TRT World - December 11, 2023
US arrests dozens of activists demanding truce in besieged Gaza
Israeli onslaught on blockaded Gaza — now in its 66th day — has left at least 18,205 Palestinians dead and more than 49,645 wounded while thousands are feared dead under debris of bombed buildings.
2115 GMT — Several dozen activists calling for the United States to push for a permanent ceasefire have protested in a US Senate office building before police ended the protest and took dozens into custody.
Groups, including the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights and Jewish Voice for Peace organised the protest, which called for the US government to divert funds to domestic priorities such as affordable housing and childcare instead of further arming Israel with US weapons.
One activist was arrested after he climbed up onto a 51-foot high black steel sculpture by artist Alexander Calder. Others chanted "ceasefire now" and wore shirts with the slogan "invest in life" as they linked arms.
US Capitol Police said they arrested 51 people in total as a result of the demonstration. Reuters images show activists engaging in civil disobedience in Hart Senate Office Building, part of the US Capitol complex where many senators and committees have their offices.
"Funding more death and destruction of human life...makes no one secure, and instead fuels hatred and continued war," Sandra Tamari, executive director of the Adalah Justice Project, one of the groups involved in the protest. "The Senate must heed our urgent demand to stop funding militarism and instead invest in life."
1900 GMT — Blinken defends sale of tank shells to Israel
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has defended the emergency sale to Israel of nearly 14,000 rounds of tank ammunition and also called for quick congressional approval of more than $100 billion in aid for Israel, Ukraine and other national security priorities.
Blinken said the needs of Israel's military invasion in Gaza justify the rare decision to bypass Congress. "Israel is in combat right now with Hamas," he said during television interviews on Sunday. "And we want to make sure that Israel has what it needs to defend itself against Hamas."
The tank ammunition and related support constitute only a small portion of military sales to Israel and the rest remains subject to congressional review, Blinken said. "It's very important that Congress' voice be heard in this," he said.
The decision to proceed with the sale of more than $106 million in tank shells came as the Biden administration’s larger aid package is caught up in a debate over US immigration policy and border security.
1807 GMT –– Gaza destruction worse than in WWII Germany: EU's Borrell
The situation in Gaza is "catastrophic, apocalyptic", with destruction proportionally "even greater" than that which Germany experienced in World War II, the EU's top diplomat Josep Borrell has said.
Israel's military invasion of Gaza has resulted in "an incredible number of civilian casualties", Borrell said after chairing a meeting of EU foreign ministers.
He said the EU was also "alarmed by the violence in the West Bank by extremist settlers" and condemned the Israeli government's decision to approve 1,700 more housing units in Jerusalem, in what Brussels considers a violation of international law.
Global Research, December 11, 2023
The View from Washington: Let the Killing in Gaza Continue
By Dr. Binoy Kampmark
Bloodletting as form; murder as fashion. The ongoing campaign in Gaza by Israel’s Defence Forces continues without stalling and restriction. But the burgeoning number of corpses is starting to become a challenge for the propaganda outlets: How to justify it? Fortunately for Israel, the United States, its unqualified defender, is happy to provide cover for murder covered in the sheath of self-defence.
Such cover also takes the form of false fairness and forced balance.
“We don’t have to choose between defending Israel and aiding Palestinian civilians,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken wrote inanely in the Washington Post on October 31. “We can and must do both. That is the only way to stand firmly by one of our closest allies, protecting innocent lives, uphold the international rules of the road that ultimately benefit the American people, and preserve the sole viable path to lasting peace and security for Israelis and Palestinians: two states for two peoples.”
Given that innocent lives are being taken with mechanistic ruthlessness, international laws broken with impunity, and any remnant of a Palestinian state being liquidated, Blinken seemingly inhabits a parallel universe of mind-bending cynicism.
The latest attempt to halt hostilities came in the form of an intervention by UN Secretary-General António Guterres under the auspices of Article 99 of the UN Charter. The article grants the secretary-general the liberty to “bring to the attention of the Security Council any matter which in his opinion, may threaten the maintenance of international peace and security.”
In his December 6 letter to the members of the Security Council, Guterres gives a brief account of the conflict, commencing on October 7. After noting the death of 1,200 Israelis and 250 abductions (130 are still being held in captivity in Gaza), the focus shifts to the death of over 15,000 individuals in the strip itself, “more than 40 per cent of whom were children.” Somewhere in the order of 80 per cent of the population of 2.2 million residents in Gaza had been displaced, with 1.1 million seeking refuge in UNRWA facilities across the strip “creating overcrowded, undignified, and unhygienic conditions.” The provision of viable health care had all but ceased, with 14 hospitals of 36 facilities “partially functional.” Overall, Gaza was facing “a severe risk of collapse of the humanitarian system.”
The secretary-general concludes his note by urging the Security Council members “to press to avert a humanitarian catastrophe” and seek a “humanitarian ceasefire”. But on December 8,
Washington predictably sabotaged the passage of the follow up resolution, which had been proposed by the United Arab Emirates. (Thirteen countries voted for the measure; with the United Kingdom abstaining.) The resolution demanded an immediate humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza and the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages and ensuring humanitarian access.
The US deputy ambassador to the UN Robert A. Wood, claimed that he and the delegation had “engaged in good faith on the text.” But “nearly all” of Washington’s recommendations had been ignored, resulting in “an unbalanced resolution divorced from reality on the ground.” Again, a sticking point was the omission in the draft of any reference to Hamas’s attack on October 7, Israel’s right to self-defence, and reference to any permission for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to access and provide medical treatment to the hostages still being held by Hamas.
With the gloves off, Wood made it clear that, in solidarity with Israel, the US will not countenance the continued existence of Hamas. “The resolution retains a call for an unconditional ceasefire – this is not only unrealistic but dangerous; it will simply leave Hamas in place, able to regroup and repeat what it did on 7 October.”
While Israel’s UN ambassador, Gilad Erdan, was not present to address the Security Council, he subsequently affirmed the blood curdling, unending mission his country has embarked upon.
“A ceasefire will only be possible only with the return of all the hostages and the destruction of Hamas.”
As this farcical theatre of constipated morality unfolded, the Biden administration was happy to beef up the Israeli war machine by asking Congress to urgently approve the sale of 45,000 shells for the IDF’s Merkava tanks to aid its offensive in Gaza. The sale, worth around $500 million, does not form part of Biden’s $110.5 billion supplemental request that covers funding for both Ukraine and Israel.
In pursuing such a course of action, be it defending Israel’s policies in the Security Council, or via armaments, the US is effectively colluding in the perpetration of crimes against humanity. This was certainly the view of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who said in a statement released by his office that “the American position is aggressive and immoral, a flagrant violation of all humanitarian principles and values, and holds the United States responsible for the bloodshed of Palestinian children, women and elderly people in the Gaza Strip”.
Amnesty International’s Secretary General, Agnès Callamard also expressed the view that the US, in vetoing the resolution, had “displayed a callous disregard for civilian suffering in the face of a staggering death toll, extensive destruction and an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe happening in the occupied Gaza Strip.” Washington had “brazenly wielded and weaponized its veto to strongarm the UN Security Council, further undermining its credibility and ability to live up to its mandate to maintain international peace and security.” Not that it had much credibility to begin with.
*Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University. He is a regular contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com
https://www.globalresearch.ca/view-washington-let-killing-gaza-continue/5842802
Information Clearing House – December 11, 2023
Ethnic cleansing of Gaza: The unambiguous goal of Israel’s genocidal assault
Israel won’t succeed in its goals to ethnically cleanse Gaza due to the heroic steadfastness of Palestinians, says Mustafa Barghouti, but the price is their blood, unless all people of conscience use all possible channels to force Israel to stop.
By Mustafa Barghouti
After Israel resumed its all-out assault on Gaza, the bombardment by its warplanes, artillery and tanks has engulfed the entirety of the Strip, from Rafah in the south to the uppermost northern border.
The Israeli army are desperately seeking to make up for their failure after 50 days of war, with this new attempt to crush the resistance in northern Gaza and Gaza City to secure control. So far it has failed to achieve this, despite the savagery of its attacks.
It is also, more importantly, attempting to displace the steadfast inhabitants of these areas – who have remained – to southern Gaza by terrorising them through relentless bombing.
”The heroic resilience of the people of Gaza under the barbaric onslaught the world has borne witness to will go down in history; but every decent human being today needs to mobilise all their energy to force Israel to stop its savage aggression and prevent the ethnic cleansing that Netanyahu is planning to carry out.”
Israel has not hidden its intentions – its planes dropped flyers over the residents of Al-Qarara, Khuza’a and Abasan, three towns in Khan Younis province, warning them that it was now a “dangerous area” and instructing them to leave and go south to Rafah on the Egyptian border.
The goal is evidently the displacement of all residents from north to south, and from there, further displacement southwards to Rafah and the Egyptian border. The Israelis clearly hope the ensuing exacerbation in human suffering as millions are crammed into an ever-smaller area, will bring about the kind of pressure needed to break the valiant Palestinian steadfastness, and force Egypt to budge from its staunch refusal to allow the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip to be pushed into its Sinai desert.
Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom, an outlet which has good relations with Netanyahu, uncovered his real intentions when discussing this displacement plan. It wrote that Netanyahu wanted to “thinﾔ the Palestinian population in the Gaza Stripﾠ“to a minimum”, by expelling as many Palestinians as possible from it.
The piece presented further expulsion scenarios via the Rafah crossing, such as ejecting the population using ships, which is what happened to Palestinians from Yaffa and Haifa during the Nakba in 1948. However, it then reverted to describing Netanyahu’s plan as “political fantasy”, due to its failure to reckon with the steadfastness of the Palestinian people and their insistence on remaining in their homeland even if the price is death and martyrdom.
Added to this is Egypt’s political line, as well as widespread international opposition, including from many figures within the US administration. The newspaper also wrote that even members of the Israeli war cabinet, like Gantz, Gallant and Eisenkot, consider Netanyahu’s plans to be unrealistic and far-fetched, even if they wish they could be realised.
Some Western media channels which have shown a disgraceful and shameful level of bias towards Israel, have denied that its goal is ethnic cleansing, even though this has already effectively been carried out given 80% of Gaza’s population was forced to leave their homes, and hundreds of thousands, under ferocious bombardment, were forced to move south. Not only this, but those who attempted to return to Gaza City and the north during the temporary ceasefire, were shot at.
These media channels ignore what Netanyahu himself openly declared in the first days of the aggression – that all inhabitants of the Gaza Strip must leave their homes. Moreover, they ignore that Israeli military spokesman Richard Hecht said even more clearly words to the effect that the entire population of the Gaza Strip needed to leave their homes and head to Egypt – a statement which made the headline of Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth.
But the Palestinians will not leave, because they experienced forcible displacement in 1948, and know deeply the bitterness and humiliation suffered by those forced to become refugees. They are also fully aware that if they depart from Palestine – their homeland – and leave the Gaza Strip, they will never be allowed to return.
The heroic resilience of the people of Gaza under the barbaric onslaught the world has borne witness to will go down in history; but every decent human being today needs to mobilise all their energy to force Israel to stop its savage aggression and prevent the ethnic cleansing that Netanyahu is planning to carry out.
The death toll of the first day that Israel renewed its bombardment on Gaza was 200 – and around 600 were injured. Israel also blocked the entry of all aid into Gaza via the Rafah crossing, which constitutes the collective punishment of 2.3 million people. All of this is taking place in addition to the unbearable pressure on hospitals and health facilities deprived of medicines and medical equipment.
Therefore, we reiterate our demand to the governments of the 57 Arab and Islamic states that met in Riyadh – that they form a humanitarian aid convoy which collectively represents them, as well as call on international humanitarian organisations to take part – to break the blockade being illegally imposed on the Rafah crossing by Israel.
If this happens, will Israel really dare bomb a convoy containing representatives from 57 states, the populations of which number over two billion people – a quarter of the world’s population?
Alongside this, with the renewal of Israel’s onslaught, we renew our legitimate demand from all states which have normalised relations with Israel, to cancel their agreements, cut ties, and expel its ambassadors.
Likewise we demand that all Arabic and Islamic states send a clear message to the US, Britain and every state that supports the continuation of Israel’s assault and refuses to support a complete and permanent ceasefire. This message should state clearly that their interests in the Arab and Islamic states will incur damage if they persist in their stance.
Israel and its occupation will not break the will of the Palestinian people, nor their steadfastness. Nor will it succeed in achieving its goal of displacement and ethnic cleansing. However, the price of this resilience is being paid for in blood – that of Palestinians and their children.
So the question is this – how many more thousands of children must die before the consciences of those who have ignored and failed in their humanitarian, national and religious duty finally wake up?
Mustafa Barghouti is founder and leader of the Palestinian National Initiative (PNI) as well as a doctor, activist, writer, and advocate of Palestinian rights. He has been a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council since 2006, and was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010.
Information Clearing House – December 11, 2023
The Evil Israel Does is the Evil Israel Gets
Israel’s settler colonial project perpetuates the cycle of violence against the indigenous inhabitants of historic Palestine. Palestinians have been forced to speak back in the language Israel speaks.
By Chris Hedges
I knew Dr. Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, the co-founder of Hamas, along with Sheikh Ahmed Ismail Yassin. Al-Rantisi’s family were expelled to the Gaza Strip by Zionist militias from historic Palestine during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. He did not fit the demonized image of a Hamas leader. He was a soft spoken, articulate and highly educated pediatrician who had graduated first in his class at Egypt’s Alexandria University.
As a nine-year-old boy, he witnessed executions in Khan Younis of 275 Palestinian men and boys, including his uncle, when Israel briefly occupied the Gaza Strip in 1956, the subject of Joe Sacco’s magisterial book Footnotes in Gaza. Scores of Palestinians were also executed by Israeli soldiers in the neighboring town of Rafah, where tens of thousands Palestinians are currently being forced to flee now that Khan Younis has come under attack.
“I still remember the wailing and the tears of my father over his brother,” al-Rantisi told Sacco and me when we visited him at his home. “I couldn’t sleep for many months after that…It left a wound in my heart that can never heal. I’m telling you a story and I’m almost crying. This sort of action can never be forgotten…[T]hey planted hatred in our hearts.”
He knew he could never trust the Israelis. He knew that the goal of the Zionist state was the occupation of all of historic Palestine – Israel seized Gaza and the West Bank in 1967 along with Syria’s Golan Heights and Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula – and the eternal subjugation or extermination of the Palestinian people. He knew he would avenge the killings.
Al-Rantisi and Yassin were assassinated in 2004 by Israel. Al-Rantisi’s widow,Jamila Abdallah Taha al-Shanti, had a doctorate in English and taught at the Islamic University in Gaza. The couple had six children, one of whom was killed along with his father. The family’s home was bombed and destroyed during the 2014 Israeli assault on Gaza known as Operation Protective Edge. Jamila was killed by Israel on Oct. 19 of this year.
Israel’s genocide in Gaza is rearing a new generation of enraged, traumatized and dispossessed Palestinians who have lost family members, friends, homes, communities and any hope of living ordinary lives. They, too, will seek retribution. Their small acts of terrorism will counter Israel’s ongoing state terror. They will hate as they have been hated. This lust for vengeance is universal. After World War Two, a clandestine unit of Jews who served in the Jewish Brigade of the British Army, called “Gmul,” – Hebrew for “Recompense” – hunted down former Nazis and executed them.
“I and the public know/What all schoolchildren learn,” W.H. Auden wrote. “Those to whom evil is done/Do evil in return.”
Chaim Engel, who took part in the uprising at the Nazis’ Sobibor death camp in Poland, described how, armed with a knife, he attacked a guard in the camp.
“It’s not a decision,” Engel said. “You just react, instinctively you react to that, and I figured, ‘Let us to do, and go and do it.’ And I went. I went with the man in the office, and we killed this German. With every jab, I said, ‘That is for my father, for my mother, for all these people, all the Jews you killed.’”
What Engel did to the Nazi guard was no less savage than what Hamas fighters did to Israelis on Oct. 7, after escaping their own prison. Taken out of context, it is inexplicable. But set against the backdrop of the extermination camp, or the 17 years trapped in Gaza’s concentration camp, it makes sense. This is not to excuse it. To understand is not to condone. But we must understand if this cycle of violence is to be stopped. No one is immune to the thirst for vengeance. Israel and the U.S. are foolishly orchestrating yet another chapter in this nightmare.
J. Glenn Gray, a combat officer in World War Two, wrote about the peculiar nature of vengeance in “The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle:”
When the soldier has lost a comrade to this enemy or possibly had his family destroyed by them through bombings or through political atrocities, so frequently the case in World War II, his anger and resentment deepen into hatred. Then the war for him takes on the character of a vendetta. Until he has himself destroyed as many of the enemy as possible, his lust for vengeance can hardly be appeased. I have known soldiers who were avid to exterminate every last one of the enemy, so fierce was their hatred. Such soldiers took great delight in hearing or reading of mass destruction through bombings. Anyone who has known or been a soldier of this kind is aware of how hatred penetrates every fiber of his being. His reason for living is to seek revenge; not an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, but a tenfold retaliation.
To the brutalized, numb with trauma, convulsed by rage, those who relentlessly attack and humiliate them are not human beings. They are representations of evil. The lust for vengeance, for tenfold retaliation, spawns rivers of blood.
The Palestinian attacks of Oct. 7, which left some 1,200 Israelis dead, feeds this lust within Israel, just as Israel’s obliteration of Gaza feeds this lust among Palestinians. Israel’s blue and white national flag with the Star of David adorns homes and cars. Crowds gather to supportﾠfamilies whose members are among the hostages in Gaza. Israelis hand out food at road junctions to soldiers headed to fight in Gaza. Banners with slogans such as “Israel at war” and “Together we will win” punctuate television broadcasts and media sites. There is little discussion in Israeli media of the slaughter in Gaza or the suffering of Palestinians – 1.7 million of whom have been driven from their homes – but a constant repetition of the stories of suffering, death and heroism that took place on the Oct. 7 attack. Only our victims matter.
“Few of us ever know how far fear and violence can transform us into creatures at bay, ready with tooth and claw,” Gray wrote. “If the war taught me anything at all, it convinced me that people are not what they seem or even think themselves to be.”
Marguerite Duras in her book “The War: A Memoir” writes of how she and other members of the French Resistance tortured a 50-year-old Frenchman accused of collaborating with the Nazis. Two men who were tortured in Montluc prison in Lyon strip the alleged informer. They beat him as the group shouts: “Bastard. Traitor. Scum.” Blood and mucus soon run from his nose. His eye is damaged. He moans, “Ow, ow, oh, oh. …” He crumples in a heap on the floor. Duras writes that he had “become someone without anything in common with other men. And with every minute the difference grows bigger and more established.” She watches the beating passively. “The more they hit and the more he bleeds, the more it’s clear that hitting is necessary, right, just.” She goes on: “You have to strike. There will never be any justice in the world unless you – yourself are justice now. Judges, paneled courtrooms play-acting, not justice.” She notes,“Every blow rings out in the silent room. They’re hitting at all the traitors, at the women who left, at all those who didn’t like what they saw from behind the shutters.”
Israel has abused, humiliated, impoverished and wantonly killed Palestinians, provoking inevitable counter violence. It is the engine behind a century of bloodshed. The genocide in Gaza outdoes even the worst excesses of the Nakba, or catastrophe, which saw 750,000 Palestinians driven from their land in 1948 and 8,000 to 15,000 murdered in massacres by Zionist terrorist militias such as Irgun and Lehi.
The Palestinian resistance has little more than small arms and rocket-propelled grenades to battle against one of the best equipped and most technologically advanced militaries on the planet, the world’s 4th strongest military, after the U.S., Russia and China. Palestinian fighters, facing these overwhelming odds, have become demigods with huge popular followings not only among Palestinians, but throughout the Muslim world. Israel may be able to hunt down and kill Hamas’s second-in-command leader Yahya Sinwar, but if they do, he will become the Middle East’s version of Ernesto “Che” Guevara. Resistance movements are built on the blood of martyrs. Israel ensures a continual supply.
The decision by the U.S.to defend, fund and participate in Israel’s carpet bombing, slaughter and ethnic cleansing in Gaza is unconscionable. Its backing for the genocide has destroyed what remained of its credibility in the Middle East, already in tatters from two decades of wars, as well as most of the rest of the world. It has forfeited its right to act as a mediator; that role will be taken by China or Russia. Its refusal to condemn Israeli aggression and war crimes exposes its hypocrisy about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It flirts with the possibility of a regional conflagration. The peace process, a sham for decades, is irrecoverable. The only language left is the language of death. It is how Israel speaks to the Palestinians. It is how the Palestinians are forced to speak back.
The Biden administration has little to gain from the leveling and depopulation of Gaza, indeed it is alienating huge segments of the Democratic Party, especially as it attacks protestors calling for a ceasefire as “pro-terrorist.” Senate Majority leader Chuck Schumer led chants of “We stand with Israel” and “No ceasefire” at a pro-Israel rally on Nov. 4 in Washington D.C., despite aﾠReuters/Ipsos survey indicating 68 percent of respondents believed that Israel should implement a ceasefire and negotiate an end to the war. That number rises to 77 percent among Democrats. Biden has a dismal approval rating of 37 percent.
On Friday, the United Nations Security Council voted 13-1 for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and unconditional release of all hostages. The U.S. voted against the resolution. The U.K. abstained. The draft resolution was not adopted due to the U.S. veto.
Biden’s real base is not disenchanted voters but the billionaire class, corporations, such as the weapons industry, which is making huge profits from the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, and groups such as the Israel lobby. They determine policy, even if it means Biden’s defeat in the next presidential election. If Biden loses, the oligarchs get Donald Trump, who serves their interests as doggedly as Biden.
The wars do not end. The suffering continues. The Palestinians die in the tens of thousands. This is by design.
https://informationclearinghouse.blog/2023/12/11/the-evil-israel-does-is-the-evil-israel-gets/
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