Tag: israel

The Israeli Government Must Be Stopped

The Israeli government has been dragging Western weapons and militaries into wars for far too long, putting all of the world — and its global institutions — at risk. The move into Lebanon, creating more dead, injured, traumatized, and homeless already in huge numbers ought to snap some war supporters out of their trance.

The danger of a catastrophic war on Iran that is joined by the United States and NATO on one side, and additional nations on the other, looms horrifically on the horizon.

It is high time for the world’s governments, including that of Israel’s top supplier, the United States, to begin complying with the International Court of Justice, the United Nations General Assembly, and each of the treaties and domestic laws violated by each arms shipment.

While the UK and Canada have stopped some weapons, that is far from sufficient. While a handful of U.S. Senators anti-democratically plan a vote weeks from now after a U.S. election, on halting illegal arms shipments to Israel, that is far from sufficient, and yet more than we see in the U.S. House of so-called representatives.

Western governments have emboldened the Israeli government with weapons supplies for so long that Israel understands there are no limits. There is nothing it can do that anyone could reasonably expect the U.S. and allied governments not to support, not to protect with propaganda assistance, Security Council vetoes, and yet more instruments of mass killing. That has to change.

Public pressure in the West has prevented western governments from going to war with Iran for decades. But Israel is now expanding an existing war in an effort to create a wider war without any debate or decision. Western media is already using the passive language of “being dragged into” a war — as if no decision need be made at all. This could not be more dangerous, more dishonest, more opposed to the supposed ideal of democracy.

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Israel Again Accused of Illegally Using White Phosphorus in Lebanon

Israeli forces were accused Tuesday of the war crime of firing white phosphorus artillery munitions over populated areas of southern Lebanon as Israel escalates an assault on its northern neighbor that has killed or wounded thousands of people.

Video footage published on social media and reported by Middle East Eye shows distinctive explosions that appear consistent with the use of white phosphorus rounds over civilian areas of southern Lebanon, including the village of Kfar Kila.

While white phosphorus munitions are not completely prohibited under international law, their use in populated areas is forbidden. White phosphorus round are primarily used to create smokescreens. However, when used as an incendiary weapon, white phosphorus – which ignites on contact with air and burns at nearly 1,500°F (815°C) – can maim and kill by burning flesh straight through to the bone, often causing a slow, agonizing death. Water does not extinguish it.

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Did the Abraham Accords Pave the Way for Total War?

The Abraham Accords, the U.S.-sponsored alliance between Israel and several Arab states, were supposed to get the United States out of the Middle East. At least, that’s what many conservative proponents argued.

In 2020, neoconservative writer Michael Doran argued in Tablet magazine that the accords were an agreement to “step up and bear more of the burden so that America can step back.” Two years later, the hawkish Washington Institute for Near East Affairs claimed that the accords were allowing Washington “to gradually withdraw from the Middle East to focus its efforts and resources on the Pacific Ocean, the rise of China, and the consequences of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.”

Sen. J.D. Vance (R–Ohio) has even made this strategy a large part of his foreign policy pitch. A few months before being nominated as former President Donald Trump’s running mate, Vance told the antiwar Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft that “combining the Abraham Accords approach with the enduring defeat of Hamas” will ensure that “Israel, with the Sunni nations, can actually police their region of the world. That allows us to spend less time and less resources in the Middle East.”

That’s not how former Trump administration official Jared Kushner, a key architect of the accords, sees it. Over the weekend, he posted an essay to social media arguing that the United States should build on the “Abraham Accords breakthrough” by backing an Israeli war in Lebanon, and hinted that the time is ripe for a wider U.S. war. “Iran is now fully exposed,” he wrote, adding that “it’s not only Israel’s fight.”

Of course, the Trump administration has never pretended that the Abraham Accords were meant to allow U.S. disengagement; then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo bragged about unlocking more “defense cooperation.” The Biden administration itself promised a permanent U.S. military commitment to Abraham Accords member Bahrain in order to entice Saudi Arabia to join the alliance.

But Kushner’s essay moves the goalposts from a defensive commitment to an offensive one. It’s now hard to pretend that the vision is anything less than a regime change campaign on the scale that old-fashioned neoconservatives could only dream of.

Kushner wrote his essay in response to the Israeli assassination of Hezbollah commander Hassan Nasrallah. Hezbollah, a Lebanese militia backed by Iran, had been engaged in a low-grade border war with Israel for the past year. Israel decided to assassinate Nasrallah after he kept demanding an end to the Israeli war in Gaza in exchange for a ceasefire in Lebanon, an Israeli official told NBC.

The Israeli army is now beginning a ground incursion into Lebanon, after the Biden administration reportedly talked Israel out of a full-on ground invasion. However, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has hinted at even larger plans, calling Nasrallah’s assassination “Operation New Order” and stating that the fall of the Iranian government “will come a lot sooner than people think.”

Nasrallah’s assassination “is significant because Iran is now fully exposed. The reason why their nuclear facilities have not been destroyed, despite weak air defense systems, is because Hezbollah has been a loaded gun pointed at Israel,” Kushner wrote. “The right move now for America would be to tell Israel to finish the job. It’s long overdue. And it’s not only Israel’s fight,” he added.

Kushner added that Iran is the “main issue between Lebanon and Israel” and brought up Hezbollah’s role in killing U.S. Marines in 1983, during the last U.S. military intervention in Lebanon.

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US Likely ‘Had a Hand’ in Israel’s Operation to Eliminate Hezbollah’s Leader Nasrallah – Analyst

Iran has condemned the Israeli attack that killed Hezbollah’s Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah, with President Masoud Pezeshkian claiming that the US greenlit the attack and bears partial responsibility for the “war crime.”

It is very likely that the US “had a hand” in Israel’s operation in Beirut that killed Hezbollah’s Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah, Nikolas Kosmatopoulos, assistant professor of public policy and international affairs at the American University of Beirut, told Sputnik.

“Certainly, there is good reason to believe that there has been diplomatic approval… military, most probably, and intelligence cooperation,” he said.

US interest in an operation targeting Nasrallah “might have to do with the protection of the role and power that Israel projects in the region,” the pundit speculated.

“It is no secret that Israel enjoys bipartisan support in the US Senate and Congress. It is also an important US ally, and carries out its dirty job in the region. It helps the US maintain economic, diplomatic, and political hegemony […] keeps the region in turmoil… It doesn’t allow for the unification of the region, doesn’t allow for the region to cooperate with each other… become a regional power that could endanger the interests of the US and the EU,” he underscored.

Kosmatopoulos pointed out that the military-industrial complexes of the US and Israel “are almost organically entwined, are an extension of each other.”

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IDF Reveals Special Operations Activity In Lebanon

More than 700 special operations in which IDF forces spent more than 200 nights in enemy territory in southern Lebanon.

Some of the promotions even lasted 2-3 consecutive days of staying in southern Lebanon.

Many special units of the IDF engaged in these operations.

As part of the operations, the forces entered the Hezbollah tunnels, destroyed weapons in the territory itself, captured and placed explosives, and also removed weapons and intelligence documents to Israeli territory.

In two of the operations over the past few months, our forces were injured – one as a result of exploding traps of our forces, and one as a result of the explosion of an old bomb that was left in the field. Hezbollah did not recognize these operations and there were no encounters or battles with terrorists at all.

The operations were carried out at a distance of up to 2-3 km from the border with Israel in the nearest strip of villages.

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Israel bombs Palestinian journalist’s home in latest Gaza massacre

Palestinian journalist Wafa Aludaini was killed alongside her family on 30 September in an Israeli airstrike targeting their home in central Gaza. 

Aludaini’s family home was bombed by Israel on Monday, killing her with her husband and two children, according to several Palestinian media reports. 

Gaza’s Government Media Office identified her as the 174th Palestinian journalist to be killed by Israel since the start of the war in Gaza on 7 October.

She worked “with several English-speaking media outlets,” the media office said, urging the international community to hold Israel accountable for its “crimes against journalists.”

“Through her words and actions, she stood as both a storyteller and a symbol of the Palestinian struggle for freedom,” wrote the Palestine Chronicle, with who Aludaini worked as a contributor, on 30 September. 

Israeli airstrikes continue to pound the entirety of the Gaza Strip on a daily basis. 

A woman and her child were killed in Deir al-Balah on Monday after an Israeli airstrike targeted a home in the Hakr al-Jami area of the city.

“Israeli occupation forces committed two massacres against families in the Gaza Strip over the last 24 hours, resulting in the killing of at least 20 Palestinians and the injury of 108 others,” WAFA news agency reported.

Since 7 October, at least 41,615 people have been reported killed and another 96,359 injured. 

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Violating the Law To Provide War Aid to Israel

In March, I wrote about eight United States Senate members sending a letter to President Joe Biden declaring that Section 6201 of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 requires the termination of offensive military aid to the Israel government because the Israel government “prohibits or otherwise restricts, directly or indirectly, the transport or delivery of United States humanitarian assistance.” This declaration seemed then and continues to seem now true to observers of the situation where Gazans suffer from the deprivation of daily needs including food and medical supplies as they also suffer from bombs and bullets. Still, the US military aid flow to Israel has continued at a high rate.

To overcome the legal objection presented by these senators and others, the US Department of State asserted in a May 10 report that “We do not currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transport or delivery of U.S. humanitarian assistance.” Ta-da: legality.

That dishonest State Department assertion enabled the Biden administration to take action prohibited under US law. And, because of the die-hard pro-Israel bent of congressional leadership, the ruse was sure not to be met with effective legislative answer.

Important new information concerning the State Department’s assertion is provided in a Tuesday ProPublica article by Brett Murphy. Looking at internal communications in the State Department, Murphy recounted how the State Department’s assertion not only flew in the face of what people could readily observe in regard to Israel’s actions to suppress aid reaching Gazans, it also was outright contradicted by two State Department organizations that were charged with assessing the situation.

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Top 10 Human Rights Violations by Netanyahu Against Palestinian People

Israel’s complex and often controversial political landscape has made human rights a central issue in the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a figurehead in Israeli politics for decades, has been overwhelmingly condemned for his policies regarding the Palestinian people.

Throughout his tenure, numerous incidents and policies under his administration have drawn widespread criticism from human rights organizations, who rightly accuse him of violating international human rights law and the rights of Palestinians.

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Meet the First Tenured Professor to Be Fired for Pro-Palestine Speech

Maura Finkelstein never hid her support for Palestinian liberation during her nine years working as a professor of anthropology at Muhlenberg College, a small liberal arts school in Allentown, Pennsylvania.

“I have always had an ethical practice of making sure that I include Palestine in my teaching,” Finkelstein told me. “It was never outside the bounds of what I do.”

For Finkelstein, who is Jewish, this was not always easy. More than 30 percent of Muhlenberg’s 2,200 students are Jewish, many of them vocal supporters of Israel.

Neither her longtime public support of Palestinians, however, nor the courses on Palestine she taught in her early years at the school prevented Finkelstein from earning tenure in 2021. Following the arduous tenure process, professors are supposed to enjoy lifetime job security and robust safeguards of academic freedom. The bar for dismissal from a tenured academic position is by design meant to be extremely high, requiring justifiable cause.

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Nobody Can Stop Netanyahu: Top EU Diplomat Laments

Josep Borrell, the European Union’s foreign policy head, expressed dismay on Friday that there is nobody who seems capable of stopping Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from escalating wars in Gaza and Lebanon.

“What we do is to put all diplomatic pressure to a ceasefire, but nobody seems to be able to stop Netanyahu, neither in Gaza nor in the West Bank,” Borrell told a group of reporters at the UN, according to The Times of Israel.

He noted how Netanyahu said he would not stop until Hezbollah is destroyed, but, “If the interpretation of being destroyed is the same as with Hamas, then we are going to go for a long war.”

Netanyahu has not achieved any military objectives in Gaza and Hamas is still in possession of about 100 hostages. Netanyahu has escalated attacks in Lebanon as Hezbollah continued to launch attacks into northern Israel in defense of the Palestinians being massacred in Gaza.

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