Hundreds of thousands of people are being forced to flee, once again, after more than half of Gaza’s population took sanctuary in the border town of Rafah. This is part of Israel’s sadistic playbook.
it appears that not even the US government knows what the US government line is on Rafah, officials seem fairly uniformly committed to ignoring the fact that Israel has long been conducting a “major military operation” in the city – just as it has been doing in the rest of the Gaza Strip since October 7.
Source: Not even the US government knows the US government line on Rafah | Israel War on Gaza | Al Jazeera
While their publicity is different, Israel’s actions are proof enough of them lying
Israeli and U.S. claims that civilian casualties in Gaza are the result of Hamas’ use of “human shields” have figured prominently in Israel’s defense of the skyrocketing death toll in the enclave, but a report by a local independent human rights group details the recent experiences of three boys in the West Bank, who say they were used to shield Israeli forces from potential harm during their raid on a refugee camp.
Defense for Children International – Palestine (DCIP) on Monday released its interviews with three boys in Tulkarem refugee camp, which was attacked by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) on May 6.
Source: ‘A War Crime’: Rights Group Details Israel’s Use of Children as Human Shields | Common Dreams
A deadly attack on a convoy of World Central Kitchen aid workers which killed 7 people last month was not a one-off occurrence, Human Rights Watch said Tuesday, but rather representative of a documented pattern in which Israel military forces have targeted relief personnel and infrastructure despite being informed of the exact locations of those operations.
Source: Israel’s Deadly Bombing of World Central Kitchen Convoy Was No Anomaly: Report | Common Dreams
Thousands of Palestinian citizens of Israel joined the annual March of Return, with many making connections to the violent displacement in Gaza.
15,000 Palestinian citizens of Israel participated in the 27th annual March of Return on Tuesday.
Although Nakba Day is officially marked on May 15, the March of Return is held every year on Israel’s Independence Day, under the slogan “Their independence is our Nakba.” In recent years, the march has become the central mobilizing event for Palestinian citizens of Israel, uniting all groups and political forces. It is organized by the Committee for the Defense of the Rights of the Internally Displaced Persons in Israel, which selects one of the more than 600 Palestinian localities uprooted by Zionist or Israeli militias in 1947-49 as the march’s destination.
Israel was founded with the Nakba, a series of atrocities that ethnically cleansed Palestinians from their homeland. Today we are witnessing Israel engage in ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza on an even larger, more violent scale.
Has the No Vote in Australia Boomeranged?
poll shows that the Palestinian Authority (PA) president Mahmoud Abbas has grown even more unpopular since the start of the Gaza war. The poll results were published by the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
he is a patriot who, through his misguided actions, has done irreparable damage to his country and to the prospects for peace in the world.
Zaslav came along at a time of establishment confusion over whether the old political center would return after Trump. America’s business establishment hoped it would. But that proved a pipe dream. The division between authoritarianism and democracy is now too deep. If anyone had any doubts, CNN’s disastrous Trump town hall should have erased them.
What seems to have confused Zaslav was the difference between being politically partisan, and standing up against authoritarian demagogues. He assumed that holding Trump accountable for what he did (and continues to do) was inconsistent with so-called “balanced journalism.”
Wrong. It is not partisan to stand up for decency and democracy. That’s where CNN’s audience wanted — and presumably still wants — CNN to be.
Source: How To Make $50 Million a Year While Your Corporation Goes Down the Tubes | The Smirking Chimp
Grassroots anti-AUKUS campaign, Labor Against War, has called on the Federal Labor Government to come clean about just how much it is pouring into US and UK coffers to rebuild their ageing nuclear shipyards, both of which build nuclear-armed submarines.
In any case, the Palestinian death toll is very likely a vast undercount. Not only are there thousands trapped under the rubble in Gaza who are not included in the OCHA death toll, but Israel’s systematic destruction of the territory’s hospitals and periodic communication blackouts have led to large gaps in the reporting of deaths.
As always, the most potent, far-reaching, and deadly misinformation so often comes from exactly those voices we’re told are the most trusted, like think tanks respected in Washington, elected officials, and certain mainstream news outlets. It’s for this reason the recent push to control and censor the information transmitted on social media will likely only accelerate — all for the sake of allowing one of the most heinous crimes we’ve seen this century to go on and on.
Last Friday evening, amid the national panic over the campus protests in solidarity with Gaza, I met fellow Jews in downtown Los Angeles to welcome Shabbat. Candles, grape juice, and challah shared space with “CEASEFIRE NOW” signs on a folding table. We heard speeches and joined together in song and prayer as the sun dipped behind the Department of Water and Power Building and the wind blew through.
Our mystics teach us that the 25 hours of the Sabbath offer a taste of “the world to come”—a holier world, one outside capitalist logic and capitalist time. The precise nature of this world is up for interpretation. Traditional sources understand it as an afterlife, where the righteous get their reward, while the political visionaries among us take “the world to come” to mean a future, better version of the world we already live in.
Source: A New Jewishness Is Being Born Before Our Eyes – ScheerPost
As human rights experts warn of an ongoing genocide in Gaza, any opposition to Zionism is being egregiously labelled as extremism, Dr Martin Hirst writes.
Source: Amidst genocide and war, anti-Zionism protesters are demonised as ‘extremists’
This evening, Israeli residents set fire twice to the perimeter of the UNRWA Headquarters in occupied East Jerusalem.
This took place while UNRWA and other UN Agencies’ staff were on the compound.
While there were no casualties among our staff, the fire caused extensive damage to the outdoor areas. The UNRWA headquarters has on its grounds a petrol and diesel station for the Agency’s fleet of cars.
Source: “Burn down the United Nations” chant Israeli mob in UNRWA HQ attack – Pearls and Irritations
These elites in politics, business, media, and church have brought shame on themselves and us. Either covertly or overtly they have supported or wilfully ignored the genocide. History will be a very harsh judge.
Source: Gaza genocide protests by students shames the elites in the Western world – Pearls and Irritations
The death toll in Israel’s military operation in Gaza has now passed at least 35,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s health ministry. The bombardment has laid waste to the coastal enclave and caused a deep humanitarian crisis.
Source: Strikes and fighting as Israeli forces push further into Gaza
Upward of 20 American doctors are trapped in Gaza as a result of Israel’s post-invasion closure of the Rafah border crossing into Egypt, according to sources with knowledge of the plight of two ill-fated medical missions.
Source: American Medical Missions Trapped in Gaza, Facing Death by Dehydration
“As the descendant of European Jews, I was raised in a particularly unforgiving moral environment when it came to the topic of bearing responsibility for ethnic cleansing,” wrote Maj. Harrison Mann.
The New York Timesreported that it is not known “whether other military officers have resigned in protest of U.S. foreign policy” since the Hamas-led attack on Israel in October and the IDF’s deadly retaliation, “but the resignation of an active-duty officer in protest of U.S. foreign policy is likely uncommon—especially one in which the officer makes public the reasons for doing so.”
Source: Citing Ethnic Cleansing, US Army Major Resigns Over Israel’s Assault on Gaza | Common Dreams
Professor Mearsheimer deep dives into each war: he explains why the US tanked Ukraine’s peace talks to further instigate Russia and what he would do now if he was in Biden’s or Putin’s position. He also delves into the influence of the Israel lobby and how Biden has given impunity to Israel’s killing Gaza killing spree.
The brilliant Palestinian Fayez Sayegh once wrote that when pro-Israel groups appeared to be at their strongest, they were only masking the fact that they were at their weakest. This is clear in the contrast of Israel’s sharp decline in standing among many demographic groups of American voters and the actions and statements by Congress and pro-Israel groups, particularly in evidence during the past week.
Source: Opinion | Israel’s Brute Show of Military Strength Shows How Weak It Has Become | Common Dreams
Israel, for its part, maintains the world’s largest repression — and weapons –testing laboratories in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, where it has a captive population of several millions Palestinians.
During a 1983 Mossad mission in the United States, Eitan disguised himself as an assistant prosecutor in the Israeli Ministry of Justice and met with the inventor of the PROMIS surveillance software. After a visit to the Department of Justice, Eitan obtained the software and had an Israeli working in Silicon Valley install a backdoor in the program.
Fellow Mossad agent Robert Maxwell, (father of Ghislaine Maxwell, the notorious child sex trafficker and partner-in-crime of Jeffrey Epstein), sold the PROMIS technology to dozens of countries around the world, including Colombia. This gave Israel unfettered access to intelligence the program collected in every country using it, friend and foe alike.
In 1985, Eitan initiated a spying operation on Israel’s top ally, the United States. Eitan’s team recruited Jonathan Pollard, the Jewish-American Naval Intelligence Service analyst, who went on to deliver 800 classified military intelligence documents relating to military capabilities of Arab states, Pakistan and the Soviet Union.
Seymour Hersh reported that the documents on U.S. intelligence capabilities were passed on to the Soviet Union in exchange for release of Soviet Jewry.
Source: The Secret History of Israel’s Role in Genocide in Colombia
Israel has sent tanks into eastern Jabalia in the northern Gaza Strip after a night of heavy aerial and ground bombardments, killing 19 people and wounding dozens of others, Palestinian health officials said.
Jabalia is the biggest of Gaza’s eight historic refugee camps and is home to more than 100,000 people, most of whom were descendants of Palestinians who were driven from towns and villages in what is now Israel during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war that led to the creation the state of Israel.
As Israel pursues its genocidal and ethnic cleansing agenda in Rafah the United States is show to be morally naked before the world. All it can do is repeat ‘anti-Semitism’ as if it were an incantation. You’d have to be brain dead to fail to understand that ‘anti-Semitism’ has been weaponised against those with a conscience.
US National Security spokesman John Kirby has said there is no evidence of “deliberate” Israeli war crimes in Gaza. To paraphrase Paul Simon’s The Boxer the man sees what he wants to see and disregards the rest.
US National Security spokesman John Kirby has said there is no evidence of “deliberate” Israeli war crimes in Gaza. To paraphrase Paul Simon’s The Boxer the man sees what he wants to see and disregards the rest.
The Murder of 6 Year Old Hind– a War Crime that Genocide Joe, Slimy Sunak & Dodgy Dave Cameron armed and supported
Ehud Barak says more than two decades ago he was new enough in Israeli politics to tell the truth. He declared then that if he was a Palestinian, he’d probably be a terrorist.
He describes Hamas’s violent October 7 attack – in which about 1,200 people were killed and around 240 kidnapped – as “the worst failure of our intelligence and operational forces since the establishment of the state of Israel”.
“That the IDF is doing everything to avoid civilian casualties is a blunt lie. Straight lie,” former Israeli army commander Yehuda Shaul says.
“And that’s a hard statement to say about my own army, but it’s the truth.”
Shaul says what Israel is currently doing in Gaza is not going to deliver security for Israel but “sow the seeds of hatreds for generations to come”.
“The end goal is to annex the land. It doesn’t take a genius to come up with that conclusion.”
Source: Israel’s defence and intelligence insiders on the Gaza war and why Netanyahu won’t stop – ABC News
Israel’s immediate response was “Egypt is blocking Aid to Gaza” needless to say they are the only ones saying it
Egypt announced on Sunday that it would join South Africa’s case before the International Court of Justice causing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza.
Source: As Gaza Assault Intensifies, Egypt Joins ICJ Case Accusing Israel of Genocide – ScheerPost
Ss
Gaza Israel Maureen Murphy
Source: Palestinians Flee Rafah As Crossings Remain Closed
In recent days, this action has led to tangible results. Trinity College Dublin in Ireland agreed to divest from three Israeli companies linked to settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories. After the university made the announcement, students began dismantling their protest camp.
The US is already downplaying Israel’s actions in Rafah so far – how much impact will a report written in a way to protect Israel from accountability have? Furthermore, the report implicates the US not only by providing the means for Israel’s genocide, but protecting genocidal actions as well. Diplomacy and genocide, it seems, make for durable compatibility.
Source: How the US continues to provide Cover for Israel’s Genocide in Gaza
All in line with what senior Rabbis have advocated
The current obliteration of Gaza is a record-breaking war on mothers and their children.
- An average of two Gazan mothers die every hour of the war leaving their families devastated and their children with diminished protection.
- After four months of Israel’s carpet bombing, more Gazan children were killed than the number of children killed in the last four years of wars around the world combined.
- With starvation imposed on Gaza by Israel’s blockades of food aid –“unprecedented in modern history” – mothers and adult women are the ones who eat last and least.
- Many mothers are too malnourished to produce milk for their newborns; but no powdered milk in the markets and next to no clean water with which to mix it are available.
- Each day about 180 women give birth in hellish conditions, with most of Gaza’s 36 hospitals lying in rubble and their existing medical supplies nearing exhaustion. Two American trauma surgeons who have volunteered for surgical missions in crisis situations all over the world, stated recently that they have never seen cruelty like Israel’s massacre in Gaza.
- Some mothers have resorted to washing clothes and bathing their children in the sea, polluted with sewage, risking their lives under Israeli strafing.
- As of late February 2024, The U.N. estimated that some 700,000 women and girls in Gaza experience menstrual cycles but don’t have adequate access to basic hygiene products like pads, toilet paper, running water and toilets because of the war. These conditions put them at risk of reproductive and urinary tract infections.
Hamas loves Joe Biden — or so says Israel’s powerful Minister for National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir.
Joe Biden has engaged in “an anti-Semitic lie” — or so says Israel’s influential Minister for Finance, Bezalel Smotrich.
These two men are kingmakers in Israeli politics. They form part of the character of the Israeli government.
And these men are not just far-right extremists but, in fact, terrorists according to Ami Ayalon, who ran Israel’s security service Shin Bet.
All of this makes the reaction from Israel’s UN ambassador, Gilad Erdan, all the more absurd. Before fellow delegates, the intemperate representative sported a miniature shredder in which he placed a copy of the UN Charter, declaring that granting Palestinians greater rights of representation entailed the following message: “you are telling the child-murdering Hamas rapists that terror pays off.” In that statement can be detected the echoes of such founding representatives of Israel as Ben Gurion and Menachim Begin, all of whom were well-versed in the calculus of violence and its ill-gotten rewards.
“They threw fliers on Rafah and said, from Rafah to al-Zawayda is safe, people should evacuate there, and they did, and what has become of them? Dismembered bodies? There is no safe place in Gaza,” Khitam Al-Khatib, who said she had lost at least 10 of her relatives in an air strike on a family house earlier on Saturday, told Reuters.
The Palestinian WAFA news agency said the Rafah crossing from Egypt was closed for a fifth day, while another crossing, Kerem Shalom from southern Israel, has been shut for around a week.
The latest evacuation orders came hours after internationally mediated ceasefire talks appeared to be faltering.
Hamas said Israel’s rejection of a truce offer it had accepted returned things to square one.
Israel said the terms did not meet its demands.
In 214 days, Israel has killed 142 journalists in Gaza, approximately one every 36 hours. The staggering death toll makes the war the deadliest conflict for journalists in modern history.
Dressed in a blue vest marked with the word “press”, Abu Akleh was killed while covering an Israeli raid in Jenin, a city in the northern part of the West Bank.
“If you can kill an American citizen, who was among the highest profile journalists in the Arab world, on camera and get away with it, that sends a very clear message about what’s permissible.”
An Israeli airstrike killed photographer Baha Akasheh along with members of his family in Jabaliya refugee camp in northern Gaza on Saturday, bringing to 143 the number of Palestinian journalists killed in the Strip throughout Israel’s genocide, according to the Hamas media office in Gaza.
Source: Israel shutters Al Jazeera, continues to kill journalists | The Electronic Intifada
Rather than acting as a check on the powerful, media outlets like CNN and MSNBC are allowing police to give their interpretation of student Palestine protests with few challenges, even in cases where police are blatantly lying or distorting the truth.
Source: Mainstream Media Is Spreading Lies About Palestine Protests
On Monday, the IDF seized control of the border crossing between Egypt and Gaza near Rafah. That crossing has been used to bring most aid into Gaza since October 7. Since Israel gained control of the Rafah crossing, aid trucks have been unable to deliver food and other lifesaving assistance into Gaza.
Source: Aid Agencies Are Running Out of Food as Israel Expands Assault on Rafah – ScheerPost
Just as Gaza has become a laboratory and showroom for Israel’s “battle-tested” weapons, the success of the Hebron Smart City facial recognition technology and database through Wolf Pack to track Palestinians will be used for Israel to continue to profit off of its illegal military occupation of Palestine and surveillance of Palestinian civilians.
This “Automated Apartheid” only further establishes segregation of Palestinians and expands Israel’s apartheid system and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
Source: Automated Apartheid: Walking Through Hebron Smart City – ScheerPost
The empire therefore needs to tread very carefully when public opinion starts to turn against it, and retreat whenever public trust in imperial institutions would be compromised too severely for the empire to continue on a given path. It simply cannot afford to wake the public up from the propaganda-induced coma it has spent generations lulling them into.
Source: Protest and dissent can absolutely push the empire to retreat on Gaza – Pearls and Irritations
Germany Created Anti-Germanism Japan Anti-Japanism. The British Anti-UKism. In the past, Britain was Anti- Papist which for some has lasted until today
But as Chris Hedges often says, ‘Israel lies.’ And in the present climate the lies are not only bellicose and incendiary, but galling to a Jew like me who grew up in a time of intense antisemitism. Even after the second world war, when we were learning more and more about the horrors of the Holocaust, antisemitism in all its guises was rampant. Yes, from 1948, when Israel was declared (and Palestinians suffered their Nakba), many European Jews who survived the Holocaust found refuge there. But that was because that Israel was now there to take them, after many Western countries had effectively closed their doors to them.
Here, in my experience, are some examples of what genuine antisemitism is. It isn’t criticising Israel. It isn’t mere ‘discomfort’ on seeing a Palestinian flag, or hearing certain words expressed at a pro-Palestinian rally. It’s limiting the number of Jews admitted to prestige universities with ‘quotas’. It’s marking off certain neighbourhoods as Jew-free in so-called ‘gentleman’s agreements’. It’s closing membership of clubs to Jews. At UCLA, where I went before coming to Australia, university campus student housing was segregated along Gentile/Jewish lines. Jews had been lynched in the American south. In the depths of the Depression, my grandfather, a grocer in Council Bluffs, Iowa, was set upon by the Ku Klux Klan, when the groceries he was giving away to the town’s unemployed ran out. Many prominent Americans such as Charles Lindbergh, or Henry Ford, or Henry Luce, were known antisemites. Authors too could be unthinkingly antisemitic: Agatha Christie, Ernest Hemingway to name just two.
The Executive Council of Australian Jewry has figures for an exponential rise in antisemitic incidents over the past months. I’m not examining the figures – numbers aren’t exactly my forte. But it’s curious that so little attempt is made by them, or pro-Zionist organisations like them, to correlate this rise with Israel’s ongoing oppression of the Palestinian people and its culmination in one of history’s most horrific human tragedies.
One thing is certain, none of us can expect to be ‘safe’ now. Because of Israel.
Source: Because of Israel, Jewish people are no longer ‘safe’ – Pearls and Irritations
We must honor the student demonstrators and all who champion them as the heroes they are, cease the opportunistic abuse of the term ‘antisemitism,’ and urge them to continue their protests.
Source: Weaponizing Antisemitism
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton delivered herself of some ahistorical and distorted remarks about Palestine on Morning Joe, maintaining that the young people protesting the Gaza atrocities do not know history.
Ms. Clinton’s self-serving description of the 2000 Camp David process has been debunked by many historians. In fact, her husband Bill Clinton promised in the Oslo Accords in 1993 that Israel would withdraw from Gaza and the West Bank by 1997. He then allowed Benjamin Netanyahu to sabotage that process and allowed the Israelis to double the number of squatters they sent in to the Palestinian West Bank to steal property and terrorize people. When Netanyahu went out and Ehud Barak came in, Clinton sponsored negotiations, but Barak was maddeningly vague about what he would offer and never produced a text that Yasser Arafat could sign. It is not clear why Arafat needed to sign anything more; he already signed the Oslo treaty, which should have resulted in an Israeli withdrawal that never came. Soon thereafter Barak lost to Ariel Sharon, who was as determined to sabotage any land for peace deal as Netanyahu had been, and he wrecked the whole process.
Her placing of all the blame on the Palestinians is typical of inside-the-Beltway Goy Zionism, and is profoundly ahistorical. The young people can’t be fooled by these glib words. They see what they see.
Source: Palestine and History: Macklemore v. Hillary Clinton
Antisemitism is making the headlines. The Israeli Prime Minister describes as antisemitic the accusation that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, and even American students who are calling for a ceasefire. What Israel is doing does in fact provoke antisemitic acts against synagogues, Jewish schools and even individual Jews. It is therefore important to understand what antisemitism is, what it is not, and how it can be distinguished from anti-Zionism.
Source: Antisemitism and Antizionism: A Dangerous Conflation
Yes, it is genocide. Although it is so difficult and painful to admit this and despite all efforts to think otherwise, at the end of six months of a brutal war it is no longer possible to escape this conclusion. Jewish history will henceforth be stained with the mark of Cain of the “crime of crimes,” which cannot be erased from its forehead. As such, it will stand trial for generations.
Source: Prof. Amos Goldberg: ‘Yes, It Is Genocide’ – ScheerPost
Will Israel sue 143 nations for their involvement in 7/10 or simply resign from the UN?
The assembly adopted a resolution with 143 votes in favour – including Australia – and nine against – including the US and Israel – while 25 countries abstained. It does not give the Palestinians full UN membership, but simply recognises them as qualified to join.
Palestine is pushing to be elevated to full UN membership from its current non-member observer state as war rages in the Gaza Strip and the US and allies call for a two-state solution to the decades-old conflict with Israel.
The Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED) examined 553 campus protests that took place across the U.S. between April 18-May 3 and found that fewer than 20 resulted in serious violence or property damage — meaning that 97 percent of the protests remained non-violent.
Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu has labelled prospective action by the International Criminal Court to hold him accountable for the murder of 14,500 children in Gaza as “an unprecedented antisemitic hate crime”.
Source: “Antisemitic hate crime”: US and Israel desperate to avoid ICC justice – Pearls and Irritations
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