Zionist attempts to silence criticism running in top gear after ICJ ruling    By Kellie Tranter

 

Friday’s findings of the International Court of Justice on Israel’s conduct must be at the forefront of our legislator’s minds when they are pushed by the Israel lobby to enact the IHRA definition of antisemitism.

The attempt by Zionist lobbyists to silence criticism of Israel is running in top gear to try to counter the swell of public opinion against Israel flowing from the exposure in real time of the barbarity of its actions in Gaza.

The attempted suppression is widespread in the United States where pressure has been put on Congress and many universities to adopt and implement the definition, and the lobby has been equally diligent in its efforts in England and Europe.

It is also openly trying to achieve a similar outcome through similar processes in Australia, as witness the Israeli lobby’s push to have universities formally adopt their desired definition of antisemitism and the AHRC complaint filed against Mary Kostakidis, the real objective of those efforts being to have the Australian government give that definition legislative force and give the lobby a more solid footing for their attempts to muzzle actual critics and ‘chill’ potential critics from expressing rational, factually based criticisms of the actions of the State of Israel and the actors behind them.

In the US, the Zionist lobby has had some success in having its wider definition implemented, probably substantially due to the ignorance of legislators, wrote Elliott Colla. There the Lobby is not only co-opting politicians and pushing hard on universities: Why anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism, it is also targeting writers. “Defenders of PEN America, the US literary and free speech organization that has been facing ongoing outcry for their relative silence on Gaza, have used the specter of antisemitism to avoid engaging with the actual critiques at hand” wrote Daniel José Older in LitHubon 11 June, 2024.

He described being “..outraged by these claims of antisemitism, but not because I’m Jewish—that just makes it personal. I’m outraged because in their desperation to distract from the ongoing genocide in Palestine they don’t even bother trying to make sense.” and went on to say:

Judaism had, of course, been around for thousands of years before the European colonial ideology Zionism came along, and Judaism will hopefully be around for thousands of years after it’s gone. Millions of Jews are not Zionists, and the vast majority of Zionists are Christian Evangelicals.

Not only are Judaism and Zionism not at all synonymous, the conflation of the two serves the strategic purpose of providing cover for Israel’s documented war crimes. In a time when actual antisemitism is on the rise from fascist right-wing elements across the globe, it’s deeply cynical and harmful to casually invoke this term to evade accountability and to muddle an uncomfortable conversation.

The Lobby’s power in the British Parliament recently came in for scathing criticism by former UK Minister Sir Alan Duncan, who called on Israel to end its occupation of Palestine, criticised the British government’s rejection of the International Criminal Court (ICC) legal processes and the United Nations generally and condemned the rise of politicians undermining institutions they are part of, emphasising the need to distinguish between legitimate criticism of Israel and antisemitism: “Unjustified accusations of antisemitism to silence legitimate comments on Israel are damaging to the Jewish community…… There’s a real lack of understanding about the history and the facts, and it’s very difficult to teach people when so many have been on paid trips to Israel, funded by the Conservative Friends of Israel.”

Also addressing the state of affairs in the UK, journalist Jonathan Cook recently said,

…..Those who make (Zionists) feel uncomfortable by highlighting the reality of Israel’s oppression of Palestinians – and their blindness to it – are accused of being “offensive”

That supposed offensiveness is now conflated with antisemitism, as the treatment of Ken Loach, the respected film-maker of this parish, attests. Disgust at Israel’s racism towards Palestinians is malevolently confused with racism towards Jews. The truth is inverted.

This confusion has also become the basis for a new definition of antisemitism – one aggressively advanced by Israel and its apologists – designed to mislead casual onlookers. The more we, as anti-racists and opponents of colonialism, try to focus attention and opprobrium on Israel’s crimes, the more we are accused of covertly attacking Jews.

… …

Here the battle over Zionism – defining it, understanding it, confronting it, refusing to be silenced by it – is in full flood. The Labour party, under Jeremy Corbyn, was politically eviscerated by a redefined antisemitism. Now the party’s ranks are being purged by his successor, Sir Keir Starmer, on the same phoney grounds.

Professors are being threatened and losing their jobs, as happened to David Miller at Bristol university, with the goal of intensifying pressure on the academy to keep silent about Israel and its lobbyists. Exhibitions are taken down, speakers cancelled.

And all the while, the current western obsession with redefining antisemitism – the latest cover story for apartheid Israel – moves us ever further from sensitivity to real racism, whether it be genuine prejudice against Jews or rampant Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism.

Welsh writer Adam Johannes has also helpfully addressed the misrepresentative weaponisation by the Zionist lobby of the Palestinian, and now worldwide, call.

The improbability of any judicial body in Australia finding that Mary Kostakidis’ journalistic republications of various news items, statements of involved parties and viewpoints about the State of Israel’s actions has now been highlighted by the ICJ’s published findings on the illegality of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands and its apartheid practices, particularly when that is read in conjunction with the ICJ’s earlier finding that there is a plausible case of genocide against it.

Israel’s contemptuous refusal to follow the orders of the World Court on its illegal settlements, on the expropriation of Palestinian land, on its breaches of the Palestinians’ human rights and on the invasion of Rafah and other matters relating to its conduct in Gaza, and its contumelious refutation of the validity and applicability of the findings concerning its illegal occupation, speak volumes about its attitude towards the concepts of human dignity and equality in any ‘rules-based international order’ .

Calling out such inhumane and nihilistic behaviour by public exposure and criticism should be an obligation of good citizenship and responsible nationhood, not the subject of state repression through an engineered abuse of legal provisions intended to protect real people from real harms.

Shielding from public criticism an anti-democratic apartheid State that illegally occupies the territories of others, persistently abuses human rights and plausibly is committing genocide is not a proper function of our anti-discrimination laws.

https://johnmenadue.com/zionist-attempts-to-silence-criticism-running-in-top-gear-after-icj-ruling/

 

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https://mronline.org/2024/07/20/mister-netanyahu-comes-to-washington-and-will-receive-a-warm-welcome/

 

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BY Kit Klarenberg

 

How western Big Tech giants enable Israel's occupation

Hewlett Packard, Motorola, and other western tech conglomerates have been deeply involved in providing the technological infrastructure that supports Israeli apartheid and settler colonialism. This is how they profit from the oppression of Palestinians.

 

On 10 July, Hebrew newspaper Maariv reported that 46,000 Israeli businesses have been forced to shut down due to the ongoing Gaza war and its devastating effect on the economy. The outlet referred to Israel as a “country in collapse.”

Regular readers of The Cradle will be well aware of the scale of the occupation state’s economic collapse since the Gaza genocide began. Yet, its effect on the precipitous decline of Tel Aviv’s once-thriving tech sector remains underexplored.

Complicity in occupation infrastructure

In mid-June, mainstream news outlets reported that chip giant Intel was halting expansion of a major factory project in Israel, which was slated to pump an extra $15 billion into the occupation entity’s economy.

Intel is just one tech giant whose fortunes have soured since Palestinian freedom fighters breached Gaza’s concentration camp walls on 7 October 2023. 

The same fate has been suffered by multiple consumer-facing tech companies profiteering from illegal Zionist settlement expansion, which also provide infrastructure and resources used to oppress Palestinians and enforce Tel Aviv’s apartheid.

This week, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that Israel's continued presence in occupied Palestinian territory is unlawful and should come to an end “as rapidly as possible.” Notably, the court opened the door to “reparations” for any illegal actions carried out by Israel and other entities since 1967.

Multiple consumer-facing western tech companies that not only profit from illegal Jewish settlement expansion but actively provide core infrastructure and resources used to oppress Palestinians and enforce Tel Aviv's apartheid could now be subject to lawsuits.

The ICJ's landmark judgment means the long-term viability of these tech firms' operations in the occupied territories is moribund - for fear of legal repercussions, if nothing else.

Fittingly, given Germany is currently in the dock at the ICJ for its support and facilitation of the genocide in Gaza, Munich-headquartered tech conglomerate Siemens is among the culprits.

The firm is “focused on automation and digitalization in the manufacturing industries, intelligent infrastructure for buildings and distributed energy systems, smart mobility solutions for rail transport, and medical technology and digital healthcare services.” Its products are profuse throughout the occupation state and its illegal settlements.

Traffic control systems and traffic lights produced by Siemens can be found in areas of the West Bank where Palestinian residents are forbidden from traveling. In 2014, the company’s Israeli subdivision RS Industries won a tender to provide traffic control systems across the Jerusalem Municipality too - East Jerusalem, designated as the capital of the Palestinian state, was occupied in 1967, and falls within the ICJ's mandate.

Elsewhere, Siemens provides its DDEMU model cars for the Tel Aviv Jerusalem Fast Train and, in 2018, was awarded a $1 billion contract by the entity-owned Israel Railways to supply 330 electric cars as part of Israel’s electrification project, which includes the Tel Aviv - Jerusalem Fast Train (A1).

A highly controversial project that passes through two areas of the West Bank, including privately owned, occupied Palestinian land, it is intended for exclusive use by Israeli Jews.

Don’t Buy Into Occupation (DBIO) states: “Siemens’ activities are of concern, as they are linked to the provision of services and utilities supporting the maintenance and existence of settlements.”

However, the company’s activities extend far further. Through its Israeli representative, Orad Group, the company provides equipment and technology to the notorious Israel Prison Service (IPS).

In 2004, the Orad Group provided a Siemens technology-based perimeter security system to Gilboa prison — a detention center specifically designated for Palestinian political prisoners. Siemens also supplies the IPS with a sophisticated fire detection and extinguishing system.

Connecting settlements

US brand Motorola is widely recognized for its innovative smartphone devices. However, DBIO has meticulously documented the involvement of Motorola's Tel Aviv division in settlement expansion over the past decade.

The tech giant has collaborated closely with Israeli occupation forces, the Ministry of Defense, and Zionist settlement councils across the illegally occupied territories. A prime example of this collaboration is the surveillance system "MotoEagle," designed to monitor settlers on appropriated land, operate within occupation military bases, and oversee the Gaza concentration camp’s separation wall.

Notably, Motorola-produced radar stations have been installed on illegally appropriated private Palestinian land, restricting Palestinian movement in these areas. Furthermore, Motorola supplies the Ministry of Defense’s Zramim System, a smart card operation utilized at Israeli checkpoints to monitor goods transportation.

Palestinian drivers, merchants, and transport companies are compelled to register their personal information in this system, enabling Tel Aviv to monitor all entry and exit points meticulously.

The company is also a preferred contractor for internal security systems in numerous occupation settlements. The Jordan Valley regional council, encompassing more than 20 settlements in the occupied West Bank, employs multiple Motorola products, including command and control systems and surveillance cameras. Additionally, the Population and Immigration Authority in the settlement of Beitar Illit uses Motorola for its security needs.

In 2022, Motorola Solutions secured a contract to provide security cameras and entrance control resources for the Jerusalem Light Rail’s (JLR) entire Green Line. This route links the Gilo settlement in occupied East Jerusalem with the city center and the Ramat Eshkol, Ma’alot Dafna, and French Hill settlements, facilitating connectivity between settler enclaves and supporting settler movement. Consequently, Motorola has been listed in the UN’s database of firms profiting from illegal settlement expansion.

Powering apartheid

Hewlett Packard Enterprises (HPE), which split from personal computer and printer provider Hewlett Packard in 2015, is one of the most profitable US corporations. However, it is less well-known that HPE supplies and manages much of the technological infrastructure underpinning the occupation state’s apartheid and settler colonialism.

For example, HPE provides “Itanium” servers and maintenance services to Tel Aviv’s Population and Immigration Authority. This computerized Israel’s checkpoint system while storing vast amounts of information on all Palestinians with Israeli citizenship and non-citizen Palestinian residents of occupied East Jerusalem.

HPE directly contracts with the illegal settler municipalities of Modi’in Ilit and Ariel, two of the largest Jewish-only settlements in the West Bank, providing them with a range of services. Additionally, HPE maintains the central server system for the Israeli Prison Service (IPS), placing the company at the core of Tel Aviv's use of mass incarceration to suppress Palestinian resistance. A 1994 Human Rights Watch reporthighlighted this by noting:

“The extraction of confessions under duress, and the acceptance into evidence of such confessions by the military courts, form the backbone of Israel's military justice system.”

Moreover, HPE is the primary provider of the Basel system, an automated biometric access control system employed at Israeli checkpoints and the Gaza apartheid wall. ID cards distributed under Basel are integral to the systematic discrimination against Palestinians.

The checkpoints, by design, segregate and fragment the Occupied Palestinian Territories and its inhabitants, separating workers from their places of employment, students from their schools, and families from each other through electrified fences, watchtowers, and concrete barriers.

Electronic counter intifada

This system is part of a broader state of siege under which Palestinians have lived for decades, significantly intensified by the sealing off of Gaza and the West Bank. The Israeli navy, another HPE customer, relies on the company’s IT infrastructure and support services. The siege severely restricts the movement of goods and people in and out of Palestinian territories, aiming explicitly to crush Palestinian resistance.

In 2006, Dov Weisglass, an adviser to then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, explained: “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.” It was hoped hunger pangs through limited caloric intake might encourage Palestinians to reject Hamas or at least force its fighters to temper their resistance efforts. The starvation of Palestinians has only galvanized their support for Hamas and their yearning for freedom from Israeli occupation.

The occupation state failed to crush the Palestinian resistance via Operation Swords of Iron, an effort so catastrophic that even Israeli media has branded it a “total defeat.”

Following Iran's successful 14 April retaliatory strikes against Israel, Tel Aviv’s reign of impunity appears to be nearing its long-overdue end. It is only a matter of time before major western tech firms like HPE, which facilitated the oppression of Palestinians, will face consequences for their complicity.

 

This investigation is the second in a series at The Cradle that examines illegal investments by western corporations in the occupied Palestinian territories and/or that assist Israel in implementing its apartheid system. The first investigation can be found here.

 

https://thecradle.co/articles/how-western-big-tech-giants-enable-israels-occupation

 

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NYT Not Much Concerned About Israel’s Mass Murder of Journalists    BY HARRY ZEHNER

 

A devoted New York Times reader might get the impression that the paper cares deeply about protecting journalists from those who seek to suppress the press.

After all, the Times runs sympathetic features on journalists like Evan Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journalreporter who was detained by Russia over a year ago. The paper (6/3/22) has written stingingly of Russia’s “clamp down on war criticism,” including in a recent editorial (3/22/24) headlined “Jailed in Putin’s Russia for Speaking the Truth.”

It has castigated China for its “draconian” attacks on the press in Hong Kong (6/23/21). The Times has similarly criticized Venezuela for an “expanding crackdown on press freedom” (3/6/19) and Iran for a “campaign of intimidation” against journalists (4/26/16).

Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger, in his keynote address at the 2023 World Press Freedom Day, spoke forcefully:

All over the world, independent journalists and press freedoms are under attack. Without journalists to provide news and information that people can depend on, I fear we will continue to see the unraveling of civic bonds, the erosion of democratic norms and the weakening of the trust—in institutions and in each other—that is so essential to the global order.

‘Targeting of journalists’

Yet since October 7—as Israel has killed more journalists, in a shorter period of time, than any country in modern history—the Times has minimized when not ignoring this mass murder. Conservative estimates from the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) estimate that 95 journalistshave been killed in the Israel/Gaza conflict since October 7, all but two being Palestinian and Lebanese journalists killed by Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). Other estimates, like those from the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate (4/4/24), place the number closer to 130. All told, Israel has killed about one out every 10 journalists in Gaza, a staggering toll.

(Two Israeli journalists were killed by Hamas on October 7, according to CPJ, and none have been killed since. Other tallies include two other Israeli journalists who were killed as part of the audience at the Supernova music festival on October 7.)

CPJ (12/31/23) wrote in December that it was “particularly concerned about an apparent pattern of targeting of journalists and their families by the Israeli military.” It noted that, in at least two instances, “journalists reported receiving threats from Israeli officials and IDF officers before their family members were killed.” This accusation has been echoed by groups like Doctors Without Borders. Israel has demonstrably targeted reporters, like Issam Abdallah, the Reuters journalist who was murdered on October 13 (Human Rights Watch, 3/29/24).

In a May 2023 report, CPJ (5/9/23) found that the IDF had killed 20 journalists since 2000. None of the killers faced accountability from the Israeli government, despite the incidents being generally well-documented. Despite its demonstration that Israel’s military has targeted—and murdered—journalists in the past, important context like this report is generally absent from the Times. (The CPJ report was mentioned at the very end of one Times article—12/7/23.)

We used the New York Times API and archive to create a database of every Times news article that included the keyword “Gaza” written between October 7, 2023, and April 7, 2024 (the first six months of the war). We then checked that database for headlines, subheads and leads which included the words (singular or plural) “journalist,” “media worker,” “news worker,” “reporter” or “photojournalist.” Opinion articles, briefings and video content were excluded from the search.

Failing to name the killer

We found that the Times wrote just nine articles focused on Israel’s killing of specific journalists, and just two which examined the phenomenon as a whole.

Of the nine headlines which directly noted that journalists have been killed, only two headlines—in six months!—named Israel as responsible for the deaths. Both of these headlines (11/21/23, 12/7/23) presented Israel’s responsibility as an accusation, not a fact.

Some headlines (e.g., 11/3/23) simply said that a journalist had been killed, without naming the perpetrator. Others blamed “the war” (e.g., 10/13/23).

During this same six-month period, the Times wrote the same number of articles (nine) on Evan Gershkovitch and Alsu Kurmasheva, two US journalists being held on trumped-up espionage charges by Russia.

From October 7 until April 7, the Times wrote 43 stories that mentioned either the overall journalist death toll or the deaths of specific journalists. As noted, 11 of these articles (26%) either focused on the death of a specific journalist or on the whole phenomenon. But in the vast majority of these articles, 32 out of 43 (74%), the killing of journalists was mentioned in passing, or only to add context, often towards the end of a report.

Many of these articles (e.g., 10/25/23, 11/3/23, 11/21/23, 12/15/23) contained a boilerplate paragraph like this one from November 4:

The war continues to take a heavy toll on those gathering the news. The Committee to Protect Journalists said that more news media workers have been killed in the Israel/Hamas war than in any other conflict in the area since it started tracking the data in 1992. As of Friday, 36 news workers—31 Palestinians, four Israelis and one Lebanese—have been killed since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, the group said.

Saying that “the war” was taking a heavy toll, and listing the number of journalists “killed in the Israel/Hamas war,” the Times‘ standard language on the death toll for reporters omits that the vast majority have been killed by Israel. It does note, however, that these deaths occurred “since Hamas attacked Israel,” suggesting that Hamas was directly or indirectly to blame.

It took a month for the Times to write a single article (11/10/23) focused on what had become “the deadliest month for journalists in at least three decades.” This November article, published on page 8 of the print edition, and apparently not even deserving of its own web page—named “the war” as the killer, managing for its entire ten paragraphs to avoid saying that Israel had killed anyone.

Again, the writing subtly implied that Hamas was to blame for Israel’s war crimes (emphasis added):

At least 40 journalists and other media workers have been killed in the Israel/Hamas war since October 7, when Hamas launched a surprise attack on Israel, making the past month the deadliest for journalists in at least three decades, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

There was no mention of Israel’s long pattern of targeting journalists.

Obscuring responsibility

It took until January 30, nearly four months and at least 85 dead journalists into the war, for the New York Times to address this mass murder in any kind of comprehensive manner. This article—“The War the World Can’t See”—aligned with the Times practice of obscuring and qualifying Israeli responsibility for its destruction of Gaza. Neither the headline, the subhead nor the lead named Israel as responsible for reporters’ killings. Israel’s responsibility for the deaths of scores of reporters appeared almost incidental.

The lead positioned the mass death of journalists and the accompanying communications blackout as tragic consequences of “the war”:

To many people outside Gaza, the war flashes by as a doomscroll of headlines and casualty tolls and photos of screaming children, the bloody shreds of somebody else’s anguish.

But the true scale of death and destruction is impossible to grasp, the details hazy and shrouded by internet and cellphone blackouts that obstruct communication, restrictions barring international journalists and the extreme, often life-threatening challenges of reporting as a local journalist from Gaza.

Remarkably, we have to wait until the 11th paragraph for the Times to acknowledge that Israel is responsible for all of the journalists’ deaths in Gaza. Palestinian accusations that Israel is intentionally targeting journalists were juxtaposed, in classic Times fashion, with a quote from the Israeli military: Israel “has never and will never deliberately target journalists,” spokesperson Nir Dinar said, and the suggestion that Israel was deliberately preventing the world from seeing what it was doing in Gaza was a “blood libel.”

This rebuttal was presented without the context that, as discussed earlier, Israel has for decades been accused by human rights groups and other media organizations of intentionally targeting journalists. The article leaves the reader with the general impression that a terrible tragedy—not a campaign of mass murder—is unfolding.

This review of six months of the New York Times’ coverage exposes a remarkable selective interest in threats to journalism. Despite Sulzberger’s lofty rhetoric, the Times seems to only care about the “worldwide assault on journalists and journalism” when those journalists are fighting repression in enemy states.

 

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https://fair.org/home/nyt-not-much-concerned-about-israels-mass-murder-of-journalists/

 

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Netanyahu en route to Washington as Israel orders new Gaza evacuations

The day after US President Joe Biden announced his resignation, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was en route to Washington on Monday to deliver an important address at a time of "great political uncertainty", as the military ordered new evacuations in the southern Gaza city of Khan Yunis. The visit comes amid heightened tensions between the US and its long-standing ally, with fears of the Gaza war once again fuelling regional violence as Israel on Saturday attacked Yemen for the first time, in retaliation for a deadly drone strike on Tel Aviv by the Huthi rebels. 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu departed for Washington on Monday to deliver a key speech, as the military ordered fresh evacuations in the southern Gaza city of Khan Yunis before sending in troops.

Netanyahu called the visit Monday a "very important trip" that comes at a time of "great political uncertainty", referring to US President Joe Biden's decision not to seek re-election and as Washington pushes Israel to seek a ceasefire deal with Hamas.

The premier is due to meet Biden on Tuesday and address the US Congress the day after. He departs Israel with significant domestic pressure to agree to a truce and hostage release deal in Gaza.

The nine-month-old war in the Palestinian territory raged on unabated on Monday, with Israel telling civilians in the eastern part of Khan Yunis to evacuate.

There was already intense shelling in the city on Monday, eyewitnesses said, while a medical source in the city's Nasser Hospital told AFP the toll from the bombing in Khan Yunis since dawn today has reached 26 dead. The health ministry had said there were 14 killed.

In a statement, the Israeli military said "due to significant terrorist activity and rocket fire toward the state of Israel... remaining in this area has become dangerous".

It said its forces were "about to forcefully operate" in the area and told Gazans to move to Al-Mawasi humanitarian zone.

'Tension in the relationship'

Al-Mawasi has been the site of several deadly incidents in recent months and displaced Palestinians told AFP it was already full.

Youssef Abu Taimah, from the town of Al-Qarara in Khan Yunis, said his family headed to the humanitarian area but found no space.

"Even the sidewalks are full of people and tents. We are tired and fed up. Enough of this displacement and migration".

Ahmed al-Bayouk, a 53-year-old man from Khan Yunis, told AFP: "We barely settle for a few days before the army comes, bombs, displaces us and destroys more."

"Where should we go? Every place is at risk of bombing."

The war has placed unprecedented strains on Israel's most significant and closest alliance, with Netanyahu defying US pressure and launching a major ground operation in Gaza's Rafah earlier this year.

"Never before has the atmosphere been so fraught," said Steven Cook, a Middle East specialist at the Council on Foreign Relations.

"There is clearly tension in the relationship, especially between the White House and the Israeli prime minister," Cook said in a commentary.

The visit comes with the Gaza war again fuelling regional violence. Israel on Saturday attacked Yemen for the first time, in retaliation for a deadly drone strike on Tel Aviv by the Huthi rebels.

There were also further exchanges of fire between Lebanon's Hezbollah and the Israeli military over the weekend, as tensions remained high along the border.

Truce pressure

The war was sparked by Hamas's October 7 attack on Israel which resulted in the deaths of 1,195 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli figures.

Militants also seized 251 hostages, 116 of whom are still in Gaza, including 42 the Israeli military says are dead.

Israel's retaliatory campaign has killed at least 38,983 people in Gaza, also mostly civilians, according to data from the health ministry in the Hamas-ruled territory.

Washington has pushed for a ceasefire deal in Gaza, but Netanyahu, who faces domestic pressure to bring home the hostages taken in the October 7 Hamas attack, has insisted that increased military pressure on the militants is the best route to a deal.

"This double pressure is not delaying the deal -– it is advancing it," Netanyahu told troops in Gaza on Thursday.

On Sunday, the premier's office said he was sending a negotiating team for new talks on a truce deal, though it was unclear where the team would go.

Egypt, Qatar and the United States have been working unsuccessfully for months to secure a deal between Israel and Hamas

 

https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20240722-netanyahu-heads-for-washington-as-israel-orders-new-gaza-evacuations

 

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ast November, just weeks into the war in Gaza, Amichai Chikli, a brash, 42-year-old Likud minister in the Israeli government, was called into the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, to brief lawmakers on what could be done about rising anti-war protests from young people across the United States, especially at elite universities.

“I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again now, that I think we should, especially in the United States, be on the offensive,” argued Chikli.

 

Chikli has since led a targeted push to counter critics of Israel. The Guardian has uncovered evidence showing how Israel has relaunched a controversial entity as part of a broader public relations campaign to target US college campuses and redefine antisemitism in US law.

Seconds after a smoke alarm subsided during the hearing, Chikli assured the lawmakers that there was new money in the budget for a pushback campaign, which was separate from more traditional public relations and paid advertising content produced by the government. It included 80 programs already under way for advocacy efforts “to be done in the ‘Concert’ way”, he said.

he “Concert” remark referred to a sprawling relaunch of a controversial Israeli government program initially known as Kela Shlomo, designed to carry out what Israel called “mass consciousness activities” targeted largely at the US and Europe. Concert, now known as Voices of Israel, previouslyworked with groups spearheading a campaign to pass so-called “anti-BDS” state laws that penalize Americans for engaging in boycotts or other non-violent protests of Israel.

Its latest incarnation is part of a hardline and sometimes covert operation by the Israeli government to strike back at student protests, human rights organizations and other voices of dissent.

Voices’ latest activities were conducted through non-profits and other entities that often do not disclose donor information. From October through May, Chikli has overseen at least 32m shekels, or about $8.6m, spent on government advocacy to reframe the public debate.

It didn’t take long for one of the American advocacy groups closely coordinating with Chikli’s ministry, the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy, or ISGAP, to score a powerful victory.

In a widely viewed December congressional hearing on alleged antisemitism among student anti-war protesters, several House GOP lawmakers explicitly cited ISGAP research in their interrogations of university presidents. The hearing concluded with Representative Elise Stefanik’s viral confrontation with the then president of Harvard University, Claudine Gay, who later retired from her role after a wave of negative news coverage. 

The ISGAP, which reportedly received the majority of its funding in 2018 from the Israeli agency that was running Concert, touted its congressional public relations coup at a 7 April event at the Palm Beach Country Club.

 

READ MORE: https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jun/24/israel-fund-us-university-protest-gaza-antisemitism

 

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Eric Zuesse (blogs at https://theduran.com/author/eric-zuesse/)

How often do U.S. mainstream news-media report honestly what Israel — armed by donated U.S. weapons — is doing to Gazans? Never — until July 21st, when “CBS News Sunday Morning” featured this extraordinarily courageous 10-minute news-segment:

——

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqusa-96WLs

Children of Gaza

CBS Sunday Morning, July 21st

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It documents that Israel’s statements, such as “The IDF [Israel Defense Force] has never, and will never, deliberately target children,” and “The IDF calls and acts for the evacuation of the civilian population from combat zones to safer zones,” are lies (the first because direct targeting of civilian children is shown; the second because many non-U.S. news-media have already documented that when civilians go to what Israel calls ‘safe areas,’ they then get bombed there, too).

This ten-minute documentary is every bit as good as the best, and might even be the very best, of all of the news-reporting that has been done of the ethnic cleansing if not extermination of Gazans, that is going on there, by Israel and America.

Unlike many of the other reports, it even makes clear that, as one interviewed American doctor (Vice President of the International College of Surgeons, who has volunteered in numerous disaster-zones) who recently visited there, said, “I’ve never seen that before, never seen more incinerated children than I’ve seen in my entire life combined. I’ve seen more shredded children in just the first week, shredded — missing body parts, being crushed by their [bombed] building, [that being] the greatest majority, or bomb explosions [directly] the next greatest majority. We’ve taken shrapnel as big as my thumb out of 8-year-olds. And then there’s sniper bullets, I have children that were shot twice. I have two children in Gaza that I have photographs of that were shot so perfectly in the chest  I couldn’t put my stethoscope over their heart more accurately, and directly on the side of the head in the same child … shot twice … dead-center shots.” The reporter then said, “In fact, more than 20 doctors recently in Gaza, also told Sunday Morning about gunshot wounds to children. One American doctor told us he even reviewed CT scans to confirm what he saw, because he quote didn’t believe that this many children could be admitted to a single hospital [an American hospital] with gunshot wounds to the head.” Then video footage was shown of such sniper-shootings killing children. However, the vast majority of killings there are by buildings collapsing onto people, and from starvation because of Israel’s blockade against food and medicine into Gaza. CBS showed an incredibly long line-up of aid trucks just waiting to be allowed into Gaza; but whether they will ever be allowed in, is uncertain.

Other than this report, all of the entirely honest news-reports that I have seen of what’s happening in Gaza are from pro-Palestinian news-sites, such as this one.

—————

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.

 

https://theduran.com/cbs-news-sunday-morning-makes-clear-that-cbs-is-still-the-best-mainstream-news-medium/

 

 

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIxNqn3blAk

US Congress CHEERS War Criminal Netanyahu, As Israel Bombs Palestinians in Gaza w/ Dimitri Lascaris

 

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SEE ALSO: stop the wars.....

US and Israel should create ‘Middle East NATO’ – Netanyahu

The Israeli prime minister has proposed an alliance aimed against Iran

 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has proposed the creation of a new military bloc modeled after NATO and called the “Abraham Alliance,” aimed against Iran.

Netanyahu spoke before the joint session of the US Congress on Wednesday. It was his fourth address to American lawmakers, beating Winston Churchill’s record, although about 70 House and Senate members declined to attend for one reason or another. 

“America forged a security alliance in Europe to counter the growing Soviet threat,” Netanyahu said at one point. “Likewise, America and Israel today can forge a security alliance in the Middle East to counter the growing Iranian threat.” 

He said a “glimpse” of that alliance could be seen on April 14, when Iran launched a missile and drone attack against Israel and the US and the UK helped shoot some of them down.

Netanyahu thanked US President Joe Biden “for bringing that alliance together,” as well as his predecessor Donald Trump for brokering the ‘Abraham Accords’ between Israel and several Arab countries during his term.

“I think we should call it the Abraham Alliance,” he said of the proposed NATO-like bloc.

According to the Israeli prime minister, countries at peace with West Jerusalem or that intend to do so ought to join the bloc, as Iran is a threat to them all.

“When we fight Iran, we are fighting the most radical and murderous enemy of the United States,” Netanyahu said. When Israel fights and works to prevent a nuclear Iran, “we are not only protecting ourselves, we are protecting you,”he argued.

“Our enemies are your enemies, our fight is your fight, our victories will be your victories,” Netanyahu told US lawmakers. “I know that America has our back.”

The US has given military aid to Israel throughout the nine-month war with Hamas that Netanyahu declared following the Palestinian armed group’s raid out of Gaza. Pressed by Palestinian and Arab Americans in Biden’s party, his government has proposed a three-stage ceasefire plan for the enclave, but West Jerusalem has been reluctant to accept it.

Israel will not stop until it has destroyed the military capabilities of Hamas, ended its rule in Gaza, and recovered all the captives taken in the October 7 attack, Netanyahu said, adding, “That’s what total victory means. And we will settle for nothing less.”

 

 

https://www.rt.com/news/601611-netanyahu-abraham-alliance-nato-congress/

 

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SEE ALSO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOBLK2uKeOU

Scott Ritter addresses Netanyahu's speech at US Congress: Al Mayadeen Exclusive

 

SEE ALSO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H15AF_HsGvM

 SEE ALSO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoPAXDWp-kw SEE ALSO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H03ZmKUkdkM

on level playing fields .....

 

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