Jonathan Lis,  Liza Rozovsky

Europe begins to act against Israel’s “complete madness” in Gaza, in the wake of a wave of diplomatic incidents.

The wave of diplomatic incidents involving Israel throughout Tuesday (20 May) has been exceptional by any standard.

“The situation in Gaza is unbearable,” a foreign diplomat familiar with the international efforts against Israel told Haaretz. “It’s time to stop. Images of children scrambling for a plate of rice, reports of real hunger, and the fact that Israel isn’t doing enough to facilitate humanitarian aid make it impossible for us to stand by any longer,” he added.

Since Monday, crisis has followed crisis: the leaders of France, the UK and Canada announced they may consider sanctions against Israel; 25 Western countries issued a joint statement expressing concern over Gaza; the UK Government suspended talks on a free trade agreement with Israel; British Foreign Secretary David Lammy announced sanctions on Israeli settlers and summoned Israeli Ambassador Tzipi Hotovely for a formal reprimand.

At the same time, Swedish Foreign Minister Maria Malmer Stenergard declared her intent to promote sanctions against Israeli ministers – a move that was later blocked. French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said on Tuesday that he supports reconsidering the EU-Israel Association Agreement. Just hours later, at the initiative of the Dutch foreign minister, EU foreign ministers gathered in Brussels to discuss suspending the agreement.

Seventeen of the EU’s 27 member states voted to re-examine the legal basis of the EU-Israel Association Agreement. While full cancellation would require consensus and is considered unlikely, a qualified majority could suspend specific parts, such as the free trade deal that exempts Israeli exports from tariffs, or the Horizon program, which allows Israeli participation in European science and technology projects.

Israeli officials took comfort in Germany, Italy, and Greece’s support, which voted alongside Israel at the EU Commission. The Israeli Foreign Ministry doubts that the agreement will be revoked altogether, but acknowledges that the decision to review it is a serious diplomatic warning.

A senior Israeli official told Haaretz the developments were expected. “The statement from Kaja Kallas was unfortunate, but it could have been worse,” he said of the chief EU diplomat’s comments. “The past 24 hours were all part of a planned ambush we knew about. This was a co-ordinated sequence of moves ahead of the EU meeting in Brussels, and thanks to joint efforts by our ambassadors and the foreign minister, we managed to moderate the outcome,” the official said.

“The bullet has left the barrel,” said Maya Sion-Tzidkiyahu, director of the Israel-Europe Relations Program at the Mitvim Institute and lecturer at the Hebrew University’s European Forum. “There’s no telling where this will lead or how the legal review will conclude. This step further isolates Israel as a pariah state, losing some of its closest friends in Europe.”

According to her, “This shift happened fast, in just two weeks, and the decision may trigger a diplomatic tsunami.”

“This is a very clear message to Israel: we’ve had enough of a senseless war. You’re increasingly seen as a country whose values no longer align with those of the European Union,” Sion-Tzidkiyahu added.

Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar has held talks in recent days with about 10 European foreign ministers and heard strong criticism from them. At Sunday’s cabinet meeting, he warned ministers that European criticism could soon be accompanied by concrete actions. Israeli army officials confirmed that Israeli monitoring systems also show the humanitarian situation in Gaza nearing a red line, with immediate aid needed.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu approved the entry of aid into Gaza without delay in co-ordination with the US. As trucks began to move, Israeli officials quickly informed counterparts that Israel was indeed acting to alleviate hunger and was not relying on declarations alone. A source familiar with the details said Netanyahu plans to issue a formal statement in response to the Western measures.

Still, Israel’s sudden response did little to satisfy the international community. Several European countries criticised the new aid distribution plan, set to begin in two weeks.

“It’s complete madness,” a European diplomat told Haaretz. “There’s no way this will work. Israel is shutting down 400 food distribution points in Gaza and replacing them with four or five. That means 6000 people at each point. I desperately hope they don’t go through with this – it would be a disaster.”

Sion-Tzidkiyahu estimated that the very fact that the EU is now debating Israeli violations of international law sends a strong signal not only to international courts, but possibly even to people in Trump’s orbit, who may be attuned to these messages.

Looking ahead, Israeli officials are already bracing for the next flashpoint. France and Saudi Arabia are expected to convene a conference in New York in June to announce recognition of a Palestinian state. According to sources, the initiative is primarily Saudi, designed to deliver a symbolic diplomatic achievement reflecting concern for the Palestinian people. However, officials now believe the organisers are working to expand the number of countries backing the move.

President Isaac Herzog, who attended the pope’s inauguration in the Vatican on Sunday, made an unannounced stop in Paris for a meeting with President Emmanuel Macron. Herzog, who often carries out quiet diplomatic missions, reportedly raised both the hostage issue and Israel’s concern about the French-Saudi initiative. Israeli officials believe it will be difficult to stop the recognition plan, which is expected to move forward as planned.

Republished from Haaretz, 21 May 2025

https://johnmenadue.com/post/2025/05/diplomatic-tsunami-on-palestine/

ISRAHELL IS A TERRORIST ORGANISATION AS BAD A ISIS, 4CHAN AND AL QAEDA... IT DOES NOT DESERVE SYMPATHY, BUT AS AN "OFFICIAL STATE" IT DESERVES FIERCE CONDEMNATION... AS WE HELP ISRAHELL ESCAPE PUNISHMENT AND WE HELP ISRAHELL CRIMINAL TERRORISM... WE, PETIT BOURGEOIS, ARE LULLED INTO THE NECESSITY OF THE CRIMINAL TERRORIST ACTIVITIES OF BIBI NETANYAHU WITH ZIONIST PROPAGANDA: WE ARE ANTI-SEMITIC, BUT WE ARE NOT. WE ARE ANTI-CRIME OF THE ZIONISTS. SIMPLE...

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    BY Ultan Banan

Look up the Irgun on Wikipedia and you’ll read that the outfit was a Zionist ‘paramilitary organisation’ that operated in the thirties and forties in the land of Palestine. A few lines later, the reader gets another angle, when the writer goes on to add that the Irgun ‘has been viewed as a terrorist organisation or an organisation which carries out terrorist acts’, cagey language that dances very prettily around the point at hand. This goes back to the question of semantics — who is it that holds the right to convey meaning (to words and language) in a political context or in the context of conflict? Whoever controls the narrative, of course. Today, for example, those who live in the West are likely to hear of Hamas referred to exclusively (and reductively) as ‘terrorists’, while Israel, on the other hand, is only exercising its ‘right to defend itself’.

Outside of the Arab world, Israel receives much positive press (and always has done) as the ‘only democracy in the Middle East’. In fact, it is almost criminal not to like Israel, and I am not saying that with any degree of facetiousness. Echoing its formidable defensive arsenal (and also that big ugly concrete wall), Israel is protected by a veritable wall of words, a ‘linguistic Iron Dome’, let’s call it, which shields it from all and any verbal affront. Subject Israel to the least criticism and you will be met head-on with that terrible slur ‘anti-Semite’, a badge which will mark you out as the worst kind of racist bigot.

Israel’s rhetorical defences are formidable, but chip away at that imposing edifice and you soon find that it serves as many walls do: it hides something you are not supposed to see.

The Irgun, Lehi and Hagana were terrorist organisations made up mostly of European Jewish settlers that oversaw and took part in the wholesale ethnic cleansing of what was then Palestine, in order to lay the ground for the modern State of Israel. There is no need to go into great detail here, only to say that these terrorist organisations were involved in the most savage acts of barbarity.

Later, many of the leaders of these organisations became leading political figures in the State of Israel. Menachem Begin, sixth president of Israel, was a leader of the Irgun. Yitzhak Shamir, seventh president of Israel, was also in the Irgun, and after they split went on to join the more militant Lehi (the Stern Gang). Yaakov Meridor, one of the founders of Herut (the political party that developed from the Irgun and that several decades later became Likud), started out as a commander in the Irgun, only to becomes a career politician after the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. What’s more, the IDF (Israeli Defence Forces) was born out of the merger of these several terrorist organisations when Israel’s political foundations had been established.

So what is it, exactly, that distinguishes the former (‘paramilitary’ organisations which carry out terrorist acts) from the latter (a state managed in part by former terrorists with a military (IDF) comprised largely of terrorists)?

There is no difference other than nomenclature. The State of Israel was conceived of and brought about through terror, and to this day maintains its control over a captive and enslaved minority through the exercise of terror. The rage and barbarity that Israel has displayed since the tragic events of October 7th are perhaps explained by Hamas’s upset of Israel’s monopoly on the use of terror within the state of Israel.

Did Hamas commit terrorist atrocities on October 7th? Certainly. But Israel has been committing terrorist atrocities against the Palestinian Arab population for 75 years now, and it is only the formidable ‘wall of words’ protecting Israel which prevents people from seeing the country for what it really is: a terrorist state.

Operation Cast Lead was a campaign of terror. Operation Protective Edgewas a campaign of terror. So was every other operation before and after, all affectionately referred to among the military establishment of Israel as the periodic ‘mowing of the lawn’. Shooting little kids is terrorism. Killing entire (civilian) families in missile attacks is terrorism. The targeted killing of journalists and medical professionals is terrorism. In short, Israel’s entire playbook of war, fundamentally, is terrorism.

What we are seeing now in Gaza is a move towards a ‘final solution’ of sorts, the ultimate ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the genocide of the Palestinian people. And why? So that the Zionist political establishment of Israel can finally realise its goal of a Jewish State of Israel built on foundations of racial purity and ethnic supremacy — somewhat reminiscent of another murderous genocidal regime of the 20th century to which the Jews fell foul, is it not?

Words matter. It is all too common for language to fall prey to fascistic manipulation. So the next time you’re forced to listen to another diatribe about Hamas terrorists and Israel’s right to defend itself, decide for yourself if the speaker has earned, and is using responsibly, the right of definition. One man’s terrorist may be another man’s freedom fighter, but killing women and children is the same no matter whose eye is peering down the barrel.

https://ultanbanan.medium.com/israel-as-a-terrorist-state-487a1c1fe878

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

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

Patrick Lawrence

Those who purport to lead and speak for the Western world seem to be breaking their disgraceful silence 18 months after the onset of the Zionist state’s primitive savagery.

A couple of weeks after Israel began its campaign of terror in Gaza two Octobers ago, a journalist and novelist named Omar El Akkad published a note on X, formerly known as Twitter, that has stayed with me ever since:

Pure pith, if you ask me, a trespass onto that forbidden land where humanity’s taboos are ignored and acid truths openly articulated.

El Akkad, an Egyptian by birth who has lived, reported and written in Canada the whole of his adult life, already had some honoured novels to his credit —  American War, 2017, and  _What Strange Paradise_, 2021 — by the time he offered the above observation.

This past winter he published his bitter reflections on Gaza and the West’s hypocrisies thereupon under the title One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. The thought altogether merits the recycle, digital media message to hard covers.

I have wondered lately whether the day El Akkad anticipates with raw indignation may be hard upon us. Those who purport to lead and speak for the Western world — parliamentarians, senior foreign policy people, various corporate media — seem to be breaking their disgraceful silence 18 months after they ought to have spoken up in condemnation of the Zionist state’s primitive savagery.

There is a great, often untraversed, distance between words and action, what is said and what is done, in our post-democracies. So I cannot usefully speculate where these recent expressions of outrage, confessions of error and misplaced sympathies prominent among them, will lead. Turns in sentiment, however, nearly always precede turns in policy and conduct. Anyone who lived through the Vietnam War years knows this.

I have suspected from the earliest days of the Israeli military’s real-time barbarities that “the Jewish state” was bound to overplay its hand at some point. The rest of the world can take only so much pretending that the murder spree in Gaza is a Biblically authorised war against — how does this work? — the descendants of those phantom, Jew-hating clans known as Amalekites. The Zionist project is at bottom an attempt to make the modern world recognise invocations of ancient wars of revenge, annihilation and race-paranoia, whether or not they ever took place, as legitimising unspeakable horrors in the third decade of the 21st century. Sooner or later, I figured, the rational would prevail over the imaginary and mythological – Athens, as the scholars think of it, over Jerusalem.

Has this moment come at last? Good enough, it is worth posing the question. A highly significant emergency session of the UN Security Council on 13 May suggests that the West’s unconscionable support for Israeli terrorism now wears very thin. So does a marked turn toward plain-spoken truths about Gaza in some Western media. (And how novel is this?) We also begin to hear a few disavowals coming from political figures who have until now defended the indefensible. There is often a danger of over-interpretation in times such as these, but a shift of sentiment seems to me in the offing, if it has not already arrived.

Shifting winds

The chronology of events, easily enough read, indicates that Israel crossed its bridge too far in early March, when it was step-by-step betraying the phased ceasefire agreement it had entered upon in January. On 2 March, the Netanyahu Government announced it would block all humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip. On 18 March, the Israeli military resumed its bombing campaign, marking a decisive breach of its recent commitment.

Blockades and bombs are hardly new to the Palestinians of Gaza. But this time the terrorist state declared its intention to escalate the violence beyond the previous 16 months, until all remaining hostages were released and Hamas was eliminated. This is to be totalised extermination just as we can read of it in Deuteronomy, Samuel and Chronicles – or in any good history of the Reich, I will add. By early April, when the World Food Program announced it was running out of food stocks, it was clear we were witnessing a campaign of savagery that simply has no limits.

My first intimation that the winds were shifting, if I did not miss an earlier sign, came by way of an editorial in _The Economist_, published on 9 April under the headline, “Israel is intent on destroying Gaza.” Shockingly honest, I recall thinking – most unlike The Economist in these sorts of matters. Ever the Atlanticists, the British weekly’s editors looked to President Donald Trump to avert a disaster no one could gloss over or justify and expect to be taken seriously. “The outlook is bleak,” they wrote. “Without pressure from him, it is hard to see anything else that could prevent Israel’s final destruction of Gaza.”

A month later we have had a flood of media reports and official statements taking the same line. As other commentators have noted, the Financial Times published  a blistering editorial on 6 May — signed by the editorial board, a measure of its gravitas — under the headline, “The West’s shameful silence on Gaza.” Wow, the FT no less. After noting Israel’s post-ceasefire blockade of water, food, medicine and all other forms of humanitarian aid, the prominent British daily levels this one at the West’s leaders:

“… the US and European countries that tout Israel as an ally that shares their values have issued barely a word of condemnation. They should be ashamed of their silence, and stop enabling Netanyahu to act with impunity.”

Further on, the FT recites the mess Trump has made with his incoherent policies and somersaults – Gaza as a luxury resort, support for the ceasefire, dispensation to breach it, all the while more weapons. And then this conclusion:

“The global tumult triggered by Trump has already distracted attention from the catastrophe in Gaza. Yet the longer it goes on, the more those who remain silent or cowed from speaking out will be complicit.”

Total destruction, shame, complicity: Let us all listen intently now that mainstream media are saying what independent media have been saying the whole of this crisis.

Last weekend the liberal Independent published its own  editorial, “End the deafening war on Gaza – it is time to speak up.” A snippet here:

“It is time for the world to wake up to what is happening and to demand an end to the suffering of the Palestinians trapped in the enclave.”

And, a day later, The Guardian stepped forthrightly up to the plate with “ The Guardian view on Gaza: Trump can stop this horror. The alternative is unthinkable.” “What is this, if not genocidal?” the paper’s editors ask. “When will the US and its allies act to stop the horror, if not now?”

The horror, the horror: The mind goes back to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, exactly as it should: Bibi Netanyahu as Mr Kurtz, the Zionist project as the true face of Western “civilisation.”

You get some herd instinct among mainstream media when touchy questions of ideology and geopolitics arise, as I have seen in years gone by at very close range. And as you would have noted, the recent outpouring of media outrage has been confined mostly to the British press. Of this kind of thing there has been nothing in the Zionist-supervised New York Times and very rarely anywhere else in mainstream American media. This is the Israeli lobby at work, to state what ought to be obvious.

The same holds for the political figures who have at last broken the silence.

Josep Borrell, the blunt-spoken Spaniard who previously served as the European Union’s foreign policy director, said at a 9 May award ceremony in Spain ( as quoted in _The New Arab_):

“We’re facing the largest ethnic cleansing operation since the end of the second World War in order to create a splendid holiday destination once all the millions of tonnes of rubble have been cleared from Gaza and the Palestinians have died or gone away.”

Mark Pritchard, a Tory MP,  addressing the House of Commons last week:

“For many years — I’ve been in this House 20 years — I have supported Israel pretty much at all costs, quite frankly. But today, I want to say that I got it wrong and I condemn Israel for what it is doing to the Palestinian people in Gaza and indeed in the West Bank, and I’d like to withdraw my support right now for the actions of Israel, what they are doing right now in Gaza… I’m really concerned that this is a moment in history when people look back, where we’ve got it wrong as a country."

I hope Omar El Akkad is listening to all this up there in Toronto.

All this suddenly seems a prelude as of Tuesday, when the Security Council met in the aforementioned emergency session at the Secretariat in New York to consider a reality no amount of “right-to-defend-itself” nonsense can be deployed to explain.

Israel has brought the 2.2 million residents of the Strip to the brink of mass starvation, dehydration and disease. Photographs, videotape and press reports coming from those courageous journalists still working inside Gaza are about to get a great deal more horrible than they have been these past many months.

There cannot be an attorney alive — apart from corrupt hacks at the State Department and elsewhere in Washington — who will not call the Israelis’ siege since March a war crime and a crime against humanity.

Suggesting the shifting sands in the West, it was Britain, France, Denmark and other members of the Atlantic alliance who asked the UNSC to convene.

Of the council’s 15 members only the US — does this go without saying? — refused to call upon the Zionist state urgently to lift its siege and allow aid flows to resume.

Bringing the point yet closer to home, the speaker who carried the session was Tom Fletcher, a long-serving British diplomat now serving as the UN’s under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs.

Fletcher’s impassioned speech is worth reading in full, and a transcript is  here, provided by ReliefWeb, an online resource run by the UN’s co-ordinator for humanitarian affairs. I single out a few of his choicer remarks, those most suggestive of the broader shift in the winds that I describe:

“Let me start with what we see and are mandated by this Council to report.

Israel is deliberately and unashamedly imposing inhumane conditions on civilians in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. [Fletcher addresses the West Bank crisis later in his remarks.]

For more than 10 weeks, nothing has entered Gaza – no food, medicine, water or tents. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have, again, been forcibly displaced and confined into ever-shrinking spaces, as 70% of Gaza’s territory is either within Israeli-militarised zones or under displacement orders….

This degradation of international law is corrosive and infectious. It is undermining decades of progress on rules to protect civilians from inhumanity and the violent and lawless among us who act with impunity.

Humanity, the law and reason must prevail. This Council must prevail. Demand this ends. Stop arming it. Insist on accountability.

To the Israeli authorities: Stop killing and injuring civilians. Lift this brutal blockade. Let humanitarians save lives.

For those killed and those whose voices are silenced: What more evidence do you need now? Will you act — decisively — to prevent genocide and to ensure respect for international humanitarian law? Or will you say instead, ‘We did all we could?’ ”

Fletcher, who received unanimous support from UNSC members — again, we must leave out the Americans — reserved some of his sharpest criticisms for the US-Israeli plan to bypass all international humanitarian organisations and resume aid by way of private groups Washington and Tel Aviv are picturesquely calling the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.

Distribution sites would be reduced from 400 to a very few. This would require Gazans to walk long distances to receive aid; Israeli military units would surround these sites and the routes leading to them.

The US representative at the session, Dorothy Shea, defended this plan — “We urge the UN to continue discussions” — as she declined to join the other 14 council members to call for Israel to end its illegal siege and let perfectly capable international aid organisations resume their work. Parenthetically, if you want to keep up with the depravities of the State Department under Marco Rubio, a transcript of Shea’s remarks will fix you right up. It is here.

And here is Fletcher on the US-Israeli plan:

“For anyone still pretending to be in any doubt, the Israeli-designed distribution modality is not the answer.

It practically excludes many, including people with disabilities, women, children, the elderly, the wounded. It forces further displacement. It exposes thousands of people to harm. It sets an unacceptable precedent for aid delivery not just in the OPT [the Occupied Palestinian Territories], but around the world.

It restricts aid to only one part of Gaza, while leaving other dire needs unmet. It makes aid conditional on political and military aims. It makes starvation a bargaining chip.

It is a cynical sideshow. A deliberate distraction. A fig leaf for further violence and displacement.

If any of that still matters, have no part in it.”

There is one theme in Fletcher’s inspired comments that seems to me to reflect the emerging zeitgeist, if this is the right word, among the Western powers – with the exception, once again, of the United States.

It makes me think again of Omar El Akkad’s point. It suggests that the price of not speaking out against the Zionist regime’s terrorism — the “personal downside,” as El Akkad puts it — now comes to outweigh the price of speaking out, as people of mediocre character would calculate these things.

I will let Tom Fletcher conclude this commentary:

“I ask you to reflect — for a moment — on what action we will tell future generations we each took to stop the 21st century atrocity to which we bear daily witness in Gaza. It is a question we will hear, sometimes incredulous, sometimes furious — but always there — for the rest of our lives.

We will surely all claim to have been against it? Maybe we will say we issued a statement? Or that we trusted that private pressure might work, despite so much evidence to the contrary?

Or pretend that we thought a more brutal military offensive had more chance of bringing the hostages home than the negotiations which brought so many hostages home?

Maybe some will recall that in a transactional world we had other priorities.

Or maybe we will use those empty words: ‘We did all we could’.”

Republished from Consortium News, 20 May 2025

The views expressed in this article may or may reflect those of ....

https://johnmenadue.com/post/2025/05/gaza-finally-waves-upon-the-sea-of-silence/

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

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

JUMPING UP AND DOWN WITH WORDS FROM AN AIR-GUITAR WILL DO NOTHING...