The White House and Congress rally around the Star of David Flag
• 2,800 WORDS •
When, as expected, President Joe Biden signs off on the Antisemitism Awareness Act the Department of Education will be empowered to send so-called antisemitism monitors to enforce civil rights law at public schools as well as at colleges to observe and report on levels of hostility towards Jews. The monitors’ reports will eventually wind up in Congress which can propose remedies as required, including cutting funding and recommending civil rights charges in extreme cases. One of the more regrettable features of the act is that it accepts the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism as it applies to the state of Israel, making criticism of the Jewish state ipso facto antisemitism. Its text includes the “targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity” as an antisemitic act. In reality, however, actual antisemitism is not as prevalent as Israel partisans claim. Most of what they call antisemitism is simply criticism of the legally self-proclaimed apartheid “Jewish State” and most of the animosity Israel experiences is opposition to its brutal treatment of the Palestinians. Giving legal sanction to that presumption that Israel must be protected from bigots means that the United States is well on the way to forbidding any criticism of Israel at all. Americans can criticize their own country or nations in Europe, or at least they are able to do so currently, but bad-mouthing Israel could soon constitute a criminal offense.
The Antisemitism Awareness Act is just one aspect of how the power of organized Jewish groups over the government and media is shaping the kind of society that Americans will be living in in the near future. It will be a society devoid of several fundamental constitutional rights, like free speech, due to deference to the preferences of one tiny demographic. And the one most interesting aspect of that power is how it has successfully hidden the fact that it even exists while also propagating the myth that Jews and Israel are especially worthy of special consideration because they are frequently or even always perceived as victims, an extension of the holocaust myth.
Indeed, Israel is recently always in the news and most often completely protected by the media and the talking heads elements, particularly true if one sinks to watching Fox or reading the Wall Street Journal, New York Times or Washington Post. Even the loathsome Benjamin Netanyahu frequently gets good press while nonviolent student peace demonstrators are invariably described as anti-Israeli or pro-Hamas terrorists even when they are assaulted by Zionist thugs led by an Israeli special ops officer and funded and armed by Jewish billionaires as occurred recently in Los Angeles.
Nevertheless, sometimes something slips through the defenses that reveals all too clearly what is going on. In responding to a question from a journalist, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken made a claim recently that absolutely no one who has spent any time in Washington will believe. The journalist had asked whether the Federal Government in making its foreign policy decisions tended to favor and/or excuse the behavior of some countries while condemning others for exactly the same actions. Blinken replied “We apply the same standard to everyone. And that doesn’t change whether the country in question is an adversary, a competitor, a friend or an ally.”
Everyone in the room understood very clearly that Blinken wasn’t telling the truth and was trying to preserve the fiction that the United States holds allies and clients to the same “rules based international order” standard that it uses for others, most notably competitor nations like Russia and China or adversaries like Iran. No one takes what Blinken says seriously in any event, and it does not help his general credibility when he feels compelled to lie for no reason whatsoever.
Would that someone in the room had had the temerity to cite one of Blinken’s most egregiously partisan comments, his greeting to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the airport tarmac of Ben Gurion airport shortly after the October 7th Hamas attack. He said “I come before you as a Jew. I understand on a personal level the harrowing echoes that Hamas’s massacres carry for Israeli Jews – indeed, for Jews everywhere.” It prompted one to mutter, “No Anthony, you are the Secretary of States of the United States of America. You are there to represent American interests in avoiding a major war in the Middle East, not to represent the interests of your tribe by declaring yourself one of them.”
The Blinken meeting with Netanyahu was particularly telling as few in Washington would doubt that the Joe Biden White House and Congress have totally surrendered to Israeli interests rather than serving the needs of their constituents in the United States. Paul Craig Roberts describes it as “The US Congress has become an extension of the Israeli government.” To answer the journalist’s question honestly Blinken should have admitted that the Biden government is fully committed to protecting Israel and even its perceived interests when they conflict with normal US policy. On Wednesday the Biden administration indicated that it has indefinitely delayed a required report investigating potential Israeli war crimes in Gaza that was supposed to be released by the US State Department. If the report had concluded, which it should have, that Israel violated international humanitarian law, the US would have to stop sending foreign aid due to the Leahy Law, which makes it illegal for the US government to provide aid to any foreign security forces found to be committing “gross violations of human rights.” So Joe Biden and Anthony Blinken decided to deep six the report instead to protect Israel by breaking US law, though they have reportedly delayed one shipment of bombs lest they be used on civilians in Rafah. Nevertheless, Biden clearly means what he says when he repeatedly stumbles to confirm that US security guarantees to Israel are “ironclad.” Indeed, the tie with the Jewish state goes well beyond what is generally due to anyone even described as an ally, which Israel, also no democracy, is not in any event, as an alliance requires both reciprocity and a precise understanding of the red lines in the relationship.
Nothing illustrates the total subservience of Washington to Israel better than how the United States is unnecessarily getting itself involved in an argument that might well prove to be a major embarrassment as well as trouble in America’s relationship with many foreign states. And, as is often the case, it involves Israel. There have been confirmed reports that the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague is preparing to issue arrest warrants for Netanyahu and two other senior Israeli officials in connection with war crimes related to the ongoing genocide directed against the Gazans. Netanyahu is reportedly reaching wildly out to his many “friends” to prevent such a development. And, in line with Washington-Jerusalem thinking that every good crisis deserves an excessive use of force or even a military solution, there are already reports that pressure, including threats, is being exerted both by Israel and the US against the jurists on the court and even directed against their families. The Israeli government warned the Biden administration that if the ICC issues arrest warrants against Israeli leaders, it will take retaliatory steps against the Palestinian Authority that could lead to its collapse, further destabilizing the region. Israel is also conducting a parallel diplomatic channels outreach in Europe to convince the local governments to advise their representatives on the court that it would be desirable to squash its investigation.
Netanyahu, who called President Joe Biden and asked for help, has in response to news reports tweeted that Israel “will never accept any attempt by the ICC to undermine its inherent right of self-defense. The threat to seize the soldiers and officials of the Middle East’s only democracy and the world’s only Jewish state is outrageous. We will not bow to it.” Netanyahu also denounced the possible warrants as an “unprecedented antisemitic hate crime.” As ICC deliberations are secret it would appear that an American or British jurist must have leaked the story to enable Netanyahu to mount a campaign against it. The White House and Congress are already moving full speed ahead to make the warrants go away and are exploring options to directly confront and discredit the court if the Israelis are actually punished.
The US has nothing to gain and much to lose in confronting the ICC as the court is generally well respected. And more might be coming. There are reports that prosecutors from the ICC have interviewed medical staff at two of Gaza’s largest hospitals in their investigation of other possible war crimes committed by Israel in connection with the mass graves recently discovered. ICC was founded in 2002 as a last resort court to deal with war crimes and crimes against humanity that were not addressable otherwise. The court was established by the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (Rome Statute). Israel is not a party to the Rome Statute and does not recognize the ICC’s jurisdiction. However, should a warrant in Netanyahu’s name be issued, his travel could be restricted, as the 123 countries that recognize the court may consider themselves obliged to arrest him.
As of March 2023, there were 123 member states of the Court. The United States is no longer a member because on May 6th, 2002, the United States, having previously signed the Rome Statute, formally withdrew its signature and indicated that it did not intend to ratify the agreement. Another state that has withdrawn its signature is the Sudan while some states that have never become parties to the Rome Statute include India, Indonesia, and China. United States policy concerning the ICC has varied by administration. The Clinton administration signed the Rome Statute in 2000, but did not submit it for Senate ratification. The George W. Bush administration, which was the US administration at the time of the ICC’s founding, stated that it would not join the ICC. The Obama administration subsequently re-established a working relationship with the Court as an observer. There has been no change in the status since that time, but the relationship is regarded as inactive.
What will the United States do to bail out Israel one more time? It has already made its position known. White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre stated “We’ve been really clear about the ICC investigation. We do not support it. We don’t believe that they have the jurisdiction.” Deputy spokesperson Vedant Patel doubled down on that declaring “Our position is clear. We continue to believe that the ICC does not have jurisdiction over the Palestinian situation.” The White House was joined by leading congressional Republicans. Zionist Speaker of the House Mike Johnson has pressured the White House and State Department to “use every available tool to prevent such an abomination,” explaining how conceding the point to ICC “would directly undermine US national security interests. If unchallenged by the Biden administration, the ICC could create and assume unprecedented power to issue arrest warrants against American political leaders, American diplomats, and American military personnel.”
There is a precedent to the US taking action against the ICC. On September 2, 2020, the United States government imposed sanctions on the ICC prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, in response to an investigation by the court into US war crimes in Afghanistan, so there is some sensitivity to the fact that as the US is the world’s leading source of war crimes, it would be wise to delegitimize agencies that would look too deeply into that fact. But the ICC sometimes has its uses as when the Biden administration publicly welcomed a war crimes investigation by the ICC against Russian President Vladimir Putin over the war in Ukraine. Asked why the United States supported an International Criminal Court investigation into Russian officials, Patel declared that “There is no moral equivalency between the kinds of things that we see [Russian President Vladimir Putin] and the Kremlin undertake in comparison to the Israeli government,” once again demonstrating that what Blinken said to the journalist was nonsense.
The Republican Party is seeking to outdo the White House in demonstrating its love for Israel. A letter signed by twelve GOP Senators was sent to Karim Khan, chief prosecutor on the ICC. The letter threatens members of the court over the possible indictment of Netanyahu and company. The group of 12 Republican senators who I like to refer to as the “Dirty Dozen” due to the large political contributions they receive from pro-Israel sources, sent a letter to the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) Karim Khan that threatens “severe sanctions” if the court goes ahead with the plan to issue arrest warrants for Netanyahu, his Defense Minister and one other senior official. The letter, dated April 24, referenced the American Service-Members’ Protection Act, a law that authorizes the president to use any means to free any US personnel detained by the ICC even though it does not apply to Israel. It says, ridiculously, that “If you issue a warrant for the arrest of the Israeli, we will interpret this not only as a threat to Israel’s sovereignty but as a threat to the sovereignty of the United States” and goes on to deny that the ICC even has jurisdiction to issue warrants since Israel is not a member of the court. The apparent drafter, Senator Tom Cotton, was seemingly unaware that Palestine is a member of the ICC and the arrest warrants would be based on war crimes committed by Israel on its nominal territory, Gaza and the West Bank.
The letter concludes with a heavy-handed threat: “The United States will not tolerate politicized attacks by the ICC on our allies. Target Israel and we will target you. If you move forward with the measures indicated in this report, we will move to end all American support for the ICC, sanction your employees and your associates, and bar you and your family from the United States. You have been warned.” A few days later, the ICC issued a statement condemning the threats made against the court and said attempts to “impede, intimidate, or improperly influence” ICC officials must “cease immediately.” The 12 Republican senators who signed on to the letter include Mitch McConnell, Tom Cotton, Marsha Blackburn, Katie Boyd Britt, Ted Budd, Kevin Cramer, Ted Cruz, Bill Hagerty, Pete Ricketts, Marco Rubio, Rick Scott, and Tim Scott. Only Lindsay Graham was missing and he was probably busy drumming up support for his plan to “destroy the enemies of the state of Israel.” Cotton, who has recommended that people who are inconvenienced by protesters should confront them and beat them up, has also introduced legislation denying college loan relief to students who faced state or federal charges while demonstrating against the deaths in Gaza. Some other Republican congressmen who are short on brain cells but strong on Israel are seeking to have protesters “convicted of unlawful activity on the campus of an American university since October 7th 2023” deported to do six months community service in Gaza, though how that would be implemented is not clear. Congressman Randy Weber of Texas explained “If you support a terrorist organization and you participate in unlawful activity on campuses, you should get a taste of your own medicine. I am going to bet that these pro-Hamas supporters wouldn’t last a day, but let’s give them the opportunity.”
So the United States will again go to bat for Israel and Israel will ignore what comes out and dodge any consequences. The real losers in the process will be the American people, who more clearly than ever will see and hopefully recognize that they have a government that spends an awful lot of time and money on Israel and doing things that are being promoted by Jewish groups. We have a legislature and executive branch that have been corrupted and compromised from top to bottom, always doing what is wrong for the most selfish reasons, often out of loyalty to foreign governments like Israel that could care less. The United States was once a symbol of freedom and opportunity. Now it has become an international embarrassment.
Police in the Turkish city of Adana detained 11 suspects, five Israeli and two Syrian, on allegations of organ trafficking, the Daily Sabahreported on 5 May.
The Provincial Directorate of Security’s Anti-Smuggling and Border Gates Branch began investigating after examining the passports of seven individuals who arrived in Adana from Israel about a month ago by plane for the purpose of health tourism. The two Syrian nationals, ages 20 and 21, were found to have fake passports.
Further investigation revealed that Syrian nationals had each agreed to sell one of their own kidneys to two of the Israeli nationals, ages 68 and 28, for kidney transplants in Adana.
During searches at the suspects’ residences, $65,000 and numerous fake passports were seized.
Israel has long been at the center of what Bloombergdescribed in 2011 as a “sprawling global black market in organs where brokers use deception, violence, and coercion to buy kidneys from impoverished people, mainly in underdeveloped countries, and then sell them to critically ill patients in more-affluent nations.”
The financial newspaper added, “Many of the black-market kidneys harvested by these gangs are destined for people who live in Israel.”
The organ-trafficking network extends from former Soviet Republics such as Azerbaijan, Belarus, Ukraine, and Moldova to Brazil, the Philippines, South Africa, and beyond, the Bloomberg investigation showed.
Accusations of Israeli involvement in organ trafficking also apply to the occupied Palestinian territories.
In 2009, Sweden’s largest daily newspaper, Aftonbladet, reported testimony that the Israeli army was kidnapping and murdering Palestinians to harvest their organs.
The report quotes Palestinian claims that young men from the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip had been seized by the Israeli army, and their bodies returned to the families with missing organs.
“‘Our sons are used as involuntary organ donors,’ relatives of Khaled from Nablus said to me, as did the mother of Raed from Jenin as well as the uncles of Machmod and Nafes from Gaza, who all had disappeared for a few days and returned by night, dead and autopsied,” wrote Donald Bostrom, the author of the report.
Bostrom also cites an incident of alleged organ theft during the first Palestinian intifada in 1992. He says that the Israeli army abducted a young man known for throwing stones at Israeli troops in the Nablus area. The young man was shot in the chest, both legs, and the stomach before being taken to a military helicopter, which transported him to an unknown location.
Five nights later, Bostrom said, the young man’s body was returned, wrapped in green hospital sheets.
Israel’s Channel 2 TV reported that in the 1990s, specialists at Abu Kabir Forensic Medicine Institute harvested skin, corneas, heart valves, and bones from the bodies of Israeli soldiers, Israeli citizens, Palestinians, and foreign workers without permission from relatives.
The Israeli military confirmed that the practice took place but claimed, “This activity ended a decade ago and does not happen any longer.”
Israel’s assault on Gaza since 7 October has provided further opportunities for the theft and harvesting of Palestinians’ organs.
On 30 January, WAFA news agency reported that the Israeli army returned the bodies of 100 Palestinian civilians it had stolen from hospitals and cemeteries in various areas in Gaza.
According to medical sources, inspection of some of the bodies showed that organs were missing from some of them.
On 18 January, the Times of Israel reported that the Israeli army confirmed reports that its soldiers dug up graves in a Gaza cemetery, claiming its soldiers were trying to “confirm that the bodies of hostages were not buried there.”
The Transformation is accelerating. The harsh, often violent, police repression of student protests across the U.S. and Europe, in wake of the continuing Palestinian massacres, exposes sheer intolerance towards those voicing condemnation against the violence in Gaza.
The category of ‘hate speech’ enacted into law has become so ubiquitous and fluid that criticism of the conduct of Israel’s behaviour in Gaza and the West Bank is now treated as a category of extremism and as a threat to the state. Confronted by criticism of Israel, the ruling élites respond by angrily lashing out.
Is there a boundary (still) between criticism and anti-semitism? In the West the two increasingly are being made to cohere.
Today’s stifling of any criticism of Israel’s conduct – in blatant contradiction with any western claim to a values-based order – reflects desperation and a touch of panic. Those who still occupy the leadership slots of Institutional Power in the U.S. and Europe are compelled by the logic of those structures to pursue courses of action that are leading to ‘system’ breakdown, both domestically – and concomitantly – provoking the dramatic intensification of international tensions, too.
Mistakes flow from the underlying ideological rigidities in which the ruling strata are trapped: The embrace of a transformed Biblical Israel that long ago separated from today’s U.S. Democratic Party zeitgeist; the inability to accept reality in Ukraine; and the notion that U.S. political coercion alone can revive paradigms in Israel and the Middle East that are long gone.
The notion that a new Israeli Nakba of Palestinians can be forced down the throats of the western and the global public are both delusional and reek of centuries of old Orientalism.
What else can one say when Senator Tom Cotton posts: “These little Gazas are disgusting cesspools of antisemitic hate, full of pro-Hamas sympathisers; fanatics and freaks”?
When order unravels, it unravels quickly and comprehensively. Suddenly, the GOP conference has had its nose rubbed in dirt (over its lack of support for Biden’s $61bn for Ukraine); the U.S. public’s despair at open border immigration is disdainfully ignored; and Gen Z’s expressions of empathy with Gaza is declared an internal ‘enemy’ to be roughly suppressed. All points of strategic inflection and transformation – likely as not.
And the rest of the world now is cast as an enemy too, being perceived as recalcitrants who fail to embrace the western recitation of its ‘Rules Order’ catechism and for failing clearly to toe the line on support for Israel and the proxy war on Russia.
It is a naked bid for unchecked power; one nevertheless that is galvanising a global blow-back. It is pushing China closer to Russia and accelerating the BRICS confluence. Plainly put, the world – faced with massacres in Gaza and West Bank – will not abide by either the Rules or any western hypocritical cherry-picking of International Law. Both systems are collapsing under the leaden weight of western hypocrisy.
Nothing is more obvious than Secretary of State Blinken’s scolding of President Xi for China’s treatment of the Uighurs and his threats of sanctions for Chinas trade with Russia – powering ‘Russia’s assault on Ukraine’, Blinken asserts. Blinken has made an enemy of the one power that can evidently out-compete the U.S.; that has manufacturing and competitive overmatch vs the U.S.
The point here is that these tensions can quickly spiral down into war of ‘Us’ versus ‘Them’ – ranged against not just the China, Russia, Iran “Axis of Evil”, but vs Turkey, India Brazil and all others who dare to criticise the moral correctness of either of the West’s Israel and Ukraine projects. That is, it has the potential to turn into the West versus the Rest.
Again, another own goal.
Crucially, these two conflicts have led to the Transformation of the West from self-styled ‘mediators’ claiming to bring calm to flashpoints, to being active contenders in these wars. And, as active contenders, they can permit no criticism of their actions – either inside, or out; for that would be to hint at appeasement.
Put plainly: this transformation to contenders in war lies at the heart of Europe’s present obsession with militarism. Bruno Maçães relates that a “senior European minister argued to him that: if the U.S. withdrew its support for Ukraine, his country, a Nato member, would have no choice but to fight alongside Ukraine – inside Ukraine. As he put it, why should his country wait for a Ukrainian defeat, followed by [a defeated Ukraine] swelling the ranks of a Russian army bent on new excursions?”
Such a proposition is both stupid and likely would lead to a continent-wide war (a prospect with which the unnamed minister seemed astonishingly at ease). Such insanity is the consequence of the Europeans’ acquiescence to Biden’s attempt at regime change in Moscow. They wanted to become consequential players at the table of the Great Game, but have come to perceive that they sorely lack the means for it. The Brussels Class fear the consequence to this hubris will be the unravelling of the EU.
“At bottom, the liberal assault on free speech [on Gaza and Ukraine] is a bid for unchecked power. By shifting the locus of decision from democratic deliberation to legal procedures, the élites aim to insulate [their neoliberal] cultish programmes from contestation and accountability. The politicisation of law – and the hollowing out of politics go hand in hand”.
Despite these efforts to cancel opposing voices, other perspectives and understandings of history nonetheless are reasserting their primacy: Do Palestinians have a point? Is there a history to their predicament? ‘No, they are a tool used by Iran, by Putin and by Xi Jinping’, Washington and Brussels says.
They say such untruths because the intellectual effort to see Palestinians as human beings, as citizens, endowed with rights, would force many Western states to revise much of their rigid system of thinking. It is simpler and easier for Palestinians to be left ambiguous, or to ‘disappear’.
The future which this approach heralds couldn’t be farther from the democratic, co-operative international order the White House claims to advocate. Rather it leads to the precipice of civil violence in the U.S. and to wider war in Ukraine.
Many of today’s Woke liberals however, would reject the allegation of being anti-free speech, labouring under the misapprehension that their liberalism is not curtailing free speech, but rather is protecting it from ‘falsehoods’ emanating from the enemies of ‘our democracy’ (i.e. the ‘MAGA contingent’). In this way, they falsely perceive themselves as still adhering to the classical liberalism of, say, John Stuart Mill.
Whilst it is true that in On Liberty (1859) Mill argued that free speech must include the freedom to cause offence, in the same essay he also insisted that the value of freedom lay in its collective utility. He specified that “it must be utility in the largest sense – grounded on the permanent interests of man as a progressive being”.
Free speech has little value if it facilitates the discourse of the ‘deplorables’ or the so-called Right.
In other words, “Like many other 19th-century liberals”, Professor Gray argues, “Mill feared the rise of democratic government because he believed it meant empowering an ignorant and tyrannical majority. Time and again, he vilified the torpid masses who were content with traditional ways of living”. One can hear here, the precursor to Mrs Clinton’s utter disdain for the ‘deplorables’ living in ‘fly-over’ U.S. states.
Rousseau too, is often taken as an icon of ‘liberty’ and ‘individualism’ and widely admired. Yet here too, we have language which conceals its’ fundamentally anti-political character.
Rousseau saw human associations rather, as groups to be acted upon, so that all thinking and daily behaviour could be folded into the like-minded units of a unitary state.
The individualism of Rousseau’s thought, therefore, is no libertarian assertion of absolute rights of free speech against the all-consuming state. No raising of the ‘tri-colour’ against oppression.
Quite the reverse! Rousseau’s passionate ‘defence of the individual’ arises out of his opposition to ‘the tyranny’ of social convention; the forms, rituals and ancient myths that bind society – religion, family, history, and social institutions. His ideal may be proclaimed as that of individual freedom, but it is ‘freedom’, however, not in a sense of immunity from control of the state, but in our withdrawal from the supposed oppressions and corruptions of collective society.
Family relationship is thus transmuted subtly into a political relationship; the molecule of the family is broken into the atoms of its individuals. With these atoms today groomed further to shed their biological gender, their cultural identity and ethnicity, they are coalesced afresh into the single unity of the state.
This is the deceit concealed in classical Liberalism’s language of freedom and individualism – ‘freedom’ nonetheless being hailed as the major contribution of the French Revolution to western civilisation.
Yet perversely, behind the language of freedom lay de-civilisation.
The ideological legacy from the French Revolution, however, was radical de-civilisation. The old sense of permanence – of belonging somewhere in space and time – was conjured away, to give place to its very opposite: Transience, temporariness and ephemerality.
“Discontinuity of culture coexists with the loss of the sense of the past … The loss of this sensibility has had an unsettling effect on culture itself and has deprived it of moral depth. Today, the anticultural exercises a powerful role in western society. Culture is frequently framed in instrumental and pragmatic terms and rarely perceived as a system of norms that endow human life with meaning. Culture has become a shallow construct to be disposed of – or changed.
“The western cultural elite is distinctively uncomfortable with the narrative of civilisation and has lost its enthusiasm for celebrating it. The contemporary cultural landscape is saturated with a corpus of literature that calls into question the moral authority of civilisation and associates it more with negative qualities.
“De-civilization means that even the most foundational identities – such as that between man and woman – is called into question. At a time when the answer to the question of ‘what it means to be human’ becomes complicated – and where the assumptions of western civilisation lose their salience – the sentiments associated with wokeism can flourish”.
Karl Polyani, in his Great Transformation (published some 80 years ago), held that the massive economic and social transformations that he had witnessed during his lifetime – the end of the century of “relative peace” in Europe from 1815 to 1914, and the subsequent descent into economic turmoil, fascism and war, which was still ongoing at the time of the book’s publication – had but a single, overarching cause:
Prior to the 19th century, he insisted, the human way of being had always been ‘embedded’ in society, and that it was subordinated to local politics, customs, religion and social relations i.e. to a civilisational culture. Life was not treated as separated into distinct particulars, but as parts of an articulate whole – of life itself.
Liberalism turned this logic on its head. It constituted an ontological break with much of human history. Not only did it artificially separate the ‘economic’ from the ‘political’, but liberal economics (its foundational notion) demanded the subordination of society – of life itself – to the abstract logic of the self-regulating market. For Polanyi, this “means no less than the running of society as an adjunct to the market”.
The answer – clearly – was to make society again a distinctly human relationship of community, given meaning through a living culture. In this sense, Polanyi also emphasised the territorial character of sovereignty – the nation-state as the pre-condition to the exercise of democratic politics.
Polanyi would have argued that, absent a return to Life Itself as the pivot to politics, a violent backlash was inevitable. (Though hopefully not as dire as the transformation through which he lived.)
An NYPD spokesperson waved a scholarly book about terrorism around on TV in an attempt to associate Columbia University protesters with terrorists. Well, we actually read it. The claim is as absurd as you might guess.
Following its brutalraid on the antiwar student protesters occupying Columbia University’s Hamilton Hall, the top brass of the New York Police Department (NYPD) appeared on right-wing cable network Newsmax with an alarming message for the country: the students responsible weren’t acting alone, but had been radicalized and taught “how to be a professional agitator, how to be a professional protester” by some unknown, malevolent force providing funding and training.
“These students were more than prepared,” observed cohost Katrina Szish.
“Extremely prepared,” stressed NYPD deputy commissioner Kaz Daughtry. He presented viewers the “serious, disturbing propaganda” they had found at Hamilton Hall as proof of this claim: a book, roughly A4 size, titled Terrorism: A Very Short Introduction.
“A book on terrorism,” said Daughtry, eyes wide with disbelief.
One person who strenuously disagrees? The author of that book, British historian Charles Townshend, who said the claim that it’s an incitement to violence “seems defamatory.”
“The suggestion that my book in some way encourages terrorism is a misrepresentation that will be plain to anyone who actually reads it,” Townshend told Jacobin over email.
So reading the book is exactly what we did, tracking down the supposedly sinister 2003 volume, which holds a 3.33 star rating on GoodReads and is accessible at libraries across the world, as well as for $12.99 on Amazon.
Combing through its 160-some pages, it was hard not to notice the distinct lack of pro-terrorism content within, not to mention the complete absence of instructions for how one would go about occupying a university building — let alone becoming a terrorist or carrying out a terrorist act. This may go some way to explain why it had been published (and continues to be sold) by the Oxford University Press, which is yet to be listed as a terrorist entity by the US government. In fact, on closer inspection, you get the distinct impression that it is simply a scholarly treatment of the subject of terrorism, part of a long-running series of over 750 titles examining everything from slavery to adolescence.
It’s safe to say that if Townshend’s book really was the lynchpin of a shadowy, well-funded effort to turn America’s campuses into hotbeds of terrorism, it would likely also be an incompetent and ineffective one.
Terrorism is sorely lacking in any practical advice for either student protesters or actual would-be terrorists. “How would these students know how to barricade a door?” Daughtry asked on Newsmax, as he charged that protesters wouldn’t have been capable of measures like locking doors with chains, blocking them with vending machines, or disabling security cameras.
Yet Terrorism turns out to be entirely unhelpful to this end, which at no point mentions these or any other techniques for occupying a building.
This is hardly surprising, since occupations are acts of civil disobedience long used by activists, including during the anti–Vietnam War, civil rights, and anti-apartheid movements. Townshend’s book, on the other hand, is exclusively concerned with, in the relatively few times it mentions them, the tactics of actual terrorists (whom he describes at various points as having a “simplified view of politics” and who “go out and kill innocent people in cold blood”): bombings, assassinations, kidnappings, and airline hijackings, among other acts of violence that are far removed from unarmed students refusing to leave a building.
Much of the book, in fact, is devoted to a bird’s eye discussion of the history of terrorism, its origin and causes, the effectiveness of government efforts to combat it, and its actual track record of success. On that last note, Terrorism is decidedly skeptical: Townshend repeatedly discusses the limited success terrorist movements have had in achieving their political goals, and even the counterproductive impact they’ve had in doing so.
Pointing to the “limited efficacy of terrorism in pursuit of radical objectives,” Townshend notes the “corrosive and possibly corrupting effect on social bonds” of terrorism, and charges that “those who have adopted a purely terrorist strategy have not been successful liberators.”
“The apocalyptic dreams which have animated many terrorist groups have never materialized,” he writes at one point, suggesting that those “who argue that terrorism has always failed are right,” because “shock and horror have their limits.” “Neither bombs nor any other technological miracles have made men free,” he writes, arguing that “no successful twentieth-century “wars of national liberation” have “succeeded by terrorism alone,” but rather required political movements to actually achieve their goals.
“The most striking failures have been those of the purest adherents to terrorist methods,” writes Townshend, “the result of whose campaigns has typically been not the overthrow of states but the intensification of state and public security, a general degradation in the quality of freedom.” He singles out in particular the 1970s Tupamaros guerrillas in Uruguay, approvingly quoting one French philosopher who argued their actions had caused them to become “the gravediggers of liberal Uruguay.”
“The verdict on urban guerrilla action was ultimately negative,” writes Townshend, pointing out that despite the Tupamaros largely winning support from Uruguayan public opinion and getting widespread acceptance of their critiques of the established order, their pursuit of terrorist tactics triggered an authoritarian response from the government that wound up both turning the public against them and leading to their demise. It also degraded the country’s democracy, he argues, for which the “end result was a far more illiberal state, and less social justice.”
Elsewhere, Townshend points to another example of the unintended, counterproductive effect of terrorism, by the Irish Republican Army (IRA). “The reaction to the 1974 Birmingham pub bombings by the IRA, for instance, was not a demand for British withdrawal but an insistence on refusing to concede to violence,” he writes.
In other words, it’s hard to see how anyone could read through Townshend’s book and, as the NYPD alleges, be brainwashed into thinking terrorism was the way to go. In fact, it’s hard to imagine anyone at the NYPD opened even a single page of the book. What seems most likely is that a police officer saw a book with the word “terrorism” on its cover and decided they could wave it around in front of television cameras to scare the public into associating student protesters demanding an end to genocide with 9/11 hijackers or Timothy McVeigh’s Oklahoma City bombing.
Ironically, one of the only examples Townshend gives where a strategy of terrorism actually succeeded was in historic Palestine, by Zionist terrorists whose ranks included several future Israeli prime ministers and out of which current Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s party, Likud, has its origins.Ironically, one of the only examples Townshend gives where a strategy of terrorism actually succeeded was in historic Palestine, by Zionist terrorists whose ranks included several future Israeli prime ministers.
“But this outcome was rare indeed,” notes Townshend, noting that the campaigns of Palestinian terrorist organizations have, by contrast, “been much longer . . . but far less successful,” and even could be “argued to have been counterproductive,” since “the general position of the Arabs of Palestine is substantially worse than it was as the outset of the ‘international’ terrorist campaign in 1969.”
“What class is this on?” Daughtry had asked about Townshend’s book. But while Columbia’s course reading lists aren’t available online, Terrorism does hold useful lessons for Israeli leadership, on whose behalf the NYPD spent the past week hospitalizing Americans.
“The Second World War was not won by bombing,” writes Townshend, “and nor has any subsequent war been won by bombing alone.”
Yet the Allied carpet bombing of World War II has been repeatedlycited by a host of Israeli and US officials as justification for Israel’s similar indiscriminate bombing campaign as a necessary evil for defeating Hamas. Elsewhere, Townshend points to the fact that terrorists’ reliance on ideological conviction, not rational cost-benefit analyses of whether terrorism really works, as “the reason why traditional notions of deterrence are ineffective against such a subject.”
Israeli officials poured resources and focus on the “targeting of leaders of terrorist organizations,” Townshend points out in the book, yet “even after this has been done time and again, it has not succeeded in eliminating or even reducing the level of terrorist attacks” — which hasn’t stopped leaders form promising that Israeli retaliation would eventually defeat terrorism. It’s both tragic and prescient to read these words more than two decades later, as Israeli officials continue to make this argument in the midst of the current war.
The NYPD’s heavy reliance on a book that has nothing to do with either occupation of buildings, nor certainly advocacy for terrorism, raises doubts about its allegations that the protests at Columbia and around the country are being directed and financed by an unnamed outside force. This hasn’t stopped police officials to continue to bandy about the claim, with NYPD chief of patrol John Chell claiming as recently as two days ago that “there is an unknown entity who is radicalizing our vulnerable students.” Townshend told Jacobin that the NYPD’s claims about his book carry “the implication that some subjects simply should not be studied” and so threaten academic freedom.
Jacobin reached out to the NYPD to ask how they square the book’s contents with their claims about its role in radicalizing Columbia students. They have not provided a response as of the time of writing.
Should Daughtry and others ever get around to reading the book, they may find it holds lessons for themselves, too. “The threat to democracy posed by terrorist acts is less important than the response that such acts evoke,” Townshend warned in the book, quoting another scholar. “[D]emocratic societies are particularly ‘vulnerable to a form of violence that incites governments to overreact’ and so lose legitimacy.”
It’s exactly what it sounds like: an entire news report about the feelings that some Israelis are feeling in their feely bits about protests in another country on the other side of the world. The Guardian’s Jason Burke asked some random people about their feelings outside a theater in Jerusalem, and then presented this weird nothing thing as relevant news reporting.
“We didn’t know so many people hated Israel,” some random security guard is quoted as saying.
“Such feelings appear widespread among the Jewish majority in Israel, seven months after war was triggered by surprise attacks launched by Hamas into the south of the country in which about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, were killed and 250 taken hostage,” writes Burke.
“Jewish Israelis interviewed by the Guardian this week blame outrage overseas on misinformation, ignorance, historical hostility from international institutions such as the UN, global ‘double standards’ and entrenched antisemitism,” Burke informs us.
If you’re just tuning in, it might seem odd to you that a major news outlet would publish a story about the emotions that some Israelis are feeling about foreign protests against an active genocide being committed by their country. After all, this is not a news story. A story about how some people’s feelings are feeling is not news, and is not journalism.
But that’s exactly what the last seven months have looked like in the imperial media: a nonstop fixation on feelings instead of facts. Israelis have upset feelings about anti-genocide protests. Western Jews have upset feelings at campus demonstrators. Biden has upset feelings at Netanyahu. Last October the imperial media suddenly got a lot less interested in reporting on the facts on the ground with Israel and Gaza, and a whole lot more interested in reporting on how some groups of people feel about it instead.
Western reporters, pundits, politicians and officials cannot stop talking about this. The feelings of Israelis and western Jews are not only given more importance than the feelings of Palestinians or any other group, they are given more importance than Palestinian lives. Some Zionist kid pretending to feel “threatened” on an Ivy League campus will get more coverage than the daily massacres that have been occurring in the densely-packed city of Rafah.
Watch Matt Orfalea’s latest video about the deluge of coddling, cooing media coverage that was given to a Zionist activist who falsely pretended to have been “stabbed in the eye” by a pro-Palestine activist for a good example of this behavior:
Israel is the only issue where the western political-media class treats people’s feelings as a matter of supreme importance.
If you’re a stressed-out single parent struggling to pay bills and keep a roof over your kids’ head, they don’t care about your feelings.
If you’re an American who’s been cast into destitution and homelessness by medical bills, they don’t care about your feelings.
If you’re a Palestinian whose apartment complex was bombed with your entire family inside, they definitely don’t care about your feelings.
But if you’re a western Zionist who doesn’t like the cognitive dissonance that comes with encountering anti-genocide protesters, or even if you’re an Israeli who’s upset about anti-genocide protests in whole other country on the other side of the planet, they’re very, very interested in your feelings.
This is of course because the west’s unconditional support for Israel cannot be defended through facts, so the narrative control needs to focus instead on one nonstop appeal to emotion fallacy. Their position is so gross and indefensible that all they have left is babbling about some select people having upset feelings and holding those feelings as more important than stopping an active genocide.
The propagandists and empire managers don’t have facts on their side and don’t have morality on their side, so they attempt to manipulate by pulling on the heart strings using sympathy and compassion. They appeal to some of the healthiest impulses within us in order to dupe us into supporting some of the most evil actions the world has ever seen.
Which is an absolutely disgusting thing to do, naturally. But, again, it’s all these freaks have left.
The original Gaza Solidarity Encampment, just minutes after NYPD arrested ~100 protesters, and still surrounded by a large protesting crowd of students as well as bystanders. عباد ديرانية, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
The American media are never short of red-letter days when it comes to their wonderful combination of superciliousness and irresponsibility. But last week the mainstream dailies and magazines went all the way to scarlet and alizarin crimson. The brighter the better, I say, when the derelictions of our media are on display such that readers can no longer miss the deceptions and distractions that are at this point their intent.
I was reading along over breakfast last Thursday in search of the overnight news on the Israeli–U.S. genocide in Gaza when I came upon the headline in The New York Times, “Laundry Detergent Sheets Are Poor Cleaners.” Wow. This is a story The Times had been following since its April 5 opener, “The 5 Best Laundry Detergents of 2024,” but my friends on Eighth Avenue left me hanging. At last I could go forth into the day confident I was a well-informed American, altogether engagé.
Last Thursday, last Thursday: Wasn’t that the day the U.N. Relief and Works Agency reported that Israel’s military operations “continue from air, land and sea” and that “in northern Gaza only five hospitals remain operational, and in the south only six”? Yes, I read this on a U.N. website, but The Times didn’t have room for it.
Then I was even better informed last Sunday, when The New Yorker published a long, delightfully inane conversation between David Remnick, who has very excellently overseen the ruination of what was once a good magazine, and Jerry Seinfeld, the comedian who always has a lot of important things to say. The occasion was … I shall let Remnick explain:
And now, for the first time, he has directed a movie. It is about a Russian Orthodox monk in the sixteenth century who starves himself to death rather than give in to the depredations of tsarist society. No, it isn’t. It’s about the race in the early sixties between Kellogg and Post to invent the Pop-Tart. Yes, really. It is called “Unfrosted” and will air on Netflix on May 3rd. It is extremely silly, in a good way.
Extremely silly in a good way. I think I understand.
Elsewhere in the news, as they say in the broadcast trade, the Israel Occupation Forces continued bombing Rafah as the Remnick item came out last Sunday—Rafah, the city in southern Gaza where the IOF had ordered Gazans to flee for their safety as they, the Israelis, bombed and bulldozed northern Gaza to the point of uninhabitability.
But let us not allow brutalities of Medieval-style gore, savagery for which we pay, to disturb our psyches. With what shall our media fill our minds? The dropping of American ordnance on Palestinian children or the history of Pop–Tarts, humorously told?
We knew the answer by the time The New Yorker published the adolescent, time-wasting badinage Remnick and Seinfeld shared because we had watched—the caker over this past week—the White House Correspondents’ Dinner last Saturday evening. We watched a stream of reporters eager for some passing social connection to celebrity and power stride disdainfully by people demonstrating against the Israeli–U.S. genocide. We watched Medea Benjamin of Code Pink get thrown out of the dinner for holding up a placard reading, “100 journalists killed in Gaza.”
And we heard Colin Jost conclude his 23 minutes of sometimes-pithy humor with his ode to what was most conspicuously missing in that roomful of feckless poseurs. “Decency is why we’re all here tonight,” the television comedian said with unfeigned seriousness. “Decency is how we’re able to be here tonight.” By then Jost, at bottom a court jester, had already told his audience of narcissists, “Your words speak truth to power. Your words bring light to the darkness.”
Yes, believe it, in the spring of 2024 people still say these sorts of things about corporate journalists. And the people so addressed take them to be true.
Words. Words. Language, its use and misuse.
As I reviewed the week that was in our media, I thought of a book that greatly impressed me when it came out in the mid–1990s. In “The Unconscious Civilization” (House of Anansi, 1995; Free Press, 1997) John Ralston Saul, the Canadian scholar and writer, was early in identifying the disconnection between language, as used in our public discourse, and reality. The expansion of knowledge has not produced an expansion of consciousness, Saul observed. It has instead caused us to take refuge in a universe of illusions wherein clear language becomes a kind of transgression. We render ourselves unconscious. Ideologies substitute for thought.
And then I thought of something else altogether. I thought of all those principled, clear-eyed students pitching tents, occupying buildings and holding placards across the U.S. in support of the Palestinian cause—which is to say the human cause. What is the difference, I came to wonder, between the demonstrating students and the journalists writing about laundry detergents and junk breakfast food or obscuring best they can the daily atrocities in Gaza? If the question implies the two are comparable, good. I think they are in some essential respects.
If we understand those who populate corporate media as painfully representative of the unconsciousness of our civilization—and I cannot see disputing this—we can stay with Saul’s terms and rotate our gaze to recognize those demonstrating in many American colleges and universities as, before they are anything else, highly conscious human beings. May the future lie with them. They are riveted to reality, while the media class flinches from it. While corporate journalists hide in forests of frivolity, the students we read of daily take refuge in nothing unless we count all those tents they’ve pitched on campus quads and greens. At writing, students at Columbia and other universities are besieged by police in riot gear—or, at UCLA, marauders, presumably students but maybe not, who swing sticks in defense of the Zionist cause.
Listen to the language of the demonstrators, not only for what they say but for how they say it. The diction, simplicity and clarity of their placards and public statements have the force of true conviction. Reconnecting language to reality lies at the core of our recovery into consciousness, Saul argued. Or there is Hannah Arendt’s variation on the thought: “We humanize what is going on in the world and in ourselves only by speaking of it, and in the course of speaking of it we learn to be human.” So: As demonstrators speak, they make themselves humanizers.
Put this next to the mainstream’s coverage of the protests. It is replete with foggy language, intentionally obscure pieces casting the perfectly obvious distinction between anti–Zionism and anti–Semitism as some kind of insoluble conundrum. Nonsense. I have heard any number of Jews complain that Zionism rips off their religion, their beliefs and their identity, and in this way they consider Zionism what is truly anti–Semitic in our midst.
This business of anti–Semitism everywhere, or anti–Semitism as “shadowing the demonstrations”—a phrase from The New York Times brimming with mal-intended suggestion but with no discernible meaning—is a case of language misused for the most cynical and corrupt of reasons. This Wednesday we were treated to a House vote on legislation that will define criticism of Israel as anti–Semitic. I blame mainstream media for encouraging over many years this outright abuse of language by pretending the equivalence deserves to be taken even the slightest bit seriously.
Between the demonstrators and the journalists, you have clarity and you have blur—language well used and language misused. There is, once again, much hope implicit in the former, none in the latter.
There is one question that divides, more radically than any other, those acting on behalf of the Palestinian people and those either ignoring or obscuring Israeli–U.S. aggression. This is the question of power.
Look at the David Remnicks, or those at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner (which became an idiotic obscenity long before the Gaza crisis), or The Times’s laundry correspondent. What are these people doing if not running for their lives—or at least their careers—from any serious confrontation with power? Those at the White House dinner, so eager to identify with power and its demotic distant cousin, celebrity: Are they not merely power-worshiping wards of the very state they are supposed to report upon?
You may have noticed that I have treated together those refusing to cover the daily atrocities in Gaza truthfully—or any of the other crises confronting our lapsing imperium, for that matter—and those filling their newspapers with … what’s my phrase? … insidious garbage. To explain this I propose to introduce the notion of passive dereliction.
Outright fabricators such as Jeffrey Gettleman are the most craven servants of power, true. And parenthetically, I can hardly wait to see what The Times, which is very inventive when it comes to punishing correspondents who embarrass it, does to Gettleman now that his “sexual violence” stories have so publicly collapsed. The Manhattan real estate desk, maybe?
But no reporter writing stories about the merits or otherwise of laundry detergent, or the importance of Beyoncé washing her hair—yes, I read a piece on this the other day—can claim to be outside the loop of responsibility as to the duties of professional journalists. Those helping to fill newspapers with distracting rubbish to crowd out worthy news reports, especially during a time of crisis such as ours, are also complicit in keeping the public distracted and misinformed in the service of power. This is what soma, that perversely calming drug Huxley imagined in “Brave New World,” looks like. These people administer daily doses of it.
By contrast, if there is one thing shared in common among the demonstrators who have their administrations, police departments and a lot of people in Washington quaking, it is their unabashed, right-out-front determination to confront power. What has brought them onto the streets and the commons of their universities is a world-historically depraved use of power to exterminate a people. They are exactly where they ought to be. But I hope they understand that the Israeli–U.S. genocide is but one manifestation of a vastly larger question, the question of late-imperial power.
And I hope they stay with it when they recognize, as eventually they must, that it is this larger question that requires address if the humanity for which they stand is to be served. Cubans, Syrians, Venezuelans, Iraqis, Nigeriens, Nicaraguans, others—let’s take the famous post–September 11 phrase and make it: They are all Palestinians now.
Texas state troopers try to break up pro-Palestinian demonstration at the University of Texas in Austin on April 24. (Photo: Jay Janner / Austin Statesman)
Democrat Biden, Republicans Smear Protests as “Anti-Semitic”
Cops/Security Guards Off Campus!
Labor: Defend Student Protesters!
APRIL 30 – As the U.S./Israel war on the Palestinian population of Gaza reached its 200th day (April 23), almost 43,000 Palestinians have been killed in the genocidal slaughter. The horror continues to mount relentlessly: over half of all homes in the strip destroyed by bombing, “flour massacres” as Israeli troops shoot hundreds of people desperately seeking food from aid trucks, the targeted murder of humanitarian aid workers, the spectre of imminent mass starvation. Now mass graves are being uncovered at Gaza hospital sites following raids by the Zionist military. As the Democratic administration of U.S. president Joe Biden continues to supply Israel with arms to carry out the butchery, on the home front Democrats and Republicans lyingly label anti-Zionist protests “anti-Semitic.” This filthy libel reached a crescendo at an April 17 hearing in Congress interrogating Columbia University president Nemat Shafik, who thanked the inquisitors and vowed to crack down on pro-Palestinian students and faculty.
In her groveling performance before the Congressional witch-hunters, Shafik condemned chants and slogans that have drawn the Zionists’ ire, promising lawmakers that “there will be consequences” for pro-Palestinian protesters. This set off a firestorm back at Columbia. That afternoon, as she was testifying in Washington, student protesters set up a Gaza solidarity encampment occupying the New York City campus’ South Lawn, leading to split-screen TV coverage. Faculty members complained that the university president threw academic freedom under the bus, while 20 Jewish professors slammed the witch-hunters’ weaponization of anti- Semitism. That night, Shafik called on the New York City Police Department to clear out the encampment, which they did the next morning, arresting 108 participants. The students were suspended from school and barred from campus; those living in dormitories were evicted on the spot, given 15 minutes to clear out their stuff.
Statistical summary of the U.S./Israeli genocide of the Palestinian population in Gaza, currently under way.
(Graphic by Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor)
Rather than squelching protest, this vindictive repression had the opposite effect, spurring Gaza solidarity actions across the country. Within hours of the police action, a new encampment sprouted at Columbia. On Friday, April 19, tents appeared in a plaza outside the New York University business school; that night, some 150 were arrested as hundreds yelled “Let them go.” The police complained that faculty protesters were the most vocal against the cops. The following Monday, April 22, an encampment sprung up at Yale University, in New Haven, Connecticut, where at least 60 were arrested. In the next days, Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass. suspended the undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee and closed off Harvard Yard, but students set up an encampment there anyway. Occupations spread to other area schools, including Emerson College in downtown Boston, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Tufts University, and a little later, at Northeastern University.
The encampments began at elite Ivy League universities and private colleges in the Northeast, but soon spread to state universities across the country, including the University of Minnesota, Ohio State, Indiana University, the University of South Carolina, University of Texas, University of Colorado and Arizona State. In all of those cases, police were called in to clear the tents and carry out mass arrests, often brutally. At UT Austin, Republican Texas governor Gregg Abbott sent baton-wielding state police, some on horseback, to break up a pro-Palestinian demonstration – not even an encampment – saying “these protesters belong in jail” and that students in “hate-filled, anti- Semitic protests at any public college or university in Texas should be expelled.” On April 24, the Republican House of Representatives speaker Mike Johnson staged a provocation at Columbia, telling protesters to “stop the nonsense,” and saying that if it didn’t stop, university president Shafik should be fired and the National Guard called in.
It’s not just right-wing Republicans who are smearing and repressing the Gaza solidarity camps and pro-Palestinian demonstrations. On April 21, the White House issued a statement in reference to the Columbia protests, saying “This blatant anti-Semitism [sic] is reprehensible and dangerous – and it has absolutely no place on college campuses.” After speaking at the University of Virginia the next day, Democratic president Biden told the press “I condemn the antisemitic protests” – putting the presidential seal of approval on this disgusting slander of young people rightly indignant at the genocidal war armed and financed by his administration. The same day, New York’s Democratic governor Kathy Hochul beat Johnson to the punch, rushing to Columbia to denounce “anti-Semitism,” seconded by New York City’s Democratic mayor Eric Adams. In Boston, liberal Democratic mayor Michelle Wu sent city police to assault the Emerson encampment (118 arrests) and liberal Democratic governor Maura Healey deployed Massachusetts state police to bust up the Gaza solidarity camp at Northeastern (102 arrests).
The brutality of the cop attack in several places horrified many. At Emory University in Atlanta, a CNN video shows a woman professor with a handbag admonishing university, city and state police to stop beating a protester when a beefy officer viciously manhandles and throws her to the ground, another piles on and a third stands watch with a semi-automatic pepper-ball gun. This wanton violence against peaceful protesters and even a faculty member passing by is hardly surprising coming from Atlanta police who each got a $500 bonus for harshly repressing the 2020 protests over the racist police murder of George Floyd; who at the height of those protests shot and killed Rayshard Brooks for falling asleep in a Wendy’s drive-thru lane; and who in December 2022 executed Manuel Esteban Paez Terán (Tortuguita) in their war against demonstrators protesting the “Cop City” police training center.1 What shocked liberals was this kind of repression being meted out at Emory, a top-flight university with a $60,000 tuition.
Against the Gaza Genocide, Bring Out the Power of the Working Class
Banner at the Gaza solidarity encampment at Columbia University in New York City, April 22. (Photo: Stefan Jeremiah / AP)
For hundreds of thousands of people across the United States – and millions worldwide – who have taken to the streets to protest the horrific slaughter in Gaza, the solidarity encampments on U.S. campuses have spurred hopes that they would mushroom into a mass movement. In New York City alone, the mayor reported more than 1,900 pro-Palestinian protests in the five months from October 7 to mid-March. Yet so far these have had no visible effect on U.S. policy, much less on the ground in Gaza. As of the end of April, some 80 encampments have been reported and over 800 arrests, climbing toward 1,000 as campus administrators look to police power to discipline academia. This is very significant, but nowhere near the scope of the 2020 mass marches that rocked U.S. cities for months protesting racist police murder, and it is politically still far from the radicalization of the student/youth revolt against the Vietnam War symbolized by the 1968 Columbia University occupation.
The reality is that the present protests have yet not gone beyond the dead-end of liberal pressure politics, seeking to turn capitalism’s universities into morally liberated zones. But the hardline Zionists in Jerusalem, together with the imperialist mass murderers in Washington who finance, arm and jointly carry out the U.S./Israel genocide in Gaza, will not be pressured into “changing their priorities.” They can only be stopped by a potentially stronger force, that of the working class here and internationally. It is to that force that the most serious student activists must turn. This requires a program of sharp class struggle.
Of course, new developments may change the course of events, such as a bloody eviction of an encampment. As the old saying has it, the brutality of a cop’s riot stick can quickly raise consciousness and dispel “ivory tower” illusions. Meanwhile, the Israeli military is readying what could be mass murder on an even greater scale with an offensive in Rafah in the southern end of Gaza. There, a million Palestinians are bottled up, many in makeshift shelter after fleeing their now-destroyed homes, stuck on a waterless desert amid the searing summer heat. As people watch an actual genocide taking place before their eyes, and are desperately seeking some way to take action against it, various intractable forces are interacting. You have kill-crazed Zionist militarists; U.S. imperialist rulers seeking to stave off the unraveling of their dominance and pushing the world closer to WWIII; McCarthyite witch-hunters in Washington and university authorities desperate to “restore order” to save their jobs. The result could be an explosive situation that goes beyond the campuses.
As the school year draws to an end, continued spread of protests, and of repression, could lay the basis for student strikes and walkouts across the country. This would certainly be an important development, but rather than illusions in “student power,” looking to and linking up with the power of the working class that can bring everything in society to a halt is key. These things don’t fall from the sky; revolutionaries work to bring the program of class struggle into the fight. Our comrades in Portland, Oregon have won construction workers unions to call for workers action to stop arms shipments to Israel, as Palestinian unions in Gaza urged. Building on that and putting such calls into practice, is a concrete way to strike a blow against Israeli and U.S. warmakers. In the face of repression against the student Gaza solidarity encampments, bringing out labor to defend the protesters could significantly change the balance of forces.
The key is a revolutionary program and revolutionary leadership. In the campus protests, this starts with a clear understanding that universities are part of the capitalist system, and those that administer them are servants of the capitalist ruling class. They can’t be made into “friends of the people” or allies of the oppressed. The war on Gaza is not a case of “mistaken priorities” but an expression of the barbarism of imperialism, the highest stage of capitalist, in a state of accelerating decay. Thus, it is vital to connect today’s struggles to the fight to overthrow this system through international socialist revolution.
The Internationalist Group and Revolutionary Internationalist Youth (RIY) have been present daily at solidarity protests outside Columbia University, as well as at the New School and NYU. Members of RIY and the Internationalist Clubs at the City University of New York (CUNY) are participating in the Gaza solidarity encampment at City College. As early as last October and repeatedly since then, the Internationalist Clubs have taken the lead in protesting McCarthyite repression against defenders of the Palestinian people at Hunter College and elsewhere in CUNY.2 In the face of the snowballing repression, we call to drop all charges against pro-Palestinian demonstrators and demand police and security guards off campus. And we appeal to the unions – beginning with the Professional Staff Congress representing 30,000 faculty and staff at CUNY – saying Labor: defend the students protesting genocide in Gaza!
Revolutionary Internationalist Youth at University of California, Berkeley Gaza solidarity encampment, April 22. (Photo: Jose Carlos Fajardo / Bay Area News Group)
Across the country, the IG and RIY have been to multiple encampments in the Boston area (Emerson, MIT, Northeastern, Tufts); at Portland State University in Oregon where a building takeover is underway, to the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and participated daily in the encampment at the University of California in Berkeley. Everywhere we have combined the call to link up with the power of the working class, to the program for a binational Arab/Hebrew Palestinian workers state in a socialist federation of the Middle East.
Above all this struggle is a political fight against the combined forces of the capitalist state, and its leading parties, Democrats and Republicans, which are responsible for financing, arming and jointly waging genocidal war against the Palestinians. It is not about “bearing moral witness,” “speaking truth to power” or other liberal platitudes. Against the bipartisan war party in Washington, which just voted $95 billion to wage U.S. imperialist wars, we call to build a revolutionary workers party that can lead the struggles of all the oppressed. The stakes couldn’t be higher. ■
Cops on the campus of Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts
When I strolled into Harvard Yard around 6:00 pm on Friday, a Shabbat service was taking place in the student encampment for Palestine. Dozens of young people were seated in a large circle on the lawn, many wearing keffiyehs, a few wearing kippahs, and at least one wearing both. A guitar player strummed and led the circle in a Yiddish song while campers nearby talked in small groups, or stared at laptops, perhaps preparing for finals. Three police SUVs were parked in sight of the camp on the centuries-old Yard, and a keffiyeh was tied around the sculpted head of the university’s namesake, John Harvard.
The encampment—or “the Liberated Zone,” as a big banner proclaimed it—now consisted of more than 40 tents. It had grown since Wednesday, when it was assembled by surprise during a noon rally on the last day of classes. Video of the moment shows students suddenly dashing onto the grass with backpacks, tarps, and bags to begin erecting tents while supporters cheer.
I had come to observe the camp and speak with Lea Kayali, a campus organizer and Palestinian American in her third year at Harvard Law School. Her family is from Jaffa and the West Bank, and the bombardment of Gaza has hit her hard. “I wake up and read the names of the dead,” she said, “the places that have been destroyed. Each headline is more gutting than the last.” Even Kayali’s cousins in the West Bank, whom she said don’t leave their houses for fear of being attacked by settlers or arrested, always remind her: “Keep eyes on Gaza.”
Though the devastation of Gaza can feel distant in the US, according to Kayali it is not. This is the point being made by student protesters at Harvard, Columbia University (where an encampment, and its police suppression, first made headlines), and other campuses across the country. Student demands include disclosure of investments in Israeli companies and others profiting from the attack on and occupation of Palestine, and divestment from those companies.
Kayali has been heartened by the enthusiasm of students new to the movement. “It’s been activating for many on campus,” she said, emphasizing the collective labor the camp requires. Students coordinate food and organize political programming, like a teach-in on the history of student activism. The camp, she said, “is an exemplar of community care, mutual aid.”
The moment the tents popped up, Kayali said, “the only sound you could hear was cheering. And this was from students who were just walking through the Yard!” Arabic students began to dance the dabke, a Palestinian folk dance, in a huge circle after the tents were raised. “Seeing a revolutionary joy that has really been absent the last seven months gave me more assurance that we can build the world we want,” she added. (When I left her, Kayali got up to help a couple of Black students practicing the steps to the dabke.)
Another inspiring moment for Kayali came Thursday during a visit to the encampment at Northeastern University, across the Charles River in Boston. There, the camp was encircled by a large ring of Boston police in riot gear, with helmets and zip tie handcuffs. But the activists stood in a smaller circle around the tents, linking arms and standing their ground. For about 20 minutes, she said, there was an intense stand-off. And then the police backed off.
Kayali’s visit to Northeastern typifies the supportive relationship among area encampments, as many student activists communicate across campuses. For instance, a speaker at a pro-Palestinian rally this week at Berklee College of Music mentioned spending time at the Emerson College encampment before it was violently broken up by police and over 100 arrests were made. That Berklee rally ended with a march to join the Northeastern encampment.
Though the police pressure on Northeastern dissipated Thursday without mass arrests, early Saturday morning the school administration followed through on their threats to break up the camp. This time, Northeastern police, the Boston police, and Massachusetts state troopers detained over 100 students, arresting those who could not or would not produce Northeastern IDs. The tents and other camp equipment were thrown into moving trucks.
I saw one of these moving trucks leaving as I entered the Northeastern campus Saturday morning around 10am. Where the camp had been was an unbroken green expanse, empty of tents and students, surrounded by metal barricades. Nearby, a group of students faced some police officers and chanted “Israel bombs, NEU pays! How many kids did you kill today?”
A Northeastern student on the scene, senior Sarah Barber, told me that Northeastern’s ties to the defense industry, particularly Raytheon, had long been a subject of debate on campus. Even when she was a freshman, there were posters in common spaces that said “Pull out of Raytheon.” In fact, in 2023 the Student Government Association voted to call on school administration to end contracts with private military companies.
Barber said she was sympathetic to the camp, but also worried that if she joined, the university might withhold her diploma. She saw many on campus who were supportive of the encampment and the Palestinian cause, but others were hostile, and tempers sometimes ran high. Barber said, “I once walked by a girl in a hijab being screamed at by people. I asked if she was okay, and she said, ‘They just started screaming at me about Gaza.’”
The administration’s excuse for breaking up the camp was that it included “professional protesters” from outside, and that antisemitic chants had been heard, including “Kill the Jews.” But as another pro-Palestinian student on the scene, Alina Caudle, pointed out, that phrase was actually yelled by a counter-protester Friday night at the camp. In video of the incident, a young man draped in an Israeli flag shouted, “Kill the Jews! Anybody on board? That’s what you chanted for!” Pro-Palestinian students can then be heard shouting him down.
I stopped by the MIT encampment on Sunday, a warm spring day. Students talked, snacked, worked on laptops, or spoke to visitors. While I was there, a couple of mothers from Lexington came to ask how they could help, and a high school student took some pictures. Seated on a lawn chair in the sun, I spoke for over an hour to Zeno (who uses just his last name), a graduate student at MIT’s Sloan School of Management—Netanyahu’s alma mater.
Zeno, a former captain in the Air Force, had been active in the Black Graduate Students Association (BGSA) before October 7. He explained, “We were doing a lot of group studies on different liberation movements. My family’s Black American and my mother’s Puerto Rican—through that side there’s indigenous Taino—so being Black and indigenous, I know oppressed populations when I see them.”
Groups that Zeno organized with demonstrated for a ceasefire and held a teach-in about Black and Palestinian solidarity. MIT Graduates for Palestine began researching and publishing about MIT’s ties to the Israeli Ministry of Defense. Student groups also created referenda calling for an immediate ceasefire and an end to MIT’s “special relationship” with the Israeli ministry; a vote by MIT undergraduates resulted in 63% support for such a resolution, and MIT graduate students voted 70% in favor.
“One of the more concerning pieces of research,” Zeno said, “involves autonomous robotic swarms. Imagine quadcopter drones being AI-driven rather than piloted, and imagine if they could swarm together. AI built by Zionists—how dangerous would that be? Sci-fi kind of stuff.”
When the police cracked down at Columbia, MIT students quickly came together on the night of Sunday, April 21, to set up tents. Zeno said it garnered a lot of support from other students and faculty.
He explained, “It’s a hearts and minds campaign—but first hearts. When you put yourself on the line, risking arrest, risking your career, that inspires people. We get more and more courage. Someone might say, ‘I was nervous about what my lab might think of me,’ but now they’re spending the night out here. So every day we’re growing the community.”
Zeno understands the risks better than many. When the Emerson College encampment was threatened late Wednesday night, he and about ten other MIT students answered a call for support and crossed the Charles River to join the Emerson activists.
Zeno said, “The state troopers pulled up with lots of cars, zip ties, face shields, very militarized.” The MIT students were chanting when confronted by a policeman, who said they wouldn’t be arrested if they left immediately. “We didn’t reply except to start chanting ‘Free Palestine,’ at which point the cops got…agitated.”
He said his face was slammed against the wall, and then he was slammed against the hood of the police car. “I told the cop, I’m a disabled veteran, I have an autoimmune disorder that makes my fascia tight, so you have to be careful how you’re cuffing me. My arms don’t move that far up my back! But he kept trying to force them farther up.” According to Zeno, his friend, a Black Muslim, had his head banged on the ground, resulting in a concussion. Despite this and other injuries to protesters, police initially claimed the only injuries were to officers.
Just as the crackdown at Columbia begot more college encampments, though, this police violence only increased students’ solidarity. Zeno described how, as he was being cuffed with his face against the hood of the car, he was looking into the eyes of another MIT student being cuffed on the other side of the car. Laughing, he said, “She was newer to the camp, I hadn’t even talked to her yet, but we trauma-bonded.”
When I ask about how solidarity with Palestine connects to other causes, Zeno warms to his topic. He talks about white supremacy, corruption in the military, the two-party system, the working class, climate change, while a student in a colorful crocheted kipah with a Star of David necklace steps closer and starts nodding. “I see vets unhoused and people walking over them! This is a full-on dystopia and this is not how society is supposed to function. And then I come here and see people helping each other, pooling their resources, and not to add to their 401k.”
He pauses. “We could be so much better. We have the imagination to build a better society, and it’s people like this administration who can’t see it.”
His words reminded me of the Shabbat service I’d heard two days before at Harvard. Someone was unfolding the passage where the prophet Moses asks to see the face of God. They said, “Moses, after fleeing persecution, dares to ask for the unimaginable. When I think of my ancestors, I think of his courage in asking this. But the difference is, what we are asking for is not unimaginable. We are imagining it here together as one. Shabbat Shalom!”
In the background, I could see Kayali still practicing the dabke. She had been joined by a couple more people who jumped and wheeled together, the circle widening as I walked away.
I would never say I expected more from Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton, as that would have required me to expect anything good from him. But I still found myself surprised when he referred to the Columbia University protests against Israel’s war on Gaza as a form of “pogroms.”
Nor did I expect more from The Wall Street Journal, which ran an op-ed arguing that Hamas and Hezbollah are “working with and grooming” pro-Palestine activists. Nor from Benjamin Netanyahu, who compared the campus protests to Nazi Germany. Nor from House Speaker Mike Johnson or Anti-Defamation League President Jonathan Greenblatt, both of whom called for the National Guard to be sent to Columbia.
Yet I have been consistently taken aback at just how ridiculous these and other claims from the media and politicians about the growing pro-Palestine movement have become recently.
Politicians and the mainstream media outlets that support them are consistently simplistic in their analyses, or flat-out wrong, or, well, stupid. But over the last few weeks, it feels like the stupidity has ramped up to a level previously unreached—a level that can no longer be described as misinterpretation or obfuscation or spin, but rather as a complete detachment from reality.
And this condition of near-psychosis appears to be spreading. It’s not just the far-right that’s responding to largely peaceful protests with extreme rhetoric and action. College administrations have sent in police in riot gear to arrest peacefully demonstrating students and faculty, suspended or expelled students, canceled graduations, and even hastily barricaded their campuses with plywood in a fashion that feels both barbaric and Wile-E.-Coyote-esque.
To understand this state of unreality, it’s important to understand that the United States and the elite media are nearly always, to some extent, in a state of unreality. We’ve known this for a while. Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman outlined the process by which Americans become unwilling or unable to confront the violence endemic in American life (whether the violence of US-backed wars in other countries or the violence of corporate-backed plutocracy at home) way back in 1988.
As they argued in Manufacturing Consent, a crucial step toward enabling war is the creation of groups of worthy and unworthy victims. Chomsky and Herman were writing about Vietnam and the lack of attention paid to the millions killed in that failed war, but the same is happening today.
Since October 7, politicians and leading media outlets have made it clear, over and over again, that they consider Israeli lives to be worthier than Palestinian ones. Now, the media’s relentless focus on Columbia and other college campuses is proof in itself that it cares, and, crucially, wants us to care, more about any perceived victims of the protests in the US (even if their victimization consists of not being able to teach a class on classical music as they’d prefer), especially if they are from elite institutions, than they do about the lives of Palestinians.
This distorted reality enabled by the media—in which the supposed dangers of student organizing get significantly more coverage than the thing the protests are actually about—partially explains the unhinged reactions of the last few weeks. If one consumes only mainstream US media, one gets a very hysterical version of reality. It’s the same reason Americans think crime is going up all the time even as it falls to historic lows. Feeling constantly under threat, while ignoring people who actually are constantly under threat, is a time-honored, mass-media-enabled, American tradition.
But, in a way, the propaganda model does not give the hysterics in this case enough credit. The average Fox News watcher can perhaps be excused for their histrionic view of the world, but American senators and presidents and highly educated op-ed page writers and university administrators should know better. And, of course, they do!
This is why it might be more useful to see their delusional rhetoric as not only a form of propagandistic misdirection but also a tool of linguistic power and control. By reframing disagreement and protest and discomfort as violence, those in power get to play victim, and thus feel righteous in their use of, or support for, actual violence—whether that’s the bombardment of Gaza or the brutality inflicted on US college students.
As Sarah Schulman brilliantly argues in her 2016 book Conflict Is Not Abuse, this strategy has been used for ages by those with privilege to hide their power over, and fear of, those they oppress. We can see it in, for example, the rape accusations leveled against Black men by white women that led to lynchings.
“Sometimes, when we are upset, we pretend or convince ourselves that Conflict is actually not only Abuse, but a crime,” Schulman writes. “When we have nowhere to go but inside ourselves, and when that self that we inhabit is convinced that it cannot bear to be seen, we call the police.”
The recent Congressional hearings leading to a bloodbath of university presidents brings back memories from my teen-age years in the 1950s when everyone’s eyes were glued to the TV broadcast of the McCarthy hearings. And the student revolts incited by vicious college presidents trying to stifle academic freedom when it opposes foreign unjust wars awakens memories of the 1960s protests against the Vietnam War and the campus clampdowns confronting police violence. I was the junior member of the “Columbia three” alongside Seymour Melman and my mentor Terence McCarthy (both of whom taught at Columbia’s Seeley Mudd School of Industrial Engineering; my job was mainly to handle publicity and publication). At the end of that decade, students occupied my office and all others at the New School’s graduate faculty in New York City – very peacefully, without disturbing any of my books and papers.
Only the epithets have changed. The invective “Communist” has been replaced by “anti-Semite,” and the renewal of police violence on campus has not yet led to a Kent State-style rifle barrage against protesters. But the common denominators are all here once again. A concerted effort has been organized to condemn and even to punish today’s nationwide student uprisings against the genocide occurring in Gaza and the West Bank. Just as the House Unamerican Activities Committee (HUAC) aimed to end the careers of progressive actors, directors, professors and State Department officials unsympathetic to Chiang Kai-Shek or sympathetic to the Soviet Union from 1947 to 1975, today’s version aims at ending what remains of academic freedom in the United States.
The epithet of “communism” from 75 years ago has been updated to “anti-Semitism.” Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin has been replaced by Elise Stefanik, House Republican from upstate New York, and Senator “Scoop” Jackson upgraded to President Joe Biden. Harvard University President Claudine Gay (now forced to resign), former University of Pennsylvania President Elizabeth Magill (also given the boot), and Massachusetts Institute of Technology President Sally Kornbluth were called upon to abase themselves by promising to accuse peace advocates critical of U.S. foreign policy of anti-Semitism.
The most recent victim was Columbia’s president Nemat “Minouche” Shafik, a cosmopolitan opportunist with trilateral citizenship who enforced neoliberal economic policy as a high-ranking official at the IMF (where she was no stranger to the violence of “IMF riots) and the World Bank, and who brought her lawyers along to help her acquiesce in the Congressional Committee’s demands. She did that and more, all on her own. Despite being told not to by the faculty and student affairs committees, she called in the police to arrest peaceful demonstrators. This radical trespass of police violence against peaceful demonstrators (the police themselves attested to their peacefulness) triggered sympathetic revolts throughout the United States, met with even more violent police responses at Emory College in Atlanta and California State Polytechnic, where cell phone videos were quickly posted on various media platforms.
Just as intellectual freedom and free speech were attacked by HUAC 75 years ago, academic freedom is now under attack at these universities. The police have trespassed onto school grounds to accuse students themselves of trespassing, with violence reminiscent of the demonstrations that peaked in May 1970 when the Ohio National Guard shot Kent State students singing and speaking out against America’s war in Vietnam.
Today’s demonstrations are in opposition to the Biden-Netanyahu genocide in Gaza and the West Bank. The more underlying crisis can be boiled down to the insistence by Benjamin Netanyahu that to criticize Israel is anti-Semitic. That is the “enabling slur” of today’s assault on academic freedom.
By “Israel,” Biden and Netanyahu mean specifically the right-wing Likud Party and its theocratic supporters aiming to create “a land without a [non-Jewish] people.” They assert that Jews owe their loyalty not to their current nationality (or humanity) but to Israel and its policy of driving the Gaza Strip’s millions of Palestinians into the sea by bombing them out of their homes, hospitals and refugee camps.
. The implication is that to support the International Court of Justice’s accusations that Israel is plausibly committing genocide is an anti-Semitic act. Supporting the UN resolutions vetoed by the United States is anti-Semitic.
The claim is that Israel is defending itself and that protesting the genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank frightens Jewish students. But research by students at Columbia’s School of Journalism found that the complaints cited by the New York Times and other pro-Israeli media were made by non-students trying to spread the story that Israel’s violence was in self-defense.
The student violence has been by Israeli nationals. Columbia has a student-exchange program with Israel for students who finish their compulsory training with the Israeli Defense Forces. It was some of these exchange students who attacked pro-Gaza demonstrators, spraying them with Skunk, a foul-smelling indelible Israeli army chemical weapon that marks demonstrators for subsequent arrest, torture or assassination. The only students endangered were the victims of this attack. Columbia under Shafik did nothing to protect or help the victims.
The hearings to which she submitted speak for themselves. Columbia’s president Shafik was able to avoid the first attack on universities not sufficiently pro-Likud by having meetings outside of the country. Yet she showed herself willing to submit to the same brow-beating that had led her two fellow presidents to be fired, hoping that her lawyers had prompted her to submit in a way that would be acceptable to the committee.
I found the most demagogic attack to be that of Republican Congressman Rick Allen from Georgia, asking Dr. Shafik whether she was familiar with the passage in Genesis 12.3. As he explained” “It was a covenant that God made with Abraham. And that covenant was real clear. … ‘If you bless Israel, I will bless you. If you curse Israel, I will curse you.’ … Do you consider that to be a serious issue? I mean, do you want Columbia University to be cursed by God of the Bible?”[1]
Shafik smiled and was friendly all the way through this bible thumping, and replied meekly, “Definitely not.”
She might have warded off this browbeating question by saying, “Your question is bizarre. This is 2024, and America is not a theocracy. And the Israel of the early 1st century BC was not Netanyahu’s Israel of today.” She accepted all the accusations that Allen and his fellow Congressional inquisitors threw at her.
Her main nemesis was Elise Stefanik, Chair of the House Republican Conference, who is on the House Armed Services Committee, and the Committee on Education and the Workforce.
Congresswoman Stefanik: You were asked were there any anti-Jewish protests and you said ‘No’.
President Shafik: So the protest was not labeled as an anti-Jewish protest. It was labeled as an anti-Israeli government. But antisemitic incidents happened or antisemitic things were said. So I just wanted to finish.
Congresswoman Stefanik: And you are aware that in that bill, that got 377 Members out of 435 Members of Congress, condemns ‘from the river to the sea’ as antisemitic?
Dr. Shafik: Yes, I am aware of that.
Congresswoman Stefanik: But you don’t believe ‘from the river to the sea’ is antisemitic?
Dr. Shafik: We have already issued a statement to our community saying that language is hurtful and we would prefer not to hear it on our campus.[2]
What an appropriate response to Stefanik’s browbeating might have been?
Shafik could have said, “The reason why students are protesting is against the Israeli genocide against the Palestinians, as the International Court of Justice has ruled, and most of the United Nations agree. I’m proud of them for taking a moral stand that most of the world supports but is under attack here in this room.”
Instead, Shafik seemed more willing than the leaders of Harvard or Penn to condemn and potentially discipline students and faculty for using the term “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” She could have said that it is absurd to say that this is a call to eliminate Israel’s Jewish population, but is a call to give Palestinians freedom instead of being treated as Untermenschen.
Asked explicitly whether calls for genocide violate Columbia’s code of conduct, Dr. Shafik answered in the affirmative — “Yes, it does.” So did the other Columbia leaders who accompanied her at the hearing. They did not say that this is not at all what the protests are about. Neither Shafik nor any other of the university officials say, “Our university is proud of our students taking an active political and social role in protesting the idea of ethnic cleansing and outright murder of families simply to grab the land that they live on. Standing up for that moral principle is what education is all about, and what civilization’s all about.”
The one highlight that I remember from the McCarthy hearings was the reply by Joseph Welch, the U.S. Army’s Special Council, on June 9, 1954 to Republican Senator Joe McCarthy’s charge that one of Welch’s attorneys had ties to a Communist front organization. “Until this moment, senator,” Welsh replied, “I think I never gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. … Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”
The audience broke into wild applause. Welch’s put-down has echoed for the past 70 years in the minds of those who were watching television then (as I was, at age 15). A similar answer by any of the three other college presidents would have shown Stefanik to be the vulgarian that she is. But none ventured to stand up against the abasement.
The Congressional attack accusing opponents of genocide in Gaza as anti-Semites supporting genocide against the Jews is bipartisan. Already in December, Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-Ore.) helped cause Harvard and Penn’s presidents to be fired for their stumbling over her red-baiting. She repeated her question to Shafik on April 17: “Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Columbia’s code of conduct?” Bonamici asked the four new Columbia witnesses. All responded: “Yes.”
That was the moment when they should have said that the students were not calling for genocide of the Jews, but seeking to mobilize opposition to genocide being committed by the Likud government against the Palestinians with President Biden’s full support.
During a break in the proceedings Rep. Stefanik told the press that “the witnesses were overheard discussing how well they thought their testimony was going for Columbia.” This arrogance is eerily reminiscent to the previous three university presidents who believed when walking out of the hearing that their testimony was acceptable. “Columbia is in for a reckoning of accountability. If it takes a member of Congress to force a university president to fire a pro-terrorist, antisemitic faculty chair, then Columbia University leadership is failing Jewish students and its academic mission,” added Stefanik. “No amount of overlawyered, overprepped, and over-consulted testimony is going to cover up for failure to act.”[3]
Shafik could have pointedly corrected the implications by the House inquisitors that it was Jewish students who needed protection. The reality was just the opposite: The danger was from the Israeli IDF students who attacked the demonstrators with military Skunk, with no punishment by Columbia.
Despite being told not to by the faculty and student groups (which Shafik was officially bound to consult), she called in the police, who arrested 107 students, tied their hands behind their backs and kept them that way for many hours as punishment while charging them for trespassing on Columbia’s property. Shafik then suspended them from classes.
The clash between two kinds of Judaism: Zionist vs. assimilationist
A good number of these protestors being criticized were Jewish. Netanyahu and AIPAC have claimed – correctly, it seems – that the greatest danger to their current genocidal policies comes from the traditionally liberal Jewish middle-class population. Progressive Jewish groups have joined the uprisings at Columbia and other universities.
Early Zionism arose in late 19th-century Europe as a response to the violent pogroms killing Jews in Ukrainian cities such as Odessa and other Central European cities that were the center of anti-Semitism. Zionism promised to create a safe refuge. It made sense at a time when Jews were fleeing their countries to save their lives in countries that accepted them. They were the “Gazans” of their day.
After World War II and the horrors of the Holocaust anti-Semitism became passé. Most Jews in the United States and other countries were being assimilated and becoming prosperous, most successfully in the United States. The past century has seen this success enable them to assimilate, while retaining the moral standard that ethnic and religious discrimination such as that which their forbears had suffered is wrong in principle. Jewish activists were in the forefront of fighting for civil liberties, most visibly against anti-Black prejudice and violence in the 1960s and ‘70s, and against the Vietnam War. Many of my Jewish school friends in the 1950s bought Israel bonds, but thought of Israel as a socialist country and thought of volunteering to work on a kibbutz in the summer. There was no thought of antagonism, and I heard no mention of the Palestinian population when the phrase “a people without a land in a land without a people” was spoken.
But Zionism’s leaders have remained obsessed with the old antagonisms in the wake of Nazism’s murders of so many Jews. In many ways they have turned Nazism inside out, fearing a renewed attack from non-Jews. Driving the Arabs out of Israel and making it an apartheid state was just the opposite of what assimilationist Jews aimed at.
The moral stance of progressive Jews, and the ideal that Jews, blacks and members of all other religions and races should be treated equally, is the opposite of Israeli Zionism. In the hands of Netanyahu’s Likud Party and the influx of right-wing supporters, Zionism asserts a claim to set Jewish people apart from the rest of their national population, and even from the rest of the world, as we are seeing today.
Claiming to speak for all Jews, living and dead, Netanyahu asserts that to criticize his genocide and the Palestinian holocaust, the nakba, is anti-Semitic. This is the position of Stefanik and her fellow committee members. It is an assertion that Jews owe their first allegiance to Israel, and hence to its ethnic cleansing and mass murder since last October. President Biden also has labeled the student demonstrations “antisemitic protests.”
This claim in the circumstances of Israel’s ongoing genocide is causing more anti-Semitism than anyone since Hitler. If people throughout the world come to adopt Netanyahu’s and his cabinet’s definition of anti-Semitism, how many, being repulsed by Israel’s actions, will say, “If that is the case, then indeed I guess I’m anti-Semitic.”
Netanyahu’s slander against Judaism and what civilization should stand for
Netanyahu characterized the U.S. protests in an extremist speech on April 24 attacking American academic freedom.
What’s happening in America’s college campuses is horrific. Antisemitic mobs have taken over leading universities. They call for the annihilation of Israel, they attack Jewish students, they attack Jewish faculty. This is reminiscent of what happened in German universities in the 1930s. We see this exponential rise of antisemitism throughout America and throughout Western societies as Israel tries to defend itself against genocidal terrorists, genocidal terrorists who hide behind civilians.
It’s unconscionable, it has to be stopped, it has to be condemned and condemned unequivocally. But that’s not what happened. The response of several university presidents was shameful. Now, fortunately, state, local, federal officials, many of them have responded differently but there has to be more. More has to be done.[4]
This is a call to make American universities into arms of a police state, imposing policies dictated by Israel’s settler state. That call is being funded by a circular flow: Congress gives enormous subsidies to Israel, which recycles some of this money back into the election campaigns of politicians willing to serve their donors. It is the same policy that Ukraine uses when it employs U.S. “aid” by setting up well-funded lobbying organizations to back client politicians.
What kind of student and academic protest expressions could oppose the Gaza and West Bank genocide without explicitly threatening Jewish students? How about “Palestinians are human being too!” That is not aggressive. To make it more ecumenical, one could add “And so are the Russians, despite what Ukrainian neo-Nazis say.”
I can understand why Israelis feel threatened by Palestinians. They know how many they have killed and brutalized to grab their land, killing just to “free” the land for themselves. They must think “If the Palestinians are like us, they must want to kill us, because of what we have done to them and there can never be a two-state solution and we can never live together, because this land was given to us by God.”
Netanyahu fanned the flames after his April 24 speech by raising today’s conflict to the level of a fight for civilization: “What is important now is for all of us, all of us who are interested and cherish our values and our civilization, to stand up together and to say enough is enough.”
Is what Israel is doing, and what the United Nations, the International Court of Justice and most of the Global Majority oppose, really “our civilization”? Ethnic cleansing, genocide and treating the Palestinian population as conquered and to be expelled as subhumans is an assault on the most basic principles of civilization.
Peaceful students defending that universal concept of civilization are called terrorists and anti-Semites – by the terrorist Israeli Prime Minister. He is following the tactics of Joseph Goebbels: The way to mobilize a population to fight the enemy is to depict yourself as under attack. That was the Nazi public relations strategy, and it is the PR strategy of Israel today – and of many in the American Congress, in AIPAC and many related institutions that proclaim a morally offensive idea of civilization as the ethnic supremacy of a group sanctioned by God.
The real focus of the protests is the U.S. policy that is backing Israel’s ethnic cleansing and genocide supported by last week’s foreign “aid.” It is also a protest against the corruption of Congressional politicians raising money from lobbyists representing foreign interests over those of the United States. Last week’s “aid” bill also backed Ukraine, that other country presently engaged in ethnic cleansing, with House members waved Ukrainian flags, not those of the United States. Shortly before that, one Congressman wore his Israeli army uniform into Congress to advertise his priorities.
Zionism has gone far beyond Judaism. I’ve read that there are nine Christian Zionists for every Jewish Zionists. It is as if both groups are calling for the End Time to arrive, while insisting that support for the United Nations and the International Court of Justice condemning Israel for genocide is anti-Semitic.
What CAN the students at Columbia ask for
Students at Columbia and other universities have called for universities to disinvest in Israeli stocks, and also those of U.S. arms makers exporting to Israel. Given the fact that universities have become business organizations, I don’t think that this is the most practical demand at present. Most important, it doesn’t go to the heart of the principles at work.
What really is the big public relations issue is the unconditional U.S. backing for Israel come what may, with “anti-Semitism” the current propaganda epithet to characterize those who oppose genocide and brutal land grabbing.
They should insist on a public announcement by Columbia (and also Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, who were equally obsequious to Rep. Stefanik) that they recognize that it is not anti-Semitic to condemn genocide, support the United Nations and denounce the U.S. veto.
They should insist that Columbia and the other universities making a sacrosanct promise not to call police onto academic grounds over issues of free speech.
They should insist that the president be fired for her one-sided support of Israeli violence against her students. In that demand they are in agreement with Rep. Stefanik’s principle of protecting students, and that Dr. Shafik must go.
But there is one class of major offenders that should be held up for contempt: the donors who try to attack academic freedom by using their money to influence university policy and turn universities away from the role in supporting academic freedom and free speech. The students should insist that university administrators – the unpleasant opportunists standing above the faculty and students – must not only refuse such pressure but should join in publicly expressing shock over such covert political influence.
The problem is that American universities have become like Congress in basing their policy on attracting contributions from their donors. That is the academic equivalent of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling. Numerous Zionist funders have threatened to withdraw their contributions to Harvard, Columbia and other schools not following Netanyahu’s demands to clamp down on opponents of genocide and defenders of the United Nations. These funders are the enemies of the students at such universities, and both students and faculty should insist on their removal. Just as Dr. Shafik’s International Monetary Fund fell subject to its economists’ protest that there must be “No more Argentinas,” perhaps the Columbia students could chant “No More Shafiks.”
This is not a Whodunit. The serial killers are known to us, are friends of ours, are supported by us. ~ilana
The U.S. has undertaken the role of IDF deputy in advancing the genocide of Gazans. ~ilana
American foreign policy is a museum of horrors in which Gaza 2023/2024 is the main exhibit.
It is my conviction that Gaza is much more than just one more American foreign-policy failure, an event and topic to swill around like mouth wash, spit out and move on, once the usual “tsk, tsk” bromides have been disgorged.
Uncle Sam’s usual deathly mixture of ignorance, cruelty and superiority has been exceeded with respect to Gaza. It is my belief that the United States’ open, even-energetic support for genocide is a defining event in the annals of American foreign-policy aberrations—repeatedly and vigorously vetoing UN Security Council resolutions against Israel’s atrocities, justifying Israel’s violations of the law, as well as, alternatively, pretending these violations had never occurred and making like the laws of man and the laws of God don’t apply to Israel.
This American failure is probably qualitatively different from blunders that went before. What the United States has approved in Gaza is the crime of all crimes, appallingly carried out in broad daylight.
Duly, the annihilation of a community and the landmass that supports it has been achieved. The arteries of supplies that sustain this Palestinian society are all but closed. The mass murder of members of the targeted group proceeds apace. Daily. Shamelessly. Before our very eyes. And as I write.
It is the case of the senile (Joe Biden) supporting the criminally insane (Israel).
To press my point: Mass graves are uncovered near the ruins of the Nasser and al-Shifa hospitals. Therein hundreds of Palestinians have been interred, bodies stacked, some handcuffed, others still tethered to medical tubes. The White House’s response amounts to, “Where, what, who, and how can this possibly be? Who could have done this horrible thing? Yes, we, too, want answers right away. Let’s do the forensics. Let’s ask the Israelis to look into it, shall we? See you tomorrow.”
This is not a Whodunit, you feckless, malevolent morons.
The serial killers are known to us. We know who murdered over 34,183 Palestinians and maimed an estimated 77,143. The serial killers loosed on millions of Gazans—their guns at the ready, pointed at the civilians huddled in the southern tip of the Strip—these are friends of ours.
Empowered by Empire, Israeli serial killers are not on-the-lam, running from the Law. They are free to come-and-go, to travel, to hobnob; at liberty to enjoy undeserved freedoms, as their innocent victims are confined, held captive, catacombed, awaiting death by one or another diabolical means. In fact, the serial killers of the Palestinians of Gaza are proudly paraded as freedom fighters in their country of Israel, and are backed and exculpated by the powerful in our own country, the United States of America.
Support for Israel’s offensive against Gaza’s civilians comes courtesy of our carpetbagger representatives, left and right. Israel is lavished with munitions despite the fact that the American taxpayer’s endorsement of the carnage these cause began dropping in November of 2023. By late March of 2024, a Gallop poll reported that 74 percent of Americans were keenly engaged with the topic and a majority now opposed Israel’s excesses.
Even young Evangelicals might well be rethinking their allegiances.
Exquisitely sensitive to its Christian Zionist base in America, the Jerusalem Post, honestly if opportunistically, divulged that, “Young Evangelical support for Israel has plummeted. Seven out of 10 Evangelical and born-again young Evangelicals … surveyed as far back as 2021 adhere to the postmillennial and amillennial theological views, which see the Jewish people and the state of Israel as no longer necessary in the fulfillment of God’s plan for the second coming.”
So settled in their habits, indications are that the elders of the Zionist, Christian Right have failed to read their young.
Indeed, these are austere days for American leadership and reputation. By dint of undertaking the role of IDF deputy in advancing genocide in Gaza—the United States has crossed a threshold. In Gaza, Uncle Sam has finally achieved an official or formal inversion of all cherished, universal values. It has earned the “Great Satan” appellation it was once awarded.
There is a vast power differential in the US-Israel relationship. The colossus that is the American Hegemon appears helpless before the tiny Jewish State, leading one to wonder which country deserves the Great Satan moniker and which the Little One.
On the scale of national crimes and misdemeanors, Gaza is simply indefensible. And our young sense this and are incensed by it.
For now, the degenerative process in America is being halted by students. “[F]rom Massachusetts to California,” students have gathered from far and wide demanding an accounting from their representatives for the industrial-scale mass murder being carried out in their name.
“The demonstration, held one block away from the home of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, came just hours before the Senate overwhelmingly approved a $95 billion foreign aid package that includes about $17 billion in arms and security funding to Israel. ‘At the core of the Passover story is that we cannot be free until all people are free,’ Beth Miller, the political director of Jewish Voice for Peace, told Democracy Now! ‘The Israeli government and the United States government are carrying out a genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, over 34,000 people killed in six months in the name of Jewish safety, in the false name of Jewish freedom.”
To cover his wretchedness, a foreign country’s prime minister libeled these quintessentially American, anti-genocide campus protests—which, we hope, may swell to match those begun in Columbia University in 1968, against the Vietnam War—as antisemitic, even terroristic.
These “antisemitism” claims-makers aim to silence and sunder dissenting free speech, one of the most cherished American (Voltairean) values, clearly not shared by our serial-killer besties. Framing loud protest against Israel as “antisemitic” is intended, very plainly, to silence opposition to the mass murder and displacement of Gazans.
The protesters across American campuses are not antisemitic. But even if they were; in America, free speech refers to the words people shout, write, tweet; the beliefs they are known to hold, the flags they fly or burn, the symbolic, non-violent ceremonies and rituals they enact, the insignia, paraphernalia, even the goose-stepping and Hitler salutes they muck around with—all this is protected speech in our country. Genocide backers, stateside and abroad, may not like it; but this speech is both constitutional and licit in natural law.
Provided protesters are not engaged in acts of violence against others—then the words they emit are irrelevant. Antipathy to Jews qua Jews, if expressed—for which there is no good evidence whatsoever—amounts to a thought “crime.”
Thought crimes are the prerogative of a free people in a free country. Americans, left and right, must join libertarians in unapologetically rejecting the very idea of policing, purging, persecuting or prosecuting people for holding or expressing politically unpopular ideas.
Superlatives cannot capture the plight of these poor people. What is clear is that patience is native to their character. Palestinians might appear enslaved, but they cannot be brought into submission by any Pharaoh.
Deliverance is possible for a long-suffering people.
(Boston, MA, Emerson College Student Released From Lock Up After Tent Protest Against The Israeli War Machine – 26 April 2024)
As more campuses join the protests against Israel’s continuing engagement in war crimes in Gaza, one common thread runs through the student demands – divest from supplying the Netanyahu government and the IDF with weapons of mass destruction. What compels many of these youthful demonstrators to occupy the public spaces and offices of their universities is the complicity of college portfolios with investments in US weapon manufacturers. They know that the products of defense contractors, like Lockheed Martin’s F-35 jet and General Dynamics MK 84 – 2000 pound bombs, are slaughtering tens of thousands of innocent civilians throughout Gaza.
They also understand that the US government, from President Biden to the Congress, is opposed to legislative efforts to hold Israel accountable to its violation of various on-the-books prohibitions for governments “engaged in gross human rights abuses” (Section 502 B of the US Foreign Assistance Act). Instead, they see the Biden Administration exploiting every loophole in any restrictions to supply Israel with unending transfers of bombs and military equipment. While countries, like Canada and numerous others, have stopped shipping weapons to Israel, the US seems oblivious to the suffering and devastation caused daily by the IDF in Gaza.
They are aware that Israeli state propaganda spreads constant disinformation about its war crimes in Gaza, from rationalizing its attacks on the staff and patients in hospitals to the murder of over 200 aid workers. They know that countless human rights agencies have condemned these kinds of war crimes in Gaza. (These same human rights agencies have also condemned the brutal killing of 1200 Israeli civilians and the taking of hostages on October 7). In order to justify the murder of so many innocent civilians, the Netanyahu government has insisted that they have actually killed 9000 Hamas militants. However, if they read one of the recent articles in the Israeli newspaper, Ha’aretz from March 31, they understand this figure is reflective of what the IDF calls “kill zones” (think “free-fire zones” in the US war on Vietnam) where anything in those zones, including women and children, were legitimate targets to then be counted as Hamas militants.
They are surely aware of what Netanyahu cabinet members have said about the Palestinians in Gaza and on the West Bank that they are just “human animals.” The Israeli Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant, has bragged about destroying the “electricity, food, and fuel” in Gaza. One of his advisers, a former IDF General, reflective of the targeting of aid workers, including those murdered seven from World Central Kitchen, acknowledged that “in order to make the siege effective, we have to prevent others from giving assistance to Gaza.” Such mass murder and wanton destruction of property in Gaza is part of a campaign of killing that one UN official has cited as “probably the highest kill ratio of any military killing anybody since the Rwandan genocide of 1994.”
When students see and hear about all of this, they are obviously motivated to express their moral outrage. On one hand, these expressions may not always comport with so-called civility. On the other hand, they are not prepared to remain silent and/or passive in the face of an unfolding genocide. In their adherence to Dr. King’s reference to the “fierce urgency of now,” they are committed, as Dr. King was, to disturbing the peace.
Indeed, we need to be reminded of another quote from Dr. King that was central to his famous Riverside Address (“A Time to Break Silence”) from April 4, 1967. He warned prophetically that “a nation that continues year after year to spend more on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” Beyond the horrors in Gaza and the long tragic history of the oppression of Palestinians, these student protestors are trying to save their own nation from its bloated “defense” budget (now approaching almost one trillion dollars) and death-dealing spiral. What their protest ultimately signifies is their commitment to an authentic advocacy for peace and justice abroad and at home.
Fran Shor is a Michigan-based retired teacher, author, and political activist.
We live in an age of increased disasters and encroaching fascism. This is a historical moment marked by a systemic attempt by an emerging authoritarianism to disable language and dissent of any substantive meaning, remove actions from the grammar of moral witnessing, and disassociate power from institutional justice. As all levels of society are hollowed out, notions of democratic community, the social contract, and compassion give way to a politics in which all matters of responsibility are individualized, privatized, and removed from broader systemic considerations. The habits of oligarchy are animated by fear and reproduced through relentless attacks on human possibilities, while “the disorder of real history is replaced by the orderliness of pseudo-history.”[1] In a time of widespread suffering and unrest, higher education is feared for its critical functions and students are expected to be silent, unresponsive to wider social issues, and ignore the relationship between the dynamics of power, marginality, and knowledge. Amid the expansion of the military-industrial complex and the carceral state, faculty and students are expected to look away or inward, unresponsive to the language of imagined futures.
This process of depoliticization is intensified by a frontal attack on dissent, free speech, academic freedom, and institutions that support and nurture these crucial democratic rights and practices. Increasingly, higher education, in particular, under the influence of right-wing billionaires, authoritarian politicians, and cravenly boards of trustees is attacked for its critical functions, reduced to morally dead zones of the imagination and a mind-numbing conformity. Disdained as a public good whose purpose should be to educate young people to be informed and critical citizens, higher education is under pressure by far-right members of the GOP to renounce its responsibility to teach students to question, challenge, and think against the grain. One model for this regressive form of education is on display in Florida where Gov. Ron DeSantis has transformed New College, a once progressive college, into a citadel for anti-woke ideology and pedagogy–cleansed of classes where faculty and students can think critically, test their opinions, and realize themselves as engaged citizens.
No longer considered a public good where ideas and important social issues are nurtured, debated. and interrogated, institutions of higher education are being transformed into indoctrination centers where critical ideas and empowering pedagogies are held in contempt, transformed into apparatuses of censorship and hopelessness. Derided as a haven for critically informed social criticism, the far-right wants to reduce teaching and learning to what might be called cloning pedagogies, designed to clone culture, knowledge, ideas, and extremist world views.
Even worse. Higher education is increasingly being attacked by the far-right for its liberal claim of equality and a common good. As an institution that aligns with a notion of “citizenship… equated with human dignity [and] equality on multiple fronts,” it has garnered the wrath of fascists for whom hostility to universal citizenship is a central element of its mobilizing passions.[2] This hatred of equality reinforced by the selective definition of who counts as an American now feeds both the attack on higher education and an increasingly vicious racist politics. As Eddie S. Claude notes, the fantasy of a “lily-white America” and the call to banish Black and brown people “from the nation’s moral conscience” create landscapes of illusion, enable white supremacy, while furthering racist violence and the logic of exclusion and annihilation.[3] The far-right views thinking as dangerous as is the notion that education is central to politics and must be defined through it claims on democracy and its role in a time of tyranny.
Moral restrictions seem obsolete as another colonial war rages in Gaza, during which thousands of Palestinians are killed, while attempts to criticize what various international organizations label as war crimes are summarily dismissed as antisemitism. This refusal to acknowledge the violence being waged against Palestinians has morphed into a war against critical journalists, cultural workers, and increasingly higher education, now viewed by the far-right as a citadel of pernicious socialist thought. Under such circumstances, those who react to the suffering of others are subject to the dehumanizing and morally cannibalistic, verbal orgies of hatred, and increasingly, state violence. They are also at risk of a society in which civic death leads state violence, domestic terrorism, and a politics of disposability.[4]
In this historical moment, attacks on higher education make clear that struggling for freedom, equality, and justice comes with great risks. Such attacks give credence to an emerging fascist politics both in the U.S. and abroad that mark students who question settler colonial dispossession and state violence as objects of disparagement and potential violence by a racist-criminogenic state. Displays of civic courage now qualify students as objects of critique, exclusion, and in some cases arrests. In the current repressive climate, this points to not only the egregious act of censorship, but also to the death of the university as a public good and civic institution, regardless of its flawed notions of equality and civic knowledge.
For Trump and his Vichy-like enablers, higher education is portrayed as a laboratory of left-wing ideologies whose ultimate purpose is “to destroy family, community, and national unity.”[5] These repressive policies represent the return of what Ellen Schrecker has called “the new McCarthyism,” which uses the smear of communism to attack critical education, teacher autonomy, and “real-world issues of race, gender, and social inequality.”[6] She writes:
The current [McCarthyite] campaign to limit what can be taught in high school and college classrooms is clearly designed to divert angry voters from the deeper structural problems that cloud their own personal futures. Yet it is also a new chapter in the decades-long campaign to roll back the changes that have brought the real world into those classrooms. In one state after another, reactionary and opportunistic politicians are joining that broader campaign to overturn the 1960s’ democratization of American life. By attacking the CRT bogeyman and demonizing contemporary academic culture and the critical perspectives that it can produce, the current limitations on what can be taught endanger teachers at every level, while the know-nothingism these measures encourage endangers us all.[7]
The right’s attack on universities as citadels of leftist ideology dates back further than the purge of academics by the rabid anti-communists under Senator Joe McCarthy in the 1950s. Authoritarian governments in the 1930s performed a similar task in order to control universities. As Professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat writes:
From the fascist years in Europe…right-wing leaders have accused universities of being incubators of left-wing ideologies and sought to mold them in the image of their own propaganda, policy, and policing aims. … Given the virulence the Nazis showed in silencing their critics in and out of the academy after Hitler took power in 1933, it is remarkable that this talking-point has retained traction for the right. It has done so thanks, largely, to the military juntas of the cold war era, which gave new life to fascism’s battles against the left.[8]
More recently, McCarthyite tactics became rampant during George W. Bush’s presidency. This was particularly evident when Vice President Cheney claimed that critics of the administration’s Iraq policy “abetted terrorists.”[9]Simultaneously, the Bush-era witnessed the emergence of McCarthyite institutions like Campus Watch, the David Project, Students for Academic Freedom, and other groups designed to police Middle East Studies and the liberal arts in general for any vestige of dissent against US domestic and foreign policies. Discoverthenetwork.org and other extremist organizations listed the names of professors considered un-American, similar to how ACTA listed the names of alleged unpatriotic professors after the 9/11 attacks.[10]
In an age dominated by feral social media platforms, a malignant form of censorship has emerged in even more virulent forms. For example, this is evident in the work of organizations such as StopAntisemitism, which engages in online vigilantism by doxing critics of Israel’s war on Gaza by “posting personal information online to encourage harassment — thereby chilling debate.”[11] Not only are such critics named, shamed, and harassed, but many of them are expelled from college and often terminated from their jobs.
At present, a more dangerous form of McCarthyism has returned with a vengeance. This authoritarian turn in higher education has been accelerated by the increasing suppression of dissent by critics of Israel’s war in Gaza. Against Israel’s historically based claim of ontological innocence and perpetual victimhood, a new generation of critics argue, as Pankaj Mishra makes clear, that “oppression does not improve moral character.”[12] Israel can no longer absolve its crimes by drawing upon its own tortured unfathomable history of repression and genocide. Federic Lordon goes further and argues that Israel’s brutal war of revenge on Gaza and its call to prevent a Palestinian state represent a form of “moral suicide.” He adds: “Never before has there been such a colossal squandering of symbolic capital that was thought to be unassailable, which had been built up in the wake of the Holocaust.”[13]
Netanyahu’s war on Gaza has intensified protests on university campuses against Israel’s brutal violence against Palestinians. In response, the mainstream media and a number of pundits, with the blessing of pro-Israeli interests, has weaponized antisemitism, a label which has been reduced to any critique of Israel’s military conduct in Gaza or the West Bank. As William I. Robinson observes, one consequence of this pernicious criticism by the far-right is that “academic freedom and free speech are under an all-out attack on university campuses in the United States, not just from college administrations and pro-Israeli groups, but also from the highest levels of the Israeli state.”[14]
Student activists who criticize Israel are facing harassment, monitoring, expulsion, public shaming, and, in some cases, mass arrest for disruptions, evidenced by recent events at Columbia and Yale University, and increasingly several other universities.[15] The protester’s call for colleges and universities to divest from corporations that profit from Israel’s war on Gaza along with their demand for “a complete ceasefire in Gaza” are buried in the blanket charge of antisemitism and the force of police violence.[16] These arrests serve as another indication of the collaboration between certain Ivy League colleges and the far-right in the assault on student voices.[17] Ari Paul observes that mainstream news has generally delighted in the crackdown, making clear “that campus safe spaces where speech is banned to protect the feelings of listeners are good, depending on the issue.” [18] This is not to suggest that attacks on Jewish and students supporting Palestinian rights should be overlooked, but the real objective of the war being waged on elite universities poses a far greater threat than generalized and undebated charges of antisemitism. The inquisition at work in the house committee hearings investigating campus antisemitism is heavily inundated with political theater displayed by Elise Stefanik and her GOP colleagues. What is obvious in this show trial, as David Bell notes, is that they “do not have any real interest in solving campus problems. Their goal is to expose liberal elites as corrupt, dangerous, and anti-American.”[19] The real objective of these hearings is to weaponize protests against the war in Gaza as components of a larger strategy aimed at exercising a defining role in the control of higher education. Robert Kuttner rightly notes in The American Prospect that this McCarthyite assault is part of a broader effort “to suppress fundamental freedoms of expression.”[20]
While the issue of campus antisemitism warrants discussion and debate, it is not within the purview of congresswomen, Elise Stefanik. Nor is any serious discussion of widespread Islamophobia and the squelching of dissent by various campus groups supporting Palestinian rights. By leading the charge in Congressional hearings on antisemitism on college campuses, Stefanik adopts a flame-throwing confrontational approach aimed at dictating “the academic mission of a university,” prescribing disciplinary measures against professors, and formulating guidelines “for acceptable campus speech.”[21] The irony and hypocrisy here are hard to overlook given Stefanik’s “Puritan superego,” belligerent stance, and self-assured role as an opponent of campus antisemitism.[22] This is especially noteworthy in light of her denial of elections results, characterization of individuals who attacked the Capitol as “January 6 hostages,” and her impassioned and staunch defense of Trump, who associates with prominent antisemites such as Kanye West and Nick Fuentes.[23]
The hypocrisy at work in criticism by far-right politicians is not limited to Stefanik. Senator Josh Hawley, Tom Cotton and other MAGA supporters of the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol on January 6 have called for President Biden, whose election they refused to accept, to use the National Guard to arrest students on college campuses. For the MAGA group, violence waged by insurrections is legitimate, but students protesting against the massacre of Palestinians represent a threat to the state. On full display here is the irony of warmongers calling for violence against students who are calling for “the American government to stop sending military aid to Israel” and “for universities to stop investing in weapons manufacturers…who profit from Israel’s invasion of Gaza.”[24] Hypocrisy in the service of violence is perfectly aligned with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s characterization of student protesters on American university campuses as “”antisemitic mobs” that must be stopped.[25] Senator Bernie Sanders aptly criticized Netanyahu’s derogatory remarks as a ploy to use antisemitism “to distract us from the immoral and illegal war policies of your extremist and racist government.”[26] He further adds:
No, Mr. Netanyahu. It is not antisemitic or pro-Hamas to point out that in a little over six months, your extremist government has killed 34,000 Palestinians and wounded more than 77,000—70% of whom are women and children. It is not antisemitic to point out that your bombing has completely destroyed more than 221,000 housing units in Gaza, leaving more than one million people homeless—almost half the population.[27]
Of course, hypocrisy is important to point out but what really is at issue here is a political party and its far-right media apparatchiks who believe in using state force and the exercise of violence against their own people in order to shut down free speech. Yes, this is a form of domestic terrorism and it is a fundamental element of fascist regimes. Campus protests are not merely seen as unwelcome disruptions but are criminalized by far-right university administrators and politicians.
Compounding these crude attacks on students protesting against the war on Gaza and the corporations that provide them with military weapons is the aggressive involvement of pro-Israel groups, some with the backing of the Israel state, in a broad campaign to shame and publicly disclose information about pro-Palestinian protesters, including students and faculty. Commenting on the repressive nature of this intervention by the Israeli state, Robinson states that the Israeli government has initiated what appears to be a wide-ranging covert campaign and action plan “to harass and intimidate students, faculty, and administrators into silence.”[28] He elaborates on some of the chilling specifics of the plan:
The plan aims at ‘inflicting economic and employment consequences on antisemitic [read: pro-Palestinian/anti-genocide] students and compelling universities to distance them from their campuses.” The plan specifies that actions taken “should not have the signature of the State of Israel on it.’… It calls for ‘personal, economic and employment repercussions for the distributors of antisemitism.’ According to the plan, the inter-ministerial task force will carry out ‘naming and shaming’ by ‘publicizing the names of those generating antisemitism on campuses — both students and faculty and impacting the employment of those identified as the perpetrators of antisemitism.’ Those targeted ‘will struggle to find employment in the U.S. and will pay a significant economic price for their conduct.’[29]
Within this frigid climate of censorship, doxing, and punishment, faculty are being fired and students are being intimidated, harassed, and silenced. One egregious example took place when the University of Southern California’s campus canceled a valedictory commencement address by Asna Tabassum, a Muslim student—more than likely because of her expressed solidarity with the Palestinian people.[30] In another instance, which has become all too familiar, some “New York University students were hauled in for disciplinary hearings after staging a reading of poetry by the Palestinian author Refaat Alareer,” who was killed in an Israeli airstrike.[31] After students erected tents on the campus of Columbia University in protesting the slaughter of Palestinians taking place in Gaza, the university president, Nemat Shafik, called in the city’s Police Department to remove them. Over a hundred students were arrested, all of them were suspended, their student IDs were deactivated, and they were evicted from their dorms.[32] Such actions are reminiscent of the protests and arrests of over one thousand students that took place at Columbia University in 1968. It is worth noting, as Judd Legum states, “In 2018, on the 50th anniversary of the 1968 arrests, then-Columbia President — and noted First Amendment scholar — Lee Bollinger said the decision to call in the NYPD in 1968 was ‘a serious breach of the ethos of the university’.”[33] Clearly, this is a lesson that President Shafik has chosen to ignore and in doing so is complicit in supporting this new wave of McCarthyism and its intensifying attacks on free speech taking place on more and more college campuses.
Her moral vacuity in calling the police to arrest students–who should be celebrated for their courage not punished–is astonishing given her comment that she has initiated “this extraordinary step because these are extraordinary circumstances.”[34] What is extraordinary is that students are protesting the fact that over 34,000 Palestinians are dead, including more than 14,000 children, and that 80 percent of the population in Gaza are homeless, many of whom are starving in the midst of an intentionally imposed famine.
What is extraordinary is that students are opposing Columbia University’s investment and ties with corporations that profit from Israel’s war on Gaza. What is extraordinary is that students are calling for an end to obscene and morally reprehensible acts of violence, such as Israel‘s bombing of Rafah—”where more than half of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million has sought refuge from fighting elsewhere.”[35] Such attacks have resulted in the indiscriminate killing of women and children who have no place to escape.
What is extraordinary is that students are trying to stop an Israeli military attack on Gaza in which war crimes are being committed in violation of international law, as evidenced by the fact that over 300 bodies have been discovered in “a series of mass graves near Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza….The dead include men, women and children….Some were discovered handcuffed, indicating that victims were killed in mass summary executions.”[36] What Shafik willfully fails to acknowledge is that the real crime is not students demonstrating against the war–asserting their sense of moral agency—but the scale of human suffering in Gaza to which they are opposed. As an educator, Shafik is shamefully blind to the fact that Israel has not only destroyed or damaged all 12universities in Gaza but has engaged in a “wholesale destruction” of Gaza’s educational system, committing what UN experts have labeled as scholasticide.[37] In all of these matters, Shafik displays an astonishing degree of moral weightlessness, rooted in an appalling mix of ignorance and political irresponsibility.
While genuine antisemitism exists, it is now being used and maligned by the far-right—known for its own embrace of antisemitism–to engage in targeted harassment and shut down all criticism of the violence waged in Gaza against the Palestinian people, especially women and children. In this context, all criticism of Israel is being branded as antisemitic. This reflects more than a blind commitment to the Israeli state under a far-right leadership; it covers up an institutional machinery of state repression while reproducing a central tenet of authoritarianism, which is to silence those minds that dare to criticize its totalitarian ideology, policies, and anti-democratic tendencies. It is worth repeating that this far-right call for an “ecstasy of obedience” increasingly uses the charge of antisemitism on university campuses as a wedge issue to attack colleges and universities, which they claim are too liberal. It is worth noting that while the Biden white house condemned antisemitic incidents taking place at Columbia University, student journalists at the school stated that many of the incidents took place “on the fringe of campus, not involving students.”[38]
What is often forgotten by critics of the new McCarthyism is that this upgraded attack on higher education is worse than anything that took place in the 1950s. Ellen Schrecker, one of the great historians of McCarthyism, has written that the current assaults on higher education are “worse than McCarthyism.” She is worth quoting at length:
It’s worse than McCarthyism. The red scare of the 1950s marginalized dissent and chilled the nation’s campuses, but it did not interfere with such matters as curriculum or classroom teaching. Its goal was to eliminate communism (however loosely defined) and all the individuals, organizations, and ideas associated with it from any position of influence within American society. The witch hunters achieved that goal by firing people who had once been in or near the small, unpopular Communist party and/or refused to inform on their ex-comrades. They also relied on blacklists, loyalty oaths, speaker bans, and interference from the FBI and other anti-communist investigators. … the classroom was not targeted.[39]
History matters and it is crucial to remember that higher education since the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 has been under severe attack by the forces of neoliberalism intent on turning education at all levels into nothing less than adjuncts of the workplace and laboratories for ideological repression. As I have stated in another article:
Across the globe, a new historical conjuncture is emerging in which attacks on higher education as a democratic institution and on dissident public voices in general – whether journalists, whistleblowers, or academics – are intensifying with alarming consequences for both higher education and the formative public spheres that make democracy possible. Hyper-capitalism … has put higher education in its crosshairs and the result has been the ongoing transformation of higher education into an adjunct of the very rich and powerful corporate interests… In fact, the right-wing defense of the neoliberal dismantling of the university as a site of critical inquiry is more brazen and arrogant than anything we have seen in the past. [40]
Since 2016, with the election of Trump as president, the attack on higher education has increased in scope and intensity and resembles forms of education similar to what took place in Nazi Germany.[41] The attempts by conservatives “to deplore knowledge, deride academic inquiry for its own sake, and discourage intellectual curiosity in our children and the American public” has a long and sordid history.[42]
What is different today is that an emerging fascist politics driven by a range of far-right billionaires and groups have education in their crosshairs. For instance, as Judd Legum recently noted, college administrators are facing “substantial political pressure from the right,” and some like Columbia President Minouche Shafik are too willing to buckle under such intimidation.[43] As Irene Mulvey, the President of the American Association of University Professors observed, we are experiencing a “new era of McCarthyism where a House Committee is using college presidents and professors for political theater.”[44] The recent attacks by the far-right on higher education are designed to reach deep into the classroom in order to erase dangerous moments of history, eliminate criticism of systemic racism, banish subjects dealing with sexual orientation, shut down any discussions of social problems, and weaken any control teachers or faculty have over their classrooms. This is more than an airbrushing of what the far-fight considers unpalatable and dangerous.
This is an education that produces moral blindness, ignorance, and reveals contempt for empowering ideas, critical thinking and civil liberties. It is a war against history, memory, solidarity, and the dissolution of the social ties that bind us together in a set of shared values.[45] As Donald Howard argues, educators and others cannot risk failing to speak and act against the current right-wing assaults, especially at a time when a range of democratic educations are under assault and “the very fabric of our democracy is frayed, if not unraveling. We cannot risk silence.”[46] Silence in the face of an emerging fascist politics offers a warning of the danger to come and the lessons to be addressed.
Such attacks function as a massive disimagination machine and a tool of subjugation by enacting a pedagogy of obedience and repression. This type of education is about more than turning schools into indoctrination centers; it is about creating an educational system that normalizes fascist ideologies and denies critical modes of agency.[47] This is nothing less than a resurgence of a poisonous neo-McCarthyism that threatens not only free speech and academic freedom, but also the central principles of democracy itself.
The acts of civil disobedience currently taking place on campuses are imbibed with spirit of the 1960s Berkely Free Speech Movement. Then, as now, students are fighting for the right to be heard, overturn acts of social injustice, and to bring to an end what Mario Savio, one of the leaders of the movement, called “the operation of the machine [that has become] so odious [that] you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels … upon the levers, upon …the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop! And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!”[48] What the students protesters at Columbia, Yale, New York University and other campuses throughout the U.S. are making clear is that power must be held accountable and that the plague of silence over the war on Palestinians has to be broken so as to inject the struggle for human rights back into the language of a politics built upon the values of equality, social justice, liberty, and human dignity. What young people are teaching the world today, heeding the words of the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass, is that freedom is an empty abstraction if people fail to act, and that “if there is no struggle, there is no progress.”[49] What they are fighting for is not just a call to end the war against the Palestinian people, a war that is a moral litmus test of our time, but what it means to imagine and fight for a more just and better world.
Damn right!
Notes.
[1] Vaclav Havel, Living in Truth, ed (Boston: faber and Faber, 1986), p. 26.
[4] Judith Butler’s various writings and books are brilliant on this issue. See, for instance, Judith Butler, The Force of Non-Violence (New York: Verso, 2024). Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, (London: Verso Press, 2004).
[5] Ruth Ben-Ghiat, “The Right’s War on Universities,” The New York Review of Books (October 15, 2020). Online: https://www.nybooks.com/online/2020/10/15/the-rights-war-on-universities; see also her larger work on authoritarianism, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present (New York: W. W. Norton, 2020).
[10] I have taken up this issue in detail in Henry A. Girox “Democracy, Freedom, and Justice after September 11th: Rethinking the Role of Educators and the Politics of Schooling,” Teachers College Record 104:6 (September 2002), pp. 1138-1162. Also on-line at www. TCRecord.Org (January 21, 2002), pp. 1-33.
[37] Press Release, “ UN experts deeply concerned over ‘scholasticide’ in Gaza,” United Nations Human Rights (April 18, 2024). Online: https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/04/un-experts-deeply-concerned-over-scholasticide-gaza The full comment is worth quoting: “After six months of military assault, more than 5,479 students, 261 teachers and 95 university professors have been killed in Gaza, and over 7,819 students and 756 teachers have been injured – with numbers growing each day. At least 60 per cent of educational facilities, including 13 public libraries, have been damaged or destroyed and at least 625,000 students have no access to education. Another 195 heritage sites, 227 mosques and three churches have also been damaged or destroyed, including the Central Archives of Gaza, containing 150 years of history. Israa University, the last remaining university in Gaza was demolished by the Israeli military on 17 January 2024.”
[49] Frederick Douglass, West India Emancipation, speech delivered at Canandaigua, New York, August 4, 1857, in Philip S. Foner, Ed., The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, vol. 2 (New York: International, 1950), p. 437.
Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and is the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy.
The Second Round of Retaliation Between Israel and Iran Has Just Begun
Joe Biden is caught in a trap caused by his own weakness
• 2,200 WORDS •
Given the lying and fact twisting that have routinely been part and parcel of accounts of what is occurring in the Middle East, the past several weeks have nevertheless been shocking in terms of how an abysmally low standard of truth can be reduced even farther. Looking at developments objectively, one comes up with a series of facts. First of all, Israel was not at war with either Syria or Iran during the first weeks in April. Iran had never attacked Israel prior to that point and Syria last fought Israel in 1973, over fifty years ago. Israel, however, has regularly been assassinating Iranian officials and scientists and it has been frequently been bombing Syria since 2017, increasing the pace to weekly and sometimes even daily attacks over the past six months paralleling the Gaza fighting. A particularly devastating attack took place on March 29th when the Israeli military launched massive strikes against a weapons storage depot in Syria’s northern province of Aleppo which killed at least 40 people, most of them Syrian soldiers. The air strikes produced a series of explosions that also killed six Lebanese Hezbollah fighters.
But three days later on April 1st a very damaging and unprovoked attack was directed against the Iranian Embassy’s Consulate General, which was located in an upscale neighborhood in Damascus, Syria’s capital. The building was completely destroyed by missiles fired from F-35 fighter planes that had crossed over the Syrian border from Israel, killing Iranian diplomats as well as Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Zahedi and Zahedi’s deputy, General Haji Rahimi, and also Brigadier General Hossein Amirollah, the chief of general staff for the al-Quds force in Syria and Lebanon. Syria subsequently confirmed that a total of 13 people were killed in the attack, including six Syrians and a Lebanese Hezbollah militiaman. Both Iran and Hezbollah vowed revenge.
Attacking a diplomatic mission is considered a major war crime according to the Vienna Convention, but there was no condemnation of the incident coming from the US and the usual suspects in Western Europe. Instead of doing what was right by pressuring Israel to stop attacking its neighbors and thereby possibly preventing a major war in the Middle East, President Joe Biden repeated his pledge that the United States would regard as “ironclad” its commitment to guarantee Israel’s security if Iran were to strike back. This guaranteed to Israel that any action taken by it would be supported by Washington. The Biden Administration also predictably voted against a Russian and Chinese drafted UN Security Council resolution to condemn the Israeli attack on the Iranian Consulate, which was a clear violation of international law and an act of war committed by Israel. The US reportedly cast its veto vote “no” after “Diplomats said the US told council colleagues that many of the facts of what happened on Monday in Damascus remained unclear.” What was actually unclear was the fog that generally surrounds the Biden foreign policy and national security team since it was pretty transparent who was the aggressor in terms of means, motive and outcome.
When Iran did retaliate on April 13th, it carried out a carefully calibrated moderate strike against military targets intended to do damage but not cause a large number of casualties. It reportedly hit several airbases from which the Israeli fighter bombers had begun their attack on Damascus as well as an Israeli Air Force intelligence center in the formerly Syrian Golan Heights. No one was killed in spite of the 300 estimated drones and missiles that were launched, most being intercepted by Israel and its allies. But the attack nevertheless sent a message from Tehran that next time it could be much worse, both immediate in timing and “considerably more severe” than its response on Saturday night had been. Iran also claims that it attempted to prevent an escalation by warning the US about their plans, which would be passed on to Israel, that a “controlled” retaliation was coming. The Pentagon denied that it had been told anything, which may mean that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was asleep at his desk once again.
Not content with the outcome, Israel inevitably struck back on Friday, hitting a major airbase near Isfahan, and, to make sure no one was missed, targets in both Iraq and Syria. Iranian military sources advise however that the loud explosions heard by local residents were Iranian air defenses shooting at some flying objects, presumably drones. Per the New York Times and other accommodating media, the strike was a warning that Israel could penetrate Iranian airspace and not intended to do serious damage. The Pentagon was apparently informed shortly before the Israeli action. Iran’s counter-counter retaliation is now pending, but it is clear that Netanyahu will not be deterred by electoral considerations in the United States to stay his hand in his own counter-counter response.
And how does the United States fit into the story? The White House response to the Iranian attack on Israeli territory was inevitably completely unlike the previous uncritical response to Israel’s Consulate General attack, namely condemnation of Iran and the repetition of the usual tripe about “Israel has a right to defend itself” and the sanctity of the “ironclad” defense arrangement. Biden also attempted to cover himself against political blowback due to his licking Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s shoes in the upcoming November election by making it known that he had spoken with and advised Netanyahu, recommending not carrying out a reprisal of the reprisal, which Washington would be unable to support as it could/would lead to major escalation. Netanyahu, not fearing Biden’s displeasure, blew the advice off and he and his war cabinet made clear that they were working on a response as well as setting a timetable for invading Rafah in south Gaza, which Biden had also recommended against.
The White House completed its groveling to Netanyahu by vetoing a UN Security Council resolution on April 18th that would have advocated full UN membership status for the state of Palestine, demonstrating that kicking the Palestinians is always a good way to maintain Israeli favor! The vote was 12 (including France, Japan and South Korea) in favor, two abstentions (the shameless United Kingdom and, surprisingly, Switzerland) and an American veto. The US insisted that elevation of Palestine’s diplomatic status can only be obtained after negotiations between the Palestinian Authority and Israel. US Ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield absurdly raised another objection: “Right now, the Palestinians don’t have control over a significant portion of what is supposed to be their state. It’s being controlled by a terrorist organization.” She was referring to Hamas but the comment actually more correctly is applicable to Israel. In any event, a leaked White House memo had previously revealed that Biden opposes full UN membership and statehood for the Palestinians without Israel’s approval, which, of course, will not be forthcoming.
So we have Israel as the aggressor against two countries that were not declared enemies and had not attacked the Jewish state in any way in many, many years. But when Israel attacked them, committing a major war crime Joe Biden and company preferred to sit on their hands and mumble, saving their vituperation for when Iran staged a deliberately mild counter-attack as a warning. That is called hypocrisy, to turn things on their head to provide the answer that one wants to see and it applies equally to Biden accusing the Russians of “illegal occupation” in Ukraine while Israel’s theft of Syria’s Golan Heights and ongoing seizure of the West Bank goes unchallenged by Washington. And the pushback against Iran is unlikely to diminish very soon as the Jewish controlled US Congress also has the bit between its teeth to demonstrate how much it loves Israel. Congressman Steve Scalise, GOP House Majority Leader, has announced that “In light of Iran’s unjustified attack on Israel, the House will move from its previously announced legislative schedule next week to instead consider legislation that supports our ally Israel and holds Iran and its terrorist proxies accountable. The House of Representatives stands strongly with Israel, and there must be consequences for this unprovoked attack.” Over at the Senate Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas is advocating punishing Iran by beating on its possible friends in the US, physically attacking folks who are demonstrating in support of the Palestinians. Cotton said that the “pro-Hamas criminals” should be confronted by angry citizens who “take matters into [their] own hands” and confront the offenders, endorsing the use of force against peaceful demonstrators.
But there is also the back story behind why Israel likely attacked the Iranians in Syria in the first place. I and a number of other observers immediately after the Israeli attack assumed that the Jewish state had staged a deliberate over-the-top provocation to draw Washington into its wars. Just as in the case of the October 7th Gaza attack by Hamas, which Israel had full knowledge of and let happen, Netanyahu sought to create a situation in which it would goad Iran into being forced to retaliate to force an “ironclad” Biden to protect its “ally” by taking on Iran directly.
Why did Israel do it beyond the obvious desire to destroy Iran just like it is destroying the Palestinians? It was done because Israel has likely become aware that it is viewed as the world’s greatest pariah state due to its genocide in Gaza, to include the recent horrific killing of hundreds of Palestinians in the Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza as well as the targeted assassination of seven employees of a charity that was bringing in food to those starving due to Israel’s blocking the entry of relief supplies. And also because Israel is actually not winning its war against Hamas, it needed to shift the narrative to something different. That would be using its time-honored technique of making itself once again the “victim” in confronting a powerful new enemy, Iran, which would make the problem of bad public relations with the world over Gaza be in part mitigated.
A shift in the story would also presumably bring with it the expected help from the United States and its European allies to do the hard work in killing Iranians. And the trick seems to have worked, predictably. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak of Britain has been recently facing demands to cut off arms shipments to Israel because of the devastating death toll in Gaza, but on the following Monday, he was able to salute the British warplanes that had shot down some Iranian drones sent by Iran to attack Israel. It was a telling example of how Israel has been able to scramble the equation in the Middle East. Faced with a intensively publicized barrage of Iranian missiles, Britain, the United States, France and others rushed to help the Israelis who had in fact started the conflict. The United States is also currently planning on increasing the pressure on Iran through a series of tough new sanctions being prepared by Treasury Secretary Janice Yellen, saying “Treasury will not hesitate to work with our allies to use our sanctions authority to continue disrupting the Iranian regime’s malign and destabilizing activity.” Yellen notably did nothing when Israel committed a major war crime in its attack on the Iranian Consulate General in Damascus, nor has she supported sanctions over the Israeli Gaza genocide. She is, of course, Jewish. More aid for the Jewish state is also still waiting for a congressional vote to approve the $14 billion currently in the pipeline, with Washington Reportclaiming that this year’s total US aid to Netanyahu will likely exceed $25 billion “in direct costs related to its fervent support for Israel.”
Right now, the dilemma for the US government will be that it must pull out all the stops in supporting Israel or face inter alia retaliation by the Israel Lobby working through its donors and media resources to defeat Biden in November. And there hovers in the peripheries of one’s mind the worse grim possibility that Israel, if rebuffed by its “allies,” will use its secret nuclear arsenal to blow up the Middle East and presumably a large chunk of adjacent areas in Europe and Asia as well. There are stories already circulating suggesting that the Israeli nuclear reactor at Dimona might have been an Iranian target and that Israel is right now preparing to take out Iranian nuclear research sites. Netanyahu is calling the shots while a befuddled White House looks on. Israel has baited a trap and Joe Biden has stepped right into it.
The Middle East is on the brink of war precisely because western politicians indulged for decades every military excess by Israel
Suddenly, western politicians from US President Joe Biden to British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak have become ardent champions of “restraint” – in a very last-minute scramble to avoid regional conflagration.
Iran launched a salvo of drones and missiles at Israel at the weekend in what amounted a largely symbolic show of strength. Many appear to have been shot down, either by Israel’s layers of US-funded interception systems or by US, British and Jordanian fighter jets. No one was killed.
It was the first direct attack by a state on Israel since Iraq fired Scud missiles during the Gulf war of 1991.
The United Nations Security Council was hurriedly pressed into session on Sunday, with Washington and its allies calling for a de-escalation of tensions that could all too easily lead to the outbreak of war across the Middle East and beyond.
“Neither the region nor the world can afford more war,” the UN’s secretary general, Antonio Guterres, told the meeting. “Now is the time to defuse and de-escalate.”
Israel, meanwhile, vowed to “exact the price” against Iran at a time of its choosing.
But the West’s abrupt conversion to “restraint” needs some explaining.
After all, western leaders showed no restraint when Israel bombed Iran’s consulate in Damascus two weeks ago, killing a senior general and more than a dozen other Iranians – the proximate cause of Tehran’s retaliation on Saturday night.
Under the Vienna Convention, the consulate is not only a protected diplomatic mission but is viewed as sovereign Iranian territory. Israel’s attack on it was an unbridled act of aggression – the “supreme international crime”, as the Nuremberg tribunal ruled at the end of the Second World War.
For that reason, Tehran invoked article 51 of the United Nations charter, which allows it to act in self-defence.
Shielding Israel
And yet, rather than condemning Israel’s dangerous belligerence – a flagrant attack on the so-called “rules-based order” so revered by the US – western leaders lined up behind Washington’s favourite client state.
At a Security Council meeting on 4 April, the US, Britain and France intentionally spurned restraint by blocking a resolution that would have condemned Israel’s attack on the Iranian consulate – a vote that, had it not been stymied, might have sufficed to placate Tehran.
At the weekend, British Foreign Secretary David Cameron still gave the thumbs-up to Israel’s flattening of Iran’s diplomatic premises, saying he could “completely understand the frustration Israel feels” – though he added, without any hint of awareness of his own hypocrisy, that the UK “would take very strong action” if a country bombed a British consulate.
By shielding Israel from any diplomatic consequences for its act of war against Iran, the western powers ensured Tehran would have to pursue a military response instead.
But it did not end there. Having stoked Iran’s sense of grievance at the UN, Biden vowed “iron-clad” support for Israel – and grave consequences for Tehran – should it dare to respond to the attack on its consulate.
Iran ignored those threats. On Saturday night, it launched some 300 drones and missiles, at the same time protesting vociferously about the Security Council’s “inaction and silence, coupled with its failure to condemn the Israeli regime’s aggressions”.
Western leaders failed to take note. They again sided with Israel and denounced Tehran. At Sunday’s Security Council meeting, the same three states – the US, UK and France – that had earlier blocked a statement condemning Israel’s attack on Iran’s diplomatic mission, sought a formal condemnation of Tehran for its response.
Russia’s ambassador to the UN, Vasily Nebenzya, ridiculed what he called “a parade of Western hypocrisy and double standards”. He added: “You know very well that an attack on a diplomatic mission is a casus belli under international law. And if Western missions were attacked, you would not hesitate to retaliate and prove your case in this room.”
There was no restraint visible either as the West publicly celebrated its collusion with Israel in foiling Iran’s attack.
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak praised RAF pilots for their “bravery and professionalism” in helping to “protect civilians” in Israel.
In a statement, Keir Starmer, leader of the supposedly opposition Labour party, condemned Iran for generating “fear and instability”, rather than “peace and security”, that risked stoking a “wider regional war”. His party, he said, would “stand up for Israel’s security”.
The “restraint” the West demands relates only, it seems, to Iran’s efforts to defend itself.
Starving to death
Given the West’s new-found recognition of the need for caution, and the obvious dangers of military excess, now may be the time for its leaders to consider demanding restraint more generally – and not just to avoid a further escalation between Iran and Israel.
Over the past six months Israel has bombed Gaza into rubble, destroyed its medical facilities and government offices, and killed and maimed many, many tens of thousands of Palestinians. In truth, such is the devastation that Gaza some time ago lost the ability to count its dead and wounded.
At the same time, Israel has intensified its 17-year blockade of the tiny enclave to the point where, so little food and water are getting through, the population are in the grip of famine. People, especially children, are literally starving to death.
The International Court of Justice, the world’s highest court, chaired by an American judge, ruled back in January – when the situation was far less dire than it is now – that a “plausible” case had been made Israel was committing genocide, a crime against humanity strictly defined in international law.
And yet there were no calls by western leaders for “restraint” as Israel bombed Gaza into ruins week after week, striking its hospitals, levelling its government offices, blowing up its universities, mosques and churches, and destroying its bakeries.
Rather, President Biden has repeatedly rushed through emergency arms sales, bypassing Congress, to make sure Israel has enough bombs to keep destroying Gaza and killing its children.
When Israeli leaders vowed to treat Gaza’s population like “human animals”, denying them all food, water and power, western politicians gave their assent.
Sunak was not interested in recruiting his brave RAF pilots to “protect civilians” in Gaza from Israel, and Starmer showed no concern about the “fear and instability” felt by Palestinians from Israel’s reign of terror.
Quite the reverse. Starmer, famed as a human rights lawyer, even gave his approval to Israel’s collective punishment of the people of Gaza, its “complete siege”, as integral to a supposed Israeli “right of self-defence”.
In doing so, he overturned one of the most fundamental principles of international law that civilians should not be targeted for the actions of their leaders. As is now all too apparent, he conferred a death sentence on the people of Gaza.
Where was “restraint” then?
Missing in action
Similarly, restraint went out of the window when Israel fabricated a pretext for eradicating the UN aid agency UNRWA, the last lifeline for Gaza’s starving population.
Even though Israel was unable to offer any evidence for its claim that a handful of UNRWA staff were implicated in an attack on Israel on 7 October, western leaders hurriedly cut off funding to the agency. In doing so, they became actively complicit in what the World Court already feared was a genocide.
Where was the restraint when Israeli officials – with a long history of lying to advance their state’s military agenda – made up stories about Hamas beheading babies, or carrying out systematic rapes on 7 October? All of this was debunked by an Al Jazeera investigation drawing largely on Israeli sources.
Those genocide-justifying deceptions were all too readily amplified by western politicians and media.
Israel showed no restraint in destroying Gaza’s hospitals, or taking hostage and torturing thousands of Palestinians it grabbed off the street.
All of that got a quiet nod from western politicians.
Where was the restraint in western capitals when protesters took to the streets to call for a ceasefire, to stop Israel’s bloodletting of women and children, the majority of Gaza’s dead? The demonstrators were smeared – are still smeared – by western politicians as supporters of terrorism and antisemites.
And where was the demand for restraint when Israel tore up the rulebook on the laws of war, allowing every would-be strongman to cite the West’s indulgence of Israeli atrocities as the precedent justifying their own crimes?
On each occasion, when it favoured Israel’s malevolent goals, the West’s commitment to “restraint” went missing in action.
Top-dog client state
There is a reason why Israel has been so ostentatious in its savaging of Gaza and its people. And it is the very same reason Israel felt emboldened to violate the diplomatic sanctity of Iran’s consulate in Damascus.
Because for decades Israel has been guaranteed protection and assistance from the West, whatever crimes it commits.
Israel’s founders ethnically cleansed much of Palestine in 1948, far beyond the terms of partition set out by the UN a year earlier. It imposed a military occupation on the remnants of historic Palestine in 1967, driving out yet more of the native population. It then imposed a regime of apartheid on the few areas where Palestinians remained.
In their West Bank reservations, Palestinians have been systematically brutalised, their homes demolished, and illegal Jewish settlements built on their land. The Palestinians’ holy places have been gradually surrounded and taken from them.
Separately, Gaza has been sealed off for 17 years, and its population denied freedom of movement, employment and the basics of life.
Israel’s reign of terror to maintain its absolute control has meant imprisonment and torture are a rite of passage for most Palestinian men. Any protest is ruthlessly crushed.
Now Israel has added mass slaughter in Gaza – genocide – to its long list of crimes.
Israel’s displacements of Palestinians to neighbouring states caused by its ethnic cleansing operations and slaughter have destabilised the wider region. And to secure its militarised settler-colonial project in the Middle East – and its place as Washington’s top-dog client state in the region – Israel has intimidated, bombed and invaded its neighbours on a regular basis.
Its attack on Iran’s consulate in Damascus was just the latest of serial humiliations faced by Arab states.
And through all of this, Washington and its vassal states have directed no more than occasional, lip-service calls for restraint towards Israel. There were never any consequences, but instead rewards from the West in the form of endless billions in aid and special trading status.
‘Something rash’
So why, after decades of debauched violence from Israel, has the West suddenly become so interested in “restraint”? Because on this rare occasion it serves western interests to calm the fires Israel is so determined to stoke.
The Israeli strike on Iran’s consulate came just as the Biden administration was finally running out of excuses for providing the weapons and diplomatic cover that has allowed Israel to slaughter, maim and orphan tens of thousands of Palestinian children in Gaza over six months.
Demands for a ceasefire and arms embargo on Israel have been reaching fever pitch, with Biden haemorrhaging support among parts of his Democratic base as he faces a re-run presidential election later this year against a resurgent rival, Donald Trump.
Small numbers of votes could be the difference between victory and defeat.
Israel had every reason to fear that its patron might soon pull the rug from under its campaign of mass slaughter in Gaza.
But having destroyed the entire infrastructure needed to support life in the enclave, Israel needs time for the consequences to play out: either mass starvation there, or a relocation of the population elsewhere on supposedly “humanitarian” grounds.
A wider war, centred on Iran, would both distract from Gaza’s desperate plight and force Biden to back Israel unconditionally – to make good on his “iron-clad” commitment to Israel’s protection.
And to top it all, with the US drawn directly into a war against Iran, Washington would have little choice but to assist Israel in its long campaign to destroy Iran’s nuclear energy programme.
Israel wants to remove any potential for Iran to develop a bomb, one that would level the military playing field between the two in ways that would make Israel far less certain that it can continue to act as it pleases across the region with impunity.
That is why Biden officials are airing concerns to the US media that Israel is ready to “do something rash” in an attempt to drag the administration into a wider war.
The truth is, however, that Washington long ago cultivated Israel as its military Frankenstein’s monster. Israel’s role was precisely to project US power ruthlessly into the oil-rich Middle East. The price Washington was more than willing to accept was Israel’s eradication of the Palestinian people, replaced by a fortress “Jewish state”.
Calling for Israel to exercise “restraint” now, as its entrenched lobbies flex their muscles meddling in western politics, and self-confessed fascists rule Israel’s government, is beyond parody.
If the West really prized restraint, they should have insisted on it from Israel decades ago.
As it continues to engage in a “plausibly genocidal” mass murder spree in Gaza, the state of Israel has embraced the most psychotic and psychopathic interpretation of one of the most violent narratives from the Hebrew Bible. This is fueling a narcissism that puts the very existence of Israel at risk.
On October 28, as Israeli ground forces began turning Gaza into a free-fire zone, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed his nation. He vowed to destroy Hamas for “our existence” and also “for the benefit of all of humanity.”
During the speech he said, “You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible. And we do remember.”
This sparked immediate global controversy and concern. Amalek was the son of Eliphaz and Timna, which are not household names for the adventitious Abrahamic religious adherent. But Eliphaz was the son of Esau, and Esau was the twin brother of Jacob. Esau and Jacob were sons of Isaac. These two have one of the most infamous rivalries in the Western Canon. Jacob’s line leads to the Israelites while Esau’s leads to the Amalekites:
“…descendants of Amalek, were an ancient biblical nation living near the land of Canaan. They were the first nation to attack the Jewish people after the Exodus from Egypt, and they are seen as the archetypal enemy of the Jews.”
According to the Hebrew Bible, the Amalekites went full 1973 on the embryonic state of Israel:
“While the Jews were still at Rephidim, recuperating from their escape from Egypt, the nation of Amalek launched a vicious surprise attack on them—though the Jews had no designs on Amalekite territory and were not even headed in that direction.”
As Libertarian Institute Executive Editor Sheldon Richman mused, “Since Yahweh many times had ‘hardened Pharaoh’s heart,’ causing him to refuse to free the Israelites, perhaps Yahweh put the Amalekites there for some unknown reason.” In any event, the Jews defeated the Amalekites in fierce battle. Almost 400 years later, Samuel advised Saul:
“This is what the Lord Almighty says: ‘I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt. Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.’” [emphasis added]
Hence the uproar over Netanyahu’s Amalek comment. However, Netanyahu’s rhetoric got even more spicy, when he said Israeli soldiers were “joining this chain of Jewish heroes. A chain that has started 3,000 years ago from Joshua ben Nun until the heroes of 1948, the Six Day War, the ’73 October War and all other wars in this country.” [emphasis added]
Why Joshua? Netanyahu could have referenced the first man, Adam. Or Noah, who saved humankind. He could have started the chain almost 4,000 years ago with Abraham, considered the first Jew and one of the Three Patriarchs of Judaism by scholars. Or Isaac or Jacob, the other two patriarchs. Jacob in particular was renamed Israel.
Netanyahu could have drawn a line to one of Jacob’s twelve sons, who gave rise to the twelve tribes (and thus the very foundation) of Israel. The obvious choice would be Levi or Judah, but there’s also Joseph, who became the trusted advisor of the Pharaoh. When famine hit the land of the Jews, Jacob and his sons sought immigrant assistance services in Egypt and Joseph was able to provide some much-needed administrative aid. That famine, by the way, was natural, unlike the famine being deliberately inflicted on Gaza by Israel.
Of course, the Jews ended up enslaved by the Egyptians. Moses eventually led the Jews out of Egypt, but it was Joshua who led them in victorious battle against the Amalekites and then onward into the Promised Land. He was a spy, a warrior, and a commander of men; no wonder Netanyahu evoked him.
We should keep in mind that archaeologists and other scholars have found no artifactual or documentary evidence of Israelite enslavement in Egypt or an exodus of two million people through the Sinai over forty years. And the Promised Land, Canaan, was part of the Egyptian Empire at the time.
Joshua fits perfectly as the patron saint of the Israeli Military-Intelligence Establishment. People around the world, and especially in America, should be able to empathize with such hero-worship.
The Joshua narrative portrays the Amalekites as archetypal, malevolent, and predatory evil. Contrast this with the portrayal of the Trojans in the Iliad, a Greek epic created for Greek audiences that actually views the enemy as human:
“Achilles is the hero of The Iliad, but he’s not described as the noble man—that title belongs to Hector the Trojan. The Greeks are just as much interested in the enemy as in their own troops, and they describe them with dignity and compassion and appreciation…There is a sense of respect for the other side: champions are matched as equals, and this is particularly Greek…The Homeric epics date to almost exactly the same period as the Book of Judges. Read the Book of Judges and see the way in which the Semitic Israelites regard their enemy. It’s a very different story.”
The Greeks destroyed Troy and killed and raped everyone they could get their hands on, but they acknowledged the Trojans’ humanity. Israel has stopped viewing its enemies as human. And that has allowed it to plan potentially suicidal military action.
The Palestinians are human beings. The Yemenis are human beings. The Lebanese are human beings. The Syrians are human beings. The Iraqis are human beings. The Iranians are human beings. Israel’s inability to accept this reality is a narcissistic flaw that imperils its existence.
ZURICH—“Technological change, while it helps humanity meet the challenges nature imposes upon us, leads to a paradigm shift: It leaves us less capable, not more, of using our intellectual capacities. It diminishes our minds in the long run. We strive to improve ourselves while risking a regression to the Stone Age if our ever more complex, ever more fragile technological infrastructure collapses.”
That is Hans Köchler, an eminent Viennese scholar and president of the International Progress Organization, a globally active think tank, addressing an audience here last Thursday evening, April 4. The date is significant: The day before Köchler spoke, +972 Magazine and Local Call, independent publications in Israel–Palestine, reported that as the Israel Defense Forces press their savage invasion of the Gaza Strip, they deploy an artificial intelligence program called Lavender that so far has marked some 37,000 Palestinians as kill targets. In the early weeks of the Israeli siege, according to the Israeli sources +972 cites, “the army gave sweeping approval for officers to adopt Lavender’s kill lists, with no requirement to thoroughly check why the machine made those choices or to examine the raw intelligence data on which they were based.”
Chilling it was to hear Köchler speak a couple of news cycles after +972 published these revelations, which are based on confidential interviews with six Israeli intelligence officers who have been directly involved in the use of AI to target Palestinians for assassination. “To use technologies to solve all our problems reduces our ability to make decisions,” Köchler asserted. “We’re no longer able to think through problems. They remove us from real life.”
Köchler titled his talk “The Trivialization of Public Space,” and his topic, broadly stated, was the impact of technologies such as digital communications and AI on our brains, our conduct, and altogether our humanity. It was sobering, to put the point mildly, to recognize that Israel’s siege of Gaza, bottomlessly depraved in itself, is an in-our-faces display of the dehumanizing effects these technologies have on all who depend on them.
Let us look on in horror, and let us see our future in it.
We see in the IDF, to make this point another way, a rupture in morality, human intelligence, and responsibility when human oversight is mediated by the algorithms that run AI systems. There is a break between causality and result, action and consequence. And this is exactly what advanced technologies have in store for the rest of humanity. Artificial intelligence, as Köchler put it, is not intelligence: “It is ‘simulated intelligence’ because it has no consciousness of itself.” It isn’t capable, he meant to say, of moral decision-making or ethical accountability.
In the Lavender case, the data it produced were accepted and treated as if they had been generated by a human being without any actual human oversight or independent verification. A second AI system, sadistically named “Where’s Daddy?”—and how sick is this?—was then used to track Hamas suspects to their homes. The IDF intentionally targeted suspected militants while they were with their families, using unguided missiles or “dumb” bombs. This strategy had the advantage of enabling Israel to preserve its more expensive precision-guided weapons, or “smart” bombs.
As one of +972’s sources told the magazine:
We were not interested in killing [Hamas] operatives only when they were in a military building or engaged in a military activity… . On the contrary, the IDF bombed them in homes without hesitation, as a first option. It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.
Once Lavender identified a potential suspect, IDF operatives had about 20 seconds to verify that the target was a male before making the decision to strike. There was no other human analysis of the “raw intelligence data.” The information generated by Lavender was treated as if it was “an order,” sources told +972—an official order to kill. Given the strategy of targeting suspects in their homes, the IDF assigned acceptable kill ratios for its bombing campaigns: 20 to 30 civilians for each junior-level Hamas operative. For Hamas leaders with the rank of battalion or brigade commander, +972’s sources said, “the army on several occasions authorized the killing of more than 100 civilians in the assassination of a single commander.”
In other words, Israeli policy, guided and assisted by AI technology, made it inevitable that thousands of civilians, many of them women and children, would be killed.
There appears to be no record of any other military deploying AI programs such as Lavender and Where’s Daddy? But it is sheer naïveté to assume this diabolic use of advanced technologies will not spread elsewhere. Israel is already the world’s leading exporter of surveillance and digital forensic tools. Anadolu, Turkey’s state-run news agency, reported as far back as February that Israel is using Gaza as a weapons-testing site so that it can market these tools as battle-tested. Antony Lowenstein, an author Anadolu quotes, calls this the marketing of “automated murder.”
And here we find ourselves: Haaretz, the Israeli daily, reported on April 5 that “intelligent” weapons proven effective in Gaza were major attractions when Israel marketed them last month at the Singapore Airshow, East Asia’s biggest arms bazaar.
Hans Köchler, who has studied the impact of digital technologies for many years, did not seem to have read the +972 Magazine report before he spoke here last week. This made his remarks all the more disturbing. He was not describing—not specifically—the murderers operating Lavender and other such technologies in Gaza. We will all live and die by these Faustian technologies: This, our common fate, was Köchler’s topic. Over the past six months, this is to say, Israel has announced the dehumanization that awaits all of us in that AI systems are technologies against which we have little defense. “Self-determination gives way to digital competence,” Köchler said. “We can’t distinguish between virtual reality and reality.”
Along with the +972 report on the use of AI came others in a week notable for its stomach-churning news of Israeli depravity. In its April 3 editions The Guardian revealed that the IDF intentionally deploys snipers and quadcopters—remotely controlled sniper drones—to target children. The evidence of this comes from U.S. and Canadian doctors who, while serving in Gaza, treat many children with wounds consistent with and easily identified as caused by snipers’ bullets. These are larger than the ammunition generally used in combat because they are intended to kill rather than wound.
The Biden regime never addresses these barbaric developments, and our corporate media, with rare exceptions such as The Guardian piece just cited, tell us almost nothing of them. Official and media accounts of events in Gaza, their “narratives,” are utterly at odds with these realities. How, we are left to ask, do they get away with these day-in, day-out dishonesties? This was the obvious question last week, given the extremes to which the IDF’s criminality now extends.
If you Google “Lavender” and “The New York Times,” you get “Lavender Oil Might Help You Sleep” and similarly frivolous headlines. Neither has The Times made any mention of the +972 investigation. If you read detailed accounts of the April 1 air attacks on the World Central Kitchen’s three food-delivery vehicles, which killed seven aid workers, it is inescapable that the Israeli military systematically targeted them, one truck to the next, until all three were destroyed—this after WCK had carefully coordinated its deployment of the vehicles with Israeli authorities. These killings are entirely in line with the directive Yoav Gallant, Israel’s repulsive defense minister, issued Oct. 9: “There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel, everything will be closed.”
And what did we read of this incident in mainstream media?
Per usual, the Israeli military was authorized to investigate the Israeli military—an absurdity no U.S. official and no media account questioned. On April 5 the IDF announced that two officers were dismissed and three other reprimanded for “mishandling critical information.” President Biden declared he was “heartbroken.” The New York Times called the attack “a botched operation,” explaining that the IDF’s top officers “were forced to admit to a string of lethal mistakes and misjudgments.” Over and over we hear the refrain that Israel “is not doing enough to protect civilians.”
So it was a regrettable accident, we are led to conclude. Israel is doing its best. It has all along done its best. Put this against the raw statistic: The IDF has killed more than 220 humanitarian workers since it began its siege last October, to go by the U.N.’s count. How can one possibly believe that these were 220–plus accidents? “Let’s be very clear. This is not an anomaly,” an Oxfam official, Scott Paul, said after the WCK attack. “The killing of aid workers in Gaza has been systemic.”
There is reality and there is meta-reality, a term I have used previously in this space. How do the two stand side-by-side? How does the latter, the conjured “reality,” prove so efficacious? How do so many accept the 220–plus-accidents “narrative?” Why, more broadly, do so many accept propaganda and lies when they know, subliminally, they are constantly fed lies and propagandized?
I go back once again to Hans Köchler. In his speech and in various of his many books, he argues that electronic media—television chief among these—have conditioned people to rely for information on pictures and images instead of reading. “They lose the ability to analyze text, and so the ability to understand problems,” he said here. “People come to live in virtual worlds.”
We cannot think of a better description of the “narratives” advanced by the Biden regime and disseminated in corporate media: They present us with a virtual world—fully aware that, our minds habituated to pictures and images, most of us will mistake this virtual world for reality, just as Köchler warns. As a member of the audience here put it, “How is it possible to watch a genocide in real time and no one says anything? Knowledge no longer has any value. Anything goes, and if anything goes, nothing goes.”
The Biden regime supplies Israel with weaponry to prosecute its criminal siege of Gaza’s 2.3 million Palestinians. It gives the apartheid state diplomatic cover at the United Nations and legal cover at the International Court of Justice. It distorts and obscures the IDF’s “Stone Age” conduct. All of this requires us to speak now not of Israel’s genocide but of the Israeli–U.S. genocide.
But the Biden regime is culpable in inflicting these multiple wounds on humanity in one other dimension we must not miss. With its incessant attempts to suspend us in a virtual reality of its making, distant from what it is doing in our names, it leads us into the dehumanized, grotesquely technologized future Köchler describes just as surely as the Israelis do as they murder human beings wholesale with AI weapons and kill innocent children with remotely controlled sniper drones.
The isolation of Gaza is almost complete. The laws of war have been torn up and the enclave is now completely at Israel’s mercy
After six months – and many tens of thousands of dead and maimed Palestinian women and children later – western commentators are finally wondering whether something may be amiss with Israel’s actions in Gaza.
Three missiles, fired over several minutes, struck vehicles in a World Central Kitchen (WCK) aid convoy heading up Gaza’s coast on one of the few roads still passable after Israel turned the enclave’s homes and streets into rubble. All the vehicles were clearly marked. All were on an approved, safe passage. And the Israeli military had been given the coordinates to track the convoy’s location.
With precise missile holes through the vehicle roofs making it impossible to blame Hamas for the strike, Israel was forced to admit responsibility. Its spokespeople claimed an armed figure had been seen entering the storage area from which the aid convoy had departed.
But even that feeble, formulaic response could not explain why the Israeli military hit cars in which it was known there were aid workers. So Israel hurriedly promised to investigate what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described as a “tragic incident”.
Presumably, it was a “tragic incident” just like the 15,000-plus other “tragic incidents” – the ones we know about – that Israel has committed against Palestinian children day after day for six months.
In those cases, of course, western commentators always managed to produce some rationalisation for the slaughter.
Not this time.
‘This has to stop’
Half a year too late, with Gaza’s entire medical infrastructure wrecked by Israel and a population on the brink of starvation, Britain’s Independent newspaper suddenly found its voice to declare decisively on its front page: “Enough.”
Richard Madeley, host of Good Morning Britain, finally felt compelled to opine that Israel had carried out an “execution” of the foreign aid workers. Presumably, 15,000 Palestinian children were not executed, they simply “died”.
When it came to the killing of WCK staff, popular LBC talk-show host Nick Ferrari concluded that Israel’s actions were “indefensible”. Did he think it defensible for Israel to bomb and starve Gaza’s children month after month?
Like the Independent, he too proclaimed: “This has to stop.”
The attack on the WCK convoy briefly changed the equation for the western media. Seven dead aid workers were a wake-up call when many tens of thousands of dead, maimed and orphaned Palestinian children had not been.
A salutary equation indeed.
British politicians reassured the public that Israel would carry out an “independent investigation” into the killings. That is, the same Israel that never punishes its soldiers even when their atrocities are televised. The same Israel whose military courts find almost every Palestinian guilty of whatever crime Israel chooses to accuse them of, if it allows them a trial.
But at least the foreign aid workers merited an investigation, however much of a foregone conclusion the verdict. That is more than the dead children of Gaza will ever get.
Israel’s playbook
British commentators appeared startled by the thought that Israel had chosen to kill the foreigners working for World Central Kitchen – even if those same journalists still treat tens of thousands of dead Palestinians as unfortunate “collateral damage” in a “war” to “eradicate Hamas”.
But had they been paying closer attention, these pundits would understand that the murder of foreigners is not exceptional. It has been central to Israel’s occupation playbook for decades – and helps explain what Israel hopes to achieve with its current slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza.
Back in the early 2000s, Israel was on another of its rampages, wrecking Gaza and the West Bank supposedly in “retaliation” for Palestinians having had the temerity to rise up against decades of military occupation.
Shocked by the brutality, a group of foreign volunteers, a significant number of them Jewish, ventured into these areas to witness and document the Israeli military’s crimes and act as human shields to protect Palestinians from the violence.
They arrived under the mantle of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), a Palestinian-led initiative. They were keen to use what were then new technologies such as digital cameras, email and blogs to focus attention on the Israeli military’s atrocities.
Some became a new breed of activist journalist, embedded in Palestinian communities to report the story western establishment journalists, embedded in Israel, never managed to cover.
Israel presented the ISM as a terrorist group and dismissed its filmed documentation as “Pallywood” – a supposedly fiction-producing industry equated to a Palestinian Hollywood.
Gaza isolated
But the ISM’s evidence increasingly exposed the “most moral army in the world” for what it really was: a criminal enterprise there to enforce land thefts and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
Israel needed to take firmer action.
The evidence suggests soldiers received authorisation to execute foreigners in the occupied territories. That included young activists such as Rachel Corrie and Tom Hurndall; James Miller, an independent filmmaker who ventured into Gaza; and even a United Nations official, Iain Hook, based in the West Bank.
This rapid spate of killings – and the maiming of many other activists – had the intended effect. The ISM largely withdrew from the occupied territories to protect its volunteers. Meanwhile, Israel formally banned the ISM from accessing the occupied territories.
Meanwhile, Israel denied press credentials to any journalist not sponsored by a state or a billionaire-owned outlet, kicking them out of the region.
Al Jazeera, the one critical Arab channel whose coverage reached western audiences, found its journalists regularly banned or killed, and its offices bombed.
The battle to isolate the Palestinians, freeing Israel to commit atrocities unmonitored, culminated in Israel’s now 17-year blockade of Gaza. It was sealed off.
With the enclave completely besieged by land, human rights activists focused their efforts on breaking the blockade via the high seas. A series of “freedom flotillas” tried to reach Gaza’s coast from 2008 onwards. Israel soon managed to stop most of them.
The largest was led by the Mavi Marmara, a Turkish vessel laden with aid and medicine. Israeli naval commandos stormed the ship illegally in international waters in 2010, killing 10 foreign aid workers and human rights activists on board and injuring another 30.
That is the proper context for understanding the latest attack on the WCK aid convoy.
Israel has always had four prongs to its strategy towards the Palestinians. Taken together, they have allowed Israel to refine its apartheid-style rule, and are now allowing it to implement its genocidal policies undisturbed.
The first is to incrementally isolate the Palestinians from the international community.
The second is to make the Palestinians entirely dependent on the Israeli military’s goodwill, and create conditions that are so precarious and unpredictable that most Palestinians try to vacate their historic homeland, leaving it free to be “Judaised”.
Third, Israel has crushed any attempt by outsiders – especially the media and human rights monitors – to scrutinise its activities in real-time or hold it to account.
And fourth, to achieve all this, Israel has needed to erode piece by piece the humanitarian protections that were enshrined in international law to stop a repeat of the common-place atrocities against civilians during the Second World War.
This process, which had been taking place over years and decades, was rapidly accelerated after Hamas’ attack on 7 October. Israel had the pretext to transform apartheid into genocide.
Unrwa, the main United Nations refugee agency, which is mandated to supply aid to the Palestinians, had long been in Israel’s sights, especially in Gaza. It has allowed the international community to keep its foot in the door of the enclave, maintaining a lifeline to the population there independent of Israel, and creating an authoritative framework for judging Israel’s human rights abuses. Worse, for Israel, Unrwa has kept alive the right of return – enshrined in international law – of Palestinian refugees expelled from their original lands so a self-declared Jewish state could be built in their place.
Israel leapt at the chance to accuse Unrwa of being implicated in the 7 October attack, even though it produced zero evidence for the claim. Almost as enthusiastically, western states turned off the funding tap to the UN agency.
The Biden administration appears keen to end UN oversight of Gaza by hiving off its main aid role to private firms. It has been one of the key sponsors of WCK, led by a celebrity Spanish chef with ties to the US State Department.
WCK, which has also been building a pier off Gaza’s coast, was expected to be an adjunct to Washington’s plan to eventually ship in aid from Cyprus – to help those Palestinians who, over the next few weeks, do not starve to death.
Until, that is, Israel struck the aid convoy, killing its staff. WCK has pulled out of Gaza for the time being, and other private aid contractors are backing off, fearful for their workers’ safety.
Goal one has been achieved. The people of Gaza are on their own. The West, rather than their saviour, is now fully complicit not only in Israel’s blockade of Gaza but in its starvation too.
Life and death lottery
Next, Israel has demonstrated beyond doubt that it regards every Palestinian in Gaza, even its children, as an enemy.
The fact that most of the enclave’s homes are now rubble should serve as proof enough, as should the fact that many tens of thousands there have been violently killed. Only a fraction of the death toll is likely to have been recorded, given Israel’s destruction of the enclave’s health sector.
Israel’s levelling of hospitals, including al-Shifa – as well as the kidnapping and torture of medical staff – has left Palestinians in Gaza completely exposed. The eradication of meaningful healthcare means births, serious injuries and chronic and acute illnesses are quickly becoming a death sentence.
Israel has intentionally been turning life in Gaza into a lottery, with nowhere safe.
According to a new investigation, Israel’s bombing campaign has relied heavily on experimental AI systems that largely automate the killing of Palestinians. That means there is no need for human oversight – and the potential limitations imposed by a human conscience.
Israeli website 972 found that tens of thousands of Palestinians had been put on “kill lists” generated by a program called Lavender, using loose definitions of “terrorist” and with an error rate estimated even by the Israeli military at one in 10.
Another programme called “Where’s Daddy?” tracked many of these “targets” to their family homes, where they – and potentially dozens of other Palestinians unlucky enough to be inside – were killed by air strikes.
An Israeli intelligence official told 972: “The IDF bombed them in homes without hesitation, as a first option. It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.”
As so many of these targets were considered to be “junior” operatives, of little military value, Israel preferred to use unguided, imprecise munitions – “dumb bombs” – increasing dramatically the likelihood of large numbers of other Palestinians being killed too.
Or, as another Israeli intelligence official observed: “You don’t want to waste expensive bombs on unimportant people – it’s very expensive for the country and there’s a shortage [of smart bombs].”
That explains how entire extended families, comprising dozens of members, have been so regularly slaughtered.
Separately, Israel’s Haaretz newspaper reported on 31 March that the Israeli military has been operating unmarked “kill zones” in which anyone moving – man, woman or child – is in danger of being shot dead.
Or, as a reserve officer who has been serving in Gaza told the paper: “In practice, a terrorist is anyone the IDF has killed in the areas in which its forces operate.”
This, Haaretz reports, is the likely reason why soldiers gunned down three escaped Israeli hostages who were trying to surrender to them.
Palestinians, of course, rarely know where these kill zones are as they desperately scour ever larger areas in the hope of finding food.
If they are fortunate enough to avoid death from the skies or expiring from starvation, they risk being seized by Israeli soldiers and taken off to one of Israel’s black sites. There, as a whistleblowing Israeli doctor admitted last week, unspeakable, Abu Ghraib-style horrors are being inflicted on the inmates.
Goal two has been achieved, leaving Palestinians terrified of the Israeli military’s largely random violence and desperate to find an escape from the Russian roulette Israel is playing with their lives.
Reporting stifled
Long ago, Israel barred UN human rights monitors from accessing the occupied territories. That has left scrutiny of its crimes largely in the hands of the media.
Independent foreign reporters have been barred from the region for some 15 years, leaving the field to establishment journalists serving state and corporate media, where there are strong pressures to present Israel’s actions in the best possible light.
That is why the most important stories about 7 October and the Israeli military’s actions in Gaza and treatment of Palestinian prisoners in Israel have been broken by Israeli-based media – as well as small, independent western outlets that have highlighted its coverage.
Since 7 October, Israel has barred all foreign journalists from Gaza, and western reporters have meekly complied. None have been alerting their audience to this major assault on their supposed role as watchdogs.
Israeli spokespeople, well-practised in the dark arts of deception and misdirection, have been allowed to fill the void in London studios.
What on-the-ground information from Gaza has been reaching western publics – when it is not suppressed by media outlets either because it would be too distressing or because its inclusion would enrage Israel – comes via Palestinian journalists. They have been showing the genocide unfolding in real-time.
But for that reason, Israel has been picking them off one by one – just as it did earlier with Rachel Corrie and Tom Hurndall – as well as murdering their extended families as a warning to others.
The one international channel that has many journalists on the ground in Gaza and is in a position to present its reporting in high-quality English is Al Jazeera.
The list of its journalists killed by Israel has grown steadily longer since 7 October. Gaza bureau chief Wael al-Dahdouh has had most of his family executed, as well as being injured himself.
His counterpart in the West Bank, Shireen Abu Akhleh, was shot dead by an Israeli army sniper two years ago.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Israel rushed a law through its parliament last week to ban Al Jazeera from broadcasting from the region. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called it a “terror channel”, claiming it participated in Hamas’ 7 October attack.
Al Jazeera had just aired a documentary revisiting the events of 7 October. It showed that Hamas did not commit the most barbaric crimes Israel accuses it of, and that, in fact, in some cases Israel was responsible for the most horrifying atrocities against its own citizens that it had attributed to Hamas.
Al Jazeera and human rights groups are understandably worried about what further actions Israel is likely to take against the channel’s journalists to snuff out its reporting.
Palestinians in Gaza, meanwhile, fear that they are about to lose the only channel that connects them to the outside world, both telling their stories and keeping them informed about what the watching world knows of their plight.
Goal three has been achieved. The lights are being turned off. Israel can carry out in the dark the potentially ugliest phase of its genocide, as Palestinian children emaciate and starve to death.
Rulebook torn up
And finally, Israel has torn up the rulebook on international humanitarian law intended to protect civilians from atrocities, as well as the infrastructure they rely on.
Israel has destroyed universities, government buildings, mosques, churches and bakeries, as well as, most critically, medical facilities.
Over the past six months, hospitals, once sacrosanct, have slowly become legitimate targets, as have the patients inside.
Collective punishment, absolutely prohibited as a war crime, has become the norm in Gaza since 2007, when the West stood mutely by as Israel besieged the enclave for 17 years.
Now, as Palestinians are starved to death, as children turn to skin and bones, and as aid convoys are bombed and aid seekers are shot dead, there is still apparently room for debate among the western media-political class about whether this all constitutes a violation of international law.
Even after six months of Israel bombing Gaza, treating its people as “human animals” and denying them food, water and power – the very definition of collective punishment – Britain’s deputy prime minister, Oliver Dowden, apparently believes Israel is, unfairly, being held to “incredibly high standards”. David Lammy, shadow foreign secretary for the supposedly opposition Labour party, still has no more than “serious concerns” that international law may have been breached.
Neither party yet proposes banning the sale of British arms to Israel, arms that are being used to commit precisely these violations of international law. Neither is referencing the International Court of Justice’s ruling that Israel is “plausibly” committing genocide.
Meanwhile, the main political conversation in the West is still mired in delusional talk about how to revive the fabled “two-state solution”, rather than how to stop an accelerating genocide.
The reality is that Israel has ripped up the most fundamental of the principles in international law: “distinction” – differentiating between combatants and civilians – and “proportionality” – using only the minimum amount of force needed to achieve legitimate military goals.
The rules of war are in tatters. The system of international humanitarian law is not under threat, it has collapsed.
Every Palestinian in Gaza now faces a death sentence. And with good reason, Israel assumes it is untouchable.
Despite the background noise of endlessly expressed “concerns” from the White House, and of rumours of growing “tensions” between allies, the US and Europe have indicated that the genocide can continue – but must be carried out more discreetly, more unobtrusively.
The killing of the World Central Kitchen staff is a setback. But the destruction of Gaza – Israel’s plan of nearly two decades’ duration – is far from over.
Norms, Conventions and Laws of Conduct Are Being Erased
• 1,900 WORDS •
We stand on the cusp of what might be termed Chaotic War. Not the formula used by Israel often in the past to intimidate adversaries; this is different.
Israeli reporter Eddie Cohen said, in the wake of the attack on the Iranian Consulate: “We are very clear that we want to start a war with Iran and Hezbollah. Do you still not understand?”
“Israel wants to drag Iran into a full-scale war in order to be able to strike at Iran’s nuclear facilities”, though these facilities are beyond American and Israeli reach, buried beneath mountains.
Cohen, and of course, Israel’s military leadership, will know that; but Israel nonetheless is locking itself into a logic that can only lead to defeat. Iran’s nuclear facilities are safe from Israeli assault. The destruction of civilian Iranian infrastructure, which is out in the open, may kill many, but will not, per se, collapse the Iranian state.
Trita Parsi places Israel’s objective in attacking the Iranian Consulate in Damascus in a different context:
“An important aspect of Israel’s conduct – and Biden’s acquiescence to it – is that Israel is engaged in a deliberate and systematic effort to destroy existing laws and norms around warfare.
Even during wartime, embassies are off-limits [yet] Israel just bombed an Iranian diplomatic compound in Damascus.
Bombing hospitals is a war crime, [yet] Israel has bombed EVERY hospital in Gaza. It has even assassinated doctors and patients inside hospitals.
The ICJ obligated Israel to allow the delivery of humanitarian aid to Gaza. Israel actively prevents aid from coming in.
Starvation of civilians as a method of warfare is prohibited under international humanitarian law. Israel has deliberately created a famine in Gaza.
Indiscriminate bombings are illegal under international humanitarian law. Biden himself admits that Israel is bombing Gaza indiscriminately”.
The list goes on and on … However, Israel’s breach of Vienna Convention immunity accorded to diplomatic premises – plus the stature of those killed – is highly significant. It is a major signal: Israel wants war – but with U.S. support, of course.
Israel’s aim, firstly, is to destroy the norms, conventions and laws of warfare; to create geo-political anarchy in which anything goes, and by which, with the White House frustrated, yet acquiescing to each norm of conduct obtrusively trodden underfoot, allows Netanyahu to grip the U.S. bridle and lead the White House horse to water – towards his regional End of Times ‘Great Victory’; a necessarily brutal war – beyond existing red lines anddevoid of limits.
As symbolically significant as the Damascus attack is that the U.S., France and Britain – after a brief ‘hat tip’ to the Vienna Convention – refused to condemn the levelling of the Iranian Consulate, thus placing the shadow of doubt over the Vienna Convention’s immunity for diplomatic premises.
Implicitly, this refusal to condemn will be widely understood as a soft condoning of Israel’s first tentative step towards war with Hizbullah and Iran.
This Israeli chaotic ‘Biblical’ nihilism, however, bears no relationship in purely rational terms to Netanyahu’s aspiration for a ‘Great Victory’. The reality is that Israel has lost its deterrence. It won’t return; the deep anger across the Islamic world generated by Israel through its massacres in Gaza during the last six months precludes it.
Yet, there is a second, adjunct reason why Israel is set on deliberately flouting humanitarian law and norms: Israeli journalist, Yuval Abraham reports in +972 Magazine in great depth how Israel has developed a AI machine (called ‘Lavender’) to generate kill lists in Gaza – with almost no human verification; only a “rubber stamp” check of about “20 seconds” to make sure the AI target is male (as no females are known to belong to the Resistance’s military).
The blatant extra-legality behind the Gaza ‘kill list’ methodology, as reported by Abraham’s various sources, can only be immunised and sheltered through normalising them as but one amongst a general pattern of illegalities – and in effect, claiming sovereign exceptionalism:
“[T]he Israeli army systematically attacks the targeted individual whilst in their homes — usually at night whilst the whole family is present — rather than during the course of military activity … Additional automated systems, including one, [callously] called “Where’s Daddy?” were used – specifically to track targets when they had entered their family’s residences… However, when a home was struck, usually at night, the individual target was sometimes not inside at all”.
“The result is that thousands of Palestinians — most of them women and children or people who were not involved in the fighting — were wiped out by Israeli airstrikes, especially during the first weeks of the war, because of the AI program’s decisions”.
“”We were not interested in killing [Hamas] operatives when they were in a military building … or engaged in a military activity,” A., an intelligence officer, told +972 and Local Call. “On the contrary, the IDF bombed them in homes without hesitation – as a first option. It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations”.
“In addition … when it came to targeting alleged junior militants marked by Lavender, the army preferred to only use unguided missiles, commonly known as “dumb” bombs (in contrast to “smart” precision bombs) which can destroy entire buildings on top of their occupants and cause significant casualties. “You don’t want to waste expensive bombs on unimportant people — it’s very expensive for the country and there’s a shortage [of those bombs]”.
“… The army also decided during the first weeks of the war that, for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians … in the event that the target was a senior Hamas official with the rank of battalion or brigade commander – the army on several occasions authorized the killing of more than 100 civilians in the assassination of a single commander”.
“Lavender — which was developed to create human targets in the current war — has marked some 37,000 Palestinians as suspected “Hamas militants”, most of them junior, for assassination (the IDF Spokesperson denied the existence of such a kill list in a statement to +972 and Local Call)”.
So, there it is – no wonder Israel might seek to camouflage the details within a normalised general array of transgressions against humanitarian law: “They wanted to allow us to attack [the junior operatives] automatically. That’s the Holy Grail. Once you go automatic, target generation goes crazy”.
It is not difficult to speculate what the ICJ might determine …
Does anyone imagine that this flawed Lavender AI machine would not be asked to churn out its kill lists, were Israel to decide to surge into Lebanon? (Another reason for normalising the procedures first in Gaza).
The key point made in the +972 Magazine report (with multiple sourcing) is that the IDF were not focussed on pin-point elimination of Hamas’ Qassam Brigades (as claimed):
“It was very surprising for me that we were asked to bomb a house to kill a ground soldier, whose importance in the fighting was so low”, said one source about the use of AI to mark alleged low-ranking militants:
“I nicknamed those targets ‘garbage targets.’ Still, I found them more ethical than the targets that we bombed just for ‘deterrence’ — high-rises that are evacuated and toppled just to cause destruction”.
This report makes clear nonsense of Israel’s claims to have dismantled 19 out of 24 Hamas Battalions: One source, critical of Lavender’s inaccuracy, points out the obvious flaw: “It’s a vague boundary”; How to tell a Hamas fighter from any other Gazan civilian male?
“At its peak, the system managed to generate 37,000 people as potential human targets”, said B. “But the numbers changed all the time, because it depends on where you set the bar of what a Hamas operative is. There were times when a Hamas operative was defined more broadly, and then the machine started bringing us all kinds of civil defence personnel, police officers, on whom it would be a shame to waste bombs”.
Just last week, War Cabinet member and Minister Ron Dermer, was delegated to travel to Washington to plead that the IDF success in dismantling 19 Hamas battalions justified an incursion into Rafah to dismantle the 4 to 5 battalions that Israel claims still remain in Rafah.
What is clear is that AI was a key Israeli tool to its Gaza ‘Victory’. Israel was going to sell a ‘smoke and mirrors story’ based on ‘Lavender’.
By contrast, Palestinians, who are aware of their quantitative inferiority, have a very different outlook: they switched to a new way of thinking that gives the simple act of resisting a civilisational meaning – a path to metaphysical victory (and quite possibly a kind of military victory), if not in their lifetimes, then for the Palestinian People, thereafter. This constitutes the asymmetrical nature of the conflict that Israel has never managed to understand.
Israel wants to be feared, believing this will restore its deterrence. Amira Hass writes that regardless of any revulsion for this government and its members: “The vast majority [of Israelis] still believe that war is the solution”. And Mairav Zonszein writing in Foreign Policy, notes that “The Problem Isn’t Just Netanyahu, It’s Israeli Society”:
“The focus on Netanyahu is a convenient distraction from the fact that the war in Gaza is not Netanyahu’s war, it is Israel’s war—and the problem isn’t only Netanyahu; it’s the Israeli electorate … A large majority—88 percent—of Jewish Israelis polled in January believe the astounding number of Palestinian deaths, which had surpassed 25,000 at the time, is justified. A large majority of the Jewish public also thinks that the [IDF] is using adequate or even too little force in Gaza … Putting all the blame on the prime minister misses the point. It disregards the fact that Israelis have long advanced, enabled, or come to terms with their country’s system of military occupation and dehumanization of Palestinians”.
Yet neither Israel, nor the U.S., has a comprehensive strategy for this mooted war. Israel’s approach is all tactical – claiming to have degraded Hamas; turning Gaza into a humanitarian hellscape and setting the scene for the “decisive plan” devised by Bezalel Smotrich for the Palestinians. Amira Hass again:
“Either agree to an inferior status, emigrate and be uprooted ostensibly voluntarily, or face defeat and death in a war. This is the plan now being carried out in Gaza and the West Bank – with most Israelis serving as active and enthusiastic accomplices, or passively acquiescing in its realisation ”.
The U.S. ‘vision’ is also tactical (and far removed from reality) – Imagining the transformation of Gaza into a ‘Vichy collaborator’ statelet; imagining that political pressure by the French in Lebanon will force Hizbullah’s retreat from its ancestral lands in south Lebanon; and imagining that the Biden White House is able to achieve politically through pressure what Israel cannot do militarily.
The paradox is that, with Israel and the U.S. being dependent on an ‘image’ that has been confused with reality, this too works to Iran’s and the Resistance Front’s advantage. (As the old adage goes, ‘do not disturb an adversary who is making mistakes’).
The Europeans will never be able to replicate the time-tested Hegemon money laundering machine
The awful shadow of some unseen Power Floats tho’ unseen amongst us, -visiting This various world with as inconstant wing As summer winds that creep from flower to flower.- Like moonbeams that behind some piny mountain shower, It visits with inconstant glance Each human heart and countenance; Like hues and harmonies of evening,- Like clouds in starlight widely spread,- Like memory of music fled,- Like aught that for its grace may be Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery. Shelley, Hymn to Intellectual Beauty
As the de facto North Atlantic Terror Organization celebrates its 75th birthday, taking Lord Ismay’s motto to ever soaring heights (“keep the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down”), that thick slab of Norwegian wood posing as Secretary-General came up with a merry “initiative” to create a 100 billion euro fund to weaponize Ukraine for the next five years.
Translation, regarding the crucial money front in the NATO-Russia clash: partial exit of the Hegemon – already obsessing with The Next Forever War, against China; enter the motley crew of ragged, de-industrialized European chihuahuas, all in deep debt and most mired in recession.
A few IQs over average room temperature at NATO’s HQ in Haren, in Brussels, had the temerity to wonder how to come up with such a fortune, as NATO has zero leverage to raise money among member states.
After all, the Europeans will never be able to replicate the time-tested Hegemon money laundering machine. For instance, assuming the White House-proposed $60 billion package to Ukraine would be approved by the U.S. Congress – and it won’t – no less than 64% of the total will never reach Kiev: it will be laundered within the industrial-military complex.
Yet it gets even more dystopic: Norwegian Wood, robotic stare, arms flailing, actually believes his proposed move will not imply a direct NATO military presence in Ukraine – or country 404; something that is already a fact on the ground for quite a while, irrespective of the warmongering hissy fits by Le Petit Roi in Paris (Peskov: “Russia-NATO relations have descended into direct confrontation”).
Now couple the Lethal Looney Tunes spectacle along the NATOstan front with the Hegemon’s aircraft carrier performance in West Asia, consistently taking its industrial-scale slaughter/starvation Genocide Project in Gaza to indescribable heights – the meticulously documented holocaust watched in contorted silence by the “leaders” of the Global North.
UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese correctly summed it all up: the biblical psychopathology entity “intentionally killed the WCK workers so that donors would pull out and civilians in Gaza could continue to be starved quietly. Israel knows Western countries and most Arab countries won’t move a finger for the Palestinians.”
The “logic” behind the deliberate three tap strike on the clearly signed humanitarian convoy of famine-alleviating workers in Gaza was to eviscerate from the news an even more horrendous episode: the genocide-within-a-genocide of al-Shifa hospital, responsible for at least 30% of all health services in Gaza. Al-Shifa was bombed, incinerated and had over 400 civilians killed in cold blood, in several cases literally smashed by bulldozers, including medical doctors, patients and dozens of children.
Nearly simultaneously, the biblical psychopathology gang completely eviscerated the Vienna convention – something that even the historical Nazis never did – striking Iran’s consular mission/ambassador’s residence in Damascus.
This was a missile attack on a diplomatic mission, enjoying immunity, on the territory of a third country, against which the gang is not at war. And on top of it, killing General Mohammad Reza Zahedi, commander of the IRGC’s Quds Force in Syria and Lebanon, his deputy Mohammad Hadi Hajizadeh, another five officers, and a total of 10 people.
Translation: an act of terror, against two sovereign states, Syria and Iran. Equivalent to the recent terror attack on Crocus City Hall in Moscow.
The inevitable question rings around all corners of the lands of the Global Majority: how can these de facto terrorists possibly get away with all this, over and over again?
The sinews of Liberal Totalitarianism
Four years ago, at the start of what I later qualified as the Raging Twenties, we were beginning to watch the consolidation of an intertwined series of concepts defining a new paradigm. We were becoming familiar with notions such as circuit breaker; negative feedback loop; state of exception; necropolitics; and hybrid neofascism.
As the decade marches on, our plight may at least have been alleviated by a twin glimmer of hope: the drive towards multipolarity, led by the Russia-China strategic partnership, with Iran playing a key part, and all that coupled with the total breakdown, live, of the “rules-based international order”.
Yet to affirm there will be a long and winding road ahead is the Mother of All Euphemisms.
So, to quote Bowie, the ultimate late, great aesthete: Where Are We Now? Let’s take this very sharp analysis by the always engaging Fabio Vighi at Cardiff University and tweak it a little further.
Anyone applying critical thinking to the world around us can feel the collapse of the system. It’s a closed system alright, easily definable as Liberal Totalitarianism. Cui bono? The 0.0001%.
Nothing ideological about that. Follow the money. The defining negative feedback loop is actually the debt loop. A criminally anti-social mechanism kept in place by – what else – a psychopathology, as acute as the one exhibited by the biblical genocidals in West Asia.
The Mechanism is enforced by a triad.
The transnational financial elite, the superstars of the 0.0001%.
Right beneath it, the politico-institutional layer, from the U.S. Congress to the European Commission (EC) in Brussels, as well as comprador elite “leaders” across the Global North and South.
The former “intelligentsia”, now essentially hacks for hire from media to academia.
This institutionalized hyper-mediatization of reality is (italics mine), in fact, The Mechanism.
It’s this mechanism that controlled the merging of the pre-fabricated “pandemic” – complete with hardcore social engineering sold as “humanitarian lockdowns” – into, once again, Forever Wars, from Project Genocide in Gaza to the Russophobia/cancel culture obsession inbuilt in Project Proxy War in Ukraine.
That’s the essence of Totalitarian Normality: the Project for Humanity by the appallingly mediocre, self-appointed Great Reset “elites” of the collective West.
Killing them softly with AI
A key vector of the whole mechanism is the direct, vicious interconnection between a tecno-military euphoria and the hyper-inflationary financial sector, now in thrall with AI.
Enter, for instance, AI models such as ‘Lavender’, tested on the ground in the Gaza killing field lab. Literally: artificial intelligence programming the extermination of humans. And it’s happening, in real time. Call it Project AI Genocide.
Another vector, already experimented, is inbuilt in the indirect assertion by toxic EC Medusa Ursula von der Lugen: essentially, the need to produce weapons as Covid vaccines.
That’s at the core of a plan to use funding of the EU by European taxpayers to “increase financing” of “joint contracts for weapons”. That’s an offspring of von der Lugen’s push to roll out Covid vaccines – a gigantic Pfizer-linked scam for which she is about to be investigated and arguably exposed by the EU’s Public Prosecutor Office. In her own words, addressing the proposed weapons scam: “We did this for vaccines and gas.”
Call it Weaponization of Social Engineering 2.0.
Amidst all the action in this vast corruption swamp, the Hegemon agenda remains quite blatant: to keep its – dwindling – predominantly thalassocratic, military hegemony, no matter what, as the basis for its financial hegemony; protect the U.S. dollar; and protect those unmeasurable, unpayable debts in U.S. dollars.
And that brings us to the tawdry economic model of turbo-capitalism, as sold by collective West media hacks: the debt loop, virtual money, borrowed non-stop to deal with “autocrat” Putin and “Russian aggression”. That’s a key by-product of Michael Hudson’s searing analysis of the FIRE (Finance-Insurance-Real Estate) syndrome.
Ouroboros intervenes: the serpent bites its own tail. Now the inherent folly of The Mechanism is inevitably leading casino capitalism to resort to barbarism. Undiluted savagery – of the Crocus City Hall kind and of the Project Gaza Genocide kind.
And that’s how The Mechanism engenders institutions – from Washington to Brussels to hubs across the Global North to genocidal Tel Aviv – stripped down to the status of psychotic killers, at the mercy of Big Finance/FIRE (oh, such fabulous seafront real estate opportunities available in “vacant” Gaza.)
How can we possibly escape such folly? Will we have the will and the discipline to follow Shelley’s vision and, in “this dim vast vale of tears”, summon the transcending Spirit of Beauty – and harmony, equanimity and justice?
Over 13,000 children have been killed in Gaza. Amr Abdallah was one of them.
• 1,500 WORDS •
Amr Abdallah
On the morning Amr Abdallah was killed, he woke before dawn to say his Ramadan prayers with his father, mother, two younger brothers and aunt, in an open field in southern Gaza.
“It is You we worship and You we ask for help,” they prayed. “Guide us to the straight path — the path of those upon whom You have bestowed favor, not of those who have evoked Your anger or of those who are astray.”
It was dark. They made their way back to their tents. Their old life was gone — their village, Al-Qarara, their house — built with the money Amr’s father saved during the 30 years he worked in the Persian Gulf — their orchards, their school, the local mosque and the town’s cultural museum with artifacts dating from 4,000 B.C.
Amr, who was 17, would have graduated from high school this year. The schools were closed in November. He would have gone to college, perhaps to be an engineer like his father, who was a prominent community leader. Amr was a gifted student. Now he lived in a tent in a designated “safe area” that, as he and his family already knew, was not safe. It was shelled sporadically by the Israelis.
It was cold and rainy. The family huddled together to keep warm. Hunger wrapped itself around them like a coil.
“When you say ‘Amr’ it’s like you’re talking about the moon,” his uncle, Abdulbaset Abdallah, who lives in New Jersey, tells me. “He was the special one, handsome, brilliant, and kind.”
Amr in Gaza
The Israeli attacks began in northern Gaza. Then they spread south. On the morning of Friday, Dec. 1, Israeli drones dropped leaflets over Amr’s village.
“To the inhabitants of al-Qarara, Khirbet al-Khuza’a, Absan and Bani Soheila,” the leaflets read. “You must evacuate immediately and go to shelters in the Rafah area. The city of Khan Yunis is a dangerous combat zone. You have been warned. Signed by the Israeli Defense Army.”
One of the leaflets dropped over Amr’s village
Families in Gaza live together. Whole generations. This is why dozens of family members are killed in a single air strike. Amr grew up surrounded by uncles, aunts and cousins.
The villagers panicked. Some began to pack. Some refused to leave.
One of Amr’s uncles was adamant. He would stay behind while the family would go to the “safe area.” His son was a physician at Nasser Hospital. Amr’s cousin left the hospital to plead with his father to leave. Moments after he and his father fled, their street was bombed.
Amr and his family moved in with relatives in Khan Yunis. A few days later more leaflets were dropped. Everyone was told to go to Rafah.
Amr’s family, now joined by relatives from Khan Yunis, fled to Rafah.
Rafah was a nightmare. Desperate Palestinians were living in the open air and on streets. There was little food or water. The family slept in their car. It was cold and rainy. They did not have blankets. They looked desperately for a tent. There were no tents. They found an old sheet of plastic, which they attached to the back of the car to make a protected area. There were no bathrooms. People relieved themselves on the side of the road. The stench was overpowering.
They had been displaced twice in the span of a week.
Amr’s father, who has diabetes and high blood pressure, fell sick. The family took him to the European Hospital near Khan Yunis. The doctor told him he was ill because he was not eating enough.
“We can’t handle your case,” the doctor told him. “There are more critical cases.”
“He had a beautiful house,” Abdallah says of his older brother. “Now he is homeless. He knew everyone in his hometown. Now he lives on the street with crowds of strangers. No one has enough to eat. There is no clean water. There are no proper facilities or bathrooms.”
The family decided to move again to al-Mawasi, designated a “humanitarian area” by Israel. They would at least be in open land, some of which belonged to their family. The coastal area, filled with dunes, now holds some 380,000 displaced Palestinians. The Israelis promised the delivery of international humanitarian aid to al-Mawasi, little of which arrived. Water has to be trucked in. There is no electricity.
Israeli warplanes hit a residential compound in al-Mawasi in January where medical teams and their families from the International Rescue Committee and Medical Aid for Palestinians were housed. Several were injured. An Israeli tank fired on a house in al-Mawasi where staff from Médecins Sans Frontières and their families were sheltering in February, killing two and injuring six.
Amr’s family set up two makeshift tents with palm tree leaves and sheets of plastic. Israeli drones circled overhead night and day.
On the day before he was killed, Amr managed to get a phone connection — telecommunications are often cut — to speak to his sister in Canada.
“Please get us out of here,” he pleaded.
The Egyptian firm Hala, which means “Welcome” in Arabic, provided travel permits for Gazans to enter Egypt for $350, before the Israeli assault. Since the genocide began, the firm has raised the price to $5,000 for an adult and $2,500 for a child. It has sometimes charged as much as $10,000 for a travel permit.
Hala has offices in Cairo and Rafah. Once the money is paid — Hala only accepts U.S. dollars — the name of the applicant is submitted to Egyptian authorities. It can take weeks to get a permit. It would cost around $25,000 to get Amr’s family out of Gaza, double that if they included his widowed aunt and three cousins. This was not a sum Amr’s relatives abroad could raise quickly. They set up a GoFundMe page here. They are still trying to collect enough money.
Once Palestinians get to Egypt, the permits expire within a month. Most of the Palestinian refugees in Egypt survive on money sent to them from abroad.
Amr awoke in the dark. It was the first Friday of Ramadan. He joined his family in the morning prayer. The Fajr. It was 5 a.m.
Muslims fast in the day during the month of Ramadan. They eat and drink once the sun goes down and shortly before dawn. But food was now in very short supply. A little olive oil. The spice za’atar. It was not much.
They went back to their tents after prayers. Amr was in the tent with his aunt and three cousins. A shell exploded near the tent. Shrapnel tore apart his aunt’s leg and critically injured his cousins. Amr frantically tried to help them. A second shell exploded. Shrapnel ripped through Amr’s stomach and exited from his back.
Amr stood up. He walked out of the tent. He collapsed. Older cousins ran towards him. They had enough gas in their car — fuel is in very short supply — to drive Amr to Nasser Hospital, three miles away.
“Amr, are you okay?” his cousins asked.
“Yes,” he moaned.
“Amr, are you awake?” they asked after a few minutes
“Yes,” he whispered.
They lifted him from the car. They carried him into the overcrowded corridors of the hospital. They set him down.
He was dead.
Amr in death
They carried Amr’s body back to the car. They drove to the family’s encampment.
Amr’s uncle shows me a video of Amr’s mother keening over his corpse.
“My son, my son, my beloved son,” she laments in the video, her left hand tenderly stroking his face. “I don’t know what I will do without you.”
They buried Amr in a makeshift grave.
Amr’s Burial
Later that night the Israelis shelled again. Several Palestinians were wounded and killed.
The empty tent, occupied the day before by Amr’s family, was obliterated.
The Israeli army has marked tens of thousands of Gazans as suspects for assassination, using an AI targeting system with little human oversight and a permissive policy for casualties, +972 and Local Call reveal.
In 2021, a book titled “The Human-Machine Team: How to Create Synergy Between Human and Artificial Intelligence That Will Revolutionize Our World” was released in English under the pen name “Brigadier General Y.S.” In it, the author — a man who we confirmed to be the current commander of the elite Israeli intelligence unit 8200 — makes the case for designing a special machine that could rapidly process massive amounts of data to generate thousands of potential “targets” for military strikes in the heat of a war. Such technology, he writes, would resolve what he described as a “human bottleneck for both locating the new targets and decision-making to approve the targets.”
Such a machine, it turns out, actually exists. A new investigation by +972 Magazine and Local Call reveals that the Israeli army has developed an artificial intelligence-based program known as “Lavender,” unveiled here for the first time. According to six Israeli intelligence officers, who have all served in the army during the current war on the Gaza Strip and had first-hand involvement with the use of AI to generate targets for assassination, Lavender has played a central role in the unprecedented bombing of Palestinians, especially during the early stages of the war. In fact, according to the sources, its influence on the military’s operations was such that they essentially treated the outputs of the AI machine “as if it were a human decision.”
Formally, the Lavender system is designed to mark all suspected operatives in the military wings of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), including low-ranking ones, as potential bombing targets. The sources told +972 and Local Call that, during the first weeks of the war, the army almost completely relied on Lavender, which clocked as many as 37,000 Palestinians as suspected militants — and their homes — for possible air strikes.
During the early stages of the war, the army gave sweeping approval for officers to adopt Lavender’s kill lists, with no requirement to thoroughly check why the machine made those choices or to examine the raw intelligence data on which they were based. One source stated that human personnel often served only as a “rubber stamp” for the machine’s decisions, adding that, normally, they would personally devote only about “20 seconds” to each target before authorizing a bombing — just to make sure the Lavender-marked target is male. This was despite knowing that the system makes what are regarded as “errors” in approximately 10 percent of cases, and is known to occasionally mark individuals who have merely a loose connection to militant groups, or no connection at all.
Moreover, the Israeli army systematically attacked the targeted individuals while they were in their homes — usually at night while their whole families were present — rather than during the course of military activity. According to the sources, this was because, from what they regarded as an intelligence standpoint, it was easier to locate the individuals in their private houses. Additional automated systems, including one called “Where’s Daddy?” also revealed here for the first time, were used specifically to track the targeted individuals and carry out bombings when they had entered their family’s residences.
The result, as the sources testified, is that thousands of Palestinians — most of them women and children or people who were not involved in the fighting — were wiped out by Israeli airstrikes, especially during the first weeks of the war, because of the AI program’s decisions.
“We were not interested in killing [Hamas] operatives only when they were in a military building or engaged in a military activity,” A., an intelligence officer, told +972 and Local Call. “On the contrary, the IDF bombed them in homes without hesitation, as a first option. It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.”
The Lavender machine joins another AI system, “The Gospel,” about which information was revealed in a previous investigation by +972 and Local Call in November 2023, as well as in the Israeli military’s own publications. A fundamental difference between the two systems is in the definition of the target: whereas The Gospel marks buildings and structures that the army claims militants operate from, Lavender marks people — and puts them on a kill list.
In addition, according to the sources, when it came to targeting alleged junior militants marked by Lavender, the army preferred to only use unguided missiles, commonly known as “dumb” bombs (in contrast to “smart” precision bombs), which can destroy entire buildings on top of their occupants and cause significant casualties. “You don’t want to waste expensive bombs on unimportant people — it’s very expensive for the country and there’s a shortage [of those bombs],” said C., one of the intelligence officers. Another source said that they had personally authorized the bombing of “hundreds” of private homes of alleged junior operatives marked by Lavender, with many of these attacks killing civilians and entire families as “collateral damage.”
In an unprecedented move, according to two of the sources, the army also decided during the first weeks of the war that, for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians; in the past, the military did not authorize any “collateral damage” during assassinations of low-ranking militants. The sources added that, in the event that the target was a senior Hamas official with the rank of battalion or brigade commander, the army on several occasions authorized the killing of more than 100 civilians in the assassination of a single commander.
The following investigation is organized according to the six chronological stages of the Israeli army’s highly automated target production in the early weeks of the Gaza war. First, we explain the Lavender machine itself, which marked tens of thousands of Palestinians using AI. Second, we reveal the “Where’s Daddy?” system, which tracked these targets and signaled to the army when they entered their family homes. Third, we describe how “dumb” bombs were chosen to strike these homes.
Fourth, we explain how the army loosened the permitted number of civilians who could be killed during the bombing of a target. Fifth, we note how automated software inaccurately calculated the amount of non-combatants in each household. And sixth, we show how on several occasions, when a home was struck, usually at night, the individual target was sometimes not inside at all, because military officers did not verify the information in real time.
STEP 1: GENERATING TARGETS
‘Once you go automatic, target generation goes crazy’
In the Israeli army, the term “human target” referred in the past to a senior military operative who, according to the rules of the military’s International Law Department, can be killed in their private home even if there are civilians around. Intelligence sources told +972 and Local Call that during Israel’s previous wars, since this was an “especially brutal” way to kill someone — often by killing an entire family alongside the target — such human targets were marked very carefully and only senior military commanders were bombed in their homes, to maintain the principle of proportionality under international law.
But after October 7 — when Hamas-led militants launched a deadly assault on southern Israeli communities, killing around 1,200 people and abducting 240 — the army, the sources said, took a dramatically different approach. Under “Operation Iron Swords,” the army decided to designate all operatives of Hamas’ military wing as human targets, regardless of their rank or military importance. And that changed everything.
The new policy also posed a technical problem for Israeli intelligence. In previous wars, in order to authorize the assassination of a single human target, an officer had to go through a complex and lengthy “incrimination” process: cross-check evidence that the person was indeed a senior member of Hamas’ military wing, find out where he lived, his contact information, and finally know when he was home in real time. When the list of targets numbered only a few dozen senior operatives, intelligence personnel could individually handle the work involved in incriminating and locating them.
However, once the list was expanded to include tens of thousands of lower-ranking operatives, the Israeli army figured it had to rely on automated software and artificial intelligence. The result, the sources testify, was that the role of human personnel in incriminating Palestinians as military operatives was pushed aside, and AI did most of the work instead. According to four of the sources who spoke to +972 and Local Call, Lavender — which was developed to create human targets in the current war — has marked some 37,000 Palestinians as suspected “Hamas militants,” most of them junior, for assassination (the IDF Spokesperson denied the existence of such a kill list in a statement to +972 and Local Call).
“We didn’t know who the junior operatives were, because Israel didn’t track them routinely [before the war],” explained senior officer B. to +972 and Local Call, illuminating the reason behind the development of this particular target machine for the current war. “They wanted to allow us to attack [the junior operatives] automatically. That’s the Holy Grail. Once you go automatic, target generation goes crazy.”
The sources said that the approval to automatically adopt Lavender’s kill lists, which had previously been used only as an auxiliary tool, was granted about two weeks into the war, after intelligence personnel “manually” checked the accuracy of a random sample of several hundred targets selected by the AI system. When that sample found that Lavender’s results had reached 90 percent accuracy in identifying an individual’s affiliation with Hamas, the army authorized the sweeping use of the system. From that moment, sources said that if Lavender decided an individual was a militant in Hamas, they were essentially asked to treat that as an order, with no requirement to independently check why the machine made that choice or to examine the raw intelligence data on which it is based.
“At 5 a.m., [the air force] would come and bomb all the houses that we had marked,” B. said. “We took out thousands of people. We didn’t go through them one by one — we put everything into automated systems, and as soon as one of [the marked individuals] was at home, he immediately became a target. We bombed him and his house.”
“It was very surprising for me that we were asked to bomb a house to kill a ground soldier, whose importance in the fighting was so low,” said one source about the use of AI to mark alleged low-ranking militants. “I nicknamed those targets ‘garbage targets.’ Still, I found them more ethical than the targets that we bombed just for ‘deterrence’ — highrises that are evacuated and toppled just to cause destruction.”
The deadly results of this loosening of restrictions in the early stage of the war were staggering. According to data from the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza, on which the Israeli army has relied almost exclusively since the beginning of the war, Israel killed some 15,000 Palestinians — almost half of the death toll so far — in the first six weeks of the war, up until a week-long ceasefire was agreed on Nov. 24.
‘The more information and variety, the better’
The Lavender software analyzes information collected on most of the 2.3 million residents of the Gaza Strip through a system of mass surveillance, then assesses and ranks the likelihood that each particular person is active in the military wing of Hamas or PIJ. According to sources, the machine gives almost every single person in Gaza a rating from 1 to 100, expressing how likely it is that they are a militant.
Lavender learns to identify characteristics of known Hamas and PIJ operatives, whose information was fed to the machine as training data, and then to locate these same characteristics — also called “features” — among the general population, the sources explained. An individual found to have several different incriminating features will reach a high rating, and thus automatically becomes a potential target for assassination.
In “The Human-Machine Team,” the book referenced at the beginning of this article, the current commander of Unit 8200 advocates for such a system without referencing Lavender by name. (The commander himself also isn’t named, but five sources in 8200 confirmed that the commander is the author, as reported also by Haaretz.) Describing human personnel as a “bottleneck” that limits the army’s capacity during a military operation, the commander laments: “We [humans] cannot process so much information. It doesn’t matter how many people you have tasked to produce targets during the war — you still cannot produce enough targets per day.”
The solution to this problem, he says, is artificial intelligence. The book offers a short guide to building a “target machine,” similar in description to Lavender, based on AI and machine-learning algorithms. Included in this guide are several examples of the “hundreds and thousands” of features that can increase an individual’s rating, such as being in a Whatsapp group with a known militant, changing cell phone every few months, and changing addresses frequently.
“The more information, and the more variety, the better,” the commander writes. “Visual information, cellular information, social media connections, battlefield information, phone contacts, photos.” While humans select these features at first, the commander continues, over time the machine will come to identify features on its own. This, he says, can enable militaries to create “tens of thousands of targets,” while the actual decision as to whether or not to attack them will remain a human one.
The book isn’t the only time a senior Israeli commander hinted at the existence of human target machines like Lavender. +972 and Local Call have obtained footage of a private lecture given by the commander of Unit 8200’s secretive Data Science and AI center, “Col. Yoav,” at Tel Aviv University’s AI week in 2023, which was reported on at the time in the Israeli media.
In the lecture, the commander speaks about a new, sophisticated target machine used by the Israeli army that detects “dangerous people” based on their likeness to existing lists of known militants on which it was trained. “Using the system, we managed to identify Hamas missile squad commanders,” “Col. Yoav” said in the lecture, referring to Israel’s May 2021 military operation in Gaza, when the machine was used for the first time.
“We rank the results and determine the threshold [at which to attack a target],” “Col. Yoav” said in the lecture, emphasizing that “eventually, people of flesh and blood take the decisions. In the defense realm, ethically speaking, we put a lot of emphasis on this. These tools are meant to help [intelligence officers] break their barriers.”
In practice, however, sources who have used Lavender in recent months say human agency and precision were substituted for mass target creation and lethality.
‘There was no “zero-error” policy’
B., a senior officer who used Lavender, echoed to +972 and Local Call that in the current war, officers were not required to independently review the AI system’s assessments, in order to save time and enable the mass production of human targets without hindrances.
“Everything was statistical, everything was neat — it was very dry,” B. said. He noted that this lack of supervision was permitted despite internal checks showing that Lavender’s calculations were considered accurate only 90 percent of the time; in other words, it was known in advance that 10 percent of the human targets slated for assassination were not members of the Hamas military wing at all.
For example, sources explained that the Lavender machine sometimes mistakenly flagged individuals who had communication patterns similar to known Hamas or PIJ operatives — including police and civil defense workers, militants’ relatives, residents who happened to have a name and nickname identical to that of an operative, and Gazans who used a device that once belonged to a Hamas operative.
“How close does a person have to be to Hamas to be [considered by an AI machine to be] affiliated with the organization?” said one source critical of Lavender’s inaccuracy. “It’s a vague boundary. Is a person who doesn’t receive a salary from Hamas, but helps them with all sorts of things, a Hamas operative? Is someone who was in Hamas in the past, but is no longer there today, a Hamas operative? Each of these features — characteristics that a machine would flag as suspicious — is inaccurate.”
Similar problems exist with the ability of target machines to assess the phone used by an individual marked for assassination. “In war, Palestinians change phones all the time,” said the source. “People lose contact with their families, give their phone to a friend or a wife, maybe lose it. There is no way to rely 100 percent on the automatic mechanism that determines which [phone] number belongs to whom.”
According to the sources, the army knew that the minimal human supervision in place would not discover these faults. “There was no ‘zero-error’ policy. Mistakes were treated statistically,” said a source who used Lavender. “Because of the scope and magnitude, the protocol was that even if you don’t know for sure that the machine is right, you know that statistically it’s fine. So you go for it.”
“It has proven itself,” said B., the senior source. “There’s something about the statistical approach that sets you to a certain norm and standard. There has been an illogical amount of [bombings] in this operation. This is unparalleled, in my memory. And I have much more trust in a statistical mechanism than a soldier who lost a friend two days ago. Everyone there, including me, lost people on October 7. The machine did it coldly. And that made it easier.”
Another intelligence source, who defended the reliance on the Lavender-generated kill lists of Palestinian suspects, argued that it was worth investing an intelligence officer’s time only to verify the information if the target was a senior commander in Hamas. “But when it comes to a junior militant, you don’t want to invest manpower and time in it,” he said. “In war, there is no time to incriminate every target. So you’re willing to take the margin of error of using artificial intelligence, risking collateral damage and civilians dying, and risking attacking by mistake, and to live with it.”
B. said that the reason for this automation was a constant push to generate more targets for assassination. “In a day without targets [whose feature rating was sufficient to authorize a strike], we attacked at a lower threshold. We were constantly being pressured: ‘Bring us more targets.’ They really shouted at us. We finished [killing] our targets very quickly.”
He explained that when lowering the rating threshold of Lavender, it would mark more people as targets for strikes. “At its peak, the system managed to generate 37,000 people as potential human targets,” said B. “But the numbers changed all the time, because it depends on where you set the bar of what a Hamas operative is. There were times when a Hamas operative was defined more broadly, and then the machine started bringing us all kinds of civil defense personnel, police officers, on whom it would be a shame to waste bombs. They help the Hamas government, but they don’t really endanger soldiers.”
One source who worked with the military data science team that trained Lavender said that data collected from employees of the Hamas-run Internal Security Ministry, whom he does not consider to be militants, was also fed into the machine. “I was bothered by the fact that when Lavender was trained, they used the term ‘Hamas operative’ loosely, and included people who were civil defense workers in the training dataset,” he said.
The source added that even if one believes these people deserve to be killed, training the system based on their communication profiles made Lavender more likely to select civilians by mistake when its algorithms were applied to the general population. “Since it’s an automatic system that isn’t operated manually by humans, the meaning of this decision is dramatic: it means you’re including many people with a civilian communication profile as potential targets.”
‘We only checked that the target was a man’
The Israeli military flatly rejects these claims. In a statement to +972 and Local Call, the IDF Spokesperson denied using artificial intelligence to incriminate targets, saying these are merely “auxiliary tools that assist officers in the process of incrimination.” The statement went on: “In any case, an independent examination by an [intelligence] analyst is required, which verifies that the identified targets are legitimate targets for attack, in accordance with the conditions set forth in IDF directives and international law.”
However, sources said that the only human supervision protocol in place before bombing the houses of suspected “junior” militants marked by Lavender was to conduct a single check: ensuring that the AI-selected target is male rather than female. The assumption in the army was that if the target was a woman, the machine had likely made a mistake, because there are no women among the ranks of the military wings of Hamas and PIJ.
“A human being had to [verify the target] for just a few seconds,” B. said, explaining that this became the protocol after realizing the Lavender system was “getting it right” most of the time. “At first, we did checks to ensure that the machine didn’t get confused. But at some point we relied on the automatic system, and we only checked that [the target] was a man — that was enough. It doesn’t take a long time to tell if someone has a male or a female voice.”
To conduct the male/female check, B. claimed that in the current war, “I would invest 20 seconds for each target at this stage, and do dozens of them every day. I had zero added value as a human, apart from being a stamp of approval. It saved a lot of time. If [the operative] came up in the automated mechanism, and I checked that he was a man, there would be permission to bomb him, subject to an examination of collateral damage.”
In practice, sources said this meant that for civilian men marked in error by Lavender, there was no supervising mechanism in place to detect the mistake. According to B., a common error occurred “if the [Hamas] target gave [his phone] to his son, his older brother, or just a random man. That person will be bombed in his house with his family. This happened often. These were most of the mistakes caused by Lavender,” B. said.
STEP 2: LINKING TARGETS TO FAMILY HOMES
‘Most of the people you killed were women and children’
The next stage in the Israeli army’s assassination procedure is identifying where to attack the targets that Lavender generates.
In a statement to +972 and Local Call, the IDF Spokesperson claimed in response to this article that “Hamas places its operatives and military assets in the heart of the civilian population, systematically uses the civilian population as human shields, and conducts fighting from within civilian structures, including sensitive sites such as hospitals, mosques, schools and UN facilities. The IDF is bound by and acts according to international law, directing its attacks only at military targets and military operatives.”
The six sources we spoke to echoed this to some degree, saying that Hamas’ extensive tunnel system deliberately passes under hospitals and schools; that Hamas militants use ambulances to get around; and that countless military assets have been situated near civilian buildings. The sources argued that many Israeli strikes kill civilians as a result of these tactics by Hamas — a characterization that human rights groups warn evades Israel’s onus for inflicting the casualties.
However, in contrast to the Israeli army’s official statements, the sources explained that a major reason for the unprecedented death toll from Israel’s current bombardment is the fact that the army has systematically attacked targets in their private homes, alongside their families — in part because it was easier from an intelligence standpoint to mark family houses using automated systems.
Indeed, several sources emphasized that, as opposed to numerous cases of Hamas operatives engaging in military activity from civilian areas, in the case of systematic assassination strikes, the army routinely made the active choice to bomb suspected militants when inside civilian households from which no military activity took place. This choice, they said, was a reflection of the way Israel’s system of mass surveillance in Gaza is designed.
The sources told +972 and Local Call that since everyone in Gaza had a private house with which they could be associated, the army’s surveillance systems could easily and automatically “link” individuals to family houses. In order to identify the moment operatives enter their houses in real time, various additional automatic softwares have been developed. These programs track thousands of individuals simultaneously, identify when they are at home, and send an automatic alert to the targeting officer, who then marks the house for bombing. One of several of these tracking softwares, revealed here for the first time, is called “Where’s Daddy?”
“You put hundreds [of targets] into the system and wait to see who you can kill,” said one source with knowledge of the system. “It’s called broad hunting: you copy-paste from the lists that the target system produces.”
Evidence of this policy is also clear from the data: during the first month of the war, more than half of the fatalities — 6,120 people — belonged to 1,340 families, many of which were completely wiped out while inside their homes, according to UN figures. The proportion of entire families bombed in their houses in the current war is much higher than in the 2014 Israeli operation in Gaza (which was previously Israel’s deadliest war on the Strip), further suggesting the prominence of this policy.
Another source said that each time the pace of assassinations waned, more targets were added to systems like Where’s Daddy? to locate individuals that entered their homes and could therefore be bombed. He said that the decision of who to put into the tracking systems could be made by relatively low-ranking officers in the military hierarchy.
“One day, totally of my own accord, I added something like 1,200 new targets to the [tracking] system, because the number of attacks [we were conducting] decreased,” the source said. “That made sense to me. In retrospect, it seems like a serious decision I made. And such decisions were not made at high levels.”
The sources said that in the first two weeks of the war, “several thousand” targets were initially inputted into locating programs like Where’s Daddy?. These included all the members of Hamas’ elite special forces unit the Nukhba, all of Hamas’ anti-tank operatives, and anyone who entered Israel on October 7. But before long, the kill list was drastically expanded.
“In the end it was everyone [marked by Lavender],” one source explained. “Tens of thousands. This happened a few weeks later, when the [Israeli] brigades entered Gaza, and there were already fewer uninvolved people [i.e. civilians] in the northern areas.” According to this source, even some minors were marked by Lavender as targets for bombing. “Normally, operatives are over the age of 17, but that was not a condition.”
Lavender and systems like Where’s Daddy? were thus combined with deadly effect, killing entire families, sources said. By adding a name from the Lavender-generated lists to the Where’s Daddy? home tracking system, A. explained, the marked person would be placed under ongoing surveillance, and could be attacked as soon as they set foot in their home, collapsing the house on everyone inside.
“Let’s say you calculate [that there is one] Hamas [operative] plus 10 [civilians in the house],” A. said. “Usually, these 10 will be women and children. So absurdly, it turns out that most of the people you killed were women and children.”
STEP 3: CHOOSING A WEAPON
‘We usually carried out the attacks with “dumb bombs”’
Once Lavender has marked a target for assassination, army personnel have verified that they are male, and tracking software has located the target in their home, the next stage is picking the munition with which to bomb them.
In December 2023, CNN reported that according to U.S. intelligence estimates, about 45 percent of the munitions used by the Israeli air force in Gaza were “dumb” bombs, which are known to cause more collateral damage than guided bombs. In response to the CNN report, an army spokesperson quoted in the article said: “As a military committed to international law and a moral code of conduct, we are devoting vast resources to minimizing harm to the civilians that Hamas has forced into the role of human shields. Our war is against Hamas, not against the people of Gaza.”
Three intelligence sources, however, told +972 and Local Call that junior operatives marked by Lavender were assassinated only with dumb bombs, in the interest of saving more expensive armaments. The implication, one source explained, was that the army would not strike a junior target if they lived in a high-rise building, because the army did not want to spend a more precise and expensive “floor bomb” (with more limited collateral effect) to kill him. But if a junior target lived in a building with only a few floors, the army was authorized to kill him and everyone in the building with a dumb bomb.
“It was like that with all the junior targets,” testified C., who used various automated programs in the current war. “The only question was, is it possible to attack the building in terms of collateral damage? Because we usually carried out the attacks with dumb bombs, and that meant literally destroying the whole house on top of its occupants. But even if an attack is averted, you don’t care — you immediately move on to the next target. Because of the system, the targets never end. You have another 36,000 waiting.”
STEP 4: AUTHORIZING CIVILIAN CASUALTIES
‘We attacked almost without considering collateral damage’
One source said that when attacking junior operatives, including those marked by AI systems like Lavender, the number of civilians they were allowed to kill alongside each target was fixed during the initial weeks of the war at up to 20. Another source claimed the fixed number was up to 15. These “collateral damage degrees,” as the military calls them, were applied broadly to all suspected junior militants, the sources said, regardless of their rank, military importance, and age, and with no specific case-by-case examination to weigh the military advantage of assassinating them against the expected harm to civilians.
According to A., who was an officer in a target operation room in the current war, the army’s international law department has never before given such “sweeping approval” for such a high collateral damage degree. “It’s not just that you can kill any person who is a Hamas soldier, which is clearly permitted and legitimate in terms of international law,” A. said. “But they directly tell you: ‘You are allowed to kill them along with many civilians.’
“Every person who wore a Hamas uniform in the past year or two could be bombed with 20 [civilians killed as] collateral damage, even without special permission,” A. continued. “In practice, the principle of proportionality did not exist.”
According to A., this was the policy for most of the time that he served. Only later did the military lower the collateral damage degree. “In this calculation, it could also be 20 children for a junior operative … It really wasn’t like that in the past,” A. explained. Asked about the security rationale behind this policy, A. replied: “Lethality.”
The predetermined and fixed collateral damage degree helped accelerate the mass creation of targets using the Lavender machine, sources said, because it saved time. B. claimed that the number of civilians they were permitted to kill in the first week of the war per suspected junior militant marked by AI was fifteen, but that this number “went up and down” over time.
“At first we attacked almost without considering collateral damage,” B. said of the first week after October 7. “In practice, you didn’t really count people [in each house that is bombed], because you couldn’t really tell if they’re at home or not. After a week, restrictions on collateral damage began. The number dropped [from 15] to five, which made it really difficult for us to attack, because if the whole family was home, we couldn’t bomb it. Then they raised the number again.”
‘We knew we would kill over 100 civilians’
Sources told +972 and Local Call that now, partly due to American pressure, the Israeli army is no longer mass-generating junior human targets for bombing in civilian homes. The fact that most homes in the Gaza Strip were already destroyed or damaged, and almost the entire population has been displaced, also impaired the army’s ability to rely on intelligence databases and automated house-locating programs.
E. claimed that the massive bombardment of junior militants took place only in the first week or two of the war, and then was stopped mainly so as not to waste bombs. “There is a munitions economy,” E. said. “They were always afraid that there would be [a war] in the northern arena [with Hezbollah in Lebanon]. They don’t attack these kinds of [junior] people at all anymore.”
However, airstrikes against senior ranking Hamas commanders are still ongoing, and sources said that for these attacks, the military is authorizing the killing of “hundreds” of civilians per target — an official policy for which there is no historical precedent in Israel, or even in recent U.S. military operations.
“In the bombing of the commander of the Shuja’iya Battalion, we knew that we would kill over 100 civilians,” B. recalled of a Dec. 2 bombing that the IDF Spokesperson said was aimed at assassinating Wisam Farhat. “For me, psychologically, it was unusual. Over 100 civilians — it crosses some red line.”
Amjad Al-Sheikh, a young Palestinian from Gaza, said many of his family members were killed in that bombing. A resident of Shuja’iya, east of Gaza City, he was at a local supermarket that day when he heard five blasts that shattered the glass windows.
“I ran to my family’s house, but there were no buildings there anymore,” Al-Sheikh told +972 and Local Call. “The street was filled with screams and smoke. Entire residential blocks turned to mountains of rubble and deep pits. People began to search in the cement, using their hands, and so did I, looking for signs of my family’s house.”
Al-Sheikh’s wife and baby daughter survived — protected from the rubble by a closet that fell on top of them — but he found 11 other members of his family, among them his sisters, brothers, and their young children, dead under the rubble. According to the human rights group B’Tselem, the bombing that day destroyed dozens of buildings, killed dozens of people, and buried hundreds under the ruins of their homes.
‘Entire families were killed’
Intelligence sources told +972 and Local Call they took part in even deadlier strikes. In order to assassinate Ayman Nofal, the commander of Hamas’ Central Gaza Brigade, a source said the army authorized the killing of approximately 300 civilians, destroying several buildings in airstrikes on Al-Bureij refugee camp on Oct. 17, based on an imprecise pinpointing of Nofal. Satellite footage and videos from the scene show the destruction of several large multi-storey apartment buildings.
“Between 16 to 18 houses were wiped out in the attack,” Amro Al-Khatib, a resident of the camp, told +972 and Local Call. “We couldn’t tell one apartment from the other — they all got mixed up in the rubble, and we found human body parts everywhere.”
In the aftermath, Al-Khatib recalled around 50 dead bodies being pulled out of the rubble, and around 200 people wounded, many of them gravely. But that was just the first day. The camp’s residents spent five days pulling the dead and injured out, he said.
Nael Al-Bahisi, a paramedic, was one of the first on the scene. He counted between 50-70 casualties on that first day. “At a certain moment, we understood the target of the strike was Hamas commander Ayman Nofal,” he told +972 and Local Call. “They killed him, and also many people who didn’t know he was there. Entire families with children were killed.”
Another intelligence source told +972 and Local Call that the army destroyed a high-rise building in Rafah in mid-December, killing “dozens of civilians,” in order to try to kill Mohammed Shabaneh, the commander of Hamas’ Rafah Brigade (it is not clear whether or not he was killed in the attack). Often, the source said, the senior commanders hide in tunnels that pass under civilian buildings, and therefore the choice to assassinate them with an airstrike necessarily kills civilians.
“Most of those injured were children,” said Wael Al-Sir, 55, who witnessed the large-scale strike believed by some Gazans to have been the assassination attempt. He told +972 and Local Call that the bombing on Dec. 20 destroyed an “entire residential block” and killed at least 10 children.
“There was a completely permissive policy regarding the casualties of [bombing] operations — so permissive that in my opinion it had an element of revenge,” D., an intelligence source, claimed. “The core of this was the assassinations of senior [Hamas and PIJ commanders] for whom they were willing to kill hundreds of civilians. We had a calculation: how many for a brigade commander, how many for a battalion commander, and so on.”
“There were regulations, but they were just very lenient,” said E., another intelligence source. “We’ve killed people with collateral damage in the high double-digits, if not low triple-digits. These are things that haven’t happened before.”
Such a high rate of “collateral damage” is exceptional not only compared to what the Israeli army previously deemed acceptable, but also compared to the wars waged by the United States in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan.
General Peter Gersten, Deputy Commander for Operations and Intelligence in the operation to fight ISIS in Iraq and Syria, told a U.S. defense magazine in 2021 that an attack with collateral damage of 15 civilians deviated from procedure; to carry it out, he had to obtain special permission from the head of the U.S. Central Command, General Lloyd Austin, who is now Secretary of Defense.
“With Osama Bin Laden, you’d have an NCV [Non-combatant Casualty Value] of 30, but if you had a low-level commander, his NCV was typically zero,” Gersten said. “We ran zero for the longest time.”
‘We were told: “Whatever you can, bomb”’
All the sources interviewed for this investigation said that Hamas’ massacres on October 7 and kidnapping of hostages greatly influenced the army’s fire policy and collateral damage degrees. “At first, the atmosphere was painful and vindictive,” said B., who was drafted into the army immediately after October 7, and served in a target operation room. “The rules were very lenient. They took down four buildings when they knew the target was in one of them. It was crazy.
“There was a dissonance: on the one hand, people here were frustrated that we were not attacking enough,” B. continued. “On the other hand, you see at the end of the day that another thousand Gazans have died, most of them civilians.”
“There was hysteria in the professional ranks,” said D., who was also drafted immediately after October 7. “They had no idea how to react at all. The only thing they knew to do was to just start bombing like madmen to try to dismantle Hamas’ capabilities.”
D. stressed that they were not explicitly told that the army’s goal was “revenge,” but expressed that “as soon as every target connected to Hamas becomes legitimate, and with almost any collateral damage being approved, it is clear to you that thousands of people are going to be killed. Even if officially every target is connected to Hamas, when the policy is so permissive, it loses all meaning.”
A. also used the word “revenge” to describe the atmosphere inside the army after October 7. “No one thought about what to do afterward, when the war is over, or how it will be possible to live in Gaza and what they will do with it,” A. said. “We were told: now we have to fuck up Hamas, no matter what the cost. Whatever you can, you bomb.”
B., the senior intelligence source, said that in retrospect, he believes this “disproportionate” policy of killing Palestinians in Gaza also endangers Israelis, and that this was one of the reasons he decided to be interviewed.
“In the short term, we are safer, because we hurt Hamas. But I think we’re less secure in the long run. I see how all the bereaved families in Gaza — which is nearly everyone — will raise the motivation for [people to join] Hamas 10 years down the line. And it will be much easier for [Hamas] to recruit them.”
In a statement to +972 and Local Call, the Israeli army denied much of what the sources told us, claiming that “each target is examined individually, while an individual assessment is made of the military advantage and collateral damage expected from the attack … The IDF does not carry out attacks when the collateral damage expected from the attack is excessive in relation to the military advantage.”
STEP 5: CALCULATING COLLATERAL DAMAGE
‘The model was not connected to reality’
According to the intelligence sources, the Israeli army’s calculation of the number of civilians expected to be killed in each house alongside a target — a procedure examined in a previous investigation by +972 and Local Call — was conducted with the help of automatic and inaccurate tools. In previous wars, intelligence personnel would spend a lot of time verifying how many people were in a house that was set to be bombed, with the number of civilians liable to be killed listed as part of a “target file.” After October 7, however, this thorough verification was largely abandoned in favor of automation.
In October, The New York Times reported on a system operated from a special base in southern Israel, which collects information from mobile phones in the Gaza Strip and provided the military with a live estimate of the number of Palestinians who fled the northern Gaza Strip southward. Brig. General Udi Ben Muha told the Times that “It’s not a 100 percent perfect system — but it gives you the information you need to make a decision.” The system operates according to colors: red marks areas where there are many people, and green and yellow mark areas that have been relatively cleared of residents.
The sources who spoke to +972 and Local Call described a similar system for calculating collateral damage, which was used to decide whether to bomb a building in Gaza. They said that the software calculated the number of civilians residing in each home before the war — by assessing the size of the building and reviewing its list of residents — and then reduced those numbers by the proportion of residents who supposedly evacuated the neighborhood.
To illustrate, if the army estimated that half of a neighborhood’s residents had left, the program would count a house that usually had 10 residents as a house containing five people. To save time, the sources said, the army did not surveil the homes to check how many people were actually living there, as it did in previous operations, to find out if the program’s estimate was indeed accurate.
“This model was not connected to reality,” claimed one source. “There was no connection between those who were in the home now, during the war, and those who were listed as living there prior to the war. [On one occasion] we bombed a house without knowing that there were several families inside, hiding together.”
The source said that although the army knew that such errors could occur, this imprecise model was adopted nonetheless, because it was faster. As such, the source said, “the collateral damage calculation was completely automatic and statistical” — even producing figures that were not whole numbers.
STEP 6: BOMBING A FAMILY HOME
‘You killed a family for no reason’
The sources who spoke to +972 and Local Call explained that there was sometimes a substantial gap between the moment that tracking systems like Where’s Daddy? alerted an officer that a target had entered their house, and the bombing itself — leading to the killing of whole families even without hitting the army’s target. “It happened to me many times that we attacked a house, but the person wasn’t even home,” one source said. “The result is that you killed a family for no reason.”
Three intelligence sources told +972 and Local Call that they had witnessed an incident in which the Israeli army bombed a family’s private home, and it later turned out that the intended target of the assassination was not even inside the house, since no further verification was conducted in real time.
“Sometimes [the target] was at home earlier, and then at night he went to sleep somewhere else, say underground, and you didn’t know about it,” one of the sources said. “There are times when you double-check the location, and there are times when you just say, ‘Okay, he was in the house in the last few hours, so you can just bomb.’”
Another source described a similar incident that affected him and made him want to be interviewed for this investigation. “We understood that the target was home at 8 p.m. In the end, the air force bombed the house at 3 a.m. Then we found out [in that span of time] he had managed to move himself to another house with his family. There were two other families with children in the building we bombed.”
In previous wars in Gaza, after the assassination of human targets, Israeli intelligence would carry out bomb damage assessment (BDA) procedures — a routine post-strike check to see if the senior commander was killed and how many civilians were killed along with him. As revealed in a previous +972 and Local Call investigation, this involved listening in to phone calls of relatives who lost their loved ones. In the current war, however, at least in relation to junior militants marked using AI, sources say this procedure was abolished in order to save time. The sources said they did not know how many civilians were actually killed in each strike, and for the low-ranking suspected Hamas and PIJ operatives marked by AI, they did not even know whether the target himself was killed.
The genocide in Gaza is the final stage of a process begun by Israel decades ago. Anyone who did not see this coming blinded themselves to the character and ultimate goals of the apartheid state.
There are no surprises in Gaza. Every horrifying act of Israel’s genocide has been telegraphed in advance. It has been for decades. The dispossession of Palestinians of their land is the beating heart of Israel’s settler colonial project. This dispossession has had dramatic historical moments — 1948 and 1967 — when huge parts of historic Palestine were seized and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were ethnically cleansed. Dispossession has also occurred in increments — the slow-motion theft of land and steady ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.
The incursion on Oct. 7 into Israel by Hamas and other resistance groups, which left 1,154 Israelis, tourists and migrant workers dead and saw about 240 people taken hostage, gave Israel the pretext for what it has long craved — the total erasure of Palestinians.
Israel has razed 77 percent of healthcare facilities in Gaza, 68 percent of telecommunication infrastructure, nearly all municipal and governmental buildings, commercial, industrial and agricultural centers, almost half of all roads, over 60 percent of Gaza’s 439,000 homes, 68 percent of residential buildings — the bombing of the Al-Taj tower in Gaza City on Oct. 25, killed 101 people, including 44 children and 37 women, and injured hundreds — and obliterated refugee camps. The attack on the Jabalia refugee camp on Oct. 25 killed at least 126 civilians, including 69 children, and injured 280. Israel has damaged or destroyed Gaza’s universities, all of which are now closed, and 60 percent of other educational facilities, including 13 libraries. It has also destroyed at least 195 heritage sites, including 208 mosques, churches, and Gaza’s Central Archives that held 150 years of historical records and documents.
Israel’s warplanes, missiles, drones, tanks, artillery shells and naval guns daily pulverize Gaza — which is only 20 miles long and five miles wide — in a scorched earth campaign unlike anything seen since the war in Vietnam. It has dropped 25,000 tons of explosives — equivalent to two nuclear bombs — on Gaza, many targets selected by Artificial Intelligence. It drops unguided munitions (“dumb bombs”) and 2000-pound “bunker buster” bombs on refugee camps and densely packed urban centers as well as the so-called “safe zones” — 42 percent of Palestinians killed have been in these “safe zones” where they were instructed by Israel to flee. Over 1.7 million Palestinians have been displaced from their homes, forced to find refuge in overcrowded UNRWA shelters, hospital corridors and courtyards, schools, tents or the open air in south Gaza, often living next to fetid pools of raw sewage.
Israel has killed at least 32,705 Palestinians in Gaza, including 13,000 children and 9,000 women. This means Israel is slaughtering as many as 187 people a day including 75 children. It has killed 136 journalists, many, if not most of them deliberately targeted. It has killed 340 doctors, nurses and other health workers — four percent of Gaza’s healthcare personnel. These numbers do not begin to reflect the actual death toll since only those dead registered in morgues and hospitals, most of which no longer function, are counted. The death toll, when those who are missing are counted, is well over 40,000.
Doctors are forced to amputate limbs without anesthetic. Those with severe medical conditions — cancer, diabetes, heart disease, kidney disease — have died from lack of treatment or will die soon. Over a hundred women give birth every day, with little to no medical care. Miscarriages are up by 300 percent. Over 90 percent of the Palestinians in Gaza suffer from severe food insecurity with people eating animal feed and grass. Children are dying of starvation. Palestinian writers, academics, scientists and their family members have been tracked and assassinated. Over 75,000 Palestinians have been wounded, many of whom will be crippled for life.
“Seventy percent of recorded deaths have consistently been women and children,” writes Francesca Albanese, the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967, in her report issued on March 25. “Israel failed to prove that the remaining 30 percent, i.e. adult males, were active Hamas combatants — a necessary condition for them to be lawfully targeted. By early-December, Israel’s security advisors claimed the killing of ‘7,000 terrorists’ in a stage of the campaign when less than 5,000 adult males in total had been identified among the casualties, thus implying that all adult males killed were ‘terrorists.’”
Israel plays linguistic tricks to deny anyone in Gaza the status of civilians and any building – including mosques, hospitals and schools – protected status. Palestinians are all branded as responsible for the attack on Oct. 7 or written off as human shields for Hamas. All structures are considered legitimate targets by Israel because they are allegedly Hamas command centers or said to harbor Hamas fighters.
These accusations, Albanese writes, are a “pretext” used to justify “the killing of civilians under a cloak of purported legality, whose all-enveloping pervasiveness admits only of genocidal intent.”
In scale we have not seen an assault on the Palestinians of this magnitude, but all these measures – the killing of civlians, dispossession of land, arbitrary detention, torture, disappearances, closures imposed on Palestinians towns and villages, house demolitions, revoking residence permits, deportation, destruction of the infrastructure that maintains civil society, military occupation, dehumanizing language, theft of natural resources, especially aquifers — have long defined Israel’s campaign to eradicate Palestinians.
The occupation and genocide would not be possible without the U.S. which gives Israel $3.8 billion in annual military assistance and is now sending another $2.5 billion in bombs, including 1,800 MK84 2,000-pound bombs, 500 MK82 500-pound bombs and fighter jets to Israel. This, too, is our genocide.
The genocide in Gaza is the culmination of a process. It is not an act. The genocide is the predictable denouement of Israel’s settler colonial project. It is coded within the DNA of the Israeli apartheid state. It is where Israel had to end up.
Zionist leaders are open about their goals.
Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant, after Oct. 7, announced that Gaza would receive “no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel.” Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs Israel Katz said: “Humanitarian aid to Gaza? No electrical switch will be turned on, no water hydrant will be opened.” Avi Dichter, the Minister of Agriculture, referred to Israel’s military assault as “the Gaza Nakba,” referencing the Nakba, or “catastrophe”, which between 1947 and 1949, drove 750,000 Palestinians from their land and saw thousands massacred by Zionist militias. Likud member of the Israeli Knesset Revital Gottlieb posted on her social media account: “Bring down buildings!! Bomb without distinction!!…Flatten Gaza. Without mercy! This time, there is no room for mercy!” Not to be outdone, Minister of Heritage Amichai Eliyahu supported using nuclear weapons on Gaza as “one of the possibilities.”
The message from the Israeli leadership is unequivocal. Annihilate the Palestinians the same way we annihilated Native Americans, the Australians annihilated the First Nations peoples, the Germans annihilated the Herero in Namibia, the Turks annihilated Armenians and the Nazis annihilated the Jews.
The specifics are different. The process is the same.
We cannot plead ignorance. We know what happened to the Palestinians. We know what is happening to the Palestinians. We know what will happen to the Palestinians.
But it is easier to pretend. Pretend Israel will allow in humanitarian aid. Pretend there will be a ceasefire. Pretend Palestinians will return to their destroyed homes in Gaza. Pretend Gaza will be rebuilt. Pretend the Palestinian Authority will administer Gaza. Pretend there will be a two-state solution. Pretend there is no genocide.
The genocide, which the U.S. is funding and sustaining with weapons shipments, says something not only about Israel, but about us, about Western civilization, about who we are as a people, where we came from and what defines us. It says that all our vaunted morality and respect for human rights is a lie. It says that people of color, especially when they are poor and vulnerable, do not count. It says their hopes, dreams, dignity and aspirations for freedom are worthless. It says we will ensure global domination through racialized violence.
This lie — that Western civilization is predicated on “values” such as respect for human rights and the rule of law — is one the Palestinians, and all those in the Global South, as well as Native Americans and Black and Brown Americans have known for centuries. But, with the Gaza genocide live streamed, this lie is impossible to sustain.
We do not halt Israel’s genocide because we are Israel, infected with white supremacy and intoxicated by our domination of the globe’s wealth and the power to obliterate others with our industrial weapons. Remember The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman telling Charlie Rose on the eve of the war in Iraq that American soldiers should go house to house from Basra to Baghdad and say to Iraqis “suck on this?” That is the real credo of the U.S. empire.
The world outside of the industrialized fortresses in the Global North is acutely aware that the fate of the Palestinians is their fate. As climate change imperils survival, as resources become scarce, as migration becomes an imperative for millions, as agricultural yields decline, as costal areas are flooded, as droughts and wild fires proliferate, as states fail, as armed resistance movements rise to battle their oppressors along with their proxies, genocide will not be an anomaly. It will be the norm. The earth’s vulnerable and poor, those Frantz Fanon called “the wretched of the earth,” will be the next Palestinians.
All Out in Solidarity with the Palestinian People! (Internationalist Group)
Labor activists of S.I. Cobas, the CALP (Autonomous Collective of Port Workers) and other “rank-and-file” unions blockade the port of Genova, Italy on February 23-24, preventing loading/unloading of an Israeli Zim Line ship. (Photo: S.I. Cobas)
With the barbaric war on Gaza now in its sixth month, it is utterly clear that this is an actual genocide, targeting the entire Palestinian Arab population of what has been termed the world’s largest open-air prison. After over 40,000 killed,1 the destruction of more than half of all homes in the densely populated enclave, the bombing of schools and universities and attacks on hospitals, now more than one million people face the spectre of imminent starvation.2 It is also clear that this is a joint U.S./Israeli war, as all the heavy bombs and all the warplanes from which they are dropped are supplied by the Pentagon, while Washington funnels billions in U.S. aid to Israel annually. Millions have marched worldwide to denounce the slaughter and calling for a ceasefire, to no avail. Every appeal to the Zionist/imperialist warmongers has come to naught.
What’s desperately needed is the mobilization of power that can bring the slaughter to a halt, the power of the working class, in the United States and around the world. This coming May 1, the workers day, should become a day of militant international workers action – including strikes and labor-led mass mobilization – to stop the genocidal U.S./Israel war on Gaza. It should be followed up with labor action worldwide to shut down all flights and shipping to and from Israel so long as the Zionist war on Gaza continues. Workers should demand: stop the bombing, stop the massacres, Israeli military and settlers get the hell out of Gaza and all the Occupied Territories NOW!
This is what genocide looks like. Residents of Gaza City gather at site of destroyed building, March 2024 (Photo: Agence France-Presse)
Last October, the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions (PGFTU) in Gaza and more than two dozen Palestinian unions and professional associations issued an urgent appeal to labor internationally to refuse to build or transport arms for and to Israel. In the U.S., over 200 union bodies have since passed resolutions calling for a ceasefire – but with no action beyond joining “peace” marches. In some cases, notably the AFL-CIO, these appeals are actually support for Israel, denouncing Palestinians for starting the war, not demanding that Israel get out of Gaza and calling for release of all Israeli hostages and nothing about the over 9,000 Palestinians being held hostage in Israeli jails (plus another 4,000 workers from Gaza who were in Israel when the war began and are now being held in military camps).3
The League for the Fourth International and its U.S. section, the Internationalist Group, have called from the outset to “Defend the Palestinians Against U.S./Israel Genocidal War on Gaza!” (The Internationalist, 10 October 2023), “For Workers Action Against Zionist Terror” and “against the shipment of arms to Israel and Ukraine,” where the U.S. and its NATO allies are waging an imperialist proxy war against Russia. We have underlined that, so far, calls for labor solidarity have been mainly on paper, and what port shutdowns there have been were mostly called by community groups rather than the unions, as long-time maritime labor activist Jack Heyman pointed out in his recent article reiterating the call “Dock Workers: Block Military Cargo to Israel” (The Internationalist, 15 February).
Motion calling for ILWU Local 10 to stop work on May 1 in solidarity with the Palestinian people and against genocidal war on Gaza.
Last week, Heyman and others put forward a resolution for International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 10 in the San Francisco Bay Area to stop work on May Day, the international workers day, “calling for international workers action in solidarity with the besieged Palestinian people, in opposition to the genocidal Israel/U.S. war on Gaza and to stop the flow of arms to that war.” The motion also urged the rest of the union and dock workers internationally to join in taking May Day Palestinian solidarity actions.
Now the Palestinian General Federation of Labor, Gaza has issued a May Day appeal to unions in the United States calling to do just that. The PGFTU statement says frankly that “we have encountered shocking silence and neglect by the international labor movement.” It spells this out:
“The international labor movement … retreated to verbal positions without taking measures on the ground or pressuring the decision-makers to stop this war of extermination, limiting union activities to conferences and statements and not delving deeply into the need to guarantee humanitarian aid, or influencing international public opinion to expose the truth about Zionist crimes and the practices of the allied countries that continue to support Israel.”
(Click here or on image below for the full text of the PGFTU, Gaza appeal.)
In response to the PGFTU’s urgent appeal to unions and trade-unionists in the U.S. and internationally “to be our voice and advocate inside and outside America,” the League for the Fourth International urges labor militants around the world to mobilize workers’ power in hard-hitting labor-led actions on May 1 in solidarity with the besieged Palestinian people against the genocidal U.S./Israel war. Such actions can and should include not only focusing May Day marches on Palestine solidarity and organizing workers aid to Gaza, but blocking arms shipments and carrying out labor boycotts of flights and shipping to and from Israel, and wherever possible, strike action andshutting down production. Such actions should demand an immediate stop to the bombing, forced population transfers and any restrictions on emergency aid to Gaza; an end to all aid to Israel, and for Israel’s complete withdrawal from Gaza and all the Occupied Territories.
In the U.S., it is crucial to fight for the workers and oppressed to break with the Democrats, who are financing, advising, arming and jointly waging war on the Palestinians in Gaza together with the Israeli government of hardline Zionists and outright fascists; and to oust the class-collaborationist labor bureaucracy, which for decades has chained the unions to the bosses’ parties. A prime example of this is the leadership of the United Auto Workers (UAW), which in response to clamor from the ranks, particularly in the Detroit area with its large Arab American population, called for a ceasefire in Gaza, and then turned around and endorsed “Genocide Joe” Biden for president! For their part, the Teamster tops are currently flirting with Donald Trump, who said of the war in Gaza that he would tell Israeli prime minister Netanyahu to “finish it up and do it quickly” (Haaretz, 17 March).
The contours of effective solidarity action with the Palestinian people vary from country to country. In Germany, labor action against the genocidal war must necessarily oppose not only the ferociously pro-Zionist Social Democrat/Free Democrat/Green government (which has banned many pro-Palestinian protests) and the equally rabidly pro-Israel right-wing “opposition” but also the Left Party, as all the parliamentary parties explicitly support “Israel’s right to self-defense,” the formula justifying the mass murder in Gaza. In Italy, where fascists lead a far-right-wing government, organizing effective labor solidarity will require united action by the normally fractious “rank-and-file” unions and bringing out key industrial sectors in a direct challenge to the “mainstream” confederations, which despite talk of a ceasefire are solidly pro-Israel.
Everywhere, the opportunist left seeks to build a “broad antiwar movement,” typically centered on calls for a ceasefire, in order to include dissident liberal or “progressive” elements from the bourgeois and reformist parties, who don’t necessarily oppose the war on Gaza but only its “excesses.” Rather than such “popular-front” coalitions pushing impotent pressure politics, what’s urgently needed is independent, militant class struggle against all the capitalist and governing social-democratic parties, which are all cogs in the imperialist system, and therefore, one way or another, complicit in the genocide being carried out in Gaza. Classless appeals for “peace” are a diversion in the face of implacable U.S. and Israeli mass murderers, who can only be stopped by international socialist revolution.
Activists of Class Struggle Workers Portland (above at 11 November 2023 Palestine labor solidarity rally) call to defend Gaza, defeat U.S./Israel war on Palestinians. Four Portland area unions have passed motions demanding an end to Israeli bombing of Gaza, for Israel out of West Bank and Gaza and to end to U.S. arming and funding. (Internationalist photo)
Highlighting the urgency of this independent class-struggle policy are resolutions that have been passed by four unions – Iron Workers Local 29, IUPAT (Painters) Local 10, IBEW (electrical workers) Local 48 and AFT (education) Local 111 – in the Portland, Oregon area of the U.S. Pacific Northwest. Rather than calling for a ceasefire, which would leave the Israeli in control of Gaza and which plays into the hands of the Biden administration that is now toying with the word, the resolutions, introduced by supporters of Class Struggle Workers – Portland, call for labor action to stop the shipment of arms to Israel, for “the immediate end to Israel’s bombing of Gaza, for Israel to vacate Gaza and the West Bank, and to end all arming or funding to it now” (click here or on reproductions below to read resolutions on the web site of Class Struggle Workers – Portland).
Above all the fight to halt the genocidal U.S./Israel war against the Palestinian people requires a political fight against the capitalist parties. This was addressed by the Portland Painters, who in a 2016 resolution called to break with all the bosses’ parties and build a class-struggle workers party. The call in that resolution for the national union to repudiate its endorsement of the Democratic presidential candidate should be a beacon to worker militants today as unions in the U.S. join calls for a ceasefire in Gaza, and then endorse war criminal Democrat Biden who is responsible for arming, financing and directing the genocidal war.
August 2016 Resolution of International Union of Painters and Allied Trades (IUPAT) Local 10 for a Class-Struggle Workers Party (Excerpt)
“Whereas across the country, from Oakland to Baltimore, police under Democratic mayors regularly murder black men and women with impunity, and
“Whereas the 2016 presidential election offers us the “choice” between a raving, bigoted clown and a career representative of Wall Street, and …
“Whereas Democrats and Republicans are and have always been strike-breaking, war-making parties of the bosses, and
“Whereas so long as the labor movement supports one or another party of the bosses, we will be playing a losing game, therefore be it
“Resolved that IUPAT Local 10 does not support the Democrats, Republicans, or any bosses’ parties or politicians, and
“Resolved that we call on the International Union to repudiate its endorsement of Hillary Clinton for president, and
“Resolved that we call on the labor movement to break from the Democratic Party, and build a class-struggle workers party.
The embattled Palestinian Arabs have been subjected to “ethnic cleansing” for more than three-quarters of a century, following subjugation by the British imperialists and the Ottoman Empire – and now to outright genocide by the Zionist state of Israel and its U.S. patrons. It will take a revolution to put an end to this oppression, a revolution that can only be successful by splitting and exploding Israeli society from within. This requires intransigent, internationalist class struggle, throughout the entire region. As the League for the Fourth International has emphasized since the beginning of that war, and long before that, the bottom line is that defenders of the oppressed and opponents of imperialism must stand foursquare with the Palestinian people against the Zionist oppressors and their state, and that the only solution that promises a just and equitable future to the two peoples inhabiting this tiny land is for an Arab-Hebrew Palestinian workers state, in a socialist federation of the Middle East.
All out for militant international workers action on May Day in solidarity with the Palestinian people against the genocidal U.S./Israel war! ■
(28 March 2024 NYC Protest Versus Biden Fundraiser)
Protesters demanding a ceasefire in Gaza interrupt U.S. President Joe Biden’s speech at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. January 8, 2024.
President Joe Biden, better known as Genocide Joe, in cooperation with a perfunctory legislative branch has mired the American people in savage, reckless, costly, and unpopular wars. The White House’s catastrophic foreign policy may force American society to a breaking point.
The American public is increasingly rejecting Washington’s proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, which has already cost well over $100 billion, put the world on the brink of nuclear annihilation, and seen Ukrainians killed or injured by the hundreds of thousands.
As Americans are more concerned with simultaneous crises of inflation, healthcare, immigration, and crime, according to the latest Harris poll, 70% of Americans oppose Biden’s policy of unending military aid going to the Ukrainian meat grinder and instead want a diplomatic settlement.
The disconnect between those living in the country and those in Washington DC is highlighted by members of the U.S. Senate openly salivating about drawing Russian blood and funneling tens of billions of dollars into the military-industrial complex.
Arch-neocon and top State Department official Victoria Nuland is threatening Moscow that the United States will assist Ukraine to “accelerate [its] asymmetric warfare” and provide “nasty surprises on the battlefield.” At the same time, French President Emmanuel Macron says deploying NATO troops to Ukraine to fight Russia should not be off the table.
Subsequent to a meeting with other leaders in Europe concerning the effort to weaken Russia with the Ukrainian battering ram, Macron declared, “There’s no consensus today to send in an official, endorsed manner troops on the ground. But in terms of dynamics, nothing can be ruled out.”
In response to Macron’s bluster, Russian President Vladimir Putin proclaimed in a speech to the Federal Assembly “[our] strategic nuclear forces are on full combat alert, and the ability to use them is assured.” The Russian leader continued, “Now they have started talking about the possibility of deploying NATO military contingents to Ukraine…They must grasp that we also have weapons—yes, they know this, as I have just said—capable of striking targets on their territory.”
Concurrently, the head of the German Air Force has been caught on a leaked tape discussing with his officers plans to provide Taurus missiles to Kiev, weapons which have a range of roughly 300 miles, in hopes of carrying out attacks against Russia. London confirmed last week that “a small number” of British troops are on the ground “supporting the armed forces of Ukraine.”
Despite Putin’s ominous remarks and the sentiments of the American people, NATO is launching massive war games, including on Russia’s borders, in preparation for war with Moscow. As the Libertarian Institute’s News Editor Kyle Anzalone reports, “[These] latest drills are a part of NATO’s Steadfast Defender military exercises—the bloc’s largest series of war games, which will see over 90,000 troops participate in about a dozen maneuvers from January through August.”
Biden’s unpopular war with Russia has brought humanity closer to a nuclear holocaust than ever before. But perhaps more widely despised and devastating to the American soul is the genocidal campaign unleashed by Israel against the Palestinian Muslims and Christians inhabiting the besieged Gaza Strip.
Per a recent Data For Progress poll, two-thirds of the American population oppose the Biden administration’s unconditional support for Israel and instead want the White House to back a permanent ceasefire. 77% of Democrats, 69% of Independents, and a staggering 56% of Republicans agree regarding this issue.
However, Israel’s globally livestreamed mass killing spree—primarily against women and children—is fully supported by the White House. The same government which practically every member of America’s political class swears is “our greatest ally” has cut Gaza off from food, water, fuel, and electricity. Israel is destroying Gaza, making it uninhabitable by bombing cities, neighborhoods, apartments, homes, schools, universities, hospitals, ambulances, UN shelters, mosques, churches, greenhouses, orchards, and refugee camps.
So far, the Israeli apartheid army has butchered over 30,000 people, including more than 12,000 children. Unfortunately, these confirmed figures paint a picture less macabre than reality, as thousands of men, women, and children are buried beneath rubble and presumed dead. One can only imagine what the final death toll and excess death rate will be.
Often using dystopian AI programs to select targets, the United States and Israel have leveled a greater percentage of infrastructure in Gaza than the Allied bombings in Dresden during World War II. TheGuardian recently reported, “As of 17 January, analysis of satellite data by Corey Scher of the City University of New York and Jamon Van Den Hoek of Oregon State University reveals that between 50% and 62% of all buildings in Gaza have likely been damaged or destroyed.”
Gaza’s 2.3 million residents, approximately half of which are children, have been bombed everywhere. At times, this has included 2,000-pound bombs raining down on the Israeli-designated safe zones. Virtually every city in Gaza has been eradicated except Rafah, where 1.5 million refugees have fled to and which the Israeli war cabinet plans to hit with a blitzkrieg this month.
Social media feeds in every American household have been flooded with graphic videos and images showing countless Palestinian babies, children, women, elderly people, and men being blown to bits, killed, shot, mutilated, or permanently disfigured with our weaponry.
Last week, in what is known now as the “Flour Massacre,” the Israeli occupation opened fire killing over a hundred Palestinians and injuring hundreds more near Gaza City as they desperately attempted to obtain what they could from a trickle of aid that was allowed into the Strip.
Biden, previously known as “Israel’s man in Washington,” is fond of reciting his assertion that “If Israel didn’t exist, [the United States] would have to invent it.” But each day, new horrors and atrocities are unearthed, revealing Israel to be nothing more than a rogue state (incidentally armed with dozens, if not hundreds, of nuclear weapons).
Caitlin Johnstone perfectly sums up the reaction of normal people with a conscience to the unending stream of Israeli barbarism reported daily:
So it turns out the IDF has been running a Telegram channel featuring homemade snuff films in which Gazans are brutally murdered by Israeli forces, captioned with celebrations of the gore and pain therein like “Burning their mother…You won’t believe the video we got! You can hear their bones crunch.” The IDF had previously denied any association with the channel, but Haaretz now reports that it was directly run by an IDF psychological warfare unit.
This is one of those many, many times where Israel is so awful that at first you’re not sure what you’re looking at. You think you must be misreading the report. Then you read it again and go “Oh wow, that’s SO much worse than I would have guessed.”
However bad you think Israel is, you can always be sure that information will come out later that proves it’s even worse.
Palestinians are being subjected to inhumane torture as well. After TheNew York Times analyzed a report from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), the paper reported, “Detainees said they were beaten, stripped, robbed, blindfolded, sexually abused, and denied access to lawyers and doctors, often for more than a month.”
The Times article continues, “Some detainees, according to the report, told UNRWA investigators that they had often been beaten on open wounds, had been held for hours in painful stress positions, and had been attacked by military dogs.”
One prisoner was “beaten so badly that his genitals turned blue and that there was still blood present in his urine…guards made him sleep naked in the open air, next to a fan blowing cold air, and played music so loudly that his ear bled.”
This coincides with numerous Israeli media reports of torture inflicted against the occupied Palestinians at the hands of their Zionist army captors. In January, +972 Magazine reported on the hellish scenes inside Israeli detention centers holding untold numbers of civilians rounded up in Gaza:
“Israeli soldiers subjected Palestinian detainees to electric shocks, burned their skin with lighters, spat in their mouths, and deprived them of sleep, food, and access to bathrooms until they defecated on themselves. Many were tied to a fence for hours, handcuffed, and blindfolded for most of the day…Several people are known to have died as a result of being held in these conditions.”
Israel has the population of Gaza trapped in an open-air concentration camp, with 75% of Palestinians crammed into a single city. More than 90% of the Palestinians living in the Strip have been internally displaced amidst the Israeli onslaught.
It is a repudiation of every treasured American value for our government to make all of us a party to such atrocities under any conditions.
The whole world sees this for what it is. Half of Americans who voted for Biden in 2020 believe he is complicit in genocide. Indeed, the International Court of Justice has issued a preliminary ruling that Israel’s actions may plausibly constitute genocide. Nevertheless, our Congress is committed to financing this systematic destruction of Gaza with another $14 billion of the American people’s hard-earned money.
Palestinians are not only being ripped apart with American bombs and shells, they are being starved to death by the hundreds of thousands. As Antiwar.com News Editor Dave DeCamp reports:
At least 16 Palestinian children have starved to death in the Gaza Strip over the past few days due to the US-backed Israeli siege, and the UN’s child relief agency is warning that the number of child deaths will “rapidly increase” if conditions don’t immediately change.
“Last week, we warned that an explosion in child deaths was imminent if the burgeoning nutrition crisis wasn’t resolved,” said Adele Khodr, UNICEF’s director for the Middle East and North Africa. “Now, the child deaths we feared are here and are likely to rapidly increase unless the war ends and obstacles to humanitarian relief are immediately resolved.”
The latest Palestinian child reported to die of hunger was Yazan al-Kafarna, a 10-year-old with cerebral palsy who was in the al-Najjar Hospital in Rafah. Fifteen children have also died of malnutrition and dehydration at the Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza.
The UN has previously warned that Gaza’s entire population of about 2.2 million people is facing “crisis” levels of food insecurity, and at least 576,000 Palestinians in Gaza are “facing catastrophic levels of deprivation and starvation.”
Despite the dire situation, the State Department reaffirmed on Monday that it will continue to provide military assistance for Israel’s genocidal war.
The last vestiges of our deluded American exceptionalism burned up in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington D.C. with Aaron Bushnell last month. As the former member of the U.S. Air Force stated before his self-immolation in protest of the genocide in Gaza, “this is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.”
But regardless of what excuses White House spokespeople are able to conjure up in an attempt to hide the blood on their hands, this is not normal and the American people will never accept it. As evidenced by the public opinion polls and protest movements across the country, Biden will pay dearly in the coming election for his role in the mass murder ongoing in Palestine.
NBC News revealed the Biden reelection team has taken “extraordinary steps” to avoid antiwar protesters including “by making [their events] smaller, withholding their precise locations from the media and the public until he arrives, and avoiding college campuses.”
Additionally, the more than 100,000 “uncommitted” protest votes in the Michigan Democratic primary last week foreshadows things to come for Genocide Joe and the Democratic Party establishment. Demonstrators camped out daily in front of Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s residence chant “Blinken! Blinken! We see you and all the war crimes that you do!”
In his last words, Bushnell said he could “no longer be complicit in genocide.” His message was one that resonates with perhaps a majority of Americans. But in Washington, his message could not be more alien.
In a video last month, Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN) was told by a peace activist on Capitol Hill, “I’ve seen the footage of shredded children’s bodies. That’s my taxpayer dollars that are going to bomb those kids.” Ogles responded proudly, “I think we should kill ’em all, if that makes you feel better.”
An American antiwar populace cannot be ruled by unrepentant and unAmerican warmongers in perpetuity; a breaking point cannot come soon enough.
The Grayzone has obtained slides from a confidential Israel lobby presentation based on data from Republican pollster Frank Luntz. They contain talking points for politicians and public figures seeking to justify Israel’s assault on the Gaza Strip.
Two prominent pro-Israel lobby groups are holding private briefings in New York City to coach elected officials and well-known figures on how to influence public opinion in favor of the Israeli military’s rampage in Gaza, The Grayzone can reveal. These PR sessions, convened by the UJA-Federation and Jewish Community Relations Council, rely on data collected by Frank Luntz, a veteran Republican pollster and pundit.
A source who was present during several meetings provided Luntz’s slides to The Grayzone. Participants were informed that the presentations and data contained in the slides were strictly confidential, the source said.
“This is NOT helpful,” Luntz stated in response to an email from The Grayzone requesting his comment on the private meetings.
The Luntz-tested presentations on the war in Gaza urge politicians to avoid trumpeting America’s supposedly shared democratic values with Israel, and focus instead on deploying “The Language of War with Hamas.” According to this framing, they must deploy incendiary language painting Hamas as a “brutal and savage…organization of hate” which has “raped women,” while insisting Israel is engaged in “a war for humanity.”
On his personal website, Luntz markets himself as “one of the most honored communications professionals in America today.” He has earned a small fortune crafting talking points for Republican Party heavyweights and scandal-stained corporate clients like Enron, the energy company which collapsed after engineering California’s energy crisis. Following the financial crash of 2008-09, Luntz advised the GOP on shielding the party’s big business donors from scrutiny. At around the same time, he furnished the Republican Governor’s Association with advice on undermining Occupy Wall Street, the movement demanding accountability for the banking industry’s malfeasance.
The celebrity GOP pollster has moonlighted as a consultant for the Israel lobby, producing a “Global Language Dictionary” for the now-defunct Israel Project in the aftermath of the brutal 2008-09 attack on Gaza known as Operation Cast Lead. In his propaganda handbook, Luntz counseled “leaders who are on the front lines of fighting the media war for Israel” to shy from debates related to the illegal occupation of Palestine.
“Avoid talking about borders in terms of pre- or post-1967,” he advised, “because it only serves to remind Americans of Israel’s military history. Particularly on the left, this does you harm.”
Luntz’s Gaza war presentation puts his poll-tested tactics back in the Israel lobby’s hands, urging pro-Israel public figures to stay on the attack with incendiary language and shocking allegations against their enemies.
In one focus group, Luntz asked participants to state which alleged act by Hamas on October 7 “bothers you more.” After being presented with a laundry list of alleged atrocities, a majority declared that they were most upset by the claim that Hamas “raped civilians” – 19 percent than those who expressed outrage that Hamas supposedly “exterminated civilians.”
Data like this apparently influenced the Israeli government to launch an obsessive but still unsuccessful campaign to prove that Hamas carried out sexual assault on a systematic basis on October 7. Initiated at Israel’s United Nations mission in December 2023 with speeches by neoliberal tech oligarch Sheryl Sandberg and former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a recipient of hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations and speaking fees from Israel lobby organizations, Tel Aviv’s propaganda blitz has yet to produce a single self-identified victim of sexual assault by Hamas. A March 5 report by UN Special Representative on Sexual Violence Pramila Patten did not contain one direct testimony of sexual assault on October 7. What’s more, Patten’s team said they found “no digital evidence specifically depicting acts of sexual violence.”
To further the demonization of Palestinians, the Luntz-crafted slides advise that “Israel’s best response is the brainwashed children of Hamas spewing hatred towards Jews (even more than condemning Israelis) with words they don’t know the meaning of and can’t even pronounce.”
The portrayal of the youth of Gaza as ignorant tools of Hamas is clearly intended to deflect from Israel’s industrial-scale slaughter of some 15,000 children in the Gaza Strip since October 7, as well as the wounding, orphaning and starving of countless more in the besieged territory.
To make their arguments stick, Luntz recommends pro-Israel forces avoid the exterminationist language favored by Israeli officials who have called, for example, to “erase” the population of Gaza, and to instead advocate for “an efficient, effective approach” to eliminating Hamas.
At the same time, veteran pollster acknowledges that Republican voters prefer phrases which imply maximalist violence, like “eradicate” and “obliterate,” while sanitized terms like “neutralize” appeal more to Democrats. Republican presidential candidates Nikki Haley and Donald Trump have showcased similar focus-grouped rhetoric with their calls to “finish them” and “finish the problem” in Gaza.
As in past Israel-lobby seminars, Luntz has urged pro-Israel forces to divert from arguments about Israel’s military occupation of Palestinian territory by deploying banal slogans like, “Israelis have a right to defend themselves.”
“This is about Israelis,” a Luntz-crafted slide declares, “not about territory.”
According to the pollster’s research, pro-Israel politicians should avoid references to “Israel” entirely and instead discuss “Israelis” when “setting the context” for a debate over the war in Gaza.
The recommended tweak hints at the PR crisis Israel lobby forces have encountered since Israel’s military invaded and besieged Gaza, leaving most of its residents homeless, placing its entire public health and sanitation system out of service, and exterminating over 2% of the overall population, according to conservative death toll estimates.
One slide demonstrates that only a small sliver of those polled by Luntz buy into the Israeli government’s mantra that “Hamas is ISIS.” The same visual aid counsels pro-Israel officials to shy from the phrases “genuine accuracy” and “hard evidence,” and allude more generally to “the truth” when discussing Israel’s actions.
Luntz acknowledges Israel’s mounting PR problems in a slide identifying the most powerful tactics employed by Palestine solidarity activists. “Israelis attacking Israel is the second most potent weapon against Israel,” the visual display reads beside a photo of a protest by Jewish Voices for Peace, a US-based Jewish organization dedicated to ending Israel’s occupation of Palestine.
“The most potent” tactic in mobilizing opposition to Israel’s assault on Gaza, according to Luntz, “is the visual destruction of Gaza and the human toll.” The slide inadvertently acknowledges the cruelty of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, displaying a bombed out apartment building with clearly anguished women and children fleeing in the foreground.
But Luntz assures his audience, “It ‘looks like a genocide’ even though the damage has nothing to do with the definition.”
According to this logic, the American public can become more tolerant of copiously documented crimes against humanity if they are simply told not to believe their lying eyes.
Palestinian territory– The Israeli army’s repeated killings of Palestinian civilians by deliberately running them over alive with military vehicles was vehemently denounced by Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor on Sunday, as was the widespread destruction of civilian property. These crimes are part of Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, the rights group said, ongoing since 7 October 2023.
Euro-Med Monitor documented the Israeli army’s killing of a Palestinian man who was deliberately run over in Gaza City’s Al-Zaytoun neighbourhood on 29 February after he was arrested. The man was subjected to harsh interrogation by members of the Israeli army, who bound his hands with plastic zip-tie handcuffs before running him over with a military vehicle from the bottom to the top of his body.
The incident occurred on the main Salah al-Din Street in the Zaytoun neighbourhood, according to eyewitnesses who spoke to the Euro-Med Monitor team. Israeli soldiers restrained the victim’s hands before they crushed him, and tramped on his body from the legs up, confirming that he was alive during the incident. To guarantee thorough and complete crushing, the victim was placed on asphalt rather than in an adjacent sandy area.
The victim’s mutilated body and the surrounding area bear obvious signs that a military bulldozer or tank was present. It appears that the victim was purposefully stripped of his clothes, as he was seen wearing only his underpants at the time of his death.
The ramming operation occurred before the Israeli army withdrew to the outskirts of the Zaytoun neighbourhood two days ago, as evidenced by the condition of the entrails and other body parts, which had not yet decomposed when the case was documented.
Another documented incident took place on 23 January, when an Israeli tank ran over members of the Ghannam family while they were sleeping in a shelter caravan in the Taiba Towers area of Khan Younis. As a result, a man and his eldest daughter were killed, and his remaining three children and wife were injured. Amina, his 13-year-old daughter, confirmed that her father and older sister were killed when an Israeli tank unexpectedly and repeatedly ran over the caravan, where the family had been sleeping. While her mother and two other siblings survived the attack, Amina experienced extreme pressure in her eyes, nearly losing her sight.
Euro-Med Monitor also documented Israeli tanks and bulldozers running over and crushing displaced people inside their tents in Beit Lahia’s Kamal Adwan Hospital courtyard on 16 December 2023. Several people were killed during the incident, including individuals who were initially injured and did not ultimately survive. The corpses of those who had been previously buried in the courtyard were also crushed in the 16 December incident, stated the rights group.
More recently, a Palestinian family survived a 20 February running attack after Israeli tracks ran over their tent on the shore of the Khan Yunis Sea. A female civilian said that she was shocked by the tank suddenly running over her tent.
In addition, Euro-Med Monitor has documented numerous incidents of Israeli army tanks destroying civilian property, particularly cars, during Israel’s ground incursions into different parts of the Gaza Strip. Most of these tank attacks have targeted vehicles parked in the streets without any military affiliation, indicating the Israeli army’s deliberate and systematic destruction of Palestinian property.
Euro-Med Monitor affirmed that all of these violations are part of a larger Israeli effort to dehumanise every Palestinian in the Gaza Strip, in order to justifiy and normalise the crimes being committed against them. Crushing civilians with tanks is just one of the many cruel ways the Israeli army murders Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, disregarding their humanity, suffering, and dignity. These practices reflect the desire of Israel’s government and military to collectively punish the Palestinian people, with the aim of eliminating, intimidating, and/or harming them physically and psychologically. These crimes come alongside a public incitement campaign by Israeli officials, media figures, and settlers calling for the annihilation of Palestinians in Gaza, and are also a result of the total impunity enjoyed by the perpetrators—evident by the absence of any meaningful action being taken to hold them accountable by any party or at any level.
The human rights organisation warned that the Israeli army has escalated its premeditated murders, extrajudicial executions, and judicial killings against Palestinian civilians since 7 October through direct targeting with snipers, drones, and running operations in various regions of the Gaza Strip. According to Euro-Med Monitor, these actions amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity under the Rome Statute Basic Law of the International Criminal Court (ICC).
There is no justification for the Israeli army to commit these serious crimes, Euro-Med Monitor confirmed. Even its claim that some of the aforementioned acts were directed towards Palestinian fighters does not release Israel from criminal responsibility, seeing as international law protects both civilians and fighters who have given up or lost all means of defense, with the Rome Statute classifying their killing or wounding as war crimes. The Israeli army’s deliberate and widespread destruction of Palestinian property, carried out in an irresponsible manner and without military necessity, also qualifies as a war crime under the Rome Statute.
In parallel to taking all necessary steps to ensure Israel’s accountability for the crimes it commits against the Palestinian people, Euro-Med Monitor reiterated its call for the international community to immediately implement its international obligations to stop the genocide that Israel has been committing against all Palestinians in the Gaza Strip for roughly five months now.
In light of the fact that the ICC has not yet taken any action or filed any charges in relation to the investigations it is supposed to be carrying out into the situation in the Gaza Strip, Euro-Med Monitor expressed deep concern about the ICC Prosecutor’s performance regarding the genocide taking place there. Genocide is one of the most serious international crimes, with catastrophic consequences for civilians. The Court has not said anything about the crimes committed by Israel in the Gaza Strip, even in the face of a plethora of evidence presented by Israeli officials and soldiers themselves, as well as warnings and documentary reports from international organisations, the United Nations and its experts, and the governments of many other nations. The ICC’s last update on the situation in Palestine was posted on 17 November 17 on its official website. This raises serious questions and concerns about its independence and integrity, as well as the extent to which it can perform its duties without becoming politicised or impacted by standards of duality and selective justice.
Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor called for the formation of an independent international investigation committee specialising in Israel’s ongoing military attack on the Gaza Strip. It also urged the international community to enable the work of a separate independent international investigation committee concerned with the Occupied Palestinian Territory, formed in 2021, to carry out its work by ensuring its access to the Strip and opening the necessary investigations into all crimes and violations committed against Palestinians there, including the deliberate killing and extrajudicial execution of civilians.
The rights group also demanded that the Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions visit the Gaza Strip as soon as feasible to look into the illegal killings that fall under the purview of his substantive mandate.
Last October 18, 2023, the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions (PGFTU) issued an urgent appeal notably “calling on trade unions in relevant industries: 1) To refuse to build weapons destined for Israel. 2) To refuse to transport weapons to Israel. 3) To pass motions in their trade union to this effect,” as well as to take action against companies complicit with the Israeli siege, to pressure governments to stop military trade with Israel “and, in the case of the U.S., stop funding it.”
In response, on October 30, five Belgian transport unions issued a joint statement saying they were refusing to load or unload arms shipments heading to the war zone. And on November 6, the Barcelona dock workers union announced it would “not permit activity in our port of ships containing war materiel,” while calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.
In Britain, Canada and elsewhere unions have passed motions and there have been protests outside Israeli companies, notably the “defense” contractor Elbit. In Italy, rank-and-file dock unions in Genoa and other ports actually stopped operations with Israeli ships and held a national one-day strike against the war on Gaza on November 17 that shut down hundreds of warehouses in logistics hubs. In Sydney, the Maritime Union of Australia (MUA) joined protests against Israeli ZIM Lines ships and has called for an immediate ceasefire. In January, the 20-million-member International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF) issued a statement, “Global Unions Call for Unified Action Following IJC Ruling on Gaza Genocide Case.” Sounds good, but there is no call for labor action, just an appeal to the U.N. and “world leaders.”
In the United States, beginning in October the United Electrical Workers (UE) circulated a petition to other unions with demands for a ceasefire and restoration of food, fuel, water and electricity to Gaza, demands that were taken up by the United Auto Workers (UAW), American Postal Workers Union (APWU), National Nurses Union (NNU), Service Employees (SEIU), Painters (IUPAT), Flight Attendants (AFA) and even the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and National Education Association (NEA). But these appeals were not opposed to Israel’s war on Gaza as such, and in the case of the UAW specifically were rendered moot by its endorsement of warmonger Democrat Biden, who has emphatically backed and enabled the Israeli slaughter, for president. The rest of the liberal union leaders will certainly follow suit.
As for the national AFL-CIO, after first quashing a ceasefire call by a local labor council in Washington State last October, on February 8, 2024, it issued a statement that begins by “condemn[ing] the attacks by Hamas,” does not oppose the Israeli assault on Gaza, and calls for the release of Israeli hostages held in Gaza but not for freeing the more than 8,000 Palestinians held hostage in Israeli prisons. In short, this is a pro-war statement – but what else can you expect from the outfit whose international “labor” operations in conjunction with U.S. intelligence agencies earned it the nickname “AFL-CIA” in much of the world?
The International Dockworkers Council (IDC), which in 2014 and 2021 issued sharp denunciations of Israeli massacres in Gaza, has said nothing about the genocide currently under way. The only recent “action” by the IDC, now headed by Dennis Daggett (son of ILA president Harold Daggett), was a statement in November against “any kind of war or confrontation” that didn’t even mention Gaza, and a January visit to Pope Francis in the Vatican, where likewise no mention of Gaza was reported.
(Dennis Daggett – International Dockworkers Council Head)
In contrast to the complicit silence of the ILA and ILWU leaders in the U.S., the Canadian section of the ILWU on December 20 issued a brief statement calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and expressing “solidarity with the Palestine General Federation of Trade Unions.” It did not, however, call for any specific action, such as boycotting war materiel. Not coincidentally, the week before, the Canadian government voted for a ceasefire resolution in the United Nations. In January, Canadian ILA Locals 273 (St. John, New Brunswick) and 1953 (St. John’s, Newfoundland) took a stand for a ceasefire in Gaza. The reality is that almost all trade-union leaderships are part of a privileged labor bureaucracy that is ultimately beholden to the capitalist-imperialist rulers. Occasionally some may break ranks, particularly when they as well as the workers organizations they lead are under attack. But mostly that will reflect divisions in the ruling class, as with “antiwar” Democrats over Vietnam.
Israel’s loyal supporters in the West combat rising world indignation over the suffering of the Palestinian people by changing the subject.
When Gazan families are buried under the rubble of their homes, it’s not about the plight of the dispossessed Palestinians; it’s about eternal Jewish victims; it’s about “Islamic terrorism;” or it’s about a threat to “Western values.”
That is the line taken by most of the French media and political class.
Or there is recourse to Biblical story-telling, featuring vengeance, ethnic slaughter and prophecy of doom. In Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declares a struggle between good and evil:
“We are the people of the light, they are the people of darkness and light shall triumph over darkness . Now my role is to lead all Israelis to an overpowering victory… We shall realize the prophecy of Isaiah…”
In the United States of America, the crazed prophecies of the Israeli leader find support from an American variant of Judeo-Christianity, more Judeo than Christian, whose followers are taught to believe that gentle Jesus will zoom back to earth as a murderous Avenger while his faithful float up to heaven.
France & the Shoah
Skeptical France is very far from such fantasies. French support to Israel is longstanding and political, but tinged with semi-religious devotion rooted in recent history.
France is officially, even ostentatiously, a secular nation, considerably de-christianized over the past two hundred years.
To a unique extent, over the past half century, this religious void has been filled by the sacred remembrance of the Shoah, as the Holocaust is usually called here.
It all began in 1954 when 27-year-old Jewish journalist named Eliezer Wiesel met the 70-year-old Catholic novelist François Mauriac in Paris.
Mauriac was deeply moved by Wiesel’s “resurrection” from his experience as a prisoner in Auschwitz, seeing him as a Christ figure. For Mauriac, the sacrifice of the Jews recalled the Crucifixion of Jesus.
With help from the prominent French writer, Wiesel transformed his copious Yiddish notes into a French memoir, La Nuit (Night), the testimony that transformed him into a major spiritual figure of the post-World War II era.
It was Mauriac, the devout Christian, who saw in Wiesel and his people the parallels with Christianity, which as the Shoah was destined to take on the attributes of a state religion in France as memories of the Nazi occupation were transformed into sacred myth.
An Alliance Against Arab Nationalism
When the Nazis invaded France, there were approximately 320,000 Jewish people living in France, including a large number of foreign nationals who had fled from anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe.
Those unfortunate exiles made up the bulk of the 74,000 Jews who were brutally rounded up and deported under German occupation. These deportations are the principal factual basis for what developed into a sense of national responsibility for the Shoah comparable to that of Germany itself.
However, of all Nazi-occupied countries, France is the country where the largest percentage of Jews escaped Nazi deportations. An estimated 75 percent of Jews survived the occupation without being deported, including around 90 percent of Jews with French citizenship.
The reasons for this are controversial, but one result is that France has the largest Jewish population in Europe today — around half a million, the third largest Jewish population in the world, although far behind Israel or the United States (with around 7 million each).
In recent years, many Jews have moved to Germany from Russia and from Israel itself (118,000 altogether), making France and Germany the home to more Jews than any other member state of the European Union. They are also the countries where institutionalized repentance for the Shoah is most developed.
A difference is that a number of prominent Jews in Germany are sharply critical of Israel (which may get them in trouble with the law), whereas the French Jewish community is more solidly Zionist. The politically influential Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France (CRIF), a sort of French AIPAC, fiercely defends Israeli interests.
A significant peculiarity of France is that Europe’s largest Jewish population is cohabitating with continental Europe’s largest population of Muslim origin, mostly Arab. Although France officially avoids ethnic or racial counting, this population is estimated at around 15 million.
While politically disorganized, this community is assumed — especially by Jewish community leaders — to be hostile to Israel. The potential for conflict between these two communities — one very small and very influential, the other very large and disparate — has for years haunted French political leaders.
France & Arab Nationalism
Guy Mollet, by then former prime minister of France, with his wife, on right, and the Israeli politician Golda Meir, on left, during Israel’s Independence Day Parade in Tel Aviv, May 13, 1959. (Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)
When the Jewish State was just a dream, it was seen by some as a sort of socialist project, based on the kibbutz. Building on long standing friendly relations between French Socialists and Zionism, France was the closest Western ally of the new State of Israel.
In 1954, the government of Socialist Prime Minister Guy Mollet agreed to sell Israel whatever military equipment it wanted. France even helped Israel develop nuclear weapons.
At that time, Tel Aviv and Paris were allied against Arab nationalism, inasmuch as secular, left-leaning Arab States (Egypt, Syria, Iraq) sympathized with both the Palestinians and the rising national liberation movement in French Algeria.
But this changed under Charles De Gaulle, who conceded Algerian independence in 1962, put an arms embargo on the region in 1967 and sought to build balanced relations with Arab States as part of an effort to develop friendly, post-colonial relations with the Global South.
In June 1967, Israel’s lightning victory in the Six Days War was celebrated in the streets of Paris by joyous horn honking. But President De Gaulle had opposed the Israeli expansion and called for a sustainable peace based on evacuation of territories conquered by Israel and mutual recognition by the belligerent states.
In a remarkable press conference on Nov. 27, 1967 in Paris, De Gaulle expressed ongoing support for the existence of Israel as a fait accompli while expressing strong misgivings about the future of Jewish rule over Palestinian territories.
After recalling the shared admiration for the Jewish people and sympathy for their suffering, De Gaulle observed, in respect to the creation of a Jewish state, that:
“Some even dreaded that the Jews, up to then dispersed, but who remained what they had always been, that is an elite people, self-confident and domineering, when once reunited on the site of their ancient greatness, might come to transform the highly moving wishes expressed for nineteen centuries into an ardent and conquering ambition.”
Charles de Gaulle in London delivering a BBC radio broadcast in 1941. (Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)
De Gaulle recalled that he had promised that France would defend Israel from any Arab attack, but implored Israel not to use its advantage to attack its Arab neighbors.
“We know that France’s voice was not heard. Israel having attacked, in six days of combat seized the objectives it wished to attain. Now, on the captured territories, it is organizing an occupation which cannot go on without oppression, repression, expulsions, and a resistance to all that which it will call terrorism.”
In response to these statements, prominent Jewish intellectuals and community leaders ceased to revere De Gaulle as the leader of the Resistance. Around this time, the Resistance itself as national patriotic myth was rapidly discredited as the public imagination of Nazi Occupation came to center on the Holocaust.
Cinema played a role. In 1967, the documentary film by Marcel Ophuls, “The Sorrow and the Pity”, convinced audiences that collaboration rather than Resistance had overwhelmingly dominated occupied France. The film had a strong impact on public opinion, not least on young leftists who the following year carried out a libertarian revolt targeting the two political heirs to the Resistance: the French Communist Party and President Charles De Gaulle.
In the revisionist mood of the time, national pride stemming from the Resistance gave way to national shame over the deportation of Jews. This guilt became a sort of public ritual for audiences who watched Claude Lanzmann’s nine-hour long documentary “Shoah,” released in 1985. In 1990, France adopted a measure called the Gayssot law which can lead to heavy fines and even imprisonment for any questioning of the official version of the Holocaust.
As I wrote in my book Circle in the Darkness, heresy defines religion. A French citizen can deny the existence of Napoleon, or any other historic event, but any questioning of the official version of the Shoah is blasphemy. Thus by sacralizing a unique historic event, the Gayssot law in effect established the Shoah as a state religion.
The Shoah is celebrated officially and unofficially, not only in the annual Shoah commemoration but almost constantly in school rooms, trips to Auschwitz, radio and television programs, books and films. It has de facto replaced Christianity, which had succumbed to laïcité (secularism) over a century ago, as the State religion. It has its martyrs and saints, its holy scripture, its rituals, its pilgrimages, everything that Christianity had except redemption.
Expanding Role of Political Islam
Meanwhile, France’s post-war industrial buildup drew thousands of workers from Algeria.
It wasn’t until new laws in the 1970s allowed “family reunion” that regrouping of foreign workers with wives and children began to create large immigrant neighborhoods, especially in the suburbs of Paris and other large cities, with their own ethnically distinct religious practices, food and dress, especially veiled women, clashing visibly with French customs.
The growth of these communities had a strong impact on the political environment. The National Front, a coalition of far right groups led by Jean-Marie Le Pen, called for stopping immigration, and the new left issued from the May ’68 movement became their champions.
In the early 1980s, in order to accommodate European unification, Socialist President François Mitterrand abandoned the program of nationalizations and social measures for which he had been elected in coalition with the French Communist Party (PCF).
The PCF left the coalition and subsequently lost its influential role both in assimilating foreign workers and in opposing unlimited immigration. The Socialists thereupon adopted human rights and antiracism as their defining issues, condemning opposition to immigration as racist. Accused of anti-Semitism, the National Front was condemned as a pariah with no fit place in the Republic. This condemnation was ensured by Le Pen’s conviction under the Gayssot law for having stated, in an interview, that gas chambers were “a detail of World War II.”
While the left has increasingly adopted an “open border” acceptance of immigration, it has increasingly advocated measures to ban Muslim customs seen to violate the official French doctrine of laïcité.
French laïcité was institutionalized by the 1905 law on the separation of Church and State, which finally deprived the Catholic Church of its traditional role in education. In response to an apparent growth of religious practice among younger Muslims, laïcité was revitalized by banning religious identity signaling in public schools, notably by prohibiting school girls from wearing Muslim headscarves to cover their hair. This focus on female dress later produced a ban on wearing the burka in public. While intended to promote cultural assimilation, such measures can also feed Muslim resentment at being a discriminated minority.
Western Schizophrenia Toward Islam
Palestinian protestors confront Israeli troops in Gaza City in 1987, during the First Intifada. (Efi Sharir / Israel Press and Photo Agency, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0)
In 1979, Western attitudes toward Islam entered their drastically schizophrenic period, decrying the Islamic Revolution in Iran as a political and human rights disaster, while giving full support to Islamic Mujahidin in neighboring Afghanistan.
French political exhibitionist Bernard Henri Lévy was a most zealous supporter of Afghan Muslims opposing the Russian incursion which failed to save modernizing progressive forces in Kabul.
It was President Jimmy Carter’s chief strategist Zbigniew Brzezinski who saw the potential of militant Islam to defeat Soviet influence in Central Asia. In the 1990s, the United States secretly backed illegal arming of Mujahideen to fight on the Islamic side in Bosnia, against Serbia, considered in Washington a miniature Russia. For leaders of the enlightened West, the most medieval expressions of Islam were considered a useful tool against the rival enlightenment in the East, based on Marxism.
Israel’s initial enemies were linked to secular Arab nationalism: the Popular Liberation Forces (PLF), Fatah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). In Gaza, the local branch of the Moslem Brotherhood, banned in Egypt and hostile to secular groups, looked harmless, especially since its leader, Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, was a quadriplegic confined to a wheelchair and half blind.
Yassin built an Islamic center, called the Mujamma, which gained popularity by a variety of social and charitable activities. The Israeli overlords favored this development as it rivaled the secular resistance groups. Israel officially recognized the Mujamma in 1979 and the number of mosques in Gaza doubled under Israeli administration.
“For leaders of the enlightened West, the most medieval expressions of Islam were considered a useful tool against the rival enlightenment in the East, based on Marxism.”
It was only during the Palestinian uprising of December 1987, known as the First Intifada, that Sheikh Yassin created Hamas, dedicated to Islamist resistance. Close to the people through its cultural and sports activities, the Islamic organization had a popular base that eventually led to electoral success in Gaza against the secular Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 2006.
The complicated U.S. instrumentalization of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, the Islamist revolution in Iran, U.S. support to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq against Iran before waging war against Saddam Hussein, led in mysterious ways to the dramatic Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon, whose one clear political effect was to cement the U.S.-NATO-Israeli alliance against “Islamic terrorism.”
This term has involved confounding different, often mutually hostile, groups with each other as well as falsely associating peaceful Muslims with armed groups. Israeli leaders had always denounced Palestine resisters as terrorists, including those who were Christian. But Islamist terrorism was a threat that made it easier to identify Israel as the front line in defense of Western Judeo-Christian civilization.
Oct. 8, 2023: Ruins left by Israeli airstrikes in Khan Younis in the southern of Gaza strip. (Mahmoud Fareed, Wafa for APAimages)
From then on, the United States and its NATO followers have ravaged the Middle East, using Islamist extremism as official enemy or factual ally, to destroy the three most secular and pro-Palestinian States in the region, Iraq, Libya and Syria — executing Saddam Hussein, murdering Moammer Gaddafi and persisting in illegal occupation and sanctions against Syria aimed at overthrowing Bashir al Assad.
Terrorist Attacks in France
Following the Gaullist tradition, President Jacques Chirac kept France out of the U.S.-led 2003 invasion of Iraq. But subsequent governments aligned with the United States, and Bernard-Henri Lévy ostentatiously goaded France into assaulting Libya. France has paid a heavy price in blowback for its ambiguous encounters with Islam. In the last 12 years, the country has experienced an extraordinary number of authentic, Islamist, terrorist attacks against civilians by fanatics shouting “Allahu Akbar.”
In March 2012, a man named Mohammed Merah shot dead seven people, including a French rabbi and three young Jewish children in southern France. His stated motives included Palestine and the French ban on the burka.
On Jan. 7, 2015, two coordinated attacks occurred, causing a major shock to the public. Gunmen entered the offices of the satirical journal Charlie Hebdo and murdered eight well-known cartoonists and two guards, in revenge for having published insulting cartoons of the Prophet. Meanwhile an accomplice killed several people in the course of taking hostages in a kosher grocery.
The deadliest attack took place in the evening of Nov. 13 the same year, killing 131 people and wounding 413 more when Islamist fanatics from Belgium blew themselves up outside a major sports event, sprayed gunfire and grenades into the theater during a rock concert and across café terraces in Paris. The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) called the attacks retaliation for French bombing of Syria.
Civil service on Nov. 15, 2015, at the Place de la République in remembrance of the victims of the attacks that took place two days earlier. (Mstyslav Chernov, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0)
On Bastille day 2016, a Tunisian drove a 19-ton cargo truck into a holiday crowd on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, killing 86 people and injuring 434 before being shot dead by police.
Twelve days later, an 86-year-old priest was stabbed to death while saying mass in a church in Normandy. ISIS claimed responsibility.
On Oct. 6, 2020, in the course of a class on freedom of expression, middle-school teacher Samuel Paty showed his class Charlie Hebdo cartoons of the Prophet, after permitting Muslim students to leave if they chose. Ten days later, in retribution, the teacher was stabbed and beheaded in the street by 18-year-old Abdullakh Anzorov, an Islamic Chechen refugee accorded political asylum from Russia. This caused an enormous shock in France, not least among the teaching profession.
On Oct. 13, 2023, a 20-year-old Chechen political refugee shouting Allahu Akbar attacked a school in the northern French city of Arras, stabbing to death French literature teacher Dominique Bernard.
In this context, people in France are particularly sensitive to the term “Islamic terrorism,” [as if the entire religion of Islam was responsible, rather than calling it Islamist terrorism, which refers to political Islam.]
When, on Oct. 7, fighters from Gaza succeeded in crossing into Israel, French media and politicians instantly condemned the attack as “Islamic terrorism,” implicitly relating it to the long chain of Islamist attacks in France.
Contrary to those attacks, the well organized Hamas fighters carried out a successful military operation, breaching the Israeli wall that imprisons Gaza and overrunning Israeli military bases. This operation had clear objectives, in particular, the taking of hostages to exchange for some of the thousands of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel. The hostage-taking was a clear invitation to negotiations, but the Israeli regime loathes any negotiations that could “legitimize” a Palestinian movement.
“When, on Oct. 7, fighters from Gaza succeeded in crossing into Israel, French media and politicians instantly condemned the attack as ‘Islamic terrorism,’ implicitly relating it to the long chain of Islamist attacks in France.”
The government initially banned demonstrations protesting against Israel’s massive attacks on the people of Gaza. Peaceful demonstrators were brutalized and fined by police. However, bans have been dropped and pro-Palestinian demonstrations have continued. Opposition to Israel’s genocidal retaliation against the people of Gaza is surely strong throughout the French population, especially among the youth, but it has very little political voice and so far, no pollsters are measuring it.
French media echoed wildly exaggerated Israeli reports of Hamas atrocities and the “rise of anti-Semitism.”
Newspapers featured growing Jewish fears of being attacked here in France. The Israeli government has deliberately exploited fear of anti-Semitism to encourage French Jews to move to Israel, but the success of the Hamas incursions risks shaking confidence in Israel as Jews’ one safe refuge — cramming half the world’s Jewish population into a small space surrounded by enemies.
In the days following Oct. 7, mainstream media interviewers tested every politician with the demand to condemn Hamas as an “Islamist terrorist organization.” Almost all enthusiastically complied, emphasizing their support for “Israel’s right to exist” (whatever that might entail).
From Communist Party leader Fabien Roussel to Eric Zemmour, founder of a nationalist party to the right of Marine Le Pen’s, French politicians were unanimous in condemning Hamas’ “brutal terrorist attack” – with one exception. The notable exception was the country’s leading leftwing politician, Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
Mélenchon refused to denounce Hamas as a “terrorist organization.” Hamas killings of civilians were “war crimes,” like any killing of civilians, he said. The attacks, he tweeted, “prove only one thing: violence only produces and reproduces itself. Horrified, our thoughts and our compassion go to all the distressed populations, victims of it all. A ceasefire should be imposed .”
Many parliamentary members of Mélenchon’s party “La France Insoumise” (LFI, France Unbowed) followed suit, contrary to other sections of the fragmented left. Danièle Obono, an African-born LFI Paris MP was rudely goaded by a hostile TV interviewer into saying that Hamas “is a resistance movement, that’s what it calls itself…its objective is the liberation of Palestine… it resists occupation.” Within a couple of hours, Interior Minister Gérard Darmanin announced that he was having her charged with “apology for terrorism.”
Danièle Obono in March 2022. (DIE LINKE, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0)
A verbal lynch mob rose up against Mélenchon, a chorus vigorously joined not only by his enemies on the right but also by rivals in smaller parties belonging to the disintegrating leftist electoral coalition NUPES (Nouvelle Union Populaire, Ecologique et Social) which he founded. Mélenchon and the LFI are denounced as “Islamo-leftists,” flattering terrorists to win over the Muslim vote.
Yonathan Arfi, the president of CRIF, angrily denounced Mélenchon as “an enemy of the Republic.” Mélenchon, he raged, “chose not to express solidarity with Israel but to legitimize terrorism by an equivalence between Israel and Hamas.”
Meanwhile Serge Klarsfeld, famous as a lifelong Nazi hunter and president of the association Sons and Daughters of Deported Jews of France, rejoiced that Marine Le Pen had completely changed the ideology of her party, the Rassemblement National, from that of her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen.
Marine Le Pen led her party in a Nov. 12, 2023 Paris demonstration against anti-Semitism while emphasizing her support for Israel. As a result, she has “become respectable”, he concluded. Such approval will make it hard to demonize her in future elections as in the past.
Referring to Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Klarsfeld expressed regret that “the far left has abandoned its line of action against anti-Semitism,” while noting that “the extreme left has always had an antisemite tradition.”
And thus a long brewing political reversal is being completed, not only in France but across Europe and even America. Israel, whose early supporters were on the left, from the Soviet Union to the French Socialists, is most vigorously championed by the right, whereas more and more people (but rarely politicians) on the left are joining the non-Western world’s shock and horror at the genocidal actions of Israel against the Palestinian people.
The War of Civilizations
The most extreme champions of Israel, including numerous commentators and Eric Zemmour, a journalist who founded a nationalist, anti-Muslim party called Reconquest to the right of Marine Le Pen, merge the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into a worldwide war of civilizations. For them, Hamas is just part of an international Islamic war on Western civilization. In this view of things, Israel is the vanguard of Western civilization whose main enemy is anti-Semitism.
In the midst of this turmoil, President Emmanuel Macron follows the European trends, but with notes of ambiguity confirming his position as a perfect centrist. He hesitated before suspending funding to UNRWA, then did so claiming his intention was to obtain a cease-fire. Such uncertainty can only displease both sides of the embittered national division over Gaza.
He stayed away from the politically overcharged Nov. 12 demonstrations against anti-Semitism, but compensated by leading a Feb. 7 commemoration in Paris of the 42 French and Franco-Israeli victims of the Oct. 7 attacks. The French government chartered a plane to fly in relatives of the victims from Israel. Participants booed and shouted “fascist!” and “terrorists!” at parliamentarians from Mélenchon’s party who showed up to pay their respects.
In a cold rain, Macron read out the first names of the 42 victims whose lives, he said, were “shattered by terrorist fury.”
“On October 7, at dawn,” he said, “the unspeakable resurfaced from the depths of history,” producing “the greatest anti-Semitic massacre of our century.” So in France, it seems, that what Oct. 7 was really about was not Gaza, nor Israel, and certainly not about the Palestinians, but fundamentally about a resurgence of the impunity wrought by the ever-present Shoah.
Diana Johnstone was press secretary of the Green Group in the European Parliament from 1989 to 1996. In her latest book, Circle in the Darkness: Memoirs of a World Watcher (Clarity Press, 2020), she recounts key episodes in the transformation of the German Green Party from a peace to a war party. Her other books include Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions (Pluto/Monthly Review) and in co-authorship with her father, Paul H. Johnstone, From MAD to Madness: Inside Pentagon Nuclear War Planning (Clarity Press). She can be reached at diana.johnstone@wanadoo.fr
The final stage of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, an orchestrated mass starvation, has begun. The international community does not intend to stop it.
There was never any possibility that the Israeli government would agree to a pause in the fighting proposed by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, much less a ceasefire. Israel is on the verge of delivering the coup de grâce in its war on Palestinians in Gaza – mass starvation. When Israeli leaders use the term “absolute victory,” they mean total decimation, total elimination. The Nazis in 1942 systematically starved the 500,000 men, women and children in the Warsaw Ghetto. This is a number Israel intends to exceed.
Israel, and its chief patron the United States, by attempting to shut down the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), which provides food and aid to Gaza, is not only committing a war crime, but is in flagrant defiance of the International Court of Justice (ICJ). The court found the charges of genocide brought by South Africa, which included statements and facts gathered by UNWRA, plausible. It ordered Israel to abide by six provisional measures to prevent genocide and alleviate the humanitarian catastrophe. The fourth provisional measure calls on Israel to secure immediate and effective steps to provide humanitarian assistance and essential services in Gaza.
UNRWA’s reports on conditions in Gaza, which I covered as a reporter for seven years, and its documentation of indiscriminate Israeli attacks illustrate that, as UNRWA said, “unilaterally declared ‘safe zones’ are not safe at all. Nowhere in Gaza is safe.”
UNRWA’s role in documenting the genocide, as well as providing food and aid to the Palestinians, infuriates the Israeli government. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused UNRWA after the ruling of providing false information to the ICJ. Already an Israeli target for decades, Israel decided that UNRWA, which supports 5.9 million Palestinian refugees across the Middle East with clinics, schools and food, had to be eliminated. Israel’s destruction of UNRWA serves a political as well as material objective.
The evidence-free Israeli accusations against UNRWA that a dozen of the 13,000 employees had links to those who carried out the attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, which saw some 1,200 Israelis killed, did the trick. It led 16 major donors, including the United States, the U.K., Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland, Finland, Australia, Canada, Sweden, Estonia and Japan, to suspend financial support for the relief agency on which nearly every Palestinian in Gaza depends for food. Israel has killed 152 UNRWA workers and damaged 147 UNRWA installations since Oct. 7. Israel has also bombed UNRWA relief trucks.
More than 27,708 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, some 67,000 have been wounded and at least 7,000 are missing, most likely dead and buried under the rubble.
More than half a million Palestinians – one in four – are starving in Gaza, according to the U.N. Starvation will soon be ubiquitous. Palestinians in Gaza, at least 1.9 million of whom have been internally displaced, lack not only sufficient food, but clean water, shelter and medicine. There are few fruits or vegetables. There is little flour to make bread. Pasta, along with meat, cheese and eggs, have disappeared. Black market prices for dry goods such as lentils and beans have increased 25 times from pre-war prices. A bag of flour on the black market has risen from $8.00 to $200 dollars. The healthcare system in Gaza, with only three of Gaza’s 36 hospitals left partially functioning, has largely collapsed. Some 1.3 million displaced Palestinians live on the streets of the southern city of Rafah, which Israel designated a “safe zone,” but has begun to bomb. Families shiver in the winter rains under flimsy tarps amid pools of raw sewage. An estimated 90 percent of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been driven from their homes.
“There is no instance since the Second World War in which an entire population has been reduced to extreme hunger and destitution with such speed,” writes Alex de Waal, executive director of the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University and the author of “Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine,” in the Guardian. “And there’s no case in which the international obligation to stop it has been so clear.”
The United States, formerly UNRWA’s largest contributor, provided $422 million to the agency in 2023. The severance of funds ensures that UNRWA food deliveries, already in very short supply because of blockages by Israel, will largely come to a halt by the end of February or the beginning of March.
Israel has given the Palestinians in Gaza two choices. Leave or die.
I covered the famine in Sudan in 1988 that took 250,000 lives. There are streaks in my lungs, scars from standing amid hundreds of Sudanese who were dying of tuberculosis. I was strong and healthy and fought off the contagion. They were weak and emaciated and did not. The international community, as is in Gaza, did little to intervene.
The precursor to starvation – undernourishment – already affects most Palestinians in Gaza. Those who starve lack enough calories to sustain themselves. In desperation people begin to eat animal fodder, grass, leaves, insects, rodents, even dirt. They suffer from diarrhea and respiratory infections. They rip up tiny bits of food, often spoiled, and ration it.
Soon, lacking enough iron to produce hemoglobin, a protein in red blood cells that carries oxygen from the lungs to the body, and myoglobin, a protein that provides oxygen to muscles, coupled with a lack of vitamin B1 , they become anemic. The body feeds on itself. Tissue and muscle waste away. It is impossible to regulate body temperature. Kidneys shut down. Immune systems crash. Vital organs – brain, heart, lungs, ovaries and testes — atrophy. Blood circulation slows. The volume of blood decreases. Infectious diseases such as typhoid, tuberculosis and cholera become an epidemic, killing people by the thousands.
It is impossible to concentrate. Emaciated victims succumb to mental and emotional withdrawal and apathy. They do not want to be touched or moved. The heart muscle is weakened. Victims, even at rest, are in a state of virtual heart failure. Wounds do not heal. Vision is impaired with cataracts, even among the young. Finally, wracked by convulsions and hallucinations, the heart stops. This process can last up to 40 days for an adult. Children, the elderly and the sick expire at faster rates.
I saw hundreds of skeletal figures, specters of human beings, moving forlornly at a glacial pace across the barren Sudanese landscape. Hyenas, accustomed to eating human flesh, routinely picked off small children. I stood over clusters of bleached human bones on the outskirts of villages where dozens of people, too weak to walk, had laid down in a group and never gotten up. Many were the remains of entire families.
In the abandoned town of Maya Abun bats dangled from the rafters of the gutted Italian mission church. The streets were overgrown with tussocks of grass. The dirt airstrip was flanked by hundreds of human bones, skulls and the remnants of iron bracelets, colored beads, baskets and tattering strips of clothing. The palm trees had been cut in half. People had eaten the leaves and the pulp inside. There had been a rumor that food would be delivered by plane. People had walked for days to the airstrip. They waited and waited and waited. No plane arrived. No one buried the dead.
Now, from a distance, I watch this happen in another land in another time. I know the indifference that doomed the Sudanese, mostly Dinkas, and today dooms the Palestinians. The poor, especially when they are of color, do not count. They can be killed like flies. The starvation in Gaza is not a natural disaster. It is Israel’s masterplan.
There will be scholars and historians who will write of this genocide, falsely believing that we can learn from the past, that we are different, that history can prevent us from being, once again, barbarians. They will hold academic conferences. They will say “Never again!” They will praise themselves for being more humane and civilized. But when it comes time to speak out with each new genocide, fearful of losing their status or academic positions, they will scurry like rats into their holes. Human history is one long atrocity for the world’s poor and vulnerable. Gaza is another chapter.
……………………………
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times , where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News , The Christian Science Monitor , and NPR . He is the host of show The Chris Hedges Report .
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued its Order yesterday (26 January 2024) on the South African case against Israel involving possible genocide in Gaza.
Predictably, the coverage of the Order in the mainstream media in the West aims to spin the story in ways that are most favorable to Israel, which means minimizing or omitting those elements of the story that make Israel look bad and emphasizing that the ICJ did not order Israel to cease all military operations in Gaza.
Hardly anyone expected the ICJ to rule that Israel would have to stop all military operations in Gaza, since it is at war with Hamas, and the court cannot order Hamas to cease its military operations against Israel. What the ICJ did tell Israel, however, is that it must focus its offensive on Hamas, and not target the civilian population. After all, the genocide charge revolves around what Israel is doing to the civilian population in Gaza, not Hamas.
What really matters in the Order is what it says about Israel committing genocide. How could it be otherwise? Genocide is the crime of all crimes.
The Order clearly states that there is: 1) plausible evidence that Israel has the intent to commit genocide; and 2) there is plausible evidence that Israel is committing genocide.
In response to that dire situation the court ordered Israel to stop committing those acts that appear to be genocidal, and to preserve any evidence that bears on this matter, obviously for the trial ahead.
In short, the ICJ did not make a final decision on the charge of genocide against Israel, but said there is sufficient evidence at this point to believe there is a “real and imminent risk” of genocide, and therefore Israel must fundamentally alter its conduct of the war in Gaza.
I think this is a stunning outcome, especially when you consider the votes among the 17 members of the ICJ.
There were six separate votes on six provisional measures that Israel was instructed to obey.
Four of the votes were 15-2.
Two of the votes were 16-1.
Amazingly, the Israeli judge — who was recently appointed by Prime Minister Netanyahu — voted in favor of two of the measures.
The American judge, who is also the head of the ICJ, voted in favor of all 6 of the measures.
The only judge who voted against all six measures is from Uganda.
I watched the ICJ proceedings on 11-12 January 2024, and they were conducted in a professional and fair-minded manner.
Both the Israelis and the South Africans sent their “A” teams to the proceedings, and each took over three hours to lay out its arguments systematically and comprehensively.
Finally, I have read the ICJ’s 27-page Order, and it is an impressive document, which is not to say one must agree with all its conclusions.
This was not a kangaroo court.
It seems clear that yesterday was a black day for Israel, as the ICJ Order will leave a deep and lasting stain on its reputation.
Joe Biden relies on advisors who view the world through the prism of the West’s civilizing mission to the “lesser breeds” of the earth to formulate his policies towards Israel and the Middle East.
Joe Biden’s inner circle of strategists for the Middle East — Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan and Brett McGurk — have little understanding of the Muslim world and a deep animus towards Islamic resistance movements. They see Europe, the United States and Israel as involved in a clash of civilizations between the enlightened West and a barbaric Middle East. They believe that violence can bend Palestinians and other Arabs to their will. They champion the overwhelming firepower of the U.S. and Israeli military as the key to regional stability — an illusion that fuels the flames of regional war and perpetuates the genocide in Gaza.
In short, these four men are grossly incompetent. They join the club of other clueless leaders, such as those who waltzed into the suicidal slaughter of World War One, waded into the quagmire of Vietnam or who orchestrated the series of recent military debacles in Iraq, Libya, Syria and Ukraine. They are endowed with the presumptive power vested in the Executive Branch to bypass Congress, to provide weapons to Israel and carry out military strikes in Yemen and Iraq. This inner circle of true believers dismiss the more nuanced and informed counsels in the State Department and the intelligence communities, who view the refusal of the Biden administration to pressure Israel to halt the ongoing genocide as ill-advised and dangerous.
Biden has always been an ardent militarist — he was calling for war with Iraq five years before the U.S. invaded. He built his political career by catering to the distaste of the white middle class for the popular movements, including the anti-war and civil rights movements, that convulsed the country in the 1960s and 1970s. He is a Republican masquerading as a Democrat. He joined Southern segregationists to oppose bringing Black students into Whites-only schools. He opposed federal funding for abortions and supported a constitutional amendment allowing states to restrict abortions. He attacked President George H. W. Bush in 1989 for being too soft in the “war on drugs.” He was one of the architects of the 1994 crime bill and a raft of other draconian laws that more than doubled the U.S. prison population, militarized the police and pushed through drug laws that saw people incarcerated for life without parole. He supported the North American Free Trade Agreement, the greatest betrayal of the working class since the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act. He has always been a strident defender of Israel, bragging that he did more fundraisers for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) than any other Senator.
“As many of you heard me say before, were there no Israel, America would have to invent one. We’d have to invent one because… you protect our interests like we protect yours,” Biden said in 2015, to an audience that included the Israeli ambassador, at the 67th Annual Israeli Independence Day Celebration in Washington D.C. During the same speech he said, “The truth of the matter is we need you. The world needs you. Imagine what it would say about humanity and the future of the 21st century if Israel were not sustained, vibrant and free.”
The year before Biden gave a gushing eulogy for Ariel Sharon, the former Israeli prime minister and general who was implicated in massacres of Palestinians, Lebanese and others in Palestine, Jordan and Lebanon — as well as Egyptian prisoners of war — going back to the 1950s. He described Sharon as “part of one of the most remarkable founding generations in the history not of this nation, but of any nation.”
While repudiating Donald Trump and his administration, Biden has not reversed Trump’s abrogation of the Iran nuclear deal negotiated by Barack Obama, or Trump’s sanctions against Iran. He has embraced Trump’s close ties with Saudi Arabia, including the rehabilitation of Crown Prince and Prime Minister Mohammed bin Salman, following the assassination of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2017 in the consulate of Saudi Arabia in Istanbul. He has not intervened to curb Israeli attacks on Palestinians and settlement expansion in the West Bank. He did not reverse Trump’s moving of the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, although the embassy includes land Israel illegally colonized after invading the West Bank and Gaza in 1967.
As a seven-term senator of Delaware, Biden received more financial support from pro-Israel donors than any other senator, since 1990. Biden retains this record despite the fact that his senatorial career ended in 2009, when he became Obama’s vice president. Biden explains his commitment to Israel as “personal” and “political.”
He has parroted back Israeli propaganda — including fabrications about beheaded babies and widespread rape of Israeli women by Hamas fighters — and asked Congress to provide $14 billion in additional aid to Israel since the Oct. 7 attack. He has twice bypassed Congress to supply Israel with thousands of bombs and munitions, including at least 100 2,000-pound bombs, used in the scorched earth campaign in Gaza.
Israel has killed or seriously wounded close to 90,000 Palestinians in Gaza, almost one in every 20 inhabitants. It has destroyed or damaged over 60 percent of the housing. The “safe areas,” to which some 2 million Gazans were instructed to flee in southern Gaza, have been bombed, with thousands of casualties. Palestinians in Gaza now make up 80 percent of all the people facing famine or catastrophic hunger worldwide, according to the U.N. Every person in Gaza is hungry. A quarter of the population are starving and struggling to find food and drinkable water. Famine is imminent. The 335,000 children under the age of five are at high risk of malnutrition. Some 50,000 pregnant women lack healthcare and adequate nutrition.
And it could all end if the U.S. chose to intervene.
“All of our missiles, the ammunition, the precision-guided bombs, all the airplanes and bombs, it’s all from the U.S.,” retired Israeli Major General Yitzhak Brick told the Jewish News Syndicate. “The minute they turn off the tap, you can’t keep fighting. You have no capability… Everyone understands that we can’t fight this war without the United States. Period.”
Blinken was Biden’s principal foreign policy adviser when Biden was the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee. He, along with Biden, lobbied for the invasion of Iraq. When he was Obama’s deputy national security advisor, he advocated the 2011 overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. He opposed withdrawing U.S. forces from Syria. He worked on the disastrous Biden Plan to partition Iraq along ethnic lines.
“Within the Obama White House, Blinken played an influential role in the imposition of sanctions against Russia over the 2014 invasion of Crimea and eastern Ukraine, and subsequently led ultimately unsuccessful calls for the U.S. to arm Ukraine,” according to the Atlantic Council, NATO’s unofficial think tank.
When Blinken landed in Israel following the attacks by Hamas and other resistance groups on Oct. 7, he announced at a press conference with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: “I come before you not only as the United States Secretary of State, but also as a Jew.”
He attempted, on Israel’s behalf, to lobby Arab leaders to accept the 2.3 million Palestinian refugees Israel intends to ethnically cleanse from Gaza, a request that evoked outrage among Arab leaders.
Sullivan, Biden’s national security advisor, and McGurk, are consummate opportunists, Machiavellian bureaucrats who cater to the reigning centers of power, including the Israel lobby.
Sullivan was the chief architect of Hillary Clinton’s Asia pivot. He backed the corporate and investor rights Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, which was sold as helping the U.S. contain China. Trump ultimately killed the trade agreement in the face of mass opposition from the U.S. public. His focus is thwarting a rising China, including through the expansion of the U.S. military.
While not focused on the Middle East, Sullivan is a foreign policy hawk who has a knee jerk embrace of force to shape the world to U.S. demands. He embraces military Keynesianism, arguing that massive government spending on the weapons industry benefits the domestic economy.
In a 7,000-word essay for Foreign Affairs magazine published five days before the Oct. 7 attacks, which left some 1,200 Israelis dead, Sullivan exposed his lack of understanding of the dynamics of the Middle East.
“Although the Middle East remains beset with perennial challenges,” he writes in the original version of the essay, “the region is quieter than it has been for decades,” adding that in the face of “serious” frictions, “we have de-escalated crises in Gaza.”
Sullivan ignores Palestinian aspirations and Washington’s rhetorical backing for a two-state solution in the article, hastily rewritten in the online version after the Oct. 7 attacks. He writes in his original piece:
At a meeting in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, last year, the president set forth his policy for the Middle East in an address to the leaders of members of the Gulf Cooperation Council, Egypt, Iraq, and Jordan. His approach returns discipline to US policy. It emphasizes deterring aggression, de-escalating conflicts, and integrating the region through joint infrastructure projects and new partnerships, including between Israel and its Arab neighbors.
McGurk, the deputy assistant to President Biden and the coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa at the White House National Security Council, was a chief architect of Bush’s “surge” in Iraq, which accelerated the bloodletting. He worked as a legal advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority and the U.S. ambassador in Baghdad. He then became Trump’s anti-ISIS czar.
He does not speak Arabic — none of the four men does — and came to Iraq with no knowledge of its history, peoples or culture. Nevertheless, he helped draft Iraq’s interim constitution and oversaw the legal transition from the Coalition Provisional Authority to an Interim Iraqi Government led by Prime Minister Ayad Allawi. McGurk was an early backer of Nouri al-Maliki, who was Iraq’s prime minister between 2006 and 2014. Al-Maliki built a Shi’ite-controlled sectarian state that deeply alienated Sunni Arabs and Kurds. In 2005, McGurk transferred to the National Security Council (NSC), where he served as director for Iraq, and later as special assistant to the president and senior director for Iraq and Afghanistan. He served on the NSC staff from 2005 to 2009. In 2015, he was appointed as Obama’s Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter ISIL. He was retained by Trump until his resignation in Dec. 2018.
An article in April 2021 titled “Brett McGurk: A Hero of Our Times,” in New Lines Magazine by former BBC foreign correspondent Paul Wood, paints a scathing portrait of McGurk. Wood writes:
A senior Western diplomat who served in Baghdad told me that McGurk had been an absolute disaster for Iraq. “He is a consummate operator in Washington, but I saw no sign that he was interested in Iraqis or Iraq as a place full of real people. It was simply a bureaucratic and political challenge for him.” One critic who was in Baghdad with McGurk called him Machiavelli reincarnated. “It’s intellect plus ambition plus the utter ruthlessness to rise no matter the cost.”
[….]
A U.S. diplomat who was in the embassy when McGurk arrived found his steady advance astonishing. “Brett only meets people who speak English. … There are like four people in the government who speak English. And somehow he’s now the person who should decide the fate of Iraq? How did this happen?”
Even those who didn’t like McGurk had to admit that he had a formidable intellect — and was a hard worker. He was also a gifted writer, no surprise as he had clerked for Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist. His rise mirrored that of an Iraqi politician named Nouri al-Maliki, one careerist helping the other. That is McGurk’s tragedy — and Iraq’s.
[….]
McGurk’s critics say his lack of Arabic meant he missed the vicious, sectarian undertones of what al-Maliki was saying in meetings right from the start. Translators censored or failed to keep up. Like many Americans in Iraq, McGurk was deaf to what was happening around him.
Al-Maliki was the consequence of two mistakes by the U.S. How much McGurk had to do with them remains in dispute. The first mistake was the “80 Percent Solution” for ruling Iraq. The Sunni Arabs were mounting a bloody insurgency, but they were just 20% of the population. The theory was that you could run Iraq with the Kurds and the Shiites. The second error was to identify the Shiites with hardline, religious parties backed by Iran. Al-Maliki, a member of the religious Da’wa Party, was the beneficiary of this.
In a piece in HuffPost in May 2022 by Akbar Shahid Ahmed, titled “Biden’s Top Middle East Advisor ‘Torched the House and Showed Up With a Firehose,’” McGurk is described by a colleague, who asked not to be named, as “the most talented bureaucrat they’ve ever seen, with the worst foreign policy judgment they’ve ever seen.”
McGurk, like others in the Biden administration, is bizarrely focused on what comes after Israel’s genocidal campaign, rather than trying to halt it. McGurk proposed denying humanitarian aid and refusing to implement a pause in the fighting in Gaza until all the Israeli hostages were freed. Biden and his three closest policy advisors have called for the Palestinian Authority — an Israeli puppet regime that is reviled by most Palestinians — to take control of Gaza once Israel finishes leveling it. They have called on Israel — since Oct. 7 — to take steps towards a two-state solution, a plan rejected in an humiliating public rebuke to the the Biden White House by Netanyahu.
The Biden White House spends more time talking to the Israelis and Saudis, who are being lobbied to normalize relations with Israel and help rebuild Gaza, than the Palestinians, who are at best, an afterthought. It believes the key to ending Palestinian resistance is found in Riyadh, summed up in a top-secret document peddled by McGurk called the “Jerusalem-Jeddah Pact,” the HuffPost reported. It is unable or unwilling to curb Israel’s bloodlust, which included missile strikes in a residential neighborhood in Damascus, Syria, on Saturday that killed five military advisors from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and a drone attack in South Lebanon on Sunday, which killed two senior members of Hezbollah. These Israeli provocations will not go unanswered, evidenced by the ballistic missiles and rockets launched on Sunday by militants in western Iraq that targeted U.S. personnel stationed at the al-Assad Airbase.
The Alice-in-Wonderland idea that once the slaughter in Gaza ends a diplomatic pact between Israel and Saudi Arabia will be the key to regional stability is stupefying. Israel’s genocide, and Washington’s complicity, is shredding U.S. credibility and influence, especially in the Global South and the Muslim world. It ensures another generation of enraged Palestinians — whose families have been obliterated and whose homes have been destroyed — seeking vengeance.
The policies embraced by the Biden administration not only blithely ignore the realities in the Arab world, but the realities of an extremist Israeli state that, with Congress bought and paid for by the Israel lobby, couldn’t care less what the Biden White House dreams up. Israel has no intention of creating a viable Palestinian state. Its goal is the ethnic cleansing of the 2.3 million Palestinians from Gaza and the annexation of Gaza by Israel. And when Israel is done with Gaza, it will turn on the West Bank, where Israeli raids now occur on an almost nightly basis and where thousands have been arrested and detained without charge since Oct. 7.
Those running the show in the Biden White House are chasing after rainbows. The march of folly led by these four blind mice perpetuates the cataclysmic suffering of the Palestinians, stokes a regional war and presages another tragic and self-defeating chapter in the two decades of U.S. military fiascos in the Middle East.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times , where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News , The Christian Science Monitor , and NPR . He is the host of show The Chris Hedges Report.
Pretoria’s genocide case against Israel is crucial, not just to stop Tel Aviv’s carnage in Gaza, but to plant the first flag of mutipolarism in the globe’s courtrooms: this is the first case of many that will seek to halt western impunity and restore international law as envisioned in the UN Charter.
Nothing less than the full concept of international law will be on trial this week in The Hague. The whole world is watching.
It took an African nation, not an Arab or Muslim nation, but significantly a BRICS member, to try to break the iron chains deployed by Zionism via fear, financial might, and non-stop threats, enslaving not only Palestine but substantial swathes of the planet.
By a twist of historical poetic justice, South Africa, a nation that knows one or two things about apartheid, had to take the moral high ground and be the first to file a suit against apartheid Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
The 84-page lawsuit,exhaustively argued, fully documented, and filed on 29 December 2023, details all the ongoing horrors perpetrated in the occupied Gaza Strip and followed by everyone with a smartphone around the planet.
South Africa asks the ICJ – a UN mechanism – something quite straightforward: Declare that the state of Israel has breached all its responsibilities under international law since 7 October.
And that, crucially, includes a violation of the 1948 Genocide Convention, according to which genocide consists of “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”
South Africa is supported by Jordan, Bolivia, Turkiye, Malaysia, and significantly the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), which combines the lands of Islam, and constitutes 57 member states, 48 of these harboring a Muslim majority. It’s as if these nations were representing the overwhelming majority of the Global South.
Whatever happens at The Hague could go way beyond a possible condemnation of Israeli for genocide. Both Pretoria and Tel Aviv are members of the ICJ – so the rulings are binding. The ICJ, in theory, carries more weight than the UN Security Council, where the US vetoes any hard facts that tarnish Israel’s carefully constructed self-image.
The only problem is that the ICJ does not have enforcement power.
What South Africa, in practical terms, is aiming to achieve is to have the ICJ impose on Israel an order to stop the invasion – and the genocide – right away. That should be the first priority.
A specific intent to destroy
Reading the full South African application is a horrifying exercise. This is literally history in the making, right in front of us living in the young, tech-addicted, 21st century, and not a science fiction account of a genocide taking place in some distant universe.
Pretoria’s application carries the merit of drawing The Big Picture, “in the broader context of Israel’s conduct towards Palestinians during its 75-year-long apartheid, its 56-year-long belligerent occupation of Palestinian territory, and its 16-year-long blockade of Gaza.”
Cause, effect, and intent are clearly delineated, transcending the horrors that have been perpetrated since the Palestinian resistance’s Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on 7 October, 2023.
Then there are “acts and omissions by Israel which are capable of amounting to other violations of international law.” South Africa lists them as “genocidal in character, as they are committed with the requisite specific intent (dolus specialis) to destroy Palestinians in Gaza as a part of the broader Palestinian national, racial and ethnic group.”
‘The Facts,’ introduced from page 9 of the application, are brutal – ranging from the indiscriminate massacre of civilians to mass expulsion: “It is estimated that over 1.9 million Palestinians out of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million people – approximately 85 percent of the population – have been forced from their homes. There is nowhere safe for them to flee to, those who cannot leave or refuse to be displaced have been killed or are at extreme risk of being killed in their homes.”
And there will be no turning back: “As noted by the Special Rapporteur on the human rights of internally displaced persons, Gaza’s housing and civilian infrastructure have been razed to the ground, frustrating any realistic prospects for displaced Gazans to return home, repeating a long history of mass forced displacement of Palestinians by Israel.”
The complicit Hegemon
Item 142 of the application may encapsulate the whole drama: “The entire population is facing starvation: 93 percent of the population in Gaza is facing crisis levels of hunger, with more than one in four facing catastrophic condition” – with death imminent.
Against this backdrop, on 25 December – Christmas day – Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu doubled down on his genocidal rhetoric, promising: ‘We are not stopping, we are continuing to fight and we are deepening the fighting in the coming days, and this will be a long battle and it is not close to being over.”
So, “as a matter of extreme urgency,” and “pending the Court’s determination of this case on the merits,” South Africa is asking for provisional measures, the first of which will be for “the state of Israel to immediately suspend its military operations in and against Gaza.”
This amounts to a permanent ceasefire. Every grain of sand from the Negev to Arabia knows that the neocon psychos in charge of US foreign policy, including their pet, remote-controlled, senile occupant of the White House are not only complicit in the Israeli genocide but oppose any possibility of a ceasefire.
Incidentally, such complicity is also punishable by law, according to the Genocide Convention.
Hence, it is a given that Washington and Tel Aviv will go no-holds-barred to block a fair trial by the ICJ, using every means of pressure and threat available. That dovetails with the extremely limited power exercised by any international court to impose the rule of international law on the exceptionalist Washington–Tel Aviv combo.
While an alarmed Global South is moved to action against Israel’s unprecedented military assault on Gaza, where over 1 percent of the population has been murdered in less than three months, the Israeli Foreign Ministry has regimented its embassies to arm-twist host country diplomats and politicians to swiftly issue an “immediate and unequivocal statement along the following lines: To publicly and clearly state that your country rejects the outrageous, absurd, and baseless allegations made against Israel.”
It will be quite enlightening to see which nations will abide by the order.
Whether Pretoria’s current efforts succeed or not, this case is likely to be only the first of its kind filed in courts around the world in the months and even years ahead. The BRICS – of which South Africa is a crucial member state – are part of the new swell of international organizations challenging western hegemony and its ‘rules-based order.’ These rules mean nothing; nobody has even seen them.
In part, multipolarism has emerged to redress the decades-long shift away from the UN Charter and rush toward the lawlessness embodied in these illusory ‘rules.’ The nation-state system that underpins the global order cannot function without the international law that secures it. Without the law, we face war, war, and more war; the Hegemon’s ideal universe of endless war, in fact.
South Africa’s genocide case against Israel is blatantly necessary to reverse these flagrant violations of the international system, and will almost certainly be the first of many such litigations against both Israel and its allies to shift the world back to stability, security, and common sense.
Motion calling for ILWU Local 10 to stop work on May 1 in solidarity with the Palestinian people and against genocidal war on Gaza. 
xenagoguevicene 
