A man mourns as he holds the wrapped body of a Palestinian child who was killed overnight by Israeli bombing at a hospital in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on December 19, 2023.
When the dust of the war on Gaza settles, it will sit on our global conscience for generations to come.
Source: Opinion | 2023: The Year Humanity Died | Common Dreams
Following Hamas’ October 7 attacks on Israel that caused more than 1,200 fatalities, there was a barrage of injunctions from Western mainstream media, politicians, and pundits insisting that anybody wishing to express an opinion on the events and the ensuing Israeli war crimes and genocide in Gaza, first denounce Hamas before expressing any other view. The failure to explicitly do so or any attempt to put events in their historical context or emphasise the root causes of the conflict were interpreted as condoning Hamas’s actions (that the speaker was a Hamas sympathiser) and conflated with antisemitism.
By what standard of morality can the violence used by a slave to break his chains be considered the same as the violence of a slave master? — Walter Rodney
Source: The false equivalence of the colonised and coloniser – Pearls and Irritations
Al-Shabaka spoke with Layla Kattermann of the European Legal Support Center (ELSC) and Diala Shamas of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) for further insight on this suppression of mobilization. Together, they detail some of the intimidation tactics and punitive actions taken by governments across North America and Europe and offer concrete advice for how to resist such efforts to stifle Palestine solidarity.
Source: Palestine Solidarity Crackdown: Challenges in the US and Europe
Ceasefire now. End the occupation. And never forget the people who were killed for giving us a glimpse of the truth.
Source: Over 100 Journalists Killed in Less Than Three Months – CounterPunch.org
Israel like Germany should no longer be allowed a voice in their fascist demand to rid Palestinians of their homeland.” Voluntary migration” at the point of a gun is not just an Oxymoron but a crime against humanity. Netanyahu’s rapist lies have been” I’ll put it in a little bit if it hurts I’ll take it out” and ” I’m only defending Israel against Hamas” “All Palestinians even babies are Hamas therefore…..” “From the river to the sea is Jewish”
The Foreign Ministry said that the Israeli prime minister’s push for what he terms “voluntary migration” shows that ethnic cleansing of the besieged enclave is the real goal of the ongoing bombing and ground invasion.
governments in the Middle East, Europe, and the U.S. have rejected any plans to transfer the population of Gaza to another country, according to Middle East Eye. Both Egypt and Jordan have refused to accept large numbers of Gazan refugees, wanting to avoid a repetition of the first Nakba, in which Israel forced more than 700,000 Palestinians from their homes in 1948.
Netanyahu admits he’s pushing for the expulsion of Gaza’s population under the label “voluntary migration” “Voluntary” as in leave Gaza or die by starvation, airstrikes, diseases, bullets or under an IDF bulldozer! Israel destroyed 2/3 of all buildings in Gaza’s northern half
Source: Palestinians Say Netanyahu ‘Confessions’ Reveal Truth of ‘Genocidal War’ in Gaza
The extremist, fascist government of Binyamin Netanyahu continues to press its monstrous, illegal and most of all completely implausible plan to push the 2.2 million Palestinians of Gaza out of the Strip into Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula or into other Arab countries. Netanyahu also pledged to continue the high-intensity campaign against the people of Gaza.
Netanyahu’s plans to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians of Gaza, which have been echoed by many other Israeli politicians, including cabinet members, aren’t just plans to commit crimes against humanity. They are also highly implausible fantasies. The hard line, fascist government that Netanyahu has cobbled together dreams big, but just isn’t that powerful in the real world, and nor does the Biden administration want to see the Palestinians ethnically cleansed. Though, if it somehow did happen, no doubt Washington would put lipstick on that pig for Israel’s sake, as well.
Source: Netanyahu Advocates Ethnically Cleansing Palestinians of Gaza: Believe him the First Time
Word of the proposal came as Israeli airstrikes heavily pounded central and southern Gaza.
Israel and Hamas on Monday gave cool public receptions to an Egyptian proposal to end their bitter war. But the longstanding enemies stopped short of rejecting the plan altogether, raising the possibility of a new round of diplomacy to halt a devastating Israeli offensive in the Gaza Strip.
The Egyptian plan calls for a phased hostage release and the formation of a Palestinian government of experts to administer the Gaza Strip and occupied West Bank, according to a senior Egyptian official and a European diplomat familiar with the proposal.
The schism of the Reformation was never healed, but people in the two spiritual traditions can agree on one thing, which is that the hunger, thirst, cold, homelessness, wounds and death stalking the 2.2 million Palestinians of Gaza at the hands of the extreme right wing government of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, aided by President Joe Biden, makes this Christmas different.
Source: Pope and Pastor: “Prince of Peace rejected by the futile Logic of War;” “Christ in the Rubble”
![Archbishop Alexios of Tiberias visits Saint Porphyrius Orthodox church in Gaza City, which was severely damaged in an Israeli airstrike on Thursday. At least 18 people were killed [Abdelhakim Abu Riash/Al Jazeera]](https://olddogthoughts.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/5q8b1910-copy-1697811869.jpg?w=845)
Since October 7, Israel and its allies have tried to put the war in Gaza within the “war on terror” framework, actively comparing Hamas to ISIS. Many who instinctively equate Palestinians with Muslims have indeed fallen for this false narrative.
But the brutal war Israel has waged on Gaza has not targeted “only terrorists” as it has claimed. Instead, it has massacred Palestinian Muslims as well as Palestinian Christians in what legal scholars agree amounts to genocide.
The Christian community in Gaza has lost at least 21 members so far. This may sound like a small number, but given they were only 1,000 before the war, these massacres threaten to eliminate the Christian presence in the strip for the first time in almost 2,000 years. Proportionally speaking, the death rate of Palestinian Christians is double that of the entire Palestinian population in Gaza.
And yet, the leaders of Christian-majority countries in the West have remained shockingly silent on the plight of Palestinian Christians. United States President Joe Biden, a devout Catholic, has said and done nothing to protect fellow Catholics in Gaza, who have also been targeted by the Israeli army.
This falls in line with decades of unwavering Western Christian support for the racist Israeli state, which has threatened the Christian presence in the holy lands for decades.
Source: Why does the Christian West ignore Palestinian Christians’ plight? | Opinions | Al Jazeera
Sorry to those weary. But the horror in Gaza churns on, and we can’t look away. Israel’s emblematic killing of three of their own – pleading in Hebrew – is one awful sliver. Add killing 109 members of one extended family, a mother and daughter in a Catholic church, a 12-year-old being treated for an amputated leg; hospitals already a “bloodbath” stormed, bombed, its medical staff detained; hunger, hubris, lies; broken children pulling friends from rubble, and “human cruelties (too) intolerable to utter aloud.”
“There is nowhere for flesh to hide in Gaza; nothing with a pulse is spared,” writes one appalled observer. “Explosions merge into one another, and vibrant lives are burned, mangled and turned into unidentifiable carnage.” In this “war against defenseless civilians” whose death toll now creeps up to 20,000 – now 19,667, 70% women and children – it was perhaps foreseeable Israeli soldiers would eventually kill three captives “mistakenly identified as a threat.” What made it shocking was the revelation that Yotam Haim, Samar Al Talalka and Alon Shamriz, men in their 20s from Kibbutz Kfar Azza and Hura, were deliberately shirtless to show they were unarmed, shouting “Help us”
Source: Further | They Deem Us Weeds: This Is What It Means To Be Unspeakable | Opinion
On December 10, 2023, Spain, the only Western nation with the moral fortitude to express its outrage at the Gaza carnage, held a solidarity event in the Basque city of Guernica’s market square, the same square that was bombed by the Nazis and Fascist forces way back in 1937. An aerial view depicts a massive Palestinian flag (the size of the entire square) in mosaic form the tesserae of which were held by citizens, trade unionists, artists, anti-war and anti-fascist groups, along with a large depiction of Picasso’s image depicting the mother, her child in her arms, crying to the high heavens.
And for a whole minute the sirens blazed in solidarity with Gaza’s mothers and children.
Viva Espana. Viva Palestina.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to keep up the fight against Hamas militants while Palestinians have mourned more than 100 people who Gaza health officials say were killed in Israeli airstrikes.
That brings us to the myriad reports in the global and local media about Israeli weapons finding their way to entities that are “controversial”, to put it mildly. For example, reports about Israeli surveillance technologies being used by the government of South Sudan against its citizens; Israeli weapons used by the government in Myanmar in its violent persecution of the Rohingya minority; and Israeli guns used in the killing of thousands of civilians in the Philippines.
Source: Does Israel do enough to control its arms sales? – Globes
A Washington Post investigation found Israel’s evidence “falls short” of showing that Hamas used the facility as a command center.
Source: No, Gaza’s al-Shifa Hospital was not a Hamas Command Center; Biden endorsed an Israeli Lie
“This war must end,” said the head of the United Nations agency where one of the victims worked. “No more families should endure the pain and suffering that Issam’s family and countless others are experiencing.”
Source: Israeli Airstrikes Kill 76 Members of One Gaza Family
Euro-Med Monitor said 1,049 elderly men and women have been killed by Israeli forces in Gaza since October 7.
Source: Dozens of Elderly Gazans ‘Executed’ by Israeli Troops: Monitor
In reaction to the UN Security Council’s passing of a watered-down resolution instead of calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, Oxfam Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa, Sally Abi-Khalil said: “The failure to call for a ceasefire after five days of deliberate delays and dilutions of the resolution is incomprehensible, and utterly…
“How can we be the criminals when the perpetrators of… [what] we now know is a genocide … are free to profit and we have to spend weeks and weeks in court for an action that we took three years ago?,” asked Nicola Stickells, a mother of two who was raised in a working class family in the English county of Kent.
Many allegations against the Elbit Eight have been rejected by a jury in a London trial.
Source: Court victory for activists who disrupted Israel’s weapons trade | The Electronic Intifada
Indeed, it is terrorism. It is terrorism against Palestinians, and some of the most vulnerable Palestinians are the minority Christian population now besieged in the few churches in Gaza.
Israel is targeting this small population of Christians and they’re doing it at Christmas.
The Israeli military is bombing churches, destroying Christian community centers, and sending snipers to shoot Christian women to death while the world watches, all part of the ninth stage of genocide: Extermination.
How many Christians will be left when Israel is done?
Churches, church hospitals and cultural centers have all been targeted endangering the existence of one of the world’s oldest Christian communities.
Source: Gaza facing a Christmas genocide | The Electronic Intifada
The Rabbi’s rats
The victimisation by Israel of Palestinian children is so profound that Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkain, a Hebrew University of Jerusalem law professor, has described it as “Unchilding,” that is, in order to “eliminate the next generation of Palestinians, Israel treats Palestinian children as both nobodies who are unworthy of global children’s rights and as dangerous and killable bodies needing to be caged and dismembered, physically and mentally”.
“While over 90 per cent of people in Gaza cannot find their next meal, some UN Security Council member states are still toying with words rather than voting for a ceasefire.
World’s West leaders wallow in ignorance presented as wisdom
The problem is that Wallace places great significance on Hamas’s original 1988 charterOpens in a new tab, which is explicitly antisemitic and rejects any coexistence with Israel. But he doesn’t appear to know Hamas issued a new charterOpens in a new tab in 2017. In it, Hamas affirms that its “conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion.” And, while the revised charter rejects the legitimacy of Zionism, it accepts “the establishment of a fully sovereign and independent Palestinian state, with Jerusalem as its capital along the lines of the 4th of June 1967, with the return of the refugees and the displaced to their homes from which they were expelled, to be a formula of national consensus.” This reference to the lines of June 4, 1967 — before Israel captured the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the Six-Day War — is regarded as accepting the existence of Israel within the borders it had at that time.
Source: How a Top U.K. Official Displays the Terrifying Ignorance of the World’s Leaders on Gaza
Biden votes to let the killing go on
“Biden’s changes will help ensure that Israel’s slaughter in Gaza continues while minimizing the U.N.’s insight into what increasingly appears to be a genocide.”
Source: ‘Disgraceful’: US Abstains After Watering Down UN Gaza Resolution
One is only humiliated if he or she internalizes that humiliation as a sense of shame and disempowerment. But Palestinians, this time around, are experiencing no such feelings. To the contrary, their ongoing sumud, and unity, have generated a sense of collective pride unequaled in history.
The perils of urban warfare, coupled with operational issues within the army, appear to be hobbling Israel’s advance.
Israel two two-week war against Hamas turned out to be an embarrassing split between Netanyahu and the IDF. How could these two possibly pretend to be capable of another front, Lebanon?
At the same time, Austin flew to Israel and began pressuring Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to change his military strategy. Otherwise, Israel faces a “strategic defeat.” This is not the first time that Washington has signaled to Israel that it is fed up with what is happening in Palestine. Indeed, the bombing of civilians in Gaza is seriously damaging to the image of Israel, the US, and the EU. The West’s collective lack of response to the thousands of Palestinian children killed is morally bankrupting Europe and America, exposing the West’s double standards and undermining all its efforts to demonize Russia in Ukraine.
Source: Is Israel ready to start a second war? — RT World News
But by the time Israel achieves its decimation of Gaza — Israel is talking about months of warfare — it will have signed its own death sentence. Its facade of civility, its supposed vaunted respect for the rule of law and democracy, its mythical story of the courageous Israeli military and miraculous birth of the Jewish nation, will lie in ash heaps. Israel’s social capital will be spent. It will be revealed as an ugly, repressive, hate-filled apartheid regime, alienating younger generations of American Jews. Its patron, the United States, as new generations come into power, will distance itself from Israel the way it is distancing itself from Ukraine. Its popular support, already eroded in the U.S., will come from America’s Christianised fascists who see Israel’s domination of ancient Biblical land as a harbinger of the Second Coming and in its subjugation of Arabs a kindred racism and white supremacy.
Israel admits to “Mowing the Grass” breaking the cease-fire by crossing borders and killing anyone in their way. After, their publicity machines blame Hamas and their Palestinians victims for their carnage. Years later investigative reports proved Israel was the peace breaker.
Israel has aggressively and illegally occupied the West Bank running it as an Apartheid State. Currently, they’re even advertising beachfront homes for sale in Gaza. The land is free, and the construction subsidized the process the same as the West Bank, why? They need an influx of 2M Jews to immigrate and colonize Palestine to become and be the Jewish majority. Meanwhile, they intend to continue to further dispossess, depopulate, and shrink the areas as they have always intended to invade like cockroaches since 1948
Israel created Hamas. There was no Hamas, per se, until the Israelis took land from established Palestinian landowners and then constructed walls to keep them out. The UN has decreed that this land theft is illegal, but Israel persisted and Hamas was born.
Source: Israel war a display of hypocrisy and de facto terrorism
That’s us. That’s western civilization. We say we value freedom, justice, truth, peace and free expression, but our actions paint a very different picture. The real western values, the actual product inside the box underneath the attractive label, are the ones you see acted out in Gaza today.
Source: The atrocities in Gaza are the perfect embodiment of ‘Western Values’ – Pearls and Irritations
As Israel excels in massacring civilians and destroying Gaza’s infrastructure, its ground offensive against Hamas is becoming a quagmire.
Source: Industrial Killing of Civilians in Gaza Won’t Defeat the Armed Insurgency
The U.S. government provides support for Israel in its war against Hamas in Gaza in retaliation for Hamas’s costly and cruel attack on October 7.
Source: US Military May be Endorsing Harsh Israeli Plan for Gaza Occupation – CounterPunch.org
Also listed as an attendee is Adam Goldstein, managing director at Harvard Management Company, which helps oversee Harvard University’s over $50 billion endowment — the largest on Earth. The endowment investment fund has been accused in the past of investing nearly $200 million in companies that profit off Israel’s illegal settlements in the occupied Palestinian West Bank. (The Harvard Management Company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
Source: Investors, Business Execs on “Tech Mission” Solidarity Trip to Israel
“The IDF (Israel Defense Forces) is continuing to operate against Hamas terrorist infrastructure and operatives in the Gaza Strip,” the Israeli military said in a statement.
The Gaza health ministry said on Monday that 19,453 Palestinians had been killed and 52,286 wounded since October 7.
“There is no food, no water, no medicine and no hospitals to take the wounded and patients too. People die in their homes and in the streets,” he added.
Source: Israel pounds Gaza, as Houthis vow more Red Sea attacks
How else is genocide defined?
Evidence Indicates Civilians Deliberately Denied Access to Food, Water
The Israeli government is using starvation of civilians
The Israeli army has, however, gone on to damage or decommission most of the hospitals in Gaza, with no further comment on American cable news.
There is no military justification for the Israeli military campaign against the hospitals, which is apparently the army’s only real success on the battlefield to date. The Israeli government party line that the hospitals are terror command centers has become wholly implausible and is clearly just a cover story. It is amazing what you can get apparently hard-boiled cynical American journalists to believe without a scintilla of evidence.
Source: Bloodbath: Israel’s War on Gaza’s Hospitals and their Patients
From the rate and scale of civilian slaughter to the killing of protected groups and the type of munitions, Israel’s war on Gaza is an exceptionally brutal campaign unlike almost anything we’ve seen.
Source: Israel’s Assault on Gaza Is Unlike Any War in Recent Memory
The world once made Palestine pay for the crimes against Europe’s Jews. The holocaust played heavily on their minds. Now the world should not be made to pay for the crimes Israel’s Zionists have foisted on the Palestinians and have done since 1948 and their consistent “mowing of the grass”
The chief political obstacle is that Israelis won’t want Gazans within Israel itself. And for good reason. A recent a survey by a respected Palestinian polling institute found that almost 75% of Palestinians believe that the October 7 attack by Hamas on Israel was correct. The same survey also found that the Gaza war has lifted support for the Islamist group both in Gaza and the West Bank.
Moreover, an earlier opinion poll conducted by the Israel Democracy Institute and Tel Aviv University’s Peace Index found that more than 60% of Israelis believe that the military operation in Gaza should continue until Hamas is completely defeated. Only 10% said they would support a pause in fighting. Israeli opinion is more hawkish than ever.
Source: How to stop a Gaza apocalypse – Pearls and Irritations
With Australia joining other nations in favour of a Gaza ceasefire, it’s time to put more pressure on our leaders to take further action in ending Palestinian suffering, writes Tom Tanuki.
Netanyahu believed that this would save him instead he’s sunk Israel in the process.
Hamas is the excuse for the Israeli attack on Gaza. It is not the reason.
The real Israeli objective in Gaza is to drive out the population and destroy infrastructure as part of a long term plan to expel Palestinians in Gaza and elsewhere.
This settler colonisation has been ongoing since 1948, starting with the Nakba. In Australia we are very familiar with settler colonisation – driving out the original inhabitants.
In 1948 Palestinians owned 94% of all land; now Israelis own 82%. These figures tell the real story.
Source: Hamas, Gaza and the continuing Zionist project – Pearls and Irritations
Across the country, pro-Israel groups and billionaires are trying to stop the antiwar movement pushing for a cease-fire in Gaza by bringing down its elected leaders, including Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar. These are fights the Left can win with popular support.
Source: Pro-Israel Billionaires Are Spending Big to Oust Socialists From Office
The U.S. president’s refusal to heed the will of the people seems outdated at best, authoritarian at worst.
Source: Opinion | Biden Takes Political Risk by Ignoring Public Clamor for Gaza Cease-Fire | Common Dreams
We keep hearing the propaganda that Israelis are behind the war. We keep hearing it from the Israeli leadership down andd from the Israeli Lobby. Test the theory and open the gates to those Jews who want to leave Israel. That just might just be a road to peace. The witnessing of the decline of Israel.
The mistaken killing of three Israeli hostages by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) at the weekend has substantially increased pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to accept a ceasefire in the war against Hamas.
Source: Israeli Public Pressures Netanyahu for Ceasefire after Hostages Killed: But will He Say ‘No’?
Note the statement by Shulamit Aloni, a former Minister of Education and winner of the Israel Prize:
“It’s a trick. We always use it. When from Europe, somebody criticizes Israel, we bring up the Holocaust. When, in the United States, people are critical of Israel, then they are anti-Semitic.”
It works all too often. Americans are smeared, being suspended or losing their jobs, their careers, and their customers because they oppose the carnage in Gaza. It is a sign of the partisan censorship that incurring such penalties is not experienced by Americans exclaiming their full support for this genocidal obliteration of Gaza – a multiple war crime pointed out by both Jewish and non-Jewish international law scholars here and abroad.
Source: Israeli and American Jews Speak Out Against Horrors in Gaza – CounterPunch.org
The fact is we have seen throughout this war, the IDF shooting Israelis at a rock concert and destroying the houses and cars in which Jews sheltered. The IDF has killed everything in sight Women, Children, Patients, Journalists, UN staff and more importantly the Truth. The IDF has killed and covered up their murderous patterns of execution on the behest of their leaders and consequently has no credibility left even among Israelis. How many ex-generals have we seen speak up against their current atrocities?
Chief of General Staff LTG Herzi Halevi said the incident “could easily not have happened” while speaking to troops.
“If it’s two Gazans with a white flag coming out to surrender why would we shoot at them?” he said.
“Absolutely not. Absolutely not. That’s not the IDF.”
Every blunder amplifies Israel’s war crimes and destroys it’s credibility.
Critics of how Israel is prosecuting its war in Gaza also seized on the event, in which Israeli soldiers fatally shot three shirtless men who were waving a white flag, as an example of the military’s failure to live up to its promises to protect civilians.
Source: Friendly-fire killings of Israeli hostages may force Israel to alter Gaza strategy
An Israeli drone attack killed an Al Jazeera cameraman and injured the network’s bureau chief in the Gaza Strip on Friday.
Source: Al Jazeera cameraman Samer Abu Daqqa left to bleed to death for hours | The Electronic Intifada
The war on Gaza has been the deadliest for media workers ever recorded.
In the occupied West Bank, Israeli forces killed an unarmed 17-year-old boy inside the Khalil Suleiman Hospital. Médecins Sans Frontières, or Doctors Without Borders, also witnessed Israeli soldiers blocking medical workers in ambulances carrying discharged patients home. Drivers were forced to get out of their vehicles, strip down and kneel in the streets. MSF says it’s part of a pattern targeting healthcare workers in the West Bank since October 7, which also has included shooting live fire and tear gas at hospitals, blocking emergency vehicles, and humiliating and harassing medical staff.
Outside the hospital compound, Israeli soldiers desecrated a mosque in Jenin and read out Jewish prayers in the style of an Islamic call to prayer. This came as part of a three-day Israeli raid on the Jenin refugee camp which killed at least 12 Palestinians. Israeli forces arrested over 100 others.
Israeli forces reportedly drove bulldozers over hospital patients in tents and buried people alive. Palestinian officials are seeking an urgent probe into allegations of an IDF bulldozer attack on patients at the Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, killing some twenty people.
That’s one of those things where even after everything that’s happened you still look at it and go “I must be reading this wrong.” You’d be considered a monster if you killed livestock in that way.
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