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.