As residents of the north are forced to flee, the Knesset has passed a law allowing Arab citizens of Israel to be deported to the besieged enclave
Mourners react next to the body of a Palestinian killed in an Israeli strike, at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir Al-Balah, in the central Gaza Strip on 13 November 2024 (Reuters)
The Israeli Knesset recently passed a law allowing the state to deport the families of Palestinian attackers from within Israel or occupied East Jerusalem.
Under the legislation, family members accused of having advance knowledge of such an attack, or who express “support or identification with the act of terrorism”, could be deported to Gaza or elsewhere, depending on the circumstances.
This new law appears to fit with Israel’s overarching goals in Gaza and Palestine more generally. The situation in Gaza, particularly in the north, provides a clearer picture of these plans.
After more than 55,000 Palestinians from Jabalia reportedly fled south, Israeli army general Itzik Cohen told reporters that “there is no intention of allowing the residents of the northern Gaza Strip to return to their homes”.
Cohen added that humanitarian aid would only be made available in the south, as there were “no more civilians left” in the north. (An Israeli army spokesperson subsequently said his words had been taken out of context and did not reflect the military’s “objectives and values”.)
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The mass expulsion of residents from Jabalia has been accompanied by Israel’s widespread destruction of buildings and infrastructure throughout northern Gaza, and the killing of at least 2,000 people. Across the besieged territory, the damage is so severe that aid agencies have warned it could take centuries to rebuild.
A detailed operations map, which covers the northern areas of Beit Lahia, Beit Hanoun and Jabalia, suggests that Israel is effectively – but quietly – implementing the Generals’ Plan, a genocidal strategy to ethnically cleanse Gaza that has faced widespread international condemnation.
Genocide and permanent occupation
Israel’s recent creation of the Netzarim Corridor sliced Gaza in half, and as the army has zoned in on the north, most Palestinians have been pushed south of the corridor. The ultimate aim appears to be the annexation of the entirety of northern Gaza, creating space for Israel to expand its settlements and deepen its control over vital trade projects in the Mediterranean.
In addition, the recent appointment of Israel Katz as defence minister raises the possibility of reviving a project he has long promoted: the creation of an artificial island that Israel would use to control and monitor aid to Gaza.
Amid the challenges of implementing a mass displacement from Gaza to Egypt’s Sinai – a notion Cairo has refused to entertain – it appears Israel is settling instead on a project to ethnically cleanse and annex the northern part of the enclave, barring displaced people from returning north of the Netzarim Corridor.
The new law enabling the deportation of families of Palestinian citizens of Israel and residents of occupied East Jerusalem is further evidence of Tel Aviv’s resolve to maintain its annexation and occupation of northern Gaza.
Israel’s actions point to a broader, emerging strategy that aims not only to reoccupy Gaza and sever it geographically, but also to reshape Palestine as a whole
By specifying Gaza as a potential destination for those being deported, the legislation suggests that the territory will remain under Israeli control. International law prohibits deportation or the revocation of citizenship without the prior agreement of the state to which the deportee is being sent – although Israel is a habitual violator of international law.
The Generals’ Plan was not the initiative of a rogue Israeli official, but rather appears to reflect a broad consensus and the coordination of high-ranking government circles.
Amid international legal constraints, the Israeli government cannot officially declare policies of genocide, ethnic cleansing, permanent occupation and annexation – but on the ground, this is what has been happening. At its core, the Generals’ Plan is no different than former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant’s declaration last year that Gaza would receive “no electricity, no food, no fuel” after the 7 October Hamas attack.
Israel’s actions point to a broader, emerging strategy that aims not only to reoccupy Gaza and sever it geographically, but also to reshape Palestine as a whole. In this context, northern Gaza would be annexed, while the south would become an enclave for displaced Palestinians – whether from the north, or those deported from within Israel or East Jerusalem.
Effectively, the southern Gaza Strip would serve as a barren point of exile for an increasingly dense population, devoid of livable conditions.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
Ameer Makhoul is a leading Palestinian activist and writer in the 48 Palestinians community. He is the former director of Ittijah, a Palestinian NGO in Israel. He was detained by Israel for ten years.
The election of Donald Trump is a critical event in the protracted crisis of American democracy, whose shattering repercussions will be felt throughout the world. A fascist demagogue—who attempted in January 2021 to violently overthrow the last presidential election—has decisively won the 2024 election with both an electoral and popular vote majority. He will be re-installed in the White House in little more than 70 days.
Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump gestures at a campaign rally at the Santander Arena, Wednesday, Oct. 9, 2024, in Reading, Pa. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
Trump owes his political triumph to the bankruptcy of the Democratic Party, whose fixation with the identity politics of the affluent middle class, arrogant indifference to the devastating impact of inflation on workers’ living standards, and unrelenting support for war in Ukraine and genocide in Gaza prepared the ground for the election debacle.
The major pillars of the capitalist press are already attempting to downplay the political implications of Trump’s victory. “Mr. Trump’s election poses a grave threat,” writes the New York Times, “but he will not determine the long-term fate of American democracy.” The Times reassures its readers that Trump will be a lame-duck president because he is barred by the Constitution from seeking another term.
This is wishful thinking. Trump openly proclaimed that this would be the last election, and that his supporters would not have to vote again. The political reality is that the election of Trump sets the stage for an unprecedented wave of social counterrevolution, which he plans to enforce with an iron heel.
Trump has pledged to become “dictator” and deploy the military to crush “the enemy within.” He plans to deport 11 million undocumented immigrants, an operation that would require placing major American cities under martial law. He has floated eliminating the income tax and promises to slash taxes for the rich and end corporate regulations. The devastating impact that these policies will have on the working class cannot be overstated.
He is not a political accident. However it was achieved—and this is not to minimize the political complicity of the Democratic Party—the coming to power of a second Trump administration represents the violent realignment of the American political superstructure to correspond with the real social relations that exist in the United States.
Donald Trump speaks not simply as one criminal individual but as the representative of a powerful capitalist oligarchy that has taken shape over the last three to four decades. Mega-millionaires and billionaires—led by the likes of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel and Larry Ellison—are utilizing Trump to effect in their interests a reactionary restructuring of American society. They will use the time leading up to the January 20 inauguration to prepare the barrage of repressive and socially reactionary measures that will be unleashed as soon as Trump is once again ensconced in the White House.
He was able to exploit the absence within the political establishment of any articulation of the interests of the vast majority of the population. The Harris campaign was opposed to making any social appeal to the working class. They pitched their campaign to the most affluent voters, promoting hated warmongers like Liz Cheney and promising to place Republicans in the cabinet.
Harris, Barack Obama and other Democratic surrogates traveled the country haranguing voters that a failure to turn out for Harris would be proof of misogyny or racism. They combined incessant appeals to racial and gender identity with full-throated endorsement of war abroad. The Democrats pledged further support for Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza and called for an escalation of the US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine.
The Democrats offered nothing to address the escalating social crisis in the United States, instead presenting the country as “on the right track” to a population which almost unanimously believes the opposite. Figures like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez presented the absurd lie that the Biden-Harris administration had improved conditions for working people and that Harris would challenge the domination of “the billionaire class.” Mimicking Hillary Clinton’s 2016 claim that the working class consists of “a basket of deplorables,” Biden called Trump’s supporters “garbage” in the final days of the election.
The vote totals show not a surge in support for Trump, who appears to have lost votes compared to his 2020 totals, but a staggering collapse in support for the Democrats, with Harris winning somewhere between 10 and 15 million fewer votes than Joe Biden in 2020.
Harris underperformed Biden in every single region of the country. The Democratic Party’s efforts to cajole various racial and gender groups behind the Harris campaign on the basis of an appeal to identity fell completely flat. Trump saw the largest increase in vote margins in counties where over 50 percent of the population is non-white, and exit poll data shows that Harris lost Latino men nationally by a 54-44 percent margin, a reversal from 2020, when Biden won that demographic by a 59-39 percent margin.
The margin by which the Democrats won young voters also fell substantially from 2020, as countless young people refused to vote for the candidate complicit in the genocide in Gaza. Harris won the youngest voters by only 56-41 percent versus Biden’s 65-31 percent margin. Trump won a majority of votes among first-time voters, a sign that the Democrats were unable to activate voters beyond the affluent upper-middle class.
In fact, Harris improved only among the affluent. Among voters with an income of $200,000 or more, she won 52-44 percent, reversing a narrow Trump win in that income bracket in 2020. Trump won voters with an income between $100,000 and $200,000 in 2020 by a 58-41 percent margin, but Harris won by 53-45 percent. Democrats simultaneously saw a collapse in support from working people, with Harris losing those making between $30,000 and $100,000, a wide swath of the population which Biden won by a roughly 57-43 percent margin in 2020.
The electorate was driven by deep social anger. Among the 43 percent of voters who said they were “dissatisfied” with “the way things are going in the country today,” Trump won 54-44 percent. Among the 29 percent who answered that they were “angry,” Trump won 71-27 percent. Harris won 89-10 percent among the tiny sliver of the population who are “enthusiastic” about economic and social conditions today. The total percentage of the population who said their financial situation is “worse” today versus four years ago more than doubled to 45 percent, with Trump winning those voters by an 80-17 percent margin.
Trump and the Republicans are well aware that they will preside over a social powder keg, and that the right-wing policies they plan to implement will only deepen the social anger. Their strategy is to combine massive police state repression with a fascist campaign to scapegoat immigrants for all social ills. Though exit polling does not suggest that voters were taken in by Trump’s vile attacks on immigrants, and though large majorities say they believe immigrants deserve a pathway to citizenship rather than face mass deportation, the stage is set for a massive and violent attack on immigrant workers on a scale that will make even his first administration appear like child’s play.
And while Trump’s demagogic claims to oppose war might have won votes away from the inveterate warmongers in the Democratic Party, Trump is himself a ruthless imperialist politician who advocates escalatory confrontation with China, Iran and North Korea.
The response of the Democrats to Trump’s electoral victory will be to seek compromise and coalition, already evident in Harris’ capitulatory statement Wednesday afternoon. She made no warnings about the dictatorial character of the incoming Trump regime and pledged to cooperate with the transition to the would-be American Führer. The Democrats will shift even further to the right, while seeking to forge an agreement with the Republicans on their central priority, the escalation of war.
The reactionary character of Trump’s political and social program will become clear enough. As the ruling class seeks to restructure the state, there has to be a restructuring of politics, along class lines. As WSWS International Editorial Board Chairman David North wrote, Trump’s election “is the disastrous outcome of the long-term and very deliberate repudiation by the Democratic Party of any programmatic orientation to the working class…
In the United States, the new anti-Marxism blended with the longstanding tradition of anti-communism. Left-wing politics, of the sort connected to working class militancy, disappeared. The grievances related to identity displaced any serious concern with the massive concentration of wealth in a small segment of society at the expense of the working class.
Those who have promoted this form of right-wing politics, promoted by the Democratic Party, now resort to the most bankrupt of all responses to the election: blaming the population.
In fact, the past year has seen an explosive growth of political and social opposition, from the mass protests against the genocide in Gaza to a steady growth of strike action by workers, who are striving to break free from the control of the corporatist trade union apparatus. Immense social struggles are on the horizon.
These struggles must be politically directed, and they must be guided by an understanding that fascism can only be stopped by the development of an independent movement of the working class against the source of political reaction and oligarchy: the capitalist system. There must be “a new birth” of genuinely socialist politics, based on the working class and animated by an international strategy.
The Socialist Equality Party, through its presidential election campaign of Joseph Kishore and Jerry White, set out to mobilize the working class on an international, socialist program in opposition to war, inequality and the capitalist system that produces them. This program now takes on an even greater urgency. In the period ahead, the Socialist Equality Party and International Committee of the Fourth International will fight to win the leadership of a growing movement of workers and youth against war, dictatorship and inequality and for the socialist transformation of society.
Defeating the Arab democracy movement left autocratic states hollowed out and often reliant on US and Israeli support to survive. Palestinians cannot expect help anytime soon
Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi (R) meets with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Alamein in northern Egypt on 20 August 2024 (AFP)
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As Israel continues its genocidal war in Gaza, and expands it to Lebanon, most Arab countries appear to be mere observers or enablers of the massacre of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians on an unprecedented scale.
Even with the threat of a large-scale regional war looming, which could have extremely destabilising effects on the entire region, the ability and desire of Arab states to restrain Israeli imperial hubris appears to be non-existent.
There is good reason to argue that the main enabler of the current crisis engulfing the Middle East is none other than the United States, which has effectively funded the Israeli wars on Gaza and Lebanon, with aid topping $17.9bn since 7 October 2023. It has also provided diplomatic cover to Israel and given its far-right government the green light to expand the war into Lebanon.
This, however, misses an important aspect of the dynamic. Namely, Israel’s colonial hubris regards having the ability to reshape the Middle East through mass violence being fed by the autocratic nature of the Arab states and the failure of the democratic movement in the region.
More than a decade after the mass revolts that swept the region, the result is weak states, with contested legitimacy, only able to exercise power over their own citizens through mass violence – not dissimilar to the way that Israel is treating the Palestinians.
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In many ways, the logic of regime survival at any cost has eroded the ability of these states to influence events in the region – and, in some cases, the social foundation of the national state itself.
Flow of US aid
A notable example of this is Egypt, the most populous Arab state and the only one to have a border with the Gaza Strip, making it, theoretically, one of the Arab states with the most potential to influence the conflict and restrain Israeli aggression.
Egypt is also a close ally of the US, receiving a whopping $183.5bn in aid since the end of the Second World War, positioning it as a possible interlocutor with Israel’s patron.
This strategic positioning, however, was overridden by the Sisi government’s obsession with survival, which placed it in a dependent relationship with Israel, even as Israel threatens the very stability that Sisi covets.
Indeed, Israel played a not insignificant role in the consolidation of the Sisi government after the 2013 coup, offering political support, security cooperation and deeper economic ties to the direct benefit of the Egyptian elites.
War on Gaza: Arab despots’ failure to stand up to Israel could fuel an explosion
For example, during the summer of 2013, after the coup that overthrew the elected president, Mohamed Morsi, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) was lobbying on behalf of the fledgling military autocracy to ensure the continued flow of American aid.
The close relationship between President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and the Zionist lobbying groups continued, with reports emerging in February 2017 that Sisi met representatives of the most influential pro-Israel groups, including Aipac, Friends of the Israel Defense Forces (FIDF) and the Zionist Organization of America (Zoa) five times in 20 months.
The relationship between Sisi and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been described as the closest between any leaders from the two nations since the peace treaty of 1979.
This apparent closeness was anchored in close security cooperation between the countries, with reports emerging in 2018 that, in the preceding two years, Israel had conducted over 100 air strikes against militants in Sinai, with Cairo’s approval.
This security cooperation was extended to include direct repression of peaceful dissent in Egypt, with the sale of Israeli spyware to Sisi’s government, which was used to hack into the phone of Ahmed Tantawy, a prominent member of the secular opposition.
The depth of the alliance extended to the energy sector, with a $15bn deal signed in 2018 between the two countries to import Israeli gas for re-export in liquid form.
An investigation by human rights campaigner Hossam Bahgat revealed that the Egyptian private company responsible for the deal was managed by Egypt’s General Intelligence Services (GIS), allowing the country’s security elites to profit from the deal directly.
Egypt’s debt crisis
These deep structural dependencies placed Sisi’s government in an extremely vulnerable position, unable to restrain Israel, even when the idea of the ethnic cleansing of Gaza was floated by Netanyahu, with its highly destabilising effects on the government and the country.
Indeed, beyond rhetorical condemnation, Egypt has done little to impact the dynamic on the ground. The most notable example of a critical public stance was the Egyptian declaration in May that it would join the International Court of Justice case against Israel.
At the time of writing, there is no evidence of it doing so. But there is evidence of deepening economic ties, with Egypt in September signing another deal with Israel, to increase its imports of natural gas by 20 percent.
More than a decade after the coup, with the Sisi government facing a grinding debt crisis and following a logic of power consolidation at any cost, it finds itself at the mercy of Israel and its colonial hubris, unable to exert influence on one of its closest allies.
Syria in shambles
The enabling of Israel’s colonial ambitions is not limited to Israel’s Arab allies, but also extends to Syria, where the logic of government survival above all else is at its most extreme.
More than a decade after the start of the Syrian uprising, the Assad government has survived, albeit at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives, high levels of foreign interference and the loss of large swathes of territory. The Syrian economy is decimated, the state’s monopoly on violence is now completely eroded, and the social foundations of the state have been eviscerated.
The post-colonial state has failed to meet its raison d’etre, namely to empower the people of the Middle East, and confront the old imperial powers, including Israel
The Syrian government has reduced the country to a narco state, blackmailing the Gulf states into reintegrating it into the Arab fold in exchange for stopping the flow of illicit drugs.
In essence, Assad decided to sacrifice the Syrian state on the altar of his survival, leaving behind a state in shambles – unable to assert control within its own borders, let alone restrain Israeli aggression that could spiral to engulf Syria as well, whose territory it already occupies.
The horrors that we are witnessing in Gaza and Lebanon are as much the result of an Israeli colonist mania, and western support for it, as it is also a direct result of the nature of the Arab political landscape that emerged from the failed Arab spring.
The post-colonial state has failed to meet its raison d’etre, namely to empower the people of the Middle East, and confront the old imperial powers, including Israel. Any pretences of this have now completely disappeared, with a new raison d’etre emerging, namely the domination of their own citizens at any cost.
This is not to argue that these states were not repressive before, but there is not now even a pretence of confronting a dangerous external enemy, now that said enemy is internal.
The dissident has now come to replace colonists and the occupier as the number one enemy of the Arab states, with the mass slaughter of the Palestinians, Lebanese and whoever dares to challenge the Israeli vision of the new Middle East standing as a testament to a new Arab autocratic political order.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
Maged Mandour is a political analyst who is a regular contributor to the Arab Digest, Middle East Eye, and Open Democracy. He is the author of an upcoming book entitled Egypt Under Sisi, to be published by IB Tauris. The book will examine the social and political developments in Egypt since the 2013 coup.
Israeli Newspaper Haaretz Editorial, Oct 29, 2024,
For three and a half weeks, Israeli forces have been besieging the northern Gaza Strip. Israel has almost completely blocked the entry of humanitarian aid, thereby starving the hundreds of thousands of people who live there. Information emerging from the besieged area is only partial, because ever since the war began, Israel has barred journalists from entering Gaza.
But even based on the little that has been revealed to the public, two things can be said about the siege. First, the scale of the civilian casualties from the army’s daily bombings of towns and refugee camps in northern Gaza – children, women, elderly people and men who are innocent of any crime – is enormous.
Gaza is the horror that can’t be denied. But Israelis will try
‘We are truly worried that Israel is going to commit something very dangerous in Gaza’
With no strategy to deal with Gaza’s humanitarian crisis, Israel is pushed into occupation
Moreover, medical and other aid facilities have largely collapsed, and other institutions are also collapsing. Consequently, hundreds of thousands of people are now at risk of starvation or are already suffering terrible hunger.
Israel says it told the residents that they needed to leave northern Gaza, and even now, they can still move southward on routes the army has designated for this purpose. Thus the residents, many of whom have already been uprooted two or three times or even more from the places to which they have fled the terrors of war, are now being asked to move again. Yet Israel has refrained from giving the displaced any guarantee that they will be able to return once the war ends.
Given this, it’s no wonder that grave suspicions have arisen that Israel is effectively perpetrating ethnic cleansing in northern Gaza and that this operation is intended to permanently empty this area of Palestinians.
This suspicion fits with both the principles of the “generals’ plan” being pushed by Maj. Gen. (res.) Giora Eiland – a plan Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has denied implementing – and the demands of the Jewish supremacist parties in the governing coalition that are openly pursuing a policy of mass expulsions and the renewal of Jewish settlement in northern Gaza.
Ethnic cleansing is both a moral crime and a legal one. Criminal law treats mass expulsions as both a war crime and a crime against humanity. Horrifyingly, some members of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government want to commit these crimes.
As soon as the war began, they began calling for “erasing Gaza” and for perpetrating a “second Nakba.” But many Israelis made light of such statements, and the law enforcement system, headed by Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, refrained from dealing with this incitement to commit crimes.
Now, we can see the results: Israel is sliding into ethnic cleansing; its soldiers are carrying out the criminal policies of the messianic, Kahanist right; and even the opposition on the center and center-left isn’t making a peep. This consensus behind ethnic cleansing is shameful, and every public leader who doesn’t demand an end to the de facto expulsion is supporting this crime and has become a party to it.
If this process doesn’t stop immediately, hundreds of thousands of people will become refugees, entire communities will be destroyed and the moral and legal stain of this crime will cling to and pursue every Israeli.
The above article is Haaretz’s lead editorial, as published in the Hebrew and English newspapers in Israel
Palestinians carry their belongings as they flee areas of Gaza City in the northern Gaza Strip, earlier in October.Credit: Omar Al-Q
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.”
In a major escalation of the imperialist military offensive throughout the Middle East, Israel launched three waves of airstrikes on Iran Saturday morning in coordination with the Biden administration.
A view of Tehran capital of Iran is seen, early Saturday, October 26, 2024. [AP Photo/Vahid Salemi]
The White House quickly endorsed Israel’s illegal attack on Iran, declaring, “We understand that Israel is conducting targeted strikes against military targets in Iran as an exercise of self-defense.”
A White House official further endorsed the illegal attack in a statement to Bloomberg, calling it “targeted and proportional.” The official told Bloomberg, “The president and his national security team, of course, worked with the Israelis over recent weeks” to plan the illegal act of war.
Rather than self-defense, the attack is a calculated provocation aimed at eliciting a military response by Iran that can be used to justify further US-Israeli aggression, including the deployment of even more combat troops to Israel and a further military build-up throughout the region.
The Iranian military confirmed that airstrikes targeted bases in Ilam, Khuzestan, and Tehran provinces, and commercial flights were suspended throughout the country.
The attack follows the October 9 discussion between US President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in which the American president signed off on the strikes, along with a series of discussions with the Pentagon and White House Friday night.
The attack took place just days after US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin announced that US combat troops had arrived in Israel, in the role of air defense support for the operation.
The attack took place as US Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived in the Middle East after extensive discussions with Netanyahu in which he reviewed both the planned attack on Iran and Israel’s so-called “generals’ plan” to starve, displace, or exterminate the remaining population of Northern Gaza.
The Israeli-US attack on Iran took place just 11 days before the November 5 US presidential election. Earlier this month, the World Socialist Web Site warned that the Biden administration was planning an “October conspiracy” to escalate the war with Iran. We wrote:
There is a long history of events taking place in October that have major effects on an upcoming US presidential election. By deploying US troops to Israel, the Biden administration is not so much seeking to impact Kamala Harris’s electoral prospects as to ensure that plans for military escalation are underway before the election takes place. Instead of an “October surprise,” it is an “October conspiracy” to massively expand US involvement in war throughout the Middle East.
These warnings have now been confirmed. While the scope of the Israeli attack is at this point unclear, it is evident that the Biden Administration is recklessly seeking to escalate war throughout the Middle East targeting Iran.
Israel’s attack on Iran is part of its rampage throughout the Middle East, supported by the imperialist powers, with the aim of reimposing colonial domination over the oil-rich region as part of their effort to dominate Russia and China.
The most horrific consequence of this imperialist offensive throughout the Middle East is the genocide in Gaza. The official death toll of the Gaza genocide stands at 42,847, with over 100,544 wounded. The real death toll is likely to be far higher, with an article in The Lancet estimating it at 186,000 or more in July.
This month, Reuters reported that Israel had suspended all commercial food shipments into Gaza, leading the availability to fall to the lowest level since the start of Israel’s onslaught, as human rights organizations warned of imminent mass starvation.
The attack on Iran follows a campaign of illegal assassinations targeting all of the leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah, as well as leading Iranian figures, as the US and Israel expand their military onslaught throughout the region. On October 16, Israel murdered Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar in Rafah. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah was killed by more than 80 Israeli 2,000-pound bombs in Lebanon last month, and Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated by Israel in Tehran in July.
Israel simultaneously continued its ground invasion and daily bombardment of Lebanon Friday, with the Lebanese death toll rising to 2,634.
The so-called defense system will allow Israel to strike Iran without fear of retaliation, experts say.
By Sharon Zhang, Truthout, October 21, 2024
Lockheed Martin’s Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system is in place in only a few places around the world. Lockheed Martin’s Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system is in place in only a few places around the world. Lockheed Martin
A U.S. weapons system has landed and is “in place” in Israel, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin said on Monday, as the Biden administration beefs up U.S. support of Israel and Israeli forces prepare to attack Iran and continue their bombardments of Lebanon and Gaza.
The Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system, worth between roughly $1 billion to $1.8 billion and made by Lockheed Martin, is an anti-missile system that can intercept ballistic missiles at high altitudes. The powerful weapon, deployed in only a few places around the world, will help bolster Israel’s ability to withstand air attacks after Iran’s missile attack on Israel earlier this month.
Austin said that the THAAD is expected to be operational soon. “We have the ability to put it into operation very quickly and we’re on pace with our expectations,” he said.
The U.S. announced last week that it was sending the THAAD as well as 100 U.S. troops to Israel. This is a significant escalation of the U.S.’s involvement in Israel’s aggression, marking the first time that U.S. troops have been directly deployed to Israel amid its genocide in Gaza and attacks across the Middle East. The U.S. announced last month that it is sending an additional 2,000 to 3,000 troops to the Middle East to bolster the 40,000 troops already stationed in the region.
U.S. officials said that the deployment of THAAD and the troops represent “another visible statement of our commitment” to Israel, per Army Secretary Christine Wormuth.
The deployment comes as a tranche of leaked classified documents reportedly prepared by the U.S. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency, meant to be seen by the “Five Eyes” allies, shows that Israel is preparing to strike Iran. This includes plans to launch ballistic missiles and conduct drone operations.
U.S. officials have said that they are investigating the leak, which initially emerged on Telegram. Officials have reportedly acknowledged that the documents are legitimate, according to The New York Times.
The addition of yet more weapons systems like Israel’s Iron Dome that can intercept missile strikes will give more leeway to Israeli forces to strike other countries in the Middle East without fear of retaliation. These supposed “defensive” weapons, as anti-Zionist advocates have pointed out, make it far easier for Israel to conduct its offensive moves.
Indeed, Haaretz reports that Israel is clearly waiting for the THAAD system to be deployed before it carries out its attack on Israel. Harrison Mann, who resigned from his position as a U.S. Army intelligence officer because of Israel’s genocide, has said that, in fact, the THAAD and troop deployment will only help escalate tensions between Iran and Israel.
“To introduce troops into hostilities, per the 1973 War Powers Act, you either need an authorization from Congress, or there needs to be some urgent and imminent self-defense threat. In this case, the supposed self-defense threat is an Iranian missile attack. But the irony here is the Iranian missile attack is only going to happen if we help Israel strike Iran first,” Mann said to Democracy Now! last week. Join us in defending the truth before it’s too late
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This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license. Sharon Zhang
Sharon Zhang is a news writer at Truthout covering politics, climate and labor. Before coming to Truthout, Sharon had written stories for Pacific Standard, The New Republic, and more. She has a master’s degree in environmental studies. She can be found on Twitter: @zhang_sharon.
“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.
Smoke billows from the site of an Israeli airstrike that targeted the southern Lebanese village of Khiam on October 17, 2024, amid the continuing war between Irsael and Hezbollah. (
(Photo by -/AFP via Getty Images)
Having full U.S. government backing, including weapons and political cover to continue the carnage, Netanyahu knows he has a free hand to attack Iran and drag the U.S. into a regional war.
Biden’s bombs and missiles, dropped daily on Lebanon, a U.S. ally, by his puppet master Netanyahu, is wreaking havoc in this small defenseless country. The Israeli genocidal machine is waging an incinerating assault on fleeing civilians and critical facilities. The scorched-earth Israeli strategy is the same as what we have seen in Gaza. Attack in Lebanon anyone who moves or anything that stands—whether a hospital, a dense residential area, a café, a municipal building, a market, a school, or a Mosque—and allege there was a Hezbollah commander or a Hezbollah site here or there. Two recent New York Times headlines express some of the impact of this latest Israeli war: “In Just a Week, a Million People in Lebanon Have Been Displaced” and “Lebanon’s Hospitals Buckle Amid an Onslaught: ‘Indiscriminate’ Strikes Overwhelm Health System, U.N. Says.”
Historical note: Hezbollah, also a political party and social service organization, was created to defend impoverished Shiite Muslims in southern Lebanon in 1982 right after the Israeli army once again invaded Lebanon and badly mistreated the residents during an 18-year-long military occupation.
No matter what or who the Israeli Air Force’s American F-16 fighter aircraft bomb, no matter the deaths and injuries to thousands of Lebanese families, many of them children and women, Biden keeps unconditionally and savagely shipping weapons of mass destruction. He is violating six federal laws requiring conditions be met—such as not violating human rights or not obstructing U.S. humanitarian aid. Netanyahu is violating these and other conditions and mocking his major benefactor, the United States government.
Israel has long had designs on a slice of Lebanon going up to and including the Litani River area. Water is valuable. Over the years, Israel has routinely violated Lebanese air space, executed incursions into Lebanon and has used forbidden cluster bombs and white phosphorous. According to Aya Majzoub, Deputy Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa at Amnesty International, “It is beyond horrific that the Israeli army has indiscriminately used white phosphorous in violation of international humanitarian law.”
The White House knows all this. It doesn’t care. Wherever Israel invades, bombs, assassinates, or boobytraps pagers and walkie-talkies, Bibi-Biden continues his servility to the Israeli terror regime and its genocidal leader Netanyahu, who is despised by three out of four Israelis for his domestic policies and is under indictment by Israeli prosecutors for corruption.
Despite reports that Biden steams in private against Netanyahu, and considers him a liar and a supporter of Trump’s re-election, Biden knows that that this foreign authoritarian has the big card: CONGRESS. Most of the legislators who attended his noxious address to a joint congressional session last June gave him a record-breaking 52 standing ovations. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said, “Benjamin Netanyahu’s presentation in the House Chamber today was by far the worst presentation of any foreign dignitary invited and honored with the privilege of addressing the Congress of the United States.”
Biden, who is known to conduct foreign and military policy without any authorization by Congress, doesn’t want to offend the powerful “Israel Government Can Do No Wrong” Lobby in the U.S.—to which he has been indentured for his entire 50-year political career. This includes Israel’s current destruction of Lebanon, where tens of thousands of Americans are residing. The Washington Post reports that the Biden White House “has so far given full backing to Israel’s ground operations in Lebanon, even amid a growing international outcry over the civilian toll … and Israeli clashes with United Nations peacekeepers,” who have been assigned there for decades.
Having full U.S. government backing, and now backed by U.S. warships, Marines and logistics, plus 100 U.S. soldiers arriving this week in Israel, Netanyahu knows he has a free hand to attack Iran and drag the U.S. into a regional war.
Both Netanyahu and Bibi-Biden have been briefed about the possibilities of “blowback” (the CIA’s term) against the U.S. These concerns come from U.S. intelligence agencies who study scenarios like future 9/11s or the recent inexpensive armed drones that can be constructed and deployed anywhere. Militarists and corporatists in the U.S. aren’t that concerned because whenever “blowback” occurs they can concentrate more power, with bigger military budgets and profits, in another “war on terror,” silencing dissent and subordinating or sidelining critical domestic priorities.
That is the lethal fix and fate that America has been subjected to by its cowardly, Constitution-violating politicians from both major parties. The power structure—the corporate state—or what Franklin Delano Roosevelt once called in a 1938 message to Congress “fascism,” is telling the American people: “Heads we win, Tails you lose.”
Here is how bad Biden has gotten. Recently, two letters signed by 65 American doctors and health workers back from the horrors, the killing fields of Gaza, to President Joe Biden, have gone unanswered. (See, “65 Doctors, Nurses and Paramedics: What We Saw in Gaza” by Feroze Sidhwa, New York Times on Sunday, October 13, 2024). Their letters plead for a ceasefire and immediate humanitarian aid for the starving, dying people of Gaza. They request a meeting with President Biden, who has often met with the pro-Israeli lobby. Scranton Joe says no way.
These brave physicians and nurses also are requesting that Joe Biden demand that Netanyahu allow children in Gaza who are seriously burned or are amputees be air-lifted to America to be treated by compassionate specialists in ready American hospitals. Biden, a practicing Catholic, has no interest.
President George Washington warned his country about avoiding foreign entanglements in his farewell address. Were he possessed of more prescience; he would have added the word “surrenders.”
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Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate and the author of “The Seventeen Solutions: Bold Ideas for Our American Future” (2012). His new book is, “Wrecking America: How Trump’s Lies and Lawbreaking Betray All” (2020, co-authored with Mark Green).
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