Truth About How Israel’s Zionism Began and Led to Genocide of Palestinians in Gaza

February 12, 2024 7:58pm

Denouncing critics of Israel as ‘un-Jews’ or antisemites is a perversion of history

The Guardian

The story of Jewish suffering means there is a moral necessity to fight oppression everywhere. (...)

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Jewish American philosopher and author, Susan Neiman: ‘I’ve been accused of being a Hamas supporter, and even a Nazi.’ Photograph: Johnny Savage/The Guardian.

The story of Zuckerman and his erasure is one of many told by Geoffrey Levin in his new book Our Palestine Question, on the forgotten history of Jewish dissent in America in the decades following the founding of Israel. It is one of several accounts that will be published this year exploring the history of American Jewish opposition to Zionism and support for the Palestinian cause. (...)

For many Jews, the existential threat posed by Hamas gives Israel the right to take any measures necessary to eliminate the organisation. For others, whatever the horrors of the Hamas attack, the destruction of Gaza, the deaths of more than 25,000 people and the displacement of almost the entire population is unconscionable and cuts against the grain of Jewish ethical traditions. (...)

In 2021, an essay in the Jewish magazine Tablet labelled Jews too critical of Israel or Zionism as “un-Jews”. Three years on, it is a description that seems to have found greater resonance.

Perhaps in no country is official ostracism of “un-Jews” more entrenched than in Germany. “To be a leftwing Jew in today’s Germany is to live in a state of permanent cognitive dissonance,” says Susan Neiman, a Jewish American philosopher and director of the Einstein Forum in Potsdam for the past quarter of a century. “German politicians and media talk incessantly about protecting Jews from antisemitism,” but many who “criticise the Israeli government and the war on Gaza have been cancelled and certainly attacked. I’m an Israeli citizen and I’ve been accused of being a Hamas supporter, and even a Nazi, in mainstream media. Need I add that I am neither?” (...)

According to the researcher Emily Dische-Becker, almost a third of those cancelled in Germany for their supposed antisemitism have been Jews. There is, as the Israeli-born architect and academic Eyal Weizman has acidly put it, a certain irony in “being lectured [on how to be properly Jewish] by the children and grandchildren of the perpetrators who murdered our families and who now dare to tell us that we are antisemitic”. (...)

What guided Jewish critics, particularly of Israeli policies towards Palestinian refugees, in the late 1940s and 1950s, was, as Levin shows, their attachment to Jewish traditions that reject discrimination or barbarism against any group. (...)

What makes all this particularly troubling, Neiman observes, is the upsurge in antisemitism in Germany and elsewhere. Rather than policing Jewish intellectuals and activists, “insisting on unconditional loyalty to Israel” and “downplaying the suffering in Gaza”, what is needed, Nieman argues, is to support those individuals and organisations that are building forms of solidarity that can both challenge antisemitism and anti-Muslim bigotry, and promote justice in Palestine and Israel.

Tags: #books #israel #palestine #gaza #zionism #jews #palestinians #israelis #antisemitism #bigotry #justice

February 1, 2024 10:28am

Gaza: Suspending UNRWA Aid Risks Hastening Famine

Human Rights Watch

Continue Funding as UN Agency Staff Is Investigated.

Governments should continue funding the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), given its vital role in averting a humanitarian catastrophe and the risk of famine in the Gaza Strip, while the agency investigates allegations that 12 of its staff were involved in the Hamas-led October 7, 2023, attacks in southern Israel, Human Rights Watch said today. (...)

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After Israeli authorities provided UNRWA with information about the alleged involvement of several of its employees in the October 7 attacks, UNRWA announced that it had “immediately terminated” the contracts of the employees identified and opened an investigation to “establish the truth without delay.” (...)

“The allegations against UNRWA staff are serious and the UN appears to be addressing them seriously. But withholding funds from the UN agency most able to provide immediate lifesaving food, water, and medicine to the more than 2.3 million people of Gaza shows callous indifference to what the world’s leading experts have warned is the looming risk of famine,” said Akshaya Kumar, crisis advocacy director at Human Rights Watch. (...)

Instead of withholding critical funds, the European Union and France issued statements clarifying that they intend to “review the matter in light of the outcome of the investigation announced by the UN and the actions it will take” and “decide when the time comes.” (...)

Shortly after the October 7 attack, Israeli authorities cut off essential services, including water and electricity, to Gaza’s population and blocked the entry of all but a trickle of fuel and critical humanitarian aid, acts of collective punishment that amount to war crimes. Human Rights Watch has also found that Israeli authorities are using starvation as a weapon of war in Gaza. (...)

Human Rights Watch has urged Israel’s key allies—including the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Germany—to suspend military assistance and arms sales to Israel so long as its forces commit, with impunity, widespread and serious abuses amounting to war crimes against Palestinian civilians. (...)

The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), a multi-partner initiative that regularly publishes information on the scale and severity of food insecurity and malnutrition globally, issued a report published at the end of December concluding that the entire population of Gaza is at crisis level of acute food insecurity or worse. (...)

As the occupying power, Israel is obliged to ensure that the humanitarian needs of the population of Gaza are met. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) ordered provisional measures on January 26 as part of South Africa’s case against Israel alleging violations of the Genocide Convention. (...)

“Despite mounting risks of famine and a binding order by the World Court in a case about genocide, Israel’s foreign minister has now announced that he will lead a brazen effort to shut down the UN agency most responsible for delivering lifesaving aid,” Kumar said. “Unless governments reverse their decisions to suspend aid to UNRWA, the main humanitarian channel into Gaza, they risk contributing to the current catastrophe.”

> See also: The Long War on Gaza

Tags: #israel #palestine #palestinians #gaza #human_rights #occupied_territories #international_law #war #humanitarian_aid #unemployment #west_bank

Gaza: Suspending UNRWA Aid Risks Hastening Famine

Governments should continue funding the UN Relief Works Agency, (UNRWA), given its vital role in averting a humanitarian catastrophe and the risk of famine in the Gaza Strip, while the agency investigates allegations that 12 of the agency’s staff...

January 27, 2024 3:27pm

Europe is heading for perilous waters, and its leaders are dozing at the tiller

The Guardian

Ukraine needs more help, the far right is on the rise and the Middle East crisis gets worse. Where is the European Union’s vision? (...)

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European Union flags fly outside the EU Commission headquarters in Brussels. Photograph: Yves Herman/Reuters.

The way it’s going, 2024 could turn into a nightmare for the 27-country bloc – an all-time annus horribilis. A daunting slew of international and internal challenges is coming to a head. Is the EU ready to meet them? Definitely not.

Take the crisis in the Red Sea. Iran-backed Houthi militants have been attacking shipping there since the Israel-Hamas war began. (...)

The EU has an important stake in this fight. About 40% of its Asia and Middle East trade moves via Suez. But only the Netherlands provided hands-on assistance. (...)

Snoozing at the tiller, Europe is again failing to pair its self-interest and aspirations as a global actor with timely, concrete, joined-up action.

The Gaza war has exploded another illusion ahead of this week’s pivotal EU summit. (...) As Israel’s largest trading partner, they think the EU has leverage. All support a two-state solution. But when Josep Borrell, EU foreign policy chief, outlined a 10-point peace plan for Palestine last week, his VIP guest, Israel Katz, Israel’s foreign minister, ignored it. (...)

Europe’s bottomless capacity for punching below its weight is damaging Ukraine, where two years on from its invasion, Russia appears to be slowly gaining the upper hand. (...)

The failure of some EU countries, notably France, to supply more and better arms, as US deliveries dry up, is also harming Ukraine’s chances – and consequentially, Europe’s hopes of defending its borders from future Russian aggression. That’s especially pertinent given Trump’s prospective return to the White House a year from now. (...)

Trump’s resurrection “would endanger European interests but Europe is not investing in mitigating the risks.” (...)

[T]he geopolitical dangers facing the EU in 2024 are global – and exacerbated by the dithering of its wealthiest member. Germany’s chancellor, Olaf Scholz, “is giving no political or strategic leadership to a Europe that is ill-prepared for a possible rupture of the transatlantic relationship.” (...)

“Similarly, neither Germany nor Europe is prepared to withstand the growing influence of regimes that challenge the traditional prominence of the west” – a reference to China, a big trade partner and bigger potential threat. (...)

Germany is also a flashpoint in the main internal political challenge confronting the EU – the rise of the far right. (...)

New polling by the European Council on Foreign Relations suggests populist “anti-European” parties, principally of the right, will make large gains in EU and national elections this year. Migration, broken budgets, energy and climate are other explosive common denominator issues. (...)

Can the EU survive a dangerous, defining year? It will probably muddle through. But the sort of strategic leadership and vision offered by Jacques Delors, the legendary Eurocrat who died last month, is evidently lacking – and urgently required. (...)

Tags: #europa #european_union #gaza #israel #palestine #palestinians #houthi #red_sea #germany #france #china #ukraine #russia #putin #far_right #migration #climate #climate_crisis #climate_change #trump #nato #borrell

January 24, 2024 3:25pm

The Long War on Gaza

The New York Review ($)

Over fifty-six years, Israel has transformed Gaza from a functional economy to a dysfunctional one, from a productive society to an impoverished one.

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Palestinians in Rafah, a city in the southern Gaza Strip, conducting search and rescue operations in the rubble of buildings destroyed by Israeli airstrikes, December 14, 2023

Gaza is being devastated as we watch. A stated goal of Israel’s assault, which has so far killed more than 19,400 people, is to “destroy Hamas” in retaliation for its attack that killed 1,200 in Israel’s south in October. But a number of critics, such as the Palestinian ambassador to the UK, Husam Zomlot, have argued persuasively that Israel’s goal is less to vanquish Hamas—impossible in any case—than to finally expel Palestinians from Gaza without international censure or sanction. (...)

The current desecration of Gaza is the latest stage in a process that has taken increasingly violent forms over time.
In the fifty-six years since it occupied the Strip in 1967, Israel has transformed Gaza from a territory politically and economically integrated with Israel and the West Bank into an isolated enclave, from a functional economy to a dysfunctional one, from a productive society to an impoverished one. It has likewise removed Gaza’s residents from the sphere of politics, transforming them from a people with a nationalist claim to a population whose majority requires some form of humanitarian aid to sustain themselves. (...)

For decades the pressure on Palestinians in Gaza has been immense and unrelenting. The damage it has done—high levels of unemployment and poverty, widespread infrastructural destruction, and environmental degradation, including dangerous contamination of water and soil, among other factors—has become a permanent condition. (...)

Israel has never known what to do with this tiny strip of land. From the beginning of the occupation, the country’s leaders recognized that Gaza would have to be pacified to preclude the creation of a Palestinian state—their primary objective—and minimize Palestinian resistance were they to annex the West Bank. During the first two decades of the occupation, from the Six-Day War of 1967 to the start of the first intifada, their preferred tactic was controlling Gaza’s economy. (...)

The first intifada made it clear that this strategy of pacification had failed. Improved living standards could no longer compensate for the absence of freedom. (...)

That year [2007] Israel imposed a blockade that severely limited both trade with Gaza and the entry of specific food products into the Strip. But the blockade—now in its seventeenth year—is only a more extreme form of measures that were already in place. (...)

Early in 1991—before Hamas started launching rockets and orchestrating suicide bombings—Israel began restricting and periodically blocking the movement of workers to and from Gaza, as well as the trade upon which its small economy disproportionately depended. (...) In January 1991 Israel canceled the general exit permit that made it possible for Palestinians to move freely through Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. (...)

The cancellation of the general exit permit marked the start of Israel’s closure policy. (...) As B’Tselem, another rights group focused on the West Bank and Gaza, has put it, “Isolating Gaza from the rest of the world, including separating it from the West Bank, is part of a longstanding Israeli policy.”

This policy of separation and containment became more explicit in the aftermath of the Oslo Accords. In 1994 Israel built a fence around Gaza, the first of several enclosures. (...)

In 2005 Israel “disengaged” from the Strip, removing all of its settlements and military forces. Israeli officials have since argued that this formally ended the country’s occupation of Gaza. According to international law, however, Israel remains an occupier, as it maintains “effective control” over Gaza’s borders (except for Rafah, which Egypt controls), sea access, airspace, and population registry. (...)

Another crucial effect of Israeli policy—more noticeable after Hamas came to power in 2007. (...) Israel in effect recast its relationship with Gaza from occupation to warfare, as evidenced by the numerous deadly assaults it launched on the territory over the past seventeen years—among them Operation Summer Rains (2006), Operation Hot Winter (2008), Operation Cast Lead (2008-09), Operation Pillar of Defense (2012), Operation Protective Edge (2014), Operation Guardian of the Walls (2021), Operation Breaking Dawn (2022), and Operation Shield and Arrow (2023). (...)

Under this new approach, Israel dispensed altogether with the notion that Gaza could have a market economy. “As part of their overall embargo plan against Gaza,” US officials wrote from Tel Aviv in November 2008, “Israeli officials have confirmed … on multiple occasions that they intend to keep the Gazan economy on the brink of collapse without quite pushing it over the edge.” More specifically, they aimed to keep it “functioning at the lowest level possible consistent with avoiding a humanitarian crisis.” (...)

Since 2010, Israel has periodically eased restrictions, but the blockade has nonetheless almost entirely destroyed Gaza’s economy. On the eve of the current conflict, unemployment was at 46.4 percent. (In 2000, before the blockade, it was at 18.9 percent.) Approximately 65 percent of the population was food-insecure, meaning they could not safely access enough nutritious food to meet their dietary needs, while 80 percent required some form of international assistance to feed their families. (...)

Gaza could only experience relief, not progress. (...) “The West Bank and Gaza are now almost completely delinked,” a World Bank report stated in 2008, “with Gaza starkly transforming from a potential trade route to a walled hub of humanitarian donations.” (...)

Israel has, in other words, created a humanitarian problem to manage a political problem. (...)

For the past ten weeks, with the exception of a one-week “humanitarian pause,” Gaza has been under a total siege; Israel has virtually halted the entry of fuel and restricted the entry of food, among other critical necessities. (...)

Complete article ($)

Tags: #israel #palestine #palestinians #gaza #human_rights #occupied_territories #international_law #war #humanitarian_aid #unemployment #west_bank

The Long War on Gaza | Sara Roy

Gaza is being devastated as we watch. A stated goal of Israel’s assault, which has so far killed more than 19,400 people, is to “destroy Hamas” in

January 22, 2024 12:13pm

The west’s complete contempt for the lives of Palestinians will not be forgotten

The Guardian

Our political and media elites are complicit in Gaza’s nightmare. Any vestige of moral authority has been lost for ever.

What is the value of a Palestinian life? For those retaining delusions not already buried in the rubble of Gaza alongside entire families – like the Zorobs, the Kashtans, the Attalahs – Joe Biden offered a definitive answer last week. In a statement marking 100 days since the current horror began, he rightly showed empathy for the plight of hostages – whose abduction by Hamas represents a grave war crime – and their traumatised families. Yet there was not a single mention of Palestinians. (...)

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‘Life is cheap, they say: it is apparently meaningless if you are Palestinian.’ Palestinians search the rubble after airstrikes on Khan Younis, October 2023. Photograph: Mohammed Dahman/AP.

If the world’s powerful nations had not so brazenly shrugged off three-quarters of a million Palestinians being driven from their homes 76 years ago, accompanied by an estimated 15,000 suffering violent deaths, the seeds of today’s bitter harvest would not have been planted. (...)

If even some worth had been attached to Palestinian life then decades of occupation, siege, illegal colonisation, apartheid, violent repression and mass slaughter might never have happened. Oppressing others becomes difficult to sustain when their humanity is accepted. (...)

Surely 10,000 children suffering violent deaths, or the 10 kids having one or both legs amputated each day, often without anaesthetic, would stir powerful emotions. Surely 5,500 pregnant women giving birth each month – many having caesareans without anaesthetic – or newborns dying of hypothermia and diarrhoea would trigger unstoppable revulsion. (...)

This has not happened, and this is why the consequences will be severe.

The devaluing of Palestinian life is not a supposition, it is a statistical fact. According to a new study of coverage in major US newspapers, for every Israeli death Israelis are mentioned eight times – or at a rate 16 times more per death than that of Palestinians. (...)

All this will have a profound impact. For a start, forget about any future western claims about human rights and international law. (...) After the west armed and backed Israel as it imposed mass death on Gaza through bombs, bullets, hunger, thirst and the destruction of medical facilities, nobody other than the terminally gullible will listen to such claims ever again.

But it’s not just other countries that western political and media elites should be panicking about. They face moral collapse at home, too. Younger generations in countries such as the US and Britain have grown up taking racism far more seriously than those before them, and polling shows they are far more sympathetic to Palestinians than older citizens are. (...)

What do these young people then make of media coverage, or the statements of politicians, that don’t seem to treat Palestinian life as having any worth at all? (...)

So yes, we have seen how the refusal to treat Palestinians as human beings made today’s nightmare inevitable. We can see how the moral claims used to justify western global dominance are permanently shredded. But little thought has been given to how political and media elites in western nations have torched their moral authority, leaving it to fester alongside thousands of unidentified Palestinian corpses buried under the rubble. A turning point, to be sure, with consequences that will only be understood when it is much too late.

Tags: #israel #palestine #palestinians #gaza #human_rights #occupied_territories #media #news #journalism #journalist #media_coverage #international_law #war

January 18, 2024 1:11pm

Gaza – A Brutal Demonstration Of ‘Western Values’

Media Lens

‘I find Westerners in general, and Europeans in particular, extremely indoctrinated and obsessed with perceptions of their own uniqueness. Many see themselves as chosen people, after going through a one-sided education and after relying on their media outlets, without studying alternative sources.’
André Vltchek, Soviet-born US political writer, 1963-2020.

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Displaced children having their faces painted ahead of New Year celebrations at an UNRWA school in Deir al-Balah, Gaza, 28 December, 2023. (Omar Ashtawy APA images)

On 20 March 2006, on the third anniversary of the illegal invasion of Iraq, BBC diplomatic correspondent Bridget Kendall declared on the Six O’Clock News:

‘There’s still bitter disagreement over invading Iraq. Was it justified or a disastrous miscalculation?’

The supposed ‘justification’ claimed by Prime Minister Tony Blair was the ‘serious and current threat’ posed by Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction. The BBC’s false notion of ‘balance’ was to present ‘disastrous miscalculation’ as the counterargument. In fact, as we detailed at the time in media alerts and in our books, the invasion was considered by many legal experts to be a ‘war of aggression’, the ‘supreme international crime’ as judged by the standards of the post-WW2 Nuremberg trials. (...)

But such narrative control is an endemic feature of state-corporate media, wrongly labelled ‘mainstream’. It is a fundamental requirement of political journalists and editors that they magically transform the crimes of ‘our’ governments into ‘miscalculations’, ‘mistakes’ or ‘misguided’ attempts to do good. (...)

Noam Chomsky succinctly explained the ideological underpinning of ‘mainstream’ news coverage:

‘In discussion of international relations, the fundamental principle is that “we are good” – “we” being the government, on the totalitarian principle that state and people are one. “We” are benevolent, seeking peace and justice, though there may be errors in practice. “We” are foiled by villains who can’t rise to our exalted level.’
(Chomsky, ‘Interventions’, Penguin Books, London, 2007, p.101). (...)

[J]ournalists can be relied upon to perform the necessary whitewashing: the Gulf War in 1990-91, Nato’s bombing of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, Iraq sanctions from 1990-2003, the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, the destruction of Libya in 2011, the US-sponsored toppling of the Ukrainian government in 2014, US-Nato air strikes against Syria, participation in the Saudi-led bombing of Yemen, and now the attacks on ‘Iran-backed’ Houthi rebels. (Of course, convention decrees that the Houthi are always described as ‘Iran-backed’, whereas Israeli forces are not routinely labelled ‘US-backed’.) (...)

In several powerful books, based on careful research of formerly secret UK government documents, historian Mark Curtis, co-founder of Declassified UK, has laid bare the motivations and reality of British foreign policy. Ethical concerns and morality are notable in these internal state records by their absence. (...)

[T]he major source of international terrorism is the West, notably the United States, supported by its ‘special relationship’ ally, the UK. Curtis wrote:

(...) Yet state-sponsored terrorism is by far the most serious category of terrorism in the world today, responsible for far more deaths in many more countries than the “private” terrorism of groups like Al Qaida.
(Curtis, ‘Web of Deceit: Britain’s Real Role in the World’, Vintage, London, 2003, p. 94.)

The Financial Times reported last October:

‘Western support for Israel’s assault on Gaza has poisoned efforts to build consensus with significant developing countries on condemning Russia’s war against Ukraine, officials and diplomats have warned.’ (...)

The senior G7 diplomat added:

‘What we said about Ukraine has to apply to Gaza. Otherwise we lose all our credibility. The Brazilians, the South Africans, the Indonesians: why should they ever believe what we say about human rights?’

Why indeed. (...)

Last week, South Africa presented a detailed 84-page submission to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) – essentially the UN’s global law court – arguing that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. (...)

The South African legal team showed ample evidence of Israeli genocidal acts in Gaza, as well as the stated intention to commit genocide, indicated in public statements by numerous senior Israeli political and military leaders. (...)

Around 24,000 people have been killed in Gaza since 7 October last year, including over 10,300 children and 7,100 women. There may be another 7,000 buried under the rubble. (...)

According to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, by the end of 2023, 1.9 million people – nearly 85 per cent of the total population of Gaza – had been internally displaced under Israel’s attacks. (...)

Jonathan Cook noted that the West is now standing in the dock alongside Israel at the ICJ:

‘Israel expects support from western capitals because they have nearly as much to fear from a verdict against Israel as Israel itself. They have staunchly backed the killing spree, with the US and UK, in particular, sending weapons that are being used against the people of Gaza, making both potentially complicit.’ (...)

Israel’s most brutal assault in Gaza’s history is a continuation of its long war of oppression against the Palestinians. (...)

[The political writer Caitlin Johnstone] explained:

‘The demolition of Gaza is indeed being perpetrated in defense of western values, and is itself a perfect embodiment of western values. Not the western values they teach you about in school, but the hidden ones they don’t want you to look at.’ (...)

‘What we are seeing in Gaza is a much better representation of what western civilization is really about than all the gibberish about freedom and democracy we learned about in school.’

True to form, Washington is doing its utmost to protect Israel. During a press briefing, US national security spokesman John Kirby told reporters:

‘South Africa’s lawsuit against Israel is “meritless, counterproductive and completely without any basis in fact whatsoever”.’

Interviewed by Andrew Napolitano, a former judge and law professor, Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University responded to Kirby’s dismissive remark:

‘I just wish there were grown-ups in power. Grown-ups who are responsible, who are honest, who are decent, who would read an 84-page detailed complaint and give a serious answer, rather than a one-sentence smack-off like that.’

He added:

‘I wish, at the same time, that the White House press corps would follow up more seriously. (...)

‘Why don’t the journalists do their job, rather than feeding us the propaganda from the White House? They should be questioning the propaganda. (...)

Media academics have analysed Israel-Palestine coverage and found that Palestinian perspectives are given ‘far less time and legitimacy’ than Israeli views in the British media. (...)

‘The Palestinian perspective is effectively absent from the coverage, in how they understand the reasons for the conflict and the nature of the occupation under which they are living.’ (...)

We should all reject the output of ‘the powerful opinion-forming corporations’ and look elsewhere, to those internet oases of real journalism, in order to understand the world and to radically change it for the better.

Tags: #human_rights #russia #ukraine #iraq #invasion #sovereignty #gaza #palestine #palestinians #israel #occupied_teritories #genocide #war_of_agression #media #journalism #journalist #media_bias #news #press #corporate_media #mainstream_media #msm #bbc #the_guardian

Eileen Brophy

January 17, 2024 1:09pm

1948: Creation & Catastrophe (Full documentary)
Through riveting and moving personal recollections of both #Palestinians and #Israelis, 1948: Creation & Catastrophe reveals the shocking events of the most pivotal year in the most controversial conflict in the world. It tells the story of the establishment of Israel as seen through the eyes of the people who lived it. But rather than being a history lesson, this documentary is a primer for the present. It is simply not possible to make sense of what is happening today without an understanding of 1948. This documentary was the last chance for many of its Israeli and Palestinian characters to narrate their first-hand accounts of the creation of a state and the expulsion of a nation. Hear stories from the Israelis and Palestinians who personally lived through events in Haifa, Jaffa, Dayr Yasin, Acre, Jerusalem, Ramla, Lydda and more. These shocking and dramatic events reveal the core of what drives the conflict today.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bwy-Rf15UIs

January 12, 2024 1:37pm

By bombing Yemen, the west risks repeating its own mistakes

The Guardian

Instead of retaliating against the Houthi militia, the US and its allies should be pressing Israel to end its invasion of Gaza and accept a ceasefire.

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A Typhoon takes off from RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus to to take part in airstrikes against military targets in Yemen. Photograph: Sgt Lee Goddard/MoD/AFP/Getty Images.

Early on Friday, the US and Britain launched military strikes against more than a dozen targets in Yemen controlled by the Houthi militia. (...)

Western leaders, and especially the US president, Joe Biden, insist that they want to reduce the risk of the war in Gaza spreading to other parts of the Middle East. But the US-led air and naval strikes on Yemen are the most significant expansion of the conflict since Israel launched its devastating assault on Gaza after the 7 October attacks by Hamas. Instead of avoiding a wider war, the US and its allies are escalating regional tensions and adding fuel to a conflict that has already spilled over to Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and the Red Sea. The conflagration could spiral out of control, perhaps more by accident than design. (...)

Washington appears almost eager to repeat its mistakes: years of bombing by US allies during Yemen’s long civil war failed to dislodge the Houthis or persuade them to change course. In fact, the Houthis became stronger after each military confrontation.(...)

The US and its allies are resisting the clearest path for de-escalation across the region: putting pressure on Israel to end its invasion and accept a ceasefire.

A truce would remove the Houthis’ rationale for their aggression against commercial shipping in the Red Sea – and the movement’s leaders have said they will cease disrupting global trade once Israel stops bombing Gaza. The US-led military strikes are likely to have the opposite effect. (...)

The Houthis, who were losing support in Yemen before the Gaza war, have little incentive to change tactics since the conflict has increased their popularity throughout the Middle East. (...)

Washington’s unwavering support and billions of dollars in arms shipments to Israel are straining other US alliances in the region. It’s notable that two of the US’s closest allies in the Arab world, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, have resisted joining an international naval coalition, assembled by the Biden administration last month, to confront the Houthis and protect shipping in the Red Sea. (...)

The Houthis essentially won the war, and they reached a UN-brokered ceasefire in 2022 with Saudi Arabia, although the two sides are still negotiating a permanent truce. (...)

For the US and Britain, that history should serve as a cautionary tale: the regional power they supported spent years trying to destroy the Houthis, only to be ground down and forced to negotiate a settlement.

#Jerusalem #AlAqsa #palestine #Israel #Occupation #Apartheid #Politics

Tags: #middle_east #israel #palestine #palestinians #gaza #lebanon #iraq #yemen #houthis #saudi_arabia #iran #hezbollah #hamas #red_sea

Farhad A

January 11, 2024 10:16am

Israeli #Settlers carry pictures of a soldier killed in the #Gaza Strip during their storming of Al-Aqsa Mosque today, with protection from the occupation police, which prevents thousands of #Palestinians from reaching it.

Eileen Brophy

January 7, 2024 4:22pm

ISRAEL KILLED MORE PALESTINIANS IN 2023 THAN IN ANY YEAR SINCE 1948

srael killed more Palestinians in 2023 than in any year since 1948, when the Nakba (Catastrophe) started, the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics said on Sunday. Of the 22,404 recorded killings of Palestinians last year, 22,141 have been killed since 7 October, 98 per cent of them in the Gaza Strip. The figure includes nearly 9,000 children and 6,450 women. At least 319 Palestinians have been martyred in the Israeli-occupied West Bank since 7 October, including 111 children and four women.

Over 7,000 Palestinians have been reported missing in Gaza, 67 per cent of them children and women, while nearly 1.9 million have been internally displaced in the coastal enclave. The total population of the territory stands at 2.3m, almost half of whom are children.

Israel has targeted civilian infrastructure during its offensive against the Palestinians in Gaza. At least 65,000 housing units have been destroyed completely, while 290,000 have been partially destroyed since 7 October. Moreover, 100 journalists have been targeted and killed; doctors and other medical staff, as well as hospitals, have also been targeted deliberately by Israel.

The Palestinian Commission of Prisoners’ and Ex-Prisoners’ Affairs has confirmed that Israel was holding 7,800 Palestinian prisoners as at the end of November, including 76 women and 260 children. The number of administrative detainees held without charge or trial stands at 2,870.

https://www.blacklistednews.com/article/85666/israel-killed-more-palestinians-in-2023-than-in-any-year-since.html

#Israel #Palestinians

Israel killed more Palestinians in 2023 than in any year since 1948

Farhad A

January 5, 2024 8:29pm

Israeli journalist Gideon Levy in an interview with Western media: #Israel deals with #Palestinian #prisoners more harshly than #Hamas deals with #Israeli prisoners, as #Israel detains hundreds of #Palestinians in bad conditions, and such conditions are not seen even in #Russia, which is ruled by #Putin.

#palestine #Israel #Occupation #Apartheid #Politics

January 4, 2024 8:25am

Palestinians stage general strike: People gather to mourn Saleh Al Arouri

Palestinians across the occupied West Bank have staged a general strike to mourn the killing of senior Hamas leader Saleh al Arouri. In his hometown of Arura...#AlJazeera #AlJazeeraEnglish #AlJazeeraLatest #AlJazeeraLive #AlJazeeraLiveNews #AlJazeeraVideo #GeneralStrike #HamasLeader #PalestineMourning #Palestinians #SalehAlArouri #WestBank
Palestinians stage general strike: People gather to mourn Saleh Al Arouri

https://newrepublic.com/article/177589/disingenuous-attack-greta-thunberg-year

January 4, 2024 5:18am

Palestinians stage general strike: People gather to mourn Saleh Al Arouri

libramoon

January 3, 2024 10:55pm

The Most Disingenuous Attack on #GretaThunberg This Year
Liza Featherstone
December 21, 2023

..."Thunberg’s stance is an eminently reasonable one: The slaughter of civilians must end, and the occupation of #Gaza must end. And while it’s clearly a divisive position for the #climate movement in some places, in much of the world solidarity with oppressed and starving people is popular. In the global south, where the worst impacts of climate change are already evident, #Israel and the United States are widely criticized for their treatment of the #Palestinians. Even in the U.S. and Europe, many young people share Thunberg’s view, and they’re not alone; as Biden admitted at a recent fundraiser, support for Israel’s ongoing massacre is cooling.

Besides, standing up against the genocide of the Palestinians is hardly a distraction from the climate movement. Gaza is a climate issue. Palestinians are among the most vulnerable people in the ongoing climate crisis, partly because of the way the Israeli government cruelly restricts the water and electricity supply. And as my TNR colleagues have reported, occupation and war are worsening warming in the region, as bombs destroy the soil and the military and settlers uproot and burn Palestinian olive trees. Gaza now faces a grave environmental crisis as well as a humanitarian one. The secretary-general of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies said as much at the U.N. climate talks in Dubai.

The reaction to Thunberg’s humane stance demonstrates the extent to which the alleged antisemitism of the Palestinian cause has become a wedge issue for the right against beloved icons of liberalism and the left, one that easily deranges and confuses onlookers. The accusations are ridiculous, and the fact that they have any traction at all shows how many have taken leave of their senses on this matter."...

The Most Disingenuous Attack on Greta Thunberg This Year

That’s saying something, given that Thunberg reliably seems to bring out the nutty in conservatives.

January 3, 2024 1:52pm

Palestinians protest killing of senior Hamas official in Lebanon | Al Jazeera Newsfeed

Palestinians in the occupied West Bank have protested the killing of Hamas’s deputy leader Saleh al-Arouri who was targeted by a drone strike in Lebanon. The...#AlJazeera #AlJazeeraEnglish #Beirut #Hamas #Palestinians #Saleh #Salehal-Arouri #UN #alJazeera #aljazeeraEnglish #aljazeeralive #aljazeeravideo #al-Arouri #aljazeeraEnglish #aljazeeralatest #aljazeeralive #aljazeeralivenews #attack #deputy #drone #escalation #killed #killing #latestnews #leader #newsheadlines #occupiedWestBank #official #protested #region #restraint #risks #strike #targeted #top
Palestinians protest killing of senior Hamas official in Lebanon | Al Jazeera Newsfeed

sol_o_o_l

January 2, 2024 1:28am

Truth About How Israel’s Zionism Began and Led to Genocide of Palestinians in Gaza

#Truth About How #Israel ’s #Zionism #Began and #Led to #Genocide of #Palestinians in #Gaza #Palestine

Truth About How Israel’s Zionism Began and Led to Genocide of Palestinians in Gaza - Global Research

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