Israel’s attack on Rafah, the southernmost city in the Gaza Strip, has now displaced nearly 1 million people and massively intensified famine throughout the entire territory.
Palestinians wounded in the Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip are brought to Al Aqsa hospital in Deir al Balah, Gaza Strip, Thursday, May 23, 2024 [AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana]
This assault is taking place with the effective endorsement of the Biden administration, despite Biden’s earlier public declarations that a full-scale attack on Rafah would be a “red line” for the White House.
On Tuesday, an unnamed senior Biden administration official told reporters, “It’s fair to say that the Israelis have updated their plans. They’ve incorporated many of the concerns that we have expressed,” giving the administration’s stamp of approval for the widening attack on the city.
On Thursday, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said that Israel had not carried out “major maneuvers into dense urban areas.” He added, “What we have seen so far has not been that.”
This is an absurd falsehood. Israel has been bombing Rafah non-stop and is pushing armored columns deep into the city, leading to the total suspension of humanitarian operations amid widespread hunger and starvation.
As a result of the offensive, only 150 trucks of food have entered Gaza since May 6. “We’re going back to levels of aid that we were getting in October when the war first started,” said Sam Rose, planning director for the UN agency for Palestinian refugees.
On Monday Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant told US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan in a meeting that Israel intends to broaden its offensive into the city. “We are committed to broadening the ground operation in Rafah to the end of dismantling Hamas and recovering the hostages,” Gallant said. Sullivan posed for a photo shaking the hand of black-shirted Gallant on the day that the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) lead prosecutor brought charges against him.
In a column published the same day, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius said that US and Israeli officials had reached an agreement over the plans to attack Rafah. Ignatius wrote, “Israeli leaders have reached a consensus about a final assault on Hamas’s four remaining battalions in Rafah,” in a move that “Biden won’t oppose.”
The Times of Israel wrote, “the Biden administration appeared to signal its initial approval of the operation launched by Israel early Tuesday morning to take over the Palestinian side of the Rafah border crossing with Egypt.” It added, “Spokespeople for the administration said the goals of the operation were legitimate.”
In response to the ICC’s charges against Netanyahu, the Biden administration has effectively dropped its earlier token criticisms of the Israeli government, with Biden declaring Tuesday, “It is clear that Israel wants to do all it can to ensure civilian protection. Contrary to allegations against Israel made by the International Court of Justice, what’s happening is not genocide,” Biden said.
The humanitarian situation in Gaza continues to deteriorate amid ongoing mass starvation imposed by the Israeli blockade.
In a briefing to the United Nations Security Council Tuesday, Edem Wosornu, a spokesperson for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, called the situation “hell on earth.”
“To be frank, we are running out of words to describe what is happening in Gaza. We have described it as a catastrophe, a nightmare, as hell on earth. It is all of these and worse,” Wosornu said.
She added, “And living conditions continue to deteriorate as a result of heavy fighting, particularly in Jabalya and eastern Rafah, as well as Israeli bombardment from air, land and sea.”
She noted that more than 35,000 people have been killed and another 79,000 injured, with 17,000 children unaccompanied or separated from their families.
She declared, “Since October 2023, 75 percent of the population in Gaza—1.7 million people—has been forcibly displaced within Gaza, many of them up to four or five times, including as a result of repeated IDF-issued evacuation instructions.”
In a statement, the UN’s World Food Program (WFP) said it was running out of food in central Gaza. “Humanitarian operations in Gaza are near collapse,” said WFP spokesperson Abeer Etefa, adding that unless food is provided “in massive quantities, famine-like conditions will spread,” she said.
On Tuesday, Israeli troops launched raids into the Jenin refugee camp in the northern West Bank, attacking a local hospital and killing a doctor, a teacher and a ninth grade student.
“Undercover forces raided the area suddenly, and they were firing at any moving body in the street,” said ambulance driver Hazim Masarwa to Al Jazeera. “They were targeting anything moving.”
In a statement, the UN Human Rights Office in Palestine said, “We are horrified by the deadly Israeli Forces operation in Jenin: 7 Palestinians killed, including two children, one on his way to school, a school teacher, and a doctor. This senseless bloodshed must stop, and those responsible must be held accountable.”
United States Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin III with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and defence minister Yoav Gallant (Wikicommons/ Chad J. McNeeley)
Extermination, murder, starvation of civilians, wilfully causing great suffering and intentionally directing attacks against civilians. These are the crimes levelled at Israel’s prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu and defence minister Yoav Gallant by Karim Khan (see right).
He is the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC). Khan said that he has “reasonable grounds to believe” that both Israeli ministers “bear criminal responsibility” for war crimes and “crimes against humanity” committed in Gaza. They used acts of starvation, murder as a war crime and intentionally directed attacks against civilians “as part of a common plan” to “collectively punish the civilian population of Gaza”.
Khan is now seeking an arrest warrant for Netanyahu and Gallant. The list of crimes won’t be a surprise for many. We’ve seen the evidence of Israel’s genocide for more than seven months, even if our leaders have tried to ignore them. But the charge of war crimes by the ICC is still a devastating blow for Israel.
The ICC is the only permanent international court that can prosecute war criminals for crimes against humanity. And its actions have enraged the West. Khan revealed that “a senior leader” told him the ICC “is built for Africa and for thugs like Russian president Vladimir Putin”—not for the West and its allies.
Predictably Netanyahu repeated slurs about antisemitism. He said that Khan was “callously pouring gasoline on the fires of antisemitism that are raging across the world”. The outrage against Netanyahu is stacking up, even if the ICC will not punish him for all his crimes.
To show “balance” Khan said the court would also push for the arrest of three Hamas leaders. But the ICC accusing Netanyahu of war crimes is a big moment. It will make it easier for pro-Palestine activists to argue in workplaces, schools and universities that the Israeli state is guilty of genocide.
And by implication the ICC’s charges are also an indictment of Israel’s Western allies. If Netanyahu is guilty of murder, extermination and deliberate starvation of civilians, so are those who arm and fund Israel. That includes Joe Biden, Rishi Sunak—and Keir Starmer. And for all their recent claims to be holding back the Zionist state, the West has rushed to defend Netanyahu.
President Joe Biden said, “The ICC prosecutor’s application for arrest warrants against Israeli leaders is outrageous.” He added that what is happening to the Palestinians “is not genocide”. Then he said, “Whatever this prosecutor might imply, there is no equivalence—none—between Israel and Hamas. We will always stand with Israel against threats to its security.”
Biden is an apologist for murder. But he is right that there is no equivalence between the Israeli state and Hamas. Hamas hasn’t levelled vast sections of Israeli cities with bombs. It hasn’t closed off checkpoints and border crossings to intentionally starve civilians to death. It hasn’t systematically tried to destroy all healthcare infrastructure or targeted health care workers.
It hasn’t held Gaza under siege for 17 years in an open-air prison. And Israel has—so far— murdered at least 35 Palestinians for every Israeli that Hamas killed on 7 October. The Palestinian resistance is fighting in reaction to the brutality that Israel has used against their people for more than 76 years. There is no equivalence between Israel—the oppressor— and Hamas—an expression of an oppressed group fighting back.
By seeking arrest warrants for the state’s top figures, the court has punctured the myth that Tel Aviv is beyond the reach of international law
Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Galant arrive for a briefing near the Salem military post in the occupied West Bank on 4 July 2023 (AFP)
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For 76 years, Israel had a narrative more robust as a protective shield than any Iron Dome.
For the victims of the worst case of industrial killing in modern history, self-determination for post-Holocaust Jewry was not merely a necessity, this narrative went, it was a moral imperative. Any state that emerged was immune from judgement, the story went. Israel was beyond international law.
It was allowed to have indeterminate borders. It was allowed to occupy. It was allowed to settle the areas it occupied. It was allowed to regularly attack its neighbours pre-emptively. It was allowed nuclear weapons, outside the control of any regulatory authority.
It could violently discriminate against its non-Jewish minority and still be accepted into the family of democratic nations. It was not just allowed to lay siege to Gaza and starve the territory’s population for 16 years, it was assisted in this by the international community.
Anyone who rejected the credo that this violent state had a right to exist faced political banishment.
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Israel was a “lifeboat” for Jews facing antisemitism throughout the world. It was not the primary cause of waves of antisemitism. It safeguarded Jews. It did not endanger them.
For 76 years, Israel literally had a licence to kill. Until Monday.
The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), Karim Khan, did much more than apply for arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant. The ICC prosecutor punctured the myth that any Israeli leader, official or soldier was beyond the reach of international law.
Opening Pandora’s box
Netanyahu was right to be nervous about the consequences, which are indeed far-reaching. A real Pandora’s box has been opened by this application.
Yes, for the moment, it’s only an application before the judges of the ICC. There have been occasions in the past when such an application was initially dismissed, as in the case of a Rwandan militia leader sought over crimes committed in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or for Omar al-Bashir, the former Sudanese president.
But the pretrial chamber of three judges must only convince themselves on two points – that there are reasonable grounds to believe that at least one crime within the court’s jurisdiction has been committed, and that the arrest of those named “appears necessary” to ensure they appear at trial, do not endanger an investigation, and cannot continue to perpetrate the same crime.
Considering the bullying that the court itself has come under, with the US threatening its members with sanctions, a third unwritten imperative will loom large in their minds: the need to uphold the independence of the ICC.
If they bow to this pressure, the ICC’s legitimacy will be finished – and besides, the evidence for the seven charges is overwhelming.
It exposes, as never before, the colonial nature of the stance that international justice applies only to others
The Pandora’s box is large. If arrest warrants are served on Netanyahu and Gallant, every other member of Israel’s war cabinet and military machine, down to the humble reservist uploading videos taken on his iPhone, could be subject to the same charges.
The second point to bear in mind is that the charges only relate to what happened on or after 7 October. Khan based his application on a report by a panel of international law experts, who homed in on Israel’s policy of famine and siege, restricting the means necessary for the population as a whole to survive. The experts did not examine the legal implications of the mass killing of civilians.
If this application succeeds, or even if it is dismissed temporarily, the ICC’s purview goes back to the moment Palestine was admitted as a member in 2015. In 2021, the ICC opened an investigation into allegations of war crimes committed in occupied Palestine since June 2014.
Monday’s application is about the here and now. A growing queue of applications about everything Israel has done in the occupied territories over the last decade awaits.
Long history
The long arm of the ICC’s law has a bitter history. Khan’s application was not the work of one moment, or indeed the work of one man who might have thought that Ukraine would be his main legacy after becoming chief prosecutor in 2021.
The ICC’s jurisdiction over the occupied territories has been bitterly contested, and a series of obstacles had to be overcome before this application could be launched. Palestine was not initially recognised as a state, so it was not allowed to be part of the ICC. Huge pressure, including the threat of US sanctions, was then put on the Palestinian Authority (PA) not to use its membership to pursue Israel.
Unpacking the ICC arrest warrant bids against Israeli and Hamas leaders
The ICC then had to debate whether it had jurisdiction over the occupied West Bank and Gaza, and it was only the decision of the previous prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, which allowed the current proceedings to go ahead. But that debate took six years, from 2015 to 2021.
The need for the ICC to step in had been only too obvious. There had been a number of failed legal attempts to get Israeli officials to face justice abroad under the principle of universal jurisdiction.
Former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, former Defence Minister Shaul Mofaz and former Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni all faced possible arrest if they travelled to London. But former Prime Minister Gordon Brown defended Livni, saying he “completely opposed” the warrant issued by a British court for her arrest for war crimes, and former Foreign Secretary David Miliband phoned his Israeli counterpart to apologise.
Miliband said at the time of the 2009 incident that British law permitting judges to issue arrest warrants against foreign dignitaries “without any prior knowledge or advice by a prosecutor” had to be changed.
Indeed it was. All such attempts now need the consent of the director of public prosecutions before a warrant is issued.
US ties itself in knots
The current reaction of the US to the ICC’s recommendation for arrest warrants is another indicator of what is at stake. This has ranged from outright threats to the court members to attempts to defund the PA if it continues to back the ICC’s case.
US President Joe Biden expressed outrage at the fact that the ICC was establishing an equivalence between Israel and Hamas by also seeking arrest warrants for three Hamas leaders. “And let me be clear: whatever this prosecutor might imply, there is no equivalence – none – between Israel and Hamas. We will always stand with Israel against threats to its security,” he said.
US State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller went further by saying that Washington’s two preferred outcomes for the leaders of Hamas were assassination or being tried before an Israeli court. “The Israeli government should hold them accountable on the battlefield. And if not a battlefield, then a court of law,” he said.
US President Joe Biden is pictured in Tel Aviv, on 18 October 2023 (Miriam Alster/AFP)
Biden’s outgoing administration is tying itself in knots. If it follows its own instincts by punishing the PA, withdrawing funds, or undermining the legitimacy of the ICC by slapping sanctions on its judges and prosecutor, the US will be shooting itself in the foot.
If Biden agrees with former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo that the ICC is a “kangaroo court”, and attempts to undermine it, what happens to the ICC’s prosecution of Russian President Vladimir Putin as a war criminal for invading Ukraine, a prosecution the US supports? What happens to all the other important ICC work?
More importantly, what happens to the US attempts to construct a civilian authority to take over Gaza instead of Hamas, if Washington defunds the only other arm of the Palestinian government?
Biden says he wants to rebuild a Palestinian state after this war is over. Instead, he is fully engaged, with the Israelis, in dismantling it.
Watershed moment
For Hamas, the prospect of charges against its leaders is not nearly as problematic. Having welcomed the ICC’s establishment of jurisdiction over the occupied Palestinian territories, Hamas condemned the court’s decision to seek warrants for its political bureau chief Ismail Haniyeh, Gaza leader Yahya Sinwar, and Qassam Brigades commander Mohammed Deif, arguing that armed resistance against occupation was enshrined in UN resolutions.
But as Hamas is listed as a terrorist organisation in much of the western world, nothing much will change, apart from the fact that Haniyeh might not trust a visit to Egypt in the current climate.
The ICC action is urgently needed to stop the barbarous war that is now being prosecuted
Whichever way you look at it, this is a watershed moment. It punctures Israel’s immunity and deeply embarrasses its backers. It exposes, as never before, the colonial nature of the stance that international justice applies only to others.
Khan himself quoted an unnamed western leader as telling him that the ICC was built for “Africa and for thugs like Putin”. As Khan observed, this was a sad indictment of a court which was created as the legacy of the Nuremberg trials.
In this regard, Aipac is right to warn the US that if the ICC warrants succeed, the same could be applied to American troops. “These actions by the court pose a serious threat: Past and current American and Israeli officials and citizens could face secret arrest warrants or summons issued by the court that ICC member states are obligated to carry out,” Aipac said in a statement.
For all these reasons, the ICC action is urgently needed to stop the barbarous war that is now being prosecuted.
Kicking the habit
It is a war without end. It is a war without an endgame, as no credible plan has been devised for the future of Gaza. It is a war where hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza are herded like cattle from one tent to another, while Israel continues to cut off all aid. And this is all happening under the umbrella of impunity.
ICC seeks arrest of Israeli and Hamas leaders. What happens next?
The ICC move has split the countries that have thus far put their weight behind Israel’s seven-month offensive. The UK is becoming isolated from Europe in its insistence that the court does not have jurisdiction in Palestine. France, Belgium and others have expressed support for the ICC investigation.
So, too, has Josep Borell, the EU foreign policy chief who reminded states that are parties to the ICC’s Rome Statute that they must implement the court’s rulings.
But for those leaders, like Biden, who are finding it hard to kick the habit of a lifetime, support for Israel is now coming at a cost. It means denying apartheid, denying genocide, and denying war crimes such as mass starvation. The charge sheet is growing, and it’s becoming impossible to defend.
The war has shredded not just Israel’s international reputation, but the global standing of all those who continue to support it – and for them, the writing is on the wall. Not before time.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
David Hearst is co-founder and editor-in-chief of Middle East Eye. He is a commentator and speaker on the region and analyst on Saudi Arabia. He was the Guardian’s foreign leader writer, and was correspondent in Russia, Europe, and Belfast. He joined the Guardian from The Scotsman, where he was education correspondent.
The legislation would grant IDF soldiers the same protections as US military personnel while they’re on active duty
by Dave DeCamp May, Antiwar. com, 21, 2024
A bill introduced in the House by Reps. Guy Reschenthaler (R-PA) and Max Miller (R-OH) would extend certain benefits for Americans serving in the US military to American citizens in the Israeli military.
The legislation, introduced on May 17, would give Americans in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) protections under the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act (SCRA) and Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act (USERRA).
The SCRA protects US service members from civil legal action while they’re on active duty and for up to a year after. The USERRA protects the civilian employment of active and reserve military personnel when they’re called to active duty.
“Over 20,000 American citizens are currently defending Israel from Hamas terrorists, risking their lives for the betterment of our ally,” Reschenthaler said in a statement on the legislation.
The Washington Post reported in February that an estimated 23,380 American citizens are serving in the Israeli military. Many are dual citizens who were already living in Israel, but as of November 2023, about 10,000 people living in the US had traveled to Israel to report for duty with the IDF after receiving draft notices. According to Responsible Statecraft, 21 American citizens serving in the IDF have been killed in Gaza, and one was killed in northern Israel near the Lebanon border.
Reschenthaler said his legislation will “ensure we do everything possible to support these heroes who are standing with Israel, fighting for freedom, and combating terrorism in the Middle East.”
It’s unclear what the chances are for Reschenthaler’s bill to pass Congress and become law, but there is strong support for the Israeli military among House Republicans. For example, Rep. Brian Mast (R-FL) is an IDF veteran who recently wore his Israeli uniform on Capitol Hill, and he did not receive any backlash from his colleagues for showing up to work in the House wearing the uniform of a foreign military.
Republicans have introduced a slew of pro-Israel legislation over the past few months to show staunch support for the Israeli slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza, including bills to impose harsh punishments on college protesters. One bill introduced by Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN) would send protesters to Gaza.
To expect the Nakba to end when the ideology of ethnic cleansing is still in power is only a dream, but the only hope is that the people of the world stand in solidarity with the people of Palestine as lately, they have shown and the resistance movement of Palestinians continues the struggle for the liberation of their land despite all the heavy odds the people of Palestine face. No colonial power has offered freedom to its colonized people on a platter, without their struggle. The history of colonialism and imperialism has taught us that.
Incredibly the Israeli genocide in Gaza is now reaching new heights of violence. Casualty figures are not coming in, as the attacks are so bad that bodies cannot be recovered, medics cannot travel and there are almost no medical facilities operational now anyway.
We now see that the Western injunctions not to attack Rafah were a smokescreen of lies to mask complicity. The final pocket of Gaza is being ruthlessly ethnically cleansed and its infrastructure will be destroyed like all the rest.
It is striking that this is accompanied by an absolutely shameless doubling down of support for Israel by the Western political and media classes. Any thought that their isolation from the vast breadth of public opinion would give them pause, must be abandoned. Their Zionist lobby paymasters have jerked the chain, and rather than rowing back, we are seeing a redoubling of their efforts to suppress dissent and obscure the truth.
Some of this shameless distortion is so dissonant with the alleged norms of Western society it is almost impossible to believe it is happening. Here are a few examples.
1) Dr Ghassan Abu Sitta is a highly respected reconstructive surgeon who continued to work heroically and tirelessly in Al Shifa hospital, carrying out operation after operation, mostly on women and children, as the hospital was shelled, strafed and machine gunned around him.
He was already a surgeon of great distinction, based in Glasgow where he is now Rector of Glasgow University.
When Germany banned him from entering to address the conference on Palestine from which Yanis Varoufakis and others were also barred, it appeared perhaps as a one-off action as part of Germany’s extreme and panicked reaction to pro-Palestinian expression.
We have come to understand that Germany has a vicious hatred of Palestinians, remarkably based on the psychological trauma of inherited guilt from the Holocaust. While this is a muddled national psychosis that is plainly immoral and wrongheaded, at least it is possible to have some understanding of how it occurred.
But it then turned out that the travel ban slapped on Dr Abu Sitta by Germany has a Schengen-wide effect as he was also banned from France. That appeared again something that was almost a technical accident as regards the rest of Europe.
But the Western political establishment has now doubled down again by banning him from the Netherlands, and this time the Dutch government has made it clear that it supports the ban, and is not just caught by a Schengen restriction.
So the major governments of the European Union are forbidding a distinguished surgeon from giving first-hand medical evidence of the genocide taking place. I cannot think of anything that more sharply exposes the willingness of the Western political class to abandon the most basic tenets of supposed “Western democracy” in the interests of Israel.
2) The willingness of the United States to use extreme violence against pro-Palestinian students on college campuses is another demonstration of the same abandonment of the pretence of democracy when it comes to Israel. It also illustrates what has come to be a serious generational divide in Western public opinion, with young people very strongly motivated to oppose the genocide (which is not to say that older people are pro-genocide, just that they are more split, particularly in the USA).
This is being followed up with yet more crazed pro-Israeli legislation in the United States, seeking to designate anti-genocide and pro-Palestinian expression on campuses as anti-semitic and thus illegal.
In many ways this typifies the reaction of the ruling class across the West. Their reaction to suddenly being exposed as the paid servants of an Israel which no longer has popular support and now causes public revulsion, is simply to attempt to ban free expression and make it specifically illegal to disagree with them.
3) The British Labour Party has gone even madder. Keir Starmer’s Genocide Party is an outstanding example of the success of the Israeli lobby in buying up both sides of the aisle and controlling the entire neoliberal uniparty that poses as the repository of democratic “choice” in the West.
Starmer had been doing his best to conceal his explicitly expressed “unequivocal support for Israel” lately, and to row back from his straightforward assertion that Israel has the right to cut off food and water from the population of Gaza. There had been a fake shift, from refusing to countenance the word “ceasefire” to supporting a temporary ceasefire or a “sustainable” ceasefire – the latter being code for a ceasefire after Israel had achieved all its ethnic cleansing objectives.
But then David Lammy blew this out of the water with an address to US Republican senators in which he made the totally bonkers assertion that Nelson Mandela would have opposed the college protests for Palestine. Lammy is a truly despicable individual, one of the ultimate examples of the corrupt politician whose voice is bought. But this was a move far beyond the pale.
4) Even today, the Western media continues to spout out Israeli propaganda at mains pressure. The Guardian, despite the thousands and thousands of dead women and children we have seen on our mobile phones this past seven months, continues to pretend that the genocidal attack is on “Hamas militants”.
The bombing and shelling of civilians in tents is still described as “clashes”. This propaganda really does not wash any more, though it may reinforce the morale of hardened Zionists. Everybody else has seen through it months ago. Yet still they persist.
5) The endgame is becoming very apparent. The United States is completing its floating harbour for Gaza, and Israel has gained control of the Rafah crossing into Egypt, giving the US and Israel total control of entry points into Gaza. Israel has announced that the Rafah crossing is to be handed over to a US mercenary force. The US can then say it is complying with Biden’s pledge not to put US forces’ boots on the ground in Gaza, while actually taking control.
The Israeli attack on Rafah has been justified by the USA as a “limited military operation”, thus claiming it does not violate Biden’s purported “red line”, even though Israel has ordered over a million displaced people in Rafah to evacuate again, to nowhere.
Conclusion:
The only possible conclusion from all of the above is to reinforce my analysis that the Zionist political and media classes in the West, including Biden, Blinken, Trudeau, Macron, Sunak, Starmer, Scholtz, von der Leyen and all, are active and willing participants in a programme of genocide.
They had numerous opportunities to turn back. We all saw what is happening months ago. They did not take them.
The endgame remains the processing of the remaining Palestinian population out of Gaza through the US-controlled points of the Rafah crossing and the floating harbour, primarily into camps in the Sinai desert. The Western powers are doubling down on their genocide and on their colonial project.
I see nothing whatsoever that indicates they can have any other long-term objective in mind than the complete Israeli annexation of Gaza minus its civilian population. What do you see?
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Today Norway is celebrating its Constitution Day, commonly called in this country, ‘The 17th of May’.
My hearty congratulations to the people of this beautiful country on their national day!
At present, Norway has become a multicultural, multi-ethnic, and multi-religious country. Despite many social changes, all people living in this beautiful, Nordic country have complete freedom to believe in any religion or reject religions and religious dogmas without any intervention, coercion or discrimination by the state authorities, unlike some countries like Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, etc., where discrimination and victimization of religious minorities on sectarian grounds is a common norm.
The people also have complete freedom to choose any political party they want to without any dictate from any state organ.
Norway’s democratic traditions and its welfare system are a model of a modern egalitarian state.
There is no razzmatazz of military hardware, tanks and missiles or military parades on this occasion. On the other hand, Norwegians’ focus is on the joyous participation of school children and young people in the processions, to the great happiness of the enthusiastic onlookers who throng the streets of Norway’s capital, Oslo. But the celebration of the 17th of May takes place everywhere in this beautiful country.
The Biden administration intends to dispatch more than $1 billion of military equipment to Israel so that it can continue the genocide against the Palestinians. The military package will include $700 million for tank ammunition, $500 million in tactical vehicles and $60 million for mortar shells. Its unveiling coincided with UN figures showing that 600,000 people, or more than a quarter of Gaza’s total population, have fled Rafah since Israel’s ground operation began on May 6.
Palestinians look at the destruction after an Israeli strike on a school run by UNRWA, the U.N. agency helping Palestinian refugees, in Nuseirat, Gaza Strip, Tuesday, May 14, 2024. [AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana]
The UN noted that 150,000 people have fled Gaza’s southernmost city in the past 48 hours. Evacuation orders have also been issued by Israel for around 100,000 residents in northern Gaza. At least 10 Palestinians were killed in Gaza City on Wednesday in an attack on a group of people trying to use a public internet connection. In the city’s Sabra neighbourhood, a United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) hospital was the target of an air strike, killing at least 10 displaced people.
Most of those fleeing Rafah have fled many times before in the past seven months. They lack not only access to food, water and medical treatment, but also almost all civil infrastructure to support human life. The UN Development Programme estimates that 270,000 tons of solid waste have accumulated in temporary dumps throughout Gaza because the means to dispose of it have been destroyed by Israel’s onslaught.
The UN wrote in its May 15 flash update:
Rising temperatures are exacerbating the impact solid waste accumulation is having on people, such as generating insects and attracting wild animals, which is particularly severe at IDP sites. UNDP warns: “If the issue of solid waste, including medical waste, is not adequately addressed and resolved, it will exacerbate the suffering of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip … and severely impact public health, particularly with limited access to healthcare services.”
According to OXFAM, the “lethal cocktail” of overcrowding, waste and sewage accumulation, malnutrition and heat is creating ideal conditions for the spread of infectious diseases like cholera.
Amid this human misery, the Biden administration’s military package would aim to replenish the weaponry used by Israel since its onslaught began and could take years to complete, according to the Wall Street Journal. The Biden administration has been by far Israel’s largest supplier of high-powered bombs, which have been used to flatten entire neighbourhoods, and other military equipment.
As part of a supplemental military spending package adopted late last month, Washington set aside some $26 billion to support Israel’s military. In comments made last week as the long-planned onslaught on Rafah began, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby insisted that every dollar would be spent.
The uninterrupted flow of weaponry from the US to Israel underscores Washington’s responsibility for the Gaza genocide. As the official death toll since October 7 rises to over 35,200 Palestinians—with well over 40,000 dead when those unaccounted for under the rubble are taken into account, the vast majority being women and children—Washington’s response is to double down on its support for the far-right Zionist regime and accelerate the shipment of arms.
There is only one place suitable for the individuals responsible for such inhuman decisions: the defendants’ bench of a war crimes tribunal.
This was underscored in a report released by the University Network for Human Rights Wednesday accusing Israel of genocide in the Gaza Strip. The Network consists of leading law schools at universities in the United States and South Africa, including Yale, Cornell, Boston University and the University of Pretoria.
The report declares in its executive summary:
[W]e conclude that Israel’s actions in and regarding Gaza since October 7, 2023 violate the Genocide Convention. Specifically, Israel has committed genocidal acts of killing, causing serious harm to, and inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction of Palestinians in Gaza, a protected group that forms a substantial part of the Palestinian people.
The report notes that the total number of Palestinians killed or wounded between October 7 and May 1—34,568 and 77,765, respectively—accounts for more than 5 percent of Gaza’s population. Two percent of children in Gaza have either been killed or injured. Israel killed more children during the first four months of its bloody onslaught than all of the child deaths in all of the world’s conflicts over the past four years.
The report continues:
Israel’s genocidal acts in Gaza have been motivated by the requisite genocidal intent, as evidenced in this report by the statements of Israeli leaders, the character of the State and its military forces’ conduct against and relating to Palestinians in Gaza, and the direct nexus between them. As this report details,13 officials at all levels of Israeli government, up to and including the Prime Minister, have made remarks that not only express blatant and unequivocal dehumanization and cruelty against Palestinians in Gaza and elsewhere, but also explicitly reflect intentions to destroy and exterminate Palestinians as such. The patterns of conduct of Israeli military forces in Gaza further reinforce the finding of Israel’s genocidal intent.
The report explains that its findings will strengthen the cases at the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of genocide and in US federal court against the Biden administration. The authors write:
Israel’s violations of the international legal prohibition of genocide amount to grave breaches of peremptory norms of international law that must cease immediately. These violations also give rise to obligations by all other States: to refrain from recognizing Israel’s breaches as legal or taking any actions that may constitute complicity in these breaches; and to take positive steps to suppress, prevent, and punish the commission by Israel of further genocidal acts against the Palestinian people in Gaza.
These appeals have fallen and will continue to fall on deaf ears. US imperialism and its allies in Canada and Europe are up to their necks in the blood of Gaza’s Palestinians.
The only steps these governments take to suppress, prevent and punish are against the opponents of the genocide, who face the full force of the repressive state apparatus as police tear down protest camps and carry out mass arrests, amid a vicious smear campaign slandering them as “antisemites.”
Over 3,000 anti-genocide protesters have been detained in the US over recent weeks, while in Germany opponents of the Israeli regime’s crimes have been barred from entering the country and speaking at public events. The Palestine Congress in Berlin, where eye-witness accounts of the devastation in Gaza were to be heard, and encampments outside the Bundestag and at the Free University and Humboldt University in Berlin, were violently dispersed in state-orchestrated police raids.
The University Network for Human Rights’ report was released on May 15, which Palestinians commemorate each year as Nakba Day. The expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians from their homes in a deliberate campaign of ethnic cleansing that led to the founding of Israel on May 14, 1948, with the backing of the imperialist powers, was one of the 20th century’s great crimes.
It is a measure of the barbarism of Israel and its imperialist backers in Gaza that the Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, could state in an interview with Al Jazeera that the Western powers’ enabling of the Gaza genocide is “even worse” than the role they played in 1948.
Pappe said:
At the time in 1948, there was no television. People did not have smartphones, and it was relatively easy to cover up the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing, and to claim that it didn’t exist. It is impossible to say now that people cannot know what is going on when it appears on our screens. So I think the level of denial today is far more sinister, far more outraging…
Remarking that massacres were used by the Zionists in 1948 to force Palestinians out of areas claimed for an Israeli state, he added, “What we see now are massacres which are part of the genocidal impulse, namely to kill people in order to downsize the number of people living in Gaza.”
The details provided to CNN are consistent with those that a doctor at the field hospital of the Sde Teiman prison camp included in a recent letter to top Israeli officials.
Three Israeli whistleblowers who worked at the notorious Sde Teiman prison camp in the Negev desert offered horrifying accounts of the treatment of Palestinians held there, telling CNN that the facility’s doctors have amputated limbs due to handcuffing injuries, allowed detainees’ wounds to rot, and carried out vicious beatings.
A medic who worked at Sde Teiman’s field hospital said that Palestinian detainees there are stripped “of anything that resembles human beings” and that the harassment and torture are done not to “gather intelligence” but “out of revenge” for the Oct. 7 attacks.
Israel has detained thousands of Gaza residents since October, with many of them held under a recently amended law that empowers Israeli authorities to imprison people indefinitely without charge or due process.
At the field hospital, CNN reported, “wounded detainees are strapped to their beds, wearing diapers and fed through straws.”
One Israeli whistleblower took a photograph of a room at the facility, which the person said was filled with a “putrid stench” and the sound of “men’s murmurs” as they were “forbidden from speaking to each other.”
“We were told they were not allowed to move,” the whistleblower said. “They should sit upright. They’re not allowed to talk. Not allowed to peek under their blindfold.”
“paint a picture of a facility where doctors sometimes amputated prisoners’ limbs due to injuries sustained from constant handcuffing; of medical procedures sometimes performed by underqualified medics earning it a reputation for being ‘a paradise for interns’; and where the air is filled with the smell of neglected wounds left to rot.”
The testimony provided to CNN is consistent with details that a doctor at the camp’s field hospital included in a recent letter to top Israeli officials. The doctor described unlawful and inhumane conditions; in a single week, the person said, “two prisoners had their legs amputated due to handcuff injuries, which unfortunately is a routine event.”
A report published last month by Al Mezan, a Palestinian human rights organization, also documented “harrowing accounts of torture and inhumane treatment” of people detained by the Israeli military.
“A 19-year-old detainee told an Al Mezan lawyer that he was tortured from the moment he was arrested,” the group said.
“He described how three of his fingernails were removed with pliers during interrogation. He also stated that investigators unleashed a dog on him and subjected him to shabeh — a form of torture which involves detainees being handcuffed and bound in stress positions for long periods — three times over three days of interrogation. He was then placed in a cell for 70 days, where he experienced starvation and extreme fatigue.”
Mohammed Al-Ran, a Palestinian doctor who was arrested by Israeli forces in December, told CNN that he was
“stripped down to his underwear, blindfolded and his wrists tied, then dumped in the back of a truck where … the near-naked detainees were piled on top of one another as they were shuttled to a detention camp in the middle of the desert.”
Al-Ran was held by Israeli forces for 44 days. Just before his release, he told CNN, “a fellow prisoner had called out to him, his voice barely rising above a whisper.”
According to CNN: “He asked the doctor to find his wife and kids in Gaza. ‘He asked me to tell them that it is better for them to be martyrs,’ said al-Ran. ‘It is better for them to die than to be captured and held here.’”
Omar Shakir, Israel and Palestine director of Human Rights Watch, said in response to the new reporting that “what we know about Gaza is only tip of the atrocity iceberg.”
Displaced Palestinians in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip carry their belongings as they leave following an evacuation order by the Israeli army on May 6, 2024, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Hamas movement.
(Photo by AFP via Getty Images)
Now that the Biden administration has established that it will not tolerate any criticism of Israel, the siege of Gaza is likely to continue.
Violent crackdowns on student protesters across the United States have brought to light an uncomfortable truth that goes unacknowledged by universities, the White House, and the mass media: the United States is an obstacle to peace in Gaza.
As Israel has directed an unrelenting military assault against Gaza, the United States has enabled it every step of the way. Among its most significant moves, the United States has provided Israel with offensive weapons, opposed a permanent ceasefire, and cracked down on student protesters.
“What we are doing today is very bad policy,” Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) said on April 23. “We are aiding and abetting the destruction of the Palestinian people.”
Since October 2023, Israel has been directing a military siege of Gaza. Israel began its operations in response to a terrorist attack on October 7, when Hamas militants crossed into Israel, killed 1,200 people, and took 250 people hostage. Hamas, the militant group that controls Gaza, is still holding an estimated 100 people hostage.
Not only has the Biden administration regularly approved weapons transfers to Israel, but it has also worked with Congress to secure billions of dollars of additional military assistance.
Although Israeli officials have insisted that their goal is to destroy Hamas, their military campaign has devastated Gaza. The Israeli siege has killed more than 34,000 people and displaced most of Gaza’s 2 million people. There is now “full-blown famine” in northern Gaza, according to the head of the World Food Program. The World Court is investigating whether Israel has committed genocide.
Over the course of Israel’s military offensive, the United States has provided Israel with diplomatic and military support. Although President Joe Biden has criticized Israel’s military campaign as “over the top” and Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has identified Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a “major obstacle to peace,” both the White House and Congress have worked together to help Israel continue its siege.
“This is not an Israeli war,” Senator Sanders said. “This is an Israeli-American war. Most of the bombs and most of the military equipment the Israeli government is using in Gaza is provided by the United States and subsidized by American taxpayers.”
Arming Israel
The primary way in which the United States has intervened in Gaza is by arming Israel, just as Senator Sanders noted. Not only has the Biden administration regularly approved weapons transfers to Israel, but it has also worked with Congress to secure billions of dollars of additional military assistance.
This past April, a large majority of elected officials in both the Democratic and Republican Parties voted to send more weapons to Israel. On April 20, the House of Representatives approved a bill to provide more arms to Israel by a vote of 366 to 58. On April 23, the Senate granted its approval as part of a broader package with a vote of 79 to 18.
“It’s a good day for world peace, for real,” President Biden said, shortly after signing the legislation into law.
Regardless of the president’s efforts to frame the legislation as a victory for world peace, several U.S. officials expressed dismay. Nearly 20 representatives issued a joint statement in which they warned that the approval of additional military assistance to Israel made the United States complicit in the destruction of Gaza.
“Are we going to participate in that carnage or not?” Representative Joaquin Castro (D-TX) asked. “I choose not to.”
When Senator Sanders spoke against the additional military assistance, he argued that the United States was violating the Foreign Assistance Act, which forbids the United States from providing military assistance to countries that are blocking the delivery of U.S. humanitarian assistance, just as Israel has been doing in Gaza.
“It’s illegal to continue current military aid to Israel,” Sanders said.
Regardless, only a minority of officials in Washington cared about the legality of sending additional arms to Israel. Their priority has been to ensure that Israel can continue its siege, just as several U.S. officials have acknowledged.
“If you don’t help Israel replenish their conventional weapons, there will be a day when Israel, if they have to, will play the nuclear card,” Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) warned.
Opposing a Permanent Ceasefire
Another way in which the United States has empowered Israel is by preventing a permanent ceasefire. At the United Nations, the United States has repeatedly thwarted diplomatic efforts to bring Israel’s military offensive to an end.
When the UN Security Council crafted a resolution for an immediate ceasefire in December 2023, the United States vetoed the resolution. After the Security Council moved forward with another attempt in February 2024, the United States vetoed that resolution as well.
In March 2024, the United States allowed the Security Council to pass a ceasefire resolution, as it abstained from voting, but U.S. officials made no effort to follow up on the resolution or enforce it. Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. Ambassador to the UN, falsely claimed that the resolution was “nonbinding,” meaning that countries were not required to follow it.
Growing international pressure has had some effect, however. The same month that the Security Council passed its ceasefire resolution, the Biden administration began claiming that it wanted to see a ceasefire in Gaza. Administration officials took the position that a ceasefire would be beneficial to Gaza and Israel by halting the fighting and creating the conditions for the release of hostages.
The actions of the United States are ensuring that Israel’s siege of Gaza will continue.
As administration officials changed their public diplomacy, however, they framed their demands in ways that made it difficult to achieve a ceasefire. For starters, the White House refused to call for a permanent ceasefire. Instead, administration officials said that they favored a temporary ceasefire that would enable Israel to continue its military operations at a later date.
At the same time, the White House portrayed Hamas as the main obstacle to a ceasefire, even after Hamas indicated that it would accept a permanent ceasefire and Israel insisted that it would continue with its military offensive, “with or without a deal,” as Prime Minister Netanyahu put it.
Indeed, the main priority of the Biden administration has been to enable Israel to continue its siege of Gaza, just as Secretary of State Antony Blinken acknowledged earlier this year.
“Israel has made good progress in doing to Hamas what needs to be done so that it can’t do October 7 again,” Blinken said. “That’s what Israel should be focused on. That’s what we are focused on.”
Cracking Down on Protesters
More recently, forces within the United States have made another major move in opposition to peace. Across the United States, police have been cracking down on student protesters who have been calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and divestment from Israel.
Elected officials in Washington have been behind the crackdowns. Not only have they worked to destroy the careers of university leaders by calling on them to testify before Congress, but they have pressured university leaders to call in police forces to arrest students and eliminate their encampments.
“Administrators must take charge of their institutions,” Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) demanded on April 30. “Clear the encampments.”
So far, police forces have dismantled several encampments and arrested or detained more than 2,500 people.
As legislators have pushed for the crackdowns, many of them have justified their demands by portraying student protesters as anti-Semitic. Essentially, they have weaponized anti-Semitism, meaning that they have accused the protesters of being racists for the purposes of silencing them, destroying their reputations, and undermining the broader antiwar movement.
Amid the crackdowns, legislators have increased the pressure on universities. On April 30, House Republicans announced that they are starting to investigate whether universities that have experienced student protests should continue to receive federal funding.
“The Congress has two really important responsibilities that will be fulfilled in this exercise,” Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) explained. “One is oversight,” and the other is “the use of the power of the purse.”
A day after House Republicans threatened to defund universities, the House of Representatives passed a bill to broaden the definition of anti-Semitism so that it would include criticism of Israel. Although its fate is uncertain in the Senate, the bill puts tremendous pressure on universities to silence members of their communities who are continuing to protest Israel’s siege of Gaza.
Still, a small but not insignificant number of legislators have come to the defense of student protesters. The country’s most progressive lawmakers have consistently supported the protesters, even visiting their encampments and providing messages of support.
After police violently cleared an encampment at Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts, Representative Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) issued a statement in which she praised the students for “raising their voices and putting their bodies on the line to press for action to save lives in Gaza.”
Following similar crackdowns at other colleges, Senator Sanders delivered a speech from the Senate floor in which he defended the students. Putting their actions into context, the senator linked the protesters’ actions to major movements for social justice in U.S. history, including the civil rights movement and the movements against the U.S. wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq.
“It is outrageous and it is disgraceful to use that charge of anti-Semitism to distract us from the immoral and illegal war policies that Netanyahu’s extremist and racist government is pursuing,” Senator Sanders said.
Regardless, there is little interest in Washington in taking the protesters seriously, even among officials in the Biden administration who have acknowledged that “the protests in and of themselves are not anti-Semitic.” Facing growing pressure from both Democrats and Republicans to take action, the White House has denounced the protesters.
On May 2, President Biden gave a speech in which he claimed that the student protesters are spreading chaos, violence, and anti-Semitism. Just as the Republicans have been doing, he weaponized anti-Semitism in an effort to delegitimize the antiwar movement.
Now that the Biden administration has established that it will not tolerate any criticism of Israel, the siege of Gaza is likely to continue. Even if some kind of deal is forged to establish a temporary ceasefire between Hamas and Israel, there is no guarantee that Israel won’t renew its military operations at a later date, just as it did after a previous pause in fighting in November 2023.
What is perhaps most remarkable, however, is how the United States has suppressed one of the key truths about the destruction of Gaza. Across elite institutions of American society, people in leadership positions remain largely silent about what student protesters have been trying to bring to the attention of the public: the United States is an obstacle to peace in Gaza.
“This is not just an Israeli war,” Senator Sanders insisted, in one of the few exceptions to the silence in Washington. “This is an American war as well.”
Indeed, the actions of the United States are ensuring that Israel’s siege of Gaza will continue. Not until the United States changes its approach will it become possible to bring an end to the destruction.
Peace and Justice Post 
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