War on Gaza: The world has abandoned us. What can we do?

Haidar Eid, Middle East Eye, published date: 28 June 2024 Palestinians must start discussing radical solutions to end Israeli occupation, apartheid and settler-colonialism Relatives of Eyad Hegazi, a 10-year-old Palestinian child who died of malnutrition as a result of Israel’s siege on Gaza, mourn outside the Aqsa Martyrs hospita in Gaza on 14 June, 2024 (AFP) messenger sharing button The bitter reality for Palestinians in Gaza is that we are alone, beleaguered, under siege, and abandoned even by those who are supposed to be our brethren. Nearly nine months of barbaric massacres have claimed the lives of more than 37,000 Palestinians, many of whom are women and children. The victims have included doctors and nurses on duty in hospitals, university students, and people doing household chores. Entire families have been slaughtered in broad daylight, amid Israel’s systematic destruction of thousands of homes in Gaza. Another 10,000 people are missing, believed to be dead and buried under the rubble. And yet, the US still blames Palestinians, while criticising international courts for trying to hold Israel to account for its ongoing genocide. Palestinians have been left alone to defend themselves against the onslaught of a state backed by the world’s biggest army. The US has supplied Israel with billions of dollars in weaponry, including bombs and fighter jets, to prolong its war. Stay informed with MEE’s newsletters Sign up to get the latest alerts, insights and analysis, starting with Turkey Unpacked Meanwhile, the humanitarian tragedy in Gaza has reached unimaginable levels. The few remaining hospitals are struggling to cope with the influx of injured civilians. Neighbouring Arab regimes have done nothing more than issue timid statements of condemnation, while mediating between oppressor and oppressed. Indeed, Arab regimes have let Palestinians down since 1948, through a combination of cowardice and hypocrisy. They have failed to bring an end to Israel’s 17-year siege on Gaza, or even to offer meaningful solidarity with the Palestinian people, who are at the receiving end of Israel’s brutal military offensive. Aiding the oppressor From Gaza, we wonder how, in the absence of democracy, the timid expressions of support in the streets and capitals of Arab nations can be turned into concrete action. We wonder whether the Arab peoples living under the rule of authoritarian regimes can change those regimes in nonviolent ways. We have exhausted ourselves trying to figure out the possible ways of achieving democratic political change. As the Gaza genocide drags on, we have not seen any practical translation by Arab states of the solidarity shown by some of their peoples with Palestine. Follow Middle East Eye’s live coverage of the Israel-Palestine war South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu once said: “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” Once again, the international community, United Nations, European Union and Arab leaders have remained largely silent about Israel’s ongoing atrocities. This puts them on Israel’s side. From Rafah, to Nuseirat, to Jabalia … we have reached a pivotal moment in Palestinian history. Gaza yearns for a leadership that rises to the occasion Thousands of corpses of women and children have failed to convince them of the need to act. Palestinians have realised that they have only one tenable option: popular power, which is the only force capable of tackling the huge asymmetry of power in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. For the past 17 years, the two choices for Palestinians in Gaza have been to die slowly amid Israel’s suffocating blockade, or to fight for dignity – their own and that of future generations. Many have chosen to fight, departing from years of self-deception that portrayed subjugation to the occupier as a fait accompli. In this context, proposed ceasefire initiatives do not take into account Israel’s objectives in the Gaza war: eliminating the largest number of Palestinians possible by targeting civilian homes and infrastructure, and removing any potential source of resistance to Israeli occupation in the open-air extermination camp we know as Gaza. Root causes Instead, the initiatives that have been put forward equate Palestinian resistance with the Israeli regime of systematic oppression, apartheid and settler-colonialism. It seems as though the world expects Palestinians to simply accept their slow death without any form of rebellion. But Palestinians, in Gaza and elsewhere, will not oblige. Any agreement that does not lead to an immediate ceasefire, the lifting of Israel’s devastating blockade, and the permanent reopening of all border crossings in a manner that allows the entry of fuel, medicine and other basic goods, will not be acceptable to the people of Gaza. The deal must also provide for the withdrawal of Israeli forces without delay. War on Gaza: Why Arab states are failing the Palestinian people Read More » The current war cannot be seen in isolation from the root causes of the situation in Gaza: Israel’s settler-colonial enterprise, occupation, apartheid and ethnic cleansing. This conflict must be situated within our demand for the Palestinian right of return to the lands from which hundreds of thousands were driven out in 1948. Two-thirds of the people of Gaza are refugees who have this right under international law. From Rafah, to Nuseirat, to Jabalia and the rest of Gaza, we have reached a pivotal moment in Palestinian history. Gaza yearns for a leadership that rises to the occasion, recognising the idea of Palestine from the river to the sea. Any talk of improving our conditions of oppression – and even this is seen as too much for us – in light of the great sacrifices that have been made, is a betrayal of Gaza’s martyrs. We need to start discussing radical solutions to move beyond the status quo, and adopt a clear slogan: End the occupation, end apartheid, and end settler-colonialism. If this happens, all the lives lost in Gaza would not have been lost in vain.

The Biden-Trump debate and the crisis of the American political system

Tom Mackaman, WSWS. org, 29 June 2024 Even by the standards of American “political culture,” Thursday night’s presidential debate between US President Joseph Biden and former President Donald Trump was a spectacle of degradation, reaction and stupidity. It is not simply an issue of Biden’s dementia, which can no longer be denied. Nor of Trump’s thuggish persona, which has never been in doubt. Exposed before the entire world on the evening of June 27, 2024 was the far-advanced decline of the entire ruling class. Joe Biden and Donald Trump. [AP Photo/Gerald Herbert] American capitalism placed on stage its two leading spokesmen—the senile warmonger Biden, whose overriding policy is limitless war against Russia, and the fascist blowhard Trump, who used the debate to defend his January 6, 2021 attempted coup d’etat. This is the “choice” American politics has on offer in 2024. The media has focused in almost choreographic unison on Biden’s catastrophic debate performance, with several major outlets, led by the New York Times, calling for him to step aside. Coverage has been peppered with words like “unintelligible,” “incomprehensible,” “stumbling” and “incoherent.” Biden struggled to speak in whole sentences, think in whole thoughts, hold the thread of any subject or offer a single new idea—a fitting epithet for American liberalism as a whole. Biden, indeed, is the perfect embodiment of an American political system that is rotting on its feet. The president, it is true, is not able to speak clearly, and may well be non compos mentis. But just what would the Times have him say? What policies should he be elaborating? What accomplishments can he point to? Where does he propose to lead the country as president and self-proclaimed “leader of the free world?” The answer to each question is the same—war. Biden’s few moments of semi-clarity revealed him to be the creature of the military-intelligence apparatus that he has always been. Like the bed-ridden patient who perks up when nurses bring the medication, Biden was finally able to say something intelligible when prompted by the CNN debate hosts to restate his unstinting support for Israel’s mass murder of the Palestinians of Gaza. “We are providing Israel with all the weapons they need and when they need them,” Biden declared. With this policy, some 40,000 civilians have been slaughtered in nine months of merciless bombardment. But Biden’s “clarity” on this subject will hardly win him support among the masses of workers and youth who hate the genocide. Biden was similarly lucid in his demand for an escalation of the NATO war against Russia in Ukraine, which threatens the planet with a nuclear holocaust. Of the Russian president, Biden said: Putin has made one thing clear: He wants to reestablish what was part of the Soviet Empire, not just a piece, he wants all of Ukraine. That’s what he wants. And then do you think he’ll stop there? Do you think he’ll stop when he – if he takes Ukraine? What do you think happens to Poland? What do you think of Belarus? What do you think happens to those NATO countries? Biden’s position is that Russia must be militarily defeated, “as long as it takes” and “as much as it costs,” as he has said many times. This war-mongering threat is a matter of pressing urgency for every person on the planet. It is clear for all those with eyes to see that Washington, along with its NATO allies, is already deep into an undeclared war with nuclear-armed Russia. To their shame, CNN hosts Jake Tapper and Dana Bash did not offer a follow-up on this momentous question. Likewise, the moderators asked nothing about the COVID-19 pandemic, whose unchecked spread was encouraged by both Trump and Biden, killing millions, much less the newly emerging H5N1 bird flu virus, even as epidemiologists and public health experts desperately sound warning alarms. The “Fourth Estate,” the media, is also far, far gone. It is not only because of his age and senility that Biden could not effectively answer a single one of Trump’s fascist threats, let alone his moonshot lies. It is because, fundamentally, he offers no alternative to the presumptive Republican nominee. Trump spent much of the debate fulminating against immigrants, repeating the demonstrably false assertion that migrant workers are responsible for a crime wave (data show that immigrants are less likely to commit violent crimes than native-born Americans) and that immigrants “are taking over our schools, our hospitals, and they’re going to be taking over Social Security.” (Immigrants are net contributors to the American tax base, as recently spelled out once again by the Congressional Budget Office. It is Trump’s brethren among the superrich who are bleeding the country dry). Trump dodged the only challenging question of the evening, from Tapper, who asked: President Trump, staying on the topic of immigration, you’ve said that you’re going to carry out “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” Does that mean that you will deport every undocumented immigrant in America, including those who have jobs, including those whose spouses are citizens, and including those who have lived here for decades? And if so, how will you do it? Trump did not explain how he would sweep up millions of immigrants—working class men, women and children. But it is obvious he could only carry out such a massive deportation by violent police state methods, which would very quickly be directed against the entire working class. Such a policy entails the destruction of what remains of American democracy and the complete inversion of the national credo of America as a nation of immigrants and “an asylum for mankind,” as Tom Paine put it. Biden did not, or could not, challenge Trump on immigration, perhaps because he and his Democratic predecessor, Barack Obama, bear responsibility for the creation of the very police state infrastructure that Trump now threatens to mobilize. The Biden administration openly boasts that it has deported “more people than in all four years of the prior administration,” in the words of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Obama, for his part, deported more immigrants than all previous administrations combined. Only last week, Biden won a Supreme Court case that asserted the untrammeled right of the executive branch to prevent American citizens from living with their immigrant husbands and wives. But it is not Biden’s right-wing politics that has stunned the Democratic Party establishment and the factions of the ruling class that tend to orient to it—Wall Street, the intelligence apparatus, the upper military brass, and Silicon Valley, among others. What these layers fear above all else is that a Biden collapse and a Trump victory will alter the war policy against Russia, though Trump makes no bones about his readiness to unleash the American military, including its nuclear arsenal. Biden’s debacle comes at a moment of mounting crisis for the American ruling class. Washington’s Ukrainian puppet regime is losing the war, at a cost of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian and Russian lives. Elections will soon take place in Britain and France, whose leaders, key Washington allies, are, if anything, more discredited than Biden. And on July 9-11, Biden is slated to oversee a NATO war council in Washington that will push for direct involvement in Ukraine. Meanwhile, US sovereign debt stands at nearly $35 trillion and is rapidly growing, owing to the endless funding for the wars in Ukraine and Israel and to the high interest rates imposed to punish the American working class in the name of fighting inflation, which has the effect of making debt more expensive. The political bankruptcy of American capitalism, indeed, reflects its financial bankruptcy. It is under these conditions that the Times is spearheading a campaign to remove Biden from the ticket. Such a move has dangers of its own. There are no politicians in the Democratic Party of genuinely national stature who are not despised (a similar problem confronts the Republicans should Trump be removed). And the upper-middle class base of the Democratic Party is cobbled together from various identity-based constituencies, which will demand that their “own” be put forward in lieu of Biden, threatening a faction war among the Democrats. This would have nothing to do with political differences. Any replacement would only mean a repackaging of Biden’s war policies behind a new face and name. In the final analysis, Biden’s decline represents that of a political order and the capitalist ruling class it represents. It is a sclerotic regime that can brook no challenge to its authority. Under these conditions, vast political possibilities open up, especially to the working class. This is why Biden has cracked down on campus protests against the Gaza genocide and why the Democratic Party is desperately seeking to exclude third parties from the ballot. Among those parties is the Socialist Equality Party (SEP). In a statement, SEP presidential candidate Joe Kishore commented: The debate gave expression to the political rot in the United States, the center of finance capital and the cockpit of imperialist war planning. This crisis must be understood as an expression of profound objective factors. While the exact course of events cannot be predicted, one thing is absolutely certain. There will be no progressive resolution to this crisis until the working class, on a world scale, comes together as an international force on the basis of a socialist program.

White House brags that it has given Israel $6.5 billion in weapons since October 7

Andre Damon, WSWS.org, 27 June 2024 @Andre__Damon The United States has provided Israel with more than $6.5 billion in weapons since October 7, the White House said Wednesday, underscoring the scale of the Biden administration’s support for the continuing genocide in Gaza. Doled out over just nine months, this figure is nearly double the US’s typical annual Israel military aid budget of $3.4 billion and will be further supplemented by $14 billion in weapons funding allocated by Congress this year. The White House admitted the scale of its arms shipments to Israel in a closed briefing to reporters, with neither a video nor transcript made available to the public. Washington Post reporter John Hudson described the content of the briefing on X: “The US has flooded Israel with more than $6.5 billion in security assistance since Oct. 7, said a senior administration official, a massive transfer of equipment and firepower despite recurring disagreements between the two nations over civilian casualties and aid access.” The US official declared, “This is a massive, massive undertaking, and nothing is paused other than that one shipment” of 2,000-pound bombs. Amid continuing mass protests against the Biden administration’s complicity in the Gaza bloodbath, the White House has sought to keep the scale of its arms transfers a secret. For this reason, it has broken up its arms shipments into more than 100 chunks in order to bypass congressional reporting requirements. The announcement came the same day that Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant met with senior White House officials. Gallant was welcomed by senior White House officials Wednesday, after the lead prosecutor of the International Criminal Court applied for charges against him last month, accusing the Israeli defense minister, alongside Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, of “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity.” The visit follows last week’s assertion by a UN investigative committee that the Israeli government is responsible for the “extermination” of the Palestinian population, with commission member Chris Sidoti declaring that the “Israeli army is one of the most criminal armies in the world.” Gallant’s trip sets the stage for the visit by Netanyahu to Washington on July 24, when he is set to address both houses of Congress. In a readout of the meeting between Gallant and US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, the White House wrote, “Mr. Sullivan reaffirmed the United States’ ironclad commitment to Israel’s security, including in the face of threats from Iranian-backed terrorist groups such as Lebanese Hezbollah.” The statement continued, “The two also discussed President Biden’s unprecedented support for Israel since the Hamas attacks of October 7th. Mr. Sullivan reaffirmed President Biden’s commitment to ensure that Israel has all it needs to defend itself militarily and confront its Iranian-backed adversaries.” The White House praised the purported humanitarian efforts of Gallant, the man who has pushed the population of the narrow enclave to the brink of starvation by declaring a “complete blockade” of food into Gaza because the Palestinians are, in his words, “human animals.” The readout declared: Mr. Sullivan and Minister Gallant discussed the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, and the need to increase and sustain the flow of humanitarian assistance into Gaza. Mr. Sullivan recognized Minister Gallant’s personal efforts and leadership to support these efforts. In a separate meeting with US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, the defense secretary “underscored the ironclad US commitment to Israel, as evidenced in part by the extraordinary defense of Israel against an unprecedented Iranian attack on April 13 and by the more than $14 billion in assistance in the Bipartisan National Security Supplemental that President Biden signed on April 24.” Gallant, for his part, responded to the meetings by threatening war against Lebanon, declaring that Israel is “preparing for every scenario” and threatening to send Lebanon “back to the Stone Age.” Israeli massacres of civilians in Gaza continued Wednesday, with 15 Palestinian civilians killed in a strike on a home in northern Gaza. Israeli forces killed Fadi Al-Wadiya, a doctor and member of Doctors Without Borders, while he was on his way to work in Gaza City. MSF reported: The attack killed Fadi, along with five other people including three children, while he was cycling to work, near the MSF clinic where he was providing care. Fadi was a 33-year-old physiotherapist and father of three. He joined MSF in 2018. Our thoughts are with his family and loved ones. Fadi’s loss marks the sixth killing of an MSF staff member in Gaza since October 7, 2023. Meanwhile, famine is worsening in Gaza. In a Twitter statement, the United Nations Children’s Fund wrote, “Malnutrition in Gaza is wreaking havoc on children” and “Lack of food, water, and medical supplies is worsening the already desperate situation for Gaza’s children.” Mass starvation and hunger in Gaza have been massively intensified by the closure of the Rafah border crossing, as part of the US-backed Israeli attack on Rafah. In a statement Wednesday, the World Health Organization said that no medical evacuations had taken place from Gaza since May. Before the closure of the border, “approximately 50 critical patients a day left Gaza. … It means that since the 7th of May at least 2,000 people have been unable to leave Gaza to receive medical care,” said World Health Organization representative Rik Peeperkorn. Separately, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) reported that at least 508 internally displaced people had been killed at its shelters in October.

The shoulders of giants: the railwaymen and seafarers who fought in Spain

Morning Star, Monday, June 24, 2024 JIM JUMP welcomes the new booklet published by the RMT and International Brigade Memorial Trust about the seafarers and rail workers who fought Franco’s fascism in Spain WORKING CLASS HEROES: Detail from the mural tribute to the International Brigades held in the Marx Memorial Library THEY SAY the past never goes away and is still with us. That couldn’t be more true of the rise of fascism in the last century. Everyone hoped this evil creed had been stamped out for good with the defeat of the Nazi war machine in 1945. But the fascist beast and its toxic ideology of race hate, militarism and hostility to organised labour have not gone away. Sadly, this makes a new booklet jointly published by RMT and the International Brigade Memorial Trust, They Shall Not Pass, all the more relevant and important today. It tells the story of the railway workers and seafarers who in the 1930s resisted fascism at home and, in the case of the Spanish civil war, took up arms to stop Hitler, Mussolini and General Franco from crushing the elected government of Spain. What stands out is that these workers recognised the true threat of fascism well before their political masters did. It was ordinary people who stopped the British Union of Fascists (BUF) from marching through our towns and cities. And it was ordinary people, including scores of members of the National Union of Railwaymen (NUR) and the National Union of Seafarers, who joined the International Brigades to fight the fascists in Spain. There’s a plaque dedicated to them proudly on display at RMT’s head office. Within the British Establishment, there was considerable sympathy for the way Europe’s fascist dictators banned trade unions and violently suppressed political parties of the left. BUF leader Sir Oswald Mosley was an aristocratic former Cabinet minister with rich and powerful friends. As They Shall Not Pass reveals, Britain’s would-be fuhrer came unstuck when he sued NUR general secretary John Marchbank for slander. The BUF leader won a technical victory but was awarded a laughable farthing (a quarter of a penny) in damages. Mosley’s High Court humiliation came in 1936. Things got worse in October of that year at the Battle of Cable Street. This was when the Jewish population of Whitechapel joined forces with local dockers, trade unionists, communists and socialists to prevent the BUF’s anti-semitic Blackshirts from parading through London’s East End. The cry of the anti-fascists was “They shall not pass,” the same one used by the defenders of Madrid — “No pasaran!” Many of the protesters at Cable Street were among more than 2,000 volunteers from Britain who joined the International Brigades to fight in Spain. This was no gap-year jaunt. More than 500 of them made the ultimate sacrifice. NUR member Ginger McElroy from Wishaw was killed at the Battle of Jarama in February 1937 after being hit by a dum-dum bullet. The bloody battle saw the British Battalion lose more than 150 men. But they held the line to stop Franco from taking Madrid. Fellow railwayman Alwyn Skinner from Neath lost his life in the Battle of the Ebro in the summer of 1938, when Hitler’s bombers pummelled the British Battalion on the rocky slopes around Gandesa. The battalion suffered 90 fatalities. Readers of the booklet will be moved and inspired by the exploits of many individuals described in it. Jimmy Prendergast, one of the leaders of the Irish contingent in the International Brigades, fought bravely at Cordoba, Jarama and Brunete. In the 1960s he was the NUR’s Marylebone branch secretary and led the campaign that broke British Rail’s colour bar that excluded black workers from senior posts. Jack Coward, one of several Liverpool seamen to fight in Spain, was captured at Calaceite in 1938 but escaped and fought behind the lines with Spanish guerillas. When he was recaptured, he pretended to be deaf and dumb and eventually made his way home from enemy Spain on a British ship. Spike Robson, a ship’s fireman from South Shields, led the NUS crew of the Linaria on strike in Boston, Massachusetts, to stop explosive materials being shipped to Franco’s Spain. Arrested on their return home, the men ended up in court, charged under the Merchant Shipping Act and facing prison sentences. Robson was blacklisted from the shipping industry as a result. It’s often said that union members “stand on the shoulders of giants” — in other words, our predecessors, who fought for the rights we enjoy today and the principles that still guide us. Delve into this booklet and meet some of those giants from the union’s past. Jim Jump is the chair of the International Brigade Memorial Trust and a former editor of the NUS journal, the Seaman.

With US support, Israel continues Rafah massacre

Andre Damon @Andre__Damon, WSWS, 22 June 2024 Israel intensified its mass displacement, ethnic cleansing and mass murder in Rafah, the southernmost city in the Gaza Strip, on Friday, killing 25 people in a strike on a refugee camp north of the city. A Palestinian family inspects heavy damage to an UNRWA school sheltering displaced persons the day after a nearby house was targeted by Israeli bombardment in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip on Friday, June 21, 2024. [AP Photo/Jehad Alshrafi] The attack by Israeli tanks took place immediately outside a Red Cross humanitarian facility in what the Israeli military had designated as a “safe zone.” The Red Cross said in a statement that Israeli shells fell within a matter of feet from its offices, damaging them. The building had been “surrounded by hundreds of displaced people living in tents.” One survivor of the attack told Al Jazeera, “We had just eaten and were about to sleep and take some rest, and the next we knew was the sound of resounding explosions destroying our places! We find ourselves alone not knowing what to do. We still can’t process what happened!” The witness continued, “Oh Lord, look at us, oh world, see our condition. … The fire is consuming us from every direction.” Another survivor told Al Jazeera, “Today, before the afternoon, a bomb was thrown near the Red Cross. My husband went out after hearing the sound of the explosion. The second bomb was near the Red Cross building. All the young men went there because some people were injured.” Friday’s massacre is only the latest in the US-backed Isreali assault on Rafah which has displaced over a million people from the city—most of whom had been displaced from other parts of Gaza. “Last night was one of the worst nights in western Rafah: drones, planes, tanks and naval boats bombarded the area. We feel the occupation is trying to complete the control of the city,” Hatem, a resident of Rafah, told Reuters. While the Biden administration had previously said that an Israeli assault on Rafah would be a “red line,” the White House has fully endorsed both the ground attack on Rafah and ongoing airstrikes on civilians. Two weeks ago, Israeli forces killed at least 274 Palestinians in a massacre at the Nuseirat refugee camp and injured more than 500 people. The White House called the Nuseirat strikes “limited” and “targeted.” Friday’s massacre in Rafah was accompanied by mass killing throughout the whole of the Gaza Strip. Gaza’s health minister said that at least 35 people were killed over the past 24 hours, bringing the official death toll since October to 37,431. The assault on Rafah and Israel’s destruction of the Rafah crossing has brought the distribution of food in Gaza to the brink of collapse. Doctors Without Borders (MSF) warned Friday that it could be forced to suspend its operations in Rafah due to the near-total unavailability of medical supplies. It blamed Israel’s attack on Rafah for the disaster, declaring, “The closure of the Rafah crossing following Israel’s offensive in the south of Gaza in early May, coupled with the endless red tape imposed by Israeli authorities, has led to a dramatically slow flow of humanitarian aid through the crossing that is open, Kerem Shalom entry point.” Friday’s massacre came just two days after the United Nations’ commission of inquiry into the war in Gaza gave its official ruling, accusing the Israeli government of “extermination,” “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity.” “The only conclusion you can draw is that the Israeli army is one of the most criminal armies in the world,” said commission member Chris Sidoti. Navi Pillay, the chairperson of the inquiry, implicitly condemned the United States for serving as the enabler of the Gaza genocide. “Had it not been for the help of powerful countries, Israel would not have been able to carry out this perpetual occupation as aggressively as it has,” Pillay said. Even as Gaza’s health system collapses, the severely injured are left in Gaza to die. In a statement Friday, World Health Organization head Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that not a single ill or wounded Palestinian has been allowed to leave Gaza since May 7. “Since the closure of the Rafah crossing on May 7, no patients have been evacuated from the Strip,” Tedros said. “That means over 2,000 people have not received critical life-saving specialized healthcare.” He added, “Medical evacuations must be facilitated through all possible crossings, including Rafah for transfers to Egypt, Karem Shalom for transfers to the West Bank and East Jerusalem referral hospitals, and when needed to other countries for specialized care.” In addition to mass killing, the Israeli government is carrying out widespread torture of detainees. In a video that went viral Friday, Gaza resident Badr Dahlan described his torture by Israeli forces. “They [Israeli army] beat my hands and legs,” Dahlan testified, saying he was subjected to “violations and acts of torture.” At least 36 prisoners in the Gaza Strip detained by Israeli forces have died due to torture and poor conditions, Gaza’s government media office said Thursday. The media office said that “54 detainees from various Palestinian regions have died in Israeli prisons due to torture and inhumane detention conditions, amid systematic assaults on prisoners since the beginning of the genocidal war,” describing Israeli prisons as “mass graves for thousands of Palestinian prisoners, ignored by international institutions.”

The United States Is the Main Obstacle to Peace in Palestine

by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies Posted on June 18, 2024 On June 13, Hamas responded to persistent needling by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken over the U.S. proposal for a pause in the Israeli massacre in Gaza. The group said it has “dealt positively… with the latest proposal and all proposals to reach a cease-fire agreement.” Hamas added, by contrast, that, “while Blinken continues to talk about ‘Israel’s approval of the latest proposal, we have not heard any Israeli official voicing approval.” U.S. Marines and IDF soldiers in joint maneuver Intrepid Maven, Feb. 28, 2023. Photo: US Marines. The full details of the U.S. proposal have yet to be made public, but the pause in Israeli attacks and release of hostages in the first phase would reportedly lead to further negotiations for a more lasting cease-fire and the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in the second phase. But there is no guarantee that the second round of negotiations would succeed. As former Israeli Labor Party prime minister Ehud Barak told Israel Radio on June 3rd, “How do you think [Gaza military commander] Sinwar will react when he is told: but be quick, because we still have to kill you, after you return all the hostages?” Meanwhile, as Hamas pointed out, Israel has not publicly accepted the terms of the latest U.S. cease-fire proposal, so it has only the word of U.S. officials that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has privately agreed to it. In public, Netanyahu still insists that he is committed to the complete destruction of Hamas and its governing authority in Gaza, and has actually stepped up Israel’s vicious attacks in central and southern Gaza. The basic disagreement that President Joe Biden and Secretary Blinken’s smoke and mirrors cannot hide is that Hamas, like every Palestinian, wants a real end to the genocide, while the Israeli and U.S. governments do not. Biden or Netanyahu could end the slaughter very quickly if they wanted to – Netanyahu by agreeing to a permanent cease-fire, or Biden by ending or suspending U.S. weapons deliveries to Israel. Israel could not carry out this war without U.S. military and diplomatic support. But Biden refuses to use his leverage, even though he has admitted in an interview that it was “reasonable” to conclude that Netanyahu is prolonging the war for his own political benefit. The U.S. is still sending weapons to Israel to continue the massacre in violation of a cease-fire order by the International Court of Justice. Bipartisan U.S. leaders have invited Netanyahu to address a joint session of the U.S. Congress on July 24, even as the International Criminal Court reviews a request by its chief prosecutor for an arrest warrant for Netanyahu for war crimes, crimes against humanity and murder. The United States seems determined to share Israel’s self-inflicted isolation from voices calling for peace from all over the world, including large majorities of countries in the UN General Assembly and Security Council. But perhaps this is appropriate, as the United States bears a great deal of responsibility for that isolation. By its decades of unconditional support for Israel, and by using its UN Security Council veto dozens of times to shield Israel from international accountability, the United States has enabled successive Israeli governments to pursue flagrantly criminal policies and to thumb their noses at the growing outrage of people and countries across the world. This pattern of U.S. support for Israel goes all the way back to its founding, when Zionist leaders in Palestine unleashed a well-planned operation to seize much more territory than the UN allocated to their new state in its partition plan, which the Palestinians and neighboring countries already firmly opposed. The massacres, the bulldozed villages and the ethnic cleansing of 750,000 to a million people in the Nakba have been meticulously documented, despite an extraordinary propaganda campaign to persuade two generations of Israelis, Americans and Europeans that they never happened. The U.S. was the first country to grant Israel de facto recognition on May 14, 1948, and played a leading role in the 1949 UN votes to recognize the new state of Israel within its illegally seized borders. President Eisenhower had the wisdom to oppose Britain, France and Israel in their war to capture the Suez Canal in 1956, but Israel’s seizure of the Occupied Palestinian Territories in 1967 persuaded U.S. leaders that it could be a valuable military ally in the Middle East. Unconditional U.S. support for Israel’s illegal occupation and annexation of more and more territory over the past 57 years has corrupted Israeli politics and encouraged increasingly extreme and racist Israeli governments to keep expanding their genocidal territorial ambitions. Netanyahu’s Likud party and government now fully embrace their Greater Israel plan to annex all of occupied Palestine and parts of other countries, wherever and whenever new opportunities for expansion present themselves. Israel’s de facto expansion has been facilitated by the United States’ monopoly over mediation between Israel and Palestine, which it has aggressively staked out and defended against the UN and other countries. The irreconcilable contradiction between the U.S.’s conflicting roles as Israel’s most powerful military ally and the principal mediator between Israel and Palestine is obvious to the whole world. But as we see even in the midst of the genocide in Gaza, the rest of the world and the UN have failed to break this U.S. monopoly and establish legitimate, impartial mediation by the UN or neutral countries that respect the lives of Palestinians and their human and civil rights. Qatar mediated a temporary cease-fire between Israel and Hamas in November 2023, but it has since been upstaged by U.S. moves to prolong the massacre through deceptive proposals, cynical posturing and Security Council vetoes. The U.S. consistently vetoes all but its own proposals on Israel and Palestine in the UN Security Council, even when its own proposals are deliberately meaningless, ineffective or counterproductive. The UN General Assembly is united in support of Palestine, voting almost unanimously year after year to demand an end to the Israeli occupation. A hundred and forty-four countries have recognized Palestine as a country, and only the U.S. veto denies it full UN membership. The Israeli genocide in Gaza has even shamed the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC) into suspending their ingrained pro-Western bias and pursuing cases against Israel. One way that the nations of the world could come together to apply greater pressure on Israel to end its assault on Gaza would be a “Uniting for Peace” resolution in the UN General Assembly. This is a measure the General Assembly can take when the Security Council is prevented from acting to restore peace and security by the veto of a permanent member. Israel has demonstrated that it is prepared to ignore cease-fire resolutions by the General Assembly and the Security Council, and an order by the ICJ, but a Uniting for Peace resolution could impose penalties on Israel for its actions, such as an arms embargo or an economic boycott. If the United States still insists on continuing its complicity in Israel’s international crimes, the General Assembly could take action against the U.S. too. A General Assembly resolution would change the terms of the international debate and shift the focus back from Biden and Blinken’s diversionary tactics to the urgency of enforcing the lasting cease-fire that the whole world is calling for. It is time for the United Nations and neutral countries to push Israel’s U.S. partner in genocide to the side, and for legitimate international authorities and mediators to take responsibility for enforcing international law, ending the Israeli occupation of Palestine and bringing peace to the Middle East. Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies are the authors of War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, published by OR Books in November 2022. Medea Benjamin is the cofounder of CODEPINK for Peace, and the author of several books, including Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher for CODEPINK and the author of Blood on Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq. F Author: Medea Benjamin Medea Benjamin (medea@globalexchange.org) is cofounder of CODEPINK: Women for Peace and Global Exchange.

ICC must be allowed to carry out work ‘without intimidation’, say 93 member states

Joint statement of support for international criminal court issued following revelations of Israeli interference Harry Davies, Guardian, Sat 15 Jun The international criminal court must be allowed to carry out its work “without intimidation”, a group of 93 states has said in a significant public intervention intended to reinforce support for the judicial body. In a joint statement issued late on Friday, the large group of ICC member states vowed to defend the institution and “preserve its integrity from any political interference and pressure against the court, its officials and those cooperating with it”. The show of unity for the court and its staff comes in the wake of revelations published by the Guardian about efforts by Israel and its intelligence agencies to undermine, influence and intimidate the court as part of a nine-year campaign of surveillance and espionage. It also follows recent warnings by the office of the ICC’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, that it has been subjected to “several forms of threats” and hostile intelligence activity apparently intended to interfere with and improperly influence the prosecutor’s work. Last month, Khan announced that he has filed applications for arrest warrants against senior Hamas and Israeli officials for war crimes and crimes against humanity, which he alleged had been committed during Hamas’s 7 October attack and the ensuing war in Gaza. Khan’s decision to seek arrest warrants against Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and defence minister, Yoav Gallant, is the first time an ICC prosecutor has taken such action against the leaders of a close western ally. The move provoked a fierce response from Israel and its allies in the US. The statement supporting the ICC was drafted by five of the court’s member states – Belgium, Chile, Jordan, Senegal and Slovenia – and is understood to have been presented to the rest of the court’s state parties last week for their endorsement. A diplomatic source familiar with the effort said the disclosures about Israeli intelligence operations against the court had been “really eye-opening for a lot of diplomats” and “made some realise that it’s time to put out some sort of statement from the states that belong to the court responding to what has now come to light”. However, they said the statement was also a response to other recent forms of hostile activity against the ICC, such as a cyber-attack last year, and came as the prosecutor is conducting an investigation into senior Russian political and military figures allegedly involved in war crimes and crimes against humanity in Ukraine. “The court is going after some very powerful people, not just in the Palestine investigation, and it’s time to send a message that the state parties are there to defend it,” the source said. Longtime ICC observers said it was notable that major western powers such as Germany, France, Canada and the UK had supported the statement, which called on “all states to ensure full cooperation with the court for it to carry out its important mandate”. They also pointed to the large number of endorsing states – 93 of the ICC’s 124 members – and noted that previous statements rallying around the court had not garnered as much support. Other signatories included Australia, South Africa, Spain, Brazil and Japan. “This is a unique moment of international solidarity, with 93 ICC states parties standing up for global justice and accountability for mass atrocities,” Danya Chaikel, the International Federation for Human Rights’s representative to the ICC, said. “They are collectively opposing the egregious threats to the court from powerful countries including Israel, the US and Russia, and strongly rejecting their efforts to manipulate the rule of law for political gains,” she added.

War on Gaza: Blinken is dragging the US ever deeper into Israel’s quagmire

David Hearst, Middle East Eye, 14 June 2024 Hamas is willing to commit to the ‘full and complete ceasefire’ touted by Biden – but Washington continues to throw its full support behind an intransigent Tel Aviv US Secretary of State Antony Blinken speaks to the media in Dubai, on 1 December, 2023 (Saul Loeb/AFP) US Secretary of State Antony Blinken speaks to the media in Dubai, on 1 December, 2023 (Saul Loeb/AFP) sharethis sharing button It takes a lot to get the diplomats of the Middle East to agree on anything. The behaviour of one man over the last eight months of the war in Gaza has, however, forged a consensus rare among such a group: Antony Blinken cannot be trusted. The US secretary of state’s powers of turning reality on its head have raised the eyebrows of even practised cynics. It is a complaint that resounds from Doha to Amman, Cairo, Tel Aviv and Ankara. Blinken is currently engaged in what one of his predecessors, James Baker, called “dead cat diplomacy”. Baker’s pupil, Aaron David Miller, wrote on X (formerly Twitter): “The objective is not to reach a deal but to ensure if it fails, the dead cat is on other’s doorstep.” The dead, or dying, cat of the moment is a ceasefire deal in Gaza that holds. Indisputably, Hamas is closer to accepting this deal than Israel is. The evidence for this is mounting. Hamas signed a ceasefire deal presented by Egypt and Qatar, under the gaze of CIA Director Bill Burns, which would have ensured a permanent halt to the war. Stay informed with MEE’s newsletters Sign up to get the latest alerts, insights and analysis, starting with Turkey Unpacked When Israel and the US walked away from it, Hamas welcomed the principles declared in President Joe Biden’s speech, in which he urged Israel to accept a “full and complete ceasefire”. It had the same reaction to the US-sponsored UN resolution. Those principles are clear: that a permanent ceasefire should exist after an initial exchange of hostages; that there should be a full withdrawal of Israeli troops; that the people of Gaza should be free to return to their homes; that there should be no change in the territory or demography of Gaza; and that its people should have full access to humanitarian aid, alongside reconstruction efforts. Sticking point Israel disagrees with each and every one of these principles. It has said consistently that no ceasefire should prevent the achievement of its war aims, which include the dismantlement of Hamas as a military power and as a government of Gaza. It continues to block aid through its land border crossings and has no intention of lifting the siege, especially after the war ends. More critically, it has made no commitment to sticking to a ceasefire should negotiations between the first and second phases of the prisoner and hostage exchange fail. This is the crux of the matter. There has been only one substantive issue preventing a ceasefire deal since the first exchange of prisoners and hostages last November. Israel has yet to give any official response to either Biden’s speech or the UN resolution. Blinken is doing all the talking for it. How curious, then, that Blinken, on his latest Middle East tour, placed all the blame on Hamas for not yet accepting the deal. The talks are stuck on Israel’s refusal to accept an upfront commitment to a permanent ceasefire. It is on Israel that Blinken should be applying all of Washington’s pressure. This is not in US interests. Netanyahu is perfectly logical in his conclusion that Biden is weak and getting weaker by the month And yet, Blinken declared: “Israel accepted the proposal as it was” – a comment that flies in the face of repeated public statements from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu casting doubt on the deal, in addition to recent remarks from National Security Adviser Tzachi Hanegbi, who said it would take another seven months to destroy the military and governing capabilities of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. “Hamas could have answered with a single word – yes,” Blinken said, surpassing himself in a brazen attempt to turn the truth on its head. Hamas has now given its formal response, and Middle East Eye has seen a copy of that reply. There are changes to the document, which are not, as it claims, minor – although they are more compatible with what Biden and the UN resolution said, than the Israeli position is. Hamas has included the Philadelphi Corridor in the list of areas that Israeli forces should withdraw from in the first 42-day stage of the deal. It also insists that prisoners to be released by Israel are in accordance with Hamas’s list, which includes high-profile resistance leaders such as Marwan Barghouti. Shielding Israel The most substantial change is to the wording of paragraph 14, which deals crucially with the transition from stage one to stage two, and the key question of whether any party can withdraw unilaterally from this process and go back to war. Paragraph 14 used to say that the temporary cessation of violence would continue into stage two “so long as the negotiations on the conditions for implementing stage 2 of this agreement are ongoing”, and that the guarantors of the deal would make “every effort to ensure that those indirect negotiations continue until both sides are able to reach agreement”. The revised version from Hamas says the temporary ceasefire would continue “until a sustainable calm” is announced, by which is meant a full cessation of military activities on both sides, and that negotiations would continue until the two parties reach an agreement on an exchange of prisoners. In addition, Hamas now demands that Israel lift its 17-year siege of Gaza and withdraw all its forces in the initial stage of the ceasefire deal. These key changes address the meaning and substance of Biden’s speech and the UN resolution. But Israel will be implacably opposed to them, as they mean that once the first set of hostages and prisoners has been released, Israel will not be able to back out of a permanent ceasefire. It does not take a genius to see that shielding an Israel that has no intention of abiding by Biden’s words, let alone the UN’s, is not doing anything to advance US goals. These are clear: Biden’s overwhelming personal political interest as an ageing president, seeking re-election while not always being able to read his teleprompter, is to shut this war down as soon as possible. He has even more interest in doing so before it spreads, as it shows every sign of doing, to Lebanon and then the wider region. Blinken is doing the opposite. He is letting Washington get dragged ever deeper, and with more direct military involvement, into a regional quagmire of Netanyahu’s creation. Only one party benefits from a continuous war in Gaza and a new front opening up in Lebanon, and that is the Religious Zionist extreme right. Netanyahu cannot abandon that party. Benny Gantz’s defection from the war cabinet would be nothing politically next to Itamar Ben Gvir’s exit. The moment that happens, Netanyahu knows he has a challenger for the leadership of the ruling right-wing coalition. That sinking feeling Accordingly, Netanyahu has responded to every failed round of negotiations by going on the military offensive. After his rejection of the ceasefire deal hammered out during the debacle in Cairo and Doha, and amid the increasing possibility of being served with an international arrest warrant for war crimes, his response was to launch the offensive on Rafah. Here again, the Israeli national interest called for caution. He showed no hesitation in jettisoning the support of the Egyptian army, which if he thought about things strategically, as a real leader should, he would realise that Israel will need after this conflict is over. Egypt’s generals could make life painful along Israel’s eminently porous 200-kilometre border with Sinai, by releasing the brakes they apply on the drug smugglers and warlords who roam the desert. Palestinians flee with their belongings as smoke rises in the background, in the area of Tel al-Sultan in Rafah, Gaza, on 30 May 2024 (Eyad Baba/AFP) Palestinians flee with their belongings as smoke rises in the background, in the area of Tel al-Sultan in Rafah, Gaza, on 30 May 2024 (Eyad Baba/AFP) Instead, Netanyahu has humiliated them – and adding insult to injury, deprived them of a personal source of hard currency by closing the Rafah border and occupying the Philadelphi corridor. The unwritten understanding between them was that any such closure would be temporary. But Netanyahu has now broken that understanding too, leaving the generals with egg on their face. Not a wise thing to do, in this region. Similarly, Netanyahu’s response to Biden’s speech was to launch a hostage rescue in Nuseirat camp, whose beneficial effects on domestic public opinion lasted all of 24 hours. Wild jubilation at the release of four hostages – Israeli networks interrupted their recorded programmes on Shabbat to go live – gave way to sober reflection on the total cost of this operation. It was not repeatable. It was not a replacement for negotiations. Israel lost a special forces police officer in the extraction, and if Hamas is to be believed, three other hostages as well. State of chaos But more puzzling still was the US claiming a decisive role in the hostage release. As the Palestinian death toll soared past 270, you might have expected National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan to distance himself from such a disaster. He did the opposite, taking credit for what he termed a “daring operation”. The exact part that US intelligence or their hostage release team played in this operation is not known. Israeli helicopters were, however, captured on camera taking off and landing on the beach, a few metres from the pier the US Navy built to provide aid for Gaza. Centcom, the US military command that oversees the Middle East, said that while Israel used an area south of the US-built pier as a landing zone, “the humanitarian pier facility, including its equipment, personnel, and assets were not used in the operation to rescue hostages”. As things stand, and with the active complicity of Blinken, the gap between Israel and Hamas will not be bridged But a US defence official, speaking with Middle East Eye, said Israel’s use of the beach, with the pier a stone’s throw away, “implies we were part of it”. Furthermore, the US would have been notified of Israel’s exfiltration plan via the beach because it maintains an air defence system at the pier. US cooperation with a hostage release operation that killed more than 270 Palestinians, and possibly also a further group of hostages, puts US policy on hostage release in a state of total chaos. Its policy goal is to persuade Israel of the obvious truth that the hostages themselves, and their families, scream often and loudly about: the only killer of hostages is Israel’s continuing bombardment. US military involvement in such a murderous operation does the opposite. “Israel’s argument has always been that it doesn’t need a ceasefire to rescue hostages,” Frank Lowenstein, the former special envoy for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations in the Obama administration, told MEE. “The rescue operation is likely to deepen Israel’s resolve on that.” US weakness This is not in US interests. Netanyahu is perfectly logical in his conclusion that Biden is weak and getting weaker by the month. He is fundamentally unable or unwilling to apply a brake to Israel’s offensive. He threatened very publicly to withhold heavy bombs for Netanyahu’s offensive on Rafah. Netanyahu went ahead with it anyway, and Biden backed down. Channel 13 recently reported that “significant progress” had been reached towards “understandings” that would allow the suspended shipment to arrive in Israel in the near future: “Within the framework of the understandings being developed between Washington and Tel Aviv, Israel will be forced to make commitments to Washington that it will not attack with certain bombs that will be supplied by the Biden administration, in populated areas, including populated areas in Rafah.” War on Gaza: The day the West defined ‘success’ as a massacre of 270 Palestinians Read More » So Israel can have the heavy bombs Biden promised to withhold, and continue with the operation in Rafah that Biden warned it not to proceed with. At every stage in this eight-month war, US diplomacy has showed its weakness, and it bears a heavy responsibility for where this has now landed both Israel and US forces in the region. As things stand, and with the activecomplicity of Blinken, the gap betweenIsrael and Hamas will not be bridged, even though the truth is that that the gap between the US and Israel is much larger than that between the US or the UNand Hamas. Both Hamas and the US, and the 13 other members of the UN Security Council that voted for the resolution, want an immediate and permanent ceasefire. Israel is in a minority of one in making sure that does not happen, knowing that neither Blinken nor Biden has the political capital left to stop it. A new low To carry on the war in Gaza is to ensure that the escalation of the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah will continue, with each side striking deeper into each other’s territory. The surest method of de-escalation on the northern border is to secure an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. I cannot think of any other time during the 76 years of this bitter conflict, when an Israeli leadership has been so obdurate in pursuing war aims that are unachievable – and a US president so weak and powerless to stop it. James Baker or George Shultz were giants of diplomacy and resolve compared with the likes of Blinken. I previously thought that the combination of Netanyahu and former President Donald Trump had brought the situation to an all-time low. But I was proved wrong; worse was to come. All the concessions Israel got during Trump’s presidency – the Golan Heights, the moving of the US embassy to Jerusalem, the Abraham Accords – pale into insignificance compared with the backing Biden has given Israel to pursue and continue its war on Gaza with this savagery, and for this long. It proved to be the combination of Netanyahu and a Democratic president that led this conflict to its most dangerous and murderous moment. - David Hearst is co-founder and editor-in-chief of Middle East Eye. He is a commentator and speaker on the region and analyst on Saudi Arabia. He was the Guardian’s foreign leader writer, and was correspondent in Russia, Europe, and Belfast. He joined the Guardian from The Scotsman, where he was education correspondent.

Unpacking Blinken’s lies on the Gaza ceasefire negotiations

After the US Secretary of State Blinken’s misleading press conference on Wednesday in Doha, there is a need to correct the record. Professor Mohamad Elmasry, Aljazeera, 14 Jun 2024 US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is pictured in Doha, Qatar, for negotiations on June 12, 2024 [Ibraheem Al Omari/Pool/Reuters] During a Wednesday press conference in Doha, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken was less than honest about a United States-proposed Gaza ceasefire deal. During the course of his opening remarks and the question and answer session, Blinken made several statements that are either transparently untrue or deeply misleading. First, Blinken insisted that the three-phased ceasefire deal announced by US President Joe Biden on May 31 was an “Israeli proposal” and that Israel fully backs it. When asked during the question and answer session whether the US was attempting to put pressure on Israel to accept the proposal, Blinken said there was no need to do so because Israel had already accepted it. But Blinken was being untruthful. Biden proposed the deal because he is desperate to get out from under his disastrous Gaza policy before the start of the Democratic National Convention, which is scheduled for August. Biden’s proclamation that it was an “Israeli proposal” simply isn’t true. In the two weeks since Biden made his announcement, Israeli officials have not come forward and announced their acceptance of the deal. In fact, they’ve done the opposite. Over the past two weeks, Israeli officials have made clear that they oppose the Biden draft proposal. Moreover, Netanyahu and other officials have made clear that Israel intends to continue its war on Gaza, an aim which contradicts the basic terms of Biden’s proposal. On Monday at the United Nations, Israeli representative Reut Shapir Ben-Naftaly could not have been clearer about Israel’s position. She said that Israel’s war aims “have not changed” and that the war “will continue … until Hamas military and governing capabilities are dismantled”. She also said that Israel would not “engage in meaningless and endless negotiations” about a permanent ceasefire. Israel’s public positions caused a former top Israeli diplomat, Alon Liel, to proclaim that Israel has “definitely not” accepted the “proposal submitted by the Americans”. Indeed, Israel continues to say it is pursuing the “total victory” it has sought since the start of the war. Although Israel claims “total victory” involves the elimination of Hamas, a more realistic interpretation is that Israel seeks the complete destruction of Gaza and the forced transfer of Palestinians there to Egypt and/or Jordan. In any case, what is clear is that Israel has no intention of honouring phase two of Biden’s agreement, which calls for a permanent end to fighting. Here, the devil is in the details. The wording in Biden’s proposal gives Israel a way out after phase one. The Biden proposal stipulates that phase two can only be reached upon Israel’s agreement at the end of phase one. If Israel doesn’t agree to move to phase two and chooses to end negotiations, then the ceasefire is off. But, as Israeli officials have made clear, Israel hasn’t agreed even to these very watered down ceasefire terms. Blinken’s second lie pertains to Hamas and its position on the proposal. During the press conference, Blinken indicated that the Biden proposal was “virtually identical” to the deal Hamas proposed on May 6. Blinken went on to blame Hamas for being insincere and “continuing to try to change the terms,” including terms that “Hamas had previously accepted”. But all of this is also untrue. First, Hamas’s May 6 proposal was quite different from the Biden proposal. It did not give Israel wiggle room to easily exit the agreement after phase one. Also, and importantly, the Hamas proposal called for an end to Israel’s illegal, suffocating blockade on Gaza. Blinken said that Hamas had proposed “numerous changes” to Biden’s proposal. All Hamas did, however, was attempt to move things closer towards its May 6 proposal, which would lead to an actual end to the war. One significant change that Hamas did introduce – an Israeli troop withdrawal – was necessitated by Israel’s taking over of the Philadelphi Corridor on May 30. This is an important fact that Blinken conveniently decided to omit. Third, Blinken said the “whole world” supports the proposal and that Hamas is the only entity to avoid getting behind it. This is highly misleading. Over the past several months, the US and Israel have rejected and obstructed several serious ceasefire proposals, all of which have been backed by Hamas and the global community. After engaging in this obstruction, the US made its very imperfect proposal on May 31. Countries in the United Nations Security Council voted for it not because it was a great proposal, nor because they thought it was better than previous proposals which they had also voted for. They voted for this proposal precisely because of US obstructionism. Countries know that this proposal is the only game in town, the only opportunity that the US and Israel will allow for at least a temporary cessation. Several countries made their reservations known on Monday. Russia, China, Malta and Algeria, among other global actors, have expressed their reservations. Blinken’s statement that the “entire world” stands behind the Biden proposal is deeply misleading. Fourth, Blinken blamed Hamas for holding up the ceasefire for 12 days. During his Wednesday remarks, Blinken mentioned the “12 days” – which is the time elapsed between Biden’s announcement and Hamas’s response – a total of five times. Each mention was an attempt by Blinken to blame Hamas for the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza. For example, Blinken said, “the reality is as this negotiation is going on, during the 12 days that it took Hamas to respond, the world wasn’t standing still. Gaza wasn’t standing still. People were suffering every single day.” But Blinken is again being untruthful. Biden announced the deal on May 31, but, as Sami Al-Arian and other analysts have noted, didn’t present a written, detailed draft to Hamas until much later. The exact date is unclear, but based on news reports, it appears that as of June 5, Hamas still hadn’t received anything in writing from Biden. It appears they may have finally received a written draft by June 6. The group responded on June 11. That would mean a five-day gap, not the 12 that Blinken misleadingly claimed. Given the apparently significant discrepancies between what Biden announced on May 31 and what he submitted to Hamas in writing, it is not unusual that Hamas needed five days to respond. In any case, attempting to blame Hamas for Palestinian suffering constitutes another US attempt to shield Israel from blame over its mass killings in Gaza. That Blinken would lie is not surprising. Indeed, in the context of Israel, the Palestinians, and Gaza, the Biden administration has a history of untruths. But the sheer amount of lies that Blinken was able to pack into a short press conference is nonetheless astonishing. Recent diplomatic manoeuvring isn’t likely to end the war on Gaza, but it will serve Biden’s domestic aims. At the end of all this posturing, Biden will be able to tell US voters that he tried his best to end the war but that Hamas didn’t allow him to. Mohamad Elmasry is a professor in the Media Studies program at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies.

𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐂𝐡𝐞 𝐆𝐮𝐞𝐯𝐚𝐫𝐚 𝐒𝐭𝐨𝐨𝐝 𝐅𝐨𝐫

— Nasir Khan Today is the birthday anniversary of Che Guevara (June 14, 1928 – October 9, 1967). Che Guevara was and is an inspiration to all those who fight against and oppose imperialists and their lackeys throughout the world. The centre of that power was and still is the United States, the ‘leader’ of the warmongers, war criminals, weapon industries and its allies who further the cause of American hegemony and perpetuate the power of colonial powers like Israel. Che Guevara and Fidel Castro stood against the gangster policies of the United States and its wars of aggression. For instance, the ethnic cleansing in Palestine that is still going on is because of the power Zionists wield in America and direct the course of US foreign policies. In Iran, America and Britain toppled the democratic government of Dr Mossadegh in 1953 and reinstated the pliant regime of the Shah. The Washington rulers did the same with the socialist-democratic government of Allende in Chile. America has been the patron of all the right-wing dictatorships in Latin America. The people who stood up against the American domination in the western hemisphere were Fidel Castro and his comrades like Che. They were the people who liberated Cuba from the Batista dictatorship and heroically upheld the cause of freedom and independence of the island nation despite all the efforts of the US to destroy the Cuban revolution and the CIA’s hundreds of secret plans and attempts to kill Fidel Castro. —- “Whenever death may surprise us, let it be welcome if our battle cry has reached even one receptive ear and another hand reaches out to take up our arms.” —Che Guevara

𝐀 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐨𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐠𝐫𝐨𝐰𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐩𝐨𝐰𝐞𝐫 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐟𝐚𝐫-𝐫𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭 𝐩𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐢𝐞𝐬 𝐢𝐧 𝐄𝐮𝐫𝐨𝐩𝐞

---Nasir Khan The right-wing and far-right parties are on the victory march. The facade of social democracy is becoming obvious, and social democrats have become indistinguishable from conservatives. That is true of the most powerful Western countries, the UK, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Italy, etc. They supported old colonial powers earlier, and now they have only anti-Russia mantras to offer to their public whereas during the Soviet era, they were united against the S.U. What is almost comical is Sweden's role, which has joined NATO and will play as Washington says or presents as 'the defence policy' for the West. NATO led by war hawks, weapons producers and war profiteers are pushing the world to a nuclear Armageddon. Ordinary people have no say or influence. The powerful political and economic interests that rule Europe, North America, and the rest of the world have marginalized socialist parties and revolutionary groups.

Colonialism dehumanises Palestinians

Imperialism and colonialism devalue and dehumanise the colonised, which enables the Israeli genocide of Palestinians By Charlie Kimber, Socialist Worker, Monday 10 June 2024 Gaza has been decimated by Israeli colonisation efforts (Photo: wikimedia commons) Gaza has been decimated by Israeli colonialism (Photo: wikimedia commons) It is central to imperialism and colonialism that the lives of colonisers are worth far, far more than the lives of those they oppress and eliminate. That murderous arrogance is allied with racism—the white invader is more human, more advanced than the black and brown people he rules. That disgusting calculus is not some ancient prejudice. It is as modern as this weekend’s news of the Israel’s massacre at the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza. An Israeli bombardment killed at least 210 Palestinians and wounded more than 400. But this led to celebrations across Israel and in Western political circles because it saw four Israelis detainees freed. One Israeli equals 50 or more Palestinians. Nidal Abdo was in Nuseirat last Saturday when he described “something we never witnessed before, maybe 150 rockets fell in less than ten minutes, while we were running away more fell on the market”. “There are children torn apart and scattered in the streets, they wiped out Nuseirat, it is hell on earth.” The four who Israel seized back could have been freed without any violence if Binyamin Netanyahu’s regime had accepted one of the ceasefire deals. Instead the Zionists chose murder—and the deaths of more detainees. Abu Obeida, spokesperson for the Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas, said that some captives were killed during the Nuseirat operation. “By committing horrifying massacres the enemy was able to liberate a few of its prisoners but at the same time it killed some of them during the operation,” Obeida said. There are many unanswered questions about the raid. Video footage obtained by Al-Jazeera showed Israeli special forces using an aid truck and a civilian car to carry out the operation. An eyewitness described seeing what he thought was a truck carrying humanitarian aid before armed forces emerged from the vehicle and shot him. Israel justifies its murder of civilians by saying Hamas shelters among humanitarian infrastructure. The Nuseirat murders saw Israel use such a tactic. The US military provided “intelligence support” to Israel in the raid, according to the mainstream CBS News which cited two American officials. Some reports claimed that US forces were involved in the operation on the ground, and the fake aid trucks left from the US-built pier. Videos circulating on social media showed helicopters that were used in the operation to evacuate the Israeli captives taking off from near the US “humanitarian” pier. There is a direct ideological line from the mass “elimination of the natives” in Australia, Canada and the Americas to imperialist- backed murder in Israel today. This is how imperialism and colonialism have always behaved, and this won’t stop until revolution destroys the system that spawned such vile actions. Hundreds murdered in ravaged West Bank “Unprecedented bloodshed”. This is how Volker Turk, the United Nations (UN) high commissioner for human rights, described the West Bank. Israeli soldiers and settlers have murdered over 500 people in the West Bank since 7 October. Last Friday Israeli soldiers invaded the West Bank city of Jenin, murdering three Palestinians. They wounded at least 13 others. Jenin has been a particular target of the Israeli state because it is a stronghold for the resistance. Israeli forces also murdered a child in the Far’a Camp, and a student was also murdered in the Dhanaba suburb, east of the city of Tulkarm, on Monday. Israeli forces rounded up another 30 Palestinians on Monday, including a child and a woman, and detained them in Israeli jails.

US Drone Flights Over Gaza Supported Israeli Operation That Killed Over 200 Palestinians in Nuseirat

A team of US special operations soldiers and intelligence personnel based in Israel assisted in the operation by Dave DeCamp, Antiwar. com, June 9, 2024 Categories NewsTags Gaza, Israel, Palestine Israel received intelligence support from the US in its Saturday operation in central Gaza’s Nuseirat camp that killed over 200 Palestinians and freed four Israeli hostages. The intelligence support included information provided by US drone flights over Gaza. The US began flying MQ-9 Reaper drones over Gaza days after October 7 and deployed special operations forces to Israel, demonstrating that US military support for Israel goes beyond providing weapons. The Washington Post reported that a team of US special operations soldiers and intelligence personnel based at the US Embassy in Jerusalem provided the intelligence support. Besides the drone flights, the US provided communications intercepts, and Israel also received intelligence support from the UK. Local residents said the Israeli special forces who carried out the raid were disguised as displaced Palestinians from Rafah, and others entered the camp in an aid truck. The Israeli military denied it used an aid truck, but Israeli media reported Israeli soldiers meant to blend in as Arabs were part of the attack. Israeli warplanes pounded Nuseirat as the Israeli commandos on the ground moved to locate the hostages. An injured child is assisted at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in the aftermath of an Israeli strike in the central Gaza Strip, June 8, 2024. REUTERS/Doaa Rouqa According to Gaza’s Health Ministry, 274 Palestinians were killed in the attack on Nuseirat, and 678 were wounded. Gaza’s Media Office said 64 of the dead were children, and 57 were women. The total death toll in Gaza since October 7 has surpassed 37,000. Israel claimed it killed less than 100 people in the assault, while the US said it didn’t know how many people died. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan celebrated the assault and also acknowledged that “innocent people” were killed. “We, the United States, are not in a position today to make a definitive statement about that. The Israeli defense forces have put out one number. The Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry has put out another number,” Sullivan said. “But we do know this … Innocent people were tragically killed in this operation.” Hamas alleged that the Israeli attack killed three other Israeli hostages, including an American citizen. The Palestinian group released a video of three corpses, but they were unidentifiable.

How Trump and Netanyahu are Tag-Teaming Biden on Gaza

H. Scott Prosterman 06/06/2024 Oakland, Ca. (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – President Joe Biden has proposed a new peace plan for Gaza, which is provisionally accepted by Hamas. Israeli cooperation is harder to come by, as Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu (Bibi) has made it clear he’s only interested in prosecuting the war in Gaza to exterminate Hamas, even if it means killing 30 innocents for every real terrorist. It’s particularly disturbing to hear the IDF spokesman say in essence, “It was a success because we killed two leaders of Oct. 7, even though 35 innocents were killed in the operation.” That’s a sociopathic approach, and cavalier attitude about murdering innocent people. Biden’s plan calls for: A six-week ceasefire with Israeli forces withdrawing from “all populated areas” of Gaza. Some elderly and women hostages would be freed, in exchange for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners. Then, Palestinian civilians could return to what’s left of their homes (if any), and 600 trucks a day would be allowed in with humanitarian aid. Hamas and Israel would negotiate a permanent ceasefire, which that Biden said would last “as long has Hamas lives up to its commitments.” If negotiations take more than six weeks, the temporary ceasefire would extend while they are at the table. There will be an exchange for all remaining living hostages, including male soldiers. Israeli forces will withdraw from Gaza,and the permanent ceasefire would begin. A major reconstruction plan for Gaza, and the return of the “final remains” of hostages to their families. Joe Biden has become an embattled president for his continued support of the Israeli genocide in Gaza. Let’s call it what it is. Biden has paid lip service to the realities, but done nothing to withhold the US financial support that makes the assaults possible. Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu (Bibi) has already expressed intent to defy any US-led plans for a cease fire in Gaza, and he is held hostage from participating by his far-right government, who would quit if he went along. His right-wing coalition, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich have already threatened to collapse the government if the proposals are accepted. Considering the way Bibi undermined Democratic President Barack Obama in 2015, it’s surprising that Democrats Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries signed on to the invitation to have Bibi address a joint session of Congress again. But this is a genuine bi-partisanship effort to keep hope alive. Consider also that eight Republican senators vowed to oppose any affirmative appointments or legislation, in retaliation for Donald Trump’s conviction in New York State Court, where there is NO federal authority or reach. But they blame Biden! They promise a sequel of Sen. Mitch McConnell’s vow to prevent President Obama from accomplishing anything. As with Bibi, Donald Trump is running for president to stay out of jail. While Trump is now a convicted felon, and Bibi uses legislative Voodoo to delay facing his own criminal charges go away for bribery, corruption and breach of trust along with attacks on his own legal system. The parallels of their political careers, and swamping of their country’s political systems has become a threat to world stability. For now, Gaza is the fuse of the global tinderbox. Before these men served, no Israeli leader had ever dared to interfere in US electoral politics. Trump openly campaigned for Bibi. It’s almost as if they ran on the same ticket in 2020. The political survival of both men is dependent on generating political outrage among their bases, because they have nothing else to run on. The latest fresh outrage is the most vivid illustration yet of Republican efforts to defy centuries of US Government customs and boundaries, in fealty to Trump. Senate Republicans are violating Separation of Powers boundaries, by pressuring Judge Juan Merchan to NOT sentence former President Trump to prison, because “that could disrupt the likely GOP nominee’s ability to campaign ahead of the November election.” Excuse me, but campaigning is a privilege, not a natural or Constitutional right. Senator Thom Tillis argued, “Now he looks like he truly is being treated in a punitive way by the courts.” Don’t multiple felony convictions usually result in “punitive” sanctions? Not surprisingly, Sens. Ted Cruz and Rand Paul now expect the Supreme Court to overturn any conviction. That’s pure fantasy in the legal realm, because the SCOTUS does not get involved in state criminal cases, where no constitutional issues have been raised at trial. Ilya Somin, a George Mason University law professor said, “There is no procedure for a case like this to go directly from a state trial court to the federal Supreme Court. There just isn’t.” NBC News Video: “New signs of tension between Biden and Israel’s Netanyahu over war” While it would be unusual for Trump, or any defendant, to receive a prison sentence for a class E felony (1 in 10), his arrogant violations of numerous gag orders are part of the equation, and attacks on Court personnel would bring punitive sanctions against any citizen. These senators are engaging in unlawful intimidation of a judge when they say, “it would be an abuse of power,” and characterizing a valid legal decision as “weaponizing the Justice Department,” as Sen. John Cornyn claimed. Their arguments that, “any sentence that would impact Trump’s mobility or ability to communicate with voters could seriously undermine voters’ confidence in the fairness of the 2024 election,” is an act of intimidation, and a veiled threat of more widespread January 6 riots. Their argument rests on the fiction that Trump running for president affords him special protections, not available to other citizens. This ignores the fact that Trump has demonstrated a sense of imperial entitlement to break laws as it suits his authoritarian ambitions. By presuming to “instruct” a judge how to manage Trump’s case, these senators, who voted to overturn the 2020 Election; are openly promoting an end to our democratic system, and embrace of an openly Fascist authoritarian. Trump and Bibi have undermined their nation’s judicial systems with their paranoid “deep state conspiracy” claims. They behave like Fascist, and accuse their opponents of their own sins, just as Ronald Reagan taught them. At the same time, Trump has destroyed confidence is the US Court system, by stacking the courts with far-right ideologues, in fealty to him. Judge Aileen Cannon in Florida is a destructive example, having “spent so much time puzzling over minor issues that the trial would almost certainly be delayed beyond the presidential election in November.” It’s hard to know if she really believes there’s any valid legal reasoning for delaying his date with Justice in the Florida documents case, or is fearful for her life and family as many Trump turncoat-patriots have been. Now the guilty verdict is being spun to his political advantage, and immediately yielded an additional $34.8M for his campaign. Vladimir Putin and Bibi are waiting for Trump to return to office, to better consolidate their respective authoritarian regimes and war campaigns. After all, he gave both everything they wanted when he was president. Bibi’s plan is to prosecute the war until the November election, betting on Trump’s return, and approval to consolidate his hold on Gaza. But whereas Bibi has empowered and enabled the worst settler elements of Israeli society to ramp up the violence against West Bank Palestinians, by elevating Israeli “Proud Boys” to cabinet positions; Trump has shot steroids into the Christian Nationalist movement in the US, with brazen Fascist underpinnings. Both leaders made Faustian bargains with the most extreme elements of their political bases for political survival. But neither learned to play guitar like Robert Johnson. Biden’s passive-aggressive approach to Gaza is working against him on two fronts. His unqualified support for Israel alienates many progressive voters in the US (including Jews), who recognize the atrocity at hand. Yet he is so patronizing towards Jews that his policies prompted a Jewish employee of the Interior Dept. to resign in protest. In a column in The Guardian, Lily Greenberg Call said, “The president has weaponized the idea of Jewish safety to justify the atrocity in Gaza. I could no longer stand by. I resigned on Wednesday, 15 May – the 76th anniversary of the Nakba – because I could no longer serve at the pleasure of a president who refuses to stop another catastrophe.” She added, “Each day, I see photos of those displaced in Gaza, and I am reminded of my own family’s memory of loved ones killed in the Shoah – which, in turn, reminds me of the Nakba: the tragedy that occurred in 1948 when . . . 700,000 Palestinians were displaced from their homeland for the formation of today’s modern Israel. Shoah and Nakba mean the same thing in Hebrew and Arabic: catastrophe.” Meanwhile, the current Israeli offensive has displaced over 1 million people. This podcast of Lily Greenberg Call encapsulates many of the objections to Biden’s management of the crisis. She said, “We’ve seen the president continue to express unconditional support for Israel in Gaza, and using my community, the Jewish community as the justification for that – saying, ‘what’s happening to Palestinians in Gaza is necessary to keep the Jewish community safe. . . . It’s also disastrous for the Jewish communities around the world.” But consider that Trump has weaponized his phony concern for Jews far worse than Biden has; and that fueled his disastrous Abraham Accords, the US Embassy move to Jerusalem, and appointment of David Friedman as Ambassador to Israel. Republicans have become so emboldened, they assume that a man who could “shoot somebody on 5th Ave. and still be elected,” could be elected president from Riker’s Island. Filed Under: Donald Trump, Featured, Israel/ Palestine, Joe Biden, US politics About the Author H. Scott Prosterman is a writer and communications consultant in the San Francisco Bay Area, and holds an M.A. in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Michigan Share this: FacebookTwitterPinterestLinkedInMore

War on Gaza: US courts must hold Biden accountable

The courts now have the opportunity to hold the administration accountable and potentially save lives. By Miranda Cleland – 5 minutes read time. It is no secret that the Israeli military is carrying out genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza. At the human rights organisation where I work, Defense for Children International – Palestine, I’ve analysed and reported on more first-hand accounts of Palestinian child killings, injuries, arrests and torture than I can count. People around the world have seen for themselves the gut-wrenching images of charred Palestinian children’s bodies on social media; heard Israeli leaders spell out their intentions to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from Gaza; and from where I live in Washington, DC, witnessed the Biden administration continue to diplomatically support and send weapons to Israel with abandon. While President Joe Biden recently said that “no one is above the law”, in response to guilty verdicts in former President Donald Trump’s hush-money trial, his administration is seemingly committed to shielding Israel from accountability at any cost – even if that means tearing apart the rules-based international order. Biden has so far not only refused to support the ongoing case brought by South Africa at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), but he has actively rejected the preliminary findings of the World Court determining that Israel is “plausibly” committing genocide. Even more, Biden continues to undermine the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, after news emerged that he was pursuing arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for perpetrating war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. While the US court system seems to finally be holding Trump accountable for some of his litany of crimes, the courts have failed to stop Biden from furthering US complicity in the Israeli genocide of Palestinians. ‘Unflagging’ support On 10 June, an appellate court in San Francisco will have the opportunity to demonstrate that indeed no one, including the president of the United States, is above the law. The Center for Constitutional Rights, representing plaintiffs Defense for Children International – Palestine (DCI-P), Al-Haq, Palestinians in Gaza and Palestinian Americans, will ask a panel of judges to reconsider the district court’s decision to dismiss a lawsuit seeking to stop the US government from transferring more weapons to Israel during an ongoing genocide. The Center for Constitutional Rights brought the lawsuit against Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin in November, arguing that the Biden administration is complicit in Israel’s genocide of Palestinians by continuing to provide financial and diplomatic support, as well as weapons. In its response to the lawsuit, the Biden administration has maintained that the courts do not have purview over foreign policy, a legal concept known as the political question doctrine. In January, Palestinians and Palestinian Americans testified in a federal court in Oakland, California, about the impacts of US weapons and support to Israel on their families and loved ones in Gaza, and asked the judge to issue an emergency order to prevent the US from sending more weapons to Israel. Just days after the ICJ issued its first provisional measures in South Africa’s case against Israel, indicating that Israel is “plausibly” committing genocide in Gaza, the US federal judge dismissed the lawsuit against the Biden administration on jurisdictional grounds, but “implored” Biden to reconsider his “unflagging” support for Israel. Since then, Israeli forces have killed thousands more Palestinians in Gaza; repeatedly targeted journalists, doctors and humanitarian aid workers; besieged hospitals; bombed displacement camps; starved disabled Palestinian children and newborn babies to death; blocked humanitarian aid and basic necessities from reaching people in need; and more. Yet still, Biden has continued expediting the transfer of US funding and weapons to Israel. Not only have US weapons, warplanes and technology been used to directly carry out much of the Israeli military’s campaign of genocide, but American taxpayers have paid for it. Choice between life and death The Israeli military dropped American bombs – GBU-39 small diameter bombs, manufactured by Boeing – on a displacement camp in Rafah at the end of May, igniting the tents sheltering thousands of Palestinians. At least 45 Palestinians were killed in the attack, including women and children. These families were sheltering in a “safe area” after fleeing their homes elsewhere in Gaza, following evacuation orders from the Israeli military. Israeli planes bombed them anyway. While Biden has acknowledged that Israeli forces have used US weapons to kill civilians, and a report by the State Department last month said “it is reasonable to assess that [US] defense articles … have been used by Israeli security forces since October 7 in instances inconsistent with its [international humanitarian law] obligations”, they have done everything possible to keep the stream of US weapons flowing to Israel. The US courts have an opportunity in front of them: judges can choose to take a minimal step towards allowing DCI-P and the other plaintiffs to have a chance at holding the Biden administration accountable for its role in the genocide of Palestinians, or they can sit back and refuse to carry out checks on the executive branch. It is a choice, quite literally, between life and death. Israeli forces, emboldened by the so-called ironclad support of the Biden administration, have killed on average more than 60 Palestinian children every day since 7 October. That’s more than 15,000 children who won’t go back to school, or play with their friends, or hug their parents ever again. Those 15,000 children will not grow up and live in a free Palestine. If the US courts continue to green-light Biden’s impunity, more Palestinian children and their families will pay the price. It is a price that I, alongside many other voters in the US, are not willing to accept.

Open Letter to Joe Biden on Behalf of Jewish Americans: Stop Sending Israel Offensive Weapons

President Biden Delivers Remarks On The Middle East From The White House U.S. President Joe Biden announces a proposed ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza while delivering remarks in the State Dining Room at the White House on May 31, 2024 in Washington, DC. Biden also briefly spoke about former President Donald Trump’s conviction in a New York court one day earlier. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) The continuation of violence will continue to increase the heart-wrenching death toll, increase the number of calls for a ceasefire, and decrease your poll numbers — straight through the election. Jamie Beran, clommon Drewams, Jun 05, 2024 Editor’s Note: The following is an open letter addressed to U.S. President Joe Biden on Tuesday, June 5, 2024 from Jamie Beran, CEO of the progressive Jewish organization Bend the Arc: Jewish Action, a domestic-focused organization that explained that while it “does not work on policy toward Israel-Palestine or any foreign policy issues… chose to send this letter because of the urgency of the danger posed by the ongoing war to the safety of American Jews and to democracy” in the United States. The Honorable Joseph R. Biden The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue Washington, D.C. 20500 Dear President Biden, As American Jews deeply committed to justice, equity, and collective safety, we welcome your support for a permanent ceasefire plan. Since that announcement, unfortunately, Israeli officials have made it clear that they do not support such a plan. Time and time again, despite your calls to end this violence, you have not followed through with material action. With over one million Palestinian refugees now being forced to flee Rafah, their last guaranteed refuge, thousands of lives lost, and families of captives being fined in Israel for demanding a ceasefire, it is long past time to end U.S. support for these attacks. Now is the moment to make good on your promise to stop providing offensive weapons to the Israeli military. We as Jews — and particularly as Jews who have built and maintained strong, decades-long partnerships with all communities targeted by the rapidly encroaching white nationalist movement — know that historically, we are most in danger when democracy is weakened, and safest when it is strengthened. We cannot overestimate how challenging it has been to focus on our strictly domestic priorities at Bend the Arc during this time. One of Bend the Arc’s founding principles is to mobilize American Jews as we are: a multi-issue community. We care deeply about pursuing justice in the United States, for Jews and non-Jews alike. But since the horrors of October 7th, the violence in Israel-Palestine has permeated our borders to the point where it jeopardizes our collective safety. It impacts Jewish life in the U.S. and the safety of Jewish and Arab Americans. And, under the threat of an emboldened authoritarian movement at our doorstep, it threatens our shared ability to defend and build what will protect all of us — a vibrant, multifaith, multiracial democracy. When you named the deadly rally in Charlottesville as your motivation to run for President in 2020, we knew you shared our vision. We knew you saw that day as a harbinger of an alternate, likely irreversible, and very disturbing timeline for this nation — one further cemented by the January 6th insurrection and hardened each time Trump spells out his public plan to disassemble democracy. From our shared fights to appoint Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, to bolster our historic movement for labor unions, and to champion the Inflation Reduction Act, we know we want to continue to work together to improve this democracy. And from our shared fights to counter antisemitism and protect public education — and from your invitation to collaborate with the White House, Department of Justice, and the Department of Education — we know we want to continue to work together to defend this democracy. So today, as the Israeli government continues to ignore your red lines, has publicly vowed to continue to cross them, and has now promised at least seven more months of attacks, we, as American Jews, are sounding an alarm: U.S. support for continued violence in Gaza is putting American safety and U.S. democracy in danger. For the sake of the lives of all people in the region, and the safety and futures of all of us in the United States, we urge you to make good on your own promise to cease sending offensive munitions to Israel. We urge you to end the ongoing violence, and reach a resolution that brings all captive loved ones home to their families, ends mass atrocities, prevents world war, and begins to achieve self-determination for all Israelis and Palestinians. The status quo does not address our immediate safety. We’ve learned from history and the last eight months that explosions of global violence dramatically increase violence at home. Antisemitism, anti-Muslim and anti-Arab bigotry, racism, and xenophobia continue to surge. In these moments, leaders scramble for false solutions to quickly provide illusions of safety, ultimately increasing criminalization and decreasing the liberties required to keep democracy healthy. The status quo does not address our future safety. Your victory this November is the single most powerful tool we have to obstruct an irreversible timeline towards the end of U.S. democracy and our continuing work to build a society that serves everybody — from protecting voting rights, to enshrining the right to abortion, to creating just pathways for immigration. Your success as a candidate is tied inextricably to the people’s faith in your ability to keep us safe. As the violence overseas continues to intertwine itself across all of our domestic work, it too is now tied to your success and all of our safety. Since October, the majority of your voters among American Jewish Democrats and the vast majority of American Democrats have called for an end to this. The continuation of violence will continue to increase the heart-wrenching death toll, increase the number of calls for a ceasefire, and decrease your poll numbers — straight through the election. We’ve seen uncommitted movements nearly overtake your previous margin of victory in key regions and, in some cities, win. We’re seeing your base of young voters and progressives increasingly losing faith. Across our community, we’re seeing too many unaffiliated Jews — the second largest group of American Jews — go unheard. And across our partnerships with non-Jewish communities, we hear stories of alienation and isolation. Not acting on your own red lines, combined with the Israeli government’s promise to continue to violate them, will further erode your viability as a candidate in a race where every vote will matter. At Bend the Arc, we fight for the joyful future we deserve: an American society free from white supremacy, antisemitism, and racism. One where Black liberation is realized and where we are all safe and thriving, no matter what we look like or where we come from. Our vision shines brightest against the ominous backdrop of white nationalism’s threat. Your candidacy can also reintroduce that contrast and end a status quo that threatens to mirror the opposition. In doing so, we pray that you can regain the faith of voters and that we can work together to reintroduce the bright vision of the future required to inspire Americans in November. Sincerely, Jamie Beran CEO, Bend the Arc: Jewish Action

Israel’s war on Gaza live: At least 75 killed in central Gaza in past day

By Stephen Quillen and Mersiha Gadzo Aljazeera, 5 Jun 2024 Morgues are overflowing and hospitals are struggling to cope with a surge of casualties in Deir el-Balah, medical sources tell Al Jazeera, as at least 75 people are killed in the past 24 hours by Israeli strikes on central Gaza. Israel announced its ground forces have moved into the Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza’s Deir el-Balah, while fighter jets and artillery attack targets in the area. Hamas says it cannot agree to any ceasefire deal unless Israel makes a “clear” commitment to a permanent truce and a complete withdrawal from Gaza, as Prime Minister Netanyahu reiterates the war will continue until the group is “eliminated”. At least 36,550 Palestinians have been killed and 82,959 wounded in Israel’s war on Gaza since October 7. The death toll in Israel from Hamas’s attacks is at least 1,139 with dozens of people still held captive in Gaza.