British newspaper The Guardian has ended its four-decade working relationship with cartoonist Steve Bell, who said his work criticizing the Israeli government’s stance on Gaza was rejected for using a supposedly anti-Semitic trope.
“The decision has been made not to renew Steve Bell’s contract,” a spokesman for the outlet told The Telegraph on Sunday.
The offending picture depicts Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu preparing to perform surgery on himself. He is seen wearing boxing gloves and holding a scalpel, poised to make a Gaza-shaped incision.
“Spiked again. It is getting pretty nigh impossible to draw this subject for the Guardian now without being accused of deploying ‘antisemitic tropes’,” Bell wrote on X (formerly Twitter) last week.
He claimed he received “an ominous phone call from the desk” after submitting the cartoon and was told: “Jewish bloke; pound of flesh; antisemitic trope”.
The cartoon was apparently perceived as an allusion to Shylock, the Jewish antagonist in Shakespeare’s play ‘The Merchant of Venice’, who demanded a pound of flesh from his Christian rival if he failed to repay a debt.
Bell said the comparison made no sense to him. The image included the caption “After David Levine,” referring to the late cartoonist of The New York Review of Books.
Levine’s 1966 work ‘Johnson’s Scar’ parodies a contemporary photo, in which then-US President Lyndon Johnson demonstrated the mark left after having his gallbladder removed. The cartoonist depicts the scar shaped as Vietnam, in reference to the US invasion.
Grieving for peaceful Palestinians or Israelis shouldn’t make you absolve terrorism or war crimes
The tragic war unfolding in the Middle East desperately needs compassion, not calls for more death and destruction
BY Rachel Marsden — a columnist, political strategist, and host of independently produced talk-shows in French and English. Her website can be found at rachelmarsden.com
Can we denounce Hamas’ attacks without being labeled a Zionist shill and defend Palestinian civilians without being labeled pro-terrorist? If not, then we have a serious problem.
Israel and Hamas are locked in a shooting war. It’s understandable when Israelis and Palestinians, as rockets rain down on their heads, take extremely and indiscriminately aggressive positions against the respective other side in the conflict. Those of us observing the fighting from a distance don’t have to do the same – and the fact that a middle-ground position is often criticized as appeasement is proof of how irrational and extreme Western discourse has become.
Ever since Gaza-dwelling Hamas attackers invaded Israel to kill and kidnap innocent Israeli civilians, and Israel responded by dropping bombs that have killed equally innocent Palestinian civilians, the rhetoric in support of both Israel and Palestine has veered to the extreme. This is about the last thing that this conflict needs. Unfortunately, those with the most power and influence are some of the very worst offenders.
Israel has the right to defend itself from terrorism. That’s not a controversial position to take. Terrorism is bad. We get it. Everyone gets it. Only the most extreme radicals would ever suggest otherwise.
Hamas’ attacks on Israeli civilians were the very definition of terrorism – an assault by non-state actors on civilians for political or ideological reasons. Acknowledging that doesn’t mean that you’re some kind of rabid Zionist, or that you’re in favor of giving carte blanche to Israel to react by indiscriminately bombing civilians or by failing to take reasonable measures to protect innocents in a proportionate response.
The initial rhetoric of Western leaders – most notably, the US president and secretary of state, the only ones with any sort of influence on Israel – should have included this balanced perspective. How hard is it to say that, yes, Israel was indeed the victim of an indisputable terrorist act. However, in light of how Israel keeps ignoring United Nations Security Council resolutions in its treatment of Palestinians in Gaza, care must be taken to ensure that any retort is not used as a pretext for further victimization of Palestinians. At the very least, everyone should be concerned with not wanting to create future generations of embittered victims ripe for radicalization.
It would also have been valuable for the US administration to have painstakingly underscored and emphasized the difference between the Hamas terrorists who perpetrated the attack and the Palestinian people as a whole. This could have been particularly helpful in response to the Israeli defense minister’s statement referencing the “human animals” that his country was fighting, while failing to make an explicit distinction between Hamas and regular Palestinian civilians. Where was the Western leadership with a “not all Palestinians are animals – just the terrorists” statement? Would that really have been so controversial that they couldn’t be bothered to speak up?
Resistance to oppression is justified. This slogan, used by pro-Palestinian protesters in the US on the weekend of the Hamas attacks on Israel, is also not a controversial position to take. What is not ever justified is terrorism – but there are those among the Palestinians who see it as the only kind of resistance left to them. And as evidenced by some of the rallies taking place thousands of miles away from the front lines, not all who think so are actual Hamas militants. If Washington officials continue to tilt the playing field that desperately needs leveling, more and more people will start believing that killing and kidnapping innocents is a “justified” form of “resistance,” and more and more people on the other side will start thinking in terms like “human animals.”
Uncompromising rhetoric in response to terrorism has been a Western staple since the September 11, 2001, attacks on US soil. As then President George W. Bush said at the time, you were either with America and its allies, or with the terrorists. A bipartisan green light was given for total eradication. As someone based in Washington, DC, at the time, and working at a think tank, I witnessed how the neoconservative perspective ruled overwhelmingly – at least initially. There was almost no one suggesting that bombing Afghanistan, killing Osama bin Laden, and liquidating Al-Qaeda and the Taliban wasn’t likely to solve the problem once and for all.
It was only when the bombing of Afghanistan ended up just being a gateway to the bombing of Iraq that some dissenting voices started asking how many more countries would need to be bombed before America and the West would consider themselves permanently safe from terrorism.
How’d all that ultimately work out for the West? Over 20 years later, we now know the answer. No amount of bombing is going to eradicate terrorism when many of its perpetrators consider it an act of resistance to oppression – and that such oppression often comes in the form of bombings or other military incursions under the often-abused pretext of… fighting terrorism.
Acknowledging that the bombing of civilians in the Middle East risks radicalizing enough of the survivors to perpetuate the problem doesn’t make someone a terrorist sympathizer or apologist. It just means that you’re more interested in a pragmatic resolution than ideological positions or actions that risk perpetuating the problem.
While the EU and the UN have started to recognize the suffering of Palestinian civilians by at least trying to set up a humanitarian corridor to Gaza and warning against ethnic cleansings, all the US has done is double down on its militant, one-sided approach to the problem. It has sent aircraft carriers to support Israel and made threats at Iran.
But what is perhaps more chilling – and definitely more indicative of the attitude problem at hand – is how the State Department has reportedly advised American diplomats to avoid calling for “de-escalation,”“ceasefire,” and an “end to bloodshed” in the current Israel-Palestine war. The people in the perfect position to inject some reason into the ongoing madness and perhaps foster a pragmatic resolution are instead choosing a black-and-white approach that will only see things spin further out of control. The last thing that the rest of us need to be doing is following their lead.
On the evening of October 17, the IDF committed another act of genocide against the Palestinian people. A precision strike hit the Al-Ahli hospital, where there were thousands of civilians, mostly women and children, and no military. At least 790 people were reportedly killed, the vast majority of victims are children and women. Many patients were burned alive in the fire that broke out in the building. The current death toll is very approximate.
The Palestinian President declared three days of mourning for the victims of the deadly strike. Journalists of the Palestinian TV channel Al-Yum claim that before the attack in the IDF warned local residents about the need to hide in this hospital.
Israel is already trying to blame the attack on the hospital in Gaza on Hamas “misfire”. Netanyahu personally blamed Hamas for the attack. However, the damage suppose that the building was hit by a powerful missile that Hamas does not have in service.
On the other hand, the representative of the Israeli army, actually confirmed Israeli responsibility with his statements: “We have warned the hospitals of Al—Maamdani, Al-Ahli, Al-Arabi and five other hospitals not to use them as a shelter for Hamas.” Earlier, the same representative of the Israeli army stated that the Jews gave the civilians 4 hours to evacuate from the northern Gaza Strip along the provided corridor. It was along the humanitarian corridor near Salah al-Din that another airstrike killed about 70 people and wounded 200 others.
I wrote last week that the root to the current US conflict with Russia was the omission, at the end of WW2, of a written treaty setting out the boundary and definition of western “interests,” and pari passu, those of Russia cum China’s security and commercial interests in the Asian Heartland.
Everything was left vague and unwritten in the post-Cold war euphoria -so as to give the US room to manoeuvre – which it took “in spades.” It manoeuvred to remilitarise Germany and to march NATO ever forward towards, and into, the heartland. As many had warned, this US approach ultimately would mean war.
And sure enough, asymmetric “war fronts” have been opened horizontally across many spheres with Russia’s Special Operation in Ukraine. Though ostensibly focussed on stymieing NATO’s stealth absorption of Ukraine, it also opened Russia’s main front – that of containing the NATO debouchment from penetrating further.
Today, all eyes are focussed on the widening “war” in the Middle East. Many questions are asked, but the principal one is “Why?”
Here, we find the issues are eerily similar. At the end of WW2, the West wanted its European Jews to have a “homeland,” and so in 1947, Palestine was peremptorily divided between Jews and Arabs.
The predominant narrative in the West has been that the travails and wars that segued from that event – particularly today’s confrontation in Israel/Palestine – result simply from Arab States’ perverse inability to come to terms with the existence of the State of Israel. Many in the West see this as irrational at the least – or as a fundamental cultural flaw, at worst.
Well, as was the case in respect to the European post-war military situation, nothing was formally agreed in respect to Jews and Arabs living on the one plot of land. The 1993 Oslo Accords were an attempt at some agreement, but again everything was vague, and the crucially master security “key” to the whole Accord rested wholly at the discretion of the Israelis.
Plainly, this was intended to give Israel maximum room for manoeuvre. More than that, it was intended that Israel should have the strategic “edge” – not just the political “edge,” but the US had pledged to ensure that Israel would have the military “edge” over its neighbours too.
Put bluntly, the objective of bringing Arab States to accept Israel’s presence was never pursued, or else it was compelled by military and financial measures (Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Iran). Except in the case of Egypt, through returning the Sanai to Cairo. The current iteration of the “Abraham normalisation” (coming to terms with Israel) however, effectively throws the Palestinians “under the bus” for the sake of Saudi compliance to normalization.
Just as NATO surging forward was intended to put Asia under the US sway, so Greater Israeli’s cultural hegemony in the Middle East – it was believed in US Beltway circles – would place the Middle East under western sway also.
What lies behind the present outpouring of Palestinian violent resistance is precisely rooted in a converse understanding to that held in the Beltway.
The converse “reality” is that, over the last decade, Israel has been departing further and further away from the foundations on which any sustainable regional peace might have been built. Israel, perversely, has been moving in the opposite direction – striking down the pillars by which a regional rapprochement might have been possible.
Netanyahu, over the last decade, has taken the Israeli electorate far to the Right, leveraging Iran as the Phantasm by which to frighten the public. (It was not always like that: After the 1979 Iranian Revolution, Israel had allied with Iran, against the Arab “near neighbourhood”).
Netanyahu also propagated “the message” to his electorate that, thanks to the “success” of the Abraham Accords, the world cares “zilch” for the Palestinians. That they are “yesterday’s news.”
This performance has distracted the western world from understanding fully what radical ministers in Netanyahu’s government have been planning:
One key commitment of Netanyahu’s Cabinet colleagues is to build the Jewish (Third) Temple on Temple Mount, where al-Aqsa Mosque presently stands. Plainly put, this implies a commitment to demolish al-Aqsa and build a Judaic Temple in its stead.
The second key pledge is to found Israel on the biblical “Land of Israel.” Again, plainly put, this would dispossess Palestinians in the West Bank; as National Security Minister Ben Gvir made clear, they would face a choice: leave or live under subservience in a Jewish supremacist state.
The third is to institute Jewish law (Halakha) in the stead of secular law. This would divest non-Jews in Israel of their legal status.
Put together – the Judaification of al-Aqsa; the founding of the State upon the biblical “Land of Israel” and the ending of secular Basic law – Palestine and the Palestinian people simply are erased. Three weeks ago, Netanyahu waved a map of Israel as he gave his address at the UN General Assembly; have a look: Gaza and the Palestinian territories do not appear on it at all. They are erased. The situation is as existential as that.
These are the stakes that ultimately underlie Hamas’ military forces’ extreme provocation into Israel. It is intended to break the paradigm (it is not a cry for some kind of return to the Oslo framework).
However, by overreacting, Netanyahu and his team may “pull-down the roof” on the entire western project. Biden doesn’t seem to see the danger lurking within his own exaggeratedly enraged language, comparing Hamas to ISIS and endorsing a “swift decisive and overwhelming” response by Netanyahu. Biden said that it is his belief that Israel had not just a right, but a “duty” to strike back, adding that “the United States has Israel’s back.”
Biden may get more than what he seeks: Tragedy in the form of total retribution visited on Palestinians in Gaza. Netanyahu, trapped by the dynamics of his own fear and vulnerability, acts the part of Dionysus, the God of Excess. And Biden eggs him on.
Just as Team Biden exposed America and NATO to humiliation in Ukraine, so Team Biden seems unable to imagine what might follow from the humiliation of Israel, through its avenging of itself on Gaza. Ukraine brought grave financial corollaries to Europe. In Israel, its intelligence and military structure just imploded. Imagine if the political structure too, becomes dysfunctional.
When the West looks at the situation in purely static instrumental mode (i.e. the IDF is hugely more powerful than Hamas, and therefore, Hamas is destined to be destroyed – “It is a matter of engineering”) – should “you” take this view – maybe, you are are posing the question wrongly.
The question to be asked rather, is a dynamic one: How will this dramaturgy proceed over time? In what way might Israel’s putative Gaza war progressively shape the calculations of Hizbullah, Syria and the Muslim sphere – and open political opportunities that were hitherto unavailable.
We can see one opportunity opening directly; listen to what Pentagon spokesman John Kirby says: “On one hand, rumours suggested Biden intended to write a giant one-and-done check for $100B to wash his hands of Ukraine,” but he now very plainly states that: “You don’t want to be trying to bake in long-term support when you’re at the end of the rope.” (Russia can now bring the Ukraine episode to an early close.)
The main purpose of dramatic tragedy is to elicit the feeling of awe to the audience who sees in the tragic hero, an image of his own self. This is what is unfolding as the Islamic world watches Gaza crumble. The (“quietist”) Grand Ayatollah Seyed al-Sistani has issued a call for the “whole world to stand up to this terrible brutality.” Will the West Bank now erupt? Will the Palestinians living inside the Green Line rise up?
If Israeli forces invade Gaza, it could easily turn into Bakhmut/Artyemovsk – a searing meat-grinder.
Hizbullah is slow-cooking the northern front – carefully, though. Will it be the US this time that overreacts (as in 1983 when the USS New Jersey shelled Druze positions in Lebanon)? Recall how that ended – with the complete destruction of the US embassy, and the separate razing of the Marine barracks, killing 241 US service members. Today, the USS Gerald Ford Strike Group is off Lebanon, ready “to deter” Hizbullah.
Hizbullah and the Resistance Front have announced their red lines. Cross them, and Nasrallah has promised to open a new front.
So, we must try to view events dynamically, and not just through the literal bubble of today’s distractions: If Netanyahu and Defence Minister Gallant – consumed by the desire to avenge Saturday’s events – overreach, Israel may find itself in existential peril.
Israel is surrounded by tens of thousands of smart missiles and swarm drones. An attack on Hizbullah or Iran constitutes the ‘Red Pill’ for Israel. Will Netayahu, consumed with anger and panic, take a gamble? And if he, Gallant and Gantz reach for the Red Pill, might the roof fall in?
Crooke is a Former British diplomat, founder and director of the Beirut-based Conflicts Forum.
Mass media reporters aren’t buying Israel’s hospital bombing story By Caitlin Johnstone
A huge blast in Gaza has destroyed the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital, killing hundreds of people. The exact death toll is still unknown.
Details of who is responsible for the explosion are being hotly debated by all parties, and this is still a developing story with a lot of details yet to be revealed. But what I’d like to quickly document as things unfold is the highly unusual number of mass media reporters I’ve been seeing who haven’t hesitated to point to Israel as the probable culprit.
After noting that Israel is blaming the blast on a failed rocket launch by Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), MSNBC foreign correspondent Raf Sanchez quickly pointed out that PIJ rockets don’t tend to do that kind of damage, but Israeli missiles do. He also noted that Israel has an extensive history of lying about this sort of thing.
“The Israeli military at this point is not providing any evidence to back up its claims that this was a Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket; they are citing intelligence that they have not yet made public,” Sanchez said. “We should also say that this kind of death toll is not what you normally associate with Palestinian rockets. These rockets are dangerous, they are deadly, they do not tend to kill hundreds of people in a single strike in the way that Israeli high explosives — especially these bunker buster bombs that are used to target these Hamas tunnels under Gaza City — do have the potential to kill hundreds of people.”
“And we should say finally that there are instances in the past where the Israeli military has said things in the immediate aftermath of an incident that have turned out not to be true in the long run,” Sanchez added. “And the one example I’ll give you is that when the Al Jazeera journalist, Shireen Abu Akleh, was killed in the occupied West Bank, the Israeli military initially said that she was killed by Palestinian gunmen, and it was only months and months later that they admitted that it was likely an Israeli soldier who fired the fatal shot.”
CNN’s Clarissa Ward said essentially the same thing.
“I will say, just based on seeing these rocket attacks many times over the years, that they don’t usually have an impact like that in terms of the size of the blast, in terms of the scale of the death toll and the scale of the damage,” Ward said. “It’s also not the first time, it’s important to add, that we have seen the IDF categorically deny something before being forced to kind of do an about-face after an extensive investigation.”
BBC foreign correspondent Jon Donnison gave basically the same opinion.
“It’s hard to see what else this could be, really, given the size of the explosion, other than an Israeli air strike, or several air strikes,” Donnison said from Jerusalem. “Because, you know, when we’ve seen rockets being fired out of Gaza, we never see explosions of that scale. We might see half a dozen, maybe a few more people being killed in such rocket attacks, but we’ve never seen anything on the scale of the sort of explosion on the video I was watching earlier.”
That’s three mass media reporters that I’ve seen just in my random information-gathering meanderings — not on their personal social media accounts, but live on air.
It’s highly unusual to see this degree of skepticism in the western press right off the bat when it goes against the information interests of Israel specifically or the US power alliance more generally. Typically we’ve been seeing the media uncritically report unverified claims about Palestinian militants while expressing rigorous skepticism solely toward any information which might benefit the Palestinian resistance, so there’s clearly something about this particular story which makes mass media reporters remarkably reluctant to push the Israeli narrative.
Maybe they’re getting information in their group chats which has caused them to keep Israel’s claims about the hospital bombing at arm’s length, or maybe they’re just looking at the facts and deciding this narrative is too flimsy to get behind. If it looks like Israel’s version of events will fall apart after investigation, they’re not going to want to stake their reputation and their pride on pushing it with their usual gusto during an Israeli military operation that is facing unusually intense scrutiny from the entire world.
Israel does after all have an extensive history of attacking hospitals and healthcare facilities, including in this current operation in Gaza, including apparently bombing this exact same hospital just a few days ago. ReliefWeb, which is run by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, recently published a report on the numerous Israeli strikes that have hit hospitals, ambulances and healthcare workers between October 12 and October 15, and listed among the hospitals hit is the Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City — the same hospital that was just destroyed a few days later.
Citing “Al Jazeera V and Personal Communication,” ReliefWeb reports the following:
“14 October 2023: In Gaza city city and governorate, Ahli Arab Hospital was hit by Israeli airstrikes, partially damaging two floors and damaging the ultrasound and mammography room. Four people were injured.”
Again, information is still coming in and this developing story could possibly wind up looking very different from what it looks like right now. But if I was an Israel apologist, I don’t think I’d find the current winds in the mass media very encouraging.
Notwithstanding a brief period of hope in the mid-1990s, successive Israeli governments have long held that the country’s security must inevitably rely on military might. But what may have worked in other places has not proven sustainable for the complex realities of the Israel-Palestine situation.
In the century-long feud between the two sides over land, there’s been little respite from violence. Competing territorial claims continue to fuel duelling narratives of victimisation. These foment anger, animosity, fear and mistrust. Colossal leadership errors on both sides during historical junctures have led to missed opportunities to resolve a conflict that becomes more intractable by the year.
On the Jewish Israeli side, deep-rooted existential fears, following millennia of persecution, pogroms and the trauma of the Holocaust, were later exacerbated by a number of mostly defensive wars fought against neighbouring Arab states.
From the 1960s, Israel’s desire for security was further challenged by continual terrorist attacks targeting its civilians. These experiences resulted in strong society-wide yearnings – to a level unfathomable by outsiders – for military supremacy as a means to ensure the country’s survival.
You can trust this article because it’s written by academics.
....
Those who care about Palestine should denounce terror, cruelty and violence against civilians, and put more pressure on their governments to support an end to the Israeli occupation in return for more viable solutions for Israel’s legitimate security needs. Those who are concerned about Israel should do the same.
There are no easy solutions to the conflict, but military ones won’t do anymore. Violence only begets more violence. It has to stop.
BEFORE THE PRESENT VIOLENCE IS BLAMED FOR THE CRAP, THE FACT IS THAT ISRAEL HAS BEEN SWINDLING THE PALESTINIANS OUT OF THEIR LANDS... EVERY WEEK OR MONTH, A NEW JEWISH SETTLEMENT OF A FEW (SEVERAL THOUSANDS) HOUSES PROPS UP AFTER HAVING DESTROYED OLIVE ORCHARDS AND A FEW GOATS — AND MOVES THE GOAL POSTS (THE APARTHEID WALL). THE PALESTINIANS WHO LIVED THERE ARE HERDED SOMEWHERE ELSE, LIKE GAZA OR PUSHED INTO SYRIAN REFUGEE CAMPS WHICH OF COURSE THE WEST, SUPPORTER OF ISRAEL, WILL FINANCE WITH MISERY. THIS HAS TO STOP.
SURE WE DEPLORE THE VIOLENCE, BUT SOMETIMES, LIKE THE FRENCH REVOLUTION, IT'S THE ONLY WAY TO "ATTRACT ATTENTION" TO THE FACT, YOU ARE BEING ROBBED IN BROAD DAYLIGHT.... WHETHER THE ARTICLE ABOVE HAS BEEN WRITTEN BY ACADEMICS OR NOT, IT SMELLS LIKE A SMOOTH JEWISH PORKIE....
“The IDF told us, ‘we warned you yesterday with two bombs. So why have you not evacuated the hospital until this moment?'”
Full Video Transcript:
“To tell them and to the whole world, today, this enemy who is threatening those hospitals under the hearing and sight of the whole world, who did not move, nor did it take deterrent measures, nor did it take decisive measures against this enemy.Rather, the enemy was receiving a message of reassurance and a message of permission to bomb hospitals.
This was completed on this day in this brutal massacre, the likes of which we rarely hear in the present world, but rather hear about in the Bygone eras that tell stories of the brutality and fascism represented today by this occupation.”
scars....
British newspaper The Guardian has ended its four-decade working relationship with cartoonist Steve Bell, who said his work criticizing the Israeli government’s stance on Gaza was rejected for using a supposedly anti-Semitic trope.
“The decision has been made not to renew Steve Bell’s contract,” a spokesman for the outlet told The Telegraph on Sunday.
The offending picture depicts Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu preparing to perform surgery on himself. He is seen wearing boxing gloves and holding a scalpel, poised to make a Gaza-shaped incision.
“Spiked again. It is getting pretty nigh impossible to draw this subject for the Guardian now without being accused of deploying ‘antisemitic tropes’,” Bell wrote on X (formerly Twitter) last week.
He claimed he received “an ominous phone call from the desk” after submitting the cartoon and was told: “Jewish bloke; pound of flesh; antisemitic trope”.
The cartoon was apparently perceived as an allusion to Shylock, the Jewish antagonist in Shakespeare’s play ‘The Merchant of Venice’, who demanded a pound of flesh from his Christian rival if he failed to repay a debt.
Bell said the comparison made no sense to him. The image included the caption “After David Levine,” referring to the late cartoonist of The New York Review of Books.
Levine’s 1966 work ‘Johnson’s Scar’ parodies a contemporary photo, in which then-US President Lyndon Johnson demonstrated the mark left after having his gallbladder removed. The cartoonist depicts the scar shaped as Vietnam, in reference to the US invasion.
https://www.rt.com/news/585126-guardian-fires-cartoonist-netanyahu/
SEE BELL'S TOON AT TOP.
SEE ALSO: cartoon bells...
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Grieving for peaceful Palestinians or Israelis shouldn’t make you absolve terrorism or war crimes
The tragic war unfolding in the Middle East desperately needs compassion, not calls for more death and destruction
BY Rachel Marsden — a columnist, political strategist, and host of independently produced talk-shows in French and English. Her website can be found at rachelmarsden.com
Can we denounce Hamas’ attacks without being labeled a Zionist shill and defend Palestinian civilians without being labeled pro-terrorist? If not, then we have a serious problem.
Israel and Hamas are locked in a shooting war. It’s understandable when Israelis and Palestinians, as rockets rain down on their heads, take extremely and indiscriminately aggressive positions against the respective other side in the conflict. Those of us observing the fighting from a distance don’t have to do the same – and the fact that a middle-ground position is often criticized as appeasement is proof of how irrational and extreme Western discourse has become.
Ever since Gaza-dwelling Hamas attackers invaded Israel to kill and kidnap innocent Israeli civilians, and Israel responded by dropping bombs that have killed equally innocent Palestinian civilians, the rhetoric in support of both Israel and Palestine has veered to the extreme. This is about the last thing that this conflict needs. Unfortunately, those with the most power and influence are some of the very worst offenders.
Israel has the right to defend itself from terrorism. That’s not a controversial position to take. Terrorism is bad. We get it. Everyone gets it. Only the most extreme radicals would ever suggest otherwise.
Hamas’ attacks on Israeli civilians were the very definition of terrorism – an assault by non-state actors on civilians for political or ideological reasons. Acknowledging that doesn’t mean that you’re some kind of rabid Zionist, or that you’re in favor of giving carte blanche to Israel to react by indiscriminately bombing civilians or by failing to take reasonable measures to protect innocents in a proportionate response.
The initial rhetoric of Western leaders – most notably, the US president and secretary of state, the only ones with any sort of influence on Israel – should have included this balanced perspective. How hard is it to say that, yes, Israel was indeed the victim of an indisputable terrorist act. However, in light of how Israel keeps ignoring United Nations Security Council resolutions in its treatment of Palestinians in Gaza, care must be taken to ensure that any retort is not used as a pretext for further victimization of Palestinians. At the very least, everyone should be concerned with not wanting to create future generations of embittered victims ripe for radicalization.
It would also have been valuable for the US administration to have painstakingly underscored and emphasized the difference between the Hamas terrorists who perpetrated the attack and the Palestinian people as a whole. This could have been particularly helpful in response to the Israeli defense minister’s statement referencing the “human animals” that his country was fighting, while failing to make an explicit distinction between Hamas and regular Palestinian civilians. Where was the Western leadership with a “not all Palestinians are animals – just the terrorists” statement? Would that really have been so controversial that they couldn’t be bothered to speak up?
Resistance to oppression is justified. This slogan, used by pro-Palestinian protesters in the US on the weekend of the Hamas attacks on Israel, is also not a controversial position to take. What is not ever justified is terrorism – but there are those among the Palestinians who see it as the only kind of resistance left to them. And as evidenced by some of the rallies taking place thousands of miles away from the front lines, not all who think so are actual Hamas militants. If Washington officials continue to tilt the playing field that desperately needs leveling, more and more people will start believing that killing and kidnapping innocents is a “justified” form of “resistance,” and more and more people on the other side will start thinking in terms like “human animals.”
Uncompromising rhetoric in response to terrorism has been a Western staple since the September 11, 2001, attacks on US soil. As then President George W. Bush said at the time, you were either with America and its allies, or with the terrorists. A bipartisan green light was given for total eradication. As someone based in Washington, DC, at the time, and working at a think tank, I witnessed how the neoconservative perspective ruled overwhelmingly – at least initially. There was almost no one suggesting that bombing Afghanistan, killing Osama bin Laden, and liquidating Al-Qaeda and the Taliban wasn’t likely to solve the problem once and for all.
It was only when the bombing of Afghanistan ended up just being a gateway to the bombing of Iraq that some dissenting voices started asking how many more countries would need to be bombed before America and the West would consider themselves permanently safe from terrorism.
How’d all that ultimately work out for the West? Over 20 years later, we now know the answer. No amount of bombing is going to eradicate terrorism when many of its perpetrators consider it an act of resistance to oppression – and that such oppression often comes in the form of bombings or other military incursions under the often-abused pretext of… fighting terrorism.
Acknowledging that the bombing of civilians in the Middle East risks radicalizing enough of the survivors to perpetuate the problem doesn’t make someone a terrorist sympathizer or apologist. It just means that you’re more interested in a pragmatic resolution than ideological positions or actions that risk perpetuating the problem.
While the EU and the UN have started to recognize the suffering of Palestinian civilians by at least trying to set up a humanitarian corridor to Gaza and warning against ethnic cleansings, all the US has done is double down on its militant, one-sided approach to the problem. It has sent aircraft carriers to support Israel and made threats at Iran.
But what is perhaps more chilling – and definitely more indicative of the attitude problem at hand – is how the State Department has reportedly advised American diplomats to avoid calling for “de-escalation,” “ceasefire,” and an “end to bloodshed” in the current Israel-Palestine war. The people in the perfect position to inject some reason into the ongoing madness and perhaps foster a pragmatic resolution are instead choosing a black-and-white approach that will only see things spin further out of control. The last thing that the rest of us need to be doing is following their lead.
https://www.rt.com/news/585172-israel-palestine-terrorism-war-crimes/
READ FROM TOP.
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On the evening of October 17, the IDF committed another act of genocide against the Palestinian people. A precision strike hit the Al-Ahli hospital, where there were thousands of civilians, mostly women and children, and no military. At least 790 people were reportedly killed, the vast majority of victims are children and women. Many patients were burned alive in the fire that broke out in the building. The current death toll is very approximate.
The Palestinian President declared three days of mourning for the victims of the deadly strike. Journalists of the Palestinian TV channel Al-Yum claim that before the attack in the IDF warned local residents about the need to hide in this hospital.
Israel is already trying to blame the attack on the hospital in Gaza on Hamas “misfire”. Netanyahu personally blamed Hamas for the attack. However, the damage suppose that the building was hit by a powerful missile that Hamas does not have in service.
On the other hand, the representative of the Israeli army, actually confirmed Israeli responsibility with his statements: “We have warned the hospitals of Al—Maamdani, Al-Ahli, Al-Arabi and five other hospitals not to use them as a shelter for Hamas.” Earlier, the same representative of the Israeli army stated that the Jews gave the civilians 4 hours to evacuate from the northern Gaza Strip along the provided corridor. It was along the humanitarian corridor near Salah al-Din that another airstrike killed about 70 people and wounded 200 others.
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https://www.theinteldrop.org/2023/10/17/oh-god-netanyahu-struck-al-ahli-hospital-filled-with-civilians-nearly-1000-dead/
post-cold war euphoria.....
by alastair crooke
I wrote last week that the root to the current US conflict with Russia was the omission, at the end of WW2, of a written treaty setting out the boundary and definition of western “interests,” and pari passu, those of Russia cum China’s security and commercial interests in the Asian Heartland.
Everything was left vague and unwritten in the post-Cold war euphoria -so as to give the US room to manoeuvre – which it took “in spades.” It manoeuvred to remilitarise Germany and to march NATO ever forward towards, and into, the heartland. As many had warned, this US approach ultimately would mean war.
And sure enough, asymmetric “war fronts” have been opened horizontally across many spheres with Russia’s Special Operation in Ukraine. Though ostensibly focussed on stymieing NATO’s stealth absorption of Ukraine, it also opened Russia’s main front – that of containing the NATO debouchment from penetrating further.
Today, all eyes are focussed on the widening “war” in the Middle East. Many questions are asked, but the principal one is “Why?”
Here, we find the issues are eerily similar. At the end of WW2, the West wanted its European Jews to have a “homeland,” and so in 1947, Palestine was peremptorily divided between Jews and Arabs.
The predominant narrative in the West has been that the travails and wars that segued from that event – particularly today’s confrontation in Israel/Palestine – result simply from Arab States’ perverse inability to come to terms with the existence of the State of Israel. Many in the West see this as irrational at the least – or as a fundamental cultural flaw, at worst.
Well, as was the case in respect to the European post-war military situation, nothing was formally agreed in respect to Jews and Arabs living on the one plot of land. The 1993 Oslo Accords were an attempt at some agreement, but again everything was vague, and the crucially master security “key” to the whole Accord rested wholly at the discretion of the Israelis.
Plainly, this was intended to give Israel maximum room for manoeuvre. More than that, it was intended that Israel should have the strategic “edge” – not just the political “edge,” but the US had pledged to ensure that Israel would have the military “edge” over its neighbours too.
Put bluntly, the objective of bringing Arab States to accept Israel’s presence was never pursued, or else it was compelled by military and financial measures (Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Iran). Except in the case of Egypt, through returning the Sanai to Cairo. The current iteration of the “Abraham normalisation” (coming to terms with Israel) however, effectively throws the Palestinians “under the bus” for the sake of Saudi compliance to normalization.
Just as NATO surging forward was intended to put Asia under the US sway, so Greater Israeli’s cultural hegemony in the Middle East – it was believed in US Beltway circles – would place the Middle East under western sway also.
What lies behind the present outpouring of Palestinian violent resistance is precisely rooted in a converse understanding to that held in the Beltway.
The converse “reality” is that, over the last decade, Israel has been departing further and further away from the foundations on which any sustainable regional peace might have been built. Israel, perversely, has been moving in the opposite direction – striking down the pillars by which a regional rapprochement might have been possible.
Netanyahu, over the last decade, has taken the Israeli electorate far to the Right, leveraging Iran as the Phantasm by which to frighten the public. (It was not always like that: After the 1979 Iranian Revolution, Israel had allied with Iran, against the Arab “near neighbourhood”).
Netanyahu also propagated “the message” to his electorate that, thanks to the “success” of the Abraham Accords, the world cares “zilch” for the Palestinians. That they are “yesterday’s news.”
This performance has distracted the western world from understanding fully what radical ministers in Netanyahu’s government have been planning:
One key commitment of Netanyahu’s Cabinet colleagues is to build the Jewish (Third) Temple on Temple Mount, where al-Aqsa Mosque presently stands. Plainly put, this implies a commitment to demolish al-Aqsa and build a Judaic Temple in its stead.
The second key pledge is to found Israel on the biblical “Land of Israel.” Again, plainly put, this would dispossess Palestinians in the West Bank; as National Security Minister Ben Gvir made clear, they would face a choice: leave or live under subservience in a Jewish supremacist state.
The third is to institute Jewish law (Halakha) in the stead of secular law. This would divest non-Jews in Israel of their legal status.
Put together – the Judaification of al-Aqsa; the founding of the State upon the biblical “Land of Israel” and the ending of secular Basic law – Palestine and the Palestinian people simply are erased. Three weeks ago, Netanyahu waved a map of Israel as he gave his address at the UN General Assembly; have a look: Gaza and the Palestinian territories do not appear on it at all. They are erased. The situation is as existential as that.
These are the stakes that ultimately underlie Hamas’ military forces’ extreme provocation into Israel. It is intended to break the paradigm (it is not a cry for some kind of return to the Oslo framework).
However, by overreacting, Netanyahu and his team may “pull-down the roof” on the entire western project. Biden doesn’t seem to see the danger lurking within his own exaggeratedly enraged language, comparing Hamas to ISIS and endorsing a “swift decisive and overwhelming” response by Netanyahu. Biden said that it is his belief that Israel had not just a right, but a “duty” to strike back, adding that “the United States has Israel’s back.”
Biden may get more than what he seeks: Tragedy in the form of total retribution visited on Palestinians in Gaza. Netanyahu, trapped by the dynamics of his own fear and vulnerability, acts the part of Dionysus, the God of Excess. And Biden eggs him on.
Just as Team Biden exposed America and NATO to humiliation in Ukraine, so Team Biden seems unable to imagine what might follow from the humiliation of Israel, through its avenging of itself on Gaza. Ukraine brought grave financial corollaries to Europe. In Israel, its intelligence and military structure just imploded. Imagine if the political structure too, becomes dysfunctional.
When the West looks at the situation in purely static instrumental mode (i.e. the IDF is hugely more powerful than Hamas, and therefore, Hamas is destined to be destroyed – “It is a matter of engineering”) – should “you” take this view – maybe, you are are posing the question wrongly.
The question to be asked rather, is a dynamic one: How will this dramaturgy proceed over time? In what way might Israel’s putative Gaza war progressively shape the calculations of Hizbullah, Syria and the Muslim sphere – and open political opportunities that were hitherto unavailable.
We can see one opportunity opening directly; listen to what Pentagon spokesman John Kirby says: “On one hand, rumours suggested Biden intended to write a giant one-and-done check for $100B to wash his hands of Ukraine,” but he now very plainly states that: “You don’t want to be trying to bake in long-term support when you’re at the end of the rope.” (Russia can now bring the Ukraine episode to an early close.)
The main purpose of dramatic tragedy is to elicit the feeling of awe to the audience who sees in the tragic hero, an image of his own self. This is what is unfolding as the Islamic world watches Gaza crumble. The (“quietist”) Grand Ayatollah Seyed al-Sistani has issued a call for the “whole world to stand up to this terrible brutality.” Will the West Bank now erupt? Will the Palestinians living inside the Green Line rise up?
If Israeli forces invade Gaza, it could easily turn into Bakhmut/Artyemovsk – a searing meat-grinder.
Hizbullah is slow-cooking the northern front – carefully, though. Will it be the US this time that overreacts (as in 1983 when the USS New Jersey shelled Druze positions in Lebanon)? Recall how that ended – with the complete destruction of the US embassy, and the separate razing of the Marine barracks, killing 241 US service members. Today, the USS Gerald Ford Strike Group is off Lebanon, ready “to deter” Hizbullah.
Hizbullah and the Resistance Front have announced their red lines. Cross them, and Nasrallah has promised to open a new front.
So, we must try to view events dynamically, and not just through the literal bubble of today’s distractions: If Netanyahu and Defence Minister Gallant – consumed by the desire to avenge Saturday’s events – overreach, Israel may find itself in existential peril.
Israel is surrounded by tens of thousands of smart missiles and swarm drones. An attack on Hizbullah or Iran constitutes the ‘Red Pill’ for Israel. Will Netayahu, consumed with anger and panic, take a gamble? And if he, Gallant and Gantz reach for the Red Pill, might the roof fall in?
Crooke is a Former British diplomat, founder and director of the Beirut-based Conflicts Forum.
Reprinted with permission from Strategic Culture Foundation. NOTE: THE SITE IS NOT SECURE.... NOR IS: http://ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2023/october/17/pulling-the-roof-down-on-today-s-paradigm/
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Israel did it......
A huge blast in Gaza has destroyed the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital, killing hundreds of people. The exact death toll is still unknown.
Details of who is responsible for the explosion are being hotly debated by all parties, and this is still a developing story with a lot of details yet to be revealed. But what I’d like to quickly document as things unfold is the highly unusual number of mass media reporters I’ve been seeing who haven’t hesitated to point to Israel as the probable culprit.
After noting that Israel is blaming the blast on a failed rocket launch by Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), MSNBC foreign correspondent Raf Sanchez quickly pointed out that PIJ rockets don’t tend to do that kind of damage, but Israeli missiles do. He also noted that Israel has an extensive history of lying about this sort of thing.
“The Israeli military at this point is not providing any evidence to back up its claims that this was a Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket; they are citing intelligence that they have not yet made public,” Sanchez said. “We should also say that this kind of death toll is not what you normally associate with Palestinian rockets. These rockets are dangerous, they are deadly, they do not tend to kill hundreds of people in a single strike in the way that Israeli high explosives — especially these bunker buster bombs that are used to target these Hamas tunnels under Gaza City — do have the potential to kill hundreds of people.”
“And we should say finally that there are instances in the past where the Israeli military has said things in the immediate aftermath of an incident that have turned out not to be true in the long run,” Sanchez added. “And the one example I’ll give you is that when the Al Jazeera journalist, Shireen Abu Akleh, was killed in the occupied West Bank, the Israeli military initially said that she was killed by Palestinian gunmen, and it was only months and months later that they admitted that it was likely an Israeli soldier who fired the fatal shot.”
CNN’s Clarissa Ward said essentially the same thing.
“I will say, just based on seeing these rocket attacks many times over the years, that they don’t usually have an impact like that in terms of the size of the blast, in terms of the scale of the death toll and the scale of the damage,” Ward said. “It’s also not the first time, it’s important to add, that we have seen the IDF categorically deny something before being forced to kind of do an about-face after an extensive investigation.”
BBC foreign correspondent Jon Donnison gave basically the same opinion.
“It’s hard to see what else this could be, really, given the size of the explosion, other than an Israeli air strike, or several air strikes,” Donnison said from Jerusalem. “Because, you know, when we’ve seen rockets being fired out of Gaza, we never see explosions of that scale. We might see half a dozen, maybe a few more people being killed in such rocket attacks, but we’ve never seen anything on the scale of the sort of explosion on the video I was watching earlier.”
That’s three mass media reporters that I’ve seen just in my random information-gathering meanderings — not on their personal social media accounts, but live on air.
It’s highly unusual to see this degree of skepticism in the western press right off the bat when it goes against the information interests of Israel specifically or the US power alliance more generally. Typically we’ve been seeing the media uncritically report unverified claims about Palestinian militants while expressing rigorous skepticism solely toward any information which might benefit the Palestinian resistance, so there’s clearly something about this particular story which makes mass media reporters remarkably reluctant to push the Israeli narrative.
Maybe they’re getting information in their group chats which has caused them to keep Israel’s claims about the hospital bombing at arm’s length, or maybe they’re just looking at the facts and deciding this narrative is too flimsy to get behind. If it looks like Israel’s version of events will fall apart after investigation, they’re not going to want to stake their reputation and their pride on pushing it with their usual gusto during an Israeli military operation that is facing unusually intense scrutiny from the entire world.
Israel does after all have an extensive history of attacking hospitals and healthcare facilities, including in this current operation in Gaza, including apparently bombing this exact same hospital just a few days ago. ReliefWeb, which is run by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, recently published a report on the numerous Israeli strikes that have hit hospitals, ambulances and healthcare workers between October 12 and October 15, and listed among the hospitals hit is the Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City — the same hospital that was just destroyed a few days later.
Citing “Al Jazeera V and Personal Communication,” ReliefWeb reports the following:
“14 October 2023: In Gaza city city and governorate, Ahli Arab Hospital was hit by Israeli airstrikes, partially damaging two floors and damaging the ultrasound and mammography room. Four people were injured.”
It’s also probably worth noting that according to the World Health Organisation this hospital was one of the twenty hospitals which the IDF had ordered to evacuate because of the aggressions it was planning to inflict on that part of Gaza.
Again, information is still coming in and this developing story could possibly wind up looking very different from what it looks like right now. But if I was an Israel apologist, I don’t think I’d find the current winds in the mass media very encouraging.
https://johnmenadue.com/mass-media-reporters-arent-buying-israels-hospital-bombing-story/
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academic?....
Yes, Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands has to end – but massacres of civilians won’t bring this end any closer
Published: October 19, 2023 6.07am AEDT
Eyal Mayroz
Notwithstanding a brief period of hope in the mid-1990s, successive Israeli governments have long held that the country’s security must inevitably rely on military might. But what may have worked in other places has not proven sustainable for the complex realities of the Israel-Palestine situation.
In the century-long feud between the two sides over land, there’s been little respite from violence. Competing territorial claims continue to fuel duelling narratives of victimisation. These foment anger, animosity, fear and mistrust. Colossal leadership errors on both sides during historical junctures have led to missed opportunities to resolve a conflict that becomes more intractable by the year.
On the Jewish Israeli side, deep-rooted existential fears, following millennia of persecution, pogroms and the trauma of the Holocaust, were later exacerbated by a number of mostly defensive wars fought against neighbouring Arab states.
From the 1960s, Israel’s desire for security was further challenged by continual terrorist attacks targeting its civilians. These experiences resulted in strong society-wide yearnings – to a level unfathomable by outsiders – for military supremacy as a means to ensure the country’s survival.
You can trust this article because it’s written by academics.....
Those who care about Palestine should denounce terror, cruelty and violence against civilians, and put more pressure on their governments to support an end to the Israeli occupation in return for more viable solutions for Israel’s legitimate security needs. Those who are concerned about Israel should do the same.
There are no easy solutions to the conflict, but military ones won’t do anymore. Violence only begets more violence. It has to stop.
https://theconversation.com/yes-israels-occupation-of-palestinian-lands-has-to-end-but-massacres-of-civilians-wont-bring-this-end-any-closer-215814
BEFORE THE PRESENT VIOLENCE IS BLAMED FOR THE CRAP, THE FACT IS THAT ISRAEL HAS BEEN SWINDLING THE PALESTINIANS OUT OF THEIR LANDS... EVERY WEEK OR MONTH, A NEW JEWISH SETTLEMENT OF A FEW (SEVERAL THOUSANDS) HOUSES PROPS UP AFTER HAVING DESTROYED OLIVE ORCHARDS AND A FEW GOATS — AND MOVES THE GOAL POSTS (THE APARTHEID WALL). THE PALESTINIANS WHO LIVED THERE ARE HERDED SOMEWHERE ELSE, LIKE GAZA OR PUSHED INTO SYRIAN REFUGEE CAMPS WHICH OF COURSE THE WEST, SUPPORTER OF ISRAEL, WILL FINANCE WITH MISERY. THIS HAS TO STOP.
SURE WE DEPLORE THE VIOLENCE, BUT SOMETIMES, LIKE THE FRENCH REVOLUTION, IT'S THE ONLY WAY TO "ATTRACT ATTENTION" TO THE FACT, YOU ARE BEING ROBBED IN BROAD DAYLIGHT.... WHETHER THE ARTICLE ABOVE HAS BEEN WRITTEN BY ACADEMICS OR NOT, IT SMELLS LIKE A SMOOTH JEWISH PORKIE....
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SEE ALSO: https://consortiumnews.com/2023/10/18/backing-the-slaughter-silencing-the-critics/
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IDF bomb.....
Full Video Transcript:
“To tell them and to the whole world, today, this enemy who is threatening those hospitals under the hearing and sight of the whole world, who did not move, nor did it take deterrent measures, nor did it take decisive measures against this enemy. Rather, the enemy was receiving a message of reassurance and a message of permission to bomb hospitals.
This was completed on this day in this brutal massacre, the likes of which we rarely hear in the present world, but rather hear about in the Bygone eras that tell stories of the brutality and fascism represented today by this occupation.”
https://www.theinteldrop.org/2023/10/18/israel-admits-bombing-al-ahli-baptist-hospital-biden-caught-lying/
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