Mondoweiss – November 24, 2023
‘Operation Al-Aqsa Flood’ Day 49:
Four-day truce begins in Gaza after a night of heavy bombardment
A window of respite opens on Friday with a hostage swap due to take place in the afternoon, after Israeli forces hit Indonesian hospital and an UNRWA school. Israeli forces kill a 12-year-old Palestinian boy in the occupied West Bank, and settlers continue to harass Palestinian communities.
Casualties
14,854 killed*, including 6,150 children, and more than 36,000 wounded in the Gaza Strip
226 Palestinians* killed in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem
Israel revises its estimated October 7 death toll down from 1,400 to 1,200
*This figure covers the casualties from October 7 to November 23. Due to breakdowns in communication networks within the Gaza Strip (particularly in northern Gaza), the Gaza Ministry of Health has not been able to update its tolls regularly. The Government Media Office in Gaza has since become the main source for tolls in the enclave. Tolls have also not been regularly updated in the occupied West Bank.
Key Developments
- Friday marks first in four-day pause in fighting in Gaza mediated by Qatar, allowing entry of meager amounts of aid.
- First prisoner swap due to take place on Friday afternoon, 13 Israeli women and children held hostage since October 7 in exchange for 39 Palestinian women and children imprisoned by Israel.
- Israeli forces shoot at Palestinians attempting to return home to northern Gaza despite ceasefire, reportedly killing two people.
- Humanitarian agencies call for full-fledged ceasefire and unlimited entrance of aid into Gaza, Israeli government vows to continue bombardment after pause is over.
- Israel pummels Gaza Strip overnight ahead of truce, attacking Indonesian hospital and UNRWA school in Jabalia.
- Two Palestinian journalists killed on Thursday, Reporters Without Borders accuses Israel of “eradicating journalism” in Gaza.
- Israeli forces kill several Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, including 12-year-old boy.
- Israeli communications minister threatens Haaretz newspaper with financial penalties for its coverage of the current war, calling it ﾓlying, defeatist propaganda.ﾔ
- Israelﾒs agriculture reels from government’s decision to rescind permits to Palestinian workers and departure of thousands of foreign workers due to conflict.
- Newly minted UK Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs David Cameron pledgesﾠ$37.38 million of additional humanitarian aid to Gaza.
- Pro-Palestine protesters disrupt famous Macyﾒs Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York City on Thursday, gluing hands to street in middle of parade route.
- Activists online urge people everywhere to boycott Black Friday sales of major brands.
- Thousands in Cuba, including President Miguel Diaz-Canel, march for Palestine.
Humanitarian pause begins, but little hope it will be extended
A planned four-day temporary ceasefire mediated by Qatar began at 7 a.m. on Friday in the Gaza Strip after 48 days of relentless bombardment and fighting.
A first batch of hostages is expected to be released by Hamas and Israel on Friday afternoon, as part of a prisoner exchange deal that is set to see the exchange of 50 Israelis held by Palestinian resistance groups in Gaza since October 7 with 150 Palestinian women and children detained in Israeli prisons.
At 4 p.m. local time, 13 Israeli women and children are scheduled to be taken to the Rafah border crossing with Egypt, then flown back to Israel via helicopter, while 34 women and girls and 15 teenage boys — 39 Palestinians in total from the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem — will be handed over to the International Committee of the Red Cross at Ofer military jail, an Israeli prison located in the West Bank, before being taken to either Jerusalem or Betunia in the West Bank depending on where they are from, Al Jazeera reported. More people are expected to be released in the following three days and beyond, depending on how the truce holds.
According to the Palestinian prisoners’ rights group Addameer, at least 200 Palestinian children were held in Israeli prisons as of early November — a number that may have gone up given the rise in Israeli detention raids in the occupied West Bank since the beginning of the onslaught more than a month and a half ago.ﾠDefense for Children International ﾖ Palestine (DCIP) has meanwhile noted that “Israeli forces detain, interrogate, prosecute, and imprison 500-700 Palestinian children between the ages of 12-17 each year” under its military court and prison system.
The identities of both the Palestinians and Israelis set to be released on Friday have yet to be publicly confirmed. While the release of a handful of the more than 7,000 Palestinians imprisoned by Israel may be seen as a positive development, it is worth noting that Israel has regularly re-imprisoned Palestinians who had been released under the Gilad Shalit prisoner swap deal.
On the first day of the truce, the Israeli army has forbidden Palestinians from heading back to their homes in northern Gaza, which has been the scene of intense fighting on the ground for weeks. Several Palestinians were shot by Israeli soldiers on Friday while attempting to cross back into central Gaza after the ceasefire went into effect, with initial reports of at least two killed.
Some aid has begun to enter the southern Gaza Strip, with 200 trucks of food, water, medical supplies, and limited amounts of fuel set to enter the devastated Palestinian enclave each day during the duration of the truce. While the entry of desperately needed aid into Gaza was welcomed by humanitarian agencies and NGOs, they noted that this was still far less than the 500 trucks that were allowed into Gaza daily before October 7.
“As we all anticipate the beginning of the much-awaited pause, I reiterate my call for a long-standing humanitarian ceasefire,” UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini said on Thursday following his second visit to Gaza since the onslaught began. “People are exhausted and are losing hope in humanity. They need respite, they deserve to sleep without being anxious about whether they will make it through the night. This is the bare minimum anyone should be able to have.”
Oxfam, meanwhile, noted that the collapse of the healthcare system in Gaza means the temporary truce “is too short and fragile to make any meaningful difference given the scale of need and destruction” and called for a “full ceasefire and unimpeded humanitarian access.”
“Amongst the horror and carnage in Gaza, we are now at the abhorrent stage of babies dying because of diarrhea and hypothermia,” Oxfam’s Middle East Regional Director Sally Abi Khalil said on Thursday. “It is shattering that newborns are coming into the world and due to the apocalyptic conditions, stand little chance of survival.”
The Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor has meanwhile called on international human rights groups to take advantage of the truce to send fact-finding committees to “document the magnitude of Israel’s crimes against Palestinian civilians” in Gaza and “ascertain the rapidly worsening humanitarian situation with their own eyes.”
Despite international calls for a permanent end to the violence in Gaza, Israel has insisted that the truce, much criticized by the most extremist elements of the far-right government, would not spell the end of the war.
Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said Thursday that Tel Aviv’s military campaign would resume “with intensity” for at least two more months, the Times of Israel reported. Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Thursday that he had “already instructed” the Mossad spy agency to target Hamas leaders “wherever they are” — a thinly veiled threat of military operations in places like Qatar, where Hamas political bureau chairman Ismail Haniyeh is based.
Yet the blustering rhetoric of Israel’s war cabinet has failed to convince the country’s right wing, which sees anything less than the total annihilation of Hamas (and Gaza’s civilian population with it) as abdication.
Jonathan Pollard, who was imprisoned by the U.S. for 30 years for spying on Washington on behalf of Israel, was quoted by the Jerusalem Post as calling the temporary ceasefire and hostage release deal a “monstrous blunder” and argued that the families of Israeli hostages, many of whom have been publicly critical of Netanyahu’s actions for putting their loved ones at risk, should have been told to “keep your mouths shut or we will shut them for you” and thrown into prison.
Violent bombing across Gaza before ceasefire
As if spurred by the deadline of the beginning of the temporary truce on Friday morning, Israel ramped up its bombardment of Gaza on Thursday and early Friday, to devastating effect.
Israeli forces continued to target the Indonesian hospital in Beit Lahia for the fourth day of siege, destroying its remaining power generators and shelling entrances to the medical facility. Soldiers then stormed the hospital, killing one woman, wounding at least three other people, and detaining six. After its unconvincing theory that Al-Shifa’ Hospital was a cover for Hamas’s main command center in Gaza, Israeli forces have reiterated similar claims regarding the Indonesian hospital, putting the lives of hundreds of patients, medical staff, and civilians seeking refuge at risk.
Deadly airstrikes meanwhile pummelled Nuseirat refugee camp, Jabalia, al-Bureij refugee camp, and the Gaza City neighborhood of Sheikh Radwan, hitting schools and homes in the northern and central Gaza Strip, which have seen the worst of the violence.
In a daily reminder that the southern Gaza Strip is not safe despite Israeli propaganda, Israeli strikes hit homes in Khan Younis and Rafah and mosques in Khuza’a, killing at least 11 people, including children.
At least two Palestinian journalists were killed on Thursday, identified as Amal Zahd and Muhammad Ayyash — as Reporters Without Borders (RSF) accused Israel on Wednesday of turning Gaza into a “cemetery for journalists” and subjecting the Palestinian territory to “a veritable eradication of journalism.”
Palestinian boy killed in the West Bank
Israeli forces have killed at least three Palestinians, including a child, since Thursday in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Muhammad Ibrahim Edeli, 12, was shot and killed by Israeli forces on Thursday night in the northern West Bank town of Beita, WAFA news agency reported. Meanwhile, Khaled al-Sayyeh Ulawn, 46, was killed in the village of Burqa, while 22-year-old Muhammad Hinawi, who was identified as a fighter in a local resistance brigade, was shot dead in Aqbat Jabr refugee camp near Jericho.
Initial reports emerged on Friday afternoon that a Palestinian was run over and killed by an Israeli settler in the Hebron-area village of Yatta.
Amer Nizar Khairallah, 27, succumbed on Friday to wounds sustained earlier this month when an Israeli drone bombed Tulkarem. Israeli forces have killed 43 Palestinians in Tulkarem alone since October 7.
DCIP had earlier reported that Israeli forces shot and killed 14-year-old Motaz Anas Subhi Mansour on Wednesday in the northern West Bank village of Burin.
At least 13 Palestinians were detained in the West Bank, including six men from Gaza whose Israeli work permits were revoked in the wake of the October 7 attack, and who, like many others, had fled to the West Bank fearing Israeli reprisals. At least 3,000 Gazan workers have been imprisoned since early October and subjected to torture and abuse.
Israeli forces also staged raids in Nablusﾠand Rummanah, where they demolished a home. In Tuquﾒ, Israeli forces shot and injured at least three Palestinians on Friday.
Meanwhile, Israeli settlers raided lands in the sensitive area of Masafer Yatta south of Hebron, damaging trees and agricultural structures. Elsewhere in the Hebron governorate, settlers destroyed the Bedouin community of al-Qanoub, which had been vacated by its inhabitants earlier this month following threats of settler violence.
In occupied East Jerusalem, Israeli forces once again fired tear gas and rubber-coated steel bullets at Palestinian worshippers seeking to pray at the Al-Aqsa Mosque.
Further north, the Lebanese Hezbollah movement claimed it had shelled dozens of areas in northern Israel ahead of the truce, but the group said it would respect the temporary pause in fighting “provided that Israel does not strike South Lebanon.” According to Lebanese newspaper L’Orient Today, at least 86 Hezbollah fighters have been killed by Israel since October 8, including the son of the parliamentary leader of Hezbollah. At least 14 civilians, including three journalists, have been killed during the same time frame.
Mondoweiss – November 24, 2023
Israel wants to pull the U.S. into a regional confrontation, but Biden remains reluctant
Israel has larger war aims than Hamas, and is deliberately provoking a regional war to draw the U.S. into the fray. Biden has made halfhearted efforts to cool the situation, but he needs to be bolder in reining Israel in before it's too late.
BY MITCHELL PLITNICK
Earlier this week, U.S. President Joe Biden dispatched one of his top security advisers, the Israeli-American Amos Hochstein, to Israel. According to a U.S. official, the purpose of the trip was to “emphasize that restoring calm along Israel’s northern border is of utmost importance to the United States and it should be a top priority for both Israel and Lebanon.”
The wording there is important. The Biden administration clearly does not believe that Israel considers “restoring calm” along its northern border a “top priority.” The mention of Lebanon is pro forma; the U.S. can’t point the finger only at Israel, lest there be a political backlash. Hezbollah’s intentions are clear: they are standing with the Palestinians and, in tit-for-tat fashion with Israel, slowly pushing the envelope, seeing how far they can go before Israel really unleashes on them. Southern Lebanon can’t afford an all-out Israeli assault, given the dire circumstances in that country. They may get one anyway.
Biden has reason to worry. Despite public denials that are increasingly absurd, Israel is obviously doing a lot more than trying to strike Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Not only have they declared a war aim that simply isn’t achievable — totally eliminating Hamas — Israel has also gone out of its way to target civilian sites. Even if the President remains willfully blind, it cannot have escaped most of Biden’s staff that Israel has larger war aims than Hamas.
As clear as that may be, the boundaries of those aims are less obvious. Some in the Biden administration are concerned that Israel is deliberately trying to provoke a wider war to draw the United States into the fray. From the outside, it appears that while some in Israel would very much like to do just that, others are merely counting on the U.S. presence to deter Iran’s direct involvement if Israel and Hezbollah do engage in an escalated fight. Still, others seem to be wholly focused on the Palestinians and would prefer to avoid any confrontation with Hezbollah. For now, that is the view that holds in Israel, but clearly, the Biden administration is uneasy about how long that will last.
The last chance for the far right
One key aspect that bears more thorough examination is the fact that this Israeli government’s life is almost certainly no longer than the current fighting, and possibly even shorter. Many have observed that Benjamin Netanyahu, who is facing calls to resign as prime minister and seems to have finally reached the end of his ability to survive politically, wants to prolong the war so that he can prolong his time in office, and perhaps even find a way out of his current, apparently hopeless, political position. But these concerns are not limited to Netanyahu.
The far right, represented by Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, also faces an uncertain future. Hamas’s criminal attack on October 7 gave them the opportunity to significantly escalate an ethnic cleansing program in both Gaza and the West Bank, and they have taken advantage of it. Though they need to proceed carefully on the West Bank, the massive escalation of completely unprovoked Israeli violence there, including both settler and military attacks, is a clear sign of their agenda at work. It’s hardly confined to Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, of course. They are simply more blunt and less cautious about it.
Yet many Israelis place some of the blame for their losses on the far right, its adherence to ideology over strategy, and its inexperience at governance. As a result, it seems more likely than not that the next government will not include them, although depending on how elections and coalition talks go, necessity may give them another opportunity.
In any case, both the extreme right and the more mainstream right in the current Israeli government recognize that they have a unique opportunity right now to change the entire playing field in Israel, Palestine, and Lebanon. For Netanyahu, too, such a project means a longer conflict as he works hard to buy himself more time.
This is a key reason that Israel delayed the hostage exchange deal for so long, risking the wrath of the families with whose loved ones’ lives the Netanyahu government was playing so callously. But we’ve all seen the result of Israel’s assault: the condensation of what’s left of the Gazan population into the south, the escalating attacks and emptying of Palestinian villages in the West Bank, and the gradual introduction into the discourse of the idea of spiriting the surviving Palestinians away to other countries.
Escalation with Hezbollah
The real danger of escalation is with Hezbollah at the Lebanese border with Israel. While neither side seems to want an escalation, there are certainly forces within the Netanyahu government that do, and that is what worries the Biden administration.
Israel and Hezbollah have been launching small escalatory attacks for weeks, inching just a bit closer to a potentially explosive confrontation. Hezbollah wants to show its support for the Palestinians, but the simple fact is that if it brings the kind of destruction to Lebanon that Israel can unleash, given the already terrible strife in the politically and economically crippled country, it risks losing most of its support in Lebanon.
Many in the Israeli leadership are not eager to open a second front either. Its forces are already divided between defending the north and destroying Gaza. Diverting even more of its resources to the Lebanese border opens up a number of grim possibilities, particularly if the West Bank should erupt in violence, as the settlers so desperately desire.
But others may want to seize the opportunity to smash Hezbollah. They may believe that the presence of the American warships in the eastern Mediterranean Sea will continue to deter Iran from directly confronting Israel, that Israel could effectively block at least a good deal of Iran’s attempts to resupply their Lebanese ally, and Hezbollah could thus be decimated by Israel alone.
More likely, though, the calculus involves drawing the U.S. into the fighting. While Iran would probably want to avoid direct involvement, an all-out battle between Israel and Hezbollah would almost certainly draw in Iran’s allies in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen. That could well be enough to escalate U.S. involvement. From that point, Iran might be forced into more direct participation, and almost any grim, even apocalyptic scenario, is possible.
Wiser minds in Israel might realize that drawing the U.S. into direct conflict at the cost of American lives risks throwing U.S. lockstep support of Israel into even greater question. The Gaza campaign has already brought unprecedented protests of Israel out into the streets. The fact that they are being led by young people — Jews and Muslims, together and in their own demonstrations — and are backed by expert opinions calling Israeli actions war crimes and even close to actual genocide has brought the limits of American and European support for Israel into view. That’s prompted harsh crackdowns on any support of Palestinians, an escalation of the fear for careers and opportunities that have long been a part of Palestine solidarity activism.
But that uptick in the crackdown is indicative of the challenge to the entrenched power of pro-Israel supporters. It is an unsubtle tactic, one that is certain to provoke a backlash in the long term. The backlash will also be magnified hundreds of times over if American soldiers’ lives are lost to the support for Israeli war crimes, and would bridge the progressive anti-war forces with the Realist foreign policy minds and mainstream Americans who have made it clear that they are tired of seeing American blood spilled in the Middle East.
Israeli divisions
The more fanatical forces in the Israeli government, however, as well as some of the more cynical, are trying to grasp this rare opportunity. It is not often that an American president is foolhardy enough to put the United States in a position to so easily be drawn into a war it does not want. Joe Biden gambled that putting U.S. forces in harm’s way would deter Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, and other Iranian-allied militias from attacking Israel. Biden was certain that none of these actors would dare interfere while the U.S. is so visibly and forcefully present.
That has proven to be correct so far, but Biden failed to take into account the temptation he was putting before Israel. With his typical hubristic lack of foresight, Biden put the United States into a position where a slight misstep or an unexpected attack on Israel (or even American forces) could force a response from the U.S. That risk is multiplied now that Israel is in a position to take steps to draw the U.S. into a war much more easily than if the American military had to mobilize and send forces over into the region.
That’s the scenario that Biden was clearly worried about when he sent Hochstein, an IDF veteran and a man who is widely respected in the Israeli establishment, to communicate with Lebanon and Israel. He could not, of course, talk directly to Hezbollah, but the Lebanese government could convey to Hezbollah’s leadership the threats that were surely Hochstein’s message to them. They’re not meant to have much effect on Hezbollah, and they don’t need to. The incremental escalations we’ve seen despite the atrocities in Gaza are a clear sign that Hezbollah is trying to avoid all-out war. Hochstein just had to make a show of talking to both sides.
At this moment, Israel is also still trying to avoid escalation, but some of its recent attacks have pushed the tension needle upward — as has Hezbollah’s. Netanyahu dreads a quick end to the war that will bring forward his day of reckoning in front of the Israeli public. He is certainly not above drawing the United States into a war, regardless of the long-term effects on the U.S.-Israel relationship as well as on Israel itself, which is likely to suffer both major damage and significant global blowback in the event it is seen as willfully widening this war.
For Biden’s part, he has already had to relent to pressure, both globally and domestically, and back a brief pause in the slaughter in Gaza. He and his spokespeople have veered gradually more toward admitting that Israel has caused “too many” civilian casualties in its operations. As little as that sounds like it, it is a significant step forward from the Biden administration’s rhetoric in the first few weeks of Israel’s onslaught, and it is all due to the pressure that the White House is feeling from activists, from other countries, and even from government employees.
Implicit in that shift is the unspoken reality that Israel is after much more than Hamas. This realization is what accounts for the Biden administration’s repeated statements of opposition to relocating any of Gaza’s population. Biden has created an expectation that he will, at least, not help Israel in forcing Gazans elsewhere, although this is far from guaranteed.
What pressure this has not resulted in yet is real and material steps to stop Israel from pursuing its more dangerous goals — both regarding the forced relocation of Palestinians and an escalation in Lebanon. That’s certainly a position Joe Biden does not want to find himself in. Any action he would take to deter Israel in that circumstance would certainly result in backlash from the pro-Israel forces, for whom he has already sacrificed some Muslim, Arab, and progressive support for him.
Biden has put himself in this position, and now he has to depend on Netanyahu to acquiesce to his requests, especially on escalation. Recent events are not promising. The escalation may be gradual, but it is proceeding. And, while right now Netanyahu does not seem to be inclined to take steps to provoke U.S. involvement, that could change if Hezbollah manages too big a strike. Biden is right to try to cool the situation, but he needs to be bolder and let Netanyahu know that the United States will not go beyond its deterrent role. The chances that Biden is ready to take such a firm stance seem questionable based on his behavior to date.
Countercurrent – November 24, 2023
Ours is an Indigenous Struggle: How Gaza United the World
by Dr Ramzy Baroud
For decades, the struggle for national liberation in Palestine was rightly understood to be part and parcel of a global struggle for liberation, mainly in the Global South.
And since national liberation movements were, per definition, the struggle for indigenous people to assert their collective rights for freedom, equality and justice, the Palestinian struggle was positioned as part of this global indigenous movement.
Alas, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the growing dominance of the United States and its allies, the return of Western colonialism in the form of neocolonialism to Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere, have localized many of the indigenous movements’ struggles.
This proved costly, as it allowed France, the US, Britain and others to, once more, sectionalize the Global South into regions of influence, controlling them through whatever military, political and economic strategies they had in mind. Similar to theﾠscramble for Africa in the late 19th century, recent decades wrought a new kind of colonial scramble for the Global South.
In the Palestinian context, in particular, the struggle was multi-faceted: theﾠdemise of global powers, like the USSR, which created some kind of geopolitical balance, isolated Palestinian Resistance movements. This forced these movements, namely those involved in the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), to seek political ‘compromises’, without achieving anything tangible in return.
For Washington, these concessions on the part of a once national liberation movement in Palestine, were consistent with the US’s regional agenda and the quest for a ‘New Middle East’.
Ultimately, this resulted in the wrongly termed ‘Palestinian division’, factionalﾠclashes in 2007, and a state of political paralysis which defined the so-called Palestinian leadership.
And, while Palestinians were busy sorting out their political and leadership crisis, Israel’s settler-colonial process accelerated, at the expense of whatever remained of the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
Of course, this does not, from an intellectual and historical point of view, alter the essential nature of the Palestinian struggle, which remained that of an indigenous nation fighting for its rights. However, it did confuse the political definitions and discourses surrounding the so-called Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
This confusion was a direct outcome of the misrepresentation of the Palestinian struggle through Israeli propaganda and US-Western media, which remained committed to elevating the Israeli line. Israel invested in presenting Palestinians as a divided people, who have no vision of peace, and their Resistance movements as essentially terrorist groups, hellbent on the destruction of Israel and so on.
But things began to change in recent years, with the revivalﾠof indigenous movements around the world, from the Black struggle in the US to the indigenous people resurgence in North and South America, to the ultimate rise of an actual global movement, centered around landless societies and indigenous rights – which heavily invested in global solidarity and intersectionality, allowing it to multiply its powers several times over.
The common element of “decolonization” – in all its manifestations – has created intersectional links among various struggles around the world, which allowed the Palestinian struggle for liberation to fit perfectly into the new global narrative.
“Black Australians and Palestinians share a history and reality of erasure that has lasted far beyond the anticolonial era of the early last century, when most colonized peoples gained independence from colonial powers,” Eugenia Flynn and Tasnim Sammak wrote in theirﾠarticle ‘Black Australia to Palestine: solidarity in decolonial struggle’.
The Black Lives Matter Movement also played a central role in recentering Palestine around urgent and revived struggles in the United States and even beyond US political geography.
“Palestinians played a crucial role in the (2014) Ferguson, Missouri, uprising that flared that year in the wake of the police killing of Black teenager Michael Brown,” Russell Rickfordﾠwrote in an article in Vox.
“Palestinian activists used social media to share with African American protesters tactics for dealing with tear gas attacks by militarized police forces — an experience with which many subjects of Israeli occupation are all too familiar,” Rickford added.
This was only the beginning, however, as, over the years, Palestine began featuring as a staple in the Black struggle discourse in the US. Both movements fed on each other’s popularity, conceiving new networks and connecting other global struggles together in a most harmonious fashion.
All of this has been propelled forward by the growing connectivity of activists and their struggles around the world, thanks to the utilization of social media, along with independent indigenous media as critical components in organization and mobilization.
While the credibility of mainstream media is beingﾠgreatly questioned by Western societies, social media is now appearing to be a reliable source of information of news about popular mobilization and direct action.
The ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza has demonstrated the power of social media in terms of its ability to overcome the intentional lies and deception of corporate media, thus greatly diminishing its traditional role in shaping public opinion around Palestine, the Middle East, the US’ self-serving ‘war on terror’ and many other issues.
It would not be an exaggeration to state that there is a parallel war to the one happening in Gaza now, one that engages millions of people around the world, working diligently to defeat Israeli-US-Western propaganda and to demand accountability for those carrying out war crimes in Gaza.
It would be inaccurate to say that Western governments have been ‘silent’ in the face of Israeli atrocities in Gaza. As indigenous struggles around the world ally with the struggle of the Palestinians, colonial and neocolonial powers have no other option but to ally with colonial Israel.
This means that Western powers are activeﾠparticipants in the Israeli war on Gaza, through their generous military support of Israel, the sharing of intelligence information and through political and financial backing.
Whether the war lasts for another week, another month or a year, the consequences of this war will certainly be felt for many years to come, not only in Palestine or even the Middle East, but worldwide as well.
The war in Gaza has galvanized global solidarity movements, especially those who are invested in indigenous rights. All of this is reminiscent of the height of the anticolonial national liberation movements of decades ago.
Thus, this historic moment must be seized, not only for the sake of Gaza and the Palestinian people but also for the sake of freedom and justice everywhere else in the world.
Dr. Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of six books. His latest book, co-edited with Ilan Pappé, is ‘Our Vision for Liberation: Engaged Palestinian Leaders and Intellectuals Speak Out’. His other books include ‘My Father was a Freedom Fighter’ and ‘The Last Earth’. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA). His website isﾠwww.ramzybaroud.net
Romana Rubeo is an Italian writer and the Managing Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. Her articles appeared in many online newspapers and academic journals. She holds a Master’s Degree in Foreign Languages and Literature and specializes in audio-visual and journalism translation.
https://countercurrents.org/2023/11/ours-is-an-indigenous-struggle-how-gaza-united-the-world/
Countercurrent – November 24, 2023
Israel’s Genocidal Antisemitism Against the Arab Civilians of Gaza
by Ralph Nader
Netanyahu’s right-wing government has unleashed a “unifying” genocidal war against every child, woman and man that comprise the 2.3 million population of Gaza.
“It should never have happened,” an elderly Holocaust survivor of a Nazi death camp told the New York Times. He was referring to the colossal failure on October 7th, of Israel’s touted high-tech military and intelligence operations that opened the door to Hamas’ attack on Israeli soldiers and civilians. In many parliamentary countries, the government ministers who are responsible for this kind of failure would have immediately been forced to resign. Not so with Prime Minister Netanyahu’s ministers.
Instead, Netanyahu’s coalition of extremists, who know that the Israeli people are enraged about their government’s failure to defend the border, has unleashed a “unifying” genocidal war against every child, woman and man that comprise the 2.3 million population of Gaza. “No electricity, no food, no fuel, no water. … We are fighting human animals and will act accordingly” was the opening genocidal war cry from defense minister Yoav Gallant to defend the onslaught that massive military forces are implementing against the long-illegally blockaded Gazan population.
Israeli leaders declare that there are Hamas fighters possibly in and under every building in Gaza. Israel has long made computer models using their unprecedented surveillance technology (see Antony Loewenstein’s interview in the November/December 2023 issue of the Capitol Hill Citizen). Nothing and no one is off limits for the Israeli bombing.
Keep in mind that Israel is an ultra-modern military superpower, with hundreds of thousands of fighters on land, air and sea, going after the few thousand Hamas fighters who have limited supplies of rifles, grenade launchers and anti-tank weapons. Moreover, all of Israel’s supplies are being replenished daily from the U.S. stockpiles in Israel and new shipments arriving by sea, compliments of President Biden. The invasion is a “piece of cake” an experienced U.S. government official told reporter Sy Hersh.
Contradictions abound. First, Netanyahu has always referred to Hamas as a “terrorist organization.” Yet he told his own Likud party for years that his “strategy” to block a two-state solution was to “support and fund Hamas.” (See, the October 22, 2023 article by prominent journalist Roger Cohen in the New York Times).
If Netanyahu believes dropping over 20,000 bombs and missiles on the civilian infrastructure of this tiny crowded enclave and its people, nearly half of whom are children, is so restrained, why has he kept Western and Israeli journalists out of Gaza, other than a few recently embedded reporters restricted to their seats in Israeli armored vehicles? Why has he ordered four nightmarish total telecommunications and electricity blackouts, with excruciating consequences, over the whole Gaza Strip for as long as 30 hours at a time?
None of this or international laws matter to the prime minister whose top priority is to keep his job, with his coalition parties, as long as the invasion continues. And before an outraged majority in Israel ousts him from power for not defending their country on October 7th from some two thousand urban guerrilla fighters on a homicide/suicide mission.
As the slaughter of defenseless babies, children, mothers, fathers and grandparents in Gaza continues to drive the death, injury and disease toll to higher numbers each day, the observant world wonders what the Israeli government, which regularly blocks humanitarian aid, intends to do with Gaza and its destitute, homeless, starving, wounded, sick, dying and abandoned civilian Palestinians.
After all, Gaza has only so many hospitals, clinics, schools, apartment buildings, homes, water mains, ambulances, bakeries, markets, electricity networks, solar panels, shelters, refugee camps, mosques, churches, and the clearly marked remaining United Nations’ facilities left, to bomb to smithereens. Endless American tax dollars are funding the carnage. Israel has also killed over 50 journalists, including some of their families, in the past seven weeks – a record.
Why will it take months to clear out the tunnels? Not so, say military experts in urban warfare. Flooding the tunnels with water, gas, napalm and robotic explosives are quick and lethal and would be deployed were it not for the Israeli hostages.
In addition to the reality that all Gazans are now hostages, over 7,000 Palestinians are languishing in Israeli jails without charges. Many are youngsters and women who were abducted over the years to extort information and to control their extended families in Gaza and the West Bank. What’s holding up an exchange, as Israel did twice before in 2004 and 2011? Again, the Netanyahu coalition stays in power by postponing the pending official inquiries into their October 7th collapse, that Israelis are awaiting.
Meanwhile, the hapless Joe Biden dittoheaded the previously hapless presidential pleas for a two-state solution. The dominant politicians in Israel have always sought “a Greater Israel” using the phrase “from the river to the sea,” meaning all of Palestine. Year after year Israel has stolen more and more land and water from the twenty-two percent left of original Palestine, inhabited by five million Palestinians under oppressive military occupation.
With Congress overwhelmingly in Israel’s pocket, Israeli politicians laugh at proposals for a two-state solution by U.S. presidents. Recall when Obama was president, Netanyahu went around him and addressed a joint session of Congress whose members exhausted themselves with standing ovations – a brazen insult to a U.S. president, unheard of in U.S. diplomatic history!
Day after day, the surviving Palestinian families are trapped in what is widely called “an open-air prison” being pulverized by Israel and its aggressive co-belligerent, the Biden regime. A regime in Washington that urges Netanyahu to comply with “the laws of war,” while enabling Israel with more weapons and UN vetoes to violate daily “the laws of war” and the Genocide Convention. (See our October 24, 2023 Letter to President Joe Biden and the Declarations from genocide scholars William Schabas and other expert historians).
Consider the plight of these innocent civilians, caught in the deadly crossfire of F-16s, helicopter gunships, and thousands of precision 155mm artillery shells. Whether huddled in their homes and schools or fleeing to nowhere under Israeli orders, the IDF is still bombing them.
Palestinians cannot escape their blockaded prison. They cannot surrender because the Israeli army does not want to be responsible for prisoners of war. They cannot bury their dead, so their families’ corpses pile up, rotting in the sun being eaten by stray dogs.
They cannot even find water to drink, since Israel has destroyed the water infrastructure – another of its many war crimes.
For years under Israel’s occupation law, collection of rainwater with rainwater harvesting cisterns has not been permitted. Rain is considered the property of the Israeli authorities and Palestinians have been forbidden to gather rainwater!
The Israeli armed forces will soon control the entire Gaza Strip. Under international law, Israel would become responsible for the protection of the civilian population as well as the essential conditions for Palestinian safety and survival. Will they at last abide by just one international law? Or will they establish obstructive checkpoints to restrict humanitarian charities trying to save lives while Israel continues to push the Gazans into the desert or neighboring countries?
The Israeli operation precisely fits the Genocide Convention’s definition by “intentionally creating conditions of life calculated to physically destroy a racial, religious, ethnic, or national group in whole or in part.” Netanyahu’s regime further incriminates itself by defining the targets for annihilation as being between 21st-century progress and “the barbaric fanaticism of the Middle Ages” and a “struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness.”
Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate and the author of “The Seventeen Solutions: Bold Ideas for Our American Future” (2012). His new book is, “Wrecking America: How Trump’s Lies and Lawbreaking Betray All” (2020, co-authored with Mark Green).
The genocidal rhetoric of the Israeli leaders is loud and clear
By Habib Siddiqui
On 8 November 2023 three Palestinian human rights organizations filed a lawsuit with the International Criminal Court (ICC) to request arrest warrants against Israeli leaders—including Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu—for genocide.
The file submitted to the ICC strongly urges the Office of the Prosecutor to: (1) Consider the inclusion of crimes against humanity, notably apartheid, and the crime of genocide, in the ongoing investigation into the situation in the State of Palestine. (2) Issue arrest warrants expeditiously for those suspected of these crimes within the Israeli political, military, and administrative apparatus, especially President Isaac Herzog, prime minister Benyamin Netanyahu, defense minister Yoav Gallant and others.
“There is no place for double standards in International Justice,” said attorney Emmanuel Daoud, who also filed a lawsuit with the ICC against Russian leaders for their war crimes against Ukrainians and obtained the issuance of an arrest warrant against President Putin. “Whether war crimes are committed in Ukraine or Palestine, the culprits should be held to account.” “We implore the ICC to acknowledge its moral and judicial responsibilities and act decisively upon our communication,” said Daoud.
Is the State of Israel committing genocide against the Palestinian inhabitants of Gaza? Before we try to answer the question, let us try to understand what does the loaded term mean.
The Article 2 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG) provides the definition of the term. It says: Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such: a) Killing members of the group; b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court was adopted at a diplomatic conference in Rome, Italy on 17 July 1998 to end impunity of those responsible or accountable for four core international crimes: genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression. Those crimes “shall not be subject to any statute of limitations”.
It is obvious from both the CPPCG and the Rome Statute that the phrase ‘intent to destroy’ is the key element in genocidal crimes. “One has to prove that the perpetrator not only committed the actions, but they committed the actions with a very specific intention of destroying the group,” says Ernesto Verdeja, a professor at the University of Notre Dame who specializes in genocide. “That can be a high bar because very often people contribute to genocidal policies, even if that's not their direct intention.”
On this main issue, Israeli leaders’ speeches, esp. after the Hamas’ reprisal attack on October 7, 2023, are quite revealing.
“The IDF will immediately use all its power to destroy the capabilities of Hamas. We will beat them to the point of destruction and take revenge with force for this black day they have inflicted on the State of Israel and its citizens,” prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a televised address. “We will turn all the places where Hamas is organized, of this evil city, all the places where Hamas is hiding, operating from, into cities of ruins. I say to the residents of Gaza, get out of there now because we will act everywhere and with all the strength.” [Google translation into English from Hebrew]
Two days later, on October 9, Netanyahu declared, “We have only started striking Hamas.” He said, “What we will do to our enemies in the coming days will reverberate with them for generations.”
Netanyahu has long proven to be a pathological liar and a psychotic mass murderer. But his threat against the Palestinian people was no exaggeration.
Netanyahu is not the only Israeli leader who has made what critics have called genocidal statement in recent weeks. Israeli President Isaac Herzog has set the tone. He asserted early on October that there are no innocent civilians in Gaza. He said, “It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible. This rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved, it’s absolutely not true. They could’ve risen up; they could have fought against that evil regime which took over Gaza in a coup d’état.”
Defense Minister Yoav Gallant vowed to “eliminate everything” there. On October 9, following an assessment at the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Southern Command in Beersheba, Gallant said, “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed.”
“Human animals must be treated as such,” IDF Maj. Gen. Ghassan Alian said on Oct. 10. “There will be no electricity and no water [in Gaza], there will only be destruction. You wanted hell, you will get hell.”
In different ways, the sentiment that the Palestinians are collectively responsible for the reprisal actions of Hamas in killing of about 1,000 Israelis and abductionﾠof 199 – and therefore deserve what is coming to them – has been echoed far beyond Israel’s borders.
Ariel Kallner, a member of parliament from Netanyahu's Likud party, urged a “Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of '48,” a reference to the forced expulsion and ethnic cleansing of over 750,000 Arabs from Palestine during the founding of the apartheid state of Israel in 1947-48.
Tally Gotliv, another Likud lawmaker, demanded ”not flattening a neighborhood,” but “crushing and flattening Gaza without mercy.”
More problematically, declaring the start of a “second stage” of Israel's war on Gaza—which he described as a “holy mission”—Netanyahu said that “you must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible.”
“If it was not obvious from the carpet bombing, use of white phosphorus, and indiscriminate killing that the Zionist government of Israel [has] clear genocidal intentions, then the... reference to Palestinians as Amalek in Netanyahu's speech describing his plans for Gaza should be enough to convince you,” British religious scholar Hamza Andreas Tzortzis wrote on social media.
“The biblical reference to Amalek is genocidal. The Bible commands to wipe out Amalek, including women, babies, children, and animals,” Tzortzis added.
As I have noted elsewhere, it is easy to carry out genocide when the enemy is dehumanized. It is no exaggeration to state that while the Nazis used this strategy the Israeli Zionists have mastered this evil art in depicting their enemies as untermenschen or subhuman. Tutsis were debased as “cockroaches” in Rwanda, a word also invoked by Rafael Eitan, then chief of the Israeli defense forces to describe Palestinians.
Some four decades later, the native Palestinians would once again be portrayed as untermenschen by another former Israeli general. “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly,” Yoav Gallant declared on October 9, 2023.
Is it any surprise that the IDF has been committing genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza? Nothing has been off-limits to these ‘foreign-cultured’ Israeli settlers.
Other Israeli political, military, and religious leaders have at different times described Palestinians as “a cancer”, “vermin”, and called for them to be “annihilated”. They are frequently portrayed as backward and a burden on the country.
The dehumanization of Palestinians in Israeli society started well before October 7, 2023. Shirts printed by Israeli army units have depicted pregnant Palestinian women and children as military targets; calls of “death to the Arabs” have characterized the annual settler Flag March through the Old City in Jerusalem; and students as young as 13 in Israel sing anti-Palestinian songs, “hoping that your village burns down”, “Muhammad is dead”, “A good Arab is a dead Arab”, and “The second Nakba is coming.”
For years, Israeli leaders have advocated ethnic cleansing, euphemistically called “transfer”, with a discourse that portrays Palestinians as a fake people with no history that matters. In 1989, Netanyahu lamented that Israel missed the opportunity presented by global attention on China’s repression of pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen square “to carry out mass expulsions among the Arabs of the (occupied) territories”.
In 2002 during the second intifada, the Tel Aviv newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth published a letter by Israeli children titled: “Dear soldiers, please kill a lot of Arabs”. The paper said dozens of such letters were sent by schoolchildren.
As duly noted by Chris McGreal of the Guardian, some of those same children are now enforcing the occupation in the West Bank where Israeli settlers have largely had a free hand to drive Palestinians off their land and out of their villages, and sometimes to beat and kill.
Is it any surprise that Israelis are engaged in the genocidal war against the Palestinians in Gaza?
Dr. Habib Siddiqui has over four decades of experience in peaceful activism, especially in defense of the rights of displaced people. His essays and articles on displaced people within Myanmar, Bosnia and Chechnya have brought to light the condition of highly marginalized and invisible populations, especially the Rohingya in Myanmar (Burma). Siddiqui has authored 18 books and more than 1500 articles on human rights; religion, history, culture and civilization of Muslim people; international politics, political Islam, political leadership, strategic and security issues; terrorism and democracy in the Muslim world, with special emphasis on the South Asia and the Middle East, which have appeared in newspapers, magazines, journals and the Internet since 1980. He also writes a blog: https://drhabibsiddiqui.blogspot.com/. He lives in the Greater Philadelphia area.
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The Journal of America Team:
Editor in chief:
Abdus Sattar Ghazali
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