April 17, 2024
( Code Pink ) –
The Israeli online magazine +972 has published a detailed report on Israel’s
use of an artificial intelligence (AI) system called “Lavender” to target
thousands of Palestinian men in its bombing campaign in Gaza. When Israel
attacked Gaza after October 7, the Lavender system had a database of 37,000
Palestinian men with suspected links to Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad
(PIJ).
Lavender assigns
a numerical score, from one to a hundred, to every man in Gaza, based mainly on
cellphone and social media data, and automatically adds those with high scores
to its kill list of suspected militants. Israel uses another automated system,
known as “Where’s Daddy?”, to call in airstrikes to kill these men and their
families in their homes.
The report is
based on interviews with six Israeli intelligence officers who have worked with
these systems. As one of the officers explained to +972, by adding a name from
a Lavender-generated list to the Where’s Daddy home tracking system, he can
place the man’s home under constant drone surveillance, and an airstrike will
be launched once he comes home.
The officers
said the “collateral” killing of the men’s extended families was of little
consequence to Israel. “Let’s say you calculate [that there is one] Hamas
[operative] plus 10 [civilians in the house],” the officer said. “Usually,
these 10 will be women and children. So absurdly, it turns out that most of the
people you killed were women and children.”
The officers
explained that the decision to target thousands of these men in their homes is
just a question of expediency. It is simply easier to wait for them to come
home to the address on file in the system, and then bomb that house or
apartment building, than to search for them in the chaos of the war-torn Gaza
Strip.
The officers who
spoke to 972+ explained that in previous Israeli massacres in Gaza, they could
not generate targets quickly enough to satisfy their political and military
bosses, and so these AI systems were designed to solve that problem for them.
The speed with which Lavender can generate new targets only gives its human
minders an average of 20 seconds to review and rubber-stamp each name, even
though they know from tests of the Lavender system that at least 10% of the men
chosen for assassination and familicide have only an insignificant or a
mistaken connection with Hamas or PIJ.
The Lavender AI
system is a new weapon, developed by Israel. But the kind of kill lists that it
generates have a long pedigree in U.S. wars, occupations and CIA regime change
operations. Since the birth of the CIA after the Second World War, the technology
used to create kill lists has evolved from the CIA’s earliest coups in Iran and
Guatemala, to Indonesia and the Phoenix program in Vietnam in the 1960s, to
Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s and to the U.S. occupations of Iraq and
Afghanistan.
Just as U.S.
weapons development aims to be at the cutting edge, or the killing edge, of new
technology, the CIA and U.S. military intelligence have always tried to use the
latest data processing technology to identify and kill their enemies.
The CIA learned
some of these methods from German intelligence officers captured at the end of
the Second World War. Many of the names on Nazi kill lists were generated by an
intelligence unit called Fremde Heere Ost (Foreign Armies East), under the command
of Major General Reinhard Gehlen, Germany’s spy chief on the eastern front(see
David Talbot, The Devil’s Chessboard, p. 268).
Gehlen and the
FHO had no computers, but they did have access to four million Soviet POWs from
all over the USSR, and no compunction about torturing them to learn the names
of Jews and communist officials in their hometowns to compile kill lists for
the Gestapo and Einsatzgruppen.
After the war,
like the 1,600 German scientists spirited out of Germany in Operation
Paperclip, the United States flew Gehlen and his senior staff to Fort Hunt in
Virginia. They were welcomed by Allen Dulles, soon to be the first and still
the longest-serving director of the CIA. Dulles sent them back to Pullach in
occupied Germany to resume their anti-Soviet operations as CIA agents. The
Gehlen Organization formed the nucleus of what became the BND, the new West
German intelligence service, with Reinhard Gehlen as its director until he
retired in 1968.
After a CIA coup
removed Iran’s popular, democratically elected prime minister Mohammad
Mosaddegh in 1953, a CIA team led by U.S. Major General Norman Schwarzkopf
trained a new intelligence service, known as SAVAK, in the use of kill lists
and torture. SAVAK used these skills to purge Iran’s government and military of
suspected communists and later to hunt down anyone who dared to oppose the
Shah.
By 1975, Amnesty
International estimated that Iran was holding between 25,000 and 100,000
political prisoners, and had “the highest rate of death penalties in the world,
no valid system of civilian courts and a history of torture that is beyond
belief.”
In Guatemala, a
CIA coup in 1954 replaced the democratic government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzman
with a brutal dictatorship. As resistance grew in the 1960s, U.S. special
forces joined the Guatemalan army in a scorched earth campaign in Zacapa, which
killed 15,000 people to defeat a few hundred armed rebels. Meanwhile,
CIA-trained urban death squads abducted, tortured and killed PGT (Guatemalan
Labor Party) members in Guatemala City, notably 28 prominent labor leaders who
were abducted and disappeared in March 1966.
Once this first
wave of resistance was suppressed, the CIA set up a new telecommunications
center and intelligence agency, based in the presidential palace. It compiled a
database of “subversives” across the country that included leaders of farming
co-ops and labor, student and indigenous activists, to provide ever-growing
lists for the death squads. The resulting civil war became a genocide against
indigenous people in Ixil and the western highlands that killed or disappeared
at least 200,000 people.
This pattern was
repeated across the world, wherever popular, progressive leaders offered hope
to their people in ways that challenged U.S. interests. As historian Gabriel
Kolko wrote in 1988, “The irony of U.S. policy in the Third World is that,
while it has always justified its larger objectives and efforts in the name of
anticommunism, its own goals have made it unable to tolerate change from any
quarter that impinged significantly on its own interests.”
When General
Suharto seized power in Indonesia in 1965, the U.S. Embassy compiled a list of
5,000 communists for his death squads to hunt down and kill. The CIA estimated
that they eventually killed 250,000 people, while other estimates run as high
as a million.
Twenty-five
years later, journalist Kathy Kadane investigated the U.S. role in the massacre
in Indonesia, and spoke to Robert Martens, the political officer who led the
State-CIA team that compiled the kill list. “It really was a big help to the
army,” Martens told Kadane. “They probably killed a lot of people, and I
probably have a lot of blood on my hands. But that’s not all bad – there’s a
time when you have to strike hard at a decisive moment.”
Kathy Kadane
also spoke to former CIA director William Colby, who was the head of the CIA’s
Far East division in the 1960s. Colby compared the U.S. role in Indonesia to
the Phoenix Program in Vietnam, which was launched two years later, claiming
that they were both successful programs to identify and eliminate the
organizational structure of America’s communist enemies.
The Phoenix
program was designed to uncover and dismantle the National Liberation Front’s
(NLF) shadow government across South Vietnam. Phoenix’s Combined Intelligence
Center in Saigon fed thousands of names into an IBM 1401 computer, along with
their locations and their alleged roles in the NLF. The CIA credited the
Phoenix program with killing 26,369 NLF officials, while another 55,000 were
imprisoned or persuaded to defect. Seymour Hersh reviewed South Vietnamese
government documents that put the death toll at 41,000.
How many of the
dead were correctly identified as NLF officials may be impossible to know, but
Americans who took part in Phoenix operations reported killing the wrong people
in many cases. Navy SEAL Elton Manzione told author Douglas Valentine (The Phoenix
Program) how he killed two young girls in a night raid on a village, and then
sat down on a stack of ammunition crates with a hand grenade and an M-16,
threatening to blow himself up, until he got a ticket home.
“The whole aura
of the Vietnam War was influenced by what went on in the “hunter-killer” teams
of Phoenix, Delta, etc,” Manzione told Valentine. “That was the point at which
many of us realized we were no longer the good guys in the white hats defending
freedom – that we were assassins, pure and simple. That disillusionment carried
over to all other aspects of the war and was eventually responsible for it
becoming America’s most unpopular war.”
Even as the U.S.
defeat in Vietnam and the “war fatigue” in the United States led to a more
peaceful next decade, the CIA continued to engineer and support coups around
the world, and to provide post-coup governments with increasingly computerized
kill lists to consolidate their rule.
After supporting
General Pinochet’s coup in Chile in 1973, the CIA played a central role in
Operation Condor, an alliance between right-wing military governments in
Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia, to hunt down tens of
thousands of their and each other’s political opponents and dissidents, killing
and disappearing at least 60,000 people.
The CIA’s role
in Operation Condor is still shrouded in secrecy, but Patrice McSherry, a
political scientist at Long Island University, has investigated the U.S. role
and concluded, “Operation Condor also had the covert support of the US
government. Washington provided Condor with military intelligence and training,
financial assistance, advanced computers, sophisticated tracking technology,
and access to the continental telecommunications system housed in the Panama
Canal Zone.”
McSherry’s
research revealed how the CIA supported the intelligence services of the Condor
states with computerized links, a telex system, and purpose-built encoding and
decoding machines made by the CIA Logistics Department. As she wrote in her
book, Predatory States: Operation Condor and Covert War in Latin America:
“The Condor
system’s secure communications system, Condortel,… allowed Condor operations
centers in member countries to communicate with one another and with the parent
station in a U.S. facility in the Panama Canal Zone. This link to the U.S.
military-intelligence complex in Panama is a key piece of evidence regarding
secret U.S. sponsorship of Condor…”
Operation Condor
ultimately failed, but the U.S. provided similar support and training to
right-wing governments in Colombia and Central America throughout the 1980s in
what senior military officers have called a “quiet, disguised, media-free
approach” to repression and kill lists.
The U.S. School
of the Americas (SOA) trained thousands of Latin American officers in the use
of torture and death squads, as Major Joseph Blair, the SOA’s former chief of
instruction described to John Pilger for his film, The War You Don’t See:
“The doctrine
that was taught was that, if you want information, you use physical abuse,
false imprisonment, threats to family members, and killing. If you can’t get
the information you want, if you can’t get the person to shut up or stop what
they’re doing, you assassinate them – and you assassinate them with one of your
death squads.”
When the same
methods were transferred to the U.S. hostile military occupation of Iraq after
2003, Newsweek headlined it “The Salvador Option.” A U.S. officer explained to
Newsweek that U.S. and Iraqi death squads were targeting Iraqi civilians as
well as resistance fighters. “The Sunni population is paying no price for the
support it is giving to the terrorists,” he said. “From their point of view, it
is cost-free. We have to change that equation.”
The United
States sent two veterans of its dirty wars in Latin America to Iraq to play key
roles in that campaign. Colonel James Steele led the U.S. Military Advisor
Group in El Salvador from 1984 to 1986, training and supervising Salvadoran
forces who killed tens of thousands of civilians. He was also deeply involved
in the Iran-Contra scandal, narrowly escaping a prison sentence for his role
supervising shipments from Ilopango air base in El Salvador to the U.S.-backed
Contras in Honduras and Nicaragua.
In Iraq, Steele
oversaw the training of the Interior Ministry’s Special Police Commandos –
rebranded as “National” and later “Federal” Police after the discovery of their
al-Jadiriyah torture center and other atrocities.
Bayan al-Jabr, a
commander in the Iranian-trained Badr Brigade militia, was appointed Interior
Minister in 2005, and Badr militiamen were integrated into the Wolf Brigade
death squad and other Special Police units. Jabr’s chief adviser was Steven
Casteel, the former intelligence chief for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency
(DEA) in Latin America.
The Interior
Ministry death squads waged a dirty war in Baghdad and other cities, filling
the Baghdad morgue with up to 1,800 corpses per month, while Casteel fed the
western media absurd cover stories, such as that the death squads were all
“insurgents” in stolen police uniforms.
Meanwhile U.S.
special operations forces conducted “kill-or-capture” night raids in search of
Resistance leaders. General Stanley McChrystal, the commander of Joint Special
Operations Command from 2003-2008, oversaw the development of a database
system, used in Iraq and Afghanistan, that compiled cellphone numbers mined
from captured cellphones to generate an ever-expanding target list for night
raids and air strikes.
The targeting of
cellphones instead of actual people enabled the automation of the targeting
system, and explicitly excluded using human intelligence to confirm identities.
Two senior U.S. commanders told the Washington Post that only half the night
raids attacked the right house or person.
In Afghanistan,
President Obama put McChrystal in charge of U.S. and NATO forces in 2009, and
his cellphone-based “social network analysis” enabled an exponential increase
in night raids, from 20 raids per month in May 2009 to up to 40 per night by
April 2011.
As with the
Lavender system in Gaza, this huge increase in targets was achieved by taking a
system originally designed to identify and track a small number of senior enemy
commanders and applying it to anyone suspected of having links with the
Taliban, based on their cellphone data.
This led to the
capture of an endless flood of innocent civilians, so that most civilian
detainees had to be quickly released to make room for new ones. The increased
killing of innocent civilians in night raids and airstrikes fueled already
fierce resistance to the U.S. and NATO occupation and ultimately led to its
defeat.
President
Obama’s drone campaign to kill suspected enemies in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia
was just as indiscriminate, with reports suggesting that 90% of the people it
killed in Pakistan were innocent civilians.
And yet Obama
and his national security team kept meeting in the White House every “Terror
Tuesday” to select who the drones would target that week, using an Orwellian,
computerized “disposition matrix” to provide technological cover for their life
and death decisions.
Looking at this
evolution of ever-more automated systems for killing and capturing enemies, we
can see how, as the information technology used has advanced from telexes to
cellphones and from early IBM computers to artificial intelligence, the human
intelligence and sensibility that could spot mistakes, prioritize human life
and prevent the killing of innocent civilians has been progressively
marginalized and excluded, making these operations more brutal and horrifying
than ever.
Nicolas has at
least two good friends who survived the dirty wars in Latin America because
someone who worked in the police or military got word to them that their names
were on a death list, one in Argentina, the other in Guatemala. If their fates
had been decided by an AI machine like Lavender, they would both be long dead.
As with supposed
advances in other types of weapons technology, like drones and “precision”
bombs and missiles, innovations that claim to make targeting more precise and
eliminate human error have instead led to the automated mass murder of innocent
people, especially women and children, bringing us full circle from one
holocaust to the next.
Jeffrey
D. Sachs
Sybil
Fares
It’s
high time for the two powers that have done the most to wreck the Middle East
to support the true path to peace.
This
week, the U.S. and U.K. have the chance to correct decades of their blatant
geopolitical errors in the Israel-Palestine conflict by welcoming Palestine as
the 194th United Nations member state. More than any other countries, the U.S.
and U.K. have wrecked the Middle East through their non-stop meddling and
imperial arrogance. This week they have the chance to make some amends.
A
total of 139 countries already recognize the State of Palestine, more than
two-thirds of the U.N. member states. Several European states will soon join
the list. Yet the U.S. has so far blocked Palestine’s membership in the U.N.,
with the U.K. always sticking close to the U.S. lead. Both have relentlessly
backed Israel’s apartheid rule over Palestine and are currently actively
backing Israel in its horrific destruction of Gaza.
This
week, most likely on Friday, the U.N. Security Council will vote in favor of
U.N. membership for Palestine—if the U.S. and U.K. don’t block it yet again
with their veto. Back in 2011, Palestine had the support of the U.N. Security
Council for membership, except that the U.S. forced the Palestinians to accept
“observer” status instead, promising that full membership would soon follow,
yet another U.S. deception.
No
countries in the world have done more to wreck the Middle East than the U.K.
and U.S. The lead role certainly goes to Britain, whose imperial machinations
in the region date back to the 19th century and continue until today. Britain
kept Egypt under its thumb for decades, from the 1880s to the 1950s. It
deceitfully promised overlapping parts of the Ottoman Middle East three times
over during World War I: to the French (in the Sykes-Picot Agreement), to the
Arabs (in the McMahon–Hussein Correspondence), and to the Zionists (in the
Balfour Declaration), purporting to allocate what was not theirs in the first
place.
After
World War I, Britain took Palestine for itself under a so-called mandate of the
newly created League of Nations, while France grabbed a mandate over Lebanon
and Syria. Britain left Palestine in a shambles in 1947, but continued its
relentless meddling by teaming up with France and Israel to invade Egypt in
1956. Britain’s meddling has also contributed to destruction and disarray in
Yemen, Iraq, and many more parts of the Middle East.
After
World War II, the U.S. picked up where Britain left off, first joining Britain
in the MI6-CIA overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953,
and then going on to a long career of CIA-led regime-change operations
including Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Libya, among others. Throughout the
entire postwar period, the U.S. has been the lead dishonest broker between
Israel and Palestine, for example calling for the Palestinian legislative
elections in 2006 but then boycotting and trying to overthrow Hamas when it won
those elections. In 2011, when Palestine applied for U.N. membership, and won
the support of the U.N. Security Council membership committee, the U.S. leaned
on Palestine to wait and to accept observer status instead, promising that full
membership would soon follow. This was yet another lie.
Despite
numerous U.N. Security Council resolutions over the years calling for a
two-state solution of the Israel-Palestine conflict, the Israeli governments
led by Benjamin Netanyahu have blatantly rejected an independent State of
Palestine. The current Netanyahu cabinet includes right-wing extremists such as
Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir who openly call for ethnic cleansing of
the West Bank and Gaza to create a Greater Israel from the Jordan River to the
Mediterranean Sea. Yet despite Israel’s relentless provocations, routine
killing of Palestinians (known colloquially as “mowing the grass”), repeated
violations of the U.N. Security Council, and now the slaughter in Gaza, the
U.S. and U.K. have remained steadfast in backing Israel and opposing Palestine
as if nothing at all is amiss.
The
question is whether the U.S. and U.K. have any sense and any shame at this
point. They may think they are supporting Israel by blocking Palestine’s U.N.
membership, but the fact is that Israel is more isolated and endangered than
ever because of the Israeli government’s extremism, its shocking violence
against the Palestinian people, and its apartheid rule. Since the start of the
war last fall, 33,000 Palestinians are officially counted as dead, yet the
actual death toll is vastly higher, with tens of thousands more still buried
under the rubble or dead from extreme deprivations of food, water, and
healthcare.
Alas,
in recent days, the double standards and falsehoods of the U.S. and U.K. have
been on full display. The U.S. and U.K. adamantly refused to condemn Israel’s
brazenly illegal bombing of Iran’s diplomatic compound in Damascus, Syria, on
April 1, but then heatedly condemned Iran when it counter-attacked two weeks
later. This absurd double-standard makes the U.S. and U.K. look like crass
bullies in the eyes of the rest of the world.
After
more than a century of U.K. and U.S. meddling in the Middle East, it’s time to
be honest about the facts and the solutions. Most importantly, welcoming
Palestine as U.N. member state and implementing the two-state solution
according to international law is the path to peace, justice, and security for
both Israel and Palestine. Most of the world enthusiastically back this
solution. It’s just a question of whether the U.K. and U.S. will veto it. It’s
high time for the two powers that have done the most to wreck the Middle East
to support the true path to peace by welcoming Palestine as a sovereign U.N.
member state now, not in some fabled future that is forever blocked by Israeli
hardliners.
Qassam
Muaddi
On
Palestinian Prisoners’ Day, rights groups report at least 5,000 Palestinians
have been detained from Gaza since October 7, and at least 16 Palestinians have
died in Israeli detention amid unprecedentedly inhumane conditions.
Casualties
- 33,899 + killed* and at least 76,664 wounded in the Gaza Strip.*
- 468+ Palestinians killed in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.**
- Israel revises its estimated October 7 death toll down from 1,400 to 1,139.
- 604 Israeli soldiers have been killed since October 7, and at least 6,800 injured.***
*Gaza’s
Ministry of Health confirmed this figure on its Telegram channel on April 17.
Some rights groups estimate the death toll to be much higher when accounting
for those presumed dead.
**
The death toll in the West Bank and Jerusalem is not updated regularly.
According to the PA’s Ministry of Health on April 5, this is the latest figure.
***
This figure is released by the Israeli military, showing the soldiers whose
names “were allowed to be published.” The number of Israeli soldiers wounded is
according to Israeli media reports.
Key
Developments
- Israel killed 56 Palestinians and wounded 89 in the past 24 hours across Gaza, raising the death toll since October 7 to 33,899 and the number of wounded to 76,664, according to the Gaza health ministry.
- Iran says it is “ready” for a major confrontation with Israel.
- Israel has detained at least 5,000 Palestinians from the Gaza Strip since October 7, according to the Gaza government media office.
- The Palestinian Prisoners’ Club says 16 identified Palestinians have died in Israeli detention since October 7.
- Israeli ‘Walla’ news website says that 60 Israeli soldiers have been wounded per day during the current war.
- Israeli forces withdraw from Beit Hanoun in the northern Gaza Strip.
- Human Rights Watch says Israeli settlers’ violence has expelled seven Palestinian communities since October 7.
- Lebanon: Hezbollah attacks several Israeli positions in Upper Galilee, Israel strikes southern Lebanon towns.
Gaza:
Israel kills 56 Palestinians in the past 24 hours
The
Gaza-based Palestinian health ministry announced that 56 Palestinians have been
killed in Israeli strikes in the past 24 hours, while 89 others were wounded.
Meanwhile,
in the northern Gaza Strip, the Israeli army withdrew from Beit Hanoun after
four days of siege. Local media sources reported that Israeli troops arrested
dozens of Palestinian men and forced women to leave the town, after searching
them.
In
Gaza City, nine Palestinians were reported killed in an Israeli strike on the
al-Tuffah neighborhood. Seven of them were policemen, according to reports.
In
the central Gaza Strip, Israeli forces continued to strike the Nusseirat
refugee camp and its surroundings, destroying five residential towers north of
the camp. Also in Nusseirat, two Palestinians were reported killed in an
Israeli strike on the Zumlot family’s house. In the Maghazi refugee camp, ten
Palestinians were reported killed in an Israeli strike on a family’s house,
mostly children according to reports.
In
the southern Gaza Strip, seven Palestinians were reported killed in an Israeli
strike on a house. Reports indicated that the victims were a man and his wife,
the wife’s mother, and four children. The family had been displaced from the
Jabalia refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip at the beginning of the current
war.
Iran
says it is ready for a major confrontation with Israel
Iranian
president Ibrahim Raisi said on Tuesday that his country will launch “a
powerful and determinant” strike against Israel if it takes any action against
Iran. Raisi added that countries in the region “can count” on Iran’s military
capabilities.
The
Iranian air force chief also told the media on Tuesday that Iran is “ready for
a confrontation on all levels”, warning that Israel will face “a wide attack”
if it attacks Iran.
Meanwhile,
the Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot quoted an unnamed Israeli official on Tuesday,
saying that Israel had “decided the form of response” to Iran’s attack last
weekend and that the Israeli government was “waiting for good timing.”
The
official reportedly added that the more time passes before conducting Israel’s
attack on Iran, the question of whether Israel should take such action is
becoming a focus of internal discussion.
Palestinian
prisoners’ rights groups say 16 Palestinians have died in Israeli prison since
October 7
The
three Palestinian prisoners’ rights groups; the official Prisoners and
Detainees Affairs Commission, the Palestinian Prisoners’ Club, and Addameer
Prisoners’ Support and Human Rights Association, said in a joint statement on
Wednesday that 16 Palestinians have died in Israel’s prisons since October 7.
The
statement was released early on Wednesday to mark Palestinian Prisoners’ Day,
which is commemorated every April 17. The statement indicated that at least
9,500 Palestinians are held in Israeli jails, including 80 women, 200 children,
56 journalists, and more than 3,660 detainees being held without charges, under
the Israeli ‘Administrative Detention’ martial law system.
The
statement added that the number of Palestinians who have died in Israeli jails
since 1967 has reached 252, including 16 since October 7 who they have been
able to identify. According to the groups, Israel continues to hide the
identities of most of the Palestinian detainees from the Gaza Strip, who have
died in Israeli detention.
In
early March, the Israeli daily Haaretz reported that 27 Palestinians detained
from the Gaza Strip since October 7 had died in Israeli detention,
In
November, Israel released 240 Palestinian women and children, as part of a
captive exchange, where Hamas released 105 Israeli civilian captives. Israel
re-arrested 15 of the released Palestinians in the following months.
Human
rights reports, based on testimonies gathered from released Palestinians, have
warned that detention conditions of Palestinians have severely deteriorated,
including beatings, overcrowded cells, reduction of sunlight and shower time,
solitary confinement, and even sexual abuse, which was reported by the UN in
February. Israeli authorities have also banned family visits for all
Palestinian inmates during the first months of the war, and continue to ban
visits for many.
Following
the UN report on sexual abuse against Palestinian detainees, Palestinian
prisoners’ rights groups announced that they had suspended all cooperation with
the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), accusing it of “inaction”
towards Israeli abuses of Palestinian detainees.
On
Wednesday, Palestinian protesters in Ramallah staged a protest in front of the
ICRC offices, hanging signs on the offices’ gates accusing the Red Cross of
“complicity” with Israel’s abuses.
Since
October 7, Israel has arrested more than 8,100 Palestinians, as its arrest
campaign in the West Bank and Jerusalem continues, mainly through night raids
into Palestinian towns and cities.
Since
1967, Israel has arrested over 1 million Palestinians according to human rights
groups. One out of every three Palestinians has experienced Israeli detention
in more than five decades of occupation.
Ellen
Cantarow
Words
can’t express the horrors of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. To actually feel the
nightmare, you would have to be there under the bombs, fleeing with
Palestinians desperately seeking a safe place that doesn’t exist; seeing
building after building destroyed; treading through blood in one of the few,
only partially standing hospitals; and witnessing children and other patients
sprawled on hospital floors, limbs amputated without anesthesia (Israel having
blocked all medical supplies).
It
has taken the Jewish state’s savagery to break decades of silence about its
history of crimes against humanity. U.S. military historian Robert Pape has
called the onslaught against Gaza “one of the most intense civilian punishment
campaigns in history.” Former U.N. Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights
Andrew Gilmour has said that we are witnessing “probably the highest kill rate
of any military… since the Rwandan genocide of 1994.”
An
Unsent Letter
Palestine
is finally an international cause. Outrage surges via global demonstrations.
Israel has become a pariah in the global South. In the United States,
organizations including A Jewish Voice for Peace, Code Pink, and the U.S.
Campaign for Palestinian Rights have been marching against the horrors now
underway.
Within
this charged atmosphere, the 66th reunion of my 1958 Philadelphia High School
for Girls graduating class will take place in June 2024. Girls’ High was that
city’s leading academic public high school of my time, together with its
brother school, Central High (attended by Noam Chomsky). It was stellar not
only for its academic excellence but for its integration of Black and White
students at a time of deep segregation elsewhere. My mother, who graduated from
Girls’ High in 1924, sent me there because of its policy of racial
inclusiveness.
I
recently began preparing an open letter to my classmates about the genocide in
Gaza and the ongoing settler pogroms of ethnic cleansing on the West Bank —
houses burned, olive trees uprooted, Palestinians made to flee. Ours is the
prototypical Zionist generation and I particularly wanted to address my former
classmates, some of whom still cling stubbornly to their allegiance to Israel.
I was told, however, that there wouldn’t be time to read the letter at our
reunion which lasts just a few afternoon hours. What follows, then, is based on
the letter I was preparing to read then, had the time been available.
Zionism
and The Six Day War
In
the early 1950s, my best childhood friend collected money to plant trees in
Israel. At one point, her synagogue, which sponsored that project, needed
“straight pins.” Somehow, I heard “shraypins” instead, a mysterious Hebrew word
my imagination concocted and that her friends would find funny indeed. Zionism,
in other words, was simply foreign to me.
The
first time I recall a thrill from it came right after Israel’s triumph in the
1967 Six Day War. I was then actively involved in the anti-Vietnam War movement
on my graduate school campus and, on a trip to Paris that year, didn’t want to
identify as American. I spoke French quite well and not being able to tell from
my slight accent that I was an American, someone asked me where I was
from. Searching for a nationality I
wouldn’t be ashamed of, I blurted out that I was an “Israelite.”
“Oh,
your people!” he exclaimed. “Such a small people, but such a brave people!” For
the first time, I felt deeply proud of being Jewish, not the sort of Jew who
had (to my mind) cowered in a ghettoized Europe, but a strong, triumphant Jew
with a powerful army. Soon after, my husband told me about Israel’s history —
its 1948 expulsion of 750,000 Palestinian Arabs and its exploitation of the
territories it illegally occupied after the 1967 war. Not long after that, I
read Noam Chomsky’s first book about Israeli settler-colonialism, Peace in the
Middle East?, and never looked back.
Settler
Violence in the 1970s
My
husband, Louis Kampf, taught in the humanities department of M.I.T. Chomsky was
a colleague and became a good friend. It was under his influence that, in 1979,
I first went to Israel and visited the occupied West Bank. I had an assignment
to write about Israeli women — I was then a feminist columnist for Cambridge’s
The Real Paper — and also agreed to do pieces for New York’s The Village Voice
and Liberation Magazine. For the Voice I wrote about Gush Emunim — the Bloc of
the Faithful, the ancestor of the Jewish settlers’ movement. For Liberation, I
wrote about a Palestinian village, Halhul, two of whose teenagers were murdered
by Israeli settlers from nearby Kiryat Arba.
I
stayed in Kiryat Arba, thanks to a distant cousin of my husband’s who got me
there in an undercover fashion. One of my interviewees assured me that she
believed in “a great chain of being,” Jews on top, all other humans below, with
Arabs at the very bottom, just before animals, vegetables, and minerals. Her
husband referred to the Talmudic injunction to “rise and kill first.” Another
settler assured me that the Arabs could stay on the West Bank only if they
would “bow their heads.”
Muhammad
Milhem, Halhul’s mayor, led me to the highest hill in his village and, pointing
toward Kiryat Arba, said, “This is a cancer in our midst.” I wonder if he
realized how tragically prophetic his words would prove to be.
Genocide
in the 2020s
Since
October 8th, I’ve been riveted by the genocide in Gaza being perpetrated by the
Israeli military, which had prepared for it in a retrospectively unsettling
fashion by decades of dehumanizing Palestinians. Hamas clearly committed war
crimes on October 7th, but international rules still govern war. A nation’s
reprisal for acts against its population must still be proportional to the
original crime, which Israel’s war on Gaza isn’t — not faintly! Instead, it’s
been distinctly genocidal. On March 28th, Reuters reported that, according to
Gaza’s health ministry, at least 32,552 Palestinians had been killed and 74,980
injured in Israel’s post-October 7th military offensive in the Gaza Strip,
while more than 7,000 Gazans are missing, many likely buried under the rubble.
Israel
has cut off most food and water to the region. A March 18th Oxfam press release
announced that Gaza hunger figures are the “worst on record.” The World Health
Organization (WHO) reports that famine, a rare and catastrophic circumstance,
is imminent. Usually caused by extreme natural events, the famine in Gaza is
wholly human-made. Famine leaves the body prone to all sorts of horrendous
diseases. According to the WHO, “[I]llness may ultimately kill more people than
Israel’s offensive. Infectious diseases are ‘soaring,’ particularly among
children with 100,000 reported cases of diarrhea, 25 times higher than before
Israel’s assaults.”
Were
I able to show my classmates scenes from the hell that is now the Gaza Strip,
where would I begin? Would it be the infant whose face was partially blown off
by an Israeli strike? Would it be the 12 year old with burns over 70% of his
body? Would it be the countless unarmed civilians, including children, shot in
the head and upper body with murderous intent? Would it be a baby with both
legs amputated, who will never learn to walk?
Dr.
Yasser Khan, an ophthalmologist specializing in eyelid and facial plastic and
reconstructive surgery, spent 10 days in Gaza and, in an interview with a
reporter from the Intercept, described what he had seen in the European Gaza
Hospital, now barely functioning, where 35,000 people were reportedly
sheltering. People were cooking in the hallways of a building in which no
sterile environment was possible because there was nothing with which to
sterilize. The medical workers were still often performing 14 or 15 amputations
on children daily. Khan saw patients like an eight-year-old girl, rescued from
the rubble with a fractured leg, all of whose family — mother, father, aunts,
uncles — was wiped out. And there are thousands more like her, suffering from trauma
that coming generations will undoubtedly inherit. They have given rise to a new
acronym: WCNSF, or Wounded Child No Surviving Family. Khan removed the eyes of
patients whose faces had been damaged by shrapnel, leaving an appearance he
dubbed “shrapnel face.”
Aid
Workers Targeted
I
would have wanted to remind my classmates that Israel has frequently targeted
aid workers, killing seven World Central Kitchen (WCK) employees in early
April. The Israelis claimed that it was an accident and fired the officers it
held responsible. But chef Jose Andres, WCK founder, insisted the attack was
purposeful, that Israel had targeted the aid convoy “car by car.”
“This
was not just a bad luck situation where ‘oops’ we dropped the bomb in the wrong
place,” Andres said. “This was over 1.5, 1.8 kilometers, with a very defined
humanitarian convoy that had signs in the top, in the roof, a very colorful
logo that we are obviously very proud of. It’s very clear who we are and what
we do.”
“WCK
is not just any relief organization,” wrote Jack Mirkinson in The Nation
magazine. “Andrés is a global celebrity with ties to the international
political establishment. WCK had been working closely with the Israeli
government both in Gaza and in Israel proper. It would be difficult to think of
a more mainstream, well-connected group.” It was as if Israel were showing off,
Mirkinson added, “flaunting its ability to cross every known line of
international humanitarian law and get away with it.”
International
Court of Justice Ruling
The
International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled on January 26th that Israel’s
slaughter in Gaza is a plausible case of genocide and additional testimony from
Francesca Albanese, the U.N.’s Special Rapporteur on Palestine, “Anatomy of a
Genocide,” only emphasized that point, given how little is left but rubble in
so much of Gaza. The majority of its homes no longer exist, nor do its schools,
universities, libraries, or music conservatories.
Violating
the 49th Geneva Convention, Israel has fired on ambulances and killed more than
685 health workers, while wounding about 900 of them. It has destroyed all but
a few of Gaza’s 36 formerly flourishing hospitals, claiming that Hamas fighters
are hiding in tunnels under the buildings. Against the civilian population
Israel has used weapons like white phosphorous, which burns to the bone and
cannot be easily extinguished. In the past, the Israeli military has been known
for using Gaza as a laboratory for weapons experiments and the same is true of
the current round of fighting.
Israel’s
“war” against Gaza did not, of course, start on October 7th. In 2006, after
Gazans elected Hamas to govern them, Israel imposed a siege on the Strip. As
lawyer Dov Weisglass, then an aide to the prime minister, said at the time, he
wanted to keep Gazans just below starvation level — not enough to kill them,
but not enough to fill them either. The present siege has turned Gaza into
what’s been called the largest open-air prison on earth, a virtual
concentration camp. A U.N. commentator described this as “possibly the most
rigorous form of international sanctions imposed in modern times.” Such
conditions helped produce the October attack.
Occupying
the West Bank since 1967, Israel has distinctly contravened international law.
Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention stipulates that “the Occupying Power
shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the
territory it occupies.” It also prohibits “individual or mass forcible
transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied
territory.” Israel, however, has settled about 700,000 Israeli Jews in the West
Bank. Once upon a time, there was indeed room for a separate Palestinian state.
No more.
Arabs
to the Gas Chambers
When
I visited the West Bank city of Hebron in the 1980s, I saw graffiti on walls
that proclaimed: “ARABS TO THE GAS CHAMBERS.” Back then, the renowned Israeli
public intellectual Yeshayahu Leibowitz warned that Israel was turning its
soldiers into Judeonazis. Recent YouTube videos of soldiers mocking their
victims bear out his prophecy. Fascism is now pervasive in Israel. There are
courageous exceptions like journalists Amira Hass and Gideon Levy who write for
the newspaper Haaretz and the group Combatants for Peace. But all too many
Israelis have supported their country’s assault on Gaza, or even wanted
something worse. I wish I could have told my classmates that, should they care
about Israel, it’s their responsibility to speak out now.
The
genocide in Gaza has been enabled, of course, by President Biden, who continues
to send billions of dollars’ worth of weaponry, including devastating
2,000-pound bombs, to Israel. Without those arms, the government of Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu couldn’t be acting as it is. While it purports to
be searching for and killing Hamas perpetrators of the October 7th atrocities,
it’s actually gone to war against the entire population of Gaza. Israeli
historian Ilan Pappe sees it as “a massive operation of killing, of ethnic
cleansing of depopulation.”
When
Jews were being slaughtered by the Nazis, the world turned away. Now, the world
has awakened to Israel’s crimes. Many American Jews, like those in A Jewish
Voice for Peace (whose demonstrations I’ve attended) are indeed speaking out.
It’s
often asked how a people who suffered so much could cause such suffering. In
fact, almost all the survivors of the Holocaust are dead. Obviously, none of
the perpetrators of the genocide in Gaza and the ethnic cleansing of the West
Bank were in European concentration camps. In a 1979 interview, renowned
Israeli dissident, Hebrew University chemistry professor Israel Shahak pointed
out that no Holocaust survivor had ever been a member of the Israeli
government. Israel frequently uses the Holocaust to justify its actions in the
Palestinian territories. This is a sacrilege, while one of history’s great
crimes is being committed, and this member of the class of 1958 knows it.
Palestinian History: Understanding the Past, Engaging with the
Present
Watch this on YouTube video by clicking on the following link
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