The United States has, particularly since 1967, been the bulwark for Israel’s expansionist dreams. US-Israeli supremacist intentions, papered over and buried for decades, are now clear for all to see.
In these difficult times, the voice of the late Palestinian-American scholar, Edward Said is ever present, “Writing is the final resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history.”
For more than fourteen painful months Israel has passed off its inhuman actions against the people of Gaza as “defensive.”
We are to believe that the massacre of tens of thousands of civilians and attacks on its Arab neighbors are somehow Israel’s “right.” Championed by the Biden administration, Tel Aviv has grown ever more bolder and barbaric in its efforts to crush the resistance and expand its “undeclared” borders; simply, because it can.
Since it proclaimed itself a state on Palestinian land in 1948, Israel has been and continues to be engaged in the largest dispossession of an ethnic group in modern history. And following its victory in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, Israel has emerged an expansionist, occupying and annexationist power, ruling over vast Arab lands and people.
The United States has, particularly since 1967, been the bulwark for Israel’s expansionist dreams. US-Israeli supremacist intentions, papered over and buried for decades, are now clear for all to see.
Out of the ashes of World War II, the newly created United Nations, with US pressure, helped legalize land theft. In 1948, the General Assembly (made up of 58 nations) said “yes” to the creation of a Jewish state on 62 percent of historic Palestine. At the time of the unequal division, 68 percent of the population were Arab Palestinian Muslims and Christians, while only 30 percent were Jewish.
Zionist plans to seize all of Palestine, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, have never ceased, and are clearly stated in the Likud Party platform of 1977: “The right of the Jewish people to the land of Israel is eternal and indisputable… therefore, Judea and Samaria will not be handed to any foreign administration; between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.”
The inhumanity, injustices and militarism that we see today in Gaza, in the occupied West Bank, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen have deep roots in the founding of the Jewish state and its ongoing desire to create a hegemonic Eretz Israel (Greater Israel) throughout the Middle East.
The expansionist policies of the current Israeli regime are not an aberration. They are rather a continuation and the inevitable outcome of the Zionist political ideology espoused by Israel’s founding fathers, advanced by the Labour and Likud parties, and currently being prosecuted by the fanatics in the far-right Religious Zionism party.
Like the early Zionists, every Israeli leader believed in the Jewish right to all of Palestine and the right to expel the indigenous population to achieve an exclusive Jewish state. Their plans, goals and strategies have been blatantly stated and well-documented over many years.
European founders, men like the father of modern political Zionism, Theodor Herzl (1860-1904); Ze’ev Jabotinsky (1880-1940), founder of Revisionist Zionism (precursor of today’s Likud Party); Chaim Weizmann (1874-1952), the first president of Israel; and David Ben-Gurion (1886-1973), Israel’s first prime minister, agreed that increased Jewish immigration and removal of Palestinians were required to secure control over Palestine and to create a Greater Israel.
Following are a handful of the many citations that should be weighed to understand European Zionism and its ethnic cleansing schemes for Palestine and its people:
“When we occupy the land, we shall bring immediate benefits to the state that receives us. We must expropriate gently the private property on the estates assigned to us. We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it employment in our own country… Both the process of expropriation and removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.” (Herzl, 1895) (to Herzl, Palestinians were “it”)
“There is no choice: The Arabs must make room for the Jews of Eretz Israel. If it was possible to transfer the Baltic peoples, it is also possible to move the Palestinian Arabs… We Jews, thank God, have nothing to do with the East… The Islamic soul must be broomed out of Eretz Israel… (Muslims are) yelling rabble dressed up in gaudy, savage rags.” (Jabotinsky, 1939)
“By a Jewish National Home I mean the creation of such conditions that as the country is developed we can pour in a considerable number of immigrants, and finally establish such a society in Palestine that Palestine shall be as Jewish as England is English or America American.” (Weizmann, 1919)
“With compulsory transfer we (would) have a vast area (for settlement)… I support compulsory transfer. I don’t see anything immoral in it.” (Ben-Gurion, 1937) and “My assumption…is that a Jewish state on only a part (referring to partition plan) of the land is not the end but the beginning… every increase in strength helps in the possession of the land as a whole.” (Ben-Gurion, 1938)
From Israel’s founder, Herzl, to its first prime minister, Ben-Gurion, its goal has been “a land for Israelis, without Palestinians.”
Furthermore, by looking back on Israel’s expansionist strategies, we can better comprehend what Tel Aviv and Washington are currently plotting for Palestine and the larger region. Their schemes for becoming the hegemons of the Levant are revealed in the: 1948 Plan Dalet (Plan D); Oded Yinon Plan, “A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s;” and 1996 “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm.”
The Dalet Plan—Blueprint for the Ethnic Cleansing
Long before the British terminated their mandate and pulled their army out of Palestine, a cabal of Zionist political and military leaders, led by Ben-Gurion, had been preparing military plans for the dispossession of the Palestinians once the British left.
Plan Dalet (Plan D) was officially put into effect on March 10, 1948. Military orders were given to the new Israeli army and Haganah militia to systematically and forcibly remove Palestinians from vast areas of the country.
The operational orders specified which population centers should be targeted and laid out in detail how to drive out the inhabitants and destroy their communities, using methods including intimidation, setting fires to homes, properties and goods, demolishing homes and planting mines to prevent inhabitants from returning. On April 9, 1948, at Deir Yassin near Jerusalem, over 150 Palestinian men, women and children were massacred by Zionist terrorist militias (members of Irgun and Stern Gang).
After six months, when the Nakba (the catastrophe) ended, over 750,000 Palestinians had been uprooted, 531 villages destroyed and eleven urban neighborhoods had been depopulated, soon repopulated with Jewish Israelis.
The destruction of Palestinian communities began during and after the 1948 Arab- Israeli War marked the beginning of Israel’s apartheid system on 78 percent of historic Palestine.
The Yinon Plan—’A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s’
In February 1982, an essay appeared in Kivinum (Directions), a journal of the World Zionist Organization. It was written by Oded Yinon, a journalist for the Jerusalem Post with close ties to Israel’s foreign ministry.
The Yinon Plan for the Middle East contained the key elements of the “Greater Israel” scheme reflected in the expansionist policies—underwritten by the United States—that Tel Aviv has implemented over more than eight decades.
Although the “de-Palestinization of Palestine” has been a priority, every Arab state has been a target of Zionist expansionism. The Yinon Plan emphasizes two key elements: To survive, Israel must become an imperial regional power; and to achieve that hegemony, it must weaken and divide neighboring Arab states. Israel’s aim has been to create small, sectarian-based Arab states with little choice but to yield to Israeli domination.
The Yinon Plan has been taking shape since the Iran-Iraq War (1980-88) and US invasion of Iraq in 2003. Israel’s interest in weak states in the Middle East
has been borne out in its air and cyber-wars and numerous assassinations of prominent opposition figures.
Since 1967, Israel has swallowed up more Arab land. It has illegally annexed Arab lands in Palestine and the Syrian Golan Heights; with plans, as recently announced, to colonize the devastated Gaza Strip and to annex the West Bank.
‘A New Strategy for Securing the Realm’
A US-Israeli neoconservative research group at the Institute for Advanced Strategies and Palestine Studies in Washington, D.C. prepared a policy document in 1996 for newly-elected Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The report titled, “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” laid out a plan of action on how Washington and Tel Aviv could integrate their policies to defeat Israel’s “foes” by reshaping the Middle East.
Notably, the authors of the manifesto worked in the George W. Bush White House, inside the Pentagon and Defense Department. Its lead author, former US Assistant Secretary of Defense for Global Strategic Affairs (1981-87), Richard Perle, was one of the key figures in the formulation of the disastrous 2003 Iraq war strategy adopted by the Bush administration.
To win American support, Netanyahu was advised to package the proposed policies in a language familiar to Americans; hence, standard-issue canards such as “Israel has the right to defend itself” and branding supporters of Palestinian rights as “terrorists.”
The strategies described in the “Yinon” and “Clean Break” plans were constructs for endless US-Israeli wars and chaos in the region. It should be noted, that the United States has engaged in or sponsored wars or conflicts—beneficial to Israeli strategy—in Iraq (2003), Libya (2011), Syria (from 2011 to the present), in Lebanon, Yemen, occupied West Bank and Gaza; and with Iran if Israel continues to have its way.
To “secure the realm,” Israel was urged to pursue aggressive policies of preemption and regime change against governments in the region that resisted Israel’s expansionist aims. Netanyahu was advised to collaborate with Jordan and Türkiye to destabilize Iraq and to contain Syria through proxy warfare.
Consistent with “clean break logic,” the Bush administration, under the pretext that Iraq harbored weapons of mass destruction, invaded Iraq in 2003, toppled Saddam and dismantled the ruling Ba’ath Party.
Iraq has yet to recover from America’s eight-year-long occupation and war.
Despite the Iraqi government’s request that the US leave, Washington has refused to withdraw its remaining 2,500 troops.
The US-Israel war on Syria, which led to the fall of President Assad in December 2024 began with the 1996 “Clean Break” strategy for the region. It escalated in 2011 when President Barack Obama covertly instructed the CIA to overthrow President Assad in Operation Timber Sycamore. Thirteen years of deadly war, frequent Israeli air strikes, and crippling US-led economic sanctions, left Syria impoverished, fragmented and unable to resist foreign invasion.
Israel got what it wanted in Syria, a Balkanized and weakened country. The United States, Türkiye and their forces dominate in the North, while Israel controls areas in the South. Tel Aviv now claims control over the demilitarized buffer zone in the Golan Heights, and has declared its intent to expand its illegal colonies in the Golan Heights, declaring them part of the Israeli state “for eternity.”
Netanyahu has eagerly embraced “Clean Break” proposals on ways to “secure the realm” in Palestine. He has perversely sabotaged the Oslo Accords (1993/1995), completely written-off the so-called two-state solution (land for peace) and sown division within the Palestinian national movement.
The Palestinian Authority (PA) tasked with limited government over parts of the occupied Palestinian territories by the now-extinct Oslo Accords, has been reduced to an enforcement arm of the Israeli security state.
The recent (December 21) large-scale armed crackdown against Palestinian resistance groups in the Jenin refugee camp carried out by PA Security Forces exemplifies the extent of the collaboration.
It should be noted, that the assault was coordinated with Washington and Tel Aviv, and put under the direction of US Army Lieutenant General Michael R. Fenzel, who has served as US Security Coordinator of the Israel-Palestinian Authority since November 2021.
Clean Break strategists callously advised Israel, “to pursue Palestinians into all areas.” In its sinister belief that it can physically destroy the Palestinian national desire to return home to a free Palestine, Israel has ravaged and pulverized the defenseless Gaza Strip. And for more than 17 years, Netanyahu has made it his mission to kill as many Palestinians as the United States and its Western allies will tolerate.
Conclusion
From Herzl’s “spirit them out” to Netanyahu’s campaign of genocide, the message and actions have been the same—-remove all traces of Palestinians. And from President Harry S. Truman to President Joe Biden, the message has been: the United States will prevent Israel from failing, whatever the political or economic cost.
When President Biden asserts that he is a “committed Zionist,” he emphatically says to Israelis and Americans that the United States is in lockstep with Israel’s plans to erase Palestinians and their hopes for a sovereign Palestinian nation. Americans, too, many unwittingly, have become committed Zionists by financing Israeli supremacy and regional militarism.
In addition, by suppressing the truth about Israel’s expansionist plans, American politicians and the corporate media have fed the country’s addiction to regional supremacy and its dreams of a Greater Israel, without Palestinians.
Ben-Gurion’s words in a letter to his son in 1937 were menacing and foreboding:
“The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as a war.”
Israel’s current Zionist extremists have seized upon the Palestinian act of resistance on October 7, 2023, to make Ben-Gurion’s hoped for “opportune moment” a reality, believing that they, like their predecessors, can continue to disfigure history.
– Dr. M. Reza Behnam is a political scientist specializing in the history, politics and governments of the Middle East. He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.
On 19 December 2024, Human Rights Watch issued a 179-page report detailing Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
On 5 December 2024, Amnesty International issued a 296-page report detailing Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
On 21 November 2024, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for crimes against humanity and war crimes.
On 26 January 2024, the International Court of Justice found that a plausible case can be made that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
Given the West’s presumed commitment to human rights and especially to preventing genocide, one would have expected countries like the United States, Britain, and Germany, to have stopped the Israeli genocide in its tracks.
Instead, the governments in those three countries, especially the United States, have supported Israel’s unimaginable behavior in Gaza at every turn. Indeed, those three countries are complicit in this genocide.
Moreover, almost all of the many human rights advocates in those countries, and in the West more generally, have stayed silent while Israel executed its genocide. The mainstream media has made hardly any effort to expose and challenge what Israel is doing to the Palestinians. Indeed some key outlets have staunchly supported Israel’s actions.
One wonders what people in the West who have either supported Israel’s genocide or remained silent tell themselves to justify their behavior and sleep at night.
Protesters with hands painted red to symbolize blood stand outside the Turkish Embassy in Croatia on Nov. 11, 2024, holding signs in English and Croatian that read, “Erdoğan stop fueling genocide in Gaza.” The demonstration is part of a global campaign urging Turkey to cease its alleged role in oil shipments benefiting Israel.
A new report by the Stop Fueling Genocide campaign, supported by Progressive International, has revealed that 10 crude oil shipments were made from Turkey to Israel over the past year, eight of which violated Ankara’s embargo announced in May, according to the Gazete Duvar news website.
The report is the second from the group, which uses satellite imagery and shipping data to track the movement of tankers from Turkey’s Ceyhan port to Israel, providing evidence that Ankara’s crude oil shipments to Israel continued despite the trade ban.
In the first report researchers confirmed that a tanker, the Seavigour, loaded Azeri crude oil in Ceyhan on October 28, turned off its tracking signal in the eastern Mediterranean on October 30 and reappeared near Sicily a week later, having reportedly offloaded its cargo. Satellite imagery later showed the Seavigour docking at the EAPC terminal near Ashkelon, Israel, on November 5.
Ceyhan serves as the endpoint of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline, which transports crude oil from Azerbaijan. This oil accounts for nearly 30 percent of Israel’s crude imports. Reports indicate that Azerbaijan’s oil exports to Israel have quadrupled this year, rising from 523,554 tons in January to 2,372,248 tons in September.
Researchers identified 10 journeys made since December 2023 by another crude oil tanker, the Kimolos, between Ceyhan and the EAPC Terminal in the second report, with eight occurring after Turkey’s trade blockade on Israel was announced.
The report said the Kimolos, similar to other vessels trading with Israel, was turning off its tracking signal in the middle of the eastern Mediterranean for several days to mask the trade between Turkey and Israel.
The two ships identified in the reports are Suezmax-size vessels, which are chartered specifically for the transfer of high volumes of crude oil.
The report said researchers “have reasonably concluded” from this evidence that the Kimolos has routinely shipped Azeri crude oil from Turkey to Israel throughout the past year.
The findings contradict statements by Turkey’s energy minister, who had denied any oil shipments to Israel since the embargo began.
The ongoing trade with Israel has drawn criticism from activists, who argue that crude oil from the BTC pipeline is refined and used to fuel Israeli military equipment. Advocacy groups have called on Turkey to enforce the embargo and align its policies with its stated support for Palestine.
Experts warn that if the International Court of Justice determines Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, those involved in supplying fuel could be found complicit in failing to prevent genocide.
Earlier this month nine activists, who had interrupted President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s November 29 speech at the TRT World Forum in İstanbul, accusing the president of hypocrisy for allegedly facilitating crude oil shipments to Israel despite Turkey’s public stance against Israeli military actions in Gaza, were detained and subsequently arrested by a court on December 2. They were released on December 6 after their lawyers filed an appeal contesting the arrests.
The arrests have sparked outrage among human rights groups and activists. Critics argue that Erdoğan’s government is suppressing dissent while enabling trade that contradicts its pro-Palestinian rhetoric.
Aid group accuses Tel Aviv of deliberate ethnic cleansing in latest damning report
Israeli soldiers move on armored personnel carriers (APC) near the Israeli-Gaza border, in southern Israel, December 18, 2024
THE medical aid group Doctors Without Borders accused Israel of “ethnic cleansing” in Gaza in a damning new report released on Thursday.
This comes as the Swedish government announced that it was ending its “core support” for the United Nations relief agency for Palestinians (Unrwa).
MSF, the acronym from Doctors Without Borders’ original French name, said Israel was systematically attacking Gaza’s healthcare system and restricting essential humanitarian assistance.
MSF say Palestinians are forcibly displaced, trapped and bombed. It also says MSF staff have witnessed a relentless campaign by the Israeli forces marked by massive destruction, devastation and dehumanisation.
The report accuses Israeli forces of having prevented essential items such as food, water, and medical supplies from entering the strip on numerous occasions, as well as blocking, denying, and delaying humanitarian assistance.
Fewer than half of Gaza’s 36 hospitals are even partially functional, and the healthcare system lies in ruins.
The report says that during the one-year period covered by the report — from October 2023 to October 2024 — MSF staff “have endured 41 attacks and violent incidents, including air strikes, shelling, and violent incursions in health facilities; direct fire on our shelters and convoys; and arbitrary detention of colleagues by Israeli forces.”
MSF medical personnel and patients have been forced to evacuate hospitals and health facilities on 17 separate occasions, often literally running for their lives.
The report says that even if the war ends today, the loss of families, repeated forced displacement and inhumane living conditions will scar the population for generations.
MSF’s secretary-general Christopher Lockyear said Israel was guilty of dismantling the infrastructure in Gaza that was essential for life and had strangled access to humanitarian aid in the besieged enclave.
He said: “We are seeing forced displacements, ethnic cleansing in the north, the destruction of infrastructure, physical and mental injuries to the population in Gaza and all of this is undeniable.”
The report said: “Attacks on civilians, the dismantling of the healthcare system, the deprivation of food, water and supplies are a form of collective punishment inflicted by the Israeli authorities on the people of Gaza.
“This must stop now.”
Israel’s Foreign Ministry hit back at the report, describing it as “entirely false and misleading.”
In a statement the ministry said Israel does not target innocent health workers and tries to ensure delivery of aid, and charged the medical group with failing to acknowledge Hamas’s alleged use of hospitals as bases “for terrorist activities and operations.”
The MSF report reinforces similar allegations made on Thursday in a Human Rights Watch study.
HRW accused Israel of a campaign in Gaza that amounted to “acts of genocide,” cutting off the flow of water and electricity, destroying infrastructure and preventing the distribution of critical supplies.
HRW executive director Tirana Hasan described the findings of the MSF report as being consistent with her own organisation’s report.
Amnesty International secretary-general Agnes Callamard said the research by MSF was “yet one more report detailing the carnage in Gaza.”
But Vedant Patel, a spokesman for the US State Department, said it “disagreed with the HRW report conclusions of genocide.”
Of the MSF report Mr Patel said the health organisation itself acknowledged that the “intentionality” of any Israeli actions was beyond the scope of its assessment.
Islington North MP Jeremy Corbyn warned the British government to learn lessons from the report.
He said: “This devastating account of Palestinian suffering should be mandatory reading for government ministers. How much more evidence of genocide does the government need to end its complicity and suspend all arms sales to Israel?”
Director of the Tricontinental Centre for Social Research Vijay Prashad told the Morning Star: “Perhaps the most stunning part of the new MSF report is this simple fact: it could take up to 15 years to clear the rubble and 80 years to rebuild housing.
“This itself shows that Israel has ethnically cleansed Gaza for at least several generations. No further proof is necessary.”
Luciano Zaccara, an associate professor in Gulf politics at Qatar University, says Israelis are trying to push all the people in the north of Gaza out of the area, which has been under siege.
He told the Al Jazeera network that the Israeli operation and siege “has been going on for more than two months without anybody being able to do anything.”
Mr Zaccara said: “There is no doubt about the kind of ethnic cleansing that they are carrying out in the north of Gaza,” he stressed.
MSF said it continued to demand an immediate and sustained ceasefire and safe access to northern Gaza, to allow the delivery of humanitarian aid and medical supplies to hospitals.
The aid organisation added that while it continues “to provide lifesaving care in central and southern Gaza, we call on Israel to end its siege on the territory and open vital land borders, including the Rafah crossing, to enable a massive scale-up of humanitarian and medical aid.”
The Israeli onslaught against the Palestinians in Gaza continues.
On Thursday five children and 12 others were killed in an Israeli air strike on the Shaaban Rais School sheltering displaced people and earlier another five people were slaughtered in the Maghazi refugee camp in Deir al-Balah.
Officials said some people remained under rubble and on roads where ambulance and civil defence crews could not reach them.
The Gaza health ministry said the total number of deaths in Gaza is now at least 45,206 since October 7, when Hamas staged a cross-border raid that killed 1,139 Israelis.
Meanwhile the Swedish government confirmed it was ending its “core support” for Unrwa.
In October, Israel’s parliament approved legislation banning Unrwa activities in the Palestinian territories, a measure that was to take effect in 90 days.
Stockholm said that 800 million kronor (around £58 million) being allocated for the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and the region next year will instead go through the channels of the Swedish International Development Co-operation Agency and the government’s support for other agencies such as the World Food Programme, the UN Children’s Fund, the UN Population Fund and the International Committee of the Red Cross.
Sweden’s minister for international development co-operation and foreign trade, Benjamin Dousa, posted on X that the Israeli decision will make much of Unrwa work difficult or impossible.
But head of Unrwa Philippe Lazzarini said on X: “Defunding Unrwa now will undermine decades of Sweden’s investment in human development including by denying access to education for hundreds of thousands of girls and boys across the region.”
He added the decision would “double” the suffering for the people of Gaza.
Desperate to stay relevant, the faithful US-Israeli ‘handpicked leader’ has intensified his crackdown on Palestinians in the West Bank and pledged to work with Trump
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas speaks during the United Nations General Assembly at the UN headquarters in New York City on 26 September 2024 (Stephanie Keith/Getty Images/AFP)
Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas has been trying to stay relevant as events in Gaza, the West Bank and across the region have been moving at a much faster pace than the octogenarian politician is able to cope with.
This week, amid an Israeli genocide that has been unceasingly raging in Gaza for 14 months, Abbas’s security forces brazenly killed several prominent resistance fighters in Jenin in an attempt to appease the Israelis and their American benefactors.
When then-US President Donald Trump announced in January 2020 the so-called “deal of the century“, a proposal that was wholly aligned with Israel on all issues of contention, Abbas said: “I want to say to the duo – Trump and [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu – that Jerusalem is not for sale, and all of our rights are not for sale or bargaining. Your deal, the conspiracy, will not happen…we say a thousand times no, no, no to the deal of the century.”
Yet, when Trump was re-elected on 5 November, Abbas called to congratulate him and vowed to work with him on a political settlement that he himself rejected out of hand five years earlier.
This was followed by a deal the Egyptians struck two weeks ago between Hamas and Fatah, the Palestinian faction headed by Abbas. The agreement was to appoint an independent committee of prominent and professional Palestinians in Gaza to run its affairs and reconstruction after the war.
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It was a demand by the Zionist regime and the Biden administration in order to dislodge Hamas from any future role in ruling Gaza.
However, Abbas’s Fatah quickly retracted its approval as the Israelis rejected any role for or input from Hamas in the future of Gaza. It seems that such a deal would not play well in Netanyahu’s vow for a “total victory” over Hamas and the resistance.
So what’s Abbas’s end game, and where is he headed in his twilight years?
Hand-picked ‘leader’
In his 20th year of a four-year term, Abbas announced in late November, a few days after he turned 89, his succession plan.
He issued a decree that called for the appointment of the unambitious, uncharismatic and feeble Fatah leader, Rawhi Fattouh, as an interim president after Abbas.
Condoleezza Rice recounted how a handful of people in 2003 hand-picked Abbas to become the leader of the Palestinian people
The 75-year-old Fattouh is currently serving as the chairman of the Palestine National Council, the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) parliament in exile.
In 28 years, the PNC met only once in 2018.
Interestingly enough, Fattouh is also the same person who served as an interim president after the death of former PA President Yasser Arafat in November 2004 until Abbas was elected to replace him in January 2005.
For over a year, Abbas has been under American pressure to appoint a successor who will be as compliant and amenable to Israel and the US as he has been during his long tenure.
As recalled in her 2011 memoir, No Higher Honor, Condoleezza Rice, who served as US President George W Bush’s national security advisor, recounted how a handful of people in 2003, including her, Bush, CIA Director George Tenet, and Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister at the time, hand-picked Abbas to become the leader of the Palestinian people.
For much of 2002, Sharon refused to deal with Arafat but was eventually able to convince Bush to sideline the PLO leader in favour of Abbas as the more submissive and yielding Fatah leader.
Before he was appointed as a prime minister in 2003 as a result of American and European pressures, Abbas was publicly ridiculed by Arafat, who called him the “Karzai of Palestine”, a reference to Hamid Karzai, the former Afghan president, who was widely considered in the Arab world as a US puppet.
Abbas, aka Abu Mazen, had risen to the leadership of Fatah and the PLO almost by default.
Even though he was considered among the first generation of Fatah founders as he joined the movement in the early 1960s, he was not distinguished or appointed to senior positions until decades later.
‘Strategic asset’
It was not until most of the early founders and senior leaders of Fatah and the PLO, such as Khalil al-Wazir (Abu Jihad), Salah Khalaf (Abu Iyad), Sa’ad Sayel, Abu Yusuf al-Najjar, and many others, had been assassinated by Israel between the 1970s and early 1990s that Abu Mazen started to hold more significant positions within Fatah and the PLO.
When the PLO adopted its 10-point plan in 1974, paving the way towards a political settlement based on recognising Israel in exchange for a truncated Palestinian state, Abbas was known to favour abandoning any form of armed resistance to the Israeli occupation.
Why the Palestinian Authority’s biggest claim is a lie
Regarding this political ideology, Abu Iyad, who was considered to be next in line in the Palestinian movement after Arafat before his assassination in 1991 by the Zionist regime, quipped: “The thing that I fear the most is that treason would one day just become (normalised as) an opinion.”
When Israel failed to crush the First Intifada (1987-1991), it adopted a political track that would preserve its expansionist and settlement policies. This path culminated in the 1993 Oslo Accords.
Abbas was not only one of the few Palestinian interlocutors in this process but also the person who actually signed the accords on the White House lawn on behalf of the Palestinians.
Needless to say, the Oslo process was nothing short of a disaster that was doomed to fail from the start.
The Palestinian negotiators led by Arafat and Abbas surrendered their main card and strongest leverage at the outset, which was the recognition of the Zionist regime on 78 percent of the historical land of Palestine.
In exchange, Israel only pledged to engage in a vain political process that should have ended with an independent Palestinian state by 1999, or so thought the PLO leaders.
Yet, more than three decades after Oslo, the Zionist regime has not only killed the so-called two-state solution but consolidated its plans for a “Greater Israel”, including a more than six-fold increase of illegal settlers in the West Bank from about 115,000 in 1993 to over 750,000 today.
According to a 2015 International Crisis Group report, most Israeli officials consider Abbas their most important “strategic asset”.
The reason is quite clear.
It has been mainly through a political philosophy championed by Abbas that rejected decades of Palestinian resistance, prompting one expert to remark: “Abbas not once in his life did he adopt armed resistance, nor did he support it.”
He often mocked any notion of armed resistance by any group, including his own, even when Israel had killed scores of Palestinians unprovoked.
Brutal security force
His leadership style turned a relatively vibrant Palestinian national movement into a subsidiary of the Israeli occupation, often referred to as a “five-star occupation” since it had relieved the Zionist regime from appearing as the occupying power, while carrying out aggressive and domineering settler-colonial policies worse than South Africa’s apartheid regime.
During his tenure, he embraced the American dictate to change the security doctrine of the Palestinian security forces from policing and protecting Palestinian population centres into a brutal security force acting as the first line of defence of Israeli settlements and the occupation army against any form of resistance, including passive popular forms.
Why western plans for another Palestinian client regime will fail
Since his rise to lead the Palestinian Authority in 2005, he adopted the American plan under Lieutenant General Keith Dayton to train PA security forces, which engaged in suppression and silencing of dissent, as well as illegal arrests and torture, many times leading to death as in the case of Nizar Banat in 2021.
In coordination with the US and the Zionist regime, Abbas created a bloated security force whose primary mission was security coordination with the Israeli army to thwart any resistance or operations against the occupation.
He called this mission sacred and for decades refused to stop it even though Palestinian public opinion overwhelmingly condemns it.
Scores of Palestinian political bodies and factions have called on him to halt such disgraceful practices.
A detailed 2017 report found that the Palestinian security sector employed around half of all civil servants, accounting for nearly $1bn of the PA budget, and receives around 30 percent of total international aid given to the Palestinians, including most of the funds coming from the US.
The study further found that the Palestinian security sector spent more of the PA’s budget than the education, health, and agriculture sectors combined. It included more than 80,000 individuals, where the ratio of security personnel to the population is as high as 1 to 48 – one of the highest in the world.
In Abbas’s first encounter with Donald Trump in 2017, the US president bragged about the PA’s continued security coordination with Israel, as he praised its effectiveness in protecting the Israeli occupation, in which he said: “They get along unbelievably well. I was actually very impressed and somewhat surprised at how well they got along. They work together beautifully.”
‘Small-time dictator’
When Hamas won the 2006 legislative elections, Abbas coordinated with the Americans and Israelis, as laid out in detail in Rice’s account in her book, to obstruct the Hamas-led government from being able to serve as the democratically elected party.
In fact, it was Abbas’s security forces, again in coordination with the Americans, that tried in 2007 to topple Hamas’s government in Gaza, only to be outmanoeuvred by Hamas, which took over Gaza, effectively resulting in two separate Palestinian governments.
Palestinian resistance can always survive without outside support. Can Israel?
David Wurmser, a Bush administration official at the time, commented in a Vanity Fair article in 2008 that the Bush administration was engaged “in a dirty war in an effort to provide a corrupt dictatorship [led by Abbas] with victory”.
He added that Hamas had no intention of taking Gaza until Fatah forced its hand.
Wurmser further observed: “It looks to me that what happened wasn’t so much a coup by Hamas but an attempted coup by Fatah that was pre-empted before it could happen.”
Ever since this internal strife, Gaza has been living under a crippling Israeli siege with little interference from Abbas.
With the support of the Americans, Israelis and regional actors, Abbas took total control of the Palestinian political life. He started to unilaterally issue decrees like any small-time dictator of a banana republic.
His unconstitutional and unlawful decrees would dismiss governments, install prime ministers, cancel elections, spend billions, cover corruption by his cronies, family members and sons, and appoint a constitutional court in order to dismiss the Hamas-led legislative council.
But perhaps the behaviour that shocked most Palestinians was Abbas’s deafening silence during the early days of Israel’s genocidal war.
As the Israeli war of extermination and ethnic cleansing campaign intensified, Abbas would voice his strong but empty opposition to the Israeli brutality on the one hand, while continuing to have security coordination with the same vigour as if no genocide in Gaza, daily settler attacks across the West Bank, or routine Al-Aqsa compound incursions had been taking place for over a year.
With the Israeli genocidal war in Gaza entering its 15th month with no end in sight, and while Israel prepares its long-term occupation of Gaza, as well as aggressively pushing its policy of effective annexation of Area C in the West Bank, it appears that the current fascist Israeli government is on the verge of dumping Abbas in favour of a new security arrangement that would favour local Palestinian collaborators to govern the Palestinian populations.
A 2017 study found that the Palestinian security sector employed around half of all civil servants, accounting for nearly $1bn of the PA budget
It’s clear that the current Zionist regime, with its grand design to impose the Greater Israel project, wants to resolve its demographic Palestinian problem and decisively end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in its favour once and for all.
Hence, part of Israel’s grand strategy to realise this objective is not merely to be content with banning Unrwa, killing the two-state solution, or establishing Israeli hegemony in the region.
But in essence, it’s moving aggressively to redesign all the Palestinian institutions and sources of power that have defined the Palestinian struggle over decades.
Regardless of Abbas’s decree or what happens to him in the near term as he enters the twilight of his life, Israel will make sure that he is the last Palestinian leader who combines all the titles that define the Palestinian institutions – the PA president, the PLO chairman, the Fatah leader, and the president of the “State of Palestine”.
From an Israeli perspective, he has served his purpose, and it is now time for the final solution.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
Sami Al-Arian is the Director of the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA) at Istanbul Zaim University. Originally from Palestine, he lived in the US for four decades (1975-2015) where he was a tenured academic, prominent speaker and human rights activist before relocating to Turkey. He is the author of several studies and books. He can be contacted at: nolandsman1948@gmail.com.
Middle East Eye delivers independent and unrivalled coverage and analysis of the Middle East, North Africa and beyond. To learn more about republishing this content and the associated fees, please fill out this form. More about MEE can be found her.
by Michael Brenner, Dissident Voice, December 2nd, 2024
Racism is at the core of Western societies complicity in Israeli’s genocide against the Arab Palestinians. That is self-evident. The United States and Britain are more than accomplices; they are co-belligerents. The behavior of all has been constant over 14 months of graphic depiction day-by-day of atrocities of the most heinous kinds.
Racism, though, is a multifaceted phenomenon. It encompasses a wide range of attitudes and actions. They should be parsed as a precondition for analyzing which have been operative in this case, how they shaped policies and interventions, how reconciled with the values of liberal democracies, and how sustained in the face of such glaring criminal abuses of humanity.
Nazi extermination of Jews is at one extreme of racism. The negative weighing of ethnic identity in vetting candidates for a position of town supervisor also is racism. Using disparaging terms about a particular ascriptive group in casual conversation is racism. Apartheid is racism – whether in the form of ghettoes, Bantustans, or the Gaza concentration camps. Thoughts can be racist, words can be racist, actions can be racist. There are connections among these three expressions of racism – but to varying degrees and not always.
Let us take a look at these ambiguities and discontinuities with a view to getting a better fix on the ways that racism has driven Western countries’ involvement in the Palestine genocide.
It is normal for social groupings to differentiate themselves. This is an affirmation of solidarity. It need not be accompanied by an ascription of the other’s intrinsic inferiority. Nor be hostile and aggressive.)
The diversity among larger, more organized societies changes things in two respects: variations in race, color, language, ethnicity are frequently encountered; the capacity for stereotyping grows along with interactions that can lead to contention and rivalry.
Competition and conflict generate a need for justification of ‘winners’ exploiting/subordinating/abusing losers. Prejudice serves this person.
That experience once institutionalized, as it was historically in Western societies’ domination of non-Western peoples, leaves an enduring residue of prejudicial feelings among both parties in the relationship.
Those feelings can fade over time while remaining dormant with the latent potential to resurface.
A dramatic event instigated by a formerly subordinate/inferior that inflicts pain is the surest catalyst for that recrudescence – for it is acutely humiliating as well as painful. The intensity of the reaction (emotional, physical) to such an offense can be commensurate with the sublimated guilt one feels about past abuse of the perpetrator.
Back to the contemporary situation. The facilitating, background factors that help explain Western elites’ willing embrace of the Palestinian genocide are easy to identify. The long history of colonial domination of ‘inferior’ peoples; their systematic exploitation; a widespread sense of diminishing status relative to emerging new centers of strength and influence – as punctuated by the 1973 oil crisis and ensuing dependency on the ‘hajjis’; a reflexive disposition to perform penance for historical sins committed against Jews in Europe by turning a blind eye to the sins of the previously sinned against; 75 years of painting the Arabs as the ‘black hats’ in their struggle against the Israeli settler state; revulsion at earlier acts of terror abroad by PLO and PFLP.
Stunning events over the past two decades have stirred a potent mix of negative emotions about Arabs. 9/11 punctuated the opening of the Terrorism Era. Reciprocation of violent acts on Western soil and the brutal, indiscriminate retaliation of the so-called War on Terror drew a line of blood not only between the Westerners on the one side, and terrorist groups along with their perceived state ‘sponsors’, on the other. It also imprinted powerful images of Arabs/Muslims as fanatics, as a menace to their comfortable social order, as people ‘beyond the pale’ – to coin a phrase – who can be dealt with only through strength and a readiness to follow the admonition of “an eye for an eye.”
This depiction of the ingredients that have formed the psyche of our political class in regard to Arabs, and the Palestinians in particular, goes aways toward explaining the West’s current abhorrent behavior. The extremity of their actions and inactions could be seen as the outcome of a dynamic wherein enmity turns into hatred (albeit expressed in the quiet tones of normality) and dehumanization of the ‘other.’ A paradoxical feature of this dynamic is that as past shameful abuses of the ‘other’ are aggravated by new ones, there is a compulsion to continue farther down that path. For doing provides a perverse form of reassurance that somehow they must have deserved such extreme ill treatment. This relentless punishment of our victims becomes a displacement of suppressed self-hatred – among a few.
Suppose that the analysis offered above makes sense. That still leaves us with an inadequate understanding of what is happening. We should bear in mind the unprecedented features of the present situation. One, Western governments have no strategic interest in supporting Jerusalem’s project of creating a Greater Israel by eliminating the Palestinians. No security or economic stakes encourage that. On the contrary, Western interests in the region, and in the wider world, manifestly have been seriously damaged by their close association with all parts of the Israeli campaign. Two, there is no uncertainly about the gross crimes against humanity being committed before our eyes daily or the genocidal intent of the Israeli government. Indeed, cabinet ministers advertise what their plans are. Three, the means to prevent the bloody onslaught existed at the outset, and have been available throughout. Without abundant provision of arms and money from the United States and allies, Israel could not have prosecuted its diabolical strategy. Sanctions are also an available option, although unnecessary. Four, Western societies – particularly the European – are timorous, complacent and risk averse; therefore, to act in a manner that erodes their legitimizing foundations is incongruous, and needs explanation.
Conclusion: the behavior of Western societies is pathological – that is to say, abnormal. It is perverse. We all share the natural instinct to protect the young of the species, and – to a somewhat lesser extent – the vulnerable aged and infirmed. This instinct, in fact, can be observed in the behavior of all mammals. Our supposedly enlightened societies go well beyond instinct to proclaim our dedication to those humane values, and to stipulate them in laws and conventions. This instinct/principle normally overrides prejudice when confronted, in the mortified flesh, with the realities of atrocity. Yet, we are acting in the diametrically opposite manner. And we ruthlessly repress those among us who point out that contradiction because their witness to our perfidy is intolerable.
Therein lies a great puzzle. No conventional political or sociological analysis can solve it. Filling that void is the compelling challenge – and precondition for restoring a collective ethical sense that abhors rather than embraces evil. There is no scarcity of anthropologists, psychiatrists and psychologists. With luck, a few talented and motivated persons among them might step forward.
Michael Brenner is Professor Emeritus of International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh and a Fellow of the Center for Transatlantic Relations at SAIS/Johns Hopkins. He was the Director of the International Relations & Global Studies Program at the University of Texas. Brenner is the author of numerous books, and over 80 articles and published papers. His most recent works are: Democracy Promotion and Islam; Fear and Dread In The Middle East; Toward A More Independent Europe ; Narcissistic Public Personalities & Our Times. Read other articles by Michael.
This article was posted on Monday, December 2nd, 2024 at 8:50am and is filed under Genocide, Palestine, Racism.
On Tuesday, a Hamas official responded to President-elect Donald Trump’s warning that there would be “all hell to pay” if Israeli hostages in Gaza weren’t released by his inauguration on January 20, 2025.
Trump didn’t mention Hamas by name in his warning but appeared to threaten US strikes on the Palestinian group, saying, “Those responsible will be hit harder than anybody has been hit in the long and storied History of the United States of America.”
Basem Naim, a senior member of Hamas’s political bureau, said Trump’s threat should be directed at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, citing his efforts to sabotage a hostage and ceasefire deal. Israeli officials and media reports have also blamed Netanyahu for the lack of a deal.
“Hamas understands that Trump’s message is, in fact, directed primarily at Netanyahu and his government,” Naim said, according to The Palestine Chronicle.
Naim said the Netanyahu government had been using negotiations as a cover to advance its own agenda. “Netanyahu’s government must put an end to this deceptive charade,” he said.
Former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, who was recently fired by Netanyahu, said that the prime minister sabotaged the chances of a hostage deal by demanding Israel maintain control of the Philadelphi Corridor on the Gaza-Egypt border.
“I can tell you what there was not, security considerations. The IDF chief and I said there was no security reason for remaining in the Philadelphi Corridor,” Gallant told hostage families on November 7. “Netanyahu said that it was a diplomatic consideration, I’m telling you there was no diplomatic consideration.”
There are believed to be 97 Israeli hostages remaining in Gaza, and Israeli media reported back in September that Netanyahu told a Knesset committee that only half of the hostages were believed to be alive.
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported in October that the Israeli government was done with ceasefire talks and was instead focused on annexing portions of the Gaza Strip. There’s been some recent efforts by mediators to restart talks, but there’s no sign the effort is going anywhere, and there’s no end in sight to the daily slaughter in Gaza.
Moshe Yaalon, a former member of the ruling Likud party, was defense minister under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from 2013 to 2016 during the 2014 Gaza War. In comments on Saturday, Yaalon criticized the current Netanyahu government.
“The path they’re dragging us down is to occupy, annex, and ethnically cleanse — look at the northern strip,” Yaalon said.
When asked to clarify if he meant Israel is currently conducting ethnic cleansing or is headed in that direction, Yaalon pointed to what is happening on the ground in northern Gaza today.
“There’s no Beit Lahia. There’s no Beit Hanoun. They’re now operating in Jabalia. They’re basically cleaning the territory of Arabs,” he said.
The northern cities of Beit Lahia, Beit Hanoun, and Jabalia have been under a total siege since early October as part of an ethnic cleansing campaign that’s following an outline known as the “general’s plan.” In those areas, Israeli troops are demolishing homes, so Palestinian civilians have nowhere to return.
Yaalon’s comments sparked a strong backlash in Israel, but he doubled down on Sunday. In another interview, the former defense minister said the term ethnic cleansing was “accurate” and asked “no other word for it.”
He pointed to Israeli ministers who openly call for the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza and the establishment of Jewish settlements. Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich recently said that it may be possible to cut the population of Gaza in half within two years through “voluntary emigration,” though there is nothing voluntary about the displacement in Gaza that’s happening today.
This is the keynote talk I gave on Nov. 1 at the conference, The End of Empire, at University of California Santa Barbara. The conference was organized by Professor Butch Ware, who is also the Green Party’s vice-presidential candidate. University administrators banned all publicity about the talk on university social media accounts.
NOTE TO SCHEERPOST READERS FROM CHRIS HEDGES: There is now no way left for me to continue to write a weekly column for ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show without your help. The walls are closing in, with startling rapidity, on independent journalism, with the elites, including the Democratic Party elites, clamoring for more and more censorship. Bob Scheer, who runs ScheerPost on a shoestring budget, and I will not waver in our commitment to independent and honest journalism, and we will never put ScheerPost behind a paywall, charge a subscription for it, sell your data or accept advertising. Please, if you can, sign up at chrishedges.substack.com so I can continue to post my now weekly Monday column on ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show, The Chris Hedges Report.
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 istalking 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 bekilled. 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.
President Joe Biden talks with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, July 25, 2024.(Susan Walsh, File / AP Photo)
Past the 20-foot-high aluminum doors of the Justice Department’s Robert F. Kennedy Building, and down a long limestone hallway lined with art deco accents, Room B-206 has long served as the epicenter of the Biden administration’s prosecutorial war against former president Donald Trump. Behind the heavy wooden door is the office of special counsel Jack Smith, a highly secure redoubt where attorneys spent years building criminal cases against Trump for allegedly attempting to overturn the outcome of the 2020 election, as well as for his alleged improper handling of classified documents after leaving the White House.
But now, instead of heading to trial, the prosecutors are scrambling to empty file cabinets and stuff their contents into cardboard storage boxes. As a result of Trump’s election win, the prosecution is officially halted by the Justice Department’s policy prohibiting the filing of criminal cases against a sitting president. But while President-elect Trump will likely never face the consequences of his alleged criminal actions, President Biden may one day face trial for his, albeit in a far different courtroom in The Hague.
Three thousand eight hundred miles to the east from Washington sits the International Criminal Court (ICC), a complex of six modern towers in the Netherlands not far from Peace Palace and Europol in The Hague. In the largest building, Court Tower, are three courtrooms that carry out the institution’s mandate: to prosecute perpetrators of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes, thereby providing justice to victims.
According to Article 1 of the Genocide Convention, the Contracting Parties, including the United States and Israel, must prevent and punish acts of genocide. Under Article III, those punishable acts include “Complicity in genocide,” such as by knowingly providing the deadly weapons used to carry it out. In 2007, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), in a case involving Bosnia and Serbia, established that the obligation to refrain from providing weapons or other assistance begins the moment a state becomes aware of the existence of a serious risk that genocide may be committed.
For the Biden administration, that moment came in January, when the ICJ found that there was a “plausible” risk of genocide being committed in Gaza against the Palestinian people by Israel. Shortly after, in February, the Dutch Appeals Court halted the transfer of F-35 munition parts to Israel on account of the serious risk of International Humanitarian Law violations. Further notice came in May with the applications for arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and others by the chief prosecutor of the ICC, Kharim Khan. Among the charges against Netanyahu related to Gaza were crimes against humanity, including extermination, murder, starvation of civilians as a method of warfare, intentional attacks against a civilian population, and “other inhumane acts.” It was the first potential ICC arrest warrant issued for the leader of a Western-style democracy. Nevertheless, European countries including France and Germany issued statements affirming their support for the legitimacy of the ICC.
Despite the clear indication that American weapons were being used to carry out an alleged Israeli genocide, the bombs continued to flow and the wholesale massacres never stopped. According to a report last week by the UN Human Rights Office, close to 70 percent of the fatalities in Gaza have been children and women, “indicating a systematic violation of the fundamental principles of international humanitarian law,” said the report. Nizam Mamode, a retired surgeon with Britain’s National Health Service who recently returned from working at a hospital in Gaza, testified last week to members of Parliament that he treated children “day after day after day” who had been deliberately targeted by Israeli drones following bomb attacks.
In July, an analysis published by the medical journal The Lancet estimated that the actual number of Palestinian deaths in Gaza, including those decomposing beneath the rubble of bombed-out hospitals, schools, and densely packed refugee camps, is likely more than 186,000. And if the deaths continue at the same rate, said Devi Sridhar, chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, the estimated deaths by the end of the year would total 335,500.
In spite of those grim statistics, the Biden administration last month decided to play politics with the lives of the desperate and starving survivors in Gaza, most of whom had been forced to flee from multiple Israeli evacuation orders. To help the Harris campaign with pro-Palestinian voters, Biden pretended to turn tough and issued a highly publicized letter giving Netanyahu a 30-day deadline to increase the flow of food and other aid to Gaza or face a potential cutoff in military support. But it was simply a scam, since the deadline would fall after the election was over. When the time limit expired last week, there was no longer a need for Biden to pretend that the United States would take action. Instead, his administration continued to deceive the American public by falsely claiming that it found no evidence that Israel was obstructing shipments of food and other aid into Gaza.
The announcement was greeted with disbelief and anger by aid groups, including Save the Children, Oxfam, Refugees International, and Mercy Corps. “Israel’s actions failed to meet any of the specific criteria set out in the U.S. letter,” said a joint statement. “Israel not only failed to meet the U.S. criteria that would indicate support to the humanitarian response, but concurrently took actions that dramatically worsened the situation on the ground, particularly in Northern Gaza. That situation is in an even more dire state today than a month ago. The principals of the Inter-Agency Standing Committee now assess that ‘the entire Palestinian population in North Gaza is at imminent risk of dying from disease, famine and violence.’” According to an editorial in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, “Israel is unleashing an apocalypse in Northern Gaza.”
Further evidence of the Biden administration’s deliberate cover-up of the ongoing genocide came days after the administration’s announcement when a UN special committee released a report that said, “The policies and practices of Israel during the reporting period [the past year] are consistent with the characteristics of genocide” and “Civilians have been indiscriminately and disproportionally killed en masse in Gaza.” The report went on to say that there were also serious concerns that Israel was “using starvation as a weapon of war”—a fact made clear by numerous reports of humanitarian aid convoys being looted right next to the Israeli troops, who stand by and do nothing to stop it. Israel’s decision to stop cooperating with UNRWA, the critical relief agency providing welfare services to Palestinians, is another clear war crime. “Since the beginning of the war,” the report concluded, “Israeli officials have publicly supported policies that strip Palestinians of the very necessities required to sustain life—food, water, and fuel.” The very definition of genocide.
Also last week, Human Rights Watch issued a report charging that Israel is using its frequent evacuation orders to cause the “deliberate and massive forced displacement” of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, actions that appear to “meet the definition of ethnic cleansing” as well as crimes against humanity. The report, entitled “Hopeless, Starving, and Besieged: Israel’s Forced Displacement of Palestinians in Gaza,” went on to say that the group has collected clear evidence pointing to “the war crime of forcible transfer [of the civilian population].” They described these actions as “a grave breach of the Geneva conventions and a crime under the Rome statute of the international criminal court.”
That same evidence of genocide, starvation, ethnic cleansing, and forced displacement was clearly available to the Biden administration, yet it lied to the American public to hide its own criminal culpability in the war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.
There is no statute of limitations when it comes to support for genocide, nor does it make a difference whether an individual is in or out of office. What matters is evidence of the crime, and there is more than enough for the ICC’s chief prosecutor to issue an application for an arrest warrant for Biden, just as it did for Netanyahu. After all, it’s the United States that builds the bombs, pays for them, ships them to Israel, provides intelligence on targets in Gaza, and supplies the planes that carry them. All Israel does is drop them, with US approval, on the tens of thousands of innocent civilians.
By June, the Biden administration had sent Israel at least 14,000 massively deadly 2,000-pound MK-84 bombs, made in Oklahoma and dropped on hospitals, apartment blocks, and crowded refugee camps. In addition, it sent 6,500 500-pound bombs, 3,000 Hellfire precision-guided air-to-ground missiles, 1,000 bunker-buster bombs, 2,600 air-dropped small-diameter bombs, and other munitions. Added to that is the approval of additional ground attack aircraft to Israel’s existing American-made F-15s, F-16s and F-35s and Apache helicopters. And in January, following a visit to Washington by Eyal Zamir, Israel’s Defense Ministry director-general, defense sources told the Times of Israel that Israel plans to procure a new squadron of 25 F35i stealth fighter jets, a squadron of 25 F-151A fighter jets, and a new squadron of 12 Apache helicopters.
In the end, it’s the American taxpayers who are financing the genocide. According to Bruce Fein, an expert in international law, “The United States has clearly become a co-belligerent with Israel in its war against Hamas-Gaza Palestinians by systematically supplying the IDF with weapons and intelligence without conditions.”
If the ICC were to seek an arrest warrant for Biden before he leaves office or shortly thereafter, it would also serve as a warning to his successor, President-elect Donald Trump, who appears to have even less regard for the Palestinians. And his return to the White House will allow Netanyahu to not only speed up the genocide, but also to achieve his ultimate goal: the annexation of Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem, illegal actions under international law.
“Netanyahu has stalled until Trump’s election, and it paid off. Now there’s nothing standing in his way,” Palestinian political scientist Nour Odeh told Le Monde. He added: “He can wage his war as he sees fit, especially as he has just sacked his defense minister, Yoav Gallant, who had opposed him. As for Trump, he’s not interested in the Palestinian Authority, the state of which is getting worse all the time, nor in a dialogue with Mahmoud Abbas, because they’ve already fallen out. He’s going to do whatever Israel wants. And international law won’t hold him back any more than American law will.”
Among those overjoyed by Trump’s triumph is far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich. “Trump’s victory brings an important opportunity for the State of Israel,” he told supporters at a conference of his Religious Zionist Party. During Trump’s first term, he said, “we were on the verge of applying sovereignty over the settlements” in the West Bank. “Now,” he said, “the time has come to make it a reality.”
And on November 12, Trump sent the same signal back to Smotrich and Netanyahu by naming as his new ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, an evangelical Christian. Shortly afterward, Huckabee said in an Israeli radio interview that “of course” annexation of the West Bank is possible in the next administration, but the policy hasn’t been set. And in 2017, he claimed, “There is no such thing as a West Bank. It’s Judea and Samaria. There’s no such thing as a settlement. They’re communities, they’re neighborhoods, they’re cities. There’s no such thing as an occupation.” He went even further in a statement during his 2008 presidential campaign. “Basically, there really is no such thing as—I need to be careful about saying this, because people will really get upset—there’s really no such thing as a Palestinian,” he said. “There’s not.”
Although neither the United States nor Israel recognizes the jurisdiction of the ICC, most other countries of the world, including in Europe, do. So, should Biden join Netanyahu on the ICC’s wanted list, he would remain safe as long as he never leaves the country. But if he were to give a speech or attend a ceremony outside the country, an Interpol Red Notice would likely be waiting for him, followed by a quick trip to the ICC’s Court Tower in The Hague. According to The Architectural Review, those awaiting trial at the ICC are confined in a “dark gray holding cell complete with steel table and chair bolted to the floor, a slab for a bed, seatless stainless-steel prison toilet and sink.” And there is plenty of room for both Netanyahu and Biden.
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Katrina vanden Heuvel Editorial Director and Publisher, The Nation
By Dr. M. Reza Behnam, The Palestine Chronicle, 24 Dec. 2024
Peace and Justice Post 
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