From undermining Iran’s new reformist leader to killing off Gaza ceasefire talks, the Hamas leader’s assassination strengthens Israel’s hand
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks to a joint meeting of Congress at the US Capitol in Washington, DC, 24 July 2024 (Roberto Schmidt/AFP)
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Last week’s assassinations by Israel of Hezbollah’s top military commander, Fuad Shukr, and Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh have brought the region to the precipice of all-out war.
Actually, the region is already at war. But so far it has been a controlled, carefully calibrated conflict – tit-for-tat, cat-and-mouse.
These institutions were founded to prevent a repetition of the Nazi Holocaust. Instead, they have failed to prevent the genocide in Gaza.
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They have failed because those western nations which established these protocols have abandoned them.
The US, Germany, the UK and others have armed Israel. They have lent political and moral support to the killing. They have done virtually nothing to stop it. The collapse of this international order is their fault.
Escalation of conflict
The New York Times, citing unspecified “Middle Eastern” sources, recently reported that Haniyeh was killed by a bomb smuggled months earlier into the Tehran guesthouse where he was staying.
I believe it is likely that this information came via the Mossad, as one of the reporters on the piece, Ronen Bergman, is known to have close ties with the Israeli intelligence agency – and only the Mossad would have such granular, detailed knowledge of the assassination scheme.
The NYT does not say how the device purportedly entered the guest house, nor how it was placed in the room. If correct, the type of access this operation demanded seems to indicate that the Mossad had a highly placed and trusted mole in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) apparatus.
IRGC officials have vehemently denied the Times’ account. They claim that an Israeli missile or drone was used.
Haniyeh killing: What will Hamas look like after the political leader’s death?
They also raise the possibility that Israel was able to pinpoint Haniyeh’s location by installing spyware on his mobile phone, which offered GPS data enabling the attack. A senior Hamas official present in the building also refuted the Times’ account.
This Israeli assassination was directed at its chief regional adversary, Iran. It may also have been intended to undermine the political standing of its newly inaugurated reformist president, Masoud Pezeshkian.
Israel prefers hardline leadership, as its interests dictate regional instability and the escalation of conflict.
The killing is also an affront to the Biden administration’s attempts to negotiate a Gaza ceasefire. For months, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been sabotaging repeated proposals put forward by Qatari mediators and US officials. He did so because he needs the war to retain power.
A former US intelligence officer who resigned in protest over US policy towards Gaza says Israel is seeking a war against Hezbollah for “political purposes”. This too would advance the prime minister’s political interests.
Killing Haniyeh kills the ceasefire talks. Hamas may never return to the table. This is precisely what Netanyahu wants – a war without end.
Consummate timing
The Biden administration has embarrassed itself in the aftermath of the killing, claiming it was neither involved in, nor even aware of, the assassination.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken later offered a bromide which refused to acknowledge the disastrous impact Haniyeh’s murder would have on prospects of a ceasefire.
“It’s urgent that all parties make the right choices in the days ahead, because those choices are the difference between staying on this path of violence, of insecurity, of suffering, or moving to something… much better for all parties concerned,” Blinken said.
“A ceasefire is… in the interests of Israelis; it’s in the interests of Palestinians. It’s in the interests of the region. So as long as everyone is focused on what their core interests actually are… we will reach a deal.”
Clearly, Netanyahu doesn’t agree with this assessment of Israel’s interests.
Netanyahu timed the assassination with consummate precision: just after his grand address to the joint session of US Congress, where he sang his own and Israel’s praises.
He also exploited political turmoil in Washington, where a weak US leader has recently been forced to drop out of the presidential race.
The Israeli premier banked on the administration being unable or unwilling to mount opposition to, or criticise, the deed (which was the case). Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris has no policy-making authority, even if she wished to set out a different approach.
The Israeli premier has given the Democrats a black eye, despite their robust support for Israel’s attacks on Gaza and Lebanon.
Insult to national honour
Iran’s Grand Ayatollah Khamenei convened an emergency national security meeting within five hours of the killing. He ordered Iranian retaliation, although it’s unclear what that entails.
Clearly, Tehran intends to land a powerful blow to avenge this insult to its national honour. That could entail Iran’s closest regional ally, Hezbollah, striking Israel as well. Once this happens, Israel can be expected to launch its own retaliatory response.
Israel has sought a war with Hezbollah since 7 October 2023. In fact, its defence minister, Yoav Gallant, urged a pre-emptive strike against the Lebanese militia before attacking Hamas. But this plan was abandoned in the face of US opposition.
He did so because Hezbollah is a far more powerful adversary than Hamas. It can rain tens of thousands of advanced missiles down on Israel’s major cities, including Tel Aviv (where the Israeli military’s headquarters are located) and Haifa.
Ismail Haniyeh killing: A moment of truth for the Middle East
These attacks and counter-attacks could lead to an all-out regional war. If Israel launched direct air attacks on Iranian soil, Iran would likely take this as a casus belli. Then we would face a conflict over which no one would have control. The physical damage and death toll would be enormous.
Nor would it be confined to Israel and Iran. All of the latter’s allies in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen would be drawn in too.
On the other side, the US promises to become a direct combatant in the first Middle East regional conflict since the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, with Axios reporting that Blinken held a conference call on 4 August with G7 foreign ministers, in which he told them to expect an Iranian-Hezbollah attack in the next 24 hours.
Biden has assured Netanyahu of military support against such an attack and promised to increase the US military presence. The US defence secretary, Lloyd Austin, expanded on the naval and air force resources to be sent to the region: “The US is sending a carrier strike group, a fighter squadron and additional warships to the Middle East as the region braces for an Iranian retaliation,” noted a CNN report.
The American administration’s policy flies in the face of US public opinion, which opposes Biden’s and Israel’s approaches to the conflict.
Americans don’t want to be dragged into yet another Middle East war – one the president is promoting, knowingly or unknowingly.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
Richard Silverstein writes the Tikun Olam blog, devoted to exposing the excesses of the Israeli national security state. His work has appeared in Haaretz, the Forward, the Seattle Times and the Los Angeles Times. He contributed to the essay collection devoted to the 2006 Lebanon war, A Time to Speak Out (Verso) and has another essay in the collection, Israel and Palestine: Alternate Perspectives on Statehood (Rowman & Littlefield) Photo of RS by: (Erika Schultz/Seattle Times)
After failing to achieve his military objectives, the indicted war criminal travelled to the US to incite a war against Iran and prolong his genocidal campaign in Gaza
The first US response to the double assassinations this week in Beirut and Tehran came from Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin on 31 July.
In the wake of Israel’s targeted killing of Hamas political bureau head Ismail Haniyeh in Iran and Hezbollah’s top military commander Fuad Shukr in Lebanon, Austin reiterated the US’s “unwavering support” for Israel and pledged to come to its defence if attacked.
As Israel ramps up its military provocations, it is now more apparent than ever that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s bellicose address in Congress last week was the opening salvo of a wider regional war – to the rapturous applause of US lawmakers.
Indeed, in the days before and after Netanyahu’s visit to Washington, the Israeli regime attacked and killed scores of civilians in Hodeidah port in Yemen, Majdal Shams in the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan Heights and the southern Dahiya neighbourhood of Beirut in Lebanon, and crossed a new threshold by assassinating Haniyeh in Tehran.
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This escalation has taken place as Palestinians mark 300 days of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, in which at least 50,000 people were killed or buried beneath the rubble and more than 100,000 injured.
Over the past week, many observers have speculated that Netanyahu’s congressional address and his subsequent meetings with President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, Donald Trump and other US officials gave him the green light to continue Israel’s rampage unabated.
In Congress, Netanyahu stated his objectives for an all-out war in no uncertain terms
Regardless, however, of what was spoken behind closed doors, Netanyahu stated his objectives for an all-out war in no uncertain terms.
The indicted war criminal, who has failed to achieve his military objectives in Gaza, arrived in Washington to drum up war against Iran and prolong his genocidal campaign against the Palestinians.
So if Netanyahu took advantage of his visit to expand the war – the disastrous results of which the world had already seen this week – then why was he invited to Washington in the first place?
What lies did the aspiring regional hegemon tell Congress to sell his devious plans, and how did he get away with it?
Saving face
The congressional address on 24 July was Netanyahu’s first international trip since he waged his genocidal campaign in Gaza last October.
Even though the Israeli prime minister was indicted on several corruption charges by his own Zionist regime and is facing arrest for war crimes and crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court (ICC), US congressional leaders extended an invitation to him anyway.
Netanyahu spoke before a joint session of Congress for an unprecedented fourth time.
Only a failing US empire would be so blind as to cheer Netanyahu and his genocide
This was an “honour” not even afforded to the British imperialist statesman and one of the iconic leaders of World War Two, Winston Churchill, who addressed the US Congress three times during his tenure (in 1941, 1943 and 1952).
Remarkably, all of the invitations to the belligerent Israeli prime minister were extended by Republican House Speakers during the terms of Democratic presidents, namely Bill Clinton in 1996, Barack Obama in 2011 and 2015 and Joe Biden in 2024.
Each occasion was a sinister Republican attempt to showcase their pro-Israel fidelity for political gain against their Democratic rivals.
During his last address at the United Nations General Assembly in September 2023, Netanyahu boasted about Israel’s perceived invincibility and its pivotal role as the anchor for the region’s security, stability and economic prosperity.
In the UN speech, he had entirely erased Palestinians and their plight as he held up a map in which Israel was drawn up to include all of the territories of historic Palestine.
A line was drawn that extended from India through the Persian Gulf, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Jordan to the port of Haifa in Israel and from there to Europe. Dubbing it the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (Imec), Netanyahu bragged that Israel would play a central role in this new geopolitical structure. But the whole scheme may unravel in the aftermath of the Hamas October attacks.
Unable to achieve any of his military and political objectives after waging an all-out genocidal war in Gaza, Netanyahu is in trouble not only at home but also internationally because of his conduct in the war. The world is no longer able to look away. As the mass murder reaches unprecedented numbers, as some estimates say, the total number of victims could reach as many as a staggering 186,000 dead.
That’s almost eight percent of Gaza’s population, with over 70 percent of the victims being women and children.
By comparison, one of the worst civilian atrocities during the Second World War was carried out by the Allies against the German city of Dresden in 1945. It resulted in about 30,000 dead out of 1.2 million, or less than three percent of its population.
In the 55-minute speech, Netanyahu was applauded almost 80 times by some servile members of Congress, who seemed to be hanging on his every word (exceeding the previous record of 58 applauds in 2015).
While half of the Democratic members of both chambers of Congress boycotted the speech, including prominent congressional leaders (131 boycotting versus 128 attending), only one Republican congressman shunned the event, Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky (out of 268 Republican House members and senators).
Iranians hold portraits of late Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh during his funeral procession, in Tehran, on 1 August ahead of his burial in Qatar (AFP)
Netanyahu’s performance was pathetic and full of flagrant lies and hubris on many levels. It was not lost that he was trying to resemble what US presidents usually do during their annual State of the Union addresses. He flaunted several Israeli soldiers and former hostages, sharing fabricated tales of valour amid one of the most humiliating and humbling days in the history of the Zionist regime.
He claimed to have freed or reclaimed 135 captives and dead bodies, disguising the fact that only five were freed through military operations. Many more, in fact, were killed either by Israel’s bombing of Gaza or by Israeli soldiers during failed rescue attempts.
Meanwhile, 110 of the captives were released last November through a negotiated deal, which had been offered by the Palestinian resistance in the early days of the conflict.
Needless to say, had Netanyahu been serious about a deal to free the captives, he would not have killed the chief Palestinian negotiator this week.
He did not acknowledge the fact that no other deal to free the remaining Israeli captives has been reached due to his continuous refusal to end the war or withdraw from Gaza as demanded not only by the Palestinians but also by UN Security Council resolution 2728 of last March, as well as the UN General Assembly resolution of last December.
Doing so could result in him being held accountable for the 7 October attacks, triggering new elections and his possible ouster in disgrace as prime minister.
Netanyahu has also vehemently rejected all rulings by the International Court of Justice (ICJ), issued in January, March and May, to stop the genocidal war, as well as the ICJ advisory opinion issued in July regarding the illegality of the Israeli occupation of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and the demand to end it.
Third-rate con artist
Netanyahu tried to demonstrate strength and resolve by declaring that he would not stop the war unless achieving what he called “total victory.”
He defined that term as total Hamas surrendering in defeat, supplanting their rule in Gaza with collaborators or compliant Palestinians, and freeing all the Israeli captives without any prisoner exchange.
These demands did not take into account the realities on the ground, where his army has failed miserably to achieve a military victory after 10 months of wreaking havoc on Gaza’s civilian population and causing massive destruction to the strip.
Netanyahu used bait-and-switch tactics before riveted members of Congress who acted like extras in a poorly scripted play featuring a third-rate con artist
In fact, Netanyahu used bait-and-switch tactics before riveted members of Congress who acted like extras in a poorly scripted play featuring a third-rate con artist.
He started his speech by invoking the 9/11 tragedy, saying what happened on 7 October was the equivalent of 29 9/11s when adjusted to the US population. What went unsaid is that what has happened to Palestinians in Gaza since October is equivalent to 2,900 9/11s when adjusting to the population. In other words, what Netanyahu and his army have done in Gaza is equivalent to killing 7.5 million Americans, injuring 22 million Americans, and destroying all American civilian life and infrastructure.
Perhaps one of his most blatant lies was to assert that his invasion of Rafah last May, while killing “1,203” resistance fighters, “accidentally” caused a few civilian casualties.
Ordinary observers would have to suspend their mental faculties or live in an alternate universe to believe such nonsense.
As the images of thousands of women, children and civilian body parts are shown every day before the whole world, only puppets and stooges masquerading as members of Congress would enable an unhinged certified liar to make fools out of them as they applaud him in unison.
One of the most pathetic moments of this spectacle was when Netanyahu stopped them from applauding until he reached his punch line. They acquiesced immediately.
Debunked lies
The racism and ethnosupremacy that this Israeli sociopath displayed during his congressional appearance was incredible.
Ismail Haniyeh killing: Netanyahu’s only goal is to set the region on fire
Netanyahu had the audacity to talk about the “sanctity of life” upheld by the Israelis and the “culture of death” by Muslims.
Such proclamations come from a genocidal maniac who is prosecuting a war that UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said has caused suffering on an “unprecedented” level – the worst he’s seen in his seven-year tenure – which has claimed tens of thousands of lives in the tiny enclave, displaced 85 percent of its population and rendered Gaza uninhabitable.
For months, Netanyahu prevented all aid from entering the Gaza Strip, including food and medicine to over two million people, prompting famine, starvation and communicable diseases.
He claimed, against uncontroverted evidence, that Israel never prevented essential aid of food and medicine from entering the doomed Gaza Strip and that 40,000 aid trucks have entered Gaza since last October.
But what he failed to mention was that, according to the United Nations, the number of trucks that used to enter Gaza before he imposed his total blockade was 500 per day, which were less than the needed supplies for a land-locked strip blockaded by the Zionist regime since 2007.
This means that out of a minimum of 150,000 truckloads that should have been allowed since Israel waged its war on Gaza, less than 27 percent of the needs had been delivered.
Adding to this is the loss of the entire agricultural and industrial production and the cutting off of electricity and energy supplies, creating a situation in Gaza that is nothing short of catastrophic.
All of these facts were omitted in the fairytale Netanyahu presented. He also continued to peddle the lie that Hamas was stealing the humanitarian aid, a charge that UN officials have already rejected. And, of course, his own army and extremist settlers have been blocking supply trucks and attacking aid workers for months.
Political theatre
Netanyahu’s congressional address was an act of shameless theatre set up by the Israeli leader himself and his cronies in the US, who are backed by the Israel lobby, primarily the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac).
Its main goal was to send an image of a strong and defiant leader to a sceptical and shaken Israeli public.
If anything, the havoc and hell Netanyahu has been inflicting on Gaza over the past 10 months could not have happened without unprecedented US support
With no political and military achievements in Gaza to his name or any willingness to change course, Netanyahu instead has been trying to escalate the conflict and drag the US into a regional war.
However, the US has repeatedly claimed that it is trying to avoid this Middle East conflagration at all costs since it would disrupt its global responsibilities and derail its geopolitical strategies. It could also result in an overwhelming Democratic defeat in the November elections.
Netanyahu claimed that the US needs to give Israel the “tools needed to finish the job”, insinuating that the US administration has been withholding the arms that Israel seeks. It is, of course, a false charge designed to divert blame for his lack of victory, let alone the “total victory” he’s been advocating.
If anything, the havoc and hell he has been inflicting on Gaza over the past 10 months could not have happened without unprecedented American support.
Such aid by the US and its western allies for Israel’s war against defenceless Palestinians included massive armaments that exceeded in total the destructive value of five Hiroshima-size bombs – including “smart” bombs, artillery shells, missiles, fighter jets – in addition to intelligence services, massive economic aid, diplomatic protection, political cover and the support of a compliant mainstream media and elite political class.
A man carries children as people inspect the damage following Israeli bombardment at al-Bureij refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip on 23 July (Eyad Baba/AFP)
Citing the US arming its allies during World War Two as an example, Netanyahu claimed that the faster the Zionist regime could receive arms, the faster it could finish the job.
What he didn’t say was that the Allies could not finish the job with US weapons alone. They needed the massive US army to fight alongside them, resulting in the eventual loss of more than 400,000 American soldiers.
Beating the war drums
Netanyahu spent about a third of his speech beating the drums of war against Iran.
Ismail Haniyeh killing: A moment of truth for the Middle East
He claimed that Iran was responsible for all of Israel’s troubles – not its occupation of Palestine, its denial of Palestinian rights or its construction of illegal settlements on stolen Palestinian lands. Israel’s policies of dehumanisation and dispossession of the Palestinians, the Judaisation of Muslim holy sanctuaries and daily incursions of Palestinian towns, villages and camps, assassinating hundreds and detaining thousands of Palestinians are also not to blame.
This record, detailed in the recent ICJ ruling a few weeks ago, was expediently dismissed in Netanyahu’s speech as he condemned the ICJ and ICC rulings to yet more cheers from his audience.
Such condemnations not only ignore facts that are overwhelmingly recognised globally but also significantly undermine the rules-based order the US has been allegedly trying to enforce for decades.
Netanyahu brazenly carried on with his lies by claiming that the Israeli army was the most moral army in history. In fact, his army has been perpetrating the worst war crimes record since World War Two, according to the top European diplomat Josep Borrell.
In fact, because of the conduct of this most immoral army in decades, the ICC prosecutor has called for his indictment and arrest along with his partner in crime, Defence Minister Yoav Gallant.
“Israel’s enemies are the US’s enemies,” Netanyahu asserted, making his objective very clear: to incite against Iran and implore American policymakers to support or even wage a US war against Iran. He also called for the creation of a regional coalition that he dubbed the “Abraham Alliance”. It would include America’s Arab allies that would join Israel’s dangerous war against Iran and its allies in the resistance axis.
If the US lost thousands of lives, trillions of dollars, and suffered a tarnished reputation and a geopolitical setback in Iraq, how much will it lose to an even more devastating war with Iran?
This agitation was reminiscent of the rhetoric used over two decades ago against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, now resurrected to drum a war against Iran.
Given Israel’s recent attacks on Yemen, Syria, Lebanon and Iran, it seems that Netanyahu’s plan has already been set in motion.
In contradiction to its own stated interest of not expanding the war into a wider conflict, the US continues to be dragged further into Israel’s war.
Following the assassinations and expected retaliation by Hezbollah and Iran, the US deployed 12 warships in the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf on Thursday. It also follows the US and its western and Arab allies bailing out Israel during Iran’s retaliatory strikes in April.
If the US lost thousands of lives, trillions of dollars and suffered a tarnished reputation and a geopolitical setback in Iraq, how much will it lose to an even more devastating war with Iran?
The degree of such Zionist hubris is breathtaking.
‘Useful idiots’
For many Americans, perhaps the most insulting claim in a stream of falsehoods was Netanyahu’s sensationalist and totally baseless assertion that the massive anti-genocide protests across US cities and college campuses were instigated and paid for by Iran.
Despite there being no evidence to support this outrageous charge, members of Congress applauded him, while making a mockery of the sacred First Amendment protections, constitutional rights and rich tradition of campus anti-war activism and dissent.
In 2007, American academics John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt argued in their book, The Israel Lobby and American Foreign Policy, that the only plausible explanation for the US’s calamitous policy in the Middle East and the submission of many American politicians to Israeli policies and interests, which often contravene America’s strategic interests and stated principles, is the grip the Israel lobby, led by Aipac, has over US politicians.
Why blaming the Israel lobby for western Middle East policies is misguided
Years earlier, in 1992, American author and former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan condemned “Israel and its Amen Corner” as he referred to American politicians under Aipac’s influence. He further described Congress as “Israeli-occupied territories”.
After more than 30 years, the circus displayed last Wednesday afternoon had all but confirmed those strong words. The physical military Israeli occupation may be in Palestine, but there is arguably one of a different nature on Capitol Hill as well.
While the US’s imperialist designs and other military interests contribute to this support, the blind enthusiastic reception of a war criminal and one of the most hawkish Israeli leaders by US politicians signals the impact of the lobby, which has also long advocated for war against Iran.
Within a week of Netanyahu’s address, some US politicians are openly calling for US involvement in Netanyahu’s hegemonic war.
During a phone call with the Israeli prime minister, Biden once again reaffirmed his support for Israel while pledging to continue to support and defend the Zionist regime. Meanwhile, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham introduced a war powers bill on Thursday that called for a direct US attack on Iran while further urging Israel to bomb Iranian oil refineries during a Fox News appearance.
While Netanyahu insulted countless Americans who are vehemently protesting his war of genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza – and his attempt at regional supremacy – as “useful idiots”, it turned out that the useful idiots were not outside the halls of Congress but enthusiastically celebrating their master in the People’s House.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
People take part in the National march for Palestine in central London organised by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, August 3, 2024
TENS of thousands of Palestine supporters marched in towns and cities across Britain on Saturday in defiance of threats of continuing far-right violence.
In London an estimated 100,000 marched as the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) staged its 17th national demonstration in the capital since Israel began its invasion of Gaza in October last year.
Hundreds turned out in Manchester marking the 300th day of Israel’s genocide in which more than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed including 20,000 children.
Norma Turner, chair of Greater Manchester Friends of Palestine which brings together a dozen Palestine campaign groups in north-west England, said: “Three hundred days — 60 children killed by Israel every day — and we demand our government stops arming Israel.
“We grieve for three children randomly killed in Southport.
“We condemn the fascist thugs trying to cause discord on the back of people’s grief. And we mourn the 40,000 martyrs in Gaza — we will continue to protest and take action until Palestine is free.”
In London PSC coupled its demands for a ceasefire in Gaza and an end to British arms sales to Israel with an appeal for funds to maintain the protests nationwide.
“Saturday’s march cost us over £40,000 to organise. We need to raise more funds to meet this cost and escalate our campaign to end Israel’s genocide in Gaza and system of apartheid across Palestine,” the group said.
PSC also highlighted Israel’s shocking treatment of more than 10,000 Palestinian political prisoners held in its jails.
“Since October Israel has rounded up, detained, stopped and tortured thousands of Palestinians, over 10,000 held in the West Bank alone,” said PSC.
“Last week the UN produced a report which documented the systemic torture and abuse, including rape, of these detainees.
“We also saw a member of the Israeli Knesset claiming that Israeli forces were entitled to use rape against Palestinian detainees and that no action should be taken against those who do. This is the true face of Israel’s genocidal regime.”
PSC will draw up plans to step up its Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign against Israel at a conference in Westminster Central Hall on Saturday August 10.
Prominent Israeli human rights group denounces decision to place victim in a situation where he could face his abusers
Soldiers lock a gate at Sde Teiman detention facility, after Israeli military police arrived as part of an investigation into the suspected abuse of a Palestinian detainee on 29 July (Reuters)
A Palestinian detainee hospitalised in Beersheba after allegedly being raped by Israeli soldiers in Sde Teiman detention centre has been returned to the notorious facility, according to the Israeli news outlet Haaretz.
The prisoner was discharged to a field hospital at Sde Teiman.
He suffered from “a ruptured bowel, a severe injury to his anus, lung damage and broken ribs”, according to Haaretz and Arab48.
On Monday, nine Israeli soldiers at Sde Teiman were arrested on suspicion of raping a Palestinian detainee, sparking a riot when far-right activists and MPs stormed the facility.
The reservists, who are members of Force 100, a unit tasked with guarding the prisoners in Sde Teiman, were brought to the military court at the Beid Lid base for a bail hearing.
They claimed the prisoner attacked them during the search process, according to Haaretz.
Israeli NGO Physicians for Human Rights denounced the prisoner’s return to the facility where he was allegedly abused.
‘Serious ethical and professional failure’
“The return of the detainee to the clinic at Sde Teiman, the facility where he was subjected to torture, is a serious ethical and professional failure of the medical officials and hospital management who were involved in his medical care,” the organisation was quoted as saying in Haaretz.
“Through this decision, the medical teams exposed the detainee to the possibility that he would once again meet the soldiers suspected of raping him, thereby putting his life in danger.”
Yoel Donchin, a doctor at Sde Teiman who has attended the prisoner, was also quoted as saying that he “couldn’t believe an Israeli prison guard could do such a thing”.
He said: “If the state and Knesset [parliament] members think there’s no limit to how much you can abuse prisoners, they should kill them themselves, like the Nazis did, or close the hospitals… If they maintain a hospital only for the sake of defending ourselves at [the International Criminal Court] the Hague, that’s no good.”
About 4,000 Palestinians have been detained from Gaza in Israel since October 2023. Most are detained and interrogated in the enclave but many are brought to Sde Teiman, even if they are a non-combatant.
Torture, rape and murder have all been reported as rife at the facility, one of several facilities where Palestinians have been mistreated for decades.
On 15 July, Israel’s High Court issued a conditional order seeking to close Sde Teiman in response to the reports of abuse there.
The court’s order seeks an explanation as to “why the Sde Teiman detention facility is not operated in accordance with the conditions set forth in the law governing internment of unlawful combatants”.
Twelve US warships are assembled in the region to protect Israel
Dave DeCamp, Antiwar. com, August 1, 2024
President Biden spoke with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday and promised the US would help defend Israel from any reprisal attacks it may face from Iran or its allies in response to recent Israeli escalations.
Iran is vowing revenge for the Israeli assassination of Hamas’s political chief in Tehran, and Hezbollah is warning it will escalate in response to the Israeli strike in Beirut that killed one of its top commanders.
“The President reaffirmed his commitment to Israel’s security against all threats from Iran, including its proxy terrorist groups Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis,” the White House said in a readout of the Biden-Netanyahu call.
Biden also said the US was deploying more military assets to the region. “The President discussed efforts to support Israel’s defense against threats, including against ballistic missiles and drones, to include new defensive US military deployments,” the readout said. The White House said Vice President Kamala Harris was also on the call.
A Pentagon official told The Washington Post that the US had assembled 12 warships in the Middle East that were already in the region to prepare to defend Israel. The aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt and six US Navy destroyers are in the Persian Gulf, while three amphibious ships and two destroyers are in the Eastern Mediterranean.
US officials told Axios that the US is preparing for a direct Iranian attack on Israel and believes it could be bigger than the April 13 missile and drone attack that came in response to the Israeli bombing of the Iranian consulate in Damascus, Syria. The next attack could include Hezbollah and other Iranian allies.
Biden, Harris, and other US officials claim they’re trying to reduce tensions. But unconditional US military aid for Israel and vows to defend Israel no matter what it does in the region only emboldens Netanyahu and leads to more escalations.
Phyllis Bennis says the killing of Haniyeh in Tehran was a deliberate provocation that matches Netanyahu’s longstanding goal of drawing the U.S. into a potential Israel-Iran war.
Ismail Haniyeh speaking in Gaza in April 2012. (Joe Catron, Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0)
A new assassination campaign aimed at Israel’s opponents has erupted across the Middle East, imperiling already shaky Gaza ceasefire talks and threatening an even greater regional expansion of war.
While Israel continues its genocidal attack on desperate Gazans, killing scores, perhaps hundreds just in the last several days, the latest moves were clearly designed to escalate Israel’s war in Gaza and expand the military tensions already simmering on its border with Lebanon, in Syria, Iraq, Yemen and elsewhere into a full-scale war, potentially drawing in both Iran and the United States even more directly.
The lethal attacks on top military and political officials of Hezbollah and Hamas, in Beirut and Tehran respectively within 24 hours, demonstrates the centrality of assassination — and the irrelevance of diplomacy — in Tel Aviv’s strategic calculus.
Tuesday evening in the Lebanese capital, an Israeli airstrike hit the neighborhood of Dahiyeh, destroying a residential building very close to a major hospital, killing and injuring still-unconfirmed numbers of people.
Israel claimed it killed Fuad Shukr, a top military official of Hezbollah, and a close adviser to Hassan Nasrallah, head of the political-military resistance organization in Lebanon. [Hezbollah has confirmed Shukur’s death.]
Just hours before that Israeli strike, U.S. State Department spokesman Vedant Patel said that U.S. officials “do not believe that all-out war is inevitable and we still believe that it can be avoided.” That followed his statement that “our commitment to Israel’s security is ironclad and unwavering against all Iran-backed threats, including Hezbollah, and we are working on a diplomatic solution.”
But the U.S. has made clear by its actions — regardless of some politicians’ rhetorical support for ending the war — that it is not prepared to do the one thing that would result in a permanent ceasefire: stop sending Israel the weapons that enable the war in Gaza.
To the contrary, the possibility of a diplomatic solution was grievously undermined again just hours after the Beirut attack when another airstrike, widely assumed to be Israeli, assassinated the political leader of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, in a guest house in Tehran.
He was visiting the Iranian capital for the inauguration of just-elected Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian. Haniyeh, who had briefly served as prime minister of the Palestinian Authority after Hamas won the 2006 Palestinian elections that were initially welcomed by the United States, lived in exile in Qatar.
In recent months he played a key role in the Qatar-sponsored and U.S.-backed Israeli-Hamas negotiations aimed at ending Israel’s assault on Gaza, ensuring access to humanitarian aid, and releasing illegally held Palestinian prisoners and Israeli hostages.
Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian in 2024. (Khamenei.ir, Wikimedia Commons, C BY 4.0)
All the talk about Washington and Tel Aviv supporting a ceasefire or wanting the hostages returned means little when a top negotiator on the other side can be assassinated with impunity.
Haniyeh was widely recognized as pragmatic and supportive of negotiations; in 2006, just three months after Hamas won the Palestinian election in both Gaza and the West Bank, Haniyeh wrote to then-President George W. Bush urging negotiations between the U.S. and Hamas, and offering acceptance of a two-state solution and a long-term truce with Israel.
The current situation, he wrote, “will encourage violence and chaos in the whole region.” Bush never responded.
The negotiations the Hamas leader was participating in will almost certainly be stalled, if not derailed entirely, as a result of Haniyeh’s killing. The resulting continuation of Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza matches the goal of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has resisted ceasefire efforts and pledged to keep fighting until Hamas is destroyed.
Biden announcing Israel’s three-phase ceasefire proposal for Gaza on May 31. (White House, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)
The likelihood of an expanding regional war is now exponentially higher — with the danger of a much more direct conflict between Israel and Iran, and the possibility of even greater direct U.S. involvement.
The assassination of Haniyeh in Tehran was a deliberate provocation, aimed at forcing an Iranian reaction.
Any government whose intelligence assets were powerful enough to know exactly where the Hamas leader was staying during a temporary visit to the Iranian capital would have known where he lived in Qatar, where an assassination, while of course still illegal, would not have had the same consequences.
Forcing Iran’s hand, particularly at the highly symbolic moment of the inauguration, will severely limit the options for the new president, who has called for renewed negotiations with the United States on nuclear issues and signaled the possibility of reopening the Iran nuclear deal.
Preventing that would match Netanyahu’s longstanding goal of undermining any hint of a U.S.-Iranian rapprochement and bringing the United States directly into a potential Israeli-Iranian war.
While details on the exact nature of the missiles or other kind of projectiles used in the two assassinations have not yet been made public, it is likely that one or both were U.S.-produced and/or U.S.-funded.
In that circumstance, the U.S. complicity in genocide by providing the weapons Israel is using in Gaza, could expand to direct U.S. involvement in what could escalate into a major regional war — exactly the war that U.S. officials claim they are trying to prevent.
The work of the movement for a permanent ceasefire — a ceasefire that includes an end to the killing, the resumption of humanitarian assistance and funding of UNRWA, and an end to U.S. arms transfers to Israel — is about to get a whole lot harder, and a whole lot more urgent.
Phyllis Bennis is a fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies and serves on the national board of Jewish Voice for Peace. Her most recent book is the 7th updated edition of Understanding the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict: A Primer (2018). Her other books include: Understanding the US-Iran Crisis: A Primer (2008) and Challenging Empire: How People, Governments, and the UN Defy US Power (2005).
This article is from Common Dreams and was co-published with Foreign Policy in Focus.
Ignore the sycophants; Joe Biden’s total support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza will define his legacy: a monster with blood on his hands, writes Owen Jones.
Without Joe Biden, one of the worst crimes of our age would not have been possible, writes Owen Jones [photo credit: Lucie Wimetz/TNA]
The response to Joe Biden finally surrendering the Democratic presidential nomination has been instructive.
Since Israel’s genocidal rampage in Gaza began, there has been a common theme in how Western politicians and media outlets have approached the horror: that Palestinian life has little or even no meaningful worth. This has not been subtle.
Sure, this has ranged from the crude — that is, outright genocidal incitement, despite its legal prohibition in the 1948 Genocide Convention — to the lack of concern about tens of thousands slaughtered with Western arms and diplomatic support, not least from the US.
As the farce over Biden’s collapsing mental faculties forced him out, the tributes flooded in. “Having led us out of the worst public health and economic crises in most of our lives, President Joe Biden should be remembered as one of our great leaders,” cooed former US Secretary of State Robert Reich.
“A courageous and selfless decision,” was former Obama official Jon Favreau’s take, in which the President “put the country’s interests ahead of his own” as he had done for the previous four years. “Biden’s legacy as a statesman who defended democracy rather than himself is now cemented”, said one associate professor in global politics at University College London.
Let’s not mince our words: this is nauseating. If you believe that Israel has committed egregious war crimes — those who do not should be regarded as sadistic flat-earthers — then it is not possible to blindly cheer Biden without expressing contempt for Palestinian life.
Without Joe Biden, one of the worst crimes of our age would not have been possible.
Here is a man with a lifelong zealous commitment to Israel: in a fiery speech in 1986, he demanded politicians stop apologising for supporting Israel, and suggested it served US interests so much it would have to be invented if it did not exist.
In the aftermath of the October 7 attacks, Biden used the bully pulpit of the US presidency to spread pro-Israel lies used to build a case for genocide.
There is no dispute that Hamas and other armed groups committed war crimes that day. What Biden specifically claimed was that he saw pictures of children being beheaded. No such pictures exist: the claim that 40 Israeli babies were beheaded spread like wildfire thanks in large part to the US President, and was used to manufacture consent for the genocidal assault which followed.
How Joe Biden bankrolled and incited Israel’s assault on Gaza
While peddling false claims about Hamas atrocities, Biden engaged in atrocity denial in favour of Israel. He told the world in late October: “I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed. I’m sure innocents have been killed, and it’s the price of waging a war.”
As well as dismissing what at the time was over 7,000 killed — including more than 3,000 children — as an inevitable cost of war, he sought to deflect horror at Israel’s butchery.
Gaza’s official statistics had been confirmed in previous Israeli assaults, and in any case, the health ministry released all the names, personal information and Israeli-approved IDs of the killed — but the damage was done.
Here is a man who bypassed Congress twice in the first two months after October 7 to approve emergency weapons sales to Israel. That included 2,000-pound bombs which — as the New York Timesuncovered — had been repeatedly used to slaughter Palestinian civilians in areas designed by Israel as safe zones.
He claimed a major Israeli offensive against Rafah was the red line, but then Israel unleashed it with murderous effect, but Biden judged no red line had been crossed. When dozens of Palestinians were killed in Rafah in May — including children who were burned to death and indeed beheaded by the explosion — the weapons used were US-supplied.
Gaza: We don’t know how, but I know we will rise again
The US has refused to state that a single war crime has been committed by Israel.
Joe Biden’s spokespeople have fallen back on generic responses about asking Israel for further information and even repeatedly expressing confidence in the state’s ability to investigate itself despite all the evidence.
The administration repeatedly echoed Israeli attempts to lie, deflect and muddy the water about atrocities committed by Israel, such as the assault on al-Shifa hospital.
It has taken no action against Israel’s policy of starvation, building a floating pier which repeatedly fell apart and delivered almost no aid before being abandoned, while resisting lawmakers’ demands to make aid conditional on Israel allowing humanitarian aid into Gaza.
Biden ensured the US used its diplomatic power to protect Israel, such as vetoing ceasefire demands from the UN Security Council, while denouncing the attempt by the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, to have arrest warrants issued for Benjamin Netanyahu and his defence minister, Yoav Gallant.
Yes, it would be a reprehensible revision of history to portray this as a Biden-specific problem: the US facilitation of Israel’s bloody dispossession of the Palestinian people is a systemic injustice.
But it is nonetheless notable that Biden has taken a weaker line than right-wing Republican presidents. When Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, Ronald Reagan rang Prime Minister Menachem Begin and condemned a “Holocaust” and demanded the bombing stopped — successfully, as it turned out.
In 2002, George W Bush’s administration condemned Israel for killing Hamas’ most wanted militant, because 14 Palestinian civilians were also killed.
If this world has any justice, Biden will be remembered properly not as a kindly, avuncular if gaffe-prone president, who put his country before his own interests.
Joe Biden is a monster. He has facilitated one of the most obscene crimes of our age. And those blindly praising him are telling the world a message which is loudly received — that they simply do not think Palestinian life matters.
To my surprise, last Thursday morning there was relatively little coverage of the address to the US Congress delivered by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last Wednesday afternoon apart from a critical opinion piece that appeared in the New York Times regarding Israel’s war on the Palestinians. The article, by Megan K. Stack, asserted that “History will cast Mr. Netanyahu’s visit in deservedly ugly tones. He’s not a guest we should aspire to host, but he is a visitor we deserve. Gaza is our war, too, thanks to the indispensable military aid and political cover the US government has lavished on Israel as the death toll climbs… What exploded as a war of retribution against Hamas has looked increasingly like a broader campaign of annihilation — the slaughter of trapped civilians; the excruciating deaths of thousands of children; the destruction of hospitals, schools and much of the civilian infrastructure.”
Polls have shown for months that more Americans disapprove than approve of the Israeli onslaught in Gaza, but Congress and the White House are not interested in the views of the public when they are on the receiving end of hundreds of millions of dollars in “donations” from Jewish billionaires. Much of the coverage of the Netanyahu appearance in the mainstream media was toothless and even adulatory. It generally reflected what was hailed as Bibi’s “fiery speech” that “did not give an inch” which vowed to continue fighting until “total victory” is achieved. There was some coverage of how Netanyahu went so far as to portray the many thousands of demonstrators, some of whom were pepper-sprayed and arrested, who surrounded the Capitol as “useful idiots paid for by Iran.” The jibe, together with other calls to go to war with Iran, produced cheers and other paroxysms of joy among the leaping and waving Congressmen. Bibi might have been particularly personally aggrieved by Pro-Palestinian protesters successfully having released insects into the Watergate Hotel where he was staying. Online video showed maggots running amok on the dinner table.
The Netanyahu speech was light on serious analysis, but heavy on emotional appeals, repeatedly invoking the assertion that he and the United States, in its “ironclad” support of Israel, are fighting to save “civilization” and that “our enemies are your enemies” and “our victory will be your victory.” Predictably, the Congressmen and guests who filled the chamber bobbed up and down applauding wildly after nearly every sentence, producing 53 standing ovations, far exceeding Netanyahu’s record 29 obtained the last time he addressed Congress in 2015.
Notably some Congressmen with active consciences skipped the event, including Nancy Pelosi, who, after the fact, denounced the address in a post on X: “Benjamin Netanyahu’s presentation in the House Chamber today was by far the worst presentation of any foreign dignitary invited and honored with the privilege of addressing the Congress of the United States. Many of us who love Israel spent time today listening to Israeli citizens whose families have suffered in the wake of the October 7th Hamas terror attack and kidnappings. These families are asking for a ceasefire deal that will bring the hostages home – and we hope the Prime Minister would spend his time achieving that goal.” Only one Republican, Tom Massie of Kentucky, did not participate after observing “Today Congress will undertake political theater on behalf of the State Department. The purpose of having Netanyahu address Congress is to bolster his political standing in Israel and to quell int’l opposition to his war. I don’t feel like being a prop so I won’t be attending.” Over 100 Congressional interns also boycotted the speech in a coordinated sick-out. “In an act of protest, many of us have pledged to call in sick today, the day of Netanyahu’s address,” read a statement from boycott participants. “We stand in full solidarity with the victims of Netanyahu’s actions. We call on all members of Congress to boycott the address and take a unified stand against what we believe is a ‘universal evil.’ We urge our representatives to respond to the collective will of the American people and reject any semblance of endorsement of Netanyahu’s actions.”
A substantial number of progressive and moderate Democrats, possibly as many as 136, also did not attend, suggesting that Netanyahu is not well regarded by many in the Democratic Party. Netanyahu spoke for an hour and the over-the-top reception he received from congress suggested that the government’s true loyalty is not to the voters who elected them but rather to a foreign leader who is a war-criminal, implying to some that Bibi is actually de facto the American president and Israel and the US are in practical terms one country, with Israel as the dominant partner in the arrangement. As an American who is deeply concerned about the US collaboration with Israel in what is indisputably a genocide in Gaza, watching this spectacle unfolding before my eyes was probably the most pathetic and humiliating hour which I have experienced in my lifetime. My country has done many bad things in the past century, but this alliance with unmitigated evil is the equivalent of selling one’s soul.
International lawyer John Whitbeck captured the feeling perfectly, writing how “After virtually every sentence uttered by the notorious war-criminal Benjamin Netanyahu, no matter how inane or blatantly false, virtually all the attending political prostitutes infesting the US Congress rose (53 times!) in a loud standing grovel of homage to their puppet-master, most long and loudly when he condemned pro-justice and anti-genocide protestors on American campuses and on the streets of Washington during his speech… Anyone watching this obscene spectacle could only conclude that the United States of America has ceased to be a respectable independent country and is now, as, indeed, it has been for many years already, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the State of Israel, with shared values which are rightfully rejected by the overwhelming majority of mankind. By their venality, cowardice, moral bankruptcy and near-treason, the American political class is flushing a once great country down history’s toilet, and the Global West, if it does not soon liberate itself from domination by the Israeli-American Empire, risks a similar fate.”
My particular gripe was over the fact that Netanyahu’s speech was full of uncontested lies and grossly exaggerated assumptions designed to get his audience roaring. The falsehoods were certainly recognizable as such by much of the audience, but Netanyahu was not challenged by anyone save only Representative Rashida Tlaib, a Democrat of Michigan and the sole Palestinian-American member of Congress, who attended the speech while holding up a sign while many of her colleagues applauded Netanyahu’s comments. One side of Tlaib’s sign read “GUILTY OF GENOCIDE” and the other read “WAR CRIMINAL.” Perhaps some dissidents in the crowd were intimidated by the threat by House Speaker Mike Johnson, who describes support of Israel as “one of America’s founding principles.” Johnson strategically stationed extra sergeants-at-arms in the chamber to arrest anyone who tried to interrupt Bibi. It is a unique and almost certainly illegal expedient to manage any pushback against favored and protected speakers like Netanyahu. Interestingly, Capitol police did forcibly removed from the rear of the chamber six relatives of Israeli hostages who reportedly attempted to disrupt the speech. One said “I couldn’t take it anymore,” and Jon Polin, the father of Israeli American hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin, said to reporters “I came here wanting to hear one sentence: ‘Today I announce that the hostages are coming home,’ and I didn’t hear that once.”
Among the lies propagated by Netanyahu was a longish tirade on how humane the Israeli army has been in its conduct of the war, claiming that Hamas “These monsters raped women, they beheaded men, they burnt babies alive. They killed parents in front of their children and children in front of their parents.” As has been confirmed by reliable independent sources, that is all a lie, a piece of Israeli government generated propaganda. And he also claimed falsely that the famine taking place in Gaza is a myth as his government has been allowing so many relief trucks to go into the strip that the average Palestinian is getting 3,000 calories of food per day. But my favorite line was his pledge to live at peace with the Palestinians when they stop wanting to “kill Jews.” The reality is, of course, it is the Jews who are killing Palestinians in large numbers using American supplied weapons. The highly respectable British medical journal The Lancet estimates that Israel has already killed more than 186,000 Palestinians since last October most of whom are still buried under the rubble of their homes, but for Netanyahu only Jewish lives matter. And the unrelenting savagery of the Israeli soldiers has also been confirmed by multiple independent sources. Bibi would also do well to read the new Knesset law passed last week that completely rejects the idea of a unilaterally declared sovereign Palestinian state side-by-side with Israel, confirming that Israel’s intentions do not include living at peace with its neighbors.
And so ends another exciting week in what once passed for the Capital of the United States of America. The visit by Netanyahu benefited certain politicians since to be qualified as an American presidential or vice-presidential candidate, you need to be photographed embracing a grinning genocidal psychopath from Israel. It keeps the cash flowing and the newspapers are empowered to tell lies on your behalf. Unfortunately, when the Israeli monsters are being received by their groveling hosts it also speaks most clearly to what we have become as a country while serving as the Israeli lapdog. Washington must finally confront the reality that its bloody close embrace of Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza is not advancing any US interests or promoting regional stability. In fact, it is doing the opposite. What has happened to America is the real tragedy.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.
Few are better qualified to challenge the official orthodoxy that stifles any discussion of this topic
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken (L) is welcomed by Aipac President Michael Tuchin at the committee’s policy summit in Washington on 5 June 2023 (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images/AFP)
No review has yet been published of Professor Ilan Pappe’s magnificent and passionate new book on the Zionist lobby. This silence is no surprise. Even a passing reference to the lobby is liable to lead to charges of antisemitism and potential career destruction.
Faiza Shaheen was dropped like a stone last month as Labour candidate for the London seat of Chingford and Woodford Green. “There have been complaints, allegedly, about her ‘liking’ a tweet that referred to the ‘Israel lobby’ – widely considered an anti-Semitic trope,” reported the New Statesman’s associate political editor, Rachel Cunliffe.
On a now-infamous Newsnight appearance following her defenestration, a tearful Shaheen apologised for liking the tweet and accepted it was a “trope”.
She didn’t have much choice. The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), the statutory regulator, agrees. In 2020, it cited a claim that the “Israel lobby” was behind antisemitism complaints as evidence supporting a finding of unlawful antisemitic harassment.
Pappe has entered perilous territory. Few are better qualified to challenge the official orthodoxy that discussion of the Israel lobby is out of bounds. None are more battle-hardened.
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One of the most eminent of the “new historians” who retold Israel’s foundation story, Pappe was denounced in the Knesset after publication in 2006 of his controversial book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Israel’s education minister called on the University of Haifa to sack him, and one of Israel’s best-selling newspapers pictured him at the centre of a target, next to which a columnist had written: “I’m not telling you to kill this person, but I shouldn’t be surprised if someone did.”
After a slew of death threats, he left Israel, and was lucky to be able to find a billet at the University of Exeter.
Targeting politicians and journalists
The famous French publisher Fayard recently halted distribution of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Last month, Pappe, who remains an Israeli citizen, was interrogated for two hours by federal agents upon arrival in the United States. He was eventually let in, but only after they copied the contents of his phone. This kind of harassment, Pappe later noted, is nothing compared to what Palestinians routinely face.
He has produced a work that needs to be read, and then re-read, by anyone who wishes to understand the international context of the war in Gaza. The book describes how the Israel lobby has targeted both politicians and journalists.
Two British politicians lost out on foreign office jobs amid pressure from the lobby on account of pro-Palestinian sympathies: Alan Duncan in 2016 and Christopher Mayhew in 1964. George Brown, a former Labour foreign secretary, was also targeted in the 1960s.
The lobby has gone after journalists such as Jeremy Bowen, who was forced to endure a long BBC investigation; former Guardian Jerusalem correspondent Suzanne Goldenberg; former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger; and broadcaster Jonathan Dimbleby.
The Israeli government repeatedly complained to the BBC that foreign correspondent Orla Guerin was “antisemitic” and showed “total identification with the goals and methods of Palestinian terror groups”, once even linking her reporting from the Middle East to the rise of antisemitism in Britain – allegations that were as grotesque as they were false.
There are other names on this long list.
In the US, William Fulbright, the longest-serving chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is the earliest and most devastating example. The appalling story of his destruction in 1974 is well told in this book: “Lobby money poured into the campaign coffers of his rival, Arkansas Governor Dale Bumpers … From that time to this day, the road to the Capitol has been scattered with candidates, from the elite of American politics, whose careers have been similarly torpedoed,” Pappe writes.
Fulbright’s crime was to argue that “instead of rearming Israel, we could have peace in the Middle East at once if we just told Tel Aviv to withdraw behind its 1967 borders and guarantee them”.
‘Nothing to touch them’
This merciless treatment of individuals distinguishes the pro-Israel lobby from other lobbies, both foreign and corporate. Michael Mates, a former member of the parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee, once told me (in a quote repeated in Pappe’s book) that “the pro-Israel lobby in our body politic is the most powerful political lobby. There’s nothing to touch them.”
Pappe goes far back into history to sketch the origins of the agitation for the return of the Jewish people to Palestine. This story begins with Christian evangelicals two centuries ago, which might explain Pappe’s employment of the term “Zionist lobby” rather than the standard “pro-Israel lobby”.
In the remote past as much as the present day, this type of support for Israel was animated by antisemitism. In the 1840s, religious scholar George Bush, a direct ancestor of two US presidents, called for a revived Jewish state in Palestine, expressing hope that Jewish people would be offered “the same carnal inducements to remove to Syria as now promote them to emigrate to this country”.
These early Christian supporters of a Jewish Palestine, like later Christian Zionists, were oblivious to the Palestinian presence in what they saw as the Holy Land. For them, Palestine was unchanged since the time of Jesus. In the words of Pappe, “later it was imagined as being organically part of medieval Europe: its people donning medieval dress, roaming a European countryside”.
In Britain, Edwin Montagu, one of the earliest practising Jews to serve in a British cabinet, described Zionism as a “mischievous political creed” – a phrase that would have had him thrown out of Keir Starmer’s Labour Party and pilloried in the media.
He viewed the Balfour Declaration as antisemitic, while warning that “when the Jews are told that Palestine is their national home, every country will immediately desire to get rid of its Jewish citizens, and you will find a population in Palestine driving out its present inhabitants”.
Safeguarding Israel’s legitimacy
After the establishment of Israel, the lobby’s main job became to safeguard the legitimacy of the Israeli state. Pappe shows that the Labour Party was a stronger and more reliable supporter than the Conservatives. He stresses the role of Poale Zion, antecedent to today’s Jewish Labour Movement, which originally sought to reconcile Marxism and Zionism. It convinced the trade unions and Labour that Israel was a socialist project.
Pappe writes that Poale Zion became “part of a lobby meant to arrest any potential anti-Israel orientations in the Labour Party in Britain and strengthen the relationship between the Labour Party and its pro-Israel Jewish constituencies”.
According to Pappe, former Prime Minister Harold Wilson, who led Labour from 1963 to 1976, was “pro-Israel to the bone”. Pappe speculates that Wilson’s admiration for Israel, like David Lloyd George’s in a previous generation, was a product of a nonconformist Christian education. The late politician Roy Jenkins noted that Wilson’s book, The Chariot of Israel, was “one of the most strongly Zionist tracts ever written by a non-Jew”.
This timely book from one of the finest historians of contemporary Israel deserves to become the subject of urgent contemporary debate. So far, it has been ignored
Alec Douglas-Home, foreign secretary in the Edward Heath government that succeeded Wilson’s administration after the 1970 general election, was more friendly to Palestinians. An Old Etonian aristocrat, Douglas-Home is today dismissed as a hopeless old fogey and aberration in postwar Britain.
Today, his views would bring a nod of approbation from the Palestine Solidarity Campaign. According to Pappe, “he was the only British foreign secretary to openly discuss the right of return of the Palestinian refugees that were expelled by Israel in 1948”, and, still more remarkable, “the only British foreign secretary to challenge the dishonest brokery of the Americans”.
In the wake of the 1967 war, Douglas-Home insisted, with Heath’s support, that Britain could no longer ignore the “political aspirations of the Palestinian Arabs”. In government, he infuriated Israel by allowing the Palestine Liberation Organization to set up a London office.
Pappe says that Douglas-Home was the only senior British politician, with the important exception of the hard-drinking George Brown, to interpret UN Resolution 242 as a demand for unconditional Israeli withdrawal to the borders of 5 June 1967. During the 1973 war, the Heath government refused to deliver arms to Israel – though, as Pappe notes, this was mostly due to a fear of the Arab oil embargo.
The Corbyn years
Pappe’s historical perspective enables him to see the Jeremy Corbyn leadership of the Labour Party in a new light. “Corbyn’s views on Palestine were virtually identical to those expressed by most British diplomats and senior politicians ever since 1967; like them he supported a two-state solution and recognised the Palestinian Authority,” Pappe writes. This made him more mainstream than the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, which supported a one-state solution.
In light of this, Pappe reasonably asks: “Why did the lobby see him as such a threat”? He answers: “They suspected, correctly, that he sincerely believed in a just two-state solution and wouldn’t swallow Israel’s excuses for obstructing it.”
In a thought-provoking passage, he adds: “Christopher Mayhew, George Brown and Jeremy Corbyn had much in common. They were in positions of power that could affect British policy towards Israel. They were all totally loyal to the official British policy supporting a two-state solution to the ‘conflict’. None of them denied the right of Israel to exist, none of them had made any anti-Semitic remark in their lifetime and they were not anti-Semitic in any sense of the word.”
Pappe also has harsh words for the EHRC inquiry into Labour antisemitism. “In a more reasonable world, or maybe years from now,” he writes, “if people were asked about what a leading institution for human rights would investigate in relation to Israel and Palestine, they would give the abuse of Palestinians’ human rights as the answer … [in this report], there was no serious discussion of what constitutes anti-Semitism, nor did it make any attempt to differentiate between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism and criticism of Israel.”
In a short conclusion written after the horrors of 7 October, Pappe writes: “Many people in the twenty-first century cannot continue to accept a colonisation project requiring military occupation and discriminatory laws to sustain itself. There is a point at which the lobby cannot endorse this brutal reality and continue to be seen as moral in the eyes of the rest of the world. I believe and hope this point will be reached within our lifetimes.”
This timely book from one of the finest historians of contemporary Israel deserves to become the subject of urgent contemporary debate. So far, it has been ignored in a media and political environment that, as the recent case of Shaheen illustrates, has imposed a system of omerta around any discussion of the Israel lobby.
Lobbing for Zionism on Both Sides of the Atlantic is published by Oneworld.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
Peter Oborne won best commentary/blogging in both 2022 and 2017, and was also named freelancer of the year in 2016 at the Drum Online Media Awards for articles he wrote for Middle East Eye. He was also named as British Press Awards Columnist of the Year in 2013. He resigned as chief political columnist of the Daily Telegraph in 2015. His latest book is The Fate of Abraham: Why the West is Wrong about Islam, published in May by Simon & Schuster. His previous books include The Triumph of the Political Class, The Rise of Political Lying, Why the West is Wrong about Nuclear Iran and The Assault on Truth: Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and the Emergence of a New Moral Barbarism.
Israel ordered the “Hannibal Directive” on October 7 by ordering the killing of captive Israeli soldiers and civilians. But the U.S. media continues to hide the truth.
Three days ago, Israel’s leading newspaper, Haaretz, published the results of its thorough, comprehensive investigation into what actually happened when Hamas attacked on October 7. So far, the U.S. mainstream media has not said a word about the shocking results of that investigation. Critics sometimes use the expression “media malpractice” to describe the American mainstream’s failure to report accurately about Israel/Palestine. This time, though, what’s happening is even worse; it has to be deliberate self-censorship, designed to hide the truth from the U.S. audience.
Haaretz’s long report found that Israel’s army had employed the “Hannibal Directive” on October 7. The Directive is an Israeli policy that instructs the military to open fire on its own soldiers to prevent them from being taken captive. Of course, this site, alongside other alternative media sources, was one of the first to point out the possible role of the Hannibal Directive in Israeli deaths on October 7. But the Haaretz report was significant in the number of military sources it interviewed who confirmed that there were direct orders to implement the Directive.
Haaretz explained that the policy has “the intent of foiling kidnapping even at the expense of the lives of the kidnapped.” At first, the army started deploying “Ziks,” unmanned assault drones. Later, the army fired mortars, and then artillery shells. Haaretz also confirmed that the military did know that Israeli civilians had also been taken hostage, but, nonetheless, at 11:22 a.m. the order came down: “Not a single vehicle can return to Gaza.”
The Haaretz report is cautious, but it still concludes: “[The 11:22 a.m. message] was understood by everyone. . . At this point, the IDF was not aware of the extent of kidnapping along the Gaza border, but it did know that many people were involved. Thus, it was entirely clear what the message meant, and what the fate of some of the kidnapped people would be.”
In other words, some — possibly many — of the Israeli deaths that day, including civilians, were deliberately caused by Israel’s own military. How this is not news is incomprehensible. But, three days later, in the New York Times: not a word. The Washington Post: nothing. CNN: nothing. National Public Radio: nada.
Instead, if you plug “Hannibal” into the search engines at these media sites, the results only mention “Hannibal Lecter,” the fictional serial killer who was the subject of a book and popular film.
But there’s nothing new about the Israeli military’s Hannibal Directive. (The doctrine is probably named for the Carthaginian general who fought Rome in 200 B.C., who said he would swallow poison instead of surrendering. Some Israeli sources claimed that the name was randomly generated, an assertion that prompts skepticism.)
“A growing number of reports indicate Israeli forces responsible for Israeli civilian and military deaths following October 7 attack.”
Then, last March, the estimable Jonathan Ofir also posted here that an actual Israeli soldier, Captain Bar Zonshein, had admitted to “firing tank shells on vehicles carrying Israeli civilians.”
The even more comprehensive Haaretz investigation should have prompted a reaction from the mainstream U.S. reporters who are stationed in Israel. American journalists should have been cultivating their own sources since October 7, and been ready to at least match the Haaretz article. Instead, the only response so far has been a panel hosted by Piers Morgan, and a Mehdi Hasan/Bassem Youssef podcast.
I’ve followed the U.S. media coverage of Israel/Palestine closely for more than a decade now. Continuing to hide Israel’s deployment of the Hannibal Directive on October 7 is one of the most offensive examples of self-censorship that I can recall. The mainstream’s dishonesty is just one more example of why alternative websites are indispensable.
Israeli soldiers sit in a tank near the Israel-Gaza border after the end of a seven-day truce between Israel and Hamas, December 1, 2023, Kibbutz Beeri. (Photo: © Ilia Yefimovich/dpa via ZUMA Press/APA Images)
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