How can we see the Palestine- Israel conflict from a Qur'an alone perspective

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By Hurting UN Agency, the West Sides With Genocide
January 31, 2024
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Israel has long plotted the downfall of UNRWA, aware that it is one of the biggest obstacles to eradicating the Palestinians as a people, writes Jonathan Cook.


December 2009: A worker carries bag of flour at a U.N. food distribution center in the Shati Refugee Camp. (Suhair Karam, IRIN, Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

By Jonathan Cook
Jonathan-Cook.net

There is an important background to the decision by the United States and other leading Western states, the U.K. among them, to freeze funding to the United Nations' Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the main channel by which the U.N. disseminates food and welfare services to the most desperate and destitute Palestinians.

The funding cut — which has been also adopted by Germany, France, Japan, Switzerland, Canada, Netherlands, Italy, Australia and Finland — was imposed even though the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled on Friday that Israel may be committing genocide in Gaza.

The World Court judges quoted at length U.N. officials who warned that Israel's actions had left almost all of the enclave's 2.3 million inhabitants on the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe, including famine.

The West's flimsy pretext for what amounts to a war on UNRWA is that Israel claims 12 local U.N. staff — out of 13,000 — are implicated in Hamas' break-out from the open-air prison of Gaza on Oct. 7. The sole evidence appears to be coerced confessions, likely extracted through torture, from Palestinian fighters captured by Israel that day.

The U.N. immediately sacked all the accused staff, seemingly without due process. We can assume that was because the refugee agency was afraid its already threadbare lifeline to the people of Gaza, as well as millions of other Palestinian refugees across the region — in the West Bank, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria — would be further threatened. It need not have worried. Western donor states cut their funding anyway, plunging Gaza deeper into calamity.


They did so without regard to the fact their decision amounts to collective punishment: some 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza face starvation and the spread of lethal disease, while another 4 million Palestinian refugees across the region are at imminent risk of losing food, health care and schooling.

According to law professor Francis Boyle, who filed a genocide case for Bosnia at the World Court some two decades ago, that shifts most of these Western states from their existing complicity with Israel's genocide (by selling arms and providing aid and diplomatic cover) into direct and active participation in the genocide, by violating the 1948 Genocide Convention's prohibition on "deliberately inflicting on the group [in this case, Palestinians] conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part."

The World Court is investigating Israel for genocide. But it could easily widen its investigation to include Western states. The threat to UNRWA needs to be seen in that light.

Not only is Israel thumbing its nose at the World Court and international law, but states like the U.S. and U.K. are doing so too, by cutting their funding to the refugee agency. They are slapping the court in the face, and indicating that they are four-square behind Israel's crimes, even if they are shown to be genocidal in nature.

Israel's Creature


Refugees at Rafah, Southern Palestine, between 1948-1949. (UN Photo)

The following is the proper context for understanding what is really going on with this latest attack on UNRWA:

The agency was created in 1949 — decades before Israel's current military slaughter in Gaza — to provide for the basic needs of Palestinian refugees, including essential food provision, health care and education. It has an outsize role in Gaza because most of the Palestinians living there lost, or are descended from families that lost, everything in 1948.
That was when they were ethnically cleansed by the fledgling Israeli military from most of Palestine, in an event known to Palestinians as the Nakba, or Catastrophe. Their lands were turned into what Israel's leaders described as an exclusively "Jewish state."

The Israeli army set about destroying the Palestinians' towns and villages inside this new state so that they could never return.

UNRWA is separate from the U.N.'s main refugee agency, the UNHCR, and deals only with Palestinian refugees. Although Israel does not want you to know it, the reason for there being two U.N. refugee agencies is because Israel and its Western backers insisted on the division back in 1948. Why? Because Israel was afraid of the Palestinians falling under the responsibility of the UNHCR's forerunner, the International Refugee Organisation. The IRO was established in the immediate wake of the Second World War in large part to cope with the millions of European Jews fleeing Nazi atrocities.
Israel did not want the two cases treated as comparable, because it was pushing hard for Jewish refugees to be settled on lands from which it had just expelled Palestinians. Part of the IRO's mission was to seek the repatriation of European Jews. Israel was worried that very principle might be used both to deny it the Jews it wanted to colonise Palestinian land and to force it to allow the Palestinian refugees to return to their former homes. So in a real sense, UNRWA is Israel's creature: it was set up to keep the Palestinians a case apart, an anomaly.

Prison Camp

Nonetheless, things did not go exactly to plan for Israel. Given its refusal to allow the refugees to return, and the reluctance of neighbouring Arab states to be complict in Israel's original act of ethnic cleansing, the Palestinian population in UNRWA's refugee camps ballooned.
They became an especial problem in Gaza, where about two-thirds of the population are refugees or descended from refugees. The tiny coastal enclave did not have the land or resources to cope with the rapidly expanding numbers there. The fear in Israel was that, as the plight of the Palestinians of Gaza became more desperate, the international community would pressure Israel into a peace agreement, allowing for the refugees' return to their former homes.


May 2010: A view of Jabalia Refugee Camp, the largest of the Gaza Strip's eight refugee camps. (Suhair Karam, IRIN, Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

That had to be stopped at all costs. In the early 1990s, as the supposed Oslo "peace process" was being unveiled, Israel began penning the Palestinians of Gaza inside a steel cage, surrounded by gun towers.

Some 17 years ago, Israel added a blockade that prevented the population's movement in and out of Gaza, including via the strip's coastal waters and its skies. The Palestinians became prisoners in a giant concentration camp, denied the most basic links to the outside world. Israel alone decided what was allowed in and out. An Israeli court later learnt that from 2008 onwards the Israeli military put Gaza on what amounted to a starvation diet by restricting food supplies.

There was a strategy here that involved making Gaza uninhabitable, something the U.N. started warning about in 2015. Israel's game plan appears to have gone something like this:

By making Palestinians in Gaza ever more desperate, it was certain that militant groups like Hamas willing to fight to liberate the enclave would gain in popularity. In turn, that would provide Israel with the excuse both to further tighten restrictions on Gaza to deal with a "terrorism threat," and to intermittently wreck Gaza in "retaliation" for those attacks — or what Israeli military commanders variously called "mowing the grass" and "returning Gaza to the Stone Age."

The assumption was that Gaza's militant groups would exhaust their energies managing the constant "humanitarian crises" Israel had engineered.

At the same time, Israel could promote twin narratives. It could say publicly that it was impossible for it to take responsibility for the people of Gaza, given that they were so clearly invested both in Jew hatred and terrorism. Meanwhile, it would privately tell the international community that, given how uninhabitable Gaza was becoming, they urgently needed to find a solution that did not involve Israel. The hope was that Washington would be able to arm-twist or bribe neighbouring Egypt into taking most of Gaza's destitute population.

Mask Ripped Off


Palestinians in the aftermath of an Israeli airstrike on the El-Remal aera in Gaza City on Oct. 9, 2023. (Naaman Omar, Palestinian News & Information Agency, or Wafa, for APAimages, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)

On Oct. 7, Hamas and other militant groups achieved what Israel had assumed was impossible. They broke out of their concentration camp. The Israeli leadership's shock is not just over the bloody nature of the break-out. It is that on that day Hamas smashed Israel's entire security concept — one designed to keep the Palestinians crushed, and Arab states and the region's other resistance groups hopeless.
Last week, in a knockout blow, the World Court agreed to put Israel on trial for genocide in Gaza, collapsing the moral case for an exclusive Jewish state built on the ruins of the Palestinians' homeland.

The judges' near-unanimous conclusion that South Africa has made a plausible case for Israel committing genocide should force a reassessment of everything that went before. Genocides don't just emerge out of thin air. They happen after long periods in which the oppressor group dehumanises another group, incites against it and abuses it.

The World Court has implicitly conceded that the Palestinians were right when they insisted that the Nakba — Israel's mass dispossession and ethnic cleansing operation of 1948 — never ended. It just took on different forms. Israel became better at concealing those crimes, until the mask was ripped off after the Oct. 7 break-out.

Israel's efforts to get rid of UNRWA are not new. They date back many years. For a number of reasons, the U.N. refugee agency is a thorn in Israel's side — and all the more so in Gaza.
Not least, it has provided a lifeline to Palestinians there, keeping them fed and cared for, and providing jobs to many thousands of local people in a place where unemployment rates are among the highest in the world.


May 2010: Palestinian school children attend mathematics lesson in a class in UNRWA Gaza Elementary School in Gaza City. (Suhair Karam, IRIN, Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

It has invested in infrastructure like hospitals and schools that make life in Gaza more bearable, when Israel's goal has long been to make the enclave uninhabitable. UNRWA's well-run schools, staffed by local Palestinians, teach the children their own history, about where their grandparents once lived, and of Israel's campaign of dispossession and ethnic cleansing against them. That runs directly counter to the infamous Zionist slogan about the Palestinians' identity-less future: "The old will die and the young forget."

Divide & Rule

But UNRWA's role is bigger than that. Uniquely, it is the sole agency unifying Palestinians wherever they live, even when they are separated by national borders and Israel's fragmentation of the territory it controls.

UNRWA brings Palestinians together even when their own political leaders have been manipulated into endless factionalism by Israel's divide-and-rule policies: Hamas is nominally in charge in Gaza, while Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah pretends to run the West Bank.

In addition, UNRWA keeps alive the moral case for a Palestinian right of return— a principle recognised in international law but long ago abandoned by Western states.



Even before Oct. 7, UNRWA had become an obstacle that needed removing if Israel was ever to ethnically cleanse Gaza. That is why Israel has repeatedly lobbied to stop the biggest donors, especially the U.S., funding UNRWA.

Back in 2018, for example, the refugee agency was plunged into an existential crisis when U.S. President Donald Trump acquiesced to Israeli pressure and cut all its funding. Even after the decision was reversed, the agency has been limping along financially.

Now Israel is in full attack mode against the World Court, and has even more to gain from destroying UNRWA than it did before. The freeze in funding, and the further weakening of the refugee agency, will undermine the support structures for Palestinians generally. But in Gaza's case, the move will specifically accelerate famine and disease, making the enclave uninhabitable faster.
But it will do more. It will also serve as a stick with which to beat the World Court as Israel tries to fight off the genocide investigation. Israel's barely veiled claim is that 15 of the International Court of Justice's 17 judges fell for South Africa's supposedly anti-Semitic argument that Israel is committing genocide.

The court quoted extensively from U.N. officials, including the head of UNRWA, that Israel was actively engineering an unprecedented humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Now, as former U.K. Ambassador Craig Murray notes, the coerced confessions against 12 UNRWA staff serve to "provide a propaganda counter-narrative to the ICJ judgment, and to reduce the credibility of UNRWA's evidence before the court."


Extraordinarily, the Western media have done Israel's PR work for it, happily focusing more attention on Israel's claims about a handful of UNRWA staff than it has on the World Court's decision to put Israel on trial for genocide.

Equally a boon to Israel is that leading western states have so quickly pinned their colours to the mast. The funding freeze cements their fates to Israel's. It sends a message that they will stand with Israel against the World Court, whatever it decides.

Their war on UNRWA is intended as an act of collective intimidation directed towards the court. It is a sign that the West refuses to accept that international law applies to it, or its client state. It is a reminder that Western states refuse any restraint on their freedom of action — and that it is Israel and its sponsors who are the true rogue states.

Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist. He was based in Nazareth, Israel, for 20 years. He returned to the U.K. in 2021.He is the author of three books on the Israel-Palestine conflict: Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish State (2006), Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (2008) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair (2008). If you appreciate his articles, please consider offering your financial support.

This article is from the author's blog, Jonathan Cook.net.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

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The provisional measures of the International Court of Justice
by Thierry Meyssan
The International Court of Justice has just taken provisional measures to protect the Gazan population from possible genocide. This decision is nothing new, but provides legal support for the political position of the United States. This decision in no way prejudges the judgment on the merits, which would condemn Israel if it were made, but probably never will be. International justice is still in its infancy, and is still struggling to apply the law.

VOLTAIRE NETWORK | PARIS (FRANCE) | 30 JANUARY 2024
DEUTSCH ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΆ ESPAÑOL FRANÇAIS ITALIANO NEDERLANDS PORTUGUÊS РУССКИЙ


The International Court of Justice, presided over by former U.S. State Department official Joan Donoghue, has issued a protective order in the case between South Africa and Israel. Unsurprisingly, the Court took exactly the same decision as the United States: Israel must do everything in its power to prevent genocide, while continuing its war against Hamas.

INTERNATIONAL JUSTICE IS STILL IN ITS INFANCY
The Court is an embryo of international justice within the United Nations. It replaces the Permanent Court of International Justice, which was created in 1922 within the League of Nations. The system is only a century old. Its aim is to ensure that each State applies the commitments it has entered into. However, since 1942, the Anglo-Saxons, who accepted this court in 1945, have been seeking not to apply international law, but to establish their governance over the world. When they signed the Atlantic Charter, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and US President Franklin D. Roosevelt asserted, in the name of their states, that they alone should decide disputes between states in the post-war world. This was the original cause of the Cold War and today's conflicts.
Consequently, contrary to the image we have of it, the International Court of Justice is not a finished court, but a battlefield where the Anglo-Saxon unipolar project of the world confronts the multipolar project of most other states. This is how we should interpret the Gaza massacre order.
The only means of pressure on governments available to the Court is not an army, but public opinion in each country. No government accepts the idea of being presented to its people as a criminal. It is therefore particularly important to understand the Court's decisions.

MAGISTRATES HAVE TO SAY WHAT'S RIGHT, BUT THEY'RE NOT ALL THAT INDEPENDENT
The Court's fifteen permanent magistrates are nominated by their own governments and elected by all. They must use legal reasoning to justify their decisions. However, their decisions generally reflect their national prejudices. It is very rare for judges chosen by their own government to rule against it. Two additional magistrates are appointed by the two parties to the conflict. They come to defend their country and look for legal arguments to back up their case.
I also remember that, when I was advising Muamar Gaddafi, the corruption of international judges was notorious. In the context of a judgment on the legality of NATO's war against his people, the Libyan leader ordered that the "gifts" received by the international judges be compensated by offering them equivalent ones.

In this case, only two judges voted against all or some of the Court's decisions.

Of course, the ad hoc judge representing Israel, Aharon Barak. He took part in the Camp David Accords alongside the revisionist Zionist Menachem Begin. When he was President of the Supreme Court, he interpreted the fundamental laws in such a way as to give himself the power to censure the Knesset; an implausible system on which Israeli democracy was built and which Benjamin Netanyahu is trying to overturn. In his rulings, he systematically defended the interests of Israel against the Palestinians, thus forbidding the latter to lodge complaints about the damage caused to them by the IDF. According to him, you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs, and examining these situations would force the IDF to reveal the confidential details of its operations. Or, in Israeli law, it was he who authorized the construction of the "Separation Barrier", which the ICJ declared illegal.

He opposed four of the six provisional measures. He opposed the general injunction to take all measures to prevent the commission of genocide, the injunction to preserve evidence of potential acts of genocide, and the injunction requiring Israel to report on its methods. He also opposed any limitation on IDF action. On the other hand, he agreed that Israel should prevent its politicians from calling for genocide, and that it should provide humanitarian aid to the Palestinians.

The other judge to oppose the Court is Julia Sebutinde from Uganda. For her, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is political and cannot be judged by a court of law. Above all, as the acts allegedly committed by Israel were not, in her view, accompanied by genocidal intent, South Africa had not demonstrated that the provisional measures requested were necessary. Finally, as Hamas is not a party to these proceedings, it would be unrealistic to impose limits on one of the belligerent parties but not on the other.

First of all, no one has asked the Court to judge the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and international law has nothing to do with politics. Secondly, South Africa was careful not to accuse Israel of genocidal intent, but it did cite enough genocidal statements by Israeli leaders to call for provisional measures, an argument which the Israeli judge considered valid. Finally, let's come to the last point: the absence of Hamas from the proceedings cannot authorize Israel to allow genocide to be perpetrated.

Julia Sebutinde's position casts doubt on her previous positions at the Special Court for Sierra Leone. Adonia Ayebare, Uganda's Permanent Representative to the United Nations, said: "Judge Sebutinde's decision before the International Court of Justice does not represent the Ugandan government's position on the situation in Palestine (...) She has already voted against Uganda's case on the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)".
The fact that Judge Sebutinde's reasoning is abstruse and that she is disowned by her own government suggests that she may have been corrupted.

The Court did not rule on South Africa's other demands, which could not be dealt with as a matter of urgency, but exclusively on the merits: reparation measures for Palestinian victims and the condemnation by Israel of individuals guilty of genocide. Above all, it did not say that "the Israeli State must immediately suspend its military operations in and against Gaza".

This order is in line with that in Gambia v. Mynamar. It enacts the same provisional measures as those used to halt the genocide of the Rohingas. However, it cannot be compared with the case of Ukraine v. Russian Federation, insofar as the latter does not concern the genocide of Ukrainians by Russians, but the use by Russia of the argument of genocide committed by Ukraine against its own Russian-speaking population.

PROVISIONAL ORDER DOES NOT PREJUDGE JUDGMENT ON THE MERITS
The Court's order is binding not only on Israel and South Africa, but also on the 151 other States that have signed the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Depending on their situation, each of them is obliged to associate itself with the provisional measures. Some could interpret this as justifying an embargo on all armaments, or prohibiting their dual nationals from taking part in this potentially genocidal war.

Algeria has already requested a meeting of the Security Council on January 31, so that it can clarify the binding effects of the Court's ruling. Obviously, it is unlikely to threaten Israel with military intervention, but it could decide on an arms embargo, for example.

In any case, this order will be cited before other courts in accordance with Anglo-Saxon law. For example, there is already a case in the Northern California District Court between Defense for Children International and Joe Biden, Antony Blinken and Lloyd Austin, and another in London between Global Legal Action Network and the British government. Both are based on the premise that supplying arms to Israel at this time is participation in the massacre in Gaza. They now have a chance to succeed.

It could also be brought before the International Criminal Court, which could be called upon to judge certain Israeli leaders. Several countries have already referred the case to the Court.

Moreover, this order is only precautionary until the Court has ruled on the merits of the case. However, we must not dream: the Court may shy away and declare itself incompetent. In that case, there will never be a ruling on the merits of the case, and the protective measures will lapse.

This is the most likely outcome. Yet the Court itself has already dismissed the argument that South Africa's previous approaches to Israel would not have given it time to respond. It could still nitpick over "genocidal intent". In the event of the complaint being deemed inadmissible. The massacre could resume.

We must not delude ourselves about the International Court of Justice. It represents a major step towards international law, but is still a long way off.

Thierry Meyssan
Translation
Roger Lagassé
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Israel Cannot Hide From the UN Court
January 31, 2024
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U.S. military force is useless or worse in sustaining regimes that lack broad international support and legitimacy,  writes Jeffrey Sachs.


Sun rising behind Long Island City and the sculpture, ""Good Defeats Evil," by Zurab Tsereteli in the north garden of the U.N. headquarters in New York, 2020. (UN Photo/Manuel Elías)

By Jeffrey D. Sachs
Common Dreams

It is easy to be cynical about the international rule of law. No sooner had the International Court of Justice (ICJ) found that Israel is plausibly committing genocide against the Palestinian people than the U.S. State Department declared,  "We continue to believe that allegations of genocide are unfounded and note the court did not make a finding about genocide or call for a ceasefire in its ruling..."

Israeli leaders declared the case to be "outrageous" and "anti-Semitic."

Yet the risks for Israel of the ICJ ruling, and its follow-up in the next year or two, are profound. If Israel spurns the Genocide Convention, it imperils its place within the community of nations.

True, the ICJ provisional ruling by itself will not end Israel's war in Gaza or perhaps the mass killing of the Palestinian people, already at 26,000 and rising, with 70 percent women and children.

The ruling by itself will not end U.S. complicity in Israel's slaughter of Palestinians. Israel could not fight the war in Gaza one more day without the U.S. providing the munitions and other military support.

Yet the ruling has started the clock on Israel's future. If Israel continues to act with impunity and finds itself declared as genocidaire in the ICJ's final ruling, Israel will become a pariah state. Young Americans in particular will pull the plug on U.S. backing for Israel. Israel will stand utterly alone, condemned by the world.

Most of the 193 governments in the United Nations already disdain Israel's behavior. Most see a country that has occupied the neighboring territories of Palestine for 57 years (since the 1967 war), that has scorned and failed to act on dozens of votes by the U.N. Security Council and the U.N. General Assembly, and illegally and blatantly settled more than 700,000 Israelis in the occupied territories.

Most U.N. member states hear clearly the expressions of visceral hatred by many Israeli leaders toward the people of Palestine. For example, the statement by Israeli President Isaac Herzog blaming all of the people of Gaza, as cited by the ICJ; and they understand clearly the intention of today's Israeli government to occupy Palestine and rule over the 7 million Palestinian Muslims and Christians living in Israel and Palestine today.

Apartheid Rule


Some of South Africa's legal time on Jan. 26 for the ICJ order on an  indication of provisional measures in Pretoria's genocide case against Israel. (ICJ)

South Africa brought the ICJ case against Israel in part because it knows murderous apartheid rule when it sees it, and it sees apartheid rule in Israel's ongoing domination over the Palestinian people.

Israel has so far not been deterred by global opinion because of its nuclear weapons, its messianic zeal and most importantly, the military, financial, and public backing of the United States, including its votes in the U.N. Security Council and General Assembly.

Moreover, the U.S. and Israel have acted on the belief that the offer of U.S. money and weapons systems to the Arab nations would induce them to turn their backs on Palestinian people.

Israel and the U.S. act with supreme arrogance, believing that military might makes right and that money talks.

Yes, Israel also acts out of fear of the Palestinians, but that is the overbearing and grossly unjustified fear of the underdog, the conquered, and the displaced. By recognizing and making peace with an independent state of Palestine, Israel would remove the hate and humiliation that fuels support for Hamas, and thereby diminish the threats that lead to Israel's own fears.

Israelis should understand that the U.S. cannot — and will not — save Israel in the long run. It will not do so any more than America has "saved" South Vietnam; Iran after the U.S.-U.K. coup in 1953; Afghanistan after 2001; Iraq after the U.S. overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003; Syria after the U.S. attempted overthrow of Bashar al-Assad in 2011; Libya after the NATO overthrow of Moammar Qaddafi in 2011; or Ukraine since the U.S.-led coup in 2014.

US Debt, Ukraine & Military Adventures


Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky meeting with U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin in Kiev on Nov. 20, 2023. (President of Ukraine, Flickr, Public domain)

American military force is useless or worse in sustaining regimes that lack broad international support and legitimacy. America tires of each misguided military adventure and moves on, and will eventually do so vis-à-vis Israel if Israel becomes a pariah and outlaw state.

Nor will U.S. money and weapons systems carry the day with the Arab neighbors.

The U.S. is at the end of its financial largesse. The U.S. public debt is already 122.9 percent of GDP and rising rapidly. There is no consensus in Washington, D.C. on how to stabilize the U.S. budget, but one point is clear: large support for foreign countries will not be part of the bargain.

The cutoff of U.S. financing for Ukraine, despite the intense lobbying by the politically powerful military-industrial complex, is a vivid case in point. Even access to advanced U.S. weapons systems will not persuade Arab nations to abandon the cause of a Palestinian state.

In any event, Russian, Iranian, North Korean, Chinese, and other advanced weapons systems will be on highly competitive offer in future years, and with better financing terms.

At the moment, the Israeli public ardently backs Israel's brutality and slaughter in Gaza. The public is gripped by a combination of overwhelming fear, religious zealotry and state propaganda.

Israelis widely believe that the Arab nations are implacably out to destroy Israel. They do not travel in the Arab countries and do not know or understand the attitudes and policies of those neighboring societies. They do not attend to the statements of Arab and Islamic leaders calling for peace based on the two-state solution because Israeli mainstream media, like U.S. mainstream media, is in the grips of relentless state propaganda, brain-deadening patriotism and relentless war-mongering.

Israeli society is immeasurably traumatized by the Nazi Holocaust, which remains the central fact of modernity and memory of every Jewish family of European roots in any part of the world.

An eventual finding by the world's highest court that Israel itself has now become a perpetrator of genocide will therefore shake Israeli society to the roots and will rupture Israel's social contract with world Jewry. At that very painful and very dire stage, Israeli public opinion may begin to reconsider its current assumptions.

Yes, despite the ICJ ruling Israel's killing goes on, but under greatly heightened legal and political scrutiny. Every Israeli murder in cold blood, every bombing of a hospital, every destruction of a Palestinian school or university, every Israeli denial of food and water for Gazans, will be meticulously recorded by South Africa's superb legal team, and by highly respected legal institutes around the world, including the Center for Constitutional Rights and Law for Palestine. All will be duly conveyed to the ICJ.

Palestine will survive the current horrific ordeal, deeply wounded but with strong worldwide backing.

Israel's future, by contrast, hangs in the balance, as it could soon find itself banished by the community of nations as a stark violator of international law.

Israel urgently requires leaders who embrace international law over military force, humility over arrogance, and peacemaking over brutality. And Israel — no less than the United States — must come to understand the self-destructive futility of deploying military force to deny justice and political rights for the Palestinian people.

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 U.N. Sustainable Development Solutions Network and a commissioner of the UN Broadband Commission for Development.

This article is from Common Dreams.

Views expressed in this article and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

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For Western Media, Only Israeli Lives Matter
February 1, 2024
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Across the Anglo-American mainstream media the killing of Palestinians is seen as normal. It's only Israeli lives that matter, writes Des Freedman.


Israeli air strike destruction in the Gaza Strip, Oct. 17, 2023. (Fars Media Corporation, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0)

By Des Freedman
Declassified UK

Twenty-four Israeli soldiers were killed in two separate incidents in Gaza on Jan. 22. Mainstream media outlets around the world reacted in unison: this was the "deadliest day" for Israel since Oct. 7.

This exact phrase was used in headlines on Jan. 23 carried by news agencies such as Reuters and AFP, and major broadcasters including the BBC, CBS, NBC, CNN, ABC and ITV News.

The exact same phrase was also used by leading news titles including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, The Daily Telegraph, The Sun, The Jerusalem Post, The Guardian, London's Evening Standard, Financial Times, The Independent and Yahoo News.

On the same day, Israeli forces killed almost 200 Palestinians in Gaza including at least 65 people in Khan Younis alone.

These deaths received no headlines in the above outlets. Where they were reported, they were listed as part of the regular daily round-up of events in an unfolding genocide that has now seen more than 26,000 people killed in Gaza.

How is it possible that the world's media could embrace exactly the same phrase in relation to Israeli victims but largely ignore the identities of the much higher number of Palestinians killed?

Why would Jan. 22 be described as "deadly" for one group of people but not for another?

Unequal Value

You might expect that editors took the "deadliest day" phrase from press statements from the Israeli government or military.

Yet Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesperson Daniel Hagari did not use this phrase in his statement and neither did the IDF Chief of the General Staff Herzi Halevi, who instead simply called it a "difficult day."

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanhayu also described it as "one of the most difficult days" while Israel's President Isaac Herzog spoke of "an unbearably difficult morning." He used the same language as both Knesset Speaker Amir Ohana and Minister Benny Gantz, both of whom referred to a "painful morning."

Of course, it is possible the phrase was used in private and informal briefings to the press on the morning of Jan. 23. It is, however, equally conceivable that this was a trope that came "naturally" from a deep-rooted idea in the western media that the lives of Israelis and Palestinians are not of equal value.

And, therefore, that measuring the "deadliness" of a particular day should only be done for Israelis (where every life matters) and not for Palestinians (whose individual lives clearly appear to count for less).

'Deadliest Day'

Indeed, a search of the Nexis database of U.K. national and local news (including BBC broadcast bulletins) reveals that there were 856 uses of the phrase "deadliest day" from Oct. 7, 2023 until Jan. 25, none of which directly referred to evidence of Palestinian deaths in Gaza.

The only exception to this were some BBC bulletins on Oct. 25 which mentioned "Palestinians reporting the deadliest day in Gaza" (emphasis added).

Otherwise, there was not a single reference during this period across the British media to "the deadliest day for Palestinians" or "for the people of Gaza."

The other approximately 850 references directly related only to Israeli casualties. Some 28 percent of them focused on the killing of IDF soldiers on Jan. 22.

The vast majority referred to the events of Oct. 7, described either as "the deadliest day for Jews" or "the deadliest day for the Jewish people" which accounted for some 25 percent of all references.

Many of these stories were focused on the words of U.S. President Joe Biden who, in a much publicised speech to Jewish leaders at the White House, described the Hamas attack on Oct. 7 as the "deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust."

Biden's words alone make up 20 percent of all references to the "deadliest day" trope.

Perhaps Biden's words were on the minds of editors across the world as they listened to Israeli spokespeople on the morning of Jan. 23 and that the deaths of 24 IDF soldiers merited such a phrase when talking about Israeli lives.

Framing the War


Biden addresses a group of Jewish Community leaders about his support for Israel on Oct. 11, 2023. (White House, Adam Schultz)

But why has the phrase not been used in relation to Palestinians and, indeed, why is there so little preoccupation with days when particularly large numbers of Gazans are killed?

Precisely because the war is not framed in a way which recognises the equal worth of all those affected — in other words, a situation where every instance of significant Palestinian casualties would deserve a headline — it's hard to be certain of which have been the very deadliest days for the residents of Gaza.

However, it's clear that the period immediately after the temporary ceasefire in the last week of November saw particularly intense airstrikes and there were, according to Al Jazeera, at least 700 Palestinians killed on Dec. 2 alone.

Yet there was no mention in the U.K. media about this being the "deadliest day" for Palestinians. Instead, The Guardian simply ran with a headline of "'Israel says its ground forces are operating across 'all of Gaza'" while The Sunday Times wrote: "Fears for hostages as Gazans say bombardment is worse than ever."

According to The Mail Online, "Israel says it is expanding its ground operations against Hamas' strongholds across the whole of the Gaza Strip as IDF continues to bomb territory after terrorists broke fragile truce."

The BBC's TV news bulletins on Dec. 3 carried distressing footage of casualties but also featured a quote from an adviser to Netanyahu saying that "Israel was making the 'maximum effort' to avoid killing civilians" without carrying an immediate rebuttal of this outrageous claim.

In other words, despite the fact that 30 times more Palestinians were killed on Dec. 2 than when the 24 IDF soldiers were killed on Jan. 22, there was no recognition of the "deadliness" of that day.

Instead, the framing was all about the strategic plans of the Israeli military rather than the mass slaughter of Palestinians.

'Intensive Strike'

On Dec. 26 a further 241 people were killed by Israeli bombs. Britain's "newspaper of record," The Times, responded with the headline: "Israel-Gaza war: Palestinians hit by 'most savage bombing'" with a sub heading: "Israel launches most intensive strike since Hamas attack on October 7."

You could be forgiven for thinking that there was nothing deadly about this episode because, after all, Palestinians were only being "struck" as opposed to brutally killed.

But this was hardly an exceptional day given that Oxfam reported earlier this year that Israel's military was killing Palestinians at an average rate of 250 people a day, a figure it said exceeded the daily death toll of any other major conflict of recent years.

There is clearly a brutal politics to counting the dead. The New York Times ran an article on Jan. 22 headlined, "The Decline of Deaths in Gaza" arguing that average daily deaths across a 30-day period have now fallen below 150.


For the NYT, it is "plausible that a lower percentage of deaths are among civilians now that Israel's attacks have become more targeted and the [average] daily toll has declined."

Not only, however, is there little evidence that the IDF is in any way opposed to killing civilians but the idea that casualties are declining at a time when we are soon likely to see a total of 30,000 Palestinian deaths is profoundly shocking.

Any slowdown in the rate of killing is hardly a consolation to the millions who still live in fear of IDF raids and rockets.

Media Consensus

The media consensus that only Israelis are the victims of the "deadliest days" in the region and not Palestinians, despite the latter accounting for 95 percent of deaths since Oct. 7, is one of the many illustrations of the unequal and profoundly distorted coverage of this war.

Until the South African government submitted its partially successful claim to the International Court of Justice, news organisations were unwilling even to investigate the genocidal language of Israeli political and military leaders.

The media also routinely uses dehumanising and differential language where Israelis are "massacred" while Palestinians simply "die." This illustrates the awful role of the mainstream media in paving the way for the ethnic cleansing we are currently seeing.

The real reason you don't see or hear the media talk about a "deadly day" for Palestinians is that every day is deadly when you live in Gaza.

Des Freedman is a professor of media and communications at Goldsmiths, University of London and a founding member of the Media Reform Coalition.

This article is from Declassified UK.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

[almarh0m]

Imperiled Gazans Do Have Somewhere to Go
February 16, 2024
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The place where they can go, writes Sam Husseini, is back to the homes in what is now Israel, from which they were forced out in 1948.


Palestinian key, symbolizing the right of return, at a Nakba Day demonstration in Berlin, May 2015. (Montecruz Foto, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0

By Sam Husseini
Substack

Many professing solidarity with Palestinians — including alleged legal experts — being slaughtered in Gaza have said they have "nowhere to go."

It's not true.

They do.

Somewhere they actually should go.

Their homes in what is now Israel.

The majority of families of Palestinians in Gaza were forced there by Israel in 1948.

See this great thread by Hanine Hassan:

"Who told you that the 1.5 million displaced Palestinians sheltering in Rafah have nowhere left to go? My family, now in Rafah, has a home in Jaffa, from which we were expelled by a fascist German family. The majority of our people in Gaza have homes to go to, all over Palestine."


As Professor John Quigley has noted: "

"They are entitled to repatriation under international law, including the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination which Israel has signed and ratified." (See his writing on this subject here and here.)

And of course there's U.N. Resolution 194 of Dec. 11, 1948 which

"Resolves that the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return..."

The extremely pro-Israel U.S. president, Harry Truman, would state the following year that if

"Israel continues to reject the basic principles set forth" in that U.N. resolution, the U.S. government "will regretfully be forced to the conclusion that a revision of its attitude toward Israel has become unavoidable."

U.N. mediator Count Folke Bernadotte would report on Sept. 18, 1948:

"It would be an offence against the principles of elemental justice if these innocent victims of the conflict were denied the right to return to their homes, while Jewish immigrants flow into Palestine, and, indeed, at least offer the threat of permanent replacement of the Arab refugees, who have been rooted in the land for centuries."

Actually, Bernadotte wouldn't report that, because the Stern Gang shot him six times the day before his report was issued. They shot his French assistant no fewer than 17 times. No one was ever brought to justice for killing the mediator.


Folke Bernadotte, foreground, in 1948. (Slowking4, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)

The prospect of Palestinians going back to their homes continues to bring out the most murderous impulses in Israeli officials. AntiWar.com reports:

"Israeli Minister of National Security Itamar Ben Gvir said on Sunday that Israeli forces should shoot Palestinian women and children in Gaza if they get too close to the Israeli border. ... 'We cannot have women and children getting close to the border... anyone who gets near must get a bullet [in his head],' Ben-Gvir said during an argument with Israeli Defense Forces Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi about the IDF's open fire policies, according to The Jerusalem Post.

"After his comments leaked to the press, Ben Gvir doubled down. In a post on X, the Israeli minister said he 'does not stutter and does not intend to apologize. All those who endanger our citizens by getting near the border must be shot. This is what they do in any normal state.'"

Indeed, in 2018 the "Great March of Return" began, as Palestinians in Gaza tried to simply walk back to their homes.

On Aug. 31, 2023, The Palestine Chronicle reported: "Gaza to Resume Great March of Return Protests."


Palestinian Key symbol over the entrance to the Aida refugee camp, near Bethlehem, 2018. (Jj M ?tp, Wikimedia Commons, CCO)

Maureen Clare Murphy at The Electronic Intifada noted in September:

"Protests along the Gaza-Israel boundary resumed in August. Massive demonstrations dubbed the Great March of Return were held on a regular basis for nearly two years beginning in early 2018.

The protests were aimed at ending the Israeli siege on Gaza and allowing Palestinian refugees to exercise their right of return as enshrined in international law. Some two-thirds of Gaza's population of more than two million people are refugees from lands just beyond the boundary fence.

More than 215 Palestinian civilians, including more than 40 children, were killed during those demonstrations, and thousands more wounded by live fire during those protests between March 2018 and December 2019.

A UN commission of inquiry found that Israel's use of lethal force against protesters warrants criminal investigation and prosecution and may amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Excessive use of force against Great March of Return protests is expected to be a major focus of the International Criminal Court's Palestine investigation, should it move forward."

The recently slain Palestinian writer Refaat Alareer noted on Oct. 8, 2023:

"The very Israeli snipers that gunned down hundreds of Palestinian marchers in the Great Return March in 2018/19 were neutralised by Palestinian freedom fighters."

In a recent piece in The New York Review of Books — "Gaza: Two Rights of Return — Most Palestinians in Gaza are now displaced at least twice over. They have a right to choose where to return" — Sari Bashi from Human Rights Watch writes as a Jewish woman married to a Palestinian man whose family was forced from their homes in 1948 and again during the current assault:

"I'll be relieved if my in-laws are merely allowed to return to northern Gaza and receive support to rebuild a house there."

Israel is great at that. Committing so many crimes such that some people are relieved that the most recent may be alleviated. In fact, such a posture may well facilitate a festering of chronic injustices — and an incentive for Israel to continue its criminality.

(See also this piece which contains my own family's story of the Nakba in my recent interview with Kim Iversen.)

Sam Husseini is an independent journalist based near D.C. He is on Twitter: @samhusseini.

This article is from the author's Substack.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

 Post Views: 1,203

[almarh0m]

BBC Hamas 'Exposé' Obscured Israel's Genocide
February 23, 2024
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With tens of thousands of Palestinians slaughtered, Panorama chose to hand the microphone over to the very military doing the killing, writes Jonathan Cook.


BBC broadcasting house in London. (Edwardx, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)

By Jonathan Cook
Jonathan-Cook.net

Israel was put on trial for committing genocide in Gaza last month by the judges of the International Court of Justice.

So far Western governments have not only done nothing to intervene but are actively assisting in that slaughter. They have supplied arms and turned a blind eye to Israel's denial of humanitarian aid.

The people of Gaza are slowly being starved to death.

But it was at this moment, as the world watches in horror, that the BBC's chief news investigation programme, Panorama, chose not to scrutinise that massacre of tens of thousands of Palestinians but to hand the microphone over to the very military doing the killing.

This week it aired a programme titled "Hamas's Secret Financial Empire" headed by reporter John Ware.

It leant heavily on Israel's military spokesman, on documents that had almost certainly been supplied by Israeli military intelligence, on video footage from the Israeli military and an Israeli survivor of the Hamas attack of Oct. 7.

Ware and Panorama have worked together before, most notably on a special hour-long edition that doubtless equally delighted Israel.

Broadcast shortly before the 2019 general election, the programme served as little more than a hatchet job on Jeremy Corbyn, claiming that the then Labour leader had allowed anti-Semitism to run rampant in his party.

Serial failures in the programme were exposed, including by me at the time.

Quotes and interviews had been edited misleadingly, including one that implied an anti-Semitic incident had happened inside the Labour Party when it had not.

Basic fact-checking had not been carried out, which led to the complete misrepresentation of a key incident the programme wrongly claimed as anti-Semitic.


Jeremy Corbyn, the former U.K. Labour leader, third from left at front of the Ceasefire Now march in London, Nov. 11, 2023. (Steve Eason, Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0)

The programme concealed the identities of those claiming to have suffered anti-Semitism in Labour, when most were in fact members of a highly partisan, pro-Israel group openly committed to ousting Corbyn as leader for his pro-Palestinian views. One had trained with the Israeli army.

Another unnamed, tearful interviewee, Ella Rose, had previously worked for the Israeli embassy, though the audience was not told. The programme also did not refer to the fact that she had admitted to being a confidante of an Israeli undercover agent, Shai Masot, who was later exposed trying to bring down a British government minister for his critical views of Israel — views far less critical than Corbyn's.

Preposterous Premise

One might have assumed that, given this disastrous outing for Panorama by Ware and his producers, they would have been considered by the BBC as a very unwise pick indeed to follow up with an investigation into another issue so close to Israel's heart. But such an assumption would be wrong.

Much as the Corbyn "investigation" presented a distorted picture of what was taking place in Labour, the latest Panorama "investigation" completely obscured the reality of what is taking place in Gaza.

Not least, the audience would have been barely aware that Israel is currently under investigation by the World Court after its panel of 17 judges accepted that Israel is plausibly committing genocide in Gaza.


The ICJ in The Hague during South Africa's genocide case against Israel, Jan. 26. (ICJ)

The Panorama narrative, following the BBC's usual script, suggested instead that this was simply another round of fighting in a long-standing "conflict" in which, the programme limply conceded, both sides are suffering.

The only non-official interviewed was an Israeli survivor of Hamas' Oct. 7 attack, a young woman present at the Nova festival. She felt betrayed that "people only look at the side of Hamas. We are invisible to them."

Bizarrely, the BBC team took this patently preposterous view as the programme's central premise. It was, said Ware, Hamas's nefarious goal to "project itself as a resistance movement and Israel as a terrorist state".

The BBC seemed to have forgotten that it was also the World Court, not just Hamas, seriously considering the idea that the Israeli military is flagrantly acting outside the laws of war. If, in the eyes of the BBC, a campaign of genocide does not constitute state terrorism — or worse — one has to wonder what does.

Former Foreign Office official Sir John Jenkins was given centre stage by Panorama to claim that Hamas, not the prolonged slaughter of children in Gaza, was fomenting the "delegitimisation of Israel".

All of this served as the prelude to the programme's efforts to delegitimise Hamas and any of its activities in creating a network of tunnels to resist Israel's occupation and siege at a time when Western capitals are more actively than ever assisting Israel in destroying Gaza.

If Israel posed no real threat to the people of Gaza, as the programme implied throughout, then Hamas apparently did not need to fortify the enclave to defend it from an Israeli attack. Its money could have been better used for the benefit of ordinary Palestinians.

Elephant in Room


Israeli ground attack in the Gaza Strip on Nov. 1, 2023. (IDF Spokesperson's Unit, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)

The elephant in the room was genocide. Ware and the BBC had to keep treating Israel's slaughter of at least 30,000 Palestinians over the past four months as an aberration – a reaction to the unprecedented events of Oct. 7 – rather than as an intensification of Israel's well-documented abuse of the Palestinian people spanning over decades.

The reference to Hamas' "secret" financial empire was meant to sound sinister. But, as the programme-makers struggled to hide, there is nothing secret about Hamas' funding.

After all, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu personally approved the flow of money to Hamas, wishing to keep the group just strong enough to ensure it could prevent the more compliant Palestinian Authority (PA), based in the West Bank, from re-establishing itself in Gaza.

Netanyahu's goal — one he never concealed — was to keep the two rival Palestinian groups permanently feuding, the two territories split, and thereby undermine the case for any kind of Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank.

Ware informed us that Hamas' "financial empire" derived from various funding sources: directly from Iran and Qatar, but also from humanitarian aid provided by international donors. The programme concluded that these donors were effectively "subsidising Hamas' war machine" by easing the economic burden on Hamas in providing — in so far as was possible given Israel's siege — essentials such as food, water and power to Gaza's civilians.

Predictably, Ware's argument echoed one of the main claims made by Israel in its current campaign to intensify the genocide in Gaza by destroying the United Nations' refugee body, UNRWA. The relief agency is the last lifeline to a population of 2.3 million people brought to the point of starvation by Israel's blockade of humanitarian aid.


Israeli officials have consistently implied that the Palestinian population of Gaza may justifiably be starved to death as the price to be paid to avoid any risk that some of that aid ends up in the hands of Hamas fighters. Such a denial of assistance is not only patently immoral but constitutes a war crime.

If journalists are ever brought to The Hague accused of complicity in the current genocide, there should surely be a place reserved in the dock for Ware and his BBC team for breathing credibility into this monstrous argument.

Context Stripped Out

Panorama's central narrative was that Hamas had used parts of its revenues to build a network of resistance fortifications such as tunnels — money that, as Ware and his interviewees kept stressing, could have been spent on building schools and homes to aid the people of Gaza.

Ware omitted to mention, of course, that, more often than not, schools and homes actually needed rebuilding, not building, because Israel blew them up every few years with its bombs.


Palestinians collect their belongings from under the rubble of a residential tower, which witnesses said was destroyed by an Israeli air strike in Gaza City on Aug. 24, 2014. (UN Photo/Shareef Sarhan)

Again, all too predictably, the programme stripped out obvious context.

Hamas chose to build these fortifications, such as its extensive network of tunnels, because Israel is an offensive, occupying power that enjoys absolute control over Gaza's borders, as well as its airspace and sea. Israel can bomb and invade Gaza any time it chooses. It can drag people off to "arrest" them — or take them hostage, as we would call it were the roles reversed.

Not only can it do those things, it did and does them regularly. And with complete impunity.

Pretending that Hamas had no reason to build a tunnel network, as Panorama does, is to rewrite history — to excise Israel's decades of crimes against the Palestinians and their legitimate desire to struggle against that oppression.

It is to unthinkingly regurgitate Israel's claim that these are simply "terror tunnels" rather than a way for Hamas to survive as a resistance organisation, as it is fully entitled to do under international law.

Hamas made it a priority to build a tunnel network to resist a violent, occupying army. Given limited resources and room to manoeuvre — after all, Gaza is a tiny territory and one of the most overcrowded places on the planet — Hamas had little choice but to move underground to avoid Israel's sophisticated surveillance technology where it could build an arsenal of largely improvised, homegrown weapons.

Its historic popularity among ordinary Palestinians — at least compared to the supine, endlessly complicit PA in the West Bank — derives precisely from its refusal to submit to Israeli control. Panorama forgot to mention this too.

By contrast, and confounding Panorama's thesis, the PA's exclusive reliance on international diplomacy has won no tangible concessions from Israel — unless winning a reprieve from genocide, at least until this point, is considered such a concession.

Also inconveniently for Panorama, the PA's standing with the Palestinian public continues to be dismal.

Proof of 'Wickedness'


Hamas election campaign event in the Palestinian West Bank city of Ramallah in 2007. (Hoheit, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0)

Bizarrely, Ware was equally troubled by the fact that Hamas raised import taxes on the limited goods that Israel did allow into Gaza.

That is all the stranger given that the programme's implicit — and entirely bogus — assumption is that Gaza is not under a belligerent Israeli occupation. Hamas, it therefore suggested, should have behaved more like a normal country.

But raising taxes on the import of goods is precisely what normal countries do. Why would Ware expect Hamas to behave differently?

And why would it be strange or sinister for it to use some of those revenues to build Gaza's defences, as best it could, against an aggressive occupier?

Does Britain not also spend the money it raises from taxes to buy weapons and "subsidise its war machine?" And it does so, even though the U.K. is not under belligerent occupation and is unlikely to be invaded any time soon.

In dramatic fashion, Ware declared ominously: "We have obtained documents that Israeli intelligence say are from inside Hamas and shine a light on how it makes some of its millions."

It is hard not to conclude that those words mean Panorama was fed those documents by the Israeli intelligence services. Nonetheless, with utter credulity, the programme treated the papers as though they were infallible proof of Hamas' wickedness.

What they actually showed, assuming they are real, is that Hamas had gained a modest income stream from investments in Middle Eastern companies and ventures. Should Hamas not make investments to raise income, as countries and funds do around the world? And if not, why?

Moving money out of Gaza and investing it overseas seems eminently sensible given that Israel has so regularly laid waste to the enclave — and is doing so once again and on an unprecedented scale.

In similar credulous fashion, Ware accepted unquestioningly the claim that Hamas' leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, was known to "hate Jews." On what basis? Because a former Israeli security officer who proudly admitted that years ago he interrogated Sinwar for "between 150 and 180 hours" said so. Interrogation of Palestinians by Israel typically includes lengthy periods of torture.

Misused Public Funds

All of this was depressingly familiar. The BBC and Panorama rarely dig into issues that might reflect badly on Israel and risk a backlash of criticism, including from the British government. That toothlessness when a genocide is unfolding in Gaza is especially egregious.

But the BBC is not just overlooking that horrifying crime but using its resources — funds provided by British taxpayers — to actively obscure Israel's campaign of genocide and implicitly rationalise it as warranted.

A programme whose thesis is that Hamas misused public funds for nefarious purposes is, paradoxically, doing the very thing it condemns. It has misused British taxes to make an entirely bogus case that provides cover for the slaughter and maiming of many tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians.

Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist. He was based in Nazareth, Israel, for 20 years. He returned to the U.K. in 2021.He is the author of three books on the Israel-Palestine conflict: Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish State (2006), Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (2008) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair (2008).

If you appreciate his articles, please consider offering your financial support.

This article is from the author's blog, Jonathan Cook.net 

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

[almarh0m]

The Real Gaza Death Toll
March 7, 2024
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Ralph Nader says it matters greatly whether the aggregate toll so far, and counting, is three, four, five, six times more than the Gaza Health Ministry's undercount.


Vigil on Feb. 27 outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington for Aaron Bushnell, an active-duty member of the U.S. Air Force who self-immolated to protest the Israeli genocide in Gaza. (Diane Krauthamer, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

By Ralph Nader
Common Dreams

Since the Hamas raid penetrated the multi-tiered Israeli border security on Oct. 7, 2023, (an unexplained collapse of Israel's defensive capabilities), 2.3 million utterly defenseless Palestinians in the tiny crowded Gaza enclave have been on the receiving end of over 65,000 bombs and missiles plus non-stop tank shelling and snipers.

The extreme right-wing Netanyahu regime has enforced its declared siege of, in its genocidal words, "no food, no water, no electricity, no fuel, no medicine."

The relentless bombing has destroyed apartment buildings, marketplaces, refugee camps, hospitals, clinics, ambulances, bakeries, schools, mosques, churches, roads, electricity networks, critical water mains — just about everything.

The U.S.-equipped Israeli war machine has even uprooted agricultural fields, including thousands of olive trees on one farm; bulldozed many cemeteries; and bombed civilians fleeing on Israeli orders, while obstructing the few trucks carrying humanitarian aid from Egypt.


With virtually no healthcare left, no medications, and infectious diseases spreading especially among infants, children, the infirm, and the elderly, can anybody believe that the fatalities have just gone over 30,000?

With 5,000 babies born every month into the rubble, their mothers wounded and without food, healthcare, medicine, and clean water for any of their children, severe skepticism about the Hamas' Health Ministry's official count is warranted.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas, which he helped over the years, have a common interest in lowballing the death and injury toll. But for different reasons. Hamas keeps the figures low to reduce being accused by its own people of not protecting them, and not building shelters. Hamas grossly underestimated the savage war crimes by the vengeful, occupying Israeli military superpower fully and unconditionally backed by the U.S. military superpower.

The Health Ministry is intentionally conservative, citing that its death toll came from reports only of those named as deceased by hospitals and morgues. But as the weeks turned into months, blasted, disabled hospitals and morgues cannot keep up with the bodies, or cannot count those slain laying on roadsides in allies and beneath building debris. Yet the Health Ministry remains conservative and the "official" rising civilian fatality and injury count continues to be uncritically reported by both friend and foe of this devastating Israeli state terrorism.

Predictions of Human Catastrophe


Medic carries an injured Palestinian child into Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City following an Israeli airstrike on Oct. 11, 2023, (Atia Darwish, Palestinian News & Information Agency — Wafa — for APAimages, CC BY-SA 3.0)

It was especially astonishing to see the most progressive groups and writers routinely use the same figures from the Health Ministry in Hamas-run Gaza as did the governments and outside groups backing the one-sided war on Gaza. All this despite predictions of a human catastrophe in the Gaza Strip almost every day since Oct. 7, 2023, by arms of the United Nations, other besieged international relief agencies on the ground, eyewitness accounts by medical personnel and many Israeli human rights groups and brave local journalists in that strip, the geographic size of Philadelphia. (Unguided Western and Israeli reporters and journalists are not allowed to enter Gaza by the Israeli government.) (See the open letter, titled "Stop the Humanitarian Catastrophe," to President Joe Biden on Dec. 13, 2023, by 16 Israeli human rights groups that also appeared as a paid notice in TheNew York Times.)


Then came the Dec. 29, 2023, opinion piece in The Guardian by the chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, Devi Sridhar. She predicted half a million deaths in 2024 if conditions continue unabated.

In recent days, the situation has become more dire. In the March 2, 2024, Washington Post, reporter Ishaan Tharoor writes:

"The bulk of Gaza's more than 2 million people face the prospect of famine — a state of affairs that constitutes the fastest decline in a population's nutrition status ever recorded, according to aid workers. Children are starving at the fastest rate the world has ever known. Aid groups have been pointing to Israel restricting the flow of assistance into the territory as a major driver of the crisis. Some prominent Israeli officials openly champion stymying these transfers of aid."


Tharoor quotes Jan Egeland, chief of the Norwegian Refugee Council: "We must be clear: civilians in Gaza are falling sick from hunger and thirst because of Israel's entry restrictions," and "Life-saving supplies are being intentionally blocked, and women and children are paying the price."

Martin Griffiths, the United Nations lead humanitarian officer, said "Life is draining out of Gaza at terrifying speed."

U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, according to the Post, warned of an "'unknown number of people' — believed to be in the tens of thousands — lying under the rubble of buildings brought down by Israeli strikes."

Volker Turk, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, said, "All people in Gaza are at imminent risk of famine. Almost all are drinking salty and contaminated water. Healthcare across the territory is barely functioning," and "Just imagine what this means for the wounded, and people suffering infectious-disease outbreaks... many are already believed to be starving."

UNICEF, the International Rescue Committee, the Palestinian Red Crescent, and Doctors Without Borders are all relating that the same catastrophic conditions are getting worse fast.

Yet, and get this, in this article, the Post still stuck with the "more than 30,000 people in Gaza have been killed since the ongoing war began."

Just like the entire mass media, many governments, even the independent media and critics of the war would have us accept that between 98 percent and 99 percent of Gaza's entire population has survived — albeit the sick, injured, and more Palestinians about to die. This is lethally improbable!

From accounts of people on the ground, videos and photographs of deadly episode after episode, plus the resultant mortalities from blocking or smashing the crucial necessities of life, a more likely estimate, in my appraisal, is that at least 200,000 Palestinians must have perished by now and the toll is accelerating by the hour.

Imagine Americans, if this powerful U.S.-made weaponry was fired on the besieged, homeless, trapped people of Philadelphia, do you think that only 30,000 of that city's 1.5 million people would have been killed?

Daily circumstantial evidence of the deliberate Israeli targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructures requires more reliable epidemiological estimates of casualties.

It matters greatly whether the aggregate toll so far, and counting, is three, four, five, six times more than the Health Ministry's undercount. It matters for elevating the urgency for a permanent cease-fire, and direct and massive humanitarian aid by the U.S. and other countries, bypassing the sadistic cruelty against innocent families of the Israeli siege. It matters for the columnists and editorial writers who have been self-censoring, with some, like the Post's Charles Lane, fictionally claiming that Israel's military doesn't "intentionally target civilians." It matters for accountability under international law.

Above all, it lets weak Secretary of State Antony Blinken and duplicitous President Biden be less servile when Netanyahu dismisses the low death toll by taunting them: What about Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

As a percentage of the total population being killed, Gaza can expose the Israeli ruling racist extremists to a stronger rebuttal for ending U.S. co-belligerent complicity in this never-to-be-forgotten slaughter of mostly children and women. (The terrifying PTSD on civilians, especially children, will continue for years.)

Respecting the more accurate casualty toll of Palestinian children, mothers, and fathers presses harder for permanent cease-fires and the process of recovery and reparations for the survivors of their holocaust.

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).

This article is from Common Dreams.

Views expressed in this article and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

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Scott Ritter: The Missiles of April
April 15, 2024
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The "Missiles of April" represent a sea-change moment in Middle Eastern geopolitics — the establishment of Iranian deterrence that impacts both Israel and the United States.


Iranian missiles passing over Al-Aqsa as IRGC hit Israel with multiple airstrikes on Sunday morning local time. (Unknown/Mehrnews.com/Wikimedia Commons)

By Scott Ritter
Substack



I've been writing about Iran for more than two decades. In 2005, I made a trip to Iran to ascertain the "ground truth" about that nation, a truth which I then incorporated into a book, Target Iran, laying out the U.S.-Israeli collaboration to craft a justification for a military attack on Iran designed to bring down its theocratic government.

I followed this book up with another, Dealbreaker, in 2018, which brought this U.S.-Israeli effort up to date.

Back in November 2006, in an address to Columbia University's School of International Relations, I underscored that the United States would never abandon my "good friend" Israel until, of course, we did. What could precipitate such an action, I asked?

I noted that Israel was a nation drunk of hubris and power, and unless the United States could find a way to remove the keys from the ignition of the bus Israel was navigating toward the abyss, we would not join Israel in its lemming-like suicidal journey.

The next year, in 2007, during an address to the American Jewish Committee, I pointed out that my criticism of Israel (which many in the audience took strong umbrage against) came from a place of concern for Israel's future.

I underscored the reality that I had spent the better part of a decade trying to protect Israel from Iraqi missiles, both during my service in Desert Storm, where I played a role in the counter-SCUD missile campaign, and as a United Nations weapons inspector, where I worked with Israeli intelligence to make sure Iraq's SCUD missiles were eliminated.

"The last thing I want to see," I told the crowd, "is a scenario where Iranian missiles were impacting on the soil of Israel. But unless Israel changes course, this is the inevitable outcome of a policy driven more by arrogance than common sense."

On Monday night, early Tuesday morning, April 13-14, my concerns were played out live before an international audience — Iranian missiles rained down on Israel, and there was nothing Israel could do to stop them.

As had been the case a little more than 33 years prior, when Iraqi SCUD missiles overcame U.S. and Israeli Patriot missile defenses to strike Israel dozens of times over the course of a month and a half, Iranian missiles, integrated into a plan of attack which was designed to overwhelm Israeli missile defense systems, struck designated targets inside Israel with impunity.

Despite having employed an extensive integrated anti-missile defense system comprised of the so-called "Iron Dome" system, U.S.-made Patriot missile batteries, and the Arrow and David's Sling missile interceptors, along with U.S., British, and Israeli aircraft, and U.S. and French shipborne anti-missile defenses, well over a dozen Iranian missiles struck heavily-protected Israeli airfields and air defense installations.

The Iranians hit at least two runways, taking them out of service, and at least five warehouse-type structures (this from satellite imagery taken after the attack.)

Iran gave Israel a five-hour advance warning to move high value items (F-35s). Moreover, Iran did not attack barracks, headquarters, or targets that would produce casualties.

The damage may have been minor, but the message is clear — Iran can hit any target it wants to, at any time.

Israel Had Hit Iranian Territory


Iranian consulate in Damascus after it was hit with an Israeli airstrike on April 1. (Unknown/Rajannews.com/Wikimedia.com)

The Iranian missile attack on Israel did not come out of the blue, so to speak, but rather was retaliation for an April 1 Israeli attack on the Iranian consulate building, in Damascus, Syria, that killed several senior Iranian military commanders.

While Israel has carried out attacks against Iranian personnel inside Syria in the past, the April 1 strike differed by not only killing very senior Iranian personnel, but by striking what was legally speaking sovereign Iranian territory — the Iranian consulate.

From an Iranian perspective, the attack on the consulate was a redline which, if not retaliated against, would erase any notion of deterrence, opening the door for even more brazen Israeli military action, up to and including direct attacks on Iran.

Weighing against retaliation, however, were a complex web of interwoven policy objectives which would probably be mooted by the kind of large-scale conflict between Israel and Iran that could be precipitated by any meaningful Iranian retaliatory strike on Israel.

First and foremost, Iran has been engaged in a strategic policy premised on a pivot away from Europe and the United States, and toward Russia, China, and the Eurasian landmass.

This shift has been driven by Iran's frustration over the U.S.-driven policy of economic sanctions, and the inability and/or unwillingness on the part of the collective West to find a path forward that would see these sanctions lifted.

The failure of the Iranian nuclear deal (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA) to produce the kind of economic opportunities that had been promised at its signing has been a major driver behind this Iranian eastward pivot.

In its stead, Iran has joined both the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and the BRICS forum and has directed its diplomatic energies into seeing Iran thoroughly and productively integrated into both groups.

A general war with Israel would play havoc on these efforts.

Secondly, but no less important in the overall geopolitical equation for Iran, is the ongoing conflict in Gaza. This is a game-changing event, where Israel is facing strategic defeat at the hands of Hamas and its regional allies, including the Iranian-led axis of resistance.

For the first time ever, the issue of Palestinian statehood has been taken up by a global audience.

This cause is further facilitated by the fact that the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu, formed from a political coalition which is vehemently opposed to any notion of Palestinian statehood, finds itself in danger of collapse as a direct result of the consequences accrued from the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023, and the subsequent failure of Israel to defeat Hamas militarily or politically.

Israel is likewise hampered by the actions of Hezbollah, which has held Israel in check along its northern border with Lebanon, and non-state actors such as the pro-Iranian Iraqi militias and the Houthi of Yemen which have attacked Israel directly and, in the case of the Houthi, indirectly, shutting down critical sea lines of communication which have the result of strangling the Israeli economy.

But it is Israel that has done the most damage to itself, carrying out a genocidal policy of retribution against the civilian population of Gaza. The Israeli actions in Gaza are the living manifestation of the very hubris and power-driven policies I warned about back in 2006-2007.

Then, I said that the U.S. would not be willing to be a passenger in a policy bus driven by Israel that would take us off the cliff of an unwinnable war with Iran.

Through its criminal behavior toward the Palestinian civilians in Gaza, Israel has lost the support of much of the world, putting the United States in a position where it will see its already-tarnished reputation irreparably damaged, at a time when the world is transitioning from a period of American-dominated singularity to a BRICS-driven multipolarity, and the U.S. needs to retain as much clout in the so-called "global south" as possible.

A Sea-Change Moment


Biden with Netanyahu in Tel Aviv on Oct. 18, 2023. (The White House/Wikimedia Commons)

The U.S. has tried — unsuccessfully — to take the keys out of the ignition of Netanyahu's suicide bus ride.

Faced with extreme reticence on the part of the Israeli government when it comes to altering its policy on Hamas and Gaza, the administration of President Joe Biden has begun to distance itself from the policies of Netanyahu and has put Israel on notice that there would be consequences for its refusal to alter its actions in Gaza to take U.S. concerns into account. 

Any Iranian retaliation against Israel would need to navigate these extremely complicated policy waters, enabling Iran to impose a viable deterrence posture designed to prevent future Israeli attacks while making sure that neither its policy objectives regarding a geopolitical pivot to the east, nor the elevation of the cause of Palestinian statehood on the global stage, were sidetracked.

The Iranian attack on Israel appears to have successfully maneuvered through these rocky policy shoals. It did so first and foremost by keeping the United States out of the fight. Yes, the United States participated in the defense of Israel, helping shoot down scores of Iranian drones and missiles.

This engagement was to the benefit of Iran, since it only reinforced the fact that there was no combination of missile defense capability that could, in the end, prevent Iranian missiles from hitting their designated targets.

The targets Iran struck — two air bases in the Negev desert from which aircraft used in the April 1 attack on the Iranian consulate had been launched, along with several Israeli air defense sites — were directly related to the points Iran was trying to make in establishing the scope and scale of its deterrence policy.


First, that the Iranian actions were justified under Article 51 of the U.N. Charter — Iran retaliated against those targets in Israel directly related to the Israeli attack on Iran, and second, that Israeli air defense sites were vulnerable to Iranian attack.

The combined impact of these two factors is that all of Israel was vulnerable to being struck by Iran at any time, and that there was nothing Israel or its allies could do to stop such an attack.

This message resonated not only in the halls of power in Tel Aviv, but also in Washington, DC, where U.S. policy makers were confronted with the uncomfortable truth that if the U.S. were to act in concert with Israel to either participate in or facilitate an Israeli retaliation, then U.S. military facilities throughout the Middle East would be subjected to Iranian attacks that the U.S. would be powerless to stop.

This is why the Iranians placed so much emphasis on keeping the U.S. out of the conflict, and why the Biden administration was so anxious to make sure that both Iran and Israel understood that the U.S. would not participate in any Israeli retaliatory strike against Iran.

The "Missiles of April" represent a sea-change moment in Middle Eastern geopolitics — the establishment of Iranian deterrence that impacts both Israel and the United States.

While emotions in Tel Aviv, especially among the more radical conservatives of the Israeli government, run high, and the threat of an Israeli retaliation against Iran cannot be completely discounted, the fact is the underlying policy objective of Netanyahu over the course of the past 30-plus years, namely to drag the U.S. into a war with Iran, has been put into checkmate by Iran.

Moreover, Iran has been able to accomplish this without either disrupting its strategic pivot to the east or undermining the cause of Palestinian statehood. "Operation True Promise," as Iran named its retaliatory attack on Israel, will go down in history as one of the most important military victories in the history of modern Iran, keeping in mind that war is but an extension of politics by other means.

The fact that Iran has established a credible deterrence posture without disrupting major policy goals and objectives is the very definition of victory.

Scott Ritter is a former U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD. His most recent book is Disarmament in the Time of Perestroika, published by Clarity Press.

This is from the author's Substack page.

[111111]

peace:

How can we see the Palestine- Israel conflict from a Qur'an alone perspective

a clear question is stated and the hypocrite only speak of the nonsense of good and evil, peace and love, love each other.

What the quran ordains in a situation like the current one:

4:75And what is it with you? You do not fight in the cause of Allah and for oppressed men, women, and children who cry out, "Our Lord! Deliver us from this land of oppressors! Appoint for us a saviour; appoint for us a helper—all by Your grace." 
4:76Believers fight for the cause of Allah, whereas disbelievers fight for the cause of the Devil. So fight against Satan's ˹evil˺ forces. Indeed, Satan's schemes are ever weak.

that if the palestinians were Muslim. but they are a people living on tradition rather than the word of Allah in quran and previous scriptures. they are more alike to the jews.

Mslim are the aouther layers of bark of the tree of Allah. Mumin are the core. the hypocrite are the dirt that adderes to the bark.

[almarh0m]

IDF Kills 18 Kids Hours After House Votes Billions to Israel
April 22, 2024
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The latest strikes on the southern Gaza city bring laws governing U.S. transfers of weaponry into the spotlight, reports Jake Johnson.


U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Israeli President Isaac Herzog in Tel Aviv on Jan. 9, 2024. (Amos Ben Gershom, Government Press Office of Israel, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)

By Jake Johnson
Common Dreams



Hours after the U.S. House approved legislation that would send billions of dollars in additional military aid to Israel, the country's forces killed nearly two dozen people in Rafah, the southern Gaza city where more than half of the enclave's population is sheltering.

Gaza health officials said Sunday that the weekend strikes on Rafah — a former "safe zone" that Israel has been threatening to invade for weeks — killed 22 people, including 18 children. The Associated Press (AP) reported that the first of the Israeli strikes "killed a man, his wife, and their 3-year-old child, according to the nearby Kuwaiti Hospital, which received the bodies."

AP added:

"The woman was pregnant and the doctors saved the baby, the hospital said. The second strike killed 17 children and two women from an extended family."

Israeli forces have killed more than 14,000 children in Gaza since October, but the Biden administration and American lawmakers have refused to back growing international calls to cut off the supply of weaponry and other military equipment even as U.S. voters express support for an arms embargo.

The measure the House approved on Saturday includes $26 billion in funding for Israel, much of which is military assistance. U.S. Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-IL), one of the 58 House lawmakers who voted against the legislation, wrote on social media late Sunday:

"Just a day after the House voted to send $14 billion in unconditional military funding to [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu's campaign of death and destruction, he bombed the safe zone of Rafah AGAIN, killing 22 Palestinians, of which 18 were CHILDREN! History books will write about today and the past seven months, and how our nation's leaders lacked the courage and moral clarity to stand up to a tyrant. Shameful."


The military aid package for Israel now heads to the U.S. Senate, which is set to consider the bill early this week. U.S. President Joe Biden, who has continued to greenlight arms sales to Israel amid clear evidence of war crimes, is expected to sign the measure if it reaches his desk.

 Arms Move Contrary to Law

U.S. law prohibits "arms transfers that risk facilitating or otherwise contributing to violations of human rights or international humanitarian law," according to a White House memo issued in February.

The U.S. State Department has said repeatedly that it has not found Israel to be in violation of international law, a position that runs directly counter to the findings of leading humanitarian organizations and United Nations experts.

The investigative outlet ProPublica reported last week that a "special State Department panel recommended months ago that Secretary of State Antony Blinken disqualify multiple Israeli military and police units from receiving U.S. aid after reviewing allegations that they committed serious human rights abuses" prior to the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack on southern Israel. ProPublica further noted:

"But Blinken has failed to act on the proposal in the face of growing international criticism of the Israeli military's conduct in Gaza, according to current and former State Department officials."

Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN), said in a statement on Sunday that senators "should reject sending additional weapons to Israel not only because our laws prohibit military aid to abusive regimes, but because it's extremely damaging to our national interests."

DAWN's advocacy director, Raed Jarrar, added that,

"At a time when Israel is bracing for International Criminal Court arrest warrants against its leaders, members of Congress should understand that approving more military aid could subject them to personal liability for aiding and abetting an ongoing genocide in Gaza. Rather than sending more weapons to Israel Congress should declare an immediate arms embargo on Israel."

Jake Johnson is a senior editor and staff writer for Common Dreams.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.