Wednesday 16th of July 2025
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delivery from chez bibi.....

The Gaza genocide is special. And not in one but two regards.

As has often been observed, this is the first genocide in history that is, in essence, livestreamed. No genocide before has been committed under the eyes of the world like this one. And second, the Gaza genocide is undermining and, in effect, devastating whole moral and legal orders – or at least longstanding claims to them – in an equally unprecedented way.

 

Humanitarian aid from hell: The extermination of Palestinians is being disguised as help
Israel and America want to ‘benevolently’ put the population of Gaza into what amounts to a concentration camp

BY Tarik Cyril Amar

 

These two peculiarities are related: The only way the world as a whole could have tolerated the Gaza genocide for almost three years now is by stubbornly disregarding fundamental norms, both written and unwritten. For instance, almost no state – with the exception of Yemen (under de facto control of the Ansar Allah movement or Houthis) – has even tried to comply with its binding and clear obligations under the 1948 UN Genocide Convention, namely to “prevent and punish” the crime of genocide. No one with the power – alone or with others – to do so, not in the Middle East, not beyond it, has come to save the Palestinian victims of the Gaza genocide in the only manner that would work: By stopping their Israeli murderers by massive force.

Yet the small but still disproportionately influential part of the world that calls itself the West has gone beyond merely failing to act. That’s because, whether the West is a civilization once shaped by Christianity or not, for a long time now, its true inner core has been hypocrisy. And during the Gaza Genocide, the West’s compulsive need to rationalize even its most vicious actions into acts of virtue covered by ‘values’, has led to a new peak of absolute moral and intellectual perversion: Precisely because the West has not only abandoned the Palestinian victims but is actively co-perpetrating this genocide together with Israel, its elites – in politics, culture, the media, the police, and judiciary – have made a sustained, obstinate effort to radically alter our sense of right and wrong, from specific legal norms down to our intuitive and widely shared understanding of limits never to be crossed.

Waging, for example, a so-called ‘war’ by killing or injuring – often maiming for life – over 50,000 children (as of May 2025)? A ‘war’ in which we receive one reliable testimony after another that many of these children are targeted deliberately, including by drone operators and snipers? A ‘war’ in which starvation, medical deprivation, and the promotion of epidemics have all been deployed equally deliberately? In the West, we are told to call this ‘self-defense’.

Indeed, we are asked – with great insistence, to say the least – to believe that this form of mass-murderous, infanticiding ‘self-defense’ is something to be proud of, even vicariously: The mayor of Berlin, Kai Wegner, for instance – notorious for his suppression of any signs of resistance to Israeli genocide – has just declared that city hall will keep flying the Israeli flag.

In the same depraved spirit, the establishments of the West hand out punishment – from vicious police beatings to crippling lawfare to international sanctions – not to the perpetrators and accomplices of the Gaza genocide, in Israel and elsewhere, but to those who resist it in solidarity with its Palestinian victims. Protesters, journalists worth their salt, and even a UN special rapporteur are treated like criminals, even terrorists for actually standing up against the crime of genocide, as – just yesterday, it seems – we were all officially supposed to do. But ‘never again’ has been turned into ‘definitely again, and as long as the murderers want, since they are Israelis and our friends’.

It is in this context of a reversal of morality, law, and meaning so complete the overused term ‘Orwellian’ for once really applies that we can understand what is now happening to the concept of ‘humanitarian’ action.

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica’s back-to-basics definition, a humanitarian is a “person who works to make other people’s lives better,” for instance, by trying to end world hunger. Since modern humanitarianism already has a history of two centuries, historians, such as Michael Barnett in his ‘Empire of Humanity’, have delivered more complex accounts. Critics have long denounced humanitarianism’s limits and even flaws. For French sociologist Jean Baudrillard, it is what’s left when a more optimistic humanism decays: A sort of bleak emergency response, a sign that the world has gotten worse, again.

In particular, during the post-Cold War decades of American hubris – misnamed the ‘unipolar moment’ – humanitarianism often allied with Western imperialism. In the war of aggression against Iraq that started in 2003, for instance, humanitarian organizations became servants to the aggressors, invaders, and occupiers.

Yet, whatever view of humanitarianism you may endorse, there are things the concept can only accommodate for the completely deranged and limitlessly evil, such as massacring starving civilians and concentration camps. And yet, in Gaza, both have been labeled humanitarian. The so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a shady US-Israeli concoction, has promoted a scheme in which pittances of food are effectively used as bait for lethal traps: Palestinians deliberately blockaded by Israel have been lured to four kill zones masquerading as aid distribution points.

Over the past one and a half months, Israeli forces and Western mercenaries have killed at least 789 victims – and injured thousands – at or near these satanic traps. Obviously, killing the unarmed on such a scale is not collateral damage but deliberate. By now, the murderous intent behind the scheme has been confirmed by various sources, including Israeli. No wonder that 170 real humanitarian and human rights group have signed a protest against this fake relief and genuine mass murder scheme.

And then there is the concentration camp plan: Israeli leaders have already driven the surviving inhabitants of Gaza – one of the most densely settled places on Earth even before the genocide – into an area comprising only 20% of Gaza’s devastated surface.

Yet that is not evil enough for them: On the way to what seems to be their idea of a final solution of the Gaza question, they have now pitched a new plan to their US allies, namely, to herd the survivors into an even smaller area. This de facto concentration camp they advertise as a ‘humanitarian city’. From there, Palestinians would have only two ways out: By death or by leaving Gaza. Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz wants to sell us this as ‘voluntary’. It is an irony of history that Israeli genociders now compete not only with the crimes of the Nazis but also with the Germans’ horrendous abuse of language.

The location of this deadly ethnic-cleansing transit station? The ruins of Rafah. You may remember Rafah, once a bustling city in southern Gaza, as the place Israel’s Western allies pretended to try to protect, sort of, for a while. Those warnings were worth nothing, of course. Rafah was flattened, and now the area is earmarked for the concentration camp to end it all.

The scheme is so outrageous – but then, that is Israel’s ordinary modus operandi – that even its critics can hardly keep up with just how depraved it is. Philippe Lazzarini, the head of UNRWA – the effective aid distribution organization that Israel has shut down in pursuit of its starvation strategy, killing almost 400 of its local staff – has posted on X that the ‘humanitarian city’ would amount to a second Nakba and “create massive concentration camps at the border with Egypt for the Palestinians.”

The Nakba was the Zionist ethnic cleansing, interspersed with massacres, of around 750,000 Palestinians in 1948. But Lazzarini is wrong if he believes that the first Nakba ever ended: For the Palestinian victims of Israeli violence, it only initiated an ongoing process of theft, apartheid, and often murder. A process that has now culminated in genocide, as multiple international experts acknowledge, including the eminent Oxford historian Avi Shlaim. This is not a second Nakba, but the Israeli attempt to complete the first one.

Lazzarini’s comment that the humanitarian city plan would create concentration camps on the border with Egypt is, of course, also true as far as it goes. Yet all of Gaza has long been what (even by 2003) the Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling called “the world’s largest concentration camp ever.” The point is not to be pedantic. What Lazzerini’s protest – welcome as it is – still misses is that what Israel is now doing to the Palestinians is creating a fresh hell within a much older one.

But not Israel alone. The West is, as always, deeply involved. Let’s set aside that the interwar Zionists learned about how to use concentration camps against Palestinians from the British Mandate authorities, as with other methods of vicious suppression, too. Now as well, various Western figures and agencies have become involved in the Israeli schemes of resettlement that drive the humanitarian city plan. Tony Blair’s foundation – really a commercial consulting and influence-peddling company systematically working for the dark side wherever it pays well – and the prestigious and powerful Boston Consulting Group have both been caught contributing to Israeli ethnic cleansing planning. And behind that stands the declared will of no one less than Donald Trump, the president of the US, who has long been explicit that he would like to see Gaza rebuilt as a vast, glitzy Trumpistan and without Palestinians.

From the beginning of the Gaza genocide, it has been both a brutal crime and a constant attempt to redefine what is right and what is wrong so that this crime would appear necessary, justifiable, and even as a legitimate opportunity to profit. And the West’s elites – with far too few exceptions – have joined Israel in this absolute perversion of fundamental ethics and reason no less than in the mass murdering. If both Israel and the West are not stopped at long last, they will use the Gaza genocide to change much of the world into a hellscape where everything we have learned to despise about the Nazis will become the new normal.

https://www.rt.com/news/621519-palestine-aid-from-hell/

 

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

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

silence....

 

Jeffrey Loewenstein

The Israel lobby stands loudly condemned for its silence

 

Reflect for a moment, as you read this piece, what is happening in Gaza.

The wanton and totally unwarranted killing of Gazans by Israel’s IDF (which can now definitely and justifiably said to be the most immoral army in the world!), principally women and children continues – daily! The wilful destruction of Palestinian culture, be it libraries, schools or universities. The wholesale destruction of mosques. In effect, the destruction of most buildings and homes, rendering them uninhabitable. Preventing drugs and all manner of medical supplies and life-supporting equipment from entering Gaza. The catalogue of what Israel is “doing” goes on and on…..

That governments around the world, including that of Australia, have effectively been mute in failing to call out Israel’s conduct is shameful. More insidious and disgraceful is that so-called leaders of the Jewish community — think, the ECAJ, the Zionist Federation, the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies, the Jewish Community Council of Victoria, Magan David Adom, the Anti-Defamation Commission, B’nai B’rith — and the various synagogues, rabbis and communal organisations around the country, have been singular silent in making any comments about what Israel is doing in Gaza and the West Bank. From being shrill, loud and offensive, bullying and threatening as part of the Israel lobby, to a man and woman their silence has been deafening with respect to Israel and Gaza.

The two Jewish politicians in the federal Parliament — Josh Burns MP (Labor) and Julian Leeser (Lib) — who have a high profile, have been no better. Yes, the occasional comment about how bad things are in the Middle East and calling for peace there, but anything, specific to Gaza or the West Bank, in relation to what is happening on the ground in Gaza being done by the Israelis? Not a word!

Take what Josh Burns MP said in an op-ed piece of his published in The Guardian on 9 July relating to anti-semitic incidents in Melbourne….

“There must be a space for legitimate criticism of the Israeli Government, to voice the need for Gazans to receive aid, to end hostilities and work towards a lasting peace”.

And this:

“…..we can hold empathy for the unimaginable suffering of the Palestinian people, while caring for the safety of the Jewish community in Australia.”

Not a word of sympathy, concern or empathy for the plight of Gazans from Burns. Not a call to Israel to stop what it is doing in and to Gaza and its peoples. And not even an adverse comment about how the Israel lobby disgracefully bombarded the ABC (after all, our public broadcaster paid for with your and my tax dollars and for whom Burns should stand up) about Antoinette Lattouf being employed by the broadcaster.

Mark Leibler, chairman of the unelected AIJAC, when speaking at a function in honour of his firm’s birthday, was reported in jMedia.online on saying this:

“My sense of the ties between my Jewish heritage, the centrality of the state of Israel, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander traditions and cultures grew even stronger through my former articled clerk and great friend, Noel Pearson.

“Noel has often described our two peoples as sharing a ‘land-based identity’ – historical and spiritual.

“Noel also says that Indigenous Australians can and must resist victimhood, as the Jewish people have done, even in the face of persistent racism and victimisation.”

Substitute the word Israel for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders and one would have expected that Leibler would be out there expressing horror and condemnation of the genocide, ethnic cleansing and racism by Israel in what it has wrought, and continues to do, in Gaza and the West Bank.

These so-called leaders of the Jewish community stand condemned for their shameful silence, apart from their hypocrisy and double-standards.

Fortunately a growing number of Jews abhor and condemn their so-called leaders for their silence and effective complicity in what Israel is doing, and are signing up with the Jewish Council of Australia as the appropriate voice for those Jews who say what Israel is doing is not in their name!

https://johnmenadue.com/post/2025/07/the-israel-lobby-stands-loudly-condemned-for-its-silence/

legitimacy?....

 

 

BY Orestis NIKIFOROU

 

The legitimacy of the State of Israel is a matter of debate. This article examines its foundations in light of classical political theories and international law, while challenging the use of the biblical narrative as a historical and moral justification for exclusive sovereignty over a contested territory.
According to political theory, the legitimacy of a state is based on criteria that can be combined but are never equivalent: legality, effectiveness, consent, recognition, and symbolism. Applied to the State of Israel, this notion raises a profound debate: Is the state legitimate according to these fundamental criteria? And if so, for whom, and at the cost of what denied rights? This text offers a critical assessment of Israel's legitimacy in light of the major principles of political philosophy and international law, also drawing on critical voices from the Israeli, Palestinian, and academic worlds—and examining contemporary uses of the biblical narrative as a source of political legitimacy.

 

1. Classical Criteria of Legitimacy

According to Max Weber, the legitimacy of a state is based on the social acceptance of its authority—whether traditional, charismatic, or legal-rational. For David Beetham, this legitimacy requires three conditions:

Compliance with legal rules.

The moral or ethical justification of these rules.

The demonstrated consent of the governed.

Hannah Arendt, for her part, points out that the state derives its legitimacy from its ability to include human pluralism within a common political space, not from imposing exclusive sovereignty.

Let us now apply these criteria to the State of Israel.

 

2. Legality and Legal Foundations

The State of Israel was created in 1948 following the UN Partition Plan (Resolution 181), but this plan was not accepted by the indigenous majority—the Palestinian Arabs, who then represented over 65% of the population. While the UN recognizes Israel, this legality is partial:

The expulsion of over 700,000 Palestinians in 1948 (the Nakba) was accompanied by massive violations of international humanitarian law (see Ilan Pappé, 2023).

The Balfour Declaration (1917), often presented as a preliminary foundation, explicitly stipulated that nothing should be done to infringe on the rights of the "non-Jewish communities" of Palestine—a clause ignored today.

In the territories occupied since 1967 (West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza), international law is continually flouted: illegal settlements, administrative detentions, legal segregation (see Human Rights Watch, 2021).

Israel therefore relies on partial international legal recognition, but its fundamental practices contradict the legal principles it invokes.

 

3. Consent of the Governed

A state cannot be legitimate if it governs populations who can neither choose nor challenge it. However:

Palestinians living in Gaza and the West Bank do not vote in Israeli elections but are subject to its effective control.

Palestinian citizens of Israel, although eligible to vote, are subject to discriminatory institutional treatment (2018 Nation-State Law, unequal access to land, services, etc.).

The right of return of Palestinian refugees has been systematically denied since 1948, in contradiction with United Nations Resolution 194.

As Michael Sfard (2018) points out, there is no equality before the law between Jewish settlers and Palestinians in the West Bank – which makes any claim to legitimacy based on consent impossible.

 

4. Effectiveness and Stability

Israel is often presented as a modern, technologically advanced state with functional institutions. However, this effectiveness is reserved for a segment of the population, based on ethno-religious norms.

Palestinians in the occupied territories do not have access to the same infrastructure and resources (water, roads, hospitals).

The legal system is bifurcated: civil law for settlers, military law for Palestinians (see Amira Hass, 2023).

Israel's stability is largely based on coercion, prolonged military occupation, and the political fragmentation of Palestinians. This type of stability cannot be confused with lasting legitimacy.

 

5. Moral Dimension, Memory of the Holocaust, and Critique of the Biblical Narrative

The Holocaust constitutes a powerful moral foundation for supporting the creation of Israel: it highlighted the need for a safe haven for the Jewish people. However:

The Holocaust cannot justify a current injustice, such as the exclusion of another people from their fundamental rights.

The Porajmos (Roma genocide), also perpetrated by the Nazis, did not lead to the creation of a Roma state, which calls into question the universality of the link between genocide and state sovereignty.

But beyond this memory, the biblical narrative is often invoked to justify a historical continuity between ancient Israel and the modern state. However, several critics have raised concerns about this naturalization of sovereignty:

This narrative, essentially theological and mythological, cannot constitute a valid legal basis for the expropriation of another people in the 21st century.

It is based on an exclusive vision of the Earth, denying the millennia-old history of the Arab-Palestinian populations.

Shlomo Sand, in How the Jewish People Was Invented, emphasizes that this biblical connection is more a matter of identity construction than of established historical facts.

Furthermore, to date, there is no irrefutable archaeological or historical evidence confirming founding biblical narratives such as the Exodus from Egypt, the conquest of Canaan, or the unified kingship of David and Solomon. Many archaeologists and historians, including Israeli ones, now recognize the symbolic and mythological character of these texts.

As Ariella Azoulay (2019) points out, memory, whether religious or traumatic, cannot be monopolized to legitimize a contemporary colonial enterprise. The Bible, in this context, is used as an ideological instrument in the service of political domination—and not as a pluralistic foundation for living together.

 

6. Recognition and Internal Dissenting Voices

Israel is recognized by the majority of states, but this recognition does not replace legitimacy based on the rights of its inhabitants. Internally, several Jewish voices criticize the Zionist project:

The ultra-Orthodox Neturei Karta reject the State of Israel for religious reasons (absence of the Messiah).

Anti-Zionist Jews, both in Israel and in the Diaspora, denounce apartheid, dispossession, and colonization (see Ilan Pappé, 2023; Human Rights Watch, 2021).

This diversity of criticism shows that Israeli legitimacy is not uncontested, even within the Jewish people.

 

Conclusion

The State of Israel enjoys international legal recognition and symbolic support linked to the tragic history of the Jewish people. But according to the classic criteria of legitimacy—legality, consent, effectiveness, morality—it fails to fully convince.

Adding to this the biblical narrative of an ancestral right to the land—a narrative that naturalizes the dispossession of Palestinians by presenting it as a divine promise or a legitimate return—we witness a form of political theology incompatible with modern principles of sovereignty based on equal rights.

Israeli legitimacy remains partial, contested, and asymmetrical: it is exercised by excluding or dominating another people, without offering an egalitarian or democratic framework to all the inhabitants of the territories it controls. Lasting legitimacy would require an end to the occupation, full recognition of Palestinian rights, and the abandonment of exclusivist narratives, whether religious, historical, or memorial, in favor of a political vision based on equality.

https://www.legrandsoir.info/legitimite-morale-historique-et-legale-de-l-etat-d-israel-une-analyse-critique.html

 

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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.

refusal

 

Israel/Palestine - From refusal to be complicit to genocide (2012)

BY Pierre STAMBUL

 

Between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, Palestinians and Israelis are roughly equal in number. But the Israelis possess everything: wealth, land, water, political rights. Palestine is being deliberately strangled, and its society is being destroyed. Inequality is blatant and institutionalized.

Words must be used to describe what is happening: occupation, colonization, apartheid, war crimes and crimes against humanity, and racism. The majority of Israelis hope that, in the long run, Palestinians will become marginalized indigenous peoples incapable of defending their rights. Israeli governments are determined to fragment Palestine into entities with different statuses: the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, Palestinians in Israel, refugees, etc.

How can a colonialist state claim a past when Jews were the pariahs of Europe? Zionist ideology is at the heart of this process. Zionism is not only militaristic, racist, colonialist, or pro-imperialist. It has contributed to a gigantic manipulation of Jewish history, memory, and identities. Zionism is, at its core, an ideology of separation proclaiming that Jews and non-Jews cannot live together. In the Jewish state, non-Jews are foreigners in their own land.

There will be no peace unless it is based on equal rights in all spheres. There will be no peace without a break with Zionism or an overcoming of this ideology. Zionism is not only criminal for Palestinians; it is suicidal for Jews.

The author of this book, Pierre Stambul, was born in 1950 and is a retired mathematics professor. He is Jewish, yet atheist and anti-Zionist. His Judaism is primarily rooted in the memory of the Nazi genocide. His parents were members of the Resistance Movement (MOI). His mother's family was exterminated. His father was in the Manouchian group and was deported to Buchenwald.

It is in the name of this Judaism that he has campaigned since 2002 in the French Jewish Union for Peace for the rights of the Palestinian people and for peace in the Middle East based on equality and justice.

https://www.legrandsoir.info/israel-palestine-du-refus-d-etre-complice-a-l-engagement.html

 

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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.