Tag: ethnic cleansing

Smotrich hails ‘full US support’ for illegal settler expansion in occupied West Bank

Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s finance minister and staunch backer of the illegal settler movement, said on 30 December that Washington has given Tel Aviv “full support” to expand settlements in the occupied West Bank in violation of international law.

“The US administration is giving us full support to expand settlements in the West Bank in order to undermine the establishment of a Palestinian state,” Smotrich said. 

The statement coincided with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the US and came after a meeting between Netanyahu and US President Donald Trump.

“We have had a discussion, big discussion for a long time on the West Bank. And I wouldn’t say we agree on the West Bank 100 percent, but we’ll come to a conclusion on the West Bank,” Trump said after the meeting.

When asked by reporters what the disagreement was about, Trump said, “I don’t want to do that, it will be announced at an appropriate time.”

Netanyahu “will do the right thing,” the US president went on to say. 

Since coming to power in late 2022, Netanyahu’s government has been rapidly advancing Israel’s longstanding goal of annexing the West Bank, which was occupied illegally during the 1967 war. 

New illegal settlements are being established at an accelerated rate, and the Knesset has approved a bill calling to impose Israeli “sovereignty” over the territory. 

Trump recently claimed that he would “not allow” Israel to annex the occupied West Bank.

“Trump and his top advisors asked Netanyahu to change Israel’s policies in the occupied West Bank during their meeting on Monday,” informed sources told Axios on 30 December.

“The White House thinks a violent escalation in the West Bank would undermine efforts to implement the Gaza peace agreement and prevent the expansion of the Abraham Accords before the end of Trump’s term,” the sources went on to say, adding that the US president’s team asked the Israelis to “calm things down.”

“The president and his team raised settler violence against Palestinian civilians, the financial instability of the Palestinian Authority, and Israeli settlements expansion. Netanyahu spoke very strongly against settler violence and said he is going to take more action,” the sources said.

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Bloody Diamonds: How Your Engagement Ring Helps Fund a Genocide in Gaza

Did your engagement ring help fund a genocide in Gaza? Quite possibly. Despite possessing no mines of their own, Israel is a major player in the world’s diamond business, buying up minerals across Africa and selling them to the West, netting billions in the process. Diamonds are Israel’s most important export, and directly bankroll the country’s ongoing genocide against the people of Gaza. MintPress explores the dark world of Israeli blood diamonds.

A Gigantic Industry

Any visitor walking through Tel Aviv’s exclusive Ramat Gan district will be struck by its wealth. Skyscrapers are everywhere, and expensive jewelry stores lines the streets. Ramat Gan is the center of the world’s diamond industry, with more than 15,000 people employed by the Israel Diamond Exchange in the business of cutting, polishing, importing, exporting, and marketing the stones.

Israel’s largest export is not tech industry or its food. Diamonds alone account for over 15% of all the country’s exports, with other jewelry also contributing significantly to its economy. Between 2018 and 2023, Israel exported over $60 billion dollars worth of precious stones.

Their number one customer is the United States. Historically, Israel has accounted for between one third and one half of all the diamonds sold across America, a growing market already worth $20 billion per year.

Genocide Stones

Unlike gold, diamonds are rarely hallmarked, meaning that few American brides know that their engagement and wedding rings were crafted and polished in Israel. Even fewer are aware that their purchase directly funds the slaughter in Gaza and Israel’s ongoing seizure of land in the West Bank, Lebanon, and Syria.

“Overall, the Israeli diamond industry contributes about $1 billion annually to the Israeli military and security industries … every time somebody buys a diamond that was exported from Israel, some of that money ends up in the Israeli military,” Israeli economist, Shir Hever, testified at the Russell Tribunal on Palestine in 2010.

Perhaps the key figure in the Israeli diamond industry is business magnate, Beny Steinmetz. Considered by many to be Israel’s richest man, the 69-year-old founder of Steinmetz Diamond Group first entered the industry in 1988, purchasing a production factory in Apartheid South Africa.

Through his charitable foundation, Steinmetz has poured money into the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), including “adopting” a unit of the Givati Brigade, buying equipment for them. During Operation Cast Lead in 2009, the brigade carried out a massacre, forcing dozens of Palestinian civilians into a house in Gaza, bombed the house, and prevented ambulances from approaching. Rescue workers who eventually found their bodies also reported seeing the words “The only good Arab is a dead Arab” daubed in Hebrew on the remains of the building.

More recently, the Givati Brigade has been filmed setting fire to Palestinian food supplies, and a Gaza sewage plant, as well as demolishing more homes.

Since October 7, 2023, Israel has destroyed 92% of the schools and residential buildings of Gaza, shot around 300 journalists, and killed at least 20,000 children. UNICEF estimates that 3,000 to 4,000 children in Gaza have lost one or more limbs. In addition to its violence in Palestine, Israel has invaded and occupied Lebanon and Syria, and bombed Iran, Tunisia, Yemen, and Qatar.

The US Pays in Dollars, Africa Pays in Blood

Israel’s appetite for diamonds is directly fueling civil war and bloodshed across Africa, where it supplies military hardware with governments, warlords, and local armed groups in exchange for access to the continent’s mineral wealth. Israel-based International Diamond Industries (IDI), for example, secured a monopoly on diamond production in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in a deal that, according to a United Nations panel, included covert weapons transfers and the training of Congolese security forces by IDF commanders. The deal was fantastically lucrative for IDI, who paid only $20 million for a monopoly generating $600 million per year.

Meanwhile, in 2002 in war-ravaged Sierra Leone, for just $1.2 million in cash, Steinmetz himself managed to acquire half of the Koidu Ltd., a company that accounted for 90% of the country’s diamonds. In 2011, Koidu produced a reported $200 million worth of diamonds.

Why authorities would agree to such ludicrously low purchase prices might be explained by a 2021 ruling by a Swiss court, that found Steinmetz guilty of paying $8.5 million in bribes to the wife of the president of Guinea. These bribes, the court ruled, secured him the rights to lucrative iron ore concessions in the country’s Simandou region. Steinmetz was sentenced to five years in prison. The Israeli billionaire is currently facing similarly grave corruption charges in Romania.

The diamond rush in D.R. Congo, Sierra Leone and other African nations has resulted in civil war, human trafficking, forced child labor, and other serious human rights violations by groups intent on securing a slice of the diamond industry for themselves. But they are relatively small players in comparison to the Israelis.

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Trump Claims Israel Is Complying With Gaza Deal ‘100%’ Despite Constant IDF Ceasefire Violations

During a joint press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Florida on Monday, President Trump claimed Israel was holding up its end of the Gaza ceasefire deal “100%” despite constant IDF attacks on Palestinians in the Strip and other Israeli violations.

Since the deal went into effect on October 10, the Israeli military has killed at least 414 Palestinians in Gaza, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. The IDF has continued demolitions and has expanded the so-called “yellow line,” the vague boundary that separates the IDF-occupied side of Gaza and the Hamas-controlled side. Israel has also maintained restrictions on aid and shelter materials entering Gaza.

When asked by a reporter at Mar-a-Lago if he was concerned that Israel wasn’t moving quickly enough into “phase two” of the plan, Trump said he was “not concerned about anything Israel is doing” and that Israel has “lived up to the plan 100%.”

Trump also appeared to issue an ultimatum to Hamas during the press conference, saying that if the group doesn’t disarm within a certain amount of time, there will be “hell to pay” and that it will be “horrible for them.”

The president said that Hamas has already agreed to disarm, but the group has been consistent in its position that it won’t give up its weapons unless a Palestinian state is established, or if progress is made in that direction. Trump’s 20-point peace plan said that Gaza would be “demilitarized,” but Hamas only agreed to use the plan as a basis for negotiations.

So far, the only deal Israel and Hamas have signed outlined a ceasefire and the exchange of Israeli captives and Palestinians held in Israeli jails. “Our people are defending themselves and will not give up their weapons as long as the occupation remains,” the new spokesman for Hamas’s armed wing, the al-Qassam Brigades, said on Monday.

Trump also claimed during the press conference that the US and Israel are helping the “people of Gaza” even though both countries are not allowing reconstruction to take place, as civilians are living in flimsy tents and the rubble of bombed-out buildings amid harsh winter storms. In recent weeks, at least 20 people in Gaza have died due to the weather.

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The Architecture of Extermination: Why the Gaza Genocide Is Premeditated and Repeatable

Suppose we accept the fiction that none of us expected Israel to launch a full-scale genocide in Gaza – a premeditated campaign to erase the Strip and exterminate a significant portion of its inhabitants. Let us pretend that nearly eighty years of relentless massacres were not a prelude to this moment, and that Israel had never before sought the physical destruction of the Palestinian people as outlined by the 1948 Genocide Convention.

If we go so far as to accept the sterile, ahistoric claim that the Nakba of 1948 was “merely” ethnic cleansing rather than genocide – ignoring the mass graves and the forced erasure of a civilization – we are still left with a terrifying reality. Having witnessed the unmasked extermination that began on October 7, 2023, who can dare to argue that its perpetrators lack the intent to repeat it?

The question itself is an act of charity, as it assumes the genocide has actually stopped. In reality, the carnage has merely shifted tactics. Since the implementation of the fragile ceasefire on October 10, Israel has killed over 400 Palestinians and wounded hundreds more. Others have perished in the frozen mud of their tents. They include infants like eight-month-old Fahar Abu Jazar, who, like others, froze to death. These are not mere tragedies; they are the inevitable results of a calculated Israeli policy of destruction targeting the most vulnerable.

During this two-year campaign of extermination, more than 20,000 Palestinian children were murdered, accounting for a staggering 30% of the total victims. This blood-soaked tally ignores the thousands of souls entrapped beneath the concrete wasteland of Gaza, and those currently being consumed by the silent killers of famine and engineered epidemics.

The horrifying statistics aside, we bear witness to the final agonies of a people. We have watched their extermination in real-time, broadcast to every handheld screen on earth. No one can claim ignorance; no one can claim innocence. Even now, we watch as 1.3 million Palestinians endure a precarious existence in tents ravaged by winter floods. We share the screams of mothers, the hollowed-out faces of broken fathers, and the haunted stares of children, and yet, the world’s political and moral institutions remain paralyzed.

If Israel resumes the full, unrestrained intensity of this genocide, will we stop it? I fear the answer is no, because the world refuses to dismantle the circumstances that permitted this slaughter in the first place. Israeli officials never bothered to hide their intent. The systematic dehumanization of Palestinians was a primary export of Israeli media, even as Western corporate outlets worked tirelessly to sanitize this criminal discourse.

The record of intent is undeniable. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir openly championed the “encouragement of migration” and demanded that “not an ounce of humanitarian aid” reach Gaza. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich argued that the starvation of two million people could be “just and moral” in the pursuit of military aims. From the halls of the Knesset to the pop charts, the refrain was the same: “erase Gaza,” “leave no one there.” When military leaders refer to an entire population as “human animals,” they are not using metaphors; they are issuing a license for extermination.

This was preceded by the hermetic siege – a decades-long experiment in human misery that began in 2006. Despite every Palestinian plea for the world to break this death grip, the blockade was allowed to persist. This was followed by successive wars targeting a besieged, impoverished population under the banner of ‘security,’ always shielded by the Western mantra of Israel’s ‘right to defend itself.’

In the dominant Western narrative, the Palestinian is the eternal aggressor. They are the occupied, the besieged, the dispossessed, and the stateless; yet they are expected to die quietly in the world’s ‘largest open-air prison‘. Whether they utilized armed resistance, threw rocks at tanks, or marched unarmed toward snipers, they were branded ‘terrorists’ and ‘militants’ whose very existence was framed as a threat to their occupier.

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The Starmer regime is turning Britain into a police state

The UK is witnessing the largest and most significant prison hunger strike since 1981. Since the beginning of November, a total of eight activists in pretrial detention for standing up against the Gaza Genocide, have been protesting against Israel’s continuing mass murder, Britain’s complicity, and their own abusive and petty treatment by, as it happens, the same infamous legal and incarceration system that used to torture Julian Assange on behalf of the US.

The hunger strikers’ demands also include releasing documents showing how Britain’s extremely powerful Israel Lobby has been influencing the government and an end to the absurd proscription of the activists’ own Palestine Action organization as ‘terrorist.’

The charges against the activists refer to two cases: the break-in at a British branch of Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit Systems and infiltration of a Royal Air Force base to damage two planes with red paint and crowbars. Elbit is one of the many Israeli and multinational companies that are deeply involved in Israel’s genocide in Gaza and its ceaseless other crimes elsewhere, as UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese has shown in her recent report “From economy of occupation to economy of genocide.”

Britain’s Royal Air Force has besmirched itself by flying reconnaissance missions over Gaza, supporting Israel and its genocide there. Official denials, insisting that these operations have exclusively served the rescuing of hostages, are “preposterous,” as Matt Kennard who has been tracking and analyzing the flights systematically has concluded. In addition, since the flights are embedded in Israeli intelligence gathering, which is notorious for routinely relying on torture, the flights also make the UK an accomplice to that specific crime.

Ages ago, as an undergraduate history student at Oxford, I could see with my own eyes the great, persisting pride still attached to the memory of Britain’s ‘finest hour,’ when the country faced off against the threat of invasion by a surging Nazi Germany that had just mauled France. Over a thousand brave Spitfire pilots who fought in World War Two must now be turning in their graves. They defended their country against a fascist, genocidal German regime. Now the Royal Air Force is helping a Zionist, genocidal Israeli regime commit mass murder.

What an incredible shame. By now – very, very late – some former officers of high rank, and with a minimum of a conscience and a sense of honor left, are finally raising their voices to demand that Britain end its self-degrading support for and cooperation with Israel.

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As support for Israel drops, the mainstream media is becoming even more Zionist

During a recent appearance on Real Time with Bill Maher, CNN’s Van Jones told the studio audience that young people protesting Israel’s genocide are actually falling for an Iranian-Qatari disinformation campaign.

Jones proceeded to do an impression of a young person’s social media feed. “Dead Gaza baby, dead Gaza baby, dead Gaza baby, Diddy, dead Gaza baby, dead Gaza baby!,” he joked.

Jones’s callous attempt at humor was condemned across social media, and he quickly apologized for the comments, acknowledging that they were “insensitive and hurtful.”

However, as Howard University law professor Ziyad Motala notes in an Al Jazeera op-ed, Jones’s apology failed to engage with a dark reality at the root of his joke: the consistent dehumanization of Palestinians.

“A true apology would have confronted the deeper problem: the instinct, common in US media, to distrust evidence of Palestinian pain unless it is filtered through Western validation,” wrote Motala. “It is an impulse rooted in hierarchy, the same hierarchy that divides the grievable from the disposable, the innocent from the suspect.”

That hierarchy has been on full display in recent days, as the mainstream media has centered stories of released Israeli captives while largely ignoring stories of Palestinians.

In a Middle East Eye, Doha Institute professor Mohamad Elmasry identifies a number of such examples.

“Since Trump announced his plan two weeks ago, western coverage has focused heavily on Hamas’s requirement to release the remains of 28 dead Israeli captives,” points out Elmasry. “Much less attention has been devoted to Israel’s obligation, under Article 5 of the plan, to return the remains of 420 Palestinians it has long withheld.”

Such bias has been par for the course throughout the genocide. Media critic Adam Johnson recently noted that the Sunday cable news shows have not featured a single Palestinian guest since October 7.

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Israeli Defense Minister Vows Permanent Israeli Occupation of Gaza, Establishment of Settlements

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz vowed on Tuesday that the Israeli military will “never leave all of Gaza” and will eventually establish settlements in the northern part of the Strip.

“We are deep inside Gaza and will never leave all of Gaza – that will not happen. We are here to defend and to prevent what happened,” Katz said during an event in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

“With God’s help, when the time comes, also in northern Gaza, we will establish Nahal pioneer groups in place of the settlements that were evacuated,” Katz added, referring to an IDF program that establishes communities for Israeli soldiers. “We’ll do it in the right way, at the appropriate time.”

Katz also vowed that Israel would not withdraw “one millimeter” from Syria, referring to the territory it has captured in southwest Syria since the fall of former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

After his remarks sparked backlash, Katz appeared to walk back the comments on settlements. “The government has no intention of establishing settlements in the Gaza Strip,” his office said in a statement, though it added that he made the comments in a “security context,” suggesting it wasn’t a complete walk back about what he said about establishing military communities.

An unnamed US official criticized Katz’s comments, saying that he was “provoking” the Arab world. “The more Israel provokes, the less the Arab countries want to work with them,” the US official said in a statement to journalists.

“The United States remains fully committed to President Trump’s 20-Point Peace Plan, which was agreed to by all parties and endorsed by the international community. The plan envisions a phased approach to security, governance, and reconstruction in Gaza. We expect all parties to adhere to the commitments they made under the 20-Point Plan,” the official added.

Katz did not walk back his comments about a permanent Israeli occupation of Gaza, and other Israeli officials have made similar vows. IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir said earlier this month that the so-called “yellow line,” the vague boundary separating the Israeli-occupied side of Gaza from the rest of the Strip, is a “new border.”

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19 New Apartheid Colonies for the Occupied West Bank

Israel’s Cabinet on Sunday finalized approval of 19 new Jewish-only settler colonies in the illegally occupied West Bank, a move the apartheid state’s far-right finance minister said was aimed at thwarting Palestinian statehood.

Cabinet ministers approved the legalization of the previously unauthorized settler outposts throughout the occupied Palestinian territory, bringing the total number of new settlements in recent years to 69.

The move will bring the overall total number of exclusively or overwhelmingly Jewish settlements — which are illegal under international law — to more than 200, up from around 140 just three years ago.

Included in the new approval are two former settlements — Kadim and Ganim — that were evacuated in compliance with the now effectively repealed 2005 Disengagement Law, under which Israel dismantled all of its colonies in the Gaza Strip and four in the West Bank.

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Hillary Clinton Is Wrong: The Genocide Isn’t ‘Fake News’

As unconditional support for Israel becomes more of a political liability and solidarity with Palestine establishes itself as a litmus test, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her fellow status-quo defenders are blaming social media for the U.S. public’s growing solidarity with Palestine.

In accusing young people of falling for fake news, they rely on an outdated assumption that equates social media with falsehoods — and equates legacy media with trustworthiness. What’s clear is that Clinton and her peers who partake in similar rhetoric fail to grasp the nuances of today’s media landscape, particularly as it has unraveled around Palestine.

More and more Americans have realized that Israel’s post-Oct. 7 assault on Gaza is not only disproportionate but genocidal, and that in spite of the carnage, the U.S. government continues to provide diplomatic cover and send billions in military aid.

It’s no wonder that public sentiment has shifted considerably against Israel in the past two years, with young people in particular being increasingly supportive of Palestine. This sea change has made establishment politicians very nervous.

In several recent speaking engagements, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has lamented that these pro-Palestine young people have the unfortunate habit of getting their news from social media; to her, that makes them uninformed and sorely misled.

“More than 50 percent of young people in America get their news from social media. Just pause on that for a second,” she said at an event for the newspaper Israel Hayom earlier this month. “They are seeing short-form videos, some of them totally made up, some of them not at all representing what they claim to be showing. And that’s where they get their information.”

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Kushner and Witkoff Reportedly Draft $112B Plan to Turn Gaza Into ‘Smart City’ With Beach Resorts, High-Speed Rail, and AI Grids — U.S. Pushes Back on Claims It Would Foot $60B

Representatives tied to the Trump administration have circulated a sweeping proposal to rebuild war-torn Gaza into a futuristic international destination, according to reporting by The Wall Street Journal.

The plan, formally titled “Project Sunrise,” envisions a decade-long, $112.1 billion redevelopment effort featuring beachside luxury resorts, high-speed rail, and AI-optimized infrastructure.

The draft proposal was developed by a team led by Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law, and U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff, along with senior White House aide Josh Gruenbaum and other administration officials.

The plan is being presented to prospective donor governments via a 32-slide PowerPoint labeled “sensitive but unclassified,” U.S. officials told the Journal.

According to the presentation, Project Sunrise would convert Gaza’s devastated landscape into a modern coastal metropolis.

Slides reportedly show high-rise developments along the Mediterranean, cost tables, and phased timelines designed to move residents “from tents to penthouses” and stimulate long-term economic growth.

U.S. officials said the plan has been shared with potential donor nations, including wealthy Gulf states as well as Turkey and Egypt.

However, the proposal does not specify which governments or private entities would ultimately finance the project, nor does it detail where Gaza’s roughly two million displaced residents would live during reconstruction, according to WSJ.

The draft estimates total costs at $112.1 billion over 10 years, including humanitarian relief, infrastructure rebuilding, and public-sector payrolls.

Of that amount, nearly $60 billion would allegedly come from grants and debt guarantees, with the United States offering to serve as an “anchor” for roughly 20% or more of that support.

The U.S. State Department immediately moved to push back on the claims that American taxpayers would directly shoulder $60 billion of the project’s cost.

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