Wednesday 4th of December 2024

where the values of justice and freedom are supposed to be sacred.....

"Many Western states and elites have consented, actively or passively, to the devastation of the Gaza Strip and the massacre of its population by Israel. To reach this conclusion, anthropologist Didier Fassin immersed himself in the analysis of the events that have shaken the region of Palestine since the Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023.

 

Professor of ethics at the Collège de France (where he holds the chair of Moral Questions and Political Issues in Contemporary Societies) and at Princeton University, he has just published Une étrange défaite (La Découverte), a book in which he questions the interpretations to which this conflict has given rise. All the while keeping in mind this question that underlies most of his work: is one life worth another?"

 

In the West of human rights and enlightenment, where the values of justice and freedom are supposed to be sacred, a genocide is taking place in silence in Gaza under a dolorous and antithetical gaze.

 

 

Middle East: The destruction of Gaza, a mirror to Western power circles

    BY Mohamed Lamine KABA

 

This article explores the glaring duality between the humanitarian discourses and strategic actions of Western powers. While they publicly denounce human rights violations in Gaza, they nevertheless continue to support Israel economically and militarily, thus perpetuating the conflict. The destruction of Gaza emerges as a poignant symbol of the West’s monumental failure on the global chessboard.

The West continues to sing its hymn to freedom and democracy, while the ruins of Gaza drown out the cries of the innocent

The Israeli blockade imposed since 2007 has led to a major economic and humanitarian crisis, highlighting the powerlessness of the circles of power to ensure the protection of civilians. The conflict in Gaza remains unfortunately neglected, with profound implications for the future of Palestinians and regional stability. This situation urgently requires a political and strategic approach, with the horizon of a negotiated two-state solution, respectful of the rights of the Palestinian people.

The Murderous Silence: How the West Let Israel Destroy Gaza

The incisive article by journalist Vincent Brown, published on October 7, 2024 in the prestigious Belgian daily newspaper “La Libre”, offers a critical and enlightening perspective on Western support for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Through the interview with Didier Fassin, eminent professor of ethics at the Collège de France and author of “Une étrange défaite“, the article reveals how the destruction of Gaza was facilitated by tacit approval by Western states, marking a historic break with their moral principles since the Second World War.

Fassin demonstrates that this support does not result from a “moral shame” in the face of past errors towards the Jewish people, but rather from a strategic calculation backed by Washington’s foreign policy aimed at positioning Israel as a Western bastion against cultures perceived as barbaric. While the major democracies justify their position by Israel’s right to self-defense, they systematically obscure the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people, thus exacerbating the hypocritical gap in their international policy. This double standard is particularly flagrant in their management of the conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine — a touchstone of contemporary tensions — further accentuated by their two-speed rhetoric and their disregard for the suffering of affected civil societies.

In resonance with a multipolar world, the article underlines that the search for alternatives by the countries of the South in the face of Western diktat is becoming inevitable, with only the use of threats remaining a lever of power for the West. While the events of October 7, 2023, can never justify the plan proclaimed by the head of the Jewish state and approved by his Western allies to exterminate an entire people, Brown’s article ingeniously couples with Fassin’s work to dress the hypocrisy of Western elites in Adam and Eve’s clothes.

The Hypocrisy of Western Power Circles: Humanitarian Speeches Versus Strategic Actions

Western governments, including the United States, the European Union and the United Kingdom, regularly express outrage at human rights violations in Gaza, calling Israeli actions “unacceptable” and “contrary to international law.” However, their concrete actions contradict these statements. Despite verbal criticism, substantial economic and military support continues to be provided to Israel, as evidenced by the US’s annual military aid of $3.8 billion, representing approximately 20% of Israel’s military budget. This assistance contributes to maintaining the blockade on Gaza, which hampers the local economy and access to essential services, and also funds weapons used in military operations there. In addition, the United States regularly uses its veto in the UN Security Council to neutralize resolutions condemning Israeli actions, thereby blocking international interventions aimed at ending human rights abuses.

At the same time, Western criticism of Israeli settlements in the West Bank remains verbal, with no concrete action taken to dismantle these settlements, which are deemed illegal under international law. Strategic priorities, such as maintaining a military presence in the region, controlling energy resources and limiting Iranian influence, explain this hypocrisy. The consequences are serious: perpetuation of the conflict, suffering with the Palestinians, loss of credibility of the Western minority and growing regional resentment. A reassessment of priorities is necessary to align actions with humanitarian discourse and promote a fair and lasting peace.

The destruction of Gaza: a symbol of the West’s failure on the global chessboard

The destruction of Gaza illustrates a series of multidimensional failures of the West, which is a historical continuity, in particular of the United States and the European Union, on the humanitarian, political, strategic and moral levels. The lack of protection of Palestinian civilians and the inability to foster a lasting peace have led to major human suffering, thus undermining Western legitimacy on the international scene. On the humanitarian level, this crisis has reached unprecedented proportions, with alarming figures such as more than 46,000 homes destroyed and 80of the inhabitants dependent on humanitarian aid. Politically, the failure of peace negotiations and contradictions in official statements have allowed the continuation of the Israeli occupation, hindering the formation of a viable Palestinian state. Strategically, the region has become a hotbed of instability (Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, etc. under Israeli air vectors), threatening Western economic and geopolitical interests, while eroding their credibility in terms of human rights. Morally, the principles of justice and equality are flouted, leading to a strengthening of extremism. It is crucial for the West to recognize its responsibilities and act to establish a just and lasting peace.

A Forgotten Conflict, Lasting Consequences: Palestinian Future at Stake

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, perceived as “forgotten” by Western power spheres, remains a crushing reality for Palestinians, jeopardizing their future with lasting consequences if left unresolved. This conflict has devastating impacts such as the displacement of over 5 million people, poverty affecting over 30% of the population, lack of access to essential services such as education, health, water and electricity, as well as psychological trauma for many children. The failures of Western powers are manifested in the impasse of peace negotiations, regular vetoes of UN resolutions and insufficient humanitarian aid. In the long term, this conflict risks fostering radicalization, worsening already worrying regional instability and undermining the credibility of Western powers. It is therefore crucial to adopt solutions such as recognition of the Palestinian state, serious peace negotiations, humanitarian and economic support, as well as strengthened protection of human rights. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict must therefore not be relegated to the background. The consequences are tangible and persistent, and it is imperative that Western powers take concrete action to build a just and lasting peace, working with the BRICS Alliance.

It can be said that the West continues to sing its hymn to freedom and democracy, while the ruins of Gaza drown out the cries of the innocent. History repeats itself, lessons are not learned. They (the West) are the heirs of the Enlightenment – they claim, but they have forgotten the art of seeing. They are the defenders of human rights – they say, but they have lost the use of their conscience. Gaza is the mirror of their soul, and it reflects their shame.

 

Mohamed Lamine KABA, Expert in geopolitics of governance and regional integration, Institute of Governance, Human and Social Sciences, Pan-African University, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook

https://journal-neo.su/2024/11/04/middle-east-the-destruction-of-gaza-a-mirror-to-western-power-circles/ ---------------------------- How Israel Killed Hundreds of Its Own People on October 7th Asa Winstanley
The Electronic Intifada One year ago today Palestinian fighters led by Hamas launched an unprecedented military offensive out of the Gaza Strip.

The immediate goal was to inflict a shattering blow against Israel's army bases and militarized settlements which have besieged Gaza's inhabitants for decades - all of which are built on land that Palestinian families were expelled from in 1948.

The bigger goal was to shatter a status quo in which Israel, the United States and their accomplices believed they had effectively sidelined the Palestinian cause, and to bring that struggle for liberation back to the forefront of world attention.

"Operation Al-Aqsa Flood," as Hamas called it, was, by any objective military measure, a stunning success.

It was said at Israel's military headquarters that day that "the Gaza Division was overpowered," a high-level source present later recalled to Israeli journalists. "These words still give me the chills."

Covered from the air by armed drones and a barrage of rockets - which opened the offensive at 6:26 am exactly - Palestinian fighters launched a lightning raid over the Gaza boundary line.

The army bases were conquered for hours. Some of the settlements still had an armed Palestinian presence two days later.

The military communications infrastructure was instantly smashed. Simultaneous attacks took place by land, air and sea.

Palestinian drones took out tanks, guard posts and watchtowers. Caught completely unprepared, most of the soldiers manning the bases were either killed or captured and taken back to Gaza as prisoners of war.

A reported 255 Israelis were captured, including soldiers and civilians. Since then, 154 of them have been released, mostly by Hamas in November's prisoner exchange.

However, the figure of those released also includes some bodies of dead captives, mostly killed in Israeli strikes on Gaza. Of the remaining 101 prisoners, 35 have been officially declared dead by Israel. The real number is likely much higher.

Many have been killed by Israeli carpet bombing, and three escaped prisoners were shot dead by Israeli ground troops in Gaza City in December.

Al-Aqsa Flood was the first time in history that Palestinian armed groups were able to retake Palestinian territories lost since 1948, however briefly.


Comment: Two days! Come now, let's not overstate Hamas's military success. It was, however, a desperate move on behalf of a desperate people, a symbolic act of defiance if nothing else. And Israel was probably not surprised by the attack. But that's our take on the military-political aspect of why October 7th happened. The author's report on what came next - Israel's sustained bombardment of its own people - is and has been excellent since that dreadful day.


Israel's response was also unprecedented, if not in its nature then undoubtedly in its scale - an undisguised genocide against the population of Gaza.

One "conservative" estimate published by the British medical journal The Lancet in July stated that as many as 186,000 Palestinians are likely to have been killed by Israel so far - almost 10 percent of Gaza's population.

The UN says that 90 percent of people in Gaza have been driven out of their homes by Israel and that about a quarter of all structures in the Strip have been destroyed.

The Western press took its lead from official Israeli disinformation. It was soon awash with lurid atrocity propaganda. These lies about rape and beheaded babies were swiftly debunked by The Electronic Intifada and a small group of other independent media - often at the cost of being smeared by mainstream mediaand banned or censored by social media giants like YouTube.

Trying to paper over the cracks of its military and intelligence defeat, Israel has also been desperate to cover up another major scandal.

That Israel killed hundreds of its own people between 7 and 9 October 2023.

The regime ideologically justified this within Israeli society using a well-established national murder-suicide pact known in Israel as the "Hannibal Directive."

The Electronic Intifada today presents a full overview of how Israel killed so many of its own people during the Palestinian offensive.

This article is based on a year's worth of The Electronic Intifada's investigative reporting, extensive monitoring and translation of the Hebrew-language Israeli media, independent examination of hundreds of videos, a recent pro-Israel film broadcast by the BBC and Paramount+ about the Supernova rave, official Israeli figures of the dead and a little-read UN Human Rights Council report.

We can conclude that during the Al-Aqsa Flood offensive:
  • Israel expanded the use of its murderous "Hannibal Directive" - designed to prevent soldiers from being taken alive as prisoners of war - by killing many of its own civilians.
  • The use of such "Hannibal" strikes are confirmed in a UN report published in June.
  • Fire from Israeli helicopters, drones, tanks and even ground troops was deliberately undertaken in order to prevent Palestinian fighters from taking live Israeli captives who could be exchanged for Palestinian prisoners.
  • At the initiative of the local Gaza Division, "Hannibal" was carried out right away: less than an hour after the Palestinian offensive began.
  • "Not a single vehicle can return to Gaza," the division was ordered at 11:22 am.
  • By midday, an unambiguous order was given from the high command of the Israeli military (the so-called "Pit" headquarters, deep under Israel's Hakirya building in downtown Tel Aviv) to invoke the Hannibal Directive throughout the entire region, "even if this means the endangerment or harming of the lives of civilians in the region, including the captives themselves."
  • This bombing of Israeli captives by Israel continues in Gaza even today.
  • Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu admitted in a December meeting with released captives and families of captives that they had been "under our bombardments" in Gaza.
  • Hundreds of Israelis were likely killed by Israel itself in "Hannibal" targeting incidents as well as unintentional crossfire.
  • Israel has been engaged in an aggressive cover-up of its crimes against its own people.
Killing their own people

If Hamas made a miscalculation in the planning of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, it was perhaps to overestimate the value Israeli planners assigned to the lives of their own people.

In 2006, Hamas successfully captured Israeli occupation soldier Gilad Shalit, exchanging him for 1,024 Palestinian prisoners in 2011 - including the current leader of Hamas Yahya Sinwar. A similar exchange was made with the Lebanese resistance in 2008.

Although exchanging prisoners is a common element of conflict, Israeli leaders felt weakened and embarrassed by what they saw as compromises. So they secretly modified their policies, preparing to strike with lethal force against their own people in the event of future captures.

At the heart of these plans was the Hannibal Directive, established in secret by Israeli generalsin 1986, and named after an ancient Carthaginian general who killed himself rather than be captured alive by the Roman Empire. Initially, the doctrine was targeted at soldiers.

In 2014, captured Israeli soldier Hadar Goldin was killed in a deliberate artillery strike during Israel's August invasion of the Gaza Strip. Up to 200 Palestinian civilians were killed in the bombardment on Rafah, including 75 children.

As a result, the secretive military doctrine was forced into the light. Despite continued obfuscation, the Israeli military admitted that the directive existed and may have been used on an Israeli solider.

Two years later, the Israeli military distanced itself from the directive, claiming that "the order as it is understood today" would be canceled. "This move was not necessarily a full change in policy but a clarification," The Times of Israel reported in 2016.

Yet multiple Israeli press reports have now confirmed that Hannibal was not only reactivated on 7 October - if it ever truly went away - but was actually extended to captured Israeli civilians on their way to Gaza.

Bombing Israelis on the road to Gaza

Overestimating Israel's humanity, Hamas may have been ignorant of this possibility in its two-year preparation and training for the offensive. Over the past year, the group has repeatedly agreed to exchange Israeli prisoners for Palestinian prisoners.

But aside from the Israeli captives released during the four-day pause in November (including the children and noncombatant captives) Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has adamantly refused to make a deal.

Instead, Israel has systematically bombed every part of the Gaza Strip - including areas where the Israeli captives are being held.

Israelis released in the November prisoner exchange have told the media that the main threat to their lives while they were held in Gaza was not Hamas, but Israeli attacks.

Chen Almog-Goldstein and three of her children were at one point held in a Gazan supermarket which was bombed by Israel."It was atrocious," she told The Guardian"It was the first time we really felt like our lives were in danger."

The bombing "was closing up on us to the point where the Hamas guards put mattresses over us on the floor to cover us, and then they covered us with their bodies to protect us from our own forces' shooting."


Comment: Take note: when it comes down to it, Hamas not only doesn't use its own people as human shields, it shields Israelis from being killed by Israelis.


In a town hall-style meeting with relatives of the captives, Benjamin Netanyahu admitted that captives had been "under our bombardments and our [military] activity there," Hebrew news site Ynet reportedin December.

"Every day in captivity was very hard," one former detainee said at the angry meeting. "I was in a house when there were bombardments all around. We were sitting in tunnels and we were very afraid that, not Hamas, but Israel would kill us, and then they'll say: 'Hamas killed you.'"

Another released detainee said: "The fact is that I was in a hideaway that was bombed, and we had to be smuggled away, and we were injured. Not to mention that we were shot at by a helicopter when we were on our way to Gaza ... You are bombing the tunnel routes exactly in the area where they [the other captives] are."

As the second released detainee's testimony about being shot at by a helicopter on the way to Gaza proves, the captives were also killed and attacked by Israel while Operation Al-Aqsa Flood was still happening.

Within the first hour of the offensive, Israeli forces began shooting and bombing Israeli captives on their way to Gaza.

"Hannibal at Erez"

An investigation by Israeli newspaper Haaretz based on documents and testimonies of soldiers found evidence that these Hannibal attacks came at least as early as 7:18 am - only 52 minutes after the start of the offensive.

The Haaretz piece was published in English in July.

But the paper lagged six months behind its competitor, Yedioth Ahronoth. In January, Yedioth'sweekend supplement 7 Days ran a landmark investigative piece laying out a timeline of the Al-Aqsa Flood offensive from the Israeli military perspective.

The paper has never published an official English translation of the article. The Electronic Intifada remains the only publication in the world to release a full professional translation, which you can read here.The 7 Days investigation found that "at midday of October 7th, the IDF [Israeli military] instructed all its fighting units to perform the Hannibal Directive in practice, although it did so without stating that name explicitly."

Well-sourced Israeli military and intelligence reporters Ronen Bergman and Yoav Zitun explained in the long piece that "the instruction was to stop 'at any cost' any attempt by Hamas terrorists to return to Gaza, using language very similar to that of the original Hannibal Directive."

In contrast to the 7 Days investigation, the more recent Haaretz piece found that the name of the doctrine was explicitly invoked - and very early on: "One of these decisions was made at 7:18 am ... 'Hannibal at Erez.'"

Erez is the massive Israeli military checkpoint and base caging Palestinians into the north of the Gaza Strip. It had been totally overrun by Palestinian fighters and besieged Israeli troops seem to have called for an airstrike on their own position.

That the 7 Days investigation reached the conclusion Hannibal was invoked from the top of Israel's military hierarchy is crucial.

It shows that the reactivation and expansion of the Hannibal Directive that day was not a matter of rogue individual troops or of simple chaos and confusion.

It was a matter of policy.

Orders and chaos

Hannibal was ordered from the top after the generals under the Hakirya building in Tel Aviv realized that Israeli soldiers and settlers all over the Gaza frontier region were being captured en masse.

They wanted the captives dead as soon as possible.

Israeli troops in the field had been trained in the procedure for years and immediately understood what they had to do.

A report by a UN commission quotes one tank commander who opened fire at Israeli captives coming from the settlement of Nir Oz.

"Something in my gut feeling made me think that they [his soldiers] could be on them [the vehicles heading to Gaza]," he said. "Yes, I could have killed them, but I decided that this is the right decision. I prefer stopping the abduction so they won't be taken."

Ending Israelis' captivity by killing them is the Hannibal doctrine in a nutshell.In November last year, Nof Erez, an Israeli Air Force colonel, admitted to a Hebrew-language podcastthat the response to Operation Al-Aqsa Flood "was a mass Hannibal."

There was also an incredibly chaotic situation that day. In a separate article by Yoav Zitun, the Israeli military admitted to an "immense and complex quantity" of what it called "friendly fire" incidents.

Caught entirely off guard over a Jewish holiday weekend, Israeli forces found themselves unable to communicate with each other after the Palestinians destroyed the communications infrastructure.

The 7 Days investigation found that "40 percent of the communication sites such as towers with relay antennas ... near the Gaza Strip ... were destroyed by Hamas" that morning.

Even the Palestinian resistance was caught off guard by the sheer scope of its own success. And, to an extent, there was a degree of chaos in the Palestinian fighters' assault.


Comment: "Immense and complex quantity of friendly fire" sounds to us like euphemism for deliberate massacring of Israeli civilians by Israeli forces. Many survivors of that Supernova rave describe being stopped by "police" only to be fired upon.


Collateral damage?

Soon after the initial wave of Hamas' vanguard commandos (known as the Nukhba force, Arabic for "elite") breached the fence in almost 50 locations, smaller armed groups - including Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - joined in.


Comment: If you're Israel and you've gamed for that, how hard would it be to have your own 'terrorists' blend in with the 'chaos'?


About an hour after the offensive started, a wave of Palestinian civilians began to flow through the breaches in the fence and managed to enter their homeland. Some of these people seem to have attacked or captured Israeli noncombatants in the militarized settlements that surround Gaza.

The chaotic situation, combined with Israel's use of its own civilians as human shields to besiege and occupy Gaza also meant that not all the Israeli casualties of the Palestinian resistance that day were combatants.


Comment: ...or, not all the 'Palestinian resistance' that day were 'Palestinian resistance'...


Despite efforts by the Western media and politicians to paint a picture of evil, baby-killing Palestinian "terrorists" rampaging around southern Israel slaughtering as many civilians as possible, it is clear that Israeli noncombatants were often caught in the crossfire between armed Israeli forces and the Palestinian fighters.Pitched battles broke out all over the region. Roughly 1,000-3,000 Palestinian fighters are estimated to have been involved.

Despite the common misconception that the Israeli army was nowhere to be found that day, the UN report and the 7 Days investigation concluded that Israeli combatants were present all over the region, and from very early on.

Within the first 24 minutes of the assault, the Israeli military scrambled at least six armed aircraft: two F-16 bombers, two F-35 bombers and two of the lethal Hermes 450 drones made by Elbit Systems.

Two more aircraft - Apache attack helicopters - also arrived at the Be'eri settlement within one hour.

The UN report says that it "confirmed that at least eight Apache helicopters were dispatched to the area around the Gaza border on 7 October" and that "some 23 tanks were stationed throughout the whole border area with Gaza" (Editor's note: in fact, Israel has no declared borders).

Human shields

But there is also no doubt that the Israelis were overwhelmed, briefly outgunned and often outsmarted by the Palestinian fighters. The battle for Kibbutz Be'eri, for example, continued over the course of three days.

Nonetheless, the presence of armed Israeli combatants embedded throughout the civilian population - often using the latter as effective human shields - speaks to the operational challenges faced by Hamas on the ground that day.

The UN report even documents some cases of Israeli "civilians" picking up weapons to engage in clashes with the Palestinian fighters.

Hamas' deputy political leader Khalil al-Hayya said in an interview with the BBC last week that its fighters had been told not to target civilians during the assault, but that there were individual failings in sticking to that plan.

He also alluded to the military difficulties faced by Palestinians trying to distinguish who was who: "Fighters may have felt that they were in danger."In "Our Narrative," a document Hamas released in January, the group admitted, "Maybe some faults happened during Operation Al-Aqsa Flood's implementation due to the rapid collapse of the Israeli security and military system, and the chaos caused along the border areas with Gaza."

One such "fault" was the fact that Hamas' intelligence branch seems not to have anticipated the presence of the all-night "Supernova" trance music rave.


Comment: And yet, the very first 'scene' in events that day was pairs of 'Hamas' paragliders making straight for the rave at dawn...


This event took place in open fields less than three miles from the Re'im military base.

Re'im was the headquarters of the Israeli army's Gaza Division - the number one target of the Al-Aqsa Flood offensive.

But the separation between Israeli settler "civilians" and Israeli combatants is not always clear cut.


Comment: Indeed, half the base's personnel was at the rave because they had been given 'special time off'...


Planted around the Gaza region mostly after the forced expulsion of the Palestinians by Zionist militias and the new Israeli army between 1947 and 1949, the settlements besieging Gaza were conceived by Israeli military doctrine as a belt of human shields to protect Israel's occupation and suppress the far bigger population of Gaza.

The population of the Gaza Strip is more than 80 percent refugees - those expelled from their homes in order to make room for the new state of Israel in 1948 and after, along with their descendants.

One of these so-called "Gaza Envelope" settlements, founded in 1951, is even called "Magen" - literally the Hebrew word for "shield." Another, Nahal Oz, was established as an explicitly military settlement.

According to the Jewish National Fund, a colonial arm of the Israeli state, Nahal Oz was intended to "supply the IDF with soldiers." It was also intended to "become a civilian center and serve as the first line of defense against potential future Arab invasions while providing a base of operations and resources for military forces operating in peripheral regions."

UN laundering of Israeli propaganda

In June this year, the United Nations Human Rights Council issued a report: "Detailed findings on attacks carried out on and after 7 October 2023 in Israel."

What little media attention it received tended to focus on how the report (along with an accompanying document focusing on Gaza) had concluded that "Israel and Hamas have both committed war crimes," as The Guardian put it.

The report's authors described themselves as an "independent international commission of inquiry" into the offensive.

For the most part, the report does not disclose its sources. The authors say that this is due to unspecified "protection concerns."

Nonetheless, it is clear from the instances where the report does disclose its sources that they relied almost entirely on Israeli claims. Where it does cite Palestinian sources, they are for the most part bodycam videos from killed or captured fighters. These were released by the Israeli occupation authorities and are highly likely to have been subjected to selective editing.

Therefore it is unsurprising to find that the document ends up, for the most part, siding with the debunked Israeli narrative about Palestinian atrocities. It does this to the point of absurdity at times.

In one instance, the commission of inquiry reverses the chronology of events to give the impression that a Palestinian fighter deliberately executed an Israeli baby at Kibbutz Be'eri, after they had broken into a room.Yet, according to press reports, the death was actually the tragic result of a stray bullet. Milla Cohen, a 10-month-old baby, died when a Palestinian fighter shot through a door before he broke into a room in a settlement house to take captives.

Even worse, the UN report appears to rely heavily on the discredited Jewish extremist group ZAKA as a source, citing it once explicitly, and frequently citing it obliquely as unnamed "first responders."

These "first responders" then tell lurid stories about supposed Palestinian "war crimes."

And yet even the report admits that ZAKA is "not trained or equipped to manage large, complex crime scenes and may have also tainted, or even tampered with, evidence" (emphasis added).

"One first responder working for ZAKA" - who the report does not name - "provided inaccurate and exaggerated accounts of findings in media interviews."

This may have been a reference to senior ZAKA leader Yossi Landau.

Landau was forced by Al Jazeera journalists to admit on camera - for a documentary broadcast in March - that his initial story about Palestinian fighters executing 10 Israeli children by burning them alive was a fiction.

Confronted with his own lack of evidence, Landau admitted: "When you look at them and they're burned you don't know exactly the ages. So you're talking about 18 years old, 20 years old ... you just don't look on the spot ... to see the ages or something like that."

Landau was later forced to step back from his position in the group after internal disputes over money and power.


Comment: ZAKA played the role of 'White Helmets' in this episode of 'atrocity propaganda'.


Hannibal strikes confirmed by UN

Despite the report's authors apparently trying their best to launder Israeli atrocity propaganda into the UN system, the document does nevertheless contain an astonishing collection of evidence confirming The Electronic Intifada's reporting over the last year that Israel itself killed many, if not most, of the Israelis that day.

Some of the evidence in the UN report is only oblique, and requires cross referencing with Hebrew-language media reports about the Hannibal doctrine and the unprecedented way it was used on 7 October 2023.

But some of it is explicit.

Over the course of three pages, the report details some of what is known about "the application of the 'Hannibal Directive'" that day.

The commission wrote that it "documented strong indications that the 'Hannibal Directive' was used in several instances on 7 October, harming Israelis at the same time as striking Palestinian militants."

In its section on the Hannibal Directive, the UN report even states that "Israeli helicopters were present at the Nova site and may have shot at targets on the ground, including civilian vehicles." It states that "one or two helicopters" were "present over the Nova festival site in the mid-morning hours."

This is something The Electronic Intifada first reported in November.

The UN report cites the testimony of two unnamed witnesses to back this up, including an Israeli army "reserve brigadier general, who fought against militants near a parked tank close to the Nova site" and explained that "he called the Gaza Battalion to request an attack helicopter."

The presence of attack helicopters - and of at least one tank - in the battle for the Supernova rave site could also go some way towards explaining the high number of noncombatant casualties among the fleeing rave attendees that morning.

The Supernova rave

Held in a location less than four miles away from the massive open-air prison camp that is the Gaza Strip, Supernova was put on by an event management company calling itself the "Tribe of Nova."

Its defenders have condemned the Palestinian fighters for attacking a "peace festival," while the event's critics have decried it as akin to German civilians dancing outside the gates of Auschwitz during the Nazi Holocaust.

Often referred to as the "Nova music festival" by Western media, the event on its official webpageactually named itself the "Supernova Sukkot Gathering." A recent film about the event showed that it was more akin to the illegal raves often organized in secret locations in many Western countries.

Supernova was not illegal and was coordinated with the local Israeli police force (which was armed and present in advance to guard the event). But for reasons that are not entirely clear, the rave's location was not announced until 6 October.

Participants in the high profile Israeli film We Will Dance Again confirmed that the Supernova location was kept secret from ticket holders until the last minute.

This (rather than any confusion about the days of the event or extension of the time, as is sometimes erroneously said online) explains why Hamas had no clue about the presence of the rave in the fields between Gaza and the biggest military base in the area - the regional headquarters at Re'im.


Comment: If the rave was a surprise to Hamas, then surely it wasn't a surprise to someone. How else does it end up in the middle of the largest Palestinian 'break-out' in Gaza's 70-year history? It was clearly placed there, and timed, to coincide with the Hamas operation.


The Supernova deaths

The rave is often reported to be the largest single site of deaths that took place on 7 October. The UN report said that 364 out of the 3,000 total ravers were "killed either at the site, near Kibbutz Re'im or in adjacent locations."

But a detailed breakdown of the deaths recently published by The Times of Israel (based on an Israeli TV channel's investigation) shows that more than 60 percent of this figure actually died outside of the designated grounds of the rave.

This is important for two reasons.

Firstly, despite the fact that the film We Will Dance Again tries to paint a picture of villainous Palestinian terrorists deliberately attacking civilians, it is clear from all available evidence that the rave was not a planned target of the Hamas offensive that day.

Indeed, the secret location of the event meant that a few Palestinian fighters - perhaps some from armed factions and probably some armed civilians - stumbled on the event in the course of their assault on the military bases.

Armed clashes with the Israeli forces - including police, soldiers and at least one tank, as well as armed Israeli "civilians" present - swiftly ensued.

Israeli intelligence has concluded that the Palestinians had no prior knowledge of the rave.Secondly, the breakdown published by The Times of Israel places the deaths of ravers outside the rave grounds as far away as Sderot (11 miles north of the Supernova site) and the Re'im military base (only 2.3 miles south).

Plotting these sites of death onto Google Earth and cross referencing them with the sites of ambushes set up by Hamas' elite commando force - as detailed by the 7 Days investigation - shows the two often coincide.

It is therefore likely that the deaths of some of these fleeing ravers were the unintended consequences of Palestinian ambushes set up to intercept Israeli army reinforcements headed to the region.

"While many reinforcements were flowing south," Ronen Bergman and Yoav Zitun wrote in the 7 Daysinvestigation, Hamas' commando force "had foreseen these reinforcements and took over the strategic junctions ... where they awaited the forces ... a lot of blood was shed at those junctions, both of soldiers and of civilians."


Comment: Were they "Hamas commandos" at those ambushes? "Disguised as [Israeli] police," according to the survivors...


The 7 Days piece also relates instances of Israeli soldiers rushing south to join the fight on their own initiative - including in their own civilian vehicles.

"Commanders who had already learned from the media or from friends that something was going on ... scrambled to get to the Gaza Envelope," Bergman and Zitun explained.

One brigade commander told the journalists that, "I came with my private vehicle to the Yad Mordechai junction [2.3 miles north of the Erez checkpoint] after I saw [the attack] on the news at home."

Exploding houses in the settlements

Evidence of deliberate Israeli "mass Hannibal" killings of Israeli civilians at the kibbutzim and other settlements surrounding Gaza is clear and undeniable.

Video footage and press reports of the Al-Aqsa Flood offensive show that many buildings in the settlements were completely destroyed, in a manner consistent with heavy weaponry only known by military experts to be in the possession of the Israeli military, and not in the possession of Palestinian fighters.

While some buildings and cars did show signs of being burned, many others were clearly bombed from the air by Israeli drones and attack helicopters or shelled by Israeli tanks.Nof Erez, the Israeli Air Force colonel who admitted that 7 October was a "mass Hannibal" event, answered positively when asked by the interviewer if they "exploded all kinds of houses inside the settlements."

Erez insisted that his pilots only did so with "permission" from their superior officers. "I saw numerous drones above every settlement on a computer image, which we can see in every IDF [Israeli military] command," he explained.

Footage on Israeli TV has shown Israeli tanks present and firing in the settlement of Kibbutz Be'eri.

Most infamously, Brigadier General Barak Hiram admitted to ordering his tanks to fire at Pessi Cohen's house in Kibbutz Be'eri - "even at the cost of the civilians," as he told The New York Times.

Palestinian fighters from Hamas had taken 15 people captive and held them at the home, while they attempted to negotiate their exit to Gaza.

Investigations by The Electronic Intifada have concluded that most of the dead were highly likely to have been killed by Hiram's assault.The Electronic Intifada was the first to publish in English the eyewitness account of survivor Yasmin Porat who said that the Israeli troops arrived at the scene and "eliminated everyone" with heavy gunfire and tank shelling.

Porat, Palestinian commander Hasan Hamduna (who surrendered) and one other captive - Hadas Dagan - were the only three survivors of Barak Hiram's massacre.

Dagan insisted in testimony to Porat - which The Electronic Intifada first reported in November last year - that everyone else in and around the building was either shot or "burned completely" by the Israeli tank fire.

The victims of this apocalypse included 12-year-old Israeli twins, Liel and Yanai Hatsroni.

Sickeningly, Liel's photo was later used in official Israeli propaganda which falsely claimed that Hamas had massacred and burned the girl to death.

"Murdered in her home by Hamas monsters... just because she's Jewish," former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett lied.Hannibal at Supernova?

What is still unclear about the Supernova rave is how many of the dead were killed by Palestinians, and whether any were killed in "Hannibal" attacks by Israel.

Unlike in the more built-up areas such as the military bases and the kibbutzim - where there is clear visual evidence of bombed buildings and conclusive eyewitness accounts - the visual situation in and around the Supernova site was more chaotic.

There were few built-up structures for Israeli aircraft or tanks to explode, as they did in the settlements.

Video and other photographic evidence does show that the fields around the exit of the site next to the armed Israeli checkpoint were intensively burned and blackened.

It is unclear whether this was the result of the helicopter or tank attacks, or the result of fires which may have caught alight after Palestinian rocket-propelled grenade strikes.

What is known is that Israeli armed forces on site set up a roadblock at the main exit, causing a massive backlog of cars waiting to leave the site. Many ravers ended up fleeing on foot, east across the fields as the firefight broke out.

While the We Will Dance Again film conspicuously fails to mention the roadblock set up by Israeli forces, an early CNN report does show the roadblock on its map of the scene, and The Times of Israel report states that it was probably set up as early as 7:00 am.

Journalist William Van Wagenen has detailed in a report for The Cradle that the roadblock likely led to Israeli forces unintentionally trapping some escaping ravers in a firefight between them and Palestinian fighters advancing on the Re'im military base from the north.


Comment: Or intentionally.


Psychoactive drugs

One thing that is clear from both We Will Dance Again and Haaretz interview with an Israeli psychologist who has treated survivors is that the use of psychoactive drugs at the rave was widespread.

As participants arrived at the site on the night of 6 October, "everyone's saying that they're going to get so high," one participant in the film recalled.

According to the Haaretz interview and to the film, ravers used ecstasy, acid, cocaine, magic mushrooms and possibly ketamine. Worse, many of the ravers had deliberately timed their dosages to kick in at sunrise - which turned out to be just before the Palestinian offensive began - with rocket salvos from Gaza starting at 6:26 am.


Comment: Again, probably not coincidental.


"This sucks so much! Everyone is high," one participant in the film recalled feeling as the rockets soared overhead. Acid, another explained, "can make things seem much worse."

Psychedelic drugs, the Israeli psychologist explained, can lead to a situation in which "parts of the unconscious also rise to consciousness."

All of this makes it unlikely that many ravers were in a fit state to discern whether they were being shot at by Israelis, Palestinians or both as they ran for their lives.

Although the existence of the Hannibal Directive is an open secret inside Israel, its use on Israeli civilian targets was - as far as we know - unprecedented before 7 October 2023.

Hannibal attacks all over the south

About 105 residents were killed at Kibbutz Be'eri.

It is currently unknown how many of those were killed by Palestinians and how many by Israelis. The UN report states that "at least 57 structures in the kibbutz were destroyed or sustained damage, amounting to more than one third of all residential buildings."

Many of these appear from the visual evidence to have been destroyed by Israel.

But one important fact to bear in mind is that Israel's "Hannibal" massacre of Israelis at Be'eri was repeated all over the region.

We only know so much about the Pessi Cohen house massacre because two civilians survived to tell their story.

Similar incidents happened elsewhere. But in most places, there were few survivors, especially of the aerial bombardments.

An all-female tank unit commandeered a military vehicle it was untrained to use and stormed through the gates of Holit, an Israeli settlement near the boundary with Egypt and the frontier with Gaza, more than 14 miles south of the Supernova rave.

"We break into the community, crash the gate," one of the soldiers told Israeli Channel 12. "The soldier points and tells me, 'Shoot there, the terrorists are there.' I ask him, 'Are there civilians there?' He says, 'I don't know, just shoot.'"

The tank commander then claims she decided not to shoot - but immediately contradicts herself: "I fire with my machine gun at a house."Similar to the visual evidence of Hannibal attacks on Israelis by Israel at Kibbutz Be'eri, an investigation by The Electronic Intifada last year also concluded that the same sort of house explosions took place at Kibbutz Kfar Aza.

The UN report lists a surprisingly high number of places where Hannibal attacks possibly or certainly took place.

Outside the Israeli settlement of Nirim (which lies on the path between the Palestinian city of Khan Younis and the Gaza Division's Re'im military headquarters) one Israeli tank crew departed to Nir Oz, another nearby settlement.

Once there, the UN report states, "they noticed hundreds of people crossing into Israel and back to Gaza and they shot at them, including at vehicles laden with people, some of whom may have been hostages" (emphasis added).

The next paragraph of the report hints at the possibility of similar incidents at Nitzana, Kissufim and Holit.

How many were killed by Israel?

Despite initially claiming that 1,400 people were "murdered by Hamas" on 7 October last year, Israel soon began revising the figure downwards.

In November, the Israeli government announced that 200 out of this figure were in fact Hamas fighters. They had been so badly burned by Israeli bombings they were completely unidentifiable.

This demonstrates how indiscriminate much of Israel's fire was that day.

The Israeli death count now stands at 1,154, according to Al Jazeera.

Of these, at least 314 are said in the UN report to have been "Israeli military personnel."

In March, a comprehensive survey of three Israeli death tolls in Hebrew by the Al Jazeera Investigative Unit put the number of armed combatants higher, totaling 372.

As well as soldiers, the Al Jazeera figure includes police, security guards (i.e. armed settlement militias) and "security personnel."

The 7 Days investigation concluded that officers from the Shin Bet - the undercover Israeli "internal security" agency - were also sent to join the battle in the south: "In the course of the fighting, 10 of the organization's people were killed."

The English edition of the Haaretz database of the dead revealed the names of three of these people - Yossi Tahar, Smadar Mor Idan and ​​Omer Gvera.

None of the three are listed in the database as combatants. It is therefore likely that the other seven dead Shin Bet combatants are also secretly listed as "civilians" on the database.

Al Jazeera's raw data - provided by the investigative unit to The Electronic Intifada for this article - reveals that its figures of "security personnel" does indeed name eight Shin Bet officers among the dead.

The 372 declared combatants plus the two undeclared Shin Bet officers gives us 374 dead combatants - almost a third of the total dead Israelis.

Taking those away from the 1,154 total dead leaves us with a maximum of 780 dead Israeli civilians.

This means that at least 41 percent of the initial (erroneous) figure of 1,400 dead were actually combatants - mostly Israelis, but including 200 of the dead Palestinian fighters.

"Everyone in the vehicle was killed"

If a maximum of 780 unarmed Israelis died during the Al-Aqsa Flood offensive, how many of these were killed by Israel and how many by Palestinians?

The current answer to this question is that it is impossible to know without a truly independent international investigation.

And, as the UN report makes clear, Israel is blocking just such an investigation. "The commission considers that Israel is obstructing its investigations into events on and since 7 October 2023, both in Israel and in the occupied Palestinian territory."

But it is possible for us to reach some tentative conclusions.

Al Jazeera's investigative film found that "at least 18" of the noncombatant dead were definitely killed by Israeli ground troops and that at least 27 of the Israelis in Palestinian captivity "died somewhere between their home and the Gaza fence in circumstances that have not been explained."

But Al Jazeera's raw data shows that these are very well-attested and deliberate Hannibal killings, such as the infamous Pessi Cohen house massacre carried out by Barak Hiram.

This doesn't take account of several other key figures, from which we can extrapolate a possible rough idea of the order of magnitude of the overall Hannibal and unintentional "friendly fire" deaths.The 7 Days investigation states that Israeli military investigators "examined some 70 vehicles that ... did not reach Gaza because on their way they had been hit by fire from a helicopter gunship, a UAV [unmanned aerial vehicle] or a tank, and at least in some of the cases, everyone in the vehicle was killed" (emphasis added).

It is unknown how many Israelis those 70 vehicles contained, but given what is known about other incidents, some cars probably contained several. These vehicles alone may have accounted for a very large number of Israeli civilian deaths.

Palestinian captors often packed multiple Israeli prisoners into pickup trucks, expropriated cars and even in some cases trailers dragged by tractors.

Fleeing Israelis did likewise.

One raver in the We Will Dance Again film describes desperately packing into cars to escape the Supernova site.

There were "a million people inside" the car, he recalled. "Half my body is outside," he added, explaining that he was hanging out of the window.

Israeli combat helicopter footage released online and compiled in the Al Jazeera film shows one video of about a dozen people fleeing a packed car as they are fired on by the Israelis. Their fates are unknown.

The film shows many similar videos. It's unclear where exactly near Gaza these incidents took place. You can watch the full film on Al Jazeera's website or in the YouTube video embedded below (due to the platform's age restrictions, you will need an appropriate YouTube account).A November news report on the Israeli website Ynet quoted a helicopter pilot as saying that "in the first four hours from the start of the battles" alone, Israeli aircraft "attacked about 300 targets, most in Israeli territory."

The report stated that they were commanded to "shoot at everything" near the fence with Gaza.

The reporter of the Hebrew piece was Yoav Zitun, the co-author of the 7 Days investigation, a well-sourced Israeli military reporter close to the intelligence and military establishment.

The drone operators seem to have been even more deadly than the helicopter pilots. The 7 Dayspiece says they often "took decisions to attack" by themselves and that by the end of the day on 7 October, "the squadron performed no fewer than 110 attacks on some 1,000 targets, most of which were inside Israel."

If "targets" includes individual persons, it's hard to know how many would have been Israelis. The pilots probably often did not know themselves. If a hit "target" also includes individual cars, the 1,000 targets hit could have easily resulted in hundreds of dead people.

The car "cemetery"

In November hundreds of the vehicles blown up during the Palestinian offensive were collected by Israeli troops and piled up in a scrapyard near the settlements of Tekuma and Netivot.Photos and drone footage of the scrapyard clearly showed many of the cars were completely flattened and twisted in a manner consistent with Israeli bombing from the air.

In short, the cars looked very similar to the Palestinian cars (of both civilians and fighters) habitually bombed by Israel from the air in Gaza over the years.

Today, it seems the scrapyard has become something of a tourist attraction for Israel and its supporters - a site they refer to as a "car burial ground." In one video shot there this past summer, an Israeli army tour guide says that the scrapyard contains "1,650 vehicles that were brought here."

In one ambulance alone, he says, from the ash and "human dust" they recovered, the remains of 18 people were found.

Whatever the true figure of the Israelis dead from "Hannibal" attacks by Israel, it does seem entirely plausible that Israel killed hundreds of the Israelis who died during the course of the offensive.

The whitewash

For the last year, there has been a systematic cover-up by Israel.

Most of the Israeli reporting on this has been in Hebrew only. And not due to lack of access to English language media.

The lead author of the 7 Days investigation was Ronen Bergman - who is also a high profile New York Times reporter and bestselling author of several hagiographies of the Mossad and other Israeli spy agencies.

Bergman has yet to write about the Hannibal Directive in English in The New York Times or elsewhere.

Very few autopsies were carried out - not on the dead at Pessi Cohen's house in Kibbutz Be'eri at any rate.

In the case of that particular crime, it would have likely been impossible anyway. Barak Hiram's tank shelling meant most of his Israeli victims were burned to cinders - including 12-year-old Liel Hatsroni.Many bodies were prematurely buried. Israeli cars destroyed in apparent "Hannibal" killings were crushed by Israeli authorities before being buried in the "cemetery" on a religious pretext.

The UN commission's report criticizes Israel for barring them access to the country. "Israeli officials not only refused to cooperate with the commission's investigation but also reportedly barred medical professionals and others from being in contact," the report states.

In a whitewash "investigation" of the killings at Pessi Cohen's house, the army in July largely cleared Barak Hiram of any wrongdoing.

The remains of the house have now been demolished by the army.

Last month, Hiram was promoted - appointed head of the humbled Gaza Division.

His predecessor, Brigadier General Avi Rosenfeld had quit over his failure to prevent the 7 October 2023 offensive.

Comparing the assault with Egypt's surprise October 1973 offensive to regain territories occupied by Israel, one high-level source who was in the "Pit" military headquarters deep under Tel Aviv that day, recalled to Bergman and Zitun the following words that were intoned.

"It is unimaginable. It's like the Old City of Jerusalem in the War of Independence or the outposts along the Suez Canal during the Yom Kippur War. We thought that this could never happen again."

"This will remain a scar burnt into our flesh forever."

With additional research by Maureen Murphy and translation from Hebrew by Dena Shunra.About the author

Asa Winstanley is an investigative journalist and associate editor with The Electronic Intifada. He is author of the book Weaponising Anti-Semitism: How the Israel Lobby Brought Down Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2023). 

 

Comment: The above report by The Electronic Intifada's Winstanley was his last before his home in the UK was raided by 10 police officers on Thursday 17th October 2024. Several electronic devices were seized "in connection with social media posts he made that are possibly illegal under sections 1 and 2 of the Terrorism Act (2006)," although he was neither arrested nor charged with any crimes. Together with the detention of Richard Medhurst, another independent UK journalist critical of Israel's BS, the net is tightening on accurate reporting of Israel's crimes.

 

https://www.sott.net/article/495565-How-Israel-Killed-Hundreds-of-Its-Own-People-on-October-7th

 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

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

         Gus Leonisky

sanctions

Israeli Justice Minister Calls for 20 Year Prison Sentences for Israelis Who Call for Sanctions

 

By Swawkbox / Larry’s List 

Israel’s justice minister – and deputy PM – Yariv Levin has responded to a call by the editor of Israel’s Haaretz newspaper for sanctions on the country to force it to recognise a Palestinian state and to end its ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the West Bank, by ordering his minions to draw up a demand for prison sentences of up to twenty years for Israeli citizens who call for sanctions....

Shocken did not even mention Israel’s genocide in Gaza, but the speech provoked a wild reaction from the regime. Levin’s letter, as translated by a well-known online translation service, reads:

Deputy Prime Minister and Justice Minister

Jerusalem 90 • In Tashir Tashfa October 31, 2024

To him D Gal• in Harav Miara

Legal advice to the government. At issue: legislation against encouraging and supporting the imposition of sanctions on the State of Israel

I would like to contact you regarding the matters in question as follows:

1. Last night it was announced that the publisher of the Haaretz newspaper, Amos Shocken, called on foreign countries to impose sanctions on the State of Israel and Israeli leaders. Is this the first time that Israeli citizens have acted in this way.

2. As we know, for more than a year the State of Israel has been at war on a number of fronts as a murderous terrorist including as a commander of the Hamas organisation. A call to impose sanctions on Israel and its leadership, the members of the security forces and Israeli citizens is a blatant violation of a citizen’s most basic duty of loyalty towards one’s country. It means encouraging and coercing a move whose purpose is to negate Israel’s right of self-defence. This is especially serious when it is done during an existential war, and while we are building and building Held in inhumane conditions by a murderous terrorist organization.

3. In view of all this, I would like you to urgently send me the draft of a legal memorandum, which will state that the actions of Israeli citizens for the sake of killing or encouraging the imposition of international sanctions on Israel, on its leaders, For the members of the security forces and the citizens of Israel, it will be a criminal offense with a prison sentence of ten years I will also request that the burning as mentioned during wartime will be an aggravating circumstance that will allow the doubling of the sentence.

 

The regime’s reaction to the waking-up of some of its citizens – especially journalists – to its crimes and to the humanity and rights of Palestinians? Bang them up for a similar sentence to what they would get for murder.

Israel claims to be ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’. It is a claim that looks extremely superficial at best.

https://scheerpost.com/2024/11/03/israeli-justice-minister-calls-for-20-year-prison-sentences-for-israelis-who-call-for-sanctions/

----------------------------

 

 

 

Why the U.S. Must Lead Sanctions on Israel’s Illegal Occupation

No multilateral sanctions campaign will be effective unless it is backed by the power of the dollar, which dominates global trade and banking.

 

By Mohsen Farshneshani,

 

With the Middle East on the brink of full-scale war, the international community, led by the United States and its allies, faces a critical choice in addressing the conflict in Gaza: gamble on eventual peace through a belligerent Israeli government or enforce a new landmark legal judgment.

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued an advisory opinion just weeks ago declaring Israel’s continued occupation of the Palestinian territories unlawful and urging its end “as rapidly as possible.”

Israel’s illegal actions include the transfer of Israeli civilians into occupied territories, confiscation of Palestinian land, and exploitation of natural resources for the benefit of Israeli settlers. The opinion stated that these practices violate the Fourth Geneva Convention and the Hague Regulations. Israel is party to the former and bound by customary international law to the latter. The ICJ ruling referred implementation of the ruling to the U.N. General Assembly and Security Council, where Washington holds significant sway.

For the opinion to be a step toward accountability, the United States and its allies must demonstrate respect for the same rules-based order they once helped establish­­––yet have failed to uphold when it comes to the Israel-Palestine conflict. Washington must employ unilateral or multilateral economic sanctions against the illegal occupation, its settlements, and their institutional underpinnings. Failure to do so risks rendering the ruling a hollow gesture from the highest judicial authority of international law.

THE ICJ OPINION is the latest indication of a growing global consensus that Israel should not be allowed to act with impunity in the Palestinian territories. A senior Australian government source said the ICJ opinion “can’t be ignored”, and Australia subsequently initiated targeted sanctions to address settler violence; the foreign minister of Germany, one of Israel’s strongest allies, also conceded the gravity of the ruling.

 

Many countries—including Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States—voted against the U.N. General Assembly resolution that led to this ICJ advisory opinion. Since then, these nations have initiated their own unprecedented sanctions to address at least some aspects of the Israeli occupation—generally following the United States in targeting “bad apples” directly involved in settler violence.

Thus far, Israel as a whole has seen no serious repercussions for its flagrant violations of international law. Israeli leaders, businesses, and organizations involved in the occupation and proliferation of illegal settlements have enjoyed global relationships while flouting international law and human rights standards. Meanwhile, close ties with U.S. donors and institutions have facilitated significant funding and support for Israeli expansionism.

U.S. state and local governments, for example, have invested billions in Israel Bonds, an investment vehicle that directly supports the Israeli government, while millions of tax-deductible U.S. dollars flow to settler organizations. Since the funds raised by Israel Bonds are deposited into the general Israeli state budget and allocated at the government’s discretion, they are fungible with other budgetary resources.

U.S. sanctions targeting settler violence and instability have been slow and performative thus far. On Feb. 1, U.S. President Joe Biden issued Executive Order 14115 to address threats to “peace, security, and stability in the West Bank.” The power of U.S. sanctions often lies in the intimidating ambiguity of their scope, which is prohibitive for Americans and imposes a chilling effect on non-Americans dealing with the sanctions’ targets. The initial round of sanctions targeted just four people. Immediately, Israeli banks, despite being non-U.S. entities, swiftly halted financial transactions with the sanctions targets. This action prompted backlash in Israel. Then, in late March, the U.S. Treasury Department informed the Bank of Israel in a guidance letter that Israeli banks could facilitate basic living expenses such as food and rent for the violent settlers in question without exposure to sanctions liability.

While humanitarian exceptions are standard across U.S. sanctions programs, this blanket guidance appears to be a concession in response to Israeli pressure. What’s more, the letter dilutes the sanctions’ impact by setting clear limits on the ambiguity of enforcement and preserving financial normalcy for the targets. For instance, the guidance prioritizes the wellbeing of the sanctioned individuals’ livestock, which play a key role in seizing control over Palestinian land. Just two months after the guidance was issued, a private recording revealed Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s plans to continue using farming outposts, which he described as a “mega-strategic tool” for advancing expansionist goals.

Isolated measures that treat violence, land seizures, and human rights abuses as anomalies rather than inherent features of the occupation are inadequate to adhere to the ICJ opinion. An impactful sanctions program must target not only the direct perpetrators of violence but also the broader infrastructure supporting the occupation. The United States must lead or support these efforts because of its monopoly on sanctions, which it derives from the U.S. dollar’s dominance in global trade and banking.

 

https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/08/14/israel-palestine-us-sanctions-icj-ruling-occupation-settlements-dollar/

 

READ FROM TOP.

 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

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         Gus Leonisky

 

 

bombs and bullets.....

 

Israel Has Built an Economy Fueled by Genocide at Home and Abroad

     With the help of the US, Israel exports instruments of oppression abroad, while testing them against Palestinians.

 

 

As Israel tightens its siege, medical supplies in the Gaza Strip are running out, and doctors confront patients with unimaginable injuries.

The orthopedist Hani Bseso operated on his niece Ahed’s leg, after a shell plowed through their home. Bleeding profusely, Ahed remained in an agonizing daze, as relatives carried her downstairs. Reaching a hospital was impossible. So Bseso amputated her leg on the kitchen table where her mother had made bread that morning.

While Gaza’s health system implodes, disease and famine are spreading like wildfire. After 25 years, polio has returned to the strip, and Israeli operations are forcing patients to evacuate Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, one of the last functioning medical facilities. Elsewhere, the scent of uncollected garbage hangs in the air, and water from blasted sewer lines forms pools reflecting the skyline as it turns to rubble. This summer, United Nations experts concluded that Israel’s “intentional and targeted starvation campaign” is “a form of genocidal violence.” Only bombs and bullets enter Gaza in abundance.

That is no coincidence. Between 2018 and 2022, Israel boasted the world’s second-largest military budget in per capita terms, boosting spending by 24 percent in 2023. The Defense Ministry emphasizes that the security sector plays “a monumental role” in the economy, spurring industrial innovation and representing about 10 percent of national exports. As Gaza burns, arms makers report “growing demand” for Israeli weapons “all around the world.”

Israel’s war footing reflects an entrenched pattern of militarism. Over the past 50 years, Israeli leaders have exploited the Occupied Territories and U.S. technical assistance to build an imposing military-industrial complex. Palestinian victims like Ahed are part of this broader process, as Israel exports the violent technologies and expertise that it perfects in Gaza to countries across the globe.

Exporting the Occupation

During the Cold War, U.S. military and technical cooperationhelped Israel become the largest per capita exporter of arms. Struggling with foreign debt, Israeli leaders promoted weapons sales to alleviate financial imbalances and fund industrial development. The defense sector became the bedrock of the economy, and the Occupied Territories offered a laboratory for lethal experimentation. “Today, it can be said that no country in the world is as dependent on arms sales as Israel,” the political scientist Bishara Bahbah concluded in 1986.

In particular, Latin American dictators such as Chile’s Gen. Augusto Pinochet became enthusiastic clients. After the October War in 1973, Israeli firms mailed advertisements to his junta, and the Chilean embassy in Tel Aviv drafted reports about the performance of their weapons. Officers regarded Israel as a model, suggesting that military rule secured “conditions of tranquility” in Palestine. Eventually, Israeli leaders helped General Pinochet develop Chile’s aerospace industry, even transferring technology to produce cluster bombs.

Increasingly, U.S. officials encouraged Israel to stifle leftist movements by arming authoritarian regimes aligned with Washington. Facing human rights legislation, President Jimmy Carter and his successors circumvented restraints on national power by outsourcing repression to Israeli leaders. “Israel is the ‘dirty work’ contractor,” Gen. Mattityahu Peled mused. “Israel is acting as an accomplice and an arm of the United States.”

This was brutally clear in Central America. Before his fall in July 1979, Nicaraguan President Anastasio Somoza Debayle relied on Israeli arms shipments to suppress a popular revolution. “The streets of Managua resemble those of Jerusalem,” El Paísobserved. “Israeli materiel is everywhere.” Nicaraguans claimed that Somoza’s forces were “genocidal” because they leveled villages, slaughtered entire families and raped women in front of their husbands.

Their Israeli-made Galil assault rifles became symbols of oppression. Upon liberating Managua, Sandinista rebels confiscated the guns, before expending their ammunition in long volleys — as if purging the country of the past in each burst. Fearing the revolution’s spread, the CIA then encouraged Israeli leaders to arm the remnant of the Somoza regime, while isolating the progressive Sandinista government. Throughout the 1980s, Israel remained a major actor in the region, supplying arms to the Nicaraguan Contras and exacerbating a civil war that killed 30,000 people.

But Israel’s heaviest footprint was in Guatemala, where Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt claimed that his 1982 coup succeeded partly “because many of our soldiers were trained by Israelis.” Over the following year, Ríos Montt escalated a genocidal war against Indigenous communities that claimed more than 200,000 victims. Officers regarded Israeli strategy as a model, pursuing the “Palestinianization” of rural zones. At Dos Erres, Guatemalan forces sprayed villagers with Galil rifles, before splitting the skulls of survivors with sledgehammers.

Journalists Andrew and Leslie Cockburn found that Israeli leaders had few reservations about weapons sales. “I don’t care what the Gentiles do with the arms,” Lt. Col. Amatzia Shuali scoffed at them. “The main thing” was that Israeli firms “profit.”

By the end of the Cold War, U.S. financial and military aid had allowed Israel to develop a formidable arms industry. In his landmark study, Bahbah noted that, at times, 40 percent of the country’s industrial workforce labored in the defense sector, and weapons exports were a leading source of foreign exchange. Arms production accelerated a drift toward militarism, turning the occupation of Palestine into an economically sustainable and profit-making enterprise. In essence, Israeli leaders funded aggression against Palestinians by dispossessing others in Latin America and elsewhere.

Choosing Terror

As the Soviet Union imploded, Israel reinvented the prevailing discourse justifying its military occupation. For decades, Israeli officers had claimed that Palestinian fighters and their socialist allies — like the Sandinistas — were vengeful “terrorists,” dismissing their political grievances and ideals. Yet Zionist leaders now claimed that “terrorism” posed the greatest threat to world peace, while stretching the elastic term to demonize all Palestinian resistance. Depicting mass protests as terror, Israeli officers distributed truncheons in 1988, ordering troops to break demonstrators’ bones. Within two years, the London-based nonprofit organization Save the Children calculated that more than 23,600 Palestinian children required medical attention for beatings. Almost one-third of the victims were 10 or younger.

At this juncture, Benjamin Netanyahu emerged as a conservative firebrand and self-proclaimed expert on global terror, while leading the Likud party. Previously, Netanyahu founded the Jonathan Institute to convince Western policy makers that “international terrorism” posed an existential threat to liberal democracy, while framing Palestinian resistance as evil, irrational and antisemitic. His political agenda celebrated colonial expansion and raw force.

In October 1995, Netanyahu denounced Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin for negotiating the Oslo Accords, inciting rabid protests and appearing at a rally with an effigy of Rabin in a Nazi SS uniform. One month later, a right-wing gunman murdered the prime minister.

Following the 9/11 attacks, Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders leveraged their counterinsurgency expertise to strengthen relations with Washington and shape the “global war on terror.” Conveniently, many advocates of the invasion of Iraq were hardcore Zionists. Vice President Dick Cheney was a former board member of the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, which promotes weapons sales to Israel. Previously, Defense Adviser Dick Perle represented Israeli arms makers, and Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith was an adviser to Netanyahu. The Jerusalem Post emphasized that a leading war architect Paul Wolfowitz was “devoutly pro-Israel,” naming him “Man of the Year” months after the invasion.

Israeli officials hoped U.S. intervention would topple hostile regimes and dash Palestinian dreams of self-governance. On the eve of the Iraq invasion, Haaretz announced that the Israeli “military and political leadership yearns for war.” Netanyahu himself published, “The Case for Toppling Saddam,” in The Wall Street Journal, echoing false claims about an Iraqi nuclear arsenal.

As the war on terror expanded, U.S. and Israeli officers shared counterinsurgency tactics, rubbing shoulders in the Negev desert. “Senior US military delegations came … to learn from Israel’s experiences in hunting terrorists in the Gaza Strip,” defense experts relayed. Foreign aid and demand for security services also fostered a sort of start-up colonialism, as Israeli veterans founded firms such as the NSO Group and Smart Shooter, which develop the latest spyware and gun targeting systems — capitalizing on the occupation to develop new technologies of social control.

Secretly, the U.S. embassy recognized that the country’s war footing propelled its economic growth. “Government investment,” Ambassador James Cunningham marveled, “is strikingly demonstrated in Israel’s military training programs.” Israeli Army engineering students developed “better missile guidance systems,” “drone aircraft,” and other deadly innovations. “After finishing military service,” he explained, graduates were “snapped up by technology firms” like Elbit Systems and Gilat Satellite Networks.

U.S. officials portrayed Israel as a start-up paradise, while isolating the Palestinian victims of its militarized economy. In 2007, U.S. diplomats locked Hamas leaders out of the Annapolis peace talks, despite acknowledging its “sweep in the local-level Gazan elections.” After vetting Palestine’s own delegates, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice bluntly told them to forget about the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians (the “Nakba”) during the creation of Israel in 1948. “Bad things happen to people all around the world all the time,” Rice lectured them. “You need to look forward.”

Ultimately, the war on terror justified soaring levels of military aid and cooperation while offering an ideological framework that discredited Palestinian dissent at the outset. For policy makers, the concept of “terrorism” inverted inconvenient truths: turning the resistance of the weak into “irrational violence” and colonial assertion into “self-defense.” Flush with foreign aid, the Israeli economy militarized further. The “peace process” became a tool of aggression, as the U.S. served as “Israel’s lawyer,” according to a U.S. negotiator.

Testing Armageddon 

While negotiations sputtered, government and corporate officials continued to embrace the “comparative advantage” of endless war. Citing Hamas rocket attacks, Israel launched Operation Cast Lead in December 2008, portraying the Gaza Strip as a “terrorist nest.” The strip became an arms laboratory with neighborhoods dissolving into rubble and columns of smoke gushing over the horizon. Invading forces showcased new equipment such as the Merkava IV tank and Tavor TAR-21 assault rifle, while reportedly testing the Dense Inert Metal Explosive, an experimental weapon developed by the U.S. Air Force.

“Homes, schools, medical facilities, and UN buildings — all civilian objects — took direct hits from Israeli artillery,” Amnesty International stressed. Soldiers pumped “precision munitions” into children’s bedrooms. Evidence also suggests they tested “a new type of missile” on civilians: killing students waiting for a school bus and an entire family in their home. They even pounded UN buildings with white phosphorus. Human rights experts found shells made in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, still smoldering three weeks after the ceasefire.

Yet U.S. policy remained in lockstep with Israel. Days after the offensive began, the Pentagon planned to ship 1 million pounds of explosives to Israeli forces, including white phosphorus bombs.

Operation Cast Lead deepened a historic pattern with Gaza serving as a testing ground for Israeli and U.S. weapons, while U.S. officials justified operations by referencing anonymous “terrorists.”

But Israel’s violent incursions were often unprovoked. In March 2018, Palestinians organized the Great March of Return, a peaceful movement demanding political and civil rights. Israeli officers responded with a hail of tear gas and bullets — killing 214 civilians and injuring more than 36,100. Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot admitted that he authorized “live fire,” explaining, “The orders are to use a lot of force.”

Health workers claimed that soldiers tested illegal “butterfly bullets” on demonstrators, which pulverized organs and compelled doctors to amputate limbs. Al Jazeera also reported that Israeli forces “experimented with ‘crowd control’ methods,” using drones to spray tear gas and whipping up chemical clouds that sent protesters “thrashing violently” on the ground.

Rather than freeze aid, the Trump administration celebrated the opening of the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem, as Israel massacred 58 Palestinians. The smug backslapping reinforced a cycle of impunity and victimhood; the next year, Israeli forces intentionally leveled the General Union of Disabled Palestinians, eliminating health services for amputees.

Building the Brand

Abroad, military offensives continued to serve as sales pitches. Ironically, Arab states became leading clients. Following the Arab Spring, a symbiotic relationship formed, as Gulf states imported security technology to crush dissent, and Israeli firms gained access to the largest arms export market in the world. Verint Systems shipped surveillance equipment to Bahrain, and the NSO Group sold Pegasus spyware to Saudi Arabia, helping authorities crack down on human rights activists. In 2023, Elbit Systems unrolled plans to build factories in Morocco, while Israeli drones prowled the Western Sahara and struck Sahrawi civilians.

Formalizing this shift, President Donald Trump negotiated the Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between Israel, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates in September 2020. Within two years, Arab states absorbed nearly 25 percent of Israeli military exports.

The European Union also sought Israel’s violent expertise, while importing security hardware to crack down on immigration. By 2017, Israeli institutions were receiving €170 million each yearin EU research funds. In 2021, Israel joined the Horizon Europe initiative, prompting Foreign Minister Yair Lapid to exclaim that his country was “a central player in the largest and most important [research and development] program in the world.” Horizon finances the development of surveillance and intelligence technology, interrogation tactics, and other projects with a clear military edge. The defense contractors Thales, Safran and MBDA have pursued joint ventures with Israel firms to produce weapons — especially drones. Israeli military experts Yaakov Katz and Amir Bohbot emphasize that the “Gaza Strip is ground zero for Israel’s drone revolution.”

Following a historical trend, Israel has secured clients by refusing to respect human rights law or weapons embargoes. Katz and Bohbot observe that “not attaching strings to arms sales” is “a key principle,” allowing firms to become “a dominant player in markets.” Over a decade after Cast Lead, Gaza remained a battered arms laboratory. Israel’s military occupation was not only a human catastrophe but a national export: a brand to build.

Accumulation by Extermination

Yet the conflict itself reflected an irrepressible contradiction: Israeli arms promised total mastery yet made resistance inevitable. By 2018, the UN warned that Israel’s siege was making Gaza “unlivable.” The U.S. embassy confided that at times occupying forces prevented even “children’s toys” and “school supplies” from entering. To unsettle the status quo, Palestinian combatants attacked Israel last October, penetrating borders ringed with blast walls and advanced surveillance equipment, capturing more than 240 people, and dealing a blow to the country’s façade of invincibility.

Their operation provoked a furious response, as Prime Minister Netanyahu exploited the war to showcase the country’s technological prowess. Days into the fighting, a military spokesman announced the combat debut of the Iron Sting mortar, while the local press registered “sharp share price rises” for arms makers and boasted that the new Barak tank “proves itself in Gaza.”

Above all, Israeli leaders suggest that cutting-edge artificial intelligence technology makes strikes precise and humane. But privately, intelligence officers deny that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) exercise constraint. “On the contrary, the IDF bombed … [combatants] in homes without hesitation,” one recalls. “It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home.” Another officer admits that, “We bombed just for ‘deterrence’” — toppling high-rises “just to cause destruction.”

UN investigators conclude that Israeli leaders have sought the “extermination” of Palestinians, “razing entire residential blocks and neighborhoods to rubble,” while displacing more than 1.7 million victims. Authorities describe soldiers gunning down refugees with flags, “ransacking homes” and using “starvation as a method of war.”

Their violence remains willfully gratuitous: This July, Israel hit four schools in four days, sending refugees flying through the air in a flood of shrapnel and fire. Amid relentless bombing runs, Human Rights Watch recently published a study demonstrating that Israeli soldiers systematically torture Palestinian prisoners, outlining evidence of burnings with cigarettes and lighters, brutal beatings, electrocutions and “sexual abuse” — including an account of IDF members raping a detainee with an M16 rifle.

Authors stress that Israel is targeting medical personnel, further contributing to the collapse of Gaza’s healthcare system. The paramedic Walid Khalili informed investigators that his captors suspended Palestinians by their handcuffs, hanging dozens from the ceiling like bloody fruit. One IDF doctor notes that such handcuffing practices frequently impede blood circulation, prompting his colleagues to amputate the limbs of prisoners.

Despite such human rights violations, the Biden administration approved an $18 billion fighter package this August and Israeli arms makers are upbeat. “This is the finest hour of the defense industries,” Smart Shooter CEO Michal Mor insists.

For decades, the dispossession of Palestinians has propelled a cycle of accumulation, as Israel not only builds settlements but arms in the Occupied Territories. Ultimately, U.S. aid has helped turn the country into a techno-dystopia that exports instruments of oppression abroad, while testing them against the refugees along its moving borders. To a disturbing degree, the ongoing genocidal war reflects this ruthless yet impersonal logic: Israel and the U.S. are plunging Palestinians into hunger and desolation, pursuing the next phase in a cycle of accumulation by extermination.

 

https://truthout.org/articles/israel-has-built-an-economy-fueled-by-genocide-at-home-and-abroad/

 

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Gaza. Montreal Students Use Divestment to Sanction Israel

Though the student camp on the McGill University campus protesting the genocidal war in Gaza was dismantled early in July, its existence made it possible to expose the financial and academic ties between that institution and Israel. Ties which the students and many faculty members of both the English and French language colleges in Montreal are still demanding they be ended.

 

BY FARAH MEKKI

 

In the night of 9–10 July, students and other pro-Palestinian protestors present in the camp located at the entrance to the McGill campus found themselves served with an eviction notice. According to the university administration’s press release, the camp represented ‘an increasingly serious threat to health and safety’. A few hours later, cranes, bulldozers and other construction machinery arrived and destroyed the much infrastructure built over a period of 75 days.

On the 1st and 15th of May, the Quebec Superior Court had rejected two applications for a temporary decommissioning injunction. The two parties were to face off again in court on 25 July, but the heads of the university, unwilling to wait for the due process of law, called on Sirco, a private Quebec security company. This decision came because of the breakdown in negotiations between the heads of McGill and Concordia, the city’s two English-language universities – the students of the latter institution having also established their camp at McGill for want of space on their own campus – and their students represented by Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights (SPHR).

‘This camp will remain historical and revolutionary’, says 20-year-old Ward (pseudo), a Lebanese student in political science and general co-ordinator for SPHR. ‘In Canada, McGill is the equivalent of Columbia in New York. When we saw that they had set up a camp down there, we said to ourselves we must do the same,’ he explains.

LETHAL INVESTMENTS

Despite the demolition of the camp, the students of McGill and Concordia have maintained their demands. They want the ‘complete disinvestment of the contracts’ signed between their universities and the private companies ‘complicit with the Gaza genocide.’ According to the data published by McGill, it has invested nearly 73 million dollars in companies involved in the crimes committed by the Israeli army in the occupied territories.

As of 31 March, McGill held $500,000 worth of stocks in the UScompany Lockheed Martin, supplier of Hellfire 9X missiles to the Israeli army. The French company Safran, in which McGill has invested nearly 1.5 million dollars also collaborates with the Israeli military technology company Rafael, on a project of advanced sensor systems and artificial intelligence – a technology which the Israeli army has used, particularly in Gaza, to kill on an even larger scale. The students also point an accusing finger at an investment of over 1.6 million dollars in the French company Thales, also specialising in defence and aerospace, in view of its collaboration with the Israeli military equipment firm Elbit Systems in June 2023. This association was denounced in a declaration published by the UN General Assembly in 2022, pointing to the use of the firm’s Apache helicopters ‘to bomb Lebanese and Palestinian villages’ but also in ‘the massive surveillance of the Palestinians’ and ‘the reinforcement of the military control over occupied Palestinian territory.’ Ward is outraged:

The college uses out tuition money to throw in with Israel (…) but those of us who come from the Middle East, we have known so many injustices [caused by Israel] in our lifetime, that we’re not afraid to fight one more. We’ve already seen much worse.

THE COMPLICITY OF THE BANKS

At Concordia University, the administration assures us they have ‘moved away from certain investments, especially in the armaments industry’ and that their investments involving Israel ‘represent [only] 0.001%’ yet they refuse to publish the list of their holdings as the students demand they do. ‘We were ignored’ Sara Al Khalid, a former member of SPHR Concordia, deplores. She is 24 and has just got her degree in public affairs and political studies. She’s Palestinian, she’s a member of Montreal Palestine, an action group of young Quebecker Palestinians who organise demonstrations in Montreal in support of Palestine. She goes on: ‘I don’t know what we were expecting. What could a university reply if one of its Palestinian students asks it up front to stop investing in the murder of her people?’

The French-language universities in Montreal have been presented with the same type of grievances. But while the board of directors of the University de Québec à Montréal (UQAM) yielded to its students’ demands and voted a resolution to the effect that ‘no direct investment in funds or companies would finance weaponry, and that it would reveal each year,’ the list of its investments, l’Université de Montréal (UdeM) refused to follow suit.

According to its report for the year 2023, it possesses over 9.2 million dollars worth of shares in Canadian banks, such as the Toronto-Dominion Bank, the Royal Bank of Canada, the Bank of Montreal and the Scota Bank. Now all these financial institutions have been taken to task many times by the Boycott Divestment Sanctions campaign (BDS Québec) for their investments of several millions of dollars in the armaments companies Elbit Systems and General Dynamics. The latter is the world’s fifth largest military company, providing not only a wide variety of bombs to the Israeli air force, sch as the MK-82 and 84, dropped on Gaza in 2014 and 2021, but also the weapons systems and other components of Israeli fighter planes F-35, F-15 and F-16, implicated in the 2014 bombing of residential tower blocks and the offices of Al-Jazira and Associated Press in Gaza Cit. y. Questioned about the investments made with her money, Geneviève O’Meara, spokesperson for the Université de Montréal, has this to say for her defence: ‘I do not select our holdings one by one […] they are part of investment portfolios rather than direct investments and these portfolios are put together by external asset managers.’

POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC THREATS

Dov Baum, director of the Action Center for Corporate Accountability with the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) based in California, denounces this kind of sophistry.

When universities claim they don’t invest directly in these companies, it means they ought to be able to issue a declaration whereby they pledge themselves publicly not to invest in them. It shouldn’t be such a big deal, since they don’t invest in them directly.

Since 2005, her organisation has been collecting, classifying and publishing information ‘which is public but hard to find’ on the companies involved in the violations of human rights in Palestine, making it available to North American activists. Her opinion is that if University authorities are so firmly opposed to divestment, it’s because they would have to face serious pressures: ‘Political ones in the first place, because they’re afraid of reprisals, of being accused of anti-Semitism by government representatives and other lobbyists, but also economic pressures, because they would lose many alumni donors and their money.’ Because disinvestment remains an effective means of pressure:

That Israeli government can carry on with its genocide and benefits from this impunity only because it still receives too much direct aid from Europe and the USA, especially through the complicity of these companies.

THE ALIBI OF ACADEMIC FREEDOM

Besides the Quebec universities’ investments, certain collaborative arrangements with Israeli universities are also seen as problematic, by professors as well as students: ‘Israeli universities are not oases of liberal values where critical thinking is cultivated’, says Dyala Hamzah who teaches contemporary Arab history at the Montréal University and belongs to BDS-Québec.

 

McGill and the Université de Montréal have collaboration agreements. These include research programs with Ben Gurion University in Negev, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and that of Tel Aviv. On the other hand, the contract with Ariel University, located in occupied Palestinian territory, was ‘suspended indefinitely last Autumn’ Geneviève O’Mear tells me. Not only do these establishments host the military programs Talplot and Havatzalot, but also those dealing with strategy development, like the ‘Dahiveh doctrine’. Developed by the Israeli army during the 2006 Lebanese war, this doctrine advocates a disproportionate striking force and a targeting of civilian infrastructure so that the reconstruction process should be long and costly. ‘It is unthinkable that Western institutions that claim to embody liberal values and belong to a humanist tradition should cultivate relationships with universities which deal in death,’ Dyala Hanzah continues.

In March 2024, the McGill administrators declared having decided not to ‘cut themselves off from Israeli universities and research institutes’ in the name of the freedom of academic research. Same story from the Université de Montréal. Dyala Hamzah has been trying, in vain, to push through the university assembly a boycott that would suspend these agreements, yet she remains convinced: the Israeli universities play a direct role in the preservation of the colonial system and the occupation of Palestine.

‘Boycotting Israeli universities won’t give the Palestinians back their freedom or let them live in peace with their Israeli Jewish neighbours overnight,’ she explains.’But depriving it of the capacity for mobilising its soft power and whitewashing its crimes through these agreements, means working towards the country’s isolation, political, economic and social.’And the professor is keen to make clear that this boycott movement is not aimed at individuals but at institutions:

It’s true, we may lose some colleagues and interrupt some collaborative ventures, but there’s a genocide going on. The boycott isn’t just to be chic, it’s an act of resistance.

At the Université de Montréal, the private activities of Chancellor Frantz Saintellemy have also made many on the faculty and in the student body feel uneasy. This businessman of forty-eight turns out to be president and operations manager of Leddar Tech, a Québec Company established in Israel, specialising in automotive technology for autonomous driving systems. Seven of Leddar Tech’s employees were sent to Gaza as reservists following 7 October, and the company is also a member of the military consortium Autonomus Vehicle Advanced Techchnolgies for Situational Awareness (AVATAR). The students and other members of the Collectif UdeM Palestine have circulated an on-line petition demanding of Daniel Jutras, Rector of the University, more transparency as to the link between the Chancellor’s firm and the Israeli military industry. The spokesperson for the Université de Montréal asserted that ‘the Chancellor is appointed by the University Council and his functions at UdeM do not include any role in the choice of the University’s academic partners, any more than in the choice of investments for its endowment fund.’ But in the eyes of Dyala Hamzah there is a glaring conflict of interests here: ‘The Chancellor is head of a firm operating alongside companies at the heart the Israeli militaro-industrial complex, i.e. Rafael and Elbit Systems’, and she concludes:

The Université de Montréal cannot pretend to be a humanistic establishment, cultivating knowledge and critical thought and be headed by an associate of the merchants of death serving an ethno-nationalist project.

https://orientxxi.info/magazine/gaza-montreal-students-use-divestment-to-sanction-israel,7545

 

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

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

         Gus Leonisky

 

 

 

bill clinton is an atrocious bastard.....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=As3HEZc5vCw

Bill Clinton's VILE Anti-Palestinian Racist Speech

 

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

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

         Gus Leonisky

 

OF ALL THE PEOPLE WHO HAVE BEEN "IN POWER" BILL SHOULD KNOW THAT MANY ISRAELIS KILLED ON THE 7TH OCTOBER 2023 WERE SHOT BY THE IDF (READ FROM TOP). SECOND, ONE GUS LEONISKY — POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951 — STRONGLY SUSPECTS THAT SOME LEADERS IN THE ISRAELI GOVERNMENT KNEW OF (OR EVEN INSTIGATED) THE BREAK BY HAMAS.... THIS WAS THE CUE FOR NETANYAHU TO START HIS GRAND PLAN "THE GREATER ISRAEL"...

THINK ABOUT IT, BY MAKING PEACE WITH THE "ARABS" HE HAD NO MOTIVATION TO INVADE LEBANON, DESTROY GAZA, OPEN FIRE ON SYRIA AND THREATEN IRAN....

NETANYAHU NEEDED THE 7TH OCTOBER 2023 — EVEN AT THE COST OF ABOUT 1100 JEWISH PEOPLE (MOSTLY KILLED BY THE IDF — READ FROM TOP) TO BUILD HIS GREATER ISRAEL...

PLACE THIS THOUGHT IN YOUR HEAD.

 

SEE ALSO: 

you cannot trust a crying clinton: it could be your pain or a deceitful laughter....

profits down....

Americana Restaurants, West Asia's largest fast-food operator, reported a 48.2 percent decline in profits on 31 October, as consumers boycott US and Israel-linked brands in response to the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.

The Kuwaiti firm announced its profits had fallen to $117.4 million over a nine-month period, while revenues had fallen 15.3 percent to $1.61 billion.

"Topline growth continued to be impacted by lower like-for-like sales due to the evolving regional geopolitical situation and slowness in consumer demand observed in some markets, despite support from new store openings," the company said in a statement.

Americana Restaurants is West Asia's franchisee for major US food outlets that include KFC, Pizza Hut, Baskin Robbins, Costa Coffee, and Krispy Kreme.

Mcdonald's has also been a target of the boycott campaign.

According to The New Arab, McDonald's reported that sales had fallen by 1.5 percent between July and September.

Between April and June, sales dropped by one percent — the first consecutive period of falling sales since lockdowns were imposed during the spread of Coronavirus.

The boycott of McDonald's began after its Israeli franchise gave thousands of free meals to Israeli soldiers at the beginning of the genocide, which began in October last year.

In April, McDonald's moved to limit the damage to its brand by buying back its 225 stores in Israel from the franchisee.

Pizza Hut has faced similar boycott pressure after its Israeli franchise shared images of soldiers with its items in January.

Calls for a boycott intensified in May after a Pizza Hut branch in Israel posted a Facebook ad mocking Palestinian hunger strikers in Israeli prisons.

Israeli authorities had earlier released a fake video of Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti, who was leading a mass hunger strike in Israeli prisons, secretly eating cookies.

Pizza Hut used a screenshot of the video, editing out the cookies and replacing them with a pizza box. The post in Hebrew read: "Barghouti, if you are going to break your strike, isn't pizza the better choice?" The US coffee chain Starbucks has also suffered losses due to the boycott.

In August, its CEO was ousted after a drop in sales for two consecutive quarters.

Revenues dropped four percent in the first three months of 2024, and three percent in the three that followed.

Calls for a boycott began after the company sued the Starbucks Workers United (SWU) union for trademark infringement in Iowa. Starbucks sued the union after it expressed "Solidarity with Palestine" "in a social media post that included the company's logo following Hamas' Operation Al-Aqsa Flood in October.

https://thecradle.co/articles/us-restaurant-chains-see-profits-collapse-as-israel-boycott-bites

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

“It’s hard to do cartoons without a drink…”

         Gus Leonisky