Source: Opinion | Israel Seems to Be the Only Country Looking for a Wider Middle East War | Common Dreams
Inspired by anti-fascist organizing in the 1940s, a group of progressive Jewish activists have formed the Jewish Council of Australia. Its goal is to challenge the hegemony of right-wing, Zionist groups that claim to speak for all Jewish Australians.
Source: Jewish Australians Are Rejecting the Zionist Establishment
(Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – Previously I’ve argued that Zionism has run its course as a political movement, and accomplished its goal: The creation of a viable Jewish nation-state. I’ve also argued that Zionism under Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu (Bibi) has become a driving force in nurturing global anti-Semitism. He has perverted and mutated Zionism to where it has become a affront to the ideals of Torah and Judaism. It’s also become a threat to democracy in the US as well as Israel. With Israel’s embrace of American Evangelical communities over progressive Jews, and Bibi’s alliance with former President Donald Trump, he has meddled into American politics to promote Trump, who has proven to be the greatest threat to Western-style Democracy since World War II.
Source: Zionism’s Expired Shelf-Life: Why Naomi Klein is right that it has become Pharaoh
Has Gaza been intentionally removed from the media’s sight?
On April 17, students at Columbia University formed a “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” on the campus’s East Butler Lawn calling for the school to divest from companies that profit from the occupation in Palestine. Their tents stood for two days before the administration suspended more than 100 participating students and asked the NYPD to dismantle the encampment. Unsurprisingly, the repression only increased the size and scope of the protest.
Source: Campus protests for Gaza are proliferating — and so is the repression
“This genocide is the desired goal of the West. No other explanation is remotely plausible.”
This is not the work of Netanyahu operating as a rogue. It is the result of the machinations of a professional political class across the Western world welded to zionism, with the supremacy of Israel as an article of fundamental belief.
Israel is violating a White House directive by blocking humanitarian aid from entering the besieged Gaza Strip during its ongoing genocidal assault on the Palestinian enclave, according to a report published Friday.
Source: Opinion | Underhanded Israeli Tactic Delays Flotilla Departure | Common Dreams
Israel claims to “treasure” its Holocaust survivors. All ageing, Israel provides them with an average pension of $1400 a Year, leaving some 50,000 living below the poverty line. Israel “tortures” its Holocaust survivors and showers its settlers with promises
“There is a question of historical responsibility towards injustice, genocide, and fascism,” said Stephen Kapos. “If you are indifferent, if you do not take a stand, you acquire a degree of guilt.
Source: Holocaust Survivor Tells Student Anti-Genocide Protesters: ‘Just Keep Doing It’ | Common Dreams
“Princeton University, like most universities around the country, is wildly overreacting from its surveillance of student activists to its rush to criminalize the most tepid forms of dissent. This will only fuel the fires of protest. These universities are frightened, not ultimately by the students, but by the clear moral issues these students raise that expose the moral bankruptcy and complicity in mass murder by all of our leading institutions. What these institutions and those who run them have failed to realize is that there is nothing they can do now. They have been exposed for who and what they are.”
Source: Princeton U. Police Stop Chris Hedges’ Speech on Gaza
The United Nations’ human rights chief on Tuesday called for an international investigation into mass graves discovered at two Gaza hospitals that Israeli forces recently assailed and destroyed, further imperilling the enclave’s barely functioning healthcare system.
OOPS! It’s a real bummer when these antisemites get in the way of Israeli bullets
An aid worker who was part of Belgium’s development aid efforts in the Gaza Strip has died in an Israeli strike, the Belgian government says, adding it is summoning the Israeli ambassador over the incident.
Source: Israeli Gaza strike kills Belgian aid worker: Minister
“The US has played a significant role in this rightward shift by ensuring Israel’s impunity for relentless illegal settlement building, thereby undercutting those within Israeli politics who warned of the consequences of unfettered expansionism,” Rahman said. “This demonstrated to the Israeli public there would be no penalty for supporting those in Israel who want all the land ‘between the river and the sea’.”
Source: Are settler politics running unchecked in Israel? | Israel War on Gaza News | Al Jazeera
Source: US Dodges Growing Calls for Probe of Mass Graves at Gaza Hospitals | Common Dreams
Apologists for Israel’s total war on the innocent civilians of Gaza, blinded by their ethno-nationalism, may attempt to maintain that these universities were part and parcel of the Hamas government that has ruled Gaza since 2006. This allegation, however, is laughable. Hamas military cadres only come to 37,000 persons by Israel’s own reckoning. None of them were undergraduates or professors of literature.
Backers of Israel’s war have lost the battle for hearts and minds, so they’ve ginned up a controversy over student protests — they want us talking about anything other than the genocide in Gaza.
Thousands of Jewish Americans and allies gathered in Brooklyn on Tuesday for a “Seder in the Streets to Stop Arming Israel” on the second night of Passover, held just a block from the home of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, to protest ongoing U.S. support for the Israeli assault on Gaza. “Too many of our people are worshiping a false idol,” said award-winning author and activist Naomi Klein, one of several speakers at Tuesday’s rally. “They are enraptured by it. They are drunk on it. They are profaned by it. And that false idol is called Zionism.”
Hundreds of protesters were arrested in Brooklyn on Tuesday when Jewish New Yorkers and allies gathered for what they called a “Seder in the Streets to Stop Arming Israel” on the second night of Passover. The demonstration, held one block away from the home of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, came just hours before the Senate overwhelmingly approved a $95 billion foreign aid package that includes about $17 billion in arms and security funding to Israel. “At the core of the Passover story is that we cannot be free until all people are free,” Beth Miller, the political director of Jewish Voice for Peace, told Democracy Now! “The Israeli government and the United States government are carrying out a genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, over 34,000 people killed in six months in the name of Jewish safety, in the false name of Jewish freedom.”
to end U.S. complicity with these grave errors that are visible throughout the world as violations of international law. This can be achieved, without abandoning Israel, by placing our promised aid to our longtime ally in an escrow account. On behalf of the majority of Americans, we ask U.S. Senators to consider this option before continuing to approve military aid for Israel.
Since 1948, Israel has invoked the Holocaust to justify the forced expulsion of Arabs from Palestine to create a Jewish state, but the systematic blueprint for ethnic cleansing was being drawn up years earlier by a Zionist zealot named Yosef Weitz.
While the world’s influential governments are allowing Israel to carry on with its genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza, the same governments are turning a blind eye to Zionist colonization and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in the West Bank. Alas the Palestine Authority of Mahmoud Abbas and all the Palestinian factions in the West Bank are spectators, watching as if they are neutral without even attempting to organize an effective non-violent campaign to boycott Israeli products. If things continue as they are now, it is only a matter of time before the West Bank will face an ethnic cleansing similar to what happened in the 1948 Nakbah.
A mass grave created by the IDF has been uncovered at a Gaza hospital, where Palestinian civilians appear to have been the victims of a gruesome massacre.
United Nations rights chief Volker Turk is “horrified” by the destruction of the Nasser and Al Shifa medical facilities in Gaza and reports of mass graves containing hundreds of bodies there, a spokesman says.
Source: UN rights chief ‘horrified’ by Gaza mass grave reports
The media misrepresents the united front of protesters as being antisemitic when it’s fundamentally not. Mass graves are less critical than amplifying the feelings of some pro-Israel supporters.
The Guardian reported that “hundreds of members of the teaching cohort at Columbia walked out in solidarity with the students who were arrested” while “students put protest tents back up in the middle of campus on Monday after they were torn down last week when more than 100 arrests were made.”
Yonah Lieberman, co-founder of IfNotNow, a Jewish-led U.S. group that organizes against Israel’s apartheid, declared: “Solidarity with these faculty members. Shame on establishment politicians and agitators who are smearing the anti-war protest at Columbia as anything other than what it is: a courageous stand for freedom and peace.”
Source: Columbia Faculty Walk Out Over Student Suspensions, Arrest for Gaza Protests – ScheerPost
They are looking for a repeat Kent State to distract from Gaza. Waving the false flag of antisemitism. Antisemitism was specifically German, and this isn’t WW2 Zionists joined the Nazi government in WW2, and they wanted autocratic repression from the top down in America too.
The legal landscape has shifted considerably since Trump last occupied the White House: states have many more tools to go after protesters, and, as the Cop City arrests indicate, Republican officials are increasingly willing to deploy existing laws in new ways to conduct sweeping arrests of activists.
The day after I spoke to Tema Okun, who has been an activist with progressive Jewish organizations for 20 years, she emailed to say she felt she had understated the threat posed in this moment. She wanted to try again.
As more and more laws are proposed and passed to “criminaliz[e] dissent, and as we face a possible presidency by a man who admires Putin and expresses his penchant for dictatorship,” Okun writes, “we are skating closer and closer to authoritarianism.” Basic freedoms, once enshrined in the Constitution, are now at risk of being eliminated. “Congress shaves off more and more rights piecemeal until we find we are unable to speak aloud our criticisms of government policies and practices. We slowly become a police state.”
Political repression is on the rise as the state finds new ways to criminalize dissent and collective action.
Source: The War on Protest – ScheerPost
U.S. law prohibits “arms transfers that risk facilitating or otherwise contributing to violations of human rights or international humanitarian law,” according to a White House memo issued in February.
The U.S. State Department has said repeatedly that it has not found Israel to be in violation of international law, a position that runs directly counter to the findings of leading humanitarian organizations and United Nations experts.
Source: IDF Kills 18 Kids Hours After House Votes Billions to Israel
Unless a ceasefire is called, it appears certain that Gaza’s hospitals and medical workers will be subjected to further attacks, that disease will spread and that more people will die from conditions that are both preventable and curable.
Source: No protection from illness in Gaza | The Electronic Intifada
$26 B Israel aid, $14.5 B Military $11.5 B free to do as they want Vs Gaza and Bidn threatening nonsense
The blanket suspension of student protesters casts “serious doubt on the University’s respect for the rule-of-law values that we teach,” 54 law professors wrote.
Source: Columbia Law School Faculty Condemn Administration for Mass Arrests
Israel has yet to provide evidence for its accusations that hundreds of staff with the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) are members of terrorist groups, according to a review of the agency’s neutrality that could prompt some donor countries to review funding freezes.
UNRWA provides education, health and aid to millions of Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. The review said UNRWA shares staff lists annually with the Palestinian Authority, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria.
On Monday, the review said Israel had not raised any concerns with UNRWA, based on those staff lists, since 2011. Then in March 2024, “Israel made public claims that a significant number of UNRWA employees are members of terrorist organisations.”
“Israeli authorities have to date not provided any supporting evidence nor responded to letters from UNRWA in March, and again in April, requesting the names and supporting evidence that would enable UNRWA to open an investigation.”
The groups are the Swedish Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law, the Norwegian Chr Michelsen Institute, and the Danish Institute for Human Rights.
Source: ‘Obvious Evidence of Genocide’: Mass Grave Discovered in Gaza’s Nasser Hospital | Common Dreams
Israel leads the Right-wing push against Refugeeism. Yet can’t exist without American aid
This is a time of seismic change in the Middle East. At the heart of this region, the United Nations Agency for Palestine Refugees – UNRWA – is a stabilising force. Today, an insidious campaign to end UNRWA’s operations is underway, with serious implications for international peace and security, says Philippe Lazzarini.
Source: Under UN Charter, Iran’s Attack Was a Legal Response to Israel’s Illegal Attack – ScheerPost
Take Gaza, for instance. Its once-fertile farmland now lies barren, its water sources poisoned by conflict and neglect. The grim statistics speak volumes: 97 percent of Gaza’s water is unfit for human consumption, leading to a staggering 26 percent of illnesses, particularly among vulnerable children.
Israel’s decades-long colonial settler project and ethnic cleansing of Palestine have caused irrefutable damage to the land, air and water, consequently contributing to the climate crisis.
In fact, in the first two months of the current genocide campaign in Gaza, Israel’s murderous bombardment, which has killed nearly 35,000 people, has also generated more planet-warming emissions than the annual carbon footprint of the world’s top 20 climate-vulnerable nations.
Source: War & Genocide on Earth Day
The US House of Representatives voted $26 billion for Israel on Saturday to reward it for its ongoing war crimes against Palestinians. Some 58 members voted against the measure, including 37 Democrats. It was the House of Representatives’ most decisive vote of confidence in genocide since the Indian Removal Act of 1830.
The US national debt is $34.5 trillion, up $2 trillion since last summer, against a gross domestic product of $27 trillion. For the debt to run so far ahead of GDP could cause the US economy to crash. That is, the US Congress does not have $26 billion to give to Israel in the first place.
The silencing of pro-Palestine voices is not a matter of over-sensitivity or hurt feelings, but rather a concerted effort by the establishment and the right wing to suppress dissent and maintain the status quo on Israel-Palestine. By exploiting accusations of anti-Semitism and the language used by marginalised groups to defend themselves against social injustices, they seek to censor and de-platform those who challenge Israel and advocate for Palestinian rights. It is our responsibility to resist this silencing, stand up for free speech and amplify the voices of those who are being suppressed.
Source: The Irony: Israel’s Supporters use “anti-Woke” Playbook to censor Palestinian Voices
The destruction of Gaza proves the entire mainstream western worldview is bullshit, because if the mainstream western worldview was accurate, the destruction of Gaza would not be happening.
Source: If the mainstream worldview was accurate, Gaza wouldn’t be burning – Pearls and Irritations
Remember when the US paid and supported Saddam & Osama and they turned on them just like Netanyahu is doing now, except Biden keeps paying
Netanyahu (that’s the name of the guy above) is a bit of crook, rather corrupt, rather pompous and proud of it, and one who likes to throw his weight around. Did we really need more guys like that? Didn’t we have plenty of assholes right here at home.
do MSM and assorted other piss ant Saudi sheiks and princes who gave that $2 billion to Jared Kushner think that squares them with us on all the money and help they gave Osama bin Laden to help him and his thugs as they were about to strike the Great Satan more than two decades ago? Two billion to that slimy little crook is a drop in the bucket for what that terrorist episode cost us, not only on the day the towers came down, but every damn day since, from the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan right up to now.
Source: With Friends Like These, Do We Need Enemies? Questions for a Sunday | The Smirking Chimp
Now in Egypt, no matter how hard I try to immerse myself in my new life, the memories of my past in Gaza remain raw. The specter of the past six months of war haunts me relentlessly, reminding me of the family I left behind to face the perils of war. The thought of my friends and loved ones brings crippling guilt. I am terrified every time news comes in of a bombing in Gaza. I rush to check on my family, but they cannot always call because of the lack of electricity, and so sometimes I wait hours, even days, for their reply. Physically, I have survived. But emotionally, I am still trapped in the war.
“Workers have recovered 180 bodies so far from a mass grave found after Israeli forces withdrew from the Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis.”
Mass graves containing Palestinian bodies found in multiple Gaza locations; released Gazan prisoners report abuse by Israeli forces; humanitarians face “hostile” environment, Israel breaking promise to increase aid; “unprecedented” levels of contamination in northern Gaza; Israel announces tents to be built ahead of attack on Rafah; Israel obstructing UN probe, Israelis obstructing aid; Israel and Iran violated int’l law; West Bank deaths as Israeli settlers and military team up, more
Source: Mass Graves In Gaza Reveal Mass Executions | – IMEMC News
Israel’s ‘war’ on Gaza, which has deep roots not only in the European colonial past but in religious mythology and a Zionist ideology that is rigid, chauvinistic and exclusive. All three factors underscore the belief that Jews alone have a right to historic Palestine.
From street protests to the vote uncommitted movement to Aaron Bushnell’s tragic self-immolation, millions of Americans have been voicing outrage over Israel’s assault on Gaza. Government unresponsiveness threatens to worsen our epidemic of political despair.
Source: Americans Are Outraged About the War on Gaza. Will Elites Listen?
But this, in fact, is what actual war looks like these days: Sometimes it’s a volley of 300 missiles and drones, and sometimes it is lean, targeted, and carried out covertly. Gone are the days of vast conquering armies and conventional military confrontations between two parties. So long as experts, the government, and the media worry only about a kind of war that is obsolete, it cannot see the war right in front of our faces.
Source: Israel Attack on Iran Is What World War III Looks Like
Even as the Biden administration vetoes Palestinian statehood, several European states are moving toward full recognition. Their dissent is a welcome crack in the West’s pro-Israel line — but they should back it up with sanctions to punish Israeli apartheid.
Source: Recognize Palestine — and Impose Sanctions on Israel
the ball may now be in the court of the General Assembly, and the International Court of Justice, the advisory opinion of which may greatly strengthen the case against the US/Israeli entity: refer in this regard to my earlier article: International law and Israel’s occupation: Understanding the ICJ advisory opinion case, March 7. What is clearly required is for Palestine to be welcomed as a UN member state, thereby implementing the two-state solution, and leading to peace, justice, and security for both Israel and Palestine.
One can only hope that this negative development will not deter the Australian government from carrying through with its recently expressed consideration of recognition of Palestine as an independent act by Australia.
While Israel tries to focus on the campus “torture of Jews” the real torture goes on behind the mainstream media print
Israel is abusing UNRWA employees detained in Gaza in order to extract forced confessions against the agency, with detainees describing being subjected to acts of torture.
Source: Israel subjects UN workers to torture | The Electronic Intifada
olddogthoughts 