PEN America may continue to exist, indeed its obsequiousness to governmental and corporate power will probably assure its funding, but it is a hollow brand used to justify the crimes and lies of the U.S. government and Israel.
Source: Chris Hedges: PEN America Self-Destructs – ScheerPost
The United Nations Human Rights Council on Monday published a draft report that found “reasonable grounds to believe” that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, a move that came on the same day as the U.N. Security Council passed a resolution demanding an immediate cease-fire in the ongoing war.
Source: Draft UN Report Finds Israel Has Met Threshold for Genocide
According to German government-funded media, Berlin “is one of the largest arms exporters to Israel” alongside the United States.
Source: Germany next up to face Gaza genocide charges in The Hague | The Electronic Intifada
Pleas for a common humanity include urgent, practical objectives:
Source: Moral cowardice hinders pleas for a Common Humanity in Gaza – Pearls and Irritations
The AJDS calls for the Australian Government to ban the importation of Israeli goods and services from the Occupied Territories and to cancel the contract for the purchase of $900million of Elbit systems for Hanwha Defence Australia because of the close connection between Elbit’s products and the war in Gaza and other action in the Occupied Territories. These actions would send a clear message to the Israeli government while not threatening its security.
Australia Shamed by Military Aid to Israel
Israel’s attacks on Palestinians aren’t only carried out through guns and bombs. They also come through its vice grip on agriculture, including its system of “water apartheid.” We spoke to a Palestinian farmer and union leader about his labor under occupation.
There’s a word for seeing — and saying — that Israel is engaged in large-scale crimes against humanity. And that word isn’t “antisemitism.” It’s realism.
“OUTRAGEOUS even after months of outrages,” declared Palestinian American political analyst Yousef Munayyer. “This video shows an Israeli military drone literally stalking four unarmed civilians posing no threat and eliminating them one after the other!!!”
Source: ‘Everyone in the World Needs to See This’: Footage Shows IDF Drone Killing Gazans – ScheerPost
Journalist Jeremy Loffredo goes inside the grassroots Israeli campaign to block desperately needed aid to the besieged Gaza Strip and elicits the shockingly candid views of the Jewish Israeli nationalists manning the barricades.
Gaza now resembles Berlin at the end of WW2. A bombed out ruin, littered with the decomposing bodies of innocent civilians, entombed in the rubble of their homes. The way is now cleared for Israel to take possession of all of Gaza. To forever banish the Palestinians from their traditional homeland. And the world watches on with little more than dispassionate interest. For Israel, founded by victims of the holocaust, how the worm has turned.
Source: Gaza is the holocaust reborn – Pearls and Irritations
Source: Gaza Humanitarian Worker: Biden Is on Board for Ethnic Cleansing
Focus Group Testing Strategies & Tactics to demonise Hamas
Luntz’s Gaza war presentation puts his poll-tested tactics back in the Israel lobby’s hands, urging pro-Israel public figures to stay on the attack with incendiary language and shocking allegations against their enemies.
“I saw scenes that were horrific and I never want to see again,” said Yasser Khan, a surgeon from Toronto.
Source: Intercepted: A Canadian Doctor on His Medical Mission to Gaza
United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has visited the Gaza border with Egypt, where he called the blocking of aid for the Gaza Strip a “moral outrage.”
The UN would continue to work with Egypt to “streamline” the flow of aid into Gaza, he told reporters in front of the gate of the Rafah crossing, an entry point for aid.
Source: ‘A moral outrage’: UN chief vents at Gaza border in ceasefire plea
I voted NO on the appropriations bill that the Senate passed last night. While hundreds of thousands of Palestinian children face starvation in Gaza, this bill actually prohibits funding to UNWRA, the key United Nations aid agency delivering life-saving humanitarian support. This will only intensify the already horrific situation in Gaza. This bill also provides another $3.3 billion in U.S. military aid for Netanyahu’s right-wing government to continue this barbaric war. The Netanyahu government should not receive another penny from U.S. taxpayers.
Source: Sanders: ‘The Netanyahu Gov’t Should Not Receive Another Penny from US’
This explains why Time Magazine gave Harvard law professor Noah Feldman space to write an analysis of anti-Semitism, which looks balanced and thoughtful but is yet more propaganda for the Israeli state and its actions. And why the article has attracted attention in cyberspace.
Source: The ‘New Anti-Semitism’
The truth of it has since been demonstrated a hundred times over. Israel has proven a failed experiment, incapable of conducting itself as a legitimate nation-state.
But whose mistake is Israel? It was the West, Britain in the lead, that created Israel by caving to the Zionists at the expense of indigenous Palestinians. This is the reality of power that should weigh most heavily on our shoulders. Israel ‘R’ us.
Britain’s abandonment of the 1920 Mandate brings us to one of the deeper characteristics of our time, our postwar edifice. This is the ever more complete disregard of those in power for the principles, standards and broadly accepted ethics that give form and coherence to a stable civilisation and keep its public space clean and well lit.
Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has declared 800 hectares (1,977 acres) in the occupied West Bank as state land, in a move that will facilitate the use of the ground for settlement building.
Israel has now killed more than 32.000 Palestinians, including about 9.000 women and 13.000 children, in addition to more than 10.000 who remain missing, buried under the rubble of bombarded homes and buildings, and injured more than 74.188, mostly children, since October 7, 2023. Among the slain Palestinians are 4.257 schoolchildren, 227 educators, and 112 journalists.
ِAl-Jazeera reported that the Israeli army also killed 685 medical workers, and injured 902, in addition to damaging 99 medical facilities, including 30 hospitals.
The army also destroyed 76 ambulances; only 9 out of 36 hospitals in the Gaza Strip are still open, although partially functioning, bombed, and lacking essential supplies.
More than %90 of the Gaza Strip population is now displaced, facing famine, diseases, deadly shortages of humanitarian supplies, and lacking access to clean water.
The Israeli army also bombed 154 UNRWA facilities, and destroyed 65.000 residential units, in addition to damaging more than 290.00.
Israel also destroyed 281 governmental schools and 65 UNRWA-run schools and damaged or destroyed %90 of governmental schools, educational facilities, and their various departments.
Source: Day 168: “Israel Kills Dozens In Gaza, Continues Shifa Hospital Invasion” | – IMEMC News
“The Israel lobby has sought to consolidate October 7th as something that towers even above Pearl Harbor, January 6th and 9/11 as a date that represents a new holocaust …They’ve done that in order to decontextualize the event and erase all the history that preceded it, which helps us understand why it took place,” Blumenthal tells Scheer.
Scheer and Blumenthal also detail how, through censorship, false reporting and other aspects of the information war, the stories of Palestinians continue to get lost and misrepresented, especially with the strength of Israeli propaganda.
“Zionism as applied in Palestine will always lead towards genocide. That’s the ultimate goal. They have to finish 1948. There’s no way to do it without genocide,” Blumenthal said.
Politics and AIPAC in 20 years
At a conference in Berlin about anti-semitism in 2004, then U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said the following: “It is not antisemitic to criticize the policies of the state of Israel.”
Nearly 20 years later, on Dec. 5, 2023 the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution by 311 to 14 votes equating criticism of Israel with anti-semitism.
The resolution says: “Resolved, That the House of Representatives … clearly and firmly states that anti-Zionism is antisemitism.”
Joe Biden has announced sanctions on Israeli settlers in Palestinian territory. But the sanctions themselves are toothless — a way to signal displeasure with the Israeli government without actually doing anything to change the situation.
Source: Biden’s Sanctions on Israeli Settlers Are Just for Show
It’s been almost two months since the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to stop killing Gazans and destroying their means of subsistence. So let’s look back and ask (1) how Israel has responded to its “orders,” and (2) how hard the Biden administration has pushed Israel to abide by those orders. Spoiler alert: the short answers are (1) not well and (2) not very.
Source: Armed by Washington, Israel Trashes the Genocide Convention – CounterPunch.org
Source: Eyewitnesses Report ‘Unlawful Killings’ by IDF as Raid on al-Shifa Hospital Continues
“We cannot see it as anything else but part of the genocidal campaign,” says Forensic Architecture director Eyal Weizman, who accuses Israel of using humanitarian principles as yet another weapon against Palestinians in Gaza. He says Israel’s objective is to “exercise pain on the civilian population” in order to deter “ongoing resistance to the Israeli occupation.”
The international human rights architecture is creaking under the weight of the hypocrisy of countries who profess support for a rules-based order yet continue to provide weapons to Israel that kill more innocent Palestinians. Above all, this is a war on human rights.
Source: There is no moral argument that justifies the sale of weapons to Israel | Mary Lawlor | The Guardian
Palestinian human rights lawyer Diana Buttu on Israel’s ongoing nakba and the fight for freedom from Gaza to the West Bank.
Source: Intercepted: “We Have to Start Thinking in Terms of Decolonization”
The Nakba that Palestinians with Israeli citizenship are facing may not be as violent and brutal as the one their brothers and sisters in Gaza and the West Bank are enduring. But its consequences and ultimate goal are the same: the complete elimination of Palestinian presence in historical Palestine.
Source: Palestinians in Israel also face a Nakba | Israel War on Gaza | Al Jazeera
It is remarked often enough, including in this space, that Israel’s savagery in its determination to exterminate the Palestinians of Gaza — and we had better brace for what is next on the West Bank of the Jordan — marks a turn for all of humanity.
In its descent into depravity the Zionist state drags the West altogether down with it.
Trump Heights already exists in the occupied Golan Heights make room for a Trump development in Gaza
Kushner, who served as a key Middle East adviser to Trump, said that Gaza’s “waterfront property could be very valuable” and urged Israel to “clean it up.”
“I know that that’s been refused, but [with] the right diplomacy I think it would be possible,” Kushner added. “But in addition to that, the thing that I would try to do if I was Israel right now is I would just bulldoze something in the Negev, I would try to move people in there. I know that won’t be the popular thing to do, but I think that that’s a better option to do so you can go in and finish the job.”
It’s been almost two months since the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to stop killing Gazans and destroying their means of subsistence. But Israel continues to flout the order with impunity — aided and abetted by the Biden administration.
This doesn’t typically happen as a result of any grand monolithic conspiracy; it’s mostly just the natural consequence of having all the major news platforms controlled by wealthy and powerful people who each have a vested interest in manufacturing consent for the status quo upon which their wealth and power are premised.
The oligarchs control the media, and they hire the executives who run the media, and the executives hire the editors who write the headlines and guide the reporters to report a certain way, and this gives rise to a system where everyone working for the outlet conducts themselves in a way that just so happens to suit the powerful people on top.
Then before you know it you’ve got editors at The New York Times — a paper that’s been published by the same family for over a century — packaging a story about starvation caused by an Israeli siege to look like it’s a story about an innocent crop failure.
Odds are nobody told them to do that; they just learned over the years that that’s how you rise to the top in an outlet like The New York Times.
We are Jewish Americans who have varying perspectives. We’ve agreed to come together to highlight and oppose the unprecedented and damaging role of AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) and allied groups in U.S. elections, especially within Democratic Party primaries. We recognize the purpose of AIPAC’s interventions in electoral politics is to defeat any critics of Israeli Government policy and to support candidates who vow unwavering loyalty to Israel, thereby ensuring the United States’ continuing support for all that Israel does, regardless of its violence and illegality.
Prominent right-wing media figures have spent months deploying antisemitic tropes and accusations to disparage liberal and anti-Zionist Jews who have questioned or opposed Israel’s military offensive in Gaza.
For any journalist, the headline should have written itself: “Israel accused of killing over 100 as crowd waits for Gaza aid.” Or: “Israel fires into food aid crowd. Hundreds killed and injured”
https://jonathancook.substack.com/p/listen-how-the-western-media-helped
Zionists the “revisionist muscle-minded Jews” have always fomented chaos, division and threat while waiting for a distracted world. Until the formation of Israel in 1948 they were terrorists. They guerillas conducting a war against both Britain and indigenous Palestinians. They knew the British Empire was decolonising and that the Palestinians would resist their invasion. But India, China and Korea were a bigger distraction. 1967 saw America busy with Vietnam so using their own “Bethlehem Directive” as an excuse they yelled “invasion” and attacked Egypt, Syria and Jordan conducting the 6-day war netting and illegally occupying and settling even more land.
Today it’s Ukraine and Russia that have enabled another perfect storm and an effort to complete more of what was always their intended plan Eretz Israel= The Greater Israel and Final Nakba. All they needed was 7/10 which Israeli intel knew was coming and did nothing about.
The collective despondency derives from various factors, including the lingering trauma of October 7, the soldiers who continue to be killed in Gaza, the hundreds of thousands of Israelis evacuated from the southern and northern regions, the precarious economic situation, and the hostages still held in captivity.
However, it also reflects a deep understanding among significant portions of the Jewish public of several things: that the war in Gaza is not going anywhere; that the total defeat of Hamas is not a realistic goal; that the belief that military force will release the hostages is hollow; and that mass population transfer of Palestinians is not possible, both because Palestinians will refuse to leave and because no one wants to take them in.
Source: The Israeli public is dispirited. So why is the right euphoric?
The International Court of Justice’s ruling to prevent genocide in Gaza has triggered cutoffs and legal challenges to military cooperation with Israel. Despite its many problems, international lawmaking is hurting Israel’s ability to wage brutal war.
the ICJ ruling has had notable real-world ripple effects on global military support for Israel’s war. This is true even if it still falls far short of what we would ideally expect to see in a world where international law truly reigned supreme.
Source: International Legal Rulings Are Helping Block Arms to Israel
AIPAC has played an important part in shifting Israel to the far right. By consistently promoting Likud’s policies, it has undermined moderate Israeli politicians. Imagine how different Israel might look if AIPAC — easily the biggest, wealthiest and most influential player in the Israel lobby — had advocated for limitations on illegal settlement expansion, thereby fostering a climate more conducive to peace and stability. Instead, Likudniks could rightly tell Israeli voters: We can maintain a harsh occupation, expand Jewish-only settlements, all while continuing to benefit from substantial American military, economic and diplomatic support.
Nevertheless, as is widely known, in view of the fact that the Israeli occupation of the OPT remains in place almost 57 years after it began, it appears that the Palestinian recognition of the partition plan may have turned out to be a Faustian bargain of sorts.
Source: Palestine Never Had a Chance for Statehood, Legally Speaking, an Expert Argues – ScheerPost
Undaunted, Netanyahu mocks international criticism for his actions. “Reports this week that Israel plans to build a further 3,476 settler homes in Maale Adumin, Efrat, and Kedar fly in the face of international law,” said in a statement Volker Türk, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights responding to the Israeli government latest settlement expansion plans.
Türk also said that Israel is violating the Fourth Geneva Convention by “effectively transferring civilian population of Israel to the occupied territory while displacing the Palestinian population from their land. Such transfers amount to a war crime that may engage the individual responsibility of those involved.”
Source: Netanyahu’s Law of Unintended Consequences – CounterPunch.org
There is nothing in recent memory that matches the scale of the atrocities being inflicted on the civilians of Gaza, who appear to be being punished for their very existence. Every report and image coming out of this tiny but densely populated piece of land brings despair, horror and incredulity, with the question “How can this be happening?” being uppermost.
His statement was not made lightly:
Source: Israel: a nation killing and starving children – Pearls and Irritations
U.S. officials say an Israeli military operation in Rafah would likely lead to a significant shift in U.S. policy — including an end to the defense of Israel at the United Nations and restrictions on the use of U.S. weapons by Israeli Defense Forces in Gaza.
Ever since it withdrew its settlements in 2005, Israel has periodically attacked Gaza. This shelling of locations throughout the narrow strip of land gave rise to the Israeli expression “mowing the lawn.” In other words, Israel was bombing Gaza regularly to “maintain order.”
Source: Dem Donors Warn Biden’s Support for Israeli War on Gaza May Hand Trump the White House
Piers allow things to come in. They allow things to go out. And Israel, which has no intention of halting its murderous siege of Gaza, including its policy of enforced starvation, appears to have found a solution to its problem of where to expel the 2.3 million Palestinians.
Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of former president and presumptive 2024 Republican nominee Donald Trump, said in a recent interview that if he were in charge of Israeli policy, he would push Gaza civilians into Egypt or Israel’s Negev desert—a proposal that critics denounced as ethnic cleansing.
Source: Trump Son-in-Law Jared Kushner Calls for Ethnic Cleansing of Gaza to ‘Finish the Job’
Israel’s war on Gaza is a war on children, a war on their childhood and a war on their future. Children are dying at an alarming rate from malnutrition and dehydration and doctors are no longer seeing normal-sized babies.
Source: A war on children: Gaza doctors no longer see normal-sized babies – Pearls and Irritations
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