Israel Threatens 143 countries
Source: Mapping which countries recognise Palestine in 2024 | Israel-Palestine conflict News | Al Jazeera
Category: Israel
In 2014, we wrote an article titled “The Blind Alley of J Street and Liberal American Zionism.”
At the time, Benjamin Netanyahu was in his sixth continuous year as Israel’s prime minister, while President Barack Obama was well into his second term.
And J Street, an emerging organization of Jews aligned with the Democratic administration, had momentum as “the political home for pro-Israel, pro-peace Americans.”
From the outset, ever since its founding in 2007, J Street has implicitly offered itself as a liberal alternative to the hardline American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which was established more than four decades earlier.
An avowed purpose of J Street has been to seek a humane resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict while maintaining fervent allegiance to Israel as “the Jewish state.”
Netanyahu says any comparison between Israel’s war crimes and those of Hamas is “absurd and false,” writes Jonathan Cook. He’s correct and here’s why.
Biden said that ‘”What’s happening in Gaza is not genocide. We reject that,” Perhaps Genocide Joe would enlighten us as to how many Israel has to kill bearing in mind the Genocide Convention and Article II which defines genocide as
‘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;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Source:
Tarneem’s Life at War: Learning to Live with the Constant Uncertainty of Evacuation – The Diary of a Young Woman Keeping Ahead of Biden’s Genocidal Monsters
The legal world was abuzz. The diplomatic channels of various countries raged and fizzed. It had been rumoured that Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, along with his cabinet colleagues, had been bracing themselves for a stinging intervention from the International Criminal Court, a body they give no credence or respect to.
Unfortunately, many a just cause sprouts from crime, and the protagonists can always claim to be on the right side of history when the world takes notice of a plight. Only at the conclusion of the peace accords can stock be taken, the egregiousness of it all accounted for. Along the way, the law looks increasingly shabby, suffering in sulky silence. These applications for arrest warrants are merely a modest measure to, pardon the pun, arrest that tendency. It is now up to the pre-trial chamber of the ICC to take the next step.
![An Israeli tank seen near the Gaza border fence, March 26, 2024. [Chaim Goldberg/Flash90]](https://olddogthoughts.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/f240326cg56-1200x802-1.jpg "An Israeli tank seen near the Gaza border fence, March 26, 2024. [Chaim Goldberg/Flash90]")
The Future of Stalag Gaza
Throughout Gaza, the Israeli military’s destruction of homes and seizure of land is an ominous sign for the future of the Strip. Obaid’s wife, who was displaced to a camp in Deir Al-Balah, told him that “watchtowers and cameras were deployed all along the [coastal] road, and … quadcopters and reconnaissance planes are monitoring the area and preventing citizens from returning to the north.” As Israel expands and cements this military architecture, Obaid observed, “it’s as if Gaza is entirely under their control.”
Source: Cementing its military footprint, Israel transforms Gaza’s geography
The Business: Lobbying for Israel can be lucrative.
As the European Union’s only directly elected institution, the European Parliament serves as democratic figleaf to a system which is generally opaque and unaccountable. Remove the figleaf and you will see that many lawmakers are beholden to pressure groups.
Source: Time for outrage over Israel’s meddling in European affairs | The Electronic Intifada
In essence, the genocide must be halted, Israel must be held accountable on a global scale, and it must bear the consequences of this crime. Subsequently, peace must be constructed by the collective international community, not solely by the U.S. or the West, allowing both Israel and Palestine to thrive together. A key step toward this is for Palestine to be admitted as a full member of the United Nations and one can only hope that the U.S. does not veto its current application.
Indeed, many Israelis and Jews around the world who oppose Zionism could be motivated to initiate reform once the charge of genocide is internationally and legally recognised. The journey towards reform and redemption will be protracted, but it will establish the foundation for lasting peace. Such metamorphoses have been observed in the past, in Japan and Germany. Their economies have since ascended to remarkable heights. However, these transformations were not immediate. They were preceded by international acknowledgment, condemnation and punishment for wartime atrocities. Only then were the steps towards restoration embarked upon.
Source: To restore humanity, stop the genocide and make Israel accountable – Pearls and Irritations
Israel clearly has little interest in recovering the hostages taken on October 7. The real objectives: protecting West Bank settlements, further eroding the judiciary, rehabilitating the military’s image, and simple revenge.
One in 5 Democrats and independents in Wisconsin, Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Minnesota say that President Joe Biden’s handling of the war in Gaza is making it less likely that they will vote for him in November, according to a new poll released on Tuesday. Two in 5 of those same respondents said an immediate and permanent ceasefire and conditioning of aid to Israel would make them more likely to vote for him.
Source: Poll: Conditioning Aid to Israel Would Boost Support for Biden in Key States
![Members of the Turkish media seen during clashes between Israeli police and Palestinians after Friday prayers in East Jerusalem, December 15, 2023. [Nati Shohat/Flash90]](https://olddogthoughts.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/f231215ns005-1200x802-1.jpg "Israeli police block members of the Turkish media in East Jerusalem, December 15, 2023. [Nati Shohat/Flash90]")
In 2023, the Israeli military censor barred the publication of 613 articles by media outlets in Israel, setting a new record for the period since +972 Magazine began collecting data in 2011. The censor also redacted parts of a further 2,703 articles, representing the highest figure since 2014. In all, the military prevented information from being made public an average of nine times a day.
Source: Israeli military censor bans highest number of articles in over a decade
The announcement today that prosecutors from the International Criminal Court are seeking arrest warrants against top Israeli officials, alongside senior officials from Hamas, has triggered a political earthquake amid the ongoing expansion of the Israel offensive in the Gaza Strip.
Source: ICC Warrants Against Israel Are First Against U.S. Ally
Last week a founder of Human Rights Watch, Aryeh Neier, wrote: “I am now persuaded that Israel is engaged in genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.” It is a horrific truth that J Street’s leaders keep evading.
In 2024, the meaning of “pro-Israel, pro-peace” is macabre: J Street refuses to call for an end to U.S. military aid to Israel while that country continues to use American weapons and ammunition for mass murder and genocide.
Source: Opinion | The Dead End of Liberal American Zionism | Common Dreams
“Biden will feel he must attack the ICC because it directly implicates his own decision-making to repeatedly defend atrocities and their authors,” said one critic.
The crimes of October 7 do not provide Israel with blanket justification for its use of any and every means at its disposal even as a response to what it may interpret as an existential threat.
You are what you do not what you say!!
Source: Opinion | In Gaza, Israel Shows Wanton Disregard for International and Moral Law | Common Dreams
The cars burn out as a result of Israeli Apache missile strikes
Today we see this playing out in Israel’s war on the Palestinians. Genocide is called Israel’s ‘right to defend itself’ and ‘terrorism’ is the Palestinians’ resistance. If anyone is the terrorist it is the Israeli state whose military has destroyed every university, nearly every hospital and virtually all civil society infrastructure such as churches, mosques and schools.
Source: We are Living in an Orwellian Dystopia Where Lies are the Truth & the Truth is a Lie
StoryMay 16, 2024
Keeping silent, while a genocide is in full swing for all to see, is not good for social cohesion. And if it were, it still would not be the moral choice to make.
Source: Papering over our pain in the time of genocide – Pearls and Irritations
The tragic irony is that negotiations led by Egypt and Qatar for a ceasefire and release of hostages have come remarkably close to success. The failure to close the deal has led The Economist to ask if Netanyahu actually wants to accept a deal.
Source: “There is no Security:” Israel’s Invasion of Rafah will not Eliminate Hamas or End the War
Nurit Peled-Elhanan maintains that these same books instill racist attitudes and enhance ignorance of “. . . the real social and geopolitical situations and of geographical and historical discourse.” Upon graduation from secondary school, young Israelis are drafted into military service to implement Israeli policies against Palestinians “. . . whose life-world is unknown to them and whose very existence they have been taught to resent and fear” (p. 232). How does Peled-Elhanan arrive at such conclusions?
Peled-Elhanan demonstrates that all Israeli schoolbooks hold some common assumptions about Palestinians and history. They emphasize Jewish historical rights to the land. Arabs are hateful and a threat to the state. Also, the Arabs have twenty-one states and the Jews have only one. Palestinian citizens are seen as a demographic problem (or threat). The Palestinians in the occupied territories must be controlled, otherwise they will kill Israelis. Therefore the only solution resides in: “A Jewish state, Jewish majority, Israeli control” (p. 21)
What is a soldier to do? Does he obey or disobey? The schoolbooks that taught him/her imbued them with fear of a dehumanized “other.” Indeed, school texts can be seen as a weapon whose use is justified precisely because the “other” is actually an imposter and an intruder. The soldier is the true “indigene.” With such logic, how can an Israeli soldier ever consider the “other” as an equal? Israeli education, as currently constructed, disallows education for peace and coexistence from its curricula (p. 232).
Learning and facing the truth about the ideology and history of Zionism was a painful process.
As young people propel the liberation movement forward by confronting their institutions, we must also do the same. My atonement, now and in the future, is using my voice to fight for the freedom of Palestinians and their right to live in the land they call home.
Source: Opinion | Atonement for My Zionist Upbringing | Common Dreams
Antony Loewenstein says the power of the Zionist lobby is waning.
“The recent, inspiring student protests in the US, Australia and beyond involving large numbers of Jews in opposition to the mass slaughter in Gaza and universities working with weapons manufacturers shows what’s possible,” he says.
“There are far more critical Jews around than many in the Jewish establishment want to acknowledge.
“The false charge of anti-Semitism against anybody who challenges Israeli racism and occupation is increasingly shunned by young Jews, Palestinians and people of conscience.”
Stream this ABC Compass episode, Not In My Name on ABC iview.
Source: Antony Loewenstein – Not in my name – Pearls and Irritations
Foreign Agents among us,
The Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC) is a constant presence in Australia’s mainstream media. Its predominant role is to defend the state of Israel come hell or high water.
Ironically, AIJAC complains about the Nine papers (Age, Sydney Morning Herald) not publishing one of its letters. It was sent in response to a column by Marc Purcell, CEO Australian Council for International Development (Age/SMH, 18 April 2024). Purcell claims that: ‘The evidence that the Israeli government is deliberately starving civilians in Gaza is unequivocal’. Evidence of media bias against Israel defenders? Rather, the denying of Israel’s Gazan starvation strategy (a longstanding affair) may have been too much for the normally acquiescent letters editors to bear.
No doubt, undaunted, AIJAC will continue to flood Australia’s ‘quality’ press with its defence of the indefensible.
Source: The AIJAC propaganda machine – Pearls and Irritations
AIPAC Demand
Republicans this week vigorously pushed legislation in the House of Representatives intended to prioritize weapons to Israel over funding parts of the US government.
Source: Republicans want weapons to Israel over funding parts of US government | The Electronic Intifada
Israeli and U.S. claims that civilian casualties in Gaza are the result of Hamas’ use of “human shields” have figured prominently in Israel’s defense of the skyrocketing death toll in the enclave, but a report by a local independent human rights group details the recent experiences of three boys in the West Bank, who say they were used to shield Israeli forces from potential harm during their raid on a refugee camp.
The three boys—Karam, 13; Mohammad, 12; and Ibrahim, 14—gave nearly identical accounts of being forced to walk ahead of the IDF soldiers as they raided residential buildings, ensuring they would be attacked by any armed people instead of the Israeli forces.
Source: ‘A War Crime’: Rights Group Details Israel’s Use of Children as Human Shields – ScheerPost
Wave a white flag and your dead
This war would look very different if Israel’s principal aim was to free the hostages. But Israel’s assault on Gaza was never about the hostages.
Source: Israel’s Priority Is Killing Gazans, Not Freeing Hostages
President Joe Biden’s floating pier off Gaza, which went operational on Friday, is such a Potemkin Village. While it isn’t completely useless, it cannot replace overland truck deliveries of food and aid. At most it will supply 150 trucks worth of aid daily, when 500 are needed. It is a PR band aid on the gaping wound of Israeli genocidal blockage of aid to the civilian population.
Israeli definition of care so they can say, “We don’t kill medical staff any more”
Remaining health care workers won’t go until Israel stops blocking entry of new medical personnel.
Some 20 American and British medical workers who had been unable to leave Gaza were evacuated from the European Hospital in Khan Younis on Friday, though three American members of medical missions refused to evacuate until Israel allows additional humanitarian workers to replace them. They remain at work, along with doctors and staff from separate medical missions, serving a population trapped in Gaza with no escape.
Source: Medical Workers Evacuated From , but 3 Americans Refuse to Leave
We now see that the Western injunctions not to attack Rafah were a smokescreen of lies to mask complicity. The final pocket of Gaza is being ruthlessly ethnically cleansed and its infrastructure will be destroyed like all the rest.
It is striking that this is accompanied by an absolutely shameless doubling down of support for Israel by the Western political and media classes.
Yesterday, the Australian Senate voted 56-12 to condemn the use of the phrase “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”, because it allegedly “opposes Israel’s right to exist, and is frequently used by those who seek to intimidate Jewish Australians via acts of antisemitism”. And yet there was no similar motion condemning (or even adequately acknowledging) the ongoing slaughter that stands in opposition to Palestine’s right to exist. If your suss-O-meter isn’t firing yet, it is well and truly broken.
“If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing”. Today, you will not find a clearer example of the phenomenon Macolm X was referring to than Israel’s wholesale slaughter of Gaza and the mesmerising cover provided by truth-discordant imperial apologia we sometimes call “the news”.
Reject it all. It is swallowing your humanity.
Source: Primetime genocide apologists and the annihilation of Gaza – The Shot
if the current Israeli government was changed. The coalition under Benyamin Netanyahu is hostage to its most hard line members, the Minister for National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, and Minister for Finance, Bezalel Smotrich, who have threatened to bring down the government if it does not retain its hard line on Hamas.
Based on surveys, most Israelis do not think the current coalition government will last its full term, until October 2026. Assuming Netanyahu can keep Ben-Gvir and Smotrich inside the tent until then, polling shows the current coalition government would then be defeated. A new government may be more amenable to a permanent solution to the Palestinian issue.
Source: Some day the Gaza war will end – Pearls and Irritations
“It’s our duty to fight back,” said Rep. Summer Lee, arguing that no super PAC “should be able to drop millions to usurp the conversation for their agenda.”
Source: ‘Jews for Jamaal’ and Squad Push Back Against AIPAC Attack on Bowman | Common Dreams
As brutal police repression sweeps campus encampments, schools have been cutting ties with pro-Palestine faculty members without tenure.
Source: College Professors Are Being Fired for Activism on Gaza War
AIPAC= Foreign Agent
With Bowman’s challenger handpicked by AIPAC, the Israel lobby is cementing its status as the biggest player in Democratic primary politics.
Source: AIPAC Spends $2 Million to Attack Rep. Jamaal Bowman
Jewish students in Western countries are increasingly facing forms of transnational repression from vigilante groups linked to the repressive Israeli state. These groups are allegedly using violence and intimidation on university campuses in coordinated strategies to curtail freedom of speech.
The strategy utilised by the Zionist Establishment within Jewish communities and outside these communities, particularly, in the United States, England, France, Germany and Australia is to engage in an intentional falsification of history and contemporary reality when it comes to the supposedly intractable conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.
As Israel shows no signs of stopping its devastating assault on the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, the question now is what it plans to do with the besieged enclave. The growing fear among Palestinians is that after inflicting all this death and destruction on 2.3 million people in Gaza, Israel is now planning to reoccupy the Palestinian territory, as suggested by various recent reports and developments on the ground.
The ‘JC’ claims to be the world’s oldest Jewish newspaper but today it’s not possible to call it a newspaper in any meaningful sense. It is a propaganda sheet serving Zionist and Israeli interests. Alan Rusbridger, former Editor of the Guardian asked, Who really funds the Jewish Chronicle? It is a question yet to be answered.
The gradual expulsion and emigration of Palestinians from their homeland has created a huge diaspora of young Palestinians who have played a leading role in organizing solidarity campaigns on college campuses through groups like Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). Their close links with extended families in Palestine have given them a visceral grasp of the U.S. role in this genocide and an authentic voice that is persuasive and inspiring to other young Americans.
Now it is up to Americans of all ages to follow our young leaders and demand not just an end to the genocide in Palestine, but also a path out of our country’s military madness and the clutches of its deeply entrenched MICIMATT (military-industrial-congressional-intelligence-media- academia-think-tank) complex, which has inflicted so much death, pain and desolation on so many of our neighbors for so long, from Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan to Vietnam and Latin America.
Source: The Arsenal of Genocide
The Nakba – the dispossession of Palestine during, before and after the declaration of Israel as a state in May 1948 – is an ongoing process, and the genocide underway in Gaza represents an escalation of colonial violence.
Source: Gaza genocide cements Israel’s status as a pariah | The Electronic Intifada
1948
1924
In light of the current Israeli assault on the Strip, Khoury’s work, and especially this recent book, poses a profound question: How do we read a story when we know that its plot has not yet come to an end? How do we tell the story of the Nakba when it is not over? How do we recognize when we have reached the conclusion?
Source: How do we tell the story of the Nakba when the plot hasn’t ended?
Insanity Reveals itself
We owe an ironic debt of gratitude to Israel’s U.N. Ambassador Gilad Erdan for advancing the cause of the State of Palestine at the United Nations.
By delivering a speech to the U.N. General Assembly that was so unhinged, absurd, vulgar, insulting, undignified and undiplomatic, Erdan helped to secure a lopsided vote of 143-to-9 in favor of Palestine’s U.N. membership (the rest abstained or did not vote).
Source: Israel’s Doomed-to-Fail Strategy
So, what is the plan for Gaza? Neither Israelis nor Palestinians would support the IDF reoccupying the strip for the long term.
Netanyahu has also made clear his government would not accept a reformed Palestinian Authority, which currently governs part of the West Bank, from taking control of Gaza. And Netanyahu’s preferred option – persuading non-aligned clan leaders to manage the strip on Israel’s behalf – is a recipe for corruption and score-settling between rival families.
Options involving outside forces from the region or the United Nations have also failed to gain traction.
Where does this leave the people of Gaza? As they flee from one conflict zone to another, Palestinian residents are losing hope. As one community leader in Rafah recently said,
The war has changed everything but most of all there is now no security. There is nothing now for the weak. Only the strong can survive now.
The legendary Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, whose works remain an influence on U.S. military officers today, wrote in his famous 19th-century treatise “On War” that “war is merely the continuation of politics by other means.” A military general himself advising on how best to wage an armed conflict, Clausewitz nonetheless reminded his readers that the purpose of war is to achieve political goals, not to pursue violence as end to itself, or as a wholesale substitute for diplomacy.
Clausewitz’s words would have been well-heeded by the U.S. and Israel before the start of the current war in the Gaza Strip, which has now reached a painful yet predictable impasse. So far, tens of thousands of Palestinians have been killed or wounded, Israel now faces genocide charges at the International Court of Justice, and Hamas control is already returning to parts of Gaza previously declared conquered by Israel.
Source: Israel Wants Endless War. Joe Biden Is Going Along for the Ride.
Israel, cruel, murderous, and otherwise criminal behavior has become state policy. Let’s review the signs of this meltdown:
— Establishing an apartheid state to satisfy a racist ideological doctrine.
— Committing “probable” genocide in Gaza.
— Committing mass executions at, among other places, Gaza hospitals.
— Issuing orders to shoot unarmed Palestinian civilians.
— Torture and murder of Palestinian detainees.
— Inducing an artificial famine in Gaza.
— Blocking humanitarian aid.
— Systematic destruction of most of the infrastructure needed to sustain human life in the Gaza Strip.
— Committing increasing numbers of pogroms against Palestinian villages and towns on the West Bank.
Lapid was raised, as he tells us, “an Israeli patriot.” That translates into being raised in a controlled, closed-information environment. So his point of view is predictable, but also consequently, lacking in an unbiased historical context.
Israeli Jews have never been at risk of being kicked into the sea. The State of Israel has never been seriously in danger of losing a war. What has always been dubious is Israel’s status as a democracy.
What is putting Zionist Israel in real danger is the growing international doubts on this score — on the Zionist state’s similarity to an apartheid state like the one South Africa used to be. Such states have, one hopes, no long term future in the modern world.
Israel’s war of “self-defense” on the Palestinians is only showing the rest of the world Israel’s capacity for barbarism — behavior Lapid excuses because “things are complex.”
Source: Israel Descends Into Barbarism
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