Tag: ethnic cleansing

The Winner at the DNC’s Latest Meeting? Israel, Ethnic Cleansing and Genocide

In the aftermath of last week’s big meeting of the Democratic National Committee in New Orleans, supporters of the U.S.-Israel alliance have been quite content. “We’re pleased that the DNC Resolutions Committee rejected a set of divisive, anti-Israel resolutions,” the president of Democratic Majority for Israel said. The CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, a former national security advisor to Kamala Harris, expressed gratitude to the DNC’s leadership.

Why did pro-Israel groups voice so much pleasure and praise – not only for the sidelining of pro-human-rights resolutions but also for the process that sidelined them? The answer has to do with the DNC’s mechanism that thwarted changes in positions on Israel. A panel named the Middle East Working Group gummed up all efforts to align the DNC with the views of most Democratic voters, even while supposedly hard at work.

Last Friday, the transparent thinness of the pretense caused Politico to headline an article this way: “Inside the DNC’s Middle East (Not) Working Group.” But the not-working group had been functioning quite well – as a charade for delay and obfuscation.

The day before the derisive headline appeared, the DNC Resolutions Committee dispensed with a resolution about events in Gaza and the West Bank. Its provisions included a declaration that the DNC “supports pausing or conditioning U.S. weapons transfers to any military units credibly implicated in violations of international humanitarian law or obstruction of humanitarian assistance.”

That resolution critical of Israel went nowhere, which is to say it went to the so-called working group, also known as a “task force.”

Assisting the diversion as chair of the Resolutions Committee was political strategist Ron Harris, described in his home state of Minnesota as a “longtime Democratic Party insider.” He made false claims during the meeting: “I know that the task force has met once a month since it was created…. I have the confidence that work is happening…. These are people working really really hard over a very thorny issue…. They are doing their work…. They’re hearing from experts and all sorts of things.”

The falsehood that the task force had met “once a month,” when actually it had scarcely met, was enough reason for me to contact Harris and ask where he’d gotten that (mis)information. He replied that it was “according to the DNC staffer coordinating the process.”

The basic problem with the working group is not only that it hasn’t done much of anything in the nearly eight months since DNC Chair Ken Martin announced it with great fanfare. The underlying hoax is that it was set up not to reflect the views of registered Democrats nationwide.

Polling is clear. Three-quarters of Democrats agree that “Israel is committing genocide,” and a large majority are more sympathetic to Palestinians than to Israelis by a 4-to-1 margin. But only a minority of the Middle East Working Group’s eight members has a record of supporting Palestinian rights, while several are firm supporters of Israel. The oil-and-water mix seems destined for stalemate or mere platitudes. But stalemate and platitudes appear to be just fine from here to the horizon for DNC leadership.

Such stalling mechanisms and scant real representation are as old as the political hills. In this case, an unfortunate boost has come from James Zogby, who for decades bravely worked inside the Democratic Party and elsewhere to advocate for the human rights of Palestinians, in sharp contrast to U.S. foreign policy.

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Israeli army says soldiers accused of abusing Palestinian to return to duty

Israeli military chief Eyal Zamir has authorised five soldiers accused of sexually assaulting a Palestinian inmate in the notorious Sde Teiman detention camp to return to reserve service after charges against them were dropped, according to Israeli media reports.

The soldiers, all from the Force 100 unit assigned to guard military prisons, are being reinstated despite an ongoing, internal military inquiry into their conduct.

Israeli Army Radio reported that some of the reservists have already returned to active duty, including deployment to combat roles.

An Israeli army statement, cited by Israel’s Haaretz newspaper, said: “The investigation does not prevent them from continuing to serve … the command-level investigation will be completed as soon as possible.”

The reinstatement comes after Israel’s top military lawyer dropped all charges against the soldiers last month, closing a case that had been among the most divisive in Israel’s recent history.

The soldiers had been charged with aggravated assault and causing severe injury, after footage broadcast by Israeli television showed them abusing a Palestinian man in Sde Teiman. The military’s own indictment described soldiers stabbing the detainee with a sharp object near his rectum, causing cracked ribs, a punctured lung and an internal tear.

A doctor at the facility, Yoel Donchin, told Haaretz he was so shocked by the Palestinian inmate’s condition that he initially assumed it was the work of a rival armed group.

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Five hundred more pro-Palestine protesters arrested in UK despite High Court ruling

Another 523 arrests were made in Britain on Saturday of people carrying placards with the words: “I oppose genocide; I support Palestine Action”.

The protesters were participating in Saturday’s “Everyone” demonstration in Trafalgar Square, London, organised by civil liberties organisation Defend Our Juries, challenging the ban on direct action group Palestine Action. Their ages ranging from 18 to 87 years old, demonstrators were all arrested under counter-terror laws on suspicion of indicating support for a proscribed organisation.

Over 3,300 people have now been arrested on these charges during various protests since Palestine Action was outlawed by the Labour government in June-July last year.

The latest mass roundup takes place after the UK’s High Court has ruled the proscription of Palestine Action unlawful. The government’s appeal is due to be heard this month, on April 28 and 29 and the arrests are clearly meant to back an overturn of the original verdict.

A Defend Our Juries spokesperson commented, “The Met are choosing to make arrests despite the government’s ban on the group being ruled unlawful by the High Court, and leading lawyers warning that any arrests would be unlawful.”

This criticism was echoed by Tom Southerden, Amnesty International UK’s Law and Human Rights Director, who said, “Today’s mass arrests of peaceful protesters in Trafalgar Square under UK terrorism law are yet another blow to civil liberties in this country—and made all the more outrageous by the Metropolitan Police’s own U-turn.

“The High Court ruled in February that the proscription of Palestine Action was unlawful. The Met rightly said it would stop making arrests.”

The about turn took place on March 25, with the Met issuing a statement claiming it had only paused arrests while it became clear whether the government would be granted the right to appeal.

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Massive Attack’s Robert Del Naja and 87-year-old among more than 500 Palestine Action supporters arrested at mass demo in London

Massive Attack musician Robert Del Naja has been arrested with over 500 supporters of banned group Palestine Action during a major protest in central London Today. 

The singer-songwriter from Bristol was seen being spoken to by officers as he took part in the march against the group’s ban in Trafalgar Square. 

Del Naja was among hundreds of demonstrators who sat with sings reading ‘I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action’. 

He was later carried away by three officers and arrested on suspicion of showing support for a proscribed organisation.

The Metropolitan Police said 523 people aged between 18 and 87 had been arrested at the mass event. 

Protesters gathered in the central London landmark from 1pm and held up their placards, despite police warning any individuals engaging in such criminal activity would be arrested. 

The group, which organisers Defend Our Juries said consisted of some 500 people, initially sat silently as around 100 police officers moved in to make arrests.

But some later started chanting ‘shame on you’ at officers as they carried protesters who refused to walk to police vans away. 

Proscription makes it a criminal offence to belong to or support Palestine Action, punishable by up to 14 years in prison. 

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Israeli-Backed Militia Launches Deadly Attack on Gaza Refugee Camp Under Cover of Airstrikes

The dead and wounded were brought to Al-Aqsa Martyrs hospital in Deir al-Balah by car, truck, ambulance, and motorized rickshaw following a brutal attack by an Israeli-backed Palestinian militia supported by airstrikes on Al-Maghazi refugee camp in central Gaza on Monday.

Inside the hospital morgue, young men wept openly as they gathered around the lifeless bodies of their relatives lying on blankets on the floor. “Don’t leave me brother,” one man screamed as he put his head on the chest of his dead relative before grabbing his limp hand and putting it to his lips in grief. At least 10 Palestinians were killed and dozens wounded in the assault, according to the WAFA news agency.

The attack began when members of an Israeli-backed militia raided the eastern part of Al-Maghazi refugee camp, multiple eyewitnesses told Drop Site News. The area was just 50 meters from the “yellow line,” where Israeli troops withdrew after the October “ceasefire” agreement, effectively cleaving the Gaza Strip in half.

“We were shocked when Abu Nasira’s forces—or the militia—entered the neighborhood and began firing at people’s homes and at the children inside those homes,” Ahmed Al-Maghari, a resident who witnessed the attacks, said in reference to an Israeli-backed militia. “Some residents of the neighborhood were forced to go out and defend the area and their community, so they began firing back at the militias that were there,” he said, adding that the area was then targeted by Israeli aircraft with multiple airstrikes.

“There were three or four injured people just three to four meters away from our homes, and we were unable to reach them because of the direct gunfire from the militia,” Al-Maghari said. “Whenever anyone tried to approach to provide aid to the injured, they were immediately targeted by the aircraft.”

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The US and Israel Are Making Gaza-Style War The New Normal

One of the most appalling aspects of the Gaza genocide — besides its near-unprecedented slaughter of children and other innocents and its near-obliteration from existence of an entire society, unpparalleled in the modern era — is that officials in both the United States and Israel were overtly hoping to make it the new, horrifying standard for modern war. As we’re seeing right now in Iran and Lebanon, they’re not wasting any time applying that standard elsewhere.

Last year, as Gaza lay in ruins with more than 10 percent of its population killed or injured, the New Yorker ran a chilling story related to the Gaza genocide. The magazine reported that a variety of US military lawyers and legal experts viewed Israel’s spree of murder and destruction in Gaza as not just a completely acceptable way to prosecute a war but as “a dress rehearsal” for a future conflict with a US adversary like China: namely, one free of restraint, adherence to international law, and squeamishness about killing civilians.

What Israel did with full US backing in Gaza, in other words, should be the new normal for war, at least when “our side” does it.

The report sat uncomfortably alongside a pattern of US and Israeli officials incessantly invoking the Allies’ carpet bombing campaigns during World War II to justify the genocide they carried out. For almost the entire period after the war, those bombing campaigns were universally understood to be war crimes and a moral horror — including by Curtis LeMay himself, the psychotic general who led the firebombing of Japan and later itched for nuclear war with the Soviet Union — and one that the civilized world immediately outlawed after that war, when it created the system of international law that today clings on by its fingernails.

It was so appalling that even Richard Nixon felt the need to pretend to the press in 1972 that the Dresden firebombing had gone too far and that he would never do such a thing to Vietnam, even though he would be totally justified if he did. (He did do it, for the record). Yet for the past three years, American and Israeli hawks have no longer even bothered to pretend.

What is now playing out in Iran and Lebanon is this doctrine in action.

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Prominent New York synagogue hosts presentation on why U.S. Jews should support the ethnic cleansing of Gaza

The American press does its best not to cover savage Israeli views of Palestinians, but a leading New York synagogue gave an honored platform to those views ten days ago. It hosted an Israeli advocate with connections in its government who argued for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, and said American Jews need to support that operation.  

Benjamin Anthony said that all “Palestinian Arabs” in Gaza pose such a threat to Israel that the international community should use “muscular diplomacy” with Egypt so as force the population out of Gaza into an “enclave” in the Sinai peninsula. 

“I believe the international community would very handily be able to create some sort of enclave for the…Gazans in the Sinai peninsula. And then we might have the breathing room to think about long-term solutions.” 

Though those two million Gazans would likely be displaced again, into African countries, said Anthony, the leader of an Israeli think tank called the MirYam Institute. 

“I think someone like [Egyptian president] Sisi would likely move the Gazans along from the Sinai peninsula in the event that he didn’t want to build a place for them there, and you would probably see them dispersed through the continent of Africa quite quickly.”

Anthony’s argument is widely shared by Israelis (according to a 2025 poll), and it only received mild push back from Eliot Cosgrove, a leading conservative rabbi in the U.S., who had brought Anthony, his first cousin, onto the synagogue dais.  

Cosgrove called the scheme “very intriguing,” but protested that Anthony was conflating “Hamas with the entire Gaza population.” And that by creating a refugee population with a “narrative”, Israel was practically and morally kicking the can down the road. Speaking “as a proud Zionist,” Cosgrove said the scheme is not in Israel’s interest.

Anthony insisted that no Gazans could be trusted because Gazan civilians cheered the atrocities against Israelis on October 7. Cosgrove folded his hand: “Well, I love you, and I disagree with you, but let’s move on.” 

Cosgrove ended the hour-long dialogue by thanking Anthony “for fighting the good fight” and “for representing our people.”

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Drugs, sexual blackmail: shocking confession letter exposes Israel’s Red Crescent spy ring

A bombshell confession letter obtained by The Grayzone reveals Israeli intelligence recruited an asset in the Palestinian Red Crescent, who admitted using drugs and sexual blackmail to create a “network of informants” which could infiltrate and destroy resistance groups.

A leaked confession indicates the Red Crescent was infiltrated by Israeli intelligence, which exploited its collaborator network within the Occupied Palestinian Territories to engage in criminal activity including drug trafficking, shocking acts of sexual blackmail, and political executions. 

The document was obtained by The Grayzone, which verified its authenticity through two West Bank sources with knowledge of the case. Originally published by the State of Palestine Public Prosecution, the letter shines a light on the inner workings of Tel Aviv’s espionage network inside the West Bank, revealing how resistance groups are infiltrated and monitored, while common Palestinians are press-ganged into serving the apartheid state.

The confession traces the story of a longstanding Palestinian collaborator within the Red Crescent who was originally recruited by Israel in December 2004, following “security incidents” across the West Bank during the height of the Second Intifada.

At this time, the Palestinian visited an Israeli “field interrogation center” established near their home. Struggling financially as the primary breadwinner in a fatherless family, they were considered an ideal recruit by Israel’s intelligence services. The Grayzone has omitted the identities of the Palestinians named in the confession letter.

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Israel Is Conducting a Campaign to Ethnically Cleanse Southern Lebanon of Shia Residents

On March 28, George Saeed, 62, and his 24-year-old son Elie were driving back to their home in Debel, a Christian village in southern Lebanon close to the border with Israel. It was a route Saeed knew well. He ran a small laundromat beneath his house, where he washed uniforms for a Polish unit in the United Nations peacekeeping force stationed in the nearby village of Tiri. The trip from Tiri used to take a few minutes, but after the main road was bombed by the invading Israeli military he had begun taking a longer route through the neighboring village of Rmeich.

That afternoon, villagers saw George’s car pass through Rmeich and enter Debel, disappearing along the village’s steep, winding roads. When they were roughly 60 meters from their house, the crackle of gunfire rang out, followed by the blare of a stuck car horn.

Elie Louqa, Saeed’s nephew and the former mayor of Debel, was in Beirut when he got a call from his brother describing what had happened. He began contacting UN peacekeepers (UNIFIL), the Lebanese Army, and the Red Cross, asking them to reach the car. Both the Red Cross unit in Rmeich and the nearby UNIFIL contingent told Louqa they could not secure permission from their superiors to move.

After about 90 minutes, a group of young men from the village decided to go themselves. Carrying white blankets and mattresses to signal they were civilians, they reached the site of the attack and found the father and son dead inside their bullet-ridden car. They pulled the bodies out and carried them to the village cemetery for burial.

“You won’t find a man with cleaner hands. He was generous to a fault,” Louqa told Drop Site News. “Go and ask the people of our villages who George Saeed was.”

The killings were just one in a series of attacks on residents of several villages along the southern border who have chosen to remain in their homes despite repeated sweeping displacement orders by the Israeli military covering all of southern Lebanon.

Earlier this week, the Lebanese army announced its forces had withdrawn from southern border villages, leaving residents without even the semblance of protection. At least six Lebanese soldiers have been killed by Israel over the past month. The army said its troops had to “reposition” as they were being encircled and cut off from their supply lines but claimed it continued to “stand by residents” by “maintaining a group of military personnel” in the villages. What this meant in practice, according to residents, was that soldiers from the area could stay in their homes provided they did not wear army uniforms or carry arms.

“We don’t know why the army made this decision,” said Boutros al-Rai, a local farmer and civilian administrator. “For us, its presence made us feel protected.”

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Knesset passes law mandating death penalty for West Bank Palestinians convicted of terrorism

The Knesset votes 62-48 to pass a controversial law mandating the death penalty for West Bank Palestinians convicted of carrying out deadly terror attacks.

The vote is a major victory for far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit party, which has long lobbied for the measure. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu voted for the bill.

“This is a day of justice for the victims and a day of deterrence for our enemies. No more revolving door for terrorists, but a clear decision. Whoever chooses terrorism chooses death,” says Ben Gvir in a statement.

the West Bank, November 18, 2025. (Chaim Goldberg/Flash90)

The Knesset votes 62-48 to pass a controversial law mandating the death penalty for West Bank Palestinians convicted of carrying out deadly terror attacks.

The vote is a major victory for far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit party, which has long lobbied for the measure. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu voted for the bill.

“This is a day of justice for the victims and a day of deterrence for our enemies. No more revolving door for terrorists, but a clear decision. Whoever chooses terrorism chooses death,” says Ben Gvir in a statement.Promoted: Jewish Crossroads, Roya HakakianKeep Watchin

The law, approved after nearly 12 hours of debate, mandates death by hanging as the default punishment for West Bank residents convicted of deadly terrorist acts by military courts. While judges can opt for life imprisonment under vaguely defined “special circumstances,” the death penalty would otherwise be mandatory.

The sentence would require a simple majority of judges rather than a unanimous decision, while eliminating any right of appeal.

The law will not apply retroactively, including to the perpetrators of the October 7 attacks, for which a separate bill is being advanced.

The law effectively enshrines capital punishment for Palestinians alone, as it explicitly excludes Israeli citizens or residents, and Palestinians alone are tried in military courts. Israelis are tried in civilian courts.

Though a separate provision allows courts to impose the death penalty on anyone, including Israeli citizens, it applies only to those who “intentionally cause the death of a person with the aim of denying the existence of the State of Israel” — a definition that in practice excludes Jewish terrorists.

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