The ICJ’s authoritative ruling on the Israeli occupation makes clear that boycotts, divestment, and sanctions against Israeli occupation, colonization, and apartheid are not only a moral imperative but also a legal obligation.
The ICJ finds that BDS is not merely a right, but an obligation
Israel prefers hardline leaders to maintain a monolithic view of the enemy. Its assassination in Tehran now forces the reformist Pezeshkian into a corner.
Politicians who irresponsibly appease Israel and its extremist lobby by conflating Judaism with Zionism are encouraging Israeli aggression, complicit with its crimes and do not serve Australia’s national interests or peace and stability in the Middle East.
What is Zionism? Who is responsible for Israel’s crimes, Jews or Zionists?
The term “Zionist lobby” would be better described as “pro-Israel lobby”. Israel is not a Jewish only state, even with its quite exclusionary 2018 Nation State law. Some 20% of its population is not Jewish. There are no mainstream organisations in the Australian Jewish community that advocate a Jewish only state.
Israel is arguably at its most precarious moment in national security since its founding, with the public’s confidence in both political and military leaders at an all-time low. The question is whether Israelis will start to openly challenge the working assumptions on which their security has been based for decades. If they fail, or are unable, to do so, they can only pray that the other key actors — the U.S. and Iran — find it sufficiently in their interests to pull us all back from the abyss.
More weapons transfers approved as Israel bombs Gaza and prepares for anticipated retaliatory strikes by Iran and Hezbollah.
US clears $20bn in arms sales for Israel as atrocities continue in Gaza
Since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel, legislators at the state and local level have led antisemitism-addressing legislation, including two Fine bills signed days before he raised this book-based concern. The measures authorize enhanced security outside Jewish day schools and adopt a definition of antisemitism that includes “[m]aking mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotypical allegations about Jewish individuals as such or the power of Jewish people as a collective, such as the myth of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy or of Jewish individuals controlling the media, economy, government, or other societal institutions.”
The declared intention is “to assist in the monitoring and reporting of anti-Semitic hate crimes and discrimination and to make residents aware of and to combat such incidents in this state.”
August 13, 2024
The U.S. has had a moral obligation to commemorate Nagasaki, but this year the U.S. refused to mark its murder of innocent Japanese by defending its murder of innocent Palestinians.
Popular accounts of Nazism often claim that Hitler rose to power democratically. But, historian Richard J. Evans argues, German fascism relied on armed militias, made up of disaffected veterans inspired by antisemitism, to crush communists and socialists.
Keating uttered the fundamental heresy long stomped on by the country’s political and intelligence establishment: Canberra could, if needed, go it alone. “Australia is capable of defending itself. There’s no way another state can invade a country like Australia with an armada of ships without it all failing.” Australia did not “need to be basically a pair of shoes hanging out of Americans’ backside.” With Keating’s savage rhetoric, and the possibility that AUKUS may collapse before the implosions of US domestic politics, improbable peace may break out.
We have been lied to for decades about the creation of Israel, writes Jonathan Cook. It was born in sin, and it continues to live in sin.
From 1933 to 1939, Hitler provided the future government of Israel with the assets of German Jews in exchange for aid undermining an international anti-Nazi boycott.
“An Indispensable Factor in the Creation of the State of Israel”
The collusion between Nazis and Zionists reached its apex in “the Transfer Agreement,” an arrangement between them that allowed the former to undermine an international boycott against German goods and the latter to access the assets of German Jews. The partnership between such ostensible enemies underscored the one point on which they both agreed: Jews had no future in Europe.
Proof positive Zionists put the Israeli nation-state over Jews themselves. German Jews at the center of were relatively non-Zionist, wealthy and assimilated into German society. While supportive of the voluntary migration to Palestine from places like Poland, a stronghold of Zionism they were much more likely to seek refuge in neighboring European countries. Even the Nazis acknowledged the fundamental disconnect between German Jews and Zionism. Estimated to be only 1 or 2 per cent of German Jews who considered themselves assimilated, loyal Germans.
Zionism was equally repugnant to orthodox German Jews, who spurned Jewish sovereignty in the Holy Land on religious grounds (e.g. that only the Jewish Messiah could reinstate the Kingdom of the Jews). In 1933, then, Zionism in Germany was a mere Jewish fringe movement. To even say that only 4% today don’t support Netanyahu is fiction as 20% of Israelis are Orthodox.
In 1933 Zionists were equally self-interested: If German Jews were going anywhere but Palestine, their $$$ could not be put toward building the Jewish state.
So, the Nazis and the Zionists were well-positioned to help each other. The Nazis could grant the Zionists access to the assets of those German Jews forcefully deported, and the Zionists could help the Nazis undermine the international boycott.
The negotiations suited both parties and included future prime ministers David Ben-Gurion, Levi Eshkol and Golda Meir: The assets of German Jews were liquidated kept and used to pay for German-made goods destined for Palestine. That agreement allowed the Nazis to continue expelling German Jews withholding their capital and using it instead to finance the import and export of German goods to Palestine, undermining the international boycott. For their part, the Zionists were able to establish an economic base for the future Israeli state. Had this not occurred on a large scale the Nazi government may have fallen by 1934,
Zionists prioritizing the Israeli nation-state over Jews goes on today. While Netanyahu and the rest of the Israeli government maintain that they are acting in the interests of Jews everywhere, they are in fact whipping up antisemitism their forever driving force to get Jews to flee to mother Israel. Even as anti-Zionist Jewish groups in the diaspora like Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow decry the daily Gazan massacres, and Israelis take to the streets to demand their government accept a cease-fire deal. While Netanyahu’s government continues to declare even more of the hostages in Gaza to be dead.
The Transfer Agreement: Nazi Support for a Jewish State in Palestine
While Israel’s war on Gaza has inflicted immeasurable suffering on Palestinians, its conflict with Hezbollah poses an existential threat to the region. Despite this, Israel is actively courting a wider war.
The imperial spin machine operates by reversing victim and victimizer, aggressor and defender — claiming to act in self-defense while existing in a continuous state of attack, writes Caitlin Johnstone.
August 12, 2024
US economic and military interests across West Asia could come under direct fire as Israel’s aggressions drag Washington into a region-wide escalation.
The U.S. just resumed sales of bombs and missiles to the Gulf state, which still owes $15 million for jet fuel from its war on Yemen.
The U.S. Fueled Saudi Jets Bombing Yemen. Now the Saudis Won’t Pay Their Gas Bill.
“Jews Against the Squad”
“The bottom line is and it’s a sad one, we need to be supportive ON PRESIDENTIAL LEVEL of the alt right Christian Neo Nazis.”
In AIPAC’s absence, a Samuels campaign staffer and pro-Israel super PAC donors strategize to oust another Squad member.
“We are making History!!!” he wrote. “My daughter knows that it is something important. She and I call Ilhan the wicked witch and when she goes to school some days she tells all her classmates that ‘her daddy has an important job fighting the wicked witch.’ This is a memory that all of us can hold onto forever. Being a part of getting rid of the squad!”
Inside the “Zionists for Don Samuels” WhatsApp Group Raising Big Money to Oust Ilhan Omar
However, the unimaginable sufferings of the Gaza population have now brought Starmer to his senses. Since entering No 10 Downing Street on July 5, he has shown fresh thinking over Gaza. He has not only broken with the approaches of his predecessor, Rishi Sunak, but also distanced the UK from the US. And it is not hard to see why.
Gaza hellscape: Starmer recalibrates UK foreign policy for global justice
The Trump fatigue has become so great, though, my belief is that any Democrat of even modest repute might have stepped into the nomination and won. We are tired of his anger and name calling and lying about subjects as mundane as crowd size comparisons between his speeches and those of civil rights leader Martin Luther King. Further, how does he think he can win by calling Kamala Harris a “fucking bitch” while rolling around on a golf cart? As Trump begins to suffer from crowd envy and the huge numbers of people drawn to hear her message of freedom and hope, joy instead of rage, he seems to forget to use his orange face spray and begins to look weary and disaffected. My suspicion is he would drop out if he were not worried about being convicted of his early crimes against the country and thus not being able to pardon himself. His last threat will be to the electoral system that tallies his defeat and he will try to destroy the republic before he goes out the door. There exists, at least for now, a considerable chance he will soon be gone.
And Americans can start working again on their optimism and hope.
Oakland, CA. (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – The branding of MAGA creeps as “weird” is horribly unfair to all the decent weird people in […]
“We need to tackle the root cause and get serious about reducing record levels of greenhouse gas emissions,”…
Climate, Environment, Politics
Aug 12, 2024
A voice that reminds us of these ideas can carry weight because of what it says, not because of the identity of who says it. The values articulated shouldn’t be accepted because they’re Jewish, but because they’re values that should carry meaning for those struggling today for freedom.
we can turn attention away from identities of people, which are so often invoked to justify oppression (the need for a Jewish state, the defense of the Jewish people, the superiority of one people to uncivilized others, and so on). We can draw attention instead to traditions of emancipation, which can be meaningful to anyone who cares about them.
No one agrees on what ‘Jewish values are.’ That’s why they matter
A new Israeli human rights group report shows that Palestinians held in Israeli prisons and detention centers during the war on Gaza are subjected to torture, sexual abuse, violence, humiliation, starvation, sleep deprivation, and denial of medical care.
08.10
“There was a water well in the school that provided for more than 300 families inside the school, and the Israeli army directly bombed the well,” Hamada said. “The world ignores our slaughter, if these scenes were published somewhere else, it would be a crime that everyone would condemn.”
This brings us to the question Netanyahu’s speech forces upon us. Does the U.S. control Israel or does Israel control the U.S.? Is the apartheid state another of Washington’s client regimes, albeit — let’s borrow a little from the Chinese — a client with Zionist characteristics? Or is Israel a case — rare, if not unique — of a distant outpost that dictates to the imperial center? The periphery exercises power over the metropole, this to say: This would have to be something new under the sun, surely.
The immediate answer, perhaps obvious, is the terrorist at the podium. It cannot be lost on anyone paying attention that more or less every member of Congress in attendance — and good on the 100 or so members who boycotted — has in the past taken and continues to take money from the Israel lobby, notably but not only the profoundly antidemocratic American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the infamous AIPAC.
Netanyahu knew this. He spoke to some people who genuinely believe in the Zionist cause and some people concerned with the imperium’s geopolitical position in the Middle East. Some and some, O.K. But everybody he addressed, allowing for exceptions, was on the take from AIPAC. Thomas Massie, the libertarian Republican from Kentucky and one of the exceptions, told us just how AIPAC works — a combination of bribes, threats, and coercion — in quite unbelievable detail when Tucker Carlson interviewed him on these subjects a couple of months ago.
Patrick Lawrence: Israel Runs the U.S. No, the U.S. Runs Israel. No, Wait
Moshe “Bogie” Ya’alon, former Chief of Staff of the IDF, who also served as Israel’s Defence Minister, had this to say in a video interview on the forces taking over in Israel:
“When you talk about Smotrich and Ben Gvir: They have a Rabbi. His name is Dov Lior. He is the Rabbi of the Jewish Underground, who intended to blow up the Dome of the Rock – and before that the buses in Jerusalem. Why? In order to hurry up the ‘Last War’. Do you [not] hear them talking in terms of the Last War; or of Smotrich’s concept of ‘subjugation’? Read the article he published in Shiloh in 2017. First of all, this concept rests on Jewish supremacy: Mein Kampf in reverse”.
“My hair stands on end when I say that – as he said it. I learned and grew up in the house of Holocaust survivors and ‘never again’. It is Mein Kampf in reverse: Jewish supremacy: and therefore [Smotrich] says: “My wife won’t go into a room with an Arab”. It is anchored in ideology. And then actually what he aspires to – as soon as possible – is to go to a big war. A war of Gog and Magog. How do you start the flames? A massacre like the [1994] Cave of the Patriarchs? Baruch Goldstein is a student of this Rabbi. Ben Gvir has hung up Goldstein’s picture [in his house]”.
“This is what goes into the decision-making process in the Israeli government”.
Rabbi Dov Lior has been described by Netanyahu as the “élite unit that leads Israel”, because of his influence and control over the settler forces. The 1948 Irgun, drawing heavily on the Mizrahim, is being reborn?
The U.S. empire has been doing everything it can to restrict the flow of inconvenient information as public opposition to its criminality swells at home and abroad.
August 10, 2024
Trump’s popularity with his base isn’t the result of economic anxiety, as many claimed in 2016. It’s about race and demographics.
In 1980, white people accounted for about 80 percent of the U.S. population.
In 2024, white people account for about 58 percent of the U.S. population.
Trump appeals to white people gripped by demographic hysteria. Especially older white people who grew up when white people represented a much larger share of the population. They fear becoming a minority.
While the Census Bureau says there are still 195 million white people in America and that they are still the majority, the white population actually declined slightly in 2023, and experts believe that they will become a minority sometime between 2040 and 2050.
Hands up if you’re tired of hearing what Peter Dutton has to say.
In addition to physical or psychological abuse, bullies use power in relationships to pressure others to adopt their world views. The bullying may appear in letters, lobbying, radio and television interviews, secret meetings with politicians and business leaders and even in legal action against those who criticise the bullies’ points of view.
The controversy arose because of comments Smotrich, a far-right politician, made about humanitarian aid at a conference on Monday.
“We bring in aid because there is no choice,” he said. “We can’t, in the current global reality, manage a war. Nobody will let us cause 2 million civilians to die of hunger, even though it might be justified and moral, until our hostages are returned.”
Critics argued that Smotrich’s remarks conveyed not only indifference to Palestinian suffering and death but also, more specifically, an attempt to justify Israel’s documented practice of blocking or disrupting aid from reaching the Gaza Strip.
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