This is extraordinary because the states supporting Israel, above all the United States, have claimed the high moral and legal ground and lectured the states of the Global South about the importance of the rule of law.

Richard Falk, Common Dreams, Jan 17, 2024

Recall Samuel Huntington’s controversial, yet influential, 1993 Foreign Affairs article, “The Clash of Civilizations,” which ends with the provocative phrase, “The West against the rest.” Although the article seemed far-fetched 30 years ago, it now seems prophetic in its discernment of a post-Cold War pattern of inter-civilizational rivalry. It is rather pronounced in relation to the heightened Israel/Palestine conflict initiated by the October 7 Hamas attack on Israeli territory with the killing and abusing of Israeli civilians and IDF soldiers, as well as the seizure of some 200 hostages.

Clearly this attack has been accompanied by some suspicious circumstances such as Israel’s foreknowledge, slow reaction time to the penetration of its borders, and, perhaps most problematic, the quickness with which Israeli adopted a genocidal approach with a clear ethnic cleansing message. At the very least the Hamas attack, itself including serious war crimes, served almost too conveniently as the needed pretext for the 100 days of disproportionate and indiscriminate violence, sadistic atrocities, and the enactment of a scenario that looked toward making Gaza unlivable and its Palestinian residents dispossessed and unwanted.

Despite the transparency of the Israeli tactics, partly attributable to ongoing TV coverage of the devastating and heartbreaking Palestinian ordeal, what was notable was the way external state actors aligned with the antagonists. The Global West (white settler colonial states and former European colonial powers) lined up with Israel, while the most active pro-Palestinian governments and movements were initially exclusively Muslim, with support coming more broadly from the Global South. This racialization of alignments seems to take precedence over efforts to regulate violence of this intensity by the norms and procedures of international law, often mediated through the United Nations.

Liberal democracies failed not only by their refusal to make active efforts to prevent genocide, which is a central obligation of the Genocide Convention, but more brazenly by openly facilitating the continuation of the genocidal onslaught.

This pattern is quite extraordinary because the states supporting Israel, above all the United States, have claimed the high moral and legal ground for themselves and have long lectured the states of the Global South about the importance of the rule of law, human rights, and respect for international law. This is instead of urging compliance with international law and morality by both sides in the face of the most transparent genocide in all of human history. In the numerous pre-Gaza genocides, the existential horrors that occurred were largely known after the fact and through statistics and abstractions, occasionally vivified by the tales told by survivors. The events, although historically reconstructed, were not as immediately real as these events in Gaza with the daily reports from journalists on the scene for more than three months.

Liberal democracies failed not only by their refusal to make active efforts to prevent genocide, which is a central obligation of the Genocide Convention, but more brazenly by openly facilitating continuation of the genocidal onslaught. Israel’s frontline supporters have contributed weapons and munitions, as well as providing intelligence and assurance of active engagement by ground forces if requested, as well as providing diplomatic support at the U.N. and elsewhere throughout this crisis.

These performative elements that describe Israel’s recourse to genocide are undeniable, while the complicity crimes enabling Israel to continue with genocide remain indistinct, being situated in the shadowland of genocide. For instance, the complicity crimes are noted but remain on the periphery of South Africa’s laudable application to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) that includes a request for Provisional Measures crafted to stop the genocide pending a decision on the substance of the charges of genocide. The evidence of genocide is overwhelmingly documented in the 84-page South African submission, but the failure to address the organic link to the crimes of complicity is a weakness that could be reflected in what the court decides.

Even if the ICJ does impose these Provisional Measures, including ordering Israel to desist from further violence in Gaza, it may not achieve the desired result, at least not before the substantive decision is reached some three to five years from now. It seems unlikely that Israel will obey Provisional Measures. It has a record of consistently defying international law. It is likely that a favorable decision on these preliminary matters will give rise to a crisis of implementation.

The law is persuasively present, but the political will to enforce is lacking or even resistant, as here in certain parts of the Global West.

The degree to which the U.S. has supplied weaponry with U.S. taxpayer money would be an important supplement to rethinking the U.S. relationship to Israel that is so important and which is underway among the American people—even in the Washington think tanks that the foreign policy elites fund and rely upon. Proposing an arms embargo would be accepted as a timely and appropriate initiative in many sectors of U.S. public opinion. I hope that such proposals may be brought before the General Assembly and perhaps the Security Council. Even if not formally endorsed, such initiatives would have considerable symbolic and possibly even substantive impacts on further delegitimizing Israel’s behavior.

A third specific initiative worth carefully considering would be timely establishment of a People’s Tribunal on the Question of Genocide initiated by global persons of conscience. Such tribunals were established in relation to many issues that the formal governance structures failed to address in satisfactory ways. Important examples are the Russell Tribunal convened in 1965-66 to assess legal responsibilities of the U.S. in the Vietnam War and the Iraq War Tribunal of 2005 in response to the U.S. and U.K. attack and occupation of Iraq commencing in 2003.

Such a tribunal on Gaza could clarify and document what happened on and subsequently to October 7. By taking testimony of witnesses, it could provide an opportunity for the people of the world to speak and to feel represented in ways that governments and international procedures are unable to given their entanglement with geopolitical hegemony in relation to international criminal law and structures of global governance.

The South African World Court Case, Pariah State, and Popular Mobilization

The South African initiative is important as a welcome effort to enlist international law and procedures for its assessment and authority in a context of severe alleged criminality. If the ICJ, the highest tribunal on a supranational level, responds favorably to South Africa’s highly reasonable and morally imperative request for Provisional Measures to stop the ongoing Gaza onslaught, it will increase pressure on Israel and its supporters to comply. And if Israel refuses to do so, it will escalate pro-Palestinian solidarity efforts throughout the world and cast Israel into the darkest regions of pariah statehood.

In such an atmosphere, nonviolent activism and pressure for the imposition of an arms embargo and trade boycotts as well as sports, culture, and touristic boycotts will become more viable policy options. This approach by way of civil society activism proved very effective in the Euro-American peace efforts during the Vietnam War and in the struggle against apartheid South Africa, and elsewhere.

Israel is becoming a pariah state due to its behavior and defiance exhibited toward legal and moral norms. It has made itself notorious by its outrageously forthright acknowledgement of genocidal intent with respect to Palestinian civilians whom they are under a special obligation to protect as the occupying power.

We know what we should be doing.to make amends, yet well-entrenched special interests preclude such rational adjustments, and the military malfunctions and accompanying geopolitical alignments persist, ignoring costly failures along the way.

Being a pariah country or rogue state makes Israel politically and economically vulnerable as never before. At this moment, a mobilized civil society can contribute to producing a new balance of forces in the world that has the potential to neutralize Western post-colonial imperial geopolitics.

It is also relevant to take note of the startling fact that the anti-colonial wars of the last century were in the end won by the weaker side militarily. This is an important lesson, as is the realization that anti-colonial struggle does not end with the attainment of political independence. It needs to continue to achieve control of national security and economic resources as the recent anti-French coups in former French colonies in sub-Saharan Africa illustrate.

In the 21st century weapons alone rarely control political outcomes. The U.S. should have learned this decades ago in Vietnam, having controlled the battlefield and dominated the military dimensions of the war, and yet having failed to achieve control over its political outcome.

The U.S. is disabled from learning lessons from such defeats. Such learning would weaken the leverage of the military-industrial-government complex, including the private sector arms industry. This would subvert the domestic balance in the U.S. and substantially discredit the global geopolitical role being played by the U.S. throughout the entire world.

So, it is a dilemma. We know what we should be doing to make amends, yet well-entrenched special interests preclude such rational adjustments, and the military malfunctions and accompanying geopolitical alignments persist, ignoring costly failures along the way.

We know what should be done, but do not have the political clout to get it done. But global public opinion is shifting, and demonstrations globally are building opposition to continuing the war.

Iran

There is a huge U.S./Israel propaganda effort to tie Iran to everything that is regarded as anti-West or anti-Israeli. It has intensified during this crisis, starting with the October 7 attack by Iran’s supposed proxy Hamas. You notice even the most influential mainstream print media as TheNew York Times routinely refers to what Hezbollah or the Houthis do as “Iran-backed.” Such actors are reduced misleadingly to being proxies of Iran.

This way of denying agency to pro-Palestinian actors and attributing behavior to Iran is a matter of state propaganda trying to promote belligerent attitudes toward Iran to the effect that Iran is our major enemy in the region, while Israel is our loyal friend. At the same time, it suppresses the reality that If Iran is backing countries and political movements, it obscures what the U.S. is doing more overtly and multiple times over.

It is largely unknown what Iran has been doing in the region to protect its interests. Without doubt, Iran has strong sympathies with the Palestinian struggle. Those sympathies coincide with its own political self interest in not being attacked and minimizing the U.S. role in the region. Additionally, Iran has lots of problems arising from opposition forces within its own society.

But I think dangerous state propaganda is building up this hostility toward Iran. It is highly misleading to regard Iran as the real enemy standing behind all anti-Israeli actions in the region. It is important to understand as accurately as possible the complexity and unknown elements present in this crisis situation that contains dangers of wider war in the region and beyond. As far as is publicly known, Iran has had an extremely limited degree of involvement in the direct shaping of the war and Israel’s all-out attack on the civilian population of Gaza.

Hamas and a Second Nakba

While I was special rapporteur for the U.N. on Israeli violations of human rights and international humanitarian law, I had the opportunity to meet and talk in detail with several of the Hamas leaders who are living either in Doha or Cairo and also in Gaza. In the period between 2010 and 2014, Hamas was publicly and by back channels pushing for a 50-year cease-fire with Israel. It was conditioned on Israel carrying out the unanimous 1967 Security Council mandate in SC Res 242 to withdraw its forces to the pre-war boundaries of “the green line.” Hamas had also sought a long-range cease-fire with Israel after its 2006 electoral victory for up to 50 years.

Neither Israel nor the U.S. would respond to those diplomatic initiatives. Hamas, Machel particularly who was perhaps the most intellectual of the Hamas leaders, told me that he warned Washington of the tragic consequences for both peoples if the conflict was allowed to go on without a cease-fire, which was confirmed by independent sources.

Where can Palestinians go as the population suffers from famine and continued bombing? What is Israel’s goal?

All indications are that Israel used the October 7 attack as a pretext for the preexisting master plan to get rid of the Palestinians whose presence blocks the establishment of Greater Israel with sovereign control over the West Bank and at least portions of Gaza.

I see the so-called commitment to thinning the Palestinian presence in Gaza and to a functional second Nakba. This is a criminal policy. I don’t know that it has to have a formal name. It is not a policy designed to achieve anything but the decapitation of the Palestinian population. Israel seeks to move Gazans to the Egyptian Sinai, and the Egyptians have already indicated that they don’t welcome this.

This is not a policy. This is some kind of a threat of elimination. The Israeli campaign after October 7 was not directed toward Hamas’ terrorism nearly as much as it was directed toward the forced evacuation of the Palestinians from Gaza and for the related dispossession of Palestine in the West Bank.

If Israel really wanted to deal with its security in an effective way, much more efficient and effective methods would have been relied upon. There was no reason to treat the entire civilian population of Gaza as if it were implicated in the Hamas attack, and there was certainly no justification for the genocidal response. The Israeli motivations seem more related to completing the Zionist Project than to restoring territorial security. All indications are that Israel used the October 7 attack as a pretext for the preexisting master plan to get rid of the Palestinians whose presence blocks the establishment of Greater Israel with sovereign control over the West Bank and at least portions of Gaza.

For a proper perspective we should remember that before October 7, the Netanyahu coalition government that took power at the start of 2023 was known as the most extreme government ever to govern the country since its establishment in 1948. The new Netanyahu government in Israel immediately gave a green light to settler violence in the Occupied West Bank and appointed overtly racist religious leaders to administer the parts of Palestine still occupied.

This was part of the end game of the whole Zionist project of claiming territorial sovereignty over the whole of the so-called promised land, enabling Greater Israel to come into existence.

The Need for a Different Context

We need to establish a different context than the one that exists now. That means a different outlook on the part of the Western supporters of Israel. And a different internal Israeli sense of their own interests, their own future. And it’s only when substantive pressure is brought to bear on an elite that has gone to these lengths that it can shake commitments to this orientation.

The lengths that the Israeli government has gone to are characteristic of settler colonial states. All of them, including the U.S. and Canada, have acted violently to neutralize or exterminate the resident Indigenous people. That is what this genocidal interlude is all about. It is an effort to realize the goals of maximal versions of Zionism, which can only succeed by eliminating the Palestinians as rightful claimants. It should not be forgotten that in the weeks before the Hamas attack, including at the U.N., Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was waving a map of “the new Middle East” that had erased the existence of Palestine.

Undoubtedly, one of Hamas’ motivations was to negate the view that Palestine had given up its right to self-determination, and that Palestine could be erased. Recall the old delusional pre-Balfour Zionist slogan: “A people without land for a land without people.” Such utterances of this early Zionist utopian phase literally erased the Palestinians who for generations lived in Palestine as an entitled Indigenous population. With the Balfour Declaration of 1917, this settler colonial vision became a political project with the blessings of the leading European colonial power.

Given post-colonial realities, the Israeli project is historically discordant and extreme. It exposes the reality of Israel’s policies and the inevitable resistance response to Israel as a supremacist state. Israeli state propaganda and management of the public discourse has obscured the maximalist agenda of Zionism over the years, and we are yet to know whether this was a deliberate tactic or just reflected the phases of Israel’s development.

This may turn out to be a moment of clarity with respect not only to Gaza, but to the overall prospects for sustainable peace and justice between these two embattled peoples.

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

Richard Falk

Richard Falk is Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University and served as UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Palestine and is currently co-convener of SHAPE (Save Humanity and Planet Earth).

Full Bio >

Joseph Massad, Middle East Eye, Published date: 11 January 2024

The question is no longer whether the Israeli government is racist and genocidal, but whether the Israeli Jewish majority supporting its crimes against Palestinians also fits this description

Protesters wave Israeli flags during a demonstration against the hearing at the International Court of Justice on a genocide complaint by South Africa against Israel, in The Hague, Netherlands, on 11 January 2024 (Robin Utrecht/AFP)

Ever since the current Israeli cabinet, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, came to power in December 2022, there has been a consensus, even in the western mainstream and among the Israeli political opposition, that it is a Jewish supremacist, racist government.

Characterisations of the government, which clearly expressed the preferences of a majority of the Israeli Jewish electorate, as “the most extreme”, “the most fundamentalist”, and “the most racist” in Israel’s history, became common. Other descriptions deemed it Israel’s “first fascist” government.

This is aside from the fact that two years before the rise of the current government, historically pro-Israel mainstream western human rights organisations had adjudged Israel a racist “apartheid” state since its founding. Palestinians and their supporters have also used this label to describe Israel since at least the 1960s.

It is the same government, which was the object of international condemnation, that has launched the ongoing genocidal war against the Palestinian people, which has so far killed and injured upwards of 100,000 Palestinians and displaced more than two million.

Yet this very same racist government and its genocidal war are supported, armed, and financed by the US and its European allies, who, forgetting their earlier criticisms, have not flinched from justifying Israeli crimes, just as they previously defended the Jewish settler colony against accusations of apartheid.

Stay informed with MEE’s newsletters

Sign up to get the latest alerts, insights and analysis, starting with Turkey Unpacked

Increasingly, however, the question being debated is no longer whether the Israeli government is racist, fascist, or genocidal, but whether a majority of Israeli Jews also fit those descriptions and that this government is, indeed, no more than a manifestation of Israeli Jewish political culture.

‘No longer fringe’

Middle East Eye editor-in-chief David Hearst recently observed that those expressing genocidal racism among Israeli Jews – including soldiers, singers, artists, and politicians – “are no longer a fringe. They represent what mainstream Israel thinks. They have become genocidal, racist and fascist when talking about Palestinians – unashamedly so. They are proud of and joke about their racism and do little to disguise it.”

Since its inception, the Zionist movement has always set out to ethnically cleanse Palestine of the country’s indigenous Palestinian population

According to the Israel Democracy Institute and Tel Aviv University’s Peace Index polls taken more than a month after the beginning of the massive Israeli bombing of Gaza, which by then had killed thousands, “57.5 percent of Israeli Jews said that they believed the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) were using too little firepower in Gaza, 36.6 percent said the IDF was using an appropriate amount of firepower, while just 1.8 percent said they believed the IDF was using too much firepower.”

Commenting on the genocidal views of a majority of Israeli Jews and their support of ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people, Israeli journalist Gideon Levy appears to be at a loss: “Either that’s the real face of Israel, and the attack on the 7th legitimised it to be above the surface, or that the 7th really changed things,” he said, adding: “I don’t know which one is true.”

---

Follow Middle East Eye’s live coverage of the Israel-Palestine war

---

Levy’s response is surprising, however, given the documented racism of the Zionist movement since its inception and the well-known fact that it has always set out to ethnically cleanse Palestine of the country’s indigenous Palestinian population.

The Israeli press has published seemingly “reasonable” articles, which frame Israel’s planned ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians of Gaza and their potential expulsion to the Egyptian Sinai as something wonderful, describing it as “one of the most suitable places on Earth to provide the people of Gaza with hope and a peaceful future.”

Yet one could presumably and just as reasonably counter that proposal with one suggesting that Israel’s Jewish colonists voluntarily move to the US and Europe, particularly Germany, where their rights and privileges are safeguarded. Indeed, these are among “the most suitable places on Earth to provide [Israeli Jews] with hope and a peaceful future”.

War on Gaza: The fate of global justice hangs on South Africa’s ICJ case

David Hearst

Read More »

This is especially true since Israeli officials and intellectuals often claim that they live in a “bad” or “tough” neighbourhood, or even in the “jungle”. Europe and the US are clearly far superior neighbourhoods with very low security concerns. After all, Europe is a “garden”, while “most of the rest of the world is a jungle”, as European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell infamously declared last year.  

The EU’s German President Ursula von der Leyen has also emphasised that “Jewish culture is European culture” and that “Europe must value its own Jewish-ness. So that Jewish life in Europe can thrive again.”

Such a voluntary move on the part of Israeli Jews, more than one million of whom already hold European and US passports, would spare the Palestinian people (and the Middle East more widely) the violence and wars that Zionist colonisation since the 1880s and especially after 1948, has visited on the people of the region.

Perhaps, rather than having Israel and its western sponsors secretly negotiate with “Congo” or Canada to take in expelled Palestinians, as was recently reported, the United Nations and Arab states should most enthusiastically urge western countries to welcome Israeli Jews in their midst.

A violent cult

With recent polls and analyses revealing the hatred and genocidal attitudes of the vast majority of Israel’s Jewish citizens towards Palestinians, their relocation to Europe and the US should bring them more happiness and peace of mind.

In addition, those who justify the annihilation of Palestinians in order to “save” western civilisation and values with which Israel identifies, would find themselves better off saving western civilisation from the heart of it, far from the colonial frontier and the anti-colonial Palestinian resistance.

Israel’s mass murder of Palestinians in Gaza began seven decades ago

Read More »

In this vein, the European Commission coordinator on combatting antisemitism and fostering Jewish life, the German Katharina von Schnurbein, recently affirmed that “Europe would not be Europe without its Jewish heritage.” She added: “Jewish heritage is part of Europe’s DNA. And as European institutions, we want to protect Jewish heritage, to safeguard and cherish it. This is a key aspect of fostering Jewish life, which is the ultimate goal of the EU strategy on combating antisemitism and fostering Jewish life.”

One might expect, as a result of such affirmation, that Europe’s doors this time would open for Jews, unlike in the 1930s and 1940s, or that the US, which refused to admit Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazis and sent back a ship filled with them in 1939 to Europe where many of them perished in Hitler’s death camps, would welcome Israeli Jews to their better neighbourhood with open arms.

A large number of Israeli psychiatrists have already left the country for greener pastures in the United Kingdom, citing a high workload that has only increased since 7 October and a mental health system on the brink of collapse.

This is unsurprising, as support for the slaughter of Palestinians in untold massacres and wars since 1948 has evidently become a veritable genocidal cult in Israel across all segments of society and government. Like all members of violent cults, the only way to save them from themselves is to deprogram them. This will undoubtedly be a lengthy and complicated process that, in the case of many Israeli Jews, will require undoing decades of brainwashing.

Perhaps those same psychiatrists who left could help deprogram Israeli Jews in a safe European environment to rid them of their attachment to ethnic cleansing and genocidal wars.

A peaceful future

Meanwhile, the case South Africa has brought to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) accusing Israel of genocide is raising alarms in the White House and Western European capitals. This is only the latest case that the ICJ received accusing Israel of crimes.

A year ago, the United Nations General Assembly approved a request for an advisory opinion from the ICJ on Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories with 87 votes in favour and 26 against – the opponents mostly are the same countries that today support Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza.

The ICJ is set to hold public hearings about the case next month. As for the more recent case that South Africa brought, the ICJ is looking into it in an emergency hearing on 11 January.

The ICJ has faced similar requests in the context of settler-colonialism since the Second World War. Most notably, in July 1966, the ICJ dismissed a petition put forth in 1962 by Liberia and Ethiopia concerning the South African settler colony of Namibia, on the basis that neither of them had legal standing to bring the petition. Both countries had been former members of the League of Nations, which had selected South Africa as the mandatory power over Namibia after World War One.

Liberia and Ethiopia’s 1962 petition called on the court to adjudicate the legal status of Namibia. The president of the court, Sir Percy Spender, himself from the settler colony of Australia, cast the deciding vote in the seven-to-seven decision in favour of South Africa. That decision launched the armed struggle by the South West Africa People’s Organisation (Swapo) against the South African apartheid occupiers. That year, the General Assembly revoked South Africa’s mandate but to no avail.

In 1969, the UN Security Council finally endorsed the General Assembly’s 1966 revocation of South Africa’s mandate. When South Africa defied the UN and refused to withdraw, the matter was referred in July 1970 to the ICJ for an advisory opinion.

It was the 1971 ICJ decision that led to international recognition of the anti-colonial Swapo and the right of the Namibian people to self-determination

Unlike in 1966, this time the ICJ’s opinion, issued on 21 June 1971, completely vindicated the UN position, ruling that the UN was the lawful governing authority in Namibia and that South Africa must withdraw.

In contrast with the 1966 pro-colonial ICJ decision, the 1971 decision removed the last vestige of legitimacy the white supremacist regime still had. Not that South Africa abided by the decision; it did not. South Africa’s western Nato sponsors continued unabashedly to support its delay tactics masquerading as a “peace process” and vetoed UN resolutions that called for sanctions on the white supremacist state.  

Nonetheless, it was the 1971 ICJ decision that led to international recognition of Swapo and the right of the Namibian people to self-determination. It would take a war of liberation for Namibia to finally obtain independence in 1990.

This is to say that an ICJ decision that condemns Israel’s war as a genocide will augur well for the Palestinian people’s struggle against their cruel and bloodthirsty colonisers.  

While it will not bring about immediate liberation and decolonisation, it will accelerate that process measurably until it dismantles Israel’s regime of Jewish supremacy and saves both Palestinians and Israeli Jews from the genocidal cult of Zionism.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

Joseph Massad is professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history at Columbia University, New York. He is the author of many books and academic and journalistic articles. His books include Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in Jordan; Desiring Arabs; The Persistence of the Palestinian Question: Essays on Zionism and the Palestinians, and most recently Islam in Liberalism. His books and articles have been translated into a dozen languages.

@Andre__Damon, WSWS. Org, January 15, 2024

In a speech Saturday marking 100 days of Israel’s onslaught on Gaza, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to continue the massacre in defiance of international law.

“We will restore security to both the south and the north,” Netanyahu vowed. “No one will stop us—not The Hague, not the axis of evil, and not anyone else.”

Netanyahu pledged “to fight on to the end—until complete victory.” He continued, adding, “We will not stop until we achieve victory.”

Netanyahu angrily denounced the genocide case against Israel brought before the International Court of Justice in the Hague, the Netherlands, by South Africa.

He called the case a “hypocritical attack in The Hague on the Jewish state that rose from the ashes of the Holocaust,” and “a moral low in the history of nations.” He vowed, “This international defamation campaign will not weaken our hands or weaken our determination to fight to the end.”

In the most explicit terms to date, Netanyahu sought to directly implicate the United States in the war crimes of the Israeli military, saying that he told US Secretary of State Antony Blinken that “this is not only our war, this is also your war.”

Indeed, the genocide in Gaza is “America’s war.” The United States has provided over 10,000 tons of military equipment to Israel since October 7, transported in 244 cargo plane flights and over 20 ships.

On January 12, the New York Times reported that the Central Intelligence Agency is collecting “information on senior Hamas leaders” and relaying it to Israel, meaning the United States is providing targeting information for Israeli strikes that have to date killed over 30,000 civilians in Gaza.

Last week, the US massively expanded its involvement in the war throughout the Middle East, striking over 30 sites in Yemen on Thursday, followed by more strikes on Friday.

In his own statement marking the 100th day of the war, President Joe Biden did not mention, much less express sympathy with, the Gazans who have been killed or the 1.9 million Gazans who are facing starvation and displacement. Instead, the entirety of the three-paragraph statement was directed toward Israelis held hostage by Hamas, whose captivity the Netanyahu regime is using as a pretext to carry out its genocide.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken echoed these statements, declaring, “The United States will not rest until all remaining hostages, including six Americans, are reunited with their loved ones.”

In its statement marking the 100th day of the attack, the Euro-Med monitor reported that approximately 100,000 Gazans have been killed, reported missing or wounded since October 7.

It noted that 31,497 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have been killed to date by Israeli bombings. It estimated that a staggering 28,961, or 92 percent, were civilians “including 12,345 children, 6,471 women, 295 health personnel, 41 civil defense personnel, and 113 journalists.”

These statistics include both those whose bodies have been identified and over 7,000 people who have been missing for more than 14 days and are presumed dead. The monitor noted that “Hundreds of bodies that cannot be recovered due to the ongoing Israeli violence remain on the roads… particularly in areas where Israel’s army has conducted ground incursions.”

A further 1.955 million Palestinians, approximately 85 percent of the total population of the Strip, have been displaced from their homes.

Nearly 70,000 housing units have been completely destroyed, and a further 187,300 units have been damaged. These include “320 schools; 1,671 industrial facilities; 183 health facilities, including 23 hospitals, 59 clinics and 92 ambulances; 239 mosques; three churches; and 170 press offices.”

Summarizing the massive level of destruction, Euro-Med reported that “Israel is deliberately targeting civilian infrastructure in order to cause as many casualties, material losses, and as much general destruction as possible as a form of retaliation and collective punishment. This is against international humanitarian law, the 1949 Geneva Convention, and amounts to war crimes according to the Rome Statute, which governs the International Criminal Court.”

In its update on the state of the offensive, the United Nations wrote: “One hundred days into the conflict, intense Israeli bombardments from air, land, and sea continued across much of the Gaza Strip on 14 January, resulting in further civilian casualties and destruction.”

In a statement on Sunday, UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini declared, “The crisis in Gaza is a man-made disaster compounded by dehumanizing language and the use of food, water, and fuel as instruments of war.”

In a statement to Al Jazeera, Lazzarini continued, “Whenever you go to a school, the kids are looking at your eyes begging for a sip of water or a loaf of bread… This 100 days feels to be an eternity.”

M S Siddiqui, Heritagre Times, May 23, 2021

This statement on the Middle East was dated 31st January, 1970, and was read on 3rd February, the day after Bertrand Russell’s death, to an International Conference of Parliamentarians meeting in Cairo.

“The latest phase of the undeclared war in the Middle East is based upon a profound miscalculation. The bombing raids deep into Egyptian territory will not persuade the civilian population to surrender, but will stiffen their resolve to resist. This is the lesson of all aerial bombardment.

The Vietnamese who have endured years of American heavy bombing have responded not by capitulation but by shooting down more enemy aircraft. In 1940 my own fellow countrymen resisted Hitler’s bombing raids with unprecedented unity and determination.

For this reason, the present Israeli attacks will fail in their essential purpose, but at the same time they must be condemned vigorously throughout the world.

---

Matiel Moghannam, “The Palestinian Gandhi”

---

The development of the crisis in the Middle East is both dangerous and instructive. For over 20 years Israel has expanded by force of arms. After every stage in this expansion Israel has appealed to “reason” and has suggested “negotiations”.

This is the traditional role of the imperial power, because it wishes to consolidate with the least difficulty what it has already taken by violence. Every new conquest becomes the new basis of the proposed negotiation from strength, which ignores the injustice of the previous aggression.

The aggression committed by Israel must be condemned, not only because no state has the right to annexe foreign territory, but because every expansion is an experiment to discover how much more aggression the world will tolerate.

The refugees who surround Palestine in their hundreds of thousands were described recently by the Washington journalist I.F. Stone as “the moral millstone around the neck of world Jewry.”

---

German Jewish Doctors in India, Refuge, Opposition and Success

---

Many of the refugees are now well into the third decade of their precarious existence in temporary settlements. The tragedy of the people of Palestine is that their country was “given” by a foreign Power to another people for the creation of a new State. The result was that many hundreds of thousands of innocent people were made permanently homeless.

With every new conflict their number have increased. How much longer is the world willing to endure this spectacle of wanton cruelty? It is abundantly clear that the refugees have every right to the homeland from which they were driven, and the denial of this right is at the heart of the continuing conflict.

No people anywhere in the world would accept being expelled en masse from their own country; how can anyone require the people of Palestine to accept a punishment which nobody else would tolerate? A permanent just settlement of the refugees in their homeland is an essential ingredient of any genuine settlement in the Middle East.

We are frequently told that we must sympathize with Israel because of the suffering of the Jews in Europe at the hands of the Nazis. I see in this suggestion no reason to perpetuate any suffering.

---

---

What Israel is doing today cannot be condoned, and to invoke the horrors of the past to justify those of the present is gross hypocrisy. Not only does Israel condemn a vast number of refugees to misery; not only are many Arabs under occupation condemned to military rule; but also Israel condemns the Arab nations only recently emerging from colonial status, to continued impoverishment as military demands take precedence over national development.

All who want to see an end to bloodshed in the Middle East must ensure that any settlement does not contain the seeds of future conflict. Justice requires that the first step towards a settlement must be an Israeli withdrawal from all the territories occupied in June, 1967. A new world campaign is needed to help bring justice to the long-suffering people of the Middle East.”

Share this Post on :

M S Siddiqui

Dr. Mohammad Siddiqui is a UK based Medical doctor. Apart from Medicine he is interested in history, culture, art and architecture. He is an avid collector of rare photographs, postcards, maps, artefacts, rare books and magazines on different themes like ‘Hajj pilgrimage’, ‘Delhi’, ‘Islam in Britain’ and ‘The role of Indian soldiers in WWI.’

Incremental Genocide and Displacement and Replacement in Gaza

Bill Astore, Bracing Views, 7 Jan. 2024

Courtesy of OpenSecrets.org, I saw a chart on AIPAC contributions to U.S. senators that showed that all 100 senators have taken AIPAC money. Leading the way are senate “giants” like Mitch McConnell (nearly two million dollars) and Chuck Schumer (roughly $1.7 million). Talk about bipartisanship! I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that the U.S. Senate is so strongly pro-Israel. It obviously has nothing to do with the power of AIPAC and all that money.

Bipartisanship and no divisiveness. Who says we have a dysfunctional and divided Congress? Nonsense!

Here’s how AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) describes itself on its own web site:

The Largest Pro-Israel PAC in America

WE STAND with those who stand with Israel. The AIPAC PAC is a bipartisan, pro-Israel political action committee. It is the largest pro-Israel PAC in America and contributed more resources directly to candidates than any other PAC. 98% of AIPAC-backed candidates won their general election races in 2022.

That last sentence is a killer. AIPAC is reminding Members of Congress that if you want to be elected, or win reelection, you very much want AIPAC on your side. And if you don’t kowtow to their agenda, they will do everything in their power to defeat you.

Imagine if there was an American Palestine Public Affairs Committee, an APPAC, that contributed hundreds of thousands if not millions to every U.S. senator and that boasted of a 98% success rate in getting APPAC-anointed candidates elected or reelected. Do you think maybe the U.S. Senate would have a different position on Gaza and the West Bank?

Speaking of Gaza, I watched Chris Hedges interview Ilan Pappé, an Israeli historian. Pappé put it simply and clearly: Israel is engaged in “incremental genocide” against the Palestinian people, a genocide in slow motion, a strategy of “displacement and replacement.” The “displacement” of the Palestinians is done by mass bombing, mass destruction, mass death, and (hopefully for the Israelis) mass migration, and the “replacement” will come when Jewish settlers take possession of Gaza (after a lot of munitions cleanup and infrastructure redevelopment, I suppose, probably paid for by the U.S. taxpayer).

There’s an Orwellian term for this. For mass death followed by forced expulsion, Israel is using the term “voluntary migration” (or “voluntary” emigration). But of course there is nothing “voluntary” about any of this.

If U.S. government officials appear clueless about what’s happening in Gaza, they’re not. They’re just bought and paid for.

@Andre__Damon, WSWS. Org, Jan. 9, 2024

On Sunday, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) murdered two Al Jazeera reporters, Hamza al-Dahdouh and Mustafa Thuraya, in a targeted airstrike on their vehicle while they were returning from a reporting assignment.

Hamza was the eldest son of Al Jazeera Gaza bureau chief Wael al-Dahdouh, whose wife, two other children and infant grandson were murdered in an October IDF airstrike on their home. In December, another targeted drone strike injured Wael and killed his camera operator near the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis.

The systematic and deliberate massacre of al-Dahdouh’s family and the repeated efforts to kill him are part of a deliberate Israeli policy of murdering journalists. As of Sunday, the number of journalists killed by Israel over the past three months stood at 109, a figure that grew to 111 by Monday with the murder of two more journalists: Abdullah Breis and Mohammad Abu Dayer.

Israel’s aim is to prevent the world from learning of the crimes it is inflicting every single day upon the Palestinian people by systematically murdering and intimidating the press. Journalists operating in Gaza have extensively documented Israel’s campaign of genocide, which has killed over 30,000 people in just three months, has displaced 90 percent of Gaza’s population, and has destroyed 70 percent of its civilian infrastructure.

Israel operates as a criminal regime, functioning outside of international law as a sort of Murder Incorporated. Its bloody crimes are made possible by the arms, funding and political backing provided by the United States and other imperialist powers.

The killing of journalists is accompanied by the deliberate murder of critics of the genocide, including prominently Refaat Alareer, a Palestinian writer, poet, professor and activist, who was killed in a targeted bombing by the Israeli military on December 7, following weeks of death threats.

Such is the brazenness of Israel’s policy of murdering journalists that, after the killing of al-Dahdouh and Thuraya, the IDF released a statement referring to them as “suspects” and saying that their car was targeted because photojournalist Hazem Rajab was a “terrorist operative.”

On the day of Hamza’s murder, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken was asked whether the Biden administration condemns Israel’s policy of deliberately targeting journalists.

Blinken refused to condemn the policy, and instead asserted he was “sorry” for the killing. Blinken declared, “I am deeply, deeply sorry for the almost unimaginable loss suffered by your colleague Wael al-Dahdouh. I am a parent myself. I can’t begin to imagine the horror that he’s experienced, not once, but twice. This is an unimaginable tragedy.”

No, the murder of Hamza and the other members of Wael al-Dahdouh’s family is not only an immense personal “tragedy,” it is the outcome of a cold-blooded criminal slaughter for which Blinken and the Biden administration bear full responsibility. The Biden administration has publicly asserted that there are no “red lines” for the crimes that Israel will be allowed to commit. In fact, the United States, which has extensively coordinated airstrike targets with Israel, is likely to have directly collaborated with Israel in selecting which journalists would be murdered.

On October 25, Axios reported that Blinken asked the prime minister of Qatar to “turn down the volume on Al Jazeera’s coverage because it is full of anti-Israel incitement.”

Israel responded to these comments by systematically murdering Al Jazeera correspondents and their families in Gaza. Just three days after Axios reported Blinken’s statement, on October 28, Israel carried out the strike on al-Dahdouh’s home that killed his wife, two children and infant grandson.

The question immediately arises: Where does Washington’s collaboration in Israel’s murder of journalists lead? If the United States declares that there are “no red lines” for Israel’s crimes, will the US allow the Israeli regime to kill its political opponents and critical journalists on its own territory? And if the US endorses these actions by Israel, what is to prevent the US government and military from targeting their own political opponents?

Throughout the past 50 years, actions by the state of Israel have set a precedent for US policy. The most significant example is the doctrine of “targeted killings,” or state-organized assassinations.

In November 2000, Israel became the first state in the world to openly acknowledge a policy of targeted killing. Within two years, the policy was adopted by the United States, which conducted its first known drone strike outside a war zone in Yemen in 2002. Within 10 years, the United States had used the doctrine of “targeted killing” to kill one of its own citizens.

In other words, what Israel is doing today, its imperialist backers will do in the near future.

The governments of the United States and Western Europe have already carried out sweeping attacks on democratic rights, banning anti-genocide protests and launching campaigns to purge opponents of the genocide from college campuses. In October, the US Senate passed a resolution accusing participants in mass demonstrations against the Gaza genocide of “expressing solidarity with terrorists.”

By this logic, could not participants in the anti-genocide protests be subjected to the same treatment as journalists in Gaza?

The Gaza genocide marks a new stage in the criminality of the United States and other world imperialist governments, which are embracing genocide and mass murder as state policy. These crimes will then set a further precedent for even more sweeping attacks on the social and democratic rights of the working class.

A particularly despicable role is being played in this process by the corporate media, which has, with few exceptions, blacked out both the genocidal crimes being committed in the US-Israeli war on the people of Gaza and the unprecedented protests around the globe against them. In their bid to normalize these crimes, the major news corporations have likewise covered up the slaughter of journalists, including in a number of cases correspondents who have provided them with reporting, photographs and video.

The endorsement of Israel’s genocide and mass murder by the world’s imperialist governments must serve as a warning. The line between “democratic” and “fascist” capitalist governments is being obliterated. Every crime, from genocide to mass murder and political repression, is being materially supported and legitimized by the criminal oligarchies that hold power.

For this reason, the struggle against Israel’s genocide in Gaza must take the form of a political struggle by the working class against the governments that are enabling it, and which will seek to use the genocide to set a precedent for even greater crimes against working people all over the world.

A Palestinian woman reacts following Israeli bombardment in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip on December 14, 2023, amid ongoing battles between Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas.

(Photo by Said Khatib/AFP via Getty Images)

Members of Congress, now providing such easy rhetoric in public statements to justify huge and ongoing military support to Israel, would not be so complacent if they had to dig their own dead children out of the rubble.

Norman Solomon, Common Dreams, Jan. 8, 2024

The vast majority of Congress members have refused to call for a ceasefire in Gaza during three months of slaughter by Israel’s military. Capitol Hill remains a friendly place for the Israeli government, as it keeps receiving massive arms shipments courtesy of U.S. taxpayers.

“Israel would not be able to conduct this war without the U.S., which over time has provided Israel with about 80 percent of the country’s weapons imports,” Voxreports. The distance between the Capitol and Gaza can be measured by the vast disconnect between the standard discourse of U.S. politics and the terroristic carnage destroying the Palestinian people.

The human toll includes upward of 22,000 dead, more than 85 percent of Gaza’s 2.2 million population displaced, and the emerging lethal combination of hunger and disease that could kill several hundred thousand more.

The impunity enjoyed by Israeli leaders is enabled by President Biden, who clearly does not want a ceasefire. The same can be said of the vast majority of Congress, with silences and equivocations if not outright zeal to voice support for the wholesale killing of civilians in the name of Israel’s “right to defend itself.”

Members of Congress, now providing such easy rhetoric in public statements to justify huge and ongoing military support to Israel, would not be so complacent if they had to dig their own dead children out of the rubble.

Seventeen members of the House stepped forward in mid-October to sign on as cosponsors of the ceasefire resolution introduced by Congresswoman Cori Bush, “calling for an immediate de-escalation and ceasefire in Israel and occupied Palestine.” The number of those forthright representatives has not risen during the 11 weeks since then.

What we’ve gotten instead has been the molasses-pace drip of some other members of Congress calling for—or kind of calling for —a ceasefire.

Now in circulation from some antiwar organizations is what’s described as “a growing list of members of Congress who have publicly called for a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip.” But the basis for listing those names—56 House members and four senators—ranges from solid to flimsy.

A case in point is my congressperson, Rep. Jared Huffman of California, whose name is on the list but doesn’t belong there. As ostensible documentation, the list provides a link to a Nov. 19 social-media post by Huffman stating that a ceasefire would require “Hamas releases all hostages, disarms & relinquishes control of Gaza”—in other words, full surrender by Hamas as a prerequisite for an end to Israel’s mass killing of civilians there.

Several other listed House members, such as Reps. Judy Chu (Calif.), Diana DeGette (Colo.), Teresa Leger Fernandez (N.M.) and Jamie Raskin (Md.), have “publicly called for a ceasefire” only with caveats and preconditions—without calling for the U.S.-backed Israeli government to immediately stop killing Palestinian civilians no matter what.

A lot of members of Congress have taken far worse positions. But we should not be grading on a curve. Constituents need accurate information—so they won’t be under the false impression that they’re being represented by an actual firm supporter of a ceasefire.

Even including the most dubious names that have been put in the category of ceasefire supporters, the current list comprises just 13 percent of the House and 4 percent of the Senate. That’s a measure of just how far we have to go in order to end what amounts to congressional support for Israel’s genocidal war on Palestinians in Gaza.

Outpourings of protests against U.S. support for that war have included large nonviolent actions at bridges, highways, train stations, airports, college campuses, legislatures, and more. Some activists have also confronted members of Congress.

But mostly, congressional supporters of Israeli impunity have been spared the nonviolent confrontations that they deserve. Such confrontations can occur at their office on Capitol Hill, but traveling to Washington is not necessary.

Senators and House members have numerous offices back home that are conveniently located for most of their constituents to visit, picket, and nonviolently disrupt—insisting that support for the mass murder in Gaza is morally unacceptable.

.

by M. Reza Behnam, CounterPunch, January 4, 2024

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Long before South Africa filed a case against Israel at the International Court of Justice on 29 December 2023 over its genocidal war on Gaza, its iconic anti-apartheid leader, Nelson Mandela, who came to embody the struggle for justice worldwide; stated, “Palestine was the greatest moral issue of our time.”  

Three decades have passed since Mandela expressed those sentiments.  They remain as relevant today as they were then.  Perhaps more so.  

Mandela and fellow Black South Africans finally won their fight against apartheid beginning in the 1990s. Palestinians, however, have yet to be free from the shackles and evils of settler-colonial apartheid. 

Palestinians have not lived free in their own country for over 75 years.  On 7 October 2023, they refused to live imprisoned for one more day.  And for three months now, in the rubble of bombed-out buildings in Gaza, they have challenged the powerful U.S.-Israeli war machines.

American politicians and U.S. media—themselves under a form of occupation through intimidation and groupthink—have reluctantly begun to break their silence on Palestine.  They have yet to clearly state that:  Israel is not a democracy, it is an apartheid entity; it is not a promised land, it is a settler-colonial project; it is not a nation under siege, it is an aggressor; it is not defending itself, it is conducting a genocidal war in Gaza.

The American enablers of Israel continue to call the slaughter of civilians and destruction of their homes in densely-populated Gaza a “war.”  Dropping over 40,000 tons of high explosives, some weighing 2,000 pounds, capable of killing and wounding people more than 1,198 feet away, must be described for what it truly is—Israel’s quest to systematically annihilate an entire population. 

Seizing a people’s homeland is comparable to robbing them of their identity, history, culture and future. All of which Israel has tried to do since it declared statehood on Palestinian land in 1948.  

Through their ongoing resistance, Palestinians have denied the Zionists their dream of an “Eretz” Greater Israel.  Not on our land, they say.  

Palestinian identity remained steadfast under Ottoman rule, during the British Mandate from 1922 to 1948 and has grown stronger under Israeli apartheid.  They have a deep relationship with the land of Filastin (Arabic for Palestine), in existence for over 3,000 years.  With the introduction of Islam (in 7th century AD), it has been the nucleus of the Islamic world, a sacred land with Al-Quds (Jerusalem) its spiritual, geographical and political center. 

Creating an ethno-nationalist state on the ruins of Palestine, as we see in Gaza today, is not new to the Zionist project.  Statehood at any cost was the primary objective of Israel’s founders, regardless of the casualties. 

The genocide we are witnessing in Gaza is the culmination of over a century of European imperialism, European Zionism and American collusion and deception.  Expulsion and erasure are entrenched in Zionist history and is a pervasive sentiment in Israeli society today. 

Zionist colonization and the roots of erasure began with the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire following the First World War.  After the war, the newly-created League of Nations granted Britain and France colonial authority (called mandates) over former Ottoman territories.  

Under Article 22 of the 1920 Covenant of the League, the Fertile Crescent—present-day Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan (then Transjordan) and Palestine—were to be governed until such time as they could become independent.  All of the mandate countries achieved varying degrees of independence, except for Palestine.  

A small cadre of influential European Zionists labored to make sure that Palestine remained under British control, knowing that the British Mandate for Palestine (officially adopted in 1922) incorporated the principles of the Balfour Declaration—a 109-word letter, authored by British foreign minister, Arthur James Balfour, declaring his government’s support for the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine.  From the start, and throughout, the people of Palestine were never consulted.  

The mandate system specifically stated that the territory entrusted to the mandated power be developed for the benefit of the native people.  In Palestine, however, instead of working in support of the Palestinians, the British, in collusion with European Zionists, established the framework and institutions for the creation of an eventual Jewish state on Palestinian land.  For example,  Article 2 of the Mandate reads: “The Mandatory shall be responsible for placing the country under such political, administrative and economic conditions as will secure the establishment of the Jewish national home….”  Promotion of Jewish immigration into Palestine was also a mandate provision.  

Additionally, Article 4  recognized the Zionist Jewish Agency as the public body to advise and cooperate with them (the British) in the administration of Palestine to affect the Jewish state.  

No where in the mandate’s 28 articles was there any reference to the Palestinians as a people or to their national or political rights.  The British mandate essentially legalized their erasure.  

After years of conflict, Britain terminated its mandate on 14 May 1948.   On that same day, Israel proclaimed its “independence,” and set in motion its “Plan Dalet” expulsion policy—euphemism for ethnic cleansing—to destroy Palestinian towns and villages and to repopulate them with Jews.

Russian-born Ze’ev Jabotinsky, influential Revisionist Zionist who provided the ideological map for Israel’s future Likud Party, expressed those same sentiments. Aware of the financial limitations of European Jewry, Jabotinsky wrote in November 1939  to a fellow party member: “We should instruct American Jewry to mobilize half a billion dollars in order that Iraq and Saudi Arabia will absorb the Palestinian Arabs….The Arabs must make room for the Jews in Eretz Israel.  If it was possible to transfer the Baltic peoples, it is also possible to move the Palestinian Arabs.”

Plan Dalet and what Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, referred to in 1938 as “compulsory transfer,” is clearly Israel’s scheme to depopulate Gaza.   

Unlike the Nakba of 1948 when 780,000 Palestinians were violently forced from their ancestral land, the Israeli regime cannot furtively carry out mass expulsions of Gaza’s population as it did then.  It has, therefore, resorted to making Gaza uninhabitable and unable to support life.  To destroy the collective memory of the Palestinians, the Israeli military has obliterated entire neighborhoods, so there will be nothing recognizable; nothing to return to.   

By denying the people of Gaza food, water, medicine, electricity and fuel, some Israeli officials, like retired Major General Giora Eiland–who continues to advise Israel’s defense minister—sees the spread of disease as a tool of war.  Eiland callously remarked, “Severe epidemics in the South of the Gaza Strip will bring victory closer.”  

Israel’s plan is to make life so unbearable, that the people of Gaza will have no choice but to leave or die.  To effect its scheme, the Israeli regime has been laying the groundwork and attempting to build international support for permanent mass expulsions of Gaza’s civilians to neighboring Egypt and Jordan; thus far rejected by both countries. 

Although he later changed course on Israel’s displacement plan, Biden had initially given Tel Aviv the green light to conduct ethnic cleansing in Gaza.  On 11 October, Secretary of State Antony Blinken confirmed that the administration was working with Egypt and Israel to create what he called a “humanitarian corridor” in the Sinai for Palestinians fleeing Gaza.  And on 20 October, an official funding request was sent to Congress to “address potential needs of Gazans fleeing to neighboring countries.”  

President Biden is one among many U.S. presidents who have shamelessly and brazenly embraced Israel.  The United States has been deeply implicated in Israel’s crimes against humanity from the beginning.  On 14 May 1948, President Harry S. Truman hastily issued a statement officially recognizing the new state of Israel—the first world leader to do so.  He released it to the press without first notifying his top ranking State Department officials and U.S. delegates to the United Nations.

In the foreword to Israel Shahak’s 1994 book, Jewish History, Jewish Religion, Gore Vidal writes that “John F. Kennedy told me how in 1948 Harry S. Truman had been pretty much abandoned by everyone when he came to run for president. Then an American Zionist brought him two million dollars in cash, in a suitcase, aboard his whistle-stop campaign train.  That’s why our recognition of Israel was rushed through so fast.”  

Since 1948, influential pro-Israel lobby groups have spent millions of dollars to insure that U.S. politicians never stray from supporting Israel. Their lobbying has also come to define the American political landscape.  Biden, for example, who prides himself on being an honorary Zionist, has been the number one recipient of Israel lobby money.  For his implacable support, he has, since 1990, received $4,346,264 from pro-Israel groups.  

While publicly stating that it has stressed to the Zionist regime the importance of minimizing civilian casualties, the White House continues to provide the Israeli military with the bombs it has been using to exterminate an imprisoned population.  For the second time in December 2023, Blinken has approved the “emergency” sale of weapons to Israel; once again bypassing Congress.  Despite civilian deaths nearing 23,000, with over 57,000 wounded and 24,000-25,000 children made orphans by Israeli bombs, Blinken approved another “emergency” sale of weapons amounting to $147.5 million.

Contradicting his promise to “restore the soul of America,” Biden has thrown the country’s power and reputation behind the supremacist Israeli regime; a regime determined to erase the Palestinian people.  His decisions to shield, finance and militarily involve the United States in Israel’s war crimes is incomprehensible. It is unclear how America’s short-term, long-term or moral interests are served by Biden’s policies.   

Israel’s barbarity has exposed its “might makes right” ethos, defined in the core writings of Jabotinsky, who set in motion Israel’s ideology of force.  Israel’s war on Gaza has also revealed the callousness of the U.S. government, well disposed to finance Israel’s genocide.   

In his 1923 essay, “The Iron Wall,” Jabotinsky argued that morality and conscience could not dictate Zionist policy and that extremism and force were integral to accomplishing Jewish statehood.  His directive read: “Zionism is a colonizing adventure and therefore it stands or falls by the question of armed force,” and that,  “It is important to build, it is important to speak Hebrew, but unfortunately, it is even more important to be able to shoot….”    

Israel’s birth certificate has been stained with the blood of Palestinians.  It has no place in the Middle East until it puts down the gun and rejects the ideology of force and exclusion. 

For over a century, Palestinians have endured untold injustices orchestrated by Britain, Israel and the United States.  The horrific crimes done to them can only be undone when the ongoing Nakba is ended and their fight against apartheid leads to a free Palestine.

 Omar Karmi, The Electronic Intifada, 2 January 2024

As Israel’s genocidal violence in Gaza slouches towards the three-month mark, an end seems nowhere in sight.

To the outside world, Israel’s leadership has repeatedly warned of a many months-long assault.

On Christmas Day, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stipulated three war aims for a US audience, aims that are entirely lacking any diplomatic horizon.

Domestically, however, the more honest talk is of ethnic cleansing, “voluntary” or otherwise.

It is the latter discourse to which attention should be paid. Unlike the three aims Netanyahu posited in the Wall Street Journal on Christmas Day – the destruction of Hamas, the demilitarization of Gaza and the “deradicalization” of Palestinian society – ethnic cleansing has a definable end game.

It is also a logical outcome of Israeli policies over many decades, not just in occupied territory but domestically. Having “settled” the land-for-peace formula by building colonies across occupied territory to prevent any independent Palestinian entity from emerging, Israel has left itself with the option of either indefinite military occupation or formal annexation.

7 October put paid to the idea of indefinite occupation.

Formal annexation under current demographic realities, however, leaves population parity, and either an apartheid state or a state with equal rights for Jews and non-Jews.

If Israel had ever been interested in the latter formula, the Palestine issue would have been long resolved.

A second Nakba

Ideologically, Zionism is not about equality, but about exclusive Jewish statehood in Palestine. That demands an unassailable Jewish majority and a sufficiently diluted, disempowered and thus manageable minority.

So, like in 1948, when Zionist militias expelled two thirds of Palestine’s native population, Israel is now sensing a chance for a repeat.

Israel’s military strategy on the ground certainly points to a deliberate effort at ejecting Gaza’s population south to Egypt, while rendering Gaza unlivable and return impossible.

Israel’s bombardment of Gaza has been among the most destructive and deadly in history, leaving some 70 percent of homes in the besieged territory damaged or destroyed.

The bombardment has destroyed mosques, churches, offices, bakeries, farmland, government buildings, cultural centers, UN facilities, universities and schools.

Some 22,000 people have been killed, according to the official death toll, the vast majority women and children, and just 13 hospitals out of 36 are left “partially functioning” to attend to more than 55,000 injured people.

The military has been pushing 1.9 million people – 85 percent of Gaza’s population – progressively south, first below Wadi Gaza and now, as it targets Khan Younis, to Rafah.

Having cut food, water, electricity and fuel supplies to Gaza, allowing in only a trickle of aid, 93 percent of Palestinians in Gaza now face starvation and malnutrition, while “soaring rates” of infectious diseases are flourishing in the unsanitary conditions of overcrowded, repurposed shelters.

Rafah, on the border with Egypt, had a population of 280,000 in October. Now, that number has swelled to 850,000.

There is nowhere left to go in Gaza. And while Egypt has been clear it will not allow Palestinians to be removed to its side of the border, it will be impossible for Cairo to resist the pressure if, and when, people start to die of hunger or disease.

Surrender or die?

Of course, Israel still needs to get to that point. The result in war is “never absolute,” war theorist Carl von Clausewitz long ago argued, and there is no other endeavor “so constantly and so generally in close connection with chance.”

Well-prepared and well-drilled Hamas fighters are uncowed and unrelenting, slowing the Israeli military’s advance and inflicting more casualties than the army is willing to admit.

Having told Hamas to surrender or die, Israel has only motivated Gaza’s resistance to fight to the finish.

As Mike Tyson – a less conventional philosopher of war – put it: It’s hard to beat somebody that doesn’t want to quit.

Moreover, Israel’s unhinged aggression is reverberating through the region.

Hizballah has kept Israel under military pressure from South Lebanon where fighting is sharpening, Yemen’s Houthis have disrupted global shipping, and in both Syria – which Israel has been freely bombing for years – and Iraq there have been several attacks against US forces.

US allies, such as Jordan and Egypt are under intense domestic pressure, and both have been vocal in condemning Israeli excesses and adamant in rejecting any suggestion that Palestinians be removed from their homeland.

Saudi Arabia has dropped any hint of normalization with Israel and even the countries of the Abraham Accords, notably the United Arab Emirates, have learnt that for all their attempts at currying favor in Washington, they do not and will not have the same purchase in America’s corridors of power as supporters of Israel.

American delusion

Growing regional instability will necessarily factor into Israel’s calculations.

It will factor even more into US calculations, where its attempt at a “coalition of the willing” to counter Yemen’s shipping blockade is foundering.

So far, and despite the many and grotesque Israeli war crimes, Washington has stood solidly by Israel, repeatedly vetoing resolutions calling for a ceasefire at the UN.

It early deployed war ships to the Mediterranean to deter actors like Hizballah from getting involved.

It has kept Israel’s munitions stores stocked. As late as 29 December, the Biden administration even circumvented Congress to send munitions to Israel, the second time it did so last month.

There is no suggestion Washington – despite calling for a lower intensity “stabilization phase” – is intending to seriously intervene any time soon, even though it is inconceivable that the US does not understand what Israel is doing.

In a country where the phrase “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is so controversial that Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib got censured by Congress for using it, while actual calls for genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from other members of Congress and presidential candidates go unremarked, that may not be surprising.

Indeed, Joe Biden seems to think of the whole thing as some sort of game, while his chief diplomat, Antony Blinken appears deluded about America’s role in the world.

Israel and the US are increasingly isolated globally, as countries around the world recoil not only from an unfolding genocide, but from Washington’s willing complicity and America’s complete disregard for the UN, its institutions and its rules.

This matters, even to Washington.

The impotence of the world body in the face of US intransigence is undermining any semblance of international order with potentially long-lasting consequences that reach far beyond Palestine.

A ticking clock

That South Africa should be the first country to invoke the Genocide Convention is hardly surprising.

After all, Israel, the US and the UK (which is also offering material support for Israel’s onslaught in Gaza) were among the last countries to stand by South Africa’s apartheid regime.

And while the deliberations of the International Court of Justice will take time, they have Israeli officials concerned already. Israel reached immediately for the anti-Semitism defense, as it does so often.

Unlike the International Criminal Court, which is tasked with investigating claims of war crimes but whose jurisdiction is not recognized by Israel, Israel is a signatory to the Genocide Convention.

Israel could of course ignore any injunction from the ICJ for Israel to cease fire. And the US could continue to protect it against any potential sanctions that might follow.

But international pressure is growing along with regional tensions, suggesting Israel is running out of time.

The resistance in Gaza, battered as it may be, is still standing.

And Washington is going to have to decide soon where it stands on ethnic cleansing.

Israel has been clear about its intentions. The clock is ticking.

Omar Karmi is associate editor of The Electronic Intifada and a former Jerusalem and Washington, DC, correspondent for The National newspaper.