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Chris Hedges at UCSB: To Kill a People

November 28, 2024

November 23, 2024 Chris Hedges

Transcript

Extermination works. At first. This is the terrible lesson of history. If Israel is not stopped — and no outside power appears willing to halt the genocide in Gaza or the destruction of Lebanon — it will achieve its goals of depopulating and annexing northern Gaza. It will turn southern Gaza into a charnel house where Palestinians are burned alive, decimated by bombs and die from starvation and infectious diseases, until they are driven out. It will achieve its goal of destroying Lebanon — 2,400 people have been killed and over 1.2 Lebanese have been displaced — in an attempt to turn it into a failed state. It is already turning its genocidal fury on the West Bank. And, it may soon realize its long cherished dream of forcing the United States into war with Iran. Israeli leaders are publicly salivating over proposals to assassinate Iranian leader Ayatollah Ali Hosseini Khamenei and carry out airstrikes on Iran’s nuclear installations and oil facilities.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his cabinet, like those driving Middle East policy in the White House — Antony Blinken, raised in a staunch Zionist family, Brett McGurk, Amos Hochstein, who was born in Israel and served in the Israeli military, and Jake Sullivan — are true believers in the doctrine that violence can mold the world to fit their demented vision. That this doctrine has been a spectacular failure in Israel’s occupied territories, and did not work in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya, and a generation earlier in Vietnam, does not deter them. This time, they assure us, it will succeed.

In the short term they are right. This is not good news for Palestinians or the Lebanese. The U.S. and Israel will continue to use their arsenal of industrial weapons to kill huge numbers of people and turn cities into rubble. But in the long term, this indiscriminate violence sows dragon’s teeth. It creates adversaries that, sometimes a generation later, outdo in savagery — we call it terrorism — what was done to those slain in the previous generation.

Hate and a lust of vengeance, as I learned covering the war in the former Yugoslavia, are passed down like a poisonous elixir from one generation to the next. Our disastrous interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen, along with Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, which created Hezbollah, should have taught us this.

But this is a lesson that is nevr learned.

How could the Bush administration imagine it would be greeted as liberators in Iraq when the U.S. had spent over a decade imposing sanctions that resulted in severe shortages of food and medicine, causing the deaths of at least one million Iraqis, including 500,000 children.

Israel’s occupation of Palestine and its saturation bombing of Lebanon in 1982, were the catalyst for Osama bin Laden’s attack on the Twin Towers in New York City in 2001, along with U.S. support for attacks on Muslims in Somalia, Chechnya, Kashmir and the South of the Philippines, U.S. military assistance to Israel and the sanctions on Iraq.

I see nothing to alt Israel, especially since the Israel lobby has bought and paid for Congress and the two ruling parties and cowed the media and universities. There is money to be made in war. A lot of it. And the influence of the war industry, buttressed by hundreds of millions of dollars spent on political campaigns by the Zionists, will be a formidable barrier to peace, not to mention sanity.

Israel has been poisoned by the psychosis of permanent war. It has been morally bankrupted by the sanctification of victimhood, which it uses to justify an occupation that is even more savage than that of apartheid South Africa. Its ‘democracy’ — which was always exclusively for Jews — has been hijacked by extremists who are pushing the country towards fascism. Human rights campaigners, intellectuals and journalists — Israeli and Palestinian — are subject to constant state surveillance, arbitrary arrests and government-run smear campaigns. Its educational system, starting in primary school, is an indoctrination machine for the military. And the greed and corruption of its venal political and economic elite have created vast income disparities, a mirror of the decay within America’s democracy, along with a culture of anti-Arab and anti-Black racism.

By the time Israel achieves its decimation of Gaza — Israel is talking about months more of warfare — its facade of civility, its supposed vaunted respect for the rule of law and democracy, its mythical story of the courageous Israeli military and miraculous birth of the Jewish nation – which it successfully sold to its western audiences – will lie in ash heaps. Israel’s social capital will be spent. It will be revealed as the ugly, repressive, hate-filled apartheid regime it always has been, alienating younger generations of American Jews. Its patron, the United States, as new generations come into power, will distance itself from Israel. Its popular support will come from reactionary Zionists and America’s Christianized fascists who see Israel’s domination of ancient Biblical land as a harbinger of the Second Coming and in its subjugation of Arabs a kindred racism and celebration of white supremacy.

Israel will become synonymous with its victims the way Turks are synonymous with the Armenians, Germans are with the Namibians and later the Jews, and Serbs are with the Bosniaks. Israel’s cultural, artistic, journalistic and intellectual life will atrophy. Israel will be a stagnant nation where the religious fanatics, bigots and Jewish extremists who have seized power will dominate public discourse. It will join the club of the globe’s most despotic regimes.

Despotisms can exist long after their past due date. But they are terminal.

Nations need more than force to survive. They need a mystique. This mystique provides purpose, civility and even nobility to inspire citizens to sacrifice for the nation. The mystique offers hope for the future. It provides meaning. It provides national identity. When mystiques implode, when they are exposed as lies, a central foundation of state power collapses.

All Israel has left is escalating savagery, including torture and lethal violence against unarmed civilians, which accelerates the decline. The Israeli military has carred out 93 massacres in Gaza in the last year. This wholesale violence works in the short term, as it did in the war waged by the French in Algeria, the Dirty War waged by Argentina’s military dictatorship, the British occupation of India, Egypt, Kenya and Northern Ireland and the American occupations of Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. But in the long term, it is suicidal.

The genocide in Gaza has turned Hamas’ resistance fighters into heroes in the Global South. Israel has killed hundreds of Palestinian leaders, including Yahya Sinwar. It assassinated Dr. Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, one of the founders of Hamas, who I knew, and Khalil al-Wazir, known as Abu Jihad, and who founded the PLO with Yasser Arafat, who I also knew. But the daily humiliation, forced impoverishment, indiscriminate violence, long prison terms and torture is fertile training ground for resistance leaders. There is no shortage of radicalized Palestinians who can take Sinwar’s place. The long struggle for freedom by Palestinians has made this point over and over and over.

Run, the Israelis demand of the Palestiniansin Gaza, run for your lives. Run from Rafah the way you ran from Gaza City, the way you ran from Jabalia, the way you ran from Deir al-Balah, the way you ran from Beit Hanoun, the way you ran from Bani Suheila, the way you ran from Khan Yunis. Run or we will kill you. We will drop GBU-39 bombs on your tent encampments and set them ablaze. We will spray you with bullets from our machine-gun-equipped drones. We will pound you with artillery and tank shells. We will shoot you down with snipers. We will decimate your tents, your refugee camps, your cities and towns, your homes, your schools, your hospitals and your water purification plants. We will rain death from the sky.

Run for your lives. Again and again and again. Pack up the few belongings you have left. Blankets. A couple of pots. Some clothes. We don’t care how exhausted you are, how hungry you are, how terrified you are, how sick you are, how old, or how young you are. Run. Run. Run. And when you run in terror to one part of Gaza, we will make you turn around and run to another. Trapped in a labyrinth of death. Back and forth. Up and down. Side to side. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten times. We toy with you like mice in a trap. Then we deport you so you can never return. Or we kill you.

Let the world denounce our genocide. What do we care? The billions in military aid flows unchecked from our American ally. The fighter jets. The artillery shells. The tanks. The bombs. An endless supply. We kill children by the thousands. We kill women and the elderly by the thousands. The sick and injured, without medicine and hospitals die. We poison the water. We cut off the food. We make you starve. We created this hell. We are the masters. Law. Duty. A code of conduct. They do not exist for us.

But first we toy with you. We humiliate you. We terrorize you. We revel in your fear. We are amused by your pathetic attempts to survive. You are not human. You are creatures. Untermensch. We feed our lust for domination. Look at our posts on social media. They have gone viral. One shows soldiers grinning in a Palestinian home with the owners tied up and blindfolded in the background. We loot. Rugs. Cosmetics. Motorbikes. Jewelry. Watches. Cash. Gold. Antiquities. We mock your misery. We cheer your death. We celebrate our religion, our nation, our identity, our superiority, by negating and erasing yours.

Depravity is moral. Atrocity is heroism. Genocide is redemption.

This is the game of terror played by Israel in Gaza. It was the game played during the Dirty War in Argentina, which I covered as a reporter, when the military junta “disappeared” 30,000 of its own citizens. The “disappeared” were subjected to torture — who cannot call what is happening to Palestinians in Gaza torture? — and humiliated before they were murdered. It was the game played in the clandestine torture centers and prisons I reported on in El Salvador and Iraq. It is what I saw in the Serbian concentration camps in Bosnia.

Israeli journalist Yinon Magal on the show “Hapatriotim” on Israel’s Channel 14, joked that Joe Biden’s red line was the killing of 30,000 Palestinians. The singer Kobi Peretz asked if that was the number of dead for a day. The audience erupted in applause and laughter.

We know Israel’s intent. Annihilate the Palestinians the same way the United States annihilated Native Americans, the Australians annihilated the First Nations peoples, the Germans annihilated the Herero in Namibia, the Turks annihilated Armenians and the Nazis annihilated the Jews. The specifics are different. The goal is the same. Erasure.

We cannot plead ignorance.

But it is easier to pretend. Pretend Israel will allow humanitarian aid. Pretend there will be a permanent ceasefire. Pretend Palestinians will return to their destroyed homes in Gaza. Pretend Gaza will be rebuilt — the hospitals, the universities, the mosques, the housing. Pretend the Palestinian Authority will administer Gaza. Pretend there will be a two-state solution. Pretend there is no genocide.

The vaunted democratic values, morality and respect for human rights, claimed by Israel and the United States, has always been a lie. The real credo is this – we have everything and if you try and take it away from us we will kill you. People of color, especially when they are poor and vulnerable, do not count. The hopes, dreams, dignity and aspirations for freedom of those outside the empire are worthless. Global domination will be sustained through racialized violence.

This lie — that the American empire is predicated on democracy and liberty — is one the Palestinians, and those in the Global South, as well as Native Americans and Black and Brown Americans, not to mention those who live in the Middle East, have known for decades. But it is a lie that still has currency in the United States and Israel, a lie used to justify the unjustifiable.

We do not halt Israel’s genocide because we, as Americans, are Israel, infected with the same white supremacy, and intoxicated by our domination of the globe’s wealth and the power to obliterate others with our advanced weaponry.

The U.S. occupation forces in Iraq and Afgnaistan, replicating what they did in Vietnam, deliberately maimed, abused, beat, tortured, raped, wounded and killed hundreds of thousands of unarmed civilians, including children.

“After the war,” Nick Turse writes, “most scholars wrote off the accounts of widespread war crimes that recur throughout Vietnamese revolutionary publications and American antiwar literature as merely so much propaganda. Few academic historians even thought to cite such sources, and almost none did so extensively. Meanwhile, My Lai came to stand for — and thus blot out — all other American atrocities. Vietnam War bookshelves are now filled with big-picture histories, sober studies of diplomacy and military tactics, and combat memoirs told from the soldiers’ perspective. Buried in forgotten U.S. government archives, locked away in the memories of atrocity survivors, the real American war in Vietnam has all but vanished from public consciousness.”

Historical amnesia is a vital part of extermination campaigns once they end, at least for the victors. But for the victims, the memory of genocide, along with a yearning for retribution, is a sacred calling. The vanquished reappear in ways the genocidal killers cannot predict, fueling new conflicts and new animosities. The physical eradication of all Palestinians, the only way genocide works, is an impossibility given that six million Palestinians alone live in the diaspora. Over five million live in Gaza and the West Bank.

Israel’s genocide has enraged the 1.9 billion Muslims worldwide, as well as most of the Global South. It has discredited and weakened the corrupt and fragile regimes of the dictatorships and monarchies in the Arab world, home to 456 million Muslims, who collaborate with the U.S. and Israel. It has fueled the ranks of the Palestinian resistance.

What is happening in Gaza is not unprecedented. Indonesia’s military, backed by the U.S., carried out a year-long campaign in 1965 to exterminate those accused of being communist leaders, functionaries, party members and sympathizers. The bloodbath — much of it carried out by rogue death squads and paramilitary gangs — decimated the labor union movement along with the intellectual and artistic class, opposition parties, university student leaders, journalists and ethnic Chinese. A million people were slaughtered. Many of the bodies were dumped into rivers, hastily buried or left to rot on roadsides.

This campaign of mass murder is today mythologized in Indonesia, as it will be in Israel. It is portrayed as an epic battle against the forces of evil, just as Israel equates the Palestinians with Nazis.

The killers in the Indonesian war against “communism” are cheered at political rallies. They are lionized for saving the country. They are interviewed on television about their “heroic” battles. The three-million-strong Pancasila Youth — Indonesia’s equivalent of the “Brownshirts” or the Hitler Youth — in 1965, joined in the genocidal mayhem and are held up as the pillars of the nation.

We mythologize our genocide of Native Americans, romanticizing our killers, gunmen, outlaws, militias and cavalry units. We, like Israel, fetishize the military.

Industrail slaughter – what the sociologist James William Gibson calls “technowar”— defines Israel’s assault on Gaza and Lebanon. Technowar is centered on the concept of “overkill.” Overkill, with its intentionally large numbers of civilian casualties, is justified as an effective form of deternece. It is what Israel, cyniucally, calls “mowing the lawn.”

The incursion on Oct. 7 into Israel by Hamas and other resistance groups, which left 1,154 Israelis, tourists and migrant workers dead and saw about 240 people taken hostage, gave Israel the pretext for what it has long craved — the total erasure of Palestinians.

Israel has damaged or destroyed Gaza’s universities, all of which are now closed, and 60 percent of other educational facilities, including 13 libraries. It has also destroyed at least 195 heritage sites, including 208 mosques, churches, and Gaza’s Central Archives that held 150 years of historical records and documents. Israel’s warplanes, missiles, drones, tanks, artillery shells and naval guns daily pulverize Gaza — which is only 20 miles long and five miles wide — in a scorched earth campaign unlike anything seen since the war in Vietnam. It has dropped 25,000 tons of explosives — equivalent to two nuclear bombs — on Gaza, many targets selected by Artificial Intelligence. It drops unguided munitions (“dumb bombs”) and 2000-pound “bunker buster” bombs on refugee camps and densely packed urban centers as well as the so-called “safe zones” — 42 percent of Palestinians killed have been in these “safe zones” where they were instructed by Israel to flee. Over 1.9 million Palestinians have been displaced from their homes, forced to find refuge in overcrowded UNRWA shelters, hospital corridors and courtyards, schools, tents or the open air in south Gaza, often living next to fetid pools of raw sewage.

The Israeli blockade of northern Gaza has left over 400,000 Palestinians are enduring a starvation siege and constant airstrikes in an attempt to depopulate the north. Israeli forces have killed 1,250 Palestinians in the assault, launched on October 5, a medical source told Al Jazeera. Reports from northern Gaza are difficult to obtain as internet and phone services have been cut and the few journalists on the ground continue to be killed. Civil defense units say they have been barred by Israeli forces from reaching the sites of strikes and their crews have been attacked.

Israel has ordered Palestinians to flee to designated “safe zones,” but once in these “safe zones” they have been attacked and ordered to move to new “safe zones.”

Israel has killed at least 42,600 Palestinians in Gaza, including 13,000 children and 9,000 women. It has wounded 99,800 others, many with life crippling injuries. It has killed at least 136 journalists, many, if not most of them deliberately targeted. It has killed 340 doctors, nurses and other health workers — four percent of Gaza’s healthcare personnel. Two-hundred and thirty-three UNRWA workers have been killed in Gaza since Oct. 7, 2023, the highest death toll in U.N. history. These numbers do not begin to reflect the actual death toll since only those dead registered in morgues and hospitals, most of which no longer function, are counted. The death toll, when those who are missing are counted, is well over 40,000.

At the same time, Israel has turned Gaza inrto a toxic wasteland.

“Nearly 40 million tons of debris, including unexploded ordnance and human remains, contaminate the ecosystem,” the U.N. reports. “More than 140 temporary waste sites and 340,000 tons of waste, untreated wastewater and sewage overflow contribute to the spread of diseases such as hepatitis A, respiratory infections, diarrhea and skin diseases.”

In a further blow, the Israeli parliament approved a bill to ban UNRWA, a lifeline for Palestinians in Gaza, from operating on Israeli territory and areas under Israel’s control. The ban almost certainly ensures the collapse of aid distribution, already crippled, in Gaza.

Israel has expanded its “buffer zone” along the Gaza perimeter to 16 percent of the territory, in the process leveling homes, apartment blocks and farms. It has pushed over 84 percent of the 2.3 million people in Gaza into “a shrinking, unsafe ‘humanitarian zone’ covering 12.6 percentof a territory now reconfigured in preparation for annexation.” Satellite imagery indicates that the Israeli military has built roads and military bases in over 26 percent of Gaza, “suggesting the aim of a permanent presence.”

Doctors are forced to amputate limbs without anesthetic. Those with severe medical conditions — cancer, diabetes, heart disease, kidney disease — have died from lack of treatment or will die soon. Over a hundred women give birth every day, with little to no medical care. Miscarriages are up by 300 percent. Over 90 percent of the Palestinians in Gaza suffer from severe food insecurity with people eating animal feed and grass. Children are dying of starvation. Palestinian writers, academics, scientists and their family members have been tracked and assassinated.

Seventy percent of recorded deaths have consistently been women and children.

Israel plays linguistic tricks to deny anyone in Gaza the status of civilians and any building – including mosques, hospitals and schools – protected status. Palestinians are all branded as responsible for the attack on Oct. 7 or written off as human shields for Hamas. All structures are considered legitimate targets by Israel because they are allegedly Hamas command centers or said to harbor Hamas fighters.

These accusations, Francesca Albanese, the U.N. Rappatour for the Palestinian territories, writes, are a “pretext” used to justify “the killing of civilians under a cloak of purported legality, whose all-enveloping pervasiveness admits only of genocidal intent.”

“In August,” Albanes writes in her most recent report, “entry permits for humanitarian organizations nearly halved. Access to water has been restricted to a quarter of pre-7 October levels. Approximately 93 per cent of the agricultural, forestry and fishing economies has been destroyed; 95 per cent of Palestinians face high levels of acute food insecurity, and deprivation for decades to come.”

“In recent months, 83 percent of food aid was prevented from entering Gaza, and the civilian police in Rafah were repeatedly targeted, impairing distribution,” the report notes. “At least 34 deaths from malnutrition were recorded by 14 September 2024.”

These measures, sh noters, “indicate an intent to destroy its population through starvation.”

The occupation and genocide would not be sustained without the U.S. which gives Israel $3.8 billion in annual military assistance. The U.S. has spent $ 17.9 billion on military aid to Israel in the last 12 months, including providing 1,800 MK84 2,000-pound bombs, 500 MK82 500-pound bombs and fighter jets to Israel. This, too, is our genocide.

The genocide in Gaza is the culmination of a process. It is not an act. The genocide is the predictable denouement of Israel’s settler colonial project. It is coded within the DNA of the Israeli apartheid state. It is where Israel had to end up. And Zionist leaders are open about their goals.

We do not halt Israel’s genocide because we are Israel, infected with white supremacy and intoxicated by our domination of the globe’s wealth and the power to obliterate others with our industrial weapons. Remember The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman telling Charlie Rose on the eve of the war in Iraq that American soldiers should go house to house from Basra to Baghdad and say to Iraqis “suck on this?” That is the real credo of the U.S. empire.

As climate change imperils survival, as resources become scarce, as migration becomes an imperative for millions, as agricultural yields decline, as costal areas are flooded, as droughts and wilfires proliferate, as states fail, as armed resistance movements rise to battle their oppressors along with their proxies, genocide will not be an anomaly. It will be the norm. The earth’s vulnerable and poor, those Frantz Fanon called “the wretched of the earth,” will be the next Palestinians.

The scorched earth tactics in Gaza and Lebanon are becoming common in the West Bank

Thousands of Palestinians in the West Bank towns of Jenin, Nablus, Qalqilya, Tubas and Tulkarem live for days under curfew, making it difficult to access food and water. As in Gaza, the Israeli army targets ambulances, blocks entrances to hospitals and bulldozes streets, electricity and public health infrastructure.

Drones and war planes carry out airstrikes. Israeli roadblocks, checkpoints and blockades make travel difficult or impossible. Israel has suspended financial transfers to the Palestinian Authority, which nominally governs the West Bank in collaboration with Israel. It has revoked 148,000 work permits for those who had jobs in Israel.

“The gross domestic product (GDP) of the West Bank contracted by 22.7 percent,nearly 30 percent of businesses have closed, and 292,000 jobs have been lost,” the report reads. Over 692 Palestinians — “10 times the previous 14 years’ annual average of 69 fatalities,” have been killed and more than 5,000 have been injured. Of the 169 Palestinian children who have been killed, “nearly 80 percent were shot in the head or the torso.”

Albanese’s report dismisses the claim that Israel is carrying out the assault in Gaza and the West Bank to “defend itself,” “eradicate Hamas” or “bring the hostages home,” charging that these claims are “camouflage,” a way of “invisibilizing the crime.” Genocidal intent, as Judge Dalveer Bhandari from the ICJ points out, “may exist simultaneously with other, ulterior motives.”

Rather, the incursion into Israel by Hamas and other resistance fighters on Oct. 7 “provided the impetus to advance towards the goal of a ‘Greater Israel.’”

Egypt and the other Arab states have refused to consider accepting Palestinian refugees. But Israel is banking on creating a humanitarian disaster of such catastrophic proportions that these countries, or other countries, will relent so they can depopulate Gaza and turn their attention to ethnically cleansing the West Bank. That is the plan, although no one, including Israel, knows if it will work.

There is only one way to end the ongoing genocide in Gaza. It is not through bilateral negotiations. Israel has amply demonstrated, including with the assassination of the lead Hamas negotiator, Ismail Haniyeh, that it has no interest in a permanent ceasefire. The only way for Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians to be halted is for the U.S. to end all weapons shipments to Israel. And the only way this will take place is if enough Americans make clear they have no intention of supporting any presidential ticket or any political party that fuels this genocide.

The arguments against a boycott of the two ruling parties are familiar: It will ensure the election of Donald Trump. Kamala Harris has rhetorically shown more compassion than Joe Biden. There are not enough of us to have an impact. We can work within the Democratic Party. The Israel lobby, especially the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which owns most members of Congress, is too powerful. Negotiations will eventually achieve a cessation of the slaughter.

In short, we are impotent and must surrender our agency to sustain a project of mass killing. We must accept as normal governance the shipment of billions of dollars in military aid to an apartheid state, the use of vetoes at the U.N. Security Council to protect Israel and the active obstruction of international efforts to end mass murder. We have no choice.

Genocide, the internationally recognized crime of crimes, is not a policy issue. It cannot be equated with trade deals, infrastructure bills, charter schools or immigration. It is a moral issue. It is about the eradication of a people. Any surrender to genocide condemns us as a nation and as a species. It plunges the global society one step closer to barbarity. It eviscerates the rule of law and mocks every fundamental value we claim to honor. It is in a category by itself. And to not, with every fiber of our being, combat genocide is to be complicit in what Hannah Arendt defines as “radical evil,” the evil where human beings, as human beings, are rendered superfluous.

The fundamental lesson of the Holocaust, which writers such as Primo Levi stress, is that we can all become willing executioners. It takes very little. We can all become complicit, if only through indifference and apathy, in evil.

“Monsters exist,” Levi, who survived Auschwitz, writes, “but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.”

To confront evil — even if there is no chance of success — keeps alive our humanity and dignity. It allows us, as Vaclav Havel writes in “The Power of the Powerless,” to live in truth, a truth the powerful do not want spoken and seek to suppress. It provides a guiding light to those who come after us. It tells the victims they are not alone. It is “humanity’s revolt against an enforced position” and an “attempt to regain control over one’s sense of responsibility.”

What does it say about us if we accept a world where we arm and fund a nation that kills and wounds hundreds of innocents a day?

What does it say about us if we support an orchestrated famine and the poisoning of the water supply where the polio virus has been detected, meaning tens of thousands will get sick and many will die?

What does it say about us if we permit for over 12 months the bombing of refugee camps, hospitals, villages and cities to wipe out families and force survivors to camp out in the open or find shelter in crude tents?

What does it say about us when we accept the murder of 11,000 children, although this is surely an undercount?

What does it say about us when we watch Israel escalate attacks on United Nations facilities, schools — including the Al-Tabaeen school in Gaza City, where over 100 Palestinians were killed while performing the Fajr, or dawn prayers — and other emergency shelters?

What does it say about us when we permit Israel to use Palestinians as human shields by forcing handcuffed civilians, including children and the elderly, to enter potentially booby-trapped tunnels and buildings in advance of Israeli troops, at times dressed in Israeli military uniforms?

What does it say about us when we support politicians and soldiers who defend the rape and torture of prisoners?

Are these the kinds of allies we want to empower? Is this behavior we want to embrace? What message does this send to the rest of the world?

If we do not hold fast to moral imperatives, we are doomed. Evil will triumph. It means there is no right and wrong. It means anything, including mass murder, is permissible. Hope lies in the university encampments, in the occupation of buildings, in the hunger strikes, in the streets, and of course, in third parties that defy the empire. These people, who march to the beat of a different drummer, are the nation’s conscience.

A moral stance always has a cost. If there is no cost, it is not moral. It is merely conventional belief.

“But what of the price of peace?” the radical Catholic priest Daniel Berrigan, who was sent to federal prison for burning draft records during the war in Vietnam, asks in his book “No Bars to Manhood:”

I think of the good, decent, peace-loving people I have known by the thousands, and I wonder. How many of them are so afflicted with the wasting disease of normalcy that, even as they declare for the peace, their hands reach out with an instinctive spasm in the direction of their comforts, their home, their security, their income, their future, their plans — that five-year plan of studies, that ten-year plan of professional status, that twenty-year plan of family growth and unity, that fifty-year plan of decent life and honorable natural demise. “Of course, let us have the peace,” we cry, “but at the same time let us have normalcy, let us lose nothing, let our lives stand intact, let us know neither prison nor ill repute nor disruption of ties.” And because we must encompass this and protect that, and because at all costs — at all costs — our hopes must march on schedule, and because it is unheard of that in the name of peace a sword should fall, disjoining that fine and cunning web that our lives have woven, because it is unheard of that good men should suffer injustice or families be sundered or good repute be lost — because of this we cry peace and cry peace, and there is no peace. There is no peace because there are no peacemakers. There are no makers of peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war — at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake.

The question is not whether resistance is practical. It is whether resistance is right. We are enjoined to love our neighbor, not our tribe. We must have faith that the good draws to it the good, even if the empirical evidence around us is bleak. The good is always embodied in action. It must be seen. It does not matter if the wider society is censorious. We are called to defy — through acts of civil disobedience and noncompliance — the laws of the state, when these laws, as they often do, conflict with moral law. We must stand, no matter the cost, with the crucified of the earth. If we fail to take this stand, whether against the abuses of militarized police, the inhumanity of our vast prison system or the genocide in Gaza, we become the crucifiers.

“Mockery of every sort was added to their deaths,” the Roman historian Tacitus wrote of those the emperor Nero singled out for torture and death. “Covered with the skins of beasts, they were torn by dogs and perished, or were nailed to crosses, or were doomed to the flames and burnt, to serve as a nightly illumination, when daylight had expired.”

Sadism by the powerful is the curse of the human condition. It was as prevalent in ancient Rome as it is in Israel.

We know the modern face of Nero, who illuminated his opulent garden parties by burning to death captives tied to stakes. That is not in dispute.

But who were Nero’s guests? Who wandered through the emperor’s grounds as human beings, as in Rafah, were burned alive? How could these guests see, and no doubt hear, such horrendous suffering and witness such appalling torture and be indifferent, even content?

Who were Nero’s guests?

We are Nero’s guests.

History will judge Israel for this genocide. But it will also judge us. It will ask why we did not do more, why we did not sever all agreements, all trade deals, all accords, all cooperation with the apartheid state, why we did not halt weapons shipments to Israel, why we did not recall our ambassadors, why when the maritime trade in the Red Sea was disrupted by Yemen an alternative overland route into Israel was set up by Saudi Arabia and Jordan, why we did not do everything in our power to end the slaughter. It will condemn us for not heeding the fundamental lesson of the Holocaust, which is not that Jews are eternal victims, but that when you have the capacity to stop genocide and you do not, you are culpable.

“The opposite of good is not evil,” Samuel Johnson wrote. “The opposite of good is indifference.”

The Palestinian resistance is our resistance. The Palestinian struggle for dignity, freedom and independence is our struggle. The Palestinian cause is our cause. For, as history has also shown, those who were once Nero’s guests soon became Nero’s victims.

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Chris Hedges

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor, and NPR. He is the host of show The Chris Hedges Report.

He was a member of the team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for The New York Times coverage of global terrorism, and he received the 2002 Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism. Hedges, who holds a Master of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School, is the author of the bestsellers American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle and was a National Book Critics Circle finalist for his book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. He writes an online column for the website ScheerPost. He has taught at Columbia University, New York University, Princeton University and the University of Toronto.

Tags:Chris Hedges, Gaza, genocide, Israel, Lebanon, Palestine
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Israeli War Crimes Documented by the Israeli Defense Forces

October 28, 2024

There’s no sense denying Israel’s indiscriminate attacks and wanton destruction when its war crimes are documented by its own armed forces.

by Jeremy R. Hammond, Oct 23, 2024

Israeli soldiers celebrate the wanton destruction of a neighborhood in Gaza.

Earlier this month, Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit published a documentary documenting Israel’s systematic use of indiscriminate attacks during its ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip. A remarkable feature of the investigation is that, to document Israel’s war crimes, it largely relies on evidence published on social media by Israeli soldiers or the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) itself.

War crimes documented in the video include wanton destruction, abuse of Palestinian detainees including torture, and the use of Palestinian civilians as human shields by Israeli forces. Watch it here:

Also this month, the organization Airwars in collaboration with Sky News published an investigation similarly relying on video evidence published to X by Israeli forces themselves to document 17 indiscriminate Israeli strikes in which collectively more than 400 Palestinian civilians were killed.

An interactive map of the murderous attacks is published at Airwars. Watch their 20-minute video of the investigation’s findings here:

Yesterday, Drop Site, a Substack publication spearheaded by journalists Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Grim published an investigation into the conduct of the IDF’s 749 Combat Engineering Battalion, whose self-described job has been “to flatten Gaza”. Once again, the documentation of brazen war crimes relies heavily on photos and videos posted to social media by Israel’s own armed forces.

Anyone still claiming that Israel is “targeting Hamas” and that Palestinian civilians have only been dying because Hamas uses them as “human shields” cannot possibly still believe that. Maybe at one point early into Israel’s assault on Gaza, some apologists for the Jewish supremacist state actually managed to convinced themselves of their own propaganda. But with Israel’s genocide ongoing now for over a year and being livestreamed on social media, including gleefully by Israel’s own military forces, it is inconceivable that any of the genocide apologists actually believe that Israel has been acting in accordance with international humanitarian law.

All one needs to do to see the truth that Israel has been perpetrating the crime of genocide — with the full backing of the US government — is to open one’s eyes.

Tags:Gaza, genocide, Israel, Lebanon, Palestine
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Israel, with US support, attacks Iran

October 26, 2024

Andre Damon , WSWS.org,

@Andre__Damon

14 hours ago

In a major escalation of the imperialist military offensive throughout the Middle East, Israel launched three waves of airstrikes on Iran Saturday morning in coordination with the Biden administration.

A view of Tehran capital of Iran is seen, early Saturday, October 26, 2024. [AP Photo/Vahid Salemi]

The White House quickly endorsed Israel’s illegal attack on Iran, declaring, “We understand that Israel is conducting targeted strikes against military targets in Iran as an exercise of self-defense.”

A White House official further endorsed the illegal attack in a statement to Bloomberg, calling it “targeted and proportional.” The official told Bloomberg, “The president and his national security team, of course, worked with the Israelis over recent weeks” to plan the illegal act of war.

Rather than self-defense, the attack is a calculated provocation aimed at eliciting a military response by Iran that can be used to justify further US-Israeli aggression, including the deployment of even more combat troops to Israel and a further military build-up throughout the region.

The Iranian military confirmed that airstrikes targeted bases in Ilam, Khuzestan, and Tehran provinces, and commercial flights were suspended throughout the country.

The attack follows the October 9 discussion between US President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in which the American president signed off on the strikes, along with a series of discussions with the Pentagon and White House Friday night.

The attack took place just days after US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin announced that US combat troops had arrived in Israel, in the role of air defense support for the operation.

The attack took place as US Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived in the Middle East after extensive discussions with Netanyahu in which he reviewed both the planned attack on Iran and Israel’s so-called “generals’ plan” to starve, displace, or exterminate the remaining population of Northern Gaza.

The Israeli-US attack on Iran took place just 11 days before the November 5 US presidential election. Earlier this month, the World Socialist Web Site warned that the Biden administration was planning an “October conspiracy” to escalate the war with Iran. We wrote:

There is a long history of events taking place in October that have major effects on an upcoming US presidential election. By deploying US troops to Israel, the Biden administration is not so much seeking to impact Kamala Harris’s electoral prospects as to ensure that plans for military escalation are underway before the election takes place. Instead of an “October surprise,” it is an “October conspiracy” to massively expand US involvement in war throughout the Middle East.

These warnings have now been confirmed. While the scope of the Israeli attack is at this point unclear, it is evident that the Biden Administration is recklessly seeking to escalate war throughout the Middle East targeting Iran.

Israel’s attack on Iran is part of its rampage throughout the Middle East, supported by the imperialist powers, with the aim of reimposing colonial domination over the oil-rich region as part of their effort to dominate Russia and China.

The most horrific consequence of this imperialist offensive throughout the Middle East is the genocide in Gaza. The official death toll of the Gaza genocide stands at 42,847, with over 100,544 wounded. The real death toll is likely to be far higher, with an article in The Lancet estimating it at 186,000 or more in July.

This month, Reuters reported that Israel had suspended all commercial food shipments into Gaza, leading the availability to fall to the lowest level since the start of Israel’s onslaught, as human rights organizations warned of imminent mass starvation.

The attack on Iran follows a campaign of illegal assassinations targeting all of the leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah, as well as leading Iranian figures, as the US and Israel expand their military onslaught throughout the region. On October 16, Israel murdered Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar in Rafah. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah was killed by more than 80 Israeli 2,000-pound bombs in Lebanon last month, and Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated by Israel in Tehran in July.

Israel simultaneously continued its ground invasion and daily bombardment of Lebanon Friday, with the Lebanese death toll rising to 2,634.

Tags:Iran, Israel, Lebanon, Middle East, politics, USA
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Biden Stands Aside as Netanyahu Incinerates Gaza, Now Lebanon

October 20, 2024

Smoke billows from the site of an Israeli airstrike that targeted the southern Lebanese village of Khiam on October 17, 2024, amid the continuing war between Irsael and Hezbollah. (

(Photo by -/AFP via Getty Images)

Having full U.S. government backing, including weapons and political cover to continue the carnage, Netanyahu knows he has a free hand to attack Iran and drag the U.S. into a regional war.

Ralph Nader, Common Dreams, Oct 19, 2024

Biden’s bombs and missiles, dropped daily on Lebanon, a U.S. ally, by his puppet master Netanyahu, is wreaking havoc in this small defenseless country. The Israeli genocidal machine is waging an incinerating assault on fleeing civilians and critical facilities. The scorched-earth Israeli strategy is the same as what we have seen in Gaza. Attack in Lebanon anyone who moves or anything that stands—whether a hospital, a dense residential area, a café, a municipal building, a market, a school, or a Mosque—and allege there was a Hezbollah commander or a Hezbollah site here or there. Two recent New York Times headlines express some of the impact of this latest Israeli war: “In Just a Week, a Million People in Lebanon Have Been Displaced” and “Lebanon’s Hospitals Buckle Amid an Onslaught: ‘Indiscriminate’ Strikes Overwhelm Health System, U.N. Says.”

Historical note: Hezbollah, also a political party and social service organization, was created to defend impoverished Shiite Muslims in southern Lebanon in 1982 right after the Israeli army once again invaded Lebanon and badly mistreated the residents during an 18-year-long military occupation.

No matter what or who the Israeli Air Force’s American F-16 fighter aircraft bomb, no matter the deaths and injuries to thousands of Lebanese families, many of them children and women, Biden keeps unconditionally and savagely shipping weapons of mass destruction. He is violating six federal laws requiring conditions be met—such as not violating human rights or not obstructing U.S. humanitarian aid. Netanyahu is violating these and other conditions and mocking his major benefactor, the United States government.

Israel has long had designs on a slice of Lebanon going up to and including the Litani River area. Water is valuable. Over the years, Israel has routinely violated Lebanese air space, executed incursions into Lebanon and has used forbidden cluster bombs and white phosphorous. According to Aya Majzoub, Deputy Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa at Amnesty International, “It is beyond horrific that the Israeli army has indiscriminately used white phosphorous in violation of international humanitarian law.”

The White House knows all this. It doesn’t care. Wherever Israel invades, bombs, assassinates, or boobytraps pagers and walkie-talkies, Bibi-Biden continues his servility to the Israeli terror regime and its genocidal leader Netanyahu, who is despised by three out of four Israelis for his domestic policies and is under indictment by Israeli prosecutors for corruption.

Despite reports that Biden steams in private against Netanyahu, and considers him a liar and a supporter of Trump’s re-election, Biden knows that that this foreign authoritarian has the big card: CONGRESS. Most of the legislators who attended his noxious address to a joint congressional session last June gave him a record-breaking 52 standing ovations. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said, “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.”

Biden, who is known to conduct foreign and military policy without any authorization by Congress, doesn’t want to offend the powerful “Israel Government Can Do No Wrong” Lobby in the U.S.—to which he has been indentured for his entire 50-year political career. This includes Israel’s current destruction of Lebanon, where tens of thousands of Americans are residing. The Washington Post reports that the Biden White House “has so far given full backing to Israel’s ground operations in Lebanon, even amid a growing international outcry over the civilian toll … and Israeli clashes with United Nations peacekeepers,” who have been assigned there for decades.

Having full U.S. government backing, and now backed by U.S. warships, Marines and logistics, plus 100 U.S. soldiers arriving this week in Israel, Netanyahu knows he has a free hand to attack Iran and drag the U.S. into a regional war.

Both Netanyahu and Bibi-Biden have been briefed about the possibilities of “blowback” (the CIA’s term) against the U.S. These concerns come from U.S. intelligence agencies who study scenarios like future 9/11s or the recent inexpensive armed drones that can be constructed and deployed anywhere. Militarists and corporatists in the U.S. aren’t that concerned because whenever “blowback” occurs they can concentrate more power, with bigger military budgets and profits, in another “war on terror,” silencing dissent and subordinating or sidelining critical domestic priorities.

That is the lethal fix and fate that America has been subjected to by its cowardly, Constitution-violating politicians from both major parties. The power structure—the corporate state—or what Franklin Delano Roosevelt once called in a 1938 message to Congress “fascism,” is telling the American people: “Heads we win, Tails you lose.”

Here is how bad Biden has gotten. Recently, two letters signed by 65 American doctors and health workers back from the horrors, the killing fields of Gaza, to President Joe Biden, have gone unanswered. (See, “65 Doctors, Nurses and Paramedics: What We Saw in Gaza” by Feroze Sidhwa, New York Times on Sunday, October 13, 2024). Their letters plead for a ceasefire and immediate humanitarian aid for the starving, dying people of Gaza. They request a meeting with President Biden, who has often met with the pro-Israeli lobby. Scranton Joe says no way.

These brave physicians and nurses also are requesting that Joe Biden demand that Netanyahu allow children in Gaza who are seriously burned or are amputees be air-lifted to America to be treated by compassionate specialists in ready American hospitals. Biden, a practicing Catholic, has no interest.

President George Washington warned his country about avoiding foreign entanglements in his farewell address. Were he possessed of more prescience; he would have added the word “surrenders.”

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Ralph Nader

Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate and the author of “The Seventeen Solutions: Bold Ideas for Our American Future” (2012). His new book is, “Wrecking America: How Trump’s Lies and Lawbreaking Betray All” (2020, co-authored with Mark Green).

Tags:biden, Gaza, Hezbollah, Israel, Lebanon, politics, USA
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Vijay Prashad: They Know What Real Bombing Means

October 13, 2024

Consortium News, October 11, 2024

Israel’s bombing of Beirut mirrors its harsh attacks on Gaza and symbolises the disdain for human life that characterises both Israeli and U.S. warfare.

Ayman Baalbaki, Lebanon, Untitled, 2020.

By Vijay Prashad
Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research

On Oct. 1, U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX), the chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee issued a statement urging U.S. President Joe Biden to “place maximum pressure on Iran and its proxies, rather than pressure Israel for a ceasefire. We need to expedite arms transfers to Israel that this administration has delayed for months, including 2,000-pound bombs, to ensure Israel has all the tools to deter these threats.”

McCaul’s belligerent call came days after Israel used over 80 U.S.-made 2,000-pound bombs and other munitions on Sept. 27, to strike a residential neighbourhood in Beirut and kill – amongst hundreds of civilians – Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah (1960–2024), the leader of Hezbollah. In this one bombing raid, Israel dropped more of these “bunker buster” bombs than the United States military used in its 2003 invasion of Iraq.

A former U.S. aviator, Commander Graham Scarbro of the U.S. Navy, reviewed the evidence of the Israeli strikes for the U.S. Naval Institute. In a very revealing article, Scarbro notes that Israel “seems to have taken a notably different approach to collateral damage than U.S. forces over the past few decades.”

While the U.S. has never demonstrated any significant concern for civilian casualties or “collateral damage,” it is worth noting that even senior U.S. military officials have raised their eyebrows at the degree of Israel’s disregard for human life. Israel’s military, Scarbro writes, “seems to have a higher threshold for collateral damage… meaning they strike even when chances are higher for civilian casualties.”

Bassim al-Shaker, Iraq, “Symphony of Death 1,” 2019.

Despite Washington’s knowledge that the Israelis have been bombing Gaza, and now Lebanon, with complete abandon — and even after the International Court of Justice ruled that it is “plausible” that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza — the United States has continued to arm the Israelis with deadly weaponry.

On Oct. 10, 2023, Biden said, “We’re surging additional military assistance,” which has amounted to a record-level of at least $17.9 billion during the past year of genocide. In March, The Washington Post reported that the U.S. had “quietly approved and delivered more than 100 separate foreign military sales to Israel that amounted to ‘thousands of precision-guided munitions, small-diameter bombs, bunker busters, small arms and other lethal aid.”

These “small” sales fell below the minimum threshold under U.S. law which requires the president to approach Congress for approval (which anyway would not have been denied). These sales amounted to the transfer of at least 14,000 of the 2,000 pound MK-84 bombs and 6,500 500-pound bombs that Israel has used in both Gaza and Lebanon.

In Gaza, the Israelis have routinely used the 2,000-pound bombs to strike areas populated by civilians — who had been told to take refuge at these locations by the Israeli authorities themselves.

“In the first two weeks of the war,” The New York Times reported, “roughly 90 percent of the munitions Israel dropped in Gaza were satellite-guided bombs of 1,000 or 2,000 pounds.”

In March, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) tweeted,

“The US cannot beg Netanyahu to stop bombing civilians one day and the next send him thousands more 2,000 lb. bombs that can level entire city blocks. This is obscene.”

A 2016 report by Action on Armed Violence offered the following assessment of these weapons of mass destruction:

“These are extremely powerful bombs, with a large destructive capacity when used in populated areas. They can blow apart buildings and kill and injure people hundreds of metres from the point of detonation. The fragmentation pattern and range of a 2,000lb MK 84 bomb are difficult to predict, but it is generally said that this weapon has a ‘lethal radius’ (i.e. the distance in which it is likely to kill people in the vicinity) of up to 360m.

The blast waves of such a weapon can create a great concussive effect; a 2,000lb bomb can be expected to cause severe injury and damage as far as 800 metres from the point of impact.”

Ismail Shammout, Palestine, “Guardian of the Fire,” 1988.

I have several times walked around the Beirut neighbourhood of Haret Hreik in Dahiyeh, which was struck by Israeli bombs in the attack on the Hezbollah leadership. This is a highly congested area, with barely a few metres between high-rise residential buildings. To strike a complex of these buildings with over 80 of these powerful bombs cannot be called “precise.”

Israel’s bombing of Beirut mirrors its harsh attacks on Gaza and symbolises the disdain for human life that characterises both Israeli and U.S. warfare. On Sept. 23, Israel bombarded Lebanon at a rate of more than one airstrike per minute. In days, Israel’s “intense airstrikes” displaced over a million people, a fifth of the entire population of Lebanon.

The first bomb to ever fall from an aircraft was a Haasen hand grenade (Denmark) dropped by Lieutenant Giulio Cavotti of the Italian Air Force on Nov. 1, 1911, onto the town of Tagiura, near Tripoli, Libya. A hundred years later, in a grotesque commemoration of sorts, French and U.S. aircraft bombed Libya once more as part of their war to overthrow the government of Muammar Gaddafi.

The ferocity of aerial bombing was understood from the very outset, as Sven Lindqvist documented in his book, A History of Bombing (2003). In March 1924, U.K. Squadron Leader Arthur “Bomber” Harris authored a report (later expunged) about his bombings in Iraq and the “real” meaning of aerial bombardment:

“Where the Arab and Kurd had just begun to realise that if they could stand a little noise, they could stand bombing … they now know what real bombing means, in casualties and damage; they now know that within forty-five minutes a full-sized village … can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured by four or five machines which offer them no real target, no opportunity for glory as warriors, no effective means of escape.”

A hundred years later, these words of “Bomber” Harris aptly describe the kind of ruthlessness inflicted on both Palestine and Lebanon.

André Masson, France, “There Is No Finished World,” 1942

You might ask: what about the rockets fired on Israel by Hezbollah and Iran? Are they not part of the brutality of war? Certainly, these are part of the ugliness of warfare, but an easy parallel cannot be drawn.

Iran’s ballistic missiles followed Israel’s attack on an Iranian diplomatic facility in Syria in April, the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran following the inauguration of Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian in July, the assassination of Nasrallah in Beirut in September, and the killing of several Iranian military officials.

Significantly, whereas Israel has launched countless strikes targeting civilians, medical personnel, journalists, and aid workers, Iran’s missiles exclusively targeted Israeli military and intelligence facilities and not civilian areas. Hezbollah, meanwhile, targeted Israel’s Ramat David Airbase, east of Haifa, in September.

Neither Iran nor Hezbollah have fired their munitions into congested neighbourhoods of Israeli cities. Since Oct. 8, 2023, Israeli airstrikes against Lebanon have far outnumbered Hezbollah’s strikes against Israel.

Before the current wave of hostilities, by Sept. 10, Israel had killed 137 Lebanese civilians and displaced hundreds of thousands of Lebanese from their homes; meanwhile, Hezbollah rockets had by then killed 14 Israeli civilians, with their rockets leading to the evacuation of 63,000 Israeli civilians.

There has been not only a quantitative difference in the number of strikes and death toll, but a qualitative difference in the use of violence. Violence that is directed largely at military targets, is permissible in certain conditions under international law; violence that is indiscriminate, such as when massive bombs are used against civilians, violates the laws of war.

Etel Adnan, Lebanon, Untitled, 2017.

Etel Adnan (1925–2021), a Lebanese poet and artist, grew up in Beirut after her parents fled the collapsing Ottoman Empire that became modern day Turkey. She dug deep into the soil of conflict and pain, the ingredients for her poetry. Her voice resonated from the balcony of her apartment in Ashrafieh, the “little mountain,” from where she could see the ships come in and out of the port.

When Etel Adnan died, the novelist Elias Khoury (1948–2024), who himself died just before Beirut was again bombarded, wrote that he mourned a woman who would not die, but he feared for his city which was suffering alone. Here are a few extracts from Etel’s poem, “Beirut, 1982,” to remind us that we are as angry as a storm.

I never believed
that vengeance
would be a tree
growing in my garden

Trees grow in all directions
So do Palestinians:

uprooted
and unlike butterflies
wingless,
earthbound,
heavy with love
for their borders and their
misery,

no people can go forever behind
bars
or under the rain.

…

We shall never cry with tears
but with blood.

…

It is not on cemeteries that we shall
plant grain
nor in the palm of my hand
We are as angry as a storm.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest books are Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism and, with Noam Chomsky, The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and the Fragility of U.S. Power.

Tags:Gaza, Hezbollah, Israel, Lebanon, politics
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Philip Giraldi: Who Is In Charge of US Foreign Policy?

October 11, 2024

Is it Israel and its Powerful Lobby or The White House or No One at all?

Philip Giraldi • October 10, 2024

It probably would surprise no one to learn that there are several viewpoints among critics of the current wars devastating the Middle East regarding who is actually encouraging a growing bloody conflict which might soon involve at least six countries in the region. In simple terms, there is a school of thought that believes that Israel, backed by its various powerful diaspora lobbies, is defying world opinion to continue its slaughter of its indigenous Palestinians and neighboring Lebanese. In other words, it is all about Israel acting maliciously and badly. However, another viewpoint sees instead a neocon dominated United States foreign policy exploiting Israeli truculence and its hard right wing leadership to carry out American national objectives in the region, in a sense using Israel as its proxy and actually encouraging its bad behavior. Meanwhile, a third plausible examination of developments tends to meld the two approaches, suggesting that the US and Israel are in a conspiratorial cooperative relationship and are in full agreement regarding reducing the power of the Jewish state’s neighbors. That would make Israel the preeminent military power dominating the Persia Gulf and beyond to control a large chunk of the world’s energy resources while also benefiting American weapons manufacturers and other political and Wall Street constituencies.

The problem is that there is sufficient carefully selected evidence to support every point of view including an alternative suggestion that American foreign policy is broken, adrift and does not reflect any US national interest at all, witness the recent $8.7 billion aid package sent to a belligerent Israel when Americans were dying in North Carolina in the wake of a devastating hurricane for which FEMA only provided meager assistance because it claimed it had run out of money. The steady flow of money and weapons from the US to Israel suggests that the United States is for some reason supporting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s expansion of the war against Hamas when the White House could have ended the war in a day by cutting off that support. Alternatively, Israel might be seen as continuing its slaughter in spite of perhaps insincere US objections because it presumes that its powerful Lobby in the US will keep Joe Biden in line with an election coming up lest it weigh in heavily to help Donald Trump. And, of course, if the two nations are acting in collusion it could all be Kabuki with Washington and Tel Aviv cynically intending to do whatever it takes reshape the Middle East to Israel’s benefit. Take your choice of which scenario fits best.

One needs to determine what actually justifies the reality of a multiplicity of fronts, to include providing political cover in the UN, where the United States is interacting to support “greatest ally and best friend” Israel while at the same time constantly verbalizing the apparently false claim that it is trying to avoid the conflict’s expanding into a major conflagration that could engulf the entire region and beyond, driving up energy costs dramatically just for starters. Such a managed co-escalation might also increase the risks and costs geometrically as more players get involved, up to and including the possibility that Israel will opt to use its nuclear weapons to “defend” itself or to attack Iran, which is where both Russia and the United States might become involved in a nuclear exchange to defend their respective “friends.”

So what is the truth and what are the lies and who in Washington and/or Tel Aviv is calling the shots in the Middle East? And what do they really intend and how do they see it all ending? There are four obvious US government players who are on the ground and meeting with the key figures in the nations involved in the fighting as well as with those ostensibly engaged in the what are being called negotiations to put an end to the killing with a ceasefire acceptable to all parties. One must concede that their task is a difficult one at best as all parties to the peace talks recognize that the United States is not an unbiased intermediary given its total commitment to support Israel politically as well as with arms and money while freely labeling the Jewish state’s neighbors and opponents alike as “terrorists” and “autocrats.” The four would be composed of two obvious officials Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director William Burns and Secretary of State Antony Blinken while a third and fourth are not-so-well-known, consisting of special negotiator for the president Amos Hochstein and the White House Coordinator for the Middle East Brett McGurk. Both Burns and Blinken have made numerous trips to the Middle East and Ukraine to convey the views of the president and make their own assessments of the situation on the ground after meeting with local officials. The role is rather unusual for Burns as a CIA Director normally operates behind the scenes and does not get involved in policy making, but Burns is not a typical director in that he has no background in intelligence. He was a highly regarded State Department officer who wound up as the US Ambassador to Russia. He very carefully worked through the nuances of the US-Russian relationship and was highly praised for explaining things from the Kremlin perspective so US planners would be able to understand very clearly the differing perspectives of the two nations. He described, for example, how very sensitive Russia was over the issue of Ukraine becoming part of NATO, a warning which was subsequently ignored by President Biden.

Blinken is, of course, better known as he served as Deputy Secretary of State during the Barack Obama administration and is regarded as a particularly close associate of Joe Biden. As Secretary of State he has been a very active traveler throughout both the Middle East and Ukraine. Blinken is Jewish and is regarded as a protector of Israel, which is, of course, also the President’s frequently enunciated view. After the Israeli assassination of Hezbollah leader Nasrallah he said that the “World is safer without Nasrallah…” whereas most of the world would quite reasonably prefer to see Benjamin Netanyahu removed. Blinken also appears to favor preemptively attacking Iran to eliminate its nuclear energy program even though there is no evidence that it is weapons-development related. He has recently come under pressure for lying about two State Department reports that indicated very clearly that Israel has been deliberately starving and killing the Gazans by blocking US supplied food and medicine supplies at the border. One large convoy of trucks containing enough food to feed most of the local people who were in danger of dying from starvation was deliberately held up at the border until the food became rotten and had to be destroyed. Blinken lied both to Congress and to the American people about the Israeli policy, saying that blocking food supplies by Israel was not taking place. It was a consequential lie as people died and are continuing to die because of it and Blinken has paid no price for what must surely be considered a major war crime.

The third policy planner is an unusual individual Amos Hochstein, who was born in Israel and served in the Israeli Army. He has been designated as Biden’s personal roving ambassador in the Middle East with a particular brief to work to avoid the expansion of the Gaza fighting into Lebanon against Hezbollah. In that effort, he has obviously failed as both Israel and Lebanon now consider themselves to be at war. It is presumed that Hochstein is the “active arm” in the White House campaign to shield Israel from any harm initiated by its much abused neighbors. Why anyone would select an Israeli who is a product of the Israeli Army as a negotiator of some type among the nations that the Israelis have been victimizing for the past seventy-five years has to be considered an enduring mystery. It is perhaps another gimmick move by Biden to pretend that he is neutral in the conflict while doing everything he can to turn Netanyahu free to destroy or subject all his neighbors.

Which brings us to the fourth likely top planner National Security Council Coordinator for Africa and the Middle East Brett McGurk. McGurk has been a bipartisan fixture floating around the national security and diplomatic communities for a number of years with the reputation of being a “hardliner” particularly when dealing with Arabs, which is not to say that he has learned anything beyond the fact that if one wants to survive in Washington it pays to love Israel. It is interesting to note that the Biden Administration claims that it is working hard to achieve a ceasefire in both Lebanon and Gaza but it continues to cover for Israel politically and provide it with the weapons and money to continue it genocidal activities as well as in support of its plan to occupy southern Lebanon to create a “buffer zone.” Israeli media is already reporting that real estate agents are offering attractive properties for Jewish buyers in what is still Lebanon, just as Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner has been peddling exclusive sea front lots in Gaza. In other words, don’t believe anything coming out of the Biden Administration as evidence for anything as it appears that its “policy makers” and press spokesmen have acquired the Israeli tendency to lie about everything.

Politico has a recent piece on both Hochstein and McGurk and it does not make one feel warm and fuzzy about what the Biden administration is up to. The article is entitled: “US officials quietly backed Israel’s military push against Hezbollah -The officials urged caution and stressed the need for diplomacy. But the timing was right for such a military shift, they concluded”. It seems that the guys who are promoted by the Biden administration as peacemakers are anything but. Politico obtained insider information from a number of anonymous sources in both Washington and Israel and learned that Biden’s team has actually agreed with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s broad strategy to shift Israel’s military focus to the north against Hezbollah. This tilt, contrary to what the White House has been preaching, produced a reaction from a number of Pentagon, intelligence and State Department officials that such a move would drag the United States into the war, which is really what Netanyahu intended, but the shift in policy was approved anyway. One senior US official noted but dismissed the flaw in a policy of calling for peace while encouraging war as “Both things can be true — the US can want diplomacy and support Israel’s larger goals against Hezbollah. There’s clearly a line that the administration is toeing, it’s just not clear what that line is.”

In spite of concerns from some in the government that a reckless Israel will go too far and ignite a major regional war that could easily spread beyond the Middle East, Politico reports how Hochstein and McGurk worked “behind the scenes” to encourage Israel and they are now describing Israel’s Lebanon operations likely to include a major land invasion as a “history-defining moment” — one that will “reshape the Middle East for the better for years to come.” That would seem to confirm that the United States and Israel are in fact collaborating and the US is fully complicit and de facto supporting the genocidal intention of Netanyahu to make a new Greater Israel largely free of Arabs. For the US, the extra benefit gained from defeating Hezbollah will be that it ultimately weakens Iran, neocon Washington’s perpetual arch enemy, which relies on Hezbollah as a proxy and a resource for projecting power. Of course, it could all go the other way and the joint American-Israeli plan could come to naught. Hezbollah notably routed invading Israeli forces in south Lebanon back in 2006 and it is better trained and equipped now than it was then. And what happens if Israeli army is in trouble and the US is forced to act on its pledge to “defend” the Jewish state, thereby leading a small war to expand and include Iran and Russia? The ball will be in your court Mr. Biden, or possibly Mr. Trump or Ms. Harris. Consider carefully how you will play it but if you really do want a ceasefire, I wouldn’t send Blinken, Hochstein and McGurk around to do the negotiating.

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.

Tags:Gaza, Hezbollah, Israel, israel Lobby, Lebanon, politics, USA, Washington
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Biden is letting Israel trap the US into war with Iran

October 8, 2024

One year after Hamas’ Oct 7 attacks, regional conflict is raging with no end in sight

Analysis | Middle East

Paul R. Pillar, Oct 07, 2024

The Biden administration is not only endorsing but also on the verge of actively assisting a new Israeli armed attack on Iran. National security adviser Jake Sullivan says that the United States is working directly with Israel regarding such an attack. “The United States is fully, fully, fully supportive of Israel,” declares President Joe Biden.

The projected attack serves no U.S. interests. The attack perpetuates a broader pattern of escalating violence in the Middle East that also serves no U.S. interests. The Iranian missile salvo to which the coming Israeli attack is ostensible retaliation was itself retaliation for previous Israeli attacks. Retaliation for retaliation is a prescription for an unending cycle of violence.

The United States is facilitating an attack on a nation that does not want war and has been remarkably restrained in trying to avoid it, in the face of repeated Israeli provocations. A sustained Israeli bombing campaign against Iranian-related targets within Syria elicited a response only when it escalated to an attack on a diplomatic compound in Damascus, killing senior Iranian officials. Even then, the Iranian response, in the form of an earlier salvo of missiles and drones in April, was designed and telegraphed in a way to make a show of defiance but — with most of the projectiles certain to be shot down — to cause minimal damage and almost no casualties.

When Israel assassinated visiting Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in a government guest house in Tehran in July — the sort of attack that would elicit a quick and forceful response by the U.S. or Israel if it happened in one of their capitals — Iran did nothing until last week. It finally acted only after yet another Israeli attack— this time an assault on residential buildings in a suburb of Beirut that killed a senior Iranian Revolutionary Guard officer along with Hezbollah secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah. Far from being motivated by any grandiose ambitions of regional dominance or desire to destabilize the region, Iranian leaders believed that they were getting killed by a thousand cuts from Israel and that they had to respond to the repeated Israeli attacks lest they lose the confidence not only of their own people but of regional allies. The missile firings that constituted Iran’s retaliation, like the ones in April, again caused minimal damage or casualties.

By cooperating with Israel in a new attack, the United States is assisting a state that has been responsible for most of the escalation and the vast majority of death and destruction in the Middle East for at least the past year. Although Hamas’ attack on southern Israel last October is commonly seen as the starting point of the subsequent mayhem in the Middle East, the question of who is responding to whom could go back farther than that. For example, the 1,200 deaths from that Hamas attack, horrible to be sure, were fewer than the number of Palestinians that Israel had killed in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip just from the day-to-day operations of the occupying Israeli army, supplemented by settler violence in the West Bank, during the previous eight years.

Since the Hamas attack, the devastating Israeli operation in the Gaza Strip has gone far beyond anything that can be construed as defense, or even as a response to Hamas, and has brought suffering to innocent civilians that is orders of magnitude greater than anything Hamas or any other Palestinian group has ever done. The still-rising official death toll exceeds 41,000, with the actual number of Palestinian deaths probably much higher and likely into six figures. Much of the Strip has been reduced to rubble and rendered unlivable.

After Hezbollah fired rounds into Israel last October in a show of support for the Palestinians in Gaza, the story of conflict along the Israeli-Lebanese frontier has mainly been one of repeated Israeli escalations. Israeli attacks in Lebanon have far exceeded Hezbollah attacks on Israel, in number but especially in physical effects, with almost no casualties within Israel apart from a few military personnel at the border. The rapidly rising toll of deaths in Lebanon from Israeli attacks has now passed 2,000, with about 10,000 injured and about 1.2 million people displaced from their homes. As in the Gaza Strip, civilians constitute much and perhaps most of that toll, including as a result of Israeli airstrikes that have demolished residential buildings in densely populated neighborhoods.

As a growing Israeli ground assault in Lebanon accompanies the aerial bombardment, Israel has told people in almost the entire southern third of Lebanon to move north, even though Israel already has been conducting lethal aerial attacks throughout Lebanon, including as far north as Tripoli. This also is reminiscent of the pattern in Gaza, in which residents are told to move, only to be bombed again in their new location.

The offensive Israeli actions that figure into confrontation with Iran — including the aerial and clandestine assassination operations in Lebanon, Syria, and the heart of Tehran — also have each constituted escalation. Those operations appear designed at least in part to goad Iran into entering a wider war, preferably one that also involves the United States.

Other motives behind the Israeli escalation are multiple and vary with the specific target. The deadly assaults on the Palestinians — in the Gaza Strip and increasingly also in the West Bank— are part of a long-term effort to use force to somehow make Israel’s Palestinian problem go away, through a combination of outright killing, inducing exile by making a homeland unlivable, and intimidation of any who remain.

Israel’s officially declared objective for its attacks in Lebanon is to permit a return home of the 70,000 temporarily displaced residents of northern Israel — whose numbers constitute less than six percent of the Lebanese who have been driven from their homes so far by the Israel offensive. That objective is genuine, but an escalating war along Israel’s northern border only places the objective farther out of reach. The Israeli operations also clearly are designed to cripple Hezbollah as much as possible, although they sustain and heighten the sort of anger that led to Hezbollah’s establishment and growth in the first place.

An Israel that is the strongest military power in the Middle East and is throwing its armed might around in seemingly every direction but the Mediterranean Sea is a nation drunk on the use of force and stumbling into still more use of it with little or no apparent attention to any long-term strategy for achieving an end state, other than living forever by the sword. Each tactical success, including the killing of a prominent adversary such as Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah, only seems to deepen the inebriation.

Beyond this, one gets into a mixture of motivations that are specific to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and ones shared with other Israeli policymakers. It is widely recognized, including by Netanyahu’s domestic opponents, that he has a personal stake in continuing and even escalating Israel’s wars. This is partly because of the usual rally-round-the-flag effect that attenuates the political problems of a wartime leader. It is also more specifically because Netanyahu is dependent on the support of the most extreme members of his right-wing ruling coalition to hold that coalition together, thereby keeping Netanyahu in power and delaying the day he has to confront fully the corruption charges against him.

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An armed attack on Iran would extend the Israeli policy— not unique to Netanyahu, although he has been its most prominent exponent — of stoking maximum hostility toward, and isolation of, Iran. That policy serves to weaken a rival for regional influence, to place blame for everything wrong with the region on someone other than Israel, to inhibit any engagement with Iran by Israel’s patron the United States, and to divert international attention away from Israel’s own actions.

The diversion seems to work. The international attention to what may come next in the confrontation with Iran, in addition to the escalating operations in Lebanon, has meant less attention than would otherwise have been given in newspapers and the airwaves to the continued carnage in the Gaza Strip that claims civilian lives, such as Israeli attacks within the last few days on a girls’ school and an orphanage that several hundred displaced persons were using as shelter.

The U.S. presidential election provides another motivation for the Israeli government to escalate regional warfare. Netanyahu certainly would like to see a second term for Donald Trump, who gave Israel just about anything it wanted during his previous time in office, with nothing in return except political support for Trump. This relationship is part of a broader political alliance between the Republican Party and Netanyahu’s Likud Party. To the extent an escalatory mess in the Middle East causes problems for the Biden administration and thereby hurts the election chances of Vice President Kamala Harris, that is a bonus from Netanyahu’s point of view.

Netanyahu is more likely to enjoy that bonus and the other fruits of ramping up conflict with Iran to the extent that the United States gets directly involved in that conflict. Such involvement not only makes the politically costly mess for the Biden administration all the messier, but also enables Netanyahu to claim credibly that he has the United States fully at his side in his government’s lethal activities.

None of these Israeli objectives are in the interest of the United States. Several of the objectives, such as hamstringing any U.S. diplomacy that involves Iran, are directly and manifestly opposed to U.S. interests.

Israel’s regional warfare — and more specifically a U.S.-backed attack on Iran — would harm U.S. interests in several additional ways.

Closer association with Israel’s lethal operations increases the chance of reprisals, including terrorist reprisals. It also worsens U.S. isolation in international politics.

Supporting or participating in an Israeli attack on Iran would further undermine U.S. claims to be in favor of peace and observance of a rules-based international order. It would mean attacking the country that in this confrontation has exercised restraint in the interest of avoiding war and is firmly in support of ceasefires on each of the fronts seeing combat. It would mean aiding further attacks by the country that in the same confrontation has inflicted far more death and destruction, and done more to promote escalation of the violence, than any other in the region.

An attack on Iran would roil the oil market and cause economic dislocations that would reach the United States, especially but not solely if such an attack targeted Iranian oil facilities.

An attack would set back any chance for fruitful diplomacy involving Iran on matters such as security in the Persian Gulf region.

An attack would increase the chance that the Iranian regime would choose to develop a nuclear weapon. Nothing would be better designed to strengthen the arguments of those in Tehran willing to take that step than armed attacks demonstrating that Iran does not now have a sufficient deterrent.

Israel has already entrapped the United States to a large degree in its lethal ways in the Middle East, and the entrapment threatens to become deeper with the anticipated new attack on Iran. The entrapment would not have been possible without mismanagement of the U.S.-Israeli relationship on the Washington end. President Biden’s approach of holding Netanyahu close in the hope of influencing his policies has failed. It also has been counterproductive. In the absence of any willingness to employ the leverage that U.S. material aid to Israel represents, all the bear-hugging and expressions of support have only reassured Netanyahu that he can continue to prosecute his wars and ignore American calls for restraint without losing that aid.

It is refreshing to see reports that at least within the Department of Defense there is some recognition that the policy has been counterproductive by emboldening Israel to escalate. It is perhaps unsurprising that the department whose personnel would be on the front line of any expanded warfare involving the United States is more willing than others to recognize the nature and sources of the violence plaguing the Middle East and the need to deter or restrain Israel rather than embolden it. One can only hope that this willingness will spread more widely in policymaking circles.

Paul R. Pillar

Paul R. Pillar is Non-resident Senior Fellow at the Center for Security Studies of Georgetown University and a non-resident fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He is also an Associate Fellow of the Geneva Center for Security Policy.

The views expressed by authors on Responsible Statecraft do not necessarily reflect those of the Quincy Institute or its associates.

Tags:biden, Gaza, Iran, Israel, Lebanon, Middle East
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Congresswoman Tlaib Slams US-Funded ‘Bloodbath’ as Biden Calls Israel Bombing Lebanon ‘Justice’

September 29, 2024

Mourners carry the bodies of people killed in Israeli airstrikes on el-Karak in Lebanon’s eastern Bekaa valley, during their funeral on September 27, 2024.

(Photo: Hassan Jarrah/AFP via Getty Images)

“The U.S. government are conspirators to the war criminal Netanyahu’s genocidal plan,” said the Michigan Democrat.

by Jessica Corbett, Common Dreams, Sep 28, 2024

U.S. President Joe Biden and Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib on Saturday had notably different responses to Israel’s intense bombing campaign in Lebanon over the past 24 hours, which killed hundreds of people including key Hezbollah leaders.

“Our country is funding this bloodbath,” Tlaib (D-Mich.) said on social media Saturday morning, sharing a post from Zeteo‘s Prem Thakker with videos of the Israeli assault on Lebanon that began Friday, as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was in New York City to address the United Nations General Assembly.

“Sending more of our troops and bombs to the region is not advancing peace,” added Tlaib, the only Palestinian American in Congress and a leading critic of Israel’s yearlong genocide in the Gaza Strip. “The U.S. government are conspirators to the war criminal Netanyahu’s genocidal plan.”

In the post shared by Tlaib, Thakker noted that “the U.S. was reportedly informed of this mass Israeli attack on Beirut in Lebanon shortly beforehand,” which “comes just one day after [the] U.S. released $8.7 billion more in aid to Israel.”

Tlaib also shared that her office is fielding “desperate calls” from U.S. citizens who are struggling to leave Lebanon. She declared that “the mission of the U.S. Department of State is to protect Americans, and they are failing AGAIN.”

Biden, meanwhile, began his Saturday afternoon statement by noting that Israel killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, which the Iran-backed Lebanese political and paramilitary group confirmed earlier in the day—a development that elevated fears of a broader regional war.

“Hassan Nasrallah and the terrorist group he led, Hezbollah, were responsible for killing hundreds of Americans over a four-decade reign of terror,” Biden said. “His death from an Israeli airstrike is a measure of justice for his many victims, including thousands of Americans, Israelis, and Lebanese civilians.”

The president continued:

The strike that killed Nasrallah took place in the broader context of the conflict that began with Hamas’ massacre on October 7, 2023. Nasrallah, the next day, made the fateful decision to join hands with Hamas and open what he called a “northern front” against Israel.

The United States fully supports Israel’s right to defend itself against Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and any other Iranian-supported terrorist groups. Just yesterday, I directed my secretary of defense to further enhance the defense posture of U.S. military forces in the Middle East region to deter aggression and reduce the risk of a broader regional war.

Ultimately, our aim is to de-escalate the ongoing conflicts in both Gaza and Lebanon through diplomatic means. In Gaza, we have been pursuing a deal backed by the U.N. Security Council for a ceasefire and the release of hostages. In Lebanon, we have been negotiating a deal that would return people safely to their homes in Israel and southern Lebanon. It is time for these deals to close, for the threats to Israel to be removed, and for the broader Middle East region to gain greater stability.

While the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) thanked Biden “for standing with our democratic ally Israel,” journalists from around the world and other critics highlighted that his statement “has not a word on civilian casualties.”

Ali Abunimah, director of The Electronic Intifada, was among those who pointed out that Biden said the “assassination of Nasrallah, in an Israeli massacre that killed hundreds, ‘is a measure of justice for his many victims.'”

“Utterly depraved, and by this twisted, criminal Biden logic, those who tried to assassinate Trump were also instruments of ‘justice,” Abunimah said, referring to former U.S. President Donald Trump, Republican nominee for the November election.

Middle East expert Assal Rad said: “Biden calls massive bombs in a densely-populated area that leveled six apartment buildings in Lebanon ‘a measure of justice.’ The torching of international law and the precedent that is being set should terrify us all.”

Rad also slammed Biden’s cease-fire call, saying: “This is nonsense. You can’t provide the funding and weapons to continue the conflict *without* conditions, twist humanitarian law to give Israel total impunity, and reject every international institution that seeks accountability, and then say your ‘aim is to de-escalate.'”

Others recalled Israel’s 2004 assassination of Hamas leader Ahmed Yassin, which also killed seven other people. The administration of former Republican U.S. President George W. Bush—who launched the global War on Terror in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks—didn’t issue a forceful condemnation like some European leaders, but a spokesperson for the State Department said at the time that “we are deeply troubled” by the attack.

As’ad Abukhalil, a Lebanese American professor at California State University, Stanislus, declared Saturday that “there has been no U.S. president EVER who has unconditionally allowed unrestrained Israeli savagery in the Middle East as Biden has done.”

Abukhalil warned that “the U.S. will suffer for years to come from the policies of Biden in the Middle East,” which he described as “more far-reaching [than] Bush’s.”

Biden, a Democrat, was initially seeking reelection in November, but after a disastrous summer debate performance against Trump, he passed the torch to Vice President Kamala Harris. After putting out Biden’s Saturday statement, the White House released a similar one from Harris—which was also lauded by AIPAC.

“Hassan Nasrallah was a terrorist with American blood on his hands. Across decades, his leadership of Hezbollah destabilized the Middle East and led to the killing of countless innocent people in Lebanon, Israel, Syria, and around the world. Today, Hezbollah’s victims have a measure of justice,” Harris said. “I have an unwavering commitment to the security of Israel. I will always support Israel’s right to defend itself against Iran and Iran-backed terrorist groups such as Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis.”

“President Biden and I do not want to see conflict in the Middle East escalate into a broader regional war,” she added. “We have been working on a diplomatic solution along the Israel-Lebanon border so that people can safely return home on both sides of that border. Diplomacy remains the best path forward to protect civilians and achieve lasting stability in the region.”

In response, Margaret Zaknoen DeReus, executive director at the California-based Institute for Middle East Understanding, said: “Like Biden, not a word from the VP , from the candidate of joy & freedom, about the 1,000+ Lebanese men, women and children Israel obliterated. Not a word about hundreds of thousands of Lebanese displaced, entire city blocks destroyed. We don’t exist as human beings to this [administration].”

Responding to both statements on social media, the anti-war group CodePink said that the Biden-Harris administration “believes flattening a residential area with… bombs is ‘justice.'”

Tags:Gaza, Hezbollah, Israel, jo-biden, Lebanon, politics, USA
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Biden Claims He’s Working for Peace in the Middle East But Continues to Back Israel

September 25, 2024

Biden made the claim in a speech at the UN General Assembly

by Dave DeCamp, Antiwar. com, September 24, 2024

President Biden delivered a speech to the UN General Assembly in New York on Tuesday and claimed that he was working to bring a “greater measure of peace and stability to the Middle East” even though his administration continues to provide full-throated support for Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza and its escalations in Lebanon.

Biden acknowledged that “innocent civilians” in Gaza are “going through hell,” a situation he helped create by providing a constant flow of weapons to Israel since October 7, 2023. An Israeli Air Force official recently said that without US support, Israel could only sustain military operations in Gaza for a few months.

The president said it was time for Hamas and Israel to finalize the terms of a hostage and ceasefire deal, but US officials have admitted that there’s no chance of an agreement before Biden’s term ends on January 20, 2025. Biden could force Israel to accept a deal by withholding military aid, but there’s no sign he’s willing to take that step.

US President Joe Biden delivered remarks at the United Nations (John Wong/EYEPRESS)

Discussing the situation between Israel and Hezbollah, Biden said, “Full-scale war is not in anyone’s interest. Even as the situation has escalated, a diplomatic solution is still possible.” His comments came a day after Israel launched a massive bombardment against southern and eastern Lebanon, killing over 500 people, mostly civilians.

Biden claimed that his administration is “working tirelessly” to achieve a diplomatic solution between Israel and Hezbollah. But the US backed the latest Israeli escalation and is deploying more troops to the Middle East as a show of support. US military aid and promises to defend Israel in the event of a major regional war have emboldened Israel to escalate in Lebanon and elsewhere in the Middle East.

Lebanese Foreign Minister Abdallah Bou Habib expressed disappointment with Biden’s comments about Lebanon and said the US was the only country that could stop the escalations. “It was not strong. It is not promising and it would not solve this problem,” Bou Habib said. “I (am) still hoping. The United States is the only country that can really make a difference in the Middle East and with regard to Lebanon.”

In his address, Biden also called for countries to stop arming the opposing sides in the war in Sudan. “The world needs to stop arming the generals, to speak with one voice and tell them: Stop tearing your country apart. Stop blocking aid to the Sudanese people. End this war now,” he said.

A day earlier, the Biden administration named the UAE a “major defense partner” as Abu Dhabi is funneling weapons into Sudan to arm the Rapid Support Forces and fuel the war. The designation will give the UAE access to more sophisticated US weapons and military technology.

Tags:Gaza, Hezbollah, Israel, Joe Biden, Lebanon, politics
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Lebanon Health Minister: ‘Majority, If Not All’ of 558 Killed by Israel Were Civilians

September 24, 2024

Experts say the scale of the Israeli bombardment in Lebanon on Monday is unprecedented in 21st-century conflicts

by Dave DeCamp, Antiwar. com, September 24, 2024

Lebanese Health Minister Dr. Firass Abiad told The New York Times on Tuesday that the “overwhelming majority, if not all,” of the people killed and wounded by Israel’s bombardment in Lebanon on Monday were civilians.

The latest health toll from Lebanon’s Health Ministry puts the number of killed by the Monday bombing at 558, which includes 50 children and 94 women. Nearly 2,000 were wounded in the attack.

The Times notes that Lebanon’s Health Ministry’s figures have historically been viewed as reliable. The ministry is not run by Hezbollah but is overseen by the Lebanese government and collects its data using an emergency operations center that gathers casualty figures from private and state-run hospitals.

Israel targeted residential areas of southern and eastern Lebanon on Monday, claiming Hezbollah missiles were being hidden inside houses. The Israeli military said that it hit more than 1,600 targets, and experts say it’s one of the heaviest single-day bombings in modern warfare. The toll in Israel’s bombardment is about half of the toll for the entire 2006 Lebanon War, which lasted 34 days.

“Prior to the Gaza war, munitions deployed with this intensity and with this frequency would have been almost unheard-of,” Emily Tripp, director of the monitoring group Airwars, told the Times. “There is no comparison in terms of death toll or munitions use with previous 21st-century air campaigns of this nature, as far as we know.”

The US supported the Israeli bombardment despite previously claiming it opposed escalation and is sending more troops to the region as a show of support. Israeli strikes continue to hit Lebanon on Tuesday, and Hezbollah has fired hundreds of rockets into Israel in response.

Tags:Gaza, Hezbollah, Israel, Lebanon, politics
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Chris Hedges at UCSB: To Kill a People

November 23, 2024 Chris Hedges

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Israeli War Crimes Documented by the Israeli Defense Forces

There’s no sense denying Israel’s indiscriminate attacks and wanton destruction when its war crimes are documented by its own armed forces.

Israel, with US support, attacks Iran

Andre Damon , WSWS.org,

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Biden Stands Aside as Netanyahu Incinerates Gaza, Now Lebanon

Having full U.S. government backing, including weapons and political cover to continue the carnage, Netanyahu knows he has a free hand to attack Iran and drag the U.S. into a regional war.

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Vijay Prashad: They Know What Real Bombing Means

Consortium News, October 11, 2024

Philip Giraldi: Who Is In Charge of US Foreign Policy?

Biden is letting Israel trap the US into war with Iran

One year after Hamas’ Oct 7 attacks, regional conflict is raging with no end in sight

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Congresswoman Tlaib Slams US-Funded ‘Bloodbath’ as Biden Calls Israel Bombing Lebanon ‘Justice’

“The U.S. government are conspirators to the war criminal Netanyahu’s genocidal plan,” said the Michigan Democrat.

Biden Claims He’s Working for Peace in the Middle East But Continues to Back Israel

Lebanon Health Minister: ‘Majority, If Not All’ of 558 Killed by Israel Were Civilians

Experts say the scale of the Israeli bombardment in Lebanon on Monday is unprecedented in 21st-century conflicts

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November 23, 2024 Chris Hedges

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There’s no sense denying Israel’s indiscriminate attacks and wanton destruction when its war crimes are documented by its own armed forces.

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Andre Damon, WSWS.org,

14 hours ago

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Having full U.S. government backing, including weapons and political cover to continue the carnage, Netanyahu knows he has a free hand to attack Iran and drag the U.S. into a regional war.

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Consortium News, October 11, 2024

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One year after Hamas’ Oct 7 attacks, regional conflict is raging with no end in sight

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“The U.S. government are conspirators to the war criminal Netanyahu’s genocidal plan,” said the Michigan Democrat.

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Experts say the scale of the Israeli bombardment in Lebanon on Monday is unprecedented in 21st-century conflicts

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