globaltimes | The humanitarian crisis in Gaza is exacerbating. US Secretary of State
Antony Blinken has made four visits to Israel since October 7, but what
he talked about was the US support for Israel instead of a ceasefire.
With
each day that a ceasefire is delayed, Palestinians' animosity toward
Israel deepens. It will definitely create a longer-term and more
devastating disaster in the region already plagued by decades of war.
When
the conflict between Palestine and Israel first broke out, China
immediately expressed its stance, emphasizing that the top priority is
to prevent a broader humanitarian disaster and that the fundamental way
out is to implement the "two-state solution." On many occasions since
then, China has repeatedly stressed the importance and urgency of
returning to the "two-state solution."
However, the US and
European countries have not actively responded to this call of
conscience. Instead, they have been constrained by domestic politics and
wavered, preventing major countries from reaching an immediate
consensus.
It was not until Israel's military operations in Gaza
had caused tens of thousands of casualties, including scores of women
and children, and displaced hundreds of thousands of people that leaders
in the US and European countries seemed to realize the need to return
to the two-state solution. US President Joe Biden and some European
leaders have expressed their stance on this recently.
Although
the current suffering in the Middle East is not directly caused by the
US and Europe, as countries deeply involved in the geopolitical game
there since World War II, they bear a heavy responsibility for the
resumption of the war.
It is precisely because of the US'
unlimited support for Israel and the cowardice of the US and Europe that
led to the failure to take action to maintain peace. Israel marched
into Gaza without any scruples, carrying US-made weapons and equipment.
So
far, the US has not called for shifting the focus to a ceasefire.
Instead, it supported Israel's retaliatory strikes against Gaza and
enhanced the deployment of force to restrain the involvement of other
forces in the Middle East.
off-guardian | There is one thing that’s new about this latest propaganda drive since January, 2020. Whereas the others all united what
we (very loosely) call “the left” (along with certain sectors of the
GOP) against the “far-right” bogey, this one has abruptly split that gross alliance, as both parties—Trump et al. included—and the
“liberal media” have (predictably) swung virulently Zionist, while the
“woke” masses (predictably, and, often, virulently) “stand with
Palestine,” along with some few politicians, movie stars and rappers.
This livid falling-out has only weakened the antagonists, since both
sides are disabled by a common blindness to what’s really happening to them both (and all the rest of us).
“We are the people of light, they are the people of darkness—and light shall triumph over darkness.”
Thus spake Netanyahu two days ago, spelling out the Manichaean vision
that “our free press” has, by and large, been variously pitching since
October 7, and that has Zionists beside themselves with open genocidal
rage, not just at Hamas, and/or its armed confederates, but at the Gazans overall, and, no doubt, all Palestinians.
It was, of course, the “sudden” horror of Hamas’s attack, and the
endless invocation of the Holocaust by the Israeli government (and,
therefore, by “our free press”), that now has Zionists not only cheering as the IDF kills thousands more than
Hamas killed (and forcibly “relocates” many thousands more), but
attacking anyone who isn’t cheering, too, demanding that whoever doesn’t
“stand with Israel” be censored, fired, expelled from school or
otherwise eliminated in a crackdown that makes “cancel culture” seem (almost) benign.
This ferocious drive against the Palestinians, and anyone who
advocates on their behalf, is wholly based on the Official Story that
“our free press” (as usual) will not question, even though the
Israeli people don’t believe it, since there is overwhelming evidence
against it—evidence that “our free press” will not report, just as it
has long blacked out the agony in Gaza (and those eight years of Nazi
violence in East Ukraine).
And as the Zionists have been disastrously misled by the Official
Story, so have those who applauded Hamas’s bloody raids, voicing
“exhilaration” over what they took to be a righteous counter-blow against the occupying power, like the heroic uprising in the Warsaw ghetto. While Gaza does recall the Warsaw ghetto, Hamas’s “surprise attack” does not recall that uprising, which actually did come as a surprise (and, of course, killed no civilians), whereas “October 7” clearly was an “inside job,” as the Israeli people know—an inconvenient fact for all who now want to see still more people
die, whether Israelis, Gazans, Jews, Palestinians, Muslims or whomever
else they hate, for whatever reason (or no reason).
So let us finally pose the crucial question: Who benefits from the catastrophe that may now sweep us all away, if we don’t break the spell of the Official Story? It’s surely not the
Zionists, since Netanyahu obviously isn’t one, or he wouldn’t have
forced “vaccination” on his people, through what may well have been the
toughest “vaccine” mandate in the world. Despite his reputation, and his
demagogic rhetoric, Netanyahu would appear to be a globalist, not a Zionist.
Certainly this latest melodrama is now speedily intensifying the
repressive trends that started with the rollout of “the virus,” from
ever-tighter censorship, to still “smarter” surveillance, to the
splintering of opposition, to the exacerbation of the refugee crisis,
and so on, as this acute OffGuardian piece makes clear:
Now, let’s return to the only bit of good news in this whole hyper-barbaric episode—that the Israeli people get it,
not just about Hamas’s “surprise attack,” but about the “vaccination”
drive that Netanyahu forced on them, and which now has them “dying
suddenly” week after week, along with other peoples the world over.
Could it be that Netanyahu actually is not the ultimate or only author of “October 7,” and that its purpose wasn’t just to save his hide politically?
Is it not possible that, just as “his” drive to “vaccinate” all the
Israeli people was probably dictated from on high, he organized “October
7,” or okayed it, on the orders of the same powers who’ve been ravaging
the world since January, 2020?
Not only is this crisis serving perfectly to foster still more chaos,
division and economic ruination overall, but, more precisely, it has
(at least for now) completely drowned out the Israelis’ quiet, shared
awareness that “vaccination” is a stroke of democide, imposed worldwide not with the noble goal of “saving lives,” but—on the contrary—to end as many lives as possible, for the purpose of extreme depopulation everywhere (as
Bill Gates once incautiously revealed, when he referred to the eventual
concluding phase of global “vaccination” as “the final solution”).
The last thing that our masters want is for the Israelis’ consciousness of what’s been done to them to spread to other countries, so that enough of us wake up, and unify enough to put an end to these catastrophes at last.
And so those whose eyes are now so full of blood that they just want to see more people die—whether Jews or Palestinians—had better understand, for their own sake, that those behind the “vaccination” drive agree with you, and with your enemy, since they want nearly all of us to die, and the sooner the better.
So if you can’t stop hating any others to the point of
wanting them all dead, go ahead and keep it up. It’s your funeral
(assuming anyone will be around to bury you).
stephensemler |The White House deployed the Secretaries of Defense and State to Capitol Hill this morning to sell Biden’s $106 billion spending request,
which includes billions in military aid for Israel. With rising
concerns that Israel’s ongoing military offensive will amount to mass ethnic cleansing, a bunch of protestors thankfully attended the congressional hearing too.
The Protestors Are Right
As
this newsletter’s resident budget boffin, I want to explain why the
activists were right to protest this specific spending plan. Biden’s
proposal lists up to $23.5 billion in funding related to Israel’s
military offensive: $8.7 billion in direct military aid, $5.6 billion in
potential long-term military support, up to $3.5 billion for State
Department’s migration assistance programs, and up to $5.7 billion for
USAID’s humanitarian aid programs.1
All of it supports the forced displacement of Palestinians. Based on my reading of the tea leaves — and the 69-page PDF from the White House Office of Management Budget detailing the $106 billion request — I believe Biden is prepared to subsidize ethnic cleansing2 on a historic scale. Here’s how.
The
$8.7 billion in military aid would bankroll Israel’s ongoing violent
displacement of Palestinian civilians by sustaining its bombing campaign
and ground invasion. The other $5.6 billion in military spending is
there to support a bloody, protracted invasion of Gaza (which Israeli
military leaders openlyadmit
is a real possibility) by boosting US weapons stockpiles in Israel that
Israel can draw from upon request, and funding the president’s new
authority to send Israel any weapon directly from Pentagon stocks (with
minimal oversight). Biden’s plan would primarily manage the humanitarian
fallout not by securing Gaza, but by financing mass migration. Judging
by how they were written in the proposal, the intent behind the $3.5
billion request for migration assistance is to manage near-term
displacement, and the $5.7 billion in humanitarian relief is to
accommodate the long-term (and perhaps permanent) mass displacement of
Palestinian civilians.
Israeli leaders have expressed interest in ultimately shrinking Palestinian territory and greatly reducing the number of people living in it, and formalizedplans
for the complete ethnic cleansing of Gaza have recently emerged from
the country’s political establishment. As president, Biden could prevent
Israel from weaponizing mass migration, but he chose to budget for it instead.
theintercept | Two months before Hamas attacked Israel, the Pentagon awarded a multimillion-dollar contract to build U.S. troop facilities for a secret base it maintains deep within Israel’s Negev desert, just 20 miles from Gaza. Code-named “Site 512,” the longstanding U.S. base is a radar facility that monitors the skies for missile attacks on Israel.
On October 7, however, when thousands of Hamas rockets were launched, Site 512 saw nothing — because it is focused on Iran, more than 700 miles away.The U.S. Army is quietly moving ahead with construction at Site 512, a classified base perched atop Mt. Har Qeren in the Negev, to include what government records describe as a “life support facility”: military speak for barracks-like structures for personnel.
Though President Joe Biden and the White House insist that there are no plans to send U.S. troops to Israel amid its war on Hamas, a secret U.S. military presence in Israel already exists. And the government contracts and budget documents show it is evidently growing.
The $35.8 million U.S. troop facility, not publicly announced or previously reported, was obliquely referenced in an August 2 contract announcement by the Pentagon. Though the Defense Department has taken pains to obscure the site’s true nature — describing it in other records merely as a “classified worldwide” project — budget documents reviewed by The Intercept reveal that it is part of Site 512. (The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
“Sometimes something is treated as an official secret not in the hope that an adversary would never find out about it but rather [because] the U.S. government, for diplomatic or political reasons, does not want to officially acknowledge it,” Paul Pillar, a former chief analyst at the CIA’s counterterrorism center who said he had no specific knowledge of the base, told The Intercept. “In this case, perhaps the base will be used to support operations elsewhere in the Middle East in which any acknowledgment that they were staged from Israel, or involved any cooperation with Israel, would be inconvenient and likely to elicit more negative reactions than the operations otherwise would elicit.”
Rare acknowledgment of the U.S. military presence in Israel came in 2017, when the two countries inaugurated a military site that the U.S. government-funded Voice of America deemed “the first American military base on Israeli soil.” Israeli Air Force’s Brig. Gen. Tzvika Haimovitch called it “historic.” He said, “We established an American base in the State of Israel, in the Israel Defense Forces, for the first time.”
johnhelmer | If we abstract from the versions about the eschatological motives of
the parties to the conflict and various hypotheses about the scenario of
how events developed, the Al-Aqsa Flood operation exposed three
vulnerabilities of the Israelis of a military intelligence nature:
— a failure in strategic intelligence regarding the plans and
intentions of Hamas. Although, based on the received HUMINT [human
intelligence] data, there were warnings from the Egyptian intelligence
services. The Israelis position their technical intelligence
capabilities as dominant [above their human intelligence].
— the discrepancy between the capabilities of the advanced, expensive
Iron Dome missile defense system and the requirements for repelling the
direct and asymmetric threats [employed by Hamas].
— strategic miscalculation in the use of a complex, high-tech,
expensive security barrier around the perimeter of the Gaza Strip. The
construction of the barrier strategically set restrictions on offensive
manoeuvre for the IDF and the ability of the Israelis to anticipate.
Hamas has gained thereby the operational initiative – the mobility of
their forces against the static dispersion of the Israelis. Considering
the barrier impenetrable before the operation, the Israelis had
relocated most of their regular forces to northern-sector control of the
territories near the borders of Lebanon and Syria,and to the West Bank.
The “great Israeli wall” has appeared to be almost totally useless.
Hamas overcame it in a short time, which allowed it to operate almost
unhindered in the adjacent territories. The disabling of [the IDF’s]
technological means demonstrated the lack of the human resources to
respond. In terms of communications, the dependence of the Israeli
forces on wireless data transmission has become a critical
vulnerability.
As in the case of Iron Dome, the Israelis relied on technological
solutions, methods, and thinking, neglecting the principle of war being
waged by people, not by machines (yet). To this is added a doctrinal
and strategic discrepancy with the actual conditions of combat.
Technological superiority was placed at the forefront, but the complex
systems showed vulnerability to a cascade of failures, leading the
system to collapse. A regional conflict would make this catastrophic.
[*] The lead cartoons are, left, by Carlos Latuff in Brazil in 2006 and, right, by Mr Fish in the US (Harper’s Magazine)
also in 2006. They have been reproduced by Evan Jones in a collection
of western media cartoons on the meaning of anti-Semitism as an
information warfare weapon in US-Israeli military operations against the
Arabs until editorial censorship was imposed in both the UK and US. Click to read.
[**] Read the 80-year old story of the German General Staff
plans for the Arab states and Hitler’s failure to implement them,
followed by the plans of Coon, the OSS, and the CIA homicidalists
against the Arabs, which are still being followed in Washington and Tel
Aviv. Click. On Saturday night, October 28,
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu blamed his intelligence
services and military staff for failing to warn him of the Hamas war
plan. Under counter-attack from the services and the military, Netanyahu
then apologised and retracted his claims. The Israeli press record of
the episode reveals that the entire Israeli political and military
leadership shares the same racial superiority doctrine.
[***] In a special session of security officials called to discuss the Makhachkala airport incidents, President Vladimir Putin said:
“We must clearly understand who in reality is behind the tragedy of the
peoples of the Middle East and other regions of the world, who
organizes deadly chaos, who benefits from it. Today, in my opinion, it
has already become obvious and understandable for everyone – customers
act openly and brazenly. It is the current ruling elites of the United
States and their satellites that are the main beneficiaries of global
instability. They extract their bloody rent from it. Their strategy is
also obvious. The United States as a global superpower – everyone sees
it, understands it, even according to trends in the global economy – is
weakening, losing its position. The American-style world, with one
hegemon, is being destroyed, is leaving, gradually but steadily going
into the past…The events in Makhachkala last night were inspired,
including through social networks, not least from the territory of
Ukraine, by the hands of agents of Western special services. I want to
ask myself in this regard: is it possible to help Palestine by trying to
attack the Tats and their families? Tats, by the way, are the titular
nation in Dagestan. Palestine can only be helped in the fight against
those who are behind this tragedy. We, Russia, are fighting them as part
of a special military operation, it is with them – both for ourselves
and for those who strive for real, true freedom.”
timesofisrael | Bias against homelands can hurt minorities in the Diaspora. Prejudices
against Africans (‘primitives,’ ‘hotheads’) devalue Black migrants
around the world. Prejudices against Asians (‘mystical people’)
dehumanize Asian migrants the world over. But propaganda against Israel
hurts Jews in their Diaspora like no other minority. Zionism is to Jews
what feminism is to women. Men who ‘like women but not feminists’ show
they don’t like women; rather, they like being served. Jews and Gentiles
who ‘like Jews but not Zionists’ show they like Jews as long as they
feel scared all the time so that they can be manipulated to serve and
comfort the Gentile powers to be; but not when they are independent and
proud of themselves.
Judaism laid much of the foundation of all Monotheism (One G^d),
Science (One Universe), and Democracy (Equality) in the world. That’s
why hatred of Jews is the ultimate ungratefulness, throwing mud on
Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Einstein, and Herzl. And therefore, the Holocaust
doesn’t compare to any other genocide, Armenian included—though they
are all horrific.
It seems that Intersectionality was designed to promote
Antisemitic. It advocates comparing oppressions and seeing how they are
all interwoven. Because Antisemitism is so unique, and because Jews are
kept hostage by the top level of societies (and blamed for all ills), it
often ends up uniting all oppressed groups against the Jews, the
victims of the oldest hatred.
And so, you see there is reason not to just regard Antisemitism
as one of the forms of Racism. Jews-oppression is too specific. It’s a
special bigotry.
NYPost | Secretary of State Antony Blinken dressed his 4-year-old son as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for a Halloween event with President Biden on the White House lawn Monday night.
Biden gave the young “Zelensky,” who wore a dark green sweatshirt, a
box of M&Ms bearing the presidential seal — after asking Congress
earlier this month to give another $61.4 billion for the real deal, on top of $113 billion already appropriated to help Kyiv resist Russia’s 20-month-old invasion.
Blinken was accompanied by his wife, Biden’s White House cabinet
secretary Evan Ryan, and their 3-year-old daughter, who was dressed in
the Ukrainian flag’s blue-and-yellow scheme.
The top US diplomat’s grandfather, Moritz Blinken, was born in
Ukraine’s capital, then part of the Russian empire, in 1900 and
immigrated to the US with his family as a 4-year-old.
Blinken’s ancestors were, like Zelensky, Ukrainian Jews.
catyjohnstone | Propagandists
are used to having a lot more wiggle room to work with than this.
They’re used to interfacing with a complex matrix of narrative and
manipulating it to distort the public’s understanding of what’s going
on. But raw video footage of a mother clutching the tattered remains of a
child is not narrative. Satellite images of powdered city blocks are
not narrative. It’s just reality. Right there in your face.
Western civilization is dominated by propaganda. The “freedom” and “democracy” we think we have is an illusion that has been carefully cultivated by those who manipulate the way we think, speak, act and vote by mass-scale psychological manipulation
— as Chomsky says, propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to
a totalitarian state. A mind-controlled dystopia is not some dark
future that awaits humanity if things go terribly wrong for us; it is already presently the case.
The Gaza massacre throws a big fat monkey wrench in all that, because the raw data
coming out of it is so transparently horrifying that no amount of
narrative spin can make it look acceptable. The fact that the US and its
allies are helping Israel murder children by the thousands is a giant
glitch in the narrative matrix.
The
longer this continues, the more people are going to wake up out of the
propaganda-induced coma the empire has had them in all their lives. The
more people are going to realize that their government is not what it
has been pretending to be and the media have not been telling them the
truth about the world. As the western empire backs the slaughter of
thousands of children, the discrepancies between what the propaganda
tells us about our society and what our society actually is are being
brightly illuminated.
By
murdering thousands of children in Gaza, the empire has exposed its
true face in front of everyone. And the people aren’t liking what they
see.
Eyes are opening everywhere. People are being radicalized in record numbers. The streets are being flooded with protesters.
Very inconvenient questions are being asked. Rigorous scrutiny is being
applied in places it was seldom applied before. Light is shining in
through cracks that weren’t there before.
This
is all so, so horrible and so, so painful to watch day in and day out.
But something is moving underneath it all. Something big. The empire has
done irreparable harm to its ability to keep everyone sleeping and
complacent going forward. A healthy world may be in our future yet.
Benjamin Netanyahu in the 1980's: 'We have the US Senate, the Congress and a record strong Jewish lobby on our side. We have a huge influence over them, America won't force us into anything' pic.twitter.com/zQXUEEyae0
strategic-culture | The Biden administration is becoming increasingly edgy about the
crisis in Gaza and what the objectives are for the Netanyahu war camp.
Most of all, its worried that it is being carefully coaxed into a war
between Israel and Iran which even the hapless U.S. president knows is
not somewhere he wants to go, regardless of how far he is away from his
re-election campaign. Netanyahu, for his part, is not even sure himself
if he actually wants to launch a ground offensive and a number of top
analysts are even predicting that he even won’t go ahead with it, given
what’s at stake and the history of such initiatives in the past.
Politically, he is not at all in a good place right now and the attack
on October 7th in many ways, while buying him time in office
and allowing him freedom from corruption investigations, is a
double-edged sword which will dismember him when Israelis’ patience runs
out. Most blame him for the attacks and kidnappings in the first place
so he has a limited amount of political bandwidth to work with.
His strategy seems to be more about playing it cool and letting time
take its toll. Even though he doesn’t have too much time himself, Biden
has much less. The stranglehold that Netanyahu has on Biden tightens
each day, when it is clear that Biden doesn’t have the patent ability to
invoke a ceasefire and do what most U.S. presidents should do: behave
like a superpower. This, apparently will have to be left to the two real
superpowers who tend to do more and talk less: China and Russia. For
the moment both Biden and Netanyahu are both waiting for a miracle to
happen which allows for a ceasefire to happen without Netanyahu losing
face. Biden could simply insist that Netanyahu stops the campaign and
then at least Bibi could say to the world “this is what the U.S. has
asked us to do”. But even in this setup, there would be a price to pay
for Biden and his administration elsewhere.
As more and more Iranian militias build up on the Syrian-Israel border
and the narrative heats up between Hezbollah and Israel, everyone in
fact is looking for a stroke of luck to throw the entire gruesome
slaughter out of sync. Biden could do this. He could be bold and
courageous and show real élan on the world stage. But that’s just not
what he does. Despite being an old school neocon and being a huge
advocate for NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, these days he has lost his
mojo. He simply doesn’t know what he wants with Israel, a country which
he always professed to being a great supporter of, but whose present
administration is not where Biden wants U.S. foreign policy to be.
Many experts question what actually is at the heart of the
U.S.-Israel relationship and the 3bn dollars it hands to Israel each
year in military aid? For a long time, it was the special relationship
that Israel cherished while it, Israel, acted on behalf of the U.S. in
the region and was there just in case Arab countries lost their way in
their token allegiance to U.S. hegemony. At the very least it was an
outpost.
responsiblestatecraft | In his recent address concerning the wars in Gaza and Ukraine and U.S. involvement in both, President Biden quoted the famous line
by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, that America is “the
indispensable nation.” This is indeed the belief by which the U.S.
foreign and security establishment lives and works.
As
Biden’s speech reflected, it is one way in which the establishment
justifies to American citizens the sacrifices that they are called on to
make for the sake of U.S. primacy. It is also how members of the Blob
pardon themselves for participation in U.S. crimes and errors. For
however ghastly their activities and mistakes may be, they can be
excused if they take place as part of America’s “indispensable” mission
to lead the world towards “freedom” and “democracy.”
It
is therefore necessary to ask: Indispensable for what? Empty claims
about the “Rules-Based Order” cannot answer this question. In the
Greater Middle East, the answer should be obvious. I suppose that a
different hegemon might have made an even bigger mess of the region at
even greater cost to itself than the United States has succeeded in
doing over the past 30 years, but it would have had to put some really
serious effort into the task. Nor is it clear that the absence of a
superpower hegemon could have made things any worse.
In
this time, not one beneficial U.S. effort at peace in the region has
succeeded; few were even seriously attempted. And more than this, the
U.S. has not even fulfilled the core positive role of any hegemon, that
of providing stability.
Instead, it has all too often acted a
force of disorder: by invading Iraq and thereby enabling an explosion of
Sunni Islamist extremism that went on to play a dreadful role in Syria
as well; by pursuing through 20 years a megalomaniac strategy of
externally-driven state-building in Afghanistan, in defiance of every
lesson of Afghan history; by destroying the Libyan state, and thereby
plunging the country into unending civil war, destabilizing much of
northern Africa, and enabling a flood of migrants to Europe; by
repeatedly wrecking or abandoning possibilities of a reasonable deal
with Iran; and most gravely of all, by refusing to take an even remotely
equitable approach to the Israel-Palestine conflict, and failing
through the greater part of the past thirty years to make any serious
effort to promote a settlement.
Over the past generation, successive U.S. administrations turned a blind eye, not merely while the Likud governments slowly killed
the “two-state solution” and stoked Palestinian and Arab rage through
its settlement policy, but while Prime Minister Netanyahu deliberately
helped build up Hamas as a force against the Palestine Liberation Organization, so as not to have to negotiate seriously with the latter.
This
strategy has now proved catastrophic for Israel itself. It was also
carried out with no regard whatsoever to the interests of the United
States or its European allies in the face of Islamist terrorism.
And what have the American people themselves gained from this? Nothing at all, is the answer; while the losses can be precisely calculated:
More than 15,000 soldiers and contractors killed in Afghanistan and
Iraq; more than 50,000 wounded, and often disabled for life; more than
30,000 veteran suicides; 2,996 civilian dead on 9/11, an attack claimed
by al-Qaida as a reprisal for U.S. Middle East policy; some $8 trillion
subsequently expended in the “Global War on Terror.”
The invasion of Gaza and the intent to destroy Hamas appear to be political aims,
since the former will be extremely costly, particularly in soldiers’
lives to a casualty-averse IDF, and the elimination of Hamas is not
attainable. The point Alex Christoforu made in his show today, that the
US with its much greater resources, has not been able to eliminate Al
Qaeda, is confirmed in a Financial Times comment, Israel must know that destroying Hamas is beyond its reach.
Many military experts, including former Lt. Colonel Daniel Davis,
Douglas Macgregor, and Scott Ritter, have warned that it will be very
difficult for the IDF to engage in this kind of urban clearing
operation, particularly given its scale versus the IDF’s limited
experience and the largely reservist status of the majority of its
forces. Foreign Affairs, the premier US foreign policy publication, just
released a grim prognosis in How Will the IDF Handle Urban Combat?Fighting Hamas in Gaza Will Be Difficult and Costly. Key sections:
A potential ground assault into Gaza…would entail
horrendously difficult tactical conditions, including room-to-room
combat and tunnel warfare that would lead to massive casualties. It
would require fighting on the ground, in the air, and at sea—fighting
that must be done in a carefully synchronized fashion. Combat will be
slow and grinding, and the resulting devastation will almost certainly
test international support for Israel’s invasion…
Urban combat is slow, grinding, destructive, environmentally
devastating, and horrendously costly in human life—especially for
civilians. It involves house-by-house, block-by-block fighting that
soaks up troops and firepower in enormous quantities, as every room,
street corner, rooftop, sewer, and basement must be secured before the
next can be taken. Such combat is particularly dangerous for junior
combat leaders, who must constantly expose themselves in order to see,
communicate with, and command their soldiers…
…for soldiers and civilians in the midst of urban fighting, the
danger, the fatigue, the sense of perpetual threat from every direction,
and the horror of close-range hand-to-hand combat all take an immense
physical and psychological toll. Battles tend to be confused, fleeting
(measured in seconds), and short range, with targets often closer than
50 yards. Troops may be focused on the house or room they are fighting
in, but at the same time they may also be targeted from a distance by
mortar crews, snipers, and drone operators.
There is a lot more along these lines.
Several points seem noteworthy. First, as is evident even from this
short extract, Foreign Affairs acts as if a ground operation is not a
given, when there are reports of large numbers of Israeli tanks and
troops newly positioned nearby and more expected. Second is that it
bangs on about the findings of “NATO researchers” and of creating a
“combined-arms effect.” As we saw in Ukraine, forces trained to supposed
NATO standards were found by the Ukraine military to perform less well
than ones that used what NATO derided as more primitive approaches
better suited to battle conditions.
Third, and perhaps most important, this article does not give much
consideration about how the extensive Gaza tunnel system vastly
complicates this operation. Readers are welcome to correct me, but my
strong impression is that not only has there never been a clearing
operation in this large a setting, there has also never been one that
has had to contend with such an extensive tunnel system.
The IDF may be correct in its belief, or one might say hope, that
bunker busters can destroy most if not all of it and also detonate
stored munitions. There was alleged evidence of that happening, with
Jacob Dreizen posting a video of a presumed bunker buster then producing
successive explosions from below ground a meaningful distance from the
strike site.
Counterpunch | Entitled Future Strategic Issues/Future Warfare [Circa 2025],
the PowerPoint presentation anticipates: a) scenarios created by U.S.
forces and agencies and b) scenarios to which they might have to
respond. The projection is contingent on the use of hi-technology. According to the report
there are/will be six Technological Ages of Humankind: “Hunter/killer
groups (sic) [million BC-10K BC]; Agriculture [10K BC-1800 AD];
Industrial [1800-1950]; IT [1950-2020]; Bio/Nano [2020-?]; Virtual.”
In the past, “Hunter/gatherer” groups fought over “hunting grounds”
against other “tribal bands” and used “handheld/thrown” weapons. In the
agricultural era, “professional armies” also used “handheld/thrown”
weapons to fight over “farm lands.” In the industrial era, conscripted
armies fought over “natural resources,” using “mechanical and chemical”
weapons. In our time, “IT/Bio/Bots” (robots) are used to prevent
“societal disruption.” The new enemy is “everyone.” “Everyone.”
Similarly, a British Ministry of Defence projection to the year 2050 states: “Warfare could become ever more personalised with individuals and their families being targeted in novel ways.”
“KNOWLEDGE DOMINANCE”
The war on you is the militarization of everyday life with the
express goal of controlling society, including your thoughts and
actions.
A U.S. Army document
on information operations from 2003 specifically cites activists as
potential threats to elite interests. “Nonstate actors, ranging from
drug cartels to social activists, are taking advantage of the
possibilities the information environment offers,” particularly with the
commercialization of the internet. “Info dominance” as the Space
Command calls it can counter these threats: “these actors use the
international news media to attempt to influence global public opinion
and shape decision-maker perceptions.” Founded in 1977, the U.S. Army
Intelligence and Security Command featured an Information Dominance Center, itself founded in 1999 by the private, veteran-owned company, IIT.
“Information Operations in support of civil-military interactions is
becoming increasingly more important as non-kinetic courses-of-action
are required,” wrote two researchers for the military in 1999. They also
said
that information operations, as defined by the Joint Chiefs of Staff JP
3-13 (1998) publication, “are aimed at influencing the information and
information systems of an adversary.” They also confirm that “[s]uch
operations require the continuous and close integration of offensive and
defensive activities … and may involve public and civil affairs-related
actions.” They conclude: “This capability begins the transition from
Information Dominance to Knowledge Dominance.”
“ATTUNED TO DISPARITIES”
The lines between law enforcement and militarism are blurred, as are
the lines between military technology and civilian technology. Some
police forces carry military-grade weapons. The same satellites that
enable us to use smartphones enable the armed forces to operate.
In a projection out to the year 2036, the British Ministry of Defence says that “[t]he clear distinction between combatants and non-combatants will be increasingly difficult to discern,” as “the urban poor will be employed in the informal sector and will
be highly vulnerable to externally-derived economic shocks and illicit
exploitation” (emphasize in original). This comes as Boris Johnson
threatens to criminalize Extinction Rebellion and Donald Trump labels
Black Lives Matter domestic terrorists.
In 2017, the U.S. Army published The Operational Environment and the Changing Character of Future Warfare. The report reads:
“The convergence of more information and more people with fewer state
resources will constrain governments’ efforts to address rampant
poverty, violence, and pollution, and create a breeding ground for
dissatisfaction among increasingly aware, yet still disempowered
populations.”
WaPo | On Friday, Jordan’s King Abdullah II described Israel’s actions in Gaza
as “a war crime.” He said Israel was carrying out “collective
punishment of a besieged and helpless people,” which ought to be seen as
“a flagrant violation of international humanitarian law.”
That may not trouble an Israeli leadership bent on retribution, argued Marc Lynch,
professor of political science and international affairs at George
Washington University, but it’s a problem for the United States. “It is
difficult to reconcile the United States’ promotion of international
norms and the laws of war in defense of Ukraine from Russia’s brutal
invasion with its cavalier disregard for the same norms in Gaza,” he wrote in Foreign Affairs.
While it seems the Biden administration is working behind the scenes
to attempt to restrain Israel’s war cabinet, Gaza’s more than 2 million
people are living in a nightmare of airstrikes and explosions and are
running out of food, water and places for safe sanctuary. In his speech,
Biden stressed the gap between Hamas and the ordinary Palestinians in
their midst. “We can’t ignore the humanity of innocent Palestinians who
only want to live in peace and have an opportunity,” he said, pointing
to the U.S. efforts to bring in humanitarian assistance — deliveries
which aid groups say are staggeringly short of what’s required.
But that rhetoric rings hollow when set against the record of U.S. actions. “If
the U.S. and other Western governments want to convince the rest of the
world they are serious about human rights and the laws of war,
principles they rightly apply to Russian atrocities in Ukraine and to
Hamas atrocities in Israel, they also have to apply to Israel’s brutal
disregard for civilian life in Gaza,” Louis Charbonneau, U.N. director
for Human Rights Watch, said in a statement after the U.S. veto.
A senior diplomat from a country in the Group of 20 major economies
told me that “it’s this kind of behavior that had the Global South so
cautious about what the West was doing” when they were cajoling foreign
governments to follow their lead on Ukraine. The current U.S. role in
blocking action on Gaza, the official added, speaking this weekend on
condition of anonymity because they were not cleared to brief
journalists, shows “how much of a double standard the U.S. or West’s
strategy relies on.”
In Europe, there’s a growing recognition of this tension, too. “What
we said about Ukraine has to apply to Gaza. Otherwise we lose all our
credibility,” a senior Group of Seven diplomat told the Financial Times. “The Brazilians, the South Africans, the Indonesians: why should they ever believe what we say about human rights?”
It is also a reminder of the failure of the international community —
but chiefly, the United States — to revive the dormant peace process
between Israelis and Palestinians. “Today, Western governments are
paying for their inability to find, or even to seek, a solution to the
Palestinian question,” noted an editorial in French daily Le Monde.
“In the current tense climate, their support for Israel — which is
perceived as exclusive by the rest of the world — risks jeopardizing
their efforts to convince Southern countries that international security
is at stake in Ukraine.”
The diplomat speaking to the FT gloomily summed up
the latest Gaza war’s impact: “All the work we have done with the
Global South [over Ukraine] has been lost. … Forget about rules, forget
about world order. They won’t ever listen to us again.”
1. President Joe Biden’s statement regarding the bombing of the
hospital in Gaza was from a misfired Palestinian rocket is totally
ridiculous and absurd.
2. Why should there be any doubt that the blast of the Al Ahli Arab
hospital is from an Israeli air strike as the murderous regime had been
attempting to wipe Palestinians and Gaza out of existence since last
week.
3. In fact, Israel had been after the Palestinians all the time, if
not wipe out the Palestinians altogether, for the past 70 years and
suddenly now, after launching air strikes day and night, Palestinians
blames for the blast on the hospital.
4. Biden’s narrative is based on feedbacks from Nethanyahu and Pentagon.
5. Obviously Nethanyahu lies about everything. And if Biden wants to
use Pentagon to give credence to his narrative, we have not forgotten
how Pentagon and other American institutions lied about the existence of
weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in Iraq.
6. A more recent lie is about Biden claiming to have seen pictures of Hamas beheading babies.
7. Indeed, the White House had withdrawn the statement, admitting
that there was no proof of such a deed. The question is how Biden could
blatantly lie in the first place and with a straight face.
8. The crux of the matter is that all these atrocities committed by
Israel on the Palestinians stems from the American support for Tel Aviv.
9. If the American Government withdraws its support for Israel and
stop all military aids to the regime, Israel would not have carried out
the genocide and mass murders of Palestinians with impunity.
10. The United States government needs to come clean and tell the
truth. Israel and its IDF are the terrorists. The United States is
blatantly supporting terrorists. So what is the United States?
BBC |US
President Joe Biden has said a deadly blast at a Gaza hospital appears
to have been caused by Palestinian militants, backing Israel's account
of the incident as he visits the country.
Mr Biden, who landed in Tel Aviv on Wednesday, said he was "deeply saddened and outraged" by the explosion.
Israel's military said it was caused by a failed Palestinian rocket launch.
But Palestinian officials said an Israeli air strike hit the hospital.
Health officials in Gaza have said almost 500 people were killed in the explosion, but no death toll has been confirmed.
Meanwhile,
Mr Biden has announced that an agreement has been reached with Israel
to allow humanitarian aid to move from Egypt into Gaza. However, Israel
said it would not allow any aid to pass through its own territory until
hostages being held by Hamas are released.
'Deeply saddened and outraged'
Mr Biden's high-stakes visit has been overshadowed by the blast at the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital on Tuesday evening, which has further inflamed tensions and sparked protests across the region.
He
landed in Tel Aviv on Wednesday where he was greeted warmly by Israel's
Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, before the pair hosted a joint news
conference.
"I was deeply saddened and outraged by the explosion at the hospital in Gaza yesterday," Mr Biden said.
"Based
on what I've seen, it appears as though it was done by the other team,
not you," he told Mr Netanyahu. "But there's a lot of people out there
not sure so we have to overcome a lot of things."
Mr
Biden was later asked by reporters what led him to conclude that Israel
was not responsible, and said: "The data I was shown by my defence
department."
In
the news conference, he reiterated his support for Israel and condemned
the Palestinian militant group Hamas, which launched an unprecedented
attack on Israel from Gaza on 7 October that left 1,400 people dead.
At least 3,000 people have been killed in retaliatory Israeli strikes on Gaza, according to Palestinian health official.
Mr
Biden had planned to travel from Israel to Jordan to meet King
Abdullah, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Egyptian
President Abdul Fattah al-Sisi, but that leg of the trip was cancelled
after the hospital blast on Tuesday.
Jordan
cancelled the meeting and condemned what it called "a great calamity
and a heinous war crime". The White House, meanwhile, said the decision
had been "made in a mutual way" and Mr Biden would call Mr Abbas and Mr
Sisi on his return flight to the US.
.@HananyaNaftali proudly boasted that Israel bombed Gaza’s ah-Ahli hospital before deleting and two minutes later lying that Hamas did it. He works directly under Netanyahu. pic.twitter.com/6QVS9ZoZhk
Details of who is responsible for the explosion are being hotly
debated by all parties, and this is still a developing story with a lot
of details yet to be revealed. But what I’d like to quickly document as
things unfold is the highly unusual number of mass media reporters I’ve
been seeing who haven’t hesitated to point to Israel as the probable
culprit.
After noting that Israel is blaming the blast on a failed rocket
launch by Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), MSNBC foreign correspondent
Raf Sanchez quickly pointed out that PIJ rockets don’t tend to do
that kind of damage, but Israeli missiles do. He also noted that Israel
has an extensive history of lying about this sort of thing.
“The Israeli military at this point is not providing any evidence to
back up its claims that this was a Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket;
they are citing intelligence that they have not yet made public,”
Sanchez said.
“We should also say that this kind of death toll is not what you
normally associate with Palestinian rockets. These rockets are
dangerous, they are deadly, they do not tend to kill hundreds of people
in a single strike in the way that Israeli high explosives — especially
these bunker buster bombs that are used to target these Hamas tunnels
under Gaza City — do have the potential to kill hundreds of people.”
“And we should say finally that there are instances in the past where
the Israeli military has said things in the immediate aftermath of an
incident that have turned out not to be true in the long run,” Sanchez
added. “And the one example I’ll give you is that when the Al Jazeera
journalist, Shireen Abu Akleh, was killed in the occupied West Bank, the
Israeli military initially said that she was killed by Palestinian
gunmen, and it was only months and months later that they admitted that
it was likely an Israeli soldier who fired the fatal shot.”
CNN’s Clarissa Ward said essentially the same thing.
“I will say, just based on seeing these rocket attacks many times
over the years, that they don’t usually have an impact like that in
terms of the size of the blast, in terms of the scale of the death toll
and the scale of the damage,” Ward said. “It’s also not the first time,
it’s important to add, that we have seen the IDF categorically deny
something before being forced to kind of do an about-face after an
extensive investigation.”
nakedcapitalism | On Sunday (October 15), the Deputy Director General for Latin America
at the Israeli Foreign Ministry, Jonathan Peled, summoned the Colombian
ambassador, Margarita Manjarez, to “deliver a reprimand” over Petro’s
“hostile and antisemitic statements against the State of Israel made
last week.” According to
the Israeli press release, Petro’s statements “constitute support for
the horrific acts of Hamas terrorists, inflame antisemitism, harm
representatives of the State of Israel, and threaten the safety of the
Jewish community in Colombia.”
Petro has refused to back down despite concerted pressure from
Israel, the US, the Jewish community and Colombia’s political and media
establishment. Last week, the US “strongly condemn[ed]” President
Petro’s statements and “call[ed] on him to condemn Hamas, a designated
terrorist organization, for its barbaric murder of Israeli men, women
and children,” all to no avail: Petro continues to lambast Israel while
refusing to condemn Hamas.
On Saturday, he even stated that “Hamas was created by Mossad to
divide the Palestinian people and have an excuse to punish them” — a
claim that was widely ridiculed by Colombian media and politicians
despite having more than a grain of truth to it. As the Wall Street Journal reported in its 2009 article, How Israel Helped to Spawn Hamas,
“Israel for years tolerated and, in some cases, encouraged [Hamas] as a
counterweight to the secular nationalists of the Palestine Liberation
Organization and its dominant faction, Yasser Arafat’s Fatah.”
In 2019, Netanyahu himself told his fellow Likud members in the Knesset:
Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a
Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money
to Hamas.
The Israeli ambassador, Dagan, responded to Petro’s tweet with a
sarcastic jibe that partly backfired — at least among those aware of the
role Israel has played in arming and training Colombia’s paramilitary
groups (more on that later):
It is true, Mr. President Gustavo Petro, as you wrote
in this tweet, indeed #Hamas is an invention of the Mossad. However, I
would like to share additional information with you from our
intelligence services, which are among the best in the world: The Elders
of Zion founded the Clan del Golfo. There are still Jews, with large,
aquiline noses, who command the Gaitanista Self-Defense Forces of
Colombia.
Tel Aviv’s next step was to suspend all “security exports” to
Colombia in response to its president’s “anti-Semitic” statements.
Outside of the US, Israel is the Colombian military’s main weapons
supplier. But if the move was supposed to bring Petro back into line, it
had, if anything, the opposite effect. Petro’s immediate response
was the following statement (translation and comments in parenthesis by
yours truly), which includes accusations of Israeli involvement in
atrocities during Colombia’s dirty wars:
If we have to suspend foreign relations with Israel, we will suspend them. We do not support genocides.
You do not insult the Colombian president.
I call on Latin America to show real solidarity with Colombia. And if
it is not capable, it will be history that will have the last word, as
it did in the great Chaco war.
Neither the Yair Kleins nor the Raifal Eithans (NC: two people we
will discuss later on) will be able to say what the history of peace in
Colombia is like. They unleashed massacres and genocide in Colombia.
To the people of Israel, I ask them to help bring about peace in Colombia and… in Palestine and the world.
That was on Sunday. On Monday, Petro followed through with his threat
— though it was Colombia’s foreign minister, Álvaro Leyva Durán, who
actually carried it out, albeit not very smoothly or for very long.
X Diplomacy
After posting a tweet
lambasting the Israeli ambassador for his “mindless boorishness” toward
Colombia’s president, Leyva Durán suggested that Dagan should
“apologise and leave”. Within minutes, the story had gone viral:
Colombia, until recently widely considered the “Israel of South
America,” had expelled Israel’s ambassador. An hour later, Leyva Durán
tweeted: “No sensible person can applaud this scorched earth policy no
matter where it comes from. It violates the dignity of the human person.
Kills innocents.”
But two hours later, the foreign minister pulled a bizarre 180 degree
turn, stating, again on Twitter/X, that he had not actually ordered
Dagan’s expulsion after all but was instead merely insisting that
respect be shown for Colombia’s president. An hour later, he tweeted:
“Relations with Israel will be maintained if this country so wishes. Our
constitutional principles teach us and command us to respect
international law. Something that must be two-way. Respectful relations
between States will always be welcome.”
It was, if nothing else, an embarrassing illustration of the dangers
of conducting high-stakes international diplomacy on social media
platforms. It is not clear why the Petro government made such a dramatic
climbdown — and what’s more, on the most public of global stages — but I
will try to hazard a guess.
We ask our partner that, as the Government of Spain, we bring Netanyahu before the International Criminal Court for war crimes. Here is my official statement 👇 pic.twitter.com/Wuu8nnKfVp
el pais | The Israeli Embassy in Spain issued a statement on Monday afternoon in which it strongly condemns the recent statements of some members of the Spanish Government,
without specifying any name or political formation, and calls on the
current president, Pedro Sánchez, to unequivocally denounce and condemn
what he considers "shameful," according to the note. Shortly before nine
o'clock in the evening, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs responded with a
strong statement in which it categorically rejects the falsehoods
poured in the communiqué of the Israeli Embassy about some of its
members and does not accept unfounded insinuations about them.
In
its note, the Israeli diplomatic legation describes as deeply worrying
that, at a time when Israel is mourning - for the loss of innocent lives
in the barbaric Hamas attack on 7 October, when more than 150
civilians, including children, women and the elderly remain captive to
Hamas terrorists in Gaza, certain elements within the Spanish Government
have chosen to align themselves with this ISIS-type terrorism, in
reference to the Islamic State. These statements are not only absolutely
immoral, but also endanger the security of the Jewish communities of
Spain, exposing them to the risk of a greater number of anti-Semitic
incidents and attacks, the note from the Israeli Embassy adds. Both
Sumar, the formation led by Yolanda Díaz, and Podemos and the United
Left participated this Sunday in the demonstration that toured the center of Madrid
in solidarity with Palestine. Sumar has expressly condemned the attacks
on the civilian population committed by Hamas in Israel.
Ione Belarra, acting Minister of Social Rights and the only member of
the Executive who attended Sunday's march in support of the Palestinian
people, has responded on the social network X
[before Twitter]: "His government [in reference to Benjamin Netanyahu's
Executive] is carrying out war crimes in the Gaza Strip, massive
bombings, water and electricity cuts, no humanitarian aid is allowed in.
To denounce this genocide is not to align itself with Hamas, it is a
democratic obligation. Silence, complicity with terror. Belarra, also
secretary general of Podemos, asked the socialist part of the current
executive to work together to file a petition with the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court
to investigate the war crimes committed in Palestine by [Prime
Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu. For her part, Yolanda Díaz, second acting
vice president and leader of the Sumar platform, in which Podemos is
integrated, denounced last week the "Israeli
apartheid" against the Palestinian people, in addition to condemning
violence against civilians wherever it comes from. Díaz demonstrated in
this way during an event organized in Madrid by the group The Left of
the European Parliament.
For its part, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has responded forcefully to the communiqué of the Israeli Embassy.
Any political leader can freely express positions as a representative
of a political party in a full democracy such as Spain, the text
emphasizes. In any case, the position of the Government of Spain as a
whole with regard to the terrorist attacks perpetrated by Hamas is
clear: sharp condemnation, demand for immediate and unconditional
release of hostages and recognition of Israel's right to defend itself
within the limits set by international law and international
humanitarian law, he adds. In order to leave no doubt, he riveted: Has
the Government as a whole repeatedly expressed the need to distinguish
the Palestinian population from the Hamas terrorist group, to protect
the civilian population in Gaza and the imperative need to maintain the
basic supplies essential for the well-being of that population. The
Government as a whole reiterates that the only viable solution to
achieving a situation of peace and stability in the region is the
two-State solution that coexists in peace and security, as endorsed by
the United Nations.
scottritterextra | I arrived late to the Palestinian cause. I was too wrapped up in the
Israeli saga, too invested in the Israeli fantasy, to see the forest for
the trees. I was too busy hating Hamas to realize that I should instead
be hating that which enabled Hamas to carry out the crimes it has
committed for the past four decades.
Simply put, I was blind to the tragedy of the Palestinian people.
Today
I know that the only true victims in the Israeli saga (outside the
children from every walk of life who are caught up in the tragic events
foisted upon them by adults who claim to be working for a bright and
shiny tomorrow, but only deliver death and destruction) are the
Palestinian people.
At least Israel’s founding fathers were honest enough to acknowledge this.
The
Zionists of today lack the moral character to admit that Israel can
only be built and sustained at the cost of a viable, free, and
independent Palestine, that Israel will never allow such a Palestine to
exist, and that if there is a Zionist Israel, there will never be an
independent Palestine.
The sins of the fathers are real,
especially when it comes to Israel’s founding fathers and the crimes
they committed against the Palestinian people. Moshe Dyan admitted this
much. So, too, did David Ben Gurion. These were men—fundamentally flawed
in their ideologies and motivations, but honestly so.
Benjamin
Netanyahu and his fellow modern-day Israeli politicians, regardless of
political affiliation, have no such integrity. They are inveterate
liars, men and women who will promise one thing, then do another, when
it comes to the future of Palestine, all the while leading Israel down
the path of permanent war.
I arrived late to the Palestinian
cause, but now that I am here, I can say this—the best way to defeat
both Hamas and Zionist Israel is to support a free and independent
Palestinian state.
I have never stood with Hamas, and I never will.
I once stood with Israel, but I will never do so again.
For
four decades now, the Israeli-Hamas collusion has run its tragic
course, each side proclaiming its desire to destroy the other, and yet
each side knowing the awful truth—that one cannot exist without the
other.
The Israeli-Palestine problem has become a never-ending
cycle of violence which feeds off the pain and suffering of the
Palestinian people. It is time to bring this cycle to an end.
From
this moment forward, I will always stand with the people of Palestine,
convinced that the only path for peace in the Middle East is one that
leads through a viable Palestinian homeland, its capital firmly and
forever ensconced in East Jerusalem.
In this way, Hamas will be
disenfranchised as a terrorist organization—a legitimate Palestinian
state takes away the perpetual state of conflict Hamas contributes to, a
status which is justified by the pursuit of a legitimate Palestinian
state Zionist Israel will never allow to exist.
A legitimate
Palestinian state delegitimizes the notion of a Zionist Israeli entity
which, by definition, can only exist by the perpetual exploitation of
the Palestinian people. Benjamin Netanyahu was able to sustain the
modern-day version of the Zionist Israeli state by generating fear
through the endless cycle of Hamas-driven violence.
Remove the
threat posed by Hamas, and Zionist Israel no longer will be able to
blind the citizens of Israel and the world to the apartheid-like reality
of the present-day Israeli existence. Basic humanity will compel
Zionist Israel to shed its Zionist ideology, just as apartheid South
Africa shed its ugly legacy of White supremacy. Post-Zionist Israel will
be compelled by necessity to learn to coexist with its non-Jewish
neighbors peacefully and prosperously, not as a colonial apartheid
state, but as equal partners in the experiment of life that will have
collectively seized the people who call the Holy Land home.
A Foundation of Joy
-
Two years and I've lost count of how many times my eye has been operated
on, either beating the fuck out of the tumor, or reattaching that slippery
eel ...
April Three
-
4/3
43
When 1 = A and 26 = Z
March = 43
What day?
4 to the power of 3 is 64
64th day is March 5
My birthday
March also has 5 letters.
4 x 3 = 12
...
Return of the Magi
-
Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
the earth.I can feel it bubbling up, effervescing and evaporating around
us, s...
New Travels
-
Haven’t published on the Blog in quite a while. I at least part have been
immersed in the area of writing books. My focus is on Science Fiction an
Historic...
Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
-
sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...
