Tag: israel

A Republic of Spies

In 2021, to his credit, President Joe Biden warned the American public against the dangers of zero-click spyware manufactured by an Israeli corporation. Zero-click is unwanted software that can expose the entire contents of one’s mobile or desktop device to prying eyes without tricking one into clicking on to a link. Biden banned its importation and use in the United States.

Last week, as an inducement to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to accept the Israel/Hamas ceasefire agreement, President Donald Trump secretly agreed to lift the embargo on zero-click.

Here is the backstory.

Though America has employed spies since the Revolutionary War, until the modern era, spying was largely limited to wartime. That changed when America became a surveillance state in 1947 with the public establishment of the Central Intelligence Agency and the secret creation of its counterparts.

The CIA’s stated public task at its inception was to spy on the Soviet Union and its satellite countries so that American officials could prepare for any adverse actions by them. This was the time of the Red Scare, in which both Republicans and Democrats fostered the Orwellian belief that America needed a foreign adversary.

We had just helped the Russians defeat Germany in World War II, and our Russian ally – which was bankrupt and had just lost 27 million troops and civilians – suddenly became so strong it needed to be kept in check. The opening salvo in this absurd argument was fired by President Harry Truman in August 1945 when he used nuclear bombs intentionally to target civilians of an already defeated Japan. One of his targets was a Roman Catholic cathedral.

But his real target – so to speak – was his new friend, Joe Stalin.

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Israel’s ‘Genocide General’ Welcomed in London – and the Media Yawns

There have been two stories deeply revealing – in starkly contrasting ways – of the West’s relationship to Israel’s industrialised, militarised slaughter of the people of Gaza over the past 15 months.

Last week, Declassified UK carried out one of the fundamental duties of journalism. Its reporter Alex Morris sought to hold accountable a war crimes suspect evading justice. And not just any suspect.

Morris doorstepped Major General Oded Basyuk as he led an Israeli military delegation through the streets of London in meetings with the Ministry of Defense and the Royal United Services Institute, a UK “security think-tank” with close ties to the British government.

Basyuk, sometimes spelt Basiuk, heads the Israeli military’s operations directorate, whose responsibilities have included the development of the military strategy that guided Israel’s brutal 15-month assault on Gaza.

The International Court of Justice ruled a year ago that a “plausible” case had been made that Israel was committing a genocide in Gaza. Israel has effectively been on trial ever since.

Meanwhile, the ICJ’s sister court, the International Criminal Court (ICC), has issued arrest warrants for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, for crimes against humanity – most notably for their policy of blocking aid and starving the entire population of 2.3 million Palestinians there.

Basyuk was one of the central figures helping to devise and direct these genocidal acts.

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Trump Plans To Finally Withdraw US Troops From Syria, Israelis Say

Israel and Turkish media reports say that President Donald Trump is planning to finally pull American occupying forces out of Syria. The statements began with a report this week by Israel’s official public broadcasting Kan. However, the Trump White House itself has yet to confirm this, but is likely in talks with regional states, particularly Turkey and close Washington ally Israel, about such a potential move.

Kan reported Tuesday that “senior White House officials conveyed a message to their Israeli counterparts indicating that President Trump intends to pull thousands of US troops from Syria.”

The Israeli reported added that “the withdrawal of American forces from Syria will raise significant concerns in Tel Aviv.” Israeli leaders see the US presence in northeast Syria as a stabilizing factor. Special forces, among some 2000 total troops have been advising and supporting the Syrian Kurds (SDF/YPG) for several years.

Just prior to Trump taking office, Biden’s Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin defended the US presence there as part of the ‘counter ISIS’ mission. US defense leaders have constantly argued over the years that the Islamic State could be resurgent if the Pentagon leaves.

But others would argue that Washington was among the biggest facilitators in the rise of ISIS, given that John Kerry once admitted that the US was trying to ‘manage’ ISIS in order to pressure Assad out.

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz has said in the wake of Assad’s shock ouster in early December, “We will not allow hostile forces to establish a foothold in the security zone south of Syria, from here to the Sweida-Damascus axis. We will act against any threat.”

Trump stretching back to his first administration had been more brutally honest about what American forces are really doing there, to the embarrassment of US intelligence and defense leaders, and deep state insiders. For example here’s what Trump told FOX years ago:

“I left troops [in Syria] to take the oil. I took the oil. The only troops I have are taking the oil. They’re protecting the oil. I took over the oil“. -Trump on Fox News

This in turn was used as an economic noose against Assad, but in reality it has been strangling the common populace of Syria, who might see one hour of electricity a day during winter conditions.

During Trump’s first term he signaled the we wanted the US out of Syria, but many reports said at the time he was stymied by more hawkish officials within his administration.

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Jordan, Egypt Reject US Plan To Resettle Gazans As Trump Doubles Down

After last Saturday President Trump floated a plan to ‘clean out’ Gaza by conducting a mass resettlement of Palestinians in neighboring countries, namely Egypt and Jordan, he’s now doubling down on the idea.

Egypt and Jordan are not happy, but are also feeling the pressure as a result, and it must be remembered that both are recipients of huge amounts of foreign aid each year – with Egypt receiving billions.

Israeli media underscores there’s been wall-to-wall firm opposition by Arab leaders: “US President Donald Trump dug in his heels Monday over a controversial suggestion that large numbers of Gazans take refuge in Egypt and Jordan, shrugging off wall-to-wall opposition to the proposal from Arab leaders.”

“Fresh off what he said were calls with Egyptian counterpart Abdel-Fatah el-Sissi and Jordan’s King Abdullah, Trump insisted both leaders would take in Palestinians from the war-ravaged territory and said the issue would be discussed with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when the two meet sometime soon, amid speculation in Israel that Trump’s gambit was being coordinated with Jerusalem,” the report details.

“Egyptian media on Tuesday cited government sources as saying that Trump and Sissi had yet to speak. If they did, Sissi’s office would issue a readout, the Egyptian officials told local media,” it continues.

This would involve these countries absorbing hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees – something which Jordan has already done historically over the last some seventy years.

Here are the latest remarks from Trump which are driving the controversy:

Asked about those comments, Trump told reporters on Air Force One Monday evening he would “like to get them living in an area where they can live without disruption and revolution and violence so much.”

“When you look at the Gaza Strip, it’s been hell for so many years,” Trump said. “There have been various civilizations on that strip. It didn’t start here. It started thousands of years before, and there’s always been violence associated with it. You could get people living in areas that are a lot safer and maybe a lot better and maybe a lot more comfortable.”

Interestingly, the tiny Balkan country of Albania has entered the discussion after an Israeli Channel 12 media report said that Trump was in talks with Albania for it to take 100,000 Palestinians from Gaza.

But Albania’s prime minister quickly batted this down, calling it false. “I haven’t heard something so fake in quite some time – and there’s been a lot of fake news lately! It is absolutely not true,” Prime Minister Edi Rama tweeted. If such talks actually did exist, the Muslim-majority population of this country would surely be outraged. 

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Trump Looking To Move Gazans To Indonesia, Albania, Pressures Jordan, Egypt

President Trump is moving forward with his plan to relocate Gaza residents displaced by the war with Israel after the Oct 7 attacks. The administration has contacted Albania and Indonesia and received a positive response. Both are Muslim countries. Albania took in thousands of Iranian resistance fighters — the PMOI/MEK after they were removed from Iraq.

The Trump team also continues to pressure Jordan and Egypt to take Gaza residents. So far, Egypt has publicly refused, even though the United States sends Egypt over a billion dollars a year in aid as part of a peace agreement with Israel in the past.

Trump told reporters last tonight, “I want them to live in an area where they can be without disturbances, revolution and violence. When you look at the Gaza Strip, it’s been hell for years. So I think we can get people out of there to live in areas that are much safer and perhaps much better and perhaps much more comfortable.

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Trump 2.0 and Palestinians: From Reversal to Repression and Deportations

In my new book, The Fall of Israel (2025), I examine the activities of all US postwar administrations regarding the Israelis and Palestinians. The first Trump administration did not just differ from its precursors. It turned upside down five decades of US policies regarding Palestinians. In the next four years, The Trump White House will build on this reversal.

The Great Reversal           

When the new administration arrived in the White House in early 2017, Trump made David M. Friedman US ambassador to Israel. Friedman advised and represented Trump and his organization in bankruptcies involving the tycoon’s Atlantic City casinos. As a revisionist Zionist donor, he had pumped millions of dollars into illegal, extremist West Bank settlements.

When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced Israel would lift all restrictions on settlement construction in the West Bank, Trump looked the other way. In 2016, the number of Jewish settlers in the occupied territories of the West Bank exceeded 400,000. Under Trump’s “peace to prosperity plan,” all settlements would remain under Israeli sovereignty and not a single settlement would be removed. Today, thanks to Trump and Biden administrations, the number of those settlers exceeds 750,000.

Subsequently, the US recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, moving its embassy from Tel Aviv to the Holy City. In 2018, Trump ordered the closure of the PLO office in Washington, D.C. and canceled nearly all US aid to the West Bank and Gaza, plus $360 million in annual aid previously given to the UNRWA.

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New ICJ president a Christian Zionist influenced by End Times theology

Julia Sebutinde stood alone in rejecting South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice. Now the court’s president, the Ugandan judge suggests her motives for protecting Israel can be found in the Old Testament. 

With new countries joining South Africa’s case accusing Israel of committing genocide in the Gaza Strip, and a ceasefire potentially enabling war crimes investigators to gather fresh evidence of Israeli atrocities, a leadership shakeup at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) threatens to undermine the campaign for legal accountability. 

The ICJ’s President Nawaf Salam resigned on January 14, 2025 to become Prime Minister of Lebanon, and was succeeded by Justice Julia Sebutinde of Uganda. Many observers were stunned when Sebutinde voted “no” on all resolutions introduced by South Africa in January 2024, placing herself in opposition to all ICJ judges, including her Israeli colleague, Aharon Barak. 

The Ugandan judge rejected the court’s call for the Israeli military to halt deliberate assaults on civilians, end its policy of forced displacement, and cancel its planned invasion of Rafah. In a previous advisory case on the legal consequences of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian Territories, Sebutinde insisted that Palestinians had not been subjected to any military occupation whatsoever. In fact, she concluded that Israel may have the right to maintain a permanent presence in the West Bank and the whole of Jerusalem on the basis of purely biblical claims.

Sebutinde’s opinion opened with a lengthy history of the Israel-Palestine conflict that blended well-worn Zionist propaganda with the Old Testament. In rejecting her colleagues’ ruling declaring Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem illegal, she resorted to accounts of the Jewish presence in the biblical land of Israel, omitting any mention of UN resolutions or international law. 

“There is substantial evidence that Jewish people lived in the region of ancient Israel between 1000-586 BCE. This period corresponds to the era of the United Monarchy under Kings Saul, David, and Solomon, and the subsequent divided kingdoms of Israel and Judah. The evidence includes archaeological findings in the City of David…” Sebutinde insisted. “The Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) offers detailed accounts of the history, culture, and governance of the Israelites during this period. While these texts are religious in nature, many scholars consider them valuable historical documents.”

Her opinion was so extreme, and so shot through with theological commentary, it prompted Uganda’s ambassador to the United Nations, Adonia Ayebare, to declare her “ruling at the International Court of Justice does not represent the Government of Uganda’s position on the situation in Palestine.”

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Trump Reverses Course In Gaza, Now Says He Wants To Move Residents, Egypt Refuses

President Trump stepped on a land mine yesterday when talking with reporters on Air Force One about the situation in Gaza.

The comments come after Hamas humiliated female IDF hostages yesterday by putting them on stage in a public act of vengeance.

Hamas has also refused to provide an accurate list of the remaining hostages in violation of the terms of the ceasefire. The agreement to end the conflict is now in jeapardy.

The President mentioned he has a plan to ask neighboring countries to take in the million and a half residents remaining in the bombed-out territory.

This is a shift from his previous pressure to allow Gazans to return to the northern sector since the ceasefire.

“I’d like Egypt to take people…You’re talking about probably a million and a half people, and we just clean out that whole thing and say, ‘You know, it’s over.”

“I spoke with the King of Jordan about the possibility of transferring Gazans to neighboring countries.”

“I told him to take more people because the Gaza Strip is in a real mess. I want Egypt to take in people too, and I will talk to Al-Sisi tomorrow.”

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Leaked documents expose deep ties between Israeli army and Microsoft

Microsoft has a “footprint in all major military infrastructures” in Israel, and sales of the company’s cloud and artificial intelligence services to the Israeli army have skyrocketed since the beginning of its onslaught on Gaza, according to leaked commercial records from Israel’s Defense Ministry and files from Microsoft’s Israeli subsidiary.

The documents reveal that dozens of units in the Israeli army have purchased services from Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, Azure, in recent months — including units in the air, ground, and naval forces, as well as the elite intelligence squad, Unit 8200. Microsoft has also provided the military with extensive access to OpenAI’s GPT-4 language model, the engine behind ChatGPT, thanks to the close partnership between the two companies. 

These revelations are the product of an investigation by +972 Magazine and Local Call in collaboration with The Guardian. It is based in part on documents obtained by Drop Site News, which has published its own story. The investigation shows how the Israeli army deepened its reliance on civilian tech giants after October 7, and comes amid growing protests by cloud company employees who fear that the technology they developed has helped Israel commit war crimes.

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Israel Passes Thoughtcrime Law Banning Doubts Over Official Narrative Of October 7th Attack

The political reverberations of Israel’s ceasefire agreement with Hamas continue to erode the foundation the Netanyahu government strengthened itself upon across the 15-month war. Over the course of the conflict, Netanyahu’s regime took unprecedented measures to consolidate power in the office of prime minister under the justification that the war constituted a state of emergency that required effectively dictatorial powers. With the war at least momentarily at a pause, the iron-fisted grasp Netanyahu held over Israel has started to slip away. The rapid deterioration of support for Netanyahu has led to the prime minister taking increasingly desperate measures to preserve his future.

The latest development serving that interest comes in the form of an Orwellian law passed by the Knesset that makes questioning the official narrative about the events of October 7th a thoughtcrime. Those events have long been marred by accusations of security failures and even speculation as to whether Netanyahu’s regime permitted the attack as a false flag to salvage his 6th term as Prime Minister Of Israel amidst the massive protests calling for his resignation that preceded it. Netanyahu now faces that same pressure yet again in the fallout from agreeing to a ceasefire with Hamas.

Following the official recognition of the Israel-Hamas ceasefire, Netanyahu lost the support of extreme rightwing factions of the ruling coalition of his government. That political upheaval was instigated by former National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, leader of Israel’s Jewish Power party as well as the leader of the Religious Zionism party and Netanyahu’s Minister Of Finance Bezalel Smotrich. The mass resignations of their respective party members from the Knesset led by Ben-Gvir and Smotrich were followed by the resignation of Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, the head of the Israel Defense Forces. Halevi’s resignation will take effect on March 6th.

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