Tag: palestine

Israeli author RENOUNCES CITIZENSHIP, calls it “a tool of genocide”

Israeli-born author Avi Steinberg announced on Dec. 26 that he has formally renounced his Israeli citizenship, citing his belief that the privilege of citizenship has been and continues to be used as a tool of settler colonialism and genocide.

Steinberg, who was born in Jerusalem to American parents and raised in an Orthodox Jewish household, detailed his decision in an op-ed published on Truthout.

In the article, Steinberg argued that Israeli citizenship is inherently tied to violent crimes and systemic discrimination. He described Israeli citizenship as a mechanism that legitimizes colonialism, pointing to laws such as the 1948 Declaration of Independence, the 1950 Law of Return and the 1952 Citizenship Law. These laws, he claimed, were shaped by the 1948 Nakba (“the catastrophe” in Arabic), during which approximately 80 percent of the Palestinian population were violently expelled from their homes in modern-day Israeli territory in a massive ethnic cleansing campaign.

Steinberg criticized Israel for creating a facade of legitimacy through what he called “forged documents,” which he said conceal the state’s “fundamental unlawfulness.” He also reflected on his family’s history, noting that his parents migrated to Israel under the Law of Return and later settled in the United States. He described the cognitive dissonance of his parents, who opposed the U.S. invasion of Vietnam while participating in what he termed the “armed settlement of another people’s land.”

The author revealed that the house he grew up in was owned by a Palestinian family who were forcibly expelled to Jordan and barred from returning. He described this displacement as a deliberate strategy to attract settlers by marketing the “native Arab charm” of villages emptied of their original inhabitants.

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Why Congress Members Face a Lawsuit for Funding Israel’s War on Gaza

On the last day of 2024, the deputy general counsel for the House of Representatives formally accepted delivery of a civil summons for two congressmembers from Northern California. More than 600 constituents of Jared Huffman and Mike Thompson have signed on as plaintiffs in a class action accusing them of helping to arm the Israeli military in violation of “international and federal law that prohibits complicity in genocide.”

Whatever the outcome of the lawsuit, it conveys widespread anger and anguish about the ongoing civilian carnage in Gaza that taxpayers have continued to bankroll.

By a wide margin, most Americans favor an arms embargo on Israel while the Gaza war persists. But Huffman and Thompson voted to approve $26.38 billion in military aid for Israel last April, long after the nonstop horrors for civilians in Gaza were evident.

Back in February – two months before passage of the enormous military aid package – both Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International found that, in the words of the lawsuit, “the Israeli government was systematically starving the people of Gaza through cutting off aid, water, and electricity, by bombing and military occupation, all underwritten by the provision of U.S. military aid and weapons.”

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Palestinian Authority Bans Al Jazeera From West Bank For ‘Stirring Strife’

The Palestinian Authority (PA) announced Wednesday the suspension of Al-Jazeera’s operations in the Palestinian West Bank, citing alleged violations of Palestinian laws and ‘interference’. 

The major Qatar-based outlet is accused of “manipulation, interference in internal affairs, and dissemination of misleading and incendiary reports,” according to a statement in the official Palestinian news agency WAFA.

The broadcaster has been further blamed for “reports that were deceiving and stirring strife” in the context of the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) effort to crackdown on unauthorized armed groups.

For the past more than two weeks the PA has laid police siege to the Jenin refugee camp in an effort to root out the Jenin Brigade and associated factions. The PA has called the groups “outlaws” and “Iranian gangs” which are operating in the camp.

At least nine Palestinians have been killed as a result of the assault, including reportedly children. The PA had already banned Al Jazeera from reporting from inside Jenin amid the crisis.

Al Jazeera issued a Thursday statement saying it was “shocked by this decision” and is urging an immediate reversal of the temporary ban, for which there hasn’t been a timetable. It has confirmed its coverage has moved to Jordan.

The outlet has charged the PA with “an attempt to hide the truth about events in the occupied territories, especially what is happening in Jenin and its camps.”

Months ago Israeli commandoes raided Al Jazeera’s West Bank offices and seized equipment and ordered the bureau closed.

As early as October 2023, soon after the Oct.7 Hamas terror attacks, Israel moved to ban Al Jazeera from having offices in Tel Aviv or operating anywhere in Israel.

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UN accuses Israel of turning Gaza hospitals into ‘death traps’

The UN Human Rights Office issued a report on 31 December condemning Israeli attacks on Gaza hospitals, saying they had become “death traps.”

The 23-page report documented various Israeli attacks on Gaza’s hospitals and the destruction of the strip’s health care system between October 2023 and July 2024.

“The destruction of the healthcare system in Gaza, and the extent of killing of patients, staff, and other civilians in these attacks, is a direct consequence of the disregard of international humanitarian and human rights law,” the report said.

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Turk, said the Israeli military had shown “blatant disregard for international humanitarian and human rights law.”

“As if the relentless bombing and the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza were not enough, the one sanctuary where Palestinians should have felt safe, in fact, became a death trap,” Turk said in a statement.

In recent days, the Israeli military escalated its attack on the Kamal Adwan Hospital in north Gaza while detaining the hospital director, Hussam Abu Safia, and hundreds of others.

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The West Bank’s Men of the CIA – Why Is the PA Killing Palestinians in Jenin?

Following a ten-day siege, the Palestinian Authority began, on December 14, a violent raid on the Jenin refugee camp in the northern West Bank.

The PA security forces used similar tactics as used by the Israeli occupation forces in their routine attacks on the area.

The camp, which is a mere half a square kilometer in size, hosts an ever-growing population of 24 thousand refugees, mostly the descendants of Palestinians ethnically cleansed by Zionist militias during the great catastrophe, or Nakba, of 1948.

The raid began with a tight siege, followed by an attack from multiple directions that resulted in the killing of an unarmed youth, Rebhi al-Shalabi, 19, then a 13-year-old child, Muhammad al-Amer.

The PA forces also killed Yazid Ja’ayseh, the commander of the Jenin Brigades, who had evaded Israeli assassination attempts for his leadership role in unifying all Palestinian Resistance fighters under the umbrella of a single group.

Expectedly, Israel is largely pleased with the PA’s action against the Palestinian Resistance, though it expects more. “The Palestinian Authority has been acting resolutely against the Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters over the past several weeks, army and Shin Bet sources said, but the Israeli officials expressed the hope that their effectiveness could be enhanced,” Haaretz reported.

Indeed, Israel had attempted to subdue Jenin 80 times in the last year alone, killing more than 220 people, Al Jazeera reported, citing Palestinian Ministry of Health sources.

By attacking Jenin, the PA is helping the Israeli army in more than one way: it is killing and detaining anti-Israeli occupation Resistance fighters, consuming the energy and resources of the Resistance, allowing Israel to spare thousands of soldiers so that they may carry on with the genocide in Gaza, and more.

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The Moral Bankruptcy of the West

On 19 December 2024, Human Rights Watch issued a 179-page report detailing Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

On 5 December 2024, Amnesty International issued a 296-page report detailing Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

On 21 November 2024, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for crimes against humanity and war crimes.

On 26 January 2024, the International Court of Justice found that a plausible case can be made that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

Given the West’s presumed commitment to human rights and especially to preventing genocide, one would have expected countries like the United States, Britain, and Germany, to have stopped the Israeli genocide in its tracks.

Instead, the governments in those three countries, especially the United States, have supported Israel’s unimaginable behavior in Gaza at every turn. Indeed, those three countries are complicit in this genocide.

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UN Expert Urges Medical World to Cut Ties With Israel Amid Attacks on Gaza Hospitals

As Israeli forces stand accused of war crimes during attacks on multiple Gaza hospitals in recent days, Francesca Albanese – the United Nations special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories – on Monday implored the global medical community to respond by cutting ties with Israel.

“I urge medical professionals worldwide to pursue the severance of all ties with Israel as a concrete way to forcefully denounce Israel’s full destruction of the Palestinian healthcare system in Gaza, a critical tool of its ongoing genocide,” Albanese wrote on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.

Albanese amplified a post by Dr. Rupa Marya – one of the most vocal defenders of Palestinian human rights in the U.S. medical community – calling on Israeli forces to release Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, director of Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahia.

Abu Safiya, who documented Israel’s siege and attack on Kamal Adwan and who reported last week that nearly 50 people including five hospital staff members were killed by an Israel Defense Forces airstrike on a nearby apartment tower, was among dozens of other medical staffers abducted by IDF troops on Saturday.

After besieging and attacking the hospital for weeks, Israeli forces raided the facility and rounded up 240 people, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. Israel claimed without evidence that Kamal Adwan was being used as a Hamas command center. With the facility shut down and badly damaged, critical patients and their caregivers were forced to evacuate to the nearby Indonesian Hospital.

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Israel ‘severely weakened’ war protocols to allow rampant killing of civilians in Gaza: Report

The Israeli army has “severely weakened” its protocols to protect civilians during military operations since the start of the war in Gaza, allowing mid-ranking officers to order indiscriminate strikes from the air force, according to a New York Times (NYT) investigation. 

According to NYT, officers were granted the authority right after 7 October to risk the killing of up to 20 civilians in each airstrike. The order had “no precedent” in Israel’s military history. 

“Mid-ranking officers had never been given so much leeway to attack so many targets, many of which had lower military significance, at such a high potential civilian cost,” NYT said, adding that under this order, “the military could target rank-and-file militants as they were at home surrounded by relatives and neighbors.” 

Previously, Israeli strikes were approved only after officers found that no civilians would be hurt. In some cases, the military had granted them the leeway of risking up to five civilian deaths. Nonetheless, this did not stop brutally deadly strikes against civilians in previous conflicts. 

An anonymous military officer told NYT that Israel changed its protocol because it believed it was existentially threatened. 

“Israel severely weakened its system of safeguards meant to protect civilians; adopted flawed methods to find targets and assess the risk of civilian casualties; routinely failed to conduct post-strike reviews of civilian harm or punish officers for wrongdoing; and ignored warnings from within its own ranks and from senior US military officials about these failings,” according to the investigation. 

NYT reviewed dozens of army records and conducted interviews with over 100 Israeli soldiers and officials, including those who had a hand in vetting targets for airstrikes and attacks. 

As part of this loosening of protocol, Tel Aviv greatly expanded its set of targets for preemptive strikes and the number of civilians it could risk killing. As a result, nearly 30,000 munitions were fired into the besieged Gaza Strip in the first seven weeks – more than the next eight months of the war combined, NYT said. 

“On a few occasions, senior commanders approved strikes on Hamas leaders that they knew would each endanger more than 100 noncombatants – crossing an extraordinary threshold for a contemporary western military,” it added. 

This policy has been evident throughout the course of the war in Gaza. One attack in the northern strip in October this year resulted in the killing of at least 100 Palestinians. 

In early June, Israel launched an indiscriminate rescue operation in the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza to retrieve Noa Argamani and three other Israeli captives. Nearly 300 Palestinians were massacred in the process.

“The military struck at a pace that made it harder to confirm it was hitting legitimate targets. It burned through much of a prewar database of vetted targets within days and adopted an unproven system for finding new targets that used artificial intelligence at a vast scale,” the NYT investigation revealed. 

Insufficient models to assess the risk of civilian loss were used repeatedly. In the first two months of the war, 15,000 Palestinians were killed by Israel. 

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Another Expert Report Finds Israel Is Committing Genocide. The West Yawns

Three separate reports published this month by leading international human rights and medical groups have detailed the same horrifying story: that Israel is well advanced in its genocide of the Palestinian population in Gaza.

Or, to be more accurate, they have confirmed what was already patently clear: that, for the past 14 months, Israel has been slaughtering tens of thousands of Palestinians with indiscriminate munitions, while at the same time gradually starving the survivors to death and denying them access to medical care.

Genocides can happen with gas chambers. Or with machetes. Or they can be carried out with 2,000lb bombs and aid blockades. Genocides rarely look the same. But they are all designed to arrive at the same endpoint: the elimination of a people.

Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) agree that Israel is striving for extermination. It has not hidden its intent, and that intent is confirmed by its actions on the ground.

Only the wilfully blind, which includes western politicians and their media, are still in denial. But worse than denial, they continue to actively collude in this, the ultimate crime against humanity, by supplying Israel with the weapons, intelligence and diplomatic cover it needs for the extermination.

Last week, MSF issued its report, titled Life in the Death Trap That is Gaza, concluding that Israel was intentionally “unravelling the fabric of society”.

The medical charity observed: “The violence unleashed by Israeli forces has caused physical and mental damage on a scale that would overwhelm any functioning health system, let alone one already decimated by a crushing offensive and a 17-year-long blockade [by Israel].”

MSF added: “Even if the offensive ended today, its long-term impact would be unprecedented, given the scale of the destruction.”

Rebuilding the society and dealing with the health consequences will “span generations”.

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Deception & Politics From Washington to Tel Aviv

In these difficult times, the voice of the late Palestinian-American scholar, Edward Said is ever present, “Writing is the final resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history.”

For more than fourteen painful months Israel has passed off its inhuman actions against the people of Gaza as “defensive.”

We are to believe that the massacre of tens of thousands of civilians and attacks on its Arab neighbors are somehow Israel’s “right.”  Championed by the Biden administration, Tel Aviv has grown ever more bold and barbaric in its efforts to crush the resistance and expand its “undeclared” borders; simply, because it can.

Since it proclaimed itself a state on Palestinian land in 1948, Israel has been and continues to be engaged in the largest dispossession of an ethnic group in modern history.  And following its victory in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, Israel has emerged an expansionist, occupying and annexationist power, ruling over vast Arab lands and people.

The United States has, particularly since 1967, been the bulwark for Israel’s expansionist dreams. U.S.-Israeli supremacist intentions, papered over and buried for decades, are now clear for all to see.

Out of the ashes of World War II, the newly created United Nations, with U.S. pressure, helped legalize land theft.  In 1947, the General Assembly (made up of 58 nations) said “yes” to the creation of a Jewish state on 62 percent of historic Palestine. 

At the time of the unequal division, 68 percent of the population were Arab Palestinian Muslims and Christians, while only 30 percent were Jewish.

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