Tag: israel

Manifest Destiny in the Histories of the US and Israel

For Palestine and Palestinians, 14 May 1948 was a fateful day in its 4,000-year history.   It was also historically pivotal for the United States.  Paraphrasing British author, George Orwell, it is essential to rediscover the past in order to gain control of the present and save the future.

Eleven minutes after David Ben-Gurion, head of the Jewish Agency, declared Israel a state in May 1948, President Harry S. Truman recognized his claim, giving legitimacy to Ben-Gurion’s bogus declaration.

In 1947, thirty-three members of the newly-created United Nations General Assembly (57 then) voted in favor of Resolution 181, recommending the partition of historic Palestine into Jewish and Palestinian states.  Truman, undeterred by the fact that the UN Security Council had not voted on the resolution, which would have made it binding on all members, threw the full weight of the United States behind it.

Truman’s decision to position Israel as a citadel of U.S. imperialism in the Middle East has boomeranged and has resulted in the United States being despised in much of the world.  Rather than protect U.S. interests in the region as planned, Israel has imperiled them.

As we have seen since the 7 October 2023 insurrection, there are no limits on U.S.-Israeli brutality and on the suffering they have been willing to inflict on the Palestinians in order to preserve their imperium in the region.

Imperial arrogance on the part of American presidents is, of course, not new.  It reached new heights, however, when President Donald J. Trump threatened to take over, “to own” Gaza and remove (euphemism for ethnically cleanse) Palestinians from their ancestral land to foreign destinations. The Zionist colonizing baton in Gaza would essentially be passed to American imperialists.

Trump revealed his illegal plan for Gaza during a recent (11 February) White House press conference.  As humiliated King Abdullah of Jordan looked on, he said:  “We’re going to hold it; we’re going to cherish it… It’s fronting on the sea. It’s going to be a great economic development job.” When asked by a reporter under what authority are you permitted to take the sovereign territory of Gaza; he smugly responded, “U.S. authority.”

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Turkey Warns That Netanyahu Will Resume Gaza War Once All Captives Released

The first phase of the Hamas-Israel ceasefire is coming to a close, with Hamas Thursday night expected to handover the bodies of four more deceased Israelis. This time there won’t be a handover ceremony, after outraged Israeli officials threatened it could collapse the deal and all progress made.

Negotiations for the second phase don’t really appear to have gotten of the ground as yet. The first phase took effect Jan.19 – and has resulted in the release of 25 living hostages by Hamas, as well as the bodies of four more.

The deal called for the exchange of some 2,000 Palestinian detainees and prisoners held by Israel. Over 60 Israeli hostages still believed to be held in Israel, but some half are suspected to be dead at this point.

Conditions in the Gaza Strip continue to deteriorate amid winter conditions. “Sila Abdul Qader is the seventh child confirmed to have died from the cold in Gaza in just 24 hours,” Al Jazeera reports Thursday.

Meanwhile, Turkey is warning that once Israel gets all its citizens back, Prime Minister Netanyahu will simply resume the war, also as the White House has been vocalizing plans for a total displacement of the Palestinian civilian population there:

In an exclusive interview with Al Jazeera, Turkiye’s Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan says he fears Israel will resume the war on Gaza after all the captives are released.

“As it is known, an ethnic cleansing war was witnessed by the whole world; almost 60,000 civilian Palestinians were killed, most of them were women and children. This must never reoccur,” Fidan said.

“However, it is feared that once all Israeli captives are released, Netanyahu will resume the war. There are deep concerns in this respect and they give rise to constant threats within the region,” he said.

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Netanyahu Views the Hostages as His Excuse To Restart the Slaughter

Israel sustained the West’s support for its slaughter in Gaza for 15 months only through an intensive campaign of lies.

It invented particularly heinous Hamas war crimes, such baby beheadings and mass rape, for which no evidence has ever been produced. Conversely, it played down its own, even graver war crimes in response to Hamas’ attack on Israel.

With Hamas’ October 2023 crimes ever-more distant in the rear-view mirror, and Israeli crimes still all too visible in Gaza’s complete destruction – amounting to a “plausible” genocide, according to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) – Israeli leaders have been desperately trying to shift attention to a fresh narrative battleground.

They need a new set of lies to justify resuming the slaughter. And as ever, the western establishment media are actively assisting.

Both Hamas and Israel are playing a predictable propaganda game, using the regular exchanges of Israeli and Palestinian hostages in the ceasefire’s first phase to seize the moral high ground.

Israel once again has all the cards, care of rock-solid western support, and yet once again it is failing to win the public relations war.

Which explains why Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu threw another of his temper tantrums at the weekend, this time blaming Hamas for stage-managing the release of Israelis in what he called “demeaning” and “humiliating ceremonies”.

Israel and its supporters were particularly incensed, it seems, by one of the captives, released on Saturday, beaming on stage as he warmly kissed two of his captors on the forehead.

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Bibas family threatens to sue Israeli govt as official propaganda on hostage killings unravels

The Bibas family demands the Israeli government cease exploiting the deaths of their family members for propaganda purposes as layers of evidence support claims an Israeli airstrike killed them.

The relatives of an Israeli family killed while in Hamas captivity in Gaza have demanded the government stop making statements attributing blame for the killings of their loved ones, threatening to “take all legal measures at their disposal” if the Netanyahu administration refuses to comply. The request came three days after a declaration by Israeli army spokesman Daniel Hagari that Palestinian “terrorists” had “deliberately” killed two young members of the Bibas family “with their bare hands.”

Lawyers representing surviving members of the Bibas family have accused government ministries of seeking to exploit their plight for propaganda purposes, complaining “the family continues to receive, surprisingly, repeated inquiries from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the National Information System… with the aim of satisfying the public’s voyeuristic instinct.”

“Although it is surprising that it is necessary to request and emphasize this,” the lawyers continued, “we ask once again and in every language of request that all parties” be instructed “not to contact the family, nor to speak with any professional party entrusted with conducting the examinations regarding the circumstances of the murder and the condition of the deceased.”

Read the Bibas family’s letter to Netanyahu and other officials here.

The Bibas family has become a symbol of the plight of Israelis taken captive on October 7, but the truth behind their experience remains obscured by official spin. All four family members were taken captive on Oct. 7, but the father was separated in the chaos. 

While he survived his time in Hamas and was later released to Israel, his wife, Shiri, and two young sons, Kfir and Ariel, were killed while in the custody of the Mujahedin Brigades, a smaller, lesser known faction. According to a Mujahedin Brigades commander, “When [Shiri Bibas] was captured [on October 7], we sent her children with her out of compassion for them. The Israeli occupation killed her along with her children after bombing them along with their captors.”

The commander also declared that Shiri Bibas had served as a soldier in the Israeli army’s Unit 8200 intelligence division, which spies on and seeks to compromise Gaza residents, and later served in the army’s Gaza Division.

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Top Israeli Calls for the Killing of All Palestinian Adults in Gaza: Report

Nissim Vaturi, the deputy speaker of Israel’s Knesset, sounded like a Fox News host on Sunday when he called for the murder of every adult male in Gaza.

The New Arab reported that Vaturi, a member of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, indicated to an Israeli radio station that there are no innocent Palestinians and that the IDF is being too “considerate” in the enclave.

“We need to separate the children and women and kill the adults in Gaza, we are being too considerate,” he said, calling them “scum and subhumans.”

He also called on the IDF to turn the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank into Gaza.

Vaturi’s comments — if they were directed at any other group of people in the world — would be met with scorn and disbelief, but his position is the same as many politicians in Washington and commentators on network news channels.

Martin Oliner, U.S. President Donald Trump’s appointee on the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, penned a recent column claiming that Gazans are fundamentally evil and unworthy of mercy.

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Massie Teases Senate Run – Jewish GOP Group Threatens ‘Unlimited’ Spending To Stop Him

Kentucky GOP Rep. Thomas Massie is teasing a potential run for Mitch McConnell’s Senate seat in 2026, and a Jewish Republican group is already threatening to unleash “unlimited” spending to thwart any such bid, given his frequent opposition to legislation pushed by the pro-Israel lobby. 

On Thursday, Massie posted a poll on X, asking if he should stay in the House, run for Senate in 2026, or run for governor in 2027. A Senate campaign was the choice of 67% of the respondents.

The libertarian-minded Massie opposes all foreign aid. At his own political peril, he dares to make no exception for the State of Israel, which is among the world’s richest countries. He has also voted against legislation that would infringe on free speech by, for example, punishing colleges that allow students and professors to say the wrong things about Israel.

Add it all up — and stir in the fact that he’s a member of a party whose legislators almost universally toe the pro-Israel line — and Massie is likely the House representative the pro-Israel lobby would most like to eliminate. The idea of him ascending to the Senate has pro-Israel forces racing to DEFCON1. 

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The Moralistic Risk for Trump’s Foreign Policy

As the new Trump Administration turns a critical eye to the priorities of government spending, one target of its investigations seems to be delivering an endless supply of questionable practices for scrutiny. USAID, long theorized to be part of a global soft regime change network by many opposed to the status quo of foreign policy, has been proven to be exactly that. This ranges from manufacturing opposition to the Cuban government, to using progressive identitarian groups to affect elections in Bangladesh, and even to create a feedback loop where American media cites supposedly independent activists abroad (who are funded by USAID)  in order to justify distorting the narrative at home.

None of this is particularly surprising to those of us who have been skeptical of the softer side of endless interventionism. Two and a half years ago I published Woke Imperium: The Coming Confluence of Social Justice and Neoconservatism, which made the case that the increasingly messianic nature of progressivism served the cause of moral justification for a foreign policy of endless interventionism abroad; it provides a built-in excuse to be involved in as many foreign countries as possible. Through everything from non-governmental organizations supporting ethnic minorities in geopolitical fault lines to the funding of media that pushes a North American–style cultural vanguardism onto very different societies, a changing domestic audience could be brought into the quest for global domination through a self-flattering moralism.

That process is hardly unique to the liberal faction of politics, however. The George W. Bush administration was obsessed with democracy promotion and nation-building as a part of its plan to combat terrorism. It also had a reputation for conflating its own conservative Christian fixation on culture war with foreign policy, such as when its plans to combat AIDS in Africa were tied to abstinence-only education and a ban on condoms, reflecting the administration’s domestic obsession with similar policies at home. It was under such conditions that foreign governments could reasonably claim that American missionaries were tied at the hip to intelligence operations.

The present Trump administration’s willingness to question old talking points about foreign policy being a moral project are laudable but inconsistent. In the transactional worldview that Trump emphasized on campaign, there can be little room for such sentiments, yet already there are signs that he is willing to lean into domestic culture war in order to justify unnecessary interventions abroad. Any plan to remake war-shattered Gaza by acquiring it in a real estate deal facilitated by the United States reflects a long line of interventionist thought about the United States playing some kind of providential role in transforming the Middle East. Indeed, USAID itself once cooked up a potential plan for the relocation of Palestinians into new settlements in Egypt.

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Status Panic on the Campus

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is “fighting back against efforts to intimidate professors into silence,” which—for many of us whose memories of college lecture halls are not uniformly pleasant—is yet another ACLU cause we might not support. The issues here, however, are of more momentous social and political consequence than our initial reaction might suggest.

The ACLU’s efforts—they’re raising funds to support them—are a response to lawsuits brought against students and faculty at Columbia University and elsewhere for their opposition to the war in Gaza. 

The issues are complicated, but the ACLU says it is fighting against attempts to “weaponize our legal system to punish and silence constitutionally protected speech.” Such lawsuits “have become a common tool for intimidating and silencing criticism—including from whistleblowers, journalists and political protestors… not necessarily to win in court, but to entangle people in expensive litigation, using the prospect of mounting legal fees and a potentially ruinous financial penalty to chill speech. In other words, to bully people into silence.” 

The plaintiffs in the Columbia case say statements by faculty supporting student protestors “somehow injured them by causing Columbia University to move classes online, restrict campus access, and cancel commencement.” Three defendants in the case are Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and Jamaal Bowman—members of the notorious Capitol Hill “Squad”—which might be about all most conservatives will want to know before making up their minds.

Personally, I have no dog in this fight. Both sides—all sides—seem intent on dragging their opponents into court, a strategy that seems unlikely to improve matters. This conclusion that the atmosphere on campuses will only get more poisonous, tentative as it is, was reinforced the other day in a casual conversation with a college professor friend at a public university more than 300 miles from Columbia. 

This professor and I have a mutual friend who was hoping to land a job at the university, and I asked what he might do to help make that happen. 

“I have no influence here,” the professor said. “I’m just a content provider.”

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The liberal establishment is finally criticizing ethnic cleansing in Gaza now that they can blame Trump

A week after the long-awaited ceasefire between Hamas and Israel brought a rare moment of quiet skies for Palestinians, President Donald Trump announced his plan to “clean out” Gaza, proposing to relocate its remaining population to neighboring countries like Jordan and Egypt. He has since reiterated this stance, claiming that the U.S. aims to “take over” Gaza, in order to rebuild and develop the area into a “riviera of the Middle East”. Is it, one may ask, truly a Trump presidency without the permanent furrowing of one’s brow?

Palestinians were quick to react to Trump: while some do have fears about the uncertainty of their safety and future in the shadow of 15 months of non-stop bombardment that left the strip decimated of both human life and infrastructure, many others expressed their steadfast resolve to remain.

“We will remain here – staying above the rubble, stones and iron. We will remain in our homeland, in Gaza”, said Manar Hamo of the Bureij camp.

But some of the most fervent pushback to Trump’s plan to takeover Gaza has come from the very same people, institutions, and newsrooms that spent fifteen months either remaining quiet on the extermination of Palestinians or supporting and building the case for it to continue. What we find is that there is a manufacturing of a moral hysteria around Trump’s proposal that seeks to – either intentionally or by way of liberal anti-Trump muscle memory – erase the direct culpability of the Biden-Harris administration and the Democrats in the genocide of Palestinians.

And so we have been ambushed by their discovery of the words “war crime”, “ethnic cleansing”, “dastardly deed” and “morally indefensible”. Even The New York Times’ made the very novel discovery of what international law may have to say about forced displacement. What we are seeing, again and again, is the introduction of language that not only offers the criminality of a Trump administration policy that has yet to be put in place but also explicitly moralizes about violence against Palestinians, a moralizing that was markedly absent as U.S-funded and made bombs were ripping apart Palestinian families for fifteen months straight.

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Israel Pushes Trump Administration To Deal With Egypt In Sinai

Israel’s political leadership is deeply concerned about Egypt’s violations of the peace agreement in the Sinai Peninsula and intends to address the issue with the Trump administration. Senior security officials warn that despite the peace treaty, Egypt has a vested interest in weakening Israel militarily and politically. They argue that it is time to abandon the misconceptions that led to the intelligence failure on October 7, 2023.

The violations of the peace agreement between Israel and Egypt are causing significant alarm within both political and security circles.

According to security sources, Egypt has expanded military airfields in Sinai, specifically in the Refidim and El-Arish areas, constructed new bunkers and anti-tank obstacles, and established new ammunition and fuel depots.

Additionally, seven tunnels have been built under the Suez Canal—four in the Ismailia area and three in Port Said.

Reports also indicate that Egypt has widened major transportation routes in Sinai into highways, despite the region’s sparse population, writes Israeli journalist Amir Tsarfati.

While some of these violations were permitted by Israel to assist the Egyptian military’s fight against ISIS affiliates in Sinai, security officials emphasize that such approvals were always granted retroactively to avoid diplomatic confrontations with Egypt.

Nevertheless, according to their assessments, Egypt currently maintains four times the military forces in Sinai than permitted under the peace treaty.

Since assuming power in 2014, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has been modernizing Egypt’s military forces—on land, at sea, and in the air—investing heavily with the assistance of the U.S. military aid package, which amounts to $1.5 billion annually.

Furthermore, the Egyptian military continues to conduct exercises simulating combat scenarios against Israel.

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