Injured Palestinians are brought to Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital for medical treatment as Israeli attacks continue in Deir al Balah, Gaza on December 11, 2023.

(Photo by Ashraf Amra/Anadolu via Getty Images)

The U.S. is more than a protector of Israel. It is now an accomplice in its genocidal attack on the Palestinian people of Gaza.

Jeffrey D. Sachs, Common Dreams, Dec 11, 2023

The nearly unanimous vote in the UN Security Council on Friday calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza is a moment of honor for the United Nations and shame for the United States. By voting to stop Israel’s war on Gaza by a vote of 13 yes, 1 no (US), and 1 abstention (UK), the vast majority put itself on the side of international law. The US stood alone against international law, with its sidekick and tutor in imperial brutality, the United Kingdom, dutifully abstaining.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres honored the UN and human decency by invoking Article 99 of the UN Charter, calling for the UN Security Council to stop the killing in Gaza as a basic responsibility under the UN Charter. Each day, UN officials on the ground in Gaza heroically struggle to feed, shelter, and protect the population from Israeli bombs. More than 100 UN staff have been killed in the Israeli assault.

The situation in Gaza is as clear as it is brutal. The State of Palestine, recognized by 139 nations, has long suffered from the brutalities of Israeli occupation in Gaza and the West Bank. Gaza has been called the world’s largest open-air prison by Human Rights Watch. After the Hamas-led horrific terrorist attack on October 7, in which 1,200 Israelis died, Israel began to ethnically cleanse Gaza. Legal specialists at the Center for Constitutional Rights regard Israel’s actions as a genocide.

To date, more than 17,400 Gazans have been killed, and an unfathomable 1.8 million Gazans have been displaced. Tens of thousands are at risk of imminent death. Last month, Guterres warned that “Gaza is becoming a graveyard for children.” Israel pushed the population from northern Gaza to the south, and then invaded the south. Israeli authorities told Gazans to flee for their life to zones within the south, and then bombed the places to which the Gazans had been directed.

The killing frenzy is being led by the very same politicians who were responsible for the October 7 security failure and who now manipulate the deepest anxieties of the Israeli population.

The US is more than a protector of Israel. It is an accomplice. The US supplies, in real-time, the munitions Israel uses for mass murder, even as US authorities pay lip-service to Gazan civilian lives.

The President of Israel Isaac Herzog justifies the slaughter by declaring that there are no innocent civilian Gazans: “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible.” The Israeli government’s biggest lie is that Israel has no options other than the mass killing of Gazans, supposedly to defeat Hamas.

The fact that Israel was lulled by its arrogance into letting its guard down on October 7 does not make Hamas an existential threat. Hamas has only a tiny fraction of Israel’s military might. October 7, like 9/11 in the US, was a colossal security blunder that should be immediately corrected by stepped-up border security, not an existential threat that in any remote manner justifies the killing of thousands or tens of thousands of innocent civilians, with women and children constituting 70% of the victims. The killing frenzy is being led by the very same politicians who were responsible for the October 7 security failure and who now manipulate the deepest anxieties of the Israeli population.

There is a larger and far more important point. Hamas can be demobilized through diplomacy, and only through diplomacy. Israel and the United States need finally to abide by international law, accept a sovereign state of Palestine alongside Israel, and welcome Palestine as the 194th member state of the UN. The US needs to stop arming the Israeli operation of ethnic cleansing in Gaza and stop protecting Israel’s rampant violations of basic human rights in the West Bank. Fifty-six years after its illegal occupation of Palestinian lands, and after decades of illegal settlements in the occupied territories, Israel needs finally to withdraw from the occupied Palestinian lands.

With such steps, peace between Israel and the neighboring countries could and would be secured. On that basis, UN peacekeepers, including both Arab and Western troops, would in turn secure the Israel-Palestine border for a needed transition period. At the same time, all international flows of financing to anti-Israel militants would be choked off by joint and coordinated actions of the US, Europe, and Israel’s Arab and Islamic neighbors.

The diplomatic route is open because the Arab and Islamic countries (including Iran) have once again reiterated their long-standing desire for peace with Israel as part of a peace agreement that establishes Palestine along the 1967 borders and its capital in East Jerusalem.

The real reason for Israel’s war in Gaza is that the Government of Israel rejects the two-state solution, and points to extremists on the other side rather than to the Arab and Islamic states, which want peace based on the two-state solution.

For rights to be secured and internationally respected in our day, governments need to abide by the international rule of law.

Israeli zealots, including several in the cabinet, believe that God promised them all of the lands from the Euphrates to the Mediterranean. This belief is fatuous. As Jewish history should make clear to religious Jews, and as all human history should make clear generally, no group, whether Jewish or otherwise, has an unconditional “right” to any land. For rights to be secured and internationally respected in our day, governments need to abide by the international rule of law. In the case of Israel and Palestine, international law, as expressed repeatedly by the UN Security Council, holds that two sovereign states, Israel and Palestine, have both the right and responsibility to live side by side in peace according to the 1967 borders.

Not only Israel, but even perhaps more so the United States, has lost its way. The deep reason was clear to Senator J. William Fulbright sixty years ago, when Fulbright was Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and wrote the magnificent book, The Arrogance of Power. Fulbright pointed to arrogance as the deep cause of America’s reckless war in Vietnam in the 1960s. In its ongoing arrogance, the US military-security state repeatedly ignores the will of the international community and international law because it believes that weapons and power enable it to do so. US foreign policy is based heavily on covert, illegal regime-change operations and on perpetual warfare that caters to the US military-industrial complex.

In its ongoing arrogance, the US military-security state repeatedly ignores the will of the international community and international law because it believes that weapons and power enable it to do so.

We must not become cynical about the UN. It is currently blocked by the US, the country that led its creation under America’s greatest president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The UN is doing its job, building international law, sustainable development, and universal human rights, step by step, with advances and reverses, over the opposition of powerful forces, but with the arc of history on its side. International law is a relatively new human creation, still in the works. It is difficult to achieve in the face of obstreperous imperial power, but we must pursue it. It is important to note that opposing Israel’s war crimes has absolutely nothing to do with antisemitism. This point has been made eloquently in an open letter by dozens of Jewish writers. Netanyahu doesn’t speak for Judaism. The Israeli Government violates the most sacred of all Jewish injunctions, to protect life (Pikuach Nefesh) and to love your neighbor as yourself (Leviticus 19:18). The message of Jewish ethics is found in the words of the Prophet Isaiah (Isaiah 2:4) inscribed on a wall directly facing the United Nations: “They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.”

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

Jeffrey D. Sachs

Jeffrey D. Sachs is a University Professor and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, where he directed The Earth Institute from 2002 until 2016. He is also President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and a commissioner of the UN Broadband Commission for Development. He has been advisor to three United Nations Secretaries-General, and currently serves as an SDG Advocate under Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. Sachs is the author, most recently, of “A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism” (2020). Other books include: “Building the New American Economy: Smart, Fair, and Sustainable” (2017) and “The Age of Sustainable Development,” (2015) with Ban Ki-moon.

Full Bio >

Patrick Martin, WSWS. org, Dec 7, 2023

The US-Israeli propaganda machine has launched a new argument in defense of Israel’s mass slaughter in Gaza: the claim that Hamas, which carried out the October 7 cross-border strike into Israel that preceded the current war, was guilty of mass rape of Israeli women during that uprising.

That there is no direct evidence to support these allegations is irrelevant to the perpetrators and defenders of genocide in Gaza. The claim, suddenly blared out in the media, serves to distract public attention from the catastrophic escalation of Israeli military operations against the population of Gaza since the end of the limited “pause” that accompanied the exchange of hostages held by Hamas for Palestinians held in Israeli jails.

More than 1,000 Palestinians were killed over the weekend by Israeli bombs and missiles. Some 2 million Palestinians have been herded into a tiny corner of Gaza, itself an enclave no larger in area than the cities of Philadelphia or Detroit but with many more people. The purpose of the Israeli military operations has become increasingly clear: to drive the entire population of Gaza across the Egyptian border into the Sinai Desert, emptying Gaza and making it available for Jewish settlers.

On Monday, coinciding with the full-scale ground assault by the Israel Defense Forces on Khan Younis, the largest city in southern Gaza, a group of 150 wealthy and influential supporters of Israel held a rally at the United Nations headquarters in New York City to promote allegations of mass rape by Hamas. Former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton addressed the group remotely, while billionaire former Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg also lent her support, along with Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (Democrat-NY).

In her pre-recorded statement, Clinton, who as secretary of state in the Obama administration spearheaded the brutal US-NATO war against Libya, claimed, “It is outrageous that some who claim to stand for justice are closing their eyes and their hearts to the victims of Hamas.” She said nothing about the tens of thousands of victims of the US war in Libya, including thousands of women sold into sexual slavery under the rival reactionary juntas that have vied for power since the war. Nor did she make mention of the tens of thousands of victims of Israel’s onslaught against Gaza, using US-supplied bombs and missiles.

The event was sponsored by Israel’s Permanent Mission to the UN and brought together alleged testimony and documents, all supplied by the Israeli government and the IDF. While a UN commission of inquiry investigating war crimes in Gaza said it would pass on any evidence of sexual violence to the International Criminal Court, the US government does not recognize that court, for fear of prosecution of US war crimes. Israel does not cooperate with it, claiming it has an anti-Israel bias because the ICC has been open to evidence of Israeli war crimes in the occupied West Bank.

The next day, President Joe Biden took up the allegations of rape at a fundraising event in Boston. “Over the past few weeks, survivors and witnesses of the attacks have shared the horrific accounts of unimaginable cruelty,” Biden told his millionaire backers gathered at the Westin Hotel. The US president previously dismissed accounts by Palestinian “survivors and witnesses” in Gaza, including those of dozens of medical doctors, of mass casualties from Israeli bombing raids, claiming these were unreliable because they came via Hamas.

That night, NBC News broadcast a five-minute report on the rape charges as the lead item in its “Nightly News,” and a media avalanche ensued, with front-page reports in the New York Times and the Washington Post and reports on other television networks. As one historian of CIA media operations once termed it, this was the “mighty Wurlitzer” of American government propaganda at full volume.

What is the actual evidence supporting the highly orchestrated barrage of charges against Hamas? All of it comes from the Israeli government and the IDF; none has any independent confirmation; no testimony from victims or eyewitnesses has been produced. According to Israeli officials, the few rape victims who survived the October 7 attack were too traumatized to speak about it. Israeli police chief Yaakov Shabtai told the British Broadcasting Corporation that “many survivors of the attacks were finding it difficult to talk and that he thought some of them would never testify about what they saw or experienced.”

The women hostages released by Hamas last week have been in good physical condition, except for those who were elderly and frail to begin with. None of them reported sexual assaults during captivity. Several of them, however, reported narrowly escaping Israeli bomb and missile strikes, leading Israeli officials to dismiss their recollections as “unreliable.” Thus, only those witnesses who serve the propaganda interests of the Netanyahu government are to be believed.

According to the pro-Palestinian website Mondoweiss, a November 13 Israeli police briefing, supposedly called to provide new evidence about sexual violence, led to a clash between police officials and journalists because of “the absence of new information and clear evidence.” The police chief refused to answer any questions, and the police media officer, Merit Ben Meir, engaged in a heated discussion with journalists when they made the intended message of the briefing clear, stating: “Based on the circumstances of the bodies, rape occurred, and there’s no room for questioning these events.’”

The allegations of mass rape follow the pattern of previous US government “big lies” to manipulate public opinion under conditions of growing mass opposition to imperialist war. The Bush administration claimed the existence of “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq to justify its decision in invade and destroy that country. Obama and Hillary Clinton promoted charges of imminent mass slaughter in Benghazi as the pretext for the US-NATO bombing of Libya. The leaders of countries targeted by US imperialism—Panama’s Noriega, Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, Syria’s Assad and now Russia’s Putin—have invariably been portrayed in the American media as monsters deserving of the worst.

The rape allegations are being promoted by fascist forces within the Israeli state and taken up by frenzied supporters of imperialist militarism in America. Their sole purpose is to intimidate anyone who would seek to express their heartfelt opposition to Israeli genocide in Gaza. They have no credibility whatever.

And even if it were true that some Hamas fighters committed sexual violence in the course of the October 7 attack, how would this justify the slaughter of thousands of women and children in Gaza by the Israeli military? The claim of mass rape by Hamas is particularly cynical given the unchallenged fact that, as the WSWS declared in an editorial board statement Monday, Israel is engaged in a “war against women and children.”

The claims by Biden, Clinton & Co. to be “horrified” by the events of October 7 likewise have no credibility. Since the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945, no country has slaughtered more men, women and children in war than the United States. As for claims of rape, mass rape was an indelible feature of such atrocities as the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. The war in Iraq produced the memorable images of sexual violence at Abu Ghraib, but thousands of such actions, similar or far worse, went unrecorded, except in the memories of the victims and perpetrators.

The latest effort by the Biden administration and the corporate media to cover up the reality of Israeli genocide in Gaza will prove a dismal failure. It cannot stem the mounting worldwide outrage over the crimes which Israel is committing, acting as the spearhead for American and European imperialism in the Middle East. The central political task of the antiwar movement remains a turn to the international working class, the only social force which can halt the war in Gaza and put an end to the capitalist system which is the source of imperialist war.

In an open letter to the UN Security Council, the organization pleads with the international body to push for an end to the wanton bloodshed. Palestinians evacuate survivors of the Israeli bombing in Rafah, Gaza Strip, Wednesday, Nov. 22, 2023. (AP Photo/Hatem Ali)

Dr. Christos Christou / MSF

In an open letter, MSF International President Dr Christos Christou writes to the United Nations Security Council, asking they use their leverage and help stop the bloodshed being committed in Gaza.

I am writing to you on behalf of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) to implore you to do everything within your power to ensure an immediate and sustained ceasefire in the Gaza Strip. You must demand that the Israeli government stop the deadly attacks on Palestinian civilians and allow crucial humanitarian aid to enter Gaza.

A seven-day truce, after weeks of relentless violence, was a welcome respite for the people of Gaza. However, these seven days were not nearly enough to organize the delivery of sufficient aid and essential supplies, to meet the immeasurable needs. Now that the truce has ended, there is a return to death and destruction.

My colleagues and I, like so many people around the world, were distressed and shocked by Hamas’s attack on Israeli civilians. Now, after 58 days, words fail us to describe the absolute horror being inflicted on Palestinian civilians by Israel as it carries out incessant and indiscriminate warfare in Gaza for all the world to see.

Words fail us to describe the absolute horror being inflicted on Palestinian civilians by Israel as it carries out incessant and indiscriminate warfare in Gaza for all the world to see.

Israel has shown a blatant and total disregard for the protection of Gaza’s medical facilities. We are watching as hospitals are turned into morgues and ruins. These supposedly protected facilities are being bombed, are being shot at by tanks and guns, encircled and raided, killing patients and medical staff. The World Health Organization (WHO) has documented 203 attacks on health care that have led to at least 22 fatalities and 59 injuries of health workers on duty. Medical staff, including our own, are utterly exhausted and in despair. They have had to amputate limbs from children suffering from severe burns without anaesthesia or sterilised surgical tools. Due to forcible evacuations by Israeli soldiers, some doctors have had to leave patients behind after facing the unimaginable choice between their lives or those of their patients. There is no justification for the atrocious attacks on healthcare.

MSF recently sent an international emergency team to Gaza to support our Palestinian colleagues in providing medical and surgical capacities. Regrettably, their activities have been severely limited due to the scale of casualties, destruction of infrastructure, lack of essential supplies such as fuel, and the ongoing insecurity. We want and ought to be able to do so much more. Today it is impossible for us to adequately respond to medical needs in Gaza due to the siege and the unrelenting, generalised warfare being unleashed by Israel.

Four of our MSF staff have been killed; many more have lost family members. Numerous other colleagues have been injured. Other humanitarian organisations have reported dozens of their staff have been killed.

Gaza, under an Israel-imposed blockade since 2007, is indeed the world’s largest open-aired prison. From the start of its military campaign on 7 October, the Israeli government has enforced a “complete siege” on Gaza, banning the entry of water, food, fuel and medicinal supplies for the 2.3 million people trapped in the enclave. Added to this, unyielding restrictions have been put on humanitarian access and are preventing much needed aid from reaching anyone who needs it. Subjecting an entire population to collective punishment is a war crime under International Humanitarian Law (IHL).

We are witnessing the fundamental principle of humanity being openly disgraced.

Despite Israel’s claims, its all-out assault is not being waged just on Hamas. It is being waged on all of Gaza and its people at any cost. Even wars have rules, but Israel is clearly trading them in for its own military strategy based on disproportionality. In the early days of this unbearable offensive, the spokesman for Israel’s Defence Forces (IDF) announced that the “emphasis” of this flagrantly excessive reprisal was to be on “damage and not accuracy”. It is safe to say Israel’s actions have spoken louder than its words.

We are witnessing the fundamental principle of humanity being openly disgraced.

Northern Gaza is being erased from the map. The health system has collapsed. More than 15,500 people have been killed, half of whom are children, according to Gaza’s health authorities. That’s one out of every 200 people in Gaza. Tens of thousands of people have been injured. Families are digging their dead loved ones out from under the rubble. At least 1.8 million people have been displaced, according to the United Nations. These civilians are being repeatedly and forcibly ordered to move further and further south, but Israel is bombing the entire Strip. Nowhere is safe.

Our emergency team in Khan Younis, in southern Gaza, has reported massive influxes of wounded after intense bombing. Last Saturday, 60 dead and 213 injured people arrived at the emergency room of Al-Aqsa hospital. These strikes are also hitting overcrowded, squalid refugee camps, where people are barely surviving on the sparse humanitarian aid available. If the bombs do not get them, infectious diseases and starvation will.

A sustained ceasefire is the only way to stop the killing of thousands of more civilians and allow for the scaled-up delivery of desperately needed humanitarian aid. MSF also calls for the establishment of an independent mechanism to oversee the adequate flow of humanitarian supplies into Gaza. Furthermore, we call for the implementation of secure and long-lasting medical evacuation routes to third countries for people suffering from severe injuries. In the short-term, the evacuation of these patients to Egypt through the Rafah crossing could be an option, and MSF is willing to contribute to scaling up necessary medical capacities.

Indiscriminate and relentless attacks must stop now. Forcible displacement must stop now.

Assaults on hospitals and medical staff must stop now. Restrictions on aid and the siege must stop now.

It must ALL STOP NOW.

We call on you to be part of the solution and exert all means in your power to prevent further carnage.

Our medical teams in the West Bank also report attacks on health care with a surge in violence, persecution and harassment, in which nearly 240 Palestinians have been killed since 7 October, either by Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) or Israeli settlers, according to the United Nations.

Thus far, world leaders, including permanent members of the Security Council, have been complicit, either by providing Israel with diplomatic cover, by supplying Israel with seemingly unconditional military assistance, or by failing to help stem the relentless bloodshed and atrocities being committed in Gaza.

We urge you to take action to uphold our shared humanity.

It is time to choose whether the Council will continue issuing half-hearted calls for the respect of international law and the protection of civilians, or will fulfil its international peace and security mandate and exercise its full diplomatic leverage to convince the State of Israel that the death sentence it has handed the people of Gaza is inhumane, indefensible, and cannot continue to be carried out.

We urge you to take action to uphold our shared humanity.

“We did what we could. Remember us.” These are the words our Dr Mahmoud Abu Nujaila, who has since been killed in a hospital strike, wrote on a Gaza hospital whiteboard normally used for planning surgeries. When the guns fall silent and the true scale of devastation is revealed, will the Council and its members be able to say the same?

The transfer has included thousands of 2,000-pound bombs that have been used to devastate Gaza.

by Kyle Anzalone, Antiwar. com, December 1, 2023s

The Wall Street Journal published details about the White House’s secretive arms transfers to Israel since October 7. The US has provided Israel with 57,000 artillery shells and 15,000 bombs, including over 5,000 with 2,000-pound warheads.

According to a list of weapons obtained by the Journal, the US has shipped Israel “more than 5,000 Mk82 unguided or ‘dumb’ bombs, more than 5,400 Mk84 2,000-pound warhead bombs, around 1,000 GBU-39 small diameter bombs, and approximately 3,000 JDAMs.”

The US has additionally shipped 57,000 155 MM shells to Israel. NBC News previously reported in October that Washington sent Tel Aviv artillery rounds that are cluster munitions.

Mick Mulroy, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense and officer in the Marine Corps, described the weapons as those the US would use in non-urban areas. “They are kind of the weapons of choice for the fights we had in Afghanistan and Syria in open, non-urban areas,” he said. “The US may use them in more urban areas, but first it would do a lot of target analysis to make sure the attack was proportional and based on military necessity.”

By contrast, Gaza is about 140 sqare miles and home to 2.3 million people—one of the most densely packed regions on earth. Additionally, Israel has relied on an AI program to rapidly generate lists of suspected low-level Hamas members to target, without respect to civilians in proximity.

The Israeli policy has led to the widespread devastation of Gaza. At least 15,000 civilians have been killed. The number of dead Palestinian children exceeds the number of Hamas fighters Israel has claimed to kill by many thousands. Nearly 100,000 buildings in Gaza have been damaged by Israel’s bombing campaign, including the destruction of universities, hospitals, schools, and entire residential neighborhoods.

On Saturday, the New York Times reported that Israel was killing civilians in Gaza at a “historic pace.” The outlet added that part of the explanation for the huge death toll was Tel Aviv’s willingness to drop 2,000-pound American-made bombs on various civilian centers.

Marc Garlasco, a former Pentagon analyst who advises the Dutch organization PAX, told the Times that he’s never seen anything like it. “It’s beyond anything that I’ve seen in my career,” he said. Garlasco added that to find a historical comparison for so many large bombs in such a small area, one would have to “go back to Vietnam or the Second World War.”

Israeli officials and American politicians have attempted to justify Tel Aviv’s slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza by referring to the allied bombings of Tokyo during World War II. In a single night during the bombing of Tokyo, more than 100,000 people were burned to death by American napalm bombs.

The White House has made some requests to Tel Aviv to try to curb civilian casualties. However, the Biden administration has refused to condition future weapons shipments to Israel on reducing the civilian death toll.

The US has primarily relied on aircraft for quick shipment to Israel hundreds of millions of dollars in arms during the past two months. Unlike weapons shipments to Ukraine, the Biden administration has refused to provide the public with information on the arms it is providing to Tel Aviv.

Kyle Anzalone is the opinion editor of Antiwar.com, news editor of the Libertarian Institute, and co-host of Conflicts of Interest.