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

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Al-Aqsa Flood & the End of Partition
January 5, 2024
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Hamas' Oct. 7 operation laid waste to Israel's belief that Palestinians can be siphoned off into Bantustans while the colonizing state enjoys peace and expansion, writes Tareq Baconi.


25th anniversary of Hamas celebrated in Gaza on Dec. 8, 2012. (Fars Media Corporation, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0)

By Tareq Baconi
Al-Shabaka

Hamas' surprise offensive last Oct. 7 dealt the most lethal blow to the Israeli military and public since the establishment of the state in 1948.

In retaliation, Israel launched the most extensive military assault on Gaza in its history, destroying large swathes of the territory and killing more than 22,185 Palestinians and injuring at least 57,000 as of Jan. 2, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.

With green lights from the U.S. and much of Europe, Israel has carried out what scholars and experts have called a genocide campaign, seeking to rid itself of the Palestinians in Gaza under the guise of decimating Hamas.

The speed with which Israel mobilized and the scale of its assault underscore the Palestinian conviction that the settler colonial regime is executing long-held plans for mass expulsion. Meanwhile, Israeli officials have utilized a narrative campaign of Palestinian dehumanization to lay the groundwork for justification of the immense violence.

Israel claims to be both a Jewish and democratic state while refusing to declare its official borders and controlling a sovereign territory that has more Palestinians than Jews living within its boundaries.

To achieve this reality requires a sophisticated structure of demographic engineering — one premised on the legal stratification of Palestinians as well as the strict control of their movement and places of residence, confining them to geographic enclaves.

This system was born out of the initial wave of mass expulsion and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians that took place in 1948, in which more than 530 Palestinian villages were depopulated to make room for Jewish settlers.

This settler-colonial practice is not an event that has passed into history books. What Palestinians call the Nakba has been ongoing ever since, with Israel's daily colonization practices taking different forms in different areas under its control. It is what constitutes a central pillar of Israel's apartheid regime.

Gaza: Israel's Starkest Bantustan


Gaza, Oct. 17, 2023. (Fars Media Corporation/Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.)

Gaza has historically presented the most extreme manifestation of what Israel's Bantustan system for Palestinians looks like. With one of the highest population densities in the world, Gaza is composed predominantly of refugees expelled from the lands surrounding the strip during Israel's establishment in 1948.

Indeed, many of the fighters who broke into Israeli towns on Oct. 7 are likely descendants of refugees from the very lands they glided over or crawled into, stepping onto these grounds for the first time since their families' expulsion. 

Since 1948, Israel has expended every effort to sever the link between present-day anti-colonial resistance and Israel's historic and present system of apartheid.

While many assume that Gaza is under blockade because it is governed by Hamas, Israel in fact has experimented since 1948 with endless tactics to depoliticize the territory or pacify its population. These tactics included economic strangulation and blockades, decades before Hamas was even established, to no avail.

With Hamas' takeover in 2007, Israeli leaders were presented with an opportunity: Using the rhetoric of terrorism, Israel placed Gaza under a hermetic blockade and ignored the movement's political platform on which it had been democratically elected.

The blockade was initially intended to be a punitive tactic to force Hamas' capitulation, but it quickly morphed into a structure aimed at containing Hamas and severing the coastal enclave from the rest of Palestine.

With over 2 million Palestinians out of sight behind walls and under siege and blockade, the Israeli government and most of the Israeli public — let alone Western leaders — could wash their hands clean of the reality they had created.

Israel's blockade serves the regime's aim of containment, both of Palestinians and of Hamas. Over the course of the past 16 years, Israel has relied primarily on Hamas to govern Gaza's population while retaining external control of the enclave.


Hamas symbol on a wall in the Palestinian city of Tulkarem in the occupied West Bank, 2008. (Michael loadenthal, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Hamas and the Israeli regime fell into a volatile equilibrium, often erupting into episodes of immense violence in which thousands of Palestinian civilians were killed by the Israeli military. For Israel, this dynamic worked so well that a political strategy for Gaza was never required.

Like elsewhere across Palestine, Israel relied on managing the occupation rather than addressing its political drivers, maintaining itself as occupying overlord over the various Palestinian pockets governed by entities under its sovereign control.

The only goal that Israel pursued in the past decade and a half was to try to ensure relative calm for Israelis, particularly those residing in the areas surrounding Gaza. It did so by using overwhelming military force, even if such calm came at the expense of imprisoning a captive population of millions and maintaining them in near starvation-like conditions.

So thoroughly was Gaza erased from the Israeli psyche that protesters marching to protect so-called Israeli democracy in early 2023 effectively deluded themselves into believing that democracy and apartheid were sustainable bedfellows.

Collapse of Partitionist Framework

Thus, Hamas' offensive came as if out of nowhere for most of the Israeli public and supporters of Israel abroad. By breaking out of its prison, the Al-Qassam Brigades — Hamas' military wing — revealed the strategic poverty at the heart of the assumption that Palestinians would acquiesce indefinitely to their imprisonment and subjugation.

More importantly, the operation laid waste to the very viability of Israel's partitionist approach: the belief that Palestinians can be siphoned off into Bantustans while the colonizing state continues to enjoy peace and security —and even expands its diplomatic and economic relations in the wider region.

By shattering the notion that Gaza can be erased from the broader political equation, Hamas has left in tatters the illusion that ethnic partition in Palestine is either a sustainable or effective form of demographic engineering, let alone a moral or legal one.

Within hours of the Al-Aqsa Flood operation, the infrastructure that had been put in place to contain Hamas — and with it, to wish away the Palestinians of Gaza — was trampled before our collective and often disbelieving eyes.


Al Qassam militants rappelling during a training exercise in Gaza in January 2013. (Fars Media Corporation, Wikimedia commons, CC BY 4.0)

As Hamas fighters burst into Israeli-controlled land, the collision between the myth of Israel as a democratic state and its reality as a purveyor of violent apartheid was shocking, tragic, and ultimately irreversible.

As a result, Israelis and Palestinians were thrown into a post-partition paradigm, where both Israel's conviction in the sustainability of demographic engineering and the Bantustan infrastructure it has employed have been revealed to be temporary and ineffective.

The collapse of the partitionist framework has presented a paradox.

On the one hand, Palestinians and their allies have worked to mainstream the understanding that Israel is a settler colonial apartheid state. This grounding has served as the basis for efforts by some to push for decolonization and the pursuit of a polity rooted in freedom, justice, equality, and self-determination.

The political architecture of such a decolonized space is one that many Palestinians believe will be produced through their struggle for liberation, once the central tenants of apartheid — ethnic cleansing, the refusal to allow refugees to return, and partition — are dismantled.

On the other hand, in the absence of a political project that can champion this de-colonial struggle, the collapse of the partition framework on Oct. 7 accelerated Israel's commitment to ethnic cleansing.

It likewise reinforced the fascist and ethno-tribal belief that, in the absence of partition, only Jews can safely exist in the land of colonized Palestine, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. In other words, the collapse of partitionist possibilities may have laid the groundwork for another Nakba rather than a decolonial future.

Hamas' Political Calculus


Palestinians hammer on the seperation fence in protest in Bilin in the occupied West Bank in April 2010. (Edo Medicks, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

This paradox explains, in part, why there has been resentment voiced at Hamas' offensive, including from some Palestinians, who see in the attack the beginning of another crisis for their collective struggle.

The looming possibility of ethnic cleansing must not be underplayed, and the staggering death toll that civilians in Gaza are experiencing must give everyone pause to reflect on the enormous cost that Hamas' operation initiated, even when primary responsibility for this violence sits squarely with Israel's colonial regime.

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However, such a reading misrepresents Hamas' political calculus. Of course, there is truth in suggesting that this violence was unleashed following Hamas's attack. Yet the reality before the offensive was also lethal for Palestinians, even if to a lesser extent than what ensued after Oct. 7.

It was a violence that had become normalized and that, at its core, had the same aim to ultimately kill Palestinians en masse.

The violence we've witnessed since Oct. 7 is nothing more than the unleashing of a brutality that had always set the foundation for Israel's engagement with Palestinians generally, and with those in Gaza specifically.

This rupture was thus inevitable. Hamas' containment was effective, yet given the movement's commitment to Palestinian liberation, and its firm refusal to concede by recognizing the State of Israel, that containment was always likely to be temporary unless serious effort was expended to deal with the political drivers at the core of the Palestinian struggle for liberation.

With a growing population in Gaza and governance shortfalls that were becoming increasingly acute, the expectation that Hamas would not overturn that reality — especially as Israeli impunity expanded — was short-sighted.

What Hamas does bear responsibility for, and what Palestinians must hold them accountable for, is the extent of its planning — or lack thereof — for the day after the attack.

[Related: SCOTT RITTER: Israel's Massive Intelligence Failure]

With the knowledge that Hamas and others have gathered over the years, there would be no question that the movement's offensive would result in unleashed fury on Palestinians at the hands of the Israeli military. The movement should have been — and perhaps was — prepared for the violence that has subsequently unfolded in Gaza.

Determining whether its calculus paid off, despite this tragic loss of life, is something Palestinians will grapple with for years to come.

Western Hypocrisy & Culpability


U.S. President Joe Biden with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Tel Aviv on Oct. 18, 2023. (The White House, Public domain)

Rather than attempt to de-escalate Israel's assault on Gaza, the Biden administration has only poured fuel on the fire. In his first speech after the attack, the U.S. president described Hamas as "pure evil," comparing its offensive to those of ISIS; he also likened Oct. 7 to 9/11 and repeatedly referred to widely discredited claims of brutality to stir up orientalist and Islamophobic tropes in an effort to justify the ferocity of Israel's response.

It is important to note that efforts to link Palestinian resistance in all its forms — peaceful or armed — to terrorism long pre-date Hamas' attack.

During the Second Intifada, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's invocation of 9/11 found a receptive audience in the Bush administration, which was in the early stages of crafting its War on Terror doctrine. The ensuing months saw Israel unleash hugely destructive military invasions against refugee camps in the West Bank under the rubric of fighting terrorism.


Palestinians confronting Israeli forces on Oct. 20, 2000, at "Ayosh" Junction, near Ramallah in the occupied West Bank. (Nadav Ganot, IDF Spokesperson's Unit, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)

Meanwhile, mainstream Western media and policy pundits continue to lack nuanced and grounded analysis on the unfolding situation.

Instead, a consistent pattern of Palestinian dehumanization has been so thoroughly meted out that any effort to utilize these platforms to dismantle — or merely call into question — Israel's system of domination is met with perplexed reactions and uniform condemnation.

In this reading, Hamas acted irrationally, Palestinians in Gaza were disposable to the movement as human shields and Israel's colonial system as a whole was sustainable and calm prior to Oct. 7. These reactions, more than anything, point to Western hypocrisy and anti-Palestinian racism.

What is clear is that Western leaders are willfully refusing to acknowledge Hamas' attack for what it was: an unprecedented display of anti-colonial violence.

The Al-Aqsa Flood operation was an inevitable response to Israel's relentless and interminable provocation through land theft, military occupation, blockage and siege, and the denial of the fundamental right to return to one's homeland for more than 75 years.

Rather than reaffirming ahistorical analogies and regurgitating tired narratives, it is past time for the international community to contend with the actual root cause of the violence we are witnessing: Israeli settler colonization and apartheid.

To limit the blood that will be spilled as Israel's system of apartheid is challenged, the international community, particularly the West, must first reckon with the fact that it has enabled an ethnonationalist political system that has eviscerated Palestinian rights and lives.

The world must face the reality that Palestinian political demands cannot be erased or sidelined under the all-encompassing but unconvincing banner of fighting terrorism. Rather than learning these lessons, Western policymakers appear content to serve as active partners in the Israeli regime's current ethnic cleansing campaign — the nakba of my generation.

Tareq Baconi serves as the president of the board of Al-Shabaka. He was Al-Shabaka's U.S. policy fellow from 2016 – 2017. Tareq is the former senior analyst for Israel/Palestine and Economics of Conflict at the International Crisis Group, based in Ramallah, and the author of Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance (Stanford University Press, 2018). Tareq's writing has appeared in The London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, The Washington Post, among others, and he is a frequent commentator in regional and international media. He is the book review editor for The Journal of Palestine Studies.

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

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[almarh0m]

The Spectacular Failure of the Zionist Project
January 8, 2024
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The two-state solution is no longer possible and the only way forward is the struggle for a democratic secular state accommodating both Palestinians and Israelis, writes Stefan Moore.



A young girl in the Gaza Strip is taken to receive medical care, Oct. 17 2023. (Fars Media Corporation, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0)

By Stefan Moore
Special to Consortium News



As a secular Jew raised in a fiercely anti-Zionist family, I grew up viewing the State of Israel as an unfortunate fait accompli and accepting that the two-state solution was probably the best that could be hoped for.

Since then, I have come to the conclusion that the creation of a Jewish state was a catastrophic mistake and that Zionist Israel has relinquished its right to exist.

What good could possibly have come from a project that handed a group of Jewish Europeans a land that for countless centuries was inhabited by Arab Palestinians?

Not only did Palestinians have no say in the creation of a Jewish state on their homeland, but just at the time when other developing countries around the world were finally breaking free from the yoke of colonial rule Palestinians, like Native Americans and Australia's First Nations people before them, became the victims of European settler colonialism — this time endorsed by a U.N. resolution that neither the Palestinians nor any of the Arab states agreed to or voted for.


Second Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, Aug. 28, 1898. On podium, center stage, Theodor Herzl is seen indistinctly, giving keynote address. (Robert Spreng/National Library of Israel/Wikimedia Commons)

The driving force behind both the 1917 Balfour Declaration that called for a Jewish homeland in the British Mandate of Palestine and the 1948 U.N. Partition Plan that established a Jewish State, was Zionism, a religious, political and cultural movement that began in the late 19th century to claim Palestine as the God-given homeland of the Jewish people.

Contrary to official mythology, however, the Zionist fervour was not shared by the majority of Jews.

The socialist Jewish Labour Bund in Eastern Europe, for instance, believed that Jewish culture should be preserved right at home in the shtetls (villages) as opposed to running off to Palestine and thought that the notion of Jews colonising Palestine was farcical.  They even wrote a mocking Yiddish song for the Zionists – "Oy, Ir Narishe Tsionistn" ("You Foolish Little Zionist").

Meanwhile Jews, Christians and Muslims had been living aside each other in historic Palestine in relative peace for centuries. It was only after the rapid influx of European Jewish refugees fleeing the pogroms in Eastern Europe following World War I, and in the wake of the Holocaust, that the conflicts in Palestine escalated and the bloodshed on both sides began. 

By the time of the U.N. partition plan, Israeli Defence Force brigades had already launched a bloody campaign of burning villages and killing men, women and children to drive Palestinians off their land. In all, 750,000 Palestinians were expelled into refugee camps in neighbouring Arab countries.

This was the beginning of the Nakba (the catastrophe) that continues today – most strikingly in Gaza — as Zionist zealots insist Israel has a rightful claim to all the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.


Basel Steet, Tel Aviv, 1939 named after Basel, Switzerland where Zionist Congresses were held. (Public Domain)

In their view, all of Palestine belongs to Jews because in the words of Likud Party Knesset Member Danny Danon, the Bible is "our deed to the land."

For Zionists like Danon, expelling Palestinians is an existential necessity, a view that echoed in 1956 by Moshe Dayan, military commander of the Jerusalem Front in 1948, who proclaimed:

"We are a generation of settlers, and without the steel helmet and the cannon we cannot plant a tree and build a home... This is the fate of our generation, and the choice of our life – to be prepared and armed, strong and tough – or otherwise, the sword will slip from our fist, and our life will be snuffed out.

What cause have we to complain about their fierce hatred to us? For eight years now, they sit in their refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we turn into our homestead the land and villages in which they and their forefathers have lived.

Let us not be afraid to see the hatred that accompanies and consumes the lives of hundreds of thousands of Arabs who sit all around us and wait for the moment when their hands will be able to reach our blood."

Next Uprising Would Dwarf Oct. 7


A Hamas rocket attack from Gaza into Israel, Oct. 7, 2023. (Tasnim News Agency, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0)

As Dayan knew then, Israel would never be safe. In Gaza now, Israel is creating the next generation of Palestinian resistance fighters who have witnessed their families slaughtered, guaranteeing that the next uprising will dwarf the Hamas invasion of Oct. 7.   

Whatever legitimacy Israel might have claimed as a haven for Jewish refugees who were abandoned in the West after the Holocaust, their right to a state of their own has long since been forfeited.

Both the 1917 Balfour Declaration that promised Jews a homeland in the British Mandate of Palestine and the 1948 U.N. partition plan creating the State of Israel stipulated that the rights of Palestinians had to be safeguarded and, following the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in 1948, U.N. General Assembly Resolution 194 of that year specifically said the refugees' had the right to return "at the earliest practicable date."

On all counts, Israel has completely failed to live up to its obligations to protect the most basic rights of the Palestinian people.

Today, Palestinians living inside Israel remain second-class citizens without equal rights to own property or even use their own language. On the West Bank, Palestinians are dispossessed and murdered daily by Jewish settlers with the backing of the IDF.

In Gaza, even before Israel's invasion following Oct. 7, Palestinians have lived under a brutal state of siege in an open air prison. The millions of Palestinians who were exiled into refugee camps in neighbouring Arab states are still denied the right to return.

Indeed, the Zionists have brought to Palestine the very scourge they fled in Europe — murdering, expelling and ethnically cleansing an entire population, mirroring the behaviour of their Nazi oppressors.

In the documentary film Tantura about the 1948 massacre of almost 300 Palestinians in the Palestinian village of Tantura, former Israeli soldiers, now in their 90s, retell the story of the slaughter unashamedly.

One brigade member laughs as he recalls, "Of course we killed them, without remorse... If you killed, you did a good thing." An old woman says matter-of-factly, "Let them remember (what we did to them) like we remember what happened in Europe (the Holocaust). If they did it, we can also." 



Yet, despite the evidence of Israeli war crimes, Zionists have continued to deny Israel's atrocities while claiming their own superiority. Professor emeritus at Haifa University, Ilan Pappe, says of the mindset:

"I think the self-image of Israel as a moral society is something I haven't seen anywhere else in the world. We are the 'Chosen People' (in the Old Testament Jews were chosen by God as his special people). This is part of the Israeli self-identification...(But) basically, the project of Zionism has a problem... You cannot create a safe haven by creating a catastrophe for other people."

Today, complicit Western leaders and their media proxies wring their hands about the regrettable loss of civilian lives in Gaza while hypocritically calling for a two-state solution they know is virtually impossible since Israel has reduced the amount of Palestinian land from 45 percent at the time of partition to 15 percent today.

Craig Mokhiber, who recently resigned as New York director for the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights over the U.N.'s failure to act on war crimes in Gaza, said in his resignation letter:

"The mantra of the 'two-state solution' has become an open joke in the corridors of the U.N., both for its utter impossibility in fact, and for its total failure to account for the inalienable human rights of the Palestinian people."

Writing On Wall For Two-State Solution


Academic Ghada Karmi at the Palestinian Festival of Literature in 2011. (PalFest/Raouf haj Yihya via Creative Commons)

After 75 years of Israel's colonial oppression of the Palestinian people, it has become glaringly obvious that any notion of a two-state solution has become little more than a fig leaf for Israel's apartheid regime and the only way forward is one secular democratic state that safeguards the fundamental rights and equality for all of its citizens.

Obviously, it won't happen overnight or without conflict – Israel will aggressively defend its perceived right to exist as a Jewish state with the massive backing of the Western powers. Palestinians will never abandon their yearning for a homeland as it was before the arrival of European Jewish settlers — but the writing is on the wall.

Almost two decades ago the late Palestinian-American academic Edward Said wrote that:

"The beginning (of one democratic state) is to develop something entirely missing from both Israeli and Palestinian realities today: the idea and practice of citizenship, not of ethnic or racial community, as the main vehicle of coexistence."

More recently, Palestinian academic and physician Ghada Karmi has cautioned:

"The U.N. that made Israel and must now unmake it, not by expulsion and displacement as in 1948, but by converting its bleak legacy into a future of hope for both peoples in one state."

But if the U.N. fails to act, Karmi sees a more apocalyptic path to the end of the Zionist state. In her recent book One State: The Only Democratic Future for Palestine, she writes:

"Israel will fiercely reject the shared state, but will be powerless to prevent it from happening. ... It will not happen solely as a result of a one-state campaign and solidarity movements. ... but rather through people's natural resistance to relentless oppression leading to the ultimate overthrow of the oppressors."

If that can happen without cataclysmic global repercussions, possibly bringing the U.S. and Europe to the brink of the next world war, perhaps a new secular democratic state for both Jews and Palestinians will evolve from the struggle.

In any event, it is time to acknowledge that the Zionist project has been a spectacular failure and the status quo can no longer be maintained. Israel has become a pariah state in the eyes of most of the world and the winds of change are now howling across the region.

Stefan Moore is an American-Australian documentary filmmaker. His documentaries have received four Emmys and other awards. In the U.S., he was co-director of TVG Productions in New York, a series producer at WNET and a producer for the prime time CBS News magazine program 48 HOURS. In the U.K. he worked as a series producer at the BBC, and in Australia he was an executive producer for Film Australia and the ABC.

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

[almarh0m]

In their view, all of Palestine belongs to Jews because in the words of Likud Party Knesset Member Danny Danon, the Bible is "our deed to the land."

[Jafar]

The two-state solution is no longer possible and the only way forward is the struggle for a democratic secular state accommodating both Palestinians and Israelis, writes Stefan Moore.

Couldn't agree more.

Over the weekend I catch a glimpse on "Exodus" movie (2014) where in there's a dialogue between Moses and Ramesses which goes as follow:

Ramesses:  Things are better than ever have been Moses, we have order!
Moses:  Order?? The slaves... their bodies burned, night and day now and you call that order?
Ramesses: They are slaves!
Moses: They are Egyptians! They should have the same rights and they should have been paid for their work or.. you must set them free!
Ramesses: They are not Egyptians! They are slaves Moses! What else do you expect? They are animals!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3l7wALwLyCo

Ain't Karma a bitch..

[almarh0m]

Israel Worried Ahead of World Court Genocide Case
January 9, 2024
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The Netanyahu regime and its chief patron, the United States, understand the magnitude of South Africa's ICJ application, writes Marjorie Cohn. 


The International Court of Justice, principal judicial organ of the UN, holding a public hearing in 2022. (UN Photo/Frank van Beek)

By Marjorie Cohn
Truthout

For nearly three months, Israel has enjoyed virtual impunity for its atrocious crimes against the Palestinian people.

That changed on Dec. 29 when South Africa, a state party to the Genocide Convention, filed an 84-page application in the International Court of Justice (ICJ, or World Court) alleging that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

South Africa's well-documented application alleges that

"acts and omissions by Israel ... are genocidal in character, as they are committed with the requisite specific intent ... to destroy Palestinians in Gaza as a part of the broader Palestinian national, racial and ethnical group" and that "the conduct of Israel — through its State organs, State agents, and other persons and entities acting on its instructions or under its direction, control or influence — in relation to Palestinians in Gaza, is in violation of its obligations under the Genocide Convention."

Israel is mounting a full-court press to prevent an ICJ finding that it's committing genocide in Gaza. On Jan. 4, the Israeli Foreign Ministry instructed its embassies to pressure politicians and diplomats in their host countries to make statements opposing South Africa's case at the ICJ.

[Consortium News will provide live coverage of the two-day hearing Thursday and Friday, 10am to noon each day in The Hague, 4-6 am EST.]

In its application, South Africa cited eight allegations to support its contention that Israel is perpetrating genocide in Gaza. They include:

(1) Killing Palestinians in Gaza, including a large proportion of women and children (approximately 70 percent) of the more than 21,110 fatalities and some appear to have been subjected to summary execution;

(2) Causing serious mental and bodily harm to Palestinians in Gaza, including maiming, psychological trauma, and inhuman and degrading treatment;

(3) Causing the forced evacuation and displacement of about 85 percent of Palestinians in Gaza — including children, the elderly and infirm, and the sick and wounded. Israel is also causing the massive destruction of Palestinian homes, villages, towns, refugee camps and entire areas, which precludes the return of a significant proportion of the Palestinian people to their homes;

(4) Causing widespread hunger, starvation and dehydration to the besieged Palestinians in Gaza by impeding sufficient humanitarian assistance, cutting off sufficient food, water, fuel and electricity, and destroying bakeries, mills, agricultural lands and other means of production and sustenance;


Protester at a Palestinian solidarity demonstration in London, Oct. 28, 2023. (Alisdare Hickson, Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0)

(5) Failing to provide and restricting the provision of adequate clothing, shelter, hygiene and sanitation to Palestinians in Gaza, including 1.9 million internally displaced persons. This has compelled them to live in dangerous situations of squalor, in conjunction with routine targeting and destruction of places of shelter and killing and wounding of persons who are sheltering, including women, children, the elderly and the disabled;

(6) Failing to provide for or ensure the provision of medical care to Palestinians in Gaza, including those medical needs created by other genocidal acts that are causing serious bodily harm. This is occurring by direct attacks on Palestinian hospitals, ambulances and other healthcare facilities, the killing of Palestinian doctors, medics and nurses (including the most qualified medics in Gaza) and the destruction and disabling of Gaza's medical system;

(7) Destroying Palestinian life in Gaza, by destroying its infrastructure, schools, universities, courts, public buildings, public records, libraries, stores, churches, mosques, roads, utilities and other facilities necessary to sustain the lives of Palestinians as a group. Israel is killing whole families, erasing entire oral histories and killing prominent and distinguished members of society;


Gaza, Oct. 7, 2023. (Ali Hamad of APAimages for WAFA, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)

( Imposing measures intended to prevent Palestinian births in Gaza, including through reproductive violence inflicted on Palestinian women, newborns, infants and children.

South Africa cited myriad statements by Israeli officials that constitute direct evidence of an intent to commit genocide:

"Gaza won't return to what it was before. We will eliminate everything," Israel's Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said. "If it doesn't take one day, it will take a week. It will take weeks or even months, we will reach all places."

Avi Dichter, Israel's minister of agriculture, declared, "We are now actually rolling out the Gaza Nakba," a reference to the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestinians to create the state of Israel.

"Now we all have one common goal — erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth," Nissim Vaturi, the deputy speaker of the Knesset and member of the Foreign Affairs and Security Committee proclaimed.

Israel's Strategy to Defeat South Africa's Case


U.S. President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meeting in Tel Aviv on Oct. 18, 2023. (White House, Cameron Smith)

Israel and its chief patron, the United States, understand the magnitude of South Africa's ICJ application, and they are livid.

Israel usually thumbs its nose at international institutions, but it is taking South Africa's case seriously. In 2021, when the International Criminal Court launched an investigation into Israel's alleged war crimes in Gaza, Israel firmly rejected the legitimacy of the probe.

"Israel generally doesn't participate in such proceedings," Professor Eliav Lieblich, an international law expert at Tel Aviv University, told Haaretz.

"But this isn't a UN inquiry commission or the International Criminal Court in the Hague, whose authority Israel rejects. It's the International Court of Justice, which derives its powers from a treaty Israel joined, so it can't reject it on the usual grounds of lack of authority. It's also a body with international prestige."

[See Craig Murray: Activating the Genocide Convention; Craig Murray: Stopping Genocide and Craig Murray: A Shift Against Impunity for Genocide]

A Jan. 4 cable from the Israeli Foreign Ministry says that Israel's "strategic goal" is that the ICJ reject South Africa's request for an injunction to suspend Israel's military action in Gaza, refuse to find that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza and rule that Israel is complying with international law.

"A ruling by the court could have significant potential implications that are not only in the legal world but have practical bilateral, multilateral, economic, security ramifications," the cable states.

"We ask for an immediate and unequivocal public statement along the following lines: To publicly and clearly state that YOUR COUNTRY rejects the outragest [sic], absurd and baseless allegations made against Israel."


Israel's embassy in Berlin. (Peter Kuley, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)

The cable instructs Israeli embassies to urge diplomats and politicians at the highest levels "to publicly acknowledge that Israel is working [together with international actors] to increase the humanitarian aid to Gaza, as well as to minimize damage to civilians, while acting in self defense after the horrible October 7th attack by a genocidal terrorist organization."

"The State of Israel will appear before the ICJ at The Hague to dispel South Africa's absurd blood libel," Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spokesperson Eylon Levy declared. South Africa's application is "without legal merit and constitutes a base exploitation and contempt of court," he said.

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Israel is pulling out all the stops, including disingenuous accusations of "blood libel," an anti-Semitic trope that erroneously accuses Jews of the ritual sacrifice of Christian children.

"How tragic that the rainbow nation that prides itself on fighting racism will be fighting pro-bono for anti-Jewish racists," Levy added ironically. He made the astonishing claim that Israel's military campaign to destroy Hamas in Gaza is designed to prevent the genocide of the Jews.

As the old adage goes, when you're being run out of town, get in front of the crowd and act like you're leading the parade.

The Biden regime rose to defend its staunch ally Israel. U.S. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby lambasted South Africa's ICJ application as "meritless, counterproductive and completely without any basis in fact whatsoever."

Kirby claimed, "Israel is not trying to wipe the Palestinian people off the map. Israel is not trying to wipe Gaza off the map. Israel is trying to defend itself against a genocidal terrorist threat," echoing Israel's preposterous assertion.


John Kirby in 2021. (DOD/Carlos M. Vazquez II)

Kirby's contention that Israel is trying to prevent genocide is particularly absurd, given that since Hamas killed 1,200 Israelis on Oct. 7, Israeli forces have killed at least 22,100 Gazans, about 9,100 of whom are children. At least 57,000 persons have been wounded and at least 7,000 are reported missing. Untold numbers of people are trapped beneath the rubble.

Provisional Measures for Immediate Impact

South Africa is requesting that the ICJ order provisional measures (interim injunction) in order to "protect against further, severe and irreparable harm to the rights of the Palestinian people under the Genocide Convention."

South Africa is also asking the court "to ensure Israel's compliance with its obligations under the Genocide Convention not to engage in genocide, and to prevent and to punish genocide."

The provisional measures South Africa seeks include ordering Israel to "immediately suspend its military operations in and against Gaza" and to cease and desist from killing and causing serious bodily or mental harm to Palestinians, inflicting on them conditions of life intended to destroy them in whole or in part, and imposing measures to prevent Palestinian births.

South Africa wants the ICJ to order that Israel stop expelling and forcibly displacing Palestinians and depriving them of food, water, fuel, and medical supplies and assistance.

The judicial arm of the United Nations, the ICJ is composed of 15 judges elected for a nine-year term by the U.N. General Assembly and the Security Council. It is not a criminal tribunal like the International Criminal Court; rather it resolves disputes between countries.

If a party to the Genocide Convention believes that another party has failed to comply with its obligations, it can take that country to the ICJ to determine its responsibility. This was done in the case of Bosnia v. Serbia, in which the Court found that Serbia violated its duties to prevent and punish genocide under the Convention.

The obligations in the Genocide Convention are erga omnes partes, that is, obligations owed by a state towards all the states parties to the Convention. The ICJ has stated,

"In such a convention the contracting States do not have any interests of their own; they merely have, one and all, a common interest, namely, the accomplishment of those high purposes which are the raison d'être of the Convention."

Article 94 of the U.N. Charter says that all parties to a dispute must comply with the decisions of the ICJ and if a party fails to do so, the other party may go to the U.N. Security Council for the enforcement of the decision.

An average ICJ case from start to finish can last several years (it was nearly 15 years from the time that Bosnia first filed its case against Serbia in 1993 to the issuance of the final judgment on the merits in 2007).

However, a case can have an immediate impact. The filing of a case in the ICJ sends a strong message to Israel that the international community will not tolerate its actions and seeks to hold it accountable.

Provisional measures can be issued quickly. For example, the ICJ ordered measures 19 days after the Bosnian case was initiated. Provisional measures are binding on the party against whom they are ordered, and compliance with them can be monitored by both the ICJ and the Security Council.

Judgments on the merits rendered by the ICJ in disputes between parties are binding on the parties involved. Article 94 of the United Nations Charter provides that "each Member of the United Nations undertakes to comply with the decision of [the Court] in any case to which it is a party." The judgments of the court are final; there is no appeal.

Public hearings on South Africa's request for provisional measures will take place this Thursday and Friday at the ICJ which is located in the Peace Palace in The Hague, Netherlands.

The hearings will be livestreamed from 4:00-6:00 a.m. Eastern/1:00-3:00 a.m. Pacific on the Court's website and on U.N. Web TV. The court could order provisional measures within a week after the hearings.

Other States Can Join


South Africa's President Cyril Ramaphosa at the U.N. General Assembly in New York, Sept. 19, 2023. (UN Photo/Loey Felipe)

Other states parties to the Genocide Convention can either request permission to intervene in the case filed by South Africa or file their own applications against Israel in the ICJ.

South Africa's application identifies several countries that have referred to Israel's genocide in Gaza. They include Algeria, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Iran, Palestine, Türkiye, Venezuela, Bangladesh, Egypt, Honduras, Iraq, Jordan, Libya, Malaysia, Namibia, Pakistan and Syria.

On Jan. 5, Quds News Network tweeted,

"Jordan's minister of Foreign Affairs, Ayman Safadi, announces that his country backs South Africa's genocide case against Israel in the ICJ. He added that the Jordanian government is working on a legal file to follow up on the case. Turkey, Malaysia, and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) had announced that they back the case too."




The newly formed International Coalition to Stop Genocide in Palestine, endorsed by more than 600 groups throughout the world, has convened to urge states parties to invoke the Genocide Convention.

The coalition contends,

"Declarations of Intervention in support of South Africa's invocation of the Genocide Convention against Israel will increase the likelihood that a positive finding of the crime of genocide will be enforced by the United Nations such that actions will be taken to end all acts of genocide and those who are responsible for the acts will be held accountable."

[See: US Citizens Push Embassies to Back SA's Genocide Charge]

During the first week of January, delegations of "grassroots diplomats," spearheaded by CODEPINK, World Beyond War and RootsAction, mounted a campaign across the United States urging nations to submit Declarations of Intervention in South Africa's case against Israel in the ICJ.

Activists traveled to 12 cities, visiting U.N. missions, embassies and consulates from Colombia, Pakistan, Bolivia, Bangladesh, the African Union, Ghana, Chile, Ethiopia, Turkey, Belize, Brazil, Denmark, France, Honduras, Ireland, Spain, Greece, Mexico, Italy, Haiti, Belgium, Kuwait, Malaysia and Slovakia.

"This is the rare case where collective social pressure urging governments to support the South African case can be a sharp turning point for Palestine," said Lamis Deek, a Palestinian attorney based in New York, whose firm convened the Palestinian Assembly for Liberation's Commission on War Crimes Justice, Reparations, and Return. "We need more states to file supporting interventions — and we need the court to feel the watchful eye of the masses so as to withstand what will be extreme U.S. political pressure on the Court."

Suzanne Adely, president of the National Lawyers Guild, noted, "The increasing global isolation of Israel and the U.S. and their European allies is an indicator that this is a key moment for popular movements to move their governments in the direction of taking these steps and being on the right side of history."

Indeed, since Oct. 7, millions of people throughout the world have marched, protested and demonstrated in support of Palestinian liberation.

RootsAction and World Beyond War have created a template that organizations and individuals can use to urge other states parties to the Genocide Convention to file a Declaration of Intervention in South Africa's genocide case against Israel in the ICJ.

Marjorie Cohn is professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, former president of the National Lawyers Guild, and a member of the national advisory boards of Assange Defense and Veterans For Peace, and the bureau of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers. She is founding dean of the People's Academy of International Law and the U.S. representative to the continental advisory council of the Association of American Jurists. Her books include Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral and Geopolitical Issues. She is co-host of "Law and Disorder" Radio.

This article is from Truthout and reprinted with permission.

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

[almarh0m]

Spark That Lit the Fire: Untold Story of Oct 7 Attacks
January 9, 2024
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Israel is reeling under collective shock because of its tendency to pay close attention to analyses of Israel and its supporters — while largely neglecting the Palestinian viewpoint, writes Ramzy Baroud.


IDF raid in Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank in January 2023. (IDF Spokesperson's Unit, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)

By Ramzy Baroud
MintPress News

The dramatic, earth-shattering events in Palestine starting on Oct. 7 have taken many people by surprise. However, attentive observers were not among them.

Few expected that Palestinian fighters would be parachuting into southern Israel on Oct. 7; that instead of capturing a single Israeli soldier — as done in 2006 — hundreds of Israelis, including many soldiers and civilians, would find themselves captive in besieged Gaza.

The reason behind the "surprise," however, is the same reason that Israel is still reeling under collective shock, which is the tendency to pay close attention to political discourses and intelligence analyses of Israel and its supporters — while largely neglecting the Palestinian discourse.

For better comprehension, let us go back to the start.

The Spark

We entered 2023 with some depressing data and dark predictions about what was awaiting Palestinians in the new year.

Just before the year commenced, the United Nations Mideast envoy, Tor Wennesland, said 2022 was the most violent year since 2005. "Too many people, overwhelmingly Palestinian, have been killed and injured," Wennesland told the U.N. Security Council.

This figure — 171 killed and hundreds wounded in the West Bank alone — did not receive much coverage in Western media. The mounting number of Palestinian victims, however, registered among Palestinians and their Resistance movements.

As anger and calls for revenge grew among ordinary Palestinians, their leadership continued to play its same traditional role — of pacifying Palestinian calls for resistance while continuing with its 'security coordination' with Israel.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, 88, carried on rehashing the old language about a two-state solution and the "peace process" while cracking down on Palestinians who dared protest his ineffectual leadership.


U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken with Abbas at the Muqata in Ramallah, West Bank, Nov. 5, 2023. (State Department, Chuck Kennedy)

Defenseless in the face of a far-right Israeli government with an open agenda to crush Palestinians, to expand illegal settlements and to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, Palestinians were forced to develop their defensive strategies.

The Lions' Den — a multi-factional Resistance group that first appeared in Nablus in August 2022 — grew in power and appeal. Other groups, old and new, emerged on the scene throughout the northern West Bank, with the single objective of uniting Palestinians around a non-factional agenda and, ultimately, producing a new Palestinian leadership in the West Bank.

These developments sounded alarm bells in Israel. The Israeli occupation army moved quickly to crush the new armed rebellion, raiding Palestinian towns and refugee camps one after the other, with the hope of turning this nascent revolution into another failed attempt to challenge the status quo in occupied Palestine.


Al-Quds Brigades weapons exhibition, Gaza Strip, Jan. 7, 2022. (Tasnim News Agency, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0)

The bloodiest of the Israeli incursions occurred in Nablus on Feb. 23, Jericho on August 15 and, most importantly, in the Jenin refugee camp.

The July 3 Israeli invasion of Jenin was reminiscent, in terms of casualties and degree of destruction, of the Israeli invasion of that very camp in April 2002.

The outcome, however, was not the same. Back then, Israel had invaded Jenin, along with other Palestinian towns and refugee camps, and succeeded in crushing armed resistance for years to come.

This time around, the Israeli invasion merely ignited a broader rebellion in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, creating a further schism in the already deteriorating relationship between Palestinians, on the one hand, and Abbas and his Palestinian Authority, on the other.

[See: Resistance in Jenin]

Indeed, just days after Israel concluded its attack on the camp, Abbas emerged with thousands of his soldiers to warn the bereaved refugees that "the hand that will break the unity of the people .. will be cut off from its arm."


Hamas' Saleh al-Arouri in 2017. (Tasnim News Agency, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0)

Yet, as the popular rebellion continued to build momentum in the West Bank, Israeli intelligence reports started talking about a plan composed by the deputy head of Hamas' political bureau, Saleh Arouri, [who was killed on Jan. 2 by Israeli forces] to ignite an armed Intifada.

The solution, according to the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, citing official Israeli sources, was to kill Arouri.

Indeed, Israel's attention and counterstrategy were focused intently on the West Bank, as Hamas, in Gaza at the time, in Israel's viewpoint, seemed disinterested in an all-out confrontation.

But why did Israel reach such a conclusion?

Miscalculation

Several significant events, the kind that would have pushed Hamas to retaliate, have taken place without any severe armed response by the Resistance in Gaza.

Last December, Israel had sworn in its most right-wing government in history. Far-right ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich arrived on the political scene with the declared objectives of annexing the West Bank, imposing military control over Al-Aqsa Mosque and other Palestinian Muslim and Christian holy sites and, in the case of Smotrich, denying the very existence of the Palestinian people.

Their pledges were quickly translated into action under the leadership of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Ben-Gvir was keen on sending a message to his constituency that the seizure of Al-Aqsa Mosque by Israel had become imminent.

He repeatedly raided or ordered raids on Al-Aqsa at an unprecedented frequency. The most violent and humiliating of these raids occurred on April 4, when worshippers were beaten up by soldiers while praying inside the mosque during the holy month of Ramadan.


Resistance groups in Gaza threatened retaliation. Several rockets were fired from Gaza toward Israel, merely serving as a symbolic reminder that Palestinians are united, regardless of where they are in the geographic map of historic Palestine.

Israel, however, ignored the message and used the Palestinian threats of retaliation and the occasional 'lone-wolf attacks' — like that of Muhannad al-Mazaraa at the illegal Maale Adumim settlement — as political capital to ignite the religious fervor of Israeli society.

Not even the death of Palestinian political prisoner Khader Adnan on May 2 seemed to have shifted Hamas' position. Some even suggested that there is a rift between Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad following Adnan's death as a result of a hunger strike in the Ramleh Prison.


Stencil of Khadar Adnan, a Palestinian political prisoner, with padlocked lips in Ramallah, November 2021. The Arabic text translates "Adnan is a guardian of freedom." (Philip Hopper, Flickr, CC BY 2.0)

On the same day, the PIJ fired rockets into Israel, as Adnan was one of its most prominent members. Israel answered by attacking hundreds of targets inside Gaza, mostly civilian homes and infrastructure, which resulted in the death of 33 Palestinians and the wounding of 147 more.

A truce was declared on May 13, again with no direct Hamas participation, giving further reassurance to Israel that its bloody onslaught on the Strip had achieved more than a military purpose – often referred to as 'mowing the lawn' – but a political one, as well.

Israel's strategic estimation, however, proved to be wrong, as attested by Hamas' well-coordinated Oct. 7 attacks in southern Israel, targeting numerous military bases, settlements and other strategic positions.

But was Hamas being deceptive? Hiding its actual strategic objectives in anticipation of that significant event?

'Roaring Flood'


Graffiti in Nablus in 2006 says "Hamas" and has the image of an armed fighter. (Michael loadenthal, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

A quick examination of Hamas' recent statements and political discourse demonstrates that the Palestinian group was hardly secretive about its future actions.

Two weeks before 2023 commenced, at a Gaza rally on Dec. 14, Hamas leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, had a message for Israel:

"We will come to you in a roaring flood. We will come to you with endless rockets; we will come to you in a limitless flood of soldiers ... like the repeating tide."

The immediate response to the Hamas' attack was the predictable U.S.-Western solidarity with Israel, calls for revenge, the destruction and annihilation of Gaza and the revitalized plans of displacing Palestinians out of Gaza into Egypt – in fact, out of the West Bank as well, into Jordan.

The Israeli war on the Strip, also starting on Oct. 7, has resulted in unprecedented casualties compared to all Israeli wars on Gaza, in fact, on Palestinians during any time in modern history.

Quickly, the term "genocide" was being used, initially by intellectuals and activists and eventually by international law experts.

"Israel's genocidal assault on Gaza is quite explicit, open, and unashamed," associate professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University, Raz Segal, wrote on Oct. 13 in an article entitled "A Textbook Case of Genocide."

Despite this, the U.N. could do nothing. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said on Nov. 8 that the U.N. has "neither money nor power" to prevent a potential genocide in Gaza.

In essence, this effectively meant the disabling of the international legal and political systems, as every attempt by the Security Council to demand an immediate and permanent ceasefire has been blocked by the U.S. and Israel's other Western allies.

As the death toll mounted among a starving population in Gaza — all food deprived per the Nov. 28 estimation of the World Food Program — Palestinians resisted throughout the Gaza Strip.

Their resistance was not only confined to attacking or ambushing invading Israeli soldiers but was predicated on the legendary steadfastness of a population that refused to be weakened or displaced.

Sumud


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)

This sumud (steadfast perseverance) continued, even when Israel began to systematically attack hospitals, schools, and every place that, in times of war, is seen as 'safe places' for a beleaguered civilian population.

Indeed, on Dec. 3, UN Human Rights Chief Volker Türk said that "there is no safe place in Gaza." This phrase was repeated often by other U.N. officials, along with other phrases such as "Gaza has become a graveyard for children," as first noted by UNICEF Spokesperson James Elder on Oct. 31.

This left Guterres with no other option but to, on Dec. 6, invoke article 99, which allows the secretary-general to "bring to the attention of the Security Council any matter which in his opinion may threaten the maintenance of international peace and security."

Israeli violence and Palestinian sumud also extended to the West Bank as well. Aware of the potential for armed resistance in the West Bank, the Israeli army quickly launched major, deadly raids on countless Palestinian towns, villages, and refugee camps, killing hundreds, injuring thousands, and arresting thousands more.

But Gaza remained the epicenter of the Israeli genocide. Aside from a brief humanitarian truce from Nov. 24 to Dec.  1, coupled with few prisoner exchanges, the battle for Gaza —  for the future of Palestine and the Palestinian people — continues at an unparalleled price of death and destruction.

Palestinians know full well that the current fight will either mean a new Nakba, like the ethnic cleansing of 1948, or the beginning of the reversal of that very Nakba — as in the process of liberating the Palestinian people from the yoke of Israeli colonialism.

While Israel is determined to end Palestinian Resistance once and for all, it is evident that the Palestinian people's determination to win their freedom in the coming years is far greater.

Dr. Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of six books. His latest book, co-edited with Ilan Pappé, is Our Vision for Liberation: Engaged Palestinian Leaders and Intellectuals Speak Out. His other books include My Father Was a Freedom Fighter and The Last Earth. Baroud is a non-resident senior research fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA). His website is www.ramzybaroud.net

This article is from MPN.news, an award winning investigative newsroom.  Sign up for their newsletter.

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

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Patrick Lawrence: What Is Said & What Is Done
January 10, 2024
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U.S. Foreign Policy as Spectacle.


U.S. President Joe Biden visiting Israel in 2022 (David Azagury, U.S. Embassy Jerusalem,       
CC BY 2.0)

By Patrick Lawrence
ScheerPost

Those Israelis: They are too honest sometimes, aren't they? It is damnably inconvenient when they explain in perfectly plain terms that the Israel Defense Forces' intent in Gaza is to ethnic-cleanse the territory of Palestinians, or that they think Palestinians — invoking the language of the Reich — are subhuman animals who ought to be slaughtered, or that the IDF's brutality, referencing the violently forced removals of 1948, is meant to be Nakba 2.

You can't, after all, go around saying what you mean if you want to work with the Americans, whose leadership cliques long ago took up the practice of obscuring what they mean and what they are doing. If these people are going to run an imperium their own citizens are not supposed to see, the last thing required is clarity.

Senior Israeli officials have made this mistake repeatedly since the Hamas incursion into southern Israel three months ago prompted the barbarity we now witness daily. As has been well reported, they made it again this week, when two of them came out and said the Gaza project is indeed an ethnic cleansing, the objective of which is to scatter the Gaza Strip's 2 million–plus people to the winds.

Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, national security minister and finance minister respectively, are senior figures in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's freak-show coalition government. Here is some of what they said when addressing their far-far-far right parties on New Year's Day. Ben-Gvir:

"The war presents an opportunity to concentrate on encouraging the migration of the residents of Gaza.... [This is] a correct, just, moral, and humane solution. We cannot withdraw from any territory we are in in the Gaza Strip. Not only do I not rule out Jewish settlement there, I believe it is also an important thing ...."

And from Smotrich the same day:

"The correct solution [is] to encourage the voluntary migration of Gaza's residents to countries that will agree to take in the refugees.... Israel will permanently control the territory of the Gaza Strip, including through the establishment of settlements."

"Encouraging migration" and "voluntary migration" are preposterous phrases under the circumstances, the sort of language, say, Secretary of State Antony Blinken would favor under different circumstances. In this case these and other such phrases seem to have made matters only worse given the instant outrage.

The two officials were describing an ethnic-cleansing operation comparable, indeed, with al–Nakba — a point not lost on the American secretary of state.  Here is the statement issued by the State Department Jan. 2, the day after Ben-Gvir and Smotrich spoke. It is brief and I will quote it in full:

"The United States rejects recent statements from Israeli Ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir advocating for the resettlement of Palestinians outside of Gaza. This rhetoric is inflammatory and irresponsible. We have been told repeatedly and consistently by the Government of Israel, including by the Prime Minister, that such statements do not reflect the policy of the Israeli government. They should stop immediately.

We have been clear, consistent, and unequivocal that Gaza is Palestinian land and will remain Palestinian land, with Hamas no longer in control of its future and with no terror groups able to threaten Israel. That is the future we seek, in the interests of Israelis and Palestinians, the surrounding region, and the world."

We do not like inflammatory rhetoric, Prime Minister Netanyahu doesn't either, it is Gaza for Palestinians when this slaughter is over: This is the gist of the State Department response.

The second of the above summaries is patently untrue, given Netanyahu has said things in line with the most racist of his ministers on numerous occasions. Israel is, indeed, reportedly negotiating resettlement agreements with several nations.

[The Egyptian and Jordanian leaders reiterated on Wednesday their firm opposition to the expulsion of Gazans into their countries.]

As to the thought that Gaza "will remain Palestinian land," it is cruelly nonsensical at this point.

We are left with, "The United States rejects recent statements" and, "They should stop immediately." The significance here lies in what is not said.

As the Biden regime continues to fund and supply Israel's criminal conduct in Gaza, as it refuses even to call for a ceasefire (which 79 percent of the U.N. General Assembly recently endorsed), the State Department's primary concern, we have to conclude, is with presentation.

Keep doing what you are doing but stop talking so plainly about what you are doing: Is there another way to read State's official response next to actual policy, text and subtext?


Ben-Gvir, at left, and Netanyahu, center, at a ceremony with Border Guard soldiers, March 2023. (Israel Police, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)

Tony "Guardrails" Blinken is now on his fourth journey to the Middle East and its surround since hostilities between Israel and Hamas broke out Oct 7. In Greece, Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan and, of course, Israel, Blinken will attempt to get the Israelis to improve the aesthetics of its attacks and to keep the war-that-is-not-a-war from igniting a regional conflict.

He will face "tough issues" and "difficult choices," according to Matthew Miller, the State Department spokesman who signed the Jan. 2 statement. But he, Blinken, will not announce any shift in U.S. policy.

That will remain as it is. "Nothing will fundamentally change," to borrow Joe Biden's assurance to Wall Street during his 2020 campaign. America supports the Israelis as they ethnic-cleanse the Gaza Strip, but it wants a better presentation out of the Israelis and it wants others to accept this presentation quiescently.

For all we know — considering Blinken's itinerary — he could be assisting in resettlement negotiations between Israel and other nations. [Israel says it's in talks with Congo and other nations about resettling Gazans.]


Smotrich celebrating election victory in March 2021. (Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Six months into the Biden regime's proxy war in Ukraine, by which time things were already going other than brilliantly for the Kyiv regime, those paying attention began to notice the widening discrepancies between the war as it was presented in Washington and in corporate media and the war as it actually was so far as one could make out by way of the reports of independent journalists.

As 2022 drew to a close, I made this observation in a commentary for Consortium News headlined, "War as Presentation:"

"It is open-and-shut evident at this point that we witness two wars as the Armed Forces of Ukraine face off with the Russian military. There is the presented war, the meta-war, you might say, and there is the waged war, the war taking place on the ground, nothing meta about it."

True enough, there is a long history of official misrepresentations in times of war. But as the late and missed John Pilger remarked in a speech delivered just after the U.S.–cultivated coup in Kyiv in 2014:

"The information age is actually a media age. We have war by media; censorship by media; demonology by media; retribution by media; diversion by media — a surreal assembly line of obedient clichés and false assumptions."

Pilger nailed something important with these observations: Some qualitative difference in the way the world is presented to us, such that we cannot easily discern it, has been increasingly evident over the past decade or so.

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As I have thought about this weird condition at various times since reading Pilger's speech, delivered at a California symposium, my mind has gone back repeatedly to none other than Guy Debord, whose The Society of the Spectacle, published a year before the 1968 événements in Paris, has proven since an enduring influence on a lot of people.

[Related:Who Determines What's 'Disinformation'?]

Debord's book was in essence a left-libertarian critique of consumer capitalism and the dreamlike state into which commodity fetishism leads us. He argued that late-stage capitalism had, already by the 1960s, turned people in the West into spectators and events into mere representations of reality — spectacle in his very useful term. Images were all, or nearly all:

"All that was once directly lived has become mere representation.... The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images."

Debord's concerns ran to art, culture, society, theory (and drinking, he was pleased enough to note in Panegyric, a brief book he wrote late in life). He seems to have had no mind for foreign policy or foreign affairs altogether — although he designed and published a war game with his wife, Alice Becker–Ho, in the 1980s.

Taking I hope not too much license, we find now that the theory of representation, of the spectacle, of the social and political centrality of image are very apt to those of us who follow international relations, war and, to get specific about it, late-imperial America.


Blinken, center right, with Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant in Tel Aviv on Jan. 9. (State Department/ Chuck Kennedy)

Foreign policy as spectacle, as representation: I do not know fully the implications of this reality because I can hardly grasp its metaphysical aspect. America has a set of policies, which rest by and large on violence or the threat of it, on coercion, or on one or another form of bribery.

And then we have the presentation of American policy, which rests on its dedication to human rights, the self-determination of all peoples, its commitment to democracy, and so on. Read again the State Department response to the Israeli officials' truth-telling statements of Israel's intent in Gaza: This is what you are reading.

It is foreign policy as spectacle. Note the reference to "the international rules-based order": This is the name Antony Blinken et al. put on their representation of American foreign policy.

If Pilger announced a new era during which war is waged via information, we will see over time where this will lead us. Again, I am not yet certain about this.

But the space between policy and its representation will grow ever wider, it seems to me, leaving ordinary citizens less and less able to discern what America does in the world, or events altogether, with any kind of clarity.

The structure of the spectacle, as it increasingly obscures reality, will license the policy cliques to conduct America's relations ever more objectionably. Of a piece with all this are the incessant intrusions into our minds in the name of "cognitive warfare," which NATO, having coined the term, describes as "the battle for the human brain."

[See: NATO's Plans to Hack Your Brain]

A few days ago I edited a colleague's piece on the famous commencement address President Kennedy delivered at American University on June 10, 1963.

I was shocked as I read again his remarks on world peace not as some angelic ideal but as an achievable reality, by his vigorous argument that a violent, divided, disorderly world is not so inevitable as was commonly thought at the Cold War's midpoint.

Peruse the speech and see what you think: For me the true shock was the sheer reality of Kennedy's thinking and his account of his thinking. There was no spectacle, no representation in it as I use this term. 

Kennedy, then with five months to live, said what he meant, and as you read the speech you are dead certain he meant what he said. How far those who purport to lead us have strayed, how pitiful their minds, how formidable the work of recovery when there will be a chance to begin it.

Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of Journalists and Their Shadows, available from Clarity Press or via Amazon.  Other books include Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been permanently censored.

TO MY READERS. Independent publications and those who write for them reach a moment that is difficult and full of promise all at once. On one hand, we assume ever greater responsibilities in the face of mainstream media's mounting derelictions. On the other, we have found no sustaining revenue model and so must turn directly to our readers for support. I am committed to independent journalism for the duration: I see no other future for American media. But the path grows steeper, and as it does I need your help. This grows urgent now. In  recognition of the commitment to independent journalism, please subscribe to The Floutist, or via my Patreon account.

This article is from ScheerPost.

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

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SA's Impassioned Plea to Stop Israel's Genocide
January 11, 2024
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Lawyers for South Africa argued before the World Court in The Hague on Thursday why Israel was committing genocide in Gaza and why the court must stop them now, reports Joe Lauria.


Adila Hassim, attorney for South Africa, addressing the World Court, with the Israel delegation looking on. (UN TV screenshot)

By Joe Lauria
Special to Consortium News



South Africa asked the International Court of Justice on Thursday to order Israel to stop its genocidal rampage against Palestinians in Gaza, saying that the "very reputation of international law ... hangs in the balance" in the historic case it has brought.   

The South Africans laid out what seems like a difficult case to refute that Israel is violating four sections of Article 2 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which Israel ratified, namely that:

"... Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group."

South Africa was not arguing on Thursday the merits of the case of whether Israel is or isn't committing genocide, which will be decided much later, but rather whether there is sufficient evidence at the outset for the Court to issue a "provisional measure" ordering Israel to immediately end its military operation.

Genocidal Intent


South Africa pleading before the judges of the ICJ. (UN TV screenshot)

Proving intent is crucial to arriving at a finding of genocide, and the South Africans laid out in great detail the "genocidal rhetoric" of Israeli officials and how it has influenced Israeli soldiers and airmen attacking Gaza. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu twice referred to an Old Testament genocide implying the same was needed for Gaza.

"The genocidal invocation to Amalek was anything but idle," said attorney Tembeka Ngcukaitobi.  He then showed a video of Israeli soldiers singing in celebration of a victory in Gaza, in which they mention Amalek.

On Oct. 9, Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant, Ngcukaitobi said:

"gave a situation update to the Army where he said that as Israel was imposing a complete siege on Gaza, there would be 'no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel,' everything would be closed because Israel is fighting human animals. Speaking to troops on the Gaza border, he instructed them that he has released all the restraints and that Gaza won't return to what it was before.

'We will eliminate everything. We will reach all places. Eliminate everything there, reach all places without any restraints.'

Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu said that Israel must find ways for Gazans that are more painful than death. It is no answer to say that neither are in command of the army. They are ministers in the Israeli government. They vote in the Knesset and are in a position to shape state policy. The intent to destroy Gaza has been nurtured at the highest levels of state. ...

Senior political and military officials encouraged without censure, the 95 year old Israeli army reservist Ezra Yachin, a veteran of the Deir Yassin massacre against the Palestinians in 1948, to speak to the soldiers ahead of the ground invasion in Gaza. In his talk, he echoed the same sentiment while being driven around in an official Israeli army vehicle dressed in Israeli army fatigue.

'I quote the triumphant and finish them off and don't leave anyone behind. Erase the memory of them. Erase them, their families, mothers and children. These animals can no longer live. If you have an Arab neighbor, don't wait. Go to his home and shoot him. We want to invade. Not like before. We want to enter and destroy what's in front of us and destroy houses.'"

The lawyers for South Africa put the current catastrophe in Gaza in historical context of years of violating Palestinians' rights and pointed out that, "For more than half a century those violations occured in a world where Israel for years has regarded itself as beyond and above the law."

Preempting Israel's Defense


Vaughn Lowe, a British attorney for South Africa, argues that Israel has no right of self-defense in Gaza. (UN TV screenshot).

The South Africans anticipated Israel's defense, which will be delivered on Friday. Vaughan Lowe, a British barrister representing South Africa, dismissed Israel's often repeated argument that it is only targeting Hamas, and not the Palestinian people.

"Months of continuous bombing, flattening entire residential blocks and cutting off food, water electricity and communications to an entire population cannot credibly be argued to be a manhunt for members of Hamas," Lowe said.

While South Africa condemned Hamas' Oct. 7 attack, "Nothing can ever justify genocide, no matter what some individuals within the group of Palestinians in Gaza may have done," he said.

Lowe also dismissed the mantra repeated by Israel and its allies, that it has "a right to self-defense" in Gaza. He referred to a 2004 World Court decision against the legality of Israel's wall, which is built on occupied Palestinian territory.

"In its advisory opinion on the wall case, the court noted that the threat that Israel had argued justified the construction of the wall was not imputed to a foreign state, but emanated from the occupied Palestinian territory over which Israel itself exercises control," Lowe said.

"For those reasons, the court decided, as a matter of international law, the right of self-defense under Article 51 of the charter, the U.N. Charter, had no relevance in such circumstances," he said.

Just three weeks ago the U.N. Security Council reaffirmed that Gaza is occupied territory, he said. "The tightness of its grip may have varied, but no one can doubt the continuous reality of Israel's grip on Gaza," Lowe said.

"The court's legal holding from 2004 holds good, and a similar point is to be made here what Israel is doing in Gaza, it is doing in territory under its own control. Its actions are enforcing its occupation. The law on self-defense under Article 51 of the U.N. Charter has no application," he said.

Urgency


Blinne Ni Ghralaigh, attorney for South Africa, addressing the court. (UN TV screenshot)

Irish lawyer Blinne Ni Ghralaigh, representing South Africa, argued why the Court must urgently act to stop Israel. She said:

"There is an urgent need for provisional measures to protect Palestinians in Gaza from the irreparable prejudice caused by Israel's violations of the Genocide Convention. The United Nations Secretary-General and its chiefs describe the situation in Gaza variously as a crisis of humanity, a living hell, a bloodbath, a situation of utter, deepening and unmatched horror where an entire population is besieged and under attack, denied access to the essentials for survival on a massive scale.

Supplies are inundated by desperate people seeking safety. A public health disaster is unfolding. Infectious diseases are spreading in overcrowded shelters as sewers spill over. Some 180 women are giving birth daily. Amidst this chaos, people are facing the highest levels of food insecurity ever recorded. Famine is around the corner.

Reports of executions and torture and ill treatment are mounting, as are images of decomposing bodies of Palestinian men, women and children left unburied where they were killed. Some are being picked upon by animals. It is becoming ever clearer that huge swathes of Gaza, entire towns, villages, refugee camps are being wiped from the map, as you have heard.

But it bears repeating. According to the World Food Program, four out of five people in the world in famine or a catastrophic type of hunger are in Gaza right now. Indeed, experts warn that deaths from starvation and disease risk significantly outstripping deaths from bombings. The daily statistics stand as clear evidence of the urgency and of the irreparable prejudice on the basis of the current figures.

On average, 247 Palestinians are being killed and are at risk of being killed each day. Many of them literally blown to pieces. They include 48 mothers each day to every hour and over 117 children each day, leading UNICEF to call Israel's actions a war on children.

On current rates, which show no sign of abating each day over three medics, two teachers, more than one United Nations employee and more than one journalist will be killed, many while at work or in what appear to be targeted attacks on their family homes or where they are sheltering.

And the risk of famine will increase each day. Each day, an average of 629 people will be wounded some multiple times over. As they move from place to place, desperately seeking sanctuary each day. Over ten Palestinian children will have one or both legs amputated, many without anesthetic. Each day on current rates, an average of 3900 Palestinian homes will be damaged or destroyed. ...

Repeating a long history of mass forced displacement of Palestinians by Israel, there is no indication at all that Israel accepts responsibility for rebuilding what it has destroyed. Instead, the destruction is celebrated by the Israeli army. Soldiers film themselves, joyfully detonating entire apartment blocks and towns squares, erecting the Israeli flag over the wreckage, seeking to reestablish Israeli settlements on the rubble of Palestinian homes, and thus extinguishing the very basis of Palestinian life in Gaza. ...

Despite the horror of the genocide against the Palestinian people being live-streamed from Gaza to our mobile phones, computers and television screens, the first genocide in history where its victims are broadcasting their own destruction in real time in the desperate, so far vain hope that the world might do something.

The world should be absolutely horrified. The world should be absolutely outraged. There is no safe space in Gaza and the world should be ashamed."

The hearing continues on Friday.


Judges leaving the courtroom at conclusion of Thursday's hearing. (UN TV screenshot)

Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette, the London Daily Mail and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times. He is the author of two books, A Political Odyssey, with Sen. Mike Gravel, foreword by Daniel Ellsberg; and How I Lost By Hillary Clinton, foreword by Julian Assange. He can be reached at joelauria@consortiumnews.com and followed on Twitter @unjoe

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[almarh0m]

Numbers: 31:17, 18 & 40
17 Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him.

18 But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves.


40 And the persons were sixteen thousand; of which the Lord'S tribute was thirty and two persons.

[good logic]

Peace All.

South Africa has presented the case of genocide  against Israel:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4f_yoal4gx8

No doubt Israel will defend itself with blaming Hamas for what they are doing. That is all they can have as excuse because what South Africa presented is what is happening -evidenced and witnessed-

You cannot hide what the world is seeing.
However , Israel and the west will do their best to sabotage and eliminate all the oppositions to their plan.

Who would want to be the jury and judge in this case? Mossad will target and go after individuals - i.e be with Israel or be assassinated-
And they will drag the case for months or even years to allow them to fulfil their evil plans.
Only another power bigger than them will be able to stop them.
GOD s plan will be the winner in the end.
GOD bless you all.
Peace.