A new report by the Israeli outlet Calcalist reviewed Israeli military spending on wars since October 7, finding that Washington is funding 70% of Tel Aviv’s military costs. In a little over a year, the US has provided Israel with more than $20 billion in military aid.
“The scope of American aid since the beginning of the war is about 85 billion shekels… According to official estimates by the Bank of Israel, the total cost of the war is…approximately NIS 118 billion.” It continues, “Therefore, according to a simple calculation, The Americans financed about 70% of the war effort.”
According to the Cost of War Project, the US has given Israel $22.57 billion in military aid since the Hamas attack. Calcalist concludes without US support, Tel Aviv’s war would simply be unaffordable.
“There is no doubt that without the American aid the government deficit for the years 2024-2025 (which is one of the highest in the country’s history), would have increased by about 4.3 % GDP, which would have made it unfinanceable,” it says. “Therefore, it is doubtful whether this war would have been conducted as it is – neither in intensity nor in scope – without the American assistance.”
The US has sent Israel tens of thousands of bombs, artillery rounds, and tank shells. Those weapons have been used to commit countless war crimes against the Palestinian people of Gaza.
The official death toll in the besieged enclave now exceeds 43,000. However, a group of American healthcare workers who have spent time volunteering in Gaza estimate the actual death count to be over 118,000.
Dr Tammy Abughanim, a pediatric intensive-care surgeon, said, “We cannot do our jobs, because Israel has made our jobs impossible, and Israel has made our jobs impossible with the direct support of the United States.” She added, “We all know the obvious step is to stop supplying Israel with the arms that it is using, the weaponry that it is using to target and kill civilians.”
Earlier this month, Al Jazeera’sInvestigative Unit published a documentary documenting Israel’s systematic use of indiscriminate attacks during its ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip. A remarkable feature of the investigation is that, to document Israel’s war crimes, it largely relies on evidence published on social media by Israeli soldiers or the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) itself.
War crimes documented in the video include wanton destruction, abuse of Palestinian detainees including torture, and the use of Palestinian civilians as human shields by Israeli forces. Watch it here:
Also this month, the organization Airwars in collaboration with Sky News published an investigation similarly relying on video evidence published to X by Israeli forces themselves to document 17 indiscriminate Israeli strikes in which collectively more than 400 Palestinian civilians were killed.
An interactive map of the murderous attacks is published at Airwars. Watch their 20-minute video of the investigation’s findings here:
Yesterday, Drop Site, a Substack publication spearheaded by journalists Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Grim published an investigation into the conduct of the IDF’s 749 Combat Engineering Battalion, whose self-described job has been “to flatten Gaza”. Once again, the documentation of brazen war crimes relies heavily on photos and videos posted to social media by Israel’s own armed forces.
Anyone still claiming that Israel is “targeting Hamas” and that Palestinian civilians have only been dying because Hamas uses them as “human shields” cannot possibly still believe that. Maybe at one point early into Israel’s assault on Gaza, some apologists for the Jewish supremacist state actually managed to convinced themselves of their own propaganda. But with Israel’s genocide ongoing now for over a year and being livestreamed on social media, including gleefully by Israel’s own military forces, it is inconceivable that any of the genocide apologists actually believe that Israel has been acting in accordance with international humanitarian law.
All one needs to do to see the truth that Israel has been perpetrating the crime of genocide — with the full backing of the US government — is to open one’s eyes.
An investigation into 749 Combat Engineering Battalion’s mission to destroy “the symbols of Gaza’s future.”
Graphic: Younis Tirawi.
“Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy everything that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.”
This is what the deputy commander of Israel’s 749 Combat Engineering Battalion, Lieutenant Colonel Adi Bekore, posted on his personal Facebook account on October 9, 2023, just two days after the Hamas attacks of October 7. Numerous soldiers from the battalion he had command over liked the post. It is a quote from a biblical passage in which the biblical nation of Israel is commanded to attack the Amalekites, an ancient biblical nation that was a recurrent enemy of the Israelites. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also invoked this reference early in the war—a moment cited by South Africa in its case to the ICJ as a piece of genocidal rhetoric:
Lieutenant Colonel Adi Bekore’s post to Facebook on October 9, 2023.
Lieutenant Colonel Adi Bekore. Source: @gdud749 on Instagram
Like much of the rhetoric coming from all organs of the Israeli military since its assault on Gaza started, these words served as a stark warning of what was to come. One year later, countless homes, schools, hospitals, and residential buildings have been bombed and destroyed. 42,718 people have been killed, according to the most recent Gaza Health Ministry figures. The actual figure is certain to be a lot higher: An estimated 10,000 people are buried in the rubble, and the official count doesn’t include those indirectly killed by Israel’s assault on Gaza.
Soldiers from Israel’s 749 Battalion planting explosives, September 19, 2024 in south Gaza City. Source: @gdud749 on Instagram
Over the past year, the 749 Battalion has played an indispensable role in Gaza. Its soldiers are reservists—alumni of the combat engineering corps, which trains soldiers in demolition. The battalion comes in after combat units, toppling buildings and homes that managed to survive air strikes.
The 749 Battalion was among the first to enter the strip through the Netzarim corridor, the four-mile-long road separating Gaza City and Deir al-Balah that Israel occupied early in the war in order to divide the north and south of Gaza. After helping to cement control of south Gaza City, including the Netzarim corridor, the battalion later advanced into areas like Shuja’iya in Gaza City, the Bureij Refugee Camp in Central Gaza, and even Rafah.
At the time of writing, the 749 Battalion is operating in northern Gaza and Jabalia, where, even following Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar’s killing in southern Gaza, Israel’s campaign has intensified to the point of executions and depopulation. There, the battalion is seemingly racing to destroy as many buildings as possible. As one soldier put it, “We will leave them nothing!”
The images in this investigation come primarily from the group’s own social media page, which Drop Site News gained access to, as well as the personal accounts of dozens of soldiers from various companies within the battalion. By stitching together the information shared within the battalion, we were able to clearly map out the unit’s organizational structure and identify over a hundred of its members.
Drop Site News was also able to use the videos to determine the areas where the 749 Battalion was operating and document their activities in the Gaza Strip in detail. They are not the only battalion tasked specifically with demolitions—if it was, Gaza wouldn’t look the way it does—but a close examination of its daily activity offers a rare window into the Israeli operation on the ground in Gaza.
749 Battalion’s chain of command. Credit: Drop Site News
“You can cut all the flowers, but you cannot keep Spring from coming.”
—Pablo Neruda
For over a year, the masters of war in Israel and the United States, abetted by the corporate media, have buried truth under the rubble of Gaza. The U.S. mainstream media have acted as the hewers of wood and drawers of water for the empire. To understand how we got here, we need to borrow from the 19th-century Scottish author, Walter Scott, who wrote, “Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.”
Scott’s reflection helps in understanding how the media have turned the horrific suffering of Palestinians and Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza into just another news story—“acceptable” scrim as we go about our daily lives. It also provides insight into how the Israeli regime soaked in blood has been portrayed as the victim, the good soldier, and worthy of defense.
Israel is a veteran of information deception. For a half-century, they have defined the narrative and controlled the information environment in order to hide their brutal apartheid occupation and expansionist goals in Palestine. They have overwhelmed audiences, particularly in the United States, with information favorable to Israel’s cause and suppressed that which has challenged their narrative.
Television anchors, journalists, and the “intelligentsia” in think tanks that dot the nation’s capital have been conditioned to accept and defend Israel’s political trope and to swiftly discredit the arguments of those who challenge its dissembling.
Corporate media self-censorship, underreporting, airbrushing of atrocities, failure to contextualize the Palestinian experience under apartheid rule, and, most egregious, ignoring America’s complicity in constructing and maintaining the Israeli apartheid regime over 76 years, have contributed to an environment that has encouraged Israel to become increasingly violent.
The worst journalistic practices were glaring after the Palestinian offensive of 7 October 2023. The mind managers have allowed Israel to establish the parameters of the message, of what could/ could not be written and said.
Coverage would be done in Israel’s way—through a military lens. All foreign news organizations operating in Israel are subject to the rules of a military censor, with only certain subjects allowed. It is commonplace, for instance, to read or to hear journalists begin their reports with “Israel said.”
There has also been little attention paid to Tel Aviv’s refusal to permit foreign journalists access to Gaza, to the regime’s internal media censorship and bans, and to the 128 Palestinian journalists and media staff in Gaza, who have been targeted and killed by the Israeli military.
Although the media gave an inordinate amount of coverage to the now debunked Israeli stories about mass killings, beheaded babies and allegations of widespread and systematic rape during the October attack, no such attention has been paid to Israel’s “Hannibal Directive” and “Dahiya Doctrine.”
On 7 October, the Israeli military gave its forces permission to execute the Hannibal Directive. Adopted in 1986, the code of conduct allows soldiers to kill their own people if they are going to be taken alive by their perceived enemy. A growing body of evidence has revealed that hundreds of Israelis who died that day were killed, not by Hamas, but by their own soldiers.
The Dahiya doctrine became official military policy after Israel’s devastating attack on Lebanon in 2006. Named after the Dahiya suburb in Beirut, the doctrine —illegal under international law—calls for the use of massive, disproportionate force and deliberate targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure in future wars.
For far too long, deceptive narratives have been used and scant attention paid to Israel’s indefensible policies. This is particularly the case regarding U.N. General Assembly Partition Resolution 181 (1947) that Israel used to declare statehood and in its colonizing of what was left of historic Palestine.
By eschewing years of Israeli apartheid rule and the 16-year siege of the Gaza Strip, the public was left with the impression that the October assault was a random unprovoked act of violence. They heard few details of the crushing siege Israel imposed on Gaza when it withdrew in 2005, leaving behind a restrictive disengagement plan retaining exclusive control over Gaza’s air space, territorial waters, borders, electricity, water supply, and movement of people and goods.
History reveals that there is a direct link between occupation and violence; that occupied people will use whatever means they have to be free, including violence.
International law (Fourth Geneva Convention, 1949) affirms the right of national liberation movements to resist, to use force against military occupation.
Through a more nuanced lens, Hamas’s action on 7 October could be seen as a reasonable and expected reaction to Israel’s violent unending colonizing project.
The media failed to remember that, like Hamas, the African National Congress was labeled a terrorist organization by the United States. And that it was only in 2008, that Nelson Mandela, imprisoned for 27 years for opposing the South African apartheid regime, was removed from the U.S. terror watchlist—transformed from “terrorist” to a celebrated “beacon for freedom and democracy.”
The concocted myth of the noble Israeli, circumspect warrior and “civilized aggressor” do not correspond with the images coming from Gaza and Lebanon. Logic, however, has been turned on its head as the people of Palestine are told to accept that they—the colonized and oppressed—have no right to defend themselves and are to blame for the carnage done by the Israeli colonizer.
English novelist, George Orwell (1903-1950), was correct when he keenly observed that “Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and do give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
Within the corporate media bubble, U.S. scribes have employed political language promotive of Israel. National liberation movements fighting against Israeli genocide and U.S. hegemony are labeled terrorists “backed” by Iran. Whereas, Washington’s “backing” of the genocidal fanatics in Tel Aviv is “helping” an ally. Political leadership in Iran is characterized as a “regime,” while Israel is led by a democratic “government.”
Like terrorism, the term “proxy” is also used repeatedly to characterize allies of Iran. Hamas, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Ansar Allah in Yemen are falsely represented as vassals of Tehran, that they are not indigenous, but foreign impositions without a mass base of support in their own countries.
Israel’s oppressive presence in the West Bank is portrayed as “defensive,” while Jewish colonizers, protected by its military, ransack and help themselves to Palestinian homes, property and bank accounts. According to the Palestinian health ministry, at least 716 Palestinians, including 160 children, have been killed by Israeli army and illegal colonizer attacks in the occupied West Bank since 7 October 2023.
After a year of war, Israel has proven that it is not a democracy, it is an apartheid entity; it is not a promised land, it is a settler-colonial project; it is not a nation under siege, it an aggressor; it is not defending itself, it is conducting a genocidal war in Gaza.
Although there have been a number of significant reports on the reality in Gaza, the media has given little, if any, attention to them. We have been kept largely in the dark. They include:
Brown University, Watson Institute, “United States Spending on Israel’s Military Operations and Related U.S. Operations in the Region, October 7, 2023-September 30, 2024.
Watson Institute, “The Human Toll: Indirect Deaths from War in Gaza and the West Bank, October 7, 2023 Forward.”
Gaza Health Care Letters, October 2, 2024, Open Letter to President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, signed by 99 physicians and other medical professionals who have served in Gaza this past year.
According to the Watson Institute, the Biden administration has spent $22.76 billion financing the genocide in Gaza. In their 2 October letter, one of many addressed to the White House, healthcare workers reported that 62,413 people in Gaza have died of starvation and the death toll is likely greater than 118,908.
It is dangerous and costly to keep “we the people” in the dark. We need to think back on the lies that led us into wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere.
Poignantly, the cautionary words of our discredited 37th president, Richard M. Nixon, are eerily relevant today: “Fundamental to our way of life,” he said on 22 November 1972, “is the belief that when information which properly belongs to the public is systematically withheld by those in power, the people soon become ignorant of their own affairs, distrustful of those who manage them, and —eventually—incapable of determining their own destinies.”
It is disingenuous to attempt to convince the public that the assassination of resistance leaders opposed to U.S.-Israeli hegemony in Palestine and in the region will end their struggle for freedom. The tangled web of deception driven by Washington, Tel Aviv, and the corporate media will not turn back the resisters.
As they have proven for more than seven decades, they are the masters of their own judgments, decisions, and actions.
‘I refuse to play the condemnation game. Let me make myself clear. I do not tell oppressed people how to resist their oppression or who their allies should be.’
Arundhathi Roy accepts the PEN Pinter Prize 2024. She is holding a portrait of Alaa Abd el-Fattah, British-Egyptian writer and activist, named Writer of Courage by her. Photo: http://www.englishpen.org
Writer and activist Arundhati Roy has been awarded the PEN Pinter Prize 2024. This is an annual award set up by English PEN in the memory of playwright Harold Pinter. Shortly after having been named for the prize, Roy announced that her share of the prize money will be donated to the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund. She named Alaa Abd el-Fattah, British-Egyptian writer and activist, a ‘Writer of Courage’ who she would share her award with. The following is her acceptance speech for the prize, delivered on the evening of October 10, 2024, at the British Library.
I thank you, members of English PEN and members of the jury, for honouring me with the PEN Pinter Prize. I would like to begin by announcing the name of this year’s Writer of Courage who I have chosen to share this award with.
My greetings to you, Alaa Abd El-Fattah, writer of courage and my fellow awardee. We hoped and prayed that you would be released in September, but the Egyptian government decided that you were too beautiful a writer and too dangerous a thinker to be freed yet. But you are here in this room with us. You are the most important person here. From prison you wrote, “[M]y words lost any power and yet they continued to pour out of me. I still had a voice, even if only a handful would listen.” We are listening, Alaa. Closely.
Greetings to you, too, my beloved Naomi Klein, friend to both Alaa and me. Thank you for being here tonight. It means the world to me.
Greetings to all of you gathered here, as well to as those who are invisible perhaps to this wonderful audience but as visible to me as anybody else in this room. I am speaking of my friends and comrades in prison in India – lawyers, academics, students, journalists – Umar Khalid, Gulfisha Fatima, Khalid Saifi, Sharjeel Imam, Rona Wilson, Surendra Gadling, Mahesh Raut. I speak to you, my friend Khurram Parvaiz, one of the most remarkable people I know, you’ve been in prison for three years, and to you too Irfan Mehraj and to the thousands incarcerated in Kashmir and across the country whose lives have been devastated.
When Ruth Borthwick, Chair of English PEN and of the Pinter panel first wrote to me about this honour, she said the Pinter Prize is awarded to a writer who has sought to define ‘the real truth of our lives and our societies’ through ‘unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination’. That is a quote from Harold Pinter’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech.
The word ‘unflinching’ made me pause for a moment, because I think of myself as someone who is almost permanently flinching.
I would like to dwell a little on the theme of ‘flinching’ and ‘unflinching’. Which may be best illustrated by Harold Pinter himself:
“I was present at a meeting at the US embassy in London in the late 1980s.
“The United States Congress was about to decide whether to give more money to the Contras in their campaign against the state of Nicaragua. I was a member of a delegation speaking on behalf of Nicaragua but the most important member of this delegation was a Father John Metcalf. The leader of the US body was Raymond Seitz (then number two to the ambassador, later ambassador himself). Father Metcalf said: ‘Sir, I am in charge of a parish in the north of Nicaragua. My parishioners built a school, a health centre, a cultural centre. We have lived in peace. A few months ago a Contra force attacked the parish. They destroyed everything: the school, the health centre, the cultural centre. They raped nurses and teachers, slaughtered doctors, in the most brutal manner. They behaved like savages. Please demand that the US government withdraw its support from this shocking terrorist activity.’
“Raymond Seitz had a very good reputation as a rational, responsible and highly sophisticated man. He was greatly respected in diplomatic circles. He listened, paused and then spoke with some gravity. ‘Father,’ he said, ‘let me tell you something. In war, innocent people always suffer.’ There was a frozen silence. We stared at him. He did not flinch.”
Remember that President Reagan called the Contras “the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers.” A turn of phrase that he was clearly fond of. He also used it to describe the CIA-backed Afghan Mujahideen, who then morphed into the Taliban. And it is the Taliban who rule Afghanistan today after waging a twenty-year-long war against the US invasion and occupation. Before the Contras and the Mujahideen, there was the war in Vietnam and the unflinching US military doctrine that ordered its soldiers to ‘Kill Anything That Moves’. If you read the Pentagon Papers and other documents on US war aims in Vietnam, you can enjoy some lively unflinching discussions about how to commit genocide – is it better to kill people outright or to starve them slowly? Which would look better? The problem that the compassionate mandarins in the Pentagon faced was that, unlike Americans, who, according to them, want ‘life, happiness, wealth, power’, Asians ‘stoically accept…the destruction of wealth and the loss of lives’ – and force America to carry their ‘strategic logic to its conclusion, which is genocide.’ A terrible burden to be borne unflinchingly.
And here we are, all these years later, more than a year into yet another genocide. The US and Israel’s unflinching and ongoing televised genocide in Gaza and now Lebanon in defence of a colonial occupation and an Apartheid state. The death toll so far, is officially 42,000, a majority of them women and children. This does not include those who died screaming under the rubble of buildings, neighbourhoods, whole cities, and those whose bodies have not yet been recovered. A recent study by Oxfam says that more children have been killed by Israel in Gaza than in the equivalent period of any other war in the last twenty years.
To assuage their collective guilt for their early years of indifference towards one genocide – the Nazi extermination of millions of European Jews – the United States and Europe have prepared the grounds for another.
Like every state that has carried out ethnic cleansing and genocide in history, Zionists in Israel – who believe themselves to be “the chosen people” – began by dehumanising Palestinians before driving them off their land and murdering them.
‘What can possibly justify what Israel is doing?’. Photo: X/@UNRWA
Prime Minister Menachem Begin called Palestinians ‘two-legged beasts’, Yitzhak Rabin called them ‘grasshoppers’ who ‘could be crushed’ and Golda Meir said ‘There was no such thing as Palestinians’. Winston Churchill, that famous warrior against fascism, said, ‘I do not admit that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time’ and then went on to declare that a ‘higher race’ had the final right to the manger. Once those two-legged beasts, grasshoppers, dogs and non-existent people were murdered, ethnically cleansed, and ghettoised, a new country was born. It was celebrated as a ‘land without people for people without a land’. The nuclear-armed state of Israel was to serve as a military outpost and gateway to the natural wealth and resources of the Middle East for US and Europe. A lovely coincidence of aims and objectives.
The new state was supported unhesitatingly and unflinchingly, armed and bankrolled, coddled and applauded, no matter what crimes it committed. It grew up like a protected child in a wealthy home whose parents smile proudly as it commits atrocity upon atrocity. No wonder today it feels free to boast openly about committing genocide. (At least The Pentagon Papers were secret. They had to be stolen. And leaked.) No wonder Israeli soldiers seem to have lost all sense of decency. No wonder they flood the social media with depraved videos of themselves wearing the lingerie of women they have killed or displaced, videos of themselves mimicking dying Palestinians and wounded children or raped and tortured prisoners, images of themselves blowing up buildings while they smoke cigarettes or jive to music on their headphones. Who are these people?
What can possibly justify what Israel is doing?
The answer, according to Israel and its allies, as well as the Western media, is the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7th last year. The killing of Israeli civilians and the taking of Israeli hostages. According to them, history only began a year ago.
So, this is the part in my speech where I am expected to equivocate to protect myself, my ‘neutrality’, my intellectual standing. This is the part where I am meant to lapse into moral equivalence and condemn Hamas, the other militant groups in Gaza and their ally Hezbollah, in Lebanon, for killing civilians and taking people hostage. And to condemn the people of Gaza who celebrated the Hamas attack. Once that’s done it all becomes easy, doesn’t it? Ah well. Everybody is terrible, what can one do? Let’s go shopping instead…
I refuse to play the condemnation game. Let me make myself clear. I do not tell oppressed people how to resist their oppression or who their allies should be.
When US President Joe Biden met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli war cabinet during a visit to Israel in October 2023, he said, ‘I don’t believe you have to be a Jew to be a Zionist, and I am a Zionist.’
Unlike President Joe Biden, who calls himself a non-Jewish Zionist and unflinchingly bankrolls and arms Israel while it commits its war crimes, I am not going to declare myself or define myself in any way that is narrower than my writing. I am what I write.
I am acutely aware that being the writer that I am, the non-Muslim that I am and the woman that I am, it would be very difficult, perhaps impossible for me to survive very long under the rule of Hamas, Hezbollah, or the Iranian regime. But that is not the point here. The point is to educate ourselves about the history and the circumstances under which they came to exist. The point is that right now they are fighting against an ongoing genocide. The point is to ask ourselves whether a liberal, secular fighting force can go up against a genocidal war machine. Because, when all the powers of the world are against them, who do they have to turn to but God? I am aware that Hezbollah and the Iranian regime have vocal detractors in their own countries, some who also languish in jails or have faced far worse outcomes. I am aware that some of their actions – the killing of civilians and the taking of hostages on October 7th by Hamas – constitute war crimes. However, there cannot be an equivalence between this and what Israel and the United States are doing in Gaza, in the West Bank and now in Lebanon. The root of all the violence, including the violence of October 7th, is Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land and its subjugation of the Palestinian people. History did not begin on 7 October 2023.
I ask you, which of us sitting in this hall would willingly submit to the indignity that Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank have been subjected to for decades? What peaceful means have the Palestinian people not tried? What compromise have they not accepted—other than the one that requires them to crawl on their knees and eat dirt?
Israel is not fighting a war of self-defence. It is fighting a war of aggression. A war to occupy more territory, to strengthen its Apartheid apparatus and tighten its control on Palestinian people and the region.
‘Polls show that a majority of the citizens in the countries whose governments enable the Israeli genocide have made it clear that they do not agree with this.’ Photo: Ahmed Abu Hameeda/Wikimedia commons
Since October 7th 2023, apart from the tens of thousands of people it has killed, Israel has displaced the majority of Gaza’s population, many times over. It has bombed hospitals. It has deliberately targeted and killed doctors, aid workers and journalists. A whole population is being starved – their history is sought to be erased. All this is supported both morally and materially by the wealthiest, most powerful governments in the world. And their media. (Here I include my country, India, which supplies Israel with weapons, as well as thousands of workers.) There is no daylight between these countries and Israel. In the last year alone, the US has spent 17.9 billion dollars in military aid to Israel. So, let us once and for all dispense with the lie about the US being a mediator, a restraining influence, or as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (considered to be on the extreme Left of mainstream US politics) put it, ‘working tirelessly for a ceasefire’. A party to the genocide cannot be a mediator.
Not all the power and money, not all the weapons and propaganda on earth can any longer hide the wound that is Palestine. The wound through which the whole world, including Israel, bleeds.
Polls show that a majority of the citizens in the countries whose governments enable the Israeli genocide have made it clear that they do not agree with this. We have watched those marches of hundreds of thousands of people – including a young generation of Jews who are tired of being used, tired of being lied to. Who would have imagined that we would live to see the day when German police would arrest Jewish citizens for protesting against Israel and Zionism and accuse them of anti-Semitism? Who would have thought the US government would, in the service of the Israeli state, undermine its cardinal principle of Free Speech by banning pro-Palestine slogans? The so-called moral architecture of western democracies – with a few honourable exceptions – has become a grim laughingstock in the rest of the world.
When Benjamin Netanyahu holds up a map of the Middle East in which Palestine has been erased and Israel stretches from the river to the sea, he is applauded as a visionary who is working to realize the dream of a Jewish homeland.
But when Palestinians and their supporters chant ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’, they are accused of explicitly calling for the genocide of Jews.
Are they really? Or is that a sick imagination projecting its own darkness onto others? An imagination that cannot countenance diversity, cannot countenance the idea of living in a country alongside other people, equally, with equal rights. Like everybody else in the world does. An imagination that cannot afford to acknowledge that Palestinians want to be free, like South Africa is, like India is, like all countries that have thrown off the yoke of colonialism are. Countries that are diverse, deeply, maybe even fatally, flawed, but free. When South Africans were chanting their popular rallying cry, Amandla! Power to the people, were they calling for the genocide of white people? They were not. They were calling for the dismantling of the Apartheid state. Just as the Palestinians are.
‘Neither the ballot boxes not the palaces or the ministries or the prisons or even the graves are big enough for our dreams’. Photo: Shome Basu in Dhaka.
The war that has now begun will be terrible. But it will eventually dismantle Israeli Apartheid. The whole world will be far safer for everyone – including for Jewish people – and far more just. It will be like pulling an arrow from our wounded heart.
If the US government withdrew its support of Israel, the war could stop today. Hostilities could end right this minute. Israeli hostages could be freed, Palestinian prisoners could be released. The negotiations with Hamas and the other Palestinian stakeholders that must inevitably follow the war could instead take place now and prevent the suffering of millions of people. How sad that most people would consider this a naïve, laughable proposition.
As I conclude, let me turn to your words, Alaa Abd El-Fatah, from your book of prison writing, You Have Not Yet Been Defeated. I have rarely read such beautiful words about the meaning of victory and defeat – and the political necessity of honestly looking despair in the eye. I have rarely seen writing in which a citizen separates himself from the state, from the generals and even from the slogans of the Square with such bell-like clarity.
“The centre is treason because there’s room in it only for the General…The centre is treason and I have never been a traitor. They think they’ve pushed us back into the margins. They don’t realize that we never left it, we just got lost for a brief while. Neither the ballot boxes not the palaces or the ministries or the prisons or even the graves are big enough for our dreams. We never sought the centre because it has no room except for those who abandon the dream. Even the square was not big enough for us, so most of the battles of the revolution happened outside it, and most of the heroes remained outside the frame.”
As the horror we are witnessing in Gaza, and now Lebanon, quickly escalates into a regional war, its real heroes remain outside the frame. But they fight on because they know that one day—
From the river to the sea
Palestine will be Free.
It will.
Keep your eye on your calendar. Not on your clock.
That’s how the people – not the generals – the people fighting for their liberation measure time.
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Arundhati Roy (born November 24, 1961) is an Indian novelist, activist and a world citizen. She won the Booker Prize in 1997 for her first novel The God of Small Things. Roy was born in Shillong, Meghalaya to a Keralite Syrian Christian mother and a Bengali Hindu father, a tea planter by profession. She spent her childhood in Aymanam, in Kerala, schooling in Corpus Christi. She left Kerala for Delhi at age 16, and embarked on a homeless lifestyle, staying in a small hut with a tin roof within the walls of Delhi’s Feroz Shah Kotla and making a living selling empty bottles. She then proceeded to study architecture at the Delhi School of Architecture, where she met her first husband, the architect Gerard Da Cunha.The God of Small Things is the only novel written by Roy. Since winning the Booker Prize, she has concentrated her writing on political issues. These include the Narmada Dam project, India’s Nuclear Weapons, corrupt power company Enron’s activities in India. She is a figure-head of the anti-globalization/alter-globalization movement and a vehement critic of neo-imperialism.In response to India’s testing of nuclear weapons in Pokhran, Rajasthan, Roy wrote The End of Imagination, a critique of the Indian government’s nuclear policies. It was published in her collection The Cost of Living, in which she also crusaded against India’s massive hydroelectric dam projects in the central and western states of Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat. She has since devoted herself solely to nonfiction and politics, publishing two more collections of essays as well as working for social causes.Roy was awarded the Sydney Peace Prize in May 2004 for her work in social campaigns and advocacy of non-violence.In June 2005 she took part in the World Tribunal on Iraq. In January 2006 she was awarded the Sahitya Akademi award for her collection of essays, ‘The Algebra of Infinite Justice’, but declined to accept it.
The latest violence brings the Health Ministry’s death toll to 42,409
by Dave DeCamp, Antiwar. com, October 16, 2024
Gaza’s Health Ministry said Wednesday that Israeli strikes across the Strip killed at least 65 Palestinians and wounded 140 in the previous 24-hour period.
The latest violence brings the ministry’s recorded death toll since October 7, 2023, to 42,409 and the number of wounded to 99,153. “There are still a number of victims under the rubble and on the streets, and ambulance and civil defense crews cannot reach them,” the ministry said.
Ninety-nine American healthcare workers who have volunteered in Gaza recently estimated in an open letter to President Biden and Vice President Harris that over 118,00 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza over the past year, a toll that includes indirect deaths caused by the Israeli siege, such as starvation and disease. People work to recover the dead body of a Palestinian boy from the rubble of a house hit in an Israeli strike in Gaza City on October 16, 2024. REUTERS/Dawoud Abu Alkas
Israeli attacks on Wednesday included a strike on a home in Gaza City that killed at least five Palestinians and injured seven. The Palestinian news agency WAFA also reported a strike on a car in central Gaza that killed at least two Palestinians and injured several others.
The Israeli military has continued its assault and siege on northern Gaza, where it’s attempting to carry out an ethnic cleansing plan to forcibly displace hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians.
Workers at hospitals in the north have refused Israeli orders to evacuate and say they’re running out of food and medicine due to the tightening of the siege. In 12 days, health officials say at least 350 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces in the Jabalia refugee camp, where Israel has focused its attack.
The death toll from Israel’s latest ground and aerial assault on northern Gaza continued to mount on Saturday as the U.S.-armed military targeted the Jabalia refugee camp and other parts of the region, trapping hundreds of thousands of people, firing on those who try to flee, and blocking deliveries of lifesaving humanitarian aid.
Israeli strikes on Jabalia homes and schools housing displaced people killed more than 20 Palestinians and wounded dozens more late Friday. Hours later, the Israeli military issued fresh evacuation orders for northern Gaza, instructing residents to move to a so-called humanitarian zone that Israel has repeatedly attacked.
Many have opted to remain in their homes as Israeli quadcopters and snipers target those attempting to escape the besieged and famine-stricken region. As Al Jazeera‘s Hind Khoudary explained Saturday, “Palestinians say they prefer dying in their homes because they believe that there is no place safe across the Gaza Strip, so even if they evacuate they might get killed on the way.”
Sarah Vuylsteke, project coordinator for Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), said Friday that “nobody is allowed to get in or out, anyone who tries is getting shot.”
MSF said five of its staffers were trapped in Jabalia and “fearing for their lives.” An MSF driver said that they were “staying at the Al-Yemen Al-Saeed Hospital, but [Israeli forces] bombed it,” killing roughly 20 people.
“I don’t know what to do, at any moment we could die,” said the MSF driver, identified as Haydar. “People are starving. I am afraid to stay, and I am also afraid to leave.”
Video footage posted to social media shows the disturbing aftermath of an Israeli strike on a residential block in Jabalia:
One resident of northern Gaza told+972 Magazine that “quadcopter drones are hovering low over the streets, firing at anything that moves.”
“Snipers are positioned on rooftops, targeting anyone who steps outside,” said 27-year-old Mohammed Shehab. “At the same time, soldiers and tanks have pushed into the camp, demolishing homes and bulldozing roads and fields.”
The true death toll from Israel’s latest assault on northern Gaza is impossible to discern, given the difficulty of navigating the area amid relentless airstrikes and gunfire as well as fuel shortages caused by Israel’s siege.
“We are unable to count the number of massacres happening in Jabalia, and ambulances are unable to reach the calls due to the fuel shortage in northern Gaza,” wrote journalist Hossam Shabat, who is on the ground in northern Gaza.
One Palestinian trapped in northern Gaza said there are “dead bodies everywhere, and the wounded lie in the streets with no one able to help them.”
The Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor warned that as the international community looks on—and as U.S. military aid continues to flow—Israel is “accelerating the pace of its genocide against the Palestinians” by “carrying out mass and planned killings, as well as widespread forced displacements,” in northern Gaza.
“The Euro-Med Monitor field team received testimonies from citizens, who were able to reach Gaza City, about witnessing dead bodies lying in the streets,” the group said. “The Israeli army is systematically working to empty northern Gaza of its residents and force them to move to the south, recently issuing several evacuation orders and dropping leaflets demanding their evacuation.”
“The forcible deportation of a population is defined as a crime against humanity under the statute of the International Criminal Court, and the United Nations and the international community must intervene immediately to save tens of thousands of Palestinian residents in northern Gaza who face ethnic cleansing by Israel,” said Euro-Med. “Furthermore, the U.N. and international community have a legal and moral obligation to put an end to the horrific crime of genocide being committed by the Israeli occupation for the second year in a row now.”
Ninety-nine American healthcare workers who volunteered in Gaza over the past year published an open letter to President Biden and Vice President Harris on Thursday that detailed the horrors they witnessed and called for an end to US military support for Israel.
The healthcare workers said they believe the true death toll in Gaza is much higher than what Gaza’s Health Ministry is reporting, estimating it to be over 118,908.
“This letter and the appendix show probative evidence that the human toll in Gaza since October is far higher than is understood in the United States,” the letter reads. “It is likely that the death toll from this conflict is already greater than 118,908, an astonishing 5.4% of Gaza’s population.”
The latest numbers from Gaza’s Health Ministry put the number of Palestinians killed by Israel in Gaza since October 7, 2023, at 41,788. The ministry’s figures only count the bodies that are brought to hospitals and morgues and don’t account for people missing and presumed dead under the rubble.
The American healthcare workers said that everyone in Gaza is either sick, injured, or both. “With only marginal exceptions, everyone in Gaza is sick, injured, or both. This includes every national aid worker, every international volunteer, and probably every Israeli hostage: every man, woman, and child,” the letter says. Palestinians inspect damages at Al Shifa Hospital after Israeli forces withdrew from the hospital and the area around it following a two-week operation in Gaza City on April 1, 2024. REUTERS/Dawoud Abu Alkas
They said that almost every child under five they encountered “had both a cough and watery diarrhea.” Each signatory to the letter saw wounds in children that showed they were being purposefully targeted by the Israeli military.
“Specifically, every one of us who worked in an emergency, intensive care, or surgical setting treated pre-teen children who were shot in the head or chest on a regular or even a daily basis,” the letter reads. “It is impossible that such widespread shooting of young children throughout Gaza, sustained over the course of an entire year is accidental or unknown to the highest Israeli civilian and military authorities.”
Dr. Mark Perlmutter, an orthopedic and hand surgeon, was quoted in the letter saying, “Gaza was the first time I held a baby’s brains in my hand. The first of many.”
The healthcare workers said newborn babies were dying due to the conditions caused by the Israeli siege and attacks on hospitals. Asma Taha, a pediatric nurse practitioner, said, “Every day, I saw babies die. They had been born healthy. Their mothers were so malnourished that they could not breastfeed, and we lacked formula or clean water to feed them, so they starved.”
The healthcare workers said their Palestinian colleagues were targeted by Israeli forces and captured during Israeli raids on hospitals. “Many of these colleagues of ours were taken by Israel during the attacks. They all told us a slightly different version of the same story: in captivity, they were barely fed, continuously physically and psychologically abused, and finally dumped naked on the side of a road. Many told us they were subjected to mock executions and other forms of mistreatment and torture,” the letter reads.
Israel claims Hamas has used hospitals as “command centers,” but the letter said that none of its signatories saw any sign of militant activity. “The 99 signatories to this letter spent a combined 254 weeks inside Gaza’s largest hospitals and clinics. We wish to be absolutely clear: not once did any of us see any type of Palestinian militant activity in any of Gaza’s hospitals or other healthcare facilities,” the letter reads.
The letter concludes with a plea for Biden and Harris to end US support for the genocidal war: “Every day that we continue supplying weapons and munitions to Israel is another day that women are shredded by our bombs and children are murdered with our bullets. President Biden and Vice President Harris, we urge you: end this madness now!”
THE Labour government has ordered 100 spy flights over Gaza to aid Israeli intelligence, an investigation by Declassified UK revealed today.
The intelligence-gathering flights began in December under the previous government.
Eleven flights took place in Labour’s first week in power, and during Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s first full month in office in August, the Royal Air Force (RAF) flew 42 flights over Gaza.
Declassified UK found that the flights were departing from Britain’s air base in Cyprus.
The flights may have gathered up to 500 hours of footage of Gaza, Declassified UK said, though it is unclear exactly where the British intelligence is going and what it comprises.
Earlier this month, Liberal Democrat MP Mike Martin, a former British army officer who served in Afghanistan, asked the military whether “UK intelligence is passed to Israel for the purposes of military targeting.”
Labour’s armed forces minister Luke Pollard responded by saying the surveillance flights were “solely tasked to support hostage rescue.”
Britain’s intelligence support to Israel is not limited to aerial missions.
An Israeli official disclosed to the New York Times that a secret British reconnaissance team was deployed to Israel early on in its attack on Gaza.
The British team gives “added value” to its intelligence operations, he said, adding that Britain is providing intelligence that “Israel cannot collect on its own.”
There is no evidence the new Labour government has brought this spy team home from Israel.
A Ministry of Defence spokesperson told Declassified that Britain is not a participant in the war in Gaza, adding: “Our mandate is narrowly defined to focus on securing the release of the hostages only, including British nationals, with the RAF routinely conducting unarmed flights since December 2023 for this sole purpose.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks at the United General Assembly and shows maps of the Middle East on September 27, 2023.
(Photo: Michael Kappeler/picture alliance via Getty Images)
Israel’s violent extremists now in control of its government believe that Israel has the Biblical license, indeed a religious mandate, to destroy the Palestinian people.
When Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took the podium at the U.N. General Assembly last week, dozens of governments walked out of the chamber. The global opprobrium of Netanyahu and his government is due to Israel’s depraved violence against its Arab neighbors. Netanyahu purveys a fundamentalist ideology that has turned Israel into the most violent nation in the world.
Israel’s fundamentalist credo holds that Palestinians have no right whatsoever to their own nation. The Israeli Knesset recently passed a declaration rejecting a Palestinian State in what the Knesset calls The Land of Israel, meaning the land west of the Jordan River.
The Knesset of Israel firmly opposes the establishment of a Palestinian state west of Jordan. The establishment of a Palestinian state in the heart of the Land of Israel will pose an existential danger to the State of Israel and its citizens, perpetuate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and destabilize the region.
To call the land west of the Jordan the “heart of the Land of Israel” is breathtaking. Israel is one part of the land west of the Jordan, not the entire land. The International Court of Justice has recently ruled that Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian lands (those outside of Israel’s borders as of June 4, 1967, before the June 1967 war) is plainly illegal. The U.N. General Assembly has recently voted overwhelmingly to back the ICJ ruling and called on Israel to withdraw from Palestinian territories within one year.
There are many sources of this Israeli brazenness, the most important being the backing of Israel by U.S. military power.
It is worth recalling that when the British empire promised a Jewish homeland in Ottoman Palestine in 1917, the Palestinian Arabs constituted around 90% of the population. At the time of the 1947 U.N. partition plan, the Palestinian Arab population was approximately 67% of the population, though the partition plan proposed to give the Arabs only 44% of the land. Now Israel asserts the claim to 100% of the land.
There are many sources of this Israeli brazenness, the most important being the backing of Israel by U.S. military power. Without the U.S. military backing, Israel could not possibly rule over an Apartheid regime in which Palestinian Arabs constitute nearly one half of the population yet hold none of the political power. Future generations will look back in amazement at the success of the Israel Lobby in manipulating the U.S. military to the severe detriment of U.S. national security and global peace.
Yet in addition to the U.S. military, there is another source of Israel’s profound injustice to the Palestinian people, and that is the religious fundamentalism purveyed fanatics such as the self-proclaimed fascist Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s Minister of Finance, and Minister of National Defense Itamar Ben-Gvir. These fanatics hold fast to the biblical Book of Joshua, according to which God promised the Israelites the land “from the Negev wilderness in the south to the Lebanon mountains in the north, from the Euphrates River in the east to the Mediterranean Sea in the west.” (Joshua 1:4).
At the U.N. last week, Netanyahu once again staked Israel’s claim to the land on Biblical grounds: “When I spoke here last year, I said we face the same timeless choice that Moses put before the people of Israel thousands of years ago, as we were about to enter the Promised Land. Moses told us that our actions would determine whether we bequeath to future generations a blessing or a curse.”
What Netanyahu did not tell his fellow leaders (most of whom had in any event vacated the hall), was that Moses laid out a genocidal path to the Promised Land (Deuteronomy 31):
[The LORD] will destroy these nations before you, and you shall dispossess them. Joshua is the one who will cross ahead of you, just as the LORD has spoken. “The LORD will do to them just as He did to Sihon and Og, the kings of the Amorites, and to their land, when He destroyed them. “The LORD will deliver them up before you, and you shall do to them according to all the commandments which I have commanded you.”
Israel’s violent extremists believe that Israel has the Biblical license, indeed a religious mandate, to destroy the Palestinian people. Their Biblical hero is Joshua, the Israelite commander who succeeded Moses, and who led the Israelites’ genocidal conquests. (Netanyahu has also referred to the Amalekites, another case of a God-ordained genocide of foes of the Israelites, in a clear “dog-whistle” to his fundamentalist followers.) Here is the Biblical account of Joshua’s conquest of Hebron (Joshua 10):
Then Joshua and all Israel with him went up from Eglon to Hebron, and they fought against it. They captured it and struck it and its king and all its cities and all the persons who were in it with the edge of the sword. He left no survivor, according to all that he had done to Eglon. And he utterly destroyed it and every person who was in it.
There is a deep irony to this genocidal account. It almost surely is not historically accurate. There is no evidence that the Jewish kingdoms arose from genocides. Most likely they arose from local Canaanite communities adopting early forms of Judaism. Jewish fundamentalists adhere to a 6th century BCE text that is most likely a mythical reconstruction of purported events several centuries earlier, and a form of political bravado that was common in ancient Near Eastern politics. The problem is 21st century Israeli politicians, illegal settlers, and other fundamentalists who propose to live by—and kill by—6th century BCE political propaganda.
Israel’s violent fundamentalists are some 2,600 years out of step with today’s acceptable forms of statecraft and international law. Israel is duty bound to the UN Charter and the Geneva Conventions, not to the Book of Joshua. According to the recent ICJ ruling and UN General Assembly resolution backing it up, Israel must withdraw in the coming twelve months from the occupied Palestinian lands. According to international law, Israel’s borders are those of June 4, 1967, not the Euphrates to the Mediterranean Sea.
Israel’s violent fundamentalists are some 2,600 years out of step with today’s acceptable forms of statecraft and international law.
The ICJ ruling and U.N. General Assembly vote is not a ruling against the state of Israel per se. It is a ruling only against extremism, indeed against extremism and malevolence on both sides of the divide. There are two peoples, each with roughly half the overall population (and with no shortage of internal social, political, and ideological divisions within the two communities). International law calls for two states, living side by side, in peace.
The best solution, which we should strive for and hope for sooner rather than later, is that the two states, and the two peoples, get along, and actually draw strength from each other. Until then, however, the practical solution will be peacekeepers and fortified borders to protect each side from the animosity of the other, but with each having the chance to prosper. The utterly intolerable and illegal situation is the status quo, in which Israel rules brutally over the Palestinian people.
Hopefully, there will soon be a State of Palestine, sovereign and independent, whether the Knesset wants it or not. This is not Israel’s choice, but the mandate of the world community and of international law. The sooner the State of Palestine is welcomed as member state of the U.N., with the security of both Israel and Palestine backed by U.N. peacekeepers, the sooner will peace come to the region.
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Jeffrey D. Sachs is a University Professor and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, where he directed The Earth Institute from 2002 until 2016. He is also President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and a commissioner of the UN Broadband Commission for Development. He has been advisor to three United Nations Secretaries-General, and currently serves as an SDG Advocate under Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. Sachs is the author, most recently, of “A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism” (2020). Other books include: “Building the New American Economy: Smart, Fair, and Sustainable” (2017) and “The Age of Sustainable Development,” (2015) with Ban Ki-moon.
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