Israel #7

Maersk to pause all container ship traffic through the Red Sea
Reuters | December 15, 2023

Danish shipping company A.P. Moller-Maersk (MAERSKb.CO) will pause all container shipments through the Red Sea until further notice, a spokesperson for the company told Reuters on Friday.

"Following the near-miss incident involving Maersk Gibraltar yesterday and yet another attack on a container vessel today, we have instructed all Maersk vessels in the area bound to pass through the Bab al-Mandab Strait to pause their journey until further notice," the company said in a statement.

Maersk on Thursday said its vessel Maersk Gibraltar was targeted by a missile while travelling from Salalah, Oman, to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia and that the crew and vessel were reported safe.

...Yemen's Iran-aligned Houthi movement {claimed} that the militia had struck a Maersk vessel sailing towards Israel...

https://www.reuters.com/world/maersk-pause-all-container-shipments-through-red-s...

Biden Staffers Hold Historic Vigil Outside White House Calling for Ceasefire
https://truthout.org/articles/biden-staffers-hold-historic-vigil-outside-white-h...

Biden administration staffers call for cease-fire while protesting outside White House
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/4359447-biden-administration-staffer...

Biden’s Own Staffers Protest Him Outside The White House
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeyAwR_Od0E

>1 margd:

Yemen Escalates Attacks against Commercial Shipping | Missile Strikes and Seizures
What is Going on With Shipping?
160K subscribers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D608B90Ai0k

Hapag-Lloyd as well, per the pinned comment.

A reminder of what can happen to those who affirm genocide contrary to official state positions. Even a century later, in this case. These sort of crimes irrevocably rupture societies and make it impossible to speak truth without recrimination. We may well be headed in a similar direction. Israel, I fear, is already there.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/nov/16/orhan-pamuk-charged-again-with-ins...

For another searing picture of the scars genocide (ETA: or, if you prefer in this case, politicide) leaves on societies, I recommend Joshua Oppenheimer's films The Act of Killing andThe Look of Silence. Here is Peter Dale Scott's (i.e. Leonard Cohen's correspondent from earlier in the thread) write-up of the former. https://apjjf.org/2014/12/50/Peter-Dale-Scott/4234.html

The last century has been, unfortunately, a century of holocausts. The documentary “The Act of Killing” revives the memory — for both Indonesians and Americans — of one of the greatest: the Indonesian mass slaughter of 1965, whose memory, for a half century, has been perhaps the most effectively suppressed. It is, in fact, virtually impossible to consider the film, or the massacre itself, without also considering, as did my poem Coming to Jakarta, the social functions of first suppressing the most excruciating victim memories, and then painfully beginning to recover them.

T.S. Eliot wrote, “human kind/ Cannot bear very much reality,”2 and I myself have called civilization “a great conspiracy/ of organized denial.”3 There is in truth so much violence and injustice in the world that to stay sane most of us have to ignore or suppress a good deal of it. But if we want to address the problems of violence and injustice, we have to seek out and deal with those crucial events of global significance, above all those in which we are involved – both directly and indirectly - and from which we can learn. If we are willing to face the truth.

“The Act of Killing” is about one of those crucial events, a half century ago and its reverberations down to the present. The film’s director, Josh Oppenheimer, has depicted not just the horror of the 1965 pogrom, but the weird craziness of today’s violent contemporary world. Chris Hedges has captured this craziness in his film review:

Oppenheimer, in the film’s strangest but most psychologically astute device, persuades the killers to re-enact some of the mass murders they carried out. They don costumes—they fancy themselves to be the stars of their own life movies—and what comes out in the costumed scenes of torture and killing is the vast disconnect between the image they have of themselves, much of it inspired by Hollywood gangster films, and the tawdry, savage and appalling crimes they committed.… The killers stage a scene at the end of the film in which actors playing their murdered victims hang a medal around the neck of Anwar Congo the film’s protagonist —who is dressed in a long, black robe and standing in front of a waterfall—and thank him for saving the country and “killing me and sending me to heaven.” This bizarre fantasy’s background music, specified by Congo, is the theme from the movie “Born Free.”

....

I suppose it will soon be time for me to tackle Scott's poetic trilogy in full.
Coming to Jakarta
Listening to the Candle
Minding the Darkness

Col. Lawrence Wilkerson: Can the US Say NO to Israel and Ukraine?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w818AIkCWQ4

"We're looking at the whole world thinking we are the worst thing in their lives."

How Israel jails hundreds of Palestinians without charge (BBC)

In a family home in Bethlehem, in the occupied West Bank, Yazen Alhasnat was sitting next to his mother rubbing sleep from his eyes. The 17-year-old had been released from prison the night before, nearly five months after being arrested in a 4am Israeli military raid on the home. Yazen had been held under "administrative detention" - a longstanding security policy, inherited from the British, that allows the Israeli state to imprison people indefinitely without charge, and without presenting any evidence against them. "They have a secret file," Yazen said. "They don't tell you what's in it." He was back at home because he was among the 180 Palestinian children and women released from prison by Israel in the recent exchange for hostages held by Hamas in Gaza. But at the same time the Palestinian prisoners were being released, Israel was detaining people at its highest rate in years. In the weeks since 7 October, the number of people in administrative detention - already at a 30-year high of 1,300 - has shot up to more than 2,800...

Brings to mind the British government's internment without trial of thousands of people in Northern Ireland during the Troubles in the 1970s. It didn't work then and it won't work now. It did nothing to reduce violence in Northern Ireland and it strengthened the resolve not only of the paramilitary groups but also the local population. And given that these Palestinians held by Israel without any recognisable legal cause are being released in exchange for Israelis illegally held by Hamas, it might be more accurate simply to refer to them as "hostages" too.

>6 John5918: The Maze prison became a training ground for Irish Republicans and to some lesser degree Protestant loyalists. The Republicans ended up organizing the blanket and dirty protests as well there was the 1980 and 1981 hunger strikes which not only put everyone together on the same page in prison and the hunger strikes ended up bringing together the entire community outside. The ten strikers who died in 1981 became icons to their communities and their faces are still all over murals in Catholic parts of Belfast to this day. The British govt. at the same time had the SUS laws in the rest of the UK which more or less came to the same thing but without as much of the torture----arresting and holding people (if a policeman decided he didn't like somebody) without formal charges or trials for however long they felt like. Blacks and Asians were targets, punk rockers, other undesirables.

Another thing about a lot of the IRA people....a large % of them identified as Marxists or Democratic Socialists more than they did as Catholics. For lots of them the Catholic part of their identity was just a happenstance of birth. There was a strong anti-capitalist ethic throughout the movement.

>6 John5918: I'll admit the same comparison occurred to me, John.
As did this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmpTVe1DrsI
Damn right it doesn't work.

Speaking out on Gaza / Israel must be allowed: UN experts
23 November 2023
https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2023/11/speaking-out-gaza-israel-must-be...

GENEVA (23 November 2023) – UN experts* today expressed alarm at the worldwide wave of attacks, reprisals, criminalisation and sanctions against those who publicly express solidarity with the victims of the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine.

“Calls for an end to the violence and attacks in Gaza, or for a humanitarian ceasefire, or criticism of Israeli government’s policies and actions, have in too many contexts been misleadingly equated with support for terrorism or antisemitism. This stifles free expression, including artistic expression, and creates an atmosphere of fear to participate in public life,” the experts said.

“In other contexts, we also see a rise in antisemitic speech as well as intolerance, for those who support or are perceived to support Israel, or who express mere sympathy for Israeli suffering in the aftermath of the 7 October attack” they said. “This leaves little space for moderate views.”

The experts pointed out that artists, academics, journalists, activists and athletes have faced particularly harsh consequences and reprisals from states and private actors because of their prominent roles and visibility.

“People have the right to express solidarity with victims of grave human rights violations and demand justice, whether from one side or the other or both,” the experts said.

They noted with deep concern that several artists around the world have been targeted because of their art or political messaging, pressured to change topics of artistic expression, and labelled either as troublemakers or as indifferent to the suffering of one side or the other. “Some artists have been deprogrammed and censored for calling for peace, others have lost their jobs, and some artists have been silenced or side-lined by their own cultural organisations and artistic communities,” they said.

Journalists and media outlets in Israel and Western countries reporting critically about Israeli policies and operations in the occupied territories or expressing pro-Palestinian views have been the target of threats, intimidation, discrimination and retaliation, which have increased the risk of self-censorship, undermining the diversity and plurality of news that is essential for press freedom and the right of the public to be informed. At least one media outlet in Israel has been threatened reportedly with closure for perceived “bias” towards Palestine. They also criticised the disproportionate and wrongful removal of pro-Palestinian content by social media platforms.

The experts raised concerns about suspensions and expulsions of students from universities, dismissal of academics, calls for their deportation, threats to dissolve student unions and associations, and restrictions on campus meetings to express solidarity with the suffering civilians in Gaza and denounce the ongoing Israeli military response. Students have also been blacklisted in some universities as supporters of terrorism, with accompanying threats to their prospects for future employment.

“Some athletes, particularly in Europe, have been suspended after publishing their views on social media, while others have been threatened with suspension from their teams, termination of their contracts and even expulsion from their countries of residence,” the experts said.

“Sport is also about building bridges and enabling all people to meet and engage, while respecting diversity of origin and opinions, which every human being has the right to hold,” they said.

The experts noted a highly disturbing trend to criminalise and label pro-Palestinian protests as “hate protests” and to pre-emptively ban them, often citing risks to national security, including risks related to incitement to hatred, without providing evidence-based justification. “Such actions not only violate the right to protest guaranteed by Article 21 of the ICCPR, but are also detrimental to democracy and any peace-building efforts,” they said.

The experts recalled that any restriction on human rights must meet the conditions of legality, necessity and proportionality. “Furthermore, advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to violence, hostility or discrimination is prohibited under international law,” they said, calling on individuals in official positions in particular to desist from hate speech and inflammatory statements.

“States have a duty to address hate speech that dehumanises parties to armed conflict and civilians,” the experts said, echoing the High Commissioner's recent call to end the rise of hate speech, antisemitism and islamophobia, and ensure a safe and enabling space for expressions of solidarity with Israelis or Palestinians.

“It is especially in times of conflicts and war that we need to uphold the universality of human rights, ensure the application of the rule of law without discrimination, and carefully avoid double standards,” they said.

(h/t https:// www. craigmurray. org.uk/archives/2023/11/banned-books/ )

>5 davidgn: When it comes to Palestine, Israel today is Russia, not Ukraine. Gaza looks like Mariupol...

>10 margd: I don't like the headline myself. It's the host's, not the guest's. Our impoverished media landscape makes strange bedfellows.

ETA:
That said, the proper course of action in Ukraine was not to provoke the needless war, or -- failing that -- not to send BoJo to scupper the offered peace agreement near the war's outset. Mearsheimer's phrase about our "leading them down the primrose path" was entirely on the money. The longer that conflict goes on, the worse will be the result, for us and for the Ukrainians. We have behaved despicably towards the Ukrainians. It is time to own up to that and salvage the best possible outcome at this late stage. They cannot now win. What remains is only to secure the terms of their loss. (Or, in our typical pattern, "declare victory and move on.")

It is a shame that we are not serious people.

Mearsheimer discusses Ukraine further in the second half of this one.
Prof. John J. Mearsheimer: Death and Destruction in Gaza: International Implications
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdRm0QboYjA

Israel Gaza: Hostages were carrying white cloth when shot, IDF says (BBC)

Three Israeli hostages mistakenly killed by Israeli soldiers in Gaza were shot dead while holding a white cloth, an Israeli military official says. The official said the case was "against our rules of engagement" and an investigation was happening at the "highest level". The hostages - Yotam Haim, 28, Samer Talalka, 22, and Alon Shamriz, 26 - were killed in Shejaiya on Friday...

Anyone carrying a white flag which signifies surrender is by definition a noncombatant and shooting at them is not just "against our rules of engagement" but is a war crime.

Israel Gaza: The perils of hostage rescue (BBC)

The disastrous incident in which Israel Defense Forces (IDF) troops shot dead three Israeli hostages in Gaza on Friday, mistaking them for Hamas fighters despite their waving a white cloth, is a graphic illustration of the risks involved in armed hostage rescue... In nearly every case of kidnap in history, those abducted stand a far better chance of emerging alive and unscathed through mediation and a deal, rather than by armed intervention...

I have been a hostage myself, and I thoroughly support that sentiment. The thing we feared most was some sort of gung ho botched attempt to "rescue" us by force. In the end we were released due to church-led negotiations.

Gaza war to take 'months', Israel tells White House (BBC)

Israel's war in Gaza may take "more than several months", the country's defence minister has told US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan... Earlier this week, Joe Biden said Israel's "indiscriminate bombing" of Gaza was costing it support globally...

>12 John5918: On 'Gaza war to take months' I've read that Israel has like 2 weeks to a month supply of bombs to drop so without a continual resupply from the United States their ability to continue their air war depends on the United States. Biden won the presidency with a lot of soft support and that soft support has eroded a lot since Israel's campaign in Gaza began. It will erode more IMO the longer this goes on and particularly if Israel continues to take it out on civilians with air strikes, indiscriminate killings and famine. AIPAC supporting democrats seem to be okay with this and I'm looking also at so called progressive stalwarts like Bernie 'no cease fire until Hamas is destroyed' Sanders, John 'I never was a progressive' Fetterman and Elizabeth Warren and these sentiments are all over the Democratic house. Biden's words are not going to rein in Netanyahu who I'm sure wouldn't mind Trump or another republican in the White House instead. What would is stopping the flow of war material. Democratic opposition amongst the rank and file to this catastrophe is well over 60% and Biden's poll numbers are in the toilet. He and Democratic Party leaders are in their bubbles and clearly not listening to their own voters and call it arrogance, hubris whatever it's the same old 'you have no choice but to vote for us because we're the lesser evil' bullshit. Meanwhile I expect thousand and thousand of more innocents to die if not from the war material we send Israel then from the famine and cutting off of medical that Israel is imposing on a civilian population.

Israeli forces bulldoze Palestinian tents, crushing people alive
Aftermath: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5OcE8JqkZM
Event: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMaVbxuabjk (not exactly recommended viewing)

cf. https://www.newarab.com/news/israel-bulldozes-gaza-refugee-tents-buries-alive-do...

https://reliefweb.int/report/occupied-palestinian-territory/urgent-intl-investig...

I just cant do this. Im gonna skip this thread tho its been an interesting discussion. But the more it goes on the more I am just speechless. wishing you all a happy new year with hope for peace

>14 davidgn: Reliefweb seems most factual? Dreadful.

Israel is hurting itself, as well. Not just losing outside sympathy, including the US, but their young soldiers will return mentally scarred by what they have seen and done? Netanyahu is transforming country into reflection of himself?

>16 margd: Why am I inadvertently reminded of Rachel Corrie? (Edited to correct touchstone)

>15 cindydavid4: To engage with these realities head-on is often much too much. If it helps, I appreciate anyone who is willing to do so at all. Far easier to resort to one mental evasion or another and wrings one's hands about matters that are, at best, symptomatic and peripheral. I see that response everywhere.

I wish you peace.

there is always a war,
and we are free
to turn off the news.

The first of the human freedoms.

It’s a blessing, isn’t it?
To be able, days at a time,
to forget what we are.

— Chana Bloch, “The First of the Human Freedoms”

Scott's quotation to introduce his piece in this collection from Brandeis, Literary Responses to Mass Violence
Page 18 on the viewer.
https://studylib.net/doc/14436577/literary-responses-to-mass-violence

Join the #GlobalDayofAction for #CeasefireNOW

Digital Toolkit

.....and we're going to veto any attempt from the UN to get them in line.....and we're going to continue to give them bombs. What Israel has done and is doing the United States is complicit in. They're not the only bad guys here.

>20 lriley: We're all going down together, Larry.

>21 davidgn: just pointing out for the umpteenth time David what's beyond the pale.

Israel should make Gaza look like Auschwitz - council head
103FM | DECEMBER 17, 2023

David Azoulai, head of the Metula Council {northernmost town in Israel, abuts the Israel-Lebanon border, in 2021 a population of 1,693}, proposed sending all Gazans to refugee camps in Lebanon and flattening the whole Strip so it becomes an empty museum like Auschwitz.

"...The entire Gaza Strip should be emptied and leveled flat, just like in Auschwitz. Let it become a museum, showcasing the capabilities of the State of Israel and dissuading anyone from living in the Gaza Strip. This is what must be done To give them a visual representation...We should leave Gaza desolate and destroyed to serve as a museum, demonstrating the madness of the people who lived there."

...about the situation up North: "Hezbollah is observing the situation in the South, and if we don't address it properly, they will see it as a weakness. No matter how strong terrorism may be, we cannot live in fear or uproot {Israeli?} people from their homes. We must act decisively...The displaced residents of the North deserve to know when and how they {Israelis?} will return home. We don't want war or casualties. However, I don't believe Hezbollah will surrender peacefully."

https://www.jpost.com/israel-hamas-war/article-778367
------------------------------------------------

Christiane Amanpour {CNN} @amanpour | 2:17 PM · Dec 18, 2023:

“We’re living in a moment of false binaries – as if people need to make a choice, you’re either with Israel or you’re with the Palestinians. When in reality the only future is a shared future.” I spoke with Rabbi @SharonBrous * about our current moment. Watch our full conversation.

12:53 ( https://twitter.com/amanpour/status/1736828013302390865 )

* Rabbi Sharon Brous is the senior and founding rabbi of IKAR, a Jewish community that launched in 2004 to reinvigorate Jewish practice and inspire people of faith to reclaim a soulful, justice-driven voice. Her 2016 TED talk, "Reclaiming Religion," has been viewed by more than 1.5 million people. https://ikar.org › team › rabbi-sharon-brous

TED: It's time to reclaim religion (16:18)
Sharon Brous | October 2016
At a moment when the world seems to be spinning out of control, religion might feel irrelevant -- or like part of the problem. But Rabbi Sharon Brous believes we can reinvent religion to meet the needs of modern life. In this impassioned talk, Brous shares four principles of a revitalized religious practice and offers faith of all kinds as a hopeful counter-narrative to the numbing realities of violence, extremism and pessimism.
https://www.ted.com/talks/sharon_brous_it_s_time_to_reclaim_religion

An Israeli airstrike killed 22 of my relatives, but I refuse to hate – video (Guardian)

Palestinian doctor and five-time Nobel Peace Prize nominee, Izzeldin Abuelaish, has experienced immense personal tragedy. In January 2009, an Israeli tank shell hit his home killing his three daughters and one of his nieces and in November this year, 22 members of his extended family were killed in Jabalia refugee camp by an Israeli airstrike. Dr Abuelaish speaks to the Guardian about how his personal loss has made him determined to push for peace

Cross-posting Sachs' long-form from the Russia thread. First half is mostly Israel/Yemen. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jowfG780mQM

>24 John5918: yes im back I read his book "I shall not hate" Id been wondering about if his views have changed in the last few months. Apparently not. He is a saint ; but I don't think many people agree with him sadely

Christiane Amanpour @amanpour | 2:17 PM · Dec 18, 2023:

“We’re living in a moment of false binaries – as if people need to make a choice, you’re either with Israel or you’re with the Palestinians. When in reality the only future is a shared future.” I spoke with Rabbi @SharonBrous about our current moment. Watch our full conversation.

12:53 ( https://twitter.com/amanpour/status/1736828013302390865 )
--------------------------------------------------

TED: It's time to reclaim religion (16:18)
Sharon Brous | October 2016

At a moment when the world seems to be spinning out of control, religion might feel irrelevant -- or like part of the problem. But Rabbi Sharon Brous believes we can reinvent religion to meet the needs of modern life. In this impassioned talk, Brous shares four principles* of a revitalized religious practice and offers faith of all kinds as a hopeful counter-narrative to the numbing realities of violence, extremism and pessimism.

* wakefulness, hope, mightiness, interconnectedness
https://www.ted.com/talks/sharon_brous_it_s_time_to_reclaim_religion

If you'd like some hope...

Hope looks like this guy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjQEK2RK0k0

I found another interview with Amb. Chas Freeman. Two weeks old, but still completely timely. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIQLBJbpJcU

Samuel Ramani {Oxford}@SamRamani2 | 5:58 PM · Dec 20, 2023

The Houthi threat to Red Sea shipping could have far-reaching negative impacts for global commerce
12% of global trade passes through the Red Sea
This includes 12% of sea-borne traded oil and 8% of LNG supplies

Metula is a town in the Northern District of Israel, and the northernmost town in Israel; it abuts the Israel-Lebanon border. It had in 2021 a population of 1,693 (Wikipedia). David Azoulai heads the town council: people voted for him...

Israel should make Gaza look like Auschwitz museum - council head
103FM | DECEMBER 17, 2023

David Azoulai, head of the Metula Council, proposed sending all Gazans to refugee camps in Lebanon and flattening the whole Strip so it becomes an empty museum like Auschwitz.

..."After October 7, instead of urging people to go south, we should direct them to the beaches. The Navy can transport them to the shores of Lebanon, where there are already sufficient refugee camps. Then, a security strip should be established from the sea to the Gaza border fence, completely empty, as a reminder of what was once there. It should resemble the Auschwitz concentration camp"...

"Tell everyone in Gaza to go to the beaches. Navy ships should load the terrorists onto the shores of Lebanon. The entire Gaza Strip should be emptied and leveled flat, just like in Auschwitz. Let it become a museum, showcasing the capabilities of the State of Israel and dissuading anyone from living in the Gaza Strip. This is what must be done To give them a visual representation."

"What occurred on October 7 was a second Holocaust. Lebanon already has refugee camps, and that's where they should go...We should leave Gaza desolate and destroyed to serve as a museum, demonstrating the madness of the people who lived there."

"Hezbollah is observing the situation in the South, and if we don't address it properly, they will see it as a weakness. No matter how strong terrorism may be, we cannot live in fear or uproot {Israeli} people from their homes. We must act decisively."

..."The displaced {Israeli} residents of the North deserve to know when and how they will return home. We don't want war or casualties. However, I don't believe Hezbollah will surrender peacefully."

https://www.jpost.com/israel-hamas-war/article-778367

Bravo, Mr. Doel.
John Fetterman Blames TikTok (LOL)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyP42LAI9zU

A Conversation on the Horrors in Gaza with Jeremy Scahill and Sharif Abdel Kouddous
The Intercept
275K subscribers

Dec 20, 2023
Everything we know about Joe Biden’s 50-year history of supporting and facilitating Israel’s worst crimes leads to one conclusion: He wants Israel’s destruction of Gaza — with more than 7,000 children dead — to unfold as it has. When will it stop?

Intercept co-founder Jeremy Scahill and journalist Sharif Abdel Kouddous discuss the U.S. role in Israel’s scorched-earth campaign to annihilate Gaza.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GeeLEJTZHNk

https://youtu.be/GeeLEJTZHNk?si=0x0xTKG2uKyI0Jny&t=1228 -- Scahill tells the story of Wael Al-Dahdouh, Al-Jazeera Arabic's bureau chief, including his live reporting on the murder of his own family, then his wounding by shrapnel while reporting on an Israeli attack on a hospital, the ambulance sent to retrieve his badly wounded cameraman which was fired upon, and the blockade which intentionally prevented the cameraman's retrieval for five hours, causing him to bleed out. Just one highlight of the intentional, systematic murder of the press, and also of their families.

>31 margd: It's a common belief of many Israeli's particularly settlers that Palestinians have multiple destinations all over the Middle East where they can live instead of Israel. That there is only one place in the Middle East that Jewish people can live in and that's Israel. That's part of their 'Israel is a Jewish country' shtick. In other words the Palestinians have plenty of places they can go but Jewish people only the one.....and that when push comes to shove Egypt and Jordan and Lebanon and Syria etc. will just have to bite the bullet and accept millions of refugees. What's the problem? Muslim people....Muslim countries. Jewish people....Jewish country. Not a whole lot of thought to where they're going to live, what they're going to do, how they're going to feed or shelter. Just dump them. And the Palestinians don't want to leave and those other Muslim countries don't want them either.

Big Brother United States along with some European allies are going to protect Israel if things go to shit.

>32 davidgn: David is pretty good. Fetterman was a fan of social media and TikTok was a fave when he was a progressive a thousand years ago.....showing up Oz in the vegetable aisle of the grocery store. Now it's just for the ignorant and kooks and not for serious minded US Senators (who'd rather show up to work in sweat pants than in a suit and tie)....you know adults. He's made it and he's already forgotten his past. He's also willing to sell out on our border issue to trade off on more bombs and weapons for Israel. The framework of his Senatorial candidacy has already been scrapped for something entirely new and it's entirely new but an all too familiar picture.

>34 lriley: Do others whose ancestors have suffered terribly take it out on third parties? Honest question. Indigenous peoples of Americas and Australia? Enslaved Africans? Armenians? Ukrainians under Stalin?

>36 margd: Quite often they do. It's also very often a symptom of past colonialism. Looking at British colonialism...South Africa, Israel/Palestine, Ireland were all settler projects....a native population suppressed by another population forced upon it that wasn't in South Africa's case anyway even necessarily British but Dutch Boers with British overseers. In Ireland's case an imported Protestant largely Scots population with Crown overseers was given land and autonomy pretty much in the Northern part where much of the industry of the island particularly shipbuilding would thereafter center. There was reason why the British govt. were keen on partitioning the country the way they did after the Irish war for independence but it created the problems that came after that favored greatly one community against another. From what I've read in the past which is not extensive the area around where Israel and Palestine was populated by Muslims and Jewish people and some christians for centuries and they basically lived together with a pretty good degree of harmony. The masses of Jewish people who migrated into the area after WWII.....the way the British authorities played one side off against the other....the conflicts, the European/American notion also that we needed a more pro-Western non-Muslim ally in a region where our avarice for oil plays into this as well. Thinking also back to WWI where T.E. Lawrence's Arab allies are betrayed in the armistice that ends that war.

Whenever you start treating one population better than another based on race, religion, native origin, whatever you create problems and people naturally if they're use to being favored will start identifying themselves as superior. That's a gender issue too. It's a power dynamic with the ones with the power thinking they deserve it by some kind of natural right which is IMO fucked up. It's always best to strive for equality for everyone.

Somehow I think Arendt would approve.

Masha Gessen in Berlin: The attempt to silence me failed
At the Böll Foundation, Gessen repeats the comparison of Gaza with an Eastern European ghetto during the Nazi era. The only difference: The world can still do something.
(auto-translated from the Berliner Zeitung)

https://archive.is/6Dkoq#selection-6231.0-6239.169

ETA cf. (with emphasis mine)
Hannah Arendt would not qualify for the Hannah Arendt prize in Germany today
Samantha Hill
The irony of Masha Gessen almost not being awarded the prize because of their writings on Gaza is almost too thick to cut
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/dec/18/hannah-arendt-prize-masha-...

....Here is the offending passage from Gessen’s New Yorker article, In the Shadow of the Holocaust:

“But as in the Jewish ghettoes of Occupied Europe, there are no prison guards –Gaza is policed not by the occupiers but by a local force. Presumably, the more fitting term ‘ghetto’ would have drawn fire for comparing the predicament of besieged Gazans to that of ghettoized Jews. It also would have given us the language to describe what is happening in Gaza now. The ghetto is being liquidated.”

The irony is almost too thick to cut.

Hannah Arendt would not qualify for the Hannah Arendt prize. She would be cancelled in Germany today for her political position on Israel and opinions about contemporary Zionism, which she remained critical of from 1942 until her death in 1975. As a Jewish German woman who was forced to flee Germany in 1933, after being arrested and detained by the Gestapo, Arendt’s writing on Germany would be more controversial than Gessen’s own. The comparison from Gessen’s essay, which caused such uproar, closely echoes a passage from Arendt’s correspondence written from Jerusalem in 1955 to her husband Heinrich Blücher, which is far more damning:

“The galut-and-ghetto mentality is in full bloom. And the idiocy is right in front of everyone’s eyes: Here in Jerusalem I can barely go for a walk, because I might turn the wrong corner and find myself ‘abroad’, ie, in Arab territory. Essentially it’s the same everywhere. On top of that, they treat the Arabs, those still here, in a way that in itself would be enough to rally the whole world against Israel.”

Gessen’s comparison was more light-footed than Arendt’s, whose reflection appears eerily prescient, but their rhetorical tact wasn’t enough to stop the censors at the gate in Germany who police what one can and cannot say about Israel, cowing the Foundation into compliance.

Following a de facto law put into effect by a non-binding resolution passed by the German parliament in 2019, which equates the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement with antisemitism, Gessen violated the German demand that one not compare the Holocaust to any other historical event. Within the culture of German memory politics the Holocaust is treated as singular; it is understood as a historical exception. And this exception-to-history mentality has the effect of placing the Holocaust outside of history altogether, which allows the German government to espouse unconditional support for the state of Israel without political accountability for what that support means. In other words, the German government uses the memory of the Holocaust as a justification to support Israel, regardless of what Israel does to the Palestinian people.

By making the comparison between a Nazi-occupied ghetto and Gaza before 7 October, Gessen is making a political argument meant to invoke historical memory and draw attention to concepts like genocide, crimes against humanity and “never again”, which emerged out of the second world war. The comparison is not a one-to-one argument, but rather a barometer for urging individuals – and countries – to think about their support for Israel as the world watches the mass slaughter of Palestinian people, people stripped of rights, resources, with nowhere to go, living under constant bombardment.

The question Arendt would have raised, I believe, is one of personal, political and moral responsibility. For her, it would not have been possible to talk about what is happening today without talking about the structure of the nation-state itself, which she argued was in part to blame for the Holocaust. For her, this meant, it was very much not an exception....

Moral complexity is necessary in the face of evil. What Arendt meant by banality, arguing that it was the inability to imagine the world from the perspective of another, was that people had gone along with the radical shift in moral norms overnight that transformed “Thou shalt not kill” into “Thou shalt kill”, without questioning. And the cost of this lack of judgment was human life.

Perhaps the greatest irony of reality today is that the rhetoric of Germany’s “antiantisemitism” is being used to justify the mass slaughter of Palestinian people, while having the effect of actually increasing antisemitism and making Jewish people less safe everywhere.

Germany must revoke its non-binding resolution. Lest it continue to censor what people can and cannot say about the state of Israel. Lest it compel moral complicity with crimes against humanity. It should not have to be said, but perhaps must be said continuously, that it is not antisemitic to critique the state of Israel. The Foundation, which has failed to show moral courage and take a stand against the resolution should turn back to Arendt – the namesake of its prestigious prize – and find the courage of its own convictions. Because at what point will the humanitarian crises stop? One hundred and thirty Israeli hostages still in Gaza. Almost 20,000 Palestinian dead. Six thousand six hundred of whom are children. More than 50,000 wounded. Two-point-three million starving people. Nine out of 10 Palestinians not eating every day. The people are starving.

Courage is the political virtue par excellence, Arendt wrote, because it demands one risk their reputation and life to express a political opinion.

Where is the courage today?

Courage – Heinrich Böll Foundation; courage, Germans.

Samantha Hill is the author of Hannah Arendt, a biography, and Hannah Arendt’s Poems.

ETA:
The Gessen affair and Germany’s ignorance about Jews
By criticising the journalist Masha Gessen, Germany misunderstands one of its greatest thinkers, Hannah Arendt.

By Susan Neiman
https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2023/12/masha-gessen-hannah-arendt-germany-je...

-----------

We live in a world gone mad.

>37 lriley: Rwanda, where one group was favored by colonizers? Did anything like that happen in India?

>39 margd: I would suspect and in China too. There certainly was a lot of repression. New Zealand and Australia are interesting as in attempts to wipe out the Maori and other indigenous populations and for Britain those were places to set up colonies of malefactors from all over the Empire particularly Irish, Scots and Welsh that they'd found reason to criminalize. It was kind of like their Gulag.

The Highland Clearances. A reason why there are so many Scots in Nova Scotia (New Scotland), Newfoundland and all over eastern Canada and some went to Northern Ireland is they were as pesky in their own ways as the Irish. They didn't end up in Canada because they wanted to. Another tactic was to deforest large areas so it wouldn't be so easy for the people they were after to hide.

I liked this article from Slate:

https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/college-conversations-war-disaster-not-160000529...

>40 lriley: I don't think the Scots cleared to Atlantic Canada targeted the Mi'kmaq? My understanding was there was some mutual respect because both had clans, etc. Although settler land practices certainly contributed to the decline of indigenous society, I'm sure*... (I may have blinders on, though, as paternal ancestors include Scots and Acadian French. Actually a much persecuted Acadian ancestress, a midwife, has some regional fame for smallpox variolation of her neighbors, indigenous as well as white.)

* Barkskins: A Novel by Annie Proux--a tome, more like it, but fascinating background on deforestation of eastern North America.

An early Acadian Christmas with the Mi'kmaq: https://backyardhistory.ca/articles/f/the-first-christmas-in-north-america

>42 margd: I think there's a fort in Port Royal N.S. (mentioned in the article) that we visited on a trip to Nova Scotia and Cape Breton about a dozen or so years ago. All the road signs are in Gaelic in Cape Breton and a French Canadian population on the western side of Nova Scotia or at least I remember all the boats out in the bay flying French flags. Barkskins is familiar to me in that right after Covid started there was a TV series and my wife and I watched I think 4 episodes and then it abruptly stopped but looking at the wikipedia site there were a couple more episodes that we didn't see. I'm somewhat confused by what's called Atlantic Canada and the Maritimes. I've talked to a Canadian writer Jeff Bursey (originally from PEI if I remember) a few times and he didn't like it said he was from the Maritimes. There was some kind of distinction and I forget what it was but I'm on alert for the future.

>21 davidgn: Me too, Larry.

>43 lriley: Atlantic provinces include Nfld, as well as NB, PEI, and NS, if I recall correctly. Maritime provinces are just the last three.

Gessen is a jewel. Here's Amy Goodman's interview with them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtSD2Y5g5OM

And one on Amanpour's show -- where they go for the jugular. Those who have, out of some misplaced sense of duty, internalized the IHRA definition as a model speech code should pay particular attention. ABSOLUTELY Essential Viewing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YU6kP9UqhGI

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

ETA: As a bonus, Peter Beinart's "cultural Zionist" argument for a binational, egalitarian state.
"The CIVIL WAR Among American Jews (w/ Peter Beinart)"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLSdRopSu-U

Which is reminiscent of Omer Bartov's proposal
"Genocide scholar Omer Bartov says only a political solution can bring peace to Israel-Palestine — and he has one in mind"
The Land for All confederation is a radical plan for peace, but it will require political will to make the most of this narrow window of opportunity.
https://www.analystnews.org/posts/genocide-scholar-omer-bartov-says-only-a-polit...

Israel is losing the war against Hamas – but Netanyahu and his government will never admit it (Guardian)

The official narrative has been that Hamas is weakened, but in reality the IDF’s doctrine of massive force is failing...

Although the whole concept of "winning" and "losing" this war (or any war) is meaningkess in my view. All sides lose in such a war, and none more than the ordinary civilians.

Hamas says no more hostage releases until war ends (BBC)

Hamas, the group which controls the Gaza Strip, has ruled out any more hostage releases until Israel agrees to a "full cessation of aggression"... The Hamas statement puts the Israeli government in a very difficult position. It has said it thinks the best way to get the release of hostages is military pressure on Hamas and by staging rescue operations. But so far that approach has not really worked. Only one hostage - Ori Megidish - has actually been rescued. The government is also under huge pressure from the relatives of the hostages still being held, with some telling it the strategy of force is not working. Hamas is putting pressure on Israel to stop the war altogether but without any guarantee that the group is going to stop its armed actions. So the Israeli government is extremely reluctant to stop fighting until it feels it has completely degraded Hamas capability and it has not done that yet. This will be a huge disappointment for the people of Gaza, who are desperate for this war to stop...

>47 John5918: I'm amazed. The Grauniad seems to have some life left in it. I'd mostly written it off for dead.

>48 davidgn:

Indeed. It's worth reading the whole article for the details.

>49 John5918: Very well done. At least a month behind the curve, but very well done.

I wish the author luck in his future struggles with the Broken Overton Window theorists of crime. Likewise the editors.

>49 John5918: The latest from those who have been saying much the same for weeks.

The polite version:
Alastair Crooke.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTyYMIZ1dJM

The scorched earth version:
Max Blumenthal
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QarUuZ_YKY4

Back to the Guardian:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/23/crowdfunding-us-residents-fund-set...

On its own it's a pretty interesting piece but what really breaks my head is one of the founders of this Israeli entity is some guy named Joseph Hitler. I followed up to the crowdsourcing link thinking maybe the Guardian story needed a correction but there it was again. His name doesn't appear to be a mistake.

>52 lriley: Poor fella.

Watching Finkelstein take down Bill Maher is satisying.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxcrqkwQYmE

If you did see the original clip, Maher's take on Irish history is as vacuous as everything else he spouts in his little valedictory for genocide.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KP-CRXROorw
Funny stuff, this genocide.

(In the realm of things that are actually funny: I think I need one of these for Christmas)
https://farmermichael.com/products/short-sleeve-unisex-t-shirt-5
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvvtZIwh4Bs

>54 davidgn: Maher is a POS.

Israeli airstrike kills Gaza aid worker and 70 of his extended family, UN says (Guardian)

An Israeli military airstrike killed more than 70 members of an extended family, including a veteran UN aid worker, as the UN secretary general warned that the scale of death and destruction inside Gaza is blocking delivery of desperately needed aid. Issam al-Mughrabi, 56, was killed with his wife, five children and dozens of other relatives in a bombing near Gaza City, said the head of the UN development programme (UNDP) in a statement that also called for an urgent ceasefire... On Saturday, Hamas also claimed that an Israeli military airstrike might have killed five hostages. Abu Ubaida, spokesman for Hamas’s armed wing, said that it had lost contact with the group responsible for holding the Israelis captive. Israel’s military did not immediately respond to the claims, but it could add to pressure on the government from some families of those held in Gaza, who are calling for a ceasefire to allow the release of their loved ones...

This is not war, it is simply mass slaughter of civilians, which is itself a war crime.

Awni Eldous: The Palestinian boy who dreamed of YouTube fame (BBC)

After Awni Eldous died, his dreams came true. In a video posted in August 2022, he holds a microphone and smiles as he declares his ambitions for his YouTube gaming channel. "So now folks, let me introduce myself: I am a Palestinian from Gaza, aged 12 years old. The aim of this channel is to reach 100,000 subscribers, or 500,000, or one million," he says. He ends the short video saying "peace out" before walking out of view. Just over a year later, Awni became one of the first Palestinian children to be killed in the war... Awni's introductory video, in which he says thank you to his 1,000 subscribers, now has more than four million views. Other videos in which he voicelessly plays racing, battle and football games have millions more collectively. His subscriber count has reached almost 1.5 million and continues to grow...

>56 John5918: Someone pointed out today that the IDF despite what they say really don't have a good idea where Hamas fighters are. If they did they would have located and rescued at least some of their hostages by now or at least have gotten into a battle to free some and it speaks to their everybody and everything being a Hamas target and the only hostages they have come across so far tried to come to them and they killed last week.

Hopefully some aid comes in soon because hundreds of thousands of people are starving right now---a good 50/60 + thousand or so of them....maybe even more recently seriously injured or wounded including amputations and burn victims and over a million kids and very little medical to help them. It's a catastrophe now that can multiply many times very quickly and undoubtedly will if they don't act soon.....something that Israel doesn't seem to care about at all and that United States politicians either don't care or even realize the dimensions of and ignorance is not a good excuse.

In the meantimes as Israel has made Gaza uninhabitable it's also made it a nightmare for its own troops to negotiate. Rubble and destroyed buildings are a nightmare to clear out. Easy to booby trap....easy to ambush. A lot easier to move through for those who know the ground than those who don't. There's a Chinese saying that for those seeking revenge to dig two graves. This entire episode from the start of their campaign has been just that.

Amb. Murray's latest.
What We Have Learned
December 24, 2023 in Uncategorized by craig

We have learnt this year that there is no crime so startling, so obvious and so visible to the whole world that the United States and Israel are not willing to commit it brazenly and openly. The massacre of 20,000 people includes the killing of babies and infants, the deliberate shooting of pregnant women and toddlers, the murder of old ladies in church and the execution of prisoners stripped naked.

This is all justified as “Israel’s right of self-defence”.

We have also seen the increasing rise of fascism as western governments crack down on their publics in order to curtail political resistance to the genocide. Tony Greenstein, Mick Napier and I have all been harassed under the Terrorism Act. I have left the country because I fear I am officially “under investigation” under the Terrorism Act and I fear I shall be arrested and placed in jail for two years awaiting trial. Numerous people have been arrested for expressing their horror at the massacre through placards, words or even songs that the police judge “offensive”. Police action is often prompted by instruction from self-appointed Zionist vigilante organisations.

We are also seeing, exactly as I predicted, a replay of the “War on Terror” state Islamophobic propaganda. Do you remember the famous “ricin plot” where the ricin found was the trace level to be found in every kitchen? The British government kept it Top Secret for two years that there was in fact no ricin. Or the non-existent Easter Bomb Plot where the “ingredient of improvised explosives” found turned out to be a bag of sugar?

In Germany they have a great deal of work to do to justify the world’s most extreme anti-Palestinian governmental racism, so they have invented a “Hamas terror plot” and arrested four young Muslims. No evidence at all that been produced to justify this.

Hamas has never, ever conducted any violent attack outside of Palestine and it has always been their policy not to do so – and it still is. The notion is ludicrous that at this time Hamas have decided to suddenly lose the propaganda war which they are winning worldwide, by attacking Germany.

Germany’s governments have form of course, not only for genocide, but also for enthusiastic creation of fake terrorism. The German government was heavily implicated both in false flag terrorist attacks in Tashkent, which I was able to investigate and report to the UK government in real time, and in the creation of a whole fake terrorist organisation, “The Islamic Jihad Union of Uzbekistan”, which was entirely the work of the CIA and the German security services. The aim at that time was to justify the German military airbase at Termez in Uzbekistan, operating into Afghanistan. People forget German participation on the losing side in the last Afghan war.

I have no doubt we are in for a period of more propaganda, fake terrorist plots, false flag actual terrorism and agent provocateur led terrorism. It is the only way the Establishment can hope to regain the propaganda narrative.

I have not quite got used yet to my new position as an itinerant terrorist, so I apologise that posting has been a bit scarce due to a lot of organisational bother and a general sense of discombobulation. This is being dashed off at Milan airport. I am very happy on a personal note to say that my family are joining me at an exotic venue for Christmas and New Year, so you may not hear much from me till mid-January as I owe my children a great deal of my attention.

I do wish you a safe and very happy festive season wherever you are, and hope you can be together with those you love. For all those living in fear and danger, particularly but not only those in Gaza, my thoughts along with those of millions around the world are with you now and always.

Shortly before the first Iraq War, between the invasion of Kuwait and the outbreak of real hostilities, I sent a minute in reply to one from John Major. I was working in a the Embargo Surveillance Centre, a Top Secret establishment operating from an underground NATO HQ in central London. We were among the recipients of a Christmas message from the Prime Minister which combined Christian wishes with a bellicose message. I replied in a formal minute with this verse from the carol It Came Upon the Midnight Clear:

But with the woes of sin and strife
The world has suffered long;
Beneath the angel-strain have rolled
Two thousand years of wrong;
And man, at war with man, hears not
The love-song which they bring; –
Oh hush the noise, ye men of strife,
And hear the angels sing!

Whomever the angels are to you, I hope you hear them sing.

'Bethlehem is empty of joy - no Santa, no celebration' (BBC)

The atmosphere in Bethlehem is heavy with absence. Christmas celebrations have been cancelled this year and the thousands of tourists and pilgrims who would normally fill Manger Square are nowhere to be found. "The city is empty from happiness, from joy, from kids, from Santa. There is no celebration this year"... The famous Christmas tree, usually in the middle of the square, is not there. There are no carols or Christmas market stands. Instead, a nativity scene, which shows a newborn Jesus surrounded by big rocks and barbed wire, has been installed as a tribute to the children of Gaza. In an unusually empty Nativity Church, Father Eissa Thaldjiya tells me his city feels like a shadow of itself. "I've been a priest in this church for 12 years. I was born in Bethlehem, and I've never seen it like this - even during the Covid-19 pandemic," he says. "We have brothers and sisters in Gaza - this is what makes it difficult to celebrate… But it's good to be united in prayers"...

One can't help thinking of parallels with the biblical nativity story. A land occupied by a foreign military power. Populations uprooted from their homes and forced to travel to places dictated by the invaders. Nowhere safe for women to give birth. The slaughter of innocent children by a political leader. Although it seems that even the actions of the Roman Empire and the Jewish King Herod two thousand years ago were not as brutal as those of the current Israeli government.

The WW1 Christmas Truce: 'The war, for that moment, came to a standstill' (BBC)

During the bleak winter of 1914, amid the mud, blood and chaos of World War One, an extraordinary series of ceasefires spontaneously occurred along the Western Front. In the 1960s the BBC spoke to some of the men who, over that exceptional Christmas period, decided to lay down their arms...

We live in hope. Merry Christmas.

A primer on historical US support for Israel: moral, strategic, lobbies.

DW News @dwnews | 5:59 AM · Dec 26, 2023:

US support for Israel remains firm despite growing criticism over its military campaign in Gaza. Here's a closer look at this historical relationship:

8:32 ( https://twitter.com/dwnews/status/1739601885298839574 )

"Christ in the Rubble": Palestinian Pastor Delivers Powerful Christmas Sermon from Bethlehem
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Md_hw_A-oIs
Democracy Now!
1.9M subscribers

"If you fail to call this a genocide, that is on you. It is a sin and a darkness you willingly embrace."

Coventry Carol (Lully, lulla) | Carols from King's 2019
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhdAWRM0tUA

>54 davidgn: The full-length interview is out today.
Norm Finkelstein UNLEASHED: Bibi, RFK Jr, Bill Maher
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tI595leq4U

There's a word for people like Norm Finkelstein. That word is "Mensch."

Israel has assassinated another Iranian general. Israel is also claiming it's being attacked from seven different sides. A lot of bellicosity aimed at Lebanon. Netanyahu no doubt has some personal survival interest in turning his war on the Gaza civilian population into a wider regional conflict and taking the United States along with him. Biden, the House, the Senate might just do that. At least so far there's only been words and no restraint at all and a continual resupply of war material to Israel. Who wants this? Far as Americans go--at least most of our elites for sure, bought and paid for politicians, right wingers of all stripes, rapture happy evangelicals.

>64 lriley: Who wants this?

Putin, fer sure.

>65 margd: That's true. It's all self inflicted.

Like Netanyahu Erdogan is a piece of shit. MBS is another. Erdogan though is comparing Netanyahu to Hitler and the Palestinians to the Jewish people during WWII. Turkey I believe is still sending oil to Israel but I suspect that will stop. There's a question whether Turkey will pull out of NATO as well. They weren't happy about Finland and Sweden and they're even more angry about this and yeah Putin would be overjoyed by that. Biden has overplayed his hand and it's apparent to almost everyone else but himself. Looked at geopolitically the nations in the middle Eastern region that aren't as belligerent towards us like Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia etc certainly aren't happy with us--we're losing friends and the nations that we consider enemies like Iran and Houthi controlled part of Yemen are readying for war. The United States might have the most powerful military and the best land troops in the world but we and the rest of the world have already seen how that worked out for us in Iraq and Afghanistan. It didn't. Occupying armies don't work and they drain their own economies. You can bomb the shit out of some place but someone is always going to pop up afterwards. Little Israel with a population of around 15 million half of whom are the despised Palestinians wouldn't be much of a real ally against Iran and its surrogates. I don't think anyone else in the world would be giving us much help either. Take a look at the map---the narrow straits of the Red Sea the entrance of which is in the direct sights of Houthi controlled Yemen. As long as they have surface missiles that can take out a warship they can wreak havoc and for all purposes control that space short of a nuclear missile or two/three. The Red Sea as well is a lifeline for goods going to Israel but insurance companies are not going to indemnify container ships running a gauntlet through that. Going to have to take the much longer way around and going to cost a whole lot more to do it. Biden has fucked up royally. He's put us on the side of an out of control genocidal state which also puts us up against practically everyone else in the Middle East region and potentially in a position where we'll be in a can't win shooting war. This calls for diplomacy not bombs but it doesn't appear diplomacy is what we're going to see. Just ranting for what it's worth.

"A delegation from Hamas, an Islamist militant group considered a terrorist organization by the EU and the US among others, is set to arrive in Cairo to discuss an Egypt-led peace proposal aimed at bringing an end to the war in Gaza"

Israel-Hamas war: Hamas leaders expected in Cairo for talks
DW | 29 Dec 2023
https://www.dw.com/en/israel-hamas-war-hamas-leaders-expected-in-cairo-for-talks...

>68 margd: How you make peace is always about talking to the people on the other side who have guns.

Max Blumenthal just finished a brutal stream with Aaron Mate
Don't believe everything you read. (Especially in The New York Times. They've got a lot of genocide to justify just now. That is what's going on, and anyone who doesn't see it is simply missing the boat. Starts 5 minutes in.)
https://twitter.com/i/broadcasts/1LyGBnYVyYyGN
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHpTnY8uoCM

He's on with Judge Nap just now, which should be a more condensed version. (ETA: Any objections should be referred to the longer version).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYlAYU4r66c

A key news hook:
South Africa launches case at top UN court accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/south-africa-launches-case-at-top-un-court...

"Sanctions On Israel Are The Only Hope": Israel's Most Distinguished Journalist Gideon Levy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuSPFuHSopo
Dec 29, 2023
Gideon Levy is a man of immense moral courage and leadership: the award-winning Ha'aretz columnist has spoken out against the atrocities committed against the Palestinian people, and has become an increasingly lone voice.

Here he tells me how Israeli society has degenerated to a terrifying degree, why he has so little hope, the forgotten horrors of the West Bank - and why the only chance for a just peace will come from sanctions against Israel.

Please like, subscribe - and help us take on the pro-war media: https://www.patreon.com/owenjones84

Surely if there are going to be peace talks, they should include both sides? If you just have the IDF/Hamas team in the room, who speaks for the people they've been going to war against?

(or are we going to try to maintain the fiction that this is a war between two armed factions, as opposed to a combination of those forces going to war against the civilians in the region?)

>72 kiparsky: The IDF is effectively the Israeli govt. and Hamas is not the only Palestinian actor. One would think that representatives from all the religions since there are at least some Palestinian christians as well would be in on any talks. Excluding Hamas would be ridiculous though when they have the ability to fuck everything up. The biggest roadblock though that I can see is the Israeli govt. or at least this particular Likud led govt. that wants to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from the both the West Bank and Gaza. To me it's not much of war when well over 90% of the dead are defenseless civilians. There were long years of atrocities that led up to the barbaric acts by Hamas on Oct. 7. That said they don't justify even worse barbaric acts inflicted by the IDF (with the full support of the Biden administration) since then.

IMO much of Gaza is unlivable and I have no idea how this could be resolved at this point so I'm pretty skeptical about any resolution. So much of the infrastructure is gone. The ability of a large number of people being able to sustain themselves.....food, water, power, hospitals isn't there now.

Like Tal Mitnick, I refused to serve Israel as a soldier. It’s important to understand why (Guardian)

Military service defines who you are in Israeli society but dissent has a long tradition, despite the many obstacles... Last week, 18-year-old Tal Mitnick was jailed for 30 days for refusing Israel Defense Forces enlistment, becoming the first conscientious objector imprisoned since the Israel-Hamas war began. “I refuse to believe that more violence will bring security. I refuse to take part in a war of revenge,” Mitnick wrote in a statement...

>72 kiparsky:

If one is seeking a cessation of hostilities or cease fire as a first step to peace, arguably the people who need to be talking are the armed groups who are actually doing the killing, as >69 lriley: says. But for a sustainable comprehensive peace agreement which addresses the root causes of the conflict, which is different from merely a cessation of hostilities, all actors need to be involved, and it should not be dominated by those who have guns.

>75 John5918: one of the first positive steps that led to the Good Friday Agreement happened in the Maze Prison when paramilitary prisoners from PIRA on the nationalist side and UVF and UDA prisoners on the loyalist side started talking together. Perhaps the biggest roadblock to getting it going came from Ian Paisley who led the Democratic Unionist Party and had been an anti-Catholic minister and bigot his entire life going back into the 1950's at the least and who had been fomenting hatred against catholics forever. His biggest gripe of course he did not want Sinn Fein or the PIRA involved in talks at all. It was a British govt. in the end pretty much that forced his hand though there was also another Ulster Unionist Party rival to the sway he had over Ulster protestants. The almost funny thing I kind of remember is David Ervine who was the leader of the UVF loyalists in the Maze prison telling how sick and tired the loyalist prisoners were of listening to Paisley---that so many of them that were locked up were there because they'd listened all their lives to people like Paisley and that as soon as they'd ended up behind bars those people would wash their hands of them and whatever things they'd done.

An issue here is Paisley had a lot of political power but the weight of the British govt. had even more and eventually forced him to the table though even very late in the process he was dead set against any agreement. I don't see Netanyahu and his Likud party allies getting pushed into talks unless the United States cuts off all support including war material and I don't see any signs for that and without something to hurry that this catastrophe could go beyond saving. Starving a population to the point of catastrophe needs only a couple months or so and here we are almost already. As well there's almost nothing in Northern Gaza for Palestinians to return to and the longer the IDF continues to kill Palestinian civilians in the thousands it becomes even more moot. I get that Hamas has been killing some of the IDF's ground troops but the weight of resistance isn't from a civilian population who are taking the brunt in an extremely disproportionate way.

Robert Pape of UChicago (probably the world's foremost expert on both the use of air power and on the motivations of suicide bombers) interviewed today by Scott Horton(2)

Ep. 5981 - Robert A. Pape on Israel’s Major Strategic Mistake - 12/28/23
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6akweN9Bfyk

A shared thought experiment of sorts on what would actually be the consequences of ethnically cleansing Gaza (and, potentially, beyond). Consequences potentially include the collapse of the State of Israel.

cf. Pape in FA
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/israel/israels-failed-bombing-campaign-gaza

As Gaza death toll mounts, Israelis look in vain for any sign of victory (Guardian)

IDF bombs urban refugee camps, UN agency warns of famine risk and skirmishes on Lebanon border intensify... The scale of death and suffering inside Gaza has isolated Israel internationally, with even allies such as the UK now calling for a “sustainable ceasefire”...

>78 John5918: Looking at those death numbers and considering the uncounted---those buried under rubble for instance...so far the IDF is killing 10,000+ Palestinians a month, mostly unarmed, defenseless civilians, almost half of whom are children. That doesn't touch on the maimed, injured, burn victims and that number is going to be even larger. It also doesn't speak to those who are starving, without clean water, without hospitals so I'm not surprised that Britain is finally coming to see some sense. What's more surprising is the Biden administration continues to send Israel war material. I mean really Israel should be isolated right now.

Stunning rant from Col. Wilkerson about possibility of a wider war.
https://youtu.be/46S5DIhOMCM?si=n7_Pv_qQ85jbLsU0&t=2556

For the Safety of Jews and Palestinians, Stop Weaponizing Antisemitism
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/12/29/steinberg-weaponizing-antisemitism...

For eighteen years I had the great privilege of working as Executive Director of Harvard Hillel.

As a leader of Jewish communities on campus, in New England, and around the nation, I have helped cultivate a new generation of Jewish leaders and citizens. I navigated moments of tension and war: the tumultuous 1990s, as the Oslo Accords began to crumble; the Second Intifada; 9/11 and its fallout; the Iraq War; Israel’s Second Lebanon War and its war on Gaza in late 2008.

During my long career as a Jewish educator and leader — including thirteen years living in Jerusalem — I have seen and lived through my community’s struggles. Now, as an elder leader, with the benefit of hindsight, I feel compelled to speak to what I see as a disturbing trend gripping our campus, and many others: The cynical weaponization of antisemitism by powerful forces who seek to intimidate and ultimately silence legitimate criticism of Israel and of American policy on Israel.

In most cases, it takes the form of bullying pro-Palestine organizers. In others, these campaigns persecute anyone who simply doesn’t show due deference to the bullies.

The recent effort to smear our new University President, Claudine Gay, is a case in point. I applaud the decision by the Harvard Corporation to stand by Dr. Gay amid the ludicrous charges that she somehow supports genocide against Jews, and I hope Harvard will continue to take a clear and strong stance against any further efforts by these powerful parties to meddle in university affairs, especially over personnel decisions.

The toppling of the president of the University of Pennsylvania is a sobering example of what can happen when we empower these unscrupulous forces to dictate our path as university leaders. The stakes are as high as they’ve ever been. Our vigilance must be up to the task.

As a leader in the Jewish community, I am particularly alarmed by today’s McCarthyist tactic of manufacturing an antisemitism scare, which, in effect, turns the very real issue of Jewish safety into a pawn in a cynical political game to cover for Israel’s deeply unpopular policies with regard to Palestine. (A recent poll found that 66 percent of all U.S. voters and 80 percent of Democratic voters desire an end to Israel’s current war, for instance.)

What makes this trend particularly disturbing is the power differential: Billionaire donors and the politically-connected, non-Jews and Jews alike on one side, targeting disproportionately people of vulnerable populations on the other, including students, untenured faculty, persons of color, Muslims, and, especially, Palestinian activists.

Let me speak directly to Jewish students at Harvard.

I know that it’s alienating and hurtful to so many of you when campus Jewish organizations, like Hillel and Chabad, take positions that exclude your voices. To those students, I say: The Jewish tradition is much deeper than any organization. No one has a monopoly on Judaism.

Continue to learn Torah, Jewish history, and our ethical traditions. Continue to draw from these sources — your sources — to find yourself, to build community, to build your own power, and even to build your own Jewish organizations.

Be boldly critical of Israel — not despite being Jewish, but because you are. There is no tradition more central to Judaism than prophetic truth-telling, no Jewish imperative more urgent than bravely criticizing corrupt leadership, starting with our own.

As someone who spent over forty years running programs in which Jews, often young people, were under my care, the safety of Jews has always been my highest priority — and, frankly, the thing that keeps me up at night. I have myself been the victim of antisemitism, including, on more than one occasion, serious violent attack.

I know what antisemitism looks like and I do not take the issue of violence against Jews lightly. I have monitored, with vigilance, the kinds of speech that Israel-aligned parties are calling “antisemitic,” and it simply does not pass the sniff test.

Let me speak plainly: It is not antisemitic to demand justice for all Palestinians living in their ancestral lands.

The activists who employ this language, and the politics of liberation, are sincere people; their cause is a legitimate and important movement dissenting against the brutal treatment of Palestinians that has been ongoing for 75 years. One can disagree with any part of what these activists say, but they must be allowed to speak safely and afforded the respect their morally serious position deserves. I have learned much by listening and carefully considering the positions of these activists.

If Israel’s cause is just, let it speak eloquently in its own defense. It is very telling that some of Israel’s own supporters instead go to extraordinary lengths to utterly silence the other side. Smearing one’s opponents is rarely a tactic employed by those confident that justice is on their side. If Israel’s case requires branding its critics antisemites, it is already conceding defeat.

Let me be clear: Antisemitism in the U.S. is a real and dangerous phenomenon, most pressingly from the alt-right white-supremacist politics that have become alarmingly mainstream since 2016. To contend against these and other antisemitic forces with clarity and purpose, we must put aside all fabricated and weaponized charges of “antisemitism” that serve to silence criticism of Israeli policy and its sponsors in the U.S.

As a Jewish leader, I say: Enough.

---
Bernie Steinberg was the executive director of Harvard Hillel from 1993 to 2010.

So Netanyahu says that his war on Gaza will go on for many more months (I saw one report he was thinking of all of 2024). He wants to take a part of Egyptian territory now as well. Why not? His cabinet minister Smotrich wants to repopulate Gaza (and the West Bank) as in with non-Palestinians. The months and months more.....maybe a year is good for Benjamin personally because he gets to kick the can of his electoral removal from power down the road a bit.....allowing him more time as well to develop further pretexts for putting off an electoral day of judgement. Makes sense to me anyway. He'd like to oversee more mass murder with his bombing, starvation and disease campaigns. Remember Amelek (sp?)? (sorry I'm not a biblical scholar). Britain represented by Tory Rishi Sunak have kind of volunteered a bombing campaign on the Houthis in Yemen wreaking havoc on shipping on the other end of the Red Sea. Netanyahu's wishlist for the Biden administration representing us here in the United States is 1) the continuation to block United Nations efforts to stop the slaughter 2) continue to send 2000 lb. bombs to the IDF Air Force to drop on Palestinian civilians along with a healthy supply of tank shells for IDF ground forces to kill and terrorize even more Palestinians 3) have our US Navy nearby to patrol the Red Sea (estimated cost of Houthi rockets being fired at commercial shipping ranges between $2,000 and $20,000--estimated costs of naval missiles to bring those rockets down $2,000,000 each) and 4) declare war on and attack Iran. Not too much to ask an ally for when you're defending your national right to exist (against approx. half of your own population that you're been repressing for three quarters of a century) is it?

My best guesses here on those Biden administration asks for 2024 are 1) probably 2) and 3) probably for the next several months anyway and 3) maybe. Chances of negotiations with Palestinians of any kind somewhere around 2%. That will be driven by the rest of the world if it were to happen. If the United States continues to support Israel as it has so far not likely at all. Of course less than a year from now we will be asked to support Biden against Trump (or some other MAGA happy replacement) in our own election all over again. To support Biden for me anyway would be to be complicit in Israel's mass murder war crimes against Palestinian civilians and the ethnic cleansing of Gaza (maybe even the West Bank) and the almost certainty that if Trump (or even some other republican replacement--Christie, Haley, DeSantis) were to come back to the power he (or whichever of his replacements) would be fine and dandy with all war crimes and ethnic cleansing wherever they might happen.

Our political leaders here don't have a moral compass anymore.

>82 lriley: I wrote my reps. Not holding my breath... On some issues at least, agencies count contacts?

The neocons want to double down for the final time. They may well get their wish.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/12/28/the-west-may-now-have-no-option-but-...

And then? The deluge.

You wonder why nobody else wants to be under U.S. naval command in the Red Sea.

Fuck. Us.

This needs to be stopped.

Perun's latest.
Red Sea Crisis: Houthi Shipping Attacks, Trade and Escalation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GKlKYQDDcQ

>83 margd: I've contacted mine too. Charles Schumer is the biggest cheerleader for this though. Gillibrand never bucks her party and Langworthy is a first term republican. Not much hope for any of them.

>85 davidgn: Bolton's wanted us to attack Iran a thousand years ago along with at least 20 other countries but Iran's always been top 3 on his list.

If the Brits or anyone else thinks they can bomb the Houthis into stopping---short of a nuclear missile or two it won't work. They can Mariupol or Gaza City the entire width and breadth of Houthi controlled Yemen but all it will take international ship magnates and those who insure from them to say 'no, we're not using the Red Sea anymore' after all the bombing is one little missile or two coming their way again and it will be an inevitability. There's always some that pop up after even days and weeks of bombing and there's a lot of territory to cover. You don't win if you don't blast everything to shit and then put troops on the ground to track down the survivors and even then it usually doesn't work. We're not in the 19th century anymore and the world is full of war material wherever you go.

Amb. Matlock, our final ambassador to the Soviet Union

https://jackmatlock.com/here-now/
WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO AMERICA?
Posted on December 2, 2023 by Jack

Rummaging through my accumulated papers, I just came across the English translation of a speech I delivered in Czech on July 4, 1982, when I was American ambassador in Prague. At that time Czechoslovakia was ruled by a Communist regime imposed by the Soviet Union.

As I perused it, I realized to my dismay that today I could not honestly make many of the statements in this message.

Here are some of the key paragraphs (in bold italic) and my reflections on them today:

I am pleased to send greetings to the people of Czechoslovakia on this 206th anniversary of my country’s independence. It is a day when we Americans celebrate the foundation of our nation as an independent, democratic republic, and a day on which we dedicate ourselves anew to implementing the ideals of our founding fathers. For us, the bedrock of these ideals is the proposition that states and governments are created by the people to serve the people and that citizens must control the government rather than being controlled by it. Furthermore, we believe that there are areas of human life such as expression of opinion, the practice and teaching of religious beliefs, and the right of citizens to leave our country and return as they wish, which no government has the right to restrict.

Can we really say that our citizens “control the government” today? Twice in this century we have installed presidents who received millions of votes fewer than did the president we installed. The Supreme Court has nullified rights supported by a decisive majority of our citizens. It takes far more votes to elect a senator in a populous state than it does in one with fewer citizens so the U.S Senate can be controlled by a minority of the country’s voters. Corporations and individuals are virtually unlimited in the amount they can spend to promote or vilify candidates and to lobby Congress for favorable tax and regulatory treatment. The Supreme Court has, in effect, ruled that corporations are citizens too! Is this not more akin to oligarchy than to democracy?

We are a nation formed of people from all corners of the world, and we have been nurtured by all the world’s cultures. What unites us is the ideal of creating a free and prosperous society. Through our history we have faced many challenges but we have been able to surmount them through a process of open discussion, accommodation of competing interests, and ultimately by preserving the absolute right of our citizens to select their leaders and determine the policies which affect their lives.

Since when have we seen an open discussion and accommodation of competing interests in the work of the U.S. Congress? When in this century has there been a debate on foreign policy? Why has Congress repeatedly authorized violence normally legal only under a state of war without voting a declaration of war as the Constitution requires?

Our society is not a perfect one and we know very well that we have sometimes failed to live up to our ideals. For we understand the truth which Goethe expressed so eloquently when he wrote, “Es irrt der Mensch, so long er strebt”(Man errs as long as he strives.) Therefore, while we hold fast to our ideals as goals and guides of action, we are convinced that no individual and no group possesses a monopoly of wisdom and that our society can be successful only if all have the right freely to express opinions, make suggestions and organize groups to promote their views.

Unless you are a Member of Congress who speaks out in defense of the fundamental rights of Palestinians to live in freedom in their ancestral lands, or students at Columbia University who wish to do the same.

As we Americans celebrate our nation’s birthday and rededicate ourselves to its ideals, we do so without the presumption that our political and economic system– however well it has served us–is something to be imposed upon others. Indeed, just as we preserve diversity at home, we wish to preserve it in the world at large. Just as every human being is unique, so is every culture and every society, and all should have the right to control their destinies, in their own ways and without compulsion from the outside. This is one of the principal goals of our foreign policy: to work for a world in which human diversity is not only tolerated but protected, a world in which negotiation and accommodation replace force as the means of settling disputes.

Unless you live in Afghanistan, or Iraq, or Syria, or Palestine…or, for that matter, in Iran, Cuba, or Venezuela.

We are still a long way from that world we seek, but we must not despair, for we believe that people throughout the world yearn basically for the same things Americans do: peace, freedom, security, and the opportunity to influence their own lives. And while we do not seek to impose our political system on others, we cannot conceal our profound admiration for those brave people in other countries who are seeking only what Americans take as their birthright.

Unless they live in Gaza or the Palestinian West Bank.

While this is a day of national rejoicing, there is no issue on our minds more important than the question of preserving world peace. We are thankful that we are living at peace with the world and that not a single American soldier is engaged in fighting anywhere in the world. Still, we are concerned with the high levels of armaments and the tendency of some countries to use them instead of settling disputes peacefully. We share the concern of all thinking people with the destructive potential of nuclear weapons in particular.

At that time the Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan and the U.S. was demanding their withdrawal. Subsequently they did withdraw in accord with an agreement the U.S, negotiated. But then, after 9/11, the U.S. invaded and stayed for 20 years without being able to create a democratic society. A subsequent invasion of Iraq, on spurious grounds, removed the Iraqi government and gave impetus to ISIS. Then, the U.S., without a declaration of war, invaded Syria and tried unsuccessfully to overthrow its government (which we recognized) and also to combat ISIS, which had been created as a result of the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
American soldiers are now stationed in more than 80 countries. We spend more on arms than all other budgets for discretionary spending, and now the Biden administration is making all but formal war against Russia, a peer nuclear power.

It is for this reason that President Reagan has proposed large reductions of nuclear weapons. … We have also made numerous other proposals which we believe would increase mutual confidence and reduce the danger of conflict. All aim for verifiable equality and balance on both sides. That way, the alliance systems facing each other would need not fear an attack from the other. …

Yes, and by 1991 we negotiated massive reductions in nuclear weapons, banned biological and chemical weapons and limited conventional weapons in Europe. The Cold War ended by agreement, not the victory of one side over the other. But, beginning with the second Bush administration, the U.S. unilaterally withdrew from every important arms control treaty and embarked on a “modernization” of the American nuclear arsenal costing tens of billions. Meanwhile, although there was no Warsaw Pact after 1990, the U.S. expanded NATO and refused to negotiate an agreement that insured Russia’s security.

The task ahead for all the peoples of the world to establish and preserve peace is not an easy one, The issues are complex and they cannot be solved by simplistic slogans, but only by sustained effort.

Nevertheless, from the late 1990s the U.S. seemed motivated by a false and simplistic doctrine that the world was destined to become like the U.S. and the U.S. was justified in using its economic and military power to transform the rest of the world to conform with its image of itself (the Neocon thesis). It was, in effect, an adaptation of the failed “Brezhnev doctrine” pursued by the USSR until abandoned by Gorbachev. As with the Brezhnev doctrine, the attempt has been an utter fiasco, but the Biden administration seems, oblivious to the dangers to the American people, determined to pursue it.

Nevertheless, I speak to you today with optimism, since I know that my country enters the 207th year of its independence with the determination not only to preserve the liberties we have one at home but to devote our energies and resources to maintaining peace in the world.

But, today, during the 248th year of American independence :

The US is sending 100 “super-bombs” for dropping on Gaza. The BLU-109 “bunker busters”, each weighing 2,000 pounds, penetrate basement concrete shelters where people are hiding, the Wall Street Journal reported Dec. 1.
America has sent 15,000 bombs and 57,000 artillery shells to Israel since October 7, the paper said. Details of the size and number of weapons sent have not been previously reported.
Also on the list are more than 5,000 Mk82 unguided or “dumb” bombs, more than 5,400 Mk84 2,000-pound warhead bombs, around 1,000 GBU-39 small diameter bombs, and approximately 3,000 JDAMs, the Journal said.
The news dramatically contradicts statements of Foreign Secretary Antony Blinken that avoiding civilian casualties is a prime concern for the United States.
The US also provided the bomb that was dropped on the Jabalia refugee camp, killing 100 people, possibly including a Hamas leader, the Journal said.
Repeated calls by the countries of the world, through the United Nations, for a ceasefire have not been supported by the U.S. and its follower nations.
Military spending makes up a dominant share of discretionary spending in the U.S., and military personnel make up the majority of government manpower.
The weapons are being airlifted on C-17 military cargo planes directly from the U.S. to Tel Aviv.

OH, LORD, WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO US?

Francis A. Boyle (UI-UC, renowned ICJ litigator) breaks down the Genocide Act filing by South Africa.

South Africa Files Case Against Israel at International Court of Justice over "Genocidal" Gaza War
Democracy Now!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypxiFjrM8RA
Transcript:
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/1/2/south_africa_israel_genocide_icj

Omar Baddar (Comms Director of Ralph Nader's Public Citizen) interviewed today by Owen Jones(3).
Israel Bombing Beirut Could Spark 'Untold Death And Destruction' - Omar Baddar
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwB1IzOlCz8

Jones also hosts Munther Isaac (dean of Bethlehem Bible College, pastor of Christmas Evangelical Lutheran Church, Bethlehem, deliverer of the viral Christmas sermon) today.

Palestinian Christian Leader: "History Will Hold You Accountable" Over Gaza Genocide
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7tAxR5mzUk

The three most worthwhile interviewed by Judge Nap today.

Alastair Crooke: America’s Fatal Hunger for Honor and Glory.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=od5lipBQhe0
A far more eloquent reflection than I could deliver on the phenomenon of doubling down on stupid. "...once you get into a losing situation, you compound your losses by creating new losses."
Also addresses UK political rudderlessness, G7 Russian asset seizure proposal, bleak prognosis on prospects for negotiations in Ukraine at this point (too late), and more. Projects war spreads to Lebanon by end of January, progressively deeper U.S. entanglement, progressively deeper Biden electoral disaster.

Prof. Jeffrey Sachs: Saving Israel by Saving Gaza.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbGf2GQjPhw

Matthew Hoh: Is the IDF in Retreat?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2-SqOCo8a4
Addresses the (partial withdrawal?) / (rotation?) / (eastward and/or northward redeployment?) of IDF forces from Gaza just announced, as well as U.S. domestic political issues.

Israel and its allies must face facts: peace talks are the only way forward, and they will have to include Hamas (Guardian)

I’m a friend to both Israelis and Palestinians, and all my experience tells me this: tough negotiation will achieve what bombs cannot... After the Hamas terror of 7 October and Benjamin Netanyahu’s horrific retaliation in Gaza, some long overdue truths need stating. First, Israel is not going to “destroy Hamas”, as its leaders promise – not even by destroying Gaza. Although Israel is damaging Hamas militarily, maybe significantly, with many of its tunnels eliminated and its fighters fleeing, Hamas is a movement and an ideology that, in many respects, Netanyahu’s extremism helped to promote. Rightwing Israeli governments have thwarted serious negotiations with Palestine’s more “moderate“ party, the late Yasser Arafat’s Fatah, since the Camp David summit in 2000 – more than 20 years ago. They have also consistently oppressed Gaza residents, imposing a near-constant state of siege. Is it really surprising that many Palestinians turned in desperation to an extremist alternative in Hamas? The lesson of all modern conflicts must be that failure by the powerful to end injustice and negotiate a solution breeds extremism. As Britain’s troubled history in Northern Ireland vividly demonstrates, when politics doesn’t work, violence fills the vacuum. British governments refused for decades to officially negotiate with the IRA because of its terrorist outrages. But when they finally did so, it resulted in the 1998 Good Friday agreement. Although an immensely painful pill for unionists to swallow, it was supported by the US president, the UK prime minister and an EU president, all of whose successors have apparently forgotten that fundamental lesson. As for the notion, peddled by leaders of the global north, that only negotiations with a discredited Palestinian Authority leadership in the West Bank can be countenanced – that won’t work either. Global north governments have a history of trying and failing to promote their “favoured” candidates on peoples demanding self-determination to choose their own representatives. Hamas will have to be included in some way. In the end, the solution has to be political. Palestinians of whatever political stripe cannot defeat Israel militarily, but nor can Israel defeat Palestinians militarily... And, despite their public postures, Netanyahu, Joe Biden and Rishi Sunak have been negotiating with Hamas over hostage and prisoner releases...

The Hill: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says there are "many more months" of war ahead https://trib.al/rWSaDyM
----------------------------------------------------

What we know about Israel’s Supreme Court ruling on Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul
Christian Edwards | January 2, 2024

Israel’s Supreme Court...ruled, by eight votes to seven, that a government amendment to the so-called reasonableness law should not stand. The bill had stripped the Supreme Court of the power to declare government decisions unreasonable, and was the first major piece of a multipronged effort to weaken the judiciary to be passed by the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, last year.

...The unprecedented Supreme Court ruling could cause splits in Israel’s war cabinet, made up of Netanyahu and two prominent critics of his efforts to overhaul the court, while the conflict in Gaza rages...

https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/02/middleeast/israel-supreme-court-ruling-netanyahu-...
-----------------------------------------------------

A Hamas official killed in a Beirut strike had been on Israel’s hit list for years
BASSEM MROUE, ABBY SEWELL and KAREEM CHEHAYEB | Updated January 2, 2024

Saleh Arouri, the deputy political head of Hamas and a founder of the group’s military wing, had been in Israel’s sights for years before he was killed in a drone strike in a southern suburb of Beirut on Tuesday.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had threatened to kill him even before Hamas carried out its deadly surprise attack on Israel on Oct. 7, sparking the ongoing brutal war in Gaza.

Israel had accused Arouri, 57, of masterminding attacks against it in the West Bank, where he was the group’s top commander. In 2015, the U.S. Department of the Treasury designated Arouri as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist offering $5 million for information about him...

https://apnews.com/article/lebanon-beirut-explosion-suburbs-hezbollah-israel-2a4...

Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate do thankless work.
https://twitter.com/MaxBlumenthal/status/1742421600371138928
https://twitter.com/MaxBlumenthal/status/1742301254154350965

Truth? Journalistic standards? Who needs them when you can have propaganda in service of manufacturing consent for genocide?

After all, everyone gets one free, right? (A genocide, that is.) Why should Israel be singled out among the genocidal nations?
(/chokingsarcasm)

---
Edited for touchstones and to add --
A recent interview with Aaron's father, Gabor Mate, still sticks in my mind.

Israel-Hamas War: Gabor Mate vs Piers Morgan On Palestine and Gaza | The Full Interview
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ph9XF39yjgU

---
ETA:
Blumenthal interviewed by Judge Nap today.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nENBRE8ykvM

Amb. Craig Murray.
Sunak, Cleverly and Shapps Could Be in the Old Bailey Dock for Genocide
January 3, 2024 in Uncategorized by craig
https:// www. craigmurray. org. uk/archives/2024/01/sunak-cleverly-and-shapps-could-be-in-the-old-bailey-dock-for-genocide/

Expect the UK to intervene on Israel’s side in the South African case against Israel for Genocide at the International Court of Justice. If Israel loses, British ministers, civil servants and military personnal could end up in the dock for genocide – not only in the Hague, but in the UK.

Infamously, UK courts give no force to international treaties even when the UK has ratified them, unless they are specifically incorporated in UK domestic legislation. The Genocide Convention was explicitly incorporated into UK law in 1969 by the Genocide Act. However the Genocide Act was repealed in 2001 and replaced by Section 51 of the International Criminal Court Act.

That is perfectly clear. Article 53 makes plain that this includes ancillary offences, eg aiding and abetting genocide.

What has the UK government done to aid and abet the genocide? It has:

1) Actively encouraged and incited genocide, including by the systematic obstruction of ceasefire resolutions at the UN Security Council;
2) Provided military equipment to Israel, with dozens of flights from RAF Akrotiri to Israel during the course of the genocide itself;
3) Provided communications intelligence to Israel to assist in genocide;
4) Provided aerial surveillance to Israel to assist in genocide.

These are for certain. It is also widely rumoured that UK Special Forces have participated directly in the genocide. That is something the prosecution will have to determine.

There has been a great sense of impunity among the zionist-controlled political classes: they have believed that they were in no danger of any personal retribution for their part in the brutal destruction of thousands and thousands of young children. In fact they felt able to turn the power of the state against anybody protesting that destruction.

There has been no legal jeopardy to anybody supplying, inciting or cheering on Israel’s monstrous atrocities. The jeopardy has all been felt by those opposing the atrocities.

That all changed with South Africa’s reference to the International Court of Justice. A determination of genocide by the International Court of Justice must be respected by the International Criminal Court and it will be impossible even for the odious Karim Khan to avoid bringing prosecutions against the perpetrators. Similarly in the UK, the fact of genocide being legally established, a police investigation will be obliged simply to focus on whether the UK aided and abetted it.

Quite simply, if you ask the police to investigate Sunak for aiding and abetting genocide today, they will laugh at you and say there is no genocide. After an ICJ judgment they can no longer do that.

Now I am not naive. Just as our rulers believe their backs are covered by Karim Khan KC at the International Criminal Court, they believe that their backs are covered in the UK by the provision that any prosecution must be with the consent of the Attorney General. A government therefore has to agree to the prosecution.

I gave evidence at great length to the police inquiry into UK complicity in CIA torture and extraordinary rendition, in which Tony Blair and Jack Straw had so much blood on their hands it would fill swimming pools. There were of course never any prosecutions.

But the world changes over time, and it feels like something has seriously shifted in both the international and domestic order from the open espousal by our ruling classes of the most extreme atrocities, happening again and again and again in plain sight.

Our ruling classes may find they are less fixed in power than they believe. I would not bet on their impunity being permanent. There is a good precedent of participants in the Holocaust being brought to justice many decades later. We may yet see justice, and I believe a good deal sooner than that.

Over 100 killed today in Kerman, Iran in a commemoration of the assassination of IRGC General Qassem Soleimani.
Someone is determined to tighten the ratchet.

Iran blasts updates: Deadly explosions target Soleimani death anniversary
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblog/2024/1/3/iran-blasts-live-deadly-explosi...

BREAKING NEWS: White House Asked Point Blank About Israel's Involvement In Recent Blasts In Iran
Forbes Breaking News
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0L40Hcli0ZE

>94 davidgn:
Blumenthal live now with Judge Nap.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nENBRE8ykvM

ETA:
Starts with a recap of the recent media wars and the collapse (largely thanks to Blumenthal and Co.) of the recent NYT cover story.

Institutionalists beware. Your "beloved," "trusted" institutions are complicit in genocide. Please reconsider your mental frameworks accordingly, lest you join them.
---
So apparently Saleh al-Arouri -- whatever else he was -- was the primary Hamas negotiator with regard to the release of the Israeli hostages. That tells you something. (And I haven't read that elsewhere. Samizdat has become compulsory. Amb. Murray is already a "terrorism suspect" and has been compelled to flee Scotland. What's next for our vaunted Western "media freedoms"? Max is fortunate in that his father is Sidney Blumenthal, but that protection only stretches so far. A state intent on facilitating genocide is a dangerous state.)

How Israel Could Be STOPPED By South Africa - Its Overwhelming Genocide Case Explained
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtXY_sQurcs
Owen Jones with a half-hour feature on the ICJ filing and its implications.

(The document, by the way. I suppose I'd better read it.)
https://www.icj-cij.org/sites/default/files/case-related/192/192-20231228-app-01...

Wrong thread? I don't think so.
Iran and Saudi Arabia join BRICS bloc | DW Business
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdfz4FVKUSA
You think this is big news, wait for the next tranche...

Israeli public figures accuse judiciary of ignoring incitement to genocide in Gaza (Guardian)

A group of prominent Israelis has accused the country’s judicial authorities of ignoring “extensive and blatant” incitement to genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza by influential public figures. In a letter to the attorney general and state prosecutors, they demand action to stop the normalisation of language that breaks both Israeli and international law. “For the first time that we can remember, the explicit calls to commit atrocious crimes, as stated, against millions of civilians have turned into a legitimate and regular part of Israeli discourse,” they write. “Today, calls of these types are an everyday matter in Israel.” Signatories include one of Israel’s top scientists, the Royal Society member Prof David Harel, alongside other academics, former diplomats, former members of the Knesset, journalists and activists... their 11-page letter contains multiple examples of “the discourse of annihilation, expulsion and revenge”. The list of elite Israelis who have incited war crimes includes cabinet ministers and Knesset members, former top military officials, academics, media figures, social media influencers and celebrities, the letter says...

Surprisingly good coverage by The Hill. They have Omar Baddar on. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4HOcabr28U

>100 John5918: I wish the signatories much luck. They're going to need it.

Max Blumenthal did a little compilation not too far back reflecting the Israeli cultural Zeitgeist. Almost all footage I'd seen before -- and unlike the Zoomers, I'm not exactly steeped in this material.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vKuB1su43c
(And compared to what else is out there, this little medley is sanitized!)

Yes, the signatories are definitely going to need any luck they can get.

Israel's assassination of Hamas leader Saleh al-Arouri the other day in Beirut Lebanon not only threatened to bring the Lebanese and/or Hezbollah into the picture but it also might signal that Netanyahu and associates are abandoning their own hostages as al-Arouri was a key figure in the hostage negotiations. Almost any other nation I would be shocked by this but for this Israeli government and the people running it I always got the idea that getting their own hostages back was nothing but an annoyance to temporarily stop them from bombing the shit out of Palestinian civilians which is what they really wanted to do and Oct 7 was just a great excuse for them to go all out. It's a murderous regime.....one that the United States and Britain are complicit in its crimes with. Kind of an axis of evil.

Netanyahu et al. face music as soon as "military operation" ends.

>104 margd: Ergo...

Fuck.

Babies must die... :(

>106 margd: And that's only the first chapter.

It's not so much that a catastrophically expanding regional war is inevitable as that none of our leaders are willing to do what is necessary to avoid it.

>103 lriley: There is a very risk that World War 3 begins here. Will we be on the right side?

>108 davidgn: Seriously? No. And apart from maybe a handful of nations in the Global North (and I wouldn't expect more than a handful to actually put up any real military assistance) most of the rest of the world is not going to be with us at all---even NATO members. I kind of expect Turkey is going to drop out of that group not that Erdogan is any prize either. But my guess is that most Middle Eastern countries other than using diplomacy are going to go to lengths to stay out of this.

Decimating a kind of small and confined defenseless area like the Gaza Strip is one thing.....rooting out for real nation states with air power IMO is nearly impossible without going nuclear. It's tantamount to walloping a hornets nest with a baseball bat. You're just stirring up shit and don't be surprised if some day blowback comes your way. I think at this point we've seen from both the United States and Russia---how ineffective nation building is from the world's greater military powers. Every adventure turns into a massive failure that only drains resources and economies and creates great misery for all actors both aggressors and benign. It's just arrogance to think anymore that all this military might can do anything other than destroy things and whoever does it.....like macho posturing it's just not a good look.

>109 lriley: I think you're entirely right that most other Middle Eastern actors (including Hezollah and Iran, if they had their druthers) want nothing to do with a wider war, but it's increasingly looking like Netanyahu and the neocons intend to force their hands. Netanyahu is even trying to pick a fight with Egypt by threatening to capture the Philadelphi corridor. Worst case, this is shaping up to be us versus most of our former regional "allies" (and our regional enemies), along with Israel and, I guess, the UK. Maybe (at this rate) Germany too (for all the good the Bundeswehr would do anyone), and whatever other European countries can't manage to slip the noose.

I posed the question as food for thought for those who may be monitoring but not posting.

>109 lriley: It's just arrogance to think anymore that all this military might can do anything other than destroy things

Which is one of the reasons countries like the USA and UK need to intentionally move away from their militaristic cultures and face the reality that violence only breeds more violence. Someone needs the courage to address the real underlying roots of the conflicts in the modern world, which will be painful for everybody... but not as painful as World War 3 will be.

Jeffrey Sachs: US Could End Gaza Genocide Tomorrow
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PV47TWWdRE
Jeffrey Sachs: US Is FOOLING Europe Into Another War
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mITeLBhmxiY
(via Neutrality Studies)

Chas Freeman has appeared on a couple of obscure Youtube channels in the past couple of days. Never heard of them. Don't care.
Amb. Freeman is always top of my list. One of the last of the surviving wise men. Posting on sight.

Israeli's could be charged with war crimes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHwyquMunWM
(Channel run by a German-sounding behavior analyst) ETA -- Dutch, or at any rate in the Netherlands.

Perpetual Israeli-Palestinian War the Alternative to a 2 State Solution? w/Ambassador Chas Freeman.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFHie3vLqjg
(Channel run by a U.S. Army vet)

>110 davidgn: From what I understand Hezbollah has quite an arsenal. Netanyahu's belligerence seems to me conditioned to great degree by his desire to stay in power and out of the courts/prison. At least a good number of the Likud politicians that keep him in power from their statements seem to be to be not just outright fascists but psychopaths as well. Netanyahu himself fits the profile in that he might be a bit more careful than some of them about what he says in public but he would still rather trade thousands and thousands of lives for his own personal ambition. Much of Israeli society even if they want change at the top is following the same leads. That Netanyahu talks about securing a part of Egyptian desert territory to offload Palestinians shows again his intentions of ethnic cleansing. If Biden and the State Dept. don't see this they're either not paying attention or they're deliberately being ignorant. I tend to think it's the latter option.

>111 John5918: As for the United States good luck with that. Just don't see it happening. We're a war happy nation. It's engrained in our culture and it's industrial. Military grade weapons are needed for all the mass shootings that go on internally from year to year. Can't stop that---it keeps the prayers coming. The right to bear arms is sacrosanct and as I'm sure you know we export. Wherever there's a conflict or even the whiff of a dispute you'll find American made weapons. The political will of our politicians (even the most well meaning democrats and there are plenty who aren't all that well meaning) has been helpless to stop domestic gun violence let alone is there any will to stop the sale of military grade weaponry all over the world. Mind also that we have military bases all around the world and that's not even speaking of our Navy patrolling all the world's seas and oceans. No other country does anything like this. For those wondering why we can't have good things like Medicare for all or paid for college tuition, or badly needed infrastructure upgrades or a better climate response like some other nations all the $'s we funnel into being a superpower and keeping the world's peace would be a good place to look.

>115 lriley: In spite of the violence we all deplore, "By historical standards, humanity today is extraordinarily safe from war." https://www.vox.com/2015/6/23/8832311/war-casualties-600-years

You are right, though, that the US system of governance is proving unable compared to others to focus on pressing needs other than security, such as healthcare, education, infrastructure, and (especially right now, IMO) climate. I think it's the system, though, that allows and encourages decision-makers to take their eye off some truly pressing issues...

>115 lriley: keeping the world's peace

I can't help thinking of Billy Bragg singing The marching song of the covert battalions. Released in 1990 but still as relevant today: "We're making the world safe for capitalism!"

>117 John5918: I like Billy Bragg very much. He kind of merged punk rock with folk and protest music.

>116 margd: By "is," I assume you mean "has been."

UN warns Gaza is now ‘uninhabitable’ as war continues (Guardian)

The UN humanitarian chief has described Gaza as “uninhabitable” three months into Israel’s war with Hamas, warning that famine was looming and a public health disaster unfolding. In a grim assessment of the devastating impact of Israel’s military response to the horrific Hamas attacks on 7 October, Martin Griffiths said that Gaza’s 2.3 million people face “daily threats to their very existence” while the world just watches. He said tens of thousands of people, mostly women and children, have been killed or injured, families are sleeping in the open as temperatures plummet and areas where Palestinians were told to relocate have been bombed. Griffiths said: “People are facing the highest levels of food insecurity ever recorded {and} famine is around the corner.”. The few partly functioning hospitals are overwhelmed and critically short of supplies, medical facilities are under relentless attack, infectious diseases are spreading and amid the chaos about 180 Palestinian women are giving birth every day. “Gaza has simply become uninhabitable,” the UN undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs said. He said the humanitarian community is facing an “impossible mission” – trying to help more than 2 million people while UN staff and aid workers from partner organisations are killed, communications blackouts continue, roads are damaged, truck convoys are shot at and vital commercial supplies “are almost nonexistent”. Griffiths reiterated UN demands for an immediate end to the war and the release of all hostages, declaring that “it is time for the international community to use all its influence to make this happen”...

>113 davidgn: Really, these are required viewing. If I had the time or money, I'd have transcripts made, or make them myself. I may yet. They're that important. Far more wide-ranging, too, than the titles would suggest. Amb. Freeman is a man with a keen sense of his country's position in history. That sort of sense has become shockingly rare.

Sat down and watched both again along with my father. Unmatched moral and strategic clarity.

Israel 'WORSE Than Apartheid': South African Jewish Former ANC Politician Andrew Feinstein
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MT_4_0ToGsM
It's rare that I end an interview on the brink of tears, but this was such a powerful interview with former ANC MP Andrew Feinstein. He tells me his family history of surviving the Holocaust - unlike so many of his relatives - and how this informed his struggle against Apartheid.

But he tells me why Israel's oppression of the Palestinians is worse than Apartheid, why the anti-apartheid movement is an example to now follow, the silencing of pro-Palestinian voices, South Africa's case against Israel alleging genocide - and why history shows we have a responsibility to speak out.

Owen Jones interviewing.
Quite important for anyone who has any question why it was South Africa that stepped up in the present moment.

Itamar Ben-Gvir is an Israeli lawyer and far-right politician who has served as the Minister of National Security since 2022. Wikipedia.

Former Obama staffer Tommy Vietor: "Ben-Gvir is a zealot and literal terrorist sympathizer who also happens to have a lot of leverage over Netanyahu. Here he is advocating for ethnic cleansing of Gaza."
-------------------------------------------------

Minister Ben-Gvir: "Encouraging the residents of Gaza to emigrate is a solution we must advance”

From Israel, translated
0:56 ( https://twitter.com/AGvaryahu/status/1741893394958364945 )

- Avner Gvaryahu @AGvaryahu | 1:45 PM · Jan 1, 2024
-------------------------------------------------

איתמר בן גביר @itamarbengvir · 4:06 PM · Jan 2, 2024:
השר לביטחון לאומי, יו''ר עוצמה יהודית. נשוי לאילה ואב לשישה ילדים מתוקים.
Translated from Hebrew by Google
Minister of National Security, Chairman of Otzma Yehudit. Married to Ayla and father of six sweet children.

מעריך מאוד את ארצות הברית של אמריקה אבל עם כל הכבוד אנחנו לא עוד כוכב בדגל האמריקאי. ארצות הברית היא ידידתנו הטובה אך לפני הכל נעשה מה שטוב למדינת ישראל: הגירת מאות אלפים מעזה תאפשר לתושבי העוטף לחזור הביתה ולחיות בביטחון ותשמור על חיילי צה"ל.

Translated from Hebrew by Google:
Really appreciate the United States of America but with all due respect we are not another star on the American flag. The United States is our best friend, but first of all we will do what is best for the State of Israel: the migration of hundreds of thousands from Gaza will allow the residents of the enclave to return home and live in security and protect the IDF soldiers.

>123 margd: "...I expect we'll see the bombing continue as long as it takes to make the 'humanitarian' case for expulsion compelling."
https://www.librarything.com/topic/354685#8277623

Amb. Freeman addresses this directly here:
https://www.youtube.com/live/KFHie3vLqjg?si=ZNoAoNFlfjfAwzaA&t=895

"So there there's a very interesting retort to that in Ha'aretz, the great Israeli liberal newspaper, this morning which says that, no, the transfer should be of the settlers. The settlers should go somewhere else, not the Palestinians. But it also appears that Israel has been negotiating with the Democratic Republic of the Congo and other African countries to try to bribe them with -- probably at our expense, if the normal procedure is followed -- to take Palestinians out of Gaza. So I know that we have not directly opposed the removal of the Palestinians. We have said there should be no involuntary expulsion, and the Israelis are claiming that if they leave, it's voluntary. Of course, they have a gun to the head of the people leaving, so that doesn't seem to be very voluntary to me."

>70 davidgn: >94 davidgn:
The disassembly of the Gettleman NYT piece has filtered up to the next level.

The New York Times "weaponized" Hamas rape story is a fraud. Ali Abunimah debunks it.
The Electronic Intifada
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VvGF9vYnlw

citing inter alia
NYT’s Disgraceful “Investigation”: Weaponizing Sexual Violence Against Women for Occupation Propaganda
https://speakupeg.com/2023/12/30/nyts-disgraceful-investigation-weaponizing-sexu...

Given present levels of journalistic shamelessness, I expect we'll see a retraction shortly after the ICJ's final ruling of genocide. So quite a few years out.

ETA: The Hill had Blumenthal on yesterday as well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bN9Rh3XOeo8

Inside Israel’s torture camp for Gaza detainees
Palestinians arrested in the northern Gaza Strip describe how Israeli soldiers systematically abused civilians and combatants alike, from severe deprivation to brutal physical violence.
https://www.972mag.com/israel-torture-camp-gaza-detainees/

Catching up with Jonathan Cook. I almost shared the same sketch here yesterday. So here it is.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToKcmnrE5oY

‘Are we the baddies?’ Western support for genocide in Gaza means the answer is yes

The desperate smear campaign to defend Israel’s crimes highlights the toxic brew of lies that’s been underpinning the liberal democratic order for decades
https://www.jonathan-cook.net/2023-12-27/baddies-genocide-gaza-answer/

>127 davidgn: ‘Are we the baddies?’

Thanks for bringing up that Mitchell and Webb sketch, which is a classic. But actually the question ‘Are we the baddies?’ is not a new one, although far too few people in the western world have asked it, nor honestly answered it. Leaving aside the evils of colonialism, during the period of colonial liberation struggles from the 1950s through to the 1990s in Africa and Asia, as well as the struggles for democracy in South America, the west consistently demonstrated that we are, in fact, the baddies, by choosing a side based on political ideology rather than on justice and morality. Plus ça change.

+1 Ali Abunimah.

Ali Abunimah
@AliAbunimah
Undoubtedly worried by the growing reach of The Electronic
@Intifada's accurate reporting debunking genocidal Israel's fabrications and lies about Oct 7, the
@washingtonpost
has assigned
@lizzadwoskin
to write a hit piece about us. What an honor! Here's her email and my response

https://twitter.com/AliAbunimah/status/1743205029618536550/photo/1
https://twitter.com/AliAbunimah/status/1743205029618536550/photo/2

>123 margd: There are video clips of Ben-Gvir handing out assault weapons to residents of il(legal) settlements in the West Bank. Not just a few people they're lining up for them and it's a big show---speeches, clapping, smiles.

>128 John5918: Henry Kissinger's toxic foreign policy informs our foreign policy to this day but it goes back even further than that. The United States has empowered South and Central American dictatorships for over a century. Our banks, lending institutions, corporations with assistance from our federal government exploited those countries meanwhile for pretty much everything robbing them blind of wealth and resources everything from bananas to rubber. From the 1950's on anyway we've been overthrowing governments and we were schooling their police and military in 'anti-terrorist' programs that were pretty much all about the torture and murder of any resistants armed or otherwise and all that came with all kinds of collateral damage.

We're still at it. Venezuela for instance is one of our targets.

>122 davidgn: I just watched and I'm glad South Africa has stepped up and done this. Not sure how it's going to turn out but it seems to have gotten the Israeli's attention. In past weeks I'd had watched a number of Irish electors trying to push the Taoiseach that way. Someone had to do it and it's fitting in a sense that a country that suffered under apartheid for so long took the step. It's also familiar that some of the same nations who backed the South African apartheid regime are here today backing the Israeli one. It's time maybe that we stop trying to export our ways of doing things.

South Africa is taking Israel to the International Court of Justice accusing it of "genocide" in Gaza. But will it have any impact on the fighting?

Here's what experts have to say:
6:43 ( https://twitter.com/dwnews/status/1743918575901982915 )

- DW News @dwnews | 3:52 AM · Jan 7, 2024

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

Israel, UK, US are parties to Genocide Convention
As are are China, Iran, Russia...which made no diff in Russian war on Ukraine. :(

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_parties_to_the_Genocide_Convention

>133 margd: From this interview with international human rights lawyer Francis Boyle he goes into how quickly these kinds of proceedings can go and his with Yugoslavia/Bosnia was very quick. Towards the end when asked what if Israel refused to comply and the United States backed Israel with a veto he goes on to say the ruling can then be taken to the general assembly and Israel could be kicked out of the UN and Palestine could be given statehood with all UN protections.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BfVkH2DWDc

'Baffling': Fmr. Rep. Denver Riggleman on Secy. Lloyd Austin delay to alert WH on hospitalization
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qu4qrfpapx4

If you're wondering how worried people at the top are about a wider war...
I'm going to fill in the blanks here and guess Austin (and/or his aide placed in charge) was terrified about what might happen if the WH were aware he was out of the loop.

cf.
The Lloyd Austin fallout is growing: ‘Someone’s head has to roll’
The defense chief is facing criticism for keeping his bosses in the dark about his hospitalization.
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/01/07/biden-stands-by-austin-as-befuddled-whi...

Genocide in Gaza
JOHN J. MEARSHEIMER
JAN 4, 2024
https://mearsheimer.substack.com/p/genocide-in-gaza

I am writing to flag a truly important document that should be widely circulated and read carefully by anyone interested in the ongoing Gaza War.

Specifically, I am referring to the 84-page “application” that South Africa filed with the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on 29 December 2023, accusing Israel of committing genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza.1 It maintains that Israel’s actions since the war began on 7 October 2023 “are intended to bring about the destruction of a substantial part of the Palestinian national, racial and ethnic … group in the Gaza Strip.” (1) That charge fits clearly under the definition of genocide in the Geneva Convention, to which Israel is a signatory.2

The application is a superb description of what Israel is doing in Gaza. It is comprehensive, well-written, well-argued, and thoroughly documented. The application has three main components.

First, it describes in detail the horrors that the IDF has inflicted on the Palestinians since 7 October 2023 and explains why much more death and destruction is in store for them.

Second, the application provides a substantial body of evidence showing that Israeli leaders have genocidal intent toward the Palestinians. (59-69) Indeed, the comments of Israeli leaders – all scrupulously documented – are shocking. One is reminded of how the Nazis talked about dealing with Jews when reading how Israelis in “positions of the highest responsibility” talk about dealing with the Palestinians. (59) In essence, the document argues that Israel’s actions in Gaza, combined with its leaders’ statements of intent, make it clear that Israeli policy is “calculated to bring about the physical destruction of Palestinians in Gaza.” (39)

Third, the document goes to considerable lengths to put the Gaza war in a broader historical context, making it clear that Israel has treated the Palestinians in Gaza like caged animals for many years. It quotes from numerous UN reports detailing Israel’s cruel treatment of the Palestinians. In short, the application makes clear that what the Israelis have done in Gaza since 7 October is a more extreme version of what they were doing well before 7 October.

There is no question that many of the facts described in the South African document have previously been reported in the media. What makes the application so important, however, is that it brings all those facts together in one place and provides an overarching and thoroughly supported description of the Israeli genocide. In other words, it provides the big picture while not neglecting the details.

Unsurprisingly, the Israeli government has labelled the charges a “blood libel” that “has no factual and judicial basis.” Moreover, Israel claims that “South Africa is collaborating with a terror group that calls for the destruction of the state of Israel.”3 A close reading of the document, however, makes it clear that there is no basis for these assertions. In fact, it is hard to see how Israel will be able to defend itself in a rational-legal way when the proceedings begin. After all, brute facts are hard to dispute.

...

Finally, the United States is a liberal democracy that is filled with intellectuals, newspaper editors, policymakers, pundits, and scholars who routinely proclaim their deep commitment to protecting human rights around the world. They tend to be highly vocal when countries commit war crimes, especially if the United States or any of its allies are involved. In the case of Israel’s genocide, however, most of the human rights mavens in the liberal mainstream have said little about Israel’s savage actions in Gaza or the genocidal rhetoric of its leaders. Hopefully, they will explain their disturbing silence at some point. Regardless, history will not be kind to them, as they said hardly a word while their country was complicit in a horrible crime, perpetrated right out in the open for all to see.

>134 lriley: Very important interview, Larry. Should be seen by all.

>137 davidgn: The problem even if hopefully this genocide is stopped is what to do with the people of Gaza who are grieving, bereft and homeless. Even if given statehood it will take them a long time to rebuild. Gaza City is completely shattered. The infrastructure destroyed....if there are hospitals still standing they're badly damaged and neighborhoods around them destroyed as well. Where would you even start? and the need will be right away. Netanyahu, Smotrich, Ben Gvir and a bunch of etc.'s should be arrested and tried in The Hague for war crimes.

Israeli Kids Torment Principal Who Voices Empathy For Gazans
The Majority Report w/ Sam Seder
1.42M subscribers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8jIwlErg04

Any hint of expressing sympathy for Gazan children --> Suspension and your Israeli schoolchildren turning on you (if you're a -- presumably Jewish -- principal)
If you're Palestinian-Israeli, and even make an ambiguous post that could be misread, you risk terrorism charges.

This society will need to be deprogrammed.

UK accused of hypocrisy in not backing claim of genocide in Gaza before ICJ (Guardian)

The UK is facing accusations of double standards after formally submitting detailed legal arguments to the international court of justice in The Hague six weeks ago to support claims that Myanmar committed genocide against the Rohingya ethnic group through its mass mistreatment of children and systematically depriving people of their homes and food. The UK made its 21-page “declaration of intervention” jointly with five other countries, but it is not supporting South Africa as it prepares to try to convince the ICJ on Thursday that Israel is at risk of committing genocide against the Palestinian people. The UK submission on Myanmar argues there is a lower threshold for determining genocide if the damage has been inflicted on children as opposed to adults. The submission said other actions that could be defined as genocidal, if systematic, include forced displacement from homes, deprivation of medical services and the imposition of subsistence diets. It argues that given declarations of intent to commit genocide are rare, the court’s test should not solely be explicit statements or numbers killed, but reasonable inference drawn from a pattern of conduct and factual evidence...

I still fail to see how people didn't see this sort of response coming immediately after the 7th, simply by knowing who was (and remains) in power in Israel.

Mehdi Hasan a year ago on the (then-threatened) accession of Ben Gvir.
This Ultra-Extremist Politician Makes Far-Right U.S. Lawmakers Look Mild | The Mehdi Hasan Show
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0ZhbCRpmfY

Meanwhile, our future in the U.S. unravels apace. (Very pertinent re-post)
The Trump movement is turning America fascist w/Jeff Sharlet | The Chris Hedges Report
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtrkSeTOv7g&t=362
(The moreso as, pending any possible interventions, we appear condemned to choose between the sick insurrectionist fuck and the demented genocidal fuck).

>129 davidgn:
Edifying.
The Grayzone confronts Washington Post reporter LIVE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQ0fMnJ1n3o

>141 davidgn: Let it be said that Jonathan Cook got the story right literally from day one --
https://www.jonathan-cook.net/2023-10-08/west-hypocrisy-gaza-breakout/

--and had already clocked where things were heading and spoken out about it by October 16.
https://www.jonathan-cook.net/2023-10-16/media-official-lies-genocide-gaza/
ETA: No, I stand corrected: by October 11. It took until the 16th to make his headline.
https://www.jonathan-cook.net/2023-10-11/blood-gaza-west-israel/

And people like him? Well, they get ignored (at best). They don't write for The Guardian anymore, so who the fuck cares what they think?

----

Too soon, some will say, to view these events from the standpoint of history. They'll come around. Eventually.

Or maybe not. Experiencing complicity in genocide will never be enough to change some people's minds -- even once that experience comes ripe. But perhaps experiencing complicity in omnicide will.

It's not out of the question.

>135 davidgn: The alternative theory on Austin is that his judgment is really just that impaired. I don't think that scenario is any better.
Sec of Defense Austin Disappearing - Why it's a HUGE red flag!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtcwQF8L_5k
Col. Davis here has been following Austin's record more closely than I have.

This piece in The New Republic begins with a thumbnail sketch on Davis.
https://newrepublic.com/article/168045/neoconservative-isolationism-republican-p...
It looks like he's one of the recipients of a Ridenhour Prize that I haven't had the privilege of recognizing.

>144 davidgn: Blinken and Biden apparently for two taken by surprise. 4 days to figure out your defense cabinet head has gone missing and in the middle of a world crisis that your government is intimately involved in. It makes you wonder how much they even talk to each other. It also makes you wonder about Austin's judgement. FWIW if I were taking sick days I'd let my job know if only because I didn't want the hassle of having my employer trying to fire my ass and my job had 0 point fuck to do with national security....running the military. Unless he was concussed or had a brain seizure he should walk the plank.

Good thing that even without him they could bypass congress and ignore the will of the majority of the American people again to make sure Israel has more ammo to murder Palestinian children though.

>145 lriley: Yes, Larry. Ain't it great that we can always trust our leaders to do what's right?

Trita Parsi (of the Quincy Institute) on with Amy Goodman today.
Biden’s Refusal of Gaza Ceasefire Could Drag U.S. into Middle East War
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4coQceMy-E

cf. Will Israel Drag the US Into Another Ruinous War?
https://quincyinst.org/2024/01/03/will-israel-drag-the-us-into-another-ruinous-w...

>146 davidgn: I don't know David.....I have a lot of anger about this and I feel I'm at an age where having a lot of anger is not a good thing. I do try to not dwell on this overmuch but for a portion of almost every day it seems I'm looking at it again.

>136 davidgn:

After the genocide of the Nazi Holocaust in Europe, there was a feeling of "never again". Then half a century later came the Rwandan genocide in 1994. It happened in full view of diplomats, the media, UN peacekeepers, and humanitarian NGOs. The French government was still supplying arms to the genocidaires right up to the last moment, and other western countries were reluctant to take a stand to prevent genocide. Everyone purported to be shocked as to how this could have happened, and once again we heard the cry "never again". And yet a mere thirty years later, genocide is once again happening in full view of diplomats, the media, the UN and humanitarian NGOs. Once again a major western power is supplying arms to the genocidaires, and others are reluctant to take a stand. Will we never learn?

What is particularly sad is that it is a nation whose people were the victims of genocide less than a century ago who are now the genocidaires.

>141 davidgn: MSNBC will be happy to learn, after cancelling his show, that it is now completely rid of Mehdi Hasan.

Mehdi Hasan Quits MSNBC Completely
The Rational National
551K subscribers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okcFq-qB5cU

>148 John5918: Rwanda.

https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/canadian-peacekeepers-in-rwand...

>150 margd:

Thanks, yes, as that article states, it is widely held that the UN peacekeepers could have prevented the genocide if they had been given the mandate and the resources. A failure of global political will, as is now happening with the genocide in Gaza. General Roméo Dallaire's book Shake hands with the devil: the failure of humanity in Rwanda is worth reading.

Amb. Craig Murray with Andrew Marr today.

Can the US and Israel stitch up genocide hearing?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVRfKlTPT1E
29,551 views Jan 8, 2024
Former UK diplomat and human rights campaigner Craig Murray joined us to talk about South Africa's case against Israel at the International Court of Justice.

David Cameron thinks that Israel may have broken international law. To let that sink in and considering all the past dark and bloody history of colonial Britain and how the former Tory ( the bloodthirstiest political party of all) Prime Minister of Great Britain kind of thinks that the current Israel regime and military might have gone a bit too far it's saying quite a bit.

It's kind of like if Vlad the impaler was shaking his head at you.

Biden State Department Flunky WAY Out Of His League (excerpt from earlier publication, I think)
The Majority Report w/ Sam Seder
1.42M subscribers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H884I13Eem4
Francis Boyle, professor of international law at the University of Illinois, discusses South Africa filing a case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) against Israel over its actions in Gaza.
...
After parsing through the difference between the ICJ and the ICC – the latter of which has a history of failing Palestinians – and what this suit means for both Israel and South Africa, Francis and Emma discuss John Kirby’s diminishment of the case, and explore the active complicity of the US government per the ICJ’s statutes. Boyle wraps up with a quick analysis of the relevant legal text and assesses the expected timeframe of the case.

Israel-Gaza war: Blinken says cost of conflict on children far too high (BBC)

The cost of war on Gaza's civilians is "far too high", US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has said... "The daily toll on civilians in Gaza, particularly on children, is far too high"...

This is an appalling comment to make, as it suggest that there might theoretically be a "daily toll" on civilians which is not "far too high", perhaps only a teeny weeny bit too high, or perhaps not too high at all but acceptable in some diabolical calculation. The world needs to state clearly that any "cost" to civilians and particularly children is too high. International humanitarian law protects civilians.

MK Ofer Cassif returns to the spotlight. Interviewed by Owen Jones.

Israeli Politician Backs Genocide Investigation - Now They're Trying To Silence Him w/ Ofer Cassif
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51vnDL0zifE

A short poem from Naomi Shihab Nye.

Before I Was a Gazan
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Wv0R_ac3ls

>155 John5918: there's been an effort for a long time to get people to expect and accept the euphemistic idea of 'collateral damage' when one's country has ongoing military operations against some enemy force. Though collateral damage happens mostly when one attacks not defends someone or something. To put it such way as if the attacker were helpless to do otherwise and innocents had to die or be maimed alongside whatever their target.

I think if worldwide there were more people who'd reject this notion outright we'd be a lot better off. I think it's a pretty big problem here in the United States.

>158 lriley:

I believe that during the Vietnam Way protesters used to chant, "Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids have you killed today?" Chants, slogans and soundbites are simplistic and I tend to avoid them, but perhaps someone should ask Mr Blinken exactly how many dead children per day he would consider to be OK, and not "far too high".

>156 davidgn: That was excellent. I'd point out Cassif's take towards the end about the perils of looking at things as a zero sum game----the idea that one side wins when the other side loses actually ends up with both sides losing because it only keeps the conflict going.

>159 John5918: I was quite young when LBJ was in office. I graduated from high school in 1975 by which time we were all purposes done there though I wasn't that far off for being draft able for that conflict. From my point of view then it was insane but there are always reasons why these things happen and there are those who attain or maintain power and wealth or prestige and usually those people make sure they have no real skin in the game.

Some time ago I read a book by Nan Milton about her father the Scottish socialist John MacLean who during WWI led massive protests in Glasgow against conscription....went to prison and on hunger strike a number of times and the hunger strikes pretty much shortened his life a lot. The way the USA has gotten around mass protests like happened back during Vietnam has a lot IMO to do with the United States going to an all volunteer military. Doing that has indemnified the middle classes on up from not having their children involved if they don't want to be. So these days we have lots and lots of cheerleaders on the sidelines who don't have skin in the game and who like to think of themselves as super patriots and flag wavers. These people don't see these things close up enough.....if they did a lot of them would change their minds.

​​Why I Resigned: Tariq Habash Is First Biden Appointee to Quit over U.S.-Backed Israeli War on Gaza
Democracy Now!
1.93M subscribers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JILGqsk8sd4

The ghost of apartheid has come back to haunt Israel and give hope to Palestinians (Guardian)

Aspectre has long haunted Israel: the spectre of South Africa. Specifically, Israeli leaders have feared that a world recognising their oppression of Palestinians as an apartheid system might be moved to impose on Israel the same international isolation that helped end South Africa’s system of white minority rule. However, few Israeli leaders would have expected that impetus to come in the form of a South African lawsuit in The Hague alleging genocide. Recent UN general assembly votes show that most of the international community is appalled by Israel’s brutalisation of Gaza, yet appears unable to act. It’s as if Israel is shielded by an unspoken but commonly accepted US prerogative to set the terms of any international interventions in the Middle East. Indeed, what makes the South African action all the more remarkable is the reality that when you indict Israel for genocide, you’re effectively accusing its armourer and diplomatic enabler – the US – of being an accomplice to the crime of all crimes. The late president Nelson Mandela had assumed, on behalf of his people, a moral burden when he declared in 1997 that “our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians”. The African National Congress (ANC) had counted the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) as a close ally that had actively assisted in its work to free itself from the indignity and oppression of apartheid. With South Africa freed, by its own struggle and with international support, by the early 1990s, Mandela believed it was time to secure the rights of the Palestinians and of others fighting for self-determination... Israel can count on unconditional US backing for its systemic criminality. And it feels comfortable following the example of its US mentor which flagrantly defied international law in its “war on terror” and Iraq invasion. Perhaps, then, South Africa’s solidarity at this point, US objections notwithstanding, also reflects the decline of Washington’s ability to enforce its unipolar hegemony. The genocide case against Israel in the international court of justice is thus a clarion call to the rest of the world that a values-based solidarity is once again an option. And that a different world order is possible.

Senior Tory launches scathing attack on bill banning boycotts of Israel (Guardian)

A senior Conservative MP launched a scathing attack on a controversial bill banning local councils from boycotting Israel, as eight Tories voted against the proposed legislation. Alicia Kearns, the Conservative chair of the foreign affairs select committee, told the Guardian that the bill undermined free speech, went against international law and risked leaving the UK isolated on the global stage. While the bill passed by 282 votes to 235, eight Conservative MPs voted against the legislation, which will cause some embarrassment... Kearns said: “This bill is flawed in four key areas: it breaks with our foreign policy; undermines freedom of speech; goes against international law; and promotes an odd exceptionalism in UK primary legislation. We rely on the rules-based system to protect ourselves and to protect our allies and yet we are at risk of breaching UN security council resolution 2334, a resolution the UK was instrumental in drafting"...

>163 John5918: I may have to start reading The Guardian regularly again.

Tories scrambling for self-preservation on the basis of liability under international law and opinion? Mirabile dictu!

>164 davidgn:

I've been reading the Guardian for decades. It's not as radical now as it perhaps used to be, but nevertheless it is usually pretty sound. When I lived in Sudan I used to get the weekly airmail version, printed on thin airmail paper, which included extracts from Le Monde and the Washington Post. It would arrive weeks late, but was always worth reading for the analysis rather than the news, much of which I would already have heard on the BBC World Service short wave radio. Nowadays I read the Grauniad every morning, and it's the only news media that I pay for. I also read the BBC website every morning - no short wave radio any more (well, it still exists, but it's very patchy and just a shadow of its former glory). The Grauniad tends to have more analysis, whereas BBC focuses mainly just on news. Al Jazeera is also worth reading from time to time, as it picks up on stories or angles which the western media tend to miss. I don't read any US media regularly, largely because the main ones seem to be behind paywalls but also because their style and content don't really interest me much. But I do a search of topics that interest me, which turns up articles from many countries, sources and political viewpoints, so I do read a wide range of reports and opinions (even right wing US ones!)

>165 John5918: Perhaps of interest.
HOW THE UK SECURITY SERVICES NEUTRALISED THE COUNTRY’S LEADING LIBERAL NEWSPAPER
The Guardian, Britain’s leading liberal newspaper with a global reputation for independent and critical journalism, has been successfully targeted by security agencies to neutralise its adversarial reporting of the ‘security state’, according to newly released documents and evidence from former and current Guardian journalists.
MATT KENNARD AND MARK CURTIS
https://www.declassifieduk.org/how-the-uk-security-services-neutralised-the-coun...

>166 davidgn:

Thanks. Interesting reading, and not surprising, given the UK security services' long held suspicion of anything to the left of hard right. I believe they kept a file open on Harold Wilson when he was prime minister in the 1960s and '70s, and he was probably more moderate that Corbyn. I see Katherine Viner is still editor of the Guardian. Let's hope it is moving on from the events described in the Declassified UK article.

>167 John5918: Speaking of Corbyn and his political assassination, I still need to review Al-Jazeera's reporting on The Labour Files in full.
https://www.ajiunit.com/investigation/the-labour-files/

Nobody with half a clue can fail to be aware of the gist, though.

>168 davidgn:

Yes, Corbyn was a principled politician who was open about what he believed in, and tried to put it into practice. I supported his ideals. Whether he was electable is a different question, and I know a lot of my own friends in the Labour party believe that Starmer is a more competent all round leader. But we stray off topic - except that Corbyn would likely have led the Labour party to robustly oppose genocide in Gaza, in contrast to Starmer's cautious approach.

>169 John5918: Exactly.

"everyone in the Levant is overwhelmingly descended from ancient Jews, or at the very least those genetically indistinguishable from ancient Jews"
"Closest people are usually Christian Levantines {more than} Many Jewish groups {more than} Muslims {more than} Other Jewish groups"

Miro C @MiroCyo | 8:05 PM · Oct 11, 2023:
Genetic Algebra and Population Genetics.
https://twitter.com/MiroCyo/status/1712258026881921287
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1712258026881921287.html

Geneticists have had access to ancient DNA whole genome sequences from Canaanites, Israelites, Judahites for some time now.

First genetic distances to modern people below.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F8Mo5zXacAEB2CY.jpg

...These are all samples recovered from the Bronze Age and Iron Age Levant, dated to differing time periods and coming from different cultures. They are all genetically similar to one another.

Closest people are usually Christian Levantines {more than} Many Jewish groups {more than} Muslims {more than} Other Jewish groups

...Palestinian Christians are almost genetically indistinguishable from Roman-era Levantines, people of the time of Jesus Christ, the Apostles, etc.

It provides interesting speculation as to their origin. Perhaps they descend from such people, the first Jews to convert to Christianity

...This is what it looks like happened.

The Bronze Age inhabitants of the region were Canaanites, Amorites, Eblaites, etc. The ancestors of the Akkadians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Chaldeans, etc also came from the BA Levant.

A subgroup of Canaanites became Israelites (they are genetically indistinguishable from Canaanites). This subgroup remains largely similar to each other until Alexander conquers the entire Middle East.

Then, Greek and Bactrian ancestry start entering the Levant. At this time, Samaritans split off from the ancestors of Jews, Christians, and Muslims of the Levant.

They are the first to split off. This is because they barely mixed with the incoming Greek/Bactrian groups.

The new population Roman-era Levantines are almost indistinguishable from modern day Palestinian Christians, Lebanese Christians, etc. They stay like this till the modern period, refusing to mix with Muslim Arabs (they weren't allowed to regardless) and not usually being allowed to own slaves.

This is where Levantine Muslims (Palestinian Muslims, Lebanese Muslims, etc) split off from the Christians - some Christians convert to Islam. They are now allowed to own slaves from Africa, and mix with Arabians and Egyptians and other Muslim groups. They carry some of this foreign ancestry.

Before, during, and after Alexanders invasion you had many other Jewish groups of course, splitting off and going to Europe and North Africa, being forcibly deported to Mesopotamia, etc. They are the only ones who either

1: didnt convert to the Arabian religion
2: didnt convert to the new religion that was formed/evolved through Judaism

The truth is, everyone in the Levant is overwhelmingly descended from ancient Jews, or at the very least those genetically indistinguishable from ancient Jews.

Lots of Muslims like to exxagerate their relationship to Arabians, since that is where their religion is from, and their prophet was an Arabian. The truth, for better or worse, is that almost none of them carry much Arabian ancestry. Only Negev Bedouins and Yemenite Jews do.

...Asheknazis are about 1/3 of the total population
Noah Lewin-Epstein & Yinon Cohen (2018): Ethnic origin and identity in the Jewish population of Israel, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, DOI:10.1080/1369183X.2018.1492370 https://people.socsci.tau.ac.il/mu/noah/files/2018/07/Ethnic-origin-and-identity...

...Philistines were genetically ancient Greeks so those with significant ancient Greek ancestry would be their relations.

Modern Palestinians have no connection to them, other than the minor ancient Greek ancestry all Levantines share

Southern Italians are much closer...

Today's ICJ hearings.
Watch in full: First day of ICJ hearings in South Africa's genocide case against Israel in Gaza
Middle East Eye
1.56M subscribers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2vQ7suQWGg

Corbyn was an old lefty type and the Labour Party's establishment is pretty much centrist types. Jeremy was able to gain power because the public started trending his way but Labour Party politicians kind of like the Democratic Party when Sanders was becoming a threat to become it's leader were willing to go to extraordinary lengths to undermine him.....to take his power away and give it to one of their own. The voters are one thing....the elected are another. We saw two attempts by Sanders and things got fixed both times and this time around the Democrats are not even doing primaries in Florida, North Carolina, Massachusetts etc. etc. It's get behind Biden or else......not that I think Dean Phillips or Maryanne Williamson were going to be great challenges but there's going to be no debate about it, no nothing.

Also Corbyn wanted a Palestinian state or something amounting to equal rights for Palestinians and Israelis but something substantive that would have a chance to resolve into solution in time but all that got turned into anti-semitism just like there's a big effort these days to turn anti-zionism or BDS into anti-semitism.....and all these mainstream politicians in the United States and Britain (out of monetary support or fear for their political lives or whatever) leading the charge and quite a number of them not scrutinizing (sometimes deliberately) very hard the nature of the Israel's extreme right wing government. Our liberals are backing Israeli fascists AFAIC. That's how I look at people like Netanyahu, Ben Gvir, Smotrich, Gallant....as fascists.....and these people are also conducting a genocide right before our eyes and the United States govt. is complicit in sending them the bombs and other war material to carry it out. The US govt. has been doing nothing to stop all this killing and destruction as we helplessly watch the IDF starve, shoot and bomb Palestinian civilians.

Speaking of Democratic Party politicians. Every time there is a mass shooting (and they happen a lot) in this country they're up in arms about it though we've been waiting for years for something concrete. What's happening now in Gaza the world gets to see mass killings on an industrial scale that far eclipses most of our mass killing events and occur day after day in multiples of locations and there's some Dem party elected reps (the demonized Justice Democrats particularly demonize d are Tlaib and Omar who happen to be the only two Muslim reps in the entire congress....go figure, like that's an accident) that don't like it for sure and others keeping quiet but the balance of political party leaders is behind Biden and some even seem to think this is a good thing. Our politicians IMO have lost their way as far as any kind of moral integrity.

>173 lriley: The trouble is that when you block reform from the left, it breaks out on the right instead. And it comes carrying guns and bombs.

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/america-the-failed-state/
Chris Hedges (citing an interview with John Ralston Saul -- who incidentally shared a dorm building with my father at McGill )

The above article was written while Trump was still in office, based on the following interview.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXUJEWNHweE (Ah! Telesur! Traitorous propaganda! -- screech the fools, neglecting that something like this could not air on American television -- certainly not since I was a child)

The most important segment, in my view, is this, which deals with the nature and effect of corruption.
https://youtu.be/kXUJEWNHweE?si=Au_MheJlnwmuJJk3&t=1074

The interview as a whole gets more relevant, not less, every year. History may well look back on Biden's Presidency as a momentary respite in a continuous downward slide, and Gaza as the final albatross that takes the system down.

The relevance to this thread should not be too hard to suss out, particularly the "legalized corruption" with respect to our electoral system.

A few excerpts from the article.

TORONTO—Our “corporate coup d’état in slow motion,” as the writer John Ralston Saul calls it, has opened a Pandora’s box of evils that is transforming America into a failed state. The “unholy trinity of corruption, impunity and violence,” he said, can no longer be checked. The ruling elites abjectly serve corporate power to exploit and impoverish the citizenry. Democratic institutions, including the courts, are mechanisms of corporate repression. Financial fraud and corporate crime are carried out with impunity. The decay is exacerbated by the state’s indiscriminate use of violence abroad and at home, where rogue law enforcement agencies harass and arrest citizens and the undocumented and often kill the unarmed. A depressed and enraged population, trapped by chronic unemployment and underemployment, is overdosing on opioids and beset by rising suicide rates. It engages in acts of nihilistic violence, including mass shootings. Hate groups proliferate. The savagery, mayhem and grotesque distortions familiar to those on the outer reaches of empire increasingly characterize American existence. And presiding over it all is the American version of Ubu Roi, playwright Alfred Jarry’s gluttonous, idiotic, vulgar, narcissistic and infantile king, who turned politics into burlesque.

“Congress works through corruption,” Saul, the author of books such as “Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West” and “The Collapse of Globalism and the Reinvention of the World,” said when we spoke in Toronto. “I look at Congress and I see the British Parliament in the late 18th century, the rotten boroughs. Did they have elections? Yes. Were the elections exciting? Yes. They were extremely exciting.”
...
The two political parties are one party—the corporate party. They do not debate substantive issues. They each support the expansion of imperial wars, the bloated military budget, the dictates of global capitalism, the bailing out of Wall Street, punishing austerity measures, assaulting basic civil liberties through wholesale government surveillance and the abolition of due process, and an electoral process that has cemented into place a system of legalized bribery. They battle over cultural tropes such as abortion, gay rights and prayer in schools. We elect politicians based on how we are made to feel about them by the public relations industry. Politics is anti-politics.

The Republican Party built its political base in these culture wars around Christian fascists, nativists and white supremacists. The Democratic Party built its base around those who supported workers’ rights, multiculturalism, diversity and gender equality. The base of each party was used and manipulated by elites. The Republican Party elites had no intention of banning abortion or turning America into a “Christian nation.” The Democratic Party elites had no intention of protecting workers from predatory corporatism. Everyone was sold out. The ascendancy of a populist right, dominated by racists and bigots, is the inevitable product of the corporate coup d’état, Saul said. He warned we should not be complacent because of President Trump’s imbecility. Trump is immensely dangerous. “The insipid,” Thomas Mann wrote in “The Magic Mountain,” “is not synonymous with the harmless.”

“How could a civilization devoted to structure, expertise and answers evolve into other than a coalition of professional groups?” Saul asked in “Voltaire’s Bastards.” “How, then, could the individual citizen not be seen as a serious impediment to getting on with business? This has been obscured by the proposition of painfully simplified abstract notions which are divorced from any social reality and presented as values.”

“The rational elites, obsessed by structure, have become increasingly authoritarian in a modern, administrative way,” he wrote in another section of the book. “The citizens feel insulted and isolated. They look for someone to throw stones on their behalf. Any old stone will do. The cruder the better to crush the self-assurance of the obscure men and their obscure methods. The New Right, with its parody of democratic values, has been a crude but devastating stone with which to punish the modern elites.”

All despotic regimes, Saul said, carry out their final battle for control by contending against public officials and government bureaucrats, the so-called deep state, which views the rise to power of demagogues and their sleazy enablers with alarm. These traditional courtiers, often cynical, ambitious, amoral and subservient to corporate power, nevertheless engage in the decorum and language of democracy. A few with a conscience win minor skirmishes to slow the rise of tyranny. Despots see these courtiers and democratic institutions, no matter how anemic, as a threat. This explains the assaults on the State Department, the Justice Department, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Education and the courts. Despots use their appointees to undermine and destroy these institutions, mocking their existence and questioning the loyalty of the professionals who staff them. The reviled and neutered public employee surrenders or walks away in despair. Last year, the entire senior level of management officials resigned at the State Department. Resignations continue to bleed the diplomatic core, as they do at other agencies and departments, and last week included James D. Melville Jr., the U.S. ambassador to Estonia, and Susan Thornton, the nominee to be assistant secretary for East Asian affairs.

“For the President to say the EU was ‘set up to take advantage of the United States, to attack our piggy bank,’ or that ‘NATO is as bad as NAFTA’ is not only factually wrong, but proves to me that it’s time to go,” Melville said in the post that announced his resignation.

Once a process of deconstruction is complete, the system calcifies into tyranny. There remain no internal mechanisms, even in name, to carry out reform....

At least some of today's proceedings at the ICJ:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ufbfFTi38A

>175 lriley: Full link at >172 davidgn:. But that is one of the more compelling portions.

>176 davidgn: Didn't catch that. Thanks David.

>177 lriley: The other key speech, IMHO, is that by Blinne Ní Ghrâlaigh KC -- https://www.youtube.com/live/g2vQ7suQWGg?si=H9FawzfEruzxSNbK&t=5518 or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w87CcLpVBpc
But the entirety is exceedingly well presented and crystal clear.

I understand Israel will be presenting tomorrow. Expect caterwauling.

Also, expect this.
Israel Warns Hospitals To PREPARE For Regional War
Breaking Points
1.15M subscribers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhTtuohEI5s

Judge Nap has an excellent review with Sachs, who is entirely cognizant of the stunning historical significance of this day.

Prof. Jeffrey Sachs: Does Israel Have a Defense at UN Court?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWsAhHnHFNg

Meanwhile, Mearsheimer is still live with him.
Prof. John Mearsheimer: Not a war crime, but GENOCIDE.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3GmgMa-4ac

>178 davidgn: I was about to add Ni Ghralaigh's speech to #175 when I found out you'd linked these videos already.

Watched the Breaking Points thing already too. They're talking about Israeli hospitals for Israeli soldiers as in a threat to expand the war to other countries. I get why Israel's right wingers want this but the Biden Administration supporting any of this would be insane.

Keeping in mind as well.....Israel has broken Gaza....shattered it into pieces but when they're not on the idea of shoving the Palestinians into the Sinai desert their other idea is other countries are going to rebuild Gaza for them which is outrageous too keeping in mind as well Israel will want to control the territory still with even an heavier hand and they're trashing their own economy to do all this. This is a country of some 15 million souls combined Jewish and Palestinian citizens and the right wing psychopaths running the Israeli govt. are pretty much telling the United States and the rest of the world how it's going to be.

>180 lriley: Great overview and excerpting of the testimony by Owen Jones. Excellent half-hour digest.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXRCfGnXVcs
And ends with a discussion for the news blackout in the UK.

Gaza daily deaths exceed all other major conflicts in 21st century: Oxfam (Al Jazeera)

The killing of civilians in Gaza is at a scale unprecedented in recent history, monitoring groups have said, as Israel continues to pound the besieged coastal enclave more than three months into the war. Britain-based charity Oxfam said on Thursday that the daily death toll of Palestinians in Israel’s war on Gaza surpasses that of any other major conflict in the 21st century, while survivors remain at high risk due to hunger, diseases and cold, as well as ongoing Israeli bombardments. “Israel’s military is killing Palestinians at an average rate of 250 people a day, which massively exceeds the daily death toll of any other major conflict of recent years,” Oxfam said in a statement. For comparison, the charity provided a list of average deaths per day in other conflicts since the turn of the century: 96.5 in Syria, 51.6 in Sudan, 50.8 in Iraq, 43.9 in Ukraine, 23.8 in Afghanistan, and 15.8 in Yemen. Oxfam said the crisis is further compounded by Israel’s restrictions on the entry of aid into Gaza, where only 10 percent of weekly food aid that is needed gets in. This poses a serious risk of starvation for those who survive the relentless bombardment, it said. Also on Thursday, United States-based rights group Human Rights Watch (HRW) released its World Report 2024, which said civilians in Gaza have been “targeted, attacked, abused, and killed over the past year at a scale unprecedented in the recent history of Israel and Palestine”... HRW noted that Israel’s war on Gaza has included “acts of collective punishment that amount to war crimes and include the use of starvation as a method of warfare”, including cutting off essential services such as water and electricity and blocking the entry of most critical humanitarian aid. Meanwhile, in the occupied West Bank, HRW said during the first eight months of 2023, incidents of settler violence against Palestinians and their property reached the highest daily average since the United Nations started recording this data in 2006...

Here's today's ICJ stream, c/o Consortium News. Due to start in 10 minutes.
https://twitter.com/i/broadcasts/1BRJjPoMRmaKw

ETA:
Or on YouTube via Middle East Eye.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ho6fvxdoYXM

Some half-assed notes.

#1 (Tal Becker)
A seamless weave of lies and truth. Top marks for sophistry.
Zinger from first speaker: "The Genocide Convention was a solemn promise made to the Jewish people -- and to all people -- of never again." Gets both the false pieties and the priorities straight.
----
#2 (Malcolm Shaw)

"Flummoxed" are they?
"Not a dispute...a 'unispute'"?
The entire thrust of the second speaker's statements is that this mess is down to a failure of South African diplomatic etiquette -- failure of providing Israel opportunity to explain its position and "assuage the SA's concerns" in a bilateral fashion -- (with overtones suggesting incompetence and/or malice).

No one cries "flummoxed" like the English. I see why the Israelis chose English barristers.

Proceeds to lean heavily on the various fig leaves and ass-covering official directives the IDF put out, minimizes all the genocidal rhetoric as misunderstood in its provenance and import and accuses SA of failing to see "the big picture." Statements "clearly rhetorical," "express anguish."

Backhandedly accuses SA of faulty biblical criticism (!) re: Amalek, declines to elaborate. Exceedingly weak. Accuses SA of selective quoting of the Amalek speech, reads at greater length in harumphing manner, does not explain or show why the more verbose framing changes the meaning or import (which it does not).

Accuses SA of complicity in genocide by providing succor to Hamas.

Much hand-wringing over the poor hostages (with no mention of having murdered the other side's negotiator, on Lebanese territory). Much stomping on about right to self-defense, which the rest of the world recognizes, but SA fails to. Hamas' actions fall within the statutory definition of genocide. Israel's response considered and necessary, in line with international law.

---
Coffee Break
---
#3 (Galit Raguan)
Hamas levelled Gaza themselves with booby trapped buildings and misfiring rockets. Especially the infamous hospital missile incident.
Doubling down on hospitals as Hamas bases. Blather. Basically, Hamas is everywhere, which is why the Israelis target everything. How can you blame them?
Look at the maps the IDF gave the Gazans of the safe zones. They posted them right on Twitter. (Of course, they shut down their internet, but hey, the people who need to see those maps -- like the people behind the dais -- can see them!)
And if the IDF *did* bomb the safe zones, it's because Hamas was there.

It's Hamas who is thwarting humanitarian efforts, rather than the IDF / COGAT restricting access to a trickle and bombing UN and aid workers. Hamas steal the aid (partly true).

Lots of reference to Israel's fine humanitarian works (carried out precisely to defend against things like genocide charges -- or else they might be more effective).
----
4. (Omri Sender)
Claims more food being delivered in late two weeks than before October 7, re-establishing bakeries, field and floating hospitals. (All in the past few weeks). (At best, evidence of reconsidering plans for immediate annihilation and concern with optics). You can take the word of the Israeli state, so nothing need be done.
Best observation I've seen on this one: Doesn't it look like these suspiciously recent changes, to the extent they are legitimate and meaningful, will have been made specifically to bolster their case at the ICJ? https://youtu.be/RTe8GtJOd50?si=n0MeRcZ1rr7FZkcr&t=1622
----
5: (Christopher Staker)
Will have to return to this later

So the war starts with Yemen.

Would have been easier to just have a ceasefire.

How can so many in the West so easily ignore genocide? (Al Jazeera)

Responses to genocide are often determined by where the crime is committed, and what the victims look like... curiously, many in the West seems to ignore mass atrocities like these with ease. And Western leaders have become skilled at evading calling them what they are: crimes against humanity. Why? In part, this is because Western collective consciousness has long been socialised with the assumption that the non-West is naturally a place of unrest, deprivation, violence and, all in all, of inescapable backwardness... So, whether there is a genocide in Gaza or Darfur, those in the West often remain content with idly watching the atrocities and suffering from afar... Equally, when these victims inevitably look to the all powerful West for help, it reaffirms the West’s self-perception as superior and deserving guardians of the global order. Of course, Western inaction against the ongoing genocide in Gaza also builds on a sordid history of anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian racism and Islamophobia... But is the West even capable of condemning mass atrocities and crimes against humanity? Sure, but only when it serves its interests. The Western media coverage was uncompromising in its condemnation of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its solidarity with the Ukrainian resistance fighting occupation. But that was only because Ukrainians are European, “with blue eyes and blond hair”, and “look like us”... After all, actually stopping a genocide requires morally and ethically grounded international action, where the priority is not self-aggrandising but bringing an immediate end to crimes against humanity. Yet, as history’s most televised genocide continues unabated in Gaza, it seems that in the current international system there is no built-in moral commitment to saving the lives and humanity of people who don’t “look like us”. Let’s hope, though, that the South Africa-led genocide case against Israel in the International Court of Justice proves me wrong.

>186 John5918: So we'd rather hand the Houthis the moral high ground (which they now openly claim) of acting to preventing a genocide that we actively support, and make martyrs out of them on that cause, than have a ceasefire. God this is fucked.

ETA: Owen Jones interviews David Wearing

Why Bombing Yemen Could Spark Catastrophe - w. Dr. David Wearing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmCEKvdWOxo

>187 davidgn: I expected this. If we've warships in the Red Sea already to protect shipping then sooner or later they were going to respond to provocations. What would be the point otherwise? It's stupid and we're backing the wrong side and the Biden Administration could force a ceasefire---even force Israel to the negotiation table if it wanted to. All that said if a shipping conglomerate is sending a container ship full of goods through there even so they're taking a big risk that that boat could end up on the bottom of that sea which will be enough for insurers to jack up insurance costs and the price of goods is going to rise just because. As long as they have the means the Houthis only have to be lucky once and to reiterate when the US Navy shoots down 20 Houthi rockets (estimated cost $2,000 to $20,000 per) our rockets cost $2,000,000 each.

>188 lriley: I was recently privy to some internal presentations from a large financial firm. Lots of talk about the oversupply in shipping capacity, projecting modest inflationary effects mitigated by that oversupply, and anticipating that freight rates will seriously tank as soon as this is all over.
The problem is they don't realize it's not going to be over. Normalcy bias is strong.

ETA: Sal has an update likewise questioning how this makes any economic or strategic sense.
US & UK Strike Houthis | Impact on Global Shipping? | Is the Red Sea Open?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OaKk-PI4jpE

Today, Chris Hedges interviews The General's Son, Miko Peled

How Israel indoctrinates its people w/Miko Peled | The Chris Hedges Report
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CU0Uc-PKe9Y

>189 davidgn: It always is. The Houthis have said that when Israel stops its genocide in Palestine they'll stop menacing international shipping. The best and easiest solution is a ceasefire and some kind of negotiating. Let in all the aid that they have. From what I understand there are warehouses full of medical supplies, tents, food, solar heating panels etc. etc. that Israel has rejected. I still have no idea how this works out.....all of the destroyed infrastructure and I'm sure Hamas fighters are still around and really getting the IDF out of Gaza altogether and bringing in UN peacekeeping troops might be one way to settle things at least temporarily.

Pascal Lottaz sees this as the first step towards Tehran. Hoping he's overly pessimistic. (Gut says no.)

US Decided To Have War With Iran! Act 1: Setting The Stage To Play The Victim.
Neutrality Studies
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGjSB4b1RHY

Amb. Murray's write-up of ICJ Day 1 (reproduced here in full, as always, given the circumstances. As Amb. Murray mentions, "It is very difficult to know what counts as terrorism these days."). His Day 2 writeup is not posted as of now.

Your Man in the Hague (in a Good Way).
January 11, 2024 in Uncategorized by craig
I attended the hearing on Thursday of South Africa’s case against Israel for genocide at the International Court of Justice. I was able to sit in the public gallery and watch all the proceedings. I was, however, handicapped in reporting by the fact that we were not allowed pens or pencils (though we were allowed paper). I asked the Head of Security at the ICJ why pens were not allowed in the public gallery. He told me, with a perfectly straight face, that they could be used as a weapon. So bereft of my deadly ballpoint, this account is less detailed and more impressionistic than I would wish to give you.

I had arrived at the Hague early Wednesday morning on 10 January, having flown in from Indonesia. This had involved four flights, to Singapore, Milan, Copenhagen and finally Schiphol. Wednesday was spent in a frantic search of the charity shops of the Hague for warm clothing, as I had only beach clothes with me apart from a friends’ old ski jacket. I called first at the ICJ to get information on how to attend Thursday morning’s session.

A young lady informed me that I had to queue outside the small arched gate in the wall. It would open at 6am and the first 15 members of the public would be admitted to the gallery. I asked where I should queue exactly. She said she doubted it was necessary, it should be fine to arrive at 6am on Thursday.

I am staying in a hotel just five minutes’ walk away, so at 10pm on Wednesday evening, with the temperature already at -4°C, I went to check if a queue had formed. Nobody was there. I returned to the hotel, but every hour went to check for a queue I should join. Nobody was there at midnight or 1am, but at 2am there were already 8 people, sat around in three very cold little groups. Everybody looked extremely cold, but everybody was friendly and talkative.

The first group, right next to the gate, consisted of three young Dutch women, who sat on a blanket and were well provided with flasks of hot coffee and boxes of baklava. The second group were three young students of international law, all of them Arabs, who had attended other cases and knew the ropes here. The third group were two young women, one Dutch and one Arab, sitting on a bench, looking cold and miserable.

We were soon all talking together and it was plain that every one of us was motivated by support for the Palestinians in their struggle against the relentless occupation. Shortly afterwards, another Arab gentleman arrived, older and authoritative, who rather incongruously had been schooled in Scotland at Gordonstoun. A tall Tunisian man kept walking back and forth making phone calls; he appeared pre-occupied and rather shy.

We had all been given similar information about the number of people who would be admitted, though some had been told 15, some 14 and some 13. Our numbers were stable at 12 for several hours. Then about 4.30am a car drew up and out jumped Varsha Gandikota-Nellutla of Progressive International. She had come as a place-keeper for Jeremy Corbyn and Jean-Luc Melenchon. Others of her organisation arrived bit by bit. Then as 6am approached, there started a small flood of people arriving, many with Palestinian flags and wearing keffiyehs.

It really was seriously cold. After four hours my toes had gone from very painful to having no feeling, and my fingers were becoming unresponsive. As so often, from 5am the cold grew more and more invasive. Melenchon and Corbyn had arrived at 5.30am to take their places in the queue, Melenchon as voluble as ever, wide awake, delighted to meet everybody, and lecturing on economics and the organisation of society to anybody who would listen. As my brain had by now frozen, that did not really include me. Jeremy was equally typically Jeremy, concerned that he did not want to take anybody’s position in the queue.

Then as preparations to open the gate began on the other side, things took an unpleasant turn. Those of us who had been there all night knew our order of arrival, but we began to be swamped by latecomers pushing past and around us to get to the gate. I had to be assertive and try to marshal the queue. Activists in the crowd challenged this, suggesting that the criterion for entry should not be time of arrival, but that Palestinians should be given the places.

It all became distressing. One Palestinian lady from Sweden who was just behind 14th in the queue became deeply distressed at the idea of not being admitted, and a couple of Palestinian gentlemen who had arrived after 6am started to determinedly push past the queue. I made a little counter speech explaining that we were all here to help the Palestinians, but none of us knew each other’s stories, and the question of what use someone’s attendance would be to the Palestinian cause was as important as gratifying individual feelings of the terribly aggrieved.

The diffident Tunisian was replaced in the queue by the former Tunisian President whose place he had been keeping – a really pleasant and diffident man, but the timing did not help the situation. In the end we were admitted in groups of five and processed. One of the Dutch ladies who had been the very first to arrive gave up her place to a Palestinian. I left clutching my pass, number 9, and returned to the hotel and straight into a hot bath. The pain from my toes and fingers as they thawed was really unpleasant.

Then it was quickly back for 9am and a lot of excessive security hassle and removal of deadly wallets and pens. Then we were escorted into the public gallery.

The Palace of Peace was built by Andrew Carnegie, the extraordinarily morally complex Fifer, a vicious and incredibly successful capitalist monopolist who also wished to end all war and to improve the lives of the poor everywhere. Its fairytale appearance, with its folly of a tower perched on a tower, belies its steel frame and concrete construction, and inside it could be any grand City Chambers in Scotland, with majolica tiling and solid Armitage Shanks in the toilets. Extraordinarily, the building is still owned and managed by the Carnegie Foundation.

For a building that was built as a world court, strangely it does not appear to contain a court room. The Grand Chamber is just a large empty hall, taking up one side-wing of the building. A comparatively modern, simple and gently curved dais has been inserted across the length of the hall and held a long table and seventeen chairs for the judges, but this structure looked temporary, as if it gets taken away and the building used for weddings. The parties to the case were seated on simple stacking chairs arranged in the body of the hall beneath the dais, again looking more like a wedding than a court. Above the judges spread a mighty stained-glass window, of garish colours and rather dubious quality.

I have written of my faith in the International Court of Justice, in its history of impartial judgment and in its system of election by the UN General Assembly. The ICJ has rather unfairly been tarnished by the reputation of its much younger sister the International Criminal Court. The ICC is rightly derided as a Western tool, but that really is not true of the ICJ. On Palestine alone, it has ruled that the Israeli “wall” in the West Bank is illegal and that Israel has no right of self-defence in the territory of which it is the occupying power. It ruled that the UK must decolonise the Chagos Islands, a cause close to my own heart.

There was every reason for those of us opposing the genocide to have travelled hopefully to the Hague.

In addition to the normal fifteen judges of the court, each of the parties to the dispute – South Africa and Israel – had exercised their right to nominate an additional judge. After the judges filed in to the court, proceedings started with these two judges taking an oath of impartiality, which gave us the first Israeli lie of the case before it had even started.

The nomination of Aharon Barak as the Israeli judge on the International Court of Justice is extraordinary, given that as President of Israel’s Supreme Court he refused to implement the ICJ judgment on the illegality of the wall, stating that he knew the facts of the matter better than the ICJ.

Barak has an extremely long history of accepting all forms of repression of Palestinians by the Israeli Defence Force as legal for “national security”, and in particular has repeatedly refused to rule against the longstanding Israeli programme of demolitions of Palestinian homes as collective punishment. That reads across directly to the destruction of civilian infrastructure in Gaza now.

Barak is viewed as a “liberal” in Israel in the constitutional struggle between the judiciary and executive. But that is about the ability of Netanyahu’s corruption to go unchallenged, not about Palestinian rights. By appointing his apparent opponent Barak to the ICJ, Netanyahu has exhibited typical cunning. If Barak rules against Israel, Netanyahu can claim his domestic opponents are traitors to national security. If Barak rules in favour of Israel, Netanyahu can claim Israeli liberals support the destruction of Gaza.

I expect it is the latter claim we shall be seeing.

I was seated in the public gallery, and watching the seventeen judges occupied much of my time throughout the hearing. Acres have been written about which way who will jump. There is a too-easy assumption they will be swayed by their domestic governments. That varies from judge to judge.

The President of the court, Joan Donoghue, is a US State Department, Clinton hack who has never formed an original idea in her life, and I should be astonished if she starts now. I half-expected her strings to actually be visible, emerging from holes in the hall’s magnificent deep relief-panelled wooden ceiling. But others are more puzzling.

There has been no more rabidly anti-Palestinian national elite than that of Germany. Rather than channel feelings of inherited guilt into opposition to genocide in general, they seem to have concluded that they need to promote alternative genocides to make amends. Added to which, the German judge on the ICJ, Nolte, does not come preceded by a liberal reputation. But friends in Munich tell me that Nolte has a particular interest in the law of armed conflict, and is a stickler for intellectual rigour. Their view is that his professional self-esteem will be the key factor, and that only points one way with regard to what the Israeli Defence Force has done so blatantly to the civilian population in Gaza.

On the other hand, there is a Ugandan judge on the ICJ who you might assume would align with South Africa. But Uganda, for reasons which frankly I do not fathom, joined the United States and Israel in opposing Palestine’s membership of the International Criminal Court, on the grounds Palestine is not a real state. Similarly India you might expect to support South Africa as a key member of BRICS. But India also has a Hindu Nationalist government prone to hideous Islamophobia. I haven’t found any evidence of Judge Bhandari’s domestic record on inter-communal issues.

But it has been suggested to me that in this case before the World Court now, the UN General Assembly may have shot itself in the foot in replacing a particular British judge with the Indian, an election viewed at the time as a triumph in the UN for the developing world. My point is this: that these questions are very complicated, and much of the analysis I have seen, including from some dear colleagues, has been simplistic mince.

Not only is the Great Hall of Justice not fitted out as a courtroom, for a World Court the public gallery is minuscule. Running along one side of the hall, high enough to kill you if you fell over the balcony edge, it is just two seats deep. Furthermore the fitted theatre-style seats are a hundred years old and in a state of near collapse. Your arse is eight inches off the ground and the seats now tilt so your thighs are four inches off the ground and the whole contraption is throwing you forward and over the edge. Rather than fix the seats, the Carnegie Foundation have fixed a strong cable from wall to wall above the balcony rail, acting in effect as a second rail giving six inches more protection.

With one third of the public gallery screened off to house the audio-visual projection and webcasting facility, there were just 24 available seats in the public gallery. There were us 14 from the queue and the rest were for representatives of key NGOs and UN organisations, such as Human Rights Watch and the World Health Organisation. They were allowed pens, obviously being judged respectable enough not to kill anybody with them. I may in fact have acquired a pen from one of them at some stage, purely of course to assist them. Or I may not – it is very difficult to know what counts as terrorism these days.

South Africa opened with statements from their Ambassador and their Minister of Justice Ronald Lamola, and they opened with a bang. I rather expected South Africa to start with some soft soap about how much they had condemned Hamas and sympathised with Israel over 7 October, but no. Within the first thirty seconds South Africa had launched both the word “Nakba” and the phrase “apartheid state” at Israel. We had to hang on to our collapsing seats. This was going to be something.

Minister of Justice Lamola came out with the first memorable phrase of the case. Palestinians had suffered “75 years of apartheid, 56 years of occupation, 13 years of blockade”. It was very well done. Before handing over to the legal team, the “agents” of the South African state, in terms of the Court’s statute, were framing the argument. This injustice, and history itself, did not start on October 7.

There was a second important point of framing. South Africa stressed that in order for the request for “provisional measures” to be granted, it did not need at this stage to be proven that Israel was committing genocide. It only had to be shown that actions of Israel were prima facie capable of falling as genocide within the terms of the Genocide Convention.

The legal team then led off with Dr. Adila Hassim. She outlined that Israel was in breach of the Genocide Convention Article II a), b), c) and d).

On a), killing of Palestinians, she outlined the simple facts without embellishment. 23,200 Palestinians were killed, 70% of them women and children. Over 7,000 were missing presumed dead under the rubble. Over 200 times, Israel had dropped 2,000lb bombs into the very residential areas in southern Gaza into which Palestinians had been ordered to evacuate.

60,000 people were seriously wounded. 355,000 homes had been damaged or destroyed. What could be observed was a substantial pattern of conduct indicating a genocidal intent.

Dr Hassim was notably calm and measured in her words and delivery. But on occasion when detailing atrocities, particularly against children, her voice trembled a little with emotion. The judges, who were generally fidgety (on which much more to follow), looked up and paid closer attention at that.

The next lawyer, Tembeka Ngcukaitobi (only South Africa spoke today) addressed the question of genocidal intent. He had perhaps the easiest task, because he could relate numerous instances of senior Israeli ministers, senior officials and military officers referring to Palestinians as “animals” and calling for their complete destruction and that of Gaza itself, emphasising that there are no innocent Palestinian civilians.

What Ngcukaitobi did particularly well was emphasise the effective transmission of these genocidal ideas from senior government to the troops on the ground, who quoted the same phrases and genocidal ideas in filming themselves committing and justifying atrocities. He emphasises that the Israeli government had ignored its obligation to prevent and act against incitement to genocide in both official and popular culture.

He concentrated particularly on Netanyahu’s invocation of the fate of Amalek and the demonstrable effect of that move on the opinions and actions of Israeli soldiers. Israeli ministers, he said, could not now deny the genocidal intent of their plain words. If they did not mean it, they should not have said it.

The venerable and eminent Professor John Dugard, a striking figure in his bright scarlet gown, then addressed questions of jurisdiction of the court and of the status of South Africa to bring the case – it is likely that Israel will rely heavily on technical argument to try to give the judges an escape route. Dugard pointed out the obligations of all state parties under the Genocide Convention to act to prevent Genocide, and the judgment of the court.

Dugard quoted Article VIII of the Genocide Convention and read out in full Paragraph 431 of the court’s judgment in Bosnia vs Serbia,

This obviously does not mean that the obligation to prevent genocide only comes into being when perpetration of genocide commences ; that would be absurd, since the whole point of the obligation is to prevent, or attempt to prevent, the occurrence of the act. In fact, a State’s obligation to prevent, and the corresponding duty to act, arise at the instant that the State learns of, or should normally have learned of, the existence of a serious risk that genocide will be committed. From that moment onwards, if the State has available to it means likely to have a deterrent effect on those suspected of preparing genocide, or reasonably suspected of harbouring specific intent (dolus specialis), it is under a duty to make such use of these means as the circumstances permit.

I must confess I was very gratified. Dugard’s argument was precisely the same, and quoted the exact same passages and paragraphs, as my article of 7 December explaining why the Genocide Convention should be invoked.

The judges particularly enjoyed Dugard’s points, enthusiastically rustling through documents and underlining things. Dealing with thousands of dead children was a bit difficult for them, but give them a nice jurisdictional point and they were in their element.

Next was Professor Max du Plessis, whose particularly straightforward manner and plainness of speech brought a new energy to proceedings. He said that Palestinians were asking the court to protect the most basic of their rights – they had the right to exist.

Palestinians had suffered 50 years of oppression, and Israel had for decades considered itself above and beyond the reach of the law, ignoring both ICJ judgments and security council resolutions. That context is important. Palestinian individuals have rights to exist protected as members of a group in terms of the Genocide Convention.

South Africa’s case was founded on respect for international law and was based on law and on fact. They had taken the decision not to show the court atrocity videos and photos, of which there were many thousands. Their case was of law and fact, they did not need to introduce shock and emotion and turn the court into a theatre.

This was a shrewd blow by Du Plessis. The hearings were originally scheduled for two hours each side. The South Africans had been told, very late, that was increased to three because the Israelis insist on showing their hour long October 7 atrocity video. But in fact the court’s guidelines reflect a longstanding resistance to this sort of material which must be used “sparsely”. If 23,000 people are dead it does not add intellectual force to show the bodies, and the same is true of the 1,000 dead from 7 October.

Du Plessis concluded that the destruction of Palestine’s infrastructure that supports human life, the displacement of 85% of residents into ever smaller areas where they were still bombed – all were plain examples of genocidal intent.

But undoubtedly the highlight of the entire morning was the astonishing presentation by Irish KC Blinne Ni Ghràlaigh. Her job was to demonstrate that if the Court did not order “provisional measures”, then irreparable damage would be done.

There are times when a writer must admit defeat. I cannot adequately convey to you the impression she made in that courtroom. Like the rest of the team she eschewed atrocity porn and set out the simple facts plainly but elegantly. She adopted the ploy used by all the South African team, of not using emotional language herself but quoting at length deeply emotional language from senior UN officials. Her outline of daily deaths by type was devastating.

I simply urge you to listen to her. “Each day over ten Palestinians will have one or more limbs amputated, many without anaesthetic …”

I should write more now about the court. The South African delegation sat beside their lawyers on the right of the court, the Israeli delegation on their left, each of about 40 people. The South Africans were colourful with South African flag scarves and keffiyehs draped over shoulders. There was a mixture of South Africans and Palestinians, with Deputy Foreign Minister of the Palestinian Authority Amaar Hijazi prominent, which I was glad to see.

The South African delegation was buoyant and mutually supporting, with a lot of inclusive body language and comparative animation. The Israeli delegation was the opposite of animated. It appeared severe and disdainful – it was as though the members were all under instruction to get on with some work and not particularly notice the proceedings were happening at all. They were generally youthful, and I think cocksure would be a fair description. When Blinne was speaking they seemed particularly keen to ensure everyone could see they were not listening.

You would not think from the body language it was Israel that stands accused. In fact the only people in the court whose demeanour was particularly dodgy and guilty were the judges. They absolutely looked like they really did not want to be there. They seemed deeply uncomfortable, fidgeted and fumbled papers a lot, and seldom looked directly at the lawyers speaking.

It occurred to me that the people who really did not want to be in the Court at all were the judges, because it is in fact the judges and the Court itself on trial. The fact of genocide is incontrovertible and had been plainly set out. But several of the judges are desperate to find a way to please the USA and Israel and avoid countering the current Zionist narrative, the adoption of which is necessary to keep your feet comfortably under the table of the elite.

What counts more for them, personal comfort, the urgings of NATO, future wealthy sinecures? Are they prepared to ditch any real notion of international law for those things?

That is the real question before the court. The International Court of Justice is on trial.

During Blinne’s talk, the President of the court suddenly took an intense interest in her startling red iPad, the colour of a particularly bright nail varnish. This came out several times during the hearing, and I could never put these iPad appearances together with what had just been discussed – it was not that cases or documents had just been cited to look up, for example.

The final speaker for the South African legal team was Vaughn Lowe, and he had the delicate task of countering Israel’s defence, which they have kept secret from the court until it is made. Countering arguments you have not seen yet is a tricky proposition, and for me this was the legal tour de force of the entire morning. Vaughn Lowe’s performance was outstanding.

He started by asserting that South Africa did have standing to bring the case, repeating Durand’s points about the duty of states to act to prevent genocide under the Genocide Convention. He said there was a dispute in the terms of the Convention, over whether or not genocide had occurred. South Africa had framed this dispute in a series of Diplomatic Notes Verbale sent to the Israeli government and not satisfactorily replied to.

Lowe said it was acknowledged that a series of individual incidents were being investigated by the International Criminal Court as war crimes, but the existence of other crimes did not preclude their being part of a wider genocide. Genocide was a crime which by its nature tends to come along with other war crimes committed in furtherance of the Genocide.

Finally Lowe said that genocide is never justified. It is absolute, a crime in itself. No matter how appalling the atrocities committed by Hamas against Israel or Israeli citizens, a genocidal response was not appropriate and never could be.

Vaughn Lowe stated that South Africa asked for action against Israel and not against Hamas, simply because Hamas was not a state and thus not subject to the jurisdiction of the court. But the fact that the court could not act against Hamas must not prevent it from acting against Israel to prevent the current urgent danger of genocide. Nor must the court be swayed by Israeli offers of voluntary restraint. Israel’s failure to acknowledge any wrongdoing whatsoever in its actions in “grinding Gaza into the dust” showed Israel could not be trusted in any assurances to adjust behaviour, as it believed it had done no wrong.

The session ended with the South African Ambassador reiterating the provisional measures South Africa now wished the court to impose. These are:

(1) The State of Israel shall immediately suspend its military operations in and against Gaza.

(2) The State of Israel shall ensure that any military or irregular armed units which may be directed, supported or influenced by it, as well as any organisations and persons which may be subject to its control, direction or influence, take no steps in furtherance of the military operations referred to point (1) above.

(3) The Republic of South Africa and the State of Israel shall each, in accordance with their obligations under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, in relation to the Palestinian people, take all reasonable measures within their power to prevent genocide.

(4) The State of Israel shall, in accordance with its obligations under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, in relation to the Palestinian people as group protected by the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, desist from the commission of any and all acts within the scope of Article II of the Convention, in particular:
 (a) killing members of the group;
 (b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to the members of the group;
 (c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; and
 (d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.

(5) The State of Israel shall, pursuant to point (4)(c) above, in relation to Palestinians, desist from, and take all measures within its power including the rescinding of relevant orders, of restrictions and/or of prohibitions to prevent:
 (a) the expulsion and forced displacement from their homes;
 (b) the deprivation of:
  (i) access to adequate food and water;
  (ii) access to humanitarian assistance, including access to adequate fuel, shelter, clothes, hygiene and sanitation;
  (iii) medical supplies and assistance; and
 (c) the destruction of Palestinian life in Gaza.

(6) The State of Israel shall, in relation to Palestinians, ensure that its military, as well as any irregular armed units or individuals which may be directed, supported or otherwise influenced by it and any organizations and persons which may be subject to its control, direction or influence, do not commit any acts described in (4) and (5) above, or engage in direct and public incitement to commit genocide, conspiracy to commit genocide, attempt to commit genocide, or complicity in genocide, and insofar as they do engage therein, that steps are taken towards their punishment pursuant to Articles I, II, III and IV of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

(7) The State of Israel shall take effective measures to prevent the destruction and ensure the preservation of evidence related to allegations of acts within the scope of Article II of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide; to that end, the State of Israel shall not act to deny or otherwise restrict access by fact-finding missions, international mandates and other bodies to Gaza to assist in ensuring the preservation and retention of said evidence.

(8) The State of Israel shall submit a report to the Court on all measures taken to give effect to this Order within one week, as from the date of this Order, and thereafter at such regular intervals as the Court shall order, until a final decision on the case is rendered by the Court.

(9) The State of Israel shall refrain from any action and shall ensure that no action is taken which might aggravate or extend the dispute before the Court or make it more difficult to resolve it.

With that, we closed the argument. Next, Israel responds.

>193 davidgn: For now, here's Jeremy Scahill on Day 2. (The Hill)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmQnBXFM-qs

‘It is a time of witch hunts in Israel’: teacher held in solitary confinement for posting concern about Gaza deaths (Guardian)

An unlikely charge of intent to commit treason landed Meir Baruchin, a grey-haired, softly spoken history and civics teacher, in the solitary confinement wing of Jerusalem’s notorious “Russian Compound” prison in early November. The evidence compiled by police who handcuffed him, then drove to his apartment and ransacked it as he watched, was a series of Facebook posts he’d made, mourning the civilians killed in Gaza, criticising the Israeli military, and warning against wars of revenge...

Pascal Lottaz's analysis.

ICJ-Case is HOPELESS for Israel. But Technicalities Might Save It After All.
Because South Africa at the moment is not seeking to have Israel already convicted of Genocide—that is reserved for a later date—but only wants to move the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to issue "provisional measures" in the form of a cease and desist order, Isreal really stands no chance of "disproving" at the current stage its Genocide. But what Israel can do, and indeed it staying to do, is to show that due to technicalities, the Genocide Convention does not apply and the case should be dismissed. It is a technicality in the rules of the court that a dispute between the parties must already have existed before one party can drag the other one before the ICJ. If this argument sticks, then it's up to the judges in question if they will go on with the case or not. In this video, I'll discuss the basis of these arguments and also look at the composition of the court to figure out how likely it is that the court will take the case forward.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJ-CotXpBy8

Schumer and Cardin and a number of republican and democratic senators are going to host this event with families of hostages to bring the hostages back home. It seems to me to be nothing short of a stunt to propagandize on behalf of Netanyahu's government and to keep more donor money coming their way. It should be clear to anyone who's watched and has a clue that after 100+ days of this clusterfuck that the only way the hostages are going to come back alive is via a ceasefire and then negotiation. The Israeli govt. and military do not want to do either. It's not in Benjamin's interest to end this. He keeps his job by keeping his war going. If his war stops he loses his job and he goes to jail. He and the IDF want to bomb, starve and shoot. The Israeli military has not rescued a single hostage in all the time from Oct. 7 until now. They had a chance to rescue three who got away from their captors and because their ground forces pretty much kill anything they see shot all three of them dead. It's shoot first and don't bother with questions later. The longer Hamas and/or other paramilitary actors hold on to these captives the more likelihood that they die.....pretty much from the same things that Palestinians die from. If they're older and need medications, food, clean water they're as shit out of luck as anyone else in Gaza. If younger and stronger they're still going to be on a diet and still going to be subject to a 2000 lb. bomb dropping on their head or a sniper picking them off. These centrist Democratic Party assholes are doing what they do best and that's bullshit.

Alastair Crooke today with Judge Nap.
Alastair Crooke: US Lured Into Battlescape in Gaza, Yemen and now Iraq
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gXBVErwS18

https:// www. craigmurray. org.uk/archives/2024/01/your-man-in-the-hague-in-a-good-way-part-2/

Your Man in the Hague (In a Good Way) Part 2
January 14, 2024 in Uncategorized by craig
There was a very good feel at the end of the South African presentation on day one. Everyone felt it had gone extremely well, and left very little room for the court to wriggle away from provisional measures. We left the public gallery, and I went with Corbyn and Mélenchon to meet the South African delegation. This caused some concern to the security officials, who told us that members of the public had to leave immediately and not meet delegates or speak to the media, who were grouped outside the court but still within the precincts.

This was fairly impractical as the media very much wanted to speak with Corbyn and Mélenchon. There was a lot of flapping of arms and waving. All my friends of the queue had left, while I stayed sticking close to Jeremy, partly because I didn’t like to leave him unsupported, but mostly because his wife Laura was somewhere looking after my phone. The ICJ staff seemed scared to tell off Corbyn and Mélenchon, so kept getting pretty shirty with me as a proxy, saying we must leave.

It was quite strange. The situation was very friendly; there was no tension. There were about sixty delegates and about the same number of journalists, who were all supposed to be there. Then there were Corbyn, Mélenchon and me, who were apparently supposed to have left, but whose presence made no actual difference to events. People being in slightly the wrong place entirely peacefully after proceedings had finished, seemed to me an unnecessary source of anger. But a succession of female officials arrived, getting increasingly cross.

At this stage the South African delegation returned to their allocated office inside the building to finalise the formal press statement. We went with them. I was chatting to Amaar Hijazi, Palestine’s Deputy Foreign Minister, who I know a bit. One of the ICJ ladies came in with a clipboard, asked for silence, and then asked the assembled group in the manner of a public proclamation: “is this a legal meeting or a political meeting?”

Nobody seemed inclined to answer. So I replied “That’s rather a philosophical question. I am not sure if you can make that simple binary distinction”. Rather more usefully, Varsha Gandikota-Nellutla of Progressive International assured her it was a legal meeting, and the official said “good, political meetings off the premises”, waving her clipboard for no apparent reason. After a bit of a conflab we went out again.

I was enjoying Mélenchon enormously; he seemed to have unlimited stores of bonhomie and was unstoppably voluble with everyone. Whether the security guards wanted a lecture on workers’ cooperatives I am not sure, but they certainly got one.

We wandered back out the front door again and back into interviews. Two ladies came up to me looking very stern and said I must leave. Jeremy was giving an interview to Israeli TV and Mélenchon had bustled back into the building. One of the ladies said to me, “I am asking you to leave and you are refusing to do what I say”. I replied, “Oh no, certainly not. Of course I am doing what you say. Just very slowly”.

By now I had three enormous security officers with me, as I tried to keep an eye on Jeremy as he drifted through the milling journalists, while I kept running in to people I knew. I have to say the security people were very friendly, and seemed unsure why they were shadowing me too. Shortly a fourth turned up, a mountain of a man with a bald head and beard, who said, “Here you are; we’ve been looking for you everywhere”, which seemed strange. Possibly they couldn’t see me surrounded by their massive bouncers.

Laura had somehow got in, and gave me back my phone. Jeremy was slowly heading for the gates, but he is incapable of being impolite and not having a friendly word with anybody who addresses him, whoever they are. Once we were outside the gates he showed no sign of stopping with the much larger crowd outside, so I said my farewells and headed back to the hotel. My toes had gone very painful again and I was keen for another warm bath.

After the bath I went down to look for some food. I felt exhausted and drained. It was not just the cold night standing in the queue with no sleep, it was the immediately preceding 40 hour, four economy-flight journey from Bali, with virtually no sleep either, to get here. I hadn’t been in a bed, I calculated, for 85 hours.

I was also feeling a bit unappreciated. I had in fact played a role in this happening at all. Copies of my initial articles on invoking the (https:// www. craigmurray. org. uk /archives/2023/11/activating-the-genocide-convention/) Genocide Convention had been physically in front of South African cabinet ministers when they took the initial decision on 8 December to ask their excellent legal services to prepare a case. It was not me that arranged that and I cannot break confidence by telling you how it came about. I didn’t expect any acknowledgement, but it seemed an unfair twist of fate that had me standing all night in the cold trying to get in.

I was, dear reader, simply wallowing in exhaustion and self-pity, and in a kind of ridiculous teenage sulk. My tired brain was fogged and I was seriously worried about finding the energy to write up day one, which I had to do immediately. I wasn’t sure that my body was physically capable of another night of no sleep and standing in the freezing cold. I was fed up with being in exile over this laughable terrorism investigation, and I was missing my children.

I made up my mind – I could not do another night. I would have to explain to readers that I had done what I could. A great feeling of relief came over me, and I decided to go to bed.

That very second, out of the lift walked the eminent British lawyer Tayab Ali, with a short, unassuming bearded Arab gentleman.
“Hello Craig, how’s it going”, he asked, but they were evidently in a hurry, going somewhere: “This is Ghassan”.
We shook hands briefly and then the realisation struck me.
“Are you the surgeon?”
Ghassan looked diffident, slightly abashed.
“The surgeon from Gaza?”.
“Yes, I am Ghassan Abu SItta.”
“I am honoured, sir. Greatly honoured”.
He looked slightly embarrassed, and they dashed off to their meeting.

I felt even more embarrassed. I had just met the man who had stayed operating in Shifa hospital while Israel bombs and missiles struck it and Israeli snipers fired through the windows. He had continued to operate with no electricity, with no bandages, with no antiseptic, with no anaesthetic. He had worked 20 hours a day, amputating the limbs of children or trying to piece them back together. He stayed and stayed and stayed through weeks under fire. He did this for love: he is a top British plastic surgeon and could have been in the UK making millions.

I felt deeply ashamed. This man had endured so much, and done so much, and seen so much suffering. Here was I giving up over sore toes and lack of sleep, and over wanting to be important. I had an epiphany; I realised I can be a dreadful egoist, and I hated myself for it. Nothing stopped hurting, but I had a new surge of adrenaline and decided to get on with it. Perhaps nothing I did would help prevent genocide, but we all have to do that which is within our power to try.

I accept you may wish to scoff, but for me that encounter with Mr Abu Sitta revealed an important element of greatness – the ability to inspire others to do more that they believed they could, to transmit will. Even without actually saying anything.

I did, however, retain the sense to know that I had to prepare, so I got a taxi to a camping shop. There I bought the warmest sleeping bag I could afford, a reflective groundsheet, thermal socks and a flask.

I then took a taxi back, went straight to my room and started to write. The first three paragraphs flowed very easily. Then suddenly I was opening my very groggy eyes with my head on the keyboard, not sideways but leaning on my forehead. I had been asleep like that for three hours.

After that it was like wading through treacle. The phrases still rushed into my head as always, but there was a strange disconnect to my fingers and what they typed, which often was a phrase that sounded a bit like the one I was trying to get down. I recall typing “to assist them” as “his big cyst hen”. It was slow going.

At 11pm I went to see if there was a queue yet for the public gallery the next day. Nobody was there. I was worried that after the arguments at the gate the previous morning, with many people disappointed, the queue would start to form much earlier for Day 2. I decided to just publish what I had written so far, with an explanatory first paragraph, and check the queue regularly. The cold walk woke me up. It was notably warmer than the previous night – plus 2 rather than minus 5 – but the ground was all wet with a heavy dew and there was a lot more wind chill.

I checked again at 1.30am, still nobody had come. But at 3am there were eight people in the queue. I rushed back to the hotel, picked up my sleeping bag and groundsheet and published the now almost finished Day 1 article. I joined the queue as number 9 of the 14 who would be let in. I met a wonderful Dutch lady who had joined the queue with the intention of giving me her place if I arrived too late. I am ashamed to say I forget her name.

I was disappointed that not one of my new friends from the previous night’s queue was there again. I felt we had bonded through a pretty tough experience and a mutual cause. Almost all had said they intended to do both nights, and I presume the cold and exhaustion just got to people. This second night was much more jolly, I think because it was not quite so cold.

The reflective groundsheet was a big success, dry and surprisingly effective at stopping the cold seeping up. The mummy sleeping bag proved more of a problem. I am not as slender as I used to be, and with several layers of clothing and my ski jacket all on, it was a very tight fit. I got the zip up pretty well, but I couldn’t do the last bit that would bring the cowl over my head, not least because by that stage the bag had immobilised my arms.

Thankfully several wonderful young ladies came to help and zipped me up tight. This involved a lot of laughing. We could have invented a whole new genre of internet porn, in which fully clothed old men get zipped into bags. Although it probably already exists. I am not going to google for it, given the frequency with which the security services seize or steal my electronic devices. It might be misunderstood.

So at 3.30am I lay down my head, and did in fact sleep until about 5.30am. It was not comfortable, but it was not cold. I then wandered off to find a bush for a pee. When I returned, three women had taken over my groundsheet and were using my sleeping bag as a blanket. They joked that they had occupied my sleeping bag. I said I perfectly understood – surely their ancestors had a sleeping bag there 3,000 years ago. It was not brilliant repartee, but this kind of thing kept us going. The 14 of us who made the public gallery took group pictures.

There were some changes from the day before. We are to be allowed pens. But in view of “people wandering around” the day before, they said huffily, we were to be escorted in via a back door and leave the same way, and strictly forbidden from talking or interacting with anybody not in our group. So we entered the tiny public gallery. It has only two rows, and I now discovered that if you sit in the second row you cannot see anything. From the hall you can’t even tell there is a second row to the gallery. Once again, I marveled at the lack of attention to the dreadful design of the courtroom.

Luckily for me, a young man who apparently should not have been there was ejected from a front row seat, and finally I got to watch the Israeli presentation.

As with the South African case, according to court procedure the Israeli case was introduced by their “agent”, permanently accredited to the court, Tal Becker of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He opened with the standard formula “it is an honour to appear before you again on behalf of the state of Israel”, managing to imply purely through phrasing and tone of voice that the honour lay in representing Israel, not in appearing before the judges.

Becker opened by going straight to the Holocaust, saying that nobody knew more than Israel why the Genocide Convention existed. 6 million Jewish people had been killed. The Convention was not to be used to cover the normal brutality of war.

The South African case aimed at the delegitimisation of the state of Israel. On 7 October Hamas had committed massacre, mutilation, rape and abduction. 1,200 had been killed and 5,500 maimed. He related several hideous individual atrocity stories and played a recording he stated to be a Hamas fighter boasting on WhatsApp to his parents about committing mass murder, rape and mutilation.

The only genocide in this case was being committed against Israel. Hamas continued to attack Israel, and for the court to take provisional measures would be to deny Israel the right to self-defence. Provisional measures should rather be taken against South Africa and its attempt by legal means to further genocide by its relationship with Hamas. Gaza was not under occupation: Israel had left it with great potential to be a political and economic success. Instead Hamas had chosen to make it a terrorist base.

Hamas was embedded in the civilian population and therefore responsible for the civilian deaths. Hamas had tunnels under schools, hospitals, mosques and UN facilities and tunnel entrances within them. It commandeered medical vehicles for military use.

South Africa had talked of civilian buildings destroyed, but did not tell you they had been destroyed by Hamas booby traps and Hamas missile misfires.

The casualty figures South Africa gave were from Hamas sources and not reliable. They did not say how many were fighters? How many of the children were child soldiers? The application by South Africa was ill-founded and ill-motivated. It was a libel.

This certainly was a hardline and uncompromising start. The judges appeared to be paying very close attention when he opened with the 7 October self-defence argument, but very definitely some of them started to fidget and become uncomfortable when he talked of Hamas operating from ambulances and UN facilities. In short, he went too far and I believe he lost his audience at that point.

Next up was Professor Malcolm Shaw KC. Shaw is regarded as an authority on the procedure of international law and is editor of the standard tome on the subject. This is an interesting facet of the legal profession, where standard reference books on particular topics are regularly updated to include key extracts from recent judges, and passages added or amended to explain the impact of these judgments. Being an editor in this field provides a route to prominence for the plodding and pedantic.

I had come across Shaw in his capacity as a co-founder of the Centre for Human Rights at Essex University. I had given a couple of talks there some twenty years ago on the attacks on human rights of the “War on Terror” and my own whistleblower experience over torture and extraordinary rendition. For an alleged human rights expert, Shaw seemed extraordinarily prone to support the national security interests of the state over individual liberty.

I do not pretend I gave it a great deal of thought. I did not know at that time of Shaw’s commitment as an extreme Zionist and in particular his long term interest in suppressing the rights of the Palestinian people. After 139 states have recognised Palestine as a state, Shaw led for Israel the legal opposition to Palestine’s membership of international institutions, including the International Criminal Court. Shaw’s rather uninspired reliance on the Montevideo Convention of 1933 is hardly a legal tour de force, and it didn’t work.

Every criminal deserves a defence, and nobody should hold it against a barrister that they defend a murderer or rapist, as it is important that guilt or innocence is tested by a court. But I think it is fair to state that defence lawyers do not in general defend those accused of murder because they agree with murder and want a murderer to go on murdering. That however is the case here: Malcolm Shaw speaks for Israel because he actually wants Israel to be able to continue killing Palestinian women and children to improve the security of Israel, in his view.

That is the difference between this and other cases, including at the ICJ. Generally the lead lawyers would happily swap sides, if the other side had hired them first. But this is entirely different. Here the lawyers (with the possible exception of Straker) believe profoundly in the case they are supporting and would never appear for the other side. That is just one more way that this is such an extraordinary case, with so much drama and such vital consequences, not least for the future of international law.

For the reason I have just explained, Shaw’s role here is not that of a simple barrister plying his trade. His attempt to extend the killing should see him viewed as a pariah by decent people everywhere, for the rest of his doubtless highly-paid existence.

Shaw opened up by saying that the South African case continually spoke of context. They talked of the 75 years of the existence of the state of Israel. Why stop there? Why not go back to the Balfour Declaration or the British Mandate over Palestine? No, the context of these events was the massacre of 7 October, and Israel’s subsequent right of self-defence. He produced and read a long quote from mid-October by European Commission President Ursula von Der Leyen, stating that Israel had suffered a terrorist atrocity and had the right of self-defence.

The truth is that this is not genocide but armed conflict, which state has existed since 7 October. That was brutal, and urban warfare always involved terrible civilian casualties, but it was not genocide.

He then turned to the question of genocide. He argued that South Africa could not bring this case and the ICJ had no jurisdiction, because there was no dispute between Israel and South Africa on which the ICJ could rule, at the time the case was filed. South Africa had communicated its views to Israel, but Israel had given no substantial reply. Therefore a dispute did not yet exist at time of filing. A dispute must involve interaction between parties and the argument had been on one side only.

This very much interested the judges. As I noted on day one, this got them more active than anything else when Professor John Dugard addressed the same point for South Africa. As I reported:

The judges particularly enjoyed Dugard’s points, enthusiastically rustling through documents and underlining things. Dealing with thousands of dead children was a bit difficult for them, but give them a nice jurisdictional point and they were in their element.

They were even more excited when Shaw tackled the same point. This gave them a way out! The case could be technically invalid, and then they would neither have to upset the major Western powers nor make fools of themselves by pretending that a genocide the whole world had seen was not happening. For a while, they looked visibly relieved.

Shaw should have given up while he was ahead, but he ploughed on for an hour, with some relief when he continually muddled his notes. A senior KC with zero ability to extemporise and recover was an interesting sight, as he kept stopping and shuffling paper.

Shaw argued that the bar for judging whether South Africa had a prima facie case must be significantly higher because of the high military and political cost to Israel if the court adopted provisional measures. It was also necessary to show genocidal intent even at this stage. Otherwise the genocide was a “car without an engine”. If any illegal actions had taken place within Israel’s carefully targeted military action, Israel’s own military courts would investigate and act on them.

Random Israeli ministers and officials making emotional statements was not important. Official policy to protect civilians would be found in the minutes of the Israeli war cabinet and national security council. Israel’s strenuous attempts to move civilians out of harm’s way was an accepted measure in international human law and should not be viewed as mass displacement.

It was South Africa which was guilty of complicity in genocide in cooperation with Hamas. South Africa’s allegations against Israel “verge on the outrageous”.

Israel’s next lawyer was a lady called Galit Raguan from the Israeli Ministry of Justice. She said the reality on the ground was that Israel had done everything possible to minimise civilian deaths and to aid humanitarian relief. Urban warfare always resulted in civilian deaths. It was Hamas who were responsible for destruction of buildings and infrastructure.

There was overwhelming evidence of Hamas’ military use of hospitals. In every single hospital in Gaza that IDF had evidence of military use by Hamas. Mass evacuation of civilians was a humanitarian and legal measure. Israel had supplied food, water and medicine into Gaza but supplies had come under Hamas fire. Hamas steals the aid for its fighters.

Next up was lawyer Omri Sender. He stated that more food trucks per day now entered Gaza than before October 7. The number had increased from 70 food trucks to 109 food trucks per day. Fuel, gas and electricity were all being supplied and Israel had repaired the sewage systems.

At this stage Israel had again lost the judges. One or two were looking at this man in a highly quizzical manner. A couple had definitely fallen asleep – there are only so many lies you can absorb, I suppose. Nobody was making notes about this guff. The judges may find a way not to condemn Israel, but could not be expected to go along with this extraordinary nonsense. Sender continued that the scope and intensity of the fighting was now decreasing as the operation entered a new phase.

Perhaps noting that nobody believed him, Sender stated that the court could not institute provisional measures but rather was obliged to accept the word of Israel on its good intentions because of the Law of the Unilateral Declarations of States.

Now I have to confess that was a bit of international law I did not know existed. But it does, specifically in relation to ICJ proceedings. On first reading, it makes a unilateral declaration of intent to the ICJ binding on the state that makes it. I cannot see that it forces the ICJ to accept it as sufficient or to believe in its sincerity. It seems rather a reach, and I wondered if Israel was running out of things to say.

That appeared to be true, because the next speaker, Christopher Straker KC, now took the floor and just ran through all the same Hamas stuff yet again, only with added theatrical indignation. Straker is the lawyer I suspect would happily have appeared for either side, because he was plainly just acting anyway. And not very well.

Straker said that it was astounding this case could be brought. It was intended to stop Israel from defending itself while Israel would still be subject to Hamas attacks. Hamas has said it will continue attacks.

If you look at the operation as a whole including relief efforts, it was plain there was no genocidal intent. Israel was in incredible danger. The proposed provisional measures were out of proportion to their effect. Can you imagine if in the Second World War, a court had ordered the Allies to stop fighting because of civilian deaths, and allowed the Axis powers to keep on killing?

The final speaker was Gilad Noam, Israel’s deputy attorney-general. He said that the bulk of the proposed provisional measures should be refused because they exposed Israel to further Hamas attack. Three more should be refused because they referred to Palestine outside Gaza. There was no genocidal intent in Israel. Ministerial and official statements made in the heat of the moment were rather examples of the tradition of democracy and freedom of speech. Prosecutions for incitement to genocide were under consideration.

The court must not conflate genocide and self-defence. The South African case devalues genocide and encourages terrorism. The Holocaust illustrated why Israel was always under existential threat. It was Hamas who were committing genocide.

And that was it. Israel had in the end not been allowed to show its contentious atrocity video, and it felt like their presentation had become repetitive and was padded to fill the time.

It is important to realise this. Israel is hoping to win on their procedural points about existence of dispute, unilateral assurances and jurisdiction. The obvious nonsense they spoke about the damage to homes and infrastructure being caused by Hamas, trucks entering Gaza and casualty figures, was not serious. They did not expect the judges to believe any of this. The procedural points were for the court. The rest was mass propaganda for the media.

In the UK, the BBC and Sky both ran almost all the Israeli case live, having not run any of the South African case live. I believe something similar was true in the USA, Australia and Germany too.

While the court was in session, Germany has announced it will intervene in the substantial case to support Israel. They argue explicitly that, as the world’s greatest perpetrator of genocide, they are uniquely placed to judge. It is in effect a copyright claim. They are protecting Germany’s intellectual property in the art of genocide. Perhaps they might in future license genocide, or allow Israel to continue genocide on a franchise basis.

I am sure the judges want to get out of this and they may go for the procedural points. But there is a real problem with Israel’s “no dispute” argument. If accepted, it would mean that a country committing genocide can simply not reply to a challenge, and then legal action will not be possible because no reply means “no dispute”. I hope that absurdity is obvious to the judges. But they may of course wish not to notice it…

What do I think will happen? Some sort of “compromise”. The judges will issue provisional measures different to South Africa’s request, asking Israel to continue to take measures to protect the civilian population, or some such guff. Doubtless the State Department have drafted something like this for President of the court Donoghoe already.

I hope I am wrong. I would hate to give up on international law. One thing I do know for certain. These two days in the Hague were absolutely crucial for deciding if there is any meaning left in notions of international law and human rights. I still believe action by the court could cause the US and UK to back off and provide some measure of relief. For now, let us all pray or wish, each in our way, for the children of Gaza.

ETA: Interviewed by George Galloway.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXkBOb8hXdY

Velshi on MSNBC:
'Stunned, angry, and infuriated': Journalists address US silence on colleagues killed in Gaza
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyE4Bpsq1xg

That took a while. Is he next on the block?

It's small compensation, but at least one good thing is coming out of the tragedy in the Middle East:
https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/quit-dsa-gaza-israel/

https://fathomjournal.org/the-democratic-socialists-of-america-just-endorsed-eth...

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/10/11/dsa-rally-aoc-israel-00121060

https://palestinianyouthmovement.com/support-dsa-working-group

https://newrepublic.com/article/176781/open-letter-why-leaving-democratic-social...
https://newrepublic.com/article/176969/democratic-socialists-america-struggle-fr...