In a new documentary, Israeli minister Bezalel Smotrich detailed his desire to conquer not only all Palestinian territory to the Jordan River but also the Syrian capital of Damascus and territories extending as far as Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

Smotrich, the Finance Minister in the Israeli cabinet and head of the Religious Zionism party, made the comments in a recently released documentary entitled Israel: Extremists in Power. The documentary was produced by Arte Reportage, a Franco-German broadcast news magazine.

When asked about his goal, Smotrich tells the interviewer, “I want a Jewish state … It is a country run according to the values of the Jewish people.”

Israel currently controls territory from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River, including the Palestinian territories in the West Bank, which have been under Israeli military occupation since 1967.

Israel has been building illegal Jewish settlements on stolen Palestinian land in the West Bank ever since.

The interviewer then asked Smotrich whether he thought the borders of the Jewish state should extend past the Jordan River.

Smotrich responded by saying, “Absolutely, but slowly … Our great religious elders used to say that the future of Jerusalem was to extend as far as Damascus.”

The documentary narrator then added, “Bezalel Smotrich has a maximalist vision of the promised land. And it includes all Palestinian lands, but also territories in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Egypt. Even in Saudi Arabia. A radical vision admittedly, but one that is accepted in public debate in Israel.”

Since the beginning of the Gaza genocide in October 2023, many Israeli soldiers, media personalities, and politicians have made it clear they are fighting to conquer the enclave for the sake of building Jewish settlements there.

They say that Gaza must be destroyed and the 2.3 million Palestinian inhabitants of the strip forcibly expelled, whether to Egypt by land or Europe by boat, to allow for Jewish settlement.

The ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in northern Gaza is now underway, according to the so-called “general’s plan.”

Some soldiers make clear the additional goal of conquering Arab territory as far as Syria and Iraq as well by the patches they wear on their uniforms.

Many in Israeli society also look forward to conquering southern Lebanon and bulding Jewish settlements there. On 25 September, the Movement for Settlement in Southern Lebanon published a map with “the new Hebrew names for the settlements of Southern Lebanon,” based on the current names of the Lebanese towns and villages.

Jewish Currents reports that in the movement's worldview, “the Israeli settlement of southern Lebanon will begin with a war with Hezbollah – which they view not as a last resort barring a diplomatic solution, but as the only reasonable path forward.”

Political analyst James Dorsey notes that the movement claims a Biblical justification for the conquest of Lebanon in the book of Deuteronomy chapter 3, verse 25. As Moses appeals to God to allow him to enter the Promised Land, he asks, “Let me go over and see the good land beyond the Jordan – that fine hill country and Lebanon.”

https://thecradle.co/articles/jewish-state-will-extend-from-jerusalem-to-damascus-israeli-finance-minister

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By Patrick Lawrence / Original to ScheerPost

I read the other day the latest paper put out by those good people who run the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute. It is called “United States Spending on Israel’s Military Operations and Related U.S. Operations in the Region, October 7, 2023–September 30, 2024” and has all sorts of information in it. Since the Zionist state began its latest assault on the Palestinians of Gaza a year ago, the Biden regime has spent $22.76 billion financing it, and this is a very conservative figure even by the three authors’ reckoning. 

That same paper has a remarkable graph showing the growth of U.S. military aid to Israel (grants and loans, in constant 2024 dollars) during the 65 years from 1959, when it was zero, to this year, when it reached $18 billion. There was a sharp spike in the years following the 1967 war, when the policy cliques in Washington began to consider the Zionist state a strategic asset in the region. 

And then I read a related paper the people at Watson finished recently. “The Human Toll: Indirect Deaths from War in Gaza and the West Bank, October 7, 2023 Forward” measures and analyzes, as the introduction explains, “the impact on population health of the destruction of public infrastructure, livelihood sources, reduced access to healthcare, water, and sanitation, and environmental damage.”  Then, beginning with the next sentence, the paper starts to hit you hard:

For instance, 96 percent of Gaza’s population (2.15 million people) faces acute levels of food insecurity. According to an October 2, 2024, letter to President Biden from a group of U.S. physicians, 62,413 people in Gaza have died of starvation.

As it happens I had already read the letter the Watson report mentions, an open letter that 99 physicians and other American medical professionals wrote to President Biden and Vice–President Harris after serving in Gaza this past year. It reads in part:

This letter and the appendix show probative evidence that the human toll in Gaza since October is far higher than is understood in the United States. It is likely that the death toll from this conflict is already greater than 118,908…. 

With only marginal exceptions, everyone in Gaza is sick, injured, or both. This includes every national aid worker, every international volunteer, and probably every Israeli hostage: every man, woman, and child.

The physicians’ letter seems to be one of numerous put out by this group under the title, “Gaza Healthcare Letters.” Among the organizers is Feroze Sidhwa, a West Coast trauma surgeon who has been energetically getting out the truth of the Gaza crisis for some time. This newest letter arrived (and my thanks to both) via John Whitbeck, an American attorney who puts out an informative blog from his home in Paris, and Dave DeCamp’s excellent piece in Antiwar.com. 

Well, right after I read the physicians’ letter and the DeCamp piece and the Costs of War material, I watched the documentary Al Jazeera’s investigative unit put out Oct. 3 as a sort of one-year-on project. “Investigating war crimes in Gaza” is an hour and 20 minutes of gut-turning footage so powerful it makes you conclude there is simply no lower limit to the Zionists’ depravity while you wonder—as many of us have this past year—what it means to be human. 

My advisory: The Al Jazeera documentary is very difficult to watch but we must, as a matter of conscience and, for those who have spent the year flinching, as a rite of passage. We must let the truth push itself in our faces. My partner’s advisory: Don’t watch it before you go to bed. 

A day or so after I saw the Al Jazeera film, having already read the Watson reports, the open letter, and the DeCamp commentary, I read Brett Murphy’s latest piece in ProPublica. “Inside the State Department’s Weapons Pipeline to Israel” lays out the whole awful tale: Here, by way of leaked diplomatic cables, email, and Murphy’s interview work, we see how obsessed all those corrupt flunkies at State were (and are) to get weapons and more weapons to terrorist Israel, at times under pressure from the arms lobbies, while ignoring vast accretions of evidence that these supplies should have been blocked by law because of the Israelis’ genocidal crimes. By the time I read of this I had already seen Murphys’ earlier report that Secretary of State Blinken had suppressed and then lied to Congress about two State Department reports on some of these derelictions.   

This is official abuse. I am abused. You are abused. And as we are abused we watch Palestinians, other human beings, suffer.  

You have to admire Brett Murphy for his perspicacity in delivering these truths to us. Even a few years ago I would have said I hope The New York Times picks this guy up. No more of that. I hope for Murphy’s sake, and the sake of his readers, The Times keeps its befouled hands off a fine journalist—and for the sake, I will add, of his fineness. 

Anyway, a few days after the Brett Murphy piece, with Watson papers, the open letter, and the Al Jazeera footage still in mind,  along came The Grayzone’s new documentary, “Atrocity Inc.: How Israel Sells Its Destruction of Gaza.” There is rarely much mercy in Max Blumenthal’s work simply because those he covers rarely deserve any, and this is just such a case. The Israeli hasbara machine, The New York Times, Sheryl Sandberg and other such Zionist cretins, the list goes on: In 44 minutes Blumenthal and Sut Jhally, his director, give us the whole truth and nothing but about the vast propaganda operation that has been so grotesquely effective in persuading so many people starvation, sniper-murders of children, ethnic-cleansing, and genocide are all the right things to do because—in racist caricatures worthy of the Klan—the militias who crossed from Gaza into southern Israel last Oct. 7 went on some kind of utterly implausible rape-beheading-baking-babies murder spree. 

Nothing like the cold, clear light of day to dispel the smog.

On Friday morning I awakened to a report in Middle East Monitor—again courtesy of John Whitbeck, who likes to make sure we get off to a bushy-tailed start—that one Matthew Brodsky, a former adviser to the White House, has just called for the Israelis to carpet-bomb an Irish contingent of U.N. peacekeepers in southern Lebanon “and then drop napalm over it.” Altogether sound. And in keeping, too: The day of the Middle East Monitor’s report the Israelis shelled—knowingly, with intent—buildings in southern Lebanon from which U.N. peacekeepers operate. 

Matthew Brodsky now survives in the Zionist reaches of Think Tank Land in Washington. He is said no longer to advise the White House. Whether he still briefs Congress, the State and Defense Departments and the National Security Council, as he has in the past, is unclear. Either way, as Chas Freeman, the distinguished former ambassador, points out, this is the kind of person who climbs through the bureaucratic scene in Washington and ends up in advisory roles by dint of extremism dressed up as expertise. 

After thinking about all this reading and viewing in so short a time I didn’t want to think about anything for a while. Then I thought of a famous adage of Aeschylus that I used to keep on my desk: “He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain, which cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”

Suffering, pain, despair. Then I thought of something else. Failing in my recall, I thought of whoever it was who said “The truth is like the sun.. It always comes out.” 

The Israelis are not at war with the Palestinians of Gaza, just as the Reich was not at war with the Jews of Europe. Genocide is something different, and it is always important to name things properly if we are to understand them as they are. But there has indeed been a war raging this past year. It is not as bloody as what Palestinians now endure, and what the Lebanese now seem to be in for, but it is arguably just as consequential. This is our war for the truth against those who would bury it in the cause of distorting events, burying reality itself and, specifically, of shielding those who conduct the genocide in Gaza. It is a war in the cause of lifting a heavy lid so that the truth can do its work, the work it always does, its work in defense of the human cause. 

“Our war,” “we.” I am wary of these words. Who are “we” in any given case? But there is a “we” now, a very big, crowded “we.” And we are getting there. We are winning our war. This is what I draw from the past week’s journalism as I have reviewed it. A solidly documented true story takes shape out of all the day-to-day reporting of the past year. It is all in the record now, or will be, a coherent whole—this while all the official lies and the corporate media lies are exposed. Let us not miss the significance here. Can we not conclude the truth is proving once again as persistent as the sun?

A case in point: On Oct. 10, The Times published a piece I found reviving of the spirit under the headline, ‘Relentless’ Israeli Attacks on Gaza Medical Workers Are War Crime, U.N. Panel Says. Beneath this was an account of a U.N. commission’s report that found Israel guilty of “relentless and deliberate attacks” on hospitals and other medical facilities, on doctors and other medical professionals, and on civilian patients. The pithy passage in the statement of Navi Pillay, formerly the U.N.’s high commissioner for human rights and the director of the commission:

Israel has perpetrated a concerted policy to destroy Gaza’s health care system as part of a broader assault on Gaza, committing war crimes and the crime against humanity of extermination with relentless and deliberate attacks on medical personnel and facilities.

This is the truth rising to the surface. Do you think Pillay’s commission would have studied conditions in Gaza and drawn its conclusions without the prompt of the medical people now speaking out, chiefly via independent media? Do you think The Times would have published this piece if circumstances, an accumulation of truths too large to inter or ignore, had not forced it to do so?  

At the end of Atrocity Inc., Max Blumenthal urges those who viewed the footage to speak out and to continue doing so as long as this is possible—until the law, he means to say, prohibits free speech. Implicit in this, if I read him correctly, is the conclusion I have just suggested: It matters, our war is going well,  and it is no use waiting for The Times to tell us so. 

Will the truths now emerging at an increasing and encouraging rate reach some critical mass such that either Israel or the U.S. will change policy? It may seem bitter to ask this question, given Israel’s escalating barbarities and Washington’s indifference even to common decency. But we must not miss the extent to which Israel is destroying itself before our eyes and dragging the U.S. down with it—both in large part because the truth of this crisis has turned world opinion  against these two rogue states. 

There are the yet-to-be-written histories of our time to be considered. We all know George Orwell’s line in  “1984”: “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” It is essential, then, to get the record of our time set down accurately, truthfully, such that the way can open to proceeding in a new direction. Let us appreciate the power of the truthful work being done now, some of which I have reviewed, with this in mind. 

https://scheerpost.com/2024/10/13/patrick-lawrence-truths-that-come-out-like-the-sun/

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AS MENTIONED BEFORE, BIBI IS DOING EXACTLY WHAT THE AMERICAN DEEP STATE WANTS.... DESTROY PALESTINE AND LEBANON, THEN DESTROY SYRIA AND IRAN...

 
SEE ALSO: https://www.dw.com/en/middle-east-israel-strikes-al-aqsa-hospital-complex-in-gaza/live-70483519

Israeli forces have attacked UN peacekeepers in Lebanon at least a dozen times in recent weeks, including one attack in which 15 peacekeepers were injured by white phosphorus, according to a new report.

The Financial Times says there have been a dozen Israeli attacks on UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) peacekeepers, damaging bases and wounding peacekeepers, according to a leaked report by a country that contributes troops to the peacekeeping force seen by the publication.

In one of these attacks, on October 13, Israeli tanks broke into one of UNIFIL’s bases. The tanks left after peacekeepers protested their presence, but shortly after, Israeli forces fired several rounds of white phosphorus 100 meters away from the base.

The attack wounded 15 peacekeepers, according to the report. UNIFIL similarly reported on Telegram last week that peacekeepers had been wounded by the attack, suffering from skin irritation and gastrointestinal symptoms. Israeli forces claimed they had deployed the white phosphorus as a smokescreen.

It is illegal to use white phosphorus in populated areas, as the caustic chemical can cause extreme harm in the short and long term. The chemical can burn through clothes, skin and bone, and causes severe damage to the eyes and respiratory system when inhaled. It can also damage the liver, heart and kidney through skin contact and exposure.

Israeli forces have used white phosphorus on southern Lebanon multiple times in the last year. In June, Human Rights Watch documented at least 17 incidents in which Israeli forces used white phosphorus on municipalities, including residential areas, injuring at least 173 people. In at least one incident, Israeli forces used white phosphorus shells manufactured in the U.S.

UNIFIL has said that Israel’s persistent attacks on its peacekeepers are “a flagrant violation of international law.” The peacekeeping force was established in response to the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon in 1978, with troop contributions from 50 countries, and analysts have said that Israeli forces are attacking them now in order to limit outside documentation of Israel’s massacres in the region.

Israeli forces have directly hit UNIFIL infrastructure, indicating intent to attack the peacekeepers despite Israel’s insistence that it is not deliberately targeting the group. Israel’s repeated threats against UNIFIL and insistence that peacekeepers evacuate their bases are also evidence of intent.

Multiple peacekeepers have been injured in other attacks, including one on October 10, in which an Israeli tank fired at an observation tower and injured two peacekeepers.

Most recently, on Sunday, UNIFIL reported that an Israeli bulldozer destroyed an observation tower and perimeter fence of another UN position. The attack was deliberate, the group said. Just the day before, UNIFIL reported that peacekeepers at one camp, in Meiss ej Jebel in south Lebanon, ran out of water as Israeli military activities had blocked roads for weeks. 

Troop contributing countries have criticized the Israeli military’s aggression against the peacekeepers. In one statement earlier this month, 40 countries said that they “strongly condemn” the attacks and that UNIFIL’s mission of protecting civilians in south Lebanon is “particularly crucial in light of the escalating situation in the region.”

Some U.S. officials, however, have waved away the concerns. In response to a question about the white phosphorus attack at a news briefing on Tuesday, Pentagon press secretary Pat Ryder said nothing of the injuries to the peacekeepers, saying only that white phosphorus has “a legitimate use in combat.”

The Financial Times report has spurred fresh condemnation of Israel’s attacks on peacekeepers, which, if deliberate, are war crimes.

“Israel is behaving like a rogue state, attacking UN facilities and injuring peacekeepers,” said Center for International Policy Vice President for Government Affairs Dylan Williams. “These are serious violations of international law that UN member states must ensure they’re not enabling. It’s yet another reason why Biden must halt offensive weapons shipments to Israel.”

https://truthout.org/articles/israel-injured-un-peacekeepers-in-lebanon-with-white-phosphorus-report-finds/

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“It’s hard to do cartoons without shedding tears…”

         Gus Leonisky