January
26, 2024
The
International Court of Justice (ICJ) found that it is “plausible” that Israel
is committing genocide in a highly anticipated initial ruling on Friday,
ordering Israel to take steps to avoid going even further in its violence in
Gaza but stopping short of calling for a ceasefire.
In
its decision, the ICJ ordered Israel to abide by its obligations under Article
II of the UN Genocide Convention, especially with regard to four of the five
convention’s criteria that define a genocide: killing members of the group,
causing bodily or mental harm to the group, inflicting conditions meant to
cause harm to the group, and preventing births within the group.
The
ruling orders Israel to ensure that its military does not commit actions within
the criteria, to take immediate action to enable humanitarian aid within Gaza,
and to prevent the destruction of evidence that could be incriminating.
The
court also orders Israeli officials to punish those who have been inciting
genocide against Palestinians and to prevent similar incitements in the future.
The
ruling highlighted several statements in October from Israeli officials, like
President Isaac Herzog’s pledge for Israel to “fight until we’ll break their
backbone” and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s speech to Israeli troops in which
he called Palestinians “human animals.” The court then cites a November press
release by the UN Human Rights Council calling attention to “discernibly
genocidal and dehumanizing rhetoric coming from senior Israeli government
officials.”
Many
Palestinians have been disheartened by the order, as Al Jazeera reports, with
many hoping that the ICJ would bring an end to Israel’s relentless bombing,
disease and starvation campaign in Gaza; indeed, even as the ICJ was delivering
its decision on Friday, Israeli forces were dropping bombs in Khan Yunis in
Southern Gaza.
“The
ICJ forg[ot] to tell Israel in [its] decision today to cease fire against
Palestinians in Gaza. We are under fire and under killing; we are under
genocide,” said Palestinian journalist Bisan Owda in a video posted on
Instagram from Gaza on Friday, with the sound of sirens clearly in the
background.
“There
is no justice in the International Court of Justice,” Owda continued. “There is
no justice in this world. ICJ is a lie…. We’re continuing this alone, as we
started this alone, with our own [cell phones] to tell you the truth, to seek
for justice. Now, there’s no truth or justice. I’m just stuck out of my home
and can’t get back, and no one can get me back to my home, or to stop killing
us day after day, for 112 days.”
South
African officials celebrated the decision as a “decisive victory for the
international rule of law and a significant milestone in the search for justice
for the Palestinian people” in a statement. However, they said that the
implication of the ruling is that there must be a ceasefire.
Israeli
officials have rejected the ruling, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
saying that the court is denying Israel the opportunity to defend itself — an
action that apparently involves depriving Palestinians of nearly all
humanitarian aid — and Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir outright mocking the
ruling in a post on social media, saying “Hague shmague.”
Advocates
for Palestinian rights say that the ruling is a historic step toward holding
Israel responsible for its horror on the world stage. But they are discouraged
by the lack of a ceasefire order, which they, like the South African officials,
say is the only way to guarantee that Israel follows through on the court’s
provisional measures, especially considering experts’ concerns that Israel may
not abide by them.
Though
the court’s decisions are binding, countries like Serbia and Russia have
refused to abide by rulings from the ICJ in the past. And, indeed, Israeli
officials have already pledged to defy the orders, saying that no one will stop
them, not even the Hague.
“Everything
[the ICJ] ordered in terms of preventive measures leads to only one conclusion,
which is ceasefire,” said Mahmood Mamdani, a Columbia University professor with
a specialization in colonialism, in an interview with Democracy Now!. “How do
you stop killing people? Ceasefire. How do you ensure that supplies for human
life get in? Ceasefire.”
Human
rights attorney and Rutgers professor Noura Erakat said that she was “relieved”
when the ICJ’s decision came down because, while it didn’t go far enough, it
still provided “vindication” in regards to recognition of the suffering that
Israel and the global community have forced on Palestinians. “This court was
never going to save us,” and rather could have been “a great source of harm,”
Erakat said in a video posted on social media.
Erakat
added that the court’s decision should serve as a further call to action for
advocates. The court “ordered all of the provisional measures requested by
South Africa, stopping short of issuing an order for a cessation of military
hostilities, which was already a longshot — and in all cases, even had they
provided that order, it wouldn’t have been sufficient to do anything. It would
still be in our hands to now take this ruling and to agitate globally,” Erakat
continued.
Groups
that advocate for Palestinian rights said that the ruling was a crucial first
step in ensuring that Israel’s massacre is documented on the world stage, and
have said that global leaders’ next moves will be crucial in showing whether or
not they are willing to shirk a decision from the ICJ in order to assist Israel
in its genocide.
“For
over 100 days, the Israeli and the U.S. governments have gaslit and smeared the
Palestinian people, denying what the entire world was witnessing: a genocide,”
said Jewish Voice for Peace political director Beth Miller in a press release.
“Now, the highest court in the world has found these claims plausible.
President Biden has a choice to make: he can reject the entire system of
international law and continue complicity in Israeli genocide, or he can stop
arming a genocidal regime and stop attacking the people and movements
struggling to build a more just and peaceful future.”
The International
Court of Justice delivers its Order
The International Court of Justice
(ICJ) delivers its Order on the request for the indication of provisional
measures submitted by South Africa versus Israel.
U.N. Court Orders Israel to Prevent
Genocide, but Does Not Demand Stop to War
“History Will Hold The US
Accountable…” Strong Condemnation From Smaller States On Gaza War At UN
The United Nations Security Council
held a two-day debate, during which representatives from various countries
expressed their concerns and perspectives on the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian
conflict. The representative of Mauritania, speaking on behalf of the
Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), strongly condemned Israel’s actions,
describing them as atrocities comparable to genocide. Emphasizing the urgency
of intervention on humanitarian, legal, and political fronts, he called on the
Security Council to enforce its resolutions, prevent further aggression, and
ensure Israel’s compliance with international law.
Syria’s representative criticized
the attempts by the United States and certain European countries to legitimize
Israel’s aggression by framing it as self-defense. Highlighting South Africa’s
actions against Israel at the International Court of Justice, he urged the
Council to take decisive measures to stop Israel’s actions, which he claimed
were destabilizing the entire region. The representative of Sri Lanka, taking a
more contemplative stance, expressed a silent wish for sanity to prevail,
avoiding further tragedy in the region. Other representatives, including those
from Cuba, Brazil, Iraq, Bangladesh, and Maldives, also voiced their concerns
and proposed various solutions. The representative of Cuba accused the United
States of impeding Security Council actions and called for an end to double
standards, emphasizing the need for a UN peace conference and recognizing
Palestine as a full member.
Brazil urged an immediate ceasefire
in Gaza and supported South Africa’s initiative at the International Court of
Justice. Iraq emphasized the Council’s responsibility to address the root
causes of the conflict and adopt resolutions to stop Israeli aggression.
Bangladesh stressed the humanitarian toll in Gaza and called for accountability
for Israel’s violations of international law, while Maldives criticized the
Council’s refusal to call for a ceasefire, warning that it could undermine
faith in the UN system. Tunisia condemned Israel’s war crimes and called for
increased international efforts to end the conflict. In a more reflective tone,
Sri Lanka’s representative shared verses on Middle East peace and recognized
the legitimate right of the Palestinian people to statehood based on a
two-state solution. Sri Lanka reaffirmed its solidarity with the Palestinian
cause and chaired the United Nations Special Committee to Investigate Israeli
Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Palestinian People and Other Arabs
of the Occupied Territories.
ICJ Lands Major Blow
to Israel—And Now the United States Must Act
The double standards of U.S. foreign
policy will hit a new low if, in this case, Biden not only argues against the
ICJ, but actively acts to prevent and block the implementation of its ruling.
The International Court of Justice
(ICJ) just ruled against Israel and determined that South Africa successfully
argued that Israel’s conduct plausibly could constitute genocide. The Court
imposes several injunctions against Israel and reminds Israel that its rulings
are binding, according to international law.
In its order, the court fell short
of South Africa's request for a ceasefire, but this ruling, however, is
overwhelmingly in favor of South Africa's case and will likely increase
international pressure for a ceasefire as a result.
On the question of whether Israel's
war in Gaza is genocide, that will still take more time, but today's news will
have significant political repercussions. Here are a few thoughts.
This is a devastating blow to
Israel’s global standing. To put it in context, Israel has worked ferociously
for the last two decades to defeat the BDS movement — Boycott, Divestment, and
Sanctions — not because it will have a significant economic impact on Israel,
but because of how it could delegitimize Israel internationally. However, the
ruling of the ICJ that Israel is plausibly engaged in genocide is far more
devastating to Israel's legitimacy than anything BDS could have achieved.
Just as much as Israel's political
system has been increasingly — and publicly — associated with apartheid in the
past few years, Israel will now be similarly associated with the charge of
genocide. As a result, those countries that have supported Israel and its
military campaign in Gaza, such as the U.S. under President Biden, will be
associated with that charge, too.
The implications for the United
States are significant. First because the court does not have the ability to
implement its ruling. Instead, the matter will go to the United Nations
Security Council, where the Biden administration will once again face the
choice of protecting Israel politically by casting a veto, and by that, further
isolate the United States, or allowing the Security Council to act and pay a
domestic political cost for “not standing by Israel.”
So far, the Biden administration has
refused to say if it will respect ICJ's decision. Of course, in previous cases
in front of the ICJ, such as Myanmar, Ukraine and Syria, the U.S. and Western
states stressed that ICJ provisional measures are binding and must be fully
implemented.
The double standards of U.S. foreign
policy will hit a new low if, in this case, Biden not only argues against the
ICJ, but actively acts to prevent and block the implementation of its ruling.
It is perhaps not surprising that senior Biden administration officials have
largely ceased using the term “rules-based order” since October 7.
It also raises questions about how
Biden’s policy of bear-hugging Israel may have contributed to Israel’s conduct.
Biden could have offered more measured support and pushed back hard against
Israeli excesses — and by that, prevented Israel from engaging in actions that
could potentially fall under the category of genocide. But he didn’t.
Instead, Biden offered unconditional
support combined with zero public criticism of Israel's conduct and only
limited push-back behind the scenes. A different American approach could have
shaped Israel’s war efforts in a manner that arguably would not have been
preliminarily ruled by the ICJ as plausibly meeting the standards of genocide.
This shows that America undermines
its own interest as well as that of its partners when it offers them blank
checks and complete and unquestionable protection. The absence of checks and
balances that such protection offers fuels reckless behavior all around.
As such, Biden’s unconditional
support may have undermined Israel, in the final analysis.
This ruling may also boost those
arguing that all states that are party to the Genocide Convention have a
positive obligation to prevent genocide. The Houthis, for instance, have
justified their attacks against ships heading to Israeli ports in the Red Sea,
citing this positive obligation. What legal implications will the court’s
ruling have as a result on the U.S. and UK’s military action against the
Houthis?
The implications for Europe will
also be considerable. The U.S. is rather accustomed to and comfortable with
setting aside international law and ignoring international institutions. Europe
is not.
International law and institutions
play a much more central role in European security thinking. The decision will
continue to split Europe. But the fact that some key EU states will reject the
ICJ’s ruling will profoundly contradict and undermine Europe’s broader security
paradigm.
One final point: The mere existence
of South Africa’s application to the ICJ appears to have moderated Israel’s war
conduct. Any plans to ethnically cleanse Gaza and send its residents to third
countries appear to have been somewhat paused, presumably because of how such
actions would boost South Africa’s application. If so, it shows that the Court,
in an era where the force of international law is increasingly questioned, has
had a greater impact in terms of deterring unlawful Israeli actions than anything
the Biden administration has done.
US and UK also committing
genocide crimes in Gaza: Former UN official
The International Court of Justice has
just issued preliminary measures against Israel for the crime of genocide in
Gaza. The ruling follows weeks of anticipation and months of international
outcry for Israel to face accountability from the UN. While much remains
undetermined, this is a critical development in a time when the integrity of
international institutions has been thrown into crisis by their ineffectiveness
in the face of Israel’s slaughter. Former director of the New York Office of
the High Commissioner for Human Rights Craig Mokhiber, who resigned from his
position last fall in protest of what he called the UN’s “failure” to protect
Palestinians, joins The Chris Hedges Report for a discussion on the weaknesses
of the UN in the face of US and Israeli impunity.
Chris Hedges: Craig Mokhiber, director of the New York
office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, resigned on
Oct. 31, stating that, “Once again, we are seeing a genocide unfolding before
our eyes, and the organization we serve appears powerless to stop it.” He noted
that the UN had failed to prevent previous genocides against the Tutsis in
Rwanda, Muslims in Bosnia, Yazidi in Iraq, Kurdistan, and the Rohingya in
Myanmar.
He wrote the high commissioner, “We are
failing again. The current wholesale slaughter of the Palestinian people,
rooted in an ethnonationalist, colonial, settler ideology and continuation of
decades of their systematic persecution and purging based entirely upon their
status as Arabs, leaves us no room for doubt.” Mokhiber added, “This is a
textbook case of genocide,” and said the US, UK, and much of Europe were not
only refusing to meet their treaty obligations under the Geneva conventions,
but were also arming Israel’s assault and providing political and diplomatic
cover for it.
“We must support the establishment of a
single democratic, secular state in all of historic Palestine with equal rights
for Christians, Muslims, and Jews,” he wrote, adding, “and therefore the
dismantling of the deeply racist, settler colonial project, and an end to
apartheid across the land.”
Mokhiber, a lawyer who specializes in
international human rights law, had worked for the UN since 1992. He led the
high commissioner’s work on devising a human rights-based approach to
development, and acted as a senior human rights adviser in Palestine,
Afghanistan, and Sudan. In the 1990s, he lived in Gaza.
Indifference to genocide, however, is
the norm, not the exception. The international community did little to halt the
Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, and the genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, and
Bosnia. It is watching passively as hundreds of Palestinians are being killed
and wounded a day while Israel blocks food, medicine, fuel, and other basic
supplies from entering Gaza, where up to 85% of the 2.3 million inhabitants are
now homeless.
The very few voices that denounce
genocide pay with their careers. Josh Paul, who worked in the Bureau of
Political Military Affairs in the State Department for more than 11 years,
resigned due, as he wrote, to a policy disagreement concerning our continued
lethal assistance to Israel. Tariq Habash, a top advisory at the Education
Department, resigned in January, saying he could no longer serve an
administration that had put millions of innocent lives in danger.
But despite protest letters within
government agencies, including the State Department and AID, there is no mass
exodus. Why do we decry genocide as the crime of crimes, teach class after
class on the Holocaust, and yet do nothing to halt it when it occurs? Why are
there so few people willing to stand up and call out the institutions and
governments for their silence or complicity? Did we learn nothing from history?
Joining me to discuss the historical
indifference to genocide and what is taking place in Gaza is Craig Mokhiber,
former director of the New York Office of the United Nations High Commissioner
for Human Rights.
So let’s begin with that question,
Craig. It isn’t new. Rwanda. I was in Bosnia. Why? Why? And then we can go back
to the lessons of the Holocaust, which have been a staple in university
curricula, and yet here we are witnessing, undeniably, a holocaust. And as you
wrote in your resignation letter, the United States is not only not moving to
stop it, but is arming those who are carrying out the genocide itself.
Craig Mokhiber: Well, that’s right, and that is the
difference, Chris. Because if you look at what the United States and the United
Kingdom did when the genocide was unfolding in Rwanda, we know from leaked
diplomatic cables that they actually instructed their diplomats not to use the
term “genocide” because they knew, as a matter of international law, that if it
were genocide they would be compelled to act, to prevent it, to stop it, and to
punish it. And so their crime at that time was a failure of their obligation of
prevention under international law.
What we’re seeing in Gaza now is much
worse because the United States and the United Kingdom and some other Western
powers have actually been complicit in the genocide. That’s a separate crime
under the Genocide Convention, the crime of complicity. And that’s because the
United States, as you know, during this genocide, has been actively providing
economic, military intelligence, diplomatic support. It’s been using its veto
at the Security Council to stop a ceasefire. And after each veto, we’ve seen
thousands and thousands of more Palestinians lose their lives in the genocide.
We’ve seen the US even use its podiums
in official institutions of the State Department and the Defense Department and
the White House and the National Security Council to disseminate Israeli
propaganda for genocide, including justification of war crimes like bombings on
hospitals and so on.
So that is actually a higher level of
accountability. It is the crime of complicity, and it is a step up from the
failures of the West, of the United States during past genocides. And my big
fear is that the position taken by powerful Western states has begun to corrupt
international institutions and to cow them into a fearful silence.
Chris Hedges: Let’s talk about what happens internally
within these institutions. And as I have noted before, I was in Sarajevo during
the war, so that was 300 to 400 shells a day, four to five dead a day, two
dozen wounded a day. I only do that by comparison. In Gaza, we’re talking about
hundreds of dead and wounded a day. So the savagery of the Israeli carpet
bombing is unlike what we have seen.
I think you’d have to go back to maybe
Bosnia. I don’t know where you would go back to, but it is at such a horrific
level. I think 60, 65% now of the housing in Gaza has been destroyed. It’s an
undeniable, at the very least, a war crime, but I think it’s undeniably
genocide.
Let’s start with the UN. You worked for
many years in the UN. What’s happening internally? The secretary general has
made statements calling quite forcefully for a ceasefire, but talk about
institutionally, what we don’t see.
Craig Mokhiber: Well, that’s right. And that was what struck
me most when I penned my final letter to the United Nations on departing in
October, is that if you had such a clear case, such a clear case on its face of
genocidal intent spoken by Israeli leaders, and genocidal action implemented on
the ground, and the UN was afraid to even use the word “genocide”, then the
very norms and standards upon which that organization were founded were very
much at risk.
And this is because Israel had already,
in October, abandoned its decades-long strategy of incremental genocide, which
I think was designed to preserve Western sponsorship, and they moved in 2023 to
an expedited destruction of the final remnants of Palestine, as they say, from
the river to the sea. And Gaza was experiencing that most of all, but we had
seen it throughout the year already in the West Bank with attacks by the
Israeli military, mass arrests, pogrom in Hawara Village, wholesale ethnic
cleansing of West Bank villages.
And this was all being brought to our
desks every single day, and yet I saw this very trepidatious, almost silent
approach on the part of the political corridors and the political leadership of
the UN.
And the way it really manifests itself,
and you’ll see it even now, more than 100 days in with this mass annihilation
of a civilian population, you’ll hear from senior UN leaders these pat phrases
about a two-state solution somewhere down the road and calls for humanitarian
assistance. In other words, the safe language of genocide.
But what you won’t hear from them is
any talk at all about the root causes, about the actual crimes, about the
realities of settler colonialism, ethnic cleansing, persecution, apartheid,
occupation, dispossession, inequality, ethnonationalism, these things that are
at the root of the Palestinian experience and all of historic Palestine, and
now genocide itself. That is not a part of what you’re hearing from the
secretary general and the senior leadership of the organization.
You’re also not hearing any
condemnation of Israel. You’ll hear appeals for more humanitarian aid, as I
said, but you won’t hear a condemnation in the way you have heard direct
condemnations of Russia in Ukraine, condemnations of Hamas’s activities using
every adjective that one can conjure up, and yet no condemnation of Israel’s
crimes, because Israel is sponsored by powerful governments of the West, and
because senior UN leaders are afraid.
What we also see is an abandonment of
the specifics of international law in favor of more amorphous political
references. The two-state solution is a part of this. Don’t hold Israel and its
partners to account under the specific requirements of international law.
And that really has led to, I think, an
abdication of responsibility by key institutions. You wouldn’t even know at
this moment that there is a genocide prevention office in the United Nations
because it’s been completely silent during this genocide happening on their
watch.
Similarly, the special adviser on
Children in Armed Conflict — Before we even get to the International criminal
court, which is not a UN institution but has a politically corrupted prosecutor
in Karim Khan, who has refused to take seriously his mandate and to prosecute
crimes committed by the Israelis.
So this is… I have pointed out the
irony of the fact that this past year was the 75th anniversary of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, it was the 75th anniversary of the Genocide
Convention, but it was also the 75th anniversary of the adoption of apartheid
in South Africa, and the 75th anniversary of the Nakba in Palestine. And what
you see already at the birth of these institutions and these norms is a double
standard that was born, that was birthed, really, into a colonial contradiction
that has continued to influence their implementation up until today.
But if you can have an actual genocide
with clear genocidal intent declared, not by peripheral actors, but by Israel’s
president, prime minister, seven of its cabinet ministers at least, the senior
military leadership. And then what the acts that they promise being carried out
with genocidal fury on the ground and repeated by Israeli soldiers, and then
perpetrated as they are described, and still not have the courage to call it
genocide, then there’s no such thing as genocide. There never was any such thing
as genocide, and there never will be again, and we will have lost a vital
international legal protection for the worst crimes.
Chris Hedges: You talk about fear. So let’s say they did
stand up, the Genocide Office, the secretary general, and named this genocide
for what it is, named the apartheid state for what it is. What would happen to
them?
Craig Mokhiber: Well, their fear is that they will then
suffer the slings and arrows of a very abusive network of Israeli lobby groups
that will do their very best to slur individual UN officials as antisemites,
supporters of terrorism, and so on. And I’ve been through that several times in
my own career.
Chris Hedges: Just to interrupt, they’ve already done that
to the secretary general. They’ve already accused him of being an antisemite
and called for his removal.
Craig Mokhiber: For the mildest of critiques, in which he
said that this happened in a particular context. So you can imagine what
happens if you actually speak out against the crimes as they’re occurring on
the ground. And people in the UN are used to this. So that piece of it is very
real.
And of course, you’re a busy UN
official who’s trying to implement programs and get a job done, and you have to
invest, then, a lot of time in pushing back against these attacks by these
Israel lobby groups — Which, when I started in the UN, had zero influence. But
today, much like in Western governments, have grown in influence and have
adopted tactics that can be quite effective in intimidating senior UN officials
into silence.
But at the same time, you have to worry
about suffering consequences from powerful UN member states, especially the
United States, the United Kingdom, states of the European Union, who will
démarche the leadership, who will bring a lot of pressure to bear, and will say
to you, look, when the time comes for the budget committee to meet on the
resources you want to fight against racism, to provide protection in a
particular area, we’re going to remember this in the budget committee. And so
there is no firewall between the normative mandates of UN agencies on the one
hand and the budget committees, which are entirely political, on the other
hand.
And then, of course, there are personal
career considerations. There is a sense, in some parts of the UN, and here the
political corridors of the UN, that not offending powerful political actors is
a form of political acumen, that that actually shows a certain wisdom, and that
speaking up on behalf of the norms and standards of the organization in a way
that irritates some of these powerful actors shows that you are not a
sophisticated player in international diplomacy.
When, in fact, the charter, the
universal declarations, the main treaties of the organization mandate the
organization to defend these principles and to defend the peoples of the United
Nations that, in a world of realpolitik, is not always what you are seeing in
those cases.
And those who do it will be left out to
hang, to swing. If you’re suddenly attacked by the Israelis, the Americans,
Israel lobby groups and others, you will not be defended by the organization,
and you may well be in jeopardy of your job as well. So it’s quite an effective
technique.
Chris Hedges: Let’s talk about the United States, it’s a
little different from the United Nations. Careerism plays, of course, as much
an element in this. Samantha Power, who wrote A Problem From Hell on genocide
and excoriated those US officials and bureaucrats who didn’t stand up, whether
during the Holocaust or Rwanda or anywhere else, of course has now remained
silent, she’s out of AID.
But you also have, as you noted, an
active participation by the United States in furthering the genocide,
especially in terms of bypassing Congress twice to sell munitions to Israel.
Cutting off of that supply chain would instantly make Israel’s assault extremely
difficult, if not impossible. Let’s talk about what happens internally within
the US government.
Craig Mokhiber: Well, I don’t have a window into what happens
internally. What I see is the face that they bring into the United Nations,
which is often a face which is quite stern when the organization seeks to speak
out against Israeli abuses.
When I criticize the UN, I have to say
I’m criticizing the political leadership of the UN, some of the
intergovernmental bodies like the failed Security Council, which has been
rendered completely impotent by the use of the US veto, the leadership in the
Secretary General’s Office, heads of agencies, and others.
What I’m not criticizing are those
people inside the organization who are there for ideological reasons, who are
there because they hate poverty, they hate war, they hate human rights abuses
and inequality, and so they’re working day in and day out to try to defend
those norms and standards and working in solidarity with human rights movements
and peace activists all around the world. But they have been abandoned by the
political leadership in cases such as this.
And I’m certainly not critiquing the
more than 150 UNRWA workers in Gaza who have been annihilated by Israeli bombs
in just about 100 days, many of them murdered with their families, who, in my
eyes, are heroes who are doing their very best to serve the community and lost
their lives by staying and suffering those slings and arrows.
But the United States, when it deals
with us, it comes carrying a stick. And that stick is not just about the
budget. It is about a very aggressive… And I’ve always said that to be a
diplomat in the State Department, you don’t have to have any diplomatic skills
because you come with power, you come with carrots and sticks.
And those same carrots and sticks that
are used to affect the voting in the General Assembly, for example, amongst
states, including small developing states that need foreign assistance or are
politically challenged, those same kinds of carrots and sticks are used inside
the UN by the United States to pressure UN officials to either be quiet on a
particular issue or speak out on a particular issue.
For the US government, human rights are
a political tool to wield against its adversaries, but always there to defend
the impunity of its perceived allies and friends. And there’s an irony in it,
Chris, too, because for all the talk about US leadership on human rights in the
International Human Rights Program, the US is an outlier because of its
opposition to most of the international Human Rights Program.
They’re opposed to economic and social
rights as rights. They’re opposed to the right to development. They’re opposed
to the abolition of capital punishment. They are the one state on the planet
that is not a party to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the only
international treaty protecting the human rights of children. Only the United
States, out of 193 countries, has not ratified that. They have a generally weak
ratification record.
And they oppose the International
Criminal Court, and have even passed legislation, the Hague Invasion Act, it
has been nicknamed, that, if any of their people or their allies are indicted
and arrested, that they will invade the Netherlands in order to liberate them.
So the US leadership on human rights is
not what I would call “leadership”. And I’ve said in the past, that if that’s
leadership, we wish they’d follow for a while. So they’re not great friends of
the human rights part of the United Nations.
And we know from leaked diplomatic
cables that when the Goldstone Commission, [inaudible] inquiry was
investigating human rights abuses some years ago, they deployed their entire
global diplomatic mechanism with a massive investment in order to obstruct the
investigation, and then to discredit it when it was completed. And so it is,
with protection in the occupied territories across the board, always opposed by
the government of the United States, as well, as I said, the United Kingdom and
some other European allies.
Chris Hedges: You’re referring to the Goldstone report by
the South African judge, which was quite courageous in investigating and
documenting Israeli war crimes. But finally, Goldstone himself was forced to
repudiate his own work. The pressure was intense.
Craig Mokhiber: Intense and personal, and smears and
slanders, and threats of not allowing him to visit relatives inside Israel. And
this is a prominent Jewish South African lawyer, self-declared Zionist,
supporter of Israel, with family members in Israel, and they went after him.
He’s been criticized for giving in to
the pressure, but I think a lot of those criticisms come from people who have
not been subjected to that pressure, which can be extremely nasty, and even
dangerous. We’ve all been subjected to these armies of online trolls and the
threats that come along with that once the lobby unleashes its fury on you for
daring to speak out about Israeli atrocities. And so I have no criticism for
Justice Goldstone, only sympathy that he was beaten into submission,
figuratively, in that way.
Chris Hedges: Consequences. What are the consequences? This
is the genocide of our time. Israel is talking about months more of pulverizing
Gaza using starvation as a weapon. All of Gaza’s hungry. I think the last UN
figure I read, 500,000 Palestinians and Gaza were classified as being starving.
I guess one, where do you think it’s going? And two, what are the consequences
of not intervening? All the US does is speak about what they’re going to set up
once it’s over.
Craig Mokhiber: Well, I think the consequences are already
being realized. I think Israel is already realizing its genocidal objectives.
It has effectively destroyed Gaza. It moved systematically from the north to the
south of the Gaza Strip. It has destroyed most housing, most civilian
infrastructure: hospitals, schools, mosques, clinics, ambulances, graveyards,
courthouses, monuments.
The purpose is very clear by the
action, even if you didn’t listen to their genocidal statements, that they’re
trying to erase Palestinian civilian life in Gaza to make it impossible for the
survivors to have a normal, dignified life there, a process that started more
than 15 years ago with the siege already, but has now been, as I say, expedited
into all out genocide there.
And there’s very little left of the
Gaza Strip that would allow… You mention starvation. This is actual starvation
in a piece of land on the Mediterranean Sea, something that we have not seen
before, imposed starvation, imposed disease. The numbers of those who have
died, who have been annihilated here, are going to grow very significantly.
The military attacks are continuing.
We’ve received notice today of moves now toward Rafah, the southernmost town in
all of Gaza, where virtually the entire population has now been concentrated in
an area that can really only sustain a few thousand.
And now, we see the move to finish the
job. I think Israel is expediting its action toward that end because it knows
it cannot continue forever. But I think they’ve already succeeded in destroying
Gaza and destroying life in Gaza.
And now what they will look is to
manage the aftermath, which they hope will result in keeping the situation bad
enough that those who do survive will voluntarily leave through the Rafah
border, and either die in tents in the Sinai or be absorbed in the diaspora
elsewhere in just the latest, as the South African case points out, just the
latest in a series of ethnic purges that started in 1947. And it’s really
continued, punctuated throughout history up until this moment.
Consequences is the open question.
We’ve seen a failure of international institutions. We’ve seen the political
corruption of the International Criminal Court, which has been delaying the
bringing of consequences for Israel for years, and that situation has only
gotten worse under Karim Khan. We have seen a failure of the United Nations to
deal with this for what it is, which is a genocide, as opposed to just a
humanitarian challenge caused by an earthquake or another war between two
warring powers.
But we see also a glimmer of hope in
what South Africa has done in bringing the case to the International Court of
Justice, the World Court. And there, there could be consequences. We expect any
day now, really, to receive an order by the Court on the provisional measures
that have been brought by South Africa.
Those provisional measures could make a
difference. They call for cessation of military activities, an end to the
siege, bringing in the humanitarian relief and aid that is needed, preservation
of evidence, allowing fact-finding missions in. That could make a huge
difference for the survivors and bring hope of reconstruction.
Now, of course, I fully expect that if
the court delivers those provisional measures, Israel will refuse to implement
them. The case is then supposed to go to the Security Council for enforcement,
where the US will veto it because this is, after all, the US-Israeli genocide
because of the degree of complicity.
The case then would go to the General
Assembly for an emergency special session. General Assembly, of course, is a
democratic body, one country, one vote, where measures could be adopted in a
resolution that could either just be a resolution that condemns what Israel has
done and encourages everybody to implement the decision of the court, or it
could be something more concrete.
It could include calls for diplomatic
measures, consular measures, economic measures, political measures, removal of
Israel from international organizations, non-recognition of passports. It could
set up mechanisms, as they did for apartheid South Africa, to bring more
pressure to bear. It could call on individual courts, because this is a crime
of universal jurisdiction, to bring criminal action against Israelis. It could
set up a tribunal itself.
So there’s a lot that the General
Assembly could do, but you can be sure that the US and others will be working
very hard to compromise that process to make sure that the GA doesn’t do
anything meaningful by pressuring individual delegations not to support
anything meaningful.
In the end, Chris, accountability is
going to come from us. I have lost confidence in national institutions and
international institutions in cases like this, but my confidence has grown in
movements in civil society, in people, in boycotts and organized divestments
and sanctions, in the anti-apartheid movement which is growing by leaps and
bounds, and the courageous efforts of groups like Jewish Voice for Peace, and
If Not Now, who took over Grand Central Station and the Statue of Liberty, of
the millions who are marching in capitals around the world, including in places
where those marches are banned. And they do it at risk of arrest and beatings
by police because they refuse to go along.
This is what changed things in the
struggle against apartheid when South African apartheid was supported by the
United States right through the 1980s. It was people in churches, in
synagogues, in mosques, in movements, in labor unions that made the difference.
I expect that’s where, to answer your question, the consequences will come
from, and that’s where all of my hope rests now.
Chris Hedges: Well, and of course, Israel was a strong
supporter of the apartheid state right up until the end in an exchange for oil,
which South Africa had. They armed the apartheid state, even when everyone else
was walking away.
I just want to close by talking about
placing this within the long nightmare the Palestinians have endured. You
referenced the Nakba in 1948, ’49 when 750,000 Palestinians were ethnically
cleansed. Thousands were killed in massacres by Zionist terrorist groups. It
seems to have accelerated, I think you used the term slow motion genocide, if I
remember, slow motion ethnic cleansing, yes. But in terms of scale, I’m not
sure we’ve ever seen anything like this.
Talk a little bit about what this means
for the Palestinians. And then of course, we can’t leave out the West Bank
because 300 Palestinians have been killed, thousands upon thousands arrested.
Settlers, Jewish settlers are seizing Palestinian villages and driving the
inhabitants out in the West Bank. But just give us a picture from the
Palestinian viewpoint.
Craig Mokhiber: Well, and that’s what’s so important about
the South African case, because it points out that what’s happening here is
happening in a broader context, and that genocide is a continuum. Raphael
Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish jurist who invented the term “genocide” and lobbied
for the adoption of the convention, pointed out that it is always a continuum
of genocide. It’s not an event that occurs.
And I’ve been arguing the genocide
started long ago in Palestine, indeed in 1947 and 1948 with the Nakba, where
you saw the wholesale purging, the massacres that you talked about of
Palestinian villages, and then just erasing those villages, renaming them, and
building Israeli realities on top of them. That never stopped. That continued
in the 1950s. It continued then inside the Green Line. It continued then with
1967 in the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, and now it’s continuing in an
expedited way in Gaza as well. All a part of the same ethnic purge.
You cannot have an ethnonationalist
state that wants to pretend to be democratic if you don’t have an overwhelming
majority of those in your ethnonationalist group. And that means, by
definition, it means ethnic purges. It means genocide. There’s no other way to
achieve that, and Israel has been doing that now for 75 years.
And there’s no doubt that just the
sheer scale of what they’re doing in Gaza is unprecedented even in the
Palestinian experience. It has eclipsed what happened in the original Nakba in
1948.
What’s different is that for 75 years,
Israel enjoyed absolute impunity for these crimes, and it also was able to
dominate the narrative in the West that effectively erased the Palestinians, or
gave a description of them as some sort of external force that came in from
outer space because it wanted to kill Jews or something like this, not that you
had these indigenous people in a place called Palestine who were invaded by
settlers from another continent who effectively erased them and has been
executing and massacring them ever since. That narrative is finally coming
through.
You finally see, even in the West, a
greater understanding of the plight of the Palestinian people, of the
legitimate cause of the Palestinian people, of the legitimate resistance of the
Palestinian people. So I think that Israel has overplayed its genocidal hand in
this case, and that we’re going to see a lot of push for accountability that we
didn’t with previous mass atrocities committed by the Israelis.
It’s not going to come from the
official institutions of government or international institutions. And whatever
happens in the course, in the case before the International Court of Justice or
the domestic case brought by the Center for Constitutional Rights, in domestic
courts in the US for US complicity in this genocide, Palestinian people will
benefit from this growing movement around the world.
And that solidarity, I think, is where
the best hope is of a change in the future, and of abandoning these old, tired
slogans about a two-state solution and really looking at something rooted in
human rights and equality like a single democratic, secular state with equal
rights for Christians, Muslims, and Jews.
Chris Hedges: And just in terms of on the ground for the
Palestinians in Gaza, I have friends who have family in Khan Yunis and Gaza
City, and they were talking about, along with everything else that Israel was
obliterating, they were actually blowing up wells that people use to get… That
just shows you at what level they were creating an uninhabitable, virtually
uninhabitable environment. What does this mean for the Palestinians in Gaza?
Craig Mokhiber: Wells, farmland, bakeries, water sources,
everything that is necessary for civilian life, which is further evidence that
this was a genocidal onslaught designed to make survival in Gaza impossible. What
it means for the Palestinian people remains to be seen. What it means for the
people of Gaza is that most of Gaza will be unlivable for a long time to come,
and this was exactly the Israeli plan.
Gaza can be rebuilt. The environmental
degradation can be reversed. Gaza can be rebuilt with massive investment.
Israel will resist that with everything that it has. And with the backing of
the US, the UK, and others, they will want the world to ratify the ethnic
cleansing that they carried out in Gaza, just as the world ratified the ethnic
cleansing that it carried out inside the Green Line in 1948. That’s what we
have to push back against.
But the movement for Palestinian rights
and for Palestinian justice and freedom, that’s going to grow, and it’s going
to continue as the anti-apartheid movement did.
And so what that means is that the tens
of thousands of civilians martyred in Gaza will have been martyred for the
cause of Palestinian freedom, and that they will not have died in vain. I do
not think in the long term that Israel can continue to use force to maintain
its ethnonationalist project in the middle of the Middle East. And I think that
the only hope is the hope that comes from people all around the world fighting
for this cause of equality, this cause of justice.
Chris Hedges: Great. That was Craig Mokhiber, longtime
international human rights lawyer, who resigned in October as director of the
New York Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.
I would like to thank The Real News
Network and its production team: Cameron Granadino, Adam Coley, David Hebden,
and Kayla Rivara. You can find me at chrishedges.substack.com.
Israel’s Victory in
Gaza turns Pyrrhic as a Majority of Youths and Democrats brand it Genocidal
Israel is losing its campaign
against Gaza not so much on the battlefield — though it is unclear that very
many of its military goals have been accomplished — but in the court of public
opinion. The Israeli far right has long ignored such PR setbacks, convinced
that as long as the US government protects it at the United Nations, it retains
impunity.
The Biden administration cannot,
however, veto public opinion. A new You.gov opinion poll finds that 34% of
Americans believe Israel is committing a genocide against the Palestinians of
Gaza. I can’t tell you what an incredible statistic this is. In previous
decades polling generally found that most Americans had no sympathy whatsoever
for the Palestinians, who might as well have been gum stuck to the soles of the
boots of Israeli troops.
These Americans are not just saying
that the Israelis are oppressing the Palestinians (which most of them wouldn’t
even have admitted 20 years ago). They’re saying that they think the Israelis
are trying to wipe out the Palestinians of Gaza.
Moreover, it isn’t just that a third
of Americans believe there is an ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza. An absolute
majority — 55% — of Americans aged 18 to 30 see it as a genocide. That isn’t a
good sign for Israel’s future.
Moreover, a simple majority of
Democrats believe the Israeli Gaza campaign is a genocide, some 51%. Again,
Israel’s impunity has resulted from bipartisan support in the US, which is now
shifting.
It is also true that 39% of
Americans believe that Hamas tried to genocide the Israelis on October 7. The
Israeli government should not, however, take it as a compliment that so many
Americans view its tactics and goals as identical to those of Hamas.
It is also significant that 20% of
Republicans think Israel is committing a genocide. The tone in the Republican
Party is set by the evangelical Christian Zionists who generally think Israel
can do no wrong and that its brutality against the Palestinians is necessary to
usher in Christ’s second coming. (I worry a little that typing that sentence
made me stupider.) Accusing Tel Aviv of genocide isn’t just a criticism, it is
a severe condemnation.
These numbers spell at least some
trouble for the deeply unpopular Joe Biden, whose enthusiastic embrace of the
Israeli campaign and denial of Palestinian deaths is deeply alienating for
youths and progressives. While it is true that they won’t vote for Trump, they
could just stay home next November out of apathy, which would not be good news
for the Biden campaign.
King Pyrrhus of Epirus (northern
Greece and Albania) bestowed his name on a military campaign where you win at
such a devastating cost that the triumph turns to dust in your mouth and
becomes a kind of defeat. Pyrrhus, fighting on the Italian coast, proved the
victor in two initial battles with the Romans, but so depleted his army of
25,000 men than he lost the third, decisive, encounter.
The extremist government of Israeli
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, chock full of full-on fascists and unabashed
racists, waged war against the Hamas terrorist organization by targeting its
known middle and lower management in their apartment buildings, blowing up the
entire complexes and killing everyone living there — women, children,
non-combatant men. They couldn’t do the same to the top leadership because of
the hostages or because the latter were better hidden. The Israeli government
also designated civil society institutions such as schools, universities,
hospitals, clinics, municipal administrative centers and Non-Governmental
Organizations as what they called “power centers” and subjected them to
intensive aerial bombardment and shelling, oblivious to the well-being of
innocent civilians. Apparently the theory was that university presidents,
provosts, faculty, staff and students were all Hamas operatives with blood on
their hands and so all universities had to be destroyed. The theory, of course,
was monstrous and did not differ from Usama Bin Laden’s declaration that no
Americans were civilians. Israel’s +972 Mag called this tactic a “mass
assassination factory.” These acts of savagery have so far racked up over
25,000 deaths and over 60,000 woundings of Palestinians some 70% of them women
and children and most of the rest non-combatant men. Of 25,000 Hamas fighters,
it isn’t clear that any significant number have been killed.
In addition to razing entire
residential blocs with 2,000-pound bombs, the rules of engagement set for
Israeli ground troops apparently directed them to shoot to kill any person
moving in the streets, regardless of whether they were waving a white flag.
A video caught such a war crime and
was replayed on Britain’s ITV on Wednesday, provoking widespread public
revulsion and condemnations in Parliament.
Israel’s atrocities against
Palestinians in recent years have increasingly ended up being recorded on
smartphone video, and were only covered up by the neglect of the major European
and American “news” organizations, which largely declined to broadcast them.
Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta (Facebook and Instagram) has intentionally used
algorithms to shadowban news about Palestinians (and, increasingly, news in
general).
The situation is so horrible now,
however, that even mainstream outlets like Britain’s Sky TV are beginning to
report when Israel fires tank rounds into a UN training center being used as a
refugee shelter, killing 9 and wounding 75.
ITV and Sky TV are playing catch up,
however. TikTok, run by a Chinese company, freely allows video from Gaza to be
shared and to go viral, and Americans thirty and under have therefore seen the
war unfold before their eyes. Old people glued to CNN or Fox might not even
know that a war is going on, and they certainly would have no sense of the
magnitude of Israel’s atrocities. Not so for the under-30 population, which is
why 55% of them have decided this is a genocide.
Biden Must Choose
Between a Ceasefire in Gaza and a Regional War
In the topsy-turvy world of
corporate media reporting on U.S. foreign policy, we have been led to believe
that U.S. air strikes on Yemen, Iraq and Syria are legitimate and responsible
efforts to contain the expanding war over Israel’s genocide in Gaza, while the
actions of the Houthi government in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Iran and
its allies in Iraq and Syria are all dangerous escalations.
In fact, it is U.S. and Israeli
actions that are driving the expansion of the war, while Iran and others are
genuinely trying to find effective ways to counter and end Israel’s genocide in
Gaza while avoiding a full-scale regional war.
We are encouraged by Egypt and
Qatar’s efforts to mediate a ceasefire and the release of hostages and
prisoners-of-war by both sides. But it is important to recognize who are the
aggressors, who are the victims, and how regional actors are taking incremental
but increasingly forceful action to respond to genocide.
A near-total Israeli
communications blackout in Gaza has reduced the flow of images of the ongoing
massacre on our TVs and computer screens, but the slaughter has not abated.
Israel is bombing and attacking Khan Younis, the largest city in the southern Gaza
Strip, as ruthlessly as it did Gaza City in the north. Israeli forces and U.S.
weapons have killed an average of 240 Gazans per day for more than three
months, and 70% of the dead are still women and children.
Israel has repeatedly claimed it
is taking new steps to protect civilians, but that is only a public relations
exercise. The Israeli government is still using 2,000 pound and even 5,000
pound “bunker-buster” bombs to dehouse the people of Gaza and herd them toward
the Egyptian border, while it debates how to push the survivors over the border
into exile, which it euphemistically refers to as “voluntary emigration.”
People throughout the Middle East
are horrified by Israel’s slaughter and plans for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza,
but most of their governments will only condemn Israel verbally. The Houthi
government in Yemen is different. Unable to directly send forces to fight for
Gaza, they began enforcing a blockade of the Red Sea against Israeli-owned
ships and other ships carrying goods to or from Israel. Since mid-November
2023, the Houthis have conducted about 30 attacks on international vessels
transiting the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden but none of the attacks have caused
casualties or sunk any ships.
In response, the Biden administration, without
Congressional approval, has launched at least six rounds of bombing, including
airstrikes on Sanaa, the capital of Yemen. The United Kingdom has contributed a
few warplanes, while Australia, Canada, Holland and Bahrain also act as
cheerleaders to provide the U.S. with the cover of leading an “international
coalition.”
President Biden has admitted that
U.S. bombing will not force Yemen to lift its blockade, but he insists that the
U.S. will keep attacking it anyway. Saudi Arabia dropped 70,000 mostly American
(and some British) bombs on Yemen in a 7-year war, but utterly failed to defeat
the Houthi government and armed forces.
Yemenis naturally identify with
the plight of the Palestinians in Gaza, and a million Yemenis took to the
street to support their country’s position challenging Israel and the United
States. Yemen is no Iranian puppet, but as with Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran’s
Iraqi and Syrian allies, Iran has trained the Yemenis to build and deploy
increasingly powerful anti-ship, cruise and ballistic missiles.
The Houthis have made it clear
that they will stop the attacks once Israel stops its slaughter in Gaza. It
beggars belief that instead of pressing for a ceasefire in Gaza, Biden and his
clueless advisers are instead choosing to deepen U.S. military involvement in a
regional Middle East conflict.
The United States and Israel have
now conducted airstrikes on the capitals of four neighboring countries:
Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Yemen. Iran also suspects U.S. and Israeli spy
agencies of a role in two bomb explosions in Kerman in Iran, which killed about
90 people and wounded hundreds more at a commemoration of the fourth
anniversary of the U.S. assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani in
January 2020.
On January 20th, an Israeli
bombing killed 10 people in Damascus, including 5 Iranian officials. After
repeated Israeli airstrikes on Syria, Russia has now deployed warplanes to
patrol the border to deter Israeli attacks, and has reoccupied two previously
vacated outposts built to monitor violations of the demilitarized zone between
Syria and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.
Iran has responded to the
terrorist bombings in Kerman and Israeli assassinations of Iranian officials
with missile strikes on targets in Iraq, Syria and Pakistan. Iranian Foreign
Minister Amir-Abdohallian has strongly defended Iran’s claim that the strikes
on Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan targeted agents of Israel’s Mossad spy agency.
Eleven Iranian ballistic missiles
destroyed an Iraqi Kurdish intelligence facility and the home of a senior
intelligence officer, and also killed a wealthy real estate developer and
businessman, Peshraw Dizayee, who had been accused of working for the Mossad,
as well as of smuggling Iraqi oil from Kurdistan to Israel via Turkey.
The targets of Iran’s missile
strikes in northwest Syria were the headquarters of two separate ISIS-linked
groups in Idlib province. The strikes precisely hit both buildings and
demolished them, at a range of 800 miles, using Iran’s newest ballistic missiles
called Kheybar Shakan or Castle Blasters, a name that equates today’s U.S.
bases in the Middle East with the 12th and 13th century European crusader
castles whose ruins still dot the landscape.
Iran launched its missiles, not
from north-west Iran, which would have been closer to Idlib, but from Khuzestan
province in south-west Iran, which is closer to Tel Aviv than to Idlib. So
these missile strikes were clearly intended as a warning to Israel and the
United States that Iran can conduct precise attacks on Israel and U.S.
“crusader castles” in the Middle East if they continue their aggression against
Palestine, Iran and their allies.
At the same time, the U.S. has
escalated its tit-for-tat airstrikes against Iranian-backed Iraqi militias. The
Iraqi government has consistently protested U.S. airstrikes against the
militias as violations of Iraqi sovereignty. Prime Minister Sudani’s military
spokesman called the latest U.S. airstrikes “acts of aggression,” and said,
“This unacceptable act undermines years of cooperation… at a time when the
region is already grappling with the danger of expanding conflict, the
repercussions of the aggression on Gaza.”
After its fiascos in Afghanistan
and Iraq killed thousands of U.S. troops, the United States has avoided large
numbers of U.S. military casualties for ten years. The last time the U.S. lost
more than a hundred troops killed in action in a year was in 2013, when 128
Americans were killed in Afghanistan.
Since then, the United States has
relied on bombing and proxy forces to fight its wars. The only lesson U.S.
leaders seem to have learned from their lost wars is to avoid putting U.S.
“boots on the ground.” The U.S. dropped over 120,000 bombs and missiles on Iraq
and Syria in its war on ISIS, while Iraqis, Syrians and Kurds did all the hard
fighting on the ground.
In Ukraine, the U.S. and its
allies found a willing proxy to fight Russia. But after two years of war,
Ukrainian casualties have become unsustainable and new recruits are hard to
find. The Ukrainian parliament has rejected a bill to authorize forced conscription,
and no amount of U.S. weapons can persuade more Ukrainians to sacrifice their
lives for a Ukrainian nationalism that treats large numbers of them, especially
Russian speakers, as second class citizens.
Now, in Gaza, Yemen and Iraq, the
United States has waded into what it hoped would be another “US-casualty-free”
war. Instead, the U.S.-Israeli genocide in Gaza is unleashing a crisis that is
spinning out of control across the region and may soon directly involve U.S.
troops in combat. This will shatter the illusion of peace Americans have lived
in for the last ten years of U.S. bombing and proxy wars, and bring the reality
of U.S. militarism and warmaking home with a vengeance.
Biden can continue to give Israel
carte-blanche to wipe out the people of Gaza, and watch as the region becomes
further engulfed in flames, or he can listen to his own campaign staff, who
warn that it’s a “moral and electoral imperative” to insist on a ceasefire. The
choice could not be more stark.
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