Beyond the US Veto: UN Options to Protect Gaza

MarjorieCohn

December 29, 2023

Any party to the Genocide Convention can submit the matter to the World Court, which could make a finding of genocide, writes Marjorie Cohn. The General Assembly also has an option left.

 

As Israel continues its genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza — with the death toll now exceeding 20,000 (about 70 percent women and children) — the world seems powerless to stop the slaughter.

The Biden administration, Israel’s chief enabler, defanged the resolution that was ultimately passed by the U.N. Security Council on Dec. 22, rendering it merely symbolic. The final resolution calls for humanitarian assistance but not for a ceasefire which would allow aid to reach the people of Gaza. The U.S. saved diplomatic face by not employing its customary veto, but it did not vote for the resolution, electing instead to abstain.

On the same day, Paula Gaviria Betancur, special rapporteur on the human rights of internally displaced persons, warned that Israel seeks to permanently change the composition of Gaza’s population with additional evacuation orders, and systematic and widespread attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure in areas of southern Gaza.

Calls for prosecution of Israeli and U.S. officials in the International Criminal Court (ICC) have been ignored as the chief prosecutor of the ICC demonstrates blatant bias in favor of Israel.

On Nov. 13, the Center for Constitutional Rights filed a lawsuit on behalf of Palestinian human rights organizations, Palestinians and Palestinian Americans against President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, charging them with failure to prevent genocide and complicity in genocide. It seeks an emergency court order to halt U.S. military and diplomatic support to the Israeli government. The suit documents how Israel is committing genocide as defined in the Genocide Convention. A hearing will take place in January.

Nevertheless, the carnage continues unabated.

‘World Court’ Decides Disputes Between Countries

The ICC’s Rome Statute provides for the prosecution of individuals who commit, or aid and abet the commission of genocide. By contrast, the International Court of Justice (ICJ or “World Court”) — the judicial arm of the U.N. system — resolves disputes between countries.

Any of the 153 state parties to the Genocide Convention can and should submit Israel’s genocide to the ICJ. Article IX of the Genocide Convention provides:

“Disputes between the Contracting Parties relating to the interpretation, application or fulfilment of the present Convention, including those relating to the responsibility of a State for genocide . . . shall be submitted to the International Court of Justice at the request of any of the parties to the dispute.”

A formal investigation of the “Situation in the State of Palestine” has been pending in the ICC for nearly three years. If the ICJ were to make a finding of genocide, the ICC would not have to determine that genocide has occurred. The ICC would just have to decide which individuals are responsible for the genocide.

In the last two months, states parties to the Genocide Convention — including South Africa, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Comoros, Colombia, Algeria and Turkey — have urged the ICC to investigate Israeli officials for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Gaza. Other countries critical of Israel’s actions include Pakistan, Brazil, Chile, Belize, Jordan, Ireland, Honduras, Bahrain, Venezuela, Iran and Cuba.

These countries should be urged to submit the matter of Israel’s genocide to the ICJ. If one of them does make a submission, the ICJ would have jurisdiction to hear the matter. Its decision must then go to the Security Council for enforcement, although that could be limited by political considerations.

When the Genocide Convention was invoked against Serbia by Bosnia and Herzegovina regarding the 1995 massacre at Srebrenica, the ICJ ruled against Serbia. This fed directly through to prosecutions at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

In 2004, the ICJ issued an advisory opinion against Israel in the case involving the barrier wall it built on Palestinian land. There’s another advisory opinion case pending in the ICJ about the legality of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory, in which the ICJ is expected to rule against Israel.

But if a state party to the Genocide Convention were to submit the matter of Israel’s genocide to the ICJ, the court’s decision could have binding authority.

On Dec. 12, Craig Murray, the U.K.’s former ambassador to Uzbekistan, attended a U.N. session in Geneva called by Palestine. More than 120 countries were represented. Murray spoke to several delegates about why no country has submitted the matter of Israel’s genocide to the ICJ.

“The answer is now clear to me,” Murray wrote. “It is not that people are worried that a claim of genocide will not be successful at the International Court of Justice. It is that everybody is quite sure it will succeed.”

World Court Finding of Genocide Would Bind the ICC

“The problem is that once the ICJ has determined that this is a genocide, it follows that not only are [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu and hundreds of senior Israeli officials and military personally liable,” according to Murray. “[B]ut it is absolutely plain that ‘Genocide Joe’ Biden, [U.K. Prime Minister Rishi] Sunak and members of their administrations are also criminally liable for complicity, having provided military support for the genocide.”

Murray added, “The International Criminal Court cannot ignore a judgment of genocide from the International Court of Justice and will have no choice but to issue arrest warrants.”

There is no doubt that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Craig Mokhiber, former director of the New York Office of the UN’s High Commissioner of Human Rights (who resigned in October to protest the UN’s failure to prevent Israel’s genocide) called it “unprecedented — a text book case of genocide.”

Speaking at a Dec. 13 webinar sponsored by the Institute for Policy Studies, Friends Committee on National Legislation and MPower Action, Mokhiber said that Israel has murdered entire bloodlines, multigenerational families and whole neighborhoods in Gaza.

Israel has destroyed the civilian infrastructure and intentionally imposed disease, hunger, thirst and a lack of medical care on the people in Gaza. This amounts to the deliberate infliction of conditions of life calculated to bring about the destruction of the Palestinians in whole or in part, Mokhiber stated, which constitutes a genocidal act.

The ICJ can infer genocidal intent from Israel’s conduct, Mokhiber noted. But, he added, the court doesn’t need to infer intent from conduct because Israel is openly declaring its genocidal intent through public statements uttered by Israeli government officials: the intent to reduce Gaza to rubble, to bury Gazans, etc. “I have never seen a case like this,” Mokhiber said.

General Assembly Should Convene Under ‘Uniting for Peace’

There is also a procedure the General Assembly can follow to circumvent a U.S. veto in the Security Council. Under Uniting for Peace, a resolution passed by the General Assembly to evade the Soviet Union’s veto power during the Korean War, the General Assembly can call on its 193 U.N. member states to impose a trade embargo on Israel and urge them to organize a military force to intervene in Gaza. The General Assembly can also suspend Israel from its ranks.

I have joined more than 1,000 global intellectuals in signing a Declaration of Conscience and Concern, urging “national governments to embargo and halt all shipments of weapons to Israel, especially the United States and the United Kingdom, which should also withdraw their provocative naval presences from the Eastern Mediterranean.” We called on “the UN Security Council and General Assembly to so decree without delay.”

Moreover, we “unequivocally” urged “an immediate ceasefire and the initiation of diplomatic negotiations under respected and impartial auspices, aimed at terminating Israel’s long and criminally abusive occupation of Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem. This process,” we wrote, “must be fully respectful of the inalienable right to self-determination of the Palestinian people and take proper account of relevant UN resolutions.”

Millions of people around the world have taken to the streets to protest Israel’s genocide. We must redouble our efforts to mobilize public opinion to pressure countries critical of Israel to submit the matter of its genocide to the ICJ and convene the General Assembly under Uniting for Peace. And we must support the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement to compel Israel to end its occupation of Palestinian land. The people of Gaza deserve our immediate and urgent action.

 

Israel’s Long History of Ethnic Cleansing

MouinRabbani

December 29, 2023

“Transfer,” often presented as the encouragement of voluntary emigration either by providing material incentives or making the conditions of life impossible, has become increasingly mainstreamed in Israeli political life.

Senior Israeli leaders, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, are again publicly advocating the ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip. Their proposals are being presented as voluntary emigration schemes, in which Israel is merely playing the role of Good Samaritan, selflessly mediating with foreign governments to find new homes for destitute and desperate Palestinians. But it is ethnic cleansing all the same.

Alarm bells should have started ringing in early November when U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and other Western politicians began insisting there could be “no forcible displacement of Palestinians from Gaza.” Rather than rejecting any mass removal of Palestinians, Blinken and colleagues objected only to optically challenging expulsions at gunpoint. The option of “voluntary” displacement by leaving residents of the Gaza Strip with no choice but departure was pointedly left open.

Ethnic cleansing, or “transfer” as it is known in Israeli parlance, has a long pedigree that goes back to the late-19nth-century beginnings of the Zionist movement. While the early Zionists adopted the slogan, “A Land Without a People for a People Without a Land,” the evidence demonstrates that, from the very outset, their leaders knew better. More to the point, they clearly understood that the Palestinians formed the main obstacle to the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. This is for the simple reason that, to them, a “Jewish state” denotes one in which its Jewish population acquires and maintains unchallenged demographic, territorial, and political supremacy.

Enter “transfer.” As early as 1895, Theodor Herzl, the founder of the contemporary Zionist movement, identified the necessity of removing the inhabitants of Palestine in the following terms: “We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country… expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.” David Ben-Gurion (née Grün), chairman of the Executive Committee of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, and later Israel’s first prime minister, was more blunt. In a 1937 letter to his son, he wrote: “We must expel the Arabs and take their place.”

Writing in his diary in 1940, Yosef Weitz, a senior Jewish National Fund official who chaired the influential Transfer Committee before and during the Nakba (“Catastrophe”), and became known as the Architect of Transfer, put it thus: “The only solution is a Land of Israel devoid of Arabs. There is no room here for compromise. They must all be moved. Not one village, not one tribe, can remain. Only through this transfer of the Arabs living in the Land of Israel will redemption come.” His diaries are littered with similar sentiments.

The point of the above is not to demonstrate that individual Zionist leaders held such views, but that the senior leadership of the Zionist movement consistently considered the ethnic cleansing of Palestine an objective and priority. Initiatives such as the Transfer Committee, and Plan Dalet, initially formulated in 1944 and described by the preeminent Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi as the “Master Plan for the Conquest of Palestine,” additionally demonstrate that the Zionist movement actively planned for it. The 1948 Nakba, during which more than four-fifths of Palestinians residing in territory that came under Israeli rule were ethnically cleansed, should, therefore, be seen as the fulfillment of a longstanding ambition and implementation of a key policy. A product of design, not of war (historical Christmas footnote: The Palestinian town of Nazareth was spared a similar fate only because the commander of Israeli forces that seized the city, a Canadian Jew named Ben Dunkelman, disobeyed orders to expel the population, and was relieved of his command the following day).

That the Nakba was a product of design is further substantiated by the Transfer Committee’s terms of reference. These comprised not only proposals for the expulsion of the Palestinians but, just as importantly, active measures to prevent their return, destroy their homes and villages, expropriate their property, and resettle those territories with Jewish immigrants. Weitz, together with fellow committee members Eliahu Sassoon and Ezra Danin, on June 5, 1948, presented a three-page blueprint, entitled “Scheme for the Solution of the Arab Problem in the State of Israel,” to Prime Minister Ben-Gurion to achieve these goals. According to leading Israeli historian Benny Morris, “there is no doubt Ben-Gurion agreed to Weitz’s scheme,” which included “what amounted to an enormous project of destruction” that saw more than 450 Palestinian villages razed to the ground.

The understandable focus on the expulsions of 1948 often overlooks the fact that ethnic cleansing remains incomplete unless its victims are barred from returning to their homes by a combination of armed force and legislation, and thereafter replaced by others. It is Israel’s determination to make Palestinian dispossession permanent that distinguishes Palestinian refugees from many other war refugees.

After 1948, Israel put out a whole series of fabrications to shift responsibility for the transformation of the Palestinians into dispossessed and stateless refugees onto the Arab states and the refugees themselves. These included claims that the refugees voluntarily left (they were either expelled or fled in justified terror); that Arab radio broadcasts ordered the Palestinians to flee (in fact, they were encouraged to stay put); that Israel conducted a population exchange with Arab states (there was nothing of the sort); and the bizarre argument that because they’re Arabs, Palestinians had numerous other states while Jews have only Israel (by the same logic, Sikhs would be entitled to seize British Columbia and deport its population to either the rest of Canada or the United States). More importantly, even if uniformly substantiated, none of these pretexts entitles Israel to prohibit the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes at the conclusion of hostilities. It is, furthermore, a right that was consecrated in United Nations General Assembly resolution 194 of December 11, 1948, which has been reaffirmed repeatedly since.

Ethnic Cleansing After 1967

In 1967, Israel seized the remaining 22% of Mandatory Palestine—the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and the Gaza Strip. Depopulation in these territories operated differently than in 1948. Most importantly, Israel, in addition to prohibiting the return of Palestinians who fled hostilities during the 1967 June War, and encouraging others to leave (by, for example, providing a daily bus service from Gaza City to the Allenby Bridge connecting the West Bank to Jordan), conducted a census during the summer of 1967. Any resident who was not present during the census was ineligible for an Israeli identity document and automatically lost their right of residency.

As a result, the population of these territories declined by more than 20% overnight. Many of those thus displaced were already refugees from 1948. Aqbat Jabr Refugee Camp near Jericho, for example—until 1967, the West Bank’s largest—became a virtual ghost town after almost all its inhabitants became refugees once again in Jordan. So many Palestinians from the Gaza Strip ended up in Jordan that a new refugee camp, Gaza Camp, was established on the outskirts of Jerash. The occupied Palestinian territories would not recover their 1967 population levels until the early 1980s.

Within the West Bank, there were also cases of mass expulsion. These included the town of Qalqilya, which was additionally slated for demolition but to which its residents were later permitted to return. Those of ‘Imwas (the Biblical Emmaus), Bayt Nuba, and Yalu in Jerusalem’s Latrun salient were less fortunate. They were summarily expelled (many today live in Ramallah’s Qaddura Refugee Camp), their villages demolished and annexed to Israel, and replaced by Canada Park, so named because the project was completed with donations from the Canadian Jewish community. Within Jerusalem’s Old City, the historic Mughrabi Quarter, abutting the Haram al-Sharif, was summarily razed to make way for a plaza astride the Wailing Wall. With many residents given only minutes to evacuate their homes, several were killed when the bulldozers went to work. According to Eitan Ben-Moshe, an engineer who oversaw the atrocity, “We threw out the wreckage of houses together with the Arab corpses.”

Depopulation Through Administrative Rule

In subsequent years, Israel employed all kinds of administrative shenanigans to further reduce the Palestinian population of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Until the 1993 Oslo Accords, for example, an exit permit from Israel’s military government was required to leave the occupied territory. It was valid for only three years and thereafter renewable annually for a maximum of three additional years (for a fee) at an Israeli consulate. If a Palestinian lost an exit permit or failed to renew an exit permit prior to its expiration for any reason (including bureaucratic foot-dragging), or couldn’t pay the renewal fee, or failed to return to Palestine prior to its expiration, that Palestinian automatically lost residency rights. Separately, Israel, over the years, deported numerous activists and community leaders, primarily to Jordan and Lebanon. During the late 1960s and 1970s, it also exiled Gaza Palestinians accused of resisting the occupation, along with their families, to prison camps in the occupied Sinai Peninsula. Among those who spent time there was the iconic Palestinian leader Haidar Abdel-Shafi.

A particularly notable case of administrative deportations occurred in 1992 after Israeli special forces botched an operation to rescue an Israeli soldier who had been seized by Hamas to exchange him for their imprisoned leader, Shaikh Ahmad Yasin. Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin ordered the summary deportation of approximately 400 Palestinians, many of them prisoners affiliated with Hamas and Islamic Jihad (PIJ), none accused of involvement in the incident that led to Rabin’s frenzied rage.

In contrast to previous deportations, which were considered permanent, these were for one- and two-year terms. In its rush to carry out the deportations under cover of night, Israel expelled a number of Palestinians who were not on its list and left behind others who were. Needless to say, the mass expulsion was, as always in such matters, approved by Israel’s High Court of Justice after minor modifications. It ruled, among other things, that this was not a collective deportation but rather a collection of individual deportations. Perhaps more significantly, the deportees were stuck in an inhospitable no-man’s land, Marj al-Zuhur, because Lebanon refused to facilitate the deportations by receiving them. During their involuntary residence in Marj al-Zuhur, assistance came primarily from Hezbollah, and it was during this period that relations between Hamas, PIJ, and Hezbollah were solidified.

Israel’s Strategies to ‘Thin’ Gaza’s Population

With the focus in recent years on the intensified campaigns of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, it is often forgotten that, for decades, the primary target for depopulation was the Gaza Strip, particularly its refugee population, which accounts for approximately three-quarters of the territory’s residents. Even before it occupied Gaza in 1967, Israel regularly promoted initiatives to achieve the “thinning” of its refugee population, with destinations as far afield as Libya and Iraq. Not without reason, Israel’s leaders felt uncomfortable with the presence of so many ethnically cleansed Palestinians within walking distance of their former homes. After 1967, it encouraged Palestinian emigration from the Gaza Strip to not only foreign countries but also the West Bank.

In 1969, Israel even devised a scheme to send 60,000 Palestinians from the Gaza Strip to Paraguay with offers of lucrative employment. The plan was negotiated between Paraguay’s military dictator Alfredo Stroessner and Mossad, the Israeli foreign intelligence agency. It was, of course, purely coincidental that, shortly thereafter, Mossad discovered it no longer had the resources to hunt Nazi fugitives in Paraguay, which had been one of their destinations of choice. The scheme was discontinued when several of its victims, upon realizing the promise of a new life of comfort was all a sham, shot up the Israeli embassy in Asunción, killing one of its staff.

‘Transfer’ and Gaza Today

In the decades since, “transfer,” often presented as the encouragement of voluntary emigration either by providing material incentives or making the conditions of life impossible, has become increasingly mainstreamed in Israeli political life. In 2019, for example, a “senior government official,” quoted in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, expressed a willingness to help Palestinians emigrate from the Gaza Strip.

Mass expulsion has been gaining its share of adherents as well, and it is a position that is today represented within Israel’s coalition government. As has the idea that “transfer” should include Palestinian citizens of Israel—Avigdor Lieberman, for example, who was Israel’s minister of defense several years ago, is an advocate of not only emptying the West Bank and Gaza Strip of Palestinians but of getting rid of Palestinian citizens of Israel as well. As one might expect from a minister who was in charge of the Israeli military, he is also an advocate of “beheading” disloyal Palestinian citizens of Israel with “an axe.”

Against this background, Israel saw the attacks of October 7 as not only a threat but also as an opportunity. Fortified with unconditional U.S. and European support, Israeli political and military leaders immediately began promoting the transfer of Gaza’s Palestinian population to the Sinai desert. The proposal was enthusiastically embraced by the United States and by Secretary of State Antony Blinken in particular. Hopelessly out of his depth when it comes to the Middle East, as ever, he appears to have genuinely believed he could recruit or pressure Washington’s Arab client regimes to make Israel’s wish a reality. Given Egyptian strongman Abdelfattah al-Sisi’s economic troubles, the fallout of the Menendez scandal, and the looming Egyptian presidential elections, it was suggested to him by the Washington echo chamber that it would take only an IMF loan, debt relief, and a promise to file away Menendez to bring Cairo on board. As so often when it comes to the Middle East, Blinken, armed only with Israel’s latest wish list, didn’t have a clue his indecent proposal would be categorically rejected, first and foremost by Egypt.

‘Transfer’ as ‘Voluntary Emigration’

The fallback position is opposition to “forcible displacement” at the point of a gun, while anything else is fair game. This includes reducing the Gaza Strip to rubble in what may well be the most intensive bombing campaign in history; a genocidal assault on an entire society that has killed civilians at an unprecedentedly rapid pace; the deliberate destruction of an entire civilian infrastructure, including the targeted obliteration of its health and education sectors; the highest proportion of households in hunger crisis ever recorded globally and the real prospect of pre-meditated famine; severance of the water and electricity supply leading to acute thirst, widespread consumption of non-potable water, and termination of sewage treatment; and promotion of a sharp rise in infectious disease. One Israeli soldier has already died of a fungal infection resulting from the collapse in sanitation he helped bring about in the Gaza Strip. How many Palestinians have been consumed by similar illnesses, we do not know, but it is reasonable to assume that children and the elderly are hit particularly hard.

In other words, if desperate Palestinians seek to flee this seventh circle of hell to save their skins, that’s considered voluntary emigration—their choice. If they cannot remain in the Gaza Strip because Israel has made it unfit for human habitation with U.S. weapons, that is a voluntary choice that will be respected. And the U.S. and Israel are only here to help, like Mother Theresa, determined to assist every last one of them whether they like it or not.

Danny Danon, a member of parliament who was previously Israel’s envoy to the United Nations (the guy who sounds like Elmer Fudd), recently held up the mass displacement of Syrians to multiple shores during the past decade as an example to be emulated. “Even if each country receives ten thousand, twenty thousand Gazans, this is significant.”

Asked about Danon’s proposal at a Likud meeting on Christmas Day, Netanyahu responded, “We are working on it. Our problem is [finding] the countries that are willing to absorb [them].”

As an editorial in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz put it on December 27: “Israeli lawmakers keep pushing for transfer under the guise of humanitarian aid.”

Not to be outdone by the politicians, the Jerusalem Post ran an opinion piece entitled “Why Moving to the Sinai Peninsula is The Solution for Gaza’s Palestinians.”

“Sinai,” its author Joel Roskin enthused, “comprises one of the most suitable places on Earth to provide the people of Gaza with hope and a peaceful future.”

Not individual Gazans, but “the people of Gaza.” Notably, such proposals consistently take it as a given that those departing will never return. One waits with bated breath, for the European Union is expected to respond to these calls for mass expulsion with further investigations of Palestinian textbooks.

While ethnic cleansing has been intrinsic to Zionist/Israeli ideology and practice from the very outset, it also has a flip side: The 1948 expulsion of the Palestinians expanded what had been a conflict between the Zionist movement and the Palestinians into a regional, Arab-Israeli one. The second Nakba Israel is currently inflicting on the Gaza Strip similarly appears well on its way to instigating the renewal of hostilities across the Middle East.

As importantly, the 1948 Nakba did not defeat the Palestinians, who initiated their struggle from the camps of exile, those in the Gaza Strip most prominently among them. It would take a Blinken level of foolishness to assume the expulsion of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip would produce a different outcome.

 

‘We Will Come to You in a Roaring Flood’: The Untold Story of the October 7 Attacks

RamzyBaroud

December 29, 2023

The dramatic, earth-shattering events in Palestine starting on October 7 have taken many people by surprise. However, attentive observers are not.

Few expected that Palestinian fighters would be parachuting into southern Israel on October 7; that instead of capturing a single Israeli soldier – as done in 2006 – hundreds of Israelis, including many soldiers and civilians, would find themselves captive in besieged Gaza.

The reason behind the ‘surprise’, however, is the same reason that Israel is still reeling under collective shock, which is the tendency to pay close attention to political discourses and intelligence analyses of Israel and its supporters – while largely neglecting the Palestinian discourse.

For better comprehension, let us go back to the start.

The Spark

We entered 2023 with some depressing data and dark predictions about what was awaiting Palestinians in the new year.

Just before the year commenced, the United Nations Mideast envoy Tor Wennesland, said that 2022 was the most violent year since 2005. “Too many people, overwhelmingly Palestinian, have been killed and injured,” Wennesland told the UN Security Council.

This figure – 171 killed and hundreds wounded in the West Bank alone – did not receive much coverage in Western media. The mounting Palestinian victims, however, registered among Palestinians and their Resistance movements.

As anger and calls for revenge grew among ordinary Palestinians, their leadership continued to play its same traditional role – of pacifying Palestinian calls for resistance, while continuing with its ‘security coordination’ with Israel.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, 88, carried on rehashing the old language about a two-state solution and the ‘peace process’, while cracking down on Palestinians who dared protest his ineffectual leadership.

Defenseless in the face of a far-right Israeli government with an open agenda to crush Palestinians, to expand illegal settlements and to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, Palestinians were forced to develop their own defensive strategies.

The Lions’ Den – a multi-factional Resistance group which first appeared in the city of Nablus in August 2022 – grew in power and appeal. Other groups, old and new, emerged on the scene throughout the northern West Bank, with the single objective of uniting Palestinians around a non-factional agenda and, ultimately, producing a new Palestinian leadership in the West Bank.

These developments sounded alarm bells in Israel. The Israeli occupation army moved quickly to crush the new armed rebellion, raiding Palestinian towns and refugee camps one after the other, with the hope of turning this nascent revolution into another failed attempt to challenge the status quo in occupied Palestine.

The bloodiest of the Israeli incursions occurred in Nablus on February 23, Jericho on August 15 and, most importantly, in the Jenin refugee camp.

The July 3 Israeli invasion of Jenin was reminiscent, in terms of casualties and degree of destruction, to the Israeli invasion of that very camp in April 2002.

The outcome, however, was not the same. Back then, Israel had invaded Jenin, along with other Palestinian towns and refugee camps, and succeeded in crushing armed resistance for years to come.

This time around, the Israeli invasion merely ignited a wider rebellion in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, creating a further schism in the already deteriorating relationship between Palestinians, on the one hand, and Abbas and his PA, on the other.

Indeed, just days after Israel concluded its attack on the camp, Abbas emerged with thousands of his soldiers to warn the bereaved refugees that “the hand that will break the unity of the people .. will be cut off from its arm”.

Yet, as the popular rebellion continued to build momentum in the West Bank, Israeli intelligence reports started talking about a plan composed by the deputy head of Hamas’ political bureau, Saleh Arouri, to ignite an armed Intifada.

The solution, according to the Israeli newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth, citing official Israeli sources, was to kill Arouri.

Indeed, Israel’s attention and counterstrategy was focused intently on the West Bank, as Hamas, in Gaza at the time, in Israel’s viewpoint, seemed disinterested in an all-out confrontation.

But why did Israel reach such a conclusion?

Miscalculation

Several major events, the kind that would have pushed Hamas to retaliate, have taken place without any serious armed response by the Resistance in Gaza.

Last December, Israel had sworn in its most right-wing government in history. Far-right ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich arrived on the political scene with the declared objectives of annexing the West Bank, imposing military control over Al-Aqsa Mosque and other Palestinian Muslim and Christian holy sites and, in the case of Smotrich, denying the very existence of the Palestinian people.

Their pledges were quickly translated into action under the leadership of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Ben-Gvir was keen on sending a message to his constituency that the seizure of Al-Aqsa Mosque by Israel had become imminent.

He repeatedly raided or ordered raids on Al-Aqsa at an unprecedented frequency. The most violent and humiliating of these raids occurred on April 4, when worshippers were beaten up by soldiers while praying inside the mosque during the holy month of Ramadan.

Resistance groups in Gaza threatened retaliation. In fact, several rockets were fired from Gaza toward Israel, merely serving as a symbolic reminder that Palestinians are united, regardless of where they are in the geographic map of historic Palestine.

Israel, however, ignored the message, and used the Palestinian threats of retaliation, and the occasional ‘lone-wolf attacks’ – like that of Muhannad al-Mazaraa at the illegal Maale Adumim settlement – as political capital to ignite the religious fervor of Israeli society.

Not even the death of Palestinian political prisoner, Khader Adnan, on May 2 seemed to have shifted Hamas’ position. Some even suggested that there is a rift between Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad following Adnan’s death as a result of hunger strike in the Ramleh Prison.

On the same day, the PIJ fired rockets into Israel, as Adnan was one of its most prominent members. Israel answered by attacking hundreds of targets inside Gaza, mostly civilian homes and infrastructure, which resulted in the death of 33 Palestinians and the wounding of 147 more.

A truce was declared on May 13, again with no direct Hamas participation, giving further reassurance to Israel that its bloody onslaught on the Strip had achieved more than a military purpose – often referred to as ‘mowing the lawn’ – but a political one, as well.

Israel’s strategic estimation, however, proved to be wrong, as attested by Hamas’ well-coordinated October 7 attacks in southern Israel, targeting numerous military bases, settlements and other strategic positions.

But was Hamas being deceptive? Hiding its actual strategic objectives in anticipation of that major event?

‘Roaring Flood’

A quick examination of Hamas’ recent statements and political discourse demonstrate that the Palestinian group was hardly secretive about its future action.

Two weeks before 2023 commenced, at a Gaza rally on December 14, Hamas leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, had a message for Israel: “We will come to you in a roaring flood. We will come to you with endless rockets; we will come to you in a limitless flood of soldiers … like the repeating tide.”

The immediate response to the Hamas’ attack was the predictable US-Western solidarity with Israel, calls for revenge, the complete destruction and annihilation of Gaza and the revitalized plans of displacing Palestinians out of Gaza into Egypt – in fact, out of the West Bank as well, into Jordan.

The Israeli war on the Strip, also starting on October 7, has resulted in unprecedented casualties compared to all Israeli wars on Gaza, in fact, on Palestinians during any time in modern history.

Quickly, the term ‘genocide’ was being used, initially by intellectuals and activists, and eventually by international law experts.

“Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza is quite explicit, open, and unashamed,” associate professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Stockton University, Raz Segal, wrote on October 13 in an article entitled ‘A Textbook Case of Genocide’.

Despite this, the UN could do nothing. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said on November 8 that the UN has “neither money nor power” to prevent a potential genocide on Gaza.

In essence, this effectively meant the disabling of the international legal and political systems, as every attempt by the Security Council to demand an immediate and permanent ceasefire has been blocked by the US and Israel’s other Western allies.

As the death toll mounted among a starving population in Gaza – all food deprived per the November 28 estimation of the World Food Program – Palestinians resisted throughout the Gaza Strip.

Their resistance was not only confined to attacking or ambushing invading Israeli soldiers but was, in fact, predicated on a legendary steadfastness of a population that refused to be weakened or displaced.

Sumud

This sumud continued, even when Israel began to systematically attack hospitals, schools and every place that, in times of war, are seen as ‘safe places’ for a beleaguered civilian population.

Indeed, on December 3, UN Human Rights Chief, Volker Türk, said that “there is no safe place in Gaza”. This phrase was repeated often by other UN officials, along with other phrases such as “Gaza has become a graveyard for children” as first noted by UNICEF Spokesperson James Elder on October 31. This left Guterres with no other option but to, on December 6, invoke article 99, which allows the Secretary-General to “bring to the attention of the Security Council any matter which in his opinion may threaten the maintenance of international peace and security.”

Israeli violence and Palestinian sumud also extended to the West Bank as well. Aware of the potential for armed resistance in the West Bank, the Israeli army quickly launched major, deadly raids on countless Palestinian towns, villages and refugee camps, killing hundreds, injuring thousands and arresting thousands more.

But Gaza remained the epicenter of the Israeli genocide. Aside from a brief humanitarian truce from November 24 to December 1, coupled with few prisoner exchanges, the battle for Gaza – in fact, for the future of Palestine and the Palestinian people – continues, at an unparalleled price of death and destruction.

Palestinians know full well that the current fight will either mean a new Nakba, like the ethnic cleansing of 1948, or the beginning of the reversal of that very Nakba – as in the process of liberating the Palestinian people from the yoke of Israeli colonialism.

While Israel is determined to end Palestinian Resistance once and for all, it is obvious that the Palestinian people’s determination to win their freedom in coming years is far greater.

 

In Gaza, Palestinian Christians Fear Being ‘Swept Under the Rubble’

 

FatimaAbdulKarim

December 29, 2023

Hundreds of Gaza’s Christian families are either sheltering in a church or have fled south, marking Christmas only as another day of Israel’s deadly assault.

This holiday season, there was little reminding the Palestinian residents of Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus Christ, that it was Christmas time. Indeed, the city marked Dec. 25 not as Christmas, but as Day 80 of a vicious war that has engulfed all of historical Palestine since October 7.

The events that are typical of Bethlehem this time of year — the tree lighting ceremony, the bustling market, Scouts parades, and other celebrations — had all been canceled. Grief and fear predominated as two million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip continued to endure Israel’s brutal military offensive and punishing siege, which has left more than 20,000 Palestinians killed. The usual joy that lights up the city was impossible to find, making it an unrecognizable Christmas season.

The decision to let the month pass without its typical festivities was proposed by various churches and priests and approved by the Bethlehem municipality, which oversees the annual celebrations. Souvenir shops and restaurants, usually packed with tourists and visitors from all over Palestine, were largely empty. The Church of the Nativity, the oldest Christian holy site in the world, would normally be packed; these days, no one is standing in line to see the spot where Jesus is said to have been born.

Traditionally, outside the church, there would also be a towering Christmas tree. This year, in its place, Bethlehem artists have erected a monumental display of the Flight of Jesus and the Virgin Mary to Egypt. The story bears painful resonances with the violence in Gaza, where 80 percent of the Strip’s residents have been displaced, and even face the looming threat of total expulsion.

The Lutheran Church, a 19th century building constructed by German pilgrims, has placed the ongoing war on Gaza at center stage, literally: at the church’s altar, there is a pile of bricks and stones resembling rubble, with a doll of baby Jesus lying wrapped in a Palestinian flag.

The pastor of the church, Mitri Raheb, told +972 that the display was the only way to make Christmas feel relevant this year, hoping it would inspire thoughts and prayers for those lying under the rubble in Gaza. “The elements of the Christmas story resonate in our [Palestinian] story,” he said. “Christmas can speak to us in a very profound way. It’s about God’s solidarity with us. We hope that Jesus is looking upon [Gaza] and that He is with them.”

Reverend Fadi Diab, of the Episcopal Church in Ramallah, warned that the current war might mark a dark historical moment for Christians in the Middle East, and in Palestine in particular, where Christian life has been especially precarious under the weight of the occupation. In the early 20th century, he said, about 17 percent of Palestine’s population was Christian; today, that figure stands at merely 1 to 2 percent, with most Palestinian Christians now living in the diaspora.

Pastor Raheb, who is also a theologian and founder and President of Dar Al-Kalima College in Bethlehem, spoke of the gravity of this year’s loss. “One of the many tragedies of the war is that it will bring an end to the existence of the Palestinian Christians in Gaza. We can’t go on with our lives and pretend nothing is happening here. We are not in a mood for celebration. While the world looks at Bethlehem, we want them to see what’s happening there in Gaza.”

No safety in churches

Reverend Diab told +972 that Christians have lived in the Gaza region since around the third century. Markers of its rich Christian history have continued to crop up over the years: in September 2022, for example, an accidental historical discovery gave the Strip’s few remaining Christian families a sense of pride — a 1,500-year-old Byzantine floor mosaic attesting to the wealth of Christian life in Gaza.

Over the past 16 years, however — since Israel imposed its blockade on the Strip following Hamas’ takeover — Gaza’s already small Palestinian Christian population dropped by two thirds, from nearly 3,000 to just 1,000. The main reasons for this emigration, according to many from the community itself, were related to the Israeli occupation and blockade, not because of a sense of religious persecution within Palestinian society.

Since the outbreak of the current war, Christian life, like the rest of Palestinian life in the Strip, has come under severe threat. Christian sites and places of worship in Gaza have been repeatedly targeted by Israeli forces. Earlier this month, two Palestinian Christian women, Nahida Khalil Anton and her daughter Samar, were shot and killed by an Israeli sniper at the Holy Family Parish, the only Catholic church in Gaza.

Both the Catholic and the Greek Orthodox churches have been targeted by Israeli airstrikes more than once, according to the Patriarchate in Jerusalem. One such strike occurred a day before the killings of the elderly mother and her daughter, damaging the only generator and water tanks that belonged to the Latin Church, according to witnesses.

The vast majority of the area’s Christian community are now reportedly sheltering in the Latin Church in Gaza City, in the north of the Strip, where Israeli troops have been waging a ground offensive for weeks. Several hundred of them were originally sheltering in the Greek Orthodox Church elsewhere in the city, but an Israeli airstrike forced them to flee to the other house of worship.

Ramzi Andrea, 458 is a Greek Orthodox Christian from Al-Zaytoun neighborhood in Gaza City, who was displaced with his entire family three times since the start of the war. He is now among a handful of Palestinian Christians who have fled to the southern city of Rafah, along with members of his family spanning three generations. Some of the other Christians are dual nationals who were able to leave through the Rafah Crossing with Egypt.

In 2006, Andrea, who had finished his first degree at Birzeit University in the occupied West Bank, rerouted his original plan to finish his graduate studies in Amman, Jordan, and instead returned to his beloved hometown of Gaza City. Despite Israel launching its siege the following year, and the repeated wars ever since, he chose to stay in the Strip, resisting the urge of many of his peers to try to leave the tiny coastal enclave.

Soon after the start of the current military offensive, the Israeli army ordered all the residents of Andrea’s neighborhood in Gaza City to relocate down south. Andrea initially refused and instead took shelter in the Greek Orthodox Church, but after the compound was hit in late October, he had to relocate again with his family and moved to the central city of Deir Al-Balah. “We had to evacuate several times until we reached Rafah, the farthest point in the south,” Andrea told +972.

‘We’ve lost the joy. We have only prayer’

“For 80 days we have been seeing all sorts of struggle amid the continued targeting of churches and places of worship, and the loss of contact with people especially in the north,” Andrea continued. “We lost a lot of friends during this journey, and we lost connection with our people in the church.”

“All this is unbearable when it comes without a political horizon,” he added. “We are now among the hundreds of thousands of refugees who are now looking for medicine and warmth.”

Andrea, a banker, was forced to abandon the 50-year-old, family-run business in Gaza City’s famous commercial center, Al-Rimal. Years ago, he had wanted to start a venture to help emerging businesses in the besieged Strip to advertise their products and their success stories. But soon after the battles between Israeli forces and Palestinian armed groups intensified in Deir Al-Balah, he was forced to evacuate again and move to Rafah with his family.

“Today is like any other day to us, not Christmas Day,” he lamented. “We want to mourn. We don’t want to celebrate — we don’t feel that we are able to. We have lost the joy. We have only prayer.”

Communication with the remaining families at the Latin Church in the north is very difficult, he explained. “When we hear a ringtone, the whole family gathers just to hear a hello from there. We are barely in touch,” he said with a sorrowful voice.

“The general thought among all Palestinian Christians now is to immigrate, after their homes and businesses were destroyed, and since there is no political horizon signaling an end to this crisis,” he added, expressing his fear that the total destruction of Gaza is “sweeping away everyone either under the rubble or into the desert.”

“My home, my neighborhood, my church, the roads leading to my house, even my gym, have been razed to the ground, with the whole world watching. There’s nothing left for the 2 million Gazans. I can’t imagine what would be the case for the few remaining Christians,” he said.

Back in Ramallah, Reverend Diab similarly worried that Christian life in Gaza could be wiped out entirely. “Hitting churches, like hitting hospitals and schools, sends a message to all Palestinians that no place is safe,” he said. “Without the people, the churches will turn into museums.”

 

Israel sued for ‘genocide’ in The Hague

RT

December 29, 2023

South Africa has asked the International Court of Justice to intervene in Gaza conflict

South Africa has filed an appeal before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague, alleging that Israeli actions in Gaza amount to “genocide” and asking for “provisional measures” to stop it, the top UN court announced on Friday.

The application claims “acts and omissions by Israel... are genocidal in character, as they are committed with the requisite specific intent ... to destroy Palestinians in Gaza as a part of the broader Palestinian national, racial and ethnical group,” the ICJ said in a statement.

Israel’s conduct towards the Palestinians in Gaza “is in violation of its obligations under the Genocide Convention,” the government in Pretoria said. They also accused Israel of having “failed to prevent genocide” and “failed to prosecute the direct and public incitement to genocide” since October 7.

South Africa also asked the ICJ to “indicate provisional measures” in order to “protect against further, severe and irreparable harm” to Palestinians under the Genocide Convention. The ICJ also published the 84-page document that lists these measures in detail, first of which is for Israel to “immediately suspend its military operations in and against Gaza.”

Pretoria also demands of West Jerusalem to stop any and all attacks on Palestinians, and to revoke any orders whose goal is “the expulsion and forced displacement from their homes” or deprivation of access to food, water, fuel, shelter, medical supplies and other humanitarian needs.

Anyone who engages in “direct and public incitement” to genocide or conspiracy to commit it must be brought to justice, the appeal insists. South Africa demanded Israel submit a report on complying with all these demands within one week.

Under the ICJ’s rules, South Africa’s application has priority over all other cases, because of the request for provisional measures.

South Africa has previously sought to charge Israel with war crimes before the International Criminal Court (ICC). West Jerusalem is not a signatory party to the ICC, but the court – also based in The Hague – has previously declared it had jurisdiction over Gaza and the West Bank.

On the other hand, both South Africa and Israel are signatories of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which was first adopted in 1948, in response to the Nazi mass murder of Jews during WWII.

 

Dead End: Israel Gets Lost in Gaza

DanielBeaumont

December 29, 2023

Until October 7 events in Gaza for the past nine years rarely made the headlines even in Israel. Some event would make Hamas fire some missiles into Israel and Israeli jets would respond by dropping bombs many times more destructive on ‘select military sites’ in Gaza. All of this was regarded as so unremarkable that the Israeli military referred to it as, “mowing the lawn.” Israel’s allies, The US, Britain, France and Germany also took little notice of these events. The situation of the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza could go on indefinitely. The Palestinians had endured more than half a century of occupation and oppression—why not another half century? From the standpoint of the various governments in Israel since the 1978 Camp David treaty with Egypt, these were matters that could be managed, while Israel continued its slow, gradual theft of the West Bank. As far as Gaza was concerned, its conversion after 2004 into a prison holding 2.2 million prisoners had ‘disposed’ of that issue. But then something happened.

On October 7 an eruption of violence occurred from that small piece of land that few people in Israel—or anywhere else—would have thought possible. The shock in Israel that the Hamas attack caused says much about the complacency not only in the Israeli government and military but among Israeli citizens in general. An Israeli journalist remarked recently that most Israelis looked at Palestinians like furniture that could be moved around in their living rooms.

October 7 also dashed the complacency of the US and Europe. Many events in the last six or seven years had obscured the issue of the Palestinians. The war in Ukraine was obviously the main event. But even when attention was given to the Middle East it was focused on other matters. Iran and its influence on Iraq, the tension between it and Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States. There were attempts in recent years to go around the issue of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and its virtual siege of Gaza. The latest attempt was ostentatiously christened ‘Abraham Accords. That—apparently a product of the brain the renowned Middle East expert Jared Kushner—was among the casualties of October 7.

After the twelve hundred people massacred by Hamas on October 7 the next casualties were the near god-like reputations of the IDF and the Mossad and its cousins in Israeli intelligence. To be fair, there were some in the Israeli intelligence establishment who sensed something might be afoot. The Israeli military intelligence Aman warned Netanyahu that the divisions in Israeli society caused by Netanyahu’s ‘judicial reforms’ could encourage an attack by Hamas or Hezbollah. But apparently the Israeli generals were as blinkered as Netanyahu whose first priority—rather like his American counterpart—is staying out of prison.

This failure accounts for the severity of the Israeli assault on Gaza. Netanyahu and the Israeli military have attempted to obscure their massive failure with a massive display of firepower that probably in its initial stages did little harm to Hamas—after all, if they’d had good intelligence before October 7, presumably with their massive advantage in firepower they would have prevented it. Also damaged were the vaunted intelligence services of Israel—Shin Bet, Mossad et al.

For Israel the Hamas attack on October 7 has been compared to 9/11 for the US. But there is a significant difference. Though US meddling and bungling in the Middle East created al-Qaeda, no one ever thought that George W Bush tried to create al-Qaeda. Not so with Netanyahu.

It is well-documented that he and others in Likud helped to create Hamas, gave financial support to it in order to fracture the Palestinians so Likud and other right-wing Israeli parties opposed to any Palestinian state could claim they had no party to negotiate with. This simply as a delaying tactic while the Israeli settlements metastasized throughout the West Bank. But on October 7 the folly of Netanyahu’s connivance in the creation Hamas was lost for most Israelis in the mists of time. How clever he was until he wasn’t.

Netanyahu’s positive rating is about 25% as I write—take heart, Biden! He’s already being accused in the Israeli press of using the war as a photo-op for his next campaign. Many of the families of the hostages are still voicing their anger with him. It took him three weeks to work up the nerve to meet with them. He has clearly given the all-out assault priority over negotiating the release of the hostages with Hamas. The two goals are not compatible. Reducing Gaza to rubble will not free the hostages.

As if the reputation of the IDF hadn’t suffered enough damage, they killed three hostages who had somehow escaped the clutches of Hamas. They were waving a makeshift white flag. An Israeli soldier shouted, “Terrorists!” Two were shot dead immediately. The third fled into a nearby building where they chased him down and killed him while he pleaded with them for his life in Hebrew. It is hard to think of a more glaring example of stupidity and criminal ineptitude.

In the meantime, the US has become concerned about civilian deaths in Gaza which stand at more than 20,000. That’s apparently too many—the State Department has yet to announce what an acceptable number of dead civilians would be. Biden has described the bombing as ‘indiscriminate’—it has emerged that more than 40% of the bombs Israel has dropped on Gaza are so-called ‘dumb bombs.’

It would appear that Hamas has a better idea of what they are doing than either Israel or the US does. It is the guerilla strategy of avoiding pitched battles, setting small ambushes before melting away. In the case of Hamas fighters into their tunnel system. Or perhaps given the vast cityscape of shelled and deserted buildings created by Israel’s bombing—the inhabitants having either fled per Israeli pamphlets to seek shelter elsewhere or lie dead in the rubble. Hamas fighters can at night exploit the ruins as an urban jungle. They know the streets and alleys and to really root them out will be very costly for the IDF.

Two other side effects of the Hamas assault of October 7 should be mentioned. The first is Netanyahu’s crackdown on Israeli dissent. The Knesset recently passed an amendment to a counter-terrorism law making a crime of “the systematic and continuous consumption of publications of a terrorist organization,” with a maximum penalty of one year’s imprisonment. In other words, a journalist who simply reads the public statements of Hamas, Hezbollah, or even the Kurdish YPG could be thrown in prison for a year—presumably their “consumption” being caught by the Israeli company’s famous Pegasus spyware used all over the world to ‘combat terrorism’ and to arrest dissidents.

Meir Baruchin, an Israeli teacher and activist who opposes the war on Gaza, was detained and investigated for “sedition and intent to commit treason.” He spent four days in solitary confinement before he was released. For journalists, especially Palestinian journalists, it will certainly be worse. So much for what is billed as the only democracy in the Middle East.

The Israeli assault on Gaza has killed 53 journalists and their media assistants, 46 Palestinians, 3 Lebanese and 4 Israelis. The assault on the civilian people of Gaza is also an assault on reporters to cover up the assault on the civilians. The killing of the Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akhleh by the IDF last year shows the Israel has no hesitation at killing journalists to kill stories.  In May of 2022 during the IDF assault on Jenin in the West Bank Abu Akhleh was shot in the head by an IDF sniper—it was not a stray bullet. Numerous investigations by non-Israeli groups, including the US Start Department, concluded she was deliberately targeted. Her killer of course was never punished.

The second effect of the Gaza war has been a surge in settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank. Settlers have seized the opportunity, while the outside world is focused on Gaza, to increase their attacks on Palestinian towns, entering homes, beating people up, burning cars, destroying orchards. They terrorize small villages and in many cases succeed in driving all the inhabitants out so as to erase the villages entirely. If these actions sound like those of the Nazis in the 1930s it’s because they are the same things. First acts of violence are committed to drive out people from a place they have lived in for eons. This is a prelude to a war on them to forcibly expel them and if they resist, to kill them. In this they are following a document written six years ago by the current Israeli minister of finance Bezalel Smotrich. The title of the document was “The Decisive Plan.” The document only mentioned Gaza in passing, Smotrich advocated the annexation of entire West Bank, giving the Palestinians the choice of leaving or staying and living as non-people. Should any take up arms to resist then they should be treated as terrorists and killed. When Smotrich did a public presentation of his plan he was asked after if that meant women and children too, he replied “In war as in war.” Decisive Plan, Final Solution—for fascists there is no such thing as irony.

On December 6 the IDF recommended that Israeli civilians evacuate to a part of the southern of al-Mawasi. Now it is estimated that homes of up to 85% of the 2.2 million people have been destroyed. Al-Jazeera reported that the IDF told more than 1.5 million homeless civilians already deprived of water, food and medicine, many of them wounded and ill, to move to an area that is about the size of Heathrow Airport. One might think that such a proposal could not be taken seriously. But it should be taken seriously because its real message was: There is no room for you anywhere in Gaza. If you stay anywhere in Gaza, you will die.

The civilian death toll is usually taken to be a byproduct of a ruthless disregard for civilian by the IDF in their determination to destroy Hamas as a military force. But this is not the case. In fact civilians are a target too. This proven by an article published by small independent on-line journal called +972. The journal was started by four Israeli journalists in 2010 and now also employs a number of Palestinian journalists. The ‘+972’ is the country code assigned to both Israel and the West Bank and Gaza and may be taken as the journal’s commitment to a single state for Israelis and Palestinians.

On November 30 +972 published an article by an Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham. The title of article was ‘A mass assassination factory’: Inside Israel’s calculated bombing of Gaza.’ Abraham draws upon anonymous sources, whistleblowers, in both the Israeli military and intelligence. Apartment buildings, schools, universities, banks markets are all targets—the idea being civilian deaths and wholesale destruction will, as one of the sources puts it, “lead civilians to put pressure on Hamas.” This dubious idea only shows the stupidity of Netanyahu and his settler allies. Another anonymous source in the article says, “When a three-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it’s because it wasn’t a big deal for her to be killed—that it was a price worth paying to hit [another] target.”

Another reason for the appalling numbers of casualty is the IDF’s use of system called Hasbora (The Gospel) which uses AI to generate targets far faster than humans could. These targets disregard any number of civilians involved what a retired intelligence officer calls, “A mass assassination factory.”

And this is central point of Yuval Abraham’s article: Palestinian civilians are as much a target in the current onslaught in Gaza as Hamas—which makes any call for the IDF to be more precise in their targeting useless. They are being precise in their targeting. They have civilians right in their crosshairs.  Nevertheless, the US continues to issue fatuous statements. On December 13 John Kirby the spokesman for the National Security said of the maps the IDF published showing which neighborhoods they would bomb, “That’s basically telegraphing your punches…I don’t know that we would do that.” Of course that is hardly high praise coming from a military power whose recent legacy is Falllujah, Ramadi and Baqubah.

Subsequently Yuval Abraham was interviewed on PBS and he spoke of another change in Israeli military targeting tactics that has multiplied civilian casualties even when they are taking into account civilian casualties:

“So, in the past, according to sources, for a single assassination attempt, dozens of Palestinian civilians would be allowed to be killed. This has become 10 times or 20 times the number that was allowed in the past after October 7.”

On October 10 an IDF spokesman said, “the emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy.” That same day, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant announced: “I have lowered all the restraints – we will kill everyone we fight against; we will use every means.” The Defense Minister Yoav Gallant: “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly.” The reference ‘human animals’ should not be taken as only referring to Hamas. Anyone who knows something about the views of many Israeli leaders knows that this is nothing new. Menachem Began, who won a Nobel Peace Prize for swindling Sadat in the 1978 Camp David Accords, referred to Palestinians as “animals on two legs.” Nor should it be taken as something confined to right-wing politicians. The celebrated Golda Meir who belonged to the Labor Party, called Palestinians “cockroaches.”

Now heavy rains are filling the streets of Gaza, and WHO, UNRWA and the many other agencies struggling to aid the Palestinians in Gaza are concerned about the outbreak of cholera and other diseases. But in the view of a retired Israeli general Giora Eiland, who previously head of the National Security Council, this will help the Israel achieve victory. In an article titled “Let’s not be intimidated by the world” he wrote:

“The international community is warning us against a severe humanitarian disaster and severe epidemics. We must not shy away from this. After all, severe epidemics in the south of Gaza will bring victory closer.”

One of the prominent issues that, according to the mainstream media, is increasingly dividing the US and Israel as the war proceeds is that the Netanyahu government has no plan for Gaza after the war ends. This is wrong. Netanyahu and his allies have a sort of plan. The only problem is that it is preposterous and has zero possibility of realization.

The Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, cited earlier, wrote in an article published on October 30 wrote:

“The Israeli Ministry of Intelligence is recommending the forcible and permanent transfer of the Gaza Strip’s 2.2 million Palestinian residents to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, according to an official document revealed in full for the first time by +972’s partner site Local Call yesterday.”

In its report the Ministry recommended that Israel “enlist international help” to carry out this transfer. Egypt is mentioned less than half a dozen times in the document. The two most significant are:

“A sterile zone of several kilometers should be created in Egypt.”

“Egypt has an obligation under international law to allow the passage of the population”

After the Israeli authors of this document generously donate Egyptian land to their preposterous scheme, they proceed with the breathtaking hypocrisy to speak of Egypt’s obligation under international law—which Israel has broken every day since its creation in 1948.

The plan is simple. According to Giora Eiland the plan is, “to create conditions where life in Gaza becomes unsustainable. Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist.”

Abraham goes on to say that a similar scheme was put forth by a right-wing think tank the Misgav Institute headed by a close associate of Netanyahu. The author was one Amir Weitmann who showed it to a Likud member of the Knesset Ariel Kallner who said, “the solution you propose, to move the population to Egypt, is a logical and necessary solution.”

Since these plans for Gaza dovetail nicely Smotrich’s plan to empty the West Bank of Palestinians it can be assumed he and those enamored of his plan would endorse. Apart from the arrogant criminality of these plans, the plans show how divorced from reality are Netanyahu’s ministers.

The possibility that the US would sign off on such proposals—and a fortiori any other country in the world—shows how out of touch with reality the Israeli right is. As I write Netanyahu is saying assault will “deepen” and “intensify.” At the same time Biden is getting pressure from careerists in the State Department and also Democrats on the House Intelligence, Armed Services or Foreign Affairs committees to curb Israel’s assault. Biden must be weighing whether his long unconditional support of Israel will now cost him his reelection. He must know also that Netanyahu’s two goals, crushing Hamas and getting the hostages back, are incompatible. The latter could be achieved by a ceasefire and negotiation. The massive assault and bombardment is more likely to kill hostages. Proposals to flood the Hamas huge tunnel system with sea water would drown them too. Biden through his career has always been inclined to compromise his ‘principles,’ but the time may be coming soon when the realpolitik of US interests and those of Israel diverge too far for compromises. Netanyahu is probably hoping for Trump’s victory in 2024 though that could backfire too—Trump has no loyalty to anyone but himself. The MAGA mob is full of anti-Semites and evangelicals who hope that Jesus will blow up the world soon.

After a vote in the UN General Assembly calling for an immediate ceasefire—which the US and Israel opposed—Biden said that Israel, “has most of the world supporting it.” The vote went against the US and Israel 153 to 10. ‘Most of the world’ according to Biden consisted of Austria, Czechia, Guatemala, Liberia, Micronesia, Nauru, Papua New Guinea and Paraguay. The main European allies of the US all abstained out of embarrassed deference. Now the desperation of the Netanyahu regime is seen in the claim of the Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. On December 26 he told a Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee meeting in the Knesset that Israel is facing a “multi-arena war” from seven different fronts including Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, West Bank, Iraq, Yemen, and Iran. Gallant said Israel has “responded and acted already on six of these fronts.” In fact the Netanyahu regime wants such a war that in their calculations would suck the US into another war in the Middle East.

The lies of Netanyahu and the IDF speak of desperation. On December 12 when the northern part of Gaza was supposedly secured by the IDF, Hamas ambushed an IDF unit killing ten Israeli soldiers. More importantly, there was the lie that Hamas had a headquarters beneath al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. No evidence was ever produced for that. The video that the IDF looked like the work of an eight-year old. A Washington Post article of December 21 found no evidence to support it. Israel under Netanyahu’s policy of no Palestinian state under any condition is on a collision course with reality. Now it appears that the Hamas attack on October 7 has not only changed Israel but the calculus of the Middle East. Israel is more isolated than ever. Its military response to October 7 is only increasing its isolation, even making more people in its most powerful ally the US question its relationship with Israel.

October 7 has made one thing clear. The Palestinians will not go away. And the current Israeli leadership is deluded in thinking they can solve matters by military power. The idea that the surrounding Arab states would take in millions of Palestinians if they could—which they cannot since their economies are in crisis—is so far removed from reality that one has to wonder what alternate universe Netanyahu’s settler ministers live in. From Morocco to Iraq, Arabs—both Muslim and Christian—have lived side by side in peace with Jews for centuries. But from Morocco to Iraq, the state of Israel is regarded as a Zionist apartheid entity implanted by a colonial power in the Arab World. The rise to power of the far right in Israel has laid bare what was always the core of the Zionist project. People from Brooklyn are telling Palestinians they have no right to the land where their ancestors have lived for thousands of years. Ami Ayalon, former head of Shin Bet the Israeli domestic security agency, said, “Israel after October 7 will be a different Israel…The current leadership will have to disappear from our lives, it led us with open eyes into the most terrible crisis.”

That is a simple hard fact that US and Israeli politicians have tried to ignore for decades. There is no back door or side door that will lead to peace between the Arab World and Israel that does not lead through Palestine. The two-state solution has been for a long time a pipedream. The West Bank is now so cut up by Israeli settlements and walls that a Palestinian state there would look like jigsaw puzzle missing most of its pieces. The Israeli plan for Gaza is that it will be uninhabitable. The most realistic solution now is for Israelis and Palestinians to live together in one free state from the river to the sea.