Tag: palestine

Why the Democrats were Israel’s perfect partners in genocide

Over the last year, we have witnessed President Joe Biden elevate the U.S.-Israel “special relationship” to new heights. From replenishing Israel’s weapons stocks and shielding it from accountability on the international stage, to deploying U.S. assets and personnel in Israel’s defense, the Biden administration has gone above and beyond to ensure that Israel not only could sustain its unprecedented assault on Gaza, but that it wouldn’t have to bear the full cost of war.

Biden went into his reelection campaign wrestling with Donald Trump for the title of “Israel’s best friend” — a grotesque race to the bottom that has become a tradition during U.S. election seasons. So when the president ultimately decided to drop out, some were hopeful that Vice President Kamala Harris would release us from this downward spiral. They were soon disappointed.

Media outlets eagerly insisted that Harris seemed to show “greater understanding and empathy for Palestinians,” and surmised that such a difference in perspective might lead to a change in policy. But in the months since assuming the head of the Democratic ticket, Harris has made it clear that she is ready and eager to carry on Biden’s catastrophic legacy for the next four years.

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Israel’s parliament votes to ban UNRWA, the UN’s Palestine aid agency

The Israeli parliament has approved two controversial bills to ban the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) from operating on Israeli territory and areas under Israel’s control.

The legislation, passed on Monday, risks collapsing the already fragile aid distribution process at a moment when the humanitarian crisis in Gaza is worsening and Israel is under increased pressure to allow in aid supplies.

The ban is set to take effect in 90 days and lead to the closure of UNRWA’s premises in the occupied Palestinian territory – the West Bank, including occupied East Jerusalem – and Gaza, effectively paralysing the agency’s ability to fulfil its mandate as set out by the UN General Assembly in 1949.

UNRWA is the leading agency running humanitarian aid in Gaza, which has been devastated by more than a year of Israel’s war. Hundreds of UNRWA workers have been killed in Israeli strikes, making it the deadliest conflict for UN workers.

The first law, which bans UNRWA from conducting “any activity” or providing any service inside Israel, passed 92-10 following a fiery debate between supporters of the bill and its opponents, primarily members of Arab parliamentary parties.

The second legislation, which declares UNRWA a “terror” group and bans Israeli officials from any contact with the agency, passed 87-9.

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Israel traps 100,000 Palestinians in Gaza extermination zone

Israeli tanks thrust deeper on Monday into northern Gaza, trapping around 100,000 civilians, while the air force carried out airstrikes that brought the number of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces since last October above 43,000.

The Palestinian Civil Emergency Service said around 100,000 people were stuck in Jabalia, Beit Lahia, and Beit Hanoun without medical or food supplies as a result of the siege imposed by Israeli forces.

The emergency service said it was forced to end its operations because of the three-week-long Israeli assault on Gaza’s north.

The Israeli military says it seeks to destroy Hamas and claimed it had captured 100 “suspected Hamas militants” during a raid of the Kamal Adwan hospital in the Jabalia camp in recent days.

Hospital officials said that Israeli forces detained members of the hospital staff, patients, and Palestinians sheltering in the hospital complex.  

Since the start of the war, Israel has claimed that Hamas uses hospitals as command centers as a pretext to deliberately destroy Gaza’s hospitals and health system.

Israeli forces carried out multiple airstrikes across Gaza on Monday, killing five people and bringing the number killed by Israel during the war on Gaza to more than 43,000.

The Palestinian news agency WAFA reported that an Israeli drone struck a group of people in the Beit Lahia area Monday, killing one and injuring several others.

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Israel attacks north Gaza’s last working hospital after carpet-bombing Jabalia

Israeli forces stormed the last operational hospital in the besieged northern Gaza on Friday after laying waste to a densely packed refugee camp in a bombing campaign that killed scores of Palestinians.

The attack on the Kamal Adwan hospital, located in Beit Lahia, was launched around 2am local time, shortly after Israeli fighter jets carpet-bombed residential buildings in the nearby Jabalia camp and southern Gaza’s Khan Younis.

The assault on the hospital began with air strikes that hit the hospital and its courtyards, including the medical oxygen generator, said Dr. Munir al-Bursh, director general of the Palestinian health ministry in Gaza. 

The bombing of the oxygen supply led to the death of children in the hospital and wounded medical staff, Bursh said.

“Instead of receiving aid, we receive tanks… which are shelling the [hospital] building,” Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, the director of Kamal Adwan hospital, said in a video published on his social media pages shortly after the bombing. Contact with him has been lost since. 

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Armed Resistance is enshrined in international law

Decades ago, it was agreed that Resistance and armed rebellion against a settler colonial occupation and apartheid power is not just recognised under international law. It is enshrined specifically as a right for the oppressed, never to be denied.

In accordance with international humanitarian law, wars of national liberation have been expressly embraced, through the adoption of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions of 1949 (pdf), as a protected and essential right of occupied people everywhere.

This runs counter to what London, Washington and Tel Aviv would have you believe. Proscribing the Resistance factions as “terrorist” groups immediately distracts people from their real role in liberating Palestinian territory from the Zionist occupier and its Western backers.

Prof. Tim Anderson:

The colonial powers almost all abstained on the 1960 Declaration on Decolonisation, the lead principle of which (the right of a people to self-determination) entered the twin covenants of the International Bill of Rights. After that the hegemonic powers tried to deny (but could not block) UN declarations and conventions on the right to resist colonialism, occupation, and apartheid. The result is that today most anti-colonial resistance groups are banned as “terrorist”, but only in the hegemonic regimes.

International law clearly supports the right to resist (further, Palestine and Lebanon as recognised nations enjoy the UN chartered right to national self-defence) while the Anglo-Americans and their collaborators live in denial. This hegemonic denial of the right to resist (including the legitimacy of Palestinian insurrection) creates a culture which confuses and must itself be resisted. Proponents of resistance education should inform, encourage and build confidence in support of legitimate popular resistance.

Anderson advocates unequivocal support for the Resistance despite the threats that confront those who do:

Self-determination is not a posthumous medal for helpless victims, it is a great right that must be fought for and taken from the imperial and colonial forces which try to deny and block self-determination. This is not well recognised in colonial cultures, which embed paternal myths.

Yet it is well recognised by anti-colonial leaders, like the great 19th century Cuban patriot Jose Marti who said in 1880, “You take your rights, you do not beg for them. You do not buy them with tears but with blood.”

While the Palestinian cause is popular in Western countries, this support begins as sympathy for the victims and is often simply an abstract call for an end to the violence. To take a further step and support the Palestinian and regional Resistance implies confronting Western regimes which have tried to ban and criminalise all Resistance groups.

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Report: Shin Bet Warned of Possible Hamas Assault Hours Before October 7 Attack

Approximately three hours prior to the Hamas’ attack in southern Israel on October 7, Shin Bet warned other elements of the police and security establishment that a potential assault emanating from the besieged Gaza Strip could be imminent.

The Kan public broadcaster and Channel 12 news reported the internal security service sent a “top secret” notification to the National Security Council, Mossad, and police that Israeli SIM cards Shin Bet had previously circulated within the group’s ranks as part of an operation had been activated “in a number of Hamas battalions.” There was no solid quantification of how many SIM cards were activated in the warning, but as the Times of Israel notes each battalion presumably contains hundreds of fighters.

The Shin Bet operation involving the cards was launched to provide an early warning for future Hamas attacks against Israel. The automatically generated alert was sent to situation rooms staffed 24 hours a day, contradicting past police claims about never receiving any warning, per Israeli media.

The Nova music festival held just outside the Gaza concentration camp went on as scheduled despite the alert, where concertgoers were subsequently slaughtered by Hamas as well as the IDF, which reportedly implemented a mass Hannibal Directive.

The Hannibal Directive is a policy of the Israeli military to kill their own soldiers when taken hostage, so as to prevent them from being used as bargaining chips by various resistance groups. However, on October 7, this order was extended to include Israeli civilians potentially kidnapped by Hamas. The group managed to abduct roughly 250 hostages and bring them back to the Strip.

Israeli police and Shin Bet are at odds over who is to blame, some sources told Kan that the internal security service should have raised a stronger alarm while other officials argue police did not pay the warning sufficient attention. Shin Bet’s warning said the activity demonstrated “unusual accumulation and, given additional suspicious signs, could be an indication of Hamas attack activities.”

The Times notes, “despite the warning, the security establishment maintained an outlook that Hamas was not capable or interested in carrying out a massive attack on the country.” Adding, “no action was taken” based on the Shin Bet alert. As the Jerusalem Post reported last year, this cavalier attitude was shared by commanders within Israel’s apartheid army who were admonished by their lookouts that suspicious activity was ongoing near the border before the attack.

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Journalists Find No Evidence of Israeli Claim That Hezbollah Money Stash Is Under Beirut Hospital

Journalists were given unrestricted access to the Sahel General Hospital in Beirut’s southern suburbs after the Israeli military claimed a Hezbollah money and gold stash was hidden in a bunker underneath the building.

A BBC journalist reporting from the hospital’s basement levels said the staff opened any doors and cabinets the reporters wanted to open. Journalists were also able to explore anywhere in the building on their own, and no evidence of a Hezbollah money stash was found.

Israel first made the claim in a video on Monday night, prompting the hospital to evacuate patients over fears they would be bombed. “We were here at the hospital working, treating patients, and then the video came out,” Dr. Omar Mneimne, who works at the hospital, told The National. “Obviously, we [have been] living in terror for the past 24 hours.”

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Meta’s Israel Policy Chief Tried to Suppress Pro-Palestinian Instagram Posts

A former senior Israeli government official now working as Meta’s Israel policy chief personally pushed for the censorship of Instagram accounts belonging to Students for Justice in Palestine — a group that has played a leading role in organizing campus protests against Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza.

Internal policy discussions reviewed by The Intercept show Jordana Cutler, Meta’s Israel & the Jewish Diaspora policy chief, used the company’s content escalation channels to flag for review at least four SJP posts, as well as other content expressing stances contrary to Israel’s foreign policy. When flagging SJP posts, Cutler repeatedly invoked Meta’s Dangerous Organizations and Individuals policy, which bars users from freely discussing a secret list of thousands of blacklisted entities. The Dangerous Organizations policy restricts “glorification” of those on the blacklist, but is supposed to allow for “social and political discourse” and “commentary.” 

It’s unclear if Cutler’s attempts to use Meta’s internal censorship system were successful; the company declined to say what ultimately happened to posts that Cutler flagged. It’s not Cutler’s decision whether flagged content is ultimately censored; another team is responsible for moderation decisions. But experts who spoke to The Intercept expressed alarm over a senior employee tasked with representing the interests of any government advocating for restricting user content that runs contrary to those interests.

“It screams bias,” said Marwa Fatafta a policy adviser with the digital rights organization Access Now, which consults with Meta on content moderation issues. “It doesn’t really require that much intelligence to conclude what this person is up to.”

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US authorizes CIA mercenaries to run biometric concentration camps in Gaza Strip

The Biden administration has approved the deployment of 1,000 CIA-trained private mercenaries as part of a joint U.S.-Israeli plan to turn Gaza’s apocalyptic rubblescape into a high-tech dystopia.

Starting with Al-Atatra, a village in the northwestern Gaza Strip, the plan calls to build what the Israeli daily Ynet calls “humanitarian bubbles” – turning the remains of villages and neighborhoods into tiny concentration camps cut off from their environs and surrounded and controlled by mercenaries.

This comes as Israel carries out daily massacres and ethnic cleansing in northern Gaza, enacting the proposal known as The Generals’ Plan, originally crafted by former national security chief Giora Eiland to turn Gaza into “a place where no human being can exist.”

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Freedom of Expression Under Attack Amid Israel’s Genocide in Gaza: UN Official

A newly released UN report raises the alarm about the risks of freedom of expression around the world as Israel carries out its effort to ethnically cleanse Gaza.

The report should come as no surprise to subscribers to The Trends Journal.

We have been reporting on the crackdown in the U.S. on college protesters and anyone who speaks out against the atrocities playing out in Gaza. There is only one position accepted in Washington and in the mainstream news, which could be summed up in the phrase: Israel has the right to defend itself.

But Israel’s rights have trumped individual freedoms across the world, Irene Khan, the UN’s special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, said in the report, which was, predictably, largely ignored in the media.

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