Anadolu Agency – December 30, 2023
Scores of Palestinians killed, wounded as Israel keeps pounding Gaza Strip
Israeli army continues incursion into central Gaza Strip with warplanes, tanks targeting refugee camps, residential buildings
Dozens of Palestinians were killed and injured in violent artillery and airstrikes launched by the Israeli army in the central Gaza Strip in the past 24 hours, according to medical sources and eyewitnesses.
The Israeli army continued its incursion into the Bureij Palestinian refugee camp as part of the latest phase of its ground operations in its war that has been ongoing for 85 days.
Meanwhile, army artillery bombed areas east of the Rafah crossing after violent clashes with Palestinian resistance fighters.
Fierce clashes broke out Friday night and continued until Saturday afternoon in areas east of the Bureij refugee camp, during which violent explosions occurred, eyewitnesses told Anadolu.
Israeli tanks heavily bombed areas east of Bureij camp, witnesses added.
Meanwhile, the Palestinian Hamas group's armed wing, the Al-Qassam Brigades, said in a statement that its fighters “managed to completely destroy a Zionist troop carrier north of the Bureij camp with a shell.”
Al-Qassam also announced it bombed an Israeli tank with a Shawaz-type explosive device north of Bureij, and targeted another with a shell in the same area.
Meanwhile, the Al-Nasser Salah al-Deen Brigades, the armed wing of the Popular Resistance Committees, said that its fighters “engaged in violent clashes with enemy soldiers in the north of the Bureij camp and caused casualties among their ranks.”
- Relentless bombing
The Israeli army launched airstrikes on the Al-Zawaida area and the Bureij, Nuseirat, and Al-Maghazi camps in Gaza, according to medical sources and eyewitnesses.
In the central Gaza Strip, witnesses stated that Israeli artillery vehicles violently bombarded the vicinity of Salah al-Din Street and its adjacent areas, east of the Nuseirat camp.
Several Palestinians were also killed and others were injured in a bombing that targeted a house for the Al-Wawi family near the Al-Sunnah Mosque in Nuseirat.
Israeli aircraft bombed another house belonging to the Al-Nuwairi family, in Al-Nuseirat, resulting in several deaths and injuries, according to eyewitnesses.
Three Palestinians were injured by Israeli army snipers in the Al-Maghazi camp, medical sources told Anadolu.
According to medical sources at the Al-Aqsa Hospital in the city of Deir Al-Balah, more than 100 people were killed and 160 injured as a result of the Israeli bombing of the central region during the past 24 hours.
Palestinians displaced from the Bureij camp told Anadolu that the Israeli forces carried out a massive arrest campaign against Palestinians who were unable to leave the camp, especially those who remained in shelter centers.
- Clashes in Rafah
In the far south of the Gaza Strip, violent clashes broke out between Israeli forces penetrating east of the city of Rafah and Palestinian resistance fighters, according to local sources.
The sources reported that the clashes took place near the Kerem Shalom commercial crossing, near the border fence with Israel and also to the east of the Rafah crossing, during which Israeli forces used artillery shells extensively.
In the city of Khan Younis, Israeli forces continued their ground operations in the east, north and center of the city, in addition to the aerial bombardment carried out by Israeli aircraft on several homes in the city.
This coincides with clashes erupting at frequent intervals between resistance fighters and army forces in eastern and central Khan Younis.
The Al-Quds Brigades, the armed wing of the Islamic Jihad movement, said that its fighters “engaged in fierce clashes with enemy soldiers north and east of the city of Khan Younis.”
In Gaza City and the North Governorate, Israeli warplanes launched dozens of raids in the early hours of Saturday, targeting homes, apartments, empty plots of land, and roads, resulting in deaths and injuries among civilians, according to Palestinian medical sources.
Since Hamas' cross-border attack on Oct. 7, Israel has continued relentless attacks on the Gaza Strip, killing at least 21,507 Palestinians and injuring 55,915, according to local health authorities.
Israeli authorities claimed that the Hamas attacks have killed around 1,200 Israelis.
The Israeli onslaught has left Gaza in ruins, with 60% of the enclave's infrastructure damaged or destroyed and nearly 2 million residents displaced amid acute shortages of food, clean water, and medicines.
https://www.yenisafak.com/en/news/scores-of-palestinians-killed-wounded-as-israel-keeps-pounding-gaza-strip-3675400
Anadolu Agency – December 30, 2023
Senior Hamas leader welcomes international forces only ‘to liberate Palestine'
Israel will not succeed in Gaza, and signs of its failure are evident, says Osama Hamdan Al-Aqsa Flood operation is Palestinian in planning, preparation, execution Root cause of problem is the Israeli aggression on Gaza, not the issue of prisoners
A senior Hamas leader said his movement will welcome the deployment of post-war international forces to the Gaza Strip to liberate Palestine, but rejected international forces as an alternative to “Zionist occupation.”
In an interview with Anadolu, Osama Hamdan said: “If the international forces want to liberate Palestine and end the occupation, they are welcome.”
Responding to a question about the Palestinian resistance group's stance on post-war international forces in the Gaza Strip, including ones from the Arab states, he said if these forces come in place of occupation (forces), the answer is no. “Who said the Palestinians want to replace the Zionist occupation with another occupation?”
A US proposal for international forces to come to Gaza after the Israeli war has been under discussion in the media in recent weeks.
On Nov. 17, the official Israeli broadcasting authority reported that White House Middle East envoy Brett McGurk met Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. Among other matters, they discussed the deployment of international forces in Gaza following the end of the war.
- Palestinian leadership is not exclusive to anyone
“The Palestinian leadership is not exclusive to anyone and should not be exclusive to anyone,” said Hamdan.
“Hamas will never be the one to monopolize Palestinian leadership. On the contrary, since its inception in 1988, Hamas has presented numerous initiatives, the first of which was in 1988, ensuring that Palestinian leadership is elected through free and direct elections in the occupied Palestinian territories and abroad,” he said.
"This remains our position, and it was reached through an agreement among all Palestinian factions in 2017, which included conducting elections for the National Council, the Legislative Council, and the Presidency. This position was reaffirmed in another agreement in 2021, during which dates were set for these elections."
Hamdan pointed out that “the elections were stalled due to Israeli obstinacy,” referring to Israel's refusal to conduct legislative and presidential elections in the occupied city of Jerusalem.
In October 2017, Fatah and Hamas signed a reconciliation agreement in Cairo, stipulating that the National Unity Government would oversee legislative and presidential elections.
The agreement also outlined the conduct of elections for the Palestinian National Council abroad. However, it could not be implemented due to subsequent disagreements between the two factions.
- Future of Gaza Strip
Regarding the future of the Gaza Strip and whether it can be defined beyond the scope of Hamas, he said: "Everyone who talks about Gaza without Hamas jumps to the conclusion that Israel succeeds in its military adventure. We say that Israel will not succeed, and the signs of its failure in this adventure are evident."
"The only achievement the Israelis have made is the killing of more than 20,000 citizens, most of them women and children. This is not a success. The real success so far is the resilient people and the effective resistance against the occupation," he said.
Hamdan emphasized that “the future of Gaza and all of Palestine is shaped by the Palestinian people. Therefore, we do not need guardianship, and we do not accept guardianship from anyone, whether from Hamas or other Palestinians.”
- Al-Aqsa Flood: Palestinian operation
Regarding a statement by a spokesperson for the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, Ramadan Sharif, which Tehran retracted, that the “Al-Aqsa operation” was in response to the assassination of the former commander of the Quds Force, Qasem Soleimani, Hamdan said: "It is a Palestinian operation in planning, preparation, execution and confrontation with the enemy. The leader of the Iranian revolution announced his support for it as a step towards the liberation of Palestine."
"The statement issued by the spokesperson of the Revolutionary Guard was immediately commented on and clarified by the Guard's commander, who affirmed the position of the Iranian leader.
"The Iranian position supports our resistance and our people. We believe that there was a statement with a flaw that was corrected. The Iranian position is firm and clear for us," he said.
Hamdan pointed out that "this correction in no way means overlooking the role played by the Revolutionary Guard, especially Qasem Soleimani, in supporting the resistance in Palestine, not only Hamas but all of the resistance."
- War cessation initiatives
Regarding negotiations for a cease-fire in the Israeli assault on Gaza, Hamdan stated: "We received some initiatives from mediators, including our brothers in Qatar and Egypt. Other parties also contacted us and discussed some initiatives."
"We have a clear and specific stance, that the root cause of the problem is the Israeli aggression on Gaza, not the issue of prisoners,” he said. "The issue of prisoners is a natural outcome of this aggression. Therefore, we cannot delve into the details before addressing the root cause of the matter, which is stopping the aggression against our people. If the aggression stops, relief enters, and the people achieve what they want in terms of lifting the blockade, then talking about the prisoners becomes natural."
The Hamas leader noted that "everyone knows that we want a deal for the exchange of prisoners, and this is not a secret. However, this exchange cannot happen while the aggression is ongoing."
Hamdan refused to discuss the details of the initiatives “because what I say today may change tomorrow due to discussions. When we reach a deal, it will be announced."
"The general framework is to stop the aggression, provide relief, open crossings, and negotiate the issue of prisoners. This is the natural sequence," he said.
- Relationship with Hezbollah
Regarding the relationship with the Lebanese group, Hezbollah, and its role in the war, Hamdan considered it a "good relationship," adding: "We will not put ourselves in a position to evaluate what Hezbollah is doing."
"It is good that Hezbollah is trying to extend a helping hand and resist from southern Lebanon, offering martyrs while its homes, families, and supporters are subjected to daily shelling by the occupation forces."
The Hamas leader emphasized that his group "does not dictate what is required of anyone and what they should do.”
"We ask everyone to do what they can and what they see fit," he added.
https://www.yenisafak.com/en/news/senior-hamas-leader-welcomes-international-forces-only-to-liberate-palestine-3675390
Chris Hedges – December 30, 2023
Israel’s Genocide Betrays the Holocaust
by Chris Hedges
Israel’s lebensraum master plan for Gaza, borrowed from the Nazi’s depopulation of Jewish ghettos, is clear. Destroy infrastrutrue, medical facilities and sanitation, including access to clean water. Block shipments of food and fuel. Unleash indiscriminate industrial violence to kill and wound hundreds a day. Let starvation — the U.N. estimates that more than half a million people are already starving — and epidemics of infectious diseases, along with the daily massacres and the displacement of Palestinians from their homes, turn Gaza into a mortuary. The Palestinians are being forced to choose between death from bombs, disease, exposure or starvation or being driven from their homeland.
There will soon reach a point where death will be so ubiquitous that deportation – for those who want to live – will be the only option.
Danny Danon, Israel’s former Ambassador to the U.N. and a close ally of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, told Israel’s Kan Bet radio that he has been contacted by “countries in Latin America and Africa that are willing to absorb refugees from the Gaza Strip.” “We have to make it easier for Gazans to leave for other countries,” he said. “I’m talking about voluntary migration by Palestinians who want to leave.”
The problem for now “is countries that are willing to absorb them, and we’re working on this,” Netanyahu told Likud Knesset members.
In the Warsaw Ghetto, the Germans handed out three kilograms of bread and one kilogram of marmalade to anyone who “voluntarily” registered for deportation. “There were times when hundreds of people had to wait in line for several hours to be ‘deported,’” Marek Edelman, one of the commanders of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, writes in “The Ghetto Fights.” “The number of people anxious to obtain three kilograms of bread was such that the transports, now leaving twice daily with 12,000 people, could not accommodate them all.”
The Nazis shipped their victims to death camps. The Israelis will ship their victims to squalid refugee camps in countries outside of Israel. Israeli leaders are also cynically advertising the proposed ethnic cleansing as voluntary and a humanitarian gesture to solve the catastrophe they created.
This is the plan. No one, especially the Biden administration, intends to stop it.
The most disturbing lesson I learned while covering armed conflicts for two decades is that we all have the capacity, with little prodding, to become willing executioners. The line between the victim and the victimizer is razor thin. The dark lusts of racial and ethnic supremacy, of vengeance and hate, of the eradication of those we condemn as embodying evil, are poisons that are not circumscribed by race, nationality, ethnicity or religion. We can all become Nazis. It takes very little. And if we do not stand in eternal vigilance over evil — our evil — we become, like those carrying out the mass killing in Gaza, monsters.
The cries of those expiring under the rubble in Gaza are the cries of the boys and men executed by the Bosnian Serbs at Srebrenica, the over 1.5 million Cambodians killed by the Khmer Rouge, the thousands of Tutsi families burned alive in churches and the tens of thousands of Jews executed by the Einsatzgruppen at Babi Yar in Ukraine. The Holocaust is not an historical relic. It lives, lurking in the shadows, waiting to ignite its vicious contagion.
We were warned. Raul Hilberg. Primo Levi. Bruno Bettelheim. Hannah Arendt. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. They understood the dark recesses of the human spirit. But this truth is bitter and hard to confront. We prefer the myth. We prefer to see in our own kind, our own race, our own ethnicity, our own nation, our own religion, superior virtues. We prefer to sanctify our hatred. Some of those who bore witness to this awful truth, including Levi, Bettelheim, Jean Am￩ry, the author of “At the Mindﾒs Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities,” and Tadeusz Borowski, who wrote “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen,” committed suicide. The German playwright and revolutionary Ernst Toller, unable to rouse an indifferent world to assist victims and refugees from the Spanish Civil War, hanged himself in 1939 in a room at the Mayflower Hotel in New York City. On his hotel desk were photos of dead Spanish children.
“Most people have no imagination,” Toller writes. “If they could imagine the sufferings of others, they would not make them suffer so. What separated a German mother from a French mother? Slogans which deafened us so that we could not hear the truth.”
Primo Levi railed against the false, morally uplifting narrative of the Holocaust that culminates in the creation of the state of Israel — a narrative embraced by the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. The contemporary history of the Third Reich, he writes, could be “reread as a war against memory, an Orwellian falsification of memory, falsification of reality, negation of reality.” He wonders if “we who have returned” have “been able to understand and make others understand our experience.”
Levi saw us reflected in Chaim Rumkowski, the Nazi collaborator and tyrannical leader of the ﾣdﾟ Ghetto. Rumkowski sold out his fellow Jews for privilege and power, although he was sent to Auschwitz on the final transport where Jewish Sonderkommando — prisoners forced to help herd victims into the gas chambers and dispose of their bodies — in an act of vengeance reportedly beat him to death outside a crematorium.
“We are all mirrored in Rumkowski,” Levi reminds us. “His ambiguity is ours, it is our second nature, we hybrids molded from clay and spirit. His fever is ours, the fever of Western civilization, that ‘descends into hell with trumpets and drums,’ and its miserable adornments are the distorting image of our symbols of social prestige.” We, like Rumkowski, “are so dazzled by power and prestige as to forget our essential fragility. Willingly or not we come to terms with power, forgetting that we are all in the ghetto, that the ghetto is walled in, that outside the ghetto reign the lords of death, and that close by the train is waiting.”
Levi insists that the camps “could not be reduced to the two blocks of victims and persecutors.” He argues, “It is naive, absurd, and historically false to believe that an infernal system such as National Socialism sanctifies its victims; on the contrary; it degrades them, it makes them resemble itself.” He chronicles what he called the “gray zone” between corruption and collaboration. The world, he writes, is not black and white, “but a vast zone of gray consciences that stands between the great men of evil and the pure victims.” We all inhabit this gray zone. We all can be induced to become part of the apparatus of death for trivial reasons and paltry rewards. This is the terrifying truth of the Holocaust.
It is hard not to be cynical about the plethora of university courses about the Holocaust given the censorship and banning of groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voices for Peace, imposed by university administrations. What is the point of studying the Holocaust if not to understand its fundamental lesson — when you have the capacity to stop genocide and you do not, you are culpable? It is hard not to be cynical about the “humanitarian interventionists” — Barack Obama, Tony Blair, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Samantha Power — who talk in sanctimonious rhymes about the “Responsibility to Protect” but are silent about war crimes when speaking out would threaten their status and careers. None of the “humanitarian interventions” they championed, from Bosnia to Libya, come close to replicating the suffering and slaughter in Gaza. But there is a cost to defending Palestinians, a cost they do not intend to pay. There is nothing moral about denouncing slavery, the Holocaust or dictatorial regimes that oppose the United States. All it means is you champion the dominant narrative.
The moral universe has been turned upside down. Those who oppose genocide are accused of advocating it. Those who carry out genocide are said to have the right to “defend” themselves. Vetoing ceasefires and providing 2,000-pound bombs to Israel that throw out metal fragments for thousands of feet is the road to peace. Refusing to negotiate with Hamas will free the hostages. Bombing hospitals, schools, mosques, churches, ambulances and refugee camps, along with killing three former Israeli hostages, stripped to the waist, waving an improvised white flag and calling out for help in Hebrew, are routine acts of war. Killing over 21,300 people, including more than 7,700 children, injuring over 55,000 and rendering nearly all of the 2.3 million people in Gaza homeless, is a way to “deradicalize” Palestinians. None of this makes sense, as protesters around the world realize.
A new world is being born. It is a world where the old rules, more often honored in the breach than the observance, no longer matter. It is a world where vast bureaucratic structures and technologically advanced systems carry out in public view vast killing projects. The industrialized nations, weakened, fearful of global chaos, are sending an ominous message to the Global South and anyone who might think of revolt — we will kill you without restraint.
One day, we will all be Palestinians.
“I fear that we live in a world in which war and racism are ubiquitous, in which the powers of government mobilization and legitimization are powerful and increasing, in which a sense of personal responsibility is increasingly attenuated by specialization and bureaucratization, and in which the peer group exerts tremendous pressures on behavior and sets moral norms,” Christopher R. Browning writes in Ordinary Men, about a German reserve police battalion in World War Two that was ultimately responsible for the murder of 83,000 Jews. “In such a world, I fear, modern governments that wish to commit mass murder will seldom fail in their efforts for being unable to induce ‘ordinary men’ to become their ‘willing executioners.’”
Evil is protean. It mutates. It finds new forms and new expressions. Germany orchestrated the murder of six million Jews, as well as over six million Gypsies, Poles, homosexuals, communists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Freemasons, artists, journalists, Soviet prisoners of war, people with physical and intellectual disabilities and political opponents. It immediately set out after the war to expiate itself for its crimes. It deftly transferred its racism and demonization to Muslims, with racial supremacy remaining firmly rooted in the German psyche. At the same time, Germany and the U.S. rehabilitated thousands of former Nazis, especially from the intelligence services and the scientific community, and did little to prosecute those who directed Nazi war crimes. Germany today is Israel’s second largest arms supplier following the U.S.
The supposed campaign against anti-Semitism, interpreted as any statement that is critical of the State of Israel or denounces the genocide, is in fact the championing of White Power. It is why the German state, which has effectively criminalized support for the Palestinians, and the most retrograde white supremists in the United States, justify the carnage. Germany’s long relationship with Israel, including paying over $90 billion since 1945 in reparations to Holocaust survivors and their heirs, is not about atonement, as the Israeli historian Ilan Pappé writes, but blackmail.
“The argument for a Jewish state as compensation for the Holocaust was a powerful argument, so powerful that nobody listened to the outright rejection of the U.N. solution by the overwhelming majority of the people of Palestine,” Pappé writes. “What comes out clearly is a European wish to atone. The basic and natural rights of the Palestinians should be sidelined, dwarfed and forgotten altogether for the sake of the forgiveness that Europe was seeking from the newly formed Jewish state. It was much easier to rectify the Nazi evil vis-à -vis a Zionist movement than facing the Jews of the world in general. It was less complex and, more importantly, it did not involve facing the victims of the Holocaust themselves, but rather a state that claimed to represent them. The price for this more convenient atonement was robbing the Palestinians of every basic and natural right they had and allowing the Zionist movement to ethnically cleanse them without fear of any rebuke or condemnation.”
The Holocaust was weaponized from almost the moment Israel was founded. It was bastardized to serve the apartheid state. If we forget the lessons of the Holocaust, we forget who we are and what we are capable of becoming. We seek our moral worth in the past, rather than the present. We condemn others, including the Palestinians, to an endless cycle of slaughter. We become the evil we abhor. We consecrate the horror.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He is the host of the Emmy Award-nominated RT America show On Contact. His most recent book is “America: The Farewell Tour” (2019).
https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/israels-genocide-betrays-the-holocaust
Countercurrent – December 30, 2023
Understanding the Palestinians
by Dr Akhtar Ali Syed
In 2015, Leicester hosted a conference on the psychological effects of war on the people living in active war zones. An Iraqi psychiatrist presented his research on the incidence of post-traumatic stress disorder in various parts of Iraq, estimating that 50 to 70 percent of the general population suffered from the disorder.
Following him, a British specialist called his estimations ludicrous and inappropriate. The Iraqi and the British specialists were both right. The Iraqi psychiatrist reported on the clinical presentation of Iraqis who had been victims of the worst atrocities committed after the invasion. The British expert sitting thousands of miles away was speaking solely from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (popularly known as DSM).
The clinical picture of traumatised Iraqis did not fulfill the diagnostic criteria of PTSD described in the manual. This argument was made while post-invasion terrorism in Iraq was still active, with more than 1.4 million citizens dead in terrorist attacks by the time. However, the same criterion was proven to be relevant to the New Yorkers in 2007.
The PTSD was shown to be four times as prevalent among the New Yorkers. Similarly, 30 percent of the American army war veterans could be diagnosed based on the criteria. The vast majority of them returned after witnessing the sufferings of mostly their victims.
When 77 percent of clinically diagnosable Palestinian children with PTSD were discovered, only about 20 percent met the diagnostic criteria, the gap between clinical presentation and the diagnostic system became more conspicuous.
Two things stick out in this particular instance. To begin with, why are diagnostic systems failing to account for the human condition, which regularly occurs around the world? People are in pain in war zones, but there is no word for it in the mental health bible.
Individuals are not responsible for suffering in such a way that their suffering qualifies for inclusion in the diagnostic system. It is the responsibility of mental health science to investigate the changing human conditions, establish scientific processes and invent new vocabulary as an old one loses utility.
Second, why does the same standard apply to certain people but not others? Is there a hidden message here? Several years after 9/11, New Yorkers, as well as American soldiers returning from their murderous sprees, suffer from the PTSD, yet Afghans, Palestinians and Iraqis do not. Are the people not affected by the ongoing violence less human? Does the world not need to be concerned about their condition because they do not suffer the same way?
The phrase post-trauma implies that the traumatic incident – for example, seeing a road accident, a robbery or a murder – has come to an end. Post-traumatic stress disorder is a condition that occurs after an event has occurred. One of the symptoms of this disorder is a fear of a recurrence of the same incident. Because of the fear that the trauma will return, the affected person remains hyper-vigilant.
But what if the worry of recurrence becomes more than a feeling? What if it becomes a terrible daylight reality? What if what happened today will almost certainly happen again tomorrow, and it will almost certainly happen over the coming days, weeks, months, years and decades? Does one still call it post-trauma or perpetual trauma?
What will be the likely state of mind of those who have inherited trauma from their forefathers? Does this human situation have a formal label? None. Is a study being done to quantify the psychological distress of persons who have been the victims of continuous wars? None, to the best of my knowledge.
Complex PTSD, a criterion in the International Classification of Diseases (ICD 11), may be mentioned here. However, a thorough examination of the ICD 11 criteria reveals only the addition of three new symptoms to PTSD. Also, the CPTSD is suggested for use in cases of chronic and ongoing trauma, such as domestic violence. Can you imagine comparing the plight of victims of the 75-year-old Israel-Palestine conflict to the victims of domestic abuse?
Western researchers, however, are capable of doing so because this is the worst incidence of trauma they can imagine. I’d like to point out that all active war zones, at the moment, are located far from the United States and United Kingdom. This is why the victims cannot find a space in the mental disorder diagnostic systems. Also, who is to be held accountable for inflicting the pain and insult on those who are affected if the correct diagnostic criteria are devised and they are appropriately diagnosed? The Palestinians will be able to document their suffering. They will then have an identified disorder to show the world, potentially gaining sympathy against the oppressors.
A misconception concerning the PTSD is that it is associated solely with fear, nightmares and helplessness. As we all know, when fear reaches a certain level, it ceases to be constraining. The individual then no longer fears the consequences and enters the combat mode. According to a Persian proverb, a cat will turn into a lion if trauma is protracted, continuous and emotionally damaging. When one’s life, integrity, modalities of survival and emotional attachments (close family, religion and hometown) are endangered, strong rage and innate aggressiveness emerge and may extend beyond the issue of life and death.
What has been happening to Palestinians for decades and what they have done in reaction is completely understandable from the standpoint of psychopathology. What they are going through will naturally influence how they react. They’ve seen how other options have been turned down and exhausted. Oppressors always have more options than the oppressed. Whether they choose dialogue or dispute, the oppressed have learnt the value of their lives.
Dr Akhtar Ali Syed is a clinical psychologist. He lives and works in Ireland.
https://countercurrents.org/2023/12/understanding-palestinians/
For peace in Palestine, Zionism must be defeated
By Antonio Minaldi
There is only one real condition for us to talk about peace in Palestine and that is for Israel to be defeated. Naturally, we are not referring to a military defeat, but rather to a diplomatic isolation and a political, but also “ethical” and “cultural” defeat. A way of passing into the pillory of history through a definitive and irreversible judgment of condemnation for the genocide carried out for more than seventy years against the Palestinian people; exactly as happened in Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa; chapters closed (hopefully) forever, and from which Germany itself and South Africa itself have been reborn to a new life. This could also happen, with the defeat of the current State of Israel, for the Jewish communities that constitute it.
Suppose this is the only true objective for achieving peace. In that case, there are at least two political orientations, often (but not always) supported in perfect good faith, which need to be carefully rethought.
The first is the position of those who take sides (without further clarification) for peace, against all forms of violence and alongside all the victims. Impeccable position on a principle level. We are all supporters of Nonviolence (deliberately with a capital letter). But Nonviolence is first and foremost an ethical and ideal posture, which our task is to make become usual political practice. However, if, in the immediate future, this aspiration is used as a discriminating element to judge every conflict, then the risk is to put Israel and Hamas on the same level because they both use armed force. In the same way, Nazism could have been lumped together with those who fought it in arms, thus ending up justifying it. Or in the face of South Africa’s racism, it could have been said that Mandela was also a terrorist (for those who don’t know, Nelson Mandela was the founder of the armed wing of the African National Congress, the party of black South Africans).
Naturally, we can discuss what is the politically best, but also the most ethically correct, ways to carry out the resistance, as long as it is clear that the Palestinian resistance is right and that the aim remains the defeat of Israel in the ways and in the sense that we have explained.
The other issue to avoid, perhaps less dangerous, but equally misleading, is the plethora of discussions on the possible institutional arrangements that should characterize a peaceful future.
First of all, there are supporters of the old thesis of two peoples in two states, which clashes with Israeli expansionism and the million and a-half settlers surrounding Gaza and the West Bank. Then there is the thesis of two peoples in one state, which sees an optimistic overcoming of all the clashes and hatred accumulated in more than seventy years of history of abuses. Finally, there is also the hypothesis of a horizontal social organization that in some way follows the revolutionary experience of democratic confederalism currently carried out by the Kurds in Rojava (and which is, in principle, the one we feel the closest to.)
In any case, whether the future is represented by the creation of two States, or of a single State that belongs to all, or even of a horizontal, democratic and stateless community, is something that is not up to us to decide, and which in any case is idle discussion if peace is not established first.
But peace has only one true condition: the defeat of Israel, or rather the defeat of Israel’s genocidal project.
Everything else comes later.
https://www.pressenza.com/2023/12/for-peace-in-palestine-zionism-must-be-defeated/
Controversial Decision Robs Pakistan Of Victory in Boxing Day Test
By Syed Rifaquat Ali
A bloomer on the part of third umpire Richard Illingworth paved way for Australia to beat Pakistan In the Boxing Day Test in Melbourne by 79 runs in the ongoing ICC World Test Championship 2024-2025.
Pakistan's team director Mohammad Hafeez was so peeved that he lambasted the ICC for sticking to DRS despite the failure of technology time and again. The DRS is no foolproof system to ensure fair play.
Spin wizard, the late Shane Warne made a mockery of DRS when he wrote to ICC that how can a player be given out and not out on the same ball. Cricket legends M.S. Dhomi and Sachin Tendulkar refused to play when DRS regulation was introduced by the ICC.
They pronounced from the rooftop that the technology was not foolproof and may lead to contraverses intermittently. And they were right as the DRS factor has raised one controversy or the other in international matches.
The Boxing Day Test in Melbourne was mired in controversies.
First the Australian skipper, Pat Cummins, was given out through DRS when the Aussies batted first to score 318. Pakistan replied with 264 in 73.5 overs.
In the second essay, Australia were restricted to 262 in 84.1 overs, after the Pakistan quickies, Shaheen Shah Afridi and Mir Hamza rattled the top order and the Kangaroos were reeling at 17 for four: Warner, Khawaja, Marnus Labuschagne and Travis Head back in the hut.
It was Steve Smith and Mitchell Marsh who rescued the sinking ship to notch up a scintillating century partnership, Marsh missing a ton by a whisker as his father Rodney and brother Shaun watched in disbelief.
The Aussies set a target of 316 for Pakistan to win the Test. Pakistan fought bravely and were consistently in the hunt through courageous batting by skipper Shan Masood and Babar Azam.
And once they were gone, it looked as if all were over. But brilliant batting by Salman Ali Agha and wicket-keeper-batsman Mohammad Rizwan put Pakistan on course once again.
With five wickets in hand, Pakistan required 98 to carve out victory and looked pretty confident. Pat Cummins, bowling in fury, bounced one to Rizwan which ripped through his right arm. All the fielders appealed in chorus for caught behind by keeper Carey.
on field umpire Michael Gough ruled him not out. Cummins immediately asked for DRS. The third umpire, Richard Illingworth, ruled him out, though Hot Spot did not show anything. The Snicko, however, showed a spike and it was enough for the third umpire Illingworth to rule him out.
The correspondent of Guardian too was not sure of the decision. In fact, the ball had brushed Rizwan's wristband which is not a part of the glove, according to ICC rules. It was a bizarre decision by the third umpire which broke the momentum of the chase and Pakistan, after being 219 for five, lost the remaining five wickets for 18 runs, leaving Pakistan 79 runs short of victory.
Mohammad Hafeez cried hoarse and appealed for introspection by ICC but the damage had already rattled the Pakistan team whivh goes into the third Test slated for January 3 in Sydney which will be David Warner's farewell Test.
What is most shocking for cricket pundits is that Pakistan is playing without a regular spinner, never heard of in Test cricket. It seems the PCB has gone crazy and such an approach is bound to affect the performance in international matches.
Moreover, the atrocious fielding of the Pakistan team requires utmost attention without delay. Hold catches and win matches should be the dictum Hafeez should know.
Syed Rifaquat Ali is JoA correspondent in Sydney
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Published since July 2008 |
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