Israeli Minister Smotrich Threatens to Turn Occupied West Bank Into Ruins ‘Like in the Gaza Strip’

Bezalel Smotrich, Israeli finance minister One advocate responded: “Take this seriously. If extremists like Smotrich get their way they will do to the West Bank exactly what they have done to Gaza.” Jessica Corbett, Common Dreams, May 30, 2024 Israel’s forces have killed at least 36,224 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip in less than eight months, and far-right Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich on Thursday threatened to similarly attack the illegally occupied West Bank. Smotrich, leader of the Religious Zionism party, shared on social media a video he recorded in Bat Hefer, following similar posts a day earlier. The Times of Israelreported that the minister’s comments came after Palestinians’ gunfire from Tulkarem in the West Bank toward the Israeli settlement. “Our message to the neighbors beyond the fence in Tulkarem, Nur Shams, Shuweika, and Qalqilya: We will turn you into ruined cities like in the Gaza Strip if the terror you are exerting on the settlements continues,” Smotrich said in Hebrew, according to a translation from Al Jazeera. NPR international correspondent Aya Batrawy pointed out that not only is Smotrich an advocate of illegal Israeli settlements—he has a home near Kedumim—but also “his role as finance minister means he oversees budgets, like police and army.” Rohan Talbot, director of advocacy and campaigns of the U.K.-based Medical Aid for Palestinians, said of Smotrich’s remarks: “Take this seriously. If extremists like Smotrich get their way they will do to the West Bank exactly what they have done to Gaza. Starting with the refugee camps and Area C communities (to a certain extent it has already begun).” Since the Hamas-led October 7 attack on Israel, Israeli forces and settlers have killed over 500 Palestinians in the West Bank. Ibrahim Hooper, national communications director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the largest Muslim civil rights group in the United States, issued a statement about multiple recent events, including the minister’s comments. “Every day, we see Israel’s far-right government targeting civilian infrastructure vital to the lives of ordinary Palestinians, whether in Gaza or the West Bank,” Hooper said. “This ongoing destruction has one goal—to make life unbearable for the Palestinian people and to force their removal from the land of Palestine.” CAIR also “condemned the far-right Israeli government’s destruction of a vegetable market in the West Bank city of Ramallah,” explaining: “During a raid, Israeli stun grenades and tear gas canisters ignited the blaze that consumed a large portion of the market. Some 200 shops and stalls were impacted.” The group further pointed out that the devastation in Ramallah followed Israeli forces bombing a pair of encampments in and near Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, attacks that killed dozens of Palestinians displaced by the war—which over 30 countries have argued to the International Court of Justice amounts to genocide. Smotrich has come under fire for other statements since Israel launched its retaliation for the October 7 attack. Just last month, in what critics called blatantly genocidal language, he advocated for “total annihilation” of Gaza. In January, Smotrich said that the mass expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza would be a “humanitarian solution” and “a small country like ours cannot afford a reality where, four minutes away from our settlements, there is a hotbed of hatred and terror, where there are 2 million people who wake up every morning with the desire to destroy the state of Israel.” Smotrich made similar remarks before the current escalation, declaring in March 2023 that an entire Palestinian town should be “wiped out” by Israel and that “there’s no such thing as Palestinians because there’s no such thing as a Palestinian people.”

The ICC Takes on Israel and the US Congressional Mafia

by Medea Benjamin Posted on May 30, 2024 Senator Lindsay Graham was bursting with contempt for the International Criminal Court (ICC) when he grilled Secretary of State Blinken at a May 21 Congressional hearing. Wagging his finger, he warned that, if the ICC gets away with issuing arrest warrants for Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, “we are next.” The audience at the hearing, stacked with CODEPINK pro-Palestine supporters, burst out in applause at the notion of the US being hauled before the world’s highest court. “You can clap all you want,” an angry Graham retorted, “but they tried to come after our soldiers in Afghanistan.” Graham was thankful that in the Afghan case “reason prevailed” when the case was dropped, adding that the US must level sanctions against the ICC “not only to protect our friends in Israel but to protect ourselves.” Graham was referring to the 2019 efforts of former ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda to hold both the Taliban and the US accountable for war crimes in Afghanistan. When Graham said that “reason prevailed,” he really meant that US thuggery prevailed because the Trump administration brazenly imposed sanctions against ICC officials, denying them visas to the US and freezing their assets in US banks. President Biden lifted the sanctions but did so with the tacit understanding that the court would not resume the probe of US crimes in Afghanistan. The message from both Democratic and Republican presidents was clear: Do not dare hold the US to the same standards you use for others. The International Criminal Court was founded in 1998 as the result of a lifetime’s work by an American (and Jewish) international lawyer, Benjamin Ferencz, rooted in his experience as an investigator and chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg tribunals after the Second World War. Ben passed away in 2023 at the age of 103, but the universal jurisdiction that the court is exercising in this case is the fruition of his life’s work to hold war criminals accountable under international law, no matter what country they are from or who their victims are. Enter Israel. The ICC has been building a case against Israel for nearly a decade. A recent blockbuster investigation by the Guardian and two Israeli-based news outlets revealed a shocking almost decade-long secret campaign against the court by Israeli intelligence agencies, who surveilled, hacked, pressured, smeared and threatened ICC officials in an effort to derail the court’s inquiries. Despite the pressure, on May 20, ICC prosecutor Karim Khan made his request for Israeli and Hamas arrest warrants. Among the charges against the Israeli officials are extermination, using starvation as a method of warfare, willfully causing great suffering, and intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population. Prosecutor Karim Khan’s request has now gone to a panel of three judges who will determine in the coming weeks whether the request is granted. But pro-Israel forces in the US are trying their best to throw sand in the wheels of justice with threats of new sanctions. One ultimatum already came from Senator Tom Cotton and 11 other Republican senators in a toxic April 24 letter. “Target Israel and we will target you,” the senators signaled to the ICC. “If you move forward with the measures indicated in the report, we will move to end all American support for the ICC, sanction your employees and associates, and bar you and your families from the United States.” The letter concluded with a hair-raising: “You have been warned.” The Biden administration has responded to the ICC by flip flopping like a fish on dry land. On May 20, the White House put out a statement calling the ICC prosecutor’s application for arrest warrants against Israeli leaders “outrageous”, adding “Whatever this prosecutor might imply, there is no equivalence – none – between Israel and Hamas. We will always stand with Israel against threats to its security.” Secretary of State Anthony Blinken called the request “shameful.” At a hearing on May 22, he told Senator Graham that he welcomed working with him on efforts to sanction the ICC. But on May 28, National Security Council Communications Advisor John Kirby said at a White House press briefing, “We don’t believe that sanctions against the ICC is the right approach here.” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, who spoke after Kirby, reiterated that message. She said that legislation against the ICC “is not something the administration is going to support” and that “sanctions on the ICC are not an effective or appropriate tool to address U.S. concerns.” This new position from the White House will make it easier for more Democrats to say no to the bills that will be introduced as soon as Congress returns from recess on June 3. Already, dueling statements are coming out from Congressional members. While Senate Majority Leader Schumer called the ICC appeal “reprehensible” and Democrat Joe Manchin joined with Republicans to call for visa bans for ICC officials and sanctions on the international body, Senator Bernie Sanders defended the court, saying, “The ICC is doing its job. It’s doing what it is supposed to do. We cannot only apply international law when it is convenient.” On the House side, progressives voiced support for the ICC. Rep. Cori Bush said, “Seeking arrest warrants for human rights abuses is an important step towards accountability. It’s shameful for U.S. officials to threaten the ICC while continuing to send weapons that enable war crimes.” Rep. Mark Pocan gave a gutsy response, saying, “If Netanyahu comes to address Congress, I would be more than glad to show the ICC the way to the House floor to issue that warrant.” While most Republicans and pro-Israel hawks in the Democratic Party will likely join hands to hammer the international court, President Biden may ultimately feel pressured to adopt the position best articulated by Senator Van Hollen. “It is fine to express opposition to a possible judicial action, but it is absolutely wrong to interfere in a judicial matter by threatening judicial officers, their family members and their employees with retribution. This thuggery is something befitting the mafia, not U.S. senators.” It is also not befitting the White House, especially one that has been such a willing partner to Israel’s war crimes. Medea Benjamin, cofounder of the peace group CODEPINK, is coauthor, with David Swanson, of the forthcoming NATO: What You Need to Know.

Israel massacres dozens in strikes on Rafah refugee camp

Jordan Shilton, WSWS, May 28, 2024 The Israeli regime’s deliberate massacre of at least 45 displaced people in a tent camp in Rafah marks yet another act of barbarism in its genocide against the Palestinians. Dozens of men, women and children, who had already fled multiple times in the past seven months, were massacred and maimed in a firestorm of American-supplied missiles fired by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF). Palestinians react next to the destruction after an Israeli strike where displaced people were staying in Rafah, Gaza Strip, Monday, May 27, 2024. [AP Photo/Jehad Alshrafi] Sunday’s bombardment was a direct response by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s fascistic government to Friday’s order from the International Court of Justice calling for an end to Israel’s military intervention in Rafah. The Zionist regime wanted to make clear that it will not be bound by any restrictions imposed by international law. It feels able to act so provocatively because it has full confidence in the unflinching support of the imperialist powers, first and foremost the United States, for its “final solution” of the Palestinian question. The strike was carried out “with precise ammunition and on the basis of precise intelligence,” the IDF asserted. Its statement blandly noted that the military was aware that “several civilians in the area were harmed. The incident is under review.” The most commonly used “precise ammunition” fired by the IDF at Gaza are weapons fitted with US-produced Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) bomb kits, which transform standard weapons into GPS-guided munitions. US aerospace company Boeing accelerated the dispatch of at least 1,800 such kits to Israel in October 2023, as the Netanyahu regime’s genocide got underway. Since then, they have played a major role in slaughtering well over 36,000 Palestinians, the current official death toll. The Tal as-Sultan neighbourhood of western Rafah, where the camp was located, was supposedly a “safe zone” for Palestinian civilians. According to the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, many victims were “burned alive” in their tents. An estimated 249 people were injured the strike, which eyewitnesses told CNN included at least eight missiles. One survivor, who made it to the Kuwait hospital, stated, “The air strikes burned the tents, the tents are melting, and the people’s bodies are melting.” With Gaza’s healthcare system collapsing after months of repeated attacks by the Israeli regime, many of the injured will not survive. A doctor, who spoke to Al Jazeera after returning to Britain from an aid mission in Gaza, stated that hospitals in the enclave are providing “medieval medicine” to patients. “It is what you would hear about or read about what would be happening in Europe maybe 300, 400 years ago,” commented Dr. Khaled Dawas, the head of gastrointestinal surgery at University College London. He added that injured Palestinians often avoid going to hospital because it “means pretty much a death sentence.” One day after the massacre, the director of the Kuwaiti hospital in Rafah, where many of the injured were treated, announced the closure of the facility due to Israeli attacks. Earlier in the day, two healthcare workers were reportedly killed in a strike on the facility’s gates. The al-Aqsa hospital in Deir el-Balah was also set to suspend all services due to a lack of fuel triggered by an IDF blockade that was initiated on the same day as the refugee camp massacre. This latest atrocity has the Biden administration’s fingerprints all over it. The IDF’s onslaught on Rafah has proceeded over the past three weeks after the White House gave it the green light. Just two weeks before Israel attacked Rafah, Biden signed a supplementary military assistance bill passed with bipartisan support that included $26 billion in funding for Israel. Biden has asserted that Israel is doing “all it can to ensure civilian protection,” while National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan insisted that the IDF’s assault has “not involved major military operations into the heart of dense urban areas.” This line has been maintained even as over 800,000 people have fled the city. Likewise, administration officials continue to claim that killing civilians in Rafah is a “red line,” even as the IDF does this every day with impunity. The Biden administration’s lying claims that no “major” operations are taking place in Rafah and that it opposes killing civilians are no more credible than Netanyahu’s attempt to present the bombing of the refugee camp in comments Monday as a “tragic mistake.” The fact of the matter is that as horrific as Sunday’s massacre was, it is part of a pattern of the systematic targeting of defenceless civilians by the IDF. From the bombardment of the al-Ahli hospital killing upwards of 500 people, to the storming of the al-Shifa hospital, and the destruction of Khan Younis, millions of workers and young people know all too well the brutality of Netanyahu’s regime and what it is capable of with imperialist backing. The imperialist governments in the United States and Germany, Israel’s two most important weapons’ suppliers, reiterated their backing for the Zionist regime after Sunday’s massacre. Adopting the Israeli government’s propaganda wholesale, White House National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said, “Israel has a right to go after Hamas, and we all understand this strike killed two senior Hamas terrorists, who are responsible for attacks on Israeli civilians.” German government spokesman Steffen Hebestreit labelled the strike as a “mistake,” echoing Netanyahu. Hebestreit also noted that the Israeli military had launched an investigation to determine what happened, adding, according to Der Spiegel, “First of all investigate what happened and then judge. And don’t come to an immediate judgement on the basis of pictures.” In other words, let the murderers investigate the crime scene and cover up any evidence that implicates them before we say anything about it. No “investigation” is needed to determine what the motivation for Sunday’s massacre was. Israeli government and military officials have repeatedly asserted since the genocide began that their plan is to ethnically cleanse Gaza of Palestinians, by killing them, starving them to death, or forcing them to flee the enclave, so that Israel can seize the territory. Gaza’s inhabitants are viewed by the Zionist regime as “human animals,” as Defence Minister Yoav Gallant put it in October. Fascist National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who recently declared that he would like to live in Gaza, celebrated Sunday’s slaughter with a post on social media urging an intensification of the attacks: “Rafah with full force.” The imperialist powers support this barbarism because they view the Gaza genocide as a critical component of their plans to redivide the world in a rapidly escalating Third World War. The same indifference to the savage massacring of human beings in Gaza by the IDF with its never-ending supply of US-manufactured bombs is on display in Ukraine, where the US and its NATO allies have sacrificed some 500,000 Ukrainians in a war for imperialist plunder. It was not for nothing that US Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson remarked in his denunciation of the application of the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor for arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant last week, “If the ICC is allowed to threaten Israeli leaders, ours could be next.” The key lesson that must be drawn following the Rafah refugee camp massacre is that appeals to the powers that be, whether to imperialist governments, the United Nations, or international courts, to “stop the genocide” will fall on deaf ears. The millions of workers, students and young people who have joined anti-genocide protests and encampments over recent months around the world must turn to the international working class, the only social force capable of leading a genuine struggle to halt the genocide against the Palestinians. The mass political mobilisation of the working class, which produces all of society’s wealth, is the only way to stop the Israeli war criminals and their imperialist accomplices in their tracks. As workers are told in every country to accept sweeping attacks on conditions and public services to pay for militarism, war and genocide, a powerful basis exists to rally workers in struggle to stop the production and delivery of all conceivable military equipment to Israel and its allied imperialist war machines in North America and Europe. It is the fight to build such a movement which requires arming the working class with a socialist programme to defeat capitalist barbarism, that is the most urgent task of all for those who want to bring the genocide in Gaza to an end.

With de facto endorsement from Biden, Israel broadens Rafah onslaught

Andre Damon, WSWS, May 24, 2024 Israel’s attack on Rafah, the southernmost city in the Gaza Strip, has now displaced nearly 1 million people and massively intensified famine throughout the entire territory. This assault is taking place with the effective endorsement of the Biden administration, despite Biden’s earlier public declarations that a full-scale attack on Rafah would be a “red line” for the White House. On Tuesday, an unnamed senior Biden administration official told reporters, “It’s fair to say that the Israelis have updated their plans. They’ve incorporated many of the concerns that we have expressed,” giving the administration’s stamp of approval for the widening attack on the city. On Thursday, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said that Israel had not carried out “major maneuvers into dense urban areas.” He added, “What we have seen so far has not been that.” This is an absurd falsehood. Israel has been bombing Rafah non-stop and is pushing armored columns deep into the city, leading to the total suspension of humanitarian operations amid widespread hunger and starvation. As a result of the offensive, only 150 trucks of food have entered Gaza since May 6. “We’re going back to levels of aid that we were getting in October when the war first started,” said Sam Rose, planning director for the UN agency for Palestinian refugees. On Monday Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant told US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan in a meeting that Israel intends to broaden its offensive into the city. “We are committed to broadening the ground operation in Rafah to the end of dismantling Hamas and recovering the hostages,” Gallant said. Sullivan posed for a photo shaking the hand of black-shirted Gallant on the day that the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) lead prosecutor brought charges against him. In a column published the same day, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius said that US and Israeli officials had reached an agreement over the plans to attack Rafah. Ignatius wrote, “Israeli leaders have reached a consensus about a final assault on Hamas’s four remaining battalions in Rafah,” in a move that “Biden won’t oppose.” The Times of Israel wrote, “the Biden administration appeared to signal its initial approval of the operation launched by Israel early Tuesday morning to take over the Palestinian side of the Rafah border crossing with Egypt.” It added, “Spokespeople for the administration said the goals of the operation were legitimate.” In response to the ICC’s charges against Netanyahu, the Biden administration has effectively dropped its earlier token criticisms of the Israeli government, with Biden declaring Tuesday, “It is clear that Israel wants to do all it can to ensure civilian protection. Contrary to allegations against Israel made by the International Court of Justice, what’s happening is not genocide,” Biden said. The humanitarian situation in Gaza continues to deteriorate amid ongoing mass starvation imposed by the Israeli blockade. In a briefing to the United Nations Security Council Tuesday, Edem Wosornu, a spokesperson for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, called the situation “hell on earth.” “To be frank, we are running out of words to describe what is happening in Gaza. We have described it as a catastrophe, a nightmare, as hell on earth. It is all of these and worse,” Wosornu said. She added, “And living conditions continue to deteriorate as a result of heavy fighting, particularly in Jabalya and eastern Rafah, as well as Israeli bombardment from air, land and sea.” She noted that more than 35,000 people have been killed and another 79,000 injured, with 17,000 children unaccompanied or separated from their families. She declared, “Since October 2023, 75 percent of the population in Gaza—1.7 million people—has been forcibly displaced within Gaza, many of them up to four or five times, including as a result of repeated IDF-issued evacuation instructions.” In a statement, the UN’s World Food Program (WFP) said it was running out of food in central Gaza. “Humanitarian operations in Gaza are near collapse,” said WFP spokesperson Abeer Etefa, adding that unless food is provided “in massive quantities, famine-like conditions will spread,” she said. On Tuesday, Israeli troops launched raids into the Jenin refugee camp in the northern West Bank, attacking a local hospital and killing a doctor, a teacher and a ninth grade student. “Undercover forces raided the area suddenly, and they were firing at any moving body in the street,” said ambulance driver Hazim Masarwa to Al Jazeera. “They were targeting anything moving.” In a statement, the UN Human Rights Office in Palestine said, “We are horrified by the deadly Israeli Forces operation in Jenin: 7 Palestinians killed, including two children, one on his way to school, a school teacher, and a doctor. This senseless bloodshed must stop, and those responsible must be held accountable.”

House GOP [Republican Party] Bill Would Give Benefits To Americans in the Israeli Military

The legislation would grant IDF soldiers the same protections as US military personnel while they’re on active duty by Dave DeCamp May, Antiwar. com, 21, 2024 A bill introduced in the House by Reps. Guy Reschenthaler (R-PA) and Max Miller (R-OH) would extend certain benefits for Americans serving in the US military to American citizens in the Israeli military. The legislation, introduced on May 17, would give Americans in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) protections under the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act (SCRA) and Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act (USERRA). The SCRA protects US service members from civil legal action while they’re on active duty and for up to a year after. The USERRA protects the civilian employment of active and reserve military personnel when they’re called to active duty. “Over 20,000 American citizens are currently defending Israel from Hamas terrorists, risking their lives for the betterment of our ally,” Reschenthaler said in a statement on the legislation. The Washington Post reported in February that an estimated 23,380 American citizens are serving in the Israeli military. Many are dual citizens who were already living in Israel, but as of November 2023, about 10,000 people living in the US had traveled to Israel to report for duty with the IDF after receiving draft notices. According to Responsible Statecraft, 21 American citizens serving in the IDF have been killed in Gaza, and one was killed in northern Israel near the Lebanon border. Reschenthaler said his legislation will “ensure we do everything possible to support these heroes who are standing with Israel, fighting for freedom, and combating terrorism in the Middle East.” It’s unclear what the chances are for Reschenthaler’s bill to pass Congress and become law, but there is strong support for the Israeli military among House Republicans. For example, Rep. Brian Mast (R-FL) is an IDF veteran who recently wore his Israeli uniform on Capitol Hill, and he did not receive any backlash from his colleagues for showing up to work in the House wearing the uniform of a foreign military. Republicans have introduced a slew of pro-Israel legislation over the past few months to show staunch support for the Israeli slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza, including bills to impose harsh punishments on college protesters. One bill introduced by Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN) would send protesters to Gaza.

The Nakba continues

Nasir Khan To expect the Nakba to end when the ideology of ethnic cleansing is still in power is only a dream, but the only hope is that the people of the world stand in solidarity with the people of Palestine as lately, they have shown and the resistance movement of Palestinians continues the struggle for the liberation of their land despite all the heavy odds the people of Palestine face. No colonial power has offered freedom to its colonized people on a platter, without their struggle. The history of colonialism and imperialism has taught us that.

Britain’s support for Zionism has caused 76 years of conflict. It is time this barbarism stops

Israel’s war on Gaza David Hearst, Published date: 15 May 2024 14:22 BST Following in Balfour’s footsteps, David Cameron is dooming Britain to irrelevance in the Middle East People protest in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza, in London, Britain, 27 April 2024 (AFP) 287 Shares facebook sharing button twitter sharing button whatsapp sharing button messenger sharing button email sharing button sharethis sharing button US President Joe Biden, the US Congress and the British Foreign Secretary David Cameron are living in a parallel world. In their world, Hamas could have had a ceasefire tomorrow if it handed over the captives. In their world, only continued pressure on Hamas will force them to release the captives and therefore weapons must be supplied to Israel to do that. Israeli forces are still mounting “pin-point operations” to the east of Rafah and hence not crossing the red line set by Biden on the use of US-supplied heavy bombs. US Senator Lindsey Graham is grotesque, but he could as well be their most eloquent spokesman. Just as the US had “rightly” ended the Second World War by dropping nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Israel should be given the bombs it needs to end this war, Graham said. By dropping one of its 200 nuclear warheads on Gaza? Stay informed with MEE’s newsletters Sign up to get the latest alerts, insights and analysis, starting with Turkey Unpacked In the real world, the US walked away from an Egyptian-brokered ceasefire deal that Hamas signed and that CIA Director Bill Burns sponsored; Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has called Biden’s bluff by launching the biggest offensive on all parts of Gaza since the war began and cutting off all but token amounts of aid. In the real world, Israeli forces are carpet bombing eastern Rafah and central and northern Gaza. Jabalia in the north, Zeitoun in Gaza City, Nuseirat in the centre and Rafah in the south are simultaneously under massive bombardment. Rafah, the main entry point of aid, has been closed completely, and a fraction of what is needed on a daily basis is let through other crossings. Since taking control of the Palestinian side of the Rafah crossing, Israel has let just six trucks of aid through its crossing at Karem Abu Salem (Kerem Shalom) and 157,000 litres of fuel. The very minimum Gaza needs is 500 trucks and 300,000 litres a day. Follow Middle East Eye’s live coverage of the Israel-Palestine war Unrwa says that nearly 450,000 people have been pushed north, heading to the devastated towns of Khan Younis and Deir al-Balah, while tens of thousands in Gaza City are heading south fleeing what the World Food Programme has called a “full-blown famine”. In the real world, half of Gaza’s population could be about to converge on central Gaza which has no food or fresh water to cope with such an influx of refugees. There is nowhere safe to flee to. Israel is seeing to that by bombing the shelters. Calling Biden’s bluff Netanyahu has called Biden’s bluff. It’s not as if he is acting regardless of the human costs. For him, the human cost is a war aim. Biden’s war on Gaza is now a war on truth and the right to protest Read More » A good part of him, the Israeli defence establishment and a clear majority of Israelis themselves want that human cost to be as high as possible. Eight months of this slaughter have not sated their thirst for revenge. So what is Biden’s reaction to being ignored by his chief ally? He has offered two responses: the assault on Rafah is not happening so no red lines have been crossed; and the blame for this offensive, if it actually exists, lies with Hamas itself. “It’s just one shipment that was delayed, Israel did not cross the red line in Rafah,” the US ambassador to Israel, Jack Lowe, shrugged. Biden agreed with Israel: “Israel said it’s up to Hamas; if they wanted to do it, we could end it tomorrow. And the ceasefire would begin tomorrow,” Biden told a fundraiser in Seattle on Saturday. Both excuses are palpable nonsense. If Hamas could “end it all now” there would have been a permanent ceasefire months ago, and certainly after the first captive and prisoner exchange. It is Israel’s refusal to “end it all now” before Hamas is eradicated that has caused the collapse of the latest negotiations. Hamas signed up to a ceasefire deal that would have ensured a permanent cessation of hostilities. Israel rejected it. And now the US is backing it. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken next to British Foreign Secretary David Cameron during the G7 meeting in Italy, on 18 April 2024 (Reuters) US Secretary of State Antony Blinken next to British Foreign Secretary David Cameron during the G7 meeting in Italy, on 18 April 2024 (Reuters) This war is not about bringing the hostages home alive. The longer the war goes on, the fewer of the 128 captives thought to be still living will survive. For as the families of the hostages all know, it is Israel’s bombing that is killing them, not Hamas. UK fully aligned with Israel Cameron has been even worse than Biden, if that is possible. In a series of interviews, he said cutting arms to Israel would strengthen Hamas and castigated the BBC for not calling it a terrorist organisation. He refused to reinstate Britain’s funding for Unrwa, despite the fact that an independent UN review headed by a former French foreign minister found no evidence to substantiate Israel’s claims that Unrwa staff were members of terrorist groups. “We are more demanding than that,” Lord Cameron scoffed. Like Israel, Britain only wants this war to end when Hamas is destroyed. As this war’s aim is unachievable, Britain is in effect supporting the permanent reoccupation of Gaza Really? So demanding that the UK cut funding without even investigating the claims, and base its action, according to sources who spoke to Middle East Eye, purely on “information in the public domain“. Over 50 MPs and members of the House of Lords urged Cameron to restore funding, saying that it would send “a powerful message of solidarity to those affected by the crisis in Gaza and reaffirm the UK’s leadership in global humanitarian efforts”. All ignored. Under Cameron, Britain has now become fully aligned with the most right-wing government in Israel’s history. Like Israel, Britain is intent on destroying Unrwa and with it the only international legal protection Palestinian refugees around the world have. Cameron apparently agrees with Stalin’s proposition: “No man, no problem”, only this time it is “no refugees, no problem”. Like Israel, Britain only wants this war to end when Hamas is destroyed. As this war’s aim is unachievable, Britain is in effect supporting the permanent reoccupation of Gaza. Like Netanyahu, Cameron ignored the death of the British-Israeli captive, Nadav Popplewell, who died of wounds sustained in Israeli bombing. Cameron has been silent, too, on the closure of Rafah. And when he finally spoke, he told the BBC over the weekend that the UK “does not support a major operation in Rafah without a plan”. He is also silent on the movement of up to half a million refugees northwards from Rafah to an area which has no capacity to feed and water them. Britain rejects supporting any legal action in the International Criminal Court (ICC) or the International Court of Justice (ICJ), using the fig leaf that it would impede negotiations that Israel has already walked away from. For the second time in this war, Biden and Cameron are giving Netanyahu a clear green light to continue this war as he started it; a war clearly and indisputably targeting the people of Gaza as a whole. But this is not to say that the Rafah campaign has not had regional consequences. A Bridge Too Far In walking away from the ceasefire plan that Hamas signed, Biden is overlooking one uncomfortable fact. It was not a Hamas counter-proposal, as one US official put it, but an Egyptian-drafted document. Its rejection as a peace plan sparked fury and humiliation in equal quantities in Cairo. Israeli leaks to the media did not improve the dark mood in Cairo. On the night the Israeli army occupied the Palestinian side of the Rafah crossing, Israeli media quoted an unnamed source saying that Israel had told Egypt that this was a limited incursion, and it would finish by the morning. War on Gaza: Is Egypt building a militia force to handle Rafah influx? Read More » The day dawned and a big Israeli flag erected on the Palestinian side of Rafah was still fluttering in Egyptian faces. Meanwhile, Israeli security sources kept feeding the Israeli media about Egypt’s under-the-table cooperation – that Cairo would work with Israel to end the tunnels under the border; that Cairo had agreed to a plan to have a US private company administering Rafah. Overnight, Egypt’s officially licensed media swapped sides. Major news anchors like Amr Adib praised what the Qassam Brigades had done. On Sunday, Adib proclaimed that Israel had lost Egypt, as the decision was announced of Egypt’s intention to join South Africa in its case for genocide against Israel in the ICJ. Israel and the US should ask themselves why a key neighbour, who towed the line on Gaza for seven months, has cracked now. In retrospect, there probably was a tacit understanding between Israel and Egypt on the reoccupation of the Rafah crossing. As far back as January, Israel’s Channel 13, citing unnamed officials, reported that Israel had informed Egypt of its intention to send troops into Rafah and the Philadelphi Corridor allegedly to rid the area of Palestinian resistance fighters. Channel 13 added that Cairo had expressed concern about the plan, warning that such action could lead to a mass Palestinian exodus to Sinai. However, the Israeli sources said this would be a “temporary step” and that “Israel will not remain there after the end of the operation, on which a final decision has not yet been taken”. Israel has clearly broken its word to Cairo that the reoccupation would be temporary, and the plan has gone much further than Egypt can tolerate. Thus far, Israeli forces have reoccupied three kilometres of the 16 kilometres of no man’s land called the Philadelphi Corridor. But what happens to Egypt if Israel occupies the whole frontier? A common interest in getting rid of Hamas in Gaza will have turned into a conflict of interest, which clearly harms the Egyptian state. If the whole corridor is reoccupied, Egypt would lose all control over access to Gaza, as well as a lucrative source of revenue. Having lost all its interests in its biggest neighbours Libya and Sudan, Cairo now stands to lose its last remaining card on the regional stage. No Egyptian state, under any leader, could tolerate that. It is after all the state, not President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi himself, that has closed the border to a mass exodus of Palestinians from Gaza into Sinai. In reality, the reoccupation of Rafah has become a bridge too far for Egypt. Not only them. The biggest supporters of normalisation with Israel, the United Arab Emirates, replied angrily to a suggestion by Netanyahu that the UAE could help run Gaza after Hamas. Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan rebuked Netanyahu in a post on X, saying Abu Dhabi denounced the Israeli leader’s comments. “The UAE stresses that the Israeli prime minister does not have any legal capacity to take this step, and the UAE refuses to be drawn into any plan aimed at providing cover for the Israeli presence in the Gaza Strip,” he said. From Balfour to Cameron Rafah has become a poisoned chalice for any Arab leader, irrespective of their hatred for the Muslim Brotherhood or Hamas. And so, barring another lurch of Biden’s doomed foreign policy, this war is set to run right through his election campaign and into next year. Israel’s colonial creators are continuing to form. From Lord Balfour, whose declaration in 1917 paved the way for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, to Lord Cameron, the policy has not changed. From Lord Balfour, whose declaration in 1917 paved the way for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, to Lord Cameron, the policy has not changed Balfour did not give Palestinians a name, nor did he talk about their political rights. He talked about indigenous communities as if they were a minority. In fact, Jews made up just 10 percent of the population of Palestine at the time. Cameron is doing nothing to create a Palestinian state. He gives it lip service only. In the meantime, in backing this war, he is doing his best to help Israel destroy a Palestinian state in Gaza. The Balfour Declaration was as controversial then as it is now. Edwin Montagu was only the third practising Jew to serve in the British Cabinet. In August 1917, he wrote a lengthy and eloquent denunciation of Zionism calling it a “mischievous political creed” and predicted with remarkable accuracy how a Zionist state would behave. “I assume that it means that Mahommedans [Muslims] and Christians are to make way for the Jews and that the Jews should be put in all positions of preference and should be peculiarly associated with Palestine in the same way that England is with the English or France with the French, that Turks and other Mahommedans in Palestine will be regarded as foreigners, just in the same way as Jews will hereafter be treated as foreigners in every country but Palestine. Perhaps also citizenship must be granted only as a result of a religious test.” Zionism, he argued, was deeply antisemitic. Following in Balfour’s footsteps, Cameron is dooming Britain to irrelevance in the Middle East. It is well nigh time for the entire political class to retire and for a new generation to throw this policy into the only place it deserves to reside: into the dustbin of history. Britain’s support for Zionism has caused 75 years of conflict. It is time for this to stop. The excuses for its barbarism are running thin. The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

Craig Murray: Active Participants in Genocide

Craig Murray; May 13, 2024 Incredibly the Israeli genocide in Gaza is now reaching new heights of violence. Casualty figures are not coming in, as the attacks are so bad that bodies cannot be recovered, medics cannot travel and there are almost no medical facilities operational now anyway. We now see that the Western injunctions not to attack Rafah were a smokescreen of lies to mask complicity. The final pocket of Gaza is being ruthlessly ethnically cleansed and its infrastructure will be destroyed like all the rest. It is striking that this is accompanied by an absolutely shameless doubling down of support for Israel by the Western political and media classes. Any thought that their isolation from the vast breadth of public opinion would give them pause, must be abandoned. Their Zionist lobby paymasters have jerked the chain, and rather than rowing back, we are seeing a redoubling of their efforts to suppress dissent and obscure the truth. Some of this shameless distortion is so dissonant with the alleged norms of Western society it is almost impossible to believe it is happening. Here are a few examples. 1) Dr Ghassan Abu Sitta is a highly respected reconstructive surgeon who continued to work heroically and tirelessly in Al Shifa hospital, carrying out operation after operation, mostly on women and children, as the hospital was shelled, strafed and machine gunned around him. He was already a surgeon of great distinction, based in Glasgow where he is now Rector of Glasgow University. When Germany banned him from entering to address the conference on Palestine from which Yanis Varoufakis and others were also barred, it appeared perhaps as a one-off action as part of Germany’s extreme and panicked reaction to pro-Palestinian expression. We have come to understand that Germany has a vicious hatred of Palestinians, remarkably based on the psychological trauma of inherited guilt from the Holocaust. While this is a muddled national psychosis that is plainly immoral and wrongheaded, at least it is possible to have some understanding of how it occurred. But it then turned out that the travel ban slapped on Dr Abu Sitta by Germany has a Schengen-wide effect as he was also banned from France. That appeared again something that was almost a technical accident as regards the rest of Europe. But the Western political establishment has now doubled down again by banning him from the Netherlands, and this time the Dutch government has made it clear that it supports the ban, and is not just caught by a Schengen restriction. So the major governments of the European Union are forbidding a distinguished surgeon from giving first-hand medical evidence of the genocide taking place. I cannot think of anything that more sharply exposes the willingness of the Western political class to abandon the most basic tenets of supposed “Western democracy” in the interests of Israel. 2) The willingness of the United States to use extreme violence against pro-Palestinian students on college campuses is another demonstration of the same abandonment of the pretence of democracy when it comes to Israel. It also illustrates what has come to be a serious generational divide in Western public opinion, with young people very strongly motivated to oppose the genocide (which is not to say that older people are pro-genocide, just that they are more split, particularly in the USA). This is being followed up with yet more crazed pro-Israeli legislation in the United States, seeking to designate anti-genocide and pro-Palestinian expression on campuses as anti-semitic and thus illegal. In many ways this typifies the reaction of the ruling class across the West. Their reaction to suddenly being exposed as the paid servants of an Israel which no longer has popular support and now causes public revulsion, is simply to attempt to ban free expression and make it specifically illegal to disagree with them. 3) The British Labour Party has gone even madder. Keir Starmer’s Genocide Party is an outstanding example of the success of the Israeli lobby in buying up both sides of the aisle and controlling the entire neoliberal uniparty that poses as the repository of democratic “choice” in the West. Starmer had been doing his best to conceal his explicitly expressed “unequivocal support for Israel” lately, and to row back from his straightforward assertion that Israel has the right to cut off food and water from the population of Gaza. There had been a fake shift, from refusing to countenance the word “ceasefire” to supporting a temporary ceasefire or a “sustainable” ceasefire – the latter being code for a ceasefire after Israel had achieved all its ethnic cleansing objectives. But then David Lammy blew this out of the water with an address to US Republican senators in which he made the totally bonkers assertion that Nelson Mandela would have opposed the college protests for Palestine. Lammy is a truly despicable individual, one of the ultimate examples of the corrupt politician whose voice is bought. But this was a move far beyond the pale. 4) Even today, the Western media continues to spout out Israeli propaganda at mains pressure. The Guardian, despite the thousands and thousands of dead women and children we have seen on our mobile phones this past seven months, continues to pretend that the genocidal attack is on “Hamas militants”. The bombing and shelling of civilians in tents is still described as “clashes”. This propaganda really does not wash any more, though it may reinforce the morale of hardened Zionists. Everybody else has seen through it months ago. Yet still they persist. 5) The endgame is becoming very apparent. The United States is completing its floating harbour for Gaza, and Israel has gained control of the Rafah crossing into Egypt, giving the US and Israel total control of entry points into Gaza. Israel has announced that the Rafah crossing is to be handed over to a US mercenary force. The US can then say it is complying with Biden’s pledge not to put US forces’ boots on the ground in Gaza, while actually taking control. The Israeli attack on Rafah has been justified by the USA as a “limited military operation”, thus claiming it does not violate Biden’s purported “red line”, even though Israel has ordered over a million displaced people in Rafah to evacuate again, to nowhere. Conclusion: The only possible conclusion from all of the above is to reinforce my analysis that the Zionist political and media classes in the West, including Biden, Blinken, Trudeau, Macron, Sunak, Starmer, Scholtz, von der Leyen and all, are active and willing participants in a programme of genocide. They had numerous opportunities to turn back. We all saw what is happening months ago. They did not take them. The endgame remains the processing of the remaining Palestinian population out of Gaza through the US-controlled points of the Rafah crossing and the floating harbour, primarily into camps in the Sinai desert. The Western powers are doubling down on their genocide and on their colonial project. I see nothing whatsoever that indicates they can have any other long-term objective in mind than the complete Israeli annexation of Gaza minus its civilian population. What do you see?

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐍𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥 𝐃𝐚𝐲 𝐨𝐟 𝐍𝐨𝐫𝐰𝐚𝐲

— Nasir Khan Today Norway is celebrating its Constitution Day, commonly called in this country, ‘The 17th of May’. My hearty congratulations to the people of this beautiful country on their national day! At present, Norway has become a multicultural, multi-ethnic, and multi-religious country. Despite many social changes, all people living in this beautiful, Nordic country have complete freedom to believe in any religion or reject religions and religious dogmas without any intervention, coercion or discrimination by the state authorities, unlike some countries like Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, etc., where discrimination and victimization of religious minorities on sectarian grounds is a common norm. The people also have complete freedom to choose any political party they want to without any dictate from any state organ. Norway’s democratic traditions and its welfare system are a model of a modern egalitarian state. There is no razzmatazz of military hardware, tanks and missiles or military parades on this occasion. On the other hand, Norwegians’ focus is on the joyous participation of school children and young people in the processions, to the great happiness of the enthusiastic onlookers who throng the streets of Norway’s capital, Oslo. But the celebration of the 17th of May takes place everywhere in this beautiful country. “Hurrah” for Norway!

Biden pledges $1 billion in additional military aid, as new report accuses Israel of genocide in Gaza

Jordan Shilton, WSWS, 15 May 2024 The Biden administration intends to dispatch more than $1 billion of military equipment to Israel so that it can continue the genocide against the Palestinians. The military package will include $700 million for tank ammunition, $500 million in tactical vehicles and $60 million for mortar shells. Its unveiling coincided with UN figures showing that 600,000 people, or more than a quarter of Gaza’s total population, have fled Rafah since Israel’s ground operation began on May 6. Palestinians look at the destruction after an Israeli strike on a school run by UNRWA, the U.N. agency helping Palestinian refugees, in Nuseirat, Gaza Strip, Tuesday, May 14, 2024. [AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana] The UN noted that 150,000 people have fled Gaza’s southernmost city in the past 48 hours. Evacuation orders have also been issued by Israel for around 100,000 residents in northern Gaza. At least 10 Palestinians were killed in Gaza City on Wednesday in an attack on a group of people trying to use a public internet connection. In the city’s Sabra neighbourhood, a United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) hospital was the target of an air strike, killing at least 10 displaced people. Most of those fleeing Rafah have fled many times before in the past seven months. They lack not only access to food, water and medical treatment, but also almost all civil infrastructure to support human life. The UN Development Programme estimates that 270,000 tons of solid waste have accumulated in temporary dumps throughout Gaza because the means to dispose of it have been destroyed by Israel’s onslaught. The UN wrote in its May 15 flash update: Rising temperatures are exacerbating the impact solid waste accumulation is having on people, such as generating insects and attracting wild animals, which is particularly severe at IDP sites. UNDP warns: “If the issue of solid waste, including medical waste, is not adequately addressed and resolved, it will exacerbate the suffering of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip … and severely impact public health, particularly with limited access to healthcare services.” According to OXFAM, the “lethal cocktail” of overcrowding, waste and sewage accumulation, malnutrition and heat is creating ideal conditions for the spread of infectious diseases like cholera. Amid this human misery, the Biden administration’s military package would aim to replenish the weaponry used by Israel since its onslaught began and could take years to complete, according to the Wall Street Journal. The Biden administration has been by far Israel’s largest supplier of high-powered bombs, which have been used to flatten entire neighbourhoods, and other military equipment. As part of a supplemental military spending package adopted late last month, Washington set aside some $26 billion to support Israel’s military. In comments made last week as the long-planned onslaught on Rafah began, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby insisted that every dollar would be spent. The uninterrupted flow of weaponry from the US to Israel underscores Washington’s responsibility for the Gaza genocide. As the official death toll since October 7 rises to over 35,200 Palestinians—with well over 40,000 dead when those unaccounted for under the rubble are taken into account, the vast majority being women and children—Washington’s response is to double down on its support for the far-right Zionist regime and accelerate the shipment of arms. There is only one place suitable for the individuals responsible for such inhuman decisions: the defendants’ bench of a war crimes tribunal. This was underscored in a report released by the University Network for Human Rights Wednesday accusing Israel of genocide in the Gaza Strip. The Network consists of leading law schools at universities in the United States and South Africa, including Yale, Cornell, Boston University and the University of Pretoria. The report declares in its executive summary: [W]e conclude that Israel’s actions in and regarding Gaza since October 7, 2023 violate the Genocide Convention. Specifically, Israel has committed genocidal acts of killing, causing serious harm to, and inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction of Palestinians in Gaza, a protected group that forms a substantial part of the Palestinian people. The report notes that the total number of Palestinians killed or wounded between October 7 and May 1—34,568 and 77,765, respectively—accounts for more than 5 percent of Gaza’s population. Two percent of children in Gaza have either been killed or injured. Israel killed more children during the first four months of its bloody onslaught than all of the child deaths in all of the world’s conflicts over the past four years. The report continues: Israel’s genocidal acts in Gaza have been motivated by the requisite genocidal intent, as evidenced in this report by the statements of Israeli leaders, the character of the State and its military forces’ conduct against and relating to Palestinians in Gaza, and the direct nexus between them. As this report details,13 officials at all levels of Israeli government, up to and including the Prime Minister, have made remarks that not only express blatant and unequivocal dehumanization and cruelty against Palestinians in Gaza and elsewhere, but also explicitly reflect intentions to destroy and exterminate Palestinians as such. The patterns of conduct of Israeli military forces in Gaza further reinforce the finding of Israel’s genocidal intent. The report explains that its findings will strengthen the cases at the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of genocide and in US federal court against the Biden administration. The authors write: Israel’s violations of the international legal prohibition of genocide amount to grave breaches of peremptory norms of international law that must cease immediately. These violations also give rise to obligations by all other States: to refrain from recognizing Israel’s breaches as legal or taking any actions that may constitute complicity in these breaches; and to take positive steps to suppress, prevent, and punish the commission by Israel of further genocidal acts against the Palestinian people in Gaza. These appeals have fallen and will continue to fall on deaf ears. US imperialism and its allies in Canada and Europe are up to their necks in the blood of Gaza’s Palestinians. The only steps these governments take to suppress, prevent and punish are against the opponents of the genocide, who face the full force of the repressive state apparatus as police tear down protest camps and carry out mass arrests, amid a vicious smear campaign slandering them as “antisemites.” Over 3,000 anti-genocide protesters have been detained in the US over recent weeks, while in Germany opponents of the Israeli regime’s crimes have been barred from entering the country and speaking at public events. The Palestine Congress in Berlin, where eye-witness accounts of the devastation in Gaza were to be heard, and encampments outside the Bundestag and at the Free University and Humboldt University in Berlin, were violently dispersed in state-orchestrated police raids. The University Network for Human Rights’ report was released on May 15, which Palestinians commemorate each year as Nakba Day. The expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians from their homes in a deliberate campaign of ethnic cleansing that led to the founding of Israel on May 14, 1948, with the backing of the imperialist powers, was one of the 20th century’s great crimes. It is a measure of the barbarism of Israel and its imperialist backers in Gaza that the Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, could state in an interview with Al Jazeera that the Western powers’ enabling of the Gaza genocide is “even worse” than the role they played in 1948. Pappe said: At the time in 1948, there was no television. People did not have smartphones, and it was relatively easy to cover up the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing, and to claim that it didn’t exist. It is impossible to say now that people cannot know what is going on when it appears on our screens. So I think the level of denial today is far more sinister, far more outraging… Remarking that massacres were used by the Zionists in 1948 to force Palestinians out of areas claimed for an Israeli state, he added, “What we see now are massacres which are part of the genocidal impulse, namely to kill people in order to downsize the number of people living in Gaza.”

Whistleblowers Further Expose Israel’s Torture of Detainees

Consortium News, May 10, 2024 The details provided to CNN are consistent with those that a doctor at the field hospital of the Sde Teiman prison camp included in a recent letter to top Israeli officials. (Josh Hallett, Flickr, CC BY 2.0) By Jake JohnsonCommon Dreams Three Israeli whistleblowers who worked at the notorious Sde Teiman prison camp in the Negev desert offered horrifying accounts of the treatment of Palestinians held there, telling CNN that the facility’s doctors have amputated limbs due to handcuffing injuries, allowed detainees’ wounds to rot, and carried out vicious beatings. A medic who worked at Sde Teiman’s field hospital said that Palestinian detainees there are stripped “of anything that resembles human beings” and that the harassment and torture are done not to “gather intelligence” but “out of revenge” for the Oct. 7 attacks. Israel has detained thousands of Gaza residents since October, with many of them held under a recently amended law that empowers Israeli authorities to imprison people indefinitely without charge or due process. Human rights organizations have documented Israeli forces’ brutal and degrading treatment of Palestinian detainees, including women and children. At the field hospital, CNN reported, “wounded detainees are strapped to their beds, wearing diapers and fed through straws.” One Israeli whistleblower took a photograph of a room at the facility, which the person said was filled with a “putrid stench” and the sound of “men’s murmurs” as they were “forbidden from speaking to each other.” “We were told they were not allowed to move,” the whistleblower said. “They should sit upright. They’re not allowed to talk. Not allowed to peek under their blindfold.” The whistleblower accounts, according to CNN, “paint a picture of a facility where doctors sometimes amputated prisoners’ limbs due to injuries sustained from constant handcuffing; of medical procedures sometimes performed by underqualified medics earning it a reputation for being ‘a paradise for interns’; and where the air is filled with the smell of neglected wounds left to rot.” The testimony provided to CNN is consistent with details that a doctor at the camp’s field hospital included in a recent letter to top Israeli officials. The doctor described unlawful and inhumane conditions; in a single week, the person said, “two prisoners had their legs amputated due to handcuff injuries, which unfortunately is a routine event.” A report published last month by Al Mezan, a Palestinian human rights organization, also documented “harrowing accounts of torture and inhumane treatment” of people detained by the Israeli military. “A 19-year-old detainee told an Al Mezan lawyer that he was tortured from the moment he was arrested,” the group said. “He described how three of his fingernails were removed with pliers during interrogation. He also stated that investigators unleashed a dog on him and subjected him to shabeh — a form of torture which involves detainees being handcuffed and bound in stress positions for long periods — three times over three days of interrogation. He was then placed in a cell for 70 days, where he experienced starvation and extreme fatigue.” Mohammed Al-Ran, a Palestinian doctor who was arrested by Israeli forces in December, told CNN that he was “stripped down to his underwear, blindfolded and his wrists tied, then dumped in the back of a truck where … the near-naked detainees were piled on top of one another as they were shuttled to a detention camp in the middle of the desert.” Al-Ran was held by Israeli forces for 44 days. Just before his release, he told CNN, “a fellow prisoner had called out to him, his voice barely rising above a whisper.” According to CNN: “He asked the doctor to find his wife and kids in Gaza. ‘He asked me to tell them that it is better for them to be martyrs,’ said al-Ran. ‘It is better for them to die than to be captured and held here.’” Omar Shakir, Israel and Palestine director of Human Rights Watch, said in response to the new reporting that “what we know about Gaza is only tip of the atrocity iceberg.” Jake Johnson is a staff writer for Common Dreams. This article is from Common Dreams. Share this: FacebookTwitterPinterestLinkedInMore

The Main Obstacle to Peace in Gaza? The United States

Now that the Biden administration has established that it will not tolerate any criticism of Israel, the siege of Gaza is likely to continue. Edward Hunt, Common Dreams, May 08, 2024 Violent crackdowns on student protesters across the United States have brought to light an uncomfortable truth that goes unacknowledged by universities, the White House, and the mass media: the United States is an obstacle to peace in Gaza. As Israel has directed an unrelenting military assault against Gaza, the United States has enabled it every step of the way. Among its most significant moves, the United States has provided Israel with offensive weapons, opposed a permanent ceasefire, and cracked down on student protesters. “What we are doing today is very bad policy,” Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) said on April 23. “We are aiding and abetting the destruction of the Palestinian people.” Since October 2023, Israel has been directing a military siege of Gaza. Israel began its operations in response to a terrorist attack on October 7, when Hamas militants crossed into Israel, killed 1,200 people, and took 250 people hostage. Hamas, the militant group that controls Gaza, is still holding an estimated 100 people hostage. Not only has the Biden administration regularly approved weapons transfers to Israel, but it has also worked with Congress to secure billions of dollars of additional military assistance. Although Israeli officials have insisted that their goal is to destroy Hamas, their military campaign has devastated Gaza. The Israeli siege has killed more than 34,000 people and displaced most of Gaza’s 2 million people. There is now “full-blown famine” in northern Gaza, according to the head of the World Food Program. The World Court is investigating whether Israel has committed genocide. Over the course of Israel’s military offensive, the United States has provided Israel with diplomatic and military support. Although President Joe Biden has criticized Israel’s military campaign as “over the top” and Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has identified Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a “major obstacle to peace,” both the White House and Congress have worked together to help Israel continue its siege. “This is not an Israeli war,” Senator Sanders said. “This is an Israeli-American war. Most of the bombs and most of the military equipment the Israeli government is using in Gaza is provided by the United States and subsidized by American taxpayers.” Arming Israel The primary way in which the United States has intervened in Gaza is by arming Israel, just as Senator Sanders noted. Not only has the Biden administration regularly approved weapons transfers to Israel, but it has also worked with Congress to secure billions of dollars of additional military assistance. This past April, a large majority of elected officials in both the Democratic and Republican Parties voted to send more weapons to Israel. On April 20, the House of Representatives approved a bill to provide more arms to Israel by a vote of 366 to 58. On April 23, the Senate granted its approval as part of a broader package with a vote of 79 to 18. “It’s a good day for world peace, for real,” President Biden said, shortly after signing the legislation into law. Regardless of the president’s efforts to frame the legislation as a victory for world peace, several U.S. officials expressed dismay. Nearly 20 representatives issued a joint statement in which they warned that the approval of additional military assistance to Israel made the United States complicit in the destruction of Gaza. “Are we going to participate in that carnage or not?” Representative Joaquin Castro (D-TX) asked. “I choose not to.” When Senator Sanders spoke against the additional military assistance, he argued that the United States was violating the Foreign Assistance Act, which forbids the United States from providing military assistance to countries that are blocking the delivery of U.S. humanitarian assistance, just as Israel has been doing in Gaza. “It’s illegal to continue current military aid to Israel,” Sanders said. Regardless, only a minority of officials in Washington cared about the legality of sending additional arms to Israel. Their priority has been to ensure that Israel can continue its siege, just as several U.S. officials have acknowledged. “If you don’t help Israel replenish their conventional weapons, there will be a day when Israel, if they have to, will play the nuclear card,” Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) warned. Opposing a Permanent Ceasefire Another way in which the United States has empowered Israel is by preventing a permanent ceasefire. At the United Nations, the United States has repeatedly thwarted diplomatic efforts to bring Israel’s military offensive to an end. When the UN Security Council crafted a resolution for an immediate ceasefire in December 2023, the United States vetoed the resolution. After the Security Council moved forward with another attempt in February 2024, the United States vetoed that resolution as well. In March 2024, the United States allowed the Security Council to pass a ceasefire resolution, as it abstained from voting, but U.S. officials made no effort to follow up on the resolution or enforce it. Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. Ambassador to the UN, falsely claimed that the resolution was “nonbinding,” meaning that countries were not required to follow it. Growing international pressure has had some effect, however. The same month that the Security Council passed its ceasefire resolution, the Biden administration began claiming that it wanted to see a ceasefire in Gaza. Administration officials took the position that a ceasefire would be beneficial to Gaza and Israel by halting the fighting and creating the conditions for the release of hostages. The actions of the United States are ensuring that Israel’s siege of Gaza will continue. As administration officials changed their public diplomacy, however, they framed their demands in ways that made it difficult to achieve a ceasefire. For starters, the White House refused to call for a permanent ceasefire. Instead, administration officials said that they favored a temporary ceasefire that would enable Israel to continue its military operations at a later date. At the same time, the White House portrayed Hamas as the main obstacle to a ceasefire, even after Hamas indicated that it would accept a permanent ceasefire and Israel insisted that it would continue with its military offensive, “with or without a deal,” as Prime Minister Netanyahu put it. Indeed, the main priority of the Biden administration has been to enable Israel to continue its siege of Gaza, just as Secretary of State Antony Blinken acknowledged earlier this year. “Israel has made good progress in doing to Hamas what needs to be done so that it can’t do October 7 again,” Blinken said. “That’s what Israel should be focused on. That’s what we are focused on.” Cracking Down on Protesters More recently, forces within the United States have made another major move in opposition to peace. Across the United States, police have been cracking down on student protesters who have been calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and divestment from Israel. Elected officials in Washington have been behind the crackdowns. Not only have they worked to destroy the careers of university leaders by calling on them to testify before Congress, but they have pressured university leaders to call in police forces to arrest students and eliminate their encampments. “Administrators must take charge of their institutions,” Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) demanded on April 30. “Clear the encampments.” So far, police forces have dismantled several encampments and arrested or detained more than 2,500 people. As legislators have pushed for the crackdowns, many of them have justified their demands by portraying student protesters as anti-Semitic. Essentially, they have weaponized anti-Semitism, meaning that they have accused the protesters of being racists for the purposes of silencing them, destroying their reputations, and undermining the broader antiwar movement. Amid the crackdowns, legislators have increased the pressure on universities. On April 30, House Republicans announced that they are starting to investigate whether universities that have experienced student protests should continue to receive federal funding. “The Congress has two really important responsibilities that will be fulfilled in this exercise,” Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) explained. “One is oversight,” and the other is “the use of the power of the purse.” A day after House Republicans threatened to defund universities, the House of Representatives passed a bill to broaden the definition of anti-Semitism so that it would include criticism of Israel. Although its fate is uncertain in the Senate, the bill puts tremendous pressure on universities to silence members of their communities who are continuing to protest Israel’s siege of Gaza. Still, a small but not insignificant number of legislators have come to the defense of student protesters. The country’s most progressive lawmakers have consistently supported the protesters, even visiting their encampments and providing messages of support. After police violently cleared an encampment at Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts, Representative Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) issued a statement in which she praised the students for “raising their voices and putting their bodies on the line to press for action to save lives in Gaza.” Following similar crackdowns at other colleges, Senator Sanders delivered a speech from the Senate floor in which he defended the students. Putting their actions into context, the senator linked the protesters’ actions to major movements for social justice in U.S. history, including the civil rights movement and the movements against the U.S. wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. “It is outrageous and it is disgraceful to use that charge of anti-Semitism to distract us from the immoral and illegal war policies that Netanyahu’s extremist and racist government is pursuing,” Senator Sanders said. Regardless, there is little interest in Washington in taking the protesters seriously, even among officials in the Biden administration who have acknowledged that “the protests in and of themselves are not anti-Semitic.” Facing growing pressure from both Democrats and Republicans to take action, the White House has denounced the protesters. On May 2, President Biden gave a speech in which he claimed that the student protesters are spreading chaos, violence, and anti-Semitism. Just as the Republicans have been doing, he weaponized anti-Semitism in an effort to delegitimize the antiwar movement. “Order must prevail,” the president insisted. Suppressing the Truth Now that the Biden administration has established that it will not tolerate any criticism of Israel, the siege of Gaza is likely to continue. Even if some kind of deal is forged to establish a temporary ceasefire between Hamas and Israel, there is no guarantee that Israel won’t renew its military operations at a later date, just as it did after a previous pause in fighting in November 2023. What is perhaps most remarkable, however, is how the United States has suppressed one of the key truths about the destruction of Gaza. Across elite institutions of American society, people in leadership positions remain largely silent about what student protesters have been trying to bring to the attention of the public: the United States is an obstacle to peace in Gaza. “This is not just an Israeli war,” Senator Sanders insisted, in one of the few exceptions to the silence in Washington. “This is an American war as well.” Indeed, the actions of the United States are ensuring that Israel’s siege of Gaza will continue. Not until the United States changes its approach will it become possible to bring an end to the destruction. Share this: Facebook Twitter Pinterest LinkedInM

Biden Gave Netanyahu the Green Light To Capture Rafah Crossing

Axios reports that Biden and Netanyahu discussed the plan on Monday by Dave DeCamp, Antiwar. com, May 7, 2024 President Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu discussed Israel’s plans to capture the Rafah border crossing in southern Gaza before the Israeli military launched the operation, Axios reported on Tuesday. The report said that the operation didn’t cross Biden’s “red line,” although it’s unclear if the US has actually set red lines for Israel. US officials have said they’re opposed to a “major operation” in Rafah since it would incur huge civilian casualties. But the capturing of the border crossing will have a devastating impact on civilians since it cut off vital aid deliveries, and it’s unclear when or if they will resume. A senior Israeli official told Axios that during the call with Netanyahu, Biden didn’t “didn’t pull the hand break on the capture of the Rafah crossing during the call.” Two US officials said Biden didn’t view the current Israeli operations as a “breaking point” in relations. On Tuesday, White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said that the US was not opposed to the operation. “We’ve been very consistent about our concerns of a major ground operation in Gaza that would put at great risk the refugees that are still there, and nothing’s changed about that,” Kirby said. “The Israelis have told us … that that’s not what this is.” He said that Israel assured the US that the operation was “of limited scope, scale, and duration, and aimed at cutting off Hamas’ ability to ship arms across the Rafah border.” Israeli tanks and soldiers took the border crossing as Israeli strikes pounded the city of Rafah, killing at least 23 Palestinians, including five women and six children. Share this: FacebookTwitterPinterestLinkedInMore

US reiterates “ironclad” support to Israel as Netanyahu launches assault on Rafah

Andre Damon, WSWS, / May 2024 @Andre__Damon Israel launched its long-planned genocidal assault on Rafah on Monday, issuing orders for the population of the city to evacuate and launching an intense bombardment. More than 1.2 million refugees, over 600,000 of whom are children, are currently sheltering in Rafah, under squalid conditions, without adequate food, water, hygiene or medicine. The majority of the children, in the words of the Euro-Med monitor, are “either injured, ill, and/or malnourished.” Smoke rises following an Israeli airstrike on buildings near the separating wall between Egypt and Rafah, southern Gaza Strip, Monday, May 6, 2024. (AP Photo/Ramez Habboub) Israel bombed residential homes throughout Gaza Monday, leaving at least 26 people dead—mostly women and children—and dozens more wounded and buried under the rubble. Israeli tanks have approached within 200 meters of the Rafah crossing with Egypt, the Associated Press reported. “The War Cabinet unanimously decided this evening that Israel will continue its operation in Rafah,” the Netanyahu government said in a statement Monday. The assault on Rafah comes despite the acceptance by Hamas Monday of a proposal for a temporary cessation of hostilities in exchange for the release of hostages. But after spending weeks attempting to blame the Palestinians for the ongoing war, Israeli officials flatly rejected the proposal. National Security Minister Ben-Gvir replied in a post on X, “Hamas’ exercises and games have only one answer: an immediate order to occupy Rafah!” In response to the murderous Israeli onslaught, multiple US officials reiterated their unlimited support for Israel. “We have always made clear that we are committed to Israel’s defense,” said State Department spokesman Vedant Patel Monday. “That commitment to Israel’s security remains ironclad.” “Our support for Israel’s security remains ironclad,” said State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller. “The President pushed very hard … so that we can continue to help Israel with its security needs…” “Israel has a right and a responsibility to defend itself,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said. “And we’re going to continue to provide for their security.” Absurdly, Kirby denied that an assault on Rafah had begun, declaring, “There hasn’t been an assault or an attack” on the city. In a cynical exercise in deceptive wordplay, Kirby said, “The president doesn’t want to see operations in Rafah that put at greater risk the more than a million people that are seeking refuge there.” This statement seeks to suggest that the White House opposes Israel’s assault on the city, despite the announcement by the White House last month, “The two sides agreed on the shared objective to see Hamas defeated in Rafah.” The Wall Street Journal, speaking for a faction of the US political establishment that openly proclaims its homicidal aims instead of trying to cover them up it with transparent lies, declared, “The battle for Rafah has begun in Gaza, and it’s an essential part of Israel’s war of self-defense against Hamas.” In a blunt assessment of the situation on the ground, the Journal wrote, “Early Monday morning Israel ordered the evacuation of eastern Rafah, directing civilians to safety. In the afternoon Israeli tanks advanced. The plan is to evacuate and fight in the city piece by piece, swiftly moving civilians north and west.” In reality, the evacuation of Rafah is being conducted just as the previous evacuations were, with Israel demanding that civilians move to areas under active bombardment and targeting people as they are fleeing. The evacuation orders included no promise of safe passage or that those displaced will be safe once they arrive. “Through written leaflets, text messages, and recorded phone calls, the Israeli army has ordered Rafah’s civilian population to move out of the city’s eastern neighborhoods, particularly the area of Al-Shouka as well as Al-Salam, Al-Geneina, and Al-Byouk, toward the area of Al-Mawasi,” wrote the Euro-Med monitor in a statement. “However, Israel provided no explanation as to how the civilian population would be safely transported to Al-Mawasi, which is west of the nearby city of Khan Yunis, or how they would be organized upon their arrival.” Euro-med noted, “More than 200,000 people may be targeted by the displacement orders, which also affect the Abu Youssef Al-Najjar Hospital, Rafah’s main hospital, as well as the Rafah and Kerem Shalom crossings. It should be noted that humanitarian aid access through these crossings has been stopped since yesterday afternoon.” To date, Israel has ordered the evacuation of—i.e., ethnically cleansed—more than two-thirds of Gaza. The Euro-Med monitor warned, “A larger wave of displacement, increased overcrowding, and the elimination of opportunities to obtain basic food and water will result from the impending Israeli ground attack on Rafah, which may be the deadliest point of escalation against Palestinian civilians. The Strip’s health system, which is already nearly destroyed, would likely collapse completely.” Palestinian journalist Bisan Owda, who is currently living in a refugee camp in Rafah, said in an Instagram posting, “If Rafah is invaded, that means the largest and the only crossing, Rafah Crossing, will be closed. And that means no humanitarian aid trucks are entering, those who are in need for treatment outside Gaza cannot travel, those who are in need to evacuate their families to find any safe places outside Gaza cannot travel, the international humanitarian workers, doctors, activists cannot get inside Gaza.” In a statement on X, Socialist Equality Party presidential candidate Joe Kishore wrote, The development of a movement in the working class against the war of the capitalist class at home has to be connected to a fight against the capitalist war abroad. It is, in reality, one war. It is by mobilizing the working class on a socialist program, independent of the parties of the ruling class, that the genocide in #Gaza can be stopped as part of a fight against the imperialist-capitalist system as a whole. http://socialism2024.org #socialism2024 Since the start of the genocide nearly seven months ago, 34,622 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza according to health officials, with thousands more buried under the rubble of buildings, meaning that the real death toll is greater than 40,000. At least 254 aid workers, 492 health workers and 141 journalists have been killed by Israeli bombs or bullets.

𝕆𝕟 𝕂𝕒𝕣𝕝 𝕄𝕒𝕣𝕩'𝕤 𝔹𝕚𝕣𝕥𝕙𝕕𝕒𝕪 𝔸𝕟𝕟𝕚𝕧𝕖𝕣𝕤𝕒𝕣𝕪

--Nasir Khan - “All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice.” ― Karl Marx Karl Marx was born on May 5, 1818, in the Prussian province of the Rhine, and died in London on March 14, 1883, at the age of 65. He was the most influential socialist philosopher and revolutionary thinker, whose ideas have deeply influenced the course of human history and human thought. His writings cover philosophy, history, political economy, anthropology, social criticism, history, theory of revolutionary practice, and he himself participated in revolutionary activities. When he was a student at the university, he was deeply involved in the Young Hegelian movement. The members of this group in their articles and pamphlets criticized Christian culture. Feuerbach’s materialism was opposed to Hegel's idealism. He reduced Hegel's 'Absolute Spirit' to human 'species being'. Because of Marx's critical articles in the Rheinische Zeitung, the government closed this paper. He went to Paris in 1843 where he made contacts with French socialist groups and émigré German workers. Here he met Frederick Engels, and the two became friends for the rest of their lives. But his stay there was short. He was expelled from Paris in 1844. After his expulsion from Paris, Marx, along with Engels, moved to Brussels, where they lived for three years. After an intensive study of history, he formulated the theory of history commonly known as historical materialism. In his theory of history, Marx accepted Hegel’s idea that the world develops according to dialectical process. But the two had different ideas about what the dialectic process entails. For Hegel, historical developments take place through the mystical entity called Absolute Spirit. Marx rejected the notion of Absolute Spirit, and said what moved society was not the Absolute Spirit, but man’s relation to matter, of which the most important part was played by the mode of production. In this way, Marx’s materialism becomes closely related to economics. Human labour shaped society, and material conditions determined the superstructures. The part played by labour, not some mystical Absolute Spirit, formed the basis of social life. Marx’s dialectal view of social change is shorn of Hegel’s idealist dialectics. The two stand on different levels, and their philosophies of history differ. For Marx, man working on nature remakes the world and in doing so he also remakes himself by increasing his powers. Marx wrote in the German Ideology, ‘Men have history because they must produce their life.’ Marx went to Paris in 1848 where the revolution first took place and then to Germany. But the failure of the revolutions forced him to seek refuge in London in 1849, where he spent the rest of his life. He and his family had to face many economic hardships in London. His friend Engels helped him economically, and he also wrote articles as a foreign correspondent for the New York Daily Tribune. However, he and his family lived in London, plagued by unending economic woes. However, the revolutionary thinker devoted much time to the First International and its annual Congresses. The rest of the time, he spent in the British Museum library, collecting material and taking notes and analysing the material for studies of political economy. In 1867, he published the first volume of Capital, in which he discussed the capitalist mode of production. He explained his views on the labour theory of value, conception of surplus value, accumulation of capital and the ‘so-called primitive accumulation’ in the final part of the book. He had completed the volumes II and II in the 1860s, which Engels published after the death of Marx in 1883. The profound analysis of capital, Marx undertook in the nineteenth century, is still relevant to our understanding of the global capitalism and the forces that control it. He had shown the tendency of capital under the general law of capitalist accumulation. A few own more wealth, but others have little to live on. A recent Oxfam report says that eight men own the same wealth as the 3.6 billion people who constitute the poorest half of humanity. In the global economy, rich industrialists and producers take advantage of the global workforce that mostly lives in the global South. The abundant cheap labour from the poor countries is used to produce goods that are sold at high prices in the industrialized western countries. The problem of ending the exploitation of the working-class people was a core issue for Marx, and his theory to end this exploitation can only take place when a more equitable form of society is created that stands opposed to the accumulation of capital by a few and the poverty or meagre existence of the majority. That objective of a just and humane society is not possible under capitalism.

'All Because Columbia Refuses to Divest': Police Storm Campus, Violently Arrest Dozens

"The U.S. government and institutions like Columbia are showing that they would rather brutalize students than divest from apartheid and genocide." Jake Johnson, Common Dreams, May 1, 2024 Hundreds of New York City police officers descended on Columbia University Tuesday night to arrest dozens of pro-Palestinian student protesters and dismantle a Gaza solidarity encampment that inspired campus protests across the United States, with demonstrators calling on their schools to divest from companies profiting off Israel's devastating war. Police, some wearing riot gear, entered Columbia's campus at the request of the university's president, Minouche Shafik, who authorized the NYPD to "clear all individuals from Hamilton Hall and all campus encampments." Video footage shows officers entering a campus building that students occupied hours earlier, renaming it "Hind's Hall" after a 6-year-old girl who was killed by Israeli forces earlier this year. The Columbia Daily Spectator, the university's student newspaper, reported that "as they entered the building, officers threw down the metal and wooden tables barricading the doors and shattered the glass on the leftmost doors of Hamilton to enter with shields in hand." "Several officers drew their guns, according to footage posted by NYPD Deputy Commissioner of Operations Kaz Daughtry," the newspaper added. "At around 9:37 pm, officers led dozens of protesters out the entrance of Hamilton. The protesters' hands were zip-tied behind their backs. The arrested individuals chanted, 'Free, free Palestine' as they were led away from the building." Other footage shows NYPD officers forcing their way through students who locked arms in front of the occupied campus building. One cop is seen kneeing a student on the ground. Students reported that police used tear gas, which is banned in war, on demonstrators. "Tonight, my university called in a militarized police force—armed in riot gear, with guns drawn, deploying weapons banned under international law—to attack teenagers," Lea Salim, a student member of Jewish Voice for Peace-Columbia/Barnard, said in a statement. "All because Columbia refuses to divest from the Israeli military and its genocidal campaign on the people of Gaza." As police set up barricades around the perimeter of the campus, onlookers gathered and chanted, "Let the students go!" in solidarity with the arrested demonstrators. Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) said he was "outraged" by the police presence at both Columbia and the City College of New York, writing on social media that the "militarization of college campuses, extensive police presence, and arrest of hundreds of students are in direct opposition to the role of education as a cornerstone of our democracy." "I call upon the Columbia administration to stop this dangerous escalation before it leads to further harm," Bowman added, "and allow the faculty back onto campus so that all parties can collectively come to a solution that centers humanity over hate." In a letter to the New York City Police Department on Tuesday, Shafik—who is facing mounting calls to resign—requested that officers maintain a presence on Columbia's campus "through at least May 17, 2024 to maintain order and ensure encampments are not reestablished." The police crackdown on Columbia students is part of a broader wave of repression against campus protests that have emerged across the country in recent weeks as Israel's assault on and forced starvation of Gaza civilians continues with no end in sight. Police actions, approved by the leaders of some universities and cheered on by right-wing government officials, have drawn international rebukes. In a statement Tuesday, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk said he is "concerned that some of law enforcement actions across a series of universities appear disproportionate in their impacts." "U.S. universities have a strong, historic tradition of student activism, strident debate and freedom of expression and peaceful assembly, "Türk said. "It must be clear that legitimate exercises of the freedom of expression cannot be conflated with incitement to violence and hatred." Observers were quick to note the parallels between the police crackdown on civil rights and anti-war protests at Columbia in 1968 and Tuesday's raid. Stefanie Fox, executive director of Jewish Voice for Peace, said in response to the police invasion of Columbia Tuesday that "the U.S. has funded and supported the Israeli government's oppression of Palestinians for decades, with private institutions across the country profiting from the same." Organizers have specifically demanded that Columbia divest its nearly $14 billion endowment from Caterpillar, Hyundai Heavy Industries, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Elbit Systems, Mekorot, Hapoalim, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin. "These students are saying: enough," said Fox. "As Prime Minister Netanyahu prepares to launch a ground invasion on Rafah—now home to one million displaced Palestinians—the U.S. government and institutions like Columbia are showing that they would rather brutalize students than divest from apartheid and genocide."