Why not suggest a similar trajectory for U.S.-China relations over the next generation? Except for ideologues detached from reality, the world would prefer it over the nuclear alternative. Dealing with the two massive, unwanted consequences of capitalism—climate change and unequal distributions of wealth and income—offers projects for a U.S.-China partnership that the world will applaud. Capitalism changed dramatically in both Britain and the United States after 1815. It will likely do so again after 2025. The opportunities are attractively open-ended.
Politically the world seems to be moving very much to the right, and with it there is an attack on thinking, especially critical thinking where an issue is questioned, analysed, interpreted and evaluated to make a judgement about the issue.
News media went out of their way to obscure the land-theft maps, zooming in on the part showing Gaza right next to Israel. The New York Times, The Guardian, Haaretz, CNN and Reuters all decided in inital articles to avoid clearly showing Netanyahu’s map replacing the West Bank with Israel.
A Times of Israel article by Jacob Magid did raise questions and Dahlia Scheindlin criticized Netanyahu’s map of dispossession in a 5 September Haaretz column. The BBC showed the map, but in a caption reference merely said the map “appeared to have erased the occupied West Bank.” In fact, it was erased.
Israel is ensuring a paranoid future never safe with a Jones Town ending.
Jonestown, (November 18, 1978), location of the mass murder-suicide of members of the California-based Peoples Templecult at the behest of their charismatic but paranoid leader, Jim Jones, in Jonestown agricultural commune, Guyana. The death toll exceeded 900, including some 300 who were age 17 and under, making the incident one of the largest mass deaths in American history.
Israel’s disposition toward war is perpetual, and its war on the Palestinians is a daily reality fueled by the complicity of its allies, an endless supply of weapons, and a staggering lack of accountability.
What history tells us, especially in the context of Israel’s war on the Palestinians, is that wars are often won by accumulation — through a relentless combination of psychological warfare, overwhelming firepower, and the deliberate creation of unbearable conditions designed to drive the Palestinian population to leave. This is the lens through which we should view the current struggle in the West Bank and the inevitable military operations that will continue to define the region for the foreseeable future. These actions are not isolated incidents but part of a slow, yet steadily escalating strategy, edging both the Palestinians and the world closer to the brink of the abyss.
WEOG, the UN grouping anchored by the Anglo countries, Israel, and European states, wields disproportionate power to undermine human rights and international law.
Israel has the right to defend itself. Let me take a moment here to agree with would-be President Harris. Yes, Israel has the right to defend itself. But what does that actually mean? Self-defense is far, far more than an us-vs.-them standoff. If Israel wants to be safe and secure, step one—Kamala, I’m certain you know this!—is to value Palestinians as fully human, talk to them, and listen. And of course, this truth goes in all directions.
Is there an attempt to chill debate on Palestine and Israel on both sides of the Atlantic?
The United States, and the West in general, are in a “dire period” of repression of speech on Palestinian freedom or criticism of Israel, argues Dima Khalidi, founder of Palestine Legal.
Khalidi tells host Steve Clemons that despite strong constitutional protections for free expression, “there seems to be this exception when it comes to Palestine”, as witnessed by the wave of censorship, intimidation, firings and restrictions on activism in the wake of Israel’s war on Gaza.
The situation is similar across Europe, says British journalist Richard Medhurst, who’s been covering Gaza closely and was arrested for “speech crimes” upon arrival in London recently.
For much of the world, Palestine is the “line in the sand” to our staggering hypocrisy. We own this genocide. It defines us. It is us.
November 2024, election month, marks one hundred and seven years since Britain issued the Balfour Declaration and seventy-seven years since the United States pushed through UNGA Resolution 181 (Partition). In both cases, it was well understood that the documents’ words were empty, and that we were institutionalizing the ethnic cleansing, and ultimately the genocide, of Palestine’s native population river-to-sea.
The war is not over and Hezbollah’s strategic conflict with Israel has only increased. But total war has not yet arrived. And this is the biggest calculation of all: It won’t happen with an array of Western and despotic Arab military forces ready to defend Israel against a full-scale attack.
Despite the shift in the media’s attention to regional developments and the Israeli invasion of the northern West Bank, the massacres in Gaza continue in silence. In the first three days of September, Israel committed nine massacres in the strip.
To suggest that in a self-proclaimed multicultural democratic nation, all are only protesting Netanyahu’s reluctance to return the hostages is Zionist propaganda that Israelis aren’t protesting the war. Israel has been portraying the war as the “right of defence” and not an outright invasion or ethnic cleansing and that the actual war is a popular one. We know Orthodox Jews don’t support it nor do the nation’s Arabs and Christians and they are 25% of Israel. Their silence is institutionally and socially policed. So is this war popular among Jews? They are a diverse religion the only uniformity is Institutional and they too are socially and psychologically monitored and have been for several generations despite their access to the internet. What we are witnessing is a rush to leave and 750,000 people protesting but not fully explained or tested by the diversity within the crowd of almost 10% of Israelis yelling for a better life. A crowd more aligned with Jews and Israelis crying “Not in our name”
Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, a Turkish American human rights advocate, was reportedly shot and killed by the Israel Defense Forces at a protest in the West Bank on September 6, 2024.
America declined to condemn the killing of sailors on the US Liberty even when lied to by Israel trying to blame Egypt. Is their historical connection that scandalous?
Former President Jimmy Carter wrote in 2006 that “reluctance to criticize policies of the Israeli government is due to the extraordinary lobbying efforts” of AIPAC and the “absence of any significant contrary voices.”” He added that “it would be almost politically suicidal for members of Congress to espouse a balanced position between Israel and Palestine, to suggest that Israel comply with international law or to speak in defense of justice or human rights for Palestinians.”
Much of the overwhelmingly liberal U.S.-Jewish community has grown resentful of AIPAC’s self-appointed role as the monolithic voice of the American-Jewish consensus on Israel.
How did AIPAC begin?
Founded in 1953 as the American Zionist Committee for Public Affairs, AIPAC took on its more familiar title in 1963. But it only started accumulating sufficient financial and political clout in the 1970s to make its presence felt and start advocating for Congress and the White House to adopt an unequivocally pro-Israel U.S. policy.
AIPAC has long navigated the tension between its registration as a nonprofit organization and its insistence that does not directly represent a foreign government, i.e., Israel. Because the group is funded by private donors rather than the Israeli government or a foreign group, it does not need to be registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
Until recently, its model utilized a tried-and-true method: Leveraging its influence on Democrats and Republicans alike thanks to hundreds of thousands of loyal supporters – many of whom are significant donors – spread across the United States. AIPAC’s affiliated American Israel Education Foundation nonprofit charitable group sponsors private trips to Israel for U.S. lawmakers, playing a major role in making Israel the most frequented travel destination for members of Congress.
if AIPAC said jump, we’d say ‘How high?’ It was pretty reflexive; I came to be bothered by that and a lot of members were bothered. A lot more members were bothered by that than cast votes that indicated that,” then-Rep. David Price told Haaretz shortly before his retirement in October 2021.
AIPAC has become steadily and increasingly ideologically aligned with the Republican Party – which has offered unconditional support for Israel while arguing Democrats are drifting further away from Israel.
Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, a human rights activist, was protesting an illegal West Bank settlement when she was reportedly shot in the head by Israeli soldiers.
Compare the response to Israel’s murder of a US citizen in the West Bank to the response to Hamas’s killing of a US citizen hostage last week, and the takeaway is clear: arming Israel is more important to Joe Biden than even the life of an American.
Mokhiber described Israel as holding “the world record for breaching UN resolutions”.
In the United Nations General Assembly, the Israeli ambassador at the time, Gilad Erdan, used a paper shredder to destroy pages of the UN Charter, saying that countries who back Palestine’s bid to join the UN are “shredding the UN Charter with your own hands”. (May 10, 2024) Meanwhile, a push by some Palestinian civil society groups to suspend Israel from the UN lacks a key element: A country to lead the initiative. Yet, the calls to oust Israel may intensify during the opening session of the General Assembly in September.
Disingenuous antisemitism charges are keeping left-wing critics of Israel on the back foot. Meanwhile, right-wing antisemitism is rising. Rather than play defense, the Left should advance an analysis of antisemitism that doesn’t conflate Jews with Israel.
From the very arrival of Zionists in the Middle East Defense was never their agenda. The land and its Colonization was the project defense the smokescreen
Similarly, the state of Israel was instituted under the propagandized premise of ‘self-defense’, yet now as then, as its leaders threaten nuclear war in the Middle East and by extension the world, its offensive aggression is clear and criminal. In contrast, Palestinian people have the full right to defend themselves against Zionist aggression by any means necessary.
Israeli prime minister presented a plan and map that showed an annexed West Bank and Gaza under Israeli army control.
Netanyahu expains to the World the UN the IJC and ICC what the plan is moving forward. Leaving out that in the New World-Based -Order the World the UN,the IJC and ICC will be ignored .
Toxic waste, water-borne diseases, vast carbon emissions: Dr. Mariam Abd El Hay describes the myriad harms of Israel’s assault to the region’s ecosystems.
Ben-Gvir and his ilk are fully aware of the historic opportunity that is now available to them as they hope to ignite the much-coveted religious war. They also know that if the war in Gaza ends without advancing their main plan of colonising the rest of the occupied territories, the opportunity may never present itself again.
The far-right Ben-Gvir’s rush to fulfil the religious Zionist agenda contradicts the traditional form of Israeli colonialism, predicated on the “incremental genocide” of Palestinians and the slow ethnic cleansing of Palestinian communities from East Jerusalem and the West Bank.
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The ongoing carnage wrought on ordinary Americans by this country’s bizarrely permissive gun laws dominated the cable news networks for […]
StorySep 06, 2024
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