A man in Boston reportedly lit himself on fire outside the Israeli consulate in Boston on September 11, making him the third person in the U.S. to self-immolate outside an Israeli consulate since the Gaza genocide began nearly one year ago.
What will it take for our government to stop parroting the ludicrous assertion that Israel’s genocidal erasure of Gaza and its people constitutes self-defence? When will our government fulfil its obligations under the Genocide Convention, and take meaningful, concrete measures to prevent further Palestinian deaths and ensure Israel’s accountability for its grotesque violations of international law?
In addition to billions in weapons, the U.S. military is renovating an air base in the south of Israel, according to a new contract.
A recent investigation by The Intercept disclosed that Site 512 is just one of more than 60 U.S. bases, garrisons, or shared foreign facilities in the Middle East. These sites range from small combat outposts to massive air bases in 13 countries: Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen
Mick Hall analyzes an Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s story — 11 months into a genocide — on the Israeli military’s use of the Hannibal Directive to kill its own citizens
Changing the current dynamic, however, cannot be done by the Histadrut alone. It will require a significant political realignment, and more significant collaboration between the union and political forces that are committed not only to replacing Netanyahu and the extreme right-wing agenda his coalition has been leading for the past years, but to rebuilding the welfare state, empowering unions, and advancing a more progressive alternative to the neoliberalism that has only increased support for occupation and war.
The reality is that within Israel, much of the power to stop the war lies in the hands of groups that do not have a primary interest in Palestinian lives. Nevertheless, concern for the hostages held in Gaza has exposed deep fault lines within Israeli society. Factions committed to indefinite war, regardless of its costs, now stand against others that see pursuing such a path as unsustainable.
The winners and losers of Israel’s ideological and political war are most likely to emerge following the end of the Gaza war, the outcomes of which will determine other factors, including the very future of the state of Israel,
I leave you to consider this as you cast an eye over the history of the current Israelites who have been occupying Palestine for the last 76 years. Do they actually live up to this covenant? Do they act mercifully? Do they welcome the stranger in their midst, do they love justice and mercy and tend the sick?
Or do they do the exact opposite? And, as such, do they deserve the sobriquet God’s Chosen People?
Ben-Gvir’s rush to achieve 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.
Those who can’t connect barbaric abuses of Palestinians by Israelis — generation after generation — and the crimes of Oct. 7, have little understanding of human nature, writes Jonathan Cook.
The horrors of Israel’s prison system aren’t new. They have been going on for decades. What’s new is that Israel has intensified the abuse. It now relishes atrocities it previously hid away like a dark secret.
Israel is lost. It is deep in a black, genocidal hole. The question is, are you going to allow yourself to be sucked into the same void? Are you going to keep covering your eyes? Does the torture end just because you prefer not to see it?
Facts to be investigated by the IDF. They already know who the sniper is!! The US on Monday also appeared to reject calls for an independent investigation into the fatal shooting of Aysenur Ezgi Eygi. State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel declined to acknowledge that Eygi was killed by an Israeli soldier, but he called for the process to “play out and for the facts to be gathered”.
Volker Türk on Monday called on countries to hold Tel Aviv accountable for violating international law in its war on Gaza and escalating violence in the illegally occupied West Bank.
We took a five-minute scroll through X this morning and this is what we saw in relation to issues impacting the world today, in Gaza…
5 minutes unearthed very little News but a far greater pro-Israel partisan flood of social media-organized noise than that of pro-Palestinian and an increasing amount from Elon Musk himself.
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.
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.
olddogthoughts 
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