by SEYMOUR HERSH

Decades ago I spent three years writing The Samson Option (1991), an exposé of the unstated policy of American presidents going back to Dwight Eisenhower to look the other way as Israel began the process of building an atomic bomb. The right or wrong for Israel, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, was not the point of the book. My point was that what America was doing was known throughout the Third World, as it was then called, and our duplicity made our worries about the spread of nuclear weapons another example of American hypocrisy. Since then others have undertaken far more comprehensive studies, as some of the most highly classified Israeli and US documents have become public.

I chose not to go to Israel to do my research in fear of running afoul of Israeli national security law. But I found Israelis living abroad who had worked on the secret project and were willing to talk to me once I indicated I had information from American intelligence files. Those who worked on such highly classified materials have remained loyal to Israel, and a few of them became lifelong friends of mine. They have also remained in close touch with former colleagues who stayed in Israel.

This is an account of the past week’s horrific events in Israel, as seen by a veteran of Israel’s national security apparatus with inside knowledge of recent happenings.

The most important thing I needed to understand, the Israeli insider told me, is that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “is finished. He is a walking dead man. He will stay in office only until the shooting stops . . . maybe another month or two.” He served as prime minister from 1996 until 1999 and again, as leader of the right-wing Likud Party, from 2009 to 2021, returning for a third stint in late 2022. “Bibi was always opposed to the 1993 Oslo Accords,” the insider said, which initially gave the Palestinian Authority nominal control over both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. When he returned to office in 2009, the insider said, “Bibi chose to support Hamas” as an alternative to the Palestinian Authority, “and gave them money and established them in Gaza.”

An arrangement was made with Qatar, which began sending hundreds of millions of dollars to the Hamas leadership with Israeli approval. The insider told me that “Bibi was convinced that he would have more control over Hamas with the Qatari money—let them occasionally fire rockets into southern Israel and have access to jobs inside Israel—than he would with the Palestinian Authority. He took that risk.

“What happened this week,” the insider said, “was a result of the Bibi doctrine that you could create a Frankenstein and have control over it.” The attack by Hamas was a direct result of a decision Bibi made, over the protest of local military commanders, “to allow a group of Orthodox settlers to celebrate Sukkot in the West Bank.” Sukkot is an annual fall holiday that commemorates the ancestral journey of Jews into the depths of the desert. It is a weeklong festival that is observed by building an outdoor temporary structure known as a sukkah in which all could share the food that their predecessors ate and viscerally connect to the harvest season.

The request came at a time of extreme tension over another West Bank incident in which Jewish settlers, according to the Associated Press, “rampaged through a flashpoint town” on October 6 and killed a 19-year-old Arab male. The youth’s death, the AP report added, “marked the latest in a surge in Israeli-Palestinian fighting that so far has killed nearly 200 Palestinians this year—the highest yearly death toll in about two decades.”

The Sukkot celebration, held near a Palestinian village known in Hebrew as Haware, would need extraordinary protection, given the tension over the latest violence, and the local Israeli military authorities, with the approval of Netanyahu, ordered two of the three Army battalions, each with about 800 soldiers, that protected the border with Gaza to shift their focus to the Sukkot festival.

“That left only eight hundred soldiers,” the insider told me, “to be responsible for guarding the 51-kilometre border between the Gaza Strip and southern Israel. That meant the Israeli citizens in the south were left without an Israeli military presence for ten to twelve hours. They were left to fend for themselves. And that is why Bibi is finished. May take a few months, but he is over.”

The insider called the attack in southern Israel “the great military failure in Israeli history” and pointed out that “only soldiers were killed in the ’73 war”—the surprise attack on Yom Kippur in which Israel was briefly overrun by Egyptian and Syrian troops. “Last Saturday twenty-two settlements in the south were under control of Hamas for hours, and they went house to house slaughtering women and children.”

There will be a military response, the insider said, noting that 360,000 reservists have been called up. “There is a big debate going on about strategy. The Israeli Air Force and Navy special forces are ready to go, but Bibi and the military leadership have always favored the high-tech services. The regular army has been used primarily as security guards in the West Bank. . . . The reality is that the ground forces are not trained for combat. Don’t misunderstand—there is confidence in the spirit of the troops but not in their ability to succeed in the ‘special situation’ that the soldiers would be facing in a ground assault” in the ruins of heavily bombed Gaza City.

The reservists are now undergoing crash training and a decision of what to do may come by the end of this week, the insider said. Meanwhile, the current bombing of civilian targets—apartment buildings, hospitals, and mosques—no longer includes a token civilian safeguard. In prior attacks in Gaza City, he said, the Israeli Air Force often would drop a small bomb on the roof of a civilian facility to be targeted—it was called “a knock on the roof”—that would theoretically alert noncombatants to flee the building. That is not happening in the current round-the-clock bombing raids.

As for a ground attack, the insider told me that there is a brutal alternative under consideration that could be described as the Leningrad approach, referring to the famed German effort to starve out the city now known as St. Petersburg during World War II. The Nazi siege lasted nearly 900 days and the death toll was at least 800,000 and possibly many more. It is known that the Hamas leadership and much of its manpower “live underground,” and Israel’s goal is to destroy as much of that manpower “without attempting a traditional house-to-house attack.”

The insider added that some Israelis were “made anxious” by the initial statements from world leaders in Germany, France, and England who avowed, in one case through an aide, their total support for an immediate response but added that it should be guided by the rule of law. President Biden reinforced that point in an unscheduled appearance at a White House conference of Jewish leaders Wednesday by pointedly saying that he had recently told Netanyahu: “it is really important that Israel, with all the anger and frustration and just—I don’t know how to explain it—that exists is that they operate by the rules of war—the rules of war. And there are rules of war.”

The option now under consideration, the Israeli insider told me, is to continue the isolation of Gaza City in terms of power supply and the delivery of food and other vital goods. “Hamas now only has a two- or three-day supply of purified water and that, along with a lack of food,” I was told, “may be enough to flush all the Hamas out.” At some point, he said, Israel may be able to negotiate the release of some prisoners—women and children—in return for food and water.

“The big debate today,” he said, “is whether to starve Hamas out or kill as many as 100,000 people in Gaza. One Israeli assumption is that Hamas, which has received as much as $1.6 billion from Qatar since 2014, wants to be seen as a sovereign that takes care of its people. He went on: “Now that President Biden says they are a terrorist state, Hamas may have reason to want to be seen as less hostile and there might be a chance for calm and rational discussion about prisoners—and a release of some of its Israeli hostages, beginning with women and children.” The other prisoners will be treated like prisoners of war, he said, and their release could be negotiated, as has happened in the past.

But, the insider added, “the more we all see” of Hamas brutality on TV and “the more Hamas is seen as another ISIS, time gets short.”

The reality, he said, is that Hamas is not rational and is incapable of any negotiations, and Qatar will not intervene. And, barring some international or third-party intervention, there may be a general ground invasion with untold deaths to all sides and to all prisoners.

The decision to invade in full force is Israel’s, and it has not yet been made.

First published by SEYMOUR HERSH October 12, 2023

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BY indianpunchline

The US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s press conference on Thursday concluding his visit to Israel conveyed three things. One, the Biden Administration will be seen as backing Israel to the hilt by way of meeting its security needs but Washington will not be drawn into the forthcoming Gaza operations except to arrange exit routes in the south for hapless civilians fleeing the conflict zone. 

Two, Washington’s top priority at the moment is on engaging with the regional states who wield influence with Hamas to negotiate the hostage issue. Fourteen US citizens in Israel remain unaccounted for. (White House confirmed that the death toll in the fighting now includes at least 27 Americans.) 

Three, the US will coordinate with the regional states to prevent any escalation in the situation to widen the conflict on the part of Hezbollah. Although the US cannot and will not stop Israeli leadership on its tracks apropos the imminent Gaza operation, it remains unconvinced.

Blinken was non-committal about any direct US military involvement, and the chances are slim as things stand. Most important, even as  Blinken could hear the war drums, he also cast his eye on a future for Israel (and the region) where it will be at peace with itself, would integrate into the region and concentrate on creating economic prosperity — metaphorically put, beating its swords into plowshares in a Biblical Messianic intent. 

That is to say, despite the massive show of force off the waters of Israel, with the deployment of two aircraft carriers along with destroyers and other naval assets and fighter jets off the waters of Israel, the Biden Administration is profoundly uneasy about any escalation of the conflict into a wider war. If the US senses that this is a catastrophe that Israel allowed to happen, that remains a strictly private thought.

Even as Blinken was heading for Tel Aviv, US House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul told reporters in Washington on Wednesday following a closed-door intelligence briefing that “We know that Egypt has warned the Israelis three days prior that an event like this could happen. I don’t want to get too much into classified, but a warning was given. I think the question was at what level.”

Shortly after McCaul spoke to reporters in Washington, an anonymous Egyptian official confirmed to the Times of Israel that Cairo’s agents did warn their Israeli counterparts about a planned Hamas attack, but that this warning may not have made it to Netanyahu’s office. 

These disclosures would embarrass the Israeli government, as Saturday’s surprise attack can be viewed as a catastrophic failure for Israel’s intelligence services. In a brutally frank statement on Thursday, the Chief of General Staff of the Israel Defense Forces General Herzi Halevi admitted, “The IDF is responsible for the security of our nation and its citizens, and we failed to do so on Saturday morning. We will look into it, we will investigate, but now it is time for war.”    

This failure will impact the decision-making in Tel Aviv. Gen. Halevi described Hamas as “animals” and “merciless terrorists who have committed unimaginable acts” against men, women and children. He said that the IDF “understands the magnitude of this time, and the magnitude of the mission that lays on our shoulders.”

“Yahya Sinwar, the ruler of the Gaza Strip, decided on this horrible attack, and therefore he and the entire system under him are dead men,” the general added, vowing to “attack them and dismantle them and their organisation” and that “Gaza will not look the same” afterward.

Make no mistake, the Israeli objective will be to use overwhelming force with its most advanced weapons, including powerful bunker-busting bombs, to inflict crippling losses on Hamas formations so that the movement cannot wage an armed struggle for many years. A ground operation is to be expected any day. 

It is improbable that Blinken would have even tried to dissuade Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from going ahead with a brutal operation. He told the media that the US would rather leave it to Israel to do what needed to be done. Meanwhile, the US deployment will not only aim to enhance surveillance, intercept communications, and prevent Hamas from acquiring more weapons, but also act as deterrent. 

That said, the US cannot afford to watch passively. Washington has no choice but to limit the expected fighting in the coming days and weeks in Gaza  to ensure that it does not spread to other areas. Thus, the US force projection specifically serves as a deterrent to Hezbollah, which possesses a vast armoury of 150,000 missiles that can be launched at major cities in Israel, potentially leading to a broader war not only in Gaza but also in Lebanon, drawing others into the conflict. 

Israel knocked out of service the airports in Damascus and Aleppo in Syria in missile strikes simultaneously on Thursday, presumably to prevent reinforcements reaching Lebanon. Iran’s foreign minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian was due to travel to Syria and Lebanon in the weekend.

Through the past four decades, the US and Iran have made a fine art of communicating with each other in dangerous times to set ground rules to avoid confrontation. This time around too, it is happening.

Certainly, the speech by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Tuesday on the conflict situation, which was translated into Hebrew by the Iranians and disseminated in an unprecedented move, conveyed a subtle message in three parts to both Israel and the US, signalling essentially that Tehran does not intend to get involved in the conflict. (See my blog Iran warns Israel against its apocalyptic war.) 

In turn, the US has signalled that it has intelligence showing that key Iranian leaders were surprised by the Hamas  attacks on Israel. Equally, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi’s phone conversation with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on Wednesday — their first ever conversation which Tehran initiated — harped on efforts to “halt the ongoing escalation.” 

The ‘known unknown’ scenario

Yet, the big question is, how far the Biden Administration would be confident about the success of any Israeli military incursion into Gaza. During the press conference in Tel Aviv, Blinken underscored in a subtle way the importance of “lessons” learnt from past experiences. The point is, Israel will be involved in urban warfare in a densely populated area with a population of 2.1 million people.

Gaza has an average of 5,500 people per sq. km, and there is bound to be heavy civilian casualties caused by Israel’s advanced American weaponry, which would lead to an international outcry, including in Europe, and lead to condemnation of not only Israel but the US as well. However, Israel is in defiant mood and Netanyahu needs at least some of the operation’s goals achieved before agreeing to a ceasefire.

More importantly, Israel needs an exit strategy, if past experiences in Lebanon and Gaza gave any lessons. Colin Powell’s Pottery Barn rule comes into play — ‘You break it, you own it.’

An extended occupation of Gaza will be an extremely dangerous outcome fraught with great risks, given the deep economic, religious, and social roots that Hamas enjoys. Suffice to say, the Israeli military will be hard-pressed to show “success” and head for the exit door.

Besides, if other Palestinian groups and organisations in the West Bank make decisions that advance Hamas’s strategic goals, all bets are off, as Israeli military will face a two-front war. In fact, the conditions for a third intifada do exist in West Bank.

And in such a scenario, the advantage goes to Hamas, which would position itself as potentially the appropriate and perhaps the sole alternative after Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who is now 87 years old. 

Again, in a worst case scenario, it cannot be ruled out that the Arab Israeli population may draw inspiration from Hamas, and if their violent eruption in 2021 is anything to go by, the long-term viability of the state of Israel will be put to test. 

Suffice to say, the best solution lies in a paradigm shift in the Israeli statecraft away from its primacy on coercion and brutal force. Blinken’s remarks suggested that the US hopes that when the dust settles down, with the helping hand of friendly Arab countries such as Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt and Jordan, a turnaround to calm the situation and reach a ceasefire might be possible. 

Of course, the longer that takes, the greater the strain it will put on the US-Israeli ties and the harder it will become for the Biden Administration to maintain an equilibrium in what is already a troubled relationship with Netanyahu. Fundamentally, Israel needs to come terms with the new reality that they are no longer invincible or the dominant power in the West Asian region.  

https://www.indianpunchline.com/us-in-a-quandary-over-israels-war-on-gaza/

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BY BILL ASTORE

Remarkably, the press secretary of the Biden administration stated that calls for deescalation of conflict in Gaza, calls for restraint, calls for a ceasefire, are “disgraceful” and “repugnant.” There are not two sides to the conflict, the press secretary said. There’s only the Israeli side of righteousness. And Israel must be given a blank check, as well as plenty of U.S. weaponry, to strike back. And so Israel has, dropping 6000 bombs in six days. Obviously, Israel had a prepared list of targets; you don’t drop one thousand bombs a day on Gaza in “precision” strikes without being long prepared to do so.

Meanwhile, President Joe Biden said he had seen photos of Hamas attackers beheading Israeli babies. No such photos exist. Indeed, the initial claim of Hamas beheading babies was false, a frontline rumor that was debunked by the reporter who put it out there.

By recklessly repeating an unsubstantiated battlefield rumor of heinous atrocities and inventing “photos” to support it, President Biden demonstrated his complete lack of fitness to serve as president.

Think about it. In what world is it acceptable for America’s president to claim he’d seen actual photos of beheadings of babies when no such photos exist? How could the president be so recklessly confused, assuming it was simply confusion?

As far as I know, the only candidate for the presidency in 2024 who’s acquitted himself with dignity is Cornel West. West actually accepts that Palestinian babies and children are just as precious and worthy of life as their Israeli counterparts. Every other “name” candidate, e.g. Marianne Williamson and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as well as all the Republicans, are at pains to support Israel without reservation or qualification.

Indeed, far more debate is allowed in Israel about the actions of the government there than is allowed in the U.S. mainstream media and in Congress. Congress is far more obedient to Netanyahu than the Knesset. Perhaps he should be nominated as the new House Speaker? He’d win in a landslide.

Of course, I deplore the Hamas attacks and the deaths of innocent Israelis, just as I deplore the deaths of innocent Palestinians caught in the reprisal bombings. It’s horrible when innocent people die. Isn’t this how any normal and sane human being would feel? Shouldn’t we all unite in calling for a ceasefire, an end to the killing, and some kind of way forward that doesn’t end in mass death and the total destruction of Gaza?

What is so “repugnant” about that?

https://bracingviews.substack.com/p/what-exactly-is-repugnant-about-efforts

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Amid a genocide against the people of Gaza by the Israeli military, the United States is threatening to unleash a war throughout the Middle East targeting Iran.

Over the weekend, bombs continued to rain down on Gaza, killing hundreds of people each day. A population of two million is being systematically killed through starvation and thirst, while one million people in Northern Gaza are being forced on a death march in advance of an imminent ground invasion.

This genocide has the full support of the Biden administration, which has given Israel a blank check to carry out war crimes. Operationally, Israel’s actions are being overseen by the United States. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin visited Israel last week, and Blinken is scheduled to return this week.

Israel’s war on Gaza has been accompanied by a massive expansion of the US military presence in the region, led by the deployment of two aircraft carriers and their associated battle groups. The dispatch of an armada of over a dozen warships to the Middle East is not simply to threaten Hamas, which has no navy. The United States is preparing for a much broader conflict in the Middle East, including war with Iran.

The US is using the present crisis to put into effect long-standing plans for a war with Iran, as the Middle Eastern front of the US war with Russia and war plans against China. On Saturday, Austin announced that the US would double its military assets deployed in the Middle East, sending a second carrier strike group, led by the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, to the region.

Austin said the strike group “includes the guided-missile cruiser USS Philippine Sea, guided-missile destroyers USS Gravely and USS Mason, and Carrier Air Wing 3, with nine aircraft squadrons.” The Eisenhower will join the USS Gerald R. Ford Carrier Strike Group, which has already been deployed to the region. Austin noted, “The Ford CSG includes the USS Normandy, USS Thomas Hudner, USS Ramage, USS Carney, and USS Roosevelt.” Earlier in the week, the US Air Force announced deployment to the region of squadrons of F-15, F-16 and A-10 fighter aircraft.

Each nuclear-powered carrier strike group has a total personnel of up to 8,000 sailors, airmen, and Marines, meaning that over 15,000 troops have been deployed to the Middle East in the span of just over one week, alongside dozens of other aircraft and thousands of support personnel.

These plans could not have been put into practice at the drop of a hat. There are indications that the Netanyahu government and US intelligence agencies had some degree of advanced knowledge of an attack from Hamas, though it was shocked by the scale of the rebellion. In any case, the Israeli regime has planned for an all-out war against the Palestinians, in part to deflect from its escalating internal social and political crisis. 

The United States, for its part, has used the crisis to put into effect its own plans for an escalation against Iran.

US officials have made clear that the aircraft carriers are targeting Iran. On Friday, US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said, “There is a risk of an escalation of this conflict, the opening of a second front in the north, and, of course, of Iran’s involvement… It’s why the president moved so rapidly and decisively to get an aircraft carrier into the Eastern Mediterranean, to get aircraft into the Gulf, because he wants to send a very clear message of deterrence.”

In an editorial Sunday night, the Wall Street Journal wrote, “The Ayatollahs in Tehran need to understand that more than their terrorist proxies are at risk. They need to know that their nuclear sites and oil fields are also on the target list.” Echoing these points, Senator Lindsay Graham raised the prospect of a declaration of war against Iran, which he said he had discussed with the White House.

“I’ll introduce a resolution in the United States Senate to allow military action by the United States, in conjunction with Israel, to knock Iran out of the oil business,” he said. “Iran, if you escalate this war, we’re coming for you.”

In an interview on 60 Minutes, Biden seemed to imply support for opening a second front in the war and attacking Lebanon’s Hezbollah political party. “Going in and taking out the extremists, Hezbollah is up north but Hamas down South is a necessary requirement,” Biden said, adding, “Iran constantly supports Hamas and Hezbollah.”

In this context, there is the possibility that the US will stage some sort of provocation to justify a war against Iran. Significantly, National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said he would not rule out deploying US troops into combat in the present crisis, ostensibly to save hostages held by Hamas. The deployment of US troops on the ground would not be about saving hostages, whose lives are of no significance to American imperialism, but at directly involving the US military in a developing conflict with Iran. 

The United States has planned for a war against Iran for decades. In January 2002, following the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, then President George W. Bush called Iran part of an “axis of evil” that included Iraq, which the United States invaded and occupied the next year. Inside the White House, Bush administration officials were fond of the saying, “Boys go to Baghdad, but real men go to Tehran.” 

The US conflict with Iran was massively intensified under the Trump administration. Following the 2018 US withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal, Iran shot down a US drone over the Strait of Hormuz in June 2019. That month, then President Donald Trump ordered a series of airstrikes on Iranian targets, which he called off at the last minute, while the planes were already in the air.

In January 2020, the US murdered Qasem Soleimani, the commander of Iran’s Quds Force and a major figure in the Iranian military establishment.

The development of a full-scale war in the Middle East is a continuation of the same policies that have led to the protracted and escalating US-NATO war against Russia over Ukraine. The US instigated the conflict with the aim of militarily defeating Russia and orchestrating a regime change operation. The war against Russia is seen as preparatory to a military conflict with China. 

The free rein given to Israel to commit mass murder against the population of Gaza, and the intensifying US war plans against Iran, must be seen in the context of the eruption of what is, in effect, the initial stages of a third world war.

The war plans of US imperialism are being disrupted by a growing movement of the working class, which is intersecting with a global movement against imperialist war. Over the weekend, millions of people marched in the Middle East, Europe and the United States in opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza. 

The massive escalation of war will be paid for through an escalation of the assault on the working class, which has already sparked a growing strike wave in the US and all the major capitalist countries. 

The eruption of popular opposition to Israeli genocide must be connected to the developing class struggle over inequality and exploitation. This requires the building of a socialist leadership in the working class, fusing the fight against war with opposition to the capitalist profit system.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/10/16/zjum-o16.html

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BY PEPE ESCOBAR

You have stolen the orchards of my ancestors
And the land that I cultivated
And you left nothing for us
Except for these rocks…
If I become hungry
The usurper’s flesh will be my food.

– Palestinian national poet Mahmoud Darwish

It’s by now confirmed that Egyptian intel warned their Israeli counterparts only 3 days before Al-Aqsa Flood that something “big” was coming from Hamas. Tel Aviv, its multi-billion dollar security apparatus and the IDF, “the strongest army in the world”, chose to ignore it.

That configures two key vectors.

1) Tel Aviv get its “Pearl Harbor” pretext to implement a remixed “war on terror” plus a sort of Final Solution to the “Gaza problem” (already in effect).

2) The Hegemon abruptly changes the narrative away from the incoming, inevitable, cosmic joint humiliation of the White House and NATO in the steppes of Novorossiya – a strategic defeat that configures the previous humiliation in Afghanistan as a masked ball in Disneyland.

The total blockade of “human animals” (copyright Israeli Defense Ministry) in Gaza, in fact a civilian population of 2.3 million, has been imposed this past Monday. No food, no water, no fuel, no essential commodities.

That’s a war crime and a crime against humanity, thrashing the four basic principles of the

Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC) – everything duly applauded or at best completely ignored by NATOstan and its assorted oligarch-controlled mainstream media.

Christians, Muslims, Jews and other ethnic groups lived peacefully in Palestine for centuries until the imposition of the racist Zionist Project – complete with all the Divide and Rule attributes of settler colonialism.

The Nakba is an old memory of 75 years ago. We are now way beyond apartheid – and entering total exclusion and expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland.

In January 2023, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu himself stressed, “the Jewish people have an exclusive and unquestionable right to all areas of the Land of Israel.”

Now, the IDF sent no less than an order to the UN to completely evacuate all residents of northern Gaza – 1.1 million people – to southern Gaza, close to Rafah, the only border crossing with Egypt.

This forced mass deportation of civilians would be the prelude to raze all of northern Gaza to the ground, coupled with expulsion and confiscation of ancestral Palestinian land – edging closer to a Zionist Final Solution.

Welcome to Sociopaths United

Netanyahu, a sociopath with a proven track record, can only get away with serial war crimes because of total support by the White House, the “Biden” combo and the State Department – not to mention inconsequential EU vassals.

We just witnessed a U.S. Secretary of State – a low-IQ functionary out of his depth on every single issue – going to Israel to support collective punishment “as a Jew as well”.

He said his grandfather “fled pogroms in Russia” (that was in 1904). Then came the direct – Nazi – connection to “my stepfather survived Auschwitz, Dachau and Majdanek”. Impressive, that’s three concentration camps in a row. The secretary is obviously oblivious to the fact that the USSR liberated all three.

Then came the connection Russia-Nazis-Hamas. At least it’s all clear.

Internally, Netanyahu is only able to stay as Prime Minister because of especially two rabid ultra-Zionist, racist, supremacist coalition partners. He named Itamar Ben-Gvir as National Security Minister and Bezalel Smotrich as Finance Minister – both de facto in charge of proliferating settlements all across the West Bank in industrial scale.

Smotrich has been on the record saying that “there is no such thing as Palestinians because there is no such thing as a Palestinian people”.

Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, in record time, are on their way to double the settler population in the cantons across the West Bank from 500,000 to one million. Palestinians – de facto non-citizens – number 3.7 million. lllegal settlements – not formally approved by Tel Aviv – are popping up all across the spectrum.

In Gaza – where poverty hovers at 60% and youth unemployment is massive – UN agencies desperately warn of an impending humanitarian catastrophe.

Over 1 million people in Gaza, mostly women and children, depend on UN food assistance. Tens of thousands of kids go to UNRWA schools (UNRWA is the agency for Palestinian refugees).

Tel Aviv is now killing them – softly. At least 11 UNRWA workers have been killed this past week (including teachers, a doctor and an engineer), at least 30 kids, plus 5 members of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent.

To top it all up, there’s the Pipelineistan angle – as in stealing Gaza gas.

At least 60% of the vast gas reserves discovered in 2000 along the Gaza-Israel coastline legally belong to Palestine.

A key consequence of the Final Solution applied to Gaza translates as sovereignty over the gas fields switched to Israel – in yet another massive trampling of international law.

The Global Majority is Palestine

Amid the horrifying prospect of Israel depopulating the entire northern half of Gaza, live on TV and cheered on by hordes of NATOstan zombies, it’s not far-fetched to consider the possibility of Turkiye, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Yemen and the Gulf monarchies joining together, at various levels, to create overwhelming pressure against the implementation of the Zionist Final Solution.

Virtually the whole Global South/Global Majority is with Palestine.

Turkiye, problematically, is not an Arab nation and has been too ideologically close to Hamas in the recent past. Assuming the current Netanyahu gang would engage in diplomacy, the possible best mediation team would be formed by Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Egyptian diplomacy.

India has just stabbed itself in the head as a leader of the Global Majority: their leadership does seem to get a hard on when facing Israel.

Then there are the Big Sovereigns: the Russia-China strategic partnership.

Russia-Iran are themselves connected by a strategic partnership – including at all state of the art military levels. The Iran-Saudi rapprochement mediated and clinched by China has led, this week, to Mohammad bin Salman and Ebrahim Raisi on the phone, for the first time ever, coordinating their unwavering support to the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people. Syria’s Bashar al-Assad has just visited China, received with full honors.

China’s trademark diplomatic sophistication – way beyond Al-Aqsa Flood – amounts to supporting legitimate Palestinian rights. The whole Arab world and the lands of Islam clearly feel it – while Israel and NATOstan are impervious to nuance.

With Russia we reach heavy metal territory. Earlier this week, Israel’s ambassador to Russia, Alexander Ben Zvi, was finally received, after several attempts by Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov. It was Israel who practically begged for a meeting.

Bogdanov cut to the chase, bluntly: Ben Zvi was warned that the IDF plan to literally destroy Gaza, expel the indigenous population and practice the ethnic cleansing of those “human animals” was “fraught with the most devastating consequences for the humanitarian situation in the region.”

That advances a quite possible scenario – whose consequences can be equally devastating: Moscow – in collaboration with Ankara – launching a Global South-supported blockade-busting operation against Israel.

It’s no secret – apart from the modus operandi – that Putin and Erdogan have discussed a possible Turkish humanitarian naval convoy to Gaza, which would be protected from an Israeli attack by the Russian Navy out of its Tartous base in Syria and the Russian air Force out of Hmeimim. That would raise the stakes to unforeseen levels.

What’s clear already is that the Hegemon proxy war against Russia in Ukraine and the Israeli “war on terror” remixed in Gaza are just parallel fronts of a single, horrifyingly evolving, global war.

https://www.unz.com/pescobar/slouching-towards-the-final-solution/

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As the latest escalation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict rages on, sparked by the October 7 Hamas militants’ attack on Israeli territories, Israeli officials appear eager to portray it as an existential struggle between good and evil where Israel is the former, an analyst has said.

In his recent address to the Israeli Knesset, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insisted the conflict between Israel and Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip is “a war between forces of light and forces of darkness, between humanity and animalism,” and even compared Hamas to Nazis.

With the Israeli strikes against the Gaza Strip already claiming some 2,750 Palestinian lives, according to the local health officials, it would appear the Israeli prime minister is “justifying this colossal response in terms of a familiar evil,” says independent media analyst professor Ellis Cashmore.

“By comparing Hamas with Nazism, he is invoking history: 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust, so it is an incredibly potent comparison,” he elaborated. “The trouble is: few people accept the equivalence. While Hamas' attack has been condemned, there were about 1,300 innocent Israeli deaths. Awful as this was, I suspect Netanyahu is fearing that Israel's response may be violating humanitarian and international law and that, at some point in the future, his response will be seen as even worse than the Hamas attack.”

https://sputnikglobe.com/20231016/netanyahu-evokes-nazism-to-justify-israels-colossal-response-to-hamas-attack-1114239142.html

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