the end of milking the holocaust.....

Basel al-Araj, a Palestinian resistance leader, shortly before Israel’s 2014 invasion of Gaza, laid down the fundamental rules for warfare against Israel.

The rules by al-Araj, not a member of Hamas, provide the Palestinian lens for the incursion by Israeli forces in Gaza. While Israel’s superior firepower — its air force, missiles, tanks, armored personnel carriers, drones, naval forces, mechanized units and artillery — make it possible to inflict huge numbers of Palestinian casualties, most of them civilians, while Israel can level whole neighborhoods and turn hospitals, schools, power stations, water treatment plants, bakeries, mosques and churches into piles of concrete, this does not translate into a defeat of the Palestinian resistance groups.

Al-Araj argued that the fight with Israel cannot be measured with body counts. The Israelis will be able to kill far greater numbers of Palestinians.

Resistant movements, he wrote, always suffer disproportionate losses. In the independence war in Algeria, between 1954 and 1962, upwards of 1.5 million Algerians — or around 10 percent of the population — were killed by the French. In the airport in Algiers, the country’s capital, is a huge sign that reads: “Welcome to Algeria. Land of a million Martyrs.”

“We are far more capable of bearing the costs, so there is no need to compare or be alarmed by the magnitude of the numbers,” he wrote.

Al-Araj, who led hunger strikes while in Palestine Authority prisons, was long a target for Israel. Israel’s counter-terrorism unit, Yamam, pursued him for months before raiding his home on March 6, 2017, in el-Bireh. After a two-hour gun battle, Israeli forces, which fired rockets into the building, burst inside and executed him at close range. He was 31.

The fight with Israel, al-Araj reminded Palestinians, must “follow the logic of guerrilla warfare or hybrid warfare, which Arabs and Muslims have become masters of through our experiences in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon and Gaza.” Never defend “fixed points and borders.” Draw the enemy into an ambush, accomplished by light resistance and tactical withdrawals. Strike the flanks and the rear.

The calculus of asymmetric warfare is very different from conventional war. And what Israel defines as success, including the seizing of territory, numerous deaths and the destruction of infrastructure and buildings, matters little to the resistance fighter. The goal of Palestinian fighters is to remain elusive, to carry out lightning strikes and recede back into the rubble or the vast tunnel network under Gaza.

Al-Qassam Brigades

The Al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas, says it partially destroyed more than 160 Israeli military targets in Gaza, including more than 27 tanks and vehicles in the past two days.

On Nov. 11, the Al-Qassam Brigade says it lured Israeli soldiers to a burning car in the West Bank and blew up their vehicles with an IED.

On Nov. 10 the Al-Qassam Brigades, Saraya Al-Quds and Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, say they allowed the Israelis to advance without significant opposition during the day.

In the evening they ambushed the Israeli forces west of Tal al-Hawa, in the areas around Al-Shifa Hospital, west of the Al-Shati refugee camp and west of Beit Lahia in the northern part of the Gaza strip. Israel unleashed a heavy bombardment, the Palestinian fighters said, in an attempt to rescue its soldiers. Israel reportedly suffered high numbers of casualties.

On Nov. 9, Al-Qassam Brigades say they ambushed Israeli soldiers in Juhr al-Dik, targeting them with an anti-personnel rocket. The Israeli soldiers were killed, they said, at “point blank range.”

On Nov. 6, the Al-Qassam Brigades say they destroyed five Israeli tanks with Yassin 105 rockets in northwest Gaza City.

On Nov. 2 Al-Qassam Brigades claimed they destroyed six tanks and two military vehicles in one hour northwest of Gaza City. “The number of casualties is significantly higher than what the enemy’s leadership has announced,” said Abu Obeida, the spokesperson for the Al Qassam Brigades.

Israel has banned the foreign press from reporting from Gaza. It has killed over 40 Palestinian journalists and media workers. It also has instituted prolonged blockages of the internet and cell phone service. No doubt, this heavy handed censorship is done to limit the horrific images of civilian casualties. But I suspect it is also intended to block images of a ground offensive that is tougher, more protracted and more costly than Israel anticipated.

Israel invests tremendous resources in its propaganda campaign, getting networks such as CNN to repeat back its talking points. Jake Tapper should be an honorary Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) spokesman.

Al-Araj warned about the attempt by Israel to demoralize fighters by posting photos and videos of Israelis occupying landmarks and public spaces.

A video being shared on social media shows the raising of the Israeli flag on a beach in Gaza. A group of soldiers surround the flag and sing the Israeli national anthem.

In October last year, Jewish settlers occupied the Ibrahimi Mosque in the West Bank town of Hebron, where a Jewish settler, Barach Goldstein, gunned down 29 Palestinians in 1994 as they prayed. The settlers held a music festival and dance party in the mosque. They hung an Israeli flag from the roof. Videos have circulated that denigrate and ridicule Palestinians.

Al-Araj wrote that Israel’s propaganda is designed to instill panic, demonize Palestinians and spread defeatism.

“We are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba,” said Israeli security cabinet member and Agriculture Minister Avi Dichter, referring to the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their land in 1948, facilitated by massacres, the raping of Palestinian women and girls, and the razing of entire villages by Zionist militias.

“From an operational point of view, there is no way to wage a war — as the IDF seeks to do in Gaza — with masses between the tanks and the soldiers.” “Gaza Nakba 2023. That’s how it’ll end,” he concluded.

Israel equates the Palestinians with the Nazis. Naftali Bennett, Israel’s former prime minister, in an interview on Sky News on Oct. 12 said, “We’re fighting Nazis.” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described Hamas in a press conference with the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, as “the new Nazis.”

The IDF posted a tweet that read: “Never again is NOW. IDF forces discovered a copy of Hitler’s infamous book ‘Mein Kampf’ — translated into Arabic — in a child’s bedroom used as a Hamas terrorist base in Gaza. The book was discovered among the personal belongings of one of the terrorists, featuring annotations and highlights. Hamas embraces the ideology of Hitler, the one responsible for the annihilation of the Jewish people.”

The message is clear. Palestinians embody absolute evil.

Israel releases images that show Palestinians and Palestinian prisoners being denigrated and abusedby Israelis. At the same time, Israel presents itself as compassionate.

A video titled “IDF Soldiers Give Gazan Civilians Water After Hamas Refused,” was recently circulated. The video, clearly staged, reminded me of the footage of the Bosnian Serb commander Gen. Ratko Mladic who handed out candy to children in Srebrenica in 1995 before overseeing the executionof 8,000 men and boys.

“The enemy will carry out tactical, qualitative operations to assassinate some symbols [of resistance], and all of this is part of psychological warfare,” al-Araj wrote.

“Those who have died and those who will die will never affect the resistance’s system and cohesion because the structure and formations of the resistance are not centralized but horizontal and widespread. Their goal is to influence the resistance’s support base and the families of the resistance fighters, as they are the only ones who can affect the men of the resistance.”

In every war, information is weaponized. But to rely exclusively on the Israeli narrative is to be deceived, not only about the war crimes Israel carries out but the nature of the war itself. The Palestinians understand their foe. They have had a lot of experience. They knew this was coming. I suspect the fighting in Gaza will continue for a long time. Israel paid a high price on Oct. 7 when Palestinian fighters breached its borders. It will pay an even higher price in Gaza.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor and NPR. He is the host of show “The Chris Hedges Report.”

Author’s Note to Readers: There is now no way left for me to continue to write a weekly column for ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show without your help. The walls are closing in, with startling rapidity, on independent journalism, with the elites, including the Democratic Party elites, clamoring for more and more censorship. Bob Scheer, who runs ScheerPost on a shoestring budget, and I will not waiver in our commitment to independent and honest journalism, and we will never put ScheerPost behind a paywall, charge a subscription for it, sell your data or accept advertising. Please, if you can, sign up at chrishedges.substack.com so I can continue to post my Monday column on ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show, “The Chris Hedges Report.”

This column is from Scheerpost, for which Chris Hedges writes a regular column. Click here to sign up for email alerts.

https://consortiumnews.com/2023/11/14/chris-hedges-the-war-according-to-hamas/

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By Gus Leonisky at 15 Nov 2023 - 6:50am
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destroying hamas....

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have managed to seize Hamas’ parliament, government seat, and police headquarters in the course of the military ground operation in the region, according to the Israeli press.

The IDF announced on Tuesday that the 7th Armored Brigade and Golani Infantry Brigade had taken over a number of Hamas sites in Gaza City despite fierce resistance from the Palestinian Islamist militants. Social media accounts have been circulating photos of Israeli troops holding the Jewish state's banner in what appears to be premises captured from Hamas.

"From the Israeli perspective, these pictures are meant to show that they are winning the battle, that the victory could be imminent as the domestic public opinion is exerting pressure on the [Benjamin] Netanyahu government to bring the hostages back and to take revenge for the 7th of October Hamas offensive," Dr. Lorenzo Trombetta, Beirut-based scholar and analyst specializing on the Middle East, told Sputnik. "Instead, from a military Israeli perspective, the seizure of the Hamas parliament or other institutional Hamas assets do not mean the end of the war as the battle could last at least for a couple of weeks."

https://sputnikglobe.com/20231114/what-are-hamas-survival-odds-as-israeli-military-gains-ground-in-gaza-city-1114957823.html

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By Gus Leonisky at 15 Nov 2023 - 6:56am
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zionism poison.....

Israel, then and now: 'kill, kill them all'

Historically, the extremist ideology of Zionism has fully and openly sanctioned murder to achieve and maintain its goal of statehood. This includes Jews and non-Jews alike.

BY William Van Wagenen

On 7 October, the armed Palestinian resistance smashed through the Gaza border fence to carry out an unprecedented surprise assault on Israel, in which some 1,200 civilians and security forces were killed.

While Israel attributes its entire death toll to the resistance fighters, in particular Hamas and its military wing, the Al-Qassam Brigades, it has since been suggested that occupation forces may bear responsibility for a significant number of deaths.

This discrepancy blows a hole in the narrative pushed by Israeli and western media, which hyperbolically frames the Al-Aqsa Flood operation as the "deadliest single attack on Jews since the Holocaust."

The Hannibal Directive

But would Israeli forces willingly kill their own - and why?

The key lies in understanding that the primary goal of the resistance operation was the capture of prisoners of war (POWs)— both soldiers and settlers — to be taken back to Gaza. These captives were intended as leverage to press Israel to meet Hamas's demands, including ending the 17-year siege on Gaza and releasing thousands of Palestinians held without trial in Israeli prisons.

It is equally key to understand that Israel, doctrinally, will go to the most extreme lengths imaginable to prevent the taking of captives - including killing them. In an attempt to thwart Hamas from taking POWs, Israeli forces took drastic measures, including airstrikes on their own military base, firing tank rounds at civilian homes, and using overwhelming firepower to enforce the highly controversial Hannibal Directive.

This infamous military policy - which was altered but not removed in 2016 - allows commanders to sacrifice their own soldiers to prevent them from being captured, aiming to deny the enemy any leverage over the occupation state. A notable case was in 2006, when Hamas captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit on the Gaza border. After holding him captive for five agonizing years, Hamas was able to exchange Shalit for 1,027 Palestinians held prisoner in Israel.

‘Do you condemn Hamas?’

The issue of Palestinians targeting Israeli civilians is understandably a controversial talking point, especially in the west. However, Hamas justifies this by claiming all Israelis are settlers living on land stolen from Palestinians in 1948 during what is known as the nakba or “catastrophe.”

That year, Zionist militias employed rape and massacre as tools to effect the forcible “transfer” of some 750,000 Palestinians from the land needed to establish Israel. Future Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion and other Zionist leaders understood that the majority of the indigenous population of British Mandate Palestine, the Christian and Muslim Arabs, needed to be “cleansed” from the land to create a state with a Jewish demographic majority.

Today, many Israelis — civilians and politicians alike — are loudly calling for their army to “complete the job,” as Israeli historian Benny Morris described it, by ethnically cleansing and annexing those parts of Palestine they failed to conquer in 1948, namely the entirety of occupied-West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip.

In his book, “Going to the Wars,” historian Max Hastings writes that Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s current prime minister, told him in the 1970s that, “In the next war, if we do it right, we’ll have the chance to get all the Arabs out … We can clear the West Bank, sort out Jerusalem.”

In contrast, the Palestinians, the indigenous population, have done their utmost to resist the Zionist colonial project and defend their lands, their homes, and their existence as a people. The expectation that they would resist the Zionist occupation is recognized by Israel's first prime minister David Ben Gurion, himself an immigrant to Palestine from Poland:

“Let us not ignore the truth among ourselves … politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves… The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them their country … Behind the terrorism [by the Arabs] is a movement, which though primitive is not devoid of idealism and self-sacrifice.”

A historical reckoning

Just as fiercely, the deeply ideological Zionists were prepared to do anything within their means to occupy Palestine and expunge its inhabitants. The historical record shows that this includes the willingness to sacrifice many of their own to advance their settler colonial project.

In 1938, as efforts were underway to evacuate Jewish children from Germany following Hitler’s Kristallnacht pogroms, Ben Gurion revealed that:

“If I knew that it was possible to save all the children of Germany by transporting them to England, and only half by transferring them to the Land of Israel, I would choose the latter, for before us lies not only the numbers of these children but the historical reckoning of the people of Israel.”

As detailed by Faris Yahya Glubb and Lenni Brenner, Zionism, and Nazism shared not only the goal of emptying Germany of Jews during this period but also the same fascist philosophical character, leading to collaboration between the two movements during this period.

Historian Avi-Ram Zoraf wrote that when faced with the choice between rescuing individual Jews and guaranteeing the sovereignty of the Israeli state, Zionism ignores the traditional Jewish commandment to redeem captives and instead demands the latter option.

Survival of the state

A critical examination of the events on 7 October reveals a pattern where, similar to the state's earliest leaders, Israel's current leadership prioritized the preservation of the occupation state's sovereignty over the lives of POWs taken by Hamas.

During a cabinet meeting on that fateful day, influential figures like Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich urged the Israeli army to “hit Hamas brutally and not take the matter of the captives into significant consideration.”

After all, Hamas’ success in breaking out of its Gaza cage, despite the billions spent by Israel to build a high-tech border fence and surveillance system, threatened to shatter the myth of Israel's regional military superiority.

Tel Aviv is now desperately trying to reestablish the deterrence it once enjoyed by unleashing a wildly disproportionate military response on a civilian population in the Gaza Strip — in part, to scare off other adversaries in Iran, Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen.

In just five weeks, the occupation army has killed over 11,000 Palestinians, over 65 percent of these women and children. In its campaign of daily massacres, Israel has employed 2,000 lb. bombs to destroy entire neighborhoods, as well as hospitals, markets, UN schools, and even an ancient orthodox Christian church, all with desperate Palestinian civilians sheltering inside.

In response to horrific videos emerging from Gaza of Israel’s slaughter, journalist Sam Husseini observed, “Israel lied about Hamas beheading babies so it could get away with blowing heads off babies.”

The Dahiya Doctrine

This is par for the course for Tel Aviv. What Gaza is witnessing today is what Beirut experienced in Israel's 2006 war. As Palestinian historian Rashid Khalidi explained, the Dahiya Doctrine was established to destroy entire urban populated areas from the air by Israeli forces - in this case, the entire southern suburb of Beirut, known as the Dahiya. Revealed publicly in 2008 by Major General Gadi Eizenkot, the deputy chief of staff of the Israeli military who commanded these forces during the 2006 war:

“What happened in the Dahiya quarter of Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on … From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases … This is not a recommendation. This is a plan. And it has been approved.”

Unsurprisingly, Raz Segal, an associate professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University, has called Israel’s current bombing campaign in Gaza “A textbook case of genocide.” Calling for the killing of all Gazans, not just members of Hamas, is now standard and accepted in Israeli public discourse.

Asked in an interview with Radio Kol Berama whether an atomic bomb should be dropped on the enclave, Israel’s Heritage Minister, Amichai Eliyahu, stated, “This is one of the possibilities … there is no such thing as uninvolved civilians in Gaza.”

Member of the Likud party and Knesset member Revital Gottlieb stated, “Flatten Gaza. Without mercy! This time, there is no room for mercy!”

“It's an entire nation out there that is responsible. It’s not true this rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved, it’s absolutely not true,” stated Israeli President Isaac Herzog.

“If, in order to finally eliminate the military capabilities of Hamas … we need a million bodies, then let there be a million bodies,” said journalist Roy Sharon.

"Erase Gaza, don't leave a single person there,” stated Eyal Golan, a popular Israeli singer.

The Gaza annexation agenda

Tel Aviv is now actively using the Hamas-led resistance operation as a pretext to ethnically cleanse and annex Gaza, which has effectively been split in half by the invading occupation army. Israeli leaders wish to use the events of 7 October to carry out a second Nakba, just as Zionist leaders used the Holocaust to carry out the first.

This further explains why Israeli leaders such as Smotrich were willing to sacrifice hundreds of Israeli soldiers and settlers in the aftermath of Al-Aqsa Flood.

Since at least 2010, Israeli leaders have sought to forcibly displace Gaza’s 2.3 million people to Egypt’s Sinai, making them refugees once again, and then annex and recolonize Gaza.

They wish to rebuild the Gush Katif settlement bloc that was dismantled following Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005, as part of then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s “disengagement plan.”

Gush Katif, once home to 8,000 Jewish settlers, has been called a “lingering wound,” one still open and fresh for Israelis.

“It’s a trauma,” an Israeli named Hillel told i24NEWS in September last year. “The whole country was hurting.”

i24NEWS also noted that in July 2022, Religious Zionist candidate Arnon Segal wrote during his campaign announcement, "It is time to begin to plan a return to Gush Katif.”

In March of this year — well before Operation Al Aqsa Flood — Israeli Minister of National Missions Orit Strook told Channel 7 that Israelis would return to Gush Katif:

"Sadly, a return to the Gaza Strip will involve many casualties, just as the departure from the Gaza Strip came with many casualties. But ultimately, it is part of the Land of Israel, and a day will come when we will return to it."

As a result, Israel’s horrific bombing campaign in Gaza was quickly accompanied by Israeli demands that Palestinians in Gaza move to the south of the enclave and finally flee to Egypt.

On 17 October, Israel's former US Ambassador Danny Ayalon stated, “The people of Gaza should evacuate and go to the vast expanses on the other side of Rafah at the Sinai border in Egypt … and Egypt will have to accept them.”

On 28 October, a document issued by Israel’s Ministry of Intelligence was leakedrecommending the Israeli army occupy Gaza and effect the permanent transfer of its inhabitants to Sinai.

Days later, the Biden Administration submitted a supplemental funding request to Congress for Israel and Ukraine, which included funds to build refugee camps in Sinai, as outlined in the Ministry of Intelligence plan.

Israel, at its most dangerous

Israel was willing to kill many of its own citizens and soldiers on 7 October to confront the threat to the sovereignty of the state posed by Hamas. At the same time, the death of these Israelis, accompanied by propaganda claiming Hamas committed horrific atrocities such as the discredited claims of raping women and beheading Jewish babies, also now provides Israel the opportunity to realize its goal to ethnically cleanse and annex Gaza.

It is, therefore, no accident that the events of 7 October were quickly branded as “Israel’s 9/11.”

The terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001 provided pro-Israel elements in the US government the opportunity to launch a global “War on Terror,” which included plans to invade and occupy Afghanistan and Iraq, while killing millions and unlocking trillions of dollars in spending to benefit the US’ military-industrial complex.

It is too early to tell if Israel will be successful in realizing its goals in Gaza, or whether Hamas and its allies in the Axis of Resistance will be able to prevent it. As the slaughter of Gazans continues, a desperate Israel appears to be at both its weakest, and at its most dangerous, prepared to kill any and all that stand in its way.

https://new.thecradle.co/articles/israel-then-and-now-kill-kill-them-all

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By Gus Leonisky at 15 Nov 2023 - 10:09am
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nursaganda.....

The Israeli government is resorting to “preposterous” and “increasingly wild” disinformation online and appears to have lost control over the narrative about its war on Gaza, the Daily Beast said in an article published on Wednesday.

As one example, author Marc Owen Jones pointed to the November 11 video posted by the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s Arabic-language account on X (formerly Twitter). It showed a “Palestinian nurse” condemning Hamas for taking over the al-Shifa hospital in Gaza.

“Everything about it smacked of high school theater – from the botched accent that sounded like it was straight out of an Israeli soap opera to the perfectly scripted IDF talking points rolling off her tongue,” Jones wrote.

The nurse had a “pristine white lab coat” and “immaculate” makeup, but no one at al-Shifa had ever seen her before, he added. The video was mocked so much that Israel Arabic deleted it within a day.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu launched a war on Gaza after the October 7 Hamas attack that killed an estimated 1,200 Israelis in nearby settlements and outposts. Public opinion in the West, initially sympathetic to Israel, has steadily turned against West Jerusalem amid the rising death toll in Gaza.

https://www.rt.com/news/587423-israel-narrative-gaza-disinformation/

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