. All Israel does is drop them, with US approval, on the tens of thousands of innocent civilians.
By June, the Biden administration had sent Israel at least 14,000 massively deadly 2,000-pound MK-84 bombs, made in Oklahoma and dropped on hospitals, apartment blocks, and crowded refugee camps. In addition, it sent 6,500 500-pound bombs, 3,000 Hellfire precision-guided air-to-ground missiles, 1,000 bunker-buster bombs, 2,600 air-dropped small-diameter bombs, and other munitions. Added to that is the approval of additional ground attack aircraft to Israelโs existing American-made F-15s, F-16s and F-35s and Apache helicopters. And in January, following a visit to Washington by Eyal Zamir, Israelโs Defense Ministry director-general, defense sources told the Times of Israel that Israel plans to procure a new squadron of 25 F35i stealth fighter jets, a squadron of 25 F-151A fighter jets, and a new squadron of 12 Apache helicopters.
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In the end, itโs the American taxpayers who are financing the genocide. According to Bruce Fein, an expert in international law, โThe United States has clearly become a co-belligerent with Israel in its war against Hamas-Gaza Palestinians by systematically supplying the IDF with weapons and intelligence without conditions.โ
If the ICC were to seek an arrest warrant for Biden before he leaves office or shortly thereafter, it would also serve as a warning to his successor, President-elect Donald Trump, who appears to have even less regard for the Palestinians. And his return to the White House will allow Netanyahu to not only speed up the genocide, but also to achieve his ultimate goal: the annexation of Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem, illegal actions under international law.
โNetanyahu has stalled until Trumpโs election, and it paid off. Now thereโs nothing standing in his way,โ Palestinian political scientist Nour Odeh told Le Monde. He added: โHe can wage his war as he sees fit, especially as he has just sacked his defense minister, Yoav Gallant, who had opposed him. As for Trump, heโs not interested in the Palestinian Authority, the state of which is getting worse all the time, nor in a dialogue with Mahmoud Abbas, because theyโve already fallen out. Heโs going to do whatever Israel wants. And international law wonโt hold him back any more than American law will.โ
Among those overjoyed by Trumpโs triumph is far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich. โTrumpโs victory brings an important opportunity for the State of Israel,โ he told supporters at a conference of his Religious Zionist Party. During Trumpโs first term, he said, โwe were on the verge of applying sovereignty over the settlementsโ in the West Bank. โNow,โ he said, โthe time has come to make it a reality.โ
And on November 12, Trump sent the same signal back to Smotrich and Netanyahu by naming as his new ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, an evangelical Christian. Shortly afterward, Huckabee said in an Israeli radio interview that โof courseโ annexation of the West Bank is possible in the next administration, but the policy hasnโt been set. And in 2017, he claimed, โThere is no such thing as a West Bank. Itโs Judea and Samaria. Thereโs no such thing as a settlement. Theyโre communities, theyโre neighborhoods, theyโre cities. Thereโs no such thing as an occupation.โ He went even further in a statement during his 2008 presidential campaign. โBasically, there really is no such thing asโI need to be careful about saying this, because people will really get upsetโthereโs really no such thing as a Palestinian,โ he said. โThereโs not.โ
Although neither the United States nor Israel recognizes the jurisdiction of the ICC, most other countries of the world, including in Europe, do. So, should Biden join Netanyahu on the ICCโs wanted list, he would remain safe as long as he never leaves the country. But if he were to give a speech or attend a ceremony outside the country, an Interpol Red Notice would likely be waiting for him, followed by a quick trip to the ICCโs Court Tower in The Hague. According to The Architectural Review, those awaiting trial at the ICC are confined in a โdark gray holding cell complete with steel table and chair bolted to the floor, a slab for a bed, seatless stainless-steel prison toilet and sink.โ And there is plenty of room for both Netanyahu and Biden.
Thereโs not a moment to lose. We must harness our fears, our grief, and yes, our anger, to resist the dangerous policies Donald Trump will unleash on our country. We rededicate ourselves to our role as journalists and writers of principle and conscience.
Today, we also steel ourselves for the fight ahead. It will demand a fearless spirit, an informed mind, wise analysis, and humane resistance. We face the enactment of Project 2025, a far-right supreme court, political authoritarianism, increasing inequality and record homelessness, a looming climate crisis, and conflicts abroad. The Nation will expose and propose, nurture investigative reporting, and stand together as a community to keep hope and possibility alive. The Nationโs work will continueโas it has in good and not-so-good timesโto develop alternative ideas and visions, to deepen our mission of truth-telling and deep reporting, and to further solidarity in a nation divided.
Armed with a remarkable 160 years of bold, independent journalism, our mandate today remains the same as when abolitionists first founded The Nationโto uphold the principles of democracy and freedom, serve as a beacon through the darkest days of resistance, and to envision and struggle for a brighter future.
The day is dark, the forces arrayed are tenacious, but as the late Nation editorial board member Toni Morrison wrote โNo! This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.โ
I urge you to stand with The Nation and donate today.
Onwards,
Katrina vanden Heuvel Editorial Director and Publisher, The Nation
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addresses a joint meeting of the United States Congress in the House chamber at the U.S. Capitol March 3, 2015 in Washington, D.C.
(Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images)
Ultimately, this is the story of how the Israel lobby undermined America, wrecked the Middle East, and set a series of international crimes against humanity in motion.
Itโs official now. Americaโs closest ally, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the one accorded more than 50 standing ovations in Congress just months ago, is under indictment by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity and war crimes. America must take note: the U.S. Government is complicit in Netanyahuโs war crimes and has fully partnered in Netanyahuโs violent rampage across the Middle East.
For 30 years the Israel Lobby has induced the U.S. to fight wars on Israelโs behalf designed to prevent the emergence of a Palestinian State. Netanyahu, who first came to power in 1996, and has been prime minister for 17 years since then, has been the main cheerleader for U.S.-backed wars in the Middle East. The result has been a disaster for the U.S. and a bloody catastrophe not only for the Palestinian people but for the entire Middle East.
These have not been wars to defend Israel, but rather wars to topple governments that oppose Israelโs oppression of the Palestinian people. Israel viciously opposes the two-state solution called for by international law, the Arab Peace Initiative, the G20, the BRICS, the OIC, and the UN General Assembly. Israelโs intransigence, and its brutal suppression of the Palestinian people, has given rise to several militant resistance movements since the beginning of the occupation. These movements are backed by several countries in the region.
The obvious solution to the Israel-Palestine crisis is to implement the two-state solution and to demilitarize the militant groups as part of the implementation process.
Israelโs approach, especially under Netanyahu, is to overthrow foreign governments that oppose Israelโs domination, and recreate the map of a โNew Middle Eastโ without a Palestinian State. Rather than making peace, Netanyahu makes endless war.
What is shocking is that Washington has turned the U.S. military and federal budget over to Netanyahu for his disastrous wars. The history of the Israel lobbyโs complete takeover of Washington can be found in the remarkable new book by Ilan Pappรฉ, Lobbying for Zionism on Both Sides of the Atlantic (2024).
Rather than making peace, Netanyahu makes endless war.
Netanyahu repeatedly told the American people that they would be the beneficiaries of his policies. In fact, Netanyahu has been an unmitigated disaster for the American people, bleeding the U.S. Treasury of trillions of dollars, squandering Americaโs standing in the world, making the U.S. complicit in his genocidal policies, and bringing the world closer to World War III.
If Trump wants to make America great again, the first thing he should do is to make America sovereign again, by ending Washingtonโs subservience to the Israel Lobby.
The Israel Lobby not only controls the votes in Congress but places hardline backers of Israel into key national security posts. These have included Madeleine Albright (Secretary of State for Clinton), Lewis Libby (Chief of Staff of Vice President Cheney), Victoria Nuland (Deputy National Security Advisor of Cheney, NATO Ambassador of Bush Jr., Assistant Secretary of State for Obama, Under-Secretary of State for Biden), Paul Wolfowitz (Under-Secretary of Defense for Bush Sr., Deputy Secretary of Defense for Bush Jr.), Douglas Feith (Under-Secretary of Defense for Bush Jr.), Abram Shulsky (Director of the Office of Special Plans, Department of Defense for Bush Jr.), Elliott Abrams (Deputy National Security Advisor for Bush Jr.), Richard Perle (Chairman of the Defense National Policy Board for Bush Jr.), Amos Hochstein (Senior Advisor to the Secretary of State for Biden), and Antony Blinken (Secretary of State for Biden).
Netanyahu has been an unmitigated disaster for the American people, bleeding the U.S. Treasury of trillions of dollars, squandering Americaโs standing in the world, making the U.S. complicit in his genocidal policies, and bringing the world closer to World War III.
In 1995, Netanyahu described his plan of action in his book Fighting Terrorism. To control terrorists (Netanyahuโs characterization of militant groups fighting Israelโs illegal rule over the Palestinians), itโs not enough to fight the terrorists. Instead, itโs necessary to fight the โterrorist regimesโ that support such groups. And the U.S. must be the one to lead:
The cessation of terrorism must therefore be a clear-cut demand, backed up by sanctions and with no prizes attached. As with all international efforts, the vigorous application of sanctions to terrorist states must be led by the United States, whose leaders must choose the correct sequence, timing, and circumstances for these actions.
As Netanyahu told the American people in 2001 (reprinted as the 2001 foreword to Fighting Terrorism):
The first and most crucial thing to understand is this: There is no international terrorism without the support of sovereign states. International terrorism simply cannot be sustained for long without the regimes that aid and abet itโฆ Take away all this state support, and the entire scaffolding of international terrorism will collapse into dust. The international terrorist network is thus based on regimesโIran, Iraq, Syria, Taliban Afghanistan, Yasir Arafatโs Palestinian Authority, and several other Arab regimes, such as the Sudan.
All of this was music to the ears of the neocons in Washington, who similarly subscribed to U.S.-led regime change operations (through wars, covert subversion, U.S.-led color revolutions, violent coups, etc.) as the main way to deal with perceived U.S. adversaries.
After 9/11, the Bush Jr. neocons (led by Cheney and Rumsfeld) and the Bush Jr. insiders of the Israel Lobby (led by Wolfowitz and Feith), teamed up to remake the Middle East through a series of U.S.-led wars on Netanyahuโs targets in the Middle East (Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Syria) and Islamic East Africa (Libya, Somalia, and Sudan). The role of the Israel Lobby in stoking these wars of choice is described in detail in Pappeโs new book.
The neocon-Israel Lobby war plan was shown to General Wesley Clark on a visit to the Pentagon soon after 9/11. An officer pulled a paper from his desk and told Clark: “I just got this memo from the Secretary of Defense’s office. It says we’re going to attack and destroy the governments in 7 countries in five yearsโwe’re going to start with Iraq, and then we’re going to move to Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran.”
In 2002, Netanyahu pitched the war with Iraq to the American people and Congress by promising them that โIf you take out Saddam, Saddamโs regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region[…] People sitting right next door in Iran, young people, and many others, will say the time of such regimes, of such despots is gone.โ
A remarkable new insider account of Netanyahuโs role in spearheading the Iraq War also comes from retired Marine Command Chief Master Sargent Dennis Fritz, in his book Deadly Betrayal (2024). When Fritz was called to deploy to Iraq in early 2002, he asked senior military officials why the U.S. was deploying to Iraq, but he got no clear answer. Rather than lead soldiers into a battle he could not explain or justify, he left the service.
The neocon-Israel Lobby teamwork has marked one of the greatest global calamities of the 21st century.
In 2005, Fritz was invited back to the Pentagon, now as a civilian, to assist Under-Secretary Douglas Feith in the declassification of documents about the war, so that Feith could use them to write a book about the war. Fritz discovered in the process that the Iraq War had been spurred by Netanyahu in close coordination with Wolfowitz and Feith. He learned that the purported U.S. war aim, to counter Saddamโs weapons of mass destruction, was a cynical public relations gimmick led by an Israel Lobby insider, Abram Shulsky, to garner U.S. public support for the war.
Iraq was to be the first of the seven wars in five years, but as Fritz explains, that follow-up wars were delayed by the anti-U.S. Iraqi insurgency. Nonetheless, the U.S. eventually went to war or backed wars against Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Lebanon. In other words, the U.S. carried out Netanyahuโs plansโexcept for Iran. To this day, indeed to this hour, Netanyahu works to stoke a U.S. war on Iran, one that could open World War III, either by Iran making the breakthrough to nuclear weapons, or by Iranโs ally, Russia, joining such a war on Iranโs side.
The neocon-Israel Lobby teamwork has marked one of the greatest global calamities of the 21st century. All of the countries attacked by the U.S. or its proxiesโIraq, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Syriaโnow lie in ruins. Meanwhile, Netanyahuโs genocide in Gaza continues apace, and yet again the U.S. has opposed the unanimous will of the world (other than Israel) this week by vetoing a UN Security Council ceasefire resolution that was backed by the other 14 members of the U.N. Security Council.
The real issue facing the Trump Administration is not defending Israel from its neighbors, who call repeatedly, almost daily, for peace based on the two-state solution. The real issue is defending the U.S. from the Israel Lobby.
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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.
Zarah Sultana, thank you for highlighting what PM Starmer said about Gaza in October and what he says now. Suppose a responsible public official is not totally indifferent to how Israel has been busy ethnically cleansing Gazans by killing innocent civilian population, mainly children and women, and is systematically destroying the infrastructure of Gaza, then how can anyone say that Israel has a right to do this?
But there are some in the ruling elites of the United States, Canada, Australia, Britain, Germany, France, etc. etc. who openly support the destruction of a captive population. They do not name it ethnic cleansing, genocide or large-scale slaughter of Palestinians. Instead, they justify what Israel does by repeating the mouldy mantra that ‘Israel has a right to defend itself’ and thus the crimes against humanity by Israel are brushed aside.
Let us not forget that, apart from the rulers of the countries just mentioned, vast numbers of the people of these countries are against the genocidal war in Gaza, and they strongly oppose what Israel has been doing. They show their solidarity with the victims of the Israeli war on the people of Gaza and the rest of the occupied territories.
In his recent response, Prime Minister Starmer expressed his knowledge of the concept of genocide, which he is unwilling to apply to Gaza. But the lives of millions of Palestinians are not a question of some definition, which he, President Biden and Antony Blinken will not use. But what stops them from using other words like mass slaughter, ethnic cleansing and killing fields of Gaza, for instance?
Lastly, I wonder if Prime Minister Starmer will be generous enough to admit that over 45 thousand Palestinians in Gaza have been mercilessly slaughtered by Israel’s army and air force and what steps he has taken to stop the ongoing carnage and destruction. Has he done anything to stop the killings and destruction or not?
Peace and Justice Post 
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