“They threw fliers on Rafah and said, from Rafah to al-Zawayda is safe, people should evacuate there, and they did, and what has become of them? Dismembered bodies? There is no safe place in Gaza,” Khitam Al-Khatib, who said she had lost at least 10 of her relatives in an air strike on a family house earlier on Saturday, told Reuters.
The Palestinian WAFA news agency said the Rafah crossing from Egypt was closed for a fifth day, while another crossing, Kerem Shalom from southern Israel, has been shut for around a week.
The latest evacuation orders came hours after internationally mediated ceasefire talks appeared to be faltering.
Hamas said Israel’s rejection of a truce offer it had accepted returned things to square one.
Israel said the terms did not meet its demands.
In 214 days, Israel has killed 142 journalists in Gaza, approximately one every 36 hours. The staggering death toll makes the war the deadliest conflict for journalists in modern history.
Dressed in a blue vest marked with the word “press”, Abu Akleh was killed while covering an Israeli raid in Jenin, a city in the northern part of the West Bank.
“If you can kill an American citizen, who was among the highest profile journalists in the Arab world, on camera and get away with it, that sends a very clear message about what’s permissible.”
An Israeli airstrike killed photographer Baha Akasheh along with members of his family in Jabaliya refugee camp in northern Gaza on Saturday, bringing to 143 the number of Palestinian journalists killed in the Strip throughout Israel’s genocide, according to the Hamas media office in Gaza.
Source: Israel shutters Al Jazeera, continues to kill journalists | The Electronic Intifada
Rather than acting as a check on the powerful, media outlets like CNN and MSNBC are allowing police to give their interpretation of student Palestine protests with few challenges, even in cases where police are blatantly lying or distorting the truth.
Source: Mainstream Media Is Spreading Lies About Palestine Protests
On Monday, the IDF seized control of the border crossing between Egypt and Gaza near Rafah. That crossing has been used to bring most aid into Gaza since October 7. Since Israel gained control of the Rafah crossing, aid trucks have been unable to deliver food and other lifesaving assistance into Gaza.
Source: Aid Agencies Are Running Out of Food as Israel Expands Assault on Rafah – ScheerPost
Just as Gaza has become a laboratory and showroom for Israel’s “battle-tested” weapons, the success of the Hebron Smart City facial recognition technology and database through Wolf Pack to track Palestinians will be used for Israel to continue to profit off of its illegal military occupation of Palestine and surveillance of Palestinian civilians.
This “Automated Apartheid” only further establishes segregation of Palestinians and expands Israel’s apartheid system and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
Source: Automated Apartheid: Walking Through Hebron Smart City – ScheerPost
The empire therefore needs to tread very carefully when public opinion starts to turn against it, and retreat whenever public trust in imperial institutions would be compromised too severely for the empire to continue on a given path. It simply cannot afford to wake the public up from the propaganda-induced coma it has spent generations lulling them into.
Source: Protest and dissent can absolutely push the empire to retreat on Gaza – Pearls and Irritations
Germany Created Anti-Germanism Japan Anti-Japanism. The British Anti-UKism. In the past, Britain was Anti- Papist which for some has lasted until today
But as Chris Hedges often says, ‘Israel lies.’ And in the present climate the lies are not only bellicose and incendiary, but galling to a Jew like me who grew up in a time of intense antisemitism. Even after the second world war, when we were learning more and more about the horrors of the Holocaust, antisemitism in all its guises was rampant. Yes, from 1948, when Israel was declared (and Palestinians suffered their Nakba), many European Jews who survived the Holocaust found refuge there. But that was because that Israel was now there to take them, after many Western countries had effectively closed their doors to them.
Here, in my experience, are some examples of what genuine antisemitism is. It isn’t criticising Israel. It isn’t mere ‘discomfort’ on seeing a Palestinian flag, or hearing certain words expressed at a pro-Palestinian rally. It’s limiting the number of Jews admitted to prestige universities with ‘quotas’. It’s marking off certain neighbourhoods as Jew-free in so-called ‘gentleman’s agreements’. It’s closing membership of clubs to Jews. At UCLA, where I went before coming to Australia, university campus student housing was segregated along Gentile/Jewish lines. Jews had been lynched in the American south. In the depths of the Depression, my grandfather, a grocer in Council Bluffs, Iowa, was set upon by the Ku Klux Klan, when the groceries he was giving away to the town’s unemployed ran out. Many prominent Americans such as Charles Lindbergh, or Henry Ford, or Henry Luce, were known antisemites. Authors too could be unthinkingly antisemitic: Agatha Christie, Ernest Hemingway to name just two.
The Executive Council of Australian Jewry has figures for an exponential rise in antisemitic incidents over the past months. I’m not examining the figures – numbers aren’t exactly my forte. But it’s curious that so little attempt is made by them, or pro-Zionist organisations like them, to correlate this rise with Israel’s ongoing oppression of the Palestinian people and its culmination in one of history’s most horrific human tragedies.
One thing is certain, none of us can expect to be ‘safe’ now. Because of Israel.
Source: Because of Israel, Jewish people are no longer ‘safe’ – Pearls and Irritations
We must honor the student demonstrators and all who champion them as the heroes they are, cease the opportunistic abuse of the term ‘antisemitism,’ and urge them to continue their protests.
Source: Weaponizing Antisemitism
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton delivered herself of some ahistorical and distorted remarks about Palestine on Morning Joe, maintaining that the young people protesting the Gaza atrocities do not know history.
Ms. Clinton’s self-serving description of the 2000 Camp David process has been debunked by many historians. In fact, her husband Bill Clinton promised in the Oslo Accords in 1993 that Israel would withdraw from Gaza and the West Bank by 1997. He then allowed Benjamin Netanyahu to sabotage that process and allowed the Israelis to double the number of squatters they sent in to the Palestinian West Bank to steal property and terrorize people. When Netanyahu went out and Ehud Barak came in, Clinton sponsored negotiations, but Barak was maddeningly vague about what he would offer and never produced a text that Yasser Arafat could sign. It is not clear why Arafat needed to sign anything more; he already signed the Oslo treaty, which should have resulted in an Israeli withdrawal that never came. Soon thereafter Barak lost to Ariel Sharon, who was as determined to sabotage any land for peace deal as Netanyahu had been, and he wrecked the whole process.
Her placing of all the blame on the Palestinians is typical of inside-the-Beltway Goy Zionism, and is profoundly ahistorical. The young people can’t be fooled by these glib words. They see what they see.
Source: Palestine and History: Macklemore v. Hillary Clinton
Antisemitism is making the headlines. The Israeli Prime Minister describes as antisemitic the accusation that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, and even American students who are calling for a ceasefire. What Israel is doing does in fact provoke antisemitic acts against synagogues, Jewish schools and even individual Jews. It is therefore important to understand what antisemitism is, what it is not, and how it can be distinguished from anti-Zionism.
Source: Antisemitism and Antizionism: A Dangerous Conflation
Yes, it is genocide. Although it is so difficult and painful to admit this and despite all efforts to think otherwise, at the end of six months of a brutal war it is no longer possible to escape this conclusion. Jewish history will henceforth be stained with the mark of Cain of the “crime of crimes,” which cannot be erased from its forehead. As such, it will stand trial for generations.
Source: Prof. Amos Goldberg: ‘Yes, It Is Genocide’ – ScheerPost
Will Israel sue 143 nations for their involvement in 7/10 or simply resign from the UN?
The assembly adopted a resolution with 143 votes in favour – including Australia – and nine against – including the US and Israel – while 25 countries abstained. It does not give the Palestinians full UN membership, but simply recognises them as qualified to join.
Palestine is pushing to be elevated to full UN membership from its current non-member observer state as war rages in the Gaza Strip and the US and allies call for a two-state solution to the decades-old conflict with Israel.
The Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED) examined 553 campus protests that took place across the U.S. between April 18-May 3 and found that fewer than 20 resulted in serious violence or property damage — meaning that 97 percent of the protests remained non-violent.
Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu has labelled prospective action by the International Criminal Court to hold him accountable for the murder of 14,500 children in Gaza as “an unprecedented antisemitic hate crime”.
Source: “Antisemitic hate crime”: US and Israel desperate to avoid ICC justice – Pearls and Irritations
This week, Biden admitted for the first time that Israeli forces have used U.S. bombs to kill civilians. In December he stated that Israel was losing support over its “indiscriminate bombing” in Gaza.
“For over 216 days, the world has watched Israel use weapons provided by the United States to commit mass atrocities and gross violations against Palestinians in Gaza. Civil society organizations, watchdogs, and former administration officials have documented and verified countless examples that have shown Israel’s assurances were never credible nor reliable,” said Mohammed Khader, action policy manager at the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights Action. “The report is grossly incomplete and is far from holding Israel accountable for violating U.S. and international law.”
“The report is a slap in the face to the Palestinian and international human rights and humanitarian organizations that provided firsthand accounts and evidence,” said the head of Oxfam America.
“The State Department’s report dutifully regurgitates every hoary defense Israel has long offered the world to justify its indefensible savagery in Gaza using U.S.-taxpayer funded military assistance,” she continued. “It wants the world to reject the evidence of our eyes and ears with utterly implausible excuses.”
Source: ‘Friday News Dump’: Biden State Dept Report Accepts Israeli Assurances | Common Dreams
Editor’s note: The following article was commissioned by The Boston Globe. The newspaper refused, however, to publish it.
Source: Read an article on the student intifada censored by The Boston Globe | The Electronic Intifada
It’s a mad, mad world of American Lawfare and who has the $$ to use it.
Four lawsuits alleging Hamas ties against Students for Justice in Palestine, the AP, UNRWA, and a cryptocurrency exchange share many of the same plaintiffs.
This conflict has killed more children in five months than all the conflicts in the world in the past four years. Children have not been killed at this rate in any other time in history: the highest kill rate since the genocide in Rwanda in 1994.
Source: Queen Rania of Jordan: What’s happening in Gaza is a war crime – Pearls and Irritations
AIPAC is an unregistered foreign agent influencing American Democracy
Pro-Israel donors threw nearly $220,000 behind a Portland, Oregon, congressional candidate in a single day this week — the latest indication that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, is working to block her opponent who has called for a ceasefire in Gaza and for conditions to be placed on U.S. aid to Israel.
The fundraiser adds to a $580,000 haul Maxine Dexter reported raising in just the month of April, after her entire campaign previously had raised only $340,000 since December. Beyond her own money, Dexter is on track to be boosted by upward of $3 million in dark-money spending, which similarly has ties to pro-Israel donors.
The ads against Jayapal funded by “Voters for Responsive Government” are brutal, and pin Portland’s homelessness crisis on her as a former member of the Multnomah County Commission. They even accuse her of “starving and abusing cats and dogs.” There is no reference in any of the ads to Israel or Gaza, where Israel is currently starving 2 million people.
Source: AIPAC and GOP Donors Raise Big Money Against Susheela Jayapal
Persistence will be truly essential. The gears of pro-Israel forces are fully meshed with the U.S. war machinery. The movement to stop Israel’s murderous oppression of Palestinians is up against the entire military-industrial-congressional complex.
Everything’s for sale.
When Trump sat down with some of America’s top oil executives last month at Mar-a-Lago, according to the The Washington Post, they complained of burdensome environmental regulations, despite spending $400 million to lobby the Biden administration in the last year.
Trump’s response? He would offer them a better deal.
He told them to raise $1 billion to return him to the White House and he’d reverse dozens of Biden’s environmental rules and policies and stop new ones from being enacted (according to people with knowledge of the meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a private conversation).
The $1 billion “deal” would more than pay for itself, Trump told the oil executives, because of the taxes and regulations they would avoid thanks to him.
Source: With Trump, Everything’s for Sale | The Smirking Chimp
A book on same sex parenting is banned. The ban only applies to a few libraries in NSW, in a local council area where the faith-based decision was made, the debate led by a man who admits to not having read the book and claiming a two-year-old saw the book and was asking questions and stating that children should not be sexualised.
Source: Book Banning and The Seven Pillars Mandate – » The Australian Independent Media Network
Israel stated there were 40,000 Hamas forces, and they have killed 14,000 or 33%. Then the balance is in 4 battalions of approx 6000 fighters each. If 20 battalions have been destroyed, that will make a total of 144,000 Hamas fighters in total which makes Israeli IDF maths a joke and the above photo evidence of a plausible genocidal action
Israeli forces have massed tanks and opened fire close to built-up areas of Rafah after US President Joe Biden vowed to withhold weapons from Israel if its forces launch a major invasion of the southern Gaza city.
Thousands of people – including some of our colleagues and partners – are fleeing after evacuation orders were issued for the eastern part of the city on Monday, yet there is nowhere safe for them to go, nor do areas which have been designated as ’safe zones’ have the infrastructure or capacity to receive them. Al-Mawasi, for example is already hugely overcrowded with more than 400,000 people living there, according to UNRWA.
Source: Rafah residents call on the world to act – » The Australian Independent Media Network
What does this mean for aid deliveries into Gaza?
The Gaza Strip is now sealed off from the rest of the region. Shipments of crucial aid supplies to Gaza through the Rafah border crossing have been halted, despite the UN warning of a looming famine.
Police Pleasure themselves at Punishment Park
In talking points sent to congressional offices on Tuesday and reviewed by The Intercept, AIPAC argued that invading Rafah is the only way to take out Hamas, and that Israel had “no other option.”
Israeli conscientious objectors
Tal Mitnick and Sofia Orr, who are in prison for refusing to serve in Israel’s military, are pleading with Biden to help stop the war on Gaza.
Source: Israeli Military Refusers Appeal to Biden: “Stop Arming Israel’s War”
The loss of Western authority as a result of Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza has merely sped up changes already underway for a generation. The latest iteration of decolonisation has seen a pervasive re-interpretation of the history of European imperialism, which has analysed the reasons for the rise of the West and focussed attention on the pillage of the outer world’s resources, the role of slavery and the theft of indigenous land. Demands for reparation grow louder. Respect for the old Imperial powers is withering away. It is a process which has been observed for some time now by the Singaporean intellectual leader, Kishore Mahbubani, who wrote in London’s Financial Times in December last year that: ‘It’s no secret that the west captured the imagination and respect of the rest of the world for centuries. However, what is a secret—because it is happening silently and invisibly in the minds of billions—is that the west is now losing that respect.’
Source: The West believes antisemitism is a more egregious problem than genocide – Pearls and Irritations
“Once again, the safety and security of Australian communities is forced to take a back seat to the voracious profit motives of the gas mining sector.
Israel’s long-threatened invasion of Rafah has begun. Under cover of intense aerial bombardment Tuesday morning, Israeli forces moved into Gaza’s southernmost city, which has become a shelter for 1.5 million Palestinians with nowhere else to go. This is the moment they most feared, carrying the potential for a catastrophe greater than anything we’ve seen so far. Gazans counted on the world to stop this invasion, and the world let them down.
Source: ‘The scenes of the Nakba are repeating’: Rafah in panic as Israeli invasion begins
Macklemore Release with the Lyrics
Source: The Nakba never ended, the coloniser lied – Pearls and Irritations
Suppressing the Truth
Now that the Biden administration has established that it will not tolerate any criticism of Israel, the siege of Gaza is likely to continue. Even if some kind of deal is forged to establish a temporary ceasefire between Hamas and Israel, there is no guarantee that Israel won’t renew its military operations at a later date, just as it did after a previous pause in fighting in November 2023.
What is perhaps most remarkable, however, is how the United States has suppressed one of the key truths about the destruction of Gaza. Across elite institutions of American society, people in leadership positions remain largely silent about what student protesters have been trying to bring to the attention of the public: the United States is an obstacle to peace in Gaza.
“This is not just an Israeli war,” Senator Sanders insisted, in one of the few exceptions to the silence in Washington. “This is an American war as well.”
Indeed, the actions of the United States are ensuring that Israel’s siege of Gaza will continue. Not until the United States changes its approach will it become possible to bring an end to the destruction.
Source: The United States Is an Obstacle to Peace in Gaza | The Smirking Chimp
Leaflets dropped on 600,000 children telling them to fuck off the Israeli adults were coming
this week into Rafah, in the Gaza Strip, the Israeli military moved swiftly to take control of the Palestinian side of the border crossing with Egypt. The takeover severed the only corridor connecting Palestinians in Gaza to land not controlled by Israel. In a gratuitous symbolic act, an Israeli tank bulldozed the “I love Gaza” monument greeting visitors as they cross into the territory from Egypt.
Source: Palestinian Kids in Rafah Can’t “Evacuate” Safely: UNICEF
Washington’s attempts to attack and impair the workings of the ICC on Israel’s behalf merely serve to further isolate a declining America.
Source: Israel is morphing into a pariah state. Time to cut the cord – Pearls and Irritations
“In our political argument abroad,” Ben-Gurion said, “we minimize Arab opposition to us, but let us not ignore the truth among ourselves. Politically, we are the aggressors and they defend themselves. The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them their country, while we are still outside. Behind the terrorism is a movement, which, though primitive, is not devoid of idealism and self-sacrifice.”
Chomsky adds further context to the Arab perspective that has not changed in three-quarters of a century of strife by explaining how they rejected the idea that they had a moral obligation to sacrifice their land to compensate “for the crimes committed by Europeans against the Jews.” The idea, he notes, had taken hold in the West, but, he writes, Arabs, “perhaps wondered why a more appropriate response would not have been to remove the population of Bavaria and turn it into a Jewish state – or given the self-righteous moralizing they hear from the United States, why the project could not have been carried out in Massachusetts or New York.”
Source: The Truth Among Ourselves – » The Australian Independent Media Network
On April 18, the Israeli police, in all its intimidating glory, entered the home of Professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian in the Old City of Jerusalem. Shalhoub-Kevorkian, who holds the Global Chair in Law at Queen Mary University of London and a post at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, was subsequently detained for comments made the previous month on the Makdisi Street podcast.
Of particular interest to the authorities were comments purportedly calling for the abolition of Zionism and the uncontroversial call to halt the genocidal actions in Gaza. She was strip-searched, handcuffed and interrogated, and denied access to such necessities as food, water and medication for a number of hours. Her frigid cell also lacked blankets, while she was inadequately clothed. Her release on bail precipitated further interrogation sessions, with the police keen to tease out incriminating matters from previously published academic papers.
From targeting academics, activists and students, to drawing the covers over a network of renown, the Israeli state has made a vulgar statement against the role of free speech. Such creeping authoritarianism, however, shows itself to be one-eyed and, eventually, self-defeating. Ultimately, in the gallop, it is bound to fall over itself.
As Israeli politics and leadership have drifted so far to the right, a lot of the people in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition don’t really care about the U.S. and what it wants. Netanyahu is now very dependent on the far right for his own political survival, so he is likely to listen to his right-wingers, not to the U.S.
Source: Could Biden stop Netanyahu’s plans? A national security expert looks at Israel’s attack on Rafah
How should we explain the unflagging and disastrous Western backing of Israel? The Israel lobby plays a huge role, persuading lawmakers that support for Israel is still in the strategic interests of their countries.
Source: The Israel Lobby Matters
On campus, inside the Capitol, and in court, there’s an all-out assault on American democracy in the name of Israel.
Source: The Attack on American Democracy — In the Name of Israel
my journey from Zionist Youth to Prominent anti-Zionist
Source: Tony Greenstein’s Blog: Tony Greenstein ‘An Ordinary Rebel’ – A film by Helena Aksentijevic
Washington: The message was not getting through. Not through the phone calls or the emissaries or the public statements or the joint committee meetings. And so, frustrated that he was being ignored, US President Joe Biden chose a more dramatic way of making himself clear to Israeli leaders. He stopped sending the bombs.
Source: Biden had hoped to send a quiet message, then Israel leaked it
olddogthoughts 
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