[This is an ongoing post, updated periodically, in which Editor of the Quick Thoughts Series on Jadaliyya provides commentary on the war on Gaza. This commentary may or may not appear elsewhere on the author’s social media.]
December 5: Toponyms
It is a persistent fad among Israel flunkies to invoke Palestinian toponymic surnames that reference foreign territory to make the argument that these individuals have no business living in their homeland. Thus, surnames like Masri (“Egyptian”), Mughrabi (“Moroccan”), Kurdi (“Kurdish”), Halabi (“Aleppine”), Baghdadi, Hijazi, Hourani, Irani, etc. are presented as proof positive the individuals concerned are not really from Palestine, cannot therefore claim rights within it, and should permanently depart to the territory identified in their surname.
There are needless to say multiple fallacies with this approach. A toponymic surname may well indicate foreign origins, but not necessarily so. It could also have originated because the family, or a prominent ancestor, had a particular connection with that territory on account of e.g. commerce, a government posting, or military service. Or because a prominent individual from that territory married into a local family, giving it its current name.
But let’s assume that in all cases where a toponymic surname references foreign territory, all members of that family originally hail from those lands. So what? Does it mean anything if that family established itself in Palestine generations if not hundreds of years ago? And in the specific context of the point Israel flunkies think they are making, shouldn’t it mean something if these families arrived in Palestine well before the first Zionist settlers arrived in Palestine from Europe at the turn of the twentieth century?
Israel’s addiction to “transfer” and to irrelevant claims of ancient title notwithstanding, not a single one of these toponymically-targetted Palestinians could show up in Egypt, Morocco, or anywhere else, and on the strength of their surname claim citizenship or so much as a tourist visa. The premise is thoroughly absurd, even by hasbara standards.
By way of comparison, imagine an Irish-American or Italian-American showing up in Dublin or Rome and, in insufferably loud American English, demanding citizenship because “my surname, Genovese” or “my surname, Galway”, constitutes proof of entitlement. Or, more to the point, that the US Citizenship and Immigration Service begins revoking citizenship and expelling entire families on the basis of such surnames.
Even within Europe, there are plenty of Brits with French toponymic surnames, and the House of Windsor was until the First World War known as the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. Yet, since Brexit, not one of these qualifies for a work permit within the European Union on this basis.
The deceit and racism motivating such arguments is further revealed by what is left unstated. Palestinians ethnically cleansed in 1948 with toponymic surnames referencing the towns and villages from which they were expelled are never told to “go back where you came from”. Similarly, non-Palestinian Arabs with surnames derived from Palestinian cities, such as Qudsi (“Jerusalemite”) or Khalili (“Hebronite”) are never invited to take up residence where according to the standards of Israel flunkies they rightfully belong.
Most tellingly, of course, the surnames of Israeli Jews that, before being Hebraized, referenced various towns and villages in central and eastern Europe are treated as if they are entirely meaningless.
12 November: Amsterdamned
The mayor of Amsterdam, Femke Halsema, today released a 12-page report on the events in Amsterdam during the past week. It provides the most detailed account we have thus far, and corrects some details in my earlier posts on the matter. For example, and contrary to what I reported, the police did in fact arrest a few Israeli hooligans (ten in total), but appear to have quickly released them as well.
The above notwithstanding, Halsema like virtually every other Dutch politician continues to frame the disturbances within the broader framework of the long history of anti-Semitism rather than the specific one of opposition to continued Israeli participation in international sports competition while the state engages in genocide against the Palestinian people, or more directly of Israeli hooligans running amok in the streets of Amsterdam. As if the Maccabi Tel Aviv hooligans were singled out because they are Jewish, rather than on account of their violent and vile conduct. As if Israelis were singled out not because they were presumed to be visiting Maccabi supporters but because of Jew hatred.
The report does provide evidence of anti-Semitic expressions, primarily by a taxi driver, and then goes on to conflate any and all hostility to rampaging Israeli hooligans and indeed to Israel and its genocide with anti-Semitism. (According to the report, Israel's foreign minister went one further, and in a telephone call with Halsema invoked the Holocaust).
As previously noted, the fatal flaw in the anti-Semitism/pogrom framework is that there is no evidence of attacks on Dutch Jews on the night in question, nor is any provided in the report. In fact, as the report recounts, the Amsterdam Jewish community held its commemoration of Kristallnacht in the city's Portuguese Synagogue - a well-known landmark - on the same night as the football match. Yet the purportedly anti-Semitic hordes made no effort to attack or disrupt this event, or any other Jewish target that was not believed to be associated with Maccabi Tel Aviv's contingent of genocidal thugs.
Given the authorities' understanding of what happened and why, the report recounts in great detail the additional measures they have since taken to provide extra protection to the Amsterdam Jewish community and its institutions. While these measures appear to have been taken as a general precaution rather than in response to specific threats, it's hard to quibble with any decision taken for the protection of communities who feel themselves to be at risk and are constantly being told that their neighbours want to slaughter them.
Yet in doing so the report reveals the gross discrepancy in Halsema’s and the authorities' response to different forms of racism and discrimination. Indeed, the systematically downplays the anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian racism that was so very evident throughout the events in question, and for that matter the severity of the conduct engaged in by the Israeli thugs. It's inconceivable this would have been given the same treatment in the report had it been discussing a visiting Arab team directing similar abuse at Amsterdam's Jews.
In contrast to a whole series of meetings with Amsterdam's Jewish community leaders and organizations, and constant communication with the Israeli embassy and Israeli officials, there was only minimal communication with the Arab or Muslim community and none whatsoever with Palestinians. And while the report recounts explicit calls to attack mosques (presumably from the nativist far right rather than the visiting fascist thugs), there is no indication the authorities considered these houses of worship worthy of protection.
Clashes between hooligans affiliated with opposing football teams are hardly a novelty, but what happened in Amsterdam was fundamentally different. Rather than pitting supporters of the home team against those of the visitors, violence erupted between visiting hooligans and residents of the home city who had nothing to do with football but rather were presumed to be of Middle Eastern origin or visibly in solidarity with the Palestinian people.
The explanation for this is to be found not in anti-Semitism, but in a somewhat opaque sentence on page 4 of the report: "Concerns centered particularly on the aggression shown by Maccabi supporters and the reaction of taxi drivers."
Rather than drawing the appropriate conclusions, Dutch politicians have engaged in endless grandstanding, seeking to outbid each other in demonizing the country's Arab and Muslim citizens, and its Moroccan community in particular, while resorting to increasingly ghastly historical comparisons to characterise last week's events.
There’s an ongoing power struggle in the country’s increasingly chaotic politics. Not only between left and right, but particularly between the right and far right, and within the expanding far right. And it is being waged on the backs and at the expense of society’s most vulnerable members. Not just by the right, but by all of them. And their political hooliganism is not expected to end anytime soon.
Representatives of a civilization that within living memory gassed their fellow human beings to death on an industrial scale in purpose-built facilities, and literally burned humans in ovens, now lecture others about norms, values, and anti-Semitism without a scintilla of self-awareness.
The link below contains links to both the Dutch original and English translation of the report in question.
https://www.amsterdam.nl/nieuws/nieuwsoverzicht/raadsbrief/
11 November: Pogrom?
The most telling reality regarding the recent events in Amsterdam is that not one member of the Dutch political elite - neither its monarch, nor its prime minister, nor its government or any of its ministers, nor any party leader, nor the mayor of Amsterdam, nor its police chief, nor any of its leading journalists or commentators or public figures or civic institutions - has uttered a single word in support of a single Dutch citizen assaulted by foreign mobs on Dutch soil.
Rather, like other Western leaders, this elite has uniformly reserved its solidarity for the racist, genocidal Israeli thugs who rampaged through Amsterdam, physically assaulting Dutch citizens and vandalizing Dutch property, on the sole basis that they assumed these citizens and properties to be Arab or in sympathy with the Palestinian people.
The self-proclaimed guardians of The Netherlands and the security of its people then added insult to injury by comparing the resulting attacks against the visiting fascist thugs to the darkest days of Dutch history, entirely oblivious to the reality that it is in fact they who have collectively legitimized the closest thing to a pogrom witnessed on Dutch soil since 1945.
Welcome to twenty-first century Europe, and to the Netherlands in particular.
10 November: Thugs and Hooligans
It’s now pretty clear what happened in Amsterdam this week. But first some background.
For over a decade the football governing bodies FIFA, the International Federation of Football Associations, and UEFA, the Union of European Football Associations, have consistently rejected demands to suspend or expel the Israel Football Association (IFA) and individual Israeli football clubs from their ranks.
FIFA and UEFA have been formally requested to do so by the Palestinian Football Association (PFA) on multiple occasions, and have additionally been called upon to adopt measures against the IFA by a variety of activists and fans who launched the Red Card Israeli Racism campaign.
The demands to sanction Israeli football were made on a variety of grounds: that Israel is an institutionally racist state and should be treated no differently than apartheid South Africa (suspended by FIFA in 1961) and Rhodesia (suspended in 1970); that the IFA includes clubs based in illegal settlements in the illegally-occupied Palestinian territories; that the IFA discriminates against Palestinian clubs; that IFA teams discriminate against Palestinian players; that Israel in 2019 prevented the PFA cup final from taking place when it prohibited the Khadamaat Rafah team traveling from the Gaza Strip to the West Bank to play against Balata FC; that Israel has killed and maimed Palestinian players; that Israeli clubs systematically tolerate racist and genocidal conduct by supporters; and a variety of other grounds, most recently that Israel is perpetrating genocide against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip that has resulted in the killing of numerous Palestinian players, officials, and staff.
The PFA petitions were based not only on general principles or international human rights treaties, but rather, and primarily, FIFA’s and UEFA’s own regulations, which explicitly prohibit the conduct Israel, the IFA, and various IFA teams are engaged in.
On each occasion FIFA and UEFA have rejected the PFA’s and Red Card Israeli Racism’s demands on the grounds that sport and politics should not mix. On the same principle, namely that politics and sport must be strictly separated, teams and players who engage in gestures of solidarity with the Palestinians, or display symbols such as the Palestinian flag, have been fined and punished.
Glasgow’s Celtic FC, which strongly identifies with the Palestinian cause, is in this respect the most notable example. In 2014 it was fined GBP 16,000 after fans raised the Palestinian flag during a Champions League qualifier against KR Reykjavik of Iceland. In 2022 Celtic was fined a further GBP 8,619 after fans displayed hundreds of Palestinian flags during a Champions League match against Israel’s Hapoel Be’ersheva. In the latter case Celtic supporters responded by raising not only the full amount of the fine, but also a six-figure sum that was promptly disbursed to various Palestinian charities.
Elsewhere, individual players have also been sanctioned. In one of many such examples, in January 2024 the Asian Football Confederation fined Jordan’s Mahmoud Al-Mardi for displaying the slogan “Palestine is the Cause of the Honourable”, which he had imprinted onto his undershirt, after he scored a goal against Malaysia during the Asian Cup.
FIFA’s position on the strict separation between sports and politics is at least in theory an arguable proposition, but it was never consistently applied. Fans of Ajax, the Dutch club that hosted Maccabi Tel Aviv for the 7 November Europa League match, for example, routinely waved giant Israeli flags in support of their team, and were consistently able to do so freely. It was only when supporters of opposing clubs began waving Palestinian flags in response that action was taken by the football authorities to ban both symbols.
More importantly, the reasoning adopted by FIFA and UEFA ultimately proved to be a complete sham enveloped in brazen hypocrisy. Specifically: within days of the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, both FIFA and UEFA suspended not only the Russian Football Union but also every single Russian football club. The entire process literally took less than a week. And in contrast to the suppression of gestures in support of the Palestinians, explicit solidarity with Ukraine, and the prominent display of the Ukrainian flag, were if anything encouraged.
As for the latest PFA application to FIFA to sanction the IFA on a variety of grounds, submitted this May and supported among others by the Asian Football Confederation, FIFA President Gianni Infantino has ensured his organization moves even slower than the International Criminal Court (ICC). Most recently, and after months of foot-dragging and refusing to even put the PFA petition on the FIFA agenda, Infantino in October announced that an investigation would be conducted to assess the PFA’s case, but refused to announce a date by which this would be completed or its results announced. Had he behaved similarly in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, he would have been dismissed faster than you can say “Infantino is a tool”.
It is against this background, and also that of the long- and well-established reputation of Maccabi Tel Aviv’s fanbase for uninhibited genocidal racism, that pro-Palestinian activists sought to have the Ajax-Maccabi Tel Aviv fixture of 7 November cancelled. When they predictably failed, the activists announced they would be holding a protest at the Ajax stadium, the Johan Cruijff ArenA, on the day of the game. Just as predictably, this too was rejected by the Amsterdam municipality and police, who ordered the activists to hold their protest at a location some distance from the stadium. The activists complied, and their demonstration passed without incident.
The violence that has been in the news for the past several days did not start during or after the game, but rather the day before it and even earlier. Several thousand Maccabi Tel Aviv fans, as is common for such events, had traveled to Amsterdam to attend their team’s away game. But rather than conducting themselves responsibly, or engaging in hooliganism directed at supporters of the opposing team or random passers-by – phenomena which are not uncommon in the world of football – the Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters set their sights on a different target altogether: Arabs.
Not only do the Israeli club’s supporters have a reputation for genocidal racism (their motto is “Death to the Arabs”, supplemented with the chant, “May Your Village Burn”), but many of those who traveled to Amsterdam have during the past year served in the Israeli military’s genocidal campaign against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
Imagining themselves to have the same liberties they are accustomed to in Israel, they began attacking private homes in Amsterdam that had the Palestinian flag on display in solidarity with Gaza; assaulting individuals of Arab appearance, including a number of Dutch-Moroccan taxi drivers; vandalized a number of taxis, completely destroying one; and more generally taunted those within earshot with chants of “We’ll Fuck the Arabs”, “Fuck you Palestine”, “Let the IDF Win to Fuck the Arabs”, and “There is No School in Gaza Because there are No Children Left”.
Simply put, these foreign terrorists – arming themselves with sticks, bicycle chains, and various other implements – rampaged through the center of the Dutch capital, subjecting the city and its residents to a racist reign of terror. In this regard Asha ten Broeke reports that for days before the match, chat groups of pro-Palestinian activists had been warning members not to wear keffiyehs, Palestinian buttons, or other visibly Palestinian items in public because such people were being physically assaulted and spat upon by Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters.
The Amsterdam police for the most part let their honoured Israeli guests go their merry way, and refrained from intervening. Indeed, there are several videos of police cars simply driving past physical assaults and similar incidents, as if attacks on residents by visiting Israeli thugs is completely normal behaviour. In one incident recounted by Ten Broeke that was filmed, Israeli hooligans threw a serving of French fries with mayo at an individual’s head then physically assaulted their prey. In this case the police did make an arrest – but of the victim rather than perpetrators.
As the game approached, the Israeli supporters were escorted to the stadium by the Amsterdam police force, apparently also a common practice in such circumstances but in this case likely intensified given widespread condemnation of Israel’s genocide and the attendant security risks. On their way to the stadium, gangs of Israeli supporters continued with their violent behaviour, all the while chanting their genocidal slogans. The Amsterdam police force is no less racist than its counterparts elsewhere in Europe or for that matter the West, and did not arrest a single one of the Israeli hooligans. It doesn’t take much imagination to understand how the police escort would have responded to supporters of an Arab club marching through the center of Amsterdam chanting “Death to the Jews” and assaulting anyone wearing a kippa.
Once inside the stadium, and before the game started, the Israeli supporters observed the minute of silence commemorating the hundreds who recently died in floods in Spain’s Valencia with loud whistles, more racist chanting, and setting off flares.
As the supporters left the stadium, their genocidal racism now intensified by the 5-0 drubbing administered to their club by Ajax, they essentially picked up where they had left off before entering the stadium earlier that evening. This time, their intended victims fought back.
According to some accounts the response was prepared and organized, according to others it was spontaneous. Most likely there were elements of both. Those who confronted the Israeli hooligans have typically been described as primarily consisting of Dutch Moroccans, with aggrieved taxi drivers prominent among them. More accurately they were primarily youths, consisting of many Amsterdammers of Arab origin but others as well.
In contrast to their previous inertia the Amsterdam police now swung into action, arresting approximately 60 of the Dutch defenders but again not a single Israeli. All but 4 were later released. Many more arrests are expected in the coming days and weeks based on CCTV footage and the like. But these too won’t include a single Israeli because the hooligans quickly left The Netherlands and enjoy total impunity in Israel. Rather, they are playing the heroic victim to popular and official acclaim in Israel, and indeed that of Western elites and media.
The energetic support of the Amsterdam police notwithstanding, the Israeli hooligans discovered that fistfights on the streets of Amsterdam are somewhat more challenging than killing babies in Gaza. A number were beaten up, and five required hospitalization (all were discharged from hospital the following day).
At this point Kafka and Alice in Wonderland jointly seized control. In the perceptive words of Philip Proudfoot, “Probably the first time in history we’ve seen world leaders offer their thoughts and prayers to football hooligans”. This is if anything a massive understatement.
Almost immediately, Western leaders and media commentators began describing the events as a “pogrom”. Not by genocidal Israeli thugs, but rather against them. As if the Amsterdam police force encouraged attacks against the Israelis rather than allowing Israeli gangs to rampage through the city they are paid to keep secure.
Instead of being correctly framed as a confrontation between Israeli hooligans and those they sought out, it was instantly transformed into a massive “Jew hunt”. Genocide Joe, who still maintains he has seen images that don’t exist of beheaded Israeli babies, likened the disturbances in Amsterdam initiated by the Israeli hooligans to the rise of Nazism and preliminary phases of the Holocaust. He was far from alone in this respect. That this was an anti-Semitic rampage and nothing else and nothing less immediately became an article of faith.
With the commemoration of 1938’s 9-10 November Kristallnacht, a key milestone on the way to the Holocaust, only days away, the comparisons flew fast and furious. As if it was Jewish properties and not those displaying Palestinian symbols that were being vandalized, and as if those presumed to be Jews rather than of Arab appearance that were being assaulted. Selective outrage, and selective condemnation, enjoyed what is arguably its moment of greatest triumph.
For these attacks to even remotely qualify as anti-Semitic, a characterization which from the very first moment was and continues to be repeated as incontestable fact, the targets would have had to be not Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters or Israelis more generally, but Jews. In other words, Dutch Jews in Amsterdam, their institutions, and properties should have been prominent among the victims, or at least recognizably so. Yet there is no evidence Dutch Jews or their properties were targeted, or that members of this community felt sufficiently threatened on the night of 7 November to seek protection from the Amsterdam police or authorities. As this article demonstrates, the pogrom hoax has also served to once again divert attention away from the very real genocide in the Gaza Strip, and now Israel’s invasion of Lebanon as well.
Given that the Amsterdam Jewish community was subject to constant sensationalist reports about an ongoing anti-Semitic pogrom in their city, fears among its members that the attacks against Israeli football supporters would expand to include their community are entirely understandable. But they didn’t, because there was no pogrom and the violence was directed at real and perceived Israeli football hooligans rather than Jews.
It’s a crucial distinction. But it is also one that has been systematically ignored by Western media and politicians. Their effortless conflation of football thugs with Israelis with Jews – particularly on the eve of the Kristallnacht commemoration, in the city of Amsterdam that saw the vast majority of its Jewish population exterminated during the Holocaust – serves a transparently political agenda. A reminder, at the height of the Gaza genocide, that the real victims in 2024 are not Palestinians but those slaughtering them.
Just as history commenced only on 7 October 2023, Asha ten Broeke notes that the response to the Amsterdam disturbances has simply elided anything and everything that transpired before the end of the Ajax-Maccabi Tel Aviv match. Even by the abysmal standards set by the media during the past year with respect to Israel’s genocidal campaign in the Gaza Strip, coverage of Amsterdam very successfully plumbed new depths.
Among the most hysterical reactions has been that of Dutch strongman Geert Wilders, who although not in government effectively rules The Netherlands. Wilders is of partly Indonesian background, and during his youth was due to his appearance often taunted by racist classmates. Rather than resolving to strive for a society free of racism, he became a peroxide blond and decided that he would defeat his tormenters by becoming the most accomplished racist of them all. A stint working on an Israeli kibbutz, where he was treated no differently than other unpaid labour, also transformed him into a fanatic Zionist and Israel flunkie. He for example continues to insist that Jordan is Palestine, and has been a vociferous genocide cheerleader from the moment it commenced.
After 9/11 Wilders found his calling, and it was Islamophobia. Given the demography of The Netherlands, his poisonous bile was specifically directed at Dutch Moroccans, who he would like to see stripped of their citizenship and deported. Indeed, he was in 2016 convicted by a Dutch court for a 2014 appearance in which he promised his audience that he would “arrange” for “less Moroccans” in The Netherlands.
Wilders is very much the ideological heir of the wartime National Socialist Movement (NSB), the blood and soil Dutch fascist party which held that one could not be both Jewish and Dutch. The NSB enthusiastically collaborated with the Nazis during the 1940-1945 occupation, was outlawed after liberation, and its leaders (e.g. Anton Mussert and Rost van Tonningen) were variously executed or committed suicide.
Wilders’s rabid pronouncements proved too much even for the right-wing liberal (i.e. conservative) VVD, which in 2004 expelled him from its ranks. He thereafter formed the Party of Freedom (PVV), which is not a political party in the normal sense but rather a personal fiefdom with opaque funding solely and wholly controlled by Wilders.
Wilders won the 2023 Dutch parliamentary elections on the strength of his positions. But since no party ever wins a majority in Dutch elections, he had to form a coalition with several other parties. This particular coalition of pandemonium includes Wilders’s former party, VVD, which since Mark Rutte’s departure to NATO is led by Dilan Yeşilgöz, the Turkish-born daughter of a Kurdish trade unionist who received political asylum in The Netherlands in the wake of Turkey’s 1980 military coup. If the younger Yeşilgöz, a fanatic firebrand who can easily give Britain’s Suella Braverman a run for her money, has her way, her father would have been sent straight back to Turkey and left to the mercy of its generals. Their partners in crime are the Farmer-Citizen Movement (BBB), essentially an agribusiness front organization determined to achieve irreversible climate emergency before the end of the decade, and New Social Contract, another new party led by former Christian Democrat Pieter Omtzigt. Omtzigt, who made a name for himself exposing government malfeasance and structural racism in what is known as the Child Benefits Affair, surprised many of his supporters when he not only sold his soul to Wilders but did so for a pittance.
Wilders’s coalition partners’ condition for joining his government was that Wilders forgo the premiership (to which he would normally be entitled) because he would be too great an embarrassment on the European and international stage. Wilders agreed, and nominated Dick Schoof, a former spy chief best known for authorizing the illegal surveillance of Dutch citizens, particularly Muslims. Cynics responded with the observation that if the elections reflected popular sentiment that government wasn’t listening to the citizen, they now had a prime minister who has been listening to them more than anyone else.
Wilders has even by his own standards reached new heights of hysterical rhetoric in response to the events in Amsterdam. Part of his project is to present anti-Semitism not as a European phenomenon that was exported to the Middle East, but rather a core Islamic value that is being imported into Europe by immigrants, and can only be extirpated by the mass expulsion of Muslim citizens, who not only don’t belong in the country but should never have been granted citizenship. His prescription goes somewhat further than that of Donald Trump, whose stated intentions for mass expulsion concern undocumented residents and other non-citizens.
Refusing to utter a word in defense of Dutch citizens violently assaulted by Israeli thugs, Wilders has instead spoken of “A pogrom in the streets of Amsterdam”, “Muslims with Palestinian flags hunting down Jews”, “A Jew hunt in Amsterdam” and to top it all off, “We have become the Gaza of Europe”. His solution is to “denaturalize” (i.e. revoke the citizenship) of “radical Muslims” and expel them from the country. His rhetoric about reclaiming The Netherlands from “Islam” would have one think he’s about to reconquer Andalusia and adopt the measures imposed by Ferdinand and Isabella.
Wilders’s Islamophobia is only part of the story. There’s also considerable domestic politics at play. He has demanded the immediate resignation of Amsterdam mayor Femke Halsema, who previously led the Green Left Party which represents everything Wilders hates, and during her tenure was the target of more misogyny by his supporters and other right-wing activists than in the entire history of Islam. Although she has been a loyal soldier repressing and demonizing pro-Palestinian activists during the past year with the familiar canard of anti-Semitism, Wilders clearly smells blood and is determined to extract his pound of flesh. He has also attacked the police in absolutely hysterical fashion and condemned the government for what he terms its limp response.
This is best understood as Wilders seeking to ensure that it is he and not Schoof who rules the roost, and to establish power and influence over institutions independently of formal government authority. It’s the authoritarian playbook, which Wilders hopes will eventually catapult him to official leadership of the country.
Seeking to maintain their own fiefdoms, Halsema, Schoof, coalition partners, and other objects of Wilders’s ire have for all intents and purposes adopted the pogrom/Kristallnacht 2024 narrative and gotten with the program. Even the Dutch monarch, King Willem-Alexander, has gotten in on the act. Collectively, they have not only demonized their own citizens and thrown them under the bus in defense of violently racist Israeli thugs, but knowingly and willingly dragged their country’s reputation through the mud in the most public fashion possible as they jostle for power and position against each other.
Whichever way the internal power struggle plays out, massive repression of opposition to Israel’s genocide in The Netherlands now seems all but certain. Indeed, Mayor Halsema, the Amsterdam police, and government have already placed the city under a state of emergency banning all demonstrations for at least the coming week. The decision, confirmed by the judiciary, was challenged by hundreds of pro-Palestinian and anti-genocide protestors on 10 November, several days after the last Israeli hooligan left for safer shores. Dozens were arrested at this demonstration, which by all accounts was entirely peaceful.
4 November: The Balfour Declaration
On 2 November 1917, Great Britain issued the Balfour Declaration. The document is of enormous significance because it transformed Zionism from a political aspiration into a credible project.
The First Zionist Congress, convened in the Swiss City of Basel in 1897, recognized that great power sponsorship was vital to the success of Zionism. Thus Article 4 of the Basel Program called for “Preparatory steps for obtaining the governmental approvals necessary for the achievement of the Zionist goal”. For the next two decades, Zionist leaders spent as much effort obtaining imperial sponsorship as they did to promoting what the Basel Program called “The expedient promotion of the settlement of Jewish agriculturists, artisans, and businessmen in Palestine”.
In 1917 the Zionist movement finally succeeded. With the Balfour Declaration it achieved the sponsorship of the world’s most powerful state. Issued as a personal letter from British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to the prominent British Zionist Walter Rothschild, it stated in relevant part:
His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done to prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.
Although it was a personal letter, the Balfour Declaration represented the policy of the British government. While sent under Balfour’s name to Rothschild, historians have speculated that the primary author may not have been Balfour but possibly his cabinet colleague Alfred Milner or Conservative politician William Ormsby-Gore. And although Rothschild was the letter’s recipient, the British government’s main counterpart in drafting the letter was in fact Chaim Weizmann, the president of the British Zionist Federation who would later become Israel’s first president.
The Balfour Declaration, which went through a number of drafts, was the result of two sets of consultations: one within the British government, and a second between the British government and British Jewish leaders, both Zionist and anti-Zionist. The influence of the latter, who opposed Zionism as antithetical to Jewish integration in Europe, can be seen in the Declaration’s final clause.
Although Palestinians at that time constituted some ninety-five per cent of the population of Palestine, not one of them was consulted in the process that led to the Balfour Declaration. This explains both why they are referenced merely as the “existing non-Jewish communities”, and why no reference is made to their political rights.
As Balfour would explicitly admit in a letter to George Curzon in 1919: “The weak point of our position is of course that in the case of Palestine we deliberately and rightly decline to accept the principle of self-determination.”
As Balfour would further inform Curzon:
In Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country, though the American [King-Crane] Commission has been going through the form of asking what they are … The Four Great Powers are committed to Zionism. And Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land … In short, so far as Palestine is concerned, the Powers have made no statement of fact which is not admittedly wrong, and no declaration of policy which, at least in the letter, they have not always intended to violate.
The King-Crane Commission mentioned above, was dispatched to the region by the US government in 1919 to gauge public sentiment about its future. With respect to Zionism it was initially “predisposed in its favour”, but reached very different conclusions once confronted with reality. So far as the Balfour Declaration was concerned, the Commission noted that if “Jewish national home” meant a state, “the erection of such a Jewish State [cannot] be accomplished without the gravest trespass upon the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine. The fact came out repeatedly in the Commission's conferences with Jewish representatives, that the Zionists looked forward to a practically complete dispossession of the present non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine.” It further noted that “No solution which is merely local or has only a single people in mind can avail."
Noting overwhelming Palestinian opposition to Zionism, the Commission presciently observed:
No British officer, consulted by the Commissioners, believed that the Zionist program could be carried out except by force of arms. The officers generally thought that a force of not less than 50,000 soldiers would be required even to initiate the program … Decisions requiring armies to carry out, are sometimes necessary. But they are surely not gratuitously to be taken in the interest of a serious injustice.
As Israel flunkies like to constantly repeat, “The war was started by the Arabs”.
The 1917 Balfour Declaration was but one of three incompatible commitments made by the British during the First World War regarding the future of Palestine, all before the first British soldier set foot in it and years before the British Mandate commenced in 1922.
The first, known as the Hussein-McMahon Correspondence, was a series of letters exchanged in 1915-1916 between Henry McMahon, the British High Commissioner in Egypt (at the time a British protectorate) and the Ottoman-appointed Hashemite Sharif of Mecca, Hussein bin Ali (the great-great grandfather of Jordan’s King Abdallah II). Their Correspondence set out the terms of a British-Hashemite partnership pursuant to which the Hashemites would rebel against the Ottomans (what became known as the Arab Revolt) and align with London (to the exclusion of France) after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire.
In addition to direct assistance to the Arab Revolt, Sharif Hussein on 14 July 1915 demanded that
England acknowledge the independence of the Arab countries, bounded on the north by Mersina and Adana up to the 37th degree of latitude, on which degree fall Birijik, Urfa, Mardin, Midiat, Jezirat (ibn ‘Umar), Amadia, up to the border of Persia; on the east by the borders of Persia up to the Gulf of Basra; on the south by the Indian Ocean, with the exception of the position of the [British colony of] Aden to remain as it is; on the west by the Red Sea, the Mediterranean Sea up to Mersina.
On 24 October McMahon replies as follows:
I have realized … from your last letter that you regard this question as one of vital and urgent importance. I have, therefore, lost no time in informing the Government of Great Britain of the contents of your letter and it is with great pleasure that I communicate to you on their behalf the following statement…
The two districts of Mersina and Alexandretta and portions of Syria lying to the West of the Districts of Damascus, Homs, Hama and Aleppo cannot be said to be purely Arab and should be excluded from the limits demanded.
With the above modification, and without prejudice to our existing treaties with Arab chiefs, we accept those limits.
As for those regions lying within those frontiers wherein Great Britain is free to act without detriment to the interest of her ally, France, I am empowered in the name of the Government of Great Britain to give the following assurance and make the following reply to your letter:
- Subject to the above modifications, Great Britain is prepared to recognize and support the independence of the Arabs in all the regions within the limits demanded by the Sharif of Mecca.
The correspondence is worth quoting in detail because both McMahon and Hussein go to considerable length to define the areas that will (and will not) be included in the territory Great Britain will recognize as part of an independent Arab state. For our purposes the relevant details are Hussein’s explicit incorporation of Palestine (“on the West by the Mediterranean Sea”), and Britain’s explicit exclusion of those “portions of Syria lying to the West of the [Ottoman] Districts of Damascus, Homs, Hama, and Aleppo”. The latter lie north of Palestine and correspond to Lebanon. In other words, London accepted that Palestine would be included as part of the Arab state whose independence it would “recognize and support”.
The second commitment is known as the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement, named after British diplomat Mark Sykes and his French counterpart François Georges-Picot. At around the same time as McMahon was corresponding with Hussein, Britain, France, and Czarist Russia – by this point collectively committed to the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire as a war aim – were secretly negotiating its division among themselves.
Given Palestine’s enormous religious significance, Protestant England, Catholic France, and Orthodox Russia agreed that in contrast to the other Ottoman territories no state would exercise sole control over it and that most of its territory would be placed under international administration.
Once Russia’s Czarist regime was overthrown by the Bolsheviks, Britain and France rescinded Russia’s allotment under their agreement. The Bolsheviks promptly responded by making the Agreement public, and published its full text in both Pravda and Izvestia, and it was several days later reproduced by the Manchester Guardian. In subsequent further negotiations between Paris and London, Britain eventually obtained French consent that Palestine would be under exclusive British control.
With the Balfour Declaration by this point also in circulation, the British were compelled to provide Sharif Hussein with not one but two explanations. With regard to Sykes-Picot, a document known as the Bassett Letter dismissed it as Ottoman propaganda designed to drive a wedge between Britain and the Arabs. Responding to Hussein’s demands for clarification regarding the Balfour Declaration, the January 1918 Hogarth Message, drafted by Mark Sykes on behalf of the British government but delivered to Hussein by David Hogarth, head of London’s Arab Bureau in Cairo, stated the following:
"(1) The Entente Powers are determined that the Arab race shall be given full opportunity of once again forming a nation in the world. This can only be achieved by the Arabs themselves uniting, and Great Britain and her Allies will pursue a policy with this ultimate unity in view.
"(2) So far as Palestine is concerned we are determined that no people shall be subject to another, but
(a) In view of the fact that there are in Palestine shrines, Wakfs and Holy places, sacred in some cases to Moslems alone, to Jews alone, to Christians alone, and in others to two or all three, and inasmuch as these places are of interest to vast masses of people outside Palestine and Arabia, there must be a special regime to deal with these places approved of by the world.
(b) As regards the Mosque of Omar [i.e. the Haram al-Sharif in Jerusalem] it shall be considered as a Moslem concern alone and shall not be subjected directly or indirectly to any non-Moslem authority.
(3) Since the Jewish opinion of the world is in favour of a return of Jews to Palestine and inasmuch as this opinion must remain a constant factor, and further as His Majesty’s Government view with favour the realisation of this aspiration, His Majesty’s Government are determined that in so far as is compatible with the freedom of the existing population both economic and political, no obstacle should be put in the way of the realisation of this ideal.”
The last paragraph in particular, with its insistence that the Zionist project would be supported only to the extent “compatible with the freedom of the existing population both economic and political”, provided a rather different interpretation than would the following year be given by Balfour in his correspondence with Curzon. But the contradiction exists only if one assumes the British government attached any value of any sort to any of the commitments it explicitly undertook as it manoeuvred its way towards control of Palestine.
The larger question concerns Britain’s motivations in issuing the Balfour Declaration. There was certainly incessant Zionist lobbying of London over many years, and Balfour and Weizmann were said to be close, but the idea that the Zionist movement forced the Declaration down the throat of the most powerful government on the planet can be safely dismissed.
Traditional explanations have focused on British efforts to mobilize influential Jewish leaders in the United States to assist with the consolidation of the US commitment to the war effort at a time when this was seen as insufficiently assured. Alternatively and/or additionally, it was said to have been intended to undermine Jewish support for the revolution in Russia that had just overthrown a regime with a long record of persecuting its Jewish population, and fears that the country’s new rulers would withdraw from the generalized European slaughter that had commenced in 1914 – something they would indeed do several months later.
While such considerations may well have played a role, and is in fact referenced in the documentary record, Zionism was during the 1910s still very much a contested if not minority persuasion among both European Jewish elites and Europe’s Jews more generally. Indeed, the only Jewish member of the British cabinet, Secretary of State for India Edwin Montagu, was an outspoken anti-Zionist. He considered Zionism to be not only a “mischievous political creed” but also an anti-Semitic one. In his August 1917 Memorandum on the Anti-Semitism of the Present [British] Government, in which he laid out his opposition to the circulating drafts of the Balfour Declaration, and whose adoption he would vote against, he explained his position as follows:
I assume that it means that Mahommedans and Christians are to make way for the Jews and that the Jews should be put in all positions of preference and should be peculiarly associated with Palestine in the same way that England is with the English or France with the French, that Turks and other Mahommedans in Palestine will be regarded as foreigners, just in the same way as Jews will hereafter be treated as foreigners in every country but Palestine. Perhaps also citizenship must be granted only as a result of a religious test.
(Indeed, and in a possible retort to Montagu, Chaim Weizmann, speaking at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, identified the Zionist movement’s goal as the transformation of Palestine so that “Palestine shall be as Jewish as England is English”.)
Anti-Semitism, and specifically the desire to see large numbers of eastern European Jews exported from Europe to Palestine, as well as Christian Zionism have also been proposed as rationales for the Balfour Declaration. These too can be seen as no more than contributory factors. While it is true that Balfour was both a Christian Zionist and a notorious anti-Semite who had been roundly condemned by the British Jewish establishment in 1905 for his sponsorship of the Aliens Act when he was prime minister, the Declaration was not a personal initiative but government policy, and as noted above Balfour may not even have been its primary author.
The suggestion by a prominent British-Israeli historian, Benny Morris, that Balfour was motivated by repentance for his sponsorship of the 1905 legislation that was designed to keep desperate and destitute eastern European Jewish refugees out of Britain, and for European anti-Semitism more generally, is simply absurd. For one, we have no evidence of Balfour renouncing his or any other anti-Semitism between 1905 and 1917.
The most persuasive explanation remains that London was primarily acting in Britain’s rather than Zionism’s interests, and that is sponsored the Zionist movement to serve British imperial policy in the Middle East.
Specifically, in 1915 a combined German-Ottoman expeditionary force launched an offensive from southern Palestine across the Sinai Peninsula that managed to reach the Suez Canal, the jugular vein of the British Empire and a vital transportation route between Great Britain and its most important imperial possession, India. Although the attack was ultimately unsuccessful, it exposed a key British vulnerability, and it would be only two years later that British forces finally recaptured Sinai.
It would thereafter take the British almost eight months to capture Gaza during the Third Battle of Gaza of 1-2 November 1917. As noted by the late journalist Gerald Butt in his 1995 history of Gaza, prior to Israel’s current genocidal campaign and systematic destruction of the Gaza Strip, it had been these three battles that inflicted more damage on Gaza City than any other event in its history.
Gaza fell to the British on the same day that Balfour published his declaration. The following month General Edmund Allenby marched into Jerusalem and proclaimed martial law. Among his first acts was a prohibition on the publication of the Balfour Declaration, out of recognition that it would set local opinion aflame.
There has been much discussion of the Declaration’s choice of the vague formulation “Jewish national home” to characterize British intentions towards Zionism and Palestine. The Zionist movement, not without justification, read this as British endorsement of a Jewish state, and in later years Balfour and other British officials would indicate that this is indeed what they intended.
Yet the more likely explanation is that London initially intended for Palestine to become a British protectorate. Settled with an implanted European population surrounded by Palestinians confronting their dispossession and an equally hostile Arab world robbed of the independence of a territory in its very heart, the Zionist project would be thoroughly dependent on London for its very survival, and thus a dependable guardian of the eastern approaches to the Suez Canal.
It is in this respect worth recalling that when Britain finally did relinquish its mandate after the Second World War, it did so unwillingly, its hand having been forced by the combination of bankruptcy and exhaustion after years of another gruelling world war, and the campaign of Zionist terrorism.
When Britian was awarded the Mandate for Palestine in 1922 on the strength of the above machinations, the Balfour Declaration was incorporated into its terms. In the words of Arthur Koestler: “One nation solemnly promised to a second nation the country of a third.”
Needless to say Great Britain had as much right to dispose of Palestine as did Palestine to dispose of Great Britain. As for the League of Nations, it was an imperial club that disintegrated in the fires of the Second World War for a reason. Its mandates system had all the legitimacy of the 1884 Berlin Conference that regulated the Scramble for Africa.
Absent the Balfour Declaration, and its imperial sponsorship of a movement until that point incapable of making significant headway on its own, it is quite likely we would today be speaking of Zionism in the past tense if at all.
Can you say Perfidious Albion?
29 October: US Elections and the Middle East
I’ve been asked to speak about the upcoming US elections and their implications for Palestine and the Middle East
The short answer is that the result is unlikely to make a significant difference.
Israeli impunity has become a central principle of US foreign policy. Less a means to an end than an end itself.
While neither Kamala Harris nor Donald Trump share Joe Biden’s fanatic devotion to Israel, both are likely to revert to the traditional policy of unconditional support for the supremacist apartheid state. This may make a difference at the margins, but that’s about it.
While it’s true that Israel’s Netanyahu has a clear preference for Trump, Agent Orange is also viewed as erratic and ultimately unreliable by Israel. Just as he is by the rest of his acolytes.
In the atmosphere of hysteria that currently dominates Israel, Harris is seen as an enemy.
This means that the period between now and January 2025, when Biden is finally wheeled out of the White House, is the period of maximum danger. Most obviously for the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, but also for those in the West Bank, for Lebanon, for the risks of a war against Iran and potentially Syria.
This is because Israel believes that what is possible until January of next year may no longer be possible after that date.
Looking more broadly at the region, there is also little reason to expect significant change. Biden’s Middle East policies were for all intents and purposes those of a second Trump administration. He changed literally nothing, whether with respect to Palestine, the occupied Syrian Golan Heights, the Western Sahara, the Iran nuclear agreement, Yemen, or the promotion of dictatorship and autocracy throughout the region.
I’d also like to make a few comments about the election itself:
To the best of my understanding no candidate has a divine right to anyone’s vote.
Trump appears to have addressed this problem by insisting that he will win and, should he lose, by insisting that he won.
The Harris campaign’s approach, not unlike that of Keir Starmer in Great Britain, has been to ostracise and vilify a key constituency for making the simple point that its votes must be earned. By, for example, renouncing support for genocide. By refusing to arm the state conducting it. Or at least by distancing herself from the mass slaughter.
I suspect the Harris campaign is the first example in modern political history where a candidate is demanding the votes of those she systematically refuses to meet with, or be seen in public with, as an inalienable right. She and her minions will of course blame the anti-genocide constituency, rather than her steadfast support for Israel’s crimes and atrocities, in the event she loses the election.
Tragically, the Democrats are prepared to inflict another four years of Donald Trump upon themselves, and upon the rest of us, for the sake of Israeli genocide and impunity.
It is this arrogance, this sense of entitlement, that is leading growing numbers of voters, who under different circumstances would be counted among Harris’s natural constituents, to conclude that the Democrats will only learn their lesson if one is administered to them at the ballot box. The Democrats will have no one but themselves to blame for the consequences.
Finally, we should not exaggerate the importance of elections. They’re of course not insignificant. Nor, for that matter, is the arena of parliamentary politics. But momentous political developments emerge from sustained political struggles throughout society rather than the ballot box alone.
To give but two examples: the US withdrawal from Vietnam was not decided by an election, and was in fact conducted by the Nixon administration after it won re-election by a landslide. Similarly, the US withdrawal from Iraq was largely arranged by George W. Bush, not Obama. And this is because the people of Vietnam, the people of Iraq, and with them the people of the United States left them with no choice.
27 October 2024: No Endorsement for Genocide
This past week, as the editorial board of the Los Angeles Times was preparing to endorse Kamala Harris for president, the newspaper's proprietor, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, intervened and ordered the editorial board to refrain from endorsing a candidate.
That's how things work in the plutocracy that is the United States. Just like its billionaires own most of the politicians, they also own most major media organizations. And just as the country's plutocrats on the strength of their financial power select candidates for office and effectively control the policies and legislative agendas of those they elect, so they control the editorial policies of the media that is their personal property.
The failure to secure an endorsement from the Los Angeles Times comes as a particularly painful blow to Harris, given that it is the leading newspaper in her home state, California.
It was widely assumed that Soon-Shiong was motivated by the same cynical calculations that recently led the Washington Post to take a similar decision. In the Post’s case the newspaper's publisher, a particularly disreputable character and former Murdoch minion, William Lewis, ordered the paper’s editorial board to shelve an endorsement of Harris the newspaper was on the verge of publishing. It is widely suspected that the decision reflects not only Lewis’s own political instincts, but also an effort by the Post’s owner, the plutocrat Jeff Bezos, to make nice with Donald Trump given that the latter may soon once again be ordering Big Macs from the Oval Office.
A lengthy article in the 26 October New York Times paints a very different picture. It quotes Soon-Shiong’s daughter, Nika, claiming that the decision was in fact taken in protest at Harris’s complicity in the Gaza genocide. Athough Nika Soon-Shiong does not have a formal role in the management of the Los Angeles Times, she indicated to the New York Times that the decision was taken by the family. This is exactly what one would expect in a plutocracy, and by its standards also a perfectly legitimate decision-making process. In her words, “the endorsement was an opportunity to repudiate justifications for the widespread targeting of journalists and ongoing war on children [by Israel in the Gaza Strip]”.
While Soon-Shiong père has insisted the decision to refrain from an endorsement was not motivated by any particular issue, his personal history suggests he didn’t need much persuading, either from his daughter or for that matter anyone else. Patrick Soon-Shiong was born in South Africa in 1952 to Chinese parents who fled their country during the Second World War on account of its occupation by Japan. He was, in other words, an Asian born and raised in a white-supremacist apartheid state because a particularly brutal foreign military occupation had made life for his parents intolerable in their homeland. His wife, the former actress Michele Chan, was also born in South Africa when it was ruled by the white-minority regime. Indeed, in her statement Nika explicitly noted that her family are “citizen[s] of a country openly financing genocide, and … that experienced South African Apartheid”.
In what appears to be a further indication of Soon-Shiong senior's sensibilities, his newspaper’s editor, Kevin Merida, abruptly resigned (i.e. was forced out) in January of this year shortly after he tried to sanction reporters who signed a letter condemning Israel’s Gaza genocide.
Much of the New York Times article on Patrick Soon-Shiong consists of bringing up various sordid details from his business career. While there is no reason to question their veracity – it’s a plutocracy, stupid! – the hatchet job in American Pravda suggests that daughter Nika was not trying to spin the decision for political gain but rather conveying its main motivation.
Expect an escalating campaign of attacks against the family in the coming weeks, combining “investigative journalism” into Patrick Soon-Shiong’s business practices, efforts to demonize Nina with standard accusations of anti-Semitism by outfits like the Defamation League (which for years functioned as an espionage agency on behalf of South Africa’s white-minority regime), and demands the family atone for its crimes by ceding the Los Angeles Times to the responsible stewardship of Bill Ackman.
In the West, opposition to apartheid, occupation, and genocide generates risk rather than reward. Always has and always will. Yet, slowly but surely, slavish devotion to Israel is proving to be not only an electoral asset but, particularly in a time of live-streamed genocide, also an electoral burden.
25 October 2024: ICC Kicks the Can Again
Judge Iulia Motoc, a member of the International Criminal Court's Pre-Trial Chamber assessing the applications submitted by the Prosecutor for the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity, on 25 October 2024 requested to be excused from the case "based on medical grounds and the need to safeguard the proper administration of justice".
The request was granted and her replacement, Judge Beti Hohler, will now presumably consume several weeks, if not months, to review the relevant case files.
Given the ICC's atrocious record on the "Situation in the State of Palestine", this seems like yet another attempt by the Court to kick the can down the road and avoid proceeding with it, so that ICC officials can get back to the more comfortable business of prosecuting Africans and adversaries of the West.
There are entirely reasonable grounds to question whether Judge Motoc is acting in good faith. In fact, there are entirely reasonable grounds to assume that both she and the Court are acting in bad faith. Judge Motoc, and her medical records, should be required to undergo scrutiny by a panel of independent specialists to determine if her condition is genuinely medical, or alternatively whether her ailment consists of cowardice and/or blackmail.
If it is determined that she does not have a genuine medical condition she and any other ICC officials implicated should be expelled from the legal profession and prosecuted under Article 70 of the Rome Statute ("Offences Against the Administration of Justice").
Postscript: Some have suggested she may have caved in to either blackmail or threats against her and/or members of her family. It is at this point pure speculation, but certainly possible. Neither blackmail nor threats are recognized medical conditions. More importantly, an individual who submits to blackmail should not be entrusted with the role of judge, and a judge who receives threats is required to report these to the authorities for investigation rather than claim illness.
25 October 2024: European Smoke and Mirrors
The European Union (EU) has been the primary engine of growth for Israel's illegal settlement project since 1967. The project would not be viable without access to the European market.
EU statements of opposition to Israeli settlements are entirely meaningless, nothing more than diversionary slogans designed to camouflage reality. Smoke and mirrors in their purest form.
Unlike Americans or Russians, who tend to be more straightforward about their policies, European politicians and officials specialize in speaking out of both sides of their mouth, doing one thing but saying another. The EU is deeply invested in the settlement project, fully committed to its continued expansion, and will never abandon it.
27 September: Beirut
On Friday 27 September Israel launched an unprecedentedly intense series of air strikes on the Lebanese capital, Beirut. Multiple 2,000 pound missiles flattened an entire area of the city’s densely populated southern suburbs, including multiple apartment buildings comprising many dozens of homes. The explosions were so powerful they could be felt dozens of kilometers away. Casualty figures are expected to be massive.
Israel claims it targeted the central command headquarters of Hizballah, and that this facility was situated below the buildings it targeted. Multiple Israeli press reports indicate the target of the bombings was Hizballah General Secretary Hassan Nasrallah, and that Israel had received a “golden tip” that the senior Hizballah leadership was meeting the moment it struck. If its claims are accurate and the strike was successful it would, in combination with a series of assassinations over the previous weeks, amount to a decapitation of the Lebanese movement.
The element of theater should also not be discounted. The attack took place only minutes after Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu addressed the annual meeting of the United Nations General Assembly. On this occasion, the chamber was largely empty as numerous delegations walked out in protest. The ecstatic cheers as he held forth on the distinction between Israel’s “Blessing” and Iran’s “Curse” came from his groupies and Israel flunkies in the peanut gallery.
As of this writing the fate of those Israel claims to have targeted remains unclear. Israel appears increasingly confident it killed Nasrallah but has yet to provide verification. Hizballah has for its part maintained strict radio silence, which could mean either that the assassination succeeded and his corpse has yet to be located, or that it has persuasive reasons to defer confirming the attack’s failure.
Irrespective of what actually transpired today, a number of conclusions can already be drawn:
- Israel is determined to deal a mortal blow against Hizballah and eliminate it as a significant military factor in the Middle East. Numerous additional massive air strikes on Beirut and other areas of Lebanon in recent hours confirm this. Any talk of diplomacy or a ceasefire emanating from Washington is pure distraction.
- Israel is targeting not only its military adversaries but also the society and constituencies that sustain it. It will also target civilian infrastructure as it has done in Gaza. See under: Dahiya Doctrine, which specifies a deliberate, and deliberately disproportionate campaign against civilians and civilian infrastructure to generate political pressure on adversaries.
- Irrespective of Nasrallah’s fate Hizballah has been hit and hit very hard. But even an organizational decapitation will not crush the movement, or its will and capacity to respond and respond forcefully. Short of a comprehensive Israeli occupation of much of Lebanon, which has been tried and failed on previous occasions, Hizballah will neither lay down its arms nor agree to a ceasefire independently of Gaza, because the latter will be seen as an act of capitulation. Hizballah has been decades in the making, has very deep reserves, and would take years to unravel.
- US protestations of ignorance and claims Washington learned of developments only when informed by Israel are laughable. At the very least it will have known about Israeli intentions well in advance. The more likely scenario is that it made its superior intelligence and planning capabilities available to its Israeli proxy, and of course supplied the munitions, weapons systems, and the diplomatic and PR cover that enable Israel to act with unrestrained impunity.
- On 7 October 2023 Hamas launched an offensive into southern Israel to irrevocably shatter the status quo. Israel’s response has been a campaign not to restore the status quo, but rather to fundamentally transform the strategic equation in the Middle East. In addition to making the Gaza Strip unfit for human habitation and finalizing the annexation of the West Bank, this requires a confrontation with not only Hizballah but also Iran – and arguably Syria as well. Its actions during the past day and in the coming days should therefore be seen as an effort that extends beyond Lebanon to ensure Iran’s direct involvement in the conflict, and in so doing produce a direct US-Iranian confrontation.
- Israel’s conduct can only be described as that of a certifiably rogue state, resorting to increasingly horrific levels of violence with abandon, and with no restraints whatsoever imposed by its US and European sponsors. This will remain the case at least until Biden is replaced by either Harris or Trump. Israeli failure in Gaza has only produced greater levels of genocidal violence. For Israel to be truly restrained at this point will require the administration of a significant military defeat. Yet even this – unlikely – scenario may lead the only nuclear power in the Middle East to go for broke.
24 September 2024: Arab Colonialism
The latest fad among Israel flunkies is to denounce the Arabs of the Middle East and North Africa as illegitimate colonizers. In this telling, not only are Russians, Poles, and Lithuanians indigenous to the Middle East, but those who have actually lived there for millenia are not, and therefore do not belong there.
The claim is based on the supposition that the Arab Muslims of the Middle East and North Africa collectively hail from the Arabian Peninsula. It is often accompanied by an insistence that Christians, Jews, Druze, and members of other faiths in the region are not Arabs at all, but rather the surviving remnants of distinct indigenous populations that are living under a foreign Arab colonial yoke to this very day.
Given that the journey from Mecca to Jerusalem is considerably shorter than that from Vilnius or Odessa, it’s a little unclear what point is being scored. But more importantly, there’s no point to score.
Arabs have been living in the Middle East since long before the rise of Islam. The pagan Nabateans, for example, who built the majestic city of Petra, established themselves in contemporary Jordan as early as the fourth century BCE. The Ghassanids, a primarily Christian Arab tribe, arrived in Syria centuries before the Islamic conquests. Long before the first Muslim set foot in Greater Syria, Arabs were already part of the region’s demographic fabric.
When the Muslim Arabs came to dominate the region during the seventh century, soldiers and administrators settled within it, and over time were joined by various others and their families. But they did not form a majority, for the simple reason that there is no evidence they exterminated or exiled the much larger existing population.
In other words, in a gradual process over the course of centuries, most of the indigenous population converted to Islam and, along with those who did not, adopted the Arabic language and culture as their own, typically merging it with their existing traditions. They were Arabized, and often Islamized as well. Over time, the distinction between Arab and Arabized in these societies disappeared.
With the exception of the Arabian Peninsula during the seventh century (the so-called Ridda Wars), there is little evidence of forced mass conversions to Islam. For those who insist it was in fact widespread and systematic, their conviction only proves the point that the pre-existing populations remained in place.
Arabs in the Arabian Peninsula will still point to a distinction between “Arab Arabs”, meaning themselves, and the “Arabized Arabs” of the Levant and North Africa. They do so because they can, or at least until recently could do so. This is however not a distinction that can be made with respect to the populations of the latter regions. Good luck distinguishing between Arab and Arabized Lebanese or Egyptians.
The moral of the story is that a Muslim from Hebron or Christian from Nablus has more Canaanite, Philistine, and Israelite blood coursing through their veins than a Jew from Moscow or New York, or for that matter Morocco or Yemen. While Arabs and Islam are often associated with each other for historical reasons, it bears recollection that the great majority of Muslims are not Arab in either ethnicity, culture, or language, and that there have always been significant numbers of non-Muslim Arabs.
Is it nevertheless accurate to describe the contemporary Arab presence in the Middle East as a colonial venture? Historians generally don’t apply the term to empires and their attendant population movements prior to the era of European expansion that commenced in 1492. That’s why scholars of colonialism don’t spend too much time on the Visigoths, Genghis Khan, or the Crusades.
If one nevertheless wants to apply this paradigm to the Arab conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries, one could certainly draw various parallels, but it’s a little rich to single out the Arabs, and not get similarly hysterical about Siberia being a Russian colony or the German colonization of Austria and much of Switzerland.
But of course, this recently discovered obsession is but one more ruse, concocted by people who couldn’t care less about what the Arabs did or are doing to either the Arabs or the other peoples of the countries they rule. It is just the latest fraudulent talking point to divert a horrified and outraged public. Think of it as the successor to “What about Darfur?”, which Israel flunkies feigning concern for its persecuted population would be challenged to find on a map.
Its purpose is, transparently, to camouflage the actually-existing colonialism in the Middle East, and the attendant dispossession, ethnic cleansing, and genocide by Israel. As was recently pointed out by Sarah Leah Whitson, every accusation is not only a confession but a statement of intent.
On a related note, the subtext of the “Arabs are colonizers” claim is that they’re all the same. And if that’s the premise, doesn’t it make perfect sense that they would come to the aid of their fellow Arabs in the Gaza Strip?
23 September 2024: The World is Watching: Who Shapes the Story?
The panel title puts it quite well. It explains both Israel’s unprecedented challenges in the court of global public opinion, and the unprecedented global solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for self-determination.
The world is indeed watching. Live. And reality is being communicated to the world directly. In an unprecedented manner. As often as not unmediated by the media conglomerates that traditionally do Israel’s bidding.
For every Rupert Murdoch, Mark Thompson, and Mathias Döpfner, there are today dozens of Palestinian journalists in Gaza, and thousands of ordinary Palestinians, livestreaming the reality of genocide from the Gaza Strip around the planet. Their voices and images are amplified throughout the world by tens if not hundreds of thousands of engaged citizens. These include, crucially, Jews and even Israelis appalled at what is being done in their name.
The enormous power disparities notwithstanding, the shifts in public opinion we have witnessed during the past year in my view demonstrate that, to a very significant extent, we are today operating on an increasingly level playing field.
CNN, BBC, and American Pravda, also known as the New York Times, may still dominate the airwaves and newspaper sales, but their commissars have compelled them to report a story that is so out of sync with observable reality, that their ability to shape the story is comparatively limited. In no small part because growing numbers of people are tuning out and turning to alternative venues and platforms for their news. Arguably, their credibility has during the past year taken an even bigger hit than during their enthusiastic promotion of the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Their predilection to report on Israeli violence in clinical, technical, and often celebratory terms, and on Arab violence through the prism of moral judgement and opprobrium, represents a double standard that is proving increasingly difficult to sustain amidst genocide. Precisely because the world is watching in ways it was it was often unable to watch before.
So who is shaping the story? And here’s the interesting part. To a large extent, it remains Israel. But it is an Israel that is no longer capable of appealing to the better instincts of its audience.
Claiming to be the only democracy in the solar system become somewhat complicated when the claim is being advanced by, and made on behalf of, the likes of Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir, and Smotrich.
Pretending to be the most moral army in the universe doesn’t fit well with an endless stream of snuff videos, atrocity porn, and social media posts by soldiers and commander dedicating the destruction of universities, hospitals, and residential blocks to their girlfriends and children. It’s difficult to argue a few rotten apples when the entire tree brags about its depravity.
Denouncing friend and foe alike of anti-Semitism has emptied this formerly potent impunity shield of all meaning. A term that used to denote an irrational fear or hatred of Jews, for no reason other than that they are Jews, today means nothing more than opposition to the genocidal policies of the Israeli government. For similar reasons, the charge of “blood libel” today carries about as much moral and political weight as a cup of coffee.
A state that stands plausibly accused of genocide before the International Court of Justice can no longer hide behind the Holocaust, or conduct mass murder on the pretext that it is acting to preventing a second one.
Similarly, it’s hard to claim self-defense in Jenin or Kiryat Arba when the ICJ has issued an advisory opinion that the occupation in its entirety is illegal, unlawful, and illegitimate. Or when every major human rights organization has denounced the regime of Jewish supremacy that sustains this illegal state of affairs.
Yes, Israel continues to play a leading role in shaping the narrative, but it seems to lose no opportunity to advertise that Zionism has become a death cult, which celebrates every Arab corpse, no matter how young or old, with the glee of a child let loose in a toy store.
Israel’s loss of control over the narrative explains the increasing resort of its acolytes and apologists to punitive legislative and disciplinary measures to stifle dissent. Rather than representing victory, each such measure – while indisputably painful and costly to those targeted – is an admission of defeat.
The past twelve months have seen the most substantial shifts in the reporting landscape about the Question of Palestine since 1948. Far in excess of that during either the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon or the 1987 popular uprising in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
The challenge is to institutionalize this transformation, and translate it into political achievements, to ensure it becomes irreversible. This will require at least as much hard, creative, dedicated work as has already been done.
23 September 2024: Axis of Resistance
Developments in Lebanon during the past week have once again focused attention on the Axis of Resistance and its role during the current crisis. A few observations:
- The Axis of Resistance is a coalition rather than a formal alliance. It consists of states, movements, and militias that share the common objective of confronting and reducing US and Israeli influence in the Middle East, and at times of weakening governments allied with the West as well.
- Iran is the most powerful member of this coalition and therefore a central and highly-influential player. But it does not command the Axis of Resistance. It is more the Germany of the European Union than the Soviet Union of the Warsaw Pact. Its influence is also far from uniform and, as demonstrated by the shifts in Iranian-Syrian relations during the past quarter century, changes over time. Some militias operating in Iraq and Syria have all the hallmarks of Iranian proxies. Yemen’s AnsarAllah clearly does not. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was closely involved with the establishment of Hizballah, which for good measure fully subscribes to the Islamic Republic’s system of rule. But it is today powerful enough to make its decisions in Beirut rather than Tehran. Hamas for its part has had an ambivalent relationship with the Axis. At the outset of the Syrian civil war Hamas broke with Damascus, and its exile leadership moved not to Beirut or Tehran but Doha, and a rupture with Iran lasting almost half a decade ensued.
- It’s transparently clear that the 7 October attacks were neither an Iranian initiative nor coordinated with the Axis of Resistance. So transparently clear that US and Israeli intelligence have come to the same conclusion to preserve their credibility. I don’t believe Hamas ever expected its coalition allies to immediately unleash similar offensives of their own upon Israel. It must have understood that just as Hamas prioritized its own interests and agenda, others would do so as well.
- Nevertheless, Hizballah on 8 October opened what it termed a support front against Israel, and over the next two months was joined by Yemen and militias in Iraq and Syria. Iran played a supporting role, except when it was directly targeted by Israel.
- The purpose of the support fronts has been to engage in multi-front attritional warfare against Israel, and to a lesser extent against its allies, in order to raise the costs to Israel and its Western sponsors of continuing the genocidal campaign against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. To this end, they have repeatedly stated that their attacks would cease the moment a ceasefire takes hold in the Gaza Strip.
- Preventing coordinated or unified action by its adversaries has been a guiding principle of Israeli statecraft going back to the 1949 Armistice negotiations that ended the Palestine War. De-linking the support fronts from the Gaza Strip, and then from each other has therefore been an Israeli priority.
- As a rule, states and conventional militaries prefer to avoid wars of attrition, particularly when these are prosecuted on their territory. They are too costly in terms of the social, economic, and manpower losses involved. This forms the crucial context for the dramatic escalations of the past week.
- Israel’s dilemma in this respect is two-fold: Its campaigns to de-link and suppress the support fronts risk their escalation into additional full-scale conflicts independent of the war against Gaza. And secondly, the longer this campaign continues the greater the prospect of a full-scale regional conflagration.
- In other words, the combination of Israel’s inability to achieve a decisive outcome in the Gaza Strip, and refusal to accept a ceasefire agreement, has forced it to play double or nothing. Either Hizballah capitulates and dismantles its support front, or it will face the full force of the Israeli military. Yemen has withstood similar efforts by the US-UK naval task force in the Red Sea. Short of a mortal Israeli blow against Hizballah and its military capabilities, a scenario that no one takes seriously, it also won’t work in Lebanon.
- Yet from Israel’s perspective the challenge is also a unique opportunity. With Biden wrapped firmly around his finger, Netanyahu believes that the period until January 2025 is ideal to provoke a direct US-Iranian confrontation. And he seems to have decided that the road to Tehran goes through the southern suburbs of Beirut.
- Just to be clear, tails don’t wag dogs. Dogs wag tails. Washington may well have liked for Israel to approach things differently, but it is geopolitically invested in preventing an Israeli defeat. And that is what makes this moment so particularly dangerous.
21 September 2024: Regional War?
As the war in the Middle East approaches its first anniversary, a full-scale regional conflagration is very much on the cards.
The crisis, which had been years if not decades in the making, erupted on 7 October 2023 with Hamas’s multi-pronged offensive into southern Israel. In a series of attacks on Israeli military installations and population centers, more than 1,000 Israeli soldiers, security personnel, and civilians were killed, most by Hamas and other Palestinians, many by Israel pursuant to its Hannibal Directive. A further 250 Israeli soldiers and civilians were taken captive and held in the Gaza Strip.
That same day Israel commenced with what quickly developed into the most intensive bombing campaign since 1945 which, accompanied by a comprehensive siege, saw Israel plausibly accused of genocide before the International Court of Justice by year’s end.
The following day, 8 October, Hizballah opened a new front in southern Lebanon. Characterized as a “support front”, and as its name implies, its purpose was to compel Israel to accept a ceasefire and captive exchange. Rather than unleashing a full-scale war of its own against Israel, Hizballah sought to achieve its objective through a campaign of attrition intended to persistently raise the cost to Israel of continuing its campaign against the Gaza Strip.
Later that month a number of militias, primarily in Iraq, opened a second support front and commenced with intermittent attacks against Israel as well as US military installations in Iraq, Syria, and Jordan.
The following month, November, AnsarAllah in northern Yemen, also known as the Houthis, opened a further support front. Initially directed against Israeli shipping, it escalated into a campaign to disrupt global commerce and supply chains, thereby increasing the pressure on not only the Israel but also the global economy.
While Iran is a leading member of the coalition known as the Axis of Resistance, it did not open a support front of its own. Rather, its role was one of supporting the support fronts in various ways. When it in April of this year did launch an unprecedented direct attack on Israel, this was a retaliatory response to a direct Israeli attack against Iran’s embassy complex in the Syrian capital Damascus. Similarly, its vow to retaliate against Israel for the 31 July assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyya should be seen in the context of the killing’s location, the Iranian capital Tehran.
Those commanding the various support fronts have consistently stated that they are acting to end Israel’s genocidal campaign against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, and that once a ceasefire agreement is reached their attacks will cease. Although the Axis of Resistance is a coalition rather than formal alliance, it has in recent years promoted what it terms “the unity of arenas”. The support fronts demonstrate the activation of this principle.
Destructive as a full-scale armed conflict undoubtedly is, from Israel’s perspective a prolonged war of attrition imposes excessively high social, economic, and military preparedness costs. A coordinated war of attrition on multiple fronts represents an even greater challenge.
The obvious response, a ceasefire agreement, was never on the cards. Simply put, Israel has no intention of bringing its war against the Gaza Strip to a formal conclusion. As importantly, the United States has no intention of compelling Israel to accept an agreement, and has not been serious about achieving one. In part on account of President Joe Biden’s complete ideological alignment with Israel, in part because Washington considers an Israeli victory – and failing victory an absence of defeat – of fundamental geopolitical importance.
Israel’s response, supported by its Western sponsors and allies, has therefore been a campaign to address each front in isolation. It seeks to collectively de-link them from Gaza, and from each other. At all costs, “the unity of the arenas” must be defeated. Thus, Operation Prosperity Guardian in the Red Sea is an Anglo-American effort to force Yemen to renounce its support front even as the Gaza genocide intensifies, and Israel’s Western and Arab allies in April mobilized to counter Iran’s missile and drone barrage against Israel.
Israel’s greatest challenge has from the outset been Hizballah. It sits immediately astride Israel’s northern border, possesses one of the most effective and committed militaries in the Middle East, and – upending Israeli military doctrine that wars must be fought on enemy territory – has turned northern Israel into a war zone from which tens of thousands of residents have fled.
It is telling that until last week, particularly when compared to the Gaza Strip, relatively few Israeli and Lebanese civilians have been killed in this conflict zone. The reason is that Hizballah has been concentrating its fire on Israeli military installations, and has threatened Israel with reprisals against Israeli civilians if it targets Lebanese civilians.
Israel’s comparatively restrained conduct in Lebanon, at least until recently, has absolutely nothing to do with Israeli fables about the morality of its warfare, and quite simply reflects its fears of getting a taste of its own medicine from an adversary capable of administering it. In this respect it bears recollection that in 1996, at the conclusion of Israel’s particularly violent “Grapes of Wrath” offensive against Lebanon, during which Hizballah responded to multiple massacres with continuous shelling of northern Israel, Israel was compelled to accept understandings that explicitly prohibited further attacks against Lebanese or Israeli civilians. The agreement to cease targeting civilians was rightfully seen as an unprecedented strategic achievement for Hizballah, and a major defeat for Israel. When a much weaker Hamas subsequently and on several occasions offered Israel a similar agreement, these were rejected out of hand.
Back to 2023-2024, Israel’s extensive bombing and shelling of southern Lebanon, and the killing of hundreds of Hizballah fighters and commanders, has failed to have an impact on Hizballah’s determination to maintain its support front. Threats of a large-scale Israeli offensive delivered to Lebanon by the United States, France, and others have made even less of an impression. More concerning for Israel is that each time it has escalated its attacks against Lebanon, Hizballah rather than being cowed has responded with counter-escalations of its own. Israel’s 1 August assassination of Hizballah’s chief of staff, Fuad Shukr, in the Lebanese capital Beirut, threatened to unleash an Israeli-Lebanese war independent of developments of Gaza. In order to maintain this link, and continue with attritional rather than full-scale war, Hizballah did not take the bait.
The first of September, the beginning of the Israeli school year, and the date by which the Israeli government had pledged that residents of northern communities could return, came and went without a change. It is against this background that we need to understand the developments of the past week. Israel’s government, seen as increasingly impotent, and with a majority of the public supporting or demanding a major campaign against Hizballah, decided to act.
On Tuesday and Wednesday Israel unleashed a terror campaign throughout Lebanon and in Syria, indiscriminately transforming thousands of pagers and then walkie-talkies into hand-grenades. Rather than representing one or more rungs further up the escalation ladder, it placed high explosives to demolish the ladder altogether.
In an address Thursday, Hizballah General Secretary Hassan Nasrallah acknowledged the unprecedented blows inflicted upon his movement and the damage they have caused, but defiantly insisted that the support front would persist, irrespective of the cost, until Israel ended its war against the Gaza Strip. For good measure, on this occasion he mentioned the West Bank as well, and additionally vowed that Hizballah would exact revenge for Israel’s terror campaign. The following day, Friday, as if to demonstrate that the attacks had not affected either Hizballah’s capacity or will to continue the fight, the Lebanese movement launched some 200 rockets across the Israeli-Lebanese frontier. Hours later Israel flattened several apartment buildings in Beirut, killing senior military commander Ibrahim Aqil and other commanders of Hizballah’s elite Radwan Force.
To be sure these latest Israeli attacks represent a severe blow to Hizballah. Particularly so because they relied on infiltration and precise intelligence against an organization that built its reputation in significant part on its professionalism, counter-intelligence capabilities and ability to withstand significant infiltration. While assassination remains, in contrast to combat, Israel’s strong suit, it is highly unlikely it acted alone, and fair to assume it was assisted by the more advance intelligence capabilities of the US, UK, and European allies.
On the face of it, Israel refraining from launching a major war on Lebanon immediately after its recent attacks doesn’t make sense, like if it had waited a week to invade Egypt after destroying its air force in June 1967.
Israel’s hesitancy has several possible explanations. It may have additional measures in store to throw Hizballah into yet greater disarray. Alternatively, it intends to keep provoking Hizballah so that it can claim that Lebanon rather than Israel escalated the situation into one of full-scale war. What is less in doubt is that absent a Hizballah capitulation and demobilization of its support front, Israel is determined to inflict a decisive strategic defeat upon its Lebanese adversary.
Doing so in late 2024 has several advantages. As the past year has made clear, Netanyahu has Biden wrapped firmly around his finger, and the US president will do nothing to restrain Israel, indeed is constitutively incapable of doing so, even when Israeli policy directly contradicts stated US objectives. Which raises the very real possibility that Washington may be stating different objectives, but in practice has endorsed and is committed to the fulfilment of the agenda of Israel’s extreme-right wing government.
The period between now and January 2025 thus represents an unprecedented if not unique opportunity for Israel to provoke a direct US-Iranian confrontation by way of Lebanon. Trump may be louder than Biden in his loyalty to Netanyahu, and more closely aligned with its supremacist ideologues, but he is also too unpredictable to be fully trusted. That said, a war during the final weeks of the US presidential election campaign can also be seen to help Trump against Harris in what is expected to be a close-fought election.
As for Hizballah, its restraint also has several explanations. One is that a full-scale war is likely to draw in other members of the Axis of Resistance coalition, and in so doing undermine the attritional model of warfare to which they are committed and draw the focus away from Gaza. Another possibility is that Iran’s response to Israel consists of crossing the nuclear weapons threshold, and restraint is required until this is achieved.
As for Hizballah’s capabilities, and even assuming further and even more painful blows against it, assassination and sabotage campaigns rarely decide wars. Particularly when deployed against movements as extensive, experienced, entrenched, and multi-layered as Hizballah. Not only was it the case with the CIA’s Phoenix program in Vietnam, it has also been the case with Israel, in both the occupied territories and indeed in Lebanon itself. Body blows such as those inflicted by Israel this past week can provide significant tactical advantages, but are not decisive strategically.
25 August 2024: Antecedents
Jamie Stern-Weiner has dug up this excerpt from the memoirs of Lt Gen E.L.M. Burns. Burns (1897-1985) was a Canadian military officer who served in both world wars, and was in 1954 appointed Chief of Staff of the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO), the UN peacekeeping mission established to maintain the 1949 Arab-Israeli armistice agreements. In 1956, in the aftermath of the Suez Crisis, Burns was transferred from UNTSO and appointed Force Commander of the United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF), the world body's first peacekeeping force that was stationed in Egypt's Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip until 1967. Burns, who remained with UNEF until 1959, published his memoir, Between Arab and Israeli, in 1962.
Burns's description and choice of words is particularly relevant given that he served in Europe during World War II, and also because these were written half a decade before the second Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip, which commenced in 1967 and continues to this day:
There are about 310,000 Arabs resident in the Strip, 210,000 of them refugees… Thus there are about 1500 persons to the square kilometre of arable soil… The available fertile soil is intensively cultivated… But, of course, it is impossible for the food thus produced to feed more than a fraction of the population. The 210,000 refugees are fed by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. The standard ration provides 1600 calories a day, mostly carbohydrates. By Western standards, 1600 calories is a reducing diet…
They live in little huts of mud and concrete blocks, corrugated-iron roofs, regimented row after row. Fairly adequate medical service is provided, probably better than they enjoyed before they were expelled from their native villages. It is especially good in the maternity and child-care clinics, with the result that the infant death-rate is low. Children swarm everywhere. There are primary schools for nearly all of them… [and] secondary schools for a good portion of the adolescents; and a great number of youths can always be seen, around examination times, strolling along the roads memorising their lessons: where else could they concentrate to study? And what will all these youths and girls do when they have finished their secondary school training? There is no employment for them in the Strip, and very few can leave it to work elsewhere…
One does not see people starving or dying of disease in the streets; nevertheless the Gaza Strip resembles a vast concentration camp [emphasis added], shut off by the sea, the border between Palestine and the Sinai near Rafah, which the Egyptians will not permit them to cross, and the Armistice Demarcation Line which they cross in peril of being shot by Israelis or imprisoned by the Egyptians. They can look to the east and see wide fields, once Arab land, cultivated extensively by a few Israelis, with a chain of kibbutzim guarding the heights or the areas beyond. It is not surprising that they look with hatred on those who have dispossessed them.
Source: E. L. M. Burns, Between Arab and Israeli (Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1969), pp. 69-70. First published in London by George G. Harrap & Co., 1962.
19 August: Dual Loyalty?
A number of people have identified the problem with US Middle East policy with the purported “dual loyalty” of senior US officials. In other words, these individuals are said to be consciously acting in the interests of a foreign state, rather than that of the government they serve, with the knowledge that their actions are contrary to US interests.
Such accusations are usually, but not always, made against individuals who have a real or perceived ethnic or religious connection to a foreign entity. When Kennedy, the first Catholic to occupy the White House, was running for president, his opponents suggested he would take orders from the Vatican and US policy would be formulated by the Pope. Currently, such accusations are directed primarily at US Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
There have certainly been cases of dual loyalty in US Middle East policy. Jonathan Pollard, the US navy intelligence analyst, is prominently mentioned in this regard, but he was in fact a spy on Israel’s payroll. More recently, I think it’s a fair assumption that, for varying reasons, Donald Trump and Jared Kushner put Israeli, Saudi, and Emirati interests ahead of what they understood to be US interests.
But such individuals are the exception rather than the rule. The problem with Blinken and those of his colleagues fanatically devoted to Israel is not dual loyalty. If that was the extent of it, replacing a few key officials would immediately set US Middle East policy on the right track. The problem goes much deeper. And that problem is US foreign policy. Unconditional support for Israel has been a foundation of US foreign policy for over half a century, for Democrats and Republicans alike, and has included senior officials of every ethnicity and religion. This includes Arab-Americans like Donna Shalala and the Sununus, as well as American Muslims. Mehmet Oz, who ran for the Senate against John Fetterman, was at least as fanatically pro-Israel as is Senator Hoodie.
Against this background, charges of dual loyalty not only don’t hold up, they’re a cop out. They seek to absolve the US government and its institutions of responsibility for their own policies and actions, and instead lay it at the feet of a few individuals said to be acting on behalf of a foreign government and distorting or subverting US foreign policy.
I’d be very surprised to learn that Blinken, like Mike Pompeo or his hero Henry Kissinger before him, or for that matter others like Dennis Ross, view themselves as not only acting to promote Israeli interests but also as doing so at the expense of the US. In their worldview, US and Israeli interests are indistinguishable. What is good for Israel is good for Washington, and Israeli failure weakens the US. And that perspective is largely shared throughout the US government.
An argument can be made that the US Congress forms an exception, but that’s a function of the nature of the US political system. As a rule, US elections are bought and sold by the highest bidder, and the Israel lobby is a key player in this marketplace. If that lobby were to disappear tomorrow and be replaced by a Turkish lobby, it would be Erdogan getting 50 standing ovations, including a particularly rousing one if he were to match Netanyahu’s audacity and claim not a single Armenian perished during the First World War.
Blinken is of course a thoroughly vile character, but that’s because the genocide he has sponsored, and the earnest mendacity that is his trademark, are faithfully and loyally executed on behalf of the government that appointed him, which like those before it considers unconditional support for Israel a cornerstone of US foreign policy. And that support, in turn, reflects deeper problems with the US approach to the world, and the Global South in particular.
16 August 2024: Ceasefire?
I’ve been making the argument that the ongoing negotiations for a Gaza ceasefire are a diversionary US-Israeli charade and shouldn’t be taken particularly seriously. Initially, their primary purpose was to serve as a fig leaf for Israel to continue with its genocidal campaign in the Gaza Strip. In other words, their purpose is process, and their objective has therefore been to avoid reaching a ceasefire agreement rather than concluding one.
An Oslo process for genocide, if you will. Just as Oslo served as the essential fig leaf enabling Israel to intensify settlement expansion and annexationist policies, while Washington ran interference for Israel with a “peace process” designed to go nowhere, so with these ceasefire negotiations that commenced many months ago.
For those who may not recall the 1990s, Washington typically rebuffed international criticism of Israeli policy with the argument that its “peace process” would resolve the matter at hand, and efforts to hold Israel accountable for its actions would derail diplomacy.
The latest ceasefire negotiations have a more specific purpose than buying time for Israel to snatch an unattainable military victory from the closing jaws of failure. And this is to forestall, and failing that to minimize to the extent possible, any retaliation by Iran, Hizballah, and their coalition partners for Israel’s recent spate of assassinations and bombings in the region.
Washington’s position is that neither Iran, nor Lebanon, nor indeed any other state in the region has a right to defend itself against Israeli attack, or any right to respond to Israeli attack. Pursuant to the rules-based international order Israel by contrast has not only a right to be protected from retaliation or any other repercussion resulting from its actions, but also the right to respond, as it sees fit, to any reprisals provoked by its actions.
As I’ve noted previously, perhaps the only consistent US position since 7 October has been its opposition to regional escalation beyond Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories. Washington’s problem is that it has consistently declined to use either its influence or power to prevent such escalation. And when it has, this has been ineffective.
There have only been two exceptions thus far: in early October, Israel was reportedly on the verge of launching a massive attack against Lebanon to strike a blow against the Hizballah movement. US President Joe Biden, recognizing Israel would be biting off far more than it was in a position to chew, counseled Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu against doing so, and the latter immediately called it off. It took only a phone call.
About a month later, a series of powerful US air raids against militias in Iraq that had been firing increasingly lethal drones and missiles at Israel as well as US bases in Iraq, Syria, and Jordan, led these groups to announce a cessation of attacks against US facilities. Their attacks against Israel however continued, and they have more recently also resumed shelling US forces.
By contrast Operation Prosperity Guardian, consisting of a US-UK naval task force conducting regular air raids on Yemen to deter its Ansar Allah movement, also known as the Houthis, from attacking shipping seeking to enter the Red Sea, has been an abject failure. The attacks have continued, shipping continues to avoid the Suez Canal, and the Israeli port of Eilat recently declared bankruptcy.
Similarly, the deployment of two US aircraft carriers to the eastern Mediterranean in October to deter Hizballah from maintaining its “support front” in southern Lebanon failed to make an impression on the Lebanese movement.
The primary reason for US failure has been Washington’s unwillingness to use its influence with Israel to end its genocidal campaign against Israel in order end the activities of the various support fronts, or to commit the blood and treasure that would be required to terminate these support fronts itself. That’s of course assuming the US can succeed where Israel has failed, and that US counter-insurgency has improved by leaps and bounds since the failed campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The main challenge to current US efforts to prevent further regional escalation are the vows of Hizballah and Iran to retaliate against Israel independently of developments in the Gaza Strip. Whether, when, where, and how they will respond is at best speculation. It could consist of anything from a coordinated attack against Israel, to a single high-profile operation, to Tehran crossing the nuclear threshold.
Washington is taking these threats sufficiently seriously that it believes ceasefire negotiations will make it difficult, if not impossible, for Israel’s adversaries to retaliate if in so doing they end up saddled with responsibility for derailing an initiative to end the war against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. That’s pretty much the sole reason the negotiations resumed with such fanfare this week.
However unlikely, it’s not inconceivable that Israel’s adversaries have either decided not to respond, or postponed their response indefinitely. It may also be the case that they have not responded because they are still preparing their reprisals. But the most plausible explanation is that Biden for once read the room correctly, and the anticipated response was postponed to determine if Washington was finally prepared rein in its Israeli proxy and end the latter’s genocidal campaign in the Gaza Strip.
The herd of elephants in the negotiating chamber is of course Israel, and specifically Netanyahu. As even his own defense minister and the negotiators the Israeli prime minister has personally appointed have now made clear, the Israeli prime minister does not want a deal and is the obstacle to one being concluded, to the extent that he has sabotaged the US initiative that according to Biden was formulated not in Washington but by Netanyahu himself.
Initially convinced that Hamas would reject it, Netanyahu was blindsided when the Palestinians on 2 July announced their acceptance. Netanyahu responded by adding new conditions that had not been part of his initiative announced by Biden.
To square this circle, and amid much fanfare as the threat of regional war looms large, Biden on 9 August sought to demonstrate seriousness of purpose by personally signing, along with the leaders of Egypt and Qatar, a statement that called for “immediate relief” for the Palestinians in Gaza, for and for captives/hostages and their families. According to the communique, the three leaders had “forge[d] a framework agreement that is now on the table with only the details of implementation left to conclude … There is no further time to waste nor excuses from any party for further delay.”
Anticipating further US-Israeli trickery, Hamas announced it would not participate in this week’s negotiations because the initiative had already been negotiated and at US insistence endorsed by the UN Security Council. Rather, it called upon the mediators to formulate a plan to implement the initiative Hamas had already accepted, and present it to the parties. After all, the 9 August communique had stated that the US, Egypt, and Qatar “are prepared to present a final bridging proposal that resolves the remaining implementation issues in a manner that meets the expectations of all parties.”
In US English, “immediate” and “no further time to waste” means you issue a statement on 9 August and call an “urgent meeting” almost a week later, on 15 August. As for the “final bridging proposal”, it predictably remains a work in progress. It is now scheduled for further discussion next Friday, 24 August. The US will be represented by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, as clear a signal as can be that progress is not on the agenda.
Recognizing that any negotiations on Israel’s new conditions would blow up the entire process and with it the Middle East, the US is seeking to incorporate these conditions as its own clarifications to the initiative previously announced by Biden. Expect Blinken, with the earnest mendacity that is his trademark, to insist these have been part of the initiative all along.
As noted above, as with Oslo the purpose here is process, not its conclusion with an agreement. And as with Oslo, which in 2000 produced the Second Intifada because the charade became impossible to conceal further, the ceasefire process is producing diminishing returns. If this week’s negotiations successfully forestalled reprisals by Hizballah and Iran, that appears to be no longer the case. I suspect it is in this context that we should interpret Hizballah’s 16 August unveiling of its sophisticated Imad 4 underground bunker complex, seemingly impervious to either US or Israeli deep-penetration bombs.
Perhaps for this reason a “senior US official” was on 16 August quoted by the Times of Israel warning Iran of “cataclysmic” consequences if it exercised its right of self-defense against Israel. The official is presumably fully aware that “cataclysmic” is typically code for WMD, not the assassination of senior officials. We’ll find out soon enough if the threat has any impact.
11 August: Human Shields
Every time Israel conducts a massacre in a school, hospital, or designated safe zone, it claims the facility was being used for military purposes by Palestinians. Most famously, we were asked to believe Al-Shifa was not really a hospital but a mock medical facility concealing beneath it a Palestinian Pentagon. Israeli intelligence even provided detailed maps and images of this very extensive facility, which were eagerly lapped up and circulated by Western media outlets. The only problem with this story is that the Al-Shifa Pentagon either never existed, was in contrast to its US counterpart built on wheels and escaped, or has been so expertly concealed that despite Israel’s best efforts it has yet to be discovered.
Israel routinely justifies such mass killings with the claim that it is actually targeting Palestinian military facilities and/or Palestinian commanders and cadres. On 10 August, for example, the Israeli military described the massacre of approximately 100 civilians seeking refuge at the Al-Taabi’in School in Gaza City’s Daraj neighborhood as an attack on a Palestinian “military headquarters”. To strengthen its claims, it released the names and mugshots of 19 Hamas and Islamic Jihad “commanders” and “operatives” it insisted were killed in the attack.
It should come as no surprise that Israel’s assertions were yet again concocted out of thin air. Several of the names on Israel’s list are known to have been killed elsewhere, at least a day before Israeli warplanes incinerated the Al-Taabi’in School with three missiles. As indicated by Ramy Abdu, Chairman of the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, who knew a number of the victims personally, others on the list are known to have had no political or military affiliation with either Hamas or any other Palestinian movement, while “Hamas operative” Mu’min Habib according to Abdu “had a serious dispute with Hamas”.
Israel’s claims are intended to put meat on the bones of its trope that Palestinians are using the civilian population of the Gaza Strip, and particularly those in civilian facilities like schools and designated safe zones, as “human shields”, and that responsibility for these mass killings therefore belongs not to those who have dropped tens of thousands of tons of explosives on them during the past year, but exclusively to the Palestinians themselves. It’s classic blame the victim, in this case by the professional victim that is Israel.
At the most basic level Israel is claiming that since the Palestinians it is fighting are in the Gaza Strip, and are defending its populated areas against an Israeli invasion, they are deliberately using the Palestinian civilian population as human shields. It’s as absurd as a claim that since the US government is based in Washington, DC, and the Pentagon and CIA have been placed in its heavily populated northern Virginia suburbs, the United States government and military are knowingly using the US population to shield themselves from foreign attack, and are solely responsible for the consequences.
The house I was born in at the height of the Cold War was immediately adjacent to a military base, and was additionally down the street from the Technical Center of NATO’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE), a facility that specialized in weapons research and development. I never felt like a human shield, because I wasn’t. The term “human shield” never made an appearance in the neighborhood.
The reason Hamas is based in Gaza is the same reason the Israeli government and military is located in Israel (and the territories it illegally occupies) rather than Cyprus or Chile. The reason the Hamas military leadership was and perhaps still is based in Gaza City is the same reason that the headquarters of the Israeli military is located in the heart of Tel Aviv and not on an artificial island in the Mediterranean. It’s what governments, and militaries, have done since the dawn of history.
Israel’s claims regarding human shields of course go beyond the incessant assertion that Hamas is responsible for Israel’s genocidal campaign against the Palestinian people. (On this note, Many Israeli apologists and flunkies additionally claim, “This is exactly what Hamas wanted”. So, Netanyahu and the Israeli military too are Hamas?)
The more specific claim is that Hamas is deliberately placing military assets in civilian facilities, particularly those like schools, hospitals, and houses of worship that traditionally enjoy the greatest level of immunity during warfare, in order to shield these assets from attack by Israel.
Technically, this would not be human shielding. Human shielding as conventionally understood requires coercion. The most relevant example in this regard is Israel’s “neighborhood procedure”, whereby its soldiers force Palestinian civilians, at gunpoint, to enter areas considered dangerous in the hope of neutralizing the threat or having their human shield absorb the threat. It’s a practice the use of which the Israeli military has defended before Israel’s supreme court, and pleaded to be allowed to continue, so its existence is not subject to debate.
In the case of the Gaza Strip, allegations that Palestinians are using civilian facilities to protect military assets would only amount to human shielding if they were also coercing civilians located in such facilities, for example by preventing them from leaving. That’s a claim that, to the best of my knowledge, Israel and its flunkies have not been making, perhaps because it is one for which no evidence exists. Palestinians are of course being forcibly prevented from fleeing the territory of the Gaza Strip by a party to this conflict, but that party is Israel rather than the Palestinians. It is Israel, and not Hamas, that is preventing Palestinians from seeking refuge in Israel for the duration of hostilities.
Even if the accusations against Hamas do not meet the criteria of human shielding, what Israel is alleging is still a very serious charge. Regardless of the strict limitations that would still exist on any Israeli attack on such facilities, any Palestinians using them for military purposes would at the very least be guilty of recklessly endangering the lives of those located in such places, and have a lot to answer for. Particularly given their claims to be defending the Palestinian civilian population from Israeli savagery.
In terms of evidence, it is appropriate, and indeed necessary, to dismiss any and all Israeli claims and presentations in this regard absent independent verification by qualified investigators. The more so when Israel prevents such investigators from conducting verification activities, for example by denying them access to the Gaza Strip. While it’s not definitively inconceivable that Palestinians used an MRI machine to store a rocket launcher, it’s entirely plausible that it was planted there by the Israeli military.
This leaves us with very few confirmed cases, pre-dating October 2023. On two occasions in July 2014, during Israel’s Operation Protective Edge, in what UNRWA indicated were the first incidents of this kind, the agency stated that it had discovered weapons in a “vacant school” in Gaza. It “strongly and unequivocally” condemned those responsible. In November 2022 UNRWA staff discovered a “man-made cavity underneath the grounds of an UNRWA school in Gaza”, and again expressed “outrage and condemnation” for this violation of its neutrality. In neither case was it able to identify the specific party responsible, but in both cases lodged a protest with the governing authority in the Gaza Strip, which was controlled by Hamas. It also immediately informed Israel and the Palestinian Authority about these discoveries.
The discovery of these weapons by UNRWA, which regularly inspects its premises including vacant ones, and the ensuing international uproar helps explain the paucity of such incidents. More frequent, but less intensively scrutinized, has been Israel’s use of schools for a variety of military purposes. Indeed, if one disregards international law, as Israel instinctively does, schools are well-suited for basing by regular armies. The practice has in recent months diminished, primarily because Israeli bombers and sappers have systematically reduced UNRWA schools and other educational institutions in the Gaza Strip to rubble.
The problem with Israel’s allegations is essentially two-fold: they require either that Palestinian armed groups believe their forces and assets would enjoy a significantly higher level of immunity from Israeli attacks if located in civilian facilities, or that such groups want Israel to commit mass atrocities and to achieve this are forcibly preventing civilians located in such facilities from leaving.
As noted above, there is no credible evidence for the latter, and certainly none indicating it is a practice or policy.
As for the former, Israel’s current genocidal onslaught on the Gaza Strip was preceded by numerous military operations which conclusively demonstrated that Israel considers no one and nothing immune from its bombing campaigns. If Israel had prior to October 2023 demonstrated a basic respect for the laws of war, or at least some of them, the proposition that Palestinian armed groups exploit civilian facilities to protect their military assets would at least be logically tenable. But long before October of last year, Palestinians had every reason to believe they would be hit as hard in a school, mosque, or hospital as anywhere else. That’s why they went underground, and have for the most part stayed there.
The allegation would be more credible if, for example, made by Spain against ETA. Spain since Franco does not have a record of bombing schools and hospitals to root out its enemies, and would presumably be keen to invite foreign correspondents and independent investigators to verify its claims. Israel is in these respects a very different kettle of fish.
The recent intensification of Israeli bombings directed at schools being used as places of refuge and designated safe zones cannot be explained by Israel’s allegations and justifications. The falsehoods Israel concocts to defend its actions demonstrate the deliberate nature of these atrocities. Some have suggested it is a further attempt by Israel to force Palestinians out of the Gaza Strip and into the deserts of Sinai. Others that Israel continues to believe it can turn the population of the Gaza Strip against Hamas by continuously increasing their indescribable suffering.
Either is possible. It is at least as possible that we are searching in vain for an underlying explanation, and it has simply reached the stage of genocide for the sake of genocide. Because Israel can. Because the supply of weapons to commit the crime of crimes, and diplomatic cover for them, continues uninterrupted. And because Israel’s leadership is confident there will be neither repercussions nor accountability for its actions, just impunity.
2 August: Preparing for War
There have been suggestions that Israel’s recent assassinations of Hizballah military commander Fuad Shukr in Beirut and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyya in Tehran were not designed to scuttle ceasefire negotiations and escalate Israel’s war against the Palestinians into a full-blown regional conflagration. Rather, they form the prelude to bringing the horrific slaughter to an end.
According to this reasoning Israel’s government has come to the realization that it must call it a day. It finally understands that what it has failed to achieve in 300 days will remain beyond its reach, that the costs associated with its genocidal campaign are mounting to unacceptable levels, but that it needs to find a dignified exit. Since we’re talking about the Israeli leadership, a dignified exit means killing more people.
Seen in this context Israel’s recent assassination spree, combined with its 31 July “confirmation” that its 13 July terror bombing of Khan Yunis successfully killed Hamas military leader Mohammad Deif, constitutes an off-ramp. Armed with these prominent scalps, it is claimed, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu can now finally accept his own ceasefire agreement from a position of strength, and drop his growing list of objections to his own text.
Alternatively, Israel might ditch the ceasefire proposal altogether and unilaterally suspend military operations in the Gaza Strip. Since Hizballah in Lebanon, Ansar Allah in Yemen, and other members of the self-styled Axis of Resistance have explicitly and repeatedly stated that they will cease fire the moment the Axis of Genocide does so, further regional escalation would also be avoided.
It is unlikely, but not entirely inconceivable, that there are some in Israel who genuinely believe this. It is more plausible that there are those in the Israeli leadership who presented this reasoning to generate Western support for the killings, either before or after the fact. Or both. But the analysis is ultimately based on pure fantasy.
Most importantly, Israel has given no indication it intends to end its genocidal onslaught on the Gaza Strip or negotiate seriously to this end. Just as importantly, there is absolutely no indication that the unconditional support the United States has provided its Israeli proxy for 300 days will not continue for the next 300.
Second, key members of Israel’s governing coalition have made credible threats to Netanyahu that if the mass killings stop for any reason, they will bolt and bring down the government.
Third, Israel believes its recent actions have created the conditions for what may be a unique opportunity to draw the US into a direct confrontation with enemies it cannot defeat on its own, primarily Iran but also Hizballah.
The US has indicated to Israel that it will defend it if it is attacked but will not participate in a war initiated by Israel. That may be Washington’s intention, and much as it would like to avoid direct engagement in a Middle East war during an election campaign, it is even more loath to be seen to be abandoning Israel during the Summer and Autumn of a presidential election year. That wouldn’t go down well with the plutocrats (such as Musk, Zuckerberg, Thiel, and their ilk) who in the US political system have more influence than voters. More to the point, even before the election campaign became a serious consideration, the Biden administration did nothing to prevent the regional escalation it sought to avoid, and limited its interventions to efforts intended to insulate Israel from the consequences of its actions.
More to the point, the US does not consider Israel’s recent assassinations as providing either Hizballah or Iran with a justification to respond, but will consider any Lebanese or Iranian retaliation an illegitimate attack that justifies whatever Israel chooses to do next. Regardless of what Washington may be up to behind the scenes in communications with Israel and, indirectly, the Iranians and Hizballah, its official and public policy will remain one of unconditional support for Israeli aggression. Just listen to what Matthew Miller and his colleagues at the State Department have had to say about these matters. Lest there be any doubt about where the US stands, the State Department can’t even bring itself to condemn gang rape, because it was committed by Israel.
If repeated statements by the US that its commitment to Israel’s security remains “ironclad”, unconditional, and all the rest of it is intended to intimidate Israel’s enemies and influence their actions, it has failed yet again. The evidence in this respect was provided by Hassan Nasrallah, the Hizballah leader, in a major address on 1 August.
Speaking shortly after Shukr’s burial, Nasrallah first stated that the activities of the Support (or Solidarity) Front launched by the Lebanese organization on 8 October would quickly resume, and continue without interruption until its objective of ending Israel’s genocidal campaign against the Palestinians is achieved. He then pivoted to the Shukr assassination, and made clear that it is being dealt with as an entirely separate matter. In Nasrallah’s words it violated three red lines: it involved an air raid on the Lebanese capital Beirut, it was launched against a residential area and resulted in civilian casualties, and it killed a senior leader.
Hizballah will therefore, according to Nasrallah, respond directly and forcefully, rather than symbolically or indirectly, and furthermore this response will be conducted independently of developments in the Support Front. In other words, even if the war against Gaza ends today and the Support Front ceases its attacks, the decision to inflict a direct and painful blow upon Israel in retaliation for the Shukr killing has already been taken, and its inevitable implementation left to the relevant commanders.
Speaking at a funeral service for Haniyya at around the same time the Iranian leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, made similar statements, indicating that not only had Israel attacked the Iranian capital, but that in doing so it had killed an important foreign guest of the Iranian government. It was presented as a significantly more serious attack than Israel’s April bombing of the Iranian embassy complex in the Syrian capital Damascus that killed several senior Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps officers. That exchange brought the region to the very brink of full-scale war.
Both Iran and Hizballah have made clear that they consider Israel’s recent attacks to be of strategic significance that therefore require a strategic response. In Nasrallah’s words, Israel’s actions have produced a new and different conflict that threatens the entire region and therefore requires a sufficiently deterrent response from the region.
The expectation is that the Axis of Resistance will respond with a coordinated attack, or series of strikes, against central Israel that seeks to inflict significant damage upon its military infrastructure, and perhaps target senior officials and/or civilian facilities like power plants as well. This may or may not be the case, and with very little indication of what is being planned we can only speculate.
Less speculation is required to predict what comes once retaliation is conducted. All indications are that the region is on the cusp of a devastating regional war that will prove exceedingly costly to all involved. And at least initially it will give Israel more freedom to slaughter and dispossess in not only the Gaza Strip’s killing fields, but also the West Bank.
As for Israel, whose strategy appears to be based on precipitating a direct US confrontation with its enemies, its illusions about US power in the Middle East are about to experience a painful confrontation with reality. Like Israel, the US is not particularly adept at fighting wars of attrition. Indeed, Israel should have more carefully studied the recent US failures in Iraq and Afghanistan before sending its assassins to Beirut and Tehran. And had the US made a simple phone call all those months ago, this could all have been so easily avoided.
31 July 2024: Two Assassinations
On 30 July Israel bombed the Lebanese capital, Beirut. It proclaimed the purpose of the attack was to kill Fuad Shukur, one of the most senior members of Hizballah’s military council.
The attack appears to have been conducted by several missiles fired from a drone. Although it killed a number of civilians in the targeted building and largely destroyed it, causing significantly more extensive damage than the January strike, also in Beirut, that killed Hamas Deputy Chairman Salih Aruri, it was described as a limited operation. By Israeli standards this is an accurate description. A recent assassination attempt in the Gaza Strip aimed at Muhammad Deif, Hamas’s military commander, was carried out with a number of 2,000 pound bombs that produced hundreds of civilian casualties. As for Shukr, his fate as of this writing remains unknown.
The same cannot be said of Ismail Haniyya, Chairman of the Hamas Politbureau and thus its formal leader. Within less than twelve hours after the Beirut bombing Haniyya was confirmed killed, along with a member of his security detail, in the Iranian capital Tehran. Haniyya had traveled to Tehran to attend the inauguration of Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, this past Sunday.
The loss of a senior leader is a serious and painful blow to any organization, and Hizballah and Hamas are no exceptions in this regard. In Hizballah’s case more than for Hamas, there is the additional question of how Israeli intelligence was able to locate its target with precision, assuming Shukr was indeed at the scene of the attack, at such a sensitive political and operational moment. This is because Shukr operates clandestinely, while Haniyya did so publicly.
After the recent killing of 12 Syrian children in Majdal Shams in the occupied Golan Heights, which Israel blamed on Hizballah and Hizballah on Israel, Israeli leaders – along with their Western sponsors led by the United States – began claiming the children were Israeli citizens and were killed in northern Israel. They weren’t, but it set the stage for Israel to vow that it would avenge its dead while its chorus of flunkies and apologists began with their usual mantra about Israel’s right to defend itself and choose the manner in which it would do so.
According to multiple news reports the United States, France, and others passed messages to Hizballah through the Lebanese government and the office of Speaker of Parliament Nabih Berri to inform it that Israel would attempt to strike a painful blow at Hizballah, but that it had no intention of escalating the situation to the level of a full-scale war. The messengers therefore requested that Hizballah absorb the blow and refrain from a response that could lead to a spiral of escalation unleashing a full-scale regional conflict. Their biggest concern is that, in contrast to Israel’s genocidal onslaught on the Gaza Strip, Iran may decide to directly intervene in any Israeli-Lebanese conflict. This in turn could precipitate a US-Iranian confrontation.
Instead of warning Israel not to attack Lebanon, Hizballah was counseled by Israel’s Western sponsors to accept being attacked in response to a massacre it strenuously denies it had any connection with. Instead of Israel’s Western messengers insisting upon an independent international investigation to determine responsibility for the Majdal Shams killings, they gave Israel a green light to do as it saw fit, including setting the entire Middle East aflame. And they continue to reject making that phone call to Israel about Gaza that would put an end to this horror show.
In other words, Israel was implicitly, and perhaps – or more than perhaps – explicitly during Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s recent sojourn to the United States, assured that there would, as ever, be no repercussions for Israel in response to its actions, at least not from the West.
Hizballah of course took a very different position on the matter, and replied that it would respond forcefully to any Israeli attack that constituted an escalation in the current Israeli-Lebanese confrontation. It also made clear that in doing so it would not distinguish between a large-scale or more limited Israeli attack or escalation. Bombing Beirut, and doing so in order to kill one of the organization’s most senior leaders, clearly constitutes such a significant Israeli escalation. That it targeted a single building and killed a small number of civilians rather than hundreds, is in this context wholly irrelevant as far as Hizballah is concerned.
A further reason one should expect a forceful Lebanese response is that Hizballah is convinced that if it does not do so it would be inviting Israel to carry out further such attacks. It may also believe that Israel is determined to provoke it into a major war, and that attaching a significant price to Israeli provocations may be its best bet to prevent one. Alternatively, but less likely, Hizballah may have come to the conclusion that Israel’s constant stream of threats against Lebanon demonstrate that a major war is inevitable, and that it would serve Lebanon better to be done with it at a time when Israel is experiencing unprecedented crisis and weakness.
But engaging Israel in a full-scale war would also undermine Hizballah’s role as a Support Front (or Solidarity Front) for the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. The purpose of Lebanon’s and other such fronts is to tie up Israeli resources and strengthen Hamas’s negotiating position. Consistently announcing that attacks from the various Support Fronts on Israel will automatically cease once Israel’s onslaught on the Gaza Strip comes to a halt strengthens the Palestinian position. Engaging Israel in a war independent of developments in the Gaza Strip makes it more difficult to link the actions of the Support Fronts to Israel’s actions in the Gaza Strip.
With respect to Haniyya he played a very different role in Hamas than did for example Yasir Arafat in Fatah or George Habash in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Haniyya, who hails from the Shati’ (Beach) Refugee Camp in Gaza City, had been active in Hamas from its very early days. He served as personal assistant to its founder, Shaikh Ahmad Yasin, before beginning his rise through the movement’s ranks. After Hamas won the 2006 Palestinian Authority (PA) legislative elections, he assumed the post of Prime Minister, and was elected (in internal Hamas polls) to its Politbureau. In 2017 was elected as the movement’s leader. According to various reports Iran, whose relations with Hamas had ruptured after the latter took a position opposing the Syrian government during that contry’s civil war, had insisted that Haniyya’s predecessor, Khalid Mash’al, be replaced as a condition for reconciliation. Mash’al had been in charge of the movement when it broke with Damascus and relocated its headquarters from Syria to Qatar.
Not long after assuming the leadership of Hamas Haniyya relocated from Gaza to Doha. So while his assumption of office reflected the shifting center of gravity within the movement to the Gaza Strip, where it ruled, his departure to Qatar removed him from the central role in his organization that Arafat and Habash played within theirs throughout their tenure. Yahya Sinwar is officially the leader of the Hamas branch of the Gaza Strip, but has been more powerful and consequential within the movement than was Haniyya.
Even if Haniyya had been the central operational figure within Hamas his removal will not have a particularly significant impact. In 2004 Israel assassinated the movement’s founder, Yasin, and his successor, Abd-al-Aziz Rantisi, within the space of two months. This didn’t really affect the movement’s continued growth and development, either politically or militarily.
Israel has for decades been quite effective at killing leaders and senior cadres, but is a genuine failure when it comes to defeating their movements. It seems to believe that these movements are dependent upon individuals rather than constituencies, and that removing this or that leader will eliminate opposition. Israel’s other problem is that those organizations it hits hardest with assassinations are also those who have become most adept at quickly replacing those killed with individuals ready to assume their roles. As it was with their predecessors, so it will be with Haniyya and – if he was indeed killed – Shukr. The damage of their killings is primarily in terms of morale and symbolism rather than operational capacity or capability.
In Haniyya’s case the fact of his assassination in the Iranian capital is at least as significant, and arguably more important, than the assassination itself. It demonstrates, conclusively, that Israel is dead set on a confrontation with Iran. With Biden still in the White House, it seems to believe it can successfully do so, and with a bit of luck also engineer a direct US-Iranian confrontation. Those within the US administration determined to stop this slide into regional war are powerless to stop it in the face of Biden’s continued unconditional support for Israel, while their colleagues who think Israel is doing the US a favor believe their moment has finally arrived.
It is going to be at least as difficult for Iran to turn the other cheek and not respond directly to an Israeli attack in its capital city as it is for Hizballah. Fasten your seatbelts. Israel’s determination to unleash a multi-front war may prove as irrational consequential as Germany’s nearly a century ago.
30 July: Sde Teiman Gang Rape
I’m interrupting my review of Arab-Israeli wars, which I will resume next week, to comment on a current development
On the morning of Monday 29 July, a contingent of Israel’s military police – the agency responsible for policing the security forces – showed up at Sde Teiman, an Israeli military base in the Negev Desert that now serves as a prison camp for Palestinians from the Gaza Strip.
The military police had come to arrest nine of the soldiers – apparently all reservists – who serve at the camp. They were wanted for their involvement in the gang rape of a prisoner who was subsequently taken to the camp’s infirmary with severe rectal injuries. (Under normal circumstances I would add something about innocent until proven guilty, but on those exceedingly rare occasions when the Israeli authorities arrest an Israeli in uniform for offences against Palestinians, this can be considered incontrovertible proof they are guilty as sin).
The soldiers resisted arrest, and a stand-off between them and the military police contingent erupted. Almost immediately, Israeli politicians took to the airwaves to denounce the arrest operation, proclaiming the rapists to be heroes – precisely because they had gang-raped a Palestinian prisoner – and called upon their supporters to flood Sde Teiman to prevent the soldiers from being taken into custody.
After protracted negotiations the soldiers agreed to be led away by the military police and were transported to the Beit Lid detention facility near Tulkarm in the northern West Bank. But no sooner had the military police and their detainees left than a mob broke into the prison camp to protest the arrests. Not just any mob, but one that included government ministers, members of parliament, soldiers in uniform, and various others. Later that day similar scenes were repeated at the Beit Lid prison.
Although breaking into or out of a prison is considered a serious violation of the law, thus far not a single individual has been arrested.
The Sde Teiman prison camp has elements of both Abu Ghraib, the US torture center in Iraq, and a Gestapo interrogation center. Among the documented abuses, based on testimonies of both former prisoners and prison staff, are torture, including electric shocks, severe beatings, and various forms of disorientation; severe malnutrition and dehydration; amputations after the very prolonged use of zip-ties that have been deliberately tightened to block circulation to hands and feet; denial of basic medical care; denial of toilet facilities; surgeries without anaesthetic; surgeries performed by unqualified medical students to gain experience; and very much else. You may have read the highly credible accounts emanating from Sde Teiman or seen images/videos of former prisoners incarcerated there. Several dozen Palestinians have been killed at the camp, through torture or denial of basic needs.
It bears recollection that the war crime of torture is considered a legal practice in Israel, and has been confirmed as such by its supreme court, most notably in 1987. Secondly, Israel considers Palestinians to be unlawful combatants who are not entitled to the protections offered by customary law on such matters. And additionally, Israel’s most senior leaders have engaged in a systematic campaign of demonization and dehumanization of Palestinians, and of those suspected of membership in Hamas in particular, which amounts to a license to torture, rape, and kill. The arrested soldiers were essentially told to do as they please with Palestinians and assured that, per standard practice, there would be no consequences of any sort. At one level one can therefore understand the astonished response of the rapists when told they would be arrested for conduct that has been officially sanctioned on a systematic basis.
The case also reflects deeper changes within Israel. Its military has, to put it mildly, admittedly never had a reputation for discipline, but it functioned as the central institution of Israeli state and society. Israel has on this basis been described as an army with a state rather than a state with a military. But that is beginning to change. As Geoffrey Aronson has argued, recent years have seen the emergence of a new class of Israeli politicians, most notably National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who in contrast to many of their predecessors did not enter and succeed in politics on the strength of a military career, but rather built successful careers through opposition to and delegitimization of Israel’s security establishment. Their preferred armed force is not a regular army, but rather militias and mobs of brownshirts. And that’s what we saw on 29 July. It’s not so much a turning point as visible evidence that the process is alive, well, and rapidly gaining momentum. That it should burst onto the scene in defense of gang rape should therefore not come as a particular surprise.
There are many other notable elements to this issue, not least of which would be the observation that every accusation is a confession. Another would be that Government ministers and members of parliament rank somewhat higher in the pecking order than falsely-accused UNRWA staff.
Yet one angle that is particularly interesting has to do with Israel’s concerns about sustaining its impunity with respect to its dealings with the Palestinian people. As Dimi Reider has pointed out, Israel’s Chief of Staff, Herzi Halevi, in his condemnation of the riot asserted that military police investigations are essential to protect Israeli soldiers “at home and abroad”. “Abroad”, Reider points out, “obviously meaning The Hague” where the International Criminal Court (ICC) and International Court of Justice (ICJ) are based.
Thanks to efforts initiated by the United Kingdom, which argued that the ICC should only prosecute Palestinians, the Court is now permitting multiple challenges to its jurisdiction over Israeli crimes perpetrated in the occupied Palestinian territories.
A particularly specious set of arguments has been put forth by Germany, arguably the most experienced state when it comes to the crimes enumerated in the Rome Statute. One of Berlin’s arguments is that the ICC should not pursue arrest warrants until Israel has completed the commission of its crimes against the Palestinian people and considers its business concluded. The other argument concerns “complementarity”, the principle according to which the ICC can and will only pursue prosecutions where national judiciaries fail to conduct such procedures themselves.
In its paeans to Israel’s judiciary, Berlin conveniently neglects that every independent study of Israel’s judiciary with respect to crimes committed by Israelis against Palestinians has concluded that the primary role of this apparatus has been to enable, legitimize, and whitewash the crimes concerned. Even were this not the case, the way ICC complementarity works is that the national judiciary would have to credibly investigate and, if appropriate, prosecute and convict the same individuals for the same crimes they stand accused of in The Hague. In other words, Germany’s desperately furious efforts to defend that other genocidal regime will prove of little use to Netanyahu and Gallant. But Halevi, a representative of Israel’s traditional military elite – let’s call him an Israeli Prussian – sees the writing on the wall, and he and his fellow officers don’t want to find themselves sharing Netanyahu and Gallant’s fate. So they are creating an argument for complementarity.
In a rational society Halevi would be hailed for his foresight and criticized for waiting so long to act. But a society where government ministers, members of parliament, uniformed soldiers, and a mob of brownshirts riot at two separate locations on a single day in defense of gang rape cannot be considered rational.
28 July: A Review of Arab-Israeli Wars (Part IV)
The 1987-1993 popular uprising in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, commonly known as the First Intifada, was neither a war nor an armed conflict in the conventional sense of the term. But it was an important milestone in the Arab-Israeli conflict and Israeli-Palestinian relations. I don’t have much to add to an article, “In Honor of Titans”, that I wrote for Mondoweiss on 9 December 2012 to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the uprising. Reproduced below:
In hindsight, the popular uprising that erupted in the occupied Palestinian territories on 9 December 1987 and continued for six grueling yet heroic years makes perfect sense. Scholars, analysts, and activists have demonstrated how a variety of factors came together to ripen conditions for the eruption of mass protest and its development into a sustained and organized rebellion.
These conditions included accelerated colonial expansion throughout the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and Gaza Strip, in some respects going well beyond the Allon Plan that has since 1967 served as Israel’s master plan for the occupied territories; a palpable increase in state-sponsored settler vigilantism as well as racist brutalization of Palestinian migrant workers within Israel; Israel’s self-proclaimed adoption of a ruthless “Iron Fist policy” in 1985, replete with deportations, incarcerations, town and house arrests, house demolitions and the like; a growth spurt and gradual mainstreaming of an Israeli fascism that openly advocated not only a combination of Jim Crow and Nuremberg laws but mass expulsion of all Arabs living under Israeli rule; and growing hardship resulting from the combination of increased Israeli restrictions on Palestinian economic activity and constriction of Arab labor markets.
No less significant were the serious investments, most notably by Khalil al-Wazir (Abu Jihad), in local popular and political organization as PLO factions – mainly Fatah, the PFLP and DFLP – joined the more longstanding campaigns of the Palestine Communist Party and Islamist movement after the PLO was evicted from Lebanon in 1982. These were augmented, in mid-1987, by the end of the Palestinian schism that had plagued the national movement since 1983, and a series of bold attacks by Islamic Jihad in the Gaza Strip and the PFLP-GC in northern Israel that exposed the vulnerabilities of Israel’s military.
To these must be added the growing despair among Palestinians as the Reagan administration transformed the American-Israeli relationship from a strategic partnership in which Washington nevertheless continued to pay lip service to international law into an insufferable erotic stage show highlighted by multiple mass Congressional orgasms. Simultaneously the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty was in the West Bank and Gaza Strip translated into the further institutionalization of military government in the guise of its Civil Administration, as well as a determined Israeli campaign to mobilize collaborationist Village Leagues. And there was no Palestinian who failed to notice the growing Arab officialdom`s preoccupation with the conflict between Iraq and Iran, to the point where the 1987 Arab League Summit mentioned Palestine as a passing afterthought.
The above checklist for insurrection could go on for several pages, vital statistics included, and still be woefully deficient. The point, and what is too often forgotten, is that on 8 December 1987 no one was expecting even a traffic accident at the Erez checkpoint between Israel and the Gaza Strip. When it came – accident or not - its four fatalities would the next day set off a series of protests in the Gaza Strip’s Jabaliyya refugee camp and then Nablus’s Balata refugee camp in the West Bank. Spreading like wildfire, these demonstrations metamorphosed into a popular revolt that within weeks made Intifada part of the English language.
To the extent that 8 December 1987 that morning had any political significance, it was yet another day in the buildup to Israel’s fortieth anniversary celebrations the following May. With the PLO down and out, Palestinians in Lebanon barely surviving the siege of their camps by the Syrian-sponsored Amal movement, the occupied territories more secure for Israeli soldiers and settlers than most small American towns, and Palestinians in Israel preoccupied with the increasingly hostile rivalry between the local communist and Islamist parties, Israel was sitting pretty. So pretty, in fact, that its fortieth anniversary was confidently anticipated by its leaders as the moment when the accursed Palestinians and their damned cause could finally and unceremoniously be consigned to the dustbin of history and vanish forevermore.
This was not an exclusively Israeli ambition. True, Palestine, sitting as it does at the nexus between East and West; North and South; past, present, and future, had become a – often the – cause célèbre in much of the third world, Africa and South Asia in particular. Yet in most of Europe, North and South America, and significant parts of East Asia, leaders and often peoples saw Israel’s upcoming celebration as a significant event, whether for strategic, political, religious, opportunistic, and/or moral reasons. If Israel’s 1982 Lebanon War had for the first time televised the realities of Zionism into its supporters’ living rooms, even the Sabra-Shatila Massacre that mid-September had done little more than jolt those who had ecstatically celebrated Israel’s 1967 conquests into questioning if Israel was entirely blameless or merely thoroughly righteous. And in any case there was still a Cold War to be won. The late 1980s was a very different world.
All that began to change on 9 December 1987. Whether one sees the Intifada as harvesting fruit sufficiently lowered by previous decades of struggle or the beginning of a new era, it was and remains the turning point. It is the date future historians will pinpoint as the moment when Israel in the global consciousness began to be transformed from a Mediterranean Shangri-La to a Middle Eastern South Africa.
In order to pierce the ignorant conscience of hundreds of millions of people who either never knew or had forgotten that colonialism is nothing less than daily evil – Israel had after all successfully marketed its presence as “the benign occupation” – Palestinians first had to break through the barrier of fear. And a very formidable barrier it was. The occupied territories were not governed like the rest of Israel – which would have been bad enough – but rather ruled by a subsidiary military government which legislated by decree and was tailor-made to drive Palestinians out of their lands and out of their minds. Anthony Coon, a specialist in town planning at Strathclyde University, for example, concluded in a study commissioned for the Palestinian human rights organization Al-Haq that he had never previously come across a town planning agency that destroyed more homes than it authorized.
Israeli control was so pervasive and intrusive that the colonial administration bore greater similarities to totalitarian states than Israel itself. Permits were required for virtually everything, with one benefit being a steady supply of informers and collaborators recruited amongst parents desperate to obtain medical attention for a severely ill child, university graduates eager for employment to support their existing families and start new ones, and a host of others.
The list of prohibited items and activities – including the Palestinian flag, uncensored newspapers, and unauthorized meetings of more than several people – would have made Kim Il Sung proud. Those who refused to cooperate, persisted with their thought crimes, or actively resisted Israeli power with so much as a slogan could expect imprisonment, torture, the sealing or outright bulldozing of their homes, and the ultimate punishment of deportation and exile. That’s the short version, and conditions in East Jerusalem, formally annexed and under direct Israeli government control, were only in some respects better while in others even worse.
But break the barrier of fear the Palestinians did. And how. Not because they had nothing to lose, but because they had everything to gain and were determined to win. Salim Tamari has pointed out that what distinguished this uprising from previous post-1967 revolts was that it included not only towns and refugee camps but villages as well. And by early 1988 the uprising encompassed every town, every refugee camp and every village from the northern West Bank to those quarters of Rafah refugee camp adjoining the Egyptian border in the southern Gaza Strip. Their residents collectively engaged in mass demonstrations that claimed a daily toll of unarmed protestors shot or beaten to death; general and commercial strikes that Israel unsuccessfully tried to break for weeks on end with punishing sanctions, including repeatedly ripping the doors off stores that refused to open and impounding everything in sight; and any variety of activities that were usually unusually creative and designed to make their homeland and themselves ungovernable. It was based on, and sustained by, numerous forms of social and economic solidarity that emerged as circumstances required and that relied first and foremost on an extraordinary and extraordinarily selfless spirit of voluntarism.
The uprising almost immediately spawned a coherent and cohesive leadership in the form of the Unified National Command of the Uprising. Representing the main PLO factions and Islamic Jihad and reflected in a multiplicity of regional and local committees, it issued weekly communiqués exhorting the people to greater militancy and sacrifice and setting out a schedule for the coming week’s activities. Its instructions were – at least initially – unquestionably followed not out of fear but out of devotion to the national movement and the cause it represented.
One of the most memorable aspects of the uprising is that it was truly national in spirit, if not always in scale. 21 December 1987, I believe it was, was the day in which Palestinians throughout mandatory Palestine conducted an active general strike. Within Israel, Palestinian activists shut down key highways with burning tires and other obstacles. For Israel’s leaders, it was perhaps their most fearful day since October 1973. In an era when Palestinians were still led as and acted as a people rather than independent fragments of a broken whole, the uprising was as much about ending the siege of the camps in Lebanon as evicting Israel from the Gaza Strip. And indeed, within the uprising’s first month Hafiz al-Asad was left with no choice but to order his Lebanese surrogates to call off their murderous siege of Beirut’s refugee camps “in solidarity with the Intifada in Palestine”.
Israel’s response was as furious as it was ferocious. The headlines rightly spoke of children shot through the head, stone-throwing youths having their arms deliberately broken, adults beaten to death in their homes and activists summarily executed in broad daylight. Israel’s soldiers were after all acting on Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s Neanderthal exhortation to “break their bones”, and Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s demand to “re-establish the barrier of fear”. Away from the floodlights Israel’s finest visited 1,001 terrors upon their subjects each and every single day and night for the next six years. Yet everything the Israelis threw at the Palestinians seemed only to make them stronger and was thrown right back at them. This was particularly the case with the prison system, which became as much a rite of passage as matriculation from high school.
Collective punishment was often the Israeli weapon of choice. These included travel bans, the severance of utilities, school closures, mass arrests, and the systematic ransacking of homes. Most punishing of all were the strictly enforced round-the-clock curfews that could persist for weeks on end. Overcrowded homes boiling with frustration over lost incomes, untended crops, missed classes and dwindling supplies often came to resemble pressure cookers. Many a child who managed to escape to the roof or garden to break the monotony for some playtime, along with adults foraging for food or work, or tending to the needs of relatives, friends or comrades paid with their lives. Then as now, the Gaza Strip was the collective human guinea pig for the latest developments in Israeli sadism.
At a time when Israel was rather successfully marketing itself as the only democracy this side of the Big Bang, it bears recalling some of the measures it introduced or resurrected during those years: the fax machine and electronic mail were prohibited, all international telecommunications were severed (apparently the first time a state had done so since the Second World War), and Israel began the process of severing the Gaza Strip from the West Bank, and East Jerusalem from the latter. The first victim of this separation policy was not the Gaza Strip but rather East Jerusalem, which lost its position as commercial, services, socio-cultural, and political hub; since 1948, it had been dependent on the West Bank (and since 1967, the Gaza Strip) “hinterland” for this role.
Israel was equally inventive with weaponry. Tear gas was transformed into a lethal weapon by firing canisters directly at the heads of demonstrators, or inundating curfewed homes full of infants, pregnant women and the elderly with copious amount of it. Its rubber bullets were actually steel marbles coated with the thinnest imaginable layer of rubber. Plastic bullets were simply hardened material shaped like the real thing, and unlike those used elsewhere for crowd control could instantly kill an adult. According to an UNRWA official in the Gaza Strip at the time, the Israeli military was constantly “improving” the material in clubs used to beat Palestinians to a pulp because victims’ skulls had a tendency to break the wooden ones and the fiberglass version tended to fray after intensive use. In a display of one-upmanship towards Palestinians armed with slingshots, Israeli army engineers developed a gravel thrower that inundated streets with large quantities of small stones delivered at what seemed to be supersonic speed.
Throughout Israel’s weapon of choice remained humiliation. Somewhere in its corridors of power, some genius determined that if enough soldiers and Border Guards insisted on being called “Abu Allah,” and forced their detainees to chant “Arafat is a dog” and then bark like one before being urinated upon or forced to masturbate in front of them and fellow detainees, Palestinians would forget they lived under occupation or at least come to love Israel with the same devotion as its friends in Congress. (That the tactic was judged wildly successful by the Americans as they prepared to invade Iraq in the midst of yet another Palestinian uprising seems almost axiomatic).
In what was above all a test of wills, Shamir and Rabin never succeeded in breaking the Palestinians or their rebellion. Nor did the collapse of the Soviet Union or the 1991 Gulf War help them much. They did, however, manage to degrade the uprising, not least by removing successive layers of ever less experienced leadership through arrest or liquidation. The PLO in exile, despite receiving insufficient credit for its role in the revolt, also undermined it in a variety of ways. And with the rise of Hamas factional cooperation gradually gave way to open rivalries.
By the early 1990s, a mass movement had increasingly developed into an armed insurgency that involved a significantly smaller number of activists. This was not by definition a negative development, although guns do always seem to bring excesses along for the ride. Rather, under the circumstances, incipient guerilla warfare seemed to retard the forward momentum of the movement as much as promote it. Israel, which had responded to unarmed demonstrations and stone-throwing protests with snipers and machine gun fire, fought Kalashnikovs with helicopter gunships and anti-tank missiles. And still it failed to restore the status quo.
It would take the 1993 Oslo Agreement to terminate – or, more accurately, to abort - the uprising and with it the increasingly successful campaign to delegitimize the Israeli occupation while continuously increasing its cost. It remains speculative, but many have persuasively argued, and many more continue to believe, that if Yasir Arafat had not rushed into secret Norwegian negotiations with Israel and instead deferred to Haidar Abd-al-Shafi’s backbone in the formal Washington talks, Israel would eventually have acceded to a settlement freeze for the duration of any interim period. If the Palestinians had played their cards right and persevered further, it is a not unreasonable view that they could also have successfully defined the length and outcome of any interim period. Doing so would have most likely extracted an unspeakably cruel cost in Palestinian blood and treasure. But it was in 1993 already apparent and indeed predictable that relinquishing the demand for an end to occupation would be exponentially more costly.
Those who maintain that Oslo could have succeeded but for the failures of Israelis, Palestinians, or both fundamentally misunderstand its nature and purpose. It was neither a peace process, nor an exam administered by Rabin and Clinton to determine if Arafat would mend his evil ways. Nor was the environment it provided for further Israeli colonial expansion the heart of the matter. Rather, Israel’s rulers and particularly its security establishment had by early 1988 concluded that the Intifada had irrevocably shattered the status quo, and began the search for a new paradigm. They chose not annexation or a two-state framework, but rather separation. Israel opted for what Ehud Barak summarized, for those lacking a proper knowledge of Afrikaans, as “us here and them there.” Separation reflected Israel’s assessment of reality and possibility in the context of the end of the Cold War, the transformation of its economy, and the unprecedented docility of the Arab world. Essentially, it would keep what it wanted and transfer responsibility for the rest to an enclosed Palestinian Authority.
The West Bank Wall, the isolation of East Jerusalem and Gaza Strip, and the ethnic cleansing of the Jordan Valley are therefore not indicators of a failed process, but rather demonstrate it is working precisely as designed. Oslo was arguably never meant to reach a terminal conclusion, since Israel’s leaders must have known the maximum they were prepared to concede on any of the so-called “permanent status issues” fell considerably short of the minimum any Palestinian leader could implement.
Few conflicts can be traced back to the conceit of a single individual. With the 2000-2005 uprising, Barak’s conviction that his powers of persuasion were such that he could convince Arafat to accept permanent suzerainty in a single tête-à-tête at Camp David is as close as it gets. To the extent Oslo has failed, this is accounted for by the PA’s failure or refusal to eradicate resistance to the occupation, and the prospect that in combination with regional transformations the model of separation under occupation is proving increasingly untenable as well.
In this context, much of what currently passes for debate regarding the correct framework to resolve the Question of Palestine is extraordinarily damaging and in many cases nothing short of infantile. The issue is not whether Palestinians can or should have one or two or several dozen states. Rather, the critical question remains unchanged: can the Palestinian people achieve anything at all if they are unable to first finish the work of uprisings past and terminate the Israeli colonial occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip? A failure to do so will produce neither two states consistent with the program proposed by the PLO during the 1970s and 1980s, nor a single state that is meaningfully different than the reality that already exists today.
Given the centrality of the struggle against occupation to any Palestinian future, and the increasingly massive international support this now has, it should come as no surprise that Zionist media today welcomes contributions dismissing this essential precondition to Palestinian self-determination – however defined – as an irrelevant sideshow. To re-imagine the struggle for Palestinian self-determination as one where a secular democratic state can only be achieved by abandoning the West Bank and Gaza Strip to the tender mercies of unbridled Israeli colonialism is at best criminally negligent. A more purposeful and certainly more responsible position to take is to maximize each and every opportunity that exists for the re-internationalization of the Question of Palestine. It is not BDS or UN, as if one is somehow superior to the point of invalidating the other, but rather both and ICJ and EU and much more, effectively calibrated and integrated into a meaningful strategy with concrete as opposed to rhetorical objectives.
The so-called first Intifada was neither the first uprising in twentieth-century Palestinian history nor even the first such event after 1967. Palestinians began rebelling from virtually the moment the first British High Commissioner set foot in their country during the Mandatory period. The 1936-1939 Arab Rebellion, replete with the longest general strike in recorded history, was consistently held up by the Intifada’s leaders and participants as an example to be emulated. (The former had failed, but not for lack of trying and certainly not because that previous generation of revolutionaries ever decided the struggle to end the Mandate had become meaningless and began demanding Arab unity instead). Similarly, the mid-1970s and early 1980s had seen sustained periods of unrest in the occupied territories. Nevertheless, the 1987-1993 Intifada represents – alongside the 1936 Rebellion and the 1982 Siege of Beirut – for many Palestinians their finest hour during the past century. There are many reasons for this, but top of the list may well be the abiding perception that the combination of adversity and hope consistently bought out the very best in people at the individual and collective level under the worst imaginable circumstances. And truth be told, for many of the younger generation not yet saddled with the responsibilities of job and family, it was despite the manifold horrors also an exciting era. Alongside the death, destruction and grief that could be all-consuming, it equally offered the exhilaration of freedom in all its dimensions.
As might be expected after six gruelling years of rebellion many Palestinians, particularly in the occupied territories, initially welcomed Oslo and either hoped – even if against hope – that the fine print would be overtaken by events or that Israel would see the light and simply go away. When this proved to be an illusion, anger began to set in, and Palestinians directed it not just at Israel and its foreign backers, but most vociferously at their own leaders who had knowingly allowed themselves to be hoodwinked at the negotiating table. Where Salim Tamari had in the 1980s pointed out that Israel’s search for a native pillar in the occupied territories had been one of the most unsuccessful in the history of colonialism, it now seemed that Israel had recruited no less than the leadership of the national liberation movement as sub-contractor for its rule.
I particularly recall taking a ride with an acquaintance in central Ramallah during the late 1990s. As we passed the boys’ school on Radio Street a few doors down from where I lived for a time during the above events, my acquaintance, as much in exasperation as admiration, began extolling its students’ contribution to the Intifada, and exclaimed they had done more for their people than the entire Palestinian Authority had or ever would do. Damn right he was. And I will honor each of those titans until the day I die.
26 July 2024: A Review of Arab-Israeli Wars (Part III)
On 6 June 1982 tens of thousands of Israeli troops, along with hundreds of tanks supported by the Israeli air force, invaded Lebanon. Israel informed the world that it had launched Operation Peace for Galilee in order to put a definitive end to Palestinian shelling of northern Israel. Israel’s leaders repeatedly declared that its forces were engaged in a limited campaign, whose aim was to push Palestinian guerilla forces based in southern Lebanon some 40 kilometers north of the Israeli border. The proclaimed objective was to place northern Israel beyond the range of Palestinian Katyusha rockets and artillery. Ergo, peace for Galilee.
Israel’s stated intentions notwithstanding, its military during the first week of the invasion surged much further north. Entering the Beqaa valley in eastern Lebanon, they engaged Syrian units stationed in the country in fierce battles, first destroying more than two dozen Syrian anti-aircraft missile batteries Damascus had deployed in Lebanon the previous year in response to Israeli attacks. In echoes of the 1967 War, the Israeli air force shot down more than 80 Syrian jets, losing only a single unmanned aircraft itself. After Israel seized the Beirut-Damascus highway, Syria accepted a ceasefire-in-place.
By 14 June the Israeli military reached the Lebanese capital Beirut, more than 100 kilometers north of the border, and encircled the city’s western half, where the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was based. Israel imposed a total, punishing siege on West Beirut that would continue until late August, when the PLO withdrew its forces from Lebanon pursuant to an agreement negotiated by the US. Israel explained the discrepancies between Operation Peace for Galilee’s stated aims and the unfolding reality in Lebanon as developments resulting from the course of the fighting – first and foremost Palestinian perfidy – rather than the manner in which the war had been planned. None of the claims put forward by Israel about its 1982 invasion of Lebanon withstand scrutiny.
The fabrications begin with the invasion’s name. “Operation Peace for Galilee” never existed, and was circulated solely for propaganda purposes. The invasion plan’s actual code name was Operation Big Pines. The Israeli military had in 1981-1982 developed two plans for an invasion of Lebanon, Big Pines and Little Pines. Its leadership adopted the more ambitious of the two to guide its actions.
Rather than forcing PLO forces several dozen kilometers north of the Israeli-Lebanese border, Big Pines from the outset envisioned the wholesale destruction and eradication of the PLO, and the physical elimination of its leadership, by seizing West Beirut where the organization had since 1970 maintained its headquarters.
Israel was similarly determined to expel the Syrian military, which had entered Lebanon in 1976 as part of an Arab League force, known as the Arab Deterrent Force, that had been established in response to that country’s civil war, which erupted in 1975.
Syria’s initial priority in Lebanon was to prevent what appeared to be an imminent victory by the Lebanese National Movement and its Palestinian allies, commonly known as the Joint Forces, against the Lebanese Forces, the right-wing Maronite militia dominated by the Lebanon’s Phalanges, or Kata’ib. The latter were closely aligned with Israel, and were now being armed by it and supported in various other ways. Syria, probably correctly, feared that a Joint Forces victory would precipitate an Israeli invasion of Lebanon, producing a strategic threat Damascus intended to avoid.
The United States was similarly opposed to a Joint Forces victory, and brokered informal Israeli-Syrian understandings, known as the Red Line Agreement, to facilitate Syria’s intervention in Lebanon. Thus, when Syrian forces initially entered Lebanon to rescue the beleaguered Phalanges from oblivion, they did so in alignment with Israel and with the support of the US. Furious battles with the Joint Forces ensued, in which the Syrians gradually gained the upper hand. Damascus’s strategy, of maintaining a balance of power between Lebanon’s warring parties in order to maintain its role as arbiter of the country’s affairs, was subsequently challenged by the resurgent Phalanges. Syria opposed Phalangist domination of Lebanon both on its own terms, and because it viewed the Lebanese militia as a proxy for increased Israeli and US influence in Lebanon, to be achieved at its expense.
Thus Operation Big Pines sought not only the destruction of the PLO but also the expulsion of Syria from Lebanon. With Syrian and Palestinian influence in Lebanon eliminated by Israel, the Lebanese National Movement would be unable to resist Israel’s installation of Bashir Jumayyil (also spelled Gemayel) as Lebanon’s president.
Jumayyil was the commander of the Lebanese Forces, the right-wing militia whose leading element was the Phalange Party. The latter was established and led by Bashir’s father, Pierre. As its name suggests, its formation was inspired by the example of Spain’s fascist Falange, led by Francisco Franco, and also by Mussolini’s Nationalist Fascist Party. It was formed in 1936 as a paramilitary movement after Jumayyil pèreattended the Berlin Olympics, impressed by the discipline of its Nazis. Emulating the latter, the Phalange initially paraded in brownshirts and adopted the Roman salute. Jumayyil fils was Israel’s surrogate of choice in Lebanon, and details of Big Pines were shared with him as early as January 1982, in part because it assigned his Lebanese Forces the role of cannon fodder during the seizure of West Beirut.
Once securely installed in Lebanon’s presidential palace in Ba’abda, Bashir would be required to sign an Israeli-Lebanese peace treaty on Israel’s terms, a demand he also readily accepted. His fascist regime would then expel the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon to Jordan, thereby fulfilling a longstanding Phalangist objective.
In Israeli thinking, the destruction of the Palestinian national movement together with the forcible relocation of Lebanon’s Palestinians to Jordan would set the stage for the Palestinians to take control of the latter and transform the Hashemite monarchy into a Palestinian republic. With an alternative Palestinian homeland thus secured, Israel could proceed with the formal incorporation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip into Israel and the “transfer” of its population to the Palestinian entity in Jordan.
In other words, the ultimate objective of the 1982 Lebanon War was to make the occupied Palestinian territories safe for Israeli annexation. With so many moving parts, it was a pipe dream from start to finish and one that only hardened ideologues could have consider feasible.
Palestinian guerillas first began launching raids from Lebanese territory into Israel during the mid-1960s. Initially, Palestinian nationalist movements like Fatah, the reverse acronym of the Palestinian National Liberation Movement, had limited appeal among Palestinians. After the 1948 Nakba, and with the emergence of pan-Arab regimes in Egypt under Abdel-Nasser and later in Syria and Iraq, and particularly after Egypt and Syria officially formed a union in the form of the United Arab Republic in 1958 (which lasted until 1961), most Palestinians believed that salvation would come from a united Arab campaign to restore their rights, rather than a separate Palestinian one. George Habash, best known as the founder and General Secretary of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), had previously, during the early 1950s, founded the Movement of Arab Nationalists to promote this broader campaign and make it a reality. Palestinians also joined other regional or internationalist movements, like the communists and Muslim Brotherhood, but pan-Arabism generally carried the day.
The 1967 June War transformed the calculations of not only Habash but also of many others. The Arab regimes, and the pan-Arab ones in particular, were thoroughly discredited by their comprehensive defeat at the hands of Israel. They were also sufficiently weakened and no longer able to prevent Palestinian militants from independently taking up arms to fight Israel from their territory.
In this context Palestinian guerilla groups like Fatah, formed during the 1950s, and the PFLP, established by Habash in late 1967, seized control of the PLO. The latter had been established in 1964 at the initiative of the Arab League, primarily as a vehicle to control rather than support Palestinian militancy, and to maintain Egyptian leadership on the Question of Palestine. Yet, by 1969 it was under the control of the guerilla movements who installed a Fatah leader, Yasir Arafat, as the Chairman of its Executive Committee.
Fatah was a strictly nationalist movement. Its cadres ranged from communists to Islamists, and its only requirement was that members not be affiliated with any other party or organization. Where prior to 1967 it sought to entangle Arab states in military conflict with Israel, thereafter its official credo was “Palestinian non-interference in Arab affairs, and Arab non-interference in Palestinian affairs”.
The PFLP along with several others took a very different position. They perceived the Palestinian Revolution as the vanguard of a movement that would radicalize the region and insisted that the liberation of Palestine could only be fulfilled after reactionary Arab regimes aligned with Western imperialism were replaced.
In September 1970 these tensions came to a head in Jordan, in what came to be known as Black September. After the 1967 War, the PLO (or more accurately, its constituent movements) established themselves throughout the country and in its capital, Amman, and the Jordan Valley in particular. Jordan was a natural choice given that it shares the longest Arab border with Israel and the territories it had just conquered. From Jordan the Palestinians launched numerous attacks across the River Jordan into Israel and the territories it had occupied, to which Israel responded with punishing attacks against both Palestinian positions and refugee camps, as well as Jordanian infrastructure. Jordan’s ruler, King Hussein, not only felt that he was losing power within his own country, but also losing it to forces such as the PFLP determined to overthrow him.
Lurking in the background was bitter rivalry about Palestinian representation. The PLO insisted it was the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, a position virtually every Palestinian endorsed but a status it had yet to achieve in either the Arab League or United Nations. Jordan, which had ruled the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) between 1948 and 1967, continued to lay claim to sovereignty over its lost territory (its 1950 annexation of the West Bank had been recognized only by the United Kingdom and Pakistan). Since Jordan contained more Palestinians than any other state, and had in 1952 conferred citizenship upon its Palestinian residents to strengthen its territorial claims, it viewed itself as the appointed interlocutor on Palestinian issues – a role which not coincidentally also enhanced its regional and international clout. Amman thus viewed not only the PLO, but Palestinian nationalism as such as a threat.
In the ferocious assault known as Black September, King Hussein defeated the Palestinians and by the end of 1971 successfully expelled the Palestinian national movement from Jordanian territory. Whether movements like the PFLP unnecessarily provoked Black September with their determination to overthrow the Jordanian monarchy and by openly flouting its authority, most visibly in September 1970 by landing three hijacked aircraft at Dawson’s Field in Zarqa (renamed Revolution Airport) and blowing them up after removing the passengers, or whether Fatah erred in not recognizing the inevitability of conflict with it and should have taken the initiative to replace the monarchy with a nationalist Jordanian regime, would be debated by Palestinians for years to come.
Much of this debate would be conducted in Beirut, where the PLO established its headquarters after losing its base in Jordan. While sharing a much smaller border with Israel, southern Lebanon also replaced Jordan as the primary staging ground for Palestinian operations against Israel. Although the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon is often referred to as the first Lebanon War, it was in fact the second if not the third.
Throughout the late 1960s and 1970s, Israel and the PLO traded fire across the Lebanese border. Palestinians primarily fired Katyusha rockets into northern Israel, while Israel launched air raids on Palestinian positions and refugee camps. Israel also extensively bombed Lebanese villages, in the expectation that doing so would turn the local population against the Palestinians. Less frequently, Israel and the Palestinians would send commando squads across the border. On 11 March 1978 a Fatah unit entered Israel and hijacked two buses bound for Tel Aviv. In what became known as the coastal road massacre, 38 Israelis were killed and 76 wounded before the chase and shootout ended with the squad of 11 Palestinians also killed.
Three days later Israel invaded southern Lebanon. More than 1,000 Palestinians and Lebanese were killed during Operation Litani, but the PLO emerged relatively unscathed. Although UN Security Council Resoluton 425 of 19 March 1978, supported by the United States, called upon Israel to “withdraw forthwith its forces from all Lebanese territory”, they would remain in Lebanon until finally expelled from the country by Hizballah in 2000. Instead, Israel established a proxy force, the South Lebanon Army (SLA), to help it maintain control of a buffer zone it established in southern Lebanon.
The next major confrontation took place in 1981. That April, the Israeli air force shot down two Syrian helicopters over Lebanon’s Beka’a Valley in support of its Phalangist allies, who were facing defeat in the battle for the town of Zahle. The Israeli attack violated the informal Syrian-Israeli understandings previously brokered by the United States. In response, and also in violation of these understandings, Syria deployed anti-aircraft missile batteries within Lebanon to deter further Israeli attacks. Then, in July, amid escalating Israeli-Palestinian cross-border shelling, Israel launched massive air raids that targeted Beirut and points south.
According to the UN the bombings, which also targeted a maternity hospital, apartment buildings, bridges and other infrastructure, killed 300 or more Palestinians and Lebanese, primarily civilians. But they failed to have any impact on Palestinian shelling of northern Israel, which intensified in response. Fearing a broader conflagration that might also draw in Syria, the Reagan administration dispatched a diplomat, Philip Habib, to Beirut to broker a ceasefire. Much like US diplomats during the current crisis, Habib refused to meet with the PLO in obeisance to Israel, but did negotiate with it indirectly through the UN.
The resulting ceasefire agreement alarmed Israel, because it elevated the standing of the PLO and for all intents and purposes made Arafat a legitimate partner and guarantor of a diplomatic agreement mediated by Washington. Should Arafat successfully maintain his end of the ceasefire bargain, Israel feared, Washington might get the idea that it could also negotiate with the Palestinians about more substantive issues, like an end to Israel’s occupation and the establishment of an independent Palestinian state.
It was against this background that Israel began formulating Operation Big Pines. But in order to unleash it, Israel would first have to provoke a Palestinian attack that it could present as a justification for going to war. Begin and his Minister of Defense, Ariel Sharon, quickly made clear that the ceasefire applied not only to the Israeli-Lebanese border but to the entire planet, and that any Palestinian attack anywhere would be a violation of the agreement. In point of fact, the agreement explicitly referenced only the Israeli-Lebanese border, and this was the interpretation accepted by both the UN and US mediators.
Although Arafat was the leader of the PLO, and his position was secure, he also presided over a fractious organization that functioned as an umbrella for multiple movements with different agendas, including scepticism about maintaining the ceasefire. Furthermore, the Fatah movement he led was arguably even more fractious than the PLO, consisting of multiple power centers that had proven themselves more than capable of acting autonomously where it served their interests to do so. Nevertheless, Arafat, recognizing the stakes as much as Israel, managed to impose discipline and maintain the ceasefire, both across the border and globally.
Determined to provoke the war it had already decided to wage, Israel used the pretext of the death of an Israeli soldier after his vehicle hit a landmine within Lebanese territory – clearly not a violation of the ceasefire agreement – to bomb the town of Damour, killing 23. The PLO held its fire. Determined to demonstrate his political chops to Washington, Arafat even went so far as to disavow any PLO connection to Palestinian protests in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Responding to a larger provocation in May Arafat, unable to restrain his forces, ordered them to deliberately aim their rocket salvos at empty fields.
Sharon had shared his plans in detail with the US. The response of Secretary of State Alexander Haig was that Washington would support an Israeli invasion, but only if there was an “internationally-recognized provocation” by the Palestinians.
This finally arrived in early June of 1982. On 3 June Israel’s ambassador to the United Kingdom was seriously wounded in a shooting attack by a Palestinian gunman. As became immediately apparent, including to both Israel and the United States, the aspiring assassin was not affiliated with the PLO but rather with the Fatah Revolutionary Council, a splinter movement fiercely opposed to the PLO and better known as the Abu Nidal Organization. Abu Nidal (Sabri al-Banna) was a Fatah renegade who had split from the movement in 1974 and been sentenced to death by the PLO for treason. Subsequently adopted by Iraq, the most likely explanation for the London shooting is that Saddam Hussein, whose war against Iran was already producing failure rather than victory, considered an Israeli-Palestinian war a useful diversion that would enable him to appeal to Iran to cease hostilities and unite in support of the Palestinians.
Israel’s response to this development was “Abu Nidal, Abu Shmidal”, and it held the PLO directly responsible for the shooting. Over the following days it launched massive air raids on Lebanon, and Beirut in particular. Hours of continuous raids against its Palestinian refugee camps, including a direct hit on Gaza Hospital in Sabra camp, left over 200 dead and many more wounded. Predictably, Palestinain forces retaliated with extensive shelling of northern Israel, resulting in damage but no fatalities. Arafat, visiting Saudi Arabia, sought the support of his hosts to restore the ceasefire. Their efforts were promptly dismissed by Israel.
Against this background, Operation Big Pines was a response to Palestinian rocket fire only to the extent that Israel had deliberately provoked it. Furthermore, it did so in order to sabotage the prospects of diplomacy and consolidate perpetual Israeli rule over the West Bank and Gaza Strip. In Western diplomatic jargon, this is known as Israel’s right and obligation to defend itself.
For those who think Israel’s savagery and fanatical rhetoric regarding Gaza and its Palestinians is a recent innovation, Begin during the Siege of Beirut referred to Palestinians as “two-legged beasts”, and likened Arafat to “Hitler in his bunker”. In Beirut too Israel shut off the water and power supply to the city, prevented the entry of food and medical supplies, and waged relentless war on the Lebanese and Palestinian civilian population. Here too Israel accused the PLO of “hiding behind civilians” and being solely responsible for the ensuing mass murder. Then too it was a line that was repeatedly endlessly by its apologists and allies.
In another echo from the present, the Israeli military – well into its transformation from an impressive fighting force into an efficient killing machine with mediocre combat capabilities – was unable to either eradicate the PLO or kill its leadership. This was not however for lack of trying, as it engaged in what one journalist would call, in reference to the bombing of numerous buildings suspected of harboring Arafat, “the first manhunt by air”. As in Gaza today, Israeli confidence that it could swiftly eliminate its enemies by force soon gave way to negotiations that were never supposed to happen. In the end Israel’s inability to conquer West Beirut produced a ceasefire and the orderly withdrawal of the PLO, its leaders, and cadres from Lebanon.
Western public opinion, raised on Israel’s myth of David v Goliath, gradually began to understand that in this conflict David is not an Israeli F-16 pilot, but wears a kuffiya and carries a Kalashnikov.
As for Bashir, just as Israel was determined to fight the Palestinians to the last Phalangist, Jumayyil begged off and insisted Israel do its own fighting, even if it was doing so also on his behalf. His disobedience forgiven, Israel in late August engineered his election as president of Lebanon by the country’s parliament. The only democracy in the solar system dragged several members from their homes to ensure a quorum, while the vote was held under the watchful gaze of Israeli tanks.
Even this gambit would ultimately fail as Jumayyil, in a scene reminiscent of 1944’s 20 July Plot to assassinate Hitler, was blown to bits by a powerful bomb placed in his party headquarters by Habib Shartuni. Israel responded by invading and occupying West Beirut, a clear violation of the agreement pursuant to which the PLO had earlier withdrawn its forces. Claiming it had done so to preserve the peace and prevent revenge attacks, and additionally insisting there were still 2,000 armed PLO militants in the refugee camps while it knew there were none, Israel promptly sent the Phalange, and its SLA proxy militia, into the Sabra-Shatila refugee camps to engage in mass slaughter.
Over the course of 16-18 September they massacred several thousand defenceless camp residents, many of them Palestinians, but also many Lebanese and other Arabs. Israeli forces not only surrounded the camps and knew exactly what their surrogates were doing at all times, they prevented terrified residents from fleeing the camps, kept the locations lit after dark with continuous flares, and aided and abetted what was ultimately an Israeli operation in multiple ways. That December the United Nations General Assembly, with not a single member voting against, condemned the Sabra-Shatila massacre as an act of genocide.
The Americans, who had guaranteed the safety of the civilian population left behind by the PLO, were fully aware of the massacre as it unfolded and chose to do absolutely nothing to restrain their Israeli protégé.
Much has been made of an incident during the 1982 War in which US President Ronald Reagan, prodded by the Saudis, called Begin and told him that “this holocaust” consuming Beirut’s children had to end. In typical Israeli fashion, Begin vociferously protested and immediately complied, because he who pays the piper calls the tune. It does indeed form a contrast with Joe Biden, whose lust for Palestinian blood seems limitless, and remains unwilling to make even a phone call to restrain Israel’s killing machine.
Yet the anecdote – while accurate - also masks an important reality, which is that in 1982 as in 2023-2024 the United States was fully complicit in Israel’s actions, which were carried out primarily with American weaponry and ordnance, and under cover of US diplomatic protection. As for the Sabra-Shatila massacre the US, which had guaranteed the safety of the civilian population left behind by the PLO, was fully aware of the massacre as it unfolded and chose to do absolutely nothing.
Israel duly replaced Bashir with his brother Amin, and on 17 May 1983 Lebanon signed a US-brokered agreement with Israel that transformed it into a vassal state. Less than a year later, Lebanon renounced the agreement as a popular uprising in Beirut diminished Phalangist hegemony.
The 1979 Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty is typically heralded as inaugurating a process that would result in a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace. In point of fact, it was designed as a separate Egyptian-Israeli peace. It served Egyptian interests because it enabled Cairo to reclaim the Sinai Peninsula – every last inch of it – without firing an additional shot. It served Israel because the treaty removed the most powerful Arab military from the conflict. It is generally accepted that, had a formal state of war persisted between Egypt and Israel in 1982, the latter would never have seriously considered committing its armed forces to Lebanon and Operation Big Pines – and for that matter Little Pines – would have remained on the drawing board.
25 July 2024: A Review of Arab-Israeli Wars (Part II)
With respect to the 1967 June War, it is certainly true that a majority of Israelis lived in genuine fear of annihilation in the period leading up to the war. Coming a mere two decades after the Holocaust, their widespread terror was put to good use by the Israeli government and official propaganda.
What ordinary Israelis and those anticipating the imminent slaughter of Israel’s Jewish population did not know, and as was subsequently confirmed by multiple senior Israeli leaders, Israel had been planning a new war and preparing to launch one for an entire decade. Among the Israeli leadership there was never really any doubt about the outcome. Nor was there any among Israel’s closest ally, the United States.
In the most notable example in this regard, US President Lyndon Johnson in late May 1967 tasked the CIA with conducting an assessment of a potential new Middle East war. The Agency swiftly concluded that Israel “could successfully defend against simultaneous Arab attacks on all fronts … or hold on any three fronts while mounting successfully a major offensive in the fourth.” In a transparent attempt to solicit additional US arms deliveries, Israeli intelligence insisted that not only was Israel badly outgunned, but that the Soviet Union was keen to see Moscow’s Arab allies attack Israel in order to give Washington a geopolitical bloody nose.
This led the CIA to produce a second assessment in early June. On this occasion it correctly determined that the Soviet Union was neither agitating for war nor would intervene if Israel gained the upper hand; that it would be Israel that would attack first; that it intended to do so “in the next few days”; and that if it was Israel that initiated the war - as it did – it would make short shrift of the Egyptian air force “in less than 24 hours” and “drive the Egyptians west of the Suez Canal in seven to nine days. Israel could contain any attacks by Syria or Jordan during this period.” As President Johnson would later recount what he told Abba Eban, “All of our intelligence people are unanimous that if the UAR [i.e. Egypt] attacks, you will whip the hell out of them”.
It was not only Israelis who anticipated the destruction of their young state. Palestinians and Arabs were as ecstatic about the prospects of an early end to the Zionist project as Israelis were fearful. Their anticipation was continuously stoked by the triumphalist propaganda of Arab governments, and that of Egypt in particular. Ahmad Sa’id of Cairo’s Voice of the Arabs, easily the region’s most recognizable voice, continually trumpeted the imminent demise of Israel and liberation of Palestine.
Against this background, a key Israeli talking point developed around the claim that Egypt’s Abdel-Nasser was openly threatening to “throw the Jews into the sea” and annihilate Israel’s Jewish population. Responding to such drivel, British politician Christopher Mayhew in 1973 offered GBP 5,000 to anyone who could produce evidence that Abdel-Nasser had indeed made such a threat, or that any Arab leader had made a statement that could be legitimately characterized as reflecting genocidal intent. An avalanche of claimants bearing manufactured and distorted citations promptly presented themselves, but none emerged from the experience with an enhanced bank balance. One claimant, a university student named Warren Bergson, in 1976 sued Mayhew to force him to pay up. Bergson not only failed to convince the judge to award him five thousand quid, but was required to apologize to Mayhew after Bergson’s lawyer admitted that the offending passage presented by Bergson in court had been taken out of context.
In point of fact, Mayhew had interviewed Abdel-Nasser on 2 June 1967, 72 hours before the war erupted, and asked him, “If Israel does not attack, will you leave them alone?” “Yes,” replied the Egyptian leader, “We will leave them alone. We have no intention of attacking Israel.” That Egypt was neither prepared for war nor intent on one, and that its deployment in Sinai was essentially defensive in nature, has among others been confirmed by Israeli Prime Ministers Levi Eshkol; his defense minister Yitzhak Rabin and foreign minister Abba Eban; his head of Mossad Meir Amit; the Commander of the UN peacekeeping force (UNEF) deployed between Egypt and Israel, General Jit Rikhye; US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara; and numerous others whose role was to formulate and implement policy as opposed to circulating propaganda. As recounted previously, Egypt’s best forces were at the time fighting in Yemen, not Sinai, in what Abdel-Nasser would characterize as “My Vietnam”.
Among the most telling statements was one by Israeli General Mattiyahu Peled, made to the French newspaper Le Monde in 1972: “The thesis according to which the danger of genocide hung over us in June 1967, and according to which Israel was fighting for her very physical survival, was nothing but a bluff which was born and bred after the war.”
A decade later Israeli Prime Minister Menahem Begin, seeking to justify Israel’s unprovoked 1982 invasion of Lebanon (more on this later) before Israel’s parliament, according to the New York Times of 12 August 1982 put it thus: “In June, 1967, we again had a choice. The Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai did not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.”
As mentioned in the intro to Part I, the claim that an unlawful attack entitles those engaged in legitimate self-defense to respond as they please, unrestrained by either international law or the laws of war, is an entirely specious and indeed preposterous position. What Israel flunkies don’t quite realize in this respect, given the copious amount of Israeli Kool-Aid they have guzzled with respect to Israel’s narrative about the 1967 June War, is that in incessantly making this argument they are in fact providing justification for the 7 October 2023 Palestinian attacks within Israel, and much, much else.
What Israeli agitprop falsely claims about the 1967 June War would prove to be entirely correct about the 1973 October War. On this occasion, Egypt and Syria initiated a combined surprise attack that launched what has been arguably the most intense military confrontation of the entire Arab-Israel conflict.
Within months of the conclusion of the 1967 War that resulted in its utter defeat, the Egyptian military commenced with artillery shelling and other attacks on Israeli occupation forces deployed on the east bank of the Suez Canal. Abdel-Nasser’s closest associate and Egypt’s senior military officer, Field Marshal Abdel-Hakim Amer, also the chief author of his country’s military debacles in 1956 and 1967, had in September 1967 been removed from the scene. Officially reported as a suicide, there is compelling evidence he was killed to prevent an imminent coup attempt. With Amer finally gone, the Arabs would not again decisively lose a military confrontation with Israel.
The retraining and rebuilding of the Egyptian military after 1967, essentially from scratch, was a task no less daunting than the construction of the pyramids, and to the best of my knowledge has yet to be properly studied. By mid-1970 Egypt was well on its way to developing a capable and professional army. It was escalating its air, artillery, and commando attacks on Israeli occupation forces in Sinai, and deploying an anti-aircraft network that neutralized Israeli air supremacy over both banks of the Suez Canal and made it possible for Egyptian aircraft to strike throughout the Canal Zone and beyond.
Israel’s previous strategy, of raising the costs of continued warfare by launching raids deep into Egypt (including the outskirts of Cairo) became increasingly risky as Soviet forces took direct responsibility for defending the Egyptian hinterland. In other words, continuing with such raids risked not only a direct Israeli-Soviet confrontation (there had apparently already been several such incidents), but by extension a superpower crisis as well. Pulling back from the brink, Cairo and Tel Aviv in August 1970 accepted a three-month ceasefire agreement, which was renewed that November. Analysts have speculated that Abdel-Nasser, who died on 28 September, may have been preparing to resume the war in full force after the first ceasefire expired. Be that as it may, Anwar Sadat, who succeeded him, elected to conserve Egyptian gains.
If Egypt’s objective was to liberate Sinai, the War of Attrition was an abject failure. It also precipitated Israel’s construction of the Bar-Lev Line, the purportedly impenetrable series of fortresses on the Canal’s east bank. But against Israel’s preservation of the status quo, Cairo had successfully demonstrated that, Egypt’s devastating 1967 defeat notwithstanding, it would never accept its losses and was a serious military adversary.
In 1971 Egypt’s new president began making a series of peace overtures, offering to conclude what was essentially a separate Egyptian-Israeli peace in exchange for the restoration of the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt. Previously, Egypt along with the other Arab states had insisted they would accept only a comprehensive resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict that would include a satisfactory response to the Question of Palestine.
US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who (for once correctly) considered Sadat a “clown”, and was erroneously convinced the new Egyptian leader would soon be replaced, ignored him. For its part Israel, at the time ruled by Joe Biden’s icon, Golda Meir, had absolutely no intention of relinquishing Sinai. Still seized by the collective hubris and triumphalism produced by 1967, Israel was confident the Arabs had no military option to recover their occupied territories, and that Sadat’s peace overtures could along with others be safely dismissed. In 1969, for example, the Israeli government, apparently encouraged by Kissinger who was intent on undermining his bureaucratic rival, rejected a peace initiative proposed by US Secretary of State William Rogers, and denounced it as “an attempt to appease [the Arabs] at the expense of Israel”.
No serious historian has ever put forward the claim that Israel initiated hostilities on 6 October 1973. In contrast to Germany on 1 September 1939 or Israel on 5 June 1967, Egypt and Syria in 1973 proudly took credit for their actions and responsibility for launching the war. While doing so might seem ill-advised given the strict prohibition on wars of aggression (a serious crime under international law), it would be virtually impossible to charge Cairo or Damascus in this respect. This is because they were not invading Israel within its internationally-recognized boundaries, but rather seeking to liberate occupied territory in a context where the international community recognizes their and not Israel’s sovereignty over these territories.
Although Egypt and Syria jointly planned and coordinated their offensive, and caught Israel thoroughly unprepared, they approached the war from fundamentally different perspectives. Syria believed it could liberate the Golan Heights by force of arms. Egypt’s objective was more limited: to demonstrate Egyptian military power and Israeli vulnerability, resulting in a crisis significant enough to force subsequent diplomatic movement. By successfully crossing the Suez Canal and demolishing the Bar-Lev line in a matter of hours, Egypt succeeded.
On the strength of a massive US airlift (and one that would be exceeded only by the US arming of Israel’s current genocide), and a breakdown in Egyptian-Syrian coordination, Israel was eventually able to turn the tide and, by the time the guns fell silent in late October, advance beyond the positions it held at the beginning of the war. Nevertheless, the Arab-Israeli equation was in 1973 thoroughly transformed.
Speaking to a group of Israeli military veterans in 1971 Moshe Dayan, Israel’s Defence Minister and hero of its 1967 victory, had triumphantly declared, in reference to the famous resort at the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula: “Better Sharm al-Shaikh without peace, than peace without Sharm al-Shaikh”.
Sadat’s objectives were to shatter Israel’s conceit of military invincibility, and compel Kissinger to reconsider his dismissive response to Egyptian diplomacy. The shock of the Egyptian-Syrian 1973 October surprise produced an Israeli realization that its military superiority was ultimately no match for Egypt’s determination to recover its occupied territories. It understood that Cairo would eventually impose on Israel a cost greater than its military, economy, or society could bear. Before the decade was out, a deflated Dayan was the architect of an agreement—the groundwork of which had been laid by a chastened Kissinger—that gave Israel peace with Egypt, but without Sharm al-Shaikh.
Yet, by concluding a separate peace that removed the most powerful Arab military from the conflict and gave Israel a free hand to wage war to its north, Sadat, Begin, and Carter had at Camp David also laid the groundwork for the inferno that would consume Lebanon in 1982.
24 July 2024: A Review of Arab-Israeli Wars (Part I)
When Israel and its apologists are confronted with evidence of criminal policies and actions they are unable to deny or dismiss, they typically resort to the argument that those who initiate wars should not complain about their consequences. Even where these consequences include ethnic cleansing, apartheid, annexation, or – as in the present case – genocide. Put simply: “Stop whining, you brought it upon yourselves”.
This is of course an entirely specious argument. International law and the laws of war make clear distinctions between the legitimacy of an armed conflict and the legality of actions taken by belligerents during armed hostilities. In other words, a state may for example have been unlawfully attacked, and be waging a legitimate war of self-defense, but this does not give it the right to shred the rule book in doing so. Were it otherwise Iraq would have had the right to carpet bomb New York, London, Sydney, Madrid, Warsaw and a host of other cities in response to the illegal 2003 invasion and destruction of that country, and the mass rape of German women by US and Soviet soldiers at the end of World War II would be deemed legitimate acts of war.
Yet the idea that Israel is entitled to respond to wars launched against it without restraint, and that any and all ensuing suffering is the responsibility of its enemies and theirs alone, lives on as standard Zionist propaganda. An important reason for this talking point is that Israel flunkies endlessly repeat the mantra that each and every war in which Israel has been involved was launched against rather than initiated by it, to the point where this factoid has entered the realm of conventional wisdom.
It is therefore worth examining who actually started the various wars in which Israel has been directly involved. There are two ways to look at this question: a narrow perspective that focuses on who fired the first shot and initiated armed hostilities, and a broader one that examines the context that produced a particular armed conflict.
The 1948 Palestine War, otherwise known as the first Arab-Israeli war, was the first war Israel was involved in. It erupted in late November 1947, immediately after the United Nations General Assembly on 29 November adopted Resolution 181 (II) recommending the partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. It ended on 20 July 1949 with the adoption of the Syrian-Israeli armistice agreement (Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon had reached separate armistice agreements with Israel earlier that year while Iraq, which also participated in the war, withdrew its forces but refrained from signing an agreement of its own).
The Palestine War consisted of two phases. The first, between November 1947 and 14 May 1948, is often characterized as a civil war and pitted Palestinians, supported by Arab irregular volunteers, against Zionist militias. The second, from the end of the British Mandate in Palestine and proclamation of the Israeli state on 14 May 1948, until the 20 July 1949 Syrian-Israeli armistice agreement, was a more conventional confrontation between the Israeli military and those of the abovementioned Arab states.
We will probably never know who fired the first shot in November 1947. Zionist militias had been mobilizing to establish control over territory allotted by the UN to the Jewish state, and to seize as much territory as possible of the proposed Arab state, before the end of the British Mandate and departure of British forces would make direct Arab intervention in Palestine possible. The Palestinians had been mobilizing to prevent the establishment of a Jewish state in their country. They were also convinced – correctly – that such a state would necessarily entail the ethnic cleansing of Palestine by the Zionist movement.
While it is true that the first fatal casualties, on 30 November, were Jewish, their Palestinian attackers claimed it was a revenge attack for the summary execution of five Palestinians by Zionist militias several days earlier, before the UN General Assembly adopted its resolution. In other words, the first phase of the Palestine War was not preceded by a situation of peaceful co-existence, and armed attacks between the British, Zionist militias, and Palestinians had been an enduring feature of the Palestinian landscape since at least 1936. It is therefore somewhat difficult to conclude that the 30 November attack launched the conflict, even if Israeli historians and others with no skin in the game tend to do so. In my view, it’s a fool’s errand to say that either party launched the first phase of the Palestine War.
If we look at the broader context, Israel and its apologists claim that they were fighting to secure what had been legitimately allotted to them by the United Nations, and that they were therefore defending themselves against illegitimate Palestinian attacks to prevent the implementation of the will of the international community. The Palestinians would respond that it was not they who went to Poland or Russia to establish an Arab state at the expense of its population, but rather the Zionist movement, a European colonial and nationalist project, which sought to transform Palestine into an exclusivist and supremacist Jewish state, and that it was only able to do so on the strength of British imperial control of the country after the First World War. It was, in other words, the Palestinians and not the Zionists who in 1947-1948 were waging a legitimate war of self-defense. It seems reasonable to assume that if the Zionist movement had emerged during the late twentieth rather than late nineteenth century, its project would never have been endorsed by the UN General Assembly. And if it today resorted to the same methods it employed nearly a century ago to establish its state, it would never have gained admission to the world body.
The second phase of the Palestine War is by comparison clear-cut. By 14 May 1948 the Nakba was unfolding in full force and over 300,000 Palestinians had already been ethnically cleansed from their homeland. As soon as the British Mandate came to an end the regular armies of five Arab states intervened in Palestine. It was thus not Israel that invaded the Arab states but rather the Arab states that intervened in Palestine. Preventing the partition of Palestine and the establishment of a Jewish state was for most a primary objective. But it was not the only motivation. Arresting and reversing the Nakba also played an important role, as did preventing the expansion of Israel into territory allotted by the UN to the Arab state.
In the case of Emirate of Transjordan, as the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan was then called, and as recounted in great detail by the British-Israeli historian Avi Shlaim, understandings had been reached between its Hashemite rulers and the Zionist movement to accept partition and prevent the emergence of an independent Palestinian state. In other words, Jordan would, with Israeli consent, annex the territories allotted by the UN partition resolution to the Arab state. It was a deal that would cost King Abdallah I, the great-grandfather of the current monarch, his life when he was assassinated in Jerusalem in 1951.
The armed hostilities that ensued in 1948-1949 between Transjordan’s Arab Legion and the nascent Israeli military were overwhelmingly the result of Israeli offensives to seize territory beyond that awarded by the UN to the Jewish state, and which Abdallah I was determined to retain pursuant to his deal with the Zionist leadership. For Egypt, then still a monarchy, rivalry with Transjordan was as important a motivation as enmity with Israel, and the same could to a certain extent be said about Iraq, then ruled by a different branch of the Hashemite family.
So while it can be fairly concluded that during the second phase of the Palestine War it was the Arab states that initiated armed hostilities, the standard narrative that this was a simple case of Arab aggression and Israeli self-defense glosses over key realities. In seeking to prevent the further expansion of Israel and the associated ethnic cleansing of Palestine, the Arab states could also legitimately claim to be fighting against Israeli aggression. In this respect, one need only compare the map adopted by the UN General Assembly with that produced by the Palestine War. Israel, allotted roughly 56 per cent of Palestine by the UN, seized 78 per cent of it by July 1949. More than three-quarters of its Arab population was ethnically cleansed – forcibly displaced and just as importantly prevented from returning.
The next major conflict was that between Israel and Egypt in 1956. The historian who would claim that it was Egypt that attacked Israel on 29 October 1956 rather than the other way around has yet to make a public appearance. The war took place in the broader context of the Suez Crisis in which, in the words of Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, Israel performed the services of a prostitute for Britain and France.
Egyptian-Israeli tensions, which had been escalating since a 1955 raid into the Egyptian-administered Gaza Strip led by Ariel Sharon that killed 38 Egyptian soldiers, played only a secondary role in this conflict. The main dynamic was the determination of London and Paris to depose Egypt’s revolutionary leader, Gamal Abdel-Nasser, who had in July 1956 nationalized the Suez Canal and was actively supporting the Algerian FLN’s campaign to expel France from their country. In return for invading Egypt and manufacturing a pretext for a British and French expeditionary force to “secure” the Suez Canal zone and overthrow the Egyptian leader, Israel hoped to annex the Gaza Strip and Sinai Peninsula, and to secure a nuclear reactor and advanced weaponry from France.
Although the combined opposition of the United States and Soviet Union forced Israel to withdraw from Egyptian territory and the Gaza Strip – where it had committed a series of massacres, most notably of some 275 Palestinians in Khan Yunis and more than 100 in Rafah – the French did not disappoint. Israel’s Dimona reactor – and thus its nuclear arsenal – was designed by French engineers, and Israel won the 1967 June War primarily with French rather than US weaponry. As might be expected, among Western states only West Germany came out in insufferably vocal support of Israel’s “right” to invade Egypt and seize the Gaza Strip.
When Israel’s most celebrated diplomat, Abba Eban, addressed the UN Security Council on 6 June 1967, he made unmistakably clear that the war that erupted in the Middle East the previous morning had been launched by Egypt. “[O]n the morning of 5 June,” he claimed, “Egyptian forces engaged us by air and land, bombarding the villages of Kissufim, Nahal-Oz, and Ein Hashelosha”. “In accordance with its inherent right to self-defence as formulated in Article 51 of the United Nations Charter,” Eban continued, “Israel responded defensively [to this attack] in full strength”. How the Egyptian air force that was purportedly busy bombing Israel was destroyed on the ground during the first minutes of the war, before a single bomber could take to the air, was left unexplained.
While the Arab states indisputably lost the 1967 War, this was in significant part because it was Israel that launched it with Operation Focus, a sophisticated surprise attack that wiped out the Egyptian air force in its entirety. Within the first two hours, the war was effectively won. As numerous Israeli leaders would later attest, planning for this conflict had begun from almost the moment Israel was forced to withdraw from Sinai and Gaza in 1957.
With respect to the other fronts in 1967, Jordan did indeed fire first, and did so pursuant to a mutual defense pact it had signed with Egypt on 30 May. It was thus exercising the right of collective self-defense. As for the Syrian front, which in the period prior to the war had seen the fiercest Arab-Israeli clashes, it remained comparatively quiet after the Israeli air force largely destroyed its Syrian counterpart on the first day of the war. While clashes certainly continued, neither Israel nor Syria launched major offensives, and on the early morning of 9 June (the fifth day of the six-day war) Syria accepted a ceasefire. Later that same day Israel launched a full-scale offensive into Syria, during which it successfully seized the Golan Heights. To conclude that this record demonstrates that the Arab states initiated the 1967 June War has little relation with reality.
As suggested above, the main impetus for the 1967 War was Israel’s failure in 1956 to translate its military accomplishments into political and territorial achievements. A further factor was Syria’s sponsorship of the emerging Palestinian guerilla movement, whose growing volume of attacks into Israel were mainly conducted from the West Bank, at the time under Jordanian rule.
In the prelude to the war, Israeli Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin threatened to march to Damascus and overthrow its government if the Palestinian attacks did not stop. Seeking to deter Israel, Egypt mobilized its forces, deployed additional troops to the Sinai Peninsula, ordered UN peacekeepers that had since 1957 been stationed on Egyptian territory and in the Gaza Strip to depart, and closed the Straits of Tiran at the mouth of the Gulf of Aqaba to Israeli shipping. Israel insisted the latter development was a casus belli, particularly because unrestricted Israeli maritime access to this route had been conceded by Egypt at the conclusion of the Suez Crisis. At the same time, as Rabin would later confirm, Egypt had neither the intention nor capability to attack Israel because its best troops were deployed in Yemen to support its republican regime against a Saudi-sponsored monarchist insurgency.
24 July: ICC in the Dock
Since assuming office in 2021, the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), Karim Khan, has done his best to avoid his responsibility to investigate what is known as the Situation in Palestine. There is no indication he took any significant action prior to 7 October 2023, and considerable evidence he avoided it like the plague.
The ICC’s refusal to act was all the more remarkable since Khan’s predecessor, Fatou Bensouda, already in 2021 formally initiated an investigation into violations of the Rome Statute (the treaty which governs the operations of the ICC and defines the crimes over which it has jurisdiction). Having finally established that the Court has jurisdiction because Palestine successfully fulfilled its conditions for membership, a panel of ICC judges known as the Pre-Trial Chamber authorized the Prosecutor to investigate crimes committed in Palestine or by Palestinians as of 2014. This is significant because unlike the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which adjudicates disputes between states and provides advisory opinions to the United Nations on matters of international law (like, recently, the legality of Israeli rule beyond the 1967 boundaries), the ICC deals with individual criminal responsibility. In other words, it has the power to prosecute, convict, and imprison officials found guilty of serious international crimes.
The crisis which erupted last October changed the equation. Khan, a British lawyer whose candidacy had been championed by the US, UK, and Israel, could now safely grandstand about the Situation in Palestine by putting the focus on Palestinian atrocities and their violations of the Rome Statute. But alas for him, Israel that same day unleashed a ferocious assault on the Gaza Strip and its Palestinian population, which by late December 2023 saw it accused of genocide before the International Court of Justice.
As the months dragged on Khan and the ICC, already experiencing a severe legitimacy and credibility crisis because the Court exclusively prosecuted Africans, adversaries of the West, and those who fell out of its favor, came under increasing pressure. Global public opinion, as well as governments that are members of the Court’s Assembly of State Parties and, notably, a growing number of Khan’s own peers – not least in the United Kingdom – publicly demanded that he do his job and begin to hold Israeli officials to account for their actions.
On 20 May of this year Khan sought to resolve this dilemma by applying for arrest warrants for five individuals: Israeli Prime Minister (and Congressional heartthrob) Binyamin Netanyahu; Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant; head of the Hamas Polibureau Ismail Haniyya; the leader of Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Yahya Sinwar; and the Commander of the Hamas military wing, the Martyr Izz-al-Din Al-Qassam Brigades, Muhammad Deif.
Khan clearly hoped that by seeking the arrest of more Palestinians than Israelis, and by remaining mute about crimes committed between 2014 and 7 October 2023, he could mollify those who had sponsored his candidacy in the expectation that he would continue to do their bidding. It was a severe miscalculation. Western governments went audibly, visibly, and collectively apoplectic, culminating in an avalanche of threats against the Court, its officials, and their families by senior US politicians. Israel for its part resorted to the same tired cliches it always does, denouncing the ICC as Hamas, anti-Semites, etc.
Pursuant to ICC procedures Khan cannot simply order the arrest of those accused. Rather, the Prosecutor applies to a panel of three judges, the Pre-Trial Chamber, to issue an arrest warrant. It had been widely anticipated that a decision on the application would be made by the judges within a month or two, and that based on its record the application would be approved.
In June the British government decided to throw a spanner in the works. It requested, and was granted, permission to file an amicus brief challenging the ICC’s jurisdiction to prosecute Israeli citizens. To clarify, Israel is not a member of the ICC, and rejects its very existence as an abomination. Despite participating in the consultations that led to the adoption of the Rome Statute in 1998, it turned against the entire enterprise when a majority of founding members voted to include settlement and apartheid as prosecutable international crimes.
But the Court’s jurisdiction over Palestine means it has the right to prosecute violations of the Rome Statute committed by any party on the territory of the State of Palestine, as well as by any Palestinian, anywhere, who has been issued with its identity documents. What Israel thinks of the ICC’s jurisdiction is irrelevant, because such matters are decided by the Court.
The reason London took the lead in objecting to the ICC’s intention to prosecute Israeli citizens for war crimes and crimes against humanity is fairly simple. It has been an axiom of British foreign policy since the twentieth century that Israel has an indisputable right to commit war crimes, and to enjoy impunity for doing so, particularly when these are perpetrated on behalf of British imperial interests, as during the 1956 Suez Crisis. Secondly, London serves as Washington’s designated agent within the ICC, because the US like Israel has also refused to join the ICC or accept its jurisdiction. In fact, the US Congress (now preparing to receive Netanyahu as a conquering hero) in 2002 passed legislation popularly known as The Hague Invasion Act, authorizing the US government to use military force in fellow NATO member The Netherlands to repatriate US citizens hauled before the ICC.
Britain’s objection is based on Annex IV (Protocol Concerning Legal Affairs) of the 1995 Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement on the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Also known as Oslo II, its main purpose was to regulate the expansion of the Palestinian Authority (PA) from the Gaza Strip and Jericho to other, limited areas of the West Bank, and to further circumscribe the limited autonomy Israel had agreed to in the original Oslo accords of 1993.
According to Annex IV, the PA agreed that it would have criminal jurisdiction only over “Palestinians and/or non-Israelis” in the territories it administered, while Israel would retain “sole criminal jurisdiction” over offenses committed within PA territory by Israelis. It is therefore the position of Perfidious Albion that the Palestinians cannot delegate jurisdiction over Israeli crimes to the ICC because it is not theirs to transfer, and that the ICC can and should prosecute only Palestinians. In other words, Israeli impunity must be preserved unmolested by the ICC.
Yet, as Rutgers Professor of Law Adil Ahmad Haque pointed out earlier this month in Just Security, where he serves as Executive Editor, “In 2020, arguments along these lines were submitted to the Pre-Trial Chamber … [which] found that such arguments over personal jurisdiction were ‘not pertinent’ to the issue of territorial jurisdiction”. He further notes:
Under the ICC Statute, States Parties do not delegate, transfer, or otherwise give their jurisdiction to the Court. Instead, States Parties accept the jurisdiction of the Court … That should be the end of the matter. Neither the Court’s jurisdiction nor its exercise is limited by Oslo II, or by any of Palestine’s bilateral agreements or internal laws. Indeed, a State Party cannot accept the Court’s jurisdiction or its exercise in part, that is, over some individuals, territory, or crimes but not others. It is all or nothing.
Haque penned his article shortly before the ICJ issued its landmark Advisory Opinion defining Israeli rule in the West Bank and Gaza Strip as illegal. I suspect he would now additionally point out that London’s sponsorship of Israeli impunity in this case also defies its obligations to refrain from aiding and abetting Israeli violations of international law as specified in the ICJ’s ruling.
Not to be outdone Germany, in recognition of its genocidal history but not in the way it presumes, has also jumped to Israel’s defense at the ICC. Berlin’s arguments are even more bizarre than London’s. First, it claims that an ICC prosecution of Israeli officials would violate “complementarity”, the principle that the ICC can only prosecute individuals for crimes if national courts have failed to do so. But complementarity requires more than a functioning legal system. For it to be applicable, the government in question must demonstrate that it is actively investigating/prosecuting the named individuals for the specific crimes they stand accused of before the ICC. Germany gets around the reality that Netanyahu and Gallant will never be put on trial for war crimes or crimes against humanity by an Israeli court by claiming that it would be premature for the Court to act while the conflict remains ongoing. Not quite the position it has taken with respect to ICC indictments of Putin or others.
The Court’s Pre-Trial Chamber has now accepted petitions for and against ICC jurisdiction from an additional seventy petitioners, including governments, organisations, and individuals. Most recently the United States has indicated it will also jump into the fray and do what it can to let Israeli criminals off the ICC hook. This is the same state that has invited accused war criminal Netanyahu to address a joint session of Congress, and to meet with its sitting head of state as well as both candidates to replace him.
The ICC’s Pre-Trial Chamber has given petitioners until 6 August to submit their briefs, and will thereafter presumably take until the end of the year to study them before taking a decision. Given what we already know about Israel’s campaign of espionage, intimidation, and attempted bribery of ICC officials, and more recently the torrent of US threats, it’s abundantly clear that the Court’s prosecutor and judges would rather have an enema than move forward with this case. They must be hoping that the time they have gained by permitting these spurious challenges to their role will give them an opportunity find an excuse to put this matter to rest. The thousands of Palestinians who will pay for this manufactured inertia with their lives is considered a small price worth paying.
23 July: Tel Aviv, Yemen, and Regional Escalation
This past Friday, 19 July, Ansar Allah, the Yemeni movement also known as the Houthis, struck the heart of Tel Aviv with an armed drone. Two days later, on 21 July, the Israeli air force bombed the Yemeni port of Hodeida, targeting oil storage facilities and a power plant.
Although Yemeni forces have targeted Israel on multiple occasions this year with drones and missiles, this was apparently their first attempt to hit Tel Aviv. Given the growing prominence of drone warfare, and the comparative ease with which insurgent movements can now build their own air force, one would have expected Israel to invest considerable resources in defending its most important city against such threats. Instead, the same combination of hubris and complacency that led the Israeli military to strategic failure on 7 October of last year enabled the Yemeni drone to fly nearly 2,000 kilometers and explode in the very center of Tel Aviv without being intercepted or even detected.
The Houthi military spokesperson, Yayha Sare’e, claimed that the attack was conducted with a new type of drone, named Jaffa after the Palestinian city subsumed by Tel Aviv, that Israel is unable to detect. Given that multiple drones launched by Lebanon’s Hizballah have successfully evaded Israeli detection this may well be correct. Others have suggested the attack was successful because the Houthis first launched a diversionary attack with multiple drones and missiles towards the Israeli port of Eilat, and that the US-UK naval task force in the Red Sea which engaged it on Israel’s behalf failed to detect and thus warn Israel of a separate attack consisting of a single drone heading for Tel Aviv. Be that as it may, subsequent Israeli accounts that it was fully aware of the drone and its trajectory but failed to destroy it on account of human error, can safely be filed along with, “We have successfully dismantled Hamas’s Shujai’iyya Battalion, yet again”.
Why Ansar Allah would directly target Tel Aviv, with predictable consequences, requires some explanation. Since Israel commenced its onslaught on the Gaza Strip on 7 October, members of the self-styled Axis of Resistance have established a variety of “Support Fronts” (i.e. solidarity fronts) in support of the Palestinians. In Lebanon this has taken the form of daily, direct attacks on northern Israel, primarily by Hizballah, designed to tie down significant Israeli military and intelligence resources on the Lebanese border which can therefore not be committed to the Gaza Strip, and raise the cost to Israel of continuing its war. In Iraq, it initially took the form of attacks on US military facilities in Iraq, Syria and Jordan, to impress upon Washington that its unconditional support of Israel and complicity in its atrocities would come at a price.
The role played by Ansar Allah was substantially different. Its main contribution was to leverage Yemen’s strategic position astride the maritime chokepoint of Bab al-Mandab at the entry to the Red Sea to prevent Israeli shipping from reaching Israel’s port of Eilat. It was later expanded to prevent the access of any ships to Eilat, then of any ship visiting any Israeli port from entering the Red Sea and thus accessing the Suez Canal. More recently the Houthis have launched attacks against ships associated with Operation Prosperity Guardian, the US-UK-led naval task force that has been engaged in a futile bombing campaign against Yemen to compel Ansar Allah to abandon the Palestinians, stop interfering with shipping traversing Bab al-Mandab, and enable Israel to continue its genocidal campaign undisturbed.
Yemen’s Support Front has, by all accounts, been extraordinarily successful. Shipping to and from Eilat has effectively ceased, and the port recently declared bankruptcy. Israeli trade with the Indian subcontinent and East Asia must now go around the entirety of the African continent and through the Mediterranean Sea. Air freight and the land bridge established by Israel’s Arab partners has compensated only partially.
Not only has the Israeli economy been damaged, but global trade, and particularly just-in-time supply chains, have been affected as well. The combination of lengthier trade routes and higher insurance rates for commercial shipping has produced inflationary pressures, while in Egypt receipts generated by the Suez Canal, a major source of revenue and foreign currency, have plummeted. The latter has thus far not led to increased Egyptian pressure on Israel to end its war.
Seen in this context the drone attack on Tel Aviv adds nothing to the economic damage Yemen is inflicting upon Israel and its Western sponsors, which has been the primary contribution of Yemen’s Support Front. It therefore requires a different explanation. The answer is to be found in how Ansar Allah and its partners characterize their roles – establishing support fronts to assist the Palestinians in achieving their objectives as opposed to launching full-scale hostilities of their own. Their role, in other words, is to maintain and increase pressure on Israel to end its war rather than initiating new wars of their own.
From this perspective a confluence of factors would have led to the Houthi’s decision to target Tel Aviv. Most importantly the negotiations on a cessation of hostilities in the Gaza Strip, mediated by Egypt and Qatar, have repeatedly been sabotaged by the Israeli government. This is by now common knowledge, and confirmed on an almost daily basis by senior Israeli officials, including those in the security establishment as well as Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s own, appointed negotiators. Even US officials, who as a rule are more pro-Israeli than Israel itself, have in an extraordinary development stopped holding Hamas solely responsible for preventing agreement on an initiative the movement has already accepted.
Given the growing fissures within Israel’s ruling elite and Israeli society more broadly about whether to continue prosecuting a failing military campaign or, alternatively, reach an agreement to retrieve its captives and hostages, and thereby also defuse the Support Fronts, the Houthi attack appears to have been designed to sharpen these contradictions. Hamas and Islamic Jihad may no longer be firing daily salvos at Tel Aviv, and Hizballah has refrained from doing so, but that does not mean that Israel’s most important urban center is safe if the war continues. Similarly, Hizballah in Lebanon has in recent weeks also further escalated its attacks on Israel. As for the timing, it may well reflect the widespread conviction that if an agreement is not reached before Netanyahu leaves Washington, where he is spending several days receiving the limitless adoration of its political class, a ceasefire agreement will not be reached before the US elections this November.
The Houthi attack was thus also intended as a message to the United States. From the very outset, preventing further regional escalation has been a priority for Washington. While it is true that the Biden administration has pursued policies that in practice have stoked regional fires to unprecedented heights, it remains highly averse to a general regional conflagration. Particularly one that could draw in Iran, and – in the midst of a US presidential election campaign – also result in direct US involvement. If Israel were to perform as poorly in a regional confrontation as it has in Gaza – by all accounts a fair assumption – the US rushing to Israel’s aid is a virtual certainty. Keen to avoid such a scenario, a combination of strategic and electoral calculations would nevertheless bring it about.
Ansar Allah’s drone attack on Tel Aviv and Israel’s bombing of Hodeida bring us one big step closer to regional confrontation. Writing in the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, military affairs correspondent Yossi Yehoshua opined that the Israeli air raid “was designed to reverberate in two other cities – Beirut and Tehran”. Falsely asserting that the US and previously Saudi Arabia had attacked exclusively military targets in Yemen, and in doing so had failed to influence Ansar Allah, he added that “Israel’s policy is now exacting a different, civilian price, damaging state infrastructure”. For good measure Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant insisted, “The fire that is now burning in Hodeida can be seen across the entire Middle East, and that has clear implications”.
Against this background Washington was quick to disassociate itself from the Israeli attack, even though it could not have been conducted without coordinating with the itchy trigger fingers of the US-UK naval task force in the Red Sea. Reports that Italy assisted Israel with mid-air refueling of its bombers remain unconfirmed. Saudi Arabia also lost no time insisting there had been no Israeli violation of its air space. For good reason, given that Ansar Allah has repeatedly warned that any state that makes its airspace available to aircraft bombing Yemen will itself be a target. In other words, the precarious ceasefire between Saudi Arabia and the Houthis also hangs in the balance.
Ansar Allah survived years of daily, relentless Saudi-Emirati bombing of their country. While that campaign was devastating to Yemen and its people, the movement emerged significantly strengthened from that war. It is therefore a pipe dream that it will be deterred by one or even several Israeli air raids. Indeed, the Houthis have already fired more missiles at Israel to demonstrate their resolve.
Once again, the equation is a simple one. End Israel’s genocidal assault on the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip, or take responsibility for the regional consequences. As of this writing, Israel is using Netanyahu’s visit to Washington to unleash some of the fiercest bombings of Gaza yet, with scores killed and hundreds wounded each day. Most recently, it on Monday ordered hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians to leave a designated safe zone, and almost immediately thereafter began bombing them. It reflects Israel’s conviction and confidence that US support is and will remain unconditional, to the point that it can escalate its genocidal campaign while Netanyahu visits with his chief sponsors.
Several observers have suggested that Netanyahu may finally be ready to accept the ceasefire initiative that Biden claims was authored by the Israeli prime minister, and will use the occasion of his address to Congress to announce this, should there be space to do so between repeated standing ovations. It’s unlikely, and it seems more plausible he will only announce that he is sending his negotiators to Doha to resume discussions. By allowing him to do so and continue this war, Washington will have endorsed further regional escalation.
22 July: An International Role in Gaza?
I was recently asked to comment about the role the international community could play in the Gaza Strip after the conclusion of Israel’s current war. My thoughts on the topic:
- Any discussion of the international community’s role must proceed from the realization that this community has no credibility with respect to the Question of Palestine. It not only has no credibility among Palestinians; it has no credibility with respect to anything that concerns Palestine and the Palestinians. Any remaining credibility it may have possessed on 6 October has thoroughly evaporated since that date. This is primarily because this community and its institutions have, by choice, systematically failed to take a single meaningful measure to confront Israel’s genocidal assault on the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip for almost an entire calendar year.
- The role of the international community and its individual members has been characterized by a combination of active complicity and passive acquiescence in Israel’s systematic destruction of the Gaza Strip and its civilian infrastructure, and the killing of tens of thousands of Palestinians at an unprecedented pace. This applies not only to enthusiastic participants such as the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany, but also to the European Union, to the United Nations and particularly its Security Council, and to the League of Arab States. Among states, the sole exception in this regard has been South Africa.
- It is highly unlikely that there will be a formal conclusion of Israeli hostilities against the Gaza Strip, and there will therefore be no “Day After” scenario as conventionally understood. Israel’s model appears to be that which it applied in the West Bank during and after its Operation Defensive Shield in 2002, at the height of the so-called Second Intifada. In this model Israel invaded Palestinian towns and cities comprising Area A, that pursuant to the Oslo accords were under exclusive Palestinian jurisdiction and had not been entered by Israeli forces since Israel redeployed from them during the mid-1990s. In 2002 Israel re-entered Area A, broke the back of the Palestinian Authority (PA), and severely degraded the Palestinian armed groups that had been leading the uprising. Rather than imposing a full re-occupation of Area A, Israeli forces thereafter intensified the fragmentation of the territories under their rule, and entered Area A at will to further weaken the PA and armed groups, and assassinate or arrest key militants. After Mahmoud Abbas succeeded Yasir Arafat in 2004, an increasingly pliant and discredited PA and a US military mission known as the United States Security Coordinator (USSC) played vital roles in bolstering Israel’s campaign.
- As the current situation in the West Bank demonstrates, Israel’s campaign in the West Bank has not proven particularly successful over the long term, and was implemented under conditions exponentially more favorable than those existing in the Gaza Strip. Implanting the PA into the Gaza Strip may well confront insurmountable obstacles for both Israeli and Palestinian reasons, while resistance movements in Gaza are more powerful and better organized than were those in the West Bank two decades ago by orders of magnitude. Israel’s campaign in the West Bank to defeat the Second Intifada also did not have to contend with, and was unaffected by, regional dynamics. The regional dynamics with respect to the Gaza Strip are, as we have repeatedly witnessed since 7 October, radically different.
- Even if there is a formal conclusion to hostilities, the idea that governance can be addressed in a political vacuum or leveraged to enable a political resolution is an illusory pipe dream. The United States and its Western allies have promoted multiple initiatives to this effect since the early 1990s, for example during the ill-fated 100-day tenure of Mahmoud Abbas as PA prime minister in 2003, and PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad’s tenure from 2007-2013 and its focus on institution-building, budgetary reforms, and crushing Hamas. The establishment and development of the PA, its institutions, and Palestinian infrastructure during the 1990s, led by Arafat and constructed on the ruins Israel had left behind, particularly in the Gaza Strip, is another example and was in fact the most successful one in this regard, on all counts (including crushing Hamas). Currently the US and EU have pinned their hopes on Abbas’s latest prime minister, his longtime bagman Muhammad Mustafa. Don’t hold your breath unless you’re suicidal.
- By insisting upon putting the cart before the horse these initiatives, without exception, predictably and inevitably failed to promote a political resolution, or even significant political progress. In fact, settlement construction, to take one key indicator, not only continued, but accelerated markedly during each of these ill-fated plans. The consolidation of Israeli rule and deepening of its annexationist agenda was in fact the primary and most significant result of the “peace process”. On each occasion the governance agenda was pursued as an alternative to a political resolution and used to divert Palestinian energies inwards and away from pursuing their internationally-recognized rights, particularly where this involved confrontation of any sort with Israel. Furthermore, whenever the PA succeeded in meeting benchmarks certified by the World Bank and others, its “donors” simply moved the goal posts further away.
- Even if one takes Western intentions at face value (and for the record, I don’t and you shouldn’t either), the idea that effective governance or meaningful economic development can be successfully achieved under conditions of colonial rule hell-bent on settlement and dispossession is a non-starter. As is the thoroughly absurd notion that Israel would respond to the development of effective Palestinian institutions by relinquishing its rule over the West Bank and Gaza Strip. It actively worked to prevent the emergence of such institutions, so the idea that these were somehow required to give Israel the confidence to pack up and leave flies in the face of logic. Israel remains in the territories it conquered in 1967 because it considers them Israeli territory that should and will ultimately come under formal Israeli sovereignty. It will only depart when the price of remaining exceeds the cost of leaving. Coddling it unconditionally eliminates the costs and multiplies the benefits.
- If the international community is serious about establishing credibility with respect to Palestine it first needs to put the horse before the cart. Rather than engaging in “Day After” fantasies, it needs to credibly address the reality that exists today. Those who have nothing to contribute to ending the ongoing genocide cannot claim to be acting in the Palestinian interest, today or ever again. Their various plans and scenarios will rightfully be seen as initiatives to promote Israel’s agenda at the expense of the Palestinian people, and opposed on this basis. This equation will persist irrespective of how many Palestinian quislings, and Arab and/or Muslim client regimes are incorporated into such scenarios.
- Speaking of effective governance, charity begins at home. Those working overtime to sustain Israeli impunity, and ensure that its actions remain beyond the purview of the international community’s established institutions and mechanisms of accountability, shouldn’t really be wagging their fingers at others, and least of all at Palestinians.
- A governance agenda in the context of Palestine can only work under three conditions: First, it must be entirely subordinated and organically connected to a meaningful, credible, and imminent political resolution. Second, it cannot be limited to the Gaza Strip and must be applied comprehensively throughout the territories Israel conquered in 1967, including East Jerusalem. Third, Palestinian leadership and representation, and equally how it is selected, is a matter for Palestinians and not others to determine. It is only on this basis that the international community can play a constructive role.
- The above is broadly in line with the role the international community would presumably like to play. It is however something the West, led by the United States, will never accept. In this regard we would do well to recognize the growing distinction between the West and the international community, and the irreconcilable contradictions between the former’s “rules-based international order” and the principles and values of the international community as enshrined in the United Nations Charter, international law and the rulings of the International Court of Justice, and the like.
- A final reason this entire discussion is largely academic is because a political resolution of the Question of Palestine is an impossibility for at least the foreseeable future. While a two-state settlement remains possible in theory, it was never going to be achieved on the basis of the Oslo process, which gave rise to many of the hair-brained schemes mentioned above. To the contrary, 7 October 2023 and the subsequent genocide in the Gaza Strip are in many respects the product of Oslo as well as its final breath. In Israel this has given way to an openly annexationist agenda and an increasingly exterminationist political culture. Among Palestinians and Arabs it has been replaced by a conviction that Israel is vulnerable, even frail, and can be defeated. We are therefore in for a very rough ride.
20 July 2024: Polio and the Destruction of Gaza’s Health Infrastructure
This past week, poliovirus was detected in sewage samples in the Gaza Strip. According to the World Health Organization (WHO) polio (poliomyelitis) is a “highly infectious disease” that “invades the nervous system and can cause total paralysis in a matter of hours”.
Like so much else in the Gaza Strip these days, polio according to the WHO “mainly affects children under 5 years of age” but can infect “anyone of any age who is unvaccinated”. Furthermore, “One in 200 infections leads to irreversible paralysis (usually in the legs). Among those paralyzed, 5-10% die when their breathing muscles become immobilized”.
Israel and its apologists can be expected to blame Hamas for this state of affairs, with canards about the Gaza health authorities prioritizing the construction of tunnels over inoculating those under their rule, dirty Arabs, and the like. The fact of the matter is that not only is polio not endemic in the Gaza Strip, it was eradicated from the territory several decades ago. The achievement was publicly touted by none other than Ted Tulchinksy, who from 1978-1994 served as the Coordinator for Health in the West Bank and Gaza Strip within Israel’s Ministry of Health. His testimony is significant because during his tenure Tulchinsky supervised the health departments of the military governments Israel established in each of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967.
Writing on the website of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2011, Tulchinsky writes that during the 1970s polio epidemics periodically erupted in Israel and the Palestinian territories it was in the process of annexing, and “despite high levels of [vaccination] coverage” in the Gaza Strip in particular, on account of its degraded sanitary infrastructure.
Tulchinsky recounts that in 1978 Israel consulted with Natan Goldblum and Joseph Melnick, two noted epidemiologists from Baylor University, to develop more effective anti-polio strategies. Their recommendation, to increase the four doses traditionally given to infants during their first year with an additional three of a different variety, was pioneered in the Gaza Strip. It proved so effective that the disease was eradicated from the territory within a few short years. Tulchinsky does not say so, but it seems likely that as with so much else the Gaza Strip here too functioned as a human laboratory for new Israeli methods. Indeed, the Goldblum-Melnick vaccination sequence was according to Tulchinsky “dubbed the Gaza system” and subsequently applied within Israel to quell a polio outbreak of its own in 1988. “As a result of this episode”, Tulchinsky wrote, “Israel adopted the Gaza system, and total eradication of polio was rapidly achieved”.
It is unclear how polio has suddenly re-appeared in the Gaza Strip. What is beyond doubt is how it’s spreading. Israel has systematically destroyed the Gaza Strip’s health, sanitary, water treatment, and power infrastructure, particularly since October 2023, leading to the collapse of systems that were already precarious. Contaminated water, untreated sewage, and uncollected garbage, particularly when paired with the severe overcrowding resulting from Israel’s genocidal campaign and repeated forced displacement of the civilian population, represent ideal conditions for its spread.
In the words of United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, speaking last December:
The people of Gaza are being told to move like human pinballs – ricocheting between ever-smaller slivers of the south, without any of the basics of survival … Conditions in shelters are overcrowded and unsanitary. People nurse open wounds. Hundreds of people stand in line for hours to use one shower or toilet … wearing clothes they have not changed for two months.
Such conditions have also created a breeding ground for other infectious diseases. As of 30 June, the WHO reported nearly a million cases of acute respiratory infection (affecting almost half the population), over half a million cases of diarrhea (including nearly 200,000 cases of “acute watery diarrhea”), and over 100,000 cases of acute jaundice (suggesting hepatitis is widespread), and so on. The WHO notes these figures “should be interpreted with caution, due to delayed and incomplete data reporting”. As the summer intensifies, there have also been multiple warnings of a cholera outbreak.
With few and limited exceptions, Israel is preventing the entry of fuel, vaccines, medical supplies, and potable water into the Gaza Strip. As Israel’s Minister of Defense, Yoav Gallant, publicly announced on 9 October, “We are imposing a complete siege on Gaza. There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything will be closed”.
There was more to this policy of collective sadism than revenge. Giora Eiland is a retired major-general who previously served as head of Israel’s National Security Council and is an advisor to its current government. He also publishes a regular column in the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth. Writing on 29 October, he urged Israel to inflict “not only destruction in Gaza City, but a humanitarian disaster and absolute governmental chaos … [O]nly that outcome – the complete destruction of all systems in Gaza and desperate distress”, would in his view bring about victory. On 19 November he exhorted the government to continue its siege on the Gaza Strip, emphasizing that “severe epidemics in the southern Gaza Strip will bring victory closer and will reduce the number of IDF casualties.” The enthusiastic identification of an entire society as a military target, and the determination to inflict maximum levels of suffering to compensate for Israel’s military failures, has been a common refrain among Israel’s senior political and military leaders.
Central to this campaign has been the eradication of Gaza’s health infrastructure. The WHO speaks of the “continued dismantling of the health system”. In late May Doctors Without Borders (MSF) put it thus: “In the last seven months the healthcare system in the Gaza Strip has been systematically dismantled. According to OCHA [The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs] 24 hospitals are now out of service, while 493 health workers have been killed”. By 12 July the WHO reported 746 health workers killed, 967 injured, and 128 still incarcerated. Israel flunkies will no doubt denounce each and every one of them as Hamas, and claim the numerous ambulances bombed to smithereens were camouflaged rocket launchers.
Attention has primarily focused on the challenges Gaza’s disintegrating Palestinian medical facilities and their overworked and under-resourced staff confront in dealing with the overwhelming number of casualties resulting from Israel’s genocidal campaign. The accounts of young children enduring amputations without anaesthetics and severe burns without pain management, of patients dying because of the unavailability of basic medical supplies like disinfectants, have become all too common. But the crisis also goes much deeper. Regular health care, for example for cancer patients or those who suffer a stroke, diabetics requiring insulin, a child or grandparent with a broken bone, and the like, has also all but disappeared. Mark Perlmutter and Feroze Sidhwa, two US surgeons who recently volunteered at a hospital in the Gaza Strip, provide a particularly harrowing account of their experience. It is, unfortunately, just one of very many such testimonials.
At the beginning of July Rasha Khatib, Martin McKee, and Salim Yusuf published a letter in the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet in which they note that “Armed conflicts have indirect health implications beyond the direct harm from violence”, with “destroyed health-care infrastructure” prominently noted as a factor. The authors observe that “In recent conflicts, such indirect deaths range from three to 15 times the number of direct deaths”. Based on current conditions in the Gaza Strip the authors, “applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death”, find it “not implausible to estimate that up to 1860,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza”, and note that this amounts to “7-9% of the population in the Gaza Strip”. That’s a lot of Pallywood for the Defamation League and other Israel flunkies to explain away.
Accounts of the destruction of the Palestinian health infrastructure typically focus on Israel’s destruction of Al-Shifa Hospital, the largest medical complex in the Gaza Strip that was razed and burned to the ground by the most moral army since the Ku Klux Klan after none of its pretexts for attacking the complex were substantiated.
Before Al-Shifa there was the 17 October mass casualty bombing of Al-Ahli Arab Hospital, also known as Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital. Established in 1882, it is the only Christian hospital in the Gaza Strip and is managed by the Anglican Diocese of Jerusalem. Along with other hospitals, it also became a refuge of choice for civilians desperate for safe haven.
Three days earlier, on 14 October, Human Rights Watch reported that “an artillery projectile struck the hospital’s diagnostic cancer treatment center”. Based on details of the shell, it concluded that “Israel is the only party to the [Gaza] conflict known to possess and use the artillery that fires this type of munition”.
Over the course of the next three days the hospital’s director and staff received numerous direct Israeli warnings and threats, demanding they evacuate the premises. (Needless to say, they refused and continued to treat their patients). In the immediate aftermath of the 17 October bombing, Israel put out several and often contradictory accounts, before eventually settling on two points: the casualty figures were vastly exaggerated and, more importantly, were caused not by Israeli fire but an errant Palestinian projectile.
As so often Israel’s purpose in rejecting culpability and blaming its victims is not to convince its audience so much as to confuse it. If journalists, Human Rights Watch, and others conclude they cannot clearly establish responsibility and must await a full and proper investigation when conditions permit, it is mission accomplished.
In this particular case the ruse worked beyond expectations. Although the Anglican Diocese of Jerusalem pointed the finger squarely at Israel, the Archbishop of Canterbury and senior cleric of the Anglican Church, Justin Welby, shamelessly denounced accusations that Israel was responsible as a “blood libel”. “Don’t assume it’s Israel”, he stated. “You have no proof”.
For good measure Welby professed total ignorance on the numbers killed and injured, stating, “I’ve heard so many different figures”. Ever the knave, US President and soon-to-be-former-nominee Joe Biden rushed to blame the Palestinians. Speaking in Israel, the same individual who claimed to have viewed non-existent images of beheaded infants on 7 October stated, “Based on what I’ve seen, it appears it was done by the other team, and not you”. The resulting outrage contributed to the abrupt cancellation of his scheduled conclave with an assortment of Arab client regimes in Amman several days later. Like these past several weeks, even his closest allies couldn’t stomach being associated with him.
The most comprehensive investigation I have come across to date has been conducted by Maher Arar, who has produced two extraordinarily detailed technical reports to demonstrate not only that it was an Israeli projectile that hit Al-Ahli Hospital, but that any other theory is inconsistent with the available evidence. While I found his reasoning entirely convincing, I’m not sufficiently technically proficient – to put it mildly – to rebut any challenges to his technical conclusions. I do however know enough to confidently dismiss any detractors who do not call for an immediate, comprehensive, independent international investigation and refuse to condemn Israel for refusing one.
Maher Arrar makes the important point that Israel attacked Al-Ahli Hospital not despite its prominent international connections, but because of them. It was a test case. If it succeeded, and it could get the likes of Welby, the BBC, and Western governments to play along, that would send an unmistakable signal that every single Palestinian hospital was fair game and could be attacked with impunity. And that’s precisely what has happened. A fundamental principle of the laws of war that has survived for centuries if not millenia lies buried in the rubble of Gaza’s hospitals. It no longer exists, and the horrific consequences will – already do – reverberate far beyond the Gaza Strip.
In the words of noted Palestinian-British surgeon Ghassan Abu-Sitta, who was at Al-Ahli Hospital the night of the attack:
This incident served as a litmus test for what was to come: Israel’s full war on Gaza’s healthcare infrastructure. After Al-Ahli was hit, and no one was held to account, the domino pieces began to fall rapidly. Hospitals were targeted one after the other. It became obvious that the attacks were systemic.
Several months ago, I had the pleasure of meeting Dr Chandra Hassan in Chicago. A dedicated medical professional and humanitarian, he had volunteered at Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis for some time during the current genocide, and has remained in regular contact with Palestinian colleagues.
During our conversation I asked him if he had what he thought the underlying purpose of Israel’s systematic destruction of the Palestinian health infrastructure. He responded – and here I paraphrase – that hospitals have a special sanctity and form the ultimate refuge and source of hope for people in crisis. They expect to have, and need the confidence they can have, access to a hospital and its staff should they or their loved ones require it, and refuge within its premises should this prove necessary. Remove that confidence, that hope, and replace it with the fear generated by the knowledge it is no longer there, that you will be left to your own devices when you most need hope and help, and you are well on your way to ensuring the disintegration of a society. Sounds about right.
7 May: Ceasefire?
On Tuesday evening it appeared the end was finally in sight. Hamas formally accepted the ceasefire proposal put forward by Egypt and Qatar, and spontaneous celebrations erupted in the streets Rafah and other Palestinian towns in the Gaza Strip. Given that US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and other US officials have repeatedly insisted that Hamas forms the sole obstacle to a ceasefire agreement, Palestinians could be forgiven for believing that day 213 of this genocidal ordeal would be the last.
The euphoria however proved short-lived. Several hours later the office of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu announced that Israel’s war cabinet had unanimously agreed that the proposal “is far from Israel’s necessary requirements”, and that its latest offensive on the southern town of Rafah abutting the Palestinian-Egyptian border would continue as planned. Indeed, Israel’s Western-supplied and supported military launched intensive air and artillery strikes to support an incursion into Rafah that commenced shortly after Netanyahu’s announcement.
Ceasefire negotiations have been going on for some time, led by Egypt and Qatar, both of whom maintain working relationships with both Israel and Hamas. Egypt additionally has a close alliance with Israel, while Qatar hosts the Hamas leadership on its territory.
The United States is often identified as a mediator as well, but this is not quite accurate. Not only is it Israel’s chief sponsor in every sense of the word, but it also openly demands the destruction and elimination of Hamas, with whom it has neither contact nor communication. Although it participates in the negotiations, as Blinken’s statements attest Washington serves primarily as a proxy for Israel rather than as what any reasonable observer would characterise as a mediator. Given US power and US President Joe Biden’s unqualified support for Israel and its far-right government, the working assumption in Cairo and Doha has been that whatever Washington accepts will be translated into an Israeli endorsement.
It hasn’t quite worked out that way, and the main reason is that Biden and Blinken’s unmatched embrace of Israel and Israeli impunity in its dealings with the Palestinian people has extended to permitting Netanyahu to ride roughshod over US policy preferences without consequence.
So long as Blinken takes center stage in US Middle East diplomacy it can safely be ignored. Clueless as ever, on his most recent trip to the Middle East he once again prioritised a Saudi-Israeli normalisation agreement, which he appears to genuinely believe is imminent. As for a ceasefire, he couldn’t restrain himself from praising Israel’s “extraordinarily generous” offer to pause its genocidal onslaught on the Gaza Strip for a few weeks, with mass killings resuming only after Israel safely retrieved its captives.
It was only after the hapless Secretary of State returned to Washington to shred further dissent memos from State Department staff and issue additional certificates of good conduct to his favorite genocidaires in order to enable further weapons deliveries to them, that things began to change. Once again, Blinken was replaced by CIA Director William Burns, a serious diplomat who knows the Middle East well, and who unlike his boss in the White House can distinguish between US and Israeli interests.
Among the key sticking points in the negotiations is that Hamas demanded an end to Israel’s war while Israel insisted on continuing it. Given this contradiction the mediators could not incorporate explicit wording that either ended or failed to end the war and still clinch the deal. What appears to have happened is that a sufficiently vague formula was included in the proposal, paired with informal American assurances that if Hamas implemented the first stages of the three-stage deal, Washington would guarantee an Israeli cessation of hostilities by the end of its final stage.
For the record, US assurances to the Palestinians over the years have been honoured mainly in the breach. This was most prominently the case in 1982, when the Reagan administration guaranteed the protection of civilians remaining in Beirut after the PLO withdrawal from the Lebanese capital, but did nothing to stop the Sabra-Shatila massacres.
Against this background, and given Hamas’s insistence on an end to Israel’s war, Netanyahu was confident no deal would be achieved, and for good measure informed the mediators and the US that Israel would only send representatives to Cairo if and when Hamas formally accepted the latest proposal.
To Israel’s great consternation, it emerged that the Hamas delegation despatched to Cairo had instructions to engage positively with the proposal and secure a deal. Netanyahu went ballistic. He responded with a series of statements that Israel was determined to invade Rafah even if a ceasefire agreement was concluded, and that it would only end its campaign after achieving the total victory that has systematically eluded it from the outset. For good measure Israel also banned Al-Jazeera from operating in Israel in a move deliberately calculated to anger the Qatari government and provoke its withdrawal from the negotiations.
Hamas interpreted Israel’s latest antics as making a mockery of the proposal and, more importantly, of the US role in its implementation, and the movement’s delegation duly returned to Doha. Similarly incensed the Egyptians and Qataris refined their proposal (and presumably the US guarantees as well) to make these more palatable to Hamas, which this time accepted them. Presented as an Egyptian-Qatari initiative, it is inconceivable that even a punctuation mark within it was not first cleared with Burns, who is also in Doha, or that Burns did not similarly consult with Washington before signing off on it.
Hamas claims it was assured by the Egyptians and Qataris that Biden would ensure the agreement’s implementation if the movement accepted it. We’ll probably find out the reality behind this assertion in the coming days. Same for any statements Burns or officials in Washington may make that they had no role in crafting the latest proposal.
In a different world one might think this would mean Israel would also be forced to accept the agreement, particularly since Biden has publicly identified an Israeli invasion of Rafah as a “red line”. But that different world does not exist. Netanyahu is confident he can cross Washington’s red lines at will, because it will continue to refrain from imposing any consequences on him for doing so. Indeed, Washington is already backing off, now claiming it only opposes a “major” Israeli ground operation into Rafah.
The coming days will reveal if Israel’s calculations are sound, or if there is a limit beyond which the Biden administration is unwilling to be led by its far-right Israeli allies.
As for the idea that this is all Netanyahu’s doing, and solely motivated by his desire to remain in power in order to evade trial for corruption, this doesn’t agree particularly well with a war cabinet that unanimously endorsed rejected the proposal on the table and the invasion of Rafah. What is happening in Gaza, and in Palestine more generally, far transcends the determination of one politician to cling to power.
29 April: Students Stand Up
The eruption of protests in solidarity with the Palestinian people at numerous Western universities, and throughout the United States in particular, represents a pivotal moment. College students are, to be sure, not an accurate reflection of public opinion or faithful mirror of their societies. But their activism often serves as a bellwether, an indication of the shape of things to come. Therein lies the enormous political significance of the encampments that are now being established at dozens of universities, from the Ivy League to state universities.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s student uprisings not only contributed to, but also portended the failure of the US imperial project in southeast Asia and its defeat in Vietnam. Student activists also played a prominent role in confronting the worst excesses of the racial hierarchy that dominates the United States. Similarly, campaigns, at times including the occupation of administration buildings, in numerous universities during the 1980s to demand divestment from South African and related assets, portended the end of Western backing for that country’s white-minority regime. When student activism reaches a critical mass, in other words, it is often a fairly reliable indicator of where things are heading.
In the present context the protests across university campuses are sending multiple messages. Most obviously, a rejection of Israel’s genocidal campaign against the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip and, no less importantly, a rejection of their own governments’ complicity and support of Israel’s transformation of the Gaza Strip into a killing field and chamber of horrors. While that is the proximate cause, it is either underpinned by or has developed into a broader opposition to Israel as a colonial apartheid state and to its policies towards the Palestinian people more generally. Hence the demands that universities divest from assets implicated in Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians. In other words, this is a genuine solidarity movement that sees Palestinians as human beings with inalienable rights which go beyond the right not to be massacred by Western weaponry.
Expressed differently, the solidarity movement has served to humanize the Palestinians. To understand the profound significance of this achievement, recall that Israel and its apologists have spent decades engaged in a systematic campaign, ably assisted by the mainstream media, to dehumanize Palestinians. It was within living memory an article of faith that Palestinians simply do not exist. That “Palestinian” and “terrorist” became synonyms. That Palestinians are motivated by anti-Semitism and nothing else in their opposition to Israel.
Opposed to this, Israel was presented as “a light unto the nations”, “the only democracy in the Middle East” possessing “the most moral army in the world” that fought only “wars of no choice” and did so with “purity of arms”. Until the eruption of the 1987 popular uprising, or intifada, it was a commonplace that Israel’s was a “benign” and “liberal” occupation, one that selflessly gave more than it took. More recently, in an update of Theodor Herzl’s “rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism” it became “the villa in the jungle”.
Yet within the past seven months the paradigm through which Western public opinion has traditionally viewed both Israel and the Palestinians has definitively collapsed. And nowhere more definitively than on college campuses.
The transformation of course did not happen overnight, and decades of struggle and hard work by innumerable individuals within the region and beyond were required to make this moment possible. Israel’s lurch towards ever greater levels of violence and extremism, to the extent that it is today the darling of the Third Reich’s ideological heirs, has also played its part.
The outcome is clear. Israel has lost the battle for public opinion, and it knows it. And given that for Israel public opinion is as much a strategic asset as its nuclear arsenal it is, unsurprisingly, responding hysterically. It’s a far cry from previous eras, where Israel and its apologists could either persuade audiences of the rightness of their cause, or sufficiently confuse them into passive neutrality.
Israel and its flunkies are today deploying the same playbook and tactics against university activists that they have for decades deployed against the Palestinians: discredit, delegitimize, defame, and demonize.
Thus, any student expressing any opposition to Israel’s genocidal campaign or solidarity with its Palestinian victims is immediately denounced as “Hamas”, “terrorist”, anti-semite”, and the like. The foot-stomping toddler who passes for assistant professor at Columbia University, to give but one example, has made it his vocation to vilify students at his own university. Among the worst offenders, predictably, is Jonathan Greenblatt of the Defamation League, that self-proclaimed civil rights organization that used to conduct espionage in the United States on behalf of South Africa’s white-minority regime. Once again going full Goebbels, he recently – without being challenged by his MSNBC hosts – denounced Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace as “campus proxies” for Iran. The audacity of knowingly placing a target on Jews while drawing a generous salary on the pretext of defending their rights is hard to beat.
The problem for Israel and its apologists is that they have devalued their favorite terms of demonization to the point of making them trivial and meaningless. Most people no longer care about being denounced as anti-Semites, terrorists, or agents of a foreign government by the likes of the Defamation League, and are no longer intimidated by the Zionist Inquisition, because they readily understand it bears no relation to the actual definition of these terms and that these are deployed for the sole purpose of defending a foreign state and its policies.
Speaking of demonization, Vietnam’s National Liberation Front was hardly the Vienna Boys’ Choir, and at the height of the divestment movement South Africans accused of collaboration were being literally burned alive with “necklaces” consisting of petrol-soaked tires. Yet today any student opposing Israeli genocide is absurdly required to take responsibility for Hamas and every one of its actions. It’s a sign of desperation by those who know their cause is lost.
Because they realize theirs is also a Lost Cause, Israel and its apologists are increasingly resorting to extreme measures, like deposing university presidents, threatening individual students and their employment prospects, deploying agents provocateurs, and mobilising the police and security forces. Principle unfortunately often comes with a cost, but the manner in which the student movement has responded to these challenges has been nothing short of inspirational.
31 March: Anything Goes
Since 7 October 2023 there has been a concerted campaign by Israel, its apologists and other flunkies to erase any distinction between Palestinian civilians and combatants. “It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible”, proclaimed Israel’s head of state, Isaac Herzog, on 13 October. Other Israeli leaders, virtually without exception, have expressed similar sentiments.
As so often, the US has proven to be more pro-Israeli than Israel itself. This week, for example, Tim Walberg, an elected member of the US legislature, recommended that the correct approach to the Gaza Strip “should be like Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Get it over quick.”
It’s a familiar playbook. Demonize your enemy with lurid propaganda about deliberate, systematic diabolical savagery, particularly against angelic children and defenceless women, then demonize an entire people and society by holding it responsible for the existence of this enemy. In Nazi Germany, for example, communists were accused of every imaginable depravity, and “the Jews” condemned for producing the communist menace. The German state’s ceaseless campaign against “Judeo-Bolshevism” was an important ingredient in the witches’ brew that ultimate produced the Holocaust.
The narratives produced to justify Israel’s genocidal war against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are not fundamentally different. Israel, its apologists, and other flunkies (not least mainstream Western media outlets) have inundated us with tall tales of babies roasted in ovens, mass rapes, and similarly fabricated “reports” of unfathomable sadism. Never one to miss an opportunity to mobilize support for his favorite ally, US President Joe Biden went so far as to repeatedly claim he viewed gruesome images of babies beheaded by Hamas, even after his aides sheepishly admitted these existed only in his imagination.
As for the general Palestinian population, Exhibit A has been, “They elected Hamas!”, and are therefore reaping what they sowed. Many go further, with Herzog, for example, insisting “It is not true this rhetoric about civilians not being aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true. They could have risen up. They could have fought against that evil regime which took over Gaza in a coup d’etat.” In other words, Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are doubly responsible: first for electing Hamas, and then for not overthrowing the movement after it seized power in the Gaza Strip. Similar variations by other Israeli and US leaders make clear the only option Palestinians had to avoid the present cataclysm was voting Likud.
There are several problems with the argument that begins with, “You elected them!”. Most obviously, Israel has killed at least 15,000 children. Individuals below the voting age who never cast a vote and now never will. Because the last elections were held in 2006, nearly two decades ago, many thousands more – arguably a majority of those who have perished in the Gaza killing fields – never voted for anybody.
Secondly, Hamas did indeed win an absolute majority of parliamentary seats in the 2006 legislative elections, which were correctly certified as thoroughly free and fair. But it shouldn’t have.
In the 2006 elections the West Bank and Gaza Strip were not contested as a single electoral district, but rather divided into fifteen constituencies reflecting the governorates within these territories. Hamas was disciplined enough to field a single list of candidates in each of these districts. The Fatah movement was everything but well-organized. Numerous candidates passed over in its official slates, dictated by Mahmoud Abbas and his closest associate at the time, Muhammad Dahlan, formed competing lists. In some cases several of them.
Additionally, leaders of prominent local families, who would normally have been expected to support Fatah but were in many cases excluded from the official Fatah list, contested the elections as independents or joined one of the unofficial Fatah slates. Had the electoral system dispensed with multiple districts, such figures would have had much less influence and probably sat out the polls. But this was not the case. The result was that Hamas failed to win the popular vote, but thanks to the disarray of its rivals and an electoral system that gave local forces an incentive and opportunity to further sap the Fatah vote, Hamas nevertheless routed Fatah in terms of number of seats won.
If one takes all of the above factors together, it emerges that not that many victims of Israel’s genocidal campaign actually voted for Hamas.
But let’s assume that Hamas had won the popular vote. Should that change anything? The idea that entire societies should be held responsible and collectively punished for the conduct of their elected leaders is a fairly new innovation, dating from approximately 7 October 2023.
Another of its distinguishing characteristics is that it’s not consistently applied and reserved for official enemies. George W Bush, for example, was in 2004 re-elected with a majority of electoral as well as popular votes, more than a year after launching the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq. Yet the idea that US society should be held responsible and entire cities reduced to rubble as punishment for this choice never really gained traction. Similarly, what is one to make of a society that repeatedly elects Binyamin Netanyahu, to the extent that he has become Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, and in its latest sojourn to the ballot box gave him Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich as powerful coalition partners? Probably better not to go there.
Even more absurd – actually, equally absurd – is the idea that a society can be held responsible for not overthrowing a government that rules by force. Yet that is precisely what Israel’s head of state, along with many others in the US-Israeli echo chamber, have been advocating. (Although Hamas was democratically elected in 2006, in 2007 it seized power in the Gaza Strip to forestall a coup attempt set in motion by Elliot Abrams and Muhammad Dahlan).
“They elected Hamas!” has been repeated so often that it’s become normalised as a justification for genocidal warfare, and now also for the deliberate engineering of famine. It demonstrates, once again, that when it comes to providing apologia for Israel and demonizing the Palestinians, there are no restrictions or limits. Anything goes.
30 March: Another ICJ Ruling
On 28 March the International Court of Justice issued a new ruling (“Order”) in the case known as Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in The Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel).
The ICJ’s ruling came in response to a new request by South Africa, submitted on 6 March, asking the Court “to indicate further provisional measures and/or modify its provisional measures indicated on 26 January 2024”.
The historic 26 January ruling had come in response to South Africa’s initial 29 December 2023 invocation of the Genocide Convention with respect to Israel’s conduct in the Gaza Strip. By an overwhelming 15-2 majority the ICJ’s judges found that South Africa had plausibly accused Israel of violating its obligations under the Genocide Convention.
On this basis the Court announced that it would proceed to a full hearing of the case, which has yet to commence and will probably require several years before a final verdict is issued. To ensure that no “irreparable harm” is inflicted while the ICJ considers the matter, the Court in late January set out a series of “provisional measures” required of Israel as well as other signatories to the Convention. It additionally ordered Israel to report back within 30 days on compliance. Had the ICJ found South Africa’s case to be insufficiently persuasive, or Israel’s rebuttal sufficiently convincing, it would have simply dismissed South Africa’s application, closed the file, and moved on to the next case.
As it stands, the state that presents itself as reparations for Germany’s campaign of extermination against Europe’s Jews, and which has weaponized the Holocaust to shield its policies from scrutiny and criticism, is now indelibly associated with genocide as a formally accused perpetrator of “the crime of crimes”.
South Africa’s most recent application to the Court essentially argues that Israel’s refusal to implement the provisional measures ordered by the Court in January, and the continued deterioration of conditions in the Gaza Strip, require the Court to take further action.
It is not the first time South Africa has called upon the Court to take additional action. On 12 February, referencing “the developing circumstances in Rafah”, it filed an “urgent request” with the ICJ, calling upon the Court to invoke its powers to issue additional provisional measures. In its response, the Court disappointed not only South Africa but also those who insist the ICJ is a partisan institution.
Although it confirmed the assessment of United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres than an Israeli ground invasion of Rafah “would exponentially increase what is already a humanitarian nightmare with untold regional consequences”, the Court concluded that “the perilous situation demands the immediate and effective implementation of the [26 January] provisional measures … which are applicable throughout the Gaza Strip, including in Rafah, and does not demand the indication of additional provisional measures”. In other words, the Court declined to go beyond what it had already pronounced in January, even as it again emphasized that “the State of Israel remains bound to fully comply with its obligations under the Genocide Convention”.
Fast forward to 28 March and the ICJ is singing a different tune. Recounting the case thus far, the Court notes, without further comment, that it received both Israel’s report on its compliance with the January Order and South Africa’s comments on this report (neither of which have been made public). It also summarizes South Africa’s 6 March application for additional measures and Israel’s response - both of which are available on the ICJ website.
The Court clarifies that, according to its statutes, it can only issue additional provisional measures (or modify or revoke existing ones) if it determines there has been a “change in the situation” that would justify doing so. It also notes that, according to these same statues, the Court’s options are not limited to either accepting or rejecting those measures requested by South Africa.
Reviewing the evidence before it, the Court “observes that Palestinians in Gaza are no longer facing only a risk of famine [as it had noted in January] … but that famine is [now] setting in, with at least 31 people, including 27 children having already died of malnutrition and dehydration". “The Court [therefore] considers that the above-mentioned developments, which are exceptionally grave, constitute a change in the situation that within the meaning” of the court’s own rules. It additionally notes that its existing measures ordered in January no longer “fully address the consequences arising from the changes in the situation” in the Gaza Strip, “thus justifying the modification of these measures”.
The Court notes it also has to satisfy two additional conditions. First, that there is a genuine risk of “irreparable harm” to the rights of the Palestinian people under the Genocide Convention, and second, “that there is urgency, in the sense that there exists a real and imminent risk that such prejudice [i.e. irreparable harm] will materialize before the Court gives its final decision in the case”.
It speaks to the weakness of Israel’s report to the ICJ on its compliance with the provisional measures ordered in January, the weakness of its response to South Africa’s 6 March application for additional measures, and the sheer savagery of its military operations in the Gaza Strip, that the Court determined that “the circumstances of the case require it” to act.
The ICJ ruling begins by repeating “the need for immediate and effective implementation of the measures” it ordered in January, “which are applicable throughout the Gaza Strip, including in Rafah”.
Israel’s non-compliance, in combination with the “catastrophic situation in the Gaza Strip”, led the the Court to unanimously order the following new measure:
“[Israel shall] Take all necessary and effective measures to ensure, without delay, in full co-operation with the United Nations, the unhindered provision at scale by all concerned of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance, including food, water, electricity, fuel, shelter, clothing, hygiene and sanitation requirements, as well as medical supplies and medical care to Palestinians throughout Gaza, including by increasing the capacity and number of land crossing points and maintaining them open for as long as necessary”.
By fifteen votes to one, it additionally ordered Israel to “submit a report to the Court on all measures taken to give effect to this order, within one month”.
As expected, and consistent with precedent, the judges once again rejected South Africa’s request that the ICJ order a ceasefire. In doing so the Court made no determination on either the nature or legitimacy of Israel’s military operations in the Gaza Strip. Rather, it stated that because a ceasefire order would only oblige states who are parties to the Genocide Convention but not other belligerents, it “cannot” do so.
By 15-1, the ICJ judges did however order Israel to “[e]nsure with immediate effect that its military does not commit acts which constitute a violation of any of the rights of the Palestinians in Gaza” under the Genocide Convention, “including by preventing, through any action, the delivery of urgently needed humanitarian assistance”.
It must have been a close call for Israel, because seven of the sixteen judges – one short of half – appended opinions that the Court should have endorsed South Africa’s ceasefire request. They did so primarily on the grounds that without a ceasefire the provisional measures ordered will remain ink on paper.
The seven judges may have been responding to the concluding paragraphs of South Africa’s application, which reminded the Court that in 1993 “it declined to order additional provisional measures” in the Bosnia Genocide Case, and within two years “approximately 7,336 Bosnians in the so-called ‘safe area’ of Srebrenica had been slaughtered, in what this court retrospectively determined to have been a genocide”. “South Africa fears that this application may be the last opportunity that this court shall have to save the Palestinian people in Gaza already dying of starvation".
Once again, I found the separate opinion submitted by the German judge, Georg Nolte, to be the most interesting. As in his January opinion, he initially expresses skepticism about the measures proposed, in this case because these in his view imply Israeli non-compliance and could therefore prejudice its position when the Court holds full hearings on the case. Nevertheless, and as in January, he voted for the measures despite his misgivings, this time citing “a qualitative change in the situation [since January] which is exceptional. These circumstances also reflect a plausible risk of a violation of relevant rights under the Genocide Convention”.
The only judge to vote against the measures was the one appointed by the Israeli government, Aharon Barak. (Under ICJ procedures, states that are party to a case but do not have a sitting judge are entitled to appoint one for that particular case). Barak made his name as president of Israel’s Supreme Court, which has served, also during his tenure, as an organic part of the machinery of occupation. His opinion is of a piece with his numerous and often legally as well as morally obscene rulings deferring to the Israeli military and his government’s expansionist agenda.
As many have noted, the ICJ’s latest ruling will have no impact on the situation in the Gaza Strip. But it is nevertheless significant. It represents one more chink in Israel’s shield of impunity, and makes it more difficult for Western states to continue providing Israel with an unlimited line of credit.
Already Ireland has indicated that it will intervene in the case, and propose that the acts constituting genocide be broadened to include the deliberate blocking of humanitarian aid. In the words of its foreign minister, Micheál Martin, “First of all there needs to be accountability for what happened in Gaza, but secondly we want to influence the future conduct of war”. Only in Ireland would a center-right European government be capable of taking a principled position on Palestine.
28 March: More Density
Steven Bonnell (stage name “Destiny”) responded to my previous post with a series of comments on Twitter/X. True to form it contained more juvenile name-calling (“cowardly fuck”, “disgusting human”, “sniveling worm”, etc.).
Regarding the issue of genocide, he appears to have appointed himself the resident expert on the phenomenon: “How can you idiots claim to be scholars or have strong opinions about genocide WHILE STILL REFUSING TO UNDERSTAND THIS TERM [dolus specialis]. STOP TALKING ABOUT THIS, YOU ARE NOT QUALIFIED”.
In point of fact, regarding this particular term my previous post referenced, in addition to my own understanding of it, the views of Bonnell, Norman Finkelstein, an international lawyer involved in cases before the International Court of Justice, and of Francesca Albanese, the author of a recent report on genocide for the UN Human Rights Council. Whether or not Finkelstein and I understand this term and its role in determining genocide can therefore easily be assessed.
On the subject of understanding terms, Bonnell doubles down on insisting that Jim Crow in the United States did not constitute apartheid. In his words: “Jim Crow in the US wasn't apartheid because people could travel, among other things, and the segregation wasn't done top down constitutionally and federally, but rather geographically throughout the US with a collection of local restrictions and policies. You're utterly clueless.”
In fact, and as noted in my previous thread, “Jim Crow was a formal system of rigidly enforced segregation in the United States imposed by state authority, enforced by legislation and violence, and confirmed by the US Supreme Court.”
Last time I checked, the US Supreme Court, whose infamous 1896 ruling in Plessy v Ferguson confirmed state laws enforcing segregation, was a federal institution.
But, assuming for the sake of argument that Bonnell’s points about travel and federal edicts are correct, are these in any way relevant? Here is how the International Criminal Court (ICC) defines apartheid, which it classifies as a crime against humanity: “an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime”. Seems the ICC didn’t get Bonnell’s memo about travel and federal regulations in time to incorporate them into the Rome Statute.
Bonnell also declines to address my other point in this regard, which specifically concerns Palestinian refugees. If, in his view, Jim Crow did not constitute apartheid, why does he insist that Arab states exercising their universally-recognized sovereign right to not extend collective citizenship rights to refugees on their territory are guilty of a crime against humanity?
27 March: A Little Knowledge is a Dangerous Thing
On 29 February I participated in a debate organised by Lex Fridman on Israel and Palestine, alongside Norman Finkelstein, Benny Morris, and Steven Bonnell (stage name “Destiny”).
Apart from reposting a link to the recording of the event, I’ve thus far refrained from comment. I’ve done so on the grounds that people interested in the discussion and prepared to endure a five-hour video can watch it themselves and make up their own minds about the various issues discussed, rather than being told what to think by a participant.
Bonnell has taken a decidedly different approach. In addition to multiple hours-long podcasts broadcast before the event, he began relitigating the discussion from virtually the moment it ended. Taking to Twitter/X and YouTube, he immediately began promoting his own version of events, including in podcasts, issued prior to the debate’s 14 March release, that were significantly longer than the debate itself.
Much of Bonnell’s commentary consisted of juvenile name-calling, insults, and distortions directed primarily at Norman Finkelstein. Bonnell’s obsession with Finkelstein, and his fixation with convincing viewers he acquitted himself with distinction in his exchanges with Finkelstein before these were publicly available, speaks for itself. As does his repeatedly expressed view that nothing of substance was uttered during the debate and watching it a waste of time. (Bonnell also lamented that he missed a "gang bang" to participate in the debate.)
As for my own contribution, Bonnell appeared to take particular exception to an observation of mine regarding a statement he made regarding apartheid in one of his pre-event podcasts. During that particular podcast, Bonnell stated that he doubted either Finkelstein or I would be watching. In fact, and since I hadn’t previously heard of Bonnell, had not previously come across anything he has published on the Middle East (he apparently hasn’t), and was entirely unacquainted with his views, I made it a point to watch.
Full disclosure: I was at the time unaware that Bonnell had in previous podcasts identified himself as “pro-genocide” with respect to Israel’s mass killings of Palestinians. Or that among other displays of familiarity with the region he couldn’t identify Bashar Assad, thought Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is the president of Israel, and was apparently unable to locate his favorite MENA state on a map.
In any event, during the pre-debate podcast in question Bonnell was explaining to his audience how he would dispense with the finding that Israel is an apartheid state. Purportedly basing his views on the legal definition of apartheid (“separateness”), Bonnell asserted that Jim Crow did not constitute apartheid, but that Arab states that have not extended citizenship to Palestinian refugees in their territory is a clear example of this crime.
I recounted this statement to Bonnell during the debate (at 4:45:59). Once again claiming to base himself on the legal definition of apartheid, Bonnell changed his position somewhat, this time to “I don’t know if Jim Crow would have qualified for apartheid”. For good measure he added, “just like if Israel were to literally nuke the Gaza Strip and kill two million people, I don’t know if that would qualify for the crime of genocide”.
It remains unclear why the legal definition of apartheid leaves Bonnell clueless about the status of Jim Crow but sufficiently confident to indict Arab states. After all, Jim Crow was a formal system of rigidly enforced segregation in the United States imposed by state authority, enforced by legislation and violence, and confirmed by the US Supreme Court. By contrast, Arab states were at worst exercising a universally-recognized sovereign right to not extend collective citizenship to foreign refugees on their territory. Rather than clarify his position, Bonnell quickly changed the subject to Israeli civilian casualties on 7 October.
Perhaps Bonnell thinks there is a state named Arabia that is withholding citizenship from its Palestinian minority, or simply doesn’t know – or care to know - how apartheid operated in his own country. What is certain is that he is entirely unaware that Jim Crow served as a model and inspiration for the South African white-minority regime’s racist policies, which bequeathed us the term and crime of apartheid.
In his post-debate podcasts the above exchange metamorphosed into my “playing the race card” and the like. In fact, I had merely restated his own words, verbatim, seeking an explanation for his rather unorthodox understanding and misunderstanding of what constitutes apartheid.
But the above incident was trivial compared to Bonnell’s multiple victory laps concerning the use of two Latin legal terms, “mens rea” and “dolus specialis”, with respect to South Africa’s 29 December 2023 application to the International Court of Justice instituting proceedings against Israel under the 1948 Genocide Convention.
I’ll start by reproducing the relevant exchange:
STEVEN BONNELL (03:17:58): I don’t know if you used the phrase “dolus specialis”, that’s the intentional part of genocide-
MOUIN RABBANI: I don’t know that term.
STEVEN BONNELL: I think it’s called “dolus specialis”, it’s the most important part of genocide, which is proving it is a highly special intent to commit genocide. It’s possible that Israel could-
NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: That’s “mens rea”.
STEVEN BONNELL: Yes, I understand the state of mind, but for genocide, it’s called “dolus specialis”. It’s a highly special intent. Did you read the case?
NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: Yeah.
STEVEN BONNELL: It is a highly special intent [inaudible].
This was not the first time Bonnell that day questioned whether Finkelstein, arguably the world’s foremost forensic scholar, a voracious reader, and someone who has on multiple occasions discussed the relevant text in detail, had read the document in question.
(Regarding my own ignorance of “dolus specialis” and for that matter “mens rea”, I know neither Latin nor legalese, and when confronted with such terms resort to a search engine to look up their translation into a language I understand, and typically consign the original to the memory hole).
Briefly, and to the best of my understanding, “mens rea” denotes criminal intent, and “dolus specialis” specific intent. “Dolus specialis” is, in other words, a subcategory of “mens rea”.
What is at issue in this specific instance is that in its application to the ICJ, South Africa references “dolus specialis” four times, but “mens rea” not once. As far as Bonnell was concerned this means not only that it is “dolus specialis” rather than “mens rea” that is required to demonstrate the intent to commit genocide, but also that Finkelstein had not read the document in question.
For the record, the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, South Africa and Israel’s oral arguments before the ICJ on 11-12 January 2024, the Court’s Order (initial ruling) of 26 January, and for that matter the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) mention neither Latin term, and speak only of “intent”.
Bonnell appears to have taken too many victory laps for his own good. His continued juvenile taunting of Finkelstein on 21 March elicited a response from the latter entitled “Moron Specialis”. According to Finkelstein:
“MENS REA (criminal intent, from the Latin for “guilty mind”) denotes the legal principle at stake while DOLUS SPECIALIS (criminal intent to commit genocide) denotes one application of it. Here is an example of this usage from the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda:”
Chapter and verse are duly provided by Finkelstein. Concluding his remarks he asks: “Did these distinguished judges err by referring to mens rea and not dolus specialis? I was stating the obvious that the critical point of contention in a genocide case is proving criminal INTENT ('That’s mens rea'), and of course everyone in the room understood that the threshold under the Genocide Convention is proving criminal INTENT to commit genocide.”
Given that Finkelstein has a vested interest in the matter, I thought it would make sense to get an independent opinion, and approached an international lawyer who has participated in cases before the ICJ unrelated to Palestine for clarification.
Here is the international lawyer’s response:
“In the crime of genocide, both mens rea and dolus specialis are essential elements that must be proven to establish criminal liability.
Mens rea refers to the mental state of the perpetrator when committing the acts that constitute genocide. The perpetrator must have the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group as such, which can be inferred from the actions, statements, and policies of the perpetrator.
Dolus specialis is particularly relevant in proving the intentionality behind the commission of genocide. It requires demonstrating that the perpetrator had the specific intent to commit the acts that constitute the crime of genocide.
Both mens rea and dolus specialis are necessary elements to establish criminal liability for genocide. Prosecutors must demonstrate that the perpetrator had not only the general intent to commit the underlying acts but also possessed the specific intent to destroy a particular group, as required by the definition of genocide.”
More recently we have the following from “Anatomy of a Genocide”, the 22 March 2024 report issued by Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories Occupied Since 1967:
“[T]he crime of genocide comprises two interconnected elements:
(a) The actus reus: the commission of any one or more specific acts against a protected group [these are enumerated]
(b) The mens rea: the intent behind the commission of one or more of the above-mentioned acts that must be established, which includes two intertwined elements:
(i) a general intention to carry out the criminal acts (dolus generalis), and
(ii) a specific intention to destroy the target group as such (dolus specialis).”
In other words, dolus specialis is a subdivision of the legal threshold called mens rea, exactly as Finkelstein stated.
As they say, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
17 March: Trump-Biden Continuities
Many have pointed out that US President Joe Biden’s embrace of Israel is unprecedented, even when compared to his immediate predecessor, Donald Trump. It’s certainly true that Biden has gone to extraordinary lengths to demonstrate his personal and ideological identification with Israel. “I’m a Zionist”, the US president has repeatedly and proudly proclaimed.
“Were there no Israel”, Biden declares like a recently-indoctrinated flunkie reciting the key tenets of his new cult, “there’s not a Jew in the world who will be safe”. Imagine the uproar and incredulity if a US president were to state that, were it not for the Republic of Ireland, the federal government would be unable to guarantee the safety of a single Irish-American. But when it comes to Israel, the most outlandish assertions typically garner a combination of pass and praise.
Biden’s passionate attachment to Israel, culminating in his enthusiastic complicity in its genocidal war against the Gaza Strip and callous contempt for Palestinian life, have served to obscure what are in fact remarkable continuities in US Middle East policy.
Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, for example, was presented as a sharp break with 70 years of US policy. More accurately, it presented the culmination of decades of changing US attitudes towards Israeli rule over the Holy City. The US Congress, with an overwhelming bipartisan majority in both houses (93-5 and 374-37), had already come out in support of Israel’s claims in 1995 with the Jerusalem Embassy Act, which stated that “Jerusalem should be recognized as the capital of the State of Israel”, and effectively endorsed Israeli claims of sovereignty over East Jerusalem by insisting that this capital be “undivided”. The Act also called for the US embassy to Israel to be relocated from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Recognition and relocation were delayed only because the Act allowed the president to sign a waiver every six months suspending its implementation on national security grounds.
For decades, every successful US presidential candidate promised to formally recognize Israel’s claims over Jerusalem and relocate the US embassy to the city, only to sign waivers postponing implementation of the Act once in office. Rather than overhaul US policy by passing new legislation, all Trump did was to stop signing waivers and implement the bipartisan Congressional legislation that had been on the books for more than twenty years.
As for the embassy itself, this too was not a Trump initiative, and acquisition of the site in fact commenced during the 1990s. Located on land expropriated from its rightful owners by the Israeli state in 1950, the heirs to this property include US citizens. But as with Israel’s killings of Palestinian-Americans, and in sharp contrast to US responses towards the infringements on the property rights of US citizens anywhere and everywhere else, in this case the US government insisted there was nothing amiss. Several years ago, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken in fact refused to meet with Palestinian-Americans holding property rights on the site to discuss their claims.
Similarly, when former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo embraced Israel’s illegal settlements as the greatest invention since the hamburger, he was in good company. Already in 1981, Ronald Reagan had opined that they were “not illegal”, and since the 1993 Oslo accords every US administration has proposed diplomatic initiatives, closely coordinated with Israel, that would allow the latter to retain the bulk of its loot. The settlements went from illegal, to “not consistent with international law”, to “an obstacle to the peace process”. Pompeo simply determined that they weren’t necessarily inconsistent with international law nor an obstacle to successful US diplomacy. It was hardly a sea change, particularly given Washington’s heroic efforts over the years to shield Israel from condemnation or consequences for its settlement policies even though these are explicitly defined as war crimes under international law.
Trump and Biden are typically perceived as polar opposites. This being the case, a comparison of their policies on those issues where Trump is said to have broken with traditional US positions is instructive in assessing continuities:
- Jerusalem: Before Trump, and pursuant to UN General Assembly Resolution 181 of 1947 (the partition resolution), which specified that Jerusalem would be governed by an international administration rather than by the proposed Arab and/or Jewish states, no US administration had formally recognized any part of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital or Israeli sovereignty over West Jerusalem. Additionally, no US administration since 1967 had recognized Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem, or claims over it. Trump did both. Biden has maintained this policy without a single change.
- US Embassy: As part of its policy on Jerusalem after 1948, the US initially established its embassy to Israel in Tel Aviv. In 1980 UN Security Council Resolution 478, responding to Israel’s illegal annexation of East Jerusalem, required all UN member states to remove diplomatic missions from the Holy City, and those few that had them complied. In 2018, the Trump administration, in direct violation of international law, relocated the US embassy to Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. The Biden administration has not only maintained this embassy but is expanding it.
- US Jerusalem Consulate: The US Consulate in East Jerusalem, responsible for relations with the Palestinians, reported directly to Washington rather than to the US Embassy in Tel Aviv. The Trump administration closed it, moved it into the relocated US embassy, and placed it under the direct authority of its ambassador to Israel. Upon assuming office in 2021 the Biden administration committed to re-opening the consulate. It has not done so and there is no indication it has any intention of doing so.
- Palestinian Self-Determination: US support for an independent Palestinian state, first enunciated by George W Bush, was declarative and never matched by concrete measures, particularly when it came to restraining Israel from policies designed to prevent it. Trump effectively removed this item from the US foreign policy agenda. Although Biden and Blinken have in recent months revived talk of a Palestinian state, it’s largely – and correctly – seen as a diversionary charade, an exercise in smoke and mirrors to deflect attention from Israel’s genocidal onslaught against the Gaza Strip and US complicity in it. In December 2023, the Biden administration revealed its hand when it was one of only four states to vote against UN General Assembly Resolution A/78/479, which “reaffirms the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination, including the right to their independent Palestinian state”.
- PLO Mission to the US: In 1987, the Congress overwhelmingly passed the bipartisan Anti-Terrorism Act, which determined that the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) “is a terrorist organization; is a threat to the interests of the United States, its allies, and to international law; and should not benefit from operating in the United States”. The Act has never been revoked. While official US policy has ever since remained that the PLO is a terrorist organization, it was in 1988 granted a presidential waiver, renewable every six months, to open a mission in Washington, DC. In 2018 Trump declined to renew the waiver, ordered the closure of the PLO General Delegation, and expelled its diplomats. The Biden administration has declined to reverse this initiative, and six years later there is still no Palestinian diplomatic mission to the US.
- UNRWA: The Trump administration terminated US funding to UNRWA, the UN agency that provides for Palestinian refugees. It demanded the dissolution of the Agency, and essentially took the position that Palestinian refugees don’t exist. Upon assuming office, the Biden administration restored US funding to the Agency. In January 2024, in response to Israeli allegations that several UNRWA staff members participated in the 7 October 2023 Palestinian attacks on southern Israel, and before any evidence had been provided or an investigation launched, the Biden administration immediately stopped funding UNRWA. The allegations, for which no evidence or substantiation has been offered by Israel, are now widely recognized as a hoax concocted by Israel to undermine the Agency, divert from its difficulties at the International Court of Justice, and facilitate its siege of the Gaza Strip. Israel’s brazen fabrications have already embarrassed a number of Western governments that followed Washington’s lead into resuming their contributions to UNRWA. But as with Biden’s claims that he viewed images that don’t exist of beheaded Israeli infants, Washington is widely expected to maintain its support of Israel’s discredited allegations and permanently sever its funding of UNRWA.
- Occupied Syrian Golan Heights: In 2019, the Trump administration recognized Israel’s illegal annexation of the Golan Heights and its claim of sovereignty over the occupied Syrian territory. The Biden administration has stated that it will not change this policy.
- Western Sahara: In 2020, the Trump administration recognized Morocco’s illegal annexation and claim of sovereignty over the Western Sahara to reward the Moroccan state for normalizing relations with Israel. In 2021 the Biden administration announced that it would not reverse this recognition.
- Iran Nuclear Agreement: In 2017 the Trump Administration unilaterally renounced and withdrew from the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the international agreement commonly known as the Iran nuclear deal. Upon assuming office the Biden administration declined to resume compliance with the JCPOA, instead demanding concessions from Tehran on issues that were not addressed by the JCPOA as the price for the fulfilment of US obligations under the original framework. The Iranians predictably demurred and the agreement has for all intents and purposes collapsed.
The list goes on, but the above should give a clear idea of US policy, where continuity generally reigns supreme. What may initially appear as sudden breaks more often than not turn out to be culmination of years if not decades of change. Seen from this perspective, singling out Trump or Biden, or both, for the direction of US policy makes as much sense as holding Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu single-handedly responsible for the policies of the Israeli state.
PS Did you say “honest broker”?
14 March: Who Was There First?
Who was there first? The short answer is that the question is irrelevant. Claims of ancient title (“This land is ours because we were here several thousand years ago”) have no standing or validity under international law. For good reason, because such claims also defy elementary common sense.
Neither I nor anyone reading this can convincingly substantiate the geographical location of their direct ancestors ten or five or even two thousand years ago. If we could, the successful completion of such an exercise would confer exactly zero property, territorial, or sovereign rights.
As a thought experiment, let’s go back only a few centuries rather than multiple millennia. Do South Africa’s Afrikaners have the right to claim The Netherlands as their homeland, or even qualify for Dutch citizenship, on the basis of their lineage? Do the descendants of African-Americans who were forcibly removed from West Africa have the right to board a flight in Atlanta, Port-au-Prince, or São Paolo and reclaim their ancestral villages from the current inhabitants, who in all probability arrived only after – perhaps long after – the previous inhabitants were abducted and sold into slavery half a world away? Do Australians who can trace their roots to convicts who were involuntarily transported Down Under by the British government have a right to return to Britain or Ireland and repossess homes from the present inhabitants even if, with the help of court records, they can identify the exact address inhabited by their forebears? Of course not.
In sharp contrast to, for example, Native Americans or the Maori of New Zealand, none of the above can demonstrate a living connection with the lands to which they would lay claim. To put it crudely, neither nostalgic attachment nor ancestry, in and of themselves, confer rights of any sort, particularly where such rights have not been asserted over the course of hundreds or thousands of years. If they did, American English would be the predominant language in large parts of Europe, and Spain would once again be speaking Arabic.
Nevertheless, the claim of ancient title has been and remains central to Zionist assertions of not only Jewish rights in Palestine, but of an exclusive Jewish right to Palestine.
For the sake of argument, let’s examine it. If we put aside religious mythology, the origin of the ancient Israelites is indeed local. In ancient times it was not unusual for those in conflict with authority or marginalized by it to take to the more secure environment of surrounding hills or mountains, conquer existing settlements or establish new ones, and in the ultimate sign of independence adopt distinct religious practices and generate their own rulers. That the Israelites originated as indigenous Canaanite tribes rather than as fully-fledged monotheistic immigrants or conquerors is more or less the scholarly consensus, buttressed by archeological and other evidence. And buttressed by the absence of evidence for the origin stories more familiar to us.
It is also the scholarly consensus that the Israelites established two kingdoms, Judah and Israel, the former landlocked and covering Jerusalem and regions to the south, the latter (also known as the Northern Kingdom or Samaria) encompassing points north, the Galilee, and parts of contemporary Jordan. Whether these entities were preceded by a United Kingdom that subsequently fractured remains the subject of fierce debate.
What is certain is that the ancient Israelites were never a significant regional power, let alone the superpower of the modern imagination. There is a reason the great empires of the Middle East emerged in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia, and Anatolia – or from outside the region altogether – but never in Palestine. It simply lacked the population and resource base for power projection. Jerusalem may be the holiest of cities on earth, but for almost the entirety of its existence, including the period in question, it existed as a village, provincial town, or small city rather than metropolis.
Judah and Israel, like the neighboring Canaanite and Philistine entities during this period, were for most of their existence vassal states, their fealty and tribute fought over by rival empires – Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, etc. – rather than extracted from others. Indeed, Israel was destroyed during the eighth century BCE by the Assyrians, who for good measured subordinated Judah to their authority, until it was in the sixth century BCE eliminated by the Babylonians, who had earlier overtaken the Assyrians in a regional power struggle.
The Babylonian Exile was not a wholesale deportation, but rather affected primarily Judah’s elites and their kin. Nor was there a collective return to the homeland when the opportunity arose several decades later after Cyrus the Great defeated Babylon and re-established a smaller Judah as a province of the Persian Achaemenid empire. Indeed, Mesopotamia would remain a key center of Jewish religion and culture for centuries afterwards.
Zionist claims of ancient title conveniently erase the reality that the ancient Israelites were hardly the only inhabitants of ancient Palestine, but rather shared it with Canaanites, Philistines, and others. The second part of the claim, that the Jewish population was forcibly expelled by the Romans and has for 2,000 years been consumed with the desire to return, is equally problematic.
By the time the Romans conquered Jerusalem during the first century BCE, established Jewish communities were already to be found throughout the Mediterranean world and Middle East – to the extent that a number of scholars have concluded that a majority of Jews already lived in the diaspora by the time the first Roman soldier set foot in Jerusalem.
These communities held a deep attachment to Jerusalem, its Temple, and the lands recounted in the Bible. They identified as diasporic communities, and in many cases may additionally have been able to trace their origins to this or that town, village, or tribe in the extinguished kingdoms of Israel and Judah. But there is no indication those born and bred in the diaspora across multiple generations considered themselves to be living in temporary exile or considered the territory of the former Israelite kingdoms rather than their lands of birth and residence their natural homeland, any more than Irish-Americans today feel they properly belong in Ireland rather than the United States.
Unlike those taken in captivity to Babylon centuries earlier there was no impediment to their relocation to or from their ancestral lands, although economic factors appear to have played an important role in the growth of the diaspora. By contrast, those traveling in the opposite direction appear to have done so, more often than not, for religious reasons, or to be buried in Jerusalem’s sacred soil.
Nations and nationalism did not exist 2,000 years ago. Nor Zionist propagandists in New York, Paris, and London incessantly proclaiming that for two millennia Jews everywhere have wanted nothing more than to return their homeland, and invariably driving home rather than taking the next flight to Tel Aviv. Nor insufferably loud Americans declaring, without a hint of irony or self-awareness, the right of the Jewish people to Palestine “because they were there first”.
Back to the Romans, about a century after their arrival a series of Jewish rebellions over the course of several decades, coupled with internecine warfare between various Jewish factions, produced devastating results. A large proportion of the Jewish population was killed in battle, massacred, sold into slavery, or exiled. Many towns and villages were ransacked, the Temple in Jerusalem destroyed, and Jews barred from entering the city for all but one day a year. Although a significant Jewish presence remained, primarily in the Galilee, the killings, associated deaths from disease and destitution, and expulsions during the Roman-Jewish wars exacted a calamitous toll.
With the destruction of the Temple Jerusalem became an increasingly spiritual rather than physical center of Jewish life. Jews neither formed a demographic majority in Palestine, nor were the majority of Jews to be found there. Many of those who remained would in subsequent centuries convert to Christianity or Islam (or Christianity and thereafter Islam), succumb to massacres during the Crusades, or join the diaspora. On the eve of Zionist colonization locally-born Jews constituted less than five percent of the total population.
As for the burning desire to return to Zion, there is precious little evidence to substantiate it. There is, for example, no evidence that upon their expulsion from Spain during the late fifteenth century, the Sephardic Jewish community, many of whom were given refuge by the Ottoman Empire that ruled Palestine, made concerted efforts to head for Jerusalem. Rather, most opted for Istanbul and Greece. Similarly, during the massive migration of Jews fleeing persecution and poverty in Eastern Europe during the nineteenth century, the destinations of choice were the United States and United Kingdom. Even after the Zionist movement began a concerted campaign to encourage Jewish emigration to Palestine, less than five per cent took up the offer. And while the British are to this day condemned for limiting Jewish immigration to Palestine during the late 1930s, the more pertinent reality is that the vast majority of those fleeing the Nazi menace once again preferred to relocate to the US and UK, but were deprived of these havens because Washington and London firmly slammed their doors shut.
Tellingly, the Jewish Agency for Israel in 2023 reported that of the world’s 15.7 million Jews, 7.2 million – less than half – reside in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories. According to the Agency, “The Jewish population numbers refer to persons who define themselves as Jews by religion or otherwise and who do not practice another religion”. It further notes that if instead of religion one were to apply Israel’s Law of Return, under which any individual with one or more Jewish grandparent is entitled to Israeli citizenship, only 7.2 of 25.5 million eligible individuals (28 percent) have opted for Zion.
In other words, “Next Year in Jerusalem” was, and largely remains, an aspirational religious incantation rather than political program. For religious Jews, furthermore, it was to result from divine rather than human intervention. For this reason, many in this community initially equated Zionism with blasphemy, and until quite recently most Orthodox Jews were either non-Zionist or rejected the ideology altogether.
Returning to the irrelevant issue of ancestry, if there is one population group that can lay a viable claim of direct descent from the ancient Israelites it would be the Samaritans, who have inhabited the area around Mount Gerizim, near the West Bank city of Nablus, without interruption since ancient times. Palestinian Jews would be next in line, although unlike the Samaritans they interacted more regularly with both other Jewish communities and their gentile neighbors.
Claims of Israelite descent made on behalf of Jewish diaspora communities are much more difficult to sustain. Conversions to and from Judaism, intermarriage with gentiles, absorption in multiple foreign societies, and related phenomena over the course of several thousand years make it a virtual certainty that the vast majority of Jews who arrived in Palestine during the late 19th and first half of the 20th century to reclaim their ancient homeland were in fact the first of their lineage to ever set foot in it. By way of an admittedly imperfect analogy, most Levantines, Egyptians, Sudanese, and North Africans identify as Arabs, yet the percentage of those who can trace their roots to the tribes of the Arabian Peninsula that conquered their lands during the seventh and eighth centuries is at best rather small.
Ironically, a contemporary Palestinian, particularly in the West Bank and Galilee, is likely to have more Israelite ancestry than a contemporary diaspora Jew.
The Palestinians take their name from the Philistines, one of the so-called Sea Peoples who arrived on the southern coast of Canaan from the Aegean islands, probably Crete, during the late second millennium BCE. They formed a number of city states, including Gaza, Ashdod, and Ashkelon. Like Judah and Israel they existed primarily as vassals of regional powers, and like them were eventually destroyed by more powerful states as well. With no record of their extermination or expulsion, the Philistines are presumed to have been absorbed by the Canaanites and thereafter disappear from the historical record.
Sitting at the crossroads between Asia, Africa, and Europe, Palestine was over the centuries repeatedly conquered by empires near and far, absorbing a constant flow of human and cultural influences throughout. Given its religious significance pilgrims from around the globe also contributed to making the Palestinian people what they are today.
A common myth is that the Palestinian origin story dates from the Arab-Muslim conquests of the seventh century. In point of fact the Arabs neither exterminated nor expelled the existing population, and the new rulers never formed a majority of the population. Rather, and over the course of several centuries, the local population was gradually Arabized, and to a large extent Islamized as well.
So the question as to who was there first can be answered in several ways: “both” and “irrelevant” are equally correct.
Indisputably, the Zionist movement had no right to establish a sovereign state in Palestine on the basis of claims of ancient title, which was and remains its primary justification for doing so. That it established an exclusivist state that not only rejected any rights for the existing Palestinian population but was from the very outset determined to displace and replace this population was and remains a historical travesty. That it as a matter of legislation confers automatic citizenship on millions who have no existing connection with the land but denies it to those who were born there and expelled from it, solely on the basis of their identity, would appear to be the very definition of apartheid.
The above notwithstanding, and while the Zionist claim of exclusive Israeli sovereignty in Palestine remains illegitimate, there are today several million Israelis who cannot be simply wished away. A path to co-existence will need to be found, even as the genocidal nature of the Israeli state, and increasingly of Israeli society as well, makes the endeavor increasingly complicated. The question, thrown into sharp relief by Israel’s genocidal onslaught on the Palestinian population of the Gaza Strip, is whether co-existence with Israeli society can be achieved without first dismantling the Israeli state and its ruling institutions.
28 February: German Hysteria
Dr. Andreas Krieg, a German academic who teaches at King’s College London, has commented on the hysteria in his native country regarding Israel and the Palestinians with the following tweet: “I am becoming increasingly concerned about the criminalization of discourse on the Middle East in Germany. For the time being, I would stay far away from any event organized/hosted in Germany on regional security.”
As it happens, I was several months ago invited to participate in a workshop on the Middle East to be convened Berlin. Although I have the highest respect for the distinguished German analyst who invited me, I felt compelled to decline the invitation. I did so for several reasons.
Most importantly, the workshop was co-sponsored by the Heinrich Böll
Foundation (HBS). In August 2023 an international jury, jointly convened by HBS and the state government of Bremen, awarded the annual Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought to the Russian-American writer Masha Gessen. It is awarded once a year to “individuals who identify critical and unseen aspects of current political events and who are not afraid to enter the public realm by presenting their opinion in controversial political discussions”.
According to press reports at the time, the range of Gessen’s writings was an important factor taken into consideration by the jury when making its decision. “In its announcement today”, Publishing Perspectives wrote on 4 August, “the program notes the sheer breadth of topical and thematic concern reflected in Gessen’s work”, further noting that the jury considered Gessen “one of the most courageous chroniclers of our time”.
The appreciation of Gessen’s courage and topical breadth would however prove to be short-lived. On 9 December 2023, Gessen published “In the Shadow of the Holocaust” in The New Yorker. An exploration of “how the politics of memory of the Holocaust and antisemitism obscure what we see in Israel and Gaza today”, it ranks among Gessen’s finest and most powerful essays. It’s still available online, and well worth reading for those who haven’t yet done so.
Germany’s commissar class by contrast went thermonuclear over the essay. Gessen, who is Jewish and lost family during Germany’s WWII Holocaust, was roundly and viciously denounced for deploying precisely those qualities for which the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought is awarded. Except that in this case these qualities were deployed to examine Israel and its treatment of the Palestinians, a taboo subject in today’s Germany.
In scenes that would have made Goebbels proud, the usual epithets and slander were trotted out and flung at Gessen with abandon by politicians, newspaper editors, and the like. Instead of simply withdrawing the prize on the grounds that courage and controversy are verboten if the subject is Israel, the state government of Bremen cancelled the awards ceremony. Determined to demonstrate it could be even more cowardly than its partner in crime, HBS issued a press statement lauding Gessen’s “unconditional commitment to democracy and to debating uncomfortable issues,” before announcing its withdrawal from the awards ceremony on the absurd pretext that “the event has lost its venue”.
As I informed the workshop organisers:
In my view this cannot be characterised as anything other than an act of political cowardice, and an indefensible capitulation to illegitimate political pressure by advocates for Israel's most extreme policies. That HBS sought to justify its actions with reference to the change of venue instead of forthrightly condemning the campaign against Gessen, the tactics employed, and those committing this intellectual atrocity only adds insult to injury. It should not have been particularly challenging to stand up for the legacy of Hannah Arendt.
As expressed more succinctly by Samantha Hill in The Guardian: “Hannah Arendt would not qualify for the Hannah Arendt prize in Germany today”
There was also a second reason I declined the invitation. As I informed the organisers:
As for my own position, I have made statements similar to those which HBS apparently found sufficient to throw Gessen under the bus. Assuming that the thought police will also be carefully vetting the event I have been invited to, I must therefore take into account the very real possibility that HBS will also disassociate itself from me. Since I do not have the stature of a Masha Gessen, and therefore won't be besieged by the international media for comment or be offered public venues in Berlin to defend myself and my reputation, I am unprepared to sustain the reputational damage that would come with being thrown to the wolves by an organization with the credentials of HBS.
More generally, I have been following with increasing alarm (and, frankly, disgust) the campaign by the German federal government, as well as regional and local authorities in Germany, to stifle voices in support of Palestinian rights and/or opposition to Israel's mass killings of Palestinians and other policies. These include positions that are considered legitimate within Israel but apparently not so in Germany. I'm not averse to breaking the law where human decency requires this, but am not prepared to get on the wrong side of the law or be subjected to vilification by the German authorities on account of making an intervention consisting of factual statements and analytical observations at an academic/policy workshop. Unfortunately, the benefits do not justify the risks and potential costs.
In further correspondence I explained why I was unprepared to reconsider my decision:
In view of the unethical manner in which HBS responded to political pressure to throw Masha Gessen to the wolves, I have to take into account the realistic possibility that it could come under similar pressure regarding my participation in the workshop. In my case HBS would find it much easier to respond to such pressure and throw me under the bus, and this would cause me unnecessary reputational damage. Since in contrast to Gessen I do not have the recognition that would motivate the international media to investigate such a decision and public figures to denounce it, nor be offered public venues to defend myself, the ramifications of such a scenario would be serious and long-lasting.
An additional concern is the current atmosphere in Germany. I lived under military occupation in Palestine for nearly a decade, and thereafter for longer in Jordan. Absent compelling reasons I prefer to avoid situations where for reasons of personal security I need to refrain from making perfectly reasonable factual observations in the public sphere.
By way of analogy, in 2011 I spoke at an HBS function in Berlin. When I questioned the wisdom of military intervention in Libya, a member of the audience accused me of endorsing genocide. I had my say, she had hers, and that was the end of it. I suspect that in 2023 things would end very differently if I were to express similar objections to someone speaking out in support of Israel's war on the Gaza Strip.
When I read about the hysteria that seems to be – once again – the norm in Germany, and the multiplying number of incidents that are crudely racist and surreal in equal measure, I’m reminded of Eugene Ionesco’s play, Rhinoceros. I read it many years ago in high school and only recall its broad outlines, but for some reason every new incident in Germany reminds me of that play.
Conclusion: Andreas Krieg is not being alarmist or dramatic, but providing constructive and necessary advice to a very real and escalating problem. Following might even have a useful impact on the situation in Germany.
20 February: What is UNRWA? (Part I)
What is UNRWA? The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Middle East, commonly known by the acronym UNRWA, is the UN agency that currently provides humanitarian relief and services to Palestinian refugees in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and the occupied Palestinian territories (the West Bank and Gaza Strip, including East Jerusalem). It has an interesting history.
UNRWA came into existence after the first attempt to implement a two-state settlement in 1948 ended in catastrophe. This attempt was initiated by the United Nations by way UN General Assembly Resolution 181(II) of 29 November 1947 recommending the partition of Palestine.
Beginning in December 1947, throughout the 1948-1949 Palestine War, and until the early 1950s, the vast majority of Palestinians living in those regions of the British Mandate of Palestine that became the state of Israel were ethnically cleansed (i.e. expelled and prevented from returning), dispossessed (i.e. their lands, homes, assets, and possessions summarily seized), and transformed into stateless refugees.
As the scale of the political and humanitarian disaster produced by the UN’s partition of Palestine became painfully apparent, the world body in May 1948 appointed Swedish diplomat Folke Bernadotte as “United Nations Mediator in Palestine”. He was the UN’s first ever such envoy.
Bernadotte had previously distinguished himself when, as vice-president of the Swedish Red Cross during the final months of WWII, he negotiated the release of tens of thousands of inmates from Nazi concentration camps with Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS and a main architect of the Holocaust. Himmler was motivated by the delusional idea that he could succeed Hitler, secure a separate peace with the US and Britain, and avoid Germany’s defeat at the hands of the Soviet Union. Needless to say, it came to nothing.
In Palestine Bernadotte initially got off to a good start, brokering two Arab-Israeli truce agreements in quick succession. He then, as required by his mandate, began proposing solutions to the conflict. These included the return of the Palestinian refugees to their homes and – as envisaged by the UN’s partition resolution – placing Jerusalem under international administration.
(Historical footnote: it was UNGA 181’s designation of Jerusalem as a “corpus separatum” to be placed under an international regime, as opposed to its incorporation into either the proposed Arab or Jewish states, that forms the basis for the international community’s refusal to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the city or maintain diplomatic missions in any part of it. While the world additionally rejects Israel’s illegal 1967 annexation of East Jerusalem as “null and void”, it also does not recognize Israeli sovereignty over West Jerusalem, which Israel conquered in 1948. Similarly, with the exception of Britain and Pakistan, states refused to recognize Jordanian sovereignty over East Jerusalem between before 1967. Here too of course US policy stands in direct contradiction to that of the international community, including its closest allies, and remains in explicit violation of multiple UN Security Council resolutions. These include UNSC 478 of 1980, which calls upon “states that have diplomatic missions in Jerusalem to withdraw such missions from the Holy City”. Note that the resolution states “Jerusalem”, not “East Jerusalem”.)
Returning to Bernadotte, his proposals for a resolution of the conflict cost him his life. On 17 September 1948, while driving through Jerusalem, he was assassinated by gunmen dispatched by Lehi (aka Stern Gang), a Zionist militia so fanatical that it in 1941 proposed a formal alliance with Nazi Germany on the basis of what it stated were shared ideological principles. The Lehi triumvirate that ordered Bernadotte’s assassination included Yitzhak Shamir (née Yezernitsky), a self-proclaimed “terrorist” who was also wanted as one by the British Mandate authorities. Rather than being imprisoned or extradited, Shamir would later be elected speaker of Israel’s parliament, serve as its foreign minister for six years, and then a further seven as prime minister. Indeed, Israel never tried or convicted anyone for the murder. That may also explain why it has never apologised to either Sweden or the UN for Bernadotte’s killing.
Guela Cohen, self-styled “woman of violence,” would decades later recount the bloodcurdling threats she directed at Bernadotte over Lehi’s clandestine radio station, pointedly informing Donald Macintyre of The Independent that she regretted nothing. Her husband, Emanuel Hanegbi, was according to Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, also involved in ordering the assassination. Their son, Tzahi Hanegbi, made his name in the early 1980s when, as president of the student union at Hebrew University, he organised violent assaults on Palestinian students. His violent racism proved sufficiently popular that he was subsequently elected head of the National Union of Israeli Students. Today Hanegbi Fils is Prime Minister Binyamnin Netanyahu’s National Security Advisor.
Bernadotte was succeeded by his deputy, the US diplomat Ralph Bunche, who was charged with negotiating the 1949 Arab-Israeli Armistice Agreements. At the same time the UN General Assembly in December 1948 adopted Resolution 194 (III). This resolution, which has been consistently re-confirmed by the General Assembly since 1948, is best known for setting forth the refugees’ right of return and right to compensation. It states in the relevant part:
Resolves that the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible.
That same resolution also established the United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine (UNCCP). Composed of France, Turkey, and the United States, the UNCCP’s role was to resolve the cataclysmic impasse created by the UN’s partition delusion. In addition to finding a political resolution, its mandate included, in the paragraph after the one quoted above, the “repatriation, resettlement, and economic and social rehabilitation of the refugees and the payment of compensation”. This was to be achieved in close coordination with a recently-established agency known as United Nations Relief for Palestine Refugees (UNRPR), which had been established a month earlier in response to the horrific humanitarian situation produced by the Nakba.
Over the next year, Israel rejected multiple initiatives, whether formulated by the UNCCP, the US, or anyone else, that included the full or partial repatriation of Palestinian refugees. The United States during the late 1940s and 1950s submitted a number of such proposals in the context of initiatives to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict. In those days Washington often feared the conflict could serve as a conduit for Soviet influence in the Middle East.
Israel’s rejectionism in part explains why the Security Council declined to recommend Israel’s first two applications to join the UN to the General Assembly. Its third application, in May 1949, was approved by the latter, but – unusually – the relevant resolution (UNGA 273) went beyond standard wording and specifically mentioned “implementation” of UNGA 181 (the partition resolution designating Jerusalem as a city under international administration) and UNGA 194 (which codifies the refugees’ right of return). Many have on this basis argued that Israel’s UN membership was conditional on the fulfilment of these resolutions, which has of course never happened.
Because the UN and its member states were unwilling to compel Israel to implement the obligations it had accepted, the UNCCP – which continues to exist to this day with the same composition but has been starved of funds – in 1949 proposed the establishment of a "United Nations agency designed to continue [the] relief activities [of UNRPR] and initiate job-creation projects". An additional factor was that relief agencies active in the region, such as the Quakers who had distinguished themselves with extraordinary humanity in the Gaza Strip during the late 1940s, were indicating that their capacity to continue providing relief services was rapidly diminishing.
UNRWA was duly established in December 1949, and commenced operations on 1 May 1950. Israel, by this time a UN member state, along with the US and Europeans voted for UNRWA’s creation. In fact, the UNCCP recommendation to establish UNRWA was primarily inspired by the recommendations of Gordon R. Clapp, Chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority, who conducted a study known as the Economic Survey Mission at the request of UNCCP. More on Clapp and his recommendations later.
Several observations are in order about UNRWA:
First, like UNRPR it provided assistance to “Palestine” rather than “Palestinian” refugees. “Palestine refugees” are defined by UNRWA as “persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine during the period 1 June 1946 to 15 May 1948, and who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 conflict.” Among those receiving assistance were Israeli citizens, non-Palestinian Arabs, and others displaced by the Palestine War, provided they met the above criteria. In 1967 UNRWA began providing services to the new influx of Palestinian refugees into Jordan, although many had already been receiving assistance since 1950.
Second, UNRWA only operates in states and territories where it is authorized to do so by the relevant authorities. Initially these comprised the Egyptian-administered Gaza Strip, Israel, Jordan (which at that time also ruled the West Bank), Lebanon, and Syria. UNRWA operated within Israel until 1952, when the Israeli government informed the Agency that it was taking over its responsibilities. (A large proportion of Israel’s Palestinian citizens, who were expelled from their towns and villages but not from the new state, met UNRWA’s criteria for assistance).
Third, UNRWA does not provide services to Palestinian refugees who do not reside within its area of operations. Palestinian refugees in Iraq, for example, who faced persecution in that country after the 2003 US occupation and were in many cases forced from their homes, were assisted by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) rather than UNRWA. Palestinian refugees forced out of Kuwait in 1991 similarly had no access to UNRWA services unless they were able to enter its area of operations. The same principle holds true for Palestinian refugees in Egypt, the Gulf states, Europe, and elsewhere who require assistance.
Fourth, UNRWA neither owns nor administers any of the 58 recognized Palestinian refugee camps, nor the additional informal ones, such as the sprawling Yarmouk Camp in Damascus. These were typically established on land leased by the relevant governments from private landowners or otherwise made available to accommodate the mass influx of refugees in 1948 and on a smaller scale in 1967. UNRWA’s role, with certain exceptions, is limited to the provision of services to Palestine refugees registered with the Agency within its areas of operations, whether they live within these camps or outside them.
Fifth, UNRWA has a humanitarian and development rather than political mandate. Although bound by UN resolutions it has no formal responsibility for either formulating, promoting, or implementing a resolution of the Palestinian refugee question. It’s also never done so. That remains within the purview of UNCCP and other UN organs like the Security Council and General Assembly.
Sixth, UNRWA unlike other UN agencies reports directly to the General Assembly, which created it. Although now in existence for more than seven decades, it formally remains a temporary agency, in the sense that it will cease to exist once a durable solution to the Palestinian refugee question is achieved. This also means that its mandate is subject to renewal by the General Assembly every three years. Its continued existence therefore reflects the collective will, repeatedly expressed, of the international community and not a decision by the UN. Additionally, it is funded by voluntary contributions paid directly to the Agency, as opposed to being funded from the UN general budget which consists of mandatory annual contributions by member states and which the UN is free to allocate as it sees fit.
UNRWA is also the world body’s largest agency, with 30,000 employees. This number was recently reduced to 29,989. I only subtracted 11 because according to Gréta Gunnarsdóttir, Director of the UNRWA Representative Office New York, UNRWA did not fire one of the twelve Palestinians recently accused by Israel of participating in the 7 October 2023 Hamas attacks in southern Israel. Reason: he isn’t an UNRWA employee. Kind of helps one understand why Israeli intelligence performed so disastrously on 7 October...
UNRWA is the only UN agency specifically dedicated to serving only one group of refugees. There are several reasons why the UN did not make Palestinian refugees, like those elsewhere in the world, the responsibility of UNHCR. Most obviously, the UN bears a special responsibility towards Palestinian refugees. It played a direct role in their dispossession by partitioning their country and handing most of it over to a supremacist movement committed to transforming its allotted entity into an exclusivist state. No partition, no Nakba. Or at least not one for which the UN bears moral, political, and arguably legal responsibility for the entirely predictable consequences.
This sets Palestinian refugees apart from, for example, South Asian and Chinese refugees during the same period, or Sahrawi, Afghan, or Syrian refugees more recently. None lost their homes, homeland, and livelihoods because the world body decided to partition their homeland.
Additionally, UNHCR did not exist when UNRWA was established, but the Palestinian humanitarian emergency did. UNHCR was created about a week later, and during its early years was primarily concerned with assisting the millions of refugees in Europe produced by the Second World War and its aftermath.
Anne Irfan of University College London, who has written a highly-regarded book on the Palestinian refugee question, in this respect notes:
When UNHCR was created it had a restricted mandate … that enabled its work to only be applied to European refugees. So this idea of creating specific UN agencies for particular groups of refugees was very much the norm at the time … So there was UNRWA, there was UNHCR, and then in the 1950s we also had UNKRA, which was created for Korean refugees so that was the norm at the time. It wasn’t until 1967 that UNHCR’s mandate was universalized and the Eurocentrism was dropped.
Even after UNHCR became a genuinely global agency UNRWA was not merged into it. Institutional inertia probably played a role, but the primary reason remains the political will of the international community to sustain it until a durable solution to the Palestinian refugee question is achieved. As expressed on 4 February of this year by Josep Borrell, Vice-President of the European Commission and the EU’s foreign policy chief (not to be confused with Frau Genocide): “UNRWA’s continued existence, since it was established in 1949, is the direct consequence of the fact that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has never been resolved.”
Given the tsunami of Israel agitprop on UNRWA and UNHCR, Irfan makes another important distinction:
UNRWA has a much more restricted mandate to this day than UNHCR … UNRWA is mandated solely to provide services to Palestine refugees in the fields where it works. UNHCR by contrast is also mandated to pursue durable solutions … So Palestine refugees are actually in some ways almost at a disadvantage because the agency that serves them has a much more limited mandate than the agency that serves all other refugee groups.
UNRWA’s critics nevertheless habitually claim that a merger with UNHCR would be meaningful because UNRWA, unlike UNHCR, alone classifies the descendants of refugees as refugees. While this makes for effective agitprop, in the world of verifiable fact UNHCR applies exactly the same criteria. In the words of the UN itself:
Under international law and the principle of family unity, the children of refugees and their descendants are also considered refugees until a durable solution is found. Both UNRWA and UNHCR recognize descendants as refugees on this basis, a practice that has been widely accepted by the international community, including both donors and refugee hosting countries. Palestine refugees are not distinct from other protracted refugee situations such as those from Afghanistan or Somalia, where there are multiple generations of refugees, considered by UNHCR as refugees and supported as such. Protracted refugee situations are the result of the failure to find political solutions to their underlying political crises.
Refugees, and their descendants, are classified as refugees until they are no longer refugees. Until, in other words, the underlying conditions that made them refugees and sustain their dispossession are resolved. In this case it is thus up to Israel, not UNRWA, to change their status.
But the idea that UNRWA artificially perpetuates Palestinian refugee status is the hoax that won’t go away. It is, more than anything else, based on a profoundly racist mentality. Bought to you by the same people who used to and in many cases continue to insist that Palestinians don’t exist, the idea seems to be that there is this group of ignorant savages, who neither know they are refugees, nor have a clue they have been dispossessed, nor have an inkling that they are entitled to any rights. Rather, it is only because such ideas are being implanted into their unthinking heads by UNRWA that they call themselves refugees and insist they have rights vis-à-vis Israel. No UNRWA, no Palestine refugee question.
4 February: Red Sea Conflicts
The escalating conflict in the Red Sea is not without historical precedent.
Initially the crisis was situated much further north. On 10 March 1949 Israeli forces seized control of Umm al-Rashrash,an abandoned British police outpost astride the Gulf of Aqaba in the extreme southeast of Palestine. The conquest provided Israel with its only access to the Red Sea.
The southern Negev, including its coastal region, had been allotted to the proposed Jewish state by UN General Assembly resolution 181 (II) of 29 November 1947 recommending the partition of Palestine. Nevertheless, Israeli forces had not yet reached Umm al-Rashrash by the time an armistice agreement had been concluded with Egypt in February 1949, or prior to the beginning of armistice negotiations with Jordan on 4 March. The UN mediator in charge of the armistice talks, the US diplomat Ralph Bunche, had insisted that all parties observe a ceasefire for the duration of negotiations. Israel promptly responded by launching Operation Uvda (“Fact [on the ground]”) on 5 March. It would be its final offensive of the Palestine War.
As with hundreds of other locations during this period Israel promptly renamed Umm al-Rashrash and called it Eilat, after the ancient city of Elath mentioned in the Bible. Elath is located beneath the present-day Jordanian resort and port city of Aqaba, located on the other side of the eponymous Gulf. Undeterred by either geography or history Yehuda Press, a member of Israel’s Committee for the Designation of Place Names, intoned that “when the real Elath [i.e. Aqaba] is finally in our hands our settlement [of Eilat] will expand and reach there”.
Although Eilat would remain largely uninhabited for some years and had yet to develop port facilities Egypt, still formally at war with Israel, moved to close off Israel’s access to the Gulf of Aqaba. By agreement with Saudi Arabia, the Egyptian military in 1950 took over the Saudi islands of Tiran and Sanafir situated at the entrance to the Gulf. Through its control of the Straits of Tiran Egypt ensured Israeli shipping could not access the Gulf of Aqaba and therefore Eilat.
Simultaneously, and pursuant to the Arab League boycott, Israeli ships were banned from the Suez Canal and Israeli-bound products were classified as contraband and seized. Together with the prohibition on overland transit through Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon, Israeli trade with Asia and Africa could only be conducted through its Mediterranean ports or by air.
On 26 July 1956 Egypt’s revolutionary leader, Gamal Abdel-Nasser, nationalized the Anglo-French controlled Suez Canal Company. Beyond the desire to eliminate European influence in Egypt, Nasser’s daring and wildly popular initiative was in response to the Eisenhower administration’s 19 July decision to block a World Bank loan to Egypt for the construction ofthe Aswan High Dam, a massive project designed to regulate the waters of the Nile and generate cheap electricity to power Egypt’s development.
Washington was using its muscle to demonstrate its displeasure with Egypt’s Cold War neutrality, which included Cairo’s recognition of the People’s Republic of China, the purchase of arms purchases from communist Czechoslovakia after a deal with the US fell through on account of excessive American demands, and Nasser’s vocal support for anti-colonial independence movements in Africa and Asia. Within the Middle East the Egyptian leader had led opposition to the Central Treaty Organization (the Baghdad Pact), which sought to entangle regional states into a formal pro-Western/anti-Soviet military alliance, and supported republican and independence movements in the Arab world.
Egyptian-Israeli relations had until 1955 been relatively stable. Nasser, who initially prioritized Egypt’s socio-economic development over confrontation with Israel, responded constructively to several initiatives to explore the prospects of Egyptian-Israeli peace. These included a series of secret meetings between Israeli and Egyptian representatives, primarily in Europe, as well as an initiative by Elmore Jackson, a US Quaker emissary who, in close coordination with the US government, shuttled between Nasser and Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion.
While it’s questionable if such efforts could have succeeded their failure is easy to identify. The first is the 1954 Lavon Affair, also known as Operation Susannah. In this grandiose plan, Israeli military intelligence recruited Egyptian Jews to plant bombs at US and UK-affiliated facilities, such as the libraries of the US Information Agency in Cairo and Alexandria, in order to blame the attacks on anti-Western Egyptian nationalists, communists, and Islamists. The campaign was supposed to produce sufficient instability throughout the country that Egyptian relations with the West would be undermined to an extent that the UK would indefinitely maintain its military presence in the Suez Canal zone. At the time, negotiations on ending this presence were nearing conclusion and the US, seeking to supplant Britain and France as the pre-eminent imperial power in the region, supported British withdrawal.
Israeli intelligence was also prone to incompetence in those days, and the plot was quickly exposed and the perpetrators arrested by the Egyptian security forces. Avri Elad (née Seidenberg), one of the Israeli operatives in charge of the campaign, was in fact later revealed to have been a double agent. Amid howls of Israeli and Western outrage at the most despicable episode of anti-Semitic persecution since the fall of the Third Reich, several of the perpetrators were executed and Nasser denounced as “Hitler on the Nile”.
The episode is called the Lavon Affair because it led to the resignation of Israeli Defense Minister Pinhas Lavon (néeLubianiker), accused of perjury for claiming (correctly, it later emerged) that he was unaware of Operation Susannah. Israel’s Prime Minister, Moshe Sharrett (née Chertok), who had strenuously denied any Israeli involvement in the affair because he had been kept in the dark, also resigned when it emerged Israel was in fact the only country involved. (In a 2007 review of a new edition of Moshe Sharett’s diaries,Israeli historian and journalist Tom Segev revealed that Lavon was hardly averse to such operations, having “proposed spreading poisonous bacteria” on the Syrian border and various “atrocities” in the Gaza Strip).
In the larger scheme of things Lavon and Sharrett were the losers in a power struggle with David Ben-Gurion (née Grün), who returned as defense minister and prime minister; his chief minion and Director-General of the Ministry of DefenseShimon Peres (née Perski), who appears to have been the one who approved the operation but gave false testimony that it was Lavon who authorised it; Moshe Dayan, chief-of-staff of the Israeli military, and head of Israeli military intelligence Binyamin Gibli. With strict military censorship in place for years after the event, the Israeli public knew only that the executed saboteurs were innocent victims of anti-Semitism.
The second reason Israeli-Egyptian relations deteriorated sharply in the mid-1950s had to do with the Egyptian-administered Gaza Strip, whose population had in 1948 swelled from 80,000 to 280,000 on account of Israel’s ethnic cleansing of southern Palestine during the Nakba and the massive influx of refugees.
Until 1955, Egypt as a rule prevented Palestinians in that territory from conducting guerilla raids into southern Israel. But not always successfully. Typically, Israel would respond with attacks on the newly-established Palestinian refugee camps, such as a 1953 attack on Bureij Refugee Camp in the central Gaza Strip which killed dozens.
In 1955, with the hawkish Ben-Gurion re-installed as prime and defense minister, and eager for conflict with Egypt and revenge for the execution of Operation Susannah’s amateur saboteurs, matters took a dramatic turn. On the night of 28 February, after an Israeli had been killed by Palestinian commandos in southern Israel, Israeli paratroopers directly targeted Egyptian forces and attacked an Egyptian military base near Gaza City. 17 Egyptian soldiers were killed in their beds, and a further 21 in an ambush laid for the military unit sent to rescue them.
Nasser termed the attack a turning point. He accelerated negotiations with the Soviet Union to sign the Czech arms deal, and Egypt began training Palestinians in the Gaza Strip in guerilla warfare, encouraging rather than preventing their activities.
After Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, Britain and France decided it was time to get rid of him. For Paris, Egypt’s open support of the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) in its war of independence against France was an additional reason to depose its leader. A delusional Paris was genuinely convinced that if Nasser were overthrown, Algeria would be quickly pacified.
Regime change in Egypt was duly planned at a secret meeting convened on 24 October 1956 in the Paris suburb of Sèvres bythe UK, France, and Israel (represented by Ben-Gurion, Peres, and Dayan). Pursuant to the agreement known as the Protocol of Sèvres, Israel would invade Egypt up to the Canal zone, and Britain and France would demand that Egypt stop fighting the invaders, “withdraw all its troops ten miles from the canal”, and “accept temporary occupation of key positions on the Canal by Anglo-French forces to guarantee freedom of passage through the Canal by vessels of all nations until a final settlement”. If Nasser refused, British and French forces would commence military operations against Egypt until their demands are accepted – code for regime change. Article 4 of the Protocol specified that Israel will “occupy the western shore of the Gulf of Aqaba [i.e. eastern Sinai]” Tiran and Sanafir islands “to ensure freedom of navigation in the Gulf of Aqaba”.
In a detailed review of the Sèvres meetings and resulting protocol, British-Israeli historian Avi Shlaim recounts how Ben-Gurion, describing Israel as the “prostitute” in this transaction, initially demanded annexation of the Sinai, Gaza Strip, West Bank, and southern Lebanon, and expulsion of Palestinian refugees to Jordan, as payment for Israel’s services. In the end he had to settle for only part of Sinai and the abovementioned islands, though Peres, the architect of Israel’s nuclear program, at the last minute managed to obtain a French commitment to provide Israel with a nuclear reactor. That’s how desperate France was to end the Algerian rebellion, and how convinced it was that removing Nasser would end it. (France would become Israel’s primary arms supplier through 1967, when De Gaulle imposed an arms boycott in response to Israel’s initiation of the war and occupation of Arab territory. It was enthusiastically replaced by the United States.)
Israel duly invaded Egypt and the Gaza Strip on 29 October, rapidly advancing towards the Suez Canal. In the process it conducted numerous atrocities, most notoriously the massacre of 275 Palestinians in Khan Yunis, and mass executions of Egyptian POWs in Sinai. British and French forces were equally savage, with hundreds of Egyptian civilians killed in bombing raids and the Egyptian city of Port Said reduced to rubble.
The above notwithstanding the plan hatched at Sèvres did not survive contact with geopolitical realities and was a total fiasco. The United States, determined to supplant Britain and France in the Middle East, joined forces with the Soviet Union, equally determined to defend its new Egyptian ally.Soviet Premier Nikolai Bulganin went so far as to threaten theuse nuclear weapons to defend Cairo. Together the rival superpowers put a definitive end to European domination of the region.
Israel, which initially expressed an intention to annex Sinai, was forced to withdraw from it and from the Gaza Strip in March 1957. True to form the retreating Israeli army left massive destruction of civilian infrastructure in its wake. In the past is prologue department, Germany virtually alone supported the tripartite aggression against Egypt; at the height of the crisis German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer paid a demonstrative solidarity visit to his French counterpart Guy Mollet. Also in the past is prologue department, Eisenhower in 1965 expressed regret for demanding an Israeli withdrawal from occupied Arab territory.
The Suez Canal, which had been rendered impassable when Egypt sunk ships within it, reponed a month later. Egypt was also required to cease interfering with shipping bound for Israel through the Straits of Tiran. As a result Eilat became a viable port and played an increasingly important role in the Israeli economy. By 1967 some 90% of Israel’s oil supplies, imported from Iran, entered the country via Eilat.
In response to Israeli threats to overthrow the Syrian government in 1967 and its subsequent mobilisation of forces on the Syrian front, Egypt in May of that year announced that it would once again close the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping to deter Israel. Although not enforced, the threat was cited by Israel as justification for launching the June 1967 War. As Israeli forces once again approached the Suez Canal, Egypt again blocked the Suez Canal with mines and scuttled ships. It would remain impassable until 1975.
1967 also bought Bab al-Mandab off the coast of Yemen, the focus of the current Red Sea crisis, into the picture. After several years of insurgency against British rule in South Yemen, London finally called it quits and announced its withdrawal. When it did so, Israel sought to persuade Britain to retain control of Bab al-Mandab on the pretext of ensuring international maritime security in the Red Sea. When this failed on account of Yemeni opposition, Israel proposed placing the Yemeni island of Perim, which divides the Bab al-Mandab Straits into two channels, under international administration under similar pretexts.This also failed.
In advance of the 1973 October War the Egyptian navy covertly sent warships to Bab al-Mandab. Once war erupted, the force successfully imposed a blockade on shipping bound for Eilat, putting the port out of service. Israel’s air force was in 1973 unequipped to conduct operations that far from its basd, and Egyptian mining of the waters further north apparently prevented the Israeli navy from coming to the rescue.
The crucial difference in 2023-2024 is that the interdiction of shipping through Bab al-Mandab to force an end to Israel’s genocidal assault on the Gaza Strip is having a far greater impact on the global economy than previous crises in Red Sea shipping. Another is that Israel, which promotes itself as a bastion of Western interests in the Middle East (Ben-Gurion’s “prostitute” turning tricks for France and Great Britain), is not only the cause of this crisis, but incapable of resolving it. Rather than Israel keeping the Red Sea open for Western shipping, the US, with the UK as always dutifully in tow, is today expending considerable resources to keep these waterways open for Israeli shipping and global trade. So that Israel can continue its genocidal onslaught on the Gaza Strip. As of this writing, neither operation looks particularly successful.
31 January: Genocide in the US Courts
Earlier today I interviewed Diala Shamas, Senior Staff Attorney with the Center for Constitution Rights (CCR), for my Connections podcast on the topic of “Unsilencing Palestine”.
Towards the conclusion of our discussion, I asked her about a case she and CCR are currently litigating. The case is “Defense for Children International-Palestine, et al., v. Joseph R. Biden, et al.”, and was heard before the US District Court for the Northern District of California. It was initiated by several Palestinian human rights organizations, Palestinian-Americans with relatives in or connections to the Gaza Strip, and individuals currently within the Gaza Strip. All represented by CCR.
It essentially consists of a lawsuit against US President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, requiring them to “take all measures within their power to prevent Israel’s commission of genocidal acts against the Palestinian people of Gaza”. In other words, CCR was seeking an injunction to prohibit the US from further complicity in genocide. It therefore requested a court order “enjoining Defendants and all persons associated with them [i.e. the US government] from providing any further military or financial support, aid, or any form of assistance to Israel’s attacks and maintenance of a total siege on Palestinians in Gaza, in accordance with their duty under federal and customary international law to prevent, and not further, genocide”. It additionally requested the court to require the defending trio to “exert influence over Israel to end its bombing of the Palestinian people of Gaza, … to lift the siege on Gaza, … [and to] prevent the ‘evacuation’ or forcible transfer and expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza”, and to enjoin them “from obstructing attempts by the international community, including at the United Nations, to implement a ceasefire in Gaza and lift the siege on Gaza”.
CCR argued that these measures are required pursuant to the US government’s obligations under the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, to which it is a signatory.
The case was always a long shot, because US foreign policy is the preserve of the Executive, in this particular case personified by #GenocideJoe, #GenocideTony, and #GenocideLloyd. US courts are as a rule loathe to intrude on decisions by the Executive to sow death and destruction abroad, even if it’s on a genocidal scale. Separation of powers, separation of limb from limb, that sort of thing. Nonetheless Diala Shamas observed that the Judge, Jeffrey White, appeared to be genuinely moved by the evidence placed before him, and had made that explicitly clear during the hearings. CCR therefore held out hope that Judge White might see the imperative of prioritizing human life and justice, and issue the requested injunction. She concluded by noting that a ruling could be expected as soon as today or at any point in the next several weeks.
As it happens Judge White issued his verdict only hours after I concluded my interview with Diala. Unfortunately, but not unexpectedly, he dismissed the case out of hand and denied those represented by CCR the relief they so urgently sought. Yet his decision had nothing to do with his assessment of the evidence placed before him and was, as the judge made quite clear, based solely on the basis of the respective roles of the Executive and Judiciary in the conduct of US foreign policy. Judge White basically determined that the case before him constituted a “political question” and could not therefore be adjudicated by his court or influenced by decisions of the judiciary.
The above notwithstanding the more interesting part of the ruling is that Judge White also considers the evidence before him. After lengthy references to the recent International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruling on South Africa’s case accusing Israel of genocide Judge White writes:
“[T]he undisputed evidence before this Court comports with the finding of the ICJ and indicates that the current treatment of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip by the Israeli military may plausibly constitute a genocide in violation of international law. Both the uncontroverted testimony of the Plaintiffs and the expert opinion proffered at the hearing on these motions as well as statements made by various officers of the Israeli government indicate that the ongoing military siege in Gaza is intended to eradicate a whole people and therefore plausibly falls within the international prohibition against genocide. It is every individual’s obligation to confront the current siege in Gaza, but it also this Court’s obligation to remain within the metes and bounds of its jurisdictional scope.”
It's unclear to me if the above represents Judge White’s assessment of the evidence submitted by CCR or merely his obligation to repeat CCR’s allegation. Either way, the opening paragraph of his Conclusion is in this respect unambiguous:
“There are rare cases in which the preferred outcome is inaccessible to the Court. This is one of those cases. The Court is bound by precedent and the division of our coordinate branches of government to abstain from exercising jurisdiction in this matter. Yet, as the ICJ has found, it is plausible that Israel’s conduct amounts to genocide. This Court implores Defendants [i.e. the genocidal trio] to examine the results of their unflagging support of the military siege against the Palestinians in Gaza.”
Expressed differently, more public pressure on #GenocideJoe and #GenocideTony is required because a court, even while agreeing with the case before it, is unable to provide the urgently required remedy.
26 January: The International Court of Justice Responds to South Africa
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has issued its ruling in response to South Africa’s invocation of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, accusing Israel of perpetrating the crime of genocide in the Gaza Strip.
It has been my view that at this stage of the proceedings this case boils down to a single issue: whether the ICJ determines that South Africa has presented a plausible accusation that Israel is committing genocide, and on this basis allows this case to move forward to a full hearing before the world’s supreme court. Everything else is secondary.
On this crucial, main point the Court’s verdict was unambiguous: the arguments presented by South Africa before the ICJ earlier this month were sufficiently compelling, and Israel’s rebuttal and denials unconvincing. Therefore, the Court will now conduct a full and proper hearing to determine whether Israel is not only plausibly accused, but substantively responsible, for the crime of genocide.
History – with a capital H – was made today. As of 26 January 2024, Israel and its Western sponsors can no longer mobilize the Holocaust to shield themselves from accountability for their crimes against the Palestinian people. Raz Segal, a professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, recently made the point that the Israeli state was born in impunity, with the Holocaust serving as an all-purpose shield against accountability for its crimes. No more.
The late Edward W. Said often spoke of the Palestinian people as “the victims of the Victims”, and the difficulties many in the West had conceiving of Israel, which claims to exist as a response to the Holocaust, as a state capable of war crimes and crimes against humanity. No more. Israel is as of today associated with the crime of genocide primarily as perpetrator, not victim. Israel’s policies towards the Palestinian people will henceforth be judged on their own merits rather than against the long shadow of European history.
The ICJ today redefined “Never Again”. It is no longer a slogan that can be used by Israel to commit and justify crimes against others, but is now one that applies equally to Israel’s actions, and Palestinian victims.
ICJ judges are not diplomats who follow instructions from their governments. It was nevertheless particularly satisfying to see the Court’s ruling delivered by the presiding American judge, in American English, Joan E. Donoghue, who additionally voted in favor of each of the provisional measures. It was a fitting retort to US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s rush to judgement that South Africa’s case was “meritless”. I’d be very surprised if Blinken even bothered to read South Africa’s submission to the ICJ. As far as he is concerned any accusation against Israel, any challenge to its impunity, any initiative to hold it accountable for its crimes, is by definition meritless.
The provisional measures ordered by the court, which are legally binding, are in my view of secondary importance. We should not confuse the ICJ with the United Nations Security Council. Nevertheless read them because they are important. Israel must take “immediate” measures, immediately refrain from others – including incitement – and report back in 30 days. In other words Israel is in the dock and is being carefully watched. The fact that the Court did not order a ceasefire which would be simply ignored by Israel, with the support of its Western sponsors, was expected and hardly what this case was about.
Finally, the ICJ ruling also imposes legal obligations upon all other signatories to the Genocide Convention, including the US and EU member states. The sun does not rise in the west, and Western hypocrisy – the foundational principle of its rules-based international order - will not end anytime soon. But the ICJ ruling lays the ground for also holding Israel’s sponsors responsible. This is the subject of a further hearing in the US later today.
26 January: The International Court of Justice Responds to South Africa
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has issued its ruling in response to South Africa’s invocation of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, accusing Israel of perpetrating the crime of genocide in the Gaza Strip.
It has been my view that at this stage of the proceedings this case boils down to a single issue: whether the ICJ determines that South Africa has presented a plausible accusation that Israel is committing genocide, and on this basis allows this case to move forward to a full hearing before the world’s supreme court. Everything else is secondary.
On this crucial, main point the Court’s verdict was unambiguous: the arguments presented by South Africa before the ICJ earlier this month were sufficiently compelling, and Israel’s rebuttal and denials unconvincing. Therefore, the Court will now conduct a full and proper hearing to determine whether Israel is not only plausibly accused, but substantively responsible, for the crime of genocide.
History – with a capital H – was made today. As of 26 January 2024, Israel and its Western sponsors can no longer mobilize the Holocaust to shield themselves from accountability for their crimes against the Palestinian people. Raz Segal, a professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, recently made the point that the Israeli state was born in impunity, with the Holocaust serving as an all-purpose shield against accountability for its crimes. No more.
The late Edward W. Said often spoke of the Palestinian people as “the victims of the Victims”, and the difficulties many in the West had conceiving of Israel, which claims to exist as a response to the Holocaust, as a state capable of war crimes and crimes against humanity. No more. Israel is as of today associated with the crime of genocide primarily as perpetrator, not victim. Israel’s policies towards the Palestinian people will henceforth be judged on their own merits rather than against the long shadow of European history.
The ICJ today redefined “Never Again”. It is no longer a slogan that can be used by Israel to commit and justify crimes against others, but is now one that applies equally to Israel’s actions, and Palestinian victims.
ICJ judges are not diplomats who follow instructions from their governments. It was nevertheless particularly satisfying to see the Court’s ruling delivered by the presiding American judge, in American English, Joan E. Donoghue, who additionally voted in favor of each of the provisional measures. It was a fitting retort to US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s rush to judgement that South Africa’s case was “meritless”. I’d be very surprised if Blinken even bothered to read South Africa’s submission to the ICJ. As far as he is concerned any accusation against Israel, any challenge to its impunity, any initiative to hold it accountable for its crimes, is by definition meritless.
The provisional measures ordered by the court, which are legally binding, are in my view of secondary importance. We should not confuse the ICJ with the United Nations Security Council. Nevertheless read them because they are important. Israel must take “immediate” measures, immediately refrain from others – including incitement – and report back in 30 days. In other words Israel is in the dock and is being carefully watched. The fact that the Court did not order a ceasefire which would be simply ignored by Israel, with the support of its Western sponsors, was expected and hardly what this case was about.
Finally, the ICJ ruling also imposes legal obligations upon all other signatories to the Genocide Convention, including the US and EU member states. The sun does not rise in the west, and Western hypocrisy – the foundational principle of its rules-based international order - will not end anytime soon. But the ICJ ruling lays the ground for also holding Israel’s sponsors responsible. This is the subject of a further hearing in the US later today.
25 January: Awaiting ICJ Ruling
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has issued a press release stating that it will this Friday “deliver its Order” in response to South Africa’s “Request for the indication of provisional measures” in the case concerning “Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel)”.
Many people, rightly horrified by Israel’s genocidal campaign against the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip, expect the ICJ to order a comprehensive ceasefire. In their view this is the least the ICJ can and should do. They will consider anything less a failure by South Africa, a betrayal of the Palestinian people, and an indictment of the ICJ and indeed of international law itself.
My own view is that this matter should be looked at very differently and judged by different criteria.
The ICJ can respond in several ways to South Africa’s application. It can determine that South Africa has not presented a plausible case that Israel needs to answer, decline to order any provisional measures, and effectively consider the case closed. The Court could also determine that South Africa has failed to demonstrate that there is a dispute between South Africa and Israel as defined by the Genocide Convention, and dismiss the case on technical grounds. Either scenario would be a clear defeat for South Africa and the Palestinians, and for that matter the concept of international justice. Most specialists consider either of these scenarios to be the least likely outcome, largely because the South African legal team presented such a meticulously detailed and cogently argued legal and factual case, while Israel’s rebuttal was comparatively weak.
If the Court does indeed order provisional measures, it is not bound by those requested by South Africa. It can adopt all of them, some of them, or entirely different ones than those proposed by South Africa. In the relevant precedents, Bosnia and thereafter Myanmar, the ICJ sufficed with general injunctions ordering the accused state to “take all measures within its power” to prevent acts that amount to or contribute to the crime of genocide. In doing so it may even prohibit specific acts identified in the Convention, such as deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction of the threatened group.
The ICJ did indeed order a ceasefire in the case of Ukraine, but as was pointed out to me in response to a previous thread, this was an entirely different case. Ukraine did not claim that it was the victim of genocide, but rather that unsubstantiated Russian accusations of genocide against Ukraine were being used by Russia to justify military operations on Ukrainian territory. It was on this basis that Ukraine requested, and the ICJ ordered, Russia to halt those operations.
Although South Africa has in the present case asked the Court to order an “immediate” suspension of Israeli military operations in the Gaza Strip in order to prevent further Israeli violations of the Genocide Convention, it has not asked the Court to specifically rule on the legality of Israel’s military operations against the Gaza Strip. The ICJ is therefore highly unlikely to offer its view on the matter by, for example, declaring Israel’s Operation Iron Sword illegal or intrinsically genocidal and on this basis ordering it to a halt.
On the basis of the above I do not expect the ICJ – which does not operate in a vacuum – to voluntarily wade into a political hornet’s nest and order a ceasefire. Even if it did, such a ruling would be dead on arrival because Israel has already stated it would ignore it. The Court does not have the power to enforce its rulings. That role is performed by the United Nations Security Council. And so long as the United States remains a veto-wielding permanent member of the Council, it will block any attempt by the ICJ to prevent Israel from committing genocide. I have it on good authority the US constitution will soon include a 28th amendment codifying Israeli impunity.
It would in my view therefore be a mistake to judge the Friday ICJ Order by whether or not it calls for a ceasefire. It won’t, for reasons largely unrelated to the substance of this case, and even if it did this would have only symbolic value and have zero impact on the ground.
Much more important, in my view, is whether the Court issues any provisional measures at all. If it does anything other than dismiss South Africa’s application this would be hugely significant, because it means the world’s highest court has judged that South Africa has made a plausible case that Israel is in violation of the Genocide Convention and that its allegations deserve a full hearing. Think of it as a formal accusation requiring a proper and full trial. And any provisional measures mean there will be that full trial.
As has been noted elsewhere, the Court is at this stage not determining whether or not Israel is guilty of the crime of genocide. Rather, it is only examining whether South Africa has plausibly accused Israel of genocide, and if so what “provisional measures” are required to prevent irreparable harm pending the conclusion of the hearings. If it indeed proceeds to that stage, these hearings can be expected to last several years. (The Bosnia case was initiated in 1993 and concluded in 2007, the Myanmar case was launched in 2019 and remains ongoing.)
While anything is possible Friday, including an ICJ ruling that either dismisses the case or orders a ceasefire, many specialists expect neither. Rather, they seem to believe that the Court will agree to proceed with the case and adopt more generic provisional measures. This would, as noted, be hugely significant. It means that Israel stands legitimately accused of genocide, widely considered the most serious crime on the books, “the crime of crimes”.
The state that claims to be a “Light unto the nations”, that claims to have “the most moral army in the world” because it fights according to the code of “purity of arms”, and that claims to exist so that “Never Again”, will stand accused of intentionally seeking to destroy a group of people on the basis of their identity, and be forced to defend itself. A searchlight unto the nations, determined to do it yet again. Irrespective of the ultimate outcome, it is a stain from which Israel will never recover.
I am indebted to Ardi Imseis, professor of law at Queen’s University, for pointing out a further significant aspect of an ICJ Order on provisional measures: “The Convention is not just about the punishment of the crime of genocide, it is also about the prevention of the crime of genocide. Once you have a plausible case of genocide, which is implied if the Court does issue a provisional measures order, that triggers a positive obligation on the part of other signatories to the Genocide Convention: to prevent genocide. This leads to the need to adjust their own policies vis-à-vis the occupying power’s actions in Gaza, including arms transfers and diplomatic protection.”
In other words, judge the ICJ Order Friday by whether it endorses or dismisses South Africa’s application, not on the basis of whether or not it orders measures that Israel will ignore and the US render meaningless.
It is also worth reflecting on how far South Africa has come since its white minority regime was one of Israel’s closest allies. Given Israel’s long and sordid record of alliances with anti-Semites, it should come as no surprise that many of the South African apartheid regime’s ruling National Party leaders, such as D.F Malan, H.F. Verwoerd, John Vorster, and P.W. Botha, actively supported the Nazis during WWII or otherwise openly espoused anti-Semitic policies. During the 1970s and 1980s both Israel and South Africa were international pariahs, bringing these institutionally racist, supremacist states even closer together. US intelligence strongly suspected that they jointly conducted a nuclear test in the Indian Ocean in 1979. Birds of a feather.
Today of course South Africa is a if not the leader of the free world, while the US and EU merely posture, preaching slogans – as we see in Gaza today – primarily honoured in the breach. And speaking of nuclear weapons and sanctimonious posturing, Israeli cabinet minister Amichai Eliyahu today once again advocated dropping a nuclear bomb on the Gaza Strip. “Even in The Hague they know my position”, he noted.
Why does he speak so brazenly? Because when he previously advocated nuclear war in late 2023, each and every Western capital ignored his genocidal advocacy and looked the other way. Because their official position is that Israel does not possess the nuclear weapons it has, and only Iran is a proliferation risk. That’s how their disintegrating rules-based international order operates.
17 January: Genocide at ICJ
South Africa’s application to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) accusing Israel of genocide is, to the best of my understanding, only the fourth time a state has been accused before this court of violating the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The other three are: Bosnia and Herzegovina v Serbia and Montenegro(1993-2007); The Gambia v Myanmar (2019-); Ukraine v Russian Federation (2022-). In other words, the first case was submitted to the Court more than four decades after the Convention was adopted.
Each case is of course very different, and only in the case of Bosnia has a final ruling been issued. But the others are worth examining for clues they might provide about how the Court will deal with the case initiated by South Africa. I should add from the outset that I’m not a specialist in either international law or the Genocide Convention, and that we also need to take into consideration that the composition of the Court, as well as the legal and political environment in which it operates, has changed over the years.
The Bosnia case lasted fourteen years from the time it was submitted in 1993 until a final ruling was issued in 2007. There were a number of reasons for this, such as disputes about the standing of the parties and their status as parties to the Genocide Convention after the disintegration of Yugoslavia. These will not be at issue in the Palestine case. Secondly, Bosnia’s main accusation was that the Government of Serbia in Belgrade exercised command responsibility over Bosnian Serb forces organized within the framework of Republika Srpska, which introduced a further complicating element that will not figure in the South African claim against Israel.
The first observation is that the Court issued provisional measures (akin to an injunction) within a few short weeks of Bosnia’s initial 1993 application. These were however of a fairly general nature, instructing Serbia “to take all measures within its power to prevent commission of the crime of genocide”. Even though war was raging throughout Bosnia at that time, it did not make any specific demands regarding, for example, an immediate and comprehensive cessation of hostilities. This may reflect the reality that the Court had not yet established whether or not Serbia exercised command responsibility over the forces of Republika Srpska.
The second observation concerns the Court’s final 2007 ruling. Having considered all the evidence, which was voluminous given the documentation collected and made available to the Court by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), the ICJdetermined that only the 1995 Srebrenica massacre qualified as an act of genocide. Neither the numerous other massacres, mass rapes, or concentration camps the Court considered were assessed to qualify as genocide. Where the Court felt that the criteria of intent was insufficiently substantiated, or that there was at least one plausible alternative to genocide as the motivation for particular atrocities, it rejected the claim that these constituted acts of genocide. Whether the Court would have characterized the entire military campaign rather than individual acts as genocide if it had reached different conclusions about other events is to me unclear, but I suspect not.
Because the case was brought to the ICJ pursuant to the Genocide Convention, and war crimes and crimes against humanity fall outside its purview, the Court drew no further conclusions with respect to acts it determined were not genocidal in character.
In its judgements the ICJ generally followed the lead of the ICTY. This raises the possibility that in adjudicating South Africa’s claims the Court may look into the conclusions reached by the investigation into “The Situation in Palestine” by the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC). If so, it will take all of three minutes to do so because, pretensions and press statements notwithstanding, there is no ICC investigation and can therefore be no conclusions to consider. Would such a scenario compel ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan to begin to take his job and responsibilities seriously and finish his homework? Don’t hold your breath, you’re guaranteed to asphyxiate.
The Court also found that Serbia was not responsible for the genocidal act in Srebrenica perpetrated by the forces of Republika Srpska, because it did not exercise command responsibility over them. What was interesting in this respect was the dissenting opinion of the ICJ Vice President, Judge Awn Al-Khasawneh of Jordan. Al-Khasawneh took the view that, going beyond the stringent requirements concerning intent imposed by the Genocide Convention, the majority chose to adopt an unrealistically high bar, and could and should have inferred intent from conduct to a greater extent than they did.
Al-Khasawneh additionally argued that his colleagues would have reached a different conclusion if they had gained access to the “redacted” sections of documents provided by Serbia’s Supreme Defence Council, and that they had the “power to do so”. Those who think South Africa merely needs to present the avalanche of available facts to the ICJ to substantiate its case would do well to read Al-Khasawneh’s dissent. And take into consideration that Serbia had considerably fewer friends on the court than does Israel.
In the Myanmar case, which has been ongoing since 2019 and concerns Gambia’s claim that Myanmar has committed genocide against the Rohingya in that country’s Rakhine State, provisional measures were also issued within weeks of the initial application. As in the Bosnia case these were also general in nature, but closely reflected the general nature of Gambia’s requests. (NB: Gambia’s invocation of its responsibilities to prevent and punish genocide by other signatories of the Convention, even though it was itself not directly affected by Myanmar’s actions, was accepted by the Court and served as a template for South Africa’s proceedings against Israel.)
Of particular interest in this case is that Gambia identified Myanmar’s “clearance operations”, the systematic destruction of Rohingya villages designed at “removing them from Myanmar”, as evidence of its genocidal intent and policy. This even though ethnic cleansing was specifically considered and excluded from the definition of genocide by the delegates who finalized the Convention in 1948. If the ICJ takes the view that these actions demonstrate an intent to erase the Rohingya identity and are thus indeed genocidal, this could have implications for its assessment of Israel’s actions in the Gaza Strip, which have included systematic destruction of the entire territory, to the extent that it now looks different from space.
The second noteworthy aspect is that Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, The Netherlands, and the United Kingdom in November 2023 – just one month before South Africa launched its case against Israel – submitted a joint declaration to the ICJ supporting Gambia’s allegations against Myanmar. In their joint declaration these governments make numerous statements revealing an expansive interpretation of genocide and of the application of the Genocide Convention.
I’m inclined to suggest that it will be very hard for them to reverse course and say they didn’t really mean what they said in order to ensure their observations and analysis are not applied to Israel. But, as always when dealing with European governments, assume consistency and principle at your peril. Germany for one has already haughtily denounced the South African application, and among these governments only Canada has come out in open support of the ICJ (while indicating this does not mean it supports the South African case). Given that that the recent Dutch elections were won by Geert Wilders, a platinum blond airhead who thinks Jordan is Palestine, and all-around Israel flunkie, don’t be surprised if the Dutch government – should Wilders come to lead it – expels the ICJ from The Netherlands if it proceeds with this case. When it comes to perpetuating Israeli impunity, anything goes.
The most recent case was that launched by Ukraine against Russia in 2022. Like the Myanmar case, it remains ongoing. Nevertheless, it too has already produced several points of interest.
First and foremost, the Court on this occasion issued Provisional Measures that went beyond the general obligation not to violate the Genocide Convention. It specifically called on Russia to “immediately suspend” its military operations within Ukrainian territory. Secondly, the Court one week later issued a new set of Provisional Measures expediting its consideration of the case.
The Ukraine case is somewhat different from the others in that Ukraine is not accusing Russia of genocide. Rather, it is rejecting an accusation made against it by Russia in multiple official statements, but not before the ICJ pursuant to the Genocide Convention. Ukraine claims that Russia has falsely accused it of genocide, and that Russia is using this false allegation as a justification for its invasion of Ukraine. It on this basis requested an end to Russian military operations within Ukraine as a provisional measure.
The Court found that Ukraine presented a plausible case that it is not engaged in genocideand decided provisional measures accordingly. Additionally, the Court considered it “doubtful” that the Genocide Convention authorizes the unilateral use of force against a foreign state to enforce the Convention. This explains the explicit ceasefire order, issue to Russia alone, as compared to the more general provisional measures the Court issued in the other cases. Like Israel during the 2004 Advisory Opinion on the West Bank Wall, Russia chose not to participate in the proceedings and was therefore not in a position to contest Ukraine’s various claims.
While South Africa has called for a cessation of Israeli military activity in the Gaza Strip, if this is accepted by the Court it would be for very different reasons than in the Ukraine case. In other words, the Provisional Measures adopted by the ICJ in Ukraine don’t constitute much of a precedent for Gaza.
Interestingly, the Court rejected the intervention of the United States in the Ukraine case at this stage of the proceedings (unclear if in full or in part), on the grounds that Washington in 1948 entered a reservation upon its ratification of the Convention that its prior consent must be obtained for its involvement in any subsequent case. It had forgotten to provide it. Or something like that. Team Biden will no doubt be more diligent when it comes to defending its favorite protégé.
The above cases may or may not be relevant as South Africa proceeds with its claims against Israel. But it’s useful information nonetheless. All the documents cited are available on the ICJ website, and well worth reading.
3 January: Revisiting a "Death Zone"
According to a 2 January NYT article, US intelligence sources are claiming that both Hamas and Islamic Jihad were using Al-Shifa Hospital as a “command center”, and also held captives there, until shortly before it was invaded by the Israeli military in November of last year.
The report is interesting for several reasons. So far as I can recall, no US intelligence source was available to be directly quoted on the matter when the US was supporting Israeli allegations about the hospital last November. Rather, it was left to Biden, Blinken, and Kirby to claim that US intelligence had independently verified Israeli claims about the hospital and thus justify its transformation into what the World Health Organization called a “death zone”.
Now, more than a month after the fact, a “senior US intelligence official” is suddenly willing to speak to the press, to state that Israel’s accusations “were at least partially correct”. NYT notes that its intelligence sources “provided no visual evidence” to back up their account, so – like Iraqi WMD – we will have to take their confirmation on faith.
The other curious aspect concerns timing. Why would US intelligence, which remained mum when it mattered, suddenly go public in early January? Particularly if, as previously claimed, it already had independent verification in November.
I suspect this development has everything to do with the upcoming session of the International Court of Justice, which in about ten days will consider the application by South Africa instituting proceedings against Israel pursuant to the Genocide Convention. Israel needs a few “slam dunks” before the court convenes, and its sponsors are readily obliging in order to ensure the genocide can continue undisturbed.
30 December: Taxing Transfers
The Israeli correspondent Barak Ravid had an interesting article in Axios on 29 December. The article in question, about a recent phone call between Biden and Netanyahu, deals in part with US efforts to persuade Israel to transfer the Palestinian tax receipts it owes to the Palestinian Authority (PA). First, a little background:
From the outset of the occupation in 1967 Israel enforced a common market and customs union between Israel and the occupied territories. This meant trade and monetary policy, and matters such as customs duties, taxation, and currency, were unilaterally determined by Israel and imposed on the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and the Gaza Strip - foreign territory whose Palestinians are not Israeli citizens.
Palestinians paid the same tariffs and same sales tax as Israelis. Foreign trade was fully controlled by Israel. If, for example, Palestinians wanted to export oranges from the Gaza Strip or olive oil from the West Bank to Europe, they could not do so directly. Rather, they had to sell their produce to Israel’s Agricultural Export Company AGREXCO, which would then export them to Europe as Israeli products. AGREXCO was also the main exporter of illegal Israeli settlement products to Europe. The Europeans, who like to sanctimoniously pontificate to the rest of the world about human rights and the rule of law, didn’t give a damn about such practices and formed AGREXCO’s largest market. Thankfully, the company went bankrupt in 2011.
The crucial point about the enforced common market is that Israel formulated economic policy based on what was best for the Israeli economy, and then imposed these policies wholesale upon the Palestinian economy. Given the growing disparity between the two economies over time, it created a situation where Palestinians earned like Jordanians but were taxed like Israelis, but unlike either Jordanians or Israelis couldn’t trade freely with the rest of the world.
One of Israel’s main priorities in the 1993 Oslo Accords was to ensure that the Palestinians would not become economically independent. Which meant Israel was determined to prevent the PA from having the authority to develop trade and monetary policies of its own. The 1994 Israeli-Palestinian Protocol on Economic Relations, also known as the Paris Protocol and incorporated into the Oslo Accords, achieved this.
Pursuant to its terms the common market and customs union continued unabated. The New Israeli Shekel (NIS) – introduced in the 1980s after the Israeli Lira (IL) became worthless on account of rampant inflation in the wake of the 1982 invasion of Lebanon – remained legal tender within territory where the PA had jurisdiction. The PA was prohibited from issuing a currency of its own. VAT was determined by Israel, and the PA was obliged to adjust its own VAT (sales tax) rate commensurate with whatever Israel decided. The same applied to customs (import) duties and related tariffs. What the Palestinians could (and could not) import and export was also determined by Israel.
Egypt and Jordan, which both had peace treaties with Israel, could not freely export their products to PA territories or import from them, since such matters were regulated by the Paris Protocol. If I remember correctly there was a schedule indicating which items Jordanian companies were permitted to export to the PA, and in which quantities.
The key instrument in Israel’s hands to enforce such arrangements was its continued control over borders, between the West Bank and Jordan, and until the 2005 disengagement between the Gaza Strip and Egypt. The PA presence at these borders during the 1990s never entailed control. A Palestinian returning to Nablus from Beijing or London via the Allenby Bridge that connects Jordan to the West Bank, for example, would give his passport to a PA border official, who would then give it to the Israeli soldier sitting in a booth behind him concealed by a two-way mirror. If the Palestinian was wanted for questioning, harassment, or arrest by the Israelis, he would be delivered to them. This cosmetic arrangement was abolished during the Second Intifada when Israel once again took full and direct control.
Pursuant to the Paris Protocol Israel also has full control over the clearance of imports and the collection of customs. This means that Israel has the right to inspect and approve/reject any imports destined for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. It also means that Israel collects, on the PA’s behalf, all import duties and related tariffs on goods and services destined for these territories. As specified in the Paris Protocol, Israel shall at the end of each month transfer to the PA the various taxes and duties it has collected on its behalf, less a three percent processing fee. The same arrangement applies taxes paid by Palestinians who work in Israel, from which Israel deducts twenty-five per cent. (Somewhat more, since the three percent processing fee is applied to the sum total of the entire monthly payment).
Although Israel since 2005 no longer has control over the border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt, these arrangements still apply to goods and services imported to Gaza from Israel, which account for the majority of imports in view of Egypt’s collaboration and enforcement of the Israeli blockade.
The Palestinians should of course never have accepted such an iniquitous arrangement, and should have immediately recognised the potential – in my view the absolute certainty – that Israel would use and abuse these arrangements for political gain. But the Palestinian leadership was excessively eager to get the ball rolling once the Oslo Accords were signed, and acted on the assumption that the Paris Protocol, like Oslo, consisted of interim arrangements that would expire within five years – i.e. by 1999, and be superseded by a different treaty.
The monthly payments, it needs to be emphasised, consisted exclusively of Palestinian funds that Israel insisted on collecting on the PA’s behalf. In exchange Israel accepted a legal/treaty obligation to transfer these funds to the PA on a monthly basis. These transfer also accounted for over two-thirds of the PA budget. In other words, it didn’t take Israel long to realise that its ability to withhold the transfers constituted a powerful instrument that could be exploited for political leverage. Starting already in the late 1990s Israel – during Netanyahu’s first term of office – would periodically withhold monthly payments under various pretexts in order to weaken the PA or pressure it to accept various Israeli demands.
Over time, Israel also began unilaterally deducting sums from these transfer payments to settle the debts of Palestinian companies and individuals – not debts of the PA itself – owed to Israel companies.
At other times Israel has refused to transfer the full amount of the monthly payment, claiming objection to the intended destination of that portion of the transfers it is withholding (e.g. social security payments to families of Palestinians languishing in Israeli prisons or killed by Israel’s soldiers and settlers). In other words, Israel has claimed the right to determine how the PA spends its budget. On previous occasions, the PA has refused to accept partial payments. This has produced a budgetary crisis, meaning that the PA cannot pay the salaries of its security forces, whose main role is to enforce the occupation on Israel’s behalf. Pressure on the Israeli government from the Israeli security establishment, Washington, and Brussels, equally committed to keeping the occupation running smoothly until the end of time, has tended to resolve the issue.
Although Hamas seized power in the Gaza Strip in 2007, part of the PA’s budget is still destined for the enclave. Initially these were limited to for example pension payments to retired PA employees or salary payments to those who obeyed orders from Ramallah to go on strike against Hamas rule. More recently, agreements were reached between the PA and Hamas whereby the PA would use that portion of the monthly transfer Israel had collected from Gaza, to pay the salaries of civil servants in the Gaza Strip, and to cover the costs of its medicine imports, of electricity imported from Israel, and the like. This amounts to some thirty per cent of the monthly transfer.
After the 7 October Hamas attacks Israel’s finance minister, the far-right messianic Zionist Bezalel Smotrich, who advocates – for starters – dismantling the PA and the immediate and total annexation of the West Bank, proclaimed that he would halt the monthly transfers on the spurious pretext that the PA supported the attacks and bore responsibility for them. After public condemnation from the Israeli security establishment, which feared the impact the measure would have on Palestinian security forces in the West Bank at a time the Israeli military was pre-occupied with its genocide in the Gaza Strip, Smotrich partially relented. He agreed to transfer the monthly payment to the PA, but insisted on withholding the thirty per cent the PA would normally disburse in or on behalf of the Gaza Strip.
Once again demonstrating unyielding principle when it comes to money, Abbas refused to accept a partial payment. Netanyahu, recognising an opportunity to further weaken the PA, probably agrees with Smotrich. More importantly, he needs the flamethrowing extremist onside to keep his governing coalition intact.
Which brings us back to Ravid, Biden, and Netanyahu. According to Ravid’s narration, Biden has been seeking to persuade Netanyahu to transfer the fund to the PA so that its security forces receive their salaries and won’t produce another crisis for Israel in the West Bank. Biden also believes the PA can be sufficiently strengthened to rule what’s left of the Gaza Strip after the genocide runs its course. Netanyahu by contrast has repeatedly and publicly opposed any role for the PA in the Gaza Strip. His preference is that there will be no one left in the territory to govern, and failing that he would like to see local notables subservient to Israel administer different sectors of the enclave. But Netanyahu also understands that Israel’s genocide is entirely dependent upon Biden’s unconditional military and diplomatic support, and therefore has to pretend he’s taking US concerns seriously.
To this end, Netanyahu had during a previous call with Biden proposed sending the withheld portion of the payment to Norway, which would retain it until arrangements are found to satisfy Israel that none of the funds would go to Hamas (which they weren’t in the first place). Presented with this option by the Americans, Abbas agreed. It seems Israel was banking on a PA rejection, and faced with its acceptance began to backtrack. During their most recent phone call, Netanyahu indicated to Biden that he was having second thoughts because he doesn’t trust the Norwegians, and that Biden should instead be pressuring Abbas to accept a partial payment. According to Ravid, Biden was sufficiently upset with Netanyahu that he abruptly ended the call.
Ravid then quotes US officials variously describing Biden as frustrated because he “is going out on a limb for Bibi every day and when Bibi needs to give something back and take some political risk he is unwilling to do it”; as satisfied because Netanyahu indicated Israel hasn’t rejected the Norwegian option and is “still working through things on their end"; and as having had a “good and productive” conversation with Netanyahu.
In other words Biden, who wants to see the PA empowered and installed in the Gaza Strip, never thought to insist that Israel simply fulfil its treaty obligations towards the PA. He instead spent the phone call trying to convince Netanyahu to accept Netanyahu’s own proposal. When this failed, he also didn’t simply insist that Israel implement its own initiative and be done with it. As I’ve previously noted in response to reports that Biden and his senior advisors destest Netanyahu, the latter must be thinking: With enemies like these, who needs friends?
Netanyahu’s problem is that unless Smotrich concedes, Netanyahu can’t accept his own proposal without entering into conflict with Smotrich. That is a conflict that could see Israel’s governing coalition implode.
Seen in broader perspective this is essentially an argument between Biden, Netanyahu, and Smotrich about which of them has the right to choose who rules the Gaza Strip. Biden wants the PA, Netanyahu wants hand-picked cronies answerable to Israel, and Smotrich wants to re-establish Israel’s settlements in the territory. The idea that this issue should be determined by Palestinians is equally rejected by all of them.
As Khalid Turani deftly summarised this Israeli government infighting amidst Israeli-US policy differences: a gang of bankrobbers start fighting about how to divide the loot before leaving the premises, then get in a fight with the driver of their getaway car about which escape route to take.
Given the state of Israel’s efforts in the Gaza Strip, soon to enters its fourth month, he might also have added that the brawl is taking place the night before the robbery, and that the gangsters have yet to figure out how to crack the safe.
Link to Barak Ravid Article: https://www.axios.com/2023/12/28/biden-netanyahu-call-palestinian-authority-tax-revenue
28 December: Transfer
Senior Israeli leaders, including Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, are again publicly advocating the ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip. Their proposals are being presented as voluntary emigration schemes, in which Israel is merely playing the role of Good Samaritan, selflessly mediating with foreign governments to find new homes for destitute and desperate Palestinians. But it is ethnic cleansing all the same.
Alarm bells should have started ringing in early November when US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and other Western politicians began insisting there could be “no forcible displacement of Palestinians from Gaza”. Rather than rejecting any mass removal of Palestinians, Blinken and colleagues objected only to optically challenging expulsions at gunpoint. The option of “voluntary” displacement by leaving residents of the Gaza Strip with no choice but departure was pointedly left open.
Ethnic cleansing, or “transfer” as it is known in Israeli parlance, has a long pedigree that goes back to the late-nineteenth-century beginnings of the Zionist movement. While the early Zionists adopted the slogan, “A Land Without a People for a People Without a Land”, the evidence demonstrates that, from the very outset, their leaders knew better. More to the point, they clearly understood that the Palestinians formed the main obstacle to the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. This is for the simple reason that to them a “Jewish state” denotes one in which its Jewish population acquires and maintains unchallenged demographic, territorial, and political supremacy.
Enter “transfer”. As early as 1895 Theodor Herzl, the founder of the contemporary Zionist movement, identified the necessity of removing the inhabitants of Palestine in the following terms: “We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country ... expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.” David Ben-Gurion (née Grün), Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, and later Israel’s first prime minister, was more blunt. In a 1937 letter to his son, he wrote: “We must expel the Arabs and take their place”.
Writing in his diary in 1940 Yosef Weitz, a senior Jewish National Fund official who chaired the influential Transfer Committee before and during the Nakba (“Catastrophe”), and became known as the Architect of Transfer, put it thus: “The only solution is a Land of Israel devoid of Arabs. There is no room here for compromise. They must all be moved. Not one village, not one tribe can remain. Only through this transfer of the Arabs living in the Land of Israel will redemption come”. His diaries are littered with similar sentiments.
The point of the above is not to demonstrate that individual Zionist leaders held such views, but that the senior leadership of the Zionist movement consistently considered the ethnic cleansing of Palestine an objective and priority. Initiatives such as the Transfer Committee, and Plan Dalet, initially formulated in 1944 and described by the pre-eminent Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi as the “Master Plan for the Conquest of Palestine”, additionally demonstrate that the Zionist movement actively planned for it. The 1948 Nakba, during which more than four-fifths of Palestinians residing in territory that came under Israeli rule were ethnically cleansed, should therefore be seen as the fulfilment of a longstanding ambition and implementation of a key policy. A product of design, not of war. Historical Christmas footnote: the Palestinian town of Nazareth was spared a similar fate only because the commander of Israeli forces that seized the city, a Canadian Jew named Ben Dunkelman, disobeyed orders to expel the population. He was relieved of his command the following day.
That the Nakba was a product of design is further substantiated by the Transfer Committee’s terms of reference. These comprised not only proposals for the expulsion of the Palestinians but, just as importantly, active measures to prevent their return; destroy their homes and villages; expropriate their property; and resettle these territories with Jewish immigrants. Weitz, together with fellow Committee members Eliahu Sassoon and Ezra Danin, on 5 June 1948 presented a three-page blueprint, entitled “Scheme for the Solution of the Arab Problem in the State of Israel”, to Prime Minister Ben-Gurion to achieve these goals. According to leading Israeli historian Benny Morris, “there is no doubt Ben-Gurion agreed to Weitz’s scheme”, which included “what amounted to an enormous project of destruction” that saw more then 450 Palestinian villages razed to the ground.
The understandable focus on the expulsions of 1948 often overlooks the fact that ethnic cleansing remains incomplete unless its victims are barred from returning to their homes by a combination of armed force and legislation, and thereafter replaced by others. It is Israel’s determination to make Palestinian dispossession permanent that distinguishes Palestinian refugees from many other war refugees.
After 1948 Israel put out a whole series of fabrications to shift responsibility for the transformation of the Palestinians into dispossessed and stateless refugees onto the Arab states and the refugees themselves. These included claims that the refugees voluntarily left (they were either expelled or fled in justified terror); that Arab radio broadcasts ordered the Palestinians to flee (in fact they were encouraged to stay put); that Israel conducted a population exchange with Arab states (there was nothing of the sort); and the bizarre argument that because they’re Arabs, Palestinians had numerous other states while Jews have only Israel (by the same logic Sikhs would be entitled to seize British Columbia and deport its population to either the rest of Canada or the United States). More importantly, even if uniformly substantiated none of these pretexts entitles Israel to prohibit the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes at the conclusion of hostilities. It is, furthermore, a right that was consecrated in United Nations General Assembly 194 of 11 December 1948, which has been re-affirmed repeatedly since.
In 1967 Israel seized the remaining 22 per cent of Mandatory Palestine – the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and the Gaza Strip. Depopulation in these territories operated differently than in 1948. Most importantly Israel, in addition to prohibiting the return of Palestinians who fled hostilities during the 1967 June War, and encouraging others to leave (by for example providing a daily bus service from Gaza City to the Allenby Bridge connecting the West Bank to Jordan), during the summer of 1967 conducted a census. Any resident who was not present during the census was ineligible for an Israeli identity document and automatically lost their right of residency.
As a result the population of these territories declined by more than twenty per cent overnight. Many of those thus displaced were already refugees from 1948. Aqbat Jabr Refugee Camp near Jericho for example, until 1967 the West Bank’s largest, became a virtual ghost town after almost all its inhabitants became refugees once again in Jordan. So many Palestinians from the Gaza Strip ended up in Jordan that a new refugee camp, Gaza Camp, was established on the outskirts of Jerash. The occupied Palestinian territories would not recover their 1967 population levels until the early 1980s.
Within the West Bank there were also cases of mass expulsion. These included the town of Qalqilya, which was additionally slated for demolition but to which its residents were later permitted to return. Those of ‘Imwas (the Biblical Emmaus), Bayt Nuba, and Yalu in Jerusalem’s Latrun salient were less fortunate. They were summarily expelled (many today live in Ramallah’s Qaddura Refugee Camp), their villages demolished and annexed to Israel, and replaced by Canada Park, so named because the project was completed with donations from the Canadian Jewish community. Within Jerusalem’s Old City the historic Mughrabi Quarter, abutting the Haram al-Sharif, was summarily razed to make way for a plaza astride the Wailing Wall. With many residents given only minutes to evacuate their homes, several were killed when the bulldozers went to work. According to Eitan Ben-Moshe, an engineer who oversaw the atrocity, “We threw out the wreckage of houses together with the Arab corpses”.
In subsequent years Israel employed all kinds of administrative shenanigans to further reduce the Palestinian population of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Until the 1993 Oslo Accords, for example, an exit permit from Israel’s military government was required to leave the occupied territories. It was valid for only three years, and thereafter renewable annually for a maximum of three additional years, for a fee, at an Israeli consulate. If a Palestinian lost an exit permit, or failed to renew an exit permit prior to its expiration for any reason (including bureaucratic foot-dragging), or couldn’t pay the renewal fee, or failed to return to Palestine prior to its expiration, that Palestinian automatically lost residency rights. Separately, Israel over the years deported numerous activists and community leaders, primarily to Jordan and Lebanon. During the late 1960s and 1970s it also exiled Gaza Palestinians accused of resisting the occupation, along with their families, to prison camps in the occupied Sinai Peninsula. Among those who spent time there was the iconic Palestinian leader Haidar Abdel-Shafi.
A particularly notable case of administrative deportations occurred in 1992, after Israeli special forces botched an operation to rescue an Israeli soldier who had been seized by Hamas to exchange him for their imprisoned leader, Shaikh Ahmad Yasin. Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin ordered the summary deportation of approximately 400 Palestinians, many of them prisoners affiliated with Hamas and Islamic Jihad (PIJ), none accused of involvement in the incident that led to Rabin’s frenzied rage.
In contrast to previous deportations, which were considered permanent, these were for one- and two-year terms. In its rush to carry out the deportations under cover of night, Israel expelled a number of Palestinians who were not on its list, and left behind others who were. Needless to say the mass expulsion was, as always in such matters, approved by Israel’s High Court of Justice after minor modifications. It ruled, among other things, that this was not a collective deportation but rather a collection of individual deportations. Perhaps more significantly the deportees were stuck in an inhospitable no-man’s land, Marj al-Zuhur, because Lebanon refused to facilitate the deportations by receiving them. During their involuntary residence in Marj al-Zuhur, assistance came primarily from Hizballah, and it was during this period that relations between Hamas, PIJ, and Hizballah were solidified.
With the focus in recent years on the intensified campaigns of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, it is often forgotten that for decades the primary target for depopulation was the Gaza Strip, and particularly its refugee population which accounts for approximately three-quarters of the territory’s residents. Even before it occupied Gaza in 1967, Israel regularly promoted initiatives to achieve the “thinning” of its refugee population, with destinations as far afield as Libya and Iraq. Not without reason, Israel’s leaders felt uncomfortable with the presence of so many ethnically-cleansed Palestinians within walking distance of their former homes. After 1967 it encouraged Palestinian emigration from the Gaza Strip to not only foreign countries but also the West Bank.
In 1969 Israel even devised a scheme to send 60,000 Palestinians from the Gaza Strip to Paraguay with offers of lucrative employment. The plan was negotiated between Paraguay’s military dictator Alfredo Stroessner and Mossad, the Israeli foreign intelligence agency. It was of course purely coincidental that shortly thereafter Mossad discovered it no longer had the resources to hunt Nazi fugitives in Paraguay, which had been their destinations of choice. The scheme was discontinued when several of its victims, upon realising the promise of a new life of comfort was all a sham, shot up the Israeli embassy in Asuncion, killing one of its staff.
In the decades since, “transfer”, often presented as the encouragement of voluntary emigration either by providing material incentives or making the conditions of life impossible, has become increasingly mainstreamed in Israeli political life. In 2019, for example, a “senior government official”, quoted in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, expressed a willingness to help Palestinians emigrate from the Gaza Strip.
Mass expulsion has been gaining its share of adherents as well, and it is a position that is today represented within Israel’s coalition government. As has the idea that “transfer" should include Palestinian citizens of Israel. Avigdor Lieberman for example, several years ago Israel’s Minister of Defense, is an advocate of not only emptying the West Bank and Gaza Strip of Palestinians, but of getting rid of Palestinian citizens of Israel as well. As one might expect from a minister in charge of the Israeli military, he is also an advocate of “beheading” disloyal Palestinian citizens of Israel with “an axe”.
Against this background Israel saw the attacks of 7 October as not only a threat but also as an opportunity. Fortified with unconditional US and European support, Israeli political and military leaders immediately began promoting the transfer of Gaza’s Palestinian population to the Sinai desert. The proposal was enthusiastically embraced by the United States, and by Secretary of State Antony Blinken in particular. As ever hopelessly out of his depth when it comes to the Middle East, he appears to have genuinely believed he could recruit or pressure Washington’s Arab client regimes to make Israel’s wish a reality. Given Egyptian strongman Abdel-Fatah Sisi’s economic troubles, the fallout of the Menendez scandal, and looming Egyptian presidential elections, it was suggested to him by the Washington echo chamber that it would take only an IMF loan, debt relief, and a promise to file away Menendez to bring Cairo on board. As so often when it comes to the Middle East Blinken, armed only with Israel’s latest wish list, didn’t have a clue his indecent proposal would be categorically rejected, first and foremost by Egypt.
The fallback position is opposition to “forcible displacement” at the point of a gun, while anything else is fair game. This includes reducing the Gaza Strip to rubble in what may well be the most intensive bombing campaign in history; a genocidal assault on an entire society that has killed civilians at an unprecedentedly rapid pace; the deliberate destruction of an entire civilian infrastructure, including the targeted obliteration of its health and education sectors; the highest proportion of households in hunger crisis ever recorded globally and the real prospect of pre-meditated famine; severance of the water and electricity supply leading to acute thirst, widespread consumption of non-potable water, and termination of sewage treatment; and promotion of a sharp rise in infectious disease. One Israeli soldier has already died of a fungal infection resulting from the collapse in sanitation he helped bring about in the Gaza Strip. How many Palestinians have been consumed by similar illness we do not know, but it is reasonable to assume that children and the elderly are hit particularly hard.
In other words, if desperate Palestinians seek to flee this seventh circle of hell to save their skins, that’s considered voluntary emigration, their choice. If they cannot remain in the Gaza Strip because Israel has made it unfit for human habitation with US weapons, that is a voluntary choice that will be respected. And the US and Israel are only here to help, like Mother Theresa determined to assist every last one of them whether they like it or not. Danny Danon, a member of parliament who was previously Israel’s envoy to the United Nations (the guy who sounds like Elmer Fudd), recently held up the mass displacement of Syrians to multiple shores during the past decade as an example to be emulated. “Even if each country receives ten thousand, twenty thousand Gazans, this is significant”. Asked about Danon’s proposal at a Likud meeting on Christmas Day, Netanyahu responded, “We are working on it. Our problem is [finding] the countries that are willing to absorb [them].” As an editorial in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz put it on 27 December: “Israeli lawmakers keep pushing for transfer under the guise of humanitarian aid”.
Not to be outdone by the politicians, the Jerusalem Post ran an opinion piece entitled “Why Moving to the Sinai Peninsula is The Solution for Gaza’s Palestinians”. “Sinai”, its author Joel Roskin enthused, “comprises one of the most suitable places on Earth to provide the people of Gaza with hope and a peaceful future”. Not individual Gazans, but “the people of Gaza”. Notably, such proposals consistently take it as a given that those departing will never return. One waits with baited breath for the European Union is expected to respond to these calls for mass expulsion with further investigations of Palestinian textbooks.
While ethnic cleansing has been intrinsic to Zionist/Israeli ideology and practice from the very outset, it also has a flip side: the 1948 expulsion of the Palestinians expanded what had been a conflict between the Zionist movement and the Palestinians into a regional, Arab-Israeli one. The second Nakba Israel is currently inflicting on the Gaza Strip similarly appears well on its way to instigating the renewal of hostilities across the Middle East.
As importantly, the 1948 Nakba did not defeat the Palestinians, who initiated their struggle from the camps of exile, those in the Gaza Strip most prominently among them. It would take a Blinken level of foolishness to assume the expulsion of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip would produce a different outcome.
16 December: Israel Kills Captives
The 15 December killing of three Israeli captives in the Gaza Strip by the Israeli military is significant in several respects.
According to the account provided by Israel the three men, in civilian attire, torsos bared, waving a white flag, and yelling for help in Hebrew, were shot on sight by Israeli snipers who feared they were Palestinian fighters. Two were instantly killed and a third, only wounded, escaped into a nearby building. When he re-emerged in the hope of being rescued, he was shot again, and this time killed. It was only later suspected, and subsequently confirmed, that those killed were in fact Israeli. The Israeli account does not indicate how the three emerged from captivity. It is noteworthy that two of the captives had distinctly European features. Not unknown among Palestinians, but neither common as in Israel.
The incident recalls one in Jerusalem last month, in which an armed Israeli man who had shot at two Palestinian who attacked the Givat Shaul junction was summarily executed by Israeli soldiers after he kneeled down, threw down his weapon, and raised his hands to demonstrate that he didn’t present a threat. The soldiers assumed he was a Palestinians involved in the attack and therefore, as so often in such circumstances, killed rather than arrested him.
According to the Israeli military its soldiers fired at the three captives in error, violating existing rules of engagement. Given numerous reports over the years, including in recent weeks, of Palestinian civilians bearing white flags being shot and killed, this is a demonstrably false statement. Rather, the incident confirms yet again that Israeli soldiers are authorized to shoot dead both surrendering combatants and civilians waving flags of surrender. Under current conditions in the Gaza Strip, and despite the Israeli military being fully aware it may encounter live Israeli captives – ostensibly a key reason for their presence there – it may additionally be the case that soldiers are being encouraged by their commanders to shoot anything that moves, or are excessively trigger-happy given their inexperience and fear of urban combat. Tellingly in this respect the incident took place in the Shuja’iyya neighborhood of Gaza City, which remains the scene of particularly intense fighting and significant Israeli losses, repeated Israeli claims to have subdued it notwithstanding.
Israeli claims that its forces have been targeted by suicide bombers and were therefore on panic alert is also fantasy. Prior to this incident neither Israel nor the Palestinians have reported have reported such attacks, for the simple reason that it makes no sense for Palestinians with access to a considerable arsenal and the means to safely withdraw to needlessly blow themselves up.
Aside from providing an instructive and globally-publicized case study of Israel’s actual rules of engagement, something habitually ignored when the resulting corpses were Palestinian, the incident is significant in additional respects.
Most obviously, it is strong evidence of an Israeli policy to take no prisoners. This would be consistent with the repeatedly stated Israeli intention to kill every member of Hamas, as well as numerous statements by Israeli leaders rejecting any distinction between civilians and combatants in the Gaza Strip.
It furthermore strongly suggests that the number of Hamas fighters Israel has captured are few in number, and that Israeli claims they are surrendering in droves and providing invaluable intelligence in interrogations can be taken with a generous helping of kosher salt. As can the various claims Israeli officials attribute to such interrogations. Quite apart from other evidence that Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and other Palestinian organizations retain the will and ability to fight, and that Israeli forces are generally seeking to avoid close-quarter combat, the only images of prisoners thus far provided by the Israeli military concern civilians stripped down to their underwear and paraded before television crews before being forced to surrender weapons handed to them for the occasion by Israeli soldiers.
If Israeli forces are indeed taking the fight directly to Palestinian militants, gaining the upper hand in such encounters, and detaining rather than killing them, the evidence remains absent. Al-Manar, the television station affiliated with Hizballah, as a rule does not broadcast Israeli military propaganda. On this occasion it has made an exception, in order to highlight the distinction between Hamas and PIJ propaganda clips that show direct confrontations with Israeli forces, and Israeli ones that exhibit its soldiers firing with abandon into empty rooms or a hole in the ground in obviously staged performances. Yes, Israeli propaganda has become that ridiculously bad, and then some.
At the political level, the killing of the three captives, taken together with the recovery of the bodies of others killed in Israeli bombing raids or failed rescue operations, could constitute a turning point to the extent that it strengthens the hand of those who insist that Israel can only recover its captives alive through negotiations and payment in kind, and that the continuation of the frenzied bombing and shelling of the Gaza Strip places not only Palestinian but also Israeli lives at risk. Hamas statements that additional Israeli captives have been killed in air and artillery raids may be no more than psychological warfare but also can’t be dismissed, and should be understood in this context.
The view that military pressure is futile and counterproductive has considerable basis in reality, given that Israel conducted its last successful rescue operation in the mid-1970s and has since had to make do with Hollywood movies glorifying its vastly diminished abilities. Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier captured in 2006, was held in the Gaza Strip by Hamas until 2011 despite Israel doing everything within its power to locate him and avoid a negotiated prisoner exchange. It failed, and in the resulting deal over 1,000 Palestinians obtained their freedom. Among them was Yahya Sinwar, today the leader of Hamas in the Gaza Strip and widely considered the architect of the 7 October attacks.
While we already have proof the Palestinians can’t conceal 250 captives and hostages with the same success, it seems reasonable to assume that the most senior military officers captured on 7 October have, like Shalit before them, the visual profile of a needle in a haystack. These are also the individuals Israel’s government is most intent on retrieving or, failing that, killing to reduce their value to their Palestinian captors. See under: Hannibal Directive.
A return to negotiations is promoted most prominently by Hamas, and also by the families of Israeli captives, who have been leading a popular campaign in Israel to urge the Netanyahu government to prioritize the fate of the captives over the illusion of eradicating Hamas, and exchanges of captives over warfare.
More than its previous killings of Israeli captives, the shooting deaths of three Israelis on the verge of freedom by those supposed to secure their release, on the mistaken assumption they were killing a few more Palestinians waving white flags, has significantly intensified the pressure on the Israeli government. It has increased domestic and foreign criticism of the Israeli government and security establishment’s continued prioritization of the onslaught on the Gaza Strip. And it has once again exposed the hollowness of assertions by Israeli leaders that it is precisely this military campaign that is forcing Hamas to release captives. This is for the simple reason that it is Hamas that from the outset insisted that only negotiations would lead to the release of live captives, while Israel had rejected this on the grounds that it would bomb the Palestinians into submission. More than 70 days later it has yet to retrieve a single live captive through armed force.
The situation today is different than that which produced a truce and exchange of captives in late November. Hamas is now insisting it will not negotiate under fire and will only engage in discussions after a cessation of hostilities. Secondly, it has announced that the terms that governed the previous exchange were explicitly negotiated for the release of civilian captives, and that a different formula will need to be agreed for the release of military prisoners.
The Israeli government has also hardened its stance, repeatedly announcing that its military campaign – despite being on the verge of decisive victory almost every time an Israeli leader grabs a microphone – will require at least several additional months to attain its objectives. Several days ago, the government blocked Mossad Director David Barnea from traveling to Qatar to resume talks about a further Israeli-Palestinian exchange of captives. Barnea did subsequently travel to Europe to meet with Qatari Prime Minister Muhammad bin Abdel-Rahman Al-Thani for discussions about a new deal. So while Hamas may not yet be negotiating, negotiations are already taking place.
When the previous truce collapsed on 1 December, I had anticipated that a new one would be concluded within a week or so. It’s now been almost three weeks. I had underestimated Israel’s determination to throw good money after bad, and its desperation to chalk up significant military achievements so that it can declare victory to its constituents and the Israeli public at large. I also mistakenly assumed that Israel’s sponsors in Washington and Brussels, having concluded Israel was not up to the task and is putting them at growing geopolitical disadvantage, would intervene more decisively to wind down this war and thereby contain further regional escalation.
Where we go from here is difficult to predict. A new ceasefire seems likely in the coming weeks, and if one is indeed achieved it can be expected to last for considerably longer than the previous one. It’s a decision that will ultimately be made by Washington, not Israel. Some believe the US has had enough of this war and of Israel’s failure to achieve anything other than genocide, because of the damage it is inflicting on Biden’s 2024 election campaign. Others argue that Biden has already lost the progressive wing of the coalition that elected him in 2020, and is not going to risk additionally alienating the more conservative elements of his party by taking on Netanyahu during an election year. My own view is that Washington will decide not on the basis of what is happening in the Gaza Strip or US, but the broader region. The effective closure of the Red Sea and therefore the Suez Canal to global shipping by Yemen is in this respect hugely significant. Will Washington try to force it open and risk even further escalation, or tell Israel that time is up?
Netanyahu has of late increasingly taken to airing his differences with the US very publicly. He has repeatedly rejected a role for the Palestinian Authority in the Gaza Strip, and on 16 December announced that he has been opposed to the Oslo process for thirty years and repeated his rejection of a two-state settlement and independent Palestinian state. This places Washington in the strange position of needing a decisive Israeli defeat of Hamas to install the PA to the Gaza Strip. It would then need a PA discredited and delegitimized beyond redemption to revive Oslo. And in the ultimate irony a two-state settlement, should Washington ever seriously pursue one, would under such circumstances require the support of Hamas, which unlike Israel has formally accepted this paradigm.
14 December: Human Shields and Suicide Bombers
The following translation of a witness statement from the Gaza Strip was produced by a volunteer with the Palestinian Journalist Syndicate, because it is an account that according to the translator “we find to be highly credible”.
I am not in a position to verify the account provided, but would suggest that doing so is an urgent task for those who claim to oppose human shields and suicide bombings, and demonstrate they are acting in support of a principle rather than of a state. Begin Translation [Brackets indicate the translator’s clarifications]:
Prior to our apprehension within Majda Wasila School, located near Palestine Mosque in the western sector of Gaza City. [When this incident occurred, the civilian was in Majda Wasila School along with his family members and others, near Palestine Mosque in the western part of Gaza City.]
I was approached by an [Israeli] officer who asked my name, occupation, and age. He also sought information regarding my relatives and family.
He then directed me to accompany him. When I asked about our destination, he said: "I am going to present you to your Lord akin to a bride." Clarifying if he meant a groom, he elucidated, "a bride adorned in white attire and makeup." [In this dialogue, the Israeli soldier is making light of the possibility of killing the civilian.]
I was escorted to a location next to a tunnel that belongs to the resistance. There, the Israeli officer outfitted me with a belt containing explosives and a GoPro camera affixed to my head. He secured a rope around my waist, with the directive, "When I tug the rope, you are to return to me." I was held at gunpoint near the tunnel entrance and threatened with harm against my family. While I was resisting compliance with his commands, he suddenly thrust me into the tunnel opening, where I landed and remained for approximately 3 minutes. Then he started yelling [at me to move] and fired shots to force me to move forward in the tunnel. I walked a distance of about 40 meters.
He then pulled me from the tunnel using the rope, and said: "your Lord still does not desire your presence." I was handed over to the soldiers, who received instructions to find another individual of younger age. When I got back outside the tunnel, I discovered my family members still near the tunnel, and a child (15 years old) was taken from the group. Fortunately, he returned unharmed, and I saw him upon my release from detention.
The [Israeli military’s] objective underlying these actions is to avoid entering the tunnel. If the camera affixed to my head had detected the presence of resistance fighters within the tunnel, [the Israeli officer] would have detonated [the explosives on my belt], killing me and others.
Further details will come out in the coming days. End Translation.
An Israeli acquaintance adds: What is described here is not "use of human shields", but rather a much more severe crime: forced conscription of a civilian to act as a suicide bomber on behalf of the IDF. That being said, there is ample evidence that the IDF is also using human shields in recent weeks, both in Gaza and in the West Bank (including one instance in which after using a Palestinian as a human shield the IDF apparently attempted to execute him: at the time reports indicated he survived the shooting).
I would also note that in [Operation] Cast Lead [in 2008-2009] there was a somewhat similar case, which in Israel is dubbed the "Child Procedure" incident, in which a 9-year-old Palestinian child was forced to open bags which the IDF suspected were wired to explode. "Child Procedure" is a paraphrase of "Neighbor Procedure", the IDF-speak for using Palestinians as human shields (a practice notably used by newly popular "leftist" Yair Golan, who called it "very humane". It is widely assumed Golan will lead the leftist-Zionist camp in the upcoming elections).
13 December: Incident in Gaza City
On Monday Israel’s Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant, stated that Hamas’s military force, the Martyr Izz-al-Din al-Qassam Brigades as well as the Jerusalem Battalions of Islamic Jihad (PIJ) were on the verge of collapse. His views have been echoed by most other Israeli military and political leaders, including Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, Chief of the General Staff Herzl Halevi and Ronen Bar, Director of the domestic intelligence agency known as Shin Bet or Shabak. These assessments were augmented by reports that Hamas and PIJ leaders are no longer able to command or communicate with their forces, and that the latter, feeling abandoned, are deserting and surrendering in growing numbers. The battle for control over the northern Gaza Strip was effectively over.
Wednesday, Israel announced that ten of its soldiers were killed in a single encounter with the Qassam Brigades in the Shuja’iyya neighborhood on the eastern fringes of Gaza City, i.e. the neighborhood closest to the boundary with Israel. This is the highest daily toll of military casualties reported by Israel since 7 October. Significantly, those killed included a lieutenant colonel who was a battalion commander in the Golani Brigade, a colonel who led a commando brigade, and four majors. More than two dozen soldiers and officers were wounded in the incident.
Significantly, the Israeli soldiers were not killed in street battles but in a carefully prepared and executed two-stage ambush. According to initial Israeli media reports, Israeli and Palestinian forces were engaged in house-to-house combat in the Qasaba quarter of Shuja’iyya, and an Israeli force, monitored by video surveillance, entered a building from which Palestinian fighters had withdrawn. An explosive device that had been concealed within the building was detonated, killing or injuring a number of Israeli soldiers. When a second force arrived to rescue them the building, which had been previously mined, was blown up over their heads.
Further south, Israel airdropped supplies to soldiers near Khan Yunis, indicating the force was surrounded and could not be supplied by land from depots within Israel located only a few kilometers away. The villages east of Khan Yunis and closer to the boundary with Israel – Khuza’a, Bani Suhaila, Abasan al-Kabira and Abasan al-Saghira – as well as Qarara to its north continue to be bombed by the Israeli air force and artillery around the clock. In other words, Israeli land forces have yet to establish control over them. Intermittent air raids and battles also continue to be reported in Beit Lahia and Beit Hanun, the northernmost towns in the Gaza Strip that Israel entered on 26 October on the first day of its ground operation. And Hamas and PIJ last week fired their heaviest rocket barrages on greater Tel Aviv region since the war began.
Although Israel several days ago reported that it had completed its encirclement of Jabalya Refugee Camp and the adjoining town of Jabalya-Nazla, located to the northeast of Gaza City, and expected to complete their subjugation within a day or two, satellite imagery suggested encirclement was still a long way off. Nor have Israeli ground forces yet penetrated the inner neighborhoods of Gaza City.
Separately, Israeli media this week reported that its military forces have suffered over 5,000 wounded since (including) 7 October, with some 2,000 expected to have permanent disabilities, such as amputations. And yesterday the military reported that some twenty per cent of its casualties were the result of friendly fire.
Given that Israel is operating under military censorship the above can be assumed to be an at best incomplete and partial account. There are persistent suspicions Israeli casualties are significantly higher, and we also for example know very little about Israeli casualties resulting from daily attacks launched from Lebanon by the much more powerful and better-armed Hizballah. Prohibiting foreign journalists, investigators, and human rights monitors from entering the Gaza Strip is only side of the coin. Restricting what Israeli media are permitted to report, for not only operational but also political considerations, is the other.
The daily video clips released by Hamas, PIJ, and Hizballah, which document direct encounters with Israeli forces and whose authenticity has not been seriously questioned, certainly suggest a higher level of Israeli casualties. Israeli clips by contrast show soldiers firing into an empty classroom, or a stripped down captive (in this case a middle-aged restaurant owner forced to play the part of Qassam commander) successively handing over a machine gun apparently concealed in his shorts with different hands in multiple takes of Unconditional Surrender in Tokyo Bay. And, of course, hundreds of Hagari tunnel memes. As previously noted, Israel has yet to assassinate a senior Hamas or PIJ leader, and has thus far killed more UN staff, journalists, and health care workers (take your pick) than Hamas commanders. Its most visible achievements to date consist of raising an Israeli flag over Al-Shifa Hospital, and more recently blowing up an empty UN school in Beit Lahia to the deafening cheers of a company of Israeli soldiers cowering behind a sandy embankment hundreds of yards away.
Given the overwhelming disparity in military power, Israel indisputably has the capacity to fully conquer the Gaza Strip and deal a severe blow to Hamas and PIJ. If it so chooses. The question, rather, is whether it is prepared to invest the (Israeli, not Palestinian) blood, treasure, and time required to do so. In this respect Israel’s military doctrine, that its wars need to be short, decisive, and fought on enemy territory, has already been shattered. Instead, Israel is fighting a war of attrition on multiple fronts. This is also imposing significant economic costs. Aside from the obvious price tag, it includes hundreds of thousands of reservists mobilised and removed from the work force since 7 October, reductions in foreign investment and tourism, ships avoiding the journey to the port of Eilat, and other losses that can’t be compensated by US taxpayers. The so-called Gaza envelope surrounding the Gaza Strip, and the far north abutting the Lebanese border, account for the bulk of Israel’s agricultural production, including fruits, vegetables, poultry and eggs. Not only have the residents of these regions been evacuated, but the foreigners who do the actual work are no longer arriving.
It is probably true that Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu would, for personal as well as political reasons, like to see this war prolonged. As would his extreme-right brothers in arms. But those who are most determined to prosecute the war against the Gaza Strip, and Lebanon if given half a chance, are the security establishment. It is they who on 7 October lost the confidence of the Israeli public, and of their US and European sponsors. They are therefore determined to restore both this confidence and Israel’s power of deterrence vis-à-vis not only the Palestinians but the Arabs in general. No one likes to place their personal security in the hands of an incompetent weakling, or maintain a strategic partnership with one, but loves such an adversary. This explains the frenzied, genocidal violence unleashed by Israel against the Gaza Strip. It is not only a lust for revenge and campaign to either expel the Palestinians to the Sinai desert or make the Gaza Strip unfit for human habitation. It is equally to impress upon friend and foe alike that Israel remains a mighty regional power deserving of their support and fear.
Israel’s problem, as previously noted and demonstrated yet again in Shuja’iyya yesterday, is that its military is a highly efficient killing machine but mediocre when it comes to combat. You can’t conquer territory using only an air force. And ground operations are by contrast not cost free. As for reports that Israel has begun flooding the Gaza Strip tunnel network, such wars are rarely if ever decided by silver bullets. Destroying the water supply in the Gaza Strip is probably the more important motivation.
The Israeli military’s strength is colonization and genocide, not urban warfare. Even when pitted against a comparatively weak adversary that has been under occupation for half a century and blockade for almost two decades, two months have proven insufficient for decisive progress. Suffice it to say that Israeli, US, and European leaders have, in unison, been insisting Israel is fighting for its very existence and survival. Not against Egypt or Iran, or even Hizballah. But against Hamas and PIJ, which between them have zero fighter jets, zero tanks, zero battleships, and zero anti-aircraft systems.
Reeling from the attacks of 7 October, Israeli public opinion was initially solidly behind Israel’s war effort. The campaign by the families of captives in the Gaza Strip to bring their loved ones home alive at any cost has eaten into this consensus, particularly after the Palestinians demonstrated that negotiations and truce, rather than insane violence, was the only option in this regard. In a society more sensitive to military than civilian casualties, mounting losses such as those in Shuja’iyya will have a further impact. But as with the US in Vietnam, a crisis of confidence in political and military leaders who repeatedly offer rosy predictions, mistaking mass killings of civilians for imminent military victory, can be decisive. People don’t like being lied to on matters of national security. What scares them even more is a realisation they’re not being lied to because their leaders are delusional.
Aware of the dangers, expect Israel’s onslaught to escalate yet further and reach a murderous crescendo potentially without parallel since the Second World War. But there are increasing indications this is the darkness before dawn. When US and European leaders who have repeatedly demonstrated their thorough disdain for Palestinian life begin to advocate for a reduction in the pace of mass killings, it’s clear that as far as their real interests are concerned this war is gradually running its course.
12 December: More on Visa Bans
It seems the new fad among Western governments is to denounce settler violence and adopt measures against individual settlers. Following the US, the European Union and United Kingdom are now also considering the nuclear option: a visa ban against particularly violent settlers who are not citizens of the state(s) adopting such measures.
It’s the ultimate charade, even on its own terms: refusing to provide someone with something they do not have, are not entitled to by right, and may not even want, as opposed to taking away something already in their possession, hardly qualifies as a punitive measure. This is not an asset freeze or even no-fly list. The US has additionally indicated that it will not reveal the names of those denied a US visa under this initiative. So we won’t find out which, if any, settlers the US government considers a particularly violent threat to society. We’ll have to take the program’s existence and implementation on faith from the same people who gave us Iraqi WMD.
More importantly, we’ll have to take it on faith from the same people who have made the entire illegal settlement enterprise viable in the first place. This is because the states adopting or considering these visa measures have since 1967 not only refused to adopt a single punitive measure against the settlement project, which is true even for those who consider Israel’s settlements illegal; the states in question have adopted or acquiesced in numerous measures that directly support the settlement project.
This includes permitting their citizens to participate in the enforcement of the occupation by enlisting in the Israeli military and security forces (Editor-in-Chief of The Atlantic and US citizen Jeffrey Goldberg, for example, served as an Israeli prison guard); permitting their citizens to participate in the confiscation and theft of Palestinian and Syrian (and until 1979 Egyptian) land and property, and in the establishment of illegal settlements on these lands and properties; permitting their citizens to reside in, and conduct commercial activities in and with illegal settlements; permitting their citizens to carry weapons to contribute to the consolidation and expansion of illegal settlements; and permitting their citizens to participate in armed vigilante attacks and violent pogroms, including attacks that have resulted in the theft or destruction of property, ethnic cleansing, and murder. All with total impunity and a total rejection of accountability. To the best of my knowledge Western governments have since 1967 collectively refused to investigate, indict, charge, try, or convict a single one of their citizens for any act conducted in furtherance of Israel’s illegal settlement enterprise. (Corrections welcome). A very different approach than that taken towards citizens who, for example, travel to Syria to join ISIS or Sri Lanka to engage in pedophilia.
Closer to home, a network of organizations in Western states raise funds for the establishment and expansion of illegal settlements, support projects in them, and promote their interests in various ways with legal recognition and impunity. Most such organizations enjoy charitable, tax-free status. This includes those that funnel funds to some of the most violent and extremist settler groups, who openly espouse genocidal agendas
Similarly, Europe is the primary market for settlement products. But rather than treat such products with the same prohibitions imposed on for example blood diamonds, they have free access to Western markets and can be openly sold and advertised. Such products have often additionally enjoyed the same preferential access to markets that Western governments provide to products exported from Israel. By contrast, try sending money from your bank account in the US or Europe to Gaza to help a pupil buy school supplies.
The effort by Western states to present settler violence as an isolated phenomenon that exists independently of the settlement enterprise writ large, and one in which neither these governments nor their citizens are directly implicated, is ultimately an exercise in smoke and mirrors. But the greater sleight of hand consists of the focus on individuals, in order to divert attention from the central player in the settlement project: the Israeli state. It’s a bit like constantly blabbing about the urgency of humanitarian aid for the Gaza Strip while your bombs are ensuring many thousands will never need another meal.
9 December: More on Karim Khan
Regarding International Criminal Court (ICC) Prosecutor Karim Khan, there is an interesting personal dimension to his story. Karim Khan, although a British citizen, is the grandson of the distinguished Pakistani diplomat and jurist Muhammad Zafarullah Khan (1893-1985). The elder Khan was Pakistan’s first foreign minister, and to date remains the only person who has served as president of both the United Nations General Assembly and of the International Court of Justice.
More importantly in this context, the elder Khan in 1947 served as Pakistan’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations. This was the year during which the UN General Assembly debated the future of Palestine, and ultimately adopted Resolution 181 (II) (”Future Government of Palestine”), which recommended partition with economic union.
The UN first took up the Question of Palestine – which it has yet to answer – in 1946 at the request of the United Kingdom. Great Britain had ruled Palestine since the early 1920s pursuant to a mandate obtained from the League of Nations, the precursor to the UN established after the First World War and which was thoroughly dominated by the imperial powers. But in the aftermath of the Second World War the British no longer had the resources to enforce their will on a global empire. In August of 1947 for example, as the UN was debating various proposals regarding the future of Palestine, London relinquished control over India, the jewel in the British imperial crown.
The Palestinians and the Arab states were fiercely opposed to the UN partition resolution. They opposed partition as a matter of principle. They also opposed the UN resolution, on the grounds that it allocated more than half the territory of Mandatory Palestine to the proposed Jewish state even though Palestine’s Jewish population, consisting largely of foreign-born immigrants, formed only approximately a third of the total population, and also did not form a clear demographic majority in the regions allocated to a Jewish state. The UN was a very different organization in 1947, with only 57 members because most of Africa and much of Asia had yet to achieve independence from European colonial rule. Even if one accepts that the General Assembly has a right to partition territories and establish states, Resolution 181 would never have seen the light of day in today’s UN.
The partition of Palestine was also one of the very few instances during the Cold War where the United States and Soviet Union saw eye to eye on a major international question. The Soviets, along with their satellite states in eastern Europe, energetically supported partition because they viewed it as a means of weakening British influence in the Middle East. It was only later that they realized they had been playing midwife to the establishment of a Western client state in the region.
Muhammad Zafarullah Khan’s significance in these events is that during the General Assembly debate on Resolution 181 he gave arguably the most powerful and eloquent speech against partition. For those interested, it is reproduced in Walid Khalidi’s seminal anthology, From Haven to Conquest: Readings in Zionism and the Palestine Problem Until 1948. His speech, and for that matter the entire book, is very highly recommended.
More to the point, Palestinians (and others) who take an interest in these matters know who the elder Khan was and remember him, fondly, for his efforts at the UN in 1947. The younger Khan is well aware of this. When campaigning for the office of ICC Prosecutor, he made a point of engaging with Palestinian diplomats, reminding them of his pedigree, and emphasizing that on this basis Palestine has a special place in his heart and that he would and could never betray it. I have this from first-hand sources.
In my view Karim Khan’s objective was not so much to gain Palestinian support for his candidacy, but to prevent a Palestinian campaign against it. It is somewhat difficult to assess if he succeeded in this endeavor or obtained his position primarily on the strength of UK, US, and Israeli sponsorship of his candidacy (somewhat ironic given that the US and Israel have refused to join the ICC and ratify the Rome Statute). Be that as it may, and as related in a previous thread, once Karim Khan was comfortably ensconced in The Hague he mercilessly threw the Palestinians to the wolves without a second thought.
The manner in which Karim Khan was willing to use and abuse the memory of his grandfather reflects, to put it politely, on his character. It is reminiscent of the way Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, in different circumstances, built a political career atop the corpse of his older brother. Not that further evidence is needed, but it is one more indication that Karim Khan is unfit for office and needs to be removed forthwith.
Postscript: It has been bought to my attention that Karim Khan is not Muhammad Zafarullah Khan’s biological grandson. According to Karim Khan he never met his biological grandfathers, but had a very close relationship with the elder Khan and considers him his “adopted grandfather”. Family trees aside it has no bearing on the above, except to note that Karim Khan did not clearly reveal this distinction when campaigning for the post of ICC Prosecutor.
7 December: Article 99
Mouin Rabbani and Hasmik Egian
On 6 December 2023 United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres invoked Article 99 of the UN Charter. A consensus has emerged that Guterres has deployed the heaviest instrument he has available under the UN Charter. It is therefore worth exploring what he has done as well as its significance.
Pursuant to Article 99, “the Secretary-General may bring to the attention of the Security Council any matter which in his (sic) opinion may threaten the maintenance of international peace and security”. It is considered unusual for the SG to do so because such matters are as a rule brought to the Council by one or more of its 15 members, acting either on their own initiative or on behalf of other UN member states. Essentially, Article 99 gives the Secretary-General the authority to determine that an issue on the Security Council’s agenda constitutes a threat to international peace and security. It is in this context significant because the Council has since 7 October dealt with Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip primarily as a humanitarian matter. This includes the only resolution it has passed on the issue, UNSC 2712 of 15 November.
The last time the wording of Article 99 was explicitly invoked was in 1989, by Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar on account of the situation in Lebanon. Guterres himself invoked the spirit but not the letter of Article 99 in 2017, during the first year of his tenure, to draw the Council’s attention to the situation in Myanmar’s Rakhine State.
According to Guterres’s 6 December letter to the Security Council, he acted to “urge the members of the Security Council to press to avert a humanitarian catastrophe” in the Gaza Strip” and “use all its influence to prevent further escalation and end this crisis”, which “may aggravate existing threats to the maintenance of international peace and security”.
The sequence of events is not definitively clear but appears to have developed as follows: earlier this week the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the only Arab current member of the Security Council, and acting on behalf of the Arab Group (Arab member states of the UN) and states affiliated with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), indicated its intention to submit a draft resolution to the Council calling for a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip.
Given Washington’s consistent opposition to a ceasefire resolution, it appears that a coalition of Arab and other states, including some Security Council members, called upon Guterres to act. When considering their messages, he would have been further motivated to act by additional, alarming messages arriving from within the UN. Of particular note are those of Martin Griffiths, the UN’s Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, who has been the most direct and outspoken UN official during this crisis about the impact of Israel’s onslaught on the Gaza Strip. Together, these developments may have forced Guterres’s hand.
On 6 December Guterres issued his letter invoking Article 99. Shortly thereafter the UAE released its draft resolution, now explicitly presented as one “taking note and acting upon” the Secretary-General’s position. It is unclear whether the UAE would have gone ahead and introduced a draft resolution to the Council in the absence of Guterres’s letter, given the strength of US opposition. It is therefore entirely possible that it took a final decision to do so only after the UN Secretary-General issued his letter.
US Deputy Permanent Representative to the UN Robert Wood emphasized that Guterres’s letter changes nothing and that Washington continues to oppose a ceasefire and for that matter further Security Council consideration of the crisis. The US, together with the UK, did attempt to have the term “immediate humanitarian ceasefire” amended to either “humanitarian pauses” or “another urgent humanitarian pause”. But this, together with their attempt to have the resolution focus on condemnation of Hamas, was rejected by the UAE, the draft resolution’s author. Israeli foreign minister Eli Cohen was less diplomatic, and accused Guterres of “endorsing Hamas terror” and acting in support of the Palestinian movement.
While a veto of the resolution by the US and perhaps the UK as well seems a foregone conclusion, Guterres’s letter is nevertheless significant. Future historians are likely to identify it as accelerating the countdown to the end of Israel’s onslaught against the Gaza Strip and its Palestinian population.
Regarding the US role, some have speculated that Washington may be using the negotiations surrounding this draft resolution to influence Israel’s conduct of the war, which is isolating the Biden administration on the world stage. Some have gone even further and suggested that if Israel’s response to Washington’s concerns is excessively rude and dismissive, the US may even consider abstaining. As noted, this is speculation.
There are two additional issues that need to be taken into consideration in evaluating the significance of Guterres’s letter. For those who have not read beyond its first paragraph, the double standards in the language he uses make it indisputably clear that, once again, Guterres is going out of his way not to offend the United States and its Western partners.
Thus, in its third paragraph he recalls that he has “condemned repeatedly” the “abhorrent acts of terror by Hamas and other Palestinian organizations” in which “[m]ore than 1,200 people were brutally killed”. Yet when referring to Israel’s violence inflicted upon the Palestinians in the subsequent two months, which has claimed in excess of 15,000 lives, he cannot bring himself to condemn anything or anyone. Rather, he speaks of those “who have reportedly been killed”.
Similarly, while “accounts of sexual violence during the [7 October] attacks are appalling”, none of the depredations Israel has been visiting upon the Palestinians since that date merit similar characterization. This despite the fact that Guterres explicitly identifies these measures. In addition to the killings, “40 per cent of whom were children”, these include a “collapse” of the health care system as a result of which “more people will die”; “desperate conditions” that make humanitarian relief “impossible”; a genuine risk of “epidemic diseases” and “increased pressure for mass displacement to neighboring countries”; a “severe risk of the collapse of the humanitarian system”; and “a situation fast deteriorating into a catastrophe with potentially irreversible implications for Palestinians as a whole”.
With respect to the “at least 130” UN employees killed since 7 October, “many with their families”, which represents the highest number of UN staff killed in any conflict since the world body was established in 1945, Guterres has yet to condemn these killings, or even call for an independent investigation into them to ensure accountability.
The second issue is one of timing. The crisis erupted on 7 October, and alarm about the issues Guterres addresses in his 6 December letter have been on the international agenda since at least the second half of that same month. The caution, hesitancy, and delay in his response to this crisis cries out for explanation. As does his continued absence from the region.
With the exception of Griffiths, the same observation applies to many of his most senior officials. Griffiths as a humanitarian official has successfully managed to repeatedly place those issues within his mandate prominently on the global agenda, even as he cannot be expected to discuss the broader political crisis. The same cannot be said, for example, of the UN’s Under-Secretary General for Political and Peacebuilding Affairs, Rosemary DiCarlo, who has during this crisis been enveloped in an impenetrable invisibility cloak.
When DiCarlo finally visited the region in early December, the world only learned about it after her office issued a press release upon her return to New York. When she subsequently briefed the Security Council, she seemed primarily concerned with efforts to ensure the Palestinian Authority (PA) was sufficiently empowered to play a role in the future governance of the Gaza Strip, an agenda item that closely reflects that of her former employer, the US State Department. Reportedly, China’s Permanent Representative to the UN presciently took DiCarlo to task for her focus on “the day after” at a time when active hostilities are putting the security and stability of the entire region at risk.
In conclusion, Secretary-General Guterres’s letter invoking Article 99 of the UN Charter is politically significant. But as noted it also raises questions about other actions and opportunities the Secretary-General could and should have taken to promote a ceasefire.
5 December: US Visa Ban
On 5 December, the United States announced “a new visa restrictions policy targeting individuals and their family members involved in or meaningfully contributing to actions that undermine peace, security, and stability in the West Bank.” According to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, “Violence against civilians will have consequences.”
On this occasion, according to reports, the punitive measures are intended primarily for use against Israelis rather than Palestinians. Specifically, they are to be deployed against Israel’s West Bank settlers, whose pogroms against Palestinian villagers have been escalating dramatically in recent years. This explains why the measures are weak, ineffective, and ultimately meaningless.
As Blinken’s announcement makes clear, the measures concern “individuals” engaged in “violence against civilians”. Because the “individuals” include Israelis, and their “violence against civilians” is being inflicted upon Palestinians, in this case it doesn’t qualify as “terrorism”. That’s a term reserved for Arabs, including Palestinians who resort to armed force against Israeli soldiers on active duty.
If applied scrupulously, the visa ban imposes no legal penalties on the individuals concerned, regardless of how much violence they inflict on civilians, and even if their victims are US citizens. Correction: even if their victims are Palestinian-Americans. No criminal indictments, no asset freezes, and certainly no “Wanted” posters. Just a visa ban on them and their families. I suspect many such settlers will conclude that not taking the kids to Disneyland is a price worth paying to knock off a few Palestinians, ethnically cleanse a village, and replace it with a Jewish settlement. They can always take the children to EuroDisney, where “individuals” who inflict “violence against civilians” in the West Bank remain very welcome. Provided they’re Israeli and their victims Arab.
If the US was serious about taking on pogroms in the West Bank it could start by making it a criminal offense for US citizens to contribute to Israel’s illegal West Bank settlement enterprise, for example by residing in, or conducting commercial transactions with, the illegal settlements. But that’s not an option because Washington rejects the position, confirmed by the International Court of Justice, that the settlements are illegal.
This being the case, the US could alternatively make it illegal for US citizens to inflict violence upon civilians in the West Bank. Particularly because Israeli courts provide impunity rather than accountability, A healthy proportion of West Bank settlers are in fact US citizens, who together with the French cohort are among the most violent and fanatic of the bunch. Baruch Goldstein, who perpetrated the 1994 Ibrahimi Mosque Massacre, and a poster of whom for many years thereafter adorned the living room of Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, was a US citizen.
But this too is a non-starter. Not only does the US not consider the settlements illegal, it believes that West Bank settlers engaged in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians have a right of self-defense. Those affected by the visa ban, if it is indeed applied, would do well to remind the US that charity begins at home, and that it is unfair of Washington to punish them for running riot in the West Bank while giving US citizens running riot alongside them a pass.
Another option available to the US government is to revoke the tax-free status of US organizations that funnel funds to Israeli organizations and individuals engaged in attacks against civilians that are sufficiently violent to cause the US government to respond with a visa ban. Previous attempts to have US courts revoke the charitable status of what can only be described as US organizations involved in the financing of terrorism failed. But the initiative did not come from the US government. When it does act against such organizations, their status changes instantaneously.
Even if the US were to take each of the above measures – and, to be clear, it won’t – it would still only be scratching the surface of the problem. Israel’s settlement enterprise is a state project, not the work of vigilantes operating independently or in opposition to the state. Even those settlements that the Israeli government itself has classified as illegal because they were not established pursuant to government directives, are as a rule retroactively legitimized. The Israeli state is the engine of the settlement enterprise. It establishes and funds settlements, arms its settlers, and deploys its military to enable and participate in their pogroms. Armed settler groups are first and foremost auxiliary militias of the state, serving its policies and strategic agenda.
Ultimately, no initiative to curb settler extremism that ignores state policy will have much impact. And that’s not really on the cards for a US government that doesn’t even believe the settlements are illegal.
Not only are the measures announced by the US weak, ineffective, and ultimately meaningless, they’re also a pre-meditated diversionary charade. At a time when the US government is arming, funding, and providing diplomatic cover for Israel’s genocidal onslaught against the Gaza Strip, it helps to pretend that you oppose violence against Palestinian civilians.
4 December: Why the Truce Collapsed
The verdict is in. The US, as could have been predicted even before the recent Israeli-Palestinian truce came into force, has blamed Hamas for its collapse. (More accurately, the truce expired because no agreement was reached by the parties on its extension or renewal). Interesting context on this issue was today provided by US National Security Advisor Jake “All Quiet on the Western Front” Sullivan.
In exonerating Israel of any culpability for anything, Sullivan didn’t bother to highlight the 30 November attack by Hamas at the Givat Shaul junction near Jerusalem, which some have erroneously identified as the moment the truce broke down and Israel decided to resume its offensive against the Gaza Strip. Sullivan’s account makes sense, because the truce was geographically limited to the Gaza Strip. Thus, unless Givat Shaul was the work of a rocket fired from Khan Yunis, where we are now all certain the Hamas leadership is ensconced after its daring escape from the Al-Shifa Hospital, the attack was irrelevant to the truce. The same goes for Israel’s continuous incursions into West Bank cities during this period.
Nor does Sullivan waste time discussing the rocket that, according to Israel, Palestinians fired into Israel some 40 minutes before the truce expired. After all, Hamas had several days earlier detonated several IEDs against Israeli forces inside the Gaza Strip, claiming it was responding to Israeli violations. Although several soldiers were wounded, the truce was unaffected and the exchange of captives continued.
According to Sullivan Hamas is to blame because it refused to release “civilian women who should have been part of the agreement”, pursuant to which Israel would have reciprocated with the release of three women and/or children captives from its prison system for every one it received. Some Israeli sources have provided a slightly different account, namely that Hamas disingenuously claimed it needed time to locate the women because they were not in its custody, thereby demonstrating it was seeking to extend the truce at no additional cost rather than fulfilling its commitments.
The most detailed account was provided by State Department spokesman Matthew Miller. In his telling Hamas was refusing to release these women to prevent them from providing testimony about their experiences in captivity, clearly implying they were being held in sexual slavery. Unlike Biden, who continues to insist that he has seen videos that don’t exist of Palestinians beheading infants, Miller under questioning from Matt Lee of the Associated Press admitted that the only verified fact in his account is that he allowed his imagination to run wild. The dais made it impossible to determine if Miller was concealing a hard-on or worn-out copy of Raphael Patai’s The Arab Mind.
Hamas and Islamic Jihad have provided a very different account of the failure to agree on an extension of the truce. According to them, the women in question are indeed their captives, but are not civilians. Rather, they are soldiers and intelligence agents who were captured, in uniform, from the security installations the Palestinians overran on 7 October. If the claim is correct, this would explain their refusal to release them under the formula agreed at the outset of the truce.
From the outset, the Palestinian organizations offered Israel a choice for the exchange of captives: “All for All”, which would see the release of all captives held in the Gaza Strip and of all Palestinians in Israel’s prison system, or a phased exchange. Israel initially opted for a third option, military pressure to force Hamas’s hand, before its failure led Israel to accept negotiations and opt for a phased exchange. In this construction, captives are grouped in categories: civilian women and children; men and boys who do not serve in the military on account of their age; and serving members of the armed forces. Additionally, each category would be exchanged according to a different formula, so that the end result would be “All for All”.
The only agreement reached between Israel and Hamas comprised an exchange of civilian woman and child captives. While Israel would be correct to claim it never agreed to a different formula for other captives, the Palestinians are equally correct in their insistence they never agreed to release additional captives, from other categories, according to the same formula.
Given that the names of the unreleased women are known, it should not be particularly difficult to determine their status, and thus who we should believe. If Sullivan’s account is correct, it would suggest the Palestinians miscalculated in the belief they could extend the truce without meeting their end of the bargain. If the Palestinian version is validated, it suggests the Israelis either refused to negotiate a further agreement or were determined to resume their offensive against the Gaza Strip, and that Miller may want to consult a therapist.
The other point to bear in mind is that Israel did not launch its war against the Gaza Strip primarily in order to retrieve its captives. This was a secondary objective, subordinated to the determination of Israel’s military and political leadership to wreak vengeance upon Palestinian society, and deal a painful blow to Hamas (even Israeli commentators no longer take Israeli vows to eradicate the movement root and branch seriously). For Israel, the destruction of the Gaza Strip is the main event.
3 December: Yemen Makes a Difference
In contrast to most military operations, Yemeni attacks on Red Sea shipping don’t need to hit their target in order to achieve their objective. The Bab Al-Mandab (“Gate of Lamentation”) strait is a very narrow maritime chokepoint, only some 25 kilometers wide, separating Yemen from the Horn of Africa. More importantly, it is the only passageway connecting the Arabian Sea to the Red Sea. The Red Sea terminates at the southern entrance to the Suez Canal, through which 10-15% of global trade, including significant volumes of oil, gas, and Chinese goods intended for Western markets, pass on any given day.
Bab al-Mandab is best compared to the better-known maritime chokepoint located on the other side of the Arabian Peninsula, the Strait of Hormuz. The Strait of Hormuz, through which huge volumes of Middle Eastern oil and gas must pass to reach global markets, has often been in the news due to fears it would be made impassable by Iran in the event of an attack on that country by the US and/or Israel.
Global shipping companies often operate on tight profit margins and tend to be risk-averse. They also don’t like to pay more in insurance rates than they can earn from shipping a tanker of oil or deck of containers from Asia to Europe. In other words, they are not going to keep using Bab Al-Mandab until the first ship is sunk to the bottom of the Red Sea. Readers may recall that when the Suez Canal was blocked by a supercontainer ship a few years ago, an incident that had nothing to do with armed conflict or threats to global shipping, the entire global supply chain was disrupted for weeks on end, and large numbers of ships chose the much longer route around the Cape of Good Hope off South Africa to transport goods between Europe and Asia.
In other words, Lloyds of London only requires the knowledge of ongoing, regular attacks on shipping off the Yemeni coast to send its insurance rates through the stratosphere. Routine attacks by pirates off the coast of Somalia earlier this century resulted in billions of dollars in excess costs resulting from higher insurance rates and re-routing of ships alone. For Israel the challenge is even greater: if shipping to and from Israel can’t use Bab al-Mandab to reach Eilat, or pass through the Suez Canal to reach its Mediterranean ports, a ship delivering goods to Israel from e.g. India has to go around South Africa all the way to Morocco, through the Straits of Gibraltar, and then traverse the entire Mediterranean Sea to reach its destination.
Given that Yemen’s objective is to impose escalating costs on not only the perpetrators but also the sponsors and enablers of the Gaza genocide, it can achieve its goal without sinking a single ship to the bottom of the sea. It just needs to instil confidence in the global shipping industry that regular attacks on its assets will continue until Israel is called to a halt.
Separately, such attacks are intended to impress upon the West, and Washington in particular, that the self-proclaimed Axis of Resistance means business when it threatens to meet Israeli escalation with regional escalation. The latter, rather than the sight of thousands of Palestinian children blown to bits by US bombs supplied to its Israeli proxy, is the West’s main concern.
2 December: Scenes From an Echo Chamber
Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip has resumed in full force. The intensity of its bombing and shelling is as intense as before the truce, perhaps even more so. Israel will however find it difficult to continue this campaign for another 50 days. Even if does, the results are unlikely to be significantly different than what we saw during the first 50 days. In other words, eliminating Palestinian military capabilities in the Gaza Strip, let alone eradicating the presence of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and others from the territory, is an unattainable objective.
But Israel is extremely unlikely to be permitted another 50 days of war by its US and European sponsors. Their foremost concern, increasingly likely with each passing day, is uncontrolled regional escalation and the ramifications this could have on their regional and global interests, and on their economies as well. Their statements of concern about the staggering levels of death and destruction in the Gaza Strip, and about the humanitarian emergency which is predicted to result in epidemics, perhaps even famine, in the Gaza Strip, are for public consumption. After all, it’s a little disingenuous for these governments to wail about a reality they encouraged, justified, defended, enabled, and in many cases directly participated in creating. It’s equally the case that these governments, and the US in particular, could transform this reality with a single phone call. If they so choose. Rather, these statements of concern are designed to deflect public and political pressure upon such governments for a change of policy, provide cover for their complicity in Israel’s war, and present a more acceptable rationale for eventually calling a halt to Israel’s offensive.
According to press reports, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu informed US President Biden that Israel would need at least an additional two months to achieve its objectives. The US response was reportedly that Israel has only two weeks. Sounds plausible in view of the above factors. The message to the Israeli government would have been along the lines of “We gave you unlimited support, everything you need, and you’ve already had 50 days to achieve it. Regrettably, you weren’t up to the job. We now need to find an alternative to your military mediocrity that is somewhat more effective.”
Even though I have argued that Israel should be analyzed as not only a radical but also an irrational state, Washington when it so chooses retains the power and leverage to set policy for its client regime. That’s certainly the case with respect to major issues that directly affect US interests, and where the US controls the arms supply and other crucial factors like a vote at the UN Security Council.
I suspect that within the next week or so we will see a new truce agreement. It is likely to be more extended than the previous one, and see complex negotiations about further exchanges of captives. These could break down and result in a new round of warfare, but that too is likely to be short and sharp.
Ultimately, and once again assuming Israel continues to fail militarily (the most likely and plausible but not a certain scenario), the Palestinians are not going to release their most valuable prisoners, the senior Israeli military officers, without obtaining the release of senior Palestinian leaders in Israeli prisons. They will also seek a guaranteed end to Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip and the withdrawal of Israeli forces to their 7 October positions. This will be a very bitter pill for Israel to swallow, but the results of military failure tend to be bitter, and the US and Europe will help Netanyahu (or whoever replaces him) take his medicine.
This leaves a fundamental question in which Western and Israeli interests remain closely aligned, unresolved: removing Hamas as a governing authority from the Gaza Strip. The most logical resolution would be for Palestinians to choose their own leaders, but this is a non-starter for both the only democracy in the Middle East and the world’s greatest democracy. In my view a Palestinian coalition makes the most sense, not only because no single Palestinian movement has the requisite qualifications to single-handedly administer the Palestinians in these territories, but also because such a construction would assist in the revitalization of the Palestinian national movement. For example as a prelude to the integration of Hamas and PIJ into the PLO, and the formation of a new national leadership committed to pursuing Palestinian rights rather than US and Israeli approval.
At this stage in their struggle Palestinians require pluralism more than elections. Although the US and Europe are in principle open to the idea of a Palestinian government chosen and appointed by Washington and Brussels administering both the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Israel has invested decades in promoting Palestinian fragmentation, will be bitterly opposed to re-unification of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and on this issue is unlikely to be challenged by its Western sponsors. As importantly, Israel will prevent any coalition government that includes Hamas from taking office and discharging its mandate in the West Bank. Which probably means Hamas won’t accept it in the Gaza Strip.
But Israel and its Western partners are determined to remove Hamas as a governing authority from the Gaza Strip. On this point, my dear friend Ibrahim and I both almost died laughing this evening discussing the latest idea emerging from the Washington echo chamber. It’s genuinely that ridiculous, and that detached from reality. Basically, there is serious discussion of applying the same formula to Hamas in Gaza that was used to extract the PLO from Beirut in 1982.
In 1982, the US engineered an agreement whereby the PLO, both leadership and cadres, boarded trucks and ships in the port of Beirut, and withdrew from Lebanon, primarily to Algeria, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. That agreement was possible for several reasons: the PLO could justify leaving Lebanon, because Lebanon was a foreign country whose capital city was being destroyed by Israel; the decision to withdraw was endorsed (and in some cases encouraged) by the PLO’s Lebanese allies; the PLO had formal Arab legitimacy (it is a full member of the Arab League), and also international legitimacy (it has permanent observer status at the UN); and the US provided security guarantees for the unarmed Palestinian civilians the PLO would leave behind. The following month Israel perpetrated the Sabra-Shatila massacres via its fascist Lebanese proxies. The US had knowledge of these massacres in real time, did nothing to stop them, and the Palestinians learned an unforgettable lesson in the value – that is, worthlessness – of US commitments.
In 2023 the idea would be that Hamas, or at least its leadership, senior echelons, and fighters, would depart their Palestinian homeland for a life of exile. In other words, voluntarily commit political and organizational suicide, and relinquish their main source of leverage, so that Israel and the US can claim the victory Israel’s military was unable to achieve on the ground. And once abroad, explain to their constituents and Palestinians more generally, that they carefully considered the matter and concluded that saving their own skins justifies the extraordinary price Palestinians have had to pay to make this possible. Only in Washington…
Finding governments prepared to receive several thousand PLO fighters in 1982 was a real challenge. Finding ones willing to receive Hamas in 2023, particularly its military members, will be virtually impossible. Recalling the US guarantees of 1982, it also seems reasonable to assume that if Hamas leaders and cadres board a ship in what’s left of Gaza harbor it will be sunk by an Israeli torpedo before it leaves port, and if they leave by land will be picked off by Israel’s death squads soon after. Unless Karim Khan’s ICC grabs them first in a further act of fealty to non-members US and Israel.
If this war proceeds as anticipated, the US and Israel will need to reconcile themselves to Israel’s failure to achieve a decisive outcome. Israel will probably opt for a period of more limited strikes, incursions, assassinations, and similar operations, which Hamas is unlikely to leave without response. But wars of attrition are not Israel’s strength, and at a certain point a more durable cessation of hostilities will have to be reached.
That could give the West time to consider the possibility of accepting the principle of Palestinians choosing their own representatives. And consider alternatives to active support or passive acquiescence to Israel’s agenda with respect to Israeli-Palestinian and Arab-Israeli relations. It won’t happen under Biden, who apart from sprinkling a few dollars over UNRWA has maintained each of Trump’s Palestine policies. This includes the closure of the representative office in Washington of the PLO/PA, which Blinken is now promoting as Gaza’s new governing authority.
1 December: Truce Collapses
As predicted, no sooner did Antony Blinken arrive in the region than hostilities erupted again. The first killings, numbering in the dozens, resulting from Israeli air raids and artillery barrages throughout the Gaza Strip have already been reported.
Israel claims the truce ended because a Palestinian rocket was fired from the Gaza Strip. If true, also unconvincing. Several days ago, claiming to respond to a series of Israeli shellings in the Gaza Strip that killed several Palestinians, the latter set off explosive devices that wounded a number of Israeli soldiers, and the truce continued. There are larger forces at work. It’s at this stage unclear whether Israel, the Palestinians, or both are flexing their muscles prior to resuming the truce on improved terms, or whether there has been an Israeli decision to resume its offensive with full fury. I suspect it’s the latter.
Several dynamics are at work. The truce that expired on the morning of 1 December local time comprised an exchange of captives, whereby the Palestinians would release child, civilian woman, and foreign captives from the Gaza Strip, in exchange for Israel releasing women and children from the much larger pool of such Palestinian captives it holds, at a ratio of 1:3.
Additionally, the United States and Israel permitted a limited volume of essential supplies (food, water, medicine, fuel) into the Gaza Strip. The latter has been presented by USAID Director Samantha Power as a major US policy victory, as if the US had nothing to do with either the 17-year blockade of the Gaza Strip or the medieval siege of the territory since 7 October. As Elliott Colla so presciently put it, “Little did we know that [Power’s bestseller], A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, was a HOW-TO book.”
There are two conflicting dynamics at work. On the one hand, there appear to be few women, children, and foreign captives left in the Gaza Strip. This means that subsequent prisoner exchanges will require the release of a different category of captives from Gaza (e.g. male youths and older men whose age makes them ineligible for military service) in exchange for a different category of Palestinian captives (e.g. those with terminal diseases and the thousands arrested in the West Bank since 7 October). An agreement therefore requires not just an extension of the existing truce in order to continue with exchanges of captives pursuant to the previously agreed formula, but further negotiations about categories, numbers, duration, and the like. In effect a new agreement, particularly since each party is also introducing additional demands. For Israel, primarily ICRC visits to the remaining captives. For the Palestinians, Samantha Power’s consent to an increase in genocide-preventing essential supplies, and the release of Palestinian prisoners who hold Israeli citizenship.
The second dynamic concerns Israel. Rather than responding to its failure to achieve anything of decisive military significance during the past 55 days by searching for an offramp, it appears convinced that where overwhelming force has failed, even more overwhelming force will succeed.
It is in this respect important to recall that 7 October represents the most catastrophic military and intelligence failure in Israel’s (admittedly short) history, and Israel’s security establishment is desperate for achievements that it believes, falsely in my opinion, will at least partially remove the stain from its reputation.
Parenthetically, I would also take reports, such as in the NYT Thursday, that Israel had precise intelligence preceding the 7 October attacks (including all relevant documentation produced in secret by Hamas), but failed to properly act on them, with a large helping of kosher salt. In addition to prosecuting Operation Swords of Iron against the Gaza Strip, Israeli leaders are no less intensively engaged in Operation Cover Your Ass. Suddenly, everyone and their brother knew exactly what was about to transpire, and it happened only because someone else failed to recognize the significance of the intelligence in their possession. It’s also a way for Israel to broadcast to its adversaries, its allies, and clients of its military-intelligence industries that despite their abysmal performance Israel’s intelligence capabilities are second to none.
Israeli leaders have indicated that their renewed offensive will continue for several months, perhaps even a year, until each of its unattainable objectives is achieved. Highly unlikely. Israel will face significantly more difficult military, political, and diplomatic challenges compared to the previous fifty days.
If it decides to enter into the heart of Gaza City and other Palestinian urban areas it has not yet reached, as opposed to terror bombing them from the skies, its air force will be of increasingly limited utility, and its mediocre ground forces will be confronting increasingly entrenched Palestinian forces. It’s not going to be a cakewalk, to borrow a phrase.
Politically, the expired truce has already demonstrated that Israel can retrieve captives through negotiations, if not exclusively through negotiations, and we may see greater pressure on the Israeli government to return to the negotiating table from both Israeli public opinion and the international community, and perhaps even from some Western governments as well.
Additionally, the damage to the Israeli economy is mounting, and will deepen further as this confrontation continues. Diplomatically, there is already a solid consensus within the international community against Israel’s slaughter of Palestinian civilians. We are now also seeing several European governments responding to popular pressure by – at least verbally – withdrawing their unconditional support for Israel’s mass killings. (That said, no European leader has yet so much as acknowledged that a serving Israeli cabinet minister recently advocated deploying a nuclear weapon against the Gaza Strip).
The United States is much less responsive to popular pressures due to its more superficial democracy, in which the political class is bought and paid for by the donor class. (Opposition to the war in the US is of course vital, given its central role in this war, but results will take time to materialize and it’s important not to get disillusioned by the absence of immediate results.)
Add to the above the fanatical support of Israel of many in the US leadership (e.g. Biden, Blinken, Sullivan, McGurk), and their conviction that Israel’s success or failure will reflect on Washington’s geopolitical position, and it becomes clear that Israel doesn’t need Karim Khan in order to perpetrate war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide with impunity. The protective embrace of the Biden administration is sufficient in this regard.
In recognition of ever-increasing US complicity with Israeli crimes, there’s an established tradition in Israel that every outgoing US president is – accurately – described as the best friend Israel has ever had in the White House. I think it’s fair to say that the next US president will be facing an extraordinarily high bar and may be the first to leave office without this sordid accolade.
What will restrain Western and particularly US support for a continuation of Israel’s war is threats to US/Western interests. These could take the form of regional escalation, which seems all but certain at this stage; threats real or perceived to the security and stability of regional client regimes; threats to US installations in the region; global partners opting out of the West’s rules-based international order; or other forms.
So even in the unlikely scenario that Israel is prepared to expend the blood and treasure required to achieve objectives that most have already concluded are unattainable, the escalating damage its war is inflicting on Western interests – in significant part because Western states are such enthusiastically active partners – is likely to limit the time Israel has available before the clock starts winding down. That said, we are likely to see extraordinarily and perhaps even unprecedentedly vicious and lethal days ahead.
Finally, it’s also important to recognize that Israel can legitimately be characterized as an irrational state. Not just radical, but irrational. This has only partly to do with its knee-jerk resort to extraordinary levels of violence, the routine genocidal statements by its leaders, and the like. Primarily on account of the West’s consistent refusal to confront Israel with any consequences for the policies of its increasingly radical and fanatic governments, Israel has become ever more radical and fanatic. To the point where it is a state that is no longer capable of inhibition or self-restraint.
This is most evident in how it treats its closest allies. Most recently, it has accused the leaders of Belgium and Spain of supporting terrorism. Its representative to the United Nations donned a yellow star, with his entire entourage dutifully following suit, in the Security Council, and proceeded to demand the “immediate resignation” of the UN Secretary-General on account of his pedestrian observation that there is a conflict in the Middle East, with similar snarls directed at other senior UN officials. During Biden’s vice-presidency, it would announce a major settlement expansion on the eve of each of Biden’s visit to his favorite state. And Israel thought nothing of converting its greatest strategic asset, solid bipartisan support in the US Congress, into a partisan political issue. That’s just scratching the surface. The point is that those engaged in “day after” scenarios also need to take into account the irrational nature of the Israeli state.
27 November: The Zionist Movement, Israel, and Their Relationships with Anti-Semitic Forces
The relationship between Zionism and anti-Semitism is often misunderstood, and just as often deliberately distorted.
Contemporary political Zionism emerged in late nineteenth-century Europe as one of several Jewish responses to the twin pressures of persecution and emancipation. European Jewish thinkers variously proposed assimilation under liberal constitutional regimes, integration through proletarian revolution, or preservation through intensified religious orthodoxy as the preferred approach to ensuring the future of their communities within the European continent.
Political Zionism offered a radically different perspective. Absorbing the nationalist milieu of the time, Theodor Herzl and his contemporaries proclaimed that Europe’s Jews formed not a religious community, national minority, or common citizenry, but rather a people and nation in their own right in the modern, political sense of these terms. (non-European Jews were with few exceptions absent from Zionist considerations until the Nazi Holocaust).
Seen from the Zionist perspective the Jews of France, Great Britain, and Russia were not French, British, or Russian nationals, but rather members of a Jewish nation and people who happened to reside in those countries, not unlike a Frenchman born and raised in Denmark or Poland.
In the nineteenth-century European political milieu a people could only achieve its fulfilment in the framework of a nation-state, a defined and recognized area in which it formed an unambiguous demographic majority and exercised political as well as territorial hegemony. Thus the title and contents of Herzl’s best-known work, Der Judenstaat (variously translated as “The Jewish State” or “The Jews’ State”).
Recognizing that establishing a Jewish state on the territory of an existing European state was a non-starter, the early Zionists embraced that other European contribution to humanity: colonialism. Even a cursory reading of Herzl’s memoirs reveals that his hero and role model was Cecil Rhodes, the founder of the unlamented former colony of Rhodesia. The early Zionists variously considered, among others, Argentina, Cyprus, Kenya, Libya, Madagascar, Manchuria, San Domingo, the Sinai Peninsula, Uganda, and the western United States as the location of their state, before settling on Palestine.
They did so primarily because they believed it would resonate with otherwise skeptical European Jews, who despite current Zionist propaganda had over the centuries showed little inclination to emigrate to Zion even though plenty of opportunities to do so existed. The same, parenthetically, might be said of Middle Eastern Jews, the majority of whom for centuries lived under the same Ottoman rule as Palestine, but refrained from migrating there (as opposed to undertaking religious pilgrimage). “Next Year in Jerusalem” was an aspirational religious incantation, not a political program.
Given current efforts by the Defamation League and other Israel apologists to conflate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, it bears recollection that the first anti-Zionists were neither Palestinians nor Arabs, but rather European Jews. The religious amongst them considered a Return to Zion accomplished through human rather than divine agency nothing short of blasphemy. Liberals feared the existence of a Jewish state would lead to accusations of dual loyalty, and socialists and other revolutionaries insisted it constituted a renunciation of the struggle for Jewish emancipation and equality. The latter had a point, because it is a foundational principle of Zionism that anti-Semitism is permanent and immutable, and fighting it an exercise in futility.
(Interesting historical footnote: the only member of the British cabinet who in 1917 voted against its endorsement of the Balfour Declaration was also its only Jewish member, the Liberal politician Edwin Samuel Montagu. He denounced Zionism as “a mischievous political creed” that would foment anti-Semitism.)
Since the Zionist movement lacked the power and resources to independently colonize Palestine, it hitched its star to yet another European contribution to modern international relations: imperialism. Preliminary efforts to establish Jewish settlements in Palestine during the so-called First Aliyah of 1881-1903, which had a tenuous connection with Zionism and lacked great power sponsorship, met with only limited success.
During those decades, millions of Jews fled intensified pogroms and persecution in eastern Europe, primarily for the United States and the Americas. Secondarily for Britain and Western Europe. Supported with funding from the Rothschilds, much like Americans can today make tax-free donations to Israeli terror groups and their illegal settlements in the West Bank, Zionist activists hoped to use this refugee crisis and funding to establish settlements in Palestine. But most Jews left disenchanted after only a few months.
Zionist leaders from the very outset recognized the utility of enabling the anti-Semitism of European leaders in seeking their support for the colonization of Palestine. Under the circumstances they emphasized not only Zionism’s determination to promote the emigration of established Jewish populations from European states to Palestine, but particularly the removal of destitute eastern European Jewish immigrants who had become an increasingly visible and unwanted presence. Much like far-right parties today, Zionist officials sought to pander specifically to anti-immigrant prejudices – in this case against those they claimed were their own people. Witte, Von Plehve, and others, all were cultivated as potential strategic allies.
The Zionist movement ultimately found its champion in Arthur Balfour, who when prime minister in 1905 had been repeatedly and explicitly condemned for “anti-Semitism” by British Jews for his sponsorship of the Aliens Act, a piece of legislation specifically designed to keep eastern European Jews out of the UK. While British sponsorship of Zionism was primarily about the Suez Canal, Balfour – like the Zionist movement – undoubtedly viewed the prospect of fewer Jews, and particularly of fewer eastern European Jews, in Great Britain with great relish.
Since both Zionism and European anti-Semitism shared the objective of removing Europe’s Jews from the continent, and both opposed their further integration or assimilation into European society, and both considered anti-Semitism to be the natural order of things, their collaboration is entirely logical rather than counterintuitive.
Zionist policy during the 1930s and 1940s was no different. In 1933, the Zionist movement negotiated the Ha’avara (Transfer) Agreement with the Third Reich, thus aborting the anti-Nazi boycott to the fury of those who had initiated it to make Hitler pay a price for his rabid anti-Semitism. In 1937 Adolf Eichmann visited Palestine as a guest of the Zionist movement. In 1941 future Israeli leader Yitzhak Shamir even went so far as to propose a formal alliance with Nazi Germany against Great Britain.
Revisionist Zionism, that branch of the movement that produced today's Likud, the party led by Netanyahu, was founded Vladimir Jabotinsky in emulation of Benito Mussolini's National Fascist Party. His Zionist rivals used to denounce him as "Vladimir Hitler".
It is often forgotten that prior to WWII and the Holocaust, the Nazis were quite happy to see Jews leave and in fact encouraged Jewish emigration. It was a policy that found a willing partner in the Zionist movement. As the US and UK closed their doors to desperate Jewish refugees as the Nazis consolidated power, Washington and London had the support of a Zionist leadership that would support only Jewish emigration to Palestine. As David Ben-Gurion cynically put it in the late 1930s regarding the kindertransport: “If I knew it was possible to save all the children of Germany by transferring all of them to England, and only half by transferring them to Palestine, I would choose the latter, for before us lies not only numbers but the historical reckoning of the people of Israel.”
As Ben-Gurion makes clear, Zionism’s singular obsession with establishing a Jewish state invariably took precedence over the survival of Jewish diaspora communities, and it was no different during the Holocaust. Where the Jews of Europe experienced anti-Semitism as a cataclysm, the Zionist movement additionally saw it as an opportunity.
It is a pattern that has been consistently maintained since Israel was established in 1948. Israel may be a Jewish state, but its leaders base their relations with foreign powers and individuals not on the basis of their attitudes towards Jews, but rather their policies towards Israel. As has been repeatedly and consistently demonstrated in practice, support for Israel, and particularly for its most violent and illegal policies, makes anti-Semitism by those offering such support a forgivable sin. Paraguay’s Stroessner, the Argentine Junta, and Idi Amin of Uganda are just a few examples. More recently the far-right, which despite its fascist roots and persistent anti-Semitism has prioritized Islamophobia, and celebrates Israel as a model for subjugating Arabs, Muslims and other undesirables, has become – along with evangelical Christians – Israel’s most enthusiastic and dependable base of support. Nazi salutes and glorification of the Third Reich? No problem, provided one also salutes Israel’s own genocide.
Yet, because anti-Semitism has acquired the status of a uniquely pernicious form of racism in the wake of the Holocaust, both because of the nature of the Nazi extermination campaign and because its victims were Europeans rather than for example Africans, Israel has simultaneously wasted no opportunity to denounce each and every critic of Israel and its policies as an anti-Semite. Pro-Israeli anti-Semites get praise, and even a kosher certificate from the Defamation League, but anti-Zionist Jews are delegitimized as anti-Semites. The examples are too numerous to recount.
Israel has consistently compared its enemies to Hitler. Gamal Abdel-Nasser, Yassir Arafat, Saddam Hussein, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and a host of others have all had this distinction thrown casually their way. At the same time, and needless to say, any comparison of Israel to Nazi Germany has drawn howls of outrage on the pretext that the Holocaust was unique and it is therefore verboten to ever compare anything to that incomparably sordid chapter of history.
It has now reached the point where Israel – the Jewish state as it likes to call itself – is downplaying the Nazi Holocaust to bolster its own policies. Thus several years ago Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu claimed that Hitler was not responsible for proposing the mass extermination of Europe’s Jews, and that the thought hadn’t occurred to him until it was planted in his head by Palestinian leader Hajj Amin al-Husseini. Imagine the firestorm – initiated, needless to say, by Israel – if an Arab or European leader had suggested that the Holocaust wasn’t Hitler’s idea. In Netanyahu’s case his remarks were met by a deafening silence. Yet today, in order to promote Israel’s own genocide, we are being informed that the Nazi Holocaust was comparatively benign because Hitler only wanted to kill the Jews of Europe, while Hamas wants to kill all Jews everywhere and then explore outer space for further signs of Jewish life.
Israel and its flunkies, often led by the Defamation League, have transformed “anti-Semite” into an entirely meaningless term. At this rate it will soon be worn as a badge of distinction by opponents of genocide, including of the Nazi Holocaust. The victims of this thoroughly cynical and opportunist campaign are not only Israel’s Palestinian and Arab victims, but also Jews who are victims of genuine anti-Semitism and may find assaults on their persons, property, and institutions dismissed for wolf having been cried several million times too often. It is yet another way in which Zionism, which claims that Israel and its policies represent and are conducted on behalf of Jews everywhere, in practice jeopardizes Jewish well-being and security.
29 November: Hamas and ISIS
About a week ago the US and Israel suddenly stopped comparing Hamas to ISIS. The term “Hamas-ISIS” had become de rigueur among Israeli officials in their public statements, and along with their partners-in-crime in Washington they often insisted Hamas is worse – much worse even – than ISIS. It’s a familiar playbook. In 2001 the Twin Towers had barely collapsed and Ariel Sharon immediately began insisting the PLO was no different than Al-Qaeda and that Yassir Arafat was worse than Usama Bin Laden. Israel’s flunkies and apologists immediately and dutifully followed suit.
But “Hamas-ISIS” is no longer. Israel’s acolytes have for the most part yet to receive the message, and continue parroting a line that has gone out of style with their leaders, but will probably follow suit at some point within the next 24 months.
So, what happened? Most obviously, the US and Israel have been negotiating, concluding, and implementing a series of agreements with “Hamas-ISIS”. It’s not a particularly good look to be in intensive discussions with, and make one concession after the other to, a movement that is purportedly more vicious and brutal than an organization that not only the West but the international community as well considers entirely beyond the pale. Especially at a time when a broader agreement, extending beyond an exchange of captives, is reportedly being discussed in Doha by the CIA and Mossad chiefs – the city where not only the Qatari mediators but also Hamas’s current and former political leaders, Ismail Haniyyeh and Khalid Mashal, reside.
The fact that Hamas is negotiating exchanges of captives and releasing not only foreign but also Israeli Jewish civilians, rather than slitting their throats in gruesome snuff videos also doesn’t help the cause. Nor do testimonies by released captives that, the violence and abuse of their initial seizure notwithstanding, they have generally been treated humanely.
Of course, no civilian deserves to be held captive unless convicted of a specific crime by legitimate authority, yet the contrast between the testimonies of released Israeli and Palestinian civilian captives is enormous. Released Palestinian women and children speak of constant physical and verbal abuse, particularly since 7 October; all manner of deprivation; and an escalation of abuse once it became apparent they would be released. Furious at Palestinian joy at the release of their own captives, rampaging Israeli forces have also shot and killed several Palestinian well-wishers, enveloped most others in clouds of tear gas, and raided the homes of receiving families to evict journalists and warn against celebrations or even “expressions of joy”.
Palestinians are not ruled by the Israeli government in the same sense that Israelis within the pre-1967 boundaries are. Rather, they are subject to military government, effectively an Israeli military dictatorship whose rule is best described as totalitarian. It has for example banned flags, even particular color combinations (in clothing and painting for example), and in 2023 also “expressions of joy”.
Hamas videos of the release of their captives, in which they assist the elderly, provide water bottles, and wave goodbye (not quite ISIS-friendly optics) have been criticized as political theatre and propaganda. Fair enough. But it is still quite the contrast with the scenes outside Ofer Prison where Israel releases Palestinian captives. There, the best that Israeli propaganda can achieve is clouds of tear gas, intimidation of journalists, live ammunition, and bullet-ridden corpses. (And, for good measure, arresting more civilians than it releases.)
So not only did the US and Israel want to avoid the accusation they were negotiating with ISIS, the available imagery is also unconducive to the narrative. Joe Biden will go to his grave insisting he has seen videos of infants beheaded by Hamas, but it’s gotten to the point where even poor Jill rolls her eyes. Other Israeli and US claims have also drawn the short end of the stick.
For example, the Israeli authorities recently reduced their tally of Israelis killed on 7 October from 1400 to 1200. The reason is that 200 corpses, burned beyond recognition, belonged to Palestinians rather than Israelis. This suggests Hamas was not systematically setting fire to live humans. Similarly, Israeli intelligence (or what’s left of it) has now concluded that Hamas did not have prior knowledge of the rave organized close to the boundary between Israel and the Gaza concentration camp. Therefore this could not have been a premeditated atrocity. I am of course not claiming no atrocities were committed on 7 October, but rather that as more facts become available the “Hamas-ISIS” propaganda line becomes increasingly untenable.
If we put aside Biden’s hallucinations and take Netanyahu off autorepeat for a moment, the ideological, organizational, and political relationship between Hamas and ISIS remains a legitimate field of inquiry. It’s also pretty conclusive. Hamas and ISIS are indeed both Islamist movements. But that’s pretty much where the comparison ends. To suggest they are equivalent or identical is akin to claiming there is no difference between constitutional and absolute monarchies because their heads of state acquire office in the same manner.
Hamas is the Palestinian chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood, a regional Islamist movement formed almost a century ago. Its various national branches have sought to achieve political power through mass mobilization, and as such have formed political parties; provided social services; participated in elections, coups, and uprisings; engaged in armed campaigns against domestic autocracy and foreign domination; and in a number of cases formed internationally-recognized governments. It’s a fundamentally different template than that pursued by ISIS.
Hamas was established in the cauldron of the Israeli occupation, and like other Palestinian organizations actively participated in the struggle to end Israeli rule. In 2006 it participated in Palestinian legislative elections, fully certified by the Carter Center, which it won. In 2007 Hamas seized power in the Gaza Strip after a year during which its various domestic and foreign adversaries, to put it politely, actively worked to undermine it. In the intervening years it has in addition to attacks which have garnered global headlines developed relations with states as diverse as Algeria, Egypt, Iran, Russia, and Qatar; negotiated prisoner exchanges and ceasefires with Israel; freed and released foreign hostages (including BBC journalist Alan Johnston) abducted by rivals and criminal gangs; endorsed a two-state settlement with Israel; and cooperated with a variety of UN agencies and international organisations.
Its governance of the Gaza Strip has, to varying degrees, been hegemonic and repressive, but like its politics and policies defies any comparison to that experienced under ISIS’s self-styled caliphate in Syria and Iraq.
ISIS has in fact been bitterly critical of Hamas, and considers the group in its entirety, as well as each of ts individual members, “apostates” and “polytheists” – its most serious transgressions of all. This is on account of, among other mortal sins, Hamas’s participation in democratic elections, its failure to govern solely in accordance with shari’a (Islamic law), its relations with Iran and other regional states, and prioritization of Palestinian liberation. Perhaps for this reason Hamas made short shrift of attempts by the Islamic State movement to establish a foothold in the Gaza Strip, primarily in Rafah, during 2015-2016.
26 November: Can Hamas be Destroyed?
On 7 October Israel vowed to destroy Hamas. To eradicate it as an organization. To neuter it as a military force, political movement, and governing entity. More recently Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, in true mob boss style, stated that he had given Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, Mossad, orders to assassinate all Hamas leaders residing in exile.
Fifty days into this war, how close is Israel to achieving its objectives? The short answer is that it requires zero knowledge of military affairs to conclude that 1) Israel’s proclaimed objectives are unattainable, and 2) Israel has additionally failed to significantly degrade either Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ).
The elimination of Hamas is unattainable for several reasons. Most importantly, unlike for example ISIS or the European Union, Hamas has – much like the IRA/Sinn Fein or Facebook, in the decades since its establishment in 1988 become deeply rooted within society, and today exists wherever Palestinian communities are to be found. So even if Israel succeeded in eradicating Hamas from the Gaza Strip – or, more accurately, driving it underground – the organization will survive in the West Bank, Lebanon, Jordan, and elsewhere. Indeed, the combined efforts of Israel and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank since 2007 have yet to succeed in eliminating either its military, political, or social presence. FYI it is now 2023.
Previous campaigns to eradicate Palestinian movements have not only generally failed, but as a rule enhanced their stature. The scale of the current onslaught has catapulted Hamas’s stature to unprecedented levels among Palestinians, and indeed among Arabs and in the Global South more generally. That’s not a challenge that can be resolved by a fleet of F-35s armed with tons of high explosives.
Israel’s extraordinary self-regard and capacity for self-glorification notwithstanding, the elimination of Hamas is a non-starter, least of all at the hands of the thoroughly mediocre Israeli military and intelligence capabilities revealed on 7 October.
Let’s for example take a closer look at those charged with assassinating Hamas leaders abroad. When a Mossad cell tried to poison Hamas leader Khalid Mashal in Amman in 1997, the assassins were caught and arrested by one – just one – of his bodyguards, after a long chase. On foot. King Hussein threatened to publicly execute the James Bond wannabes, and Israel (in the person of none other than Netanyahu) was forced to deliver to Jordan not only the antidote that saved Mashal’s life but also the imprisoned Hamas founder/leader Shaikh Ahmad Yassin. In 2010, when Mossad inexplicably dispatched a team of some two dozen agents to Dubai to assassinate a single Hamas operative, Muhammad Mabhouh, they forgot to observe elementary principles of operational security (e.g. hiding their faces from hotel CCTV monitors), and all ended up on Interpol’s wanted list. Their amateurish use of foreign passports additionally strained relations with key international allies, like Israel acolyte Stephen Harper of Canada.
There’s no indication the agency has gotten any better during the intervening years. Unless you’re watching a Hollywood movie produced by Mossad asset Arnon Milchan, the Israeli foreign intelligence agency is not your go-to outfit for a campaign of high-profile foreign assassinations against an organization on high alert. I suspect American and European intelligence agencies are slowly reaching similar conclusions.
Mossad’s domestic counterpart, Shin Bet, hasn’t fared much better. Not only because it has been unable to eliminate Hamas military chief Muhammad Deif for decades, but more importantly because Hamas was able to arm itself, prepare, and launch the 7 October attacks right under its noses, and it hadn’t a clue. While Israel was busy “mowing the lawn” in the belief it was keeping Gaza’s armed groups in check, the Palestinians constructed an entire rainforest in plain sight.
Israel may well get a few high-profile scalps and proclaim the End of History, but the organizational impact will be minor and temporary. Yassin was assassinated in 2004, a time when the most powerful rocket in the Hamas arsenal had difficulty making it across my living room. Its successful assassination of Hizballah leader Abbas in Mussawi in 1992 produced Hassan Nasrallah, Israel’s worst nightmare. In 2006, a daring midnight wartime raid in the Bekaa Valley finally captured Hassan Nasrallah. But there was a minor hiccup: the Mossad, which constantly proclaims itself the greatest and most sophisticated intelligence agency in recorded history, confused the head of Hizballah with a greengrocer bearing the same name.
Similarly, Israel’s assassination campaign against Iranian nuclear scientists has been – to put it mildly – ineffective. Even the 2004 assassination of Yassir Arafat was counterproductive, as it set the stage for not only the obedient non-entity that is Mahmoud Abbas but also made possible the rise of Hamas as a genuinely national movement.
But I digress. How significantly has Israel weakened Hamas since 7 October? If you listen to Daniel Hagari (the tunnel meme celebrity), Defense Minister Yoav Gallant (who looks like death warmed over when delivering good news), or Netanyahu, it’s clear there is very little left of the Palestinian movements, their leadership, or infrastructure. Antony Blinken, Jake “All Quiet on the Western Front” Sullivan, and John “Tearstosterone” Kirby, who seem to prefer receiving news after it has been vetted by the Israeli military censor, appear similarly confident.
But once you step outside their echo chamber reality tells a very different story. A significantly degraded organization would not have been able to uniformly and simultaneously cease firing throughout the Gaza Strip at the very moment a truce went into effect. Or to continue firing coordinated rocket barrages until moments before. Or to record, edit, and centrally broadcast video footage of its military operations from multiple locations on a nearly daily basis. Or collect and deliver captives from multiple locations, to multiple locations, during the truce – including deliberately choosing a location in central Gaza City that the Israeli military claimed is under its control.
The most important functions of any military organization – command and control, communications, logistics, reconnaissance, PR, and last but not least the ability and will to fight, appear intact and at best marginally affected. As pointed out previously, Israel has killed more UN staff than Hamas commanders. The same in fact holds true for journalists and medical personnel. And the Israeli military has yet to unearth a fraction of the tunnels found in Hagari memes.
It's inconceivable that Hamas has not been weakened and degraded during the past 50 days, or not lost important cadres and commanders, or depleted a significant proportion of its arsenal. But significantly degraded? The evidence for this is entirely absent. The Israeli military is admittedly a highly efficient killing machine, but also a mediocre fighting force, particularly in ground operations. Wars are not won by slaughtering children by the thousands, or turning Gaza City into rubble and depriving an entire society of basic necessities. The Germans tried this in the Soviet Union, and the Americans in Iraq, and it didn’t end well for either of them. Many have expressed disgust at the video of an Israeli major dedicating the destruction of a building to his daughter on her second birthday. One could also point out that when a military reaches the point of celebrating the demolition of an apartment building, it should repurpose as a municipal engineering corps and can no longer be considered a serious fighting force.
This also helps explain why the US – by any standard an active participant in this war – and Israel decided to not only negotiate with Hamas, but specifically with Yahya Sinwar, the architect of the 7 October attacks, and to accept most of Hamas’s conditions for the agreement reached several days ago.
Before the truce was concluded US and Israeli officials – who previously rejected anything of the sort – explained that it would be an important agreement because it would legitimize a subsequent continuation and escalation of the war against the Gaza Strip. Several additional months on the scale of what we have witnessed this past month or even greater, as Gallant and Hagari keep promising, now seems increasingly unlikely.
To be sure, Israel has an overwhelming advantage in military power. But when a serving cabinet minister advocates using a nuclear weapon against the Gaza Strip (a threat that has yet to be acknowledged by a single Western leader), it suggests the conventional military is having difficulty succeeding.
Given its overwhelming power, Israel can of course inflict very severe damage on not only Palestinian society but also Hamas. It will almost certainly make another effort to do so in the coming days or weeks. But it seems increasingly unlikely it is prepared to expend the blood and treasure required to achieve a meaningful military result. Its US and European sponsors also appear to be reaching a point where they would prefer to gradually wind this down before it gets completely out of hand and Israeli conduct ends up damaging rather than promoting their interests in the region.
Israel’s systematic, deliberate attacks on the civilian population of the Gaza Strip, and systematic destruction of civilian infrastructure, should be understood in this context. In addition to being motivated by a lust for revenge and desire to achieve a body count many time higher than that inflicted by the Palestinians on 7 October, such campaigns, for example by the Nazis in occupied Europe, the French in Algeria, the British in Kenya, the US in Iraq and before that in Vietnam/Laos/Cambodia, and indeed Israel in Palestine and Lebanon, deliberately target civilian society in order to put pressure on armed groups that superior military force is unable to eliminate. The British after all pioneered the concentration camp during the Boer War for this objective, decades before the Nazis repurposed it for mass extermination.
Given the above examples, one might conclude that such tactics rarely end well for the occupiers. They often don’t. Yet it is also true that the dustbin of history is littered with just causes. In the case of Israel and the Palestinians, and despite the colossal imbalance of power, it appears that Israel is increasingly losing the plot.
25 November: Truce
It is difficult to predict whether or not the Israeli-Palestinian truce will be extended beyond its expiration on the morning of 29 November, or for that matter whether it will even last until then.
There are a number of factors that would appear to encourage a resumption of the Israeli offensive. Many have pointed to Netanyahu, and his personal interest in prolonging the conflict in order to remain in power as a wartime leader and thereby avoid conviction on corruption charges. This is not irrelevant, but also at best a secondary factor. I don’t believe the Israeli prime minister can drag the entire country into a war against its will in a transparent effort to save his political skin. And even if he did, it merely postpones the day of reckoning and buys him some time to cut a deal that would see him avoid a prison sentence. Furthermore, his management of the war is placing severe strain on the governing coalition because he has been forced to make compromises with political rivals, and conclude agreements with the Palestinians, that would otherwise be unnecessary.
Rather, it is Israel’s entire political and military-intelligence leadership that has the greatest interest in renewing the war. They are collectively and individually responsible for the 7 October debacle, the most catastrophic military failure in Israel’s (admittedly short) history. Since that date and despite the most intensive bombing campaign in the history of the Middle East against a fairly modest adversary that doesn’t possess a single airplane, tank, anti-aircraft battery, or APC, the Israeli military has failed to achieve anything of military significance - unless one considers raising a flag over a hospital and 10,000 tunnel memes the greatest battlefield accomplishment since the Soviet victory at Kursk.
Israel’s initial strategic objective was to expel the Palestinian population of the Gaza Strip into the Sinai desert. Despite enthusiastic and energetic US support for this exercise in ethnic cleansing, particularly by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, the initiative was stopped dead in its tracks by Arab opposition and Palestinian resolve. Israel and the US also vowed to eradicate Hamas root and branch, as both a military force and political movement, and jointly insisted there would be no truce until this was achieved. They also repeatedly proclaimed that only military pressure rather than negotiations would result in the recovery of their captives. One month later and they have negotiated and concluded an agreement with the architect of the 7 October attacks, Yahya Sinwar, for both an exchange of captives and a truce, and on conditions that closely mirror those proposed by Hamas before negotiations began. Israeli leaders and their US sponsors have a tendency to believe that where force fails to achieve an objective the solution is even greater violence, and this forms an additional incentive for them to resume hostilities.
Among these are forces within the Israeli governing coalition, not limited to Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, who see the current crisis as an opportunity: to reclaim the Gaza Strip for colonisation, to intensify settlement and ethnic cleansing of the West Bank, to further dispossess Palestinian citizens of Israel, and ultimately to make Greater Israel a reality. Others in the leadership believe this is an opportune time for a regional conflict, and are convinced that if they play their cards right, they can draw the US into a direct confrontation with Lebanon and perhaps even Iran.
But there are also and perhaps more compelling reasons for an extension. The truce agreement has been structured to permit and encourage further exchanges of captives, which can only take place if the guns remain silent. Thus far, only Israeli and dual-national women and minors are being released by the Palestinians. This was agreed in order to allay Israeli concerns that the US would prioritise the release of its own citizens and then abandon the negotiations, and to bolster Netanyahu’s standing with the Israeli public. The US and European governments, who have functioned as Israel’s partners in this war, thus have a real incentive to extend the truce, and can expected to make this preference known to Israel.
Within Israel, the Israeli public, which has clear memories of the 2011 Shalit prisoner exchange, has had a further demonstration that not one captive was recovered on account of military pressure, while dozens achieved freedom through negotiated agreements. And Qatar and Egypt have demonstrated their credentials as mediators that are able to deliver. They are reportedly already proposing a further 5-6 day extension of the present agreement. Public pressure on the government to continue with the truce could therefore be significant, and play a significant role.
Israel’s military failures notwithstanding it is also the case that if it resumes operations, its most difficult challenges lie ahead rather than behind it. Cognizant of its mediocrity as a fighting force, it may choose to cut its losses and take satisfaction with the staggering levels of death and destruction inflicted upon the Gaza Strip.
With Blinken largely sidelined in Washington, the US agenda appears to be increasingly dominated by concerns about regional conflict. A resumption of hostilities makes further such escalation a virtual certainty. US confidence in Israel’s ability to fight a two-front war and potentially on three fronts is non-existent, as is Washington’s appetite for another US war in the Middle East during an election year. Red Sea shipping (and rising insurance rates), attacks on US bases in Iraq and Syria, and the specter of confrontation with Iran, even if unlikely, are additional concerns. US client regimes in the region appear largely secure, but threats to their stability could emerge suddenly. While unprecedented demonstrations against Biden’s complicity in the Gaza killing fields and the possibility of Democratic voters sitting out the 2024 elections in disgust are a factor, Biden seems wholly unconcerned and determined to stay the course despite the political cost. In any case, and particularly in recent decades US elections are decided by dollars not voters – about half of whom typically don’t vote in presidential elections anyway.
European governments are more susceptible to public opinion and electoral consequences, and some of these have begun to advocate less or even no further mass killing in Gaza. Arab states, and other US partners globally, would prefer that this ended yesterday.
Informed by Israel’s instrumentalization of ceasefires during the 1982 Siege of Beirut to advance militarily, I initially believed the truce unlikely to last more than a few hours. But conditions in 2023 are fundamentally different. While it is true that Israel’s lust for revenge appears insatiable, the uncompromisingly tough talk coming from Defense Minister Gallant and others may prove to be cover for accepting a truce extension on the pretext that Israeli threats made it possible.
Hamas’s ability to remain intact, and Israel’s inability to defeat it, makes an extension of the truce both more and less likely. Again, one can at this stage only speculate, but I suspect there will be a temporary extension, Israel will at some point launch a final, furious assault, and its failure may prove to be the point where the end comes in sight.
25 November: Itamar Ben-Gvir
Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel's Reinhard Heydrich wannabe, has banned "expressions of joy" in East Jerusalem for released prisoners. "My instructions are clear: Expressions of joy are equivalent to backing terrorism, victory celebrations give backing to those human scum". Ben-Gvir's stormtroopers now threatening any liberated prisoner whose freedom is publicly celebrated with re-arrest. He can't stomach presiding over the early release rather than execution of prisoners. The true mark of a desperate, defeated regime.
Ben-Gvir views introduction of death penalty as his signature policy and wants mass executions of Palestinian prisoners as his enduring legacy. He’s now overseeing their early release. The harder they come…
24 November: US Negotiators
There’s a reason why CIA chief Burns rather than Secretary of State Blinken was the chief US negotiator with Hamas to reach the current truce. One important reason is that unlike Blinken, who is a rather clueless airhead when it comes to the Middle East, Burns knows the region well and understands its politics. More importantly, while Blinken may be a diplomat who has never handled so much as a water pistol, the guy just loves war. As in obsessively besotted with it. Since reaching adulthood he’s done everything within his power to promote each and every war in the Middle East, and also worked overtime to promote armed conflicts that unfortunately for him ultimately didn’t erupt. He probably still considers the 2003 Iraq War his greatest accomplishment. It’s like the guy is either advocating for war or playing Call of Duty 24/7. Blinken is not the person you want in the room when you’re conducting complex diplomacy and trying to reach actual agreements with adversaries, as opposed to promoting mass killings and apocalyptic destruction. That's why the White House left the serious diplomacy to Burns, and recalled Blinken to Washington to issue meaningless platitudes about the current crisis. Now that an agreement has been reached, he's being allowed back to the region for a short trip.
23 November: The Decline and Fall of Hasbara
What has happened to Israeli hasbara (“explaining”, i.e. propaganda)? Others may disagree but it used to be professional, sophisticated, intelligent, and effective. Different messages were carefully tailored to appeal to the agendas, values, sentiments, and prejudices of different audiences. It was believable if you didn’t know better, and if you did real effort was required to expose it.
Today it is crude and vulgar to the point of being cartoonish, more often than not outlandishly detached from reality, and aside from committed apologists persuades nobody aside from Western mainstream media organisations which still dutifully report its claims as serious news. Beyond this narrow orbit Israeli propaganda produces a vastly greater volume of sarcastic memes than serious discussions.
So what happened? Simply stated, Israel has had it too good for too long. For decades its lies, distortions, and dubious assertions went essentially unchallenged. Then highly successful campaigns were launched by e.g. AIPAC and the Defamation League to delegitimise any who would dare criticise Israel and place them beyond the pale. As a result Israeli hasbara, much like the Israeli military, became complacent, lazy, and mired in past glory. It failed to recognise and prepare for new challenges emerging on the horizon, and once these became real was unable to respond to them with more than rote barking of “anti-Semitism”. Gilad Erdan, Israel’s clownish Permanent Representative to the United Nations, is the personification of Israeli hasbara in the twenty-first century. Military spokesperson Daniel Hagari runs an increasingly close second.
But there is also another dynamic at work. Israel’s elites as well as Israeli society have in recent decades shifted so decisively to the right that they are no longer able to formulate effective messages for multiple audiences without violating their own core principles. They would rather lose the argument if winning it means they have to go through the motions of expressing support for negotiations with the Palestinians, a two-state settlement, equal citizenship for Palestinians in Israel, and so on. As a result they are unable to reach beyond the converted - MAGA types, Islamophobic white supremacists, messianic evangelicals, and the like. For these reasons Israeli hasbara has in my view reached structural dead ends from which it cannot recover.
23 November: Nazis?
Israel has repeatedly denounced Hamas as Nazis. It has now concluded yet another agreement with the Palestinian movement. If we accept Israel’s characterisation of Hamas, this means it is negotiating with Nazis. Sound strange? Not really.
In 1933 the Zionist movement shattered the Ant-Nazi Boycott when it concluded the Ha’avara (Transfer) agreement with the Third Reich. In 1937 Adolf Eichmann visited Palestine as a guest of the Zionist movement. In 1941 Yitzhak Shamir proposed an alliance with Nazi Germany against Great Britain. And in 1944 Rudolf Kastner, prominent Hungarian Zionist, negotiated an agreement with Adolf Eichmann that facilitated the deportation of Hungary’s Jews to Auschwitz.
That’s the short and partial version. Perhaps characterizing Hamas as Nazis made it easier for Israel to negotiate an agreement with it.
21 November: Truce?
In an interview last week I speculated that there may have been an informal US-Israeli agreement: The Biden administration would support Israel’s invasion of Al-Shifa Hospital, and would cover for this war crime with lies of its own about the existence of a Palestinian Pentagon beneath it. But once it became clear that the only facility on the premises was a hospital and Israel completed its destruction, the US would finalise a deal with Hamas and Israel would agree to its terms. This is what now appears to have happened: in exchange for US support for Israel’s systematic destruction of the health sector in the Gaza Strip, a US-Israeli deal with Hamas has been reached. Some observations on this agreement:
The US and Israel, which vowed to eradicate Hamas, are negotiating with the Palestinian movement and reaching agreements with it. Qatari-Egyptian mediation is a formality. Biden and Netanyahu are not negotiating with Cairo and Doha. Judging by Israeli press reports Hamas was desperate for any respite, however brief, from the Israeli onslaught for almost any price. Yet the deal includes: the release of 3x the number of Palestinian women and children by Israel; no Israeli soldiers included in the exchange; humanitarian supplies to the entire Gaza Strip; a continuous 4-day ceasefire rather than for only several hours a day; and specified periods during which Israeli jets and drones are prohibited from using the airspace over the Gaza Strip.
This is quite close to the deal initially offered by Hamas some time ago, and it seems all of its key conditions have been accepted by Israel and the US. Desperate, you say? If the adage that negotiations reflect reality on the ground rather than overturning it applies, Hamas – in contrast to the Palestinian population of the Gaza Strip that has been Israel’s main target – seems to remain rather intact.
Hamas has forced the US and Israel to consent to the supply of essential humanitarian supplies throughout the entirety of the Gaza Strip. In other words, Hamas has in one fell swoop achieved exponentially more on the humanitarian front than the much-vaunted US “negotiations” about humanitarian relief during the past month. This confirms that the entire US effort was nothing but a circus and diversionary charade to enable Israel to continue with its mass killings and transform the Gaza Strip into a wasteland and killing field.
It bears repeating: Hamas forced the US and Israel to allow food, water, medicine, and fuel to reach the entire civilian population of the Gaza Strip. But of course, Hamas are Nazi-ISIS terrorists, Israel a light unto the nations with the world’s most moral army, and the US the world’s greatest democracy whose sole mission is to spread the gospel of human rights to the rest of the planet.
What happens next is difficult to assess. According to reports only Israeli and dual nationals are being released, presumably to help the Israeli leadership swallow this very bitter pill. This also means that further negotiations to release foreign citizens are ongoing, potentially leading to an extension of the ceasefire. I find it difficult to believe that the Israeli leadership – not just Netanyahu – can accept this. Although the Gaza Strip has been substantially destroyed, Hamas hasn’t, and none of its key leaders have been located.
If Israel is confident it can flout US policy and once again incur no consequences for doing so, it will. The Israeli-Lebanese front also seems to be rapidly escalating. While it is true that it is in Netanyahu’s personal and political interest to keep this conflict going, I don’t believe he can do so against the will of the Israeli leadership. The security establishment is desperate to wipe the stain of 7 October but has yet to kill more Hamas commanders than UN staff. Other coalition partners see the crisis as a golden opportunity to unleash the apocalypse and therefore voted against this deal.
So further escalation is likely. But it is also possible implementation of this deal could cause the government to collapse under a combination of internal contradictions and public pressure. The US leadership is also a question mark. With respect to the impact of this crisis on US interests in the region and beyond, and particularly the question of regional escalation: Biden doesn’t care, Blinken doesn’t know, and Burns and Austin are shitting bricks. Perhaps the one conclusion that can already be drawn: the various “day after” scenarios emanating from the Washington echo chamber can be safely filed away. They require the eradication of Hamas, not negotiated agreements with it.
20 November: Piracy
Given my limited knowledge of international law, could someone please explain why Yemen seizing a ship in international waters is very, very bad but Israel seizing a ship in international waters and killing ten of its passengers is very, very good?
16 November: Intelligence Failure?
Can Israel’s Al-Shifa Hospital debacle, and specifically the Biden administration’s full-throated support for Israel’s fraudulent claims about the hospital and for its invasion of the compound, be characterised as a US intelligence failure? Not in my view.
An intelligence failure requires the existence of actual intelligence reports that have reached particular conclusions with sufficient confidence, and are deemed sufficiently reliable by relevant decision-makers, to inform their policies. When such reports are subsequently found to have been based on significant errors of fact and/or analysis, resulting in policy debacles, we can legitimately speak of an intelligence failure. The 1968 Tet Offensive in Vietnam and 1973 October War are considered classic intelligence failures, for the US and Israel respectively. Why? Because there was extensive genuine intelligence and reporting preceding these events, but these were based on either faulty data or produced flawed analysis, contributing to disastrous decision-making.
The 2003 invasion of Iraq was by contrast not an intelligence failure. Why? Because the US and UK governments knowingly fabricated false reports about Iraqi WMD, Iraq’s relationship with Al-Qaeda, and other issues. Their fabrications either did not have a basis in existing intelligence, or thoroughly distorted the available intelligence, or were produced by alternative intelligence procedures specifically designed to produce fraudulent conclusions that would promote government policy. Colin Powell’s subsequent protestations about being hoodwinked by the CIA notwithstanding he was a liar, not a fool.
If we turn to Al-Shifa, the US cannot claim it was fooled by Israeli intelligence. US officials have repeatedly insisted they possess independent intelligence, collected by US agencies, that corroborate Israeli claims. More than 24 hours after Israel invaded the hospital and it became indisputably clear that such intelligence could not have existed, Joe Biden continues to insist that it is both real and wholly accurate.
But it’s inconceivable that US intelligence agencies independently collected detailed, extensive information about a facility that doesn’t exist. In other words, like Powell, Biden is lying. But unlike Powell, he’s also a fool.
US National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby has made similar claims. The proposition that Kirby, a retired admiral, would have been willing to make claims of such significance without first ensuring they are substantiated by reliable intelligence, simply stretches credulity. In other words, he is certain to have checked, found out that there was nothing to substantiate the claims, and then went to the podium and knowingly lied to the assembled media. Like Biden, both a liar and a fool. For my part I consider it a certainty that we will eventually learn – probably later than sooner – that there was never any reliable US intelligence, collected independently of Israel, that concluded there was anything of significance below Al-Shifa Hospital, let alone a Palestinian Pentagon. Is this Biden’s 2003 moment? No, he already had that in 2003 when he was an enthusiastic sponsor of the illegal invasion of Iraq.
15 November: United Nations in the Dark
In response to the 2003 Canal Hotel bombing in Baghdad, in which approximately 20 United Nations personnel were killed, the UN launched a thorough review of its security procedures, which in 2004 resulted in the establishment of a Department of Safety and Security (UNDSS). To date, UNDSS still hasn't been able to identify the state responsible for the killing of even one of the more than 100 UN staff killed by Israel in the Gaza Strip during the past month. Everyone else seems to have figured it out, including Israel, but not UNDSS. This has put UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres in the extraordinarily embarrassing position of being unable to tell anyone who is responsible for killing the largest number of staff in UN history, or even confirming that they were killed rather than died of natural causes, joined a cult and committed collective suicide, or perished in a natural disaster. Guterres clearly needs to fire the head of UNDSS forthwith and replace him with a more competent director who can at least read a newspaper and inform him who is killing his staff in record numbers at a record pace.
12 November: The Al-Shifa Pentagon
I have never been underneath Al-Shifa Hospital and have no idea what is or isn’t there. It is however clear that Israeli accusations regarding the hospital are 80 per cent assertion, 20 per cent drawings, and 100 per cent unverified. The enthusiastic confirmation of Israel’s assertions by US intelligence officials and European politicians, with zero additional evidence provided, add nothing to the accusations. The confirmations provided by Hamas prisoners can also be safely dismissed. Both because torture in Israeli prisons is systematic, and because as a matter of elementary logic there is no reason ordinary cadres would possess detailed information about the clandestine headquarters and movements of their secretive leadership.
Hospital staff, foreign doctors, and others have all vigorously disputed Israel’s claims of numerous – indeed of any – tunnel entrances/exits within the hospital compound. Logically this makes sense. A hospital is a public institution open at all hours 24/7/365 to members of the public, including inquisitive journalists, spies, and Israeli intelligence agents who could easily collect photographic evidence of Israeli assertions rather than resorting to drawings and graphics.
The argument about human shields also makes little sense. The claim that non-combatant casualties restrain Israeli military operations has zero evidence in the historical record, and those allegedly hiding below Al-Shifa Hospital know this. By contrast, there is ample evidence of Israeli campaigns deliberately and/or indiscriminately targeting civilians to generate pressure on combatants and their leaders.
This entire debate can be easily resolved by an independent investigation. Tellingly the Palestinians, including Hamas and the Gaza authorities, have repeatedly invited this, suggesting that the ICRC or other international organisation carry it out. Israel has not supported an investigation that is not carried out under its auspices, and has additionally prevented the entry of any journalist or investigator into the Gaza Strip.
Pending such an investigation, the conclusion that Al-Shifa Hospital is being targeted because Israel needs a symbolic victory after elevating it to the status of Iwo Jima, and has convinced itself that conquering Al-Shifa will terminate Hamas governance in the Gaza Strip, seems reasonable. If and when Israeli forces enter Al-Shifa, expect to see evidence exceeding Israeli claims provided by the Israeli military, faithfully parroted by Western media but denied independent verification. The reality, I suspect, will prove as substantiated as Iraqi WMD.
Speaking of Iraqi WMD, NYT reports, "Senior Israeli intelligence officials allowed The Times to review photographs that purported to show secret entrances to the compound from inside the hospital. Signs identifying the location as Al Shifa were clearly visible in the photographs, though their authenticity could not be independently verified." NYT has been awarded numerous Pulitzers for its investigative reporting, and takes great pride in it. What prevented NYT from sending a reporter to the hospital, comparing the photographs with the entrance inside the hospital clearly marked by "signs," and then taking a peek at what's inside?