Tag: perpetual war

The Price of Genocide: How US Funding Sustains an Unraveling Israeli Economy

In an important step toward the economic isolation of Israel due to its genocide in Gaza, Norway’s Government Pension Fund Global has decided to divest from yet more Israeli companies.

Norway’s sovereign wealth fund is the world’s largest, with total investments in Israel once estimated at $1.9 billion. The decision to divest was taken gradually but is consistent with the Norwegian government’s growing solidarity with Palestine and rising criticism of Israel.

Taking a leading role along with Spain, Ireland, and Slovenia, Norway has been a vocal European critic of the Israeli genocide and man-made famine in Gaza, actively contributing to the International Court of Justice’s investigation into the genocide, and formally recognizing the state of Palestine in May 2024. This diplomatic and legal stance, coupled with its financial divestment, represents a coherent and escalating effort to hold Israel accountable for the ongoing extermination of Palestinians.

The Israeli economy was already in a state of freefall even before the genocide. The initial collapse was related to the deep political instability in the country, a result of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his extremist government’s attempt to co-opt the judicial system, thus compromising any semblance of “democracy” remaining in that country. This resulted in a significant lowering of investor confidence.

The war and genocide, beginning on October 7, 2023, only accelerated the crisis, pushing an already fragile economy to the brink. According to reports from the Israel Ministry of Finance, foreign direct investments in Israel fell by an estimated 28% in the first half of 2024 compared to the same period in 2023.

Any supposed recovery in foreign investments, however, was deceptive. It was not the outcome of a global rallying to save Israel, but rather a consequence of a torrent of US funds pouring in to help Israel sustain both its economy and the genocide in Gaza, along with its other war fronts.

Israel’s Gross Domestic Product was estimated by the World Bank to be around $540 billion by the end of 2024. The war on Gaza has already taken a considerable bite out of Israel’s entire GDP. Estimates from Israel itself are complex, but all data points to the fact that the Israeli economy is suffering and will continue to suffer in the foreseeable future. Citing reports from the Bank of Israel and the Ministry of Finance, the Israeli business newspaper Calcalist reported in January 2025 that the cost of the Israeli war on Gaza had already reached more than $67.5 billion. That figure represented the costs of the war up to the end of 2024.

Keeping in mind that the ongoing war costs continue to rise exponentially, and with other consequences of the war – including divestments from the Israeli market by Norway and other countries – future projections for the Israeli economy look very grim. The Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics reported that the Israeli economy, already in a constant state of contraction, shrunk by another 3.5% in the period between April and June 2025.

This collapse is projected to continue, even with the unprecedented US financial backing of Tel Aviv. Indeed, without US help, the precarious Israeli economy would be in a much worse state. Though the US has always propped up Israel – with nearly $4 billion in aid annually – the US help for Israel in the last two years was the most generous and critical yet.

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A Moment Of Truth About Killing Gaza’s Children

“It doesn’t matter if they are children.”

That’s Ex-Israeli Intelligence Chief Aharon Haliva’s brutally honest assessment of the 50,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza. His remarks were recorded shortly after Israel reached that bloody milestone in March of this year. He resigned from the IDF’s Military Intelligence Directorate a year earlier in response to the security failures surrounding Hamas’ October 7th massacre.

That means he was not speaking officially.

But he was speaking candidly. And his blunt admission suggests something other than physical proximity to a suspected member Hamas is at play when the IDF kills underage non-combatants in bunches.

It’s been clear since the end of December 2023 that there is no meaningful restriction on the number of children Israel’s soldiers and pilots can kill, maim and orphan. The IDF set a heady pace during the five weeks, killing one child every ten minutes. Nearly nine thousand children were killed during the first eleven weeks of bombing.

On December 5, 2023, the IDF reassured the public (particularly in the US) it was only killing two civilians per Hamas fighter. The Times Of Israel also cited unnamed officials who claimed “the IDF was deploying high-tech mapping software to try to reduce noncombatant deaths.”

Those assurances didn’t match the reality reported by the BBC just the day before. It introduced the world to the acronym “WCNSF.” It’s shorthand for “Wounded Child No Surviving Family” and it’s assigned during triage because injured children without parents, siblings or legal guardians require specific attention and additional resources.

Obviously, Gazans do not have the infrastructure or resources to care for a generation of battle-scarred orphans. Imagine the trauma of being Injured, trapped and then pulled from a collapsed apartment building, only to discover your mother, father and siblings are dead. That’s exactly what happened to Noor, a 14 year-old Palestinian girl who became a WCNSF twenty months after the BBC’s story first aired:

On August 6, at around 3:00 a.m., an Israeli airstrike hit the apartment where my sister Somaiya, 35, her husband Anas, 35, and their daughters Noor, 14, Hoor, 13, and Sham, 9, were staying. The airstrike killed my sister’s family except for Noor, who survived with an arm fracture that required surgery. When Noor was admitted to the hospital on August 8 and rushed to the operating room, she called out to her parents, who were gone forever.

Her story comes via her uncle “Yousef,” a Gaza-based coordinator for the American Friends Service Committee (the Quakers). She does still have an uncle, though, which sets her apart from other WCNSFs who have lost their uncles, aunts, cousins and grandparents.

One hundred thirty-two members of the Abu Naser family died on October 29, 2023, when the family-owned apartment building was struck by the IDF, which said the intended target was an “enemy spotter” on the roof. NPR asked for visual evidence to back up the claim. The IDF declined. Even if there was one spotter on the roof, does that warrant destroying an entire building? Is there another way to neutralize one spotter on the roof of a multi-family apartment building? Could bullets be used instead of bombs?

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A Dark Theory: Russian Strategy In Ukraine

Let’s talk about Russian strategy in Ukraine…

Looking at developments lately, specifically:

(1) the Ukrainian casualty leak showing an astronomical 1.7M KIA/MIA; and

(2) the Ukrainian collapse north of Pokrovsk

I thought should revisit a dark thought I had a while ago, namely that, “maybe the killing itself is the point of all of this.”

I’ve said before that the Russians have fought an extraordinarily clean war in Ukraine, but it should be understood that there is a very legalistic shade on that assessment.

They’ve killed very few civilians, and Ukrainian propagandists are perpetually beclowning themselves trying to pretend that the usual single-digit handful of injured civilians that accompany the latest attack using hundreds of standoff weapons fired into city centers (producing secondary explosions visible from outer space as military targets hidden among civilian infrastructure are destroyed with surgical precision) somehow constitute gEnOCiDe rather than some of the most well-controlled warfighting in the history of the business.

There is another and far darker side to Russia’s “clean” war, however.

Let us consider the fate of the Armed Forces of Ukraine – legal combatants all, whom the Russians can and do target and kill without limit. I mentioned the casualty leak earlier, but I feel this needs to have a line drawn under it – one point seven million personnel killed or missing in action in the AFU, over the course of the war. 1.7 MILLION. Seven or eight percent of Ukraine’s prewar population, probably something like a quarter of the entire national cohort of military-aged males, dead or missing. Casualties on the scale of a genocide, sufficient to permanently cripple any postwar Ukrainian nation.

Casualties multiple times that which I assessed two years ago as sufficient to shatter the AFU based on the experience of Nazi Germany.

This brings me to the Ukrainian collapse north of Pokrovsk two weeks ago, in which a run-of-the-mill Russian attack walked through twenty kilometers of Ukrainian defensive belts and into open country.

The Ukrainian propagandists coped by whining about how the single most important front sector for the AFU had somehow “run out of infantry.”

But did the Russians throw in a mobile reserve to collapse the front and chase the AFU back to the Dniper, despite doubtless knowing full well what was going on? No, they did not – they consolidated in the breach and awaited the inevitable, panicked Ukrainian counterattack, in which they would have the opportunity to destroy Ukraine’s remaining elite troops.

Which brings me to my conclusion.

The Russians have had countless opportunities to make large advances in this war, especially recently – the Ukrainian front line is an absolute shambles and their “drone wall” tactic will falter against any serious attack. So ineffectual is the AFU that very few Russian moves at the front even face serious opposition these days, with most geolocations of Russian advances showing them already established in place and dealing with harassment by kill drones after having seized positions bloodlessly. The Russians have in fact consistently foregone breaking the front and taking swathes of ground in favor of killing the largest possible number of Ukrainian soldiers on the existing front line under the existing attritional combat dynamic.

This “tactical directive” held true even during the Battle of Sudzha-Korenevo, fought in prewar Russia. Rather than counterattacking aggressively to evict the AFU, the Russians saw the opportunity to kill gigantic numbers of Ukrainians in a trap the enemy wouldn’t be able to extract themselves from for ideological reasons, and they took it. That battle ended up being nine months of hideously lopsided butchery that broke the back of the AFU.

All of this makes observing the war more than a little maddening, but it’s a consistent pattern of behavior that begs for explanation.

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Europe on the Path to a War Economy

In Unterlüß, Lower Saxony, Europe’s largest ammunition factory began production last week. What started clandestinely is now being publicly scaled with full firepower: the European Union is building its own war economy.

In the good old days in Germany, recessions were typically masked by state-funded infrastructure programs. The concept worked as long as the state did not overgrow, overregulate, or force the private sector into a destructive ideological agenda, as is the case with the green transformation. In other words, the economy was always able to clear away the debris left behind by the state.

Southern Europe Could Never Recover

In Southern Europe, where the state’s role has traditionally been high, monetary policy generous, and handling of public funds notoriously lax, this policy left nothing but infrastructure ruins and industrial wastelands. Local economies were never able to productively absorb the artificial credit distributed by Brussels. The fatal consequences of this pseudo-boom still shape the landscape today.

For economic historians, present-day Europe has long been a fascinating case study. Crisis followed crisis, with the public sector intervening each time with increasing volume. The attempt to install the Green Deal, a Keynesian pseudo-economy, must be understood in this context. The new Rheinmetall plant fits into this narrative.

The company invested half a billion euros to provide an annual capacity of up to 350,000 rounds by 2027. 500 new jobs are to be created, celebrated by politicians as a turning point and the beginning of a pan-European defense architecture.

Ceremony and Half-Truths

Rheinmetall CEO Armin Papperger expressed satisfaction: “It was not easy for us to invest half a billion without orders. I am very grateful to you” — the words were directed at Defense Minister Boris Pistorius — “for keeping your handshake agreements. You are a man of word and deed.” A heavy dose of pathos and self-congratulation is evident here — politics and the defense industry are long intertwined.

Of course, this is only half the truth. Beyond the usual behind-the-scenes deals, politics has made it clear that it is ready to mobilize all means to build a German defense industry and provide sector companies with guarantees and subsidies where necessary. Big business, no risk.

After the collapse of the green economy, politics is now betting everything on the next pseudo-economy. The aim is to loosen dependence on America while exploiting the media spin that stylized Vladimir Putin’s Russia over years as a potential European invader. Whether this fear campaign will work in the long term remains to be seen.

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‘We Have Many Options’: US Warships Pass Through Panama Canal Toward Southern Caribbean

U.S. warships were seen entering the Panama Canal while navigating east toward the Atlantic, according to photos taken on Aug. 30.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Aug. 19 that President Donald Trump was “prepared to use every element of American power to stop drugs from flooding into [the United States] and to bring those responsible to justice.”

“Many Caribbean nations and many nations in the region have applauded the administration’s counterdrug operations and efforts,” Leavitt added.

As Jacob Burg reports below, the previous day, a White House official told The Epoch Times that U.S. naval and air assets would deploy to the southern Caribbean Sea amid a heightened counternarcotics effort.

That deployment puts U.S. warships a short distance off Venezuela’s northern coastline, following years of strained relations between the United States and Venezuela.

In 2017, Trump told reporters, “We have many options for Venezuela, including a possible military option, if necessary.”

Trump rejected the 2018 snap presidential election, in which Nicolás Maduro was declared the winner. He also backed then-Venezuelan National Assembly President Juan Guaidó’s efforts to declare himself the rightful head of state of Venezuela until new elections commenced.

In 2019, Guaidó led a short-lived attempted uprising against Maduro. A year later, the U.S. Department of Justice declared that Maduro was linked to both drug and weapons trafficking and offered $15 million for information leading to the regime leader’s arrest.

When Maduro claimed he had won Venezuela’s 2024 presidential election, the Biden administration rejected the results, and accusations mounted that the outcome was rigged for Maduro.

Now, the Justice Department is offering $50 million for information leading to Maduro’s arrest.

Maduro denounced the news that U.S. warships were traveling to the Southern Caribbean this week.

On Aug. 28, Venezuela criticized the U.S. naval buildup to United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres and accused Washington of breaking the founding U.N. Charter.

“It’s a massive propaganda operation to justify what the experts call kinetic action—meaning military intervention in a country which is a sovereign and independent country and is no threat to anyone,” Venezuelan U.N. Ambassador Samuel Moncada told reporters after meeting with Guterres.

In February, the Trump administration designated several transnational gangs, including Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel and Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua, as global terrorist organizations.

In response to the U.S. actions, Maduro said, “Our diplomacy isn’t the diplomacy of cannons, of threats, because the world cannot be the world of 100 years ago.”

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US-Israel plan aims to empty Gaza of Palestinians, build AI-powered ‘smart cities’: Report

A postwar plan for Gaza circulating within President Donald Trump’s White House envisions demolishing the strip, confiscating all public land within it, paying small amounts to remove the entire population of more than 2 million Palestinians, and building “a gleaming tourism resort and high-tech manufacturing and technology hub” on its ruins, The Washington Post reported on 31 August.

A 38-page prospectus seen by The Post envisions placing Gaza in a trust controlled by Israeli and American investors. The trust will then serve as the vehicle for the development of the strip into a high-tech commercial, residential, and tourist hub resembling Dubai.

The Post reports that the proposal to establish the Gaza Reconstitution, Economic Acceleration and Transformation Trust, or GREAT Trust, was developed by some of the same Israelis who created the deadly, US and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), which was used as a pretext to block the delivery of food aid by the UN.

Financial planning for the GREAT Trust project was carried out by a team from the Boston Consulting Group, which also worked on establishing the GHF.

The plan calls for the “voluntary” departure of Gaza’s residents to another country, making them refugees, or herding them into “restricted, secured zones” amounting to concentration camps, within the strip.

In exchange for abandoning their land, Palestinians would be “offered a digital token by the trust in exchange for rights to redevelop their property,” The Post writes. The token could allegedly be used to “finance a new life elsewhere or eventually redeemed for an apartment in the new ”AI-powered smart cities'” to be built in Gaza.

“Each Palestinian who chooses to leave would be given a $5,000 cash payment and subsidies to cover four years of rent elsewhere, as well as a year of food,” The Post further wrote.

After beginning his term as president in January, Trump boasted that all Palestinians would be removed from Gaza, never to return, and the strip redeveloped as the “Riviera of the Middle East.”

“I looked at a picture of Gaza, it’s like a massive demolition site,” Trump stated just two days after taking office.

“It’s got to be rebuilt in a different way.” Gaza, he said, was “a phenomenal location … on the sea, the best weather. Everything’s good. Some beautiful things can be done with it.”

Trump appointed Steve Witkoff, a Jewish real estate developer from New York, as his Special Envoy to the Middle East and point man for alleged negotiations with Hamas to reach a ceasefire.

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Director Woody Allen and Investigative Journalist Seymour Hersh Included in Ukraine’s Mirotvorets ‘Kill List’

Hersh and Allen are now targeted by Zelensky and his goons.

It seems that Americans have become fair game to the extremists embedded in or allied to Kiev regime.

The Mirotvorets ‘kill list’ has long been controversial, and at one point, Volodymyr Zelensky and his team have once been careful not to antagonize the US administration – but no more.

Over the years, many US citizens have been included, such as Tucker Carlson, Tulsi Gabbard, Henry Kissinger, Scott Ritter, Glenn Greenwald, Jeffrey Sachs…

The Mirotvorets website lists individuals deemed ‘enemies of Ukraine’, and it’s often labeled a ‘kill list’ due to its publication of personal information and instances where listed individuals were later assassinated.

This week, even as Ukraine’s defenses are crumbling on the frontlines, the goons at the Kiev regime are still including new names, such as Hollywood director Woody Allen and investigative journalist Seymour Hersh.

“American filmmaker and screenwriter Woody Allen has been added to the database of Ukraine’s Mirotvorets extremist website, TASS has learnt.”

Allen was reportedly included in the list for appearing via video link in the Moscow film festival.

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EU science grants are funding Israeli military tech, data shows

The EU has given Israeli technology start-ups run by ex-IDF soldiers nearly half a billion euros in research grants since the start of the Gaza genocide. Some of the founders of these tech start-ups have served as reservists in Gaza, and in at least one instance the technology has been deployed to aid the genocide.

This article was originally published by ¡Do Not Panic!

The Horizon Europe program, described by the EU as ‘a scientific research initiative to develop a sustainable and livable society in Europe,’ has awarded around 475 million euros to 348 Israeli start-ups and research projects since October 2023, many of which are run by former IDF soldiers and intelligence officers.

In 2024, the EU awarded grants of €220m to 179 companies and initiatives run by Israelis. The scale of this funding, coming in a year when the world’s pre-eminent genocide experts all declared Israel was committing a genocide, a year in which entire cities were wiped out and tens of thousands of civilians murdered, is staggering.

In the same year Israel was also the third largest recipient, behind France and Germany, of ‘accelerator’ grants, a separate component of the Horizon program intended to support small and medium-sized companies working to improve life in Europe.

In 2025, the year in which Israel announced its full-scale ethnic cleansing plans and scholars estimated that 434,000 Palestinians in Gaza had been murdered by Israel, EU funding for Israeli tech initiatives still topped 110 million euros.

And this summer, with Gaza being driven officially into famine by Israel’s deliberate starvation campaign and as the Knesset was voting through a final solution, the EU was still dolling out tens of millions to companies run by ex-IDF personnel.

Horizon funding is critical to Israeli science and the Israeli economy. Since the inception of the programme in 1996, the EU has given Israeli companies, some of which have been directly spun out from the Israeli military, €3.4 billion euros. Israel is by far the largest non-EU recipient of Horizon, and its researchers are given an extremely generous, even curious amount of money for a program designed to support European researchers and European society. The president of Israel’s Academy of Sciences and Humanities said in May that cutting Israel off from EU research and innovation funds would be “almost a death sentence for Israeli science.”

Israel’s participation in the Horizon program has drawn attention in the past. Campaigners have argued the program is breaking its purely civilian mandate by giving money to Israeli institutions linked to the security state, and have demanded Israel is cut from the program. Under pressure with the genocide of Gaza moving into its final stages, the European Commission recently proposed a limited, partial ban on Israeli access to Horizon. It’s unclear though if the tepid move will garner enough votes from member states to pass. While Israel’s participation in Horizon has been the subject of controversy, the individuals behind these EU-funded initiatives, many of whom have a significant military background, have not previously been named. I’ve also found clear evidence that the program, which is mandated to support exclusively civilian applications, has funded military technology deployed during the genocide of Gaza.

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JD Vance Accuses Politico of ‘Journalistic Malpractice’ Over New Report: ‘It’s a Foreign Influence Operation’

Vice President JD Vance has taken a blistering shot at one of the White House’s most notorious rivals: the media.

On Friday, Politico released a critical report that took aim at one key member of President Donald Trump’s administration — and Vance wasn’t standing for it.

Alongside the blaring headline of “‘His inexperience shines through’: Steve Witkoff struggles to manage Russia as Trump peace envoy,” Politico spilled quite a bit of digital ink calling out the alleged inefficacy of Trump’s special envoy for Peace Missions.

Specifically, Politico’s Felicia Schwartz chronicled the struggles that Witkoff was purportedly having while trying to bring about an amicable end to the Russia-Ukraine war.

“Some frustrated U.S., Ukrainian and European officials say part of the problem is the go-it-alone style of Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy for peace missions and go-to negotiator on Ukraine,” Schwartz reports. “He has refused to consult with experts and allies, leaving him uninformed at times and unprepared at others, according to seven people familiar with internal discussions.”

The report added, “Two said he misses the mark by viewing the conflict through a real estate lens, like a land dispute.”

Enter: Vance.

The vice president took to X shortly after the report’s publication and did not mince words when it came to what he thought of the Washington, D.C.-based outlet — and Schwartz.

“This story from Politico is journalistic malpractice,” Vance posted Friday. “But it’s more than that: it’s a foreign influence operation meant to hurt the administration and one of our most effective members.

“Notice how all of the people attacking Steve are on background? That means it’s two or three deep staters who are angry that Witkoff has succeeded where they’ve failed.

“You know what this ‘reporter’ left out to make room for anonymous quotes? The full quote from the sitting vice president, on the record. A quote from the secretary of the state, on the record. A quote from Jared Kushner, on the record.

“The full quote from the UK’s Jonathan Powell, one of the most respected national security people in the Western World, who defended Steve vigorously from these malicious smears.”

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Prominent Ukrainian Politician Assassinated In Broad Daylight On Streets Of Lviv

Former Ukrainian parliamentary speaker Andriy Parubiy – a prominent voice on the hardline Ukrainian right – was shot and killed in the western city of Lviv on Saturday, grabbing headlines in Ukraine and internationally, and resulting in an urgent manhunt for the assailant. He had been walking casually near his home on a sidewalk when he was executed in the street.

The country’s Prosecutor General’s Office described Parubiy was fatally shot multiple times by an unidentified gunman who quickly fled the scene. It appeared to be a professional hit or assassination, given authorities described a gunman dressed as a courier on an e-bike as the killer. The assassin never removes his helmet during the attack from behind.

The 54-year old Parubiy served as speaker of Ukraine’s parliament from April 2016 to August 2019 and was a prominent figure and organizer of 2014 Euromaidan protests (or Maidan coup) and anti-Russian/pro-EU coup events which ousted President Viktor Yanukovych, and in many ways led to the current Russia-Ukraine war.

He had also held the position of secretary of the National Security and Defense Council in early 2014, during the events of the civil/proxy war in the Donbass, as well as when Russia declared full sovereignty over Crimea.

President Volodymyr Zelensky within hours after confirmed the assassination and condemned it as a “horrific murder” and said “all necessary forces and means” would be used to uncover the plot and assailant. 

“Minister of Internal Affairs Ihor Klymenko and Prosecutor General Ruslan Kravchenko have just reported on the first known circumstances of a horrific murder in Lviv. Andriy Parubiy has been killed,” Zelensky solemnly announced on social media. The shooting happened at around noon local time.

Parubiy is already being hailed as a national hero and “patriot” – including by Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha, who said he “belongs in the history books”. According to more:

National police said the shooting in Lviv was reported at around noon. Lviv Mayor Andriy Sadovyi said finding the killer and establishing the circumstances of the attack was of outmost importance.

“This is a matter of security in a country at war, where, as we can see, there are no completely safe places,” he wrote on Telegram.

Tributes poured in from colleagues in parliament and the government, praising Parubiy’s contribution to Ukraine’s fight for sovereignty and independence as one of the leaders of what became known as the Euromaidan protests in 2013-14.

CCTV footage was quickly released of the killing, in hopes of finding a suspect…

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