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Deception & Politics From Washington to Tel Aviv
U.S.-Israeli supremacist intentions, papered over and buried for decades, are now clear for all to see, writes M. Reza Behnam. Read here...
By M. Reza Behnam
Z-Network
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.
Second Session of the United Nations General Assembly in November 1947, during which delegates approved the partition of Palestine into Arab and Jewish States. (UN Photo/Albert Fox)
Zionist plans to seize all of Palestine, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, have never ceased, and are clearly stated in the Likud Party platform of 1977:
“The right of the Jewish people to the land of Israel is eternal and indisputable… therefore, Judea and Samaria will not be handed to any foreign administration; between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.”
The inhumanity, injustices and militarism that we see today in Gaza, in the occupied West Bank, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen have deep roots in the founding of the Jewish state and its ongoing desire to create a hegemonic Eretz Israel (Greater Israel) throughout the Middle East.
The expansionist policies of the current Israeli regime are not an aberration. They are rather a continuation and the inevitable outcome of Zionist political ideology espoused by Israel’s founding fathers, advanced by the Labour and Likud parties, and currently being prosecuted by the fanatics in the far-right Religious Zionism party.
Like the early Zionists, every Israeli leader has believed in the Jewish right to all of Palestine and the right to expel the indigenous population to achieve an exclusive Jewish state. Their plans, goals and strategies have been blatantly stated and well documented over many years.
European founders, men like the father of modern political Zionism, Theodor Herzl (1860-1904); Ze’ev Jabotinsky (1880-1940), founder of Revisionist Zionism (precursor of today’s Likud Party); Chaim Weizmann (1874-1952), the first president of Israel; and David Ben-Gurion (1886-1973), Israel’s first prime minister, agreed that increased Jewish immigration and removal of Palestinians were required to secure control over Palestine and to create a Greater Israel.
Following are a handful of the many citations that should be weighed to understand European Zionism and its ethnic cleansing schemes for Palestine and its people:
“When we occupy the land, we shall bring immediate benefits to the state that receives us. We must expropriate gently the private property on the estates assigned to us. We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it employment in our own country….Both the process of expropriation and removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.” — Herzl, 1895 [to Herzl, Palestinians were “it”]
Herzl en route to Palestine aboard a ship in 1898. (National Photo Collection of Israel, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)
“There is no choice: The Arabs must make room for the Jews of Eretz Israel. If it was possible to transfer the Baltic peoples, it is also possible to move the Palestinian Arabs….We Jews, thank God, have nothing to do with the East….The Islamic soul must be broomed out of Eretz Israel….[Muslims are] yelling rabble dressed up in gaudy, savage rags.” — Jabotinsky, 1939.
Jabotisky in 1926. (Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)
“By a Jewish National Home I mean the creation of such conditions that as the country is developed we can pour in a considerable number of immigrants, and finally establish such a society in Palestine that Palestine shall be as Jewish as England is English or America American.” — Weizmann, 1919.
Weizmann in 1900. (Bain News Service, Library of Congress, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)
“With compulsory transfer we [would] have a vast area [for settlement]….I support compulsory transfer. I don’t see anything immoral in it.” — Ben-Gurion, 1937.
And:
“My assumption…is that a Jewish state on only a part [referring to partition plan] of the land is not the end but the beginning….every increase in strength helps in the possession of the land as a whole.” — Ben-Gurion, 1938.
From Israel’s founder, Herzl, to its first prime minister, Ben-Gurion, its goal has been “a land for Israelis, without Palestinians.”
Ben Gurion speaking at the cornerstone laying ceremony for the building of the Histadrut, which would become Israel’s national trade union, in Jerusalem, 1924. (National Photo Collection of Israel, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)
Furthermore, by looking back on Israel’s expansionist strategies, we can better comprehend what Tel Aviv and Washington are currently plotting for Palestine and the larger region.
Their schemes for becoming the hegemons of the Levant are revealed in the: 1948 Plan Dalet (Plan D); Oded Yinon Plan, “A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s;” and 1996 “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm.”
Dalet Plan — Blueprint for Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine
Long before the British terminated their mandate and pulled their army out of Palestine, a cabal of Zionist political and military leaders, led by Ben-Gurion, had been preparing militarily plans for the dispossession of the Palestinians once the British left.
Plan Dalet (Plan D) was officially put into effect on March 10, 1948. Military orders were given to the new Israeli army and Haganah militia to systematically and forcibly remove Palestinians from vast areas of the country.
The operational orders specified which population centers should be targeted and laid out in detail how to drive out the inhabitants and destroy their communities, using methods including intimidation, setting fires to homes, properties and goods, demolishing homes and planting mines to prevent inhabitants from returning.
On April 9, 1948, at Deir Yassin near Jerusalem, over 150 Palestinian men, women and children were massacred by Zionist terrorist militias (members of Irgun and Stern Gang).
Jewish militias in the village of Deir Yassin, April 1948. (Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)
After six months, when the Nakba (the catastrophe) ended, over 750,000 Palestinians had been uprooted, 531 villages destroyed and eleven urban neighborhoods had been depopulated, soon repopulated with Jewish Israelis.
The destruction of Palestinian communities begun during and after the 1948 Arab-Israeli War marked the beginning of Israel’s apartheid system on 78 percent of historic Palestine.
Yinon Plan — ‘Strategy for Israel in the 1980s’
In February 1982, an essay appeared in Kivinum (Directions), a journal of the World Zionist Organization. It was written by Oded Yinon, a journalist for The Jerusalem Post with close ties to Israel’s Foreign Ministry.
The Yinon Plan for the Middle East contained the key elements of the “Greater Israel” scheme reflected in the expansionist policies — underwritten by the United States — that Tel Aviv has implemented over more than eight decades.
Although the “de-Palestinezation of Palestine” has been a priority, every Arab state has been a target of Zionist expansionism.
The Yinon Plan emphasizes two key elements: To survive, Israel must become an imperial regional power; and to achieve that hegemony, it must weaken and divide neighboring Arab states.
Israel’s aim has been to create small, sectarian-based Arab states with little choice but to yield to Israeli domination.
The Yinon Plan has been taking shape since the Iran-Iraq War (1980-88) and U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. Israel’s interest in weak states in the Middle East has been borne out in its air and cyber-wars and numerous assassinations of prominent opposition figures.
US Army tanks pose for a photo under the “Hands of Victory” in Ceremony Square, Baghdad. (U.S. Air Force, John L. Houghton, Jr., Public domain)
Since 1967, Israel has swallowed up more Arab land. It has illegally annexed Arab lands in Palestine and the Syrian Golan Heights; with plans, as recently announced, to colonize the devastated Gaza Strip and to annex the West Bank.
A Clean Break — ‘New Strategy for Securing the Realm’
A U.S.-Israeli neoconservative research group at the Institute for Advanced Strategies and Palestine Studies in Washington, D.C. prepared a policy document in 1996 for newly-elected Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The report titled, “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” laid out a plan of action for how Washington and Tel Aviv could integrate their policies to defeat Israel’s “foes” by reshaping the Middle East.
Notably, the authors of the manifesto worked in the George W. Bush White House, inside the Pentagon and Defense Department. Its lead author, former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense for Global Strategic Affairs (1981-87), Richard Perle, was one of the key figures in the formulation of the disastrous 2003 Iraq war strategy adopted by the Bush administration.
Perle in December 2009. (New America Foundation, Flickr, CC BY 2.0)
To win American support, Netanyahu was advised to package the proposed policies in a language familiar to Americans; hence, standard-issue canards such as “Israel has the right to defend itself” and branding supporters of Palestinian rights as “terrorists.”
The strategies described in the “Yinon” and “Clean Break” plans were constructs for endless U.S.-Israeli wars and chaos in the region.
It should be noted, that the United States has engaged in or sponsored wars or conflicts — beneficial to Israeli strategy — in Iraq (2003), Libya (2011), Syria (from 2011 to the present), in Lebanon, Yemen, occupied West Bank and Gaza; and with Iran if Israel continues to have its way.
To “secure the realm,” Israel was urged to pursue aggressive policies of preemption and regime change against governments in the region that resisted Israel’s expansionist aims. Netanyahu was advised to collaborate with Jordan and Türkiye to destabilize Iraq and to contain Syria through proxy warfare.
Consistent with “clean break logic,” the Bush administration, under the pretext that Iraq harbored weapons of mass destruction, invaded Iraq in 2003, toppled Saddam Hussein and dismantled the ruling Ba’ath Party.
Iraq has yet to recover from America’s eight-year-long occupation and war.
Despite the Iraqi government’s request that the U.S. leave, Washington has refused to withdraw its remaining 2,500 troops.
The U.S.-Israel war on Syria, which led to the fall of President Bahar al-Assad in December 2024 began with the 1996 “Clean Break” strategy for the region.
It escalated in 2011 when President Barack Obama covertly instructed the C.I.A. to overthrow President Assad in Operation Timber Sycamore. Thirteen years of deadly war, frequent Israeli air strikes, and crippling U.S.-led economic sanctions, left Syria impoverished, fragmented and unable to resist foreign invasion.
Israel got what it wanted in Syria, a Balkanized and weakened country. The United States, Türkiye and their forces dominate in the North, while Israel controls areas in the South.
Tel Aviv now claims control over the demilitarized buffer zone in the Golan Heights, and has declared its intent to expand its illegal colonies in the Golan Heights, declaring them part of the Israeli state “for eternity.”
Netanyahu has eagerly embraced “Clean Break” proposals on ways to “secure the realm” in Palestine. He has perversely sabotaged the Oslo Accords (1993/1995), completely written-off the so-called two-state solution (land for peace) and sown division within the Palestinian national movement.
The Palestinian Authority (PA) tasked with limited government over parts of the occupied Palestinian territories by the now extinct Oslo Accords, has been reduced to an enforcement arm of the Israeli security state.
The Dec. 21 large-scale armed crackdown against Palestinian resistance groups in the Jenin refugee camp carried out by PA Security Forces exemplifies the extent of the collaboration.
It should be noted, that the assault was coordinated with Washington and Tel Aviv, and put under the direction of U.S. Army Lieutenant General Michael R. Fenzel, who has served as U.S. security coordinator of the Israel-Palestinian Authority since November 2021.
Clean Break strategists callously advised Israel, “to pursue Palestinians into all areas.” In its sinister belief that it can physically destroy the Palestinian national desire to return home to a free Palestine, Israel has ravaged and pulverized the defenseless Gaza Strip.
And for more than 17 years, Netanyahu has made it his mission to kill as many Palestinians as the United States and its Western allies will tolerate.
From Herzl to Netanyahu
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken meeting with Netanyahu in Jerusalem on June 10. (State Department, Chuck Kennedy)
From Herzl’s “spirit them out” to Netanyahu’s campaign of genocide, the message and actions have been the same — remove all trace of Palestinians.
And from President Harry S. Truman to President Joe Biden, the message has been: the United States will prevent Israel from failing, whatever the political or economic cost.
When Biden asserts that he is a “committed Zionist,” he emphatically says to Israelis and Americans that the United States is in lockstep with Israel’s plans to erase Palestinians and their hopes for a sovereign Palestinian nation. Americans, too, many unwittingly, have become committed Zionists by financing Israeli supremacy and regional militarism.
In addition, by suppressing the truth about Israel’s expansionist plans, American politicians and the corporate media have fed the country’s addiction to regional supremacy and its dreams of a Greater Israel, without Palestinians.
Ben-Gurion’s words in a letter to his son in 1937 were menacing and foreboding:
“The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as a war.”
Israel’s current Zionist extremists have seized upon the Palestinian act of resistance on Oct. 7, 2023 to make Ben-Gurion’s hoped for “opportune moment” a reality, believing that they, like their predecessors, can continue to disfigure history.
M. Reza Behnam is a political scientist specializing in the history, politics and governments of the Middle East.
This article is from -Network.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
U.S.-Israeli supremacist intentions, papered over and buried for decades, are now clear for all to see, writes M. Reza Behnam. Read here...
By M. Reza Behnam
Z-Network
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.
Second Session of the United Nations General Assembly in November 1947, during which delegates approved the partition of Palestine into Arab and Jewish States. (UN Photo/Albert Fox)
Zionist plans to seize all of Palestine, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, have never ceased, and are clearly stated in the Likud Party platform of 1977:
“The right of the Jewish people to the land of Israel is eternal and indisputable… therefore, Judea and Samaria will not be handed to any foreign administration; between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.”
The inhumanity, injustices and militarism that we see today in Gaza, in the occupied West Bank, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen have deep roots in the founding of the Jewish state and its ongoing desire to create a hegemonic Eretz Israel (Greater Israel) throughout the Middle East.
The expansionist policies of the current Israeli regime are not an aberration. They are rather a continuation and the inevitable outcome of Zionist political ideology espoused by Israel’s founding fathers, advanced by the Labour and Likud parties, and currently being prosecuted by the fanatics in the far-right Religious Zionism party.
Like the early Zionists, every Israeli leader has believed in the Jewish right to all of Palestine and the right to expel the indigenous population to achieve an exclusive Jewish state. Their plans, goals and strategies have been blatantly stated and well documented over many years.
European founders, men like the father of modern political Zionism, Theodor Herzl (1860-1904); Ze’ev Jabotinsky (1880-1940), founder of Revisionist Zionism (precursor of today’s Likud Party); Chaim Weizmann (1874-1952), the first president of Israel; and David Ben-Gurion (1886-1973), Israel’s first prime minister, agreed that increased Jewish immigration and removal of Palestinians were required to secure control over Palestine and to create a Greater Israel.
Following are a handful of the many citations that should be weighed to understand European Zionism and its ethnic cleansing schemes for Palestine and its people:
“When we occupy the land, we shall bring immediate benefits to the state that receives us. We must expropriate gently the private property on the estates assigned to us. We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it employment in our own country….Both the process of expropriation and removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.” — Herzl, 1895 [to Herzl, Palestinians were “it”]
Herzl en route to Palestine aboard a ship in 1898. (National Photo Collection of Israel, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)
“There is no choice: The Arabs must make room for the Jews of Eretz Israel. If it was possible to transfer the Baltic peoples, it is also possible to move the Palestinian Arabs….We Jews, thank God, have nothing to do with the East….The Islamic soul must be broomed out of Eretz Israel….[Muslims are] yelling rabble dressed up in gaudy, savage rags.” — Jabotinsky, 1939.
Jabotisky in 1926. (Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)
“By a Jewish National Home I mean the creation of such conditions that as the country is developed we can pour in a considerable number of immigrants, and finally establish such a society in Palestine that Palestine shall be as Jewish as England is English or America American.” — Weizmann, 1919.
Weizmann in 1900. (Bain News Service, Library of Congress, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)
“With compulsory transfer we [would] have a vast area [for settlement]….I support compulsory transfer. I don’t see anything immoral in it.” — Ben-Gurion, 1937.
And:
“My assumption…is that a Jewish state on only a part [referring to partition plan] of the land is not the end but the beginning….every increase in strength helps in the possession of the land as a whole.” — Ben-Gurion, 1938.
From Israel’s founder, Herzl, to its first prime minister, Ben-Gurion, its goal has been “a land for Israelis, without Palestinians.”
Ben Gurion speaking at the cornerstone laying ceremony for the building of the Histadrut, which would become Israel’s national trade union, in Jerusalem, 1924. (National Photo Collection of Israel, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)
Furthermore, by looking back on Israel’s expansionist strategies, we can better comprehend what Tel Aviv and Washington are currently plotting for Palestine and the larger region.
Their schemes for becoming the hegemons of the Levant are revealed in the: 1948 Plan Dalet (Plan D); Oded Yinon Plan, “A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s;” and 1996 “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm.”
Dalet Plan — Blueprint for Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine
Long before the British terminated their mandate and pulled their army out of Palestine, a cabal of Zionist political and military leaders, led by Ben-Gurion, had been preparing militarily plans for the dispossession of the Palestinians once the British left.
Plan Dalet (Plan D) was officially put into effect on March 10, 1948. Military orders were given to the new Israeli army and Haganah militia to systematically and forcibly remove Palestinians from vast areas of the country.
The operational orders specified which population centers should be targeted and laid out in detail how to drive out the inhabitants and destroy their communities, using methods including intimidation, setting fires to homes, properties and goods, demolishing homes and planting mines to prevent inhabitants from returning.
On April 9, 1948, at Deir Yassin near Jerusalem, over 150 Palestinian men, women and children were massacred by Zionist terrorist militias (members of Irgun and Stern Gang).
Jewish militias in the village of Deir Yassin, April 1948. (Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)
After six months, when the Nakba (the catastrophe) ended, over 750,000 Palestinians had been uprooted, 531 villages destroyed and eleven urban neighborhoods had been depopulated, soon repopulated with Jewish Israelis.
The destruction of Palestinian communities begun during and after the 1948 Arab-Israeli War marked the beginning of Israel’s apartheid system on 78 percent of historic Palestine.
Yinon Plan — ‘Strategy for Israel in the 1980s’
In February 1982, an essay appeared in Kivinum (Directions), a journal of the World Zionist Organization. It was written by Oded Yinon, a journalist for The Jerusalem Post with close ties to Israel’s Foreign Ministry.
The Yinon Plan for the Middle East contained the key elements of the “Greater Israel” scheme reflected in the expansionist policies — underwritten by the United States — that Tel Aviv has implemented over more than eight decades.
Although the “de-Palestinezation of Palestine” has been a priority, every Arab state has been a target of Zionist expansionism.
The Yinon Plan emphasizes two key elements: To survive, Israel must become an imperial regional power; and to achieve that hegemony, it must weaken and divide neighboring Arab states.
Israel’s aim has been to create small, sectarian-based Arab states with little choice but to yield to Israeli domination.
The Yinon Plan has been taking shape since the Iran-Iraq War (1980-88) and U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. Israel’s interest in weak states in the Middle East has been borne out in its air and cyber-wars and numerous assassinations of prominent opposition figures.
US Army tanks pose for a photo under the “Hands of Victory” in Ceremony Square, Baghdad. (U.S. Air Force, John L. Houghton, Jr., Public domain)
Since 1967, Israel has swallowed up more Arab land. It has illegally annexed Arab lands in Palestine and the Syrian Golan Heights; with plans, as recently announced, to colonize the devastated Gaza Strip and to annex the West Bank.
A Clean Break — ‘New Strategy for Securing the Realm’
A U.S.-Israeli neoconservative research group at the Institute for Advanced Strategies and Palestine Studies in Washington, D.C. prepared a policy document in 1996 for newly-elected Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The report titled, “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” laid out a plan of action for how Washington and Tel Aviv could integrate their policies to defeat Israel’s “foes” by reshaping the Middle East.
Notably, the authors of the manifesto worked in the George W. Bush White House, inside the Pentagon and Defense Department. Its lead author, former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense for Global Strategic Affairs (1981-87), Richard Perle, was one of the key figures in the formulation of the disastrous 2003 Iraq war strategy adopted by the Bush administration.
Perle in December 2009. (New America Foundation, Flickr, CC BY 2.0)
To win American support, Netanyahu was advised to package the proposed policies in a language familiar to Americans; hence, standard-issue canards such as “Israel has the right to defend itself” and branding supporters of Palestinian rights as “terrorists.”
The strategies described in the “Yinon” and “Clean Break” plans were constructs for endless U.S.-Israeli wars and chaos in the region.
It should be noted, that the United States has engaged in or sponsored wars or conflicts — beneficial to Israeli strategy — in Iraq (2003), Libya (2011), Syria (from 2011 to the present), in Lebanon, Yemen, occupied West Bank and Gaza; and with Iran if Israel continues to have its way.
To “secure the realm,” Israel was urged to pursue aggressive policies of preemption and regime change against governments in the region that resisted Israel’s expansionist aims. Netanyahu was advised to collaborate with Jordan and Türkiye to destabilize Iraq and to contain Syria through proxy warfare.
Consistent with “clean break logic,” the Bush administration, under the pretext that Iraq harbored weapons of mass destruction, invaded Iraq in 2003, toppled Saddam Hussein and dismantled the ruling Ba’ath Party.
Iraq has yet to recover from America’s eight-year-long occupation and war.
Despite the Iraqi government’s request that the U.S. leave, Washington has refused to withdraw its remaining 2,500 troops.
The U.S.-Israel war on Syria, which led to the fall of President Bahar al-Assad in December 2024 began with the 1996 “Clean Break” strategy for the region.
It escalated in 2011 when President Barack Obama covertly instructed the C.I.A. to overthrow President Assad in Operation Timber Sycamore. Thirteen years of deadly war, frequent Israeli air strikes, and crippling U.S.-led economic sanctions, left Syria impoverished, fragmented and unable to resist foreign invasion.
Israel got what it wanted in Syria, a Balkanized and weakened country. The United States, Türkiye and their forces dominate in the North, while Israel controls areas in the South.
Tel Aviv now claims control over the demilitarized buffer zone in the Golan Heights, and has declared its intent to expand its illegal colonies in the Golan Heights, declaring them part of the Israeli state “for eternity.”
Netanyahu has eagerly embraced “Clean Break” proposals on ways to “secure the realm” in Palestine. He has perversely sabotaged the Oslo Accords (1993/1995), completely written-off the so-called two-state solution (land for peace) and sown division within the Palestinian national movement.
The Palestinian Authority (PA) tasked with limited government over parts of the occupied Palestinian territories by the now extinct Oslo Accords, has been reduced to an enforcement arm of the Israeli security state.
The Dec. 21 large-scale armed crackdown against Palestinian resistance groups in the Jenin refugee camp carried out by PA Security Forces exemplifies the extent of the collaboration.
It should be noted, that the assault was coordinated with Washington and Tel Aviv, and put under the direction of U.S. Army Lieutenant General Michael R. Fenzel, who has served as U.S. security coordinator of the Israel-Palestinian Authority since November 2021.
Clean Break strategists callously advised Israel, “to pursue Palestinians into all areas.” In its sinister belief that it can physically destroy the Palestinian national desire to return home to a free Palestine, Israel has ravaged and pulverized the defenseless Gaza Strip.
And for more than 17 years, Netanyahu has made it his mission to kill as many Palestinians as the United States and its Western allies will tolerate.
From Herzl to Netanyahu
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken meeting with Netanyahu in Jerusalem on June 10. (State Department, Chuck Kennedy)
From Herzl’s “spirit them out” to Netanyahu’s campaign of genocide, the message and actions have been the same — remove all trace of Palestinians.
And from President Harry S. Truman to President Joe Biden, the message has been: the United States will prevent Israel from failing, whatever the political or economic cost.
When Biden asserts that he is a “committed Zionist,” he emphatically says to Israelis and Americans that the United States is in lockstep with Israel’s plans to erase Palestinians and their hopes for a sovereign Palestinian nation. Americans, too, many unwittingly, have become committed Zionists by financing Israeli supremacy and regional militarism.
In addition, by suppressing the truth about Israel’s expansionist plans, American politicians and the corporate media have fed the country’s addiction to regional supremacy and its dreams of a Greater Israel, without Palestinians.
Ben-Gurion’s words in a letter to his son in 1937 were menacing and foreboding:
“The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as a war.”
Israel’s current Zionist extremists have seized upon the Palestinian act of resistance on Oct. 7, 2023 to make Ben-Gurion’s hoped for “opportune moment” a reality, believing that they, like their predecessors, can continue to disfigure history.
M. Reza Behnam is a political scientist specializing in the history, politics and governments of the Middle East.
This article is from -Network.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
_______________________________________________________________________________________
Good & Bad War Criminals
Tony Blair sent special forces to hunt down suspected Bosnian war criminals in the 1990s who were accused of lesser abuses than Netanyahu and Gallant, writes Mark Curtis. Read here...
Very little is known about Operation Tango, a secret Special Air Service (SAS) mission to capture suspected war criminals in Bosnia in 1997.
It was one of several clandestine special forces missions ordered by Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government in support of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.
This had been set up in 1993 to try suspects for gruesome crimes committed during the conflicts in the Balkans.
One man believed to have been seized by the SAS was Vlatko Kupreskic, a Bosnian Croat soldier who was accused of involvement in murder.
After the SAS captured Kupreskic he was removed to The Hague and initially sentenced to six years in prison. But in an appeal the following year Kupreskic was found not guilty and released.
The tribunal judges found there was insufficient evidence to convict Kupreskic for aiding and abetting an attack that killed Muslim residents of the village of Ahmici in central Bosnia in April 1993.
The crimes of which Kupreskic was accused were certainly serious. But, along with several other figures captured by the SAS in the late 1990s, they were less extensive than those currently levelled against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant.
U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin with Netanyahu and Gallant in Tel Aviv, Israel, Oct. 13, 2023. (DoD, Chad J. McNeeley, CC BY 2.0)
Judges at the International Criminal Court (ICC) believe that both Netanyahu and Gallant “bear criminal responsibility” for seven categories of “war crimes and crimes against humanity.”
They say there are reasonable grounds to suspect that both Netanyahu and Gallant have “committed the war crime of using starvation as a method of warfare and crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.”
They are also accused of “intentionally directing attacks against civilians.” These policies have surely affected tens of thousands, if not more, Palestinians.
Far from sending in the SAS, the U.K. government is equivocating on whether it would even arrest the Israelis if they entered Britain, while the Conservative opposition thinks the ICC has no right to accuse them at all.
Behind Enemy Lines
Building where the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia was held in Scheveningen, The Hague. (Julian Ny?a, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0)
Another figure captured by the SAS was Stevan Todorovic, who was seized in September 1998.
The U.K. Ministry of Defence was so determined to arrest Todorovic that it ordered the SAS to carry out this operation inside Serbia itself.
The territory was then still under the control of Slobodan Milosevic, whose policies sparked the Bosnian war and who later became the first sitting head of state charged with war crimes.
Todorovic, the police chief in Bosanski Šamac in north-eastern Bosnia, was removed to The Hague and later sentenced by the Tribunal to 10 years in prison.
His crimes included beating a man who died as a result of this mistreatment, repeatedly beating seven other men over a period of eight months, and ordering three individuals over whom he had superior responsibility to torture a man.
According to the U.K. Elite Forces website,
“On the night of the 27th of September, 1998, the 4-man SAS team, all fluent Serb speakers, stormed Todorovic’s cabin. He was bound, gagged and put into a 4×4 and driven to the Drina River, close to the border with Bosnia.
“Once at the river, the SAS loaded Todorovic into a Zodiac-style inflatable boat and took him across and over the border where he was bundled into a waiting helicopter and flown to Tuzla for formal arrest.”
Others captured by the SAS were Anto Furundzija, a Bosnian Croat commander who was sentenced to 10 years for involvement in torture, and Bosnian Serb general Stanislav Galic.
He was sentenced to life in prison for conducting sniping and shelling attacks on the city of Sarajevo. These attacks, killing hundreds of men and women, were part of the siege of Bosnia’s capital, which some have compared to the situation in Gaza.
Putin
Three of the Russian individuals indicted by the ICC, from left: Valery Gerasimov, President Vladimir Putin and Sergei Shoigu, September 2021. (Kremlin.ru, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0)
Whitehall’s weak reaction to ICC arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant stands in contrast to the exertions it made towards the former Yugoslavia and, more recently, Russia.
When the ICC announced an arrest warrant for Russian ruler Vladimir Putin in March 2023, the U.K. increased funding to the organisation and hosted an international conference in London.
“The ICC plays a vital role in global efforts to end impunity for war crimes,” the U.K. Ministry of Justice said.
A year earlier the U.K. had galvanised a group of governments to refer Russian atrocities in Ukraine to the ICC to enable it to proceed straight to an investigation — a process known as “state party referral.”
David Lammy, [member of Parliament at the time], described the ICC’s arrest warrant for Putin as “an historic step,” adding that “President Putin is now a wanted man.”
By contrast, Lammy now, as the current foreign secretary, has only grudgingly conceded that, in the cases of Netanyahu and Gallant, “there is an obligation on me to transmit to the courts should those named seek to come in to our country”.
When in 2006 former Liberian President Charles Taylor was undergoing a war crimes trial in The Hague for aiding rebels in Sierra Leone notorious for hacking off limbs of civilians, the British government offered to house him in a U.K. jail if convicted.
Sentenced to 50 years imprisonment, Taylor began serving his conviction at HMP Frankland near Durham. It seems inconceivable that Netanyahu and Gallant will ever see the inside of a British jail.
Mark Curtis is the director of Declassified UK, and the author of five books and many articles on U.K. foreign policy.
This article is from Declassified UK.
Views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
Tony Blair sent special forces to hunt down suspected Bosnian war criminals in the 1990s who were accused of lesser abuses than Netanyahu and Gallant, writes Mark Curtis. Read here...
Very little is known about Operation Tango, a secret Special Air Service (SAS) mission to capture suspected war criminals in Bosnia in 1997.
It was one of several clandestine special forces missions ordered by Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government in support of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.
This had been set up in 1993 to try suspects for gruesome crimes committed during the conflicts in the Balkans.
One man believed to have been seized by the SAS was Vlatko Kupreskic, a Bosnian Croat soldier who was accused of involvement in murder.
After the SAS captured Kupreskic he was removed to The Hague and initially sentenced to six years in prison. But in an appeal the following year Kupreskic was found not guilty and released.
The tribunal judges found there was insufficient evidence to convict Kupreskic for aiding and abetting an attack that killed Muslim residents of the village of Ahmici in central Bosnia in April 1993.
The crimes of which Kupreskic was accused were certainly serious. But, along with several other figures captured by the SAS in the late 1990s, they were less extensive than those currently levelled against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant.
U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin with Netanyahu and Gallant in Tel Aviv, Israel, Oct. 13, 2023. (DoD, Chad J. McNeeley, CC BY 2.0)
Judges at the International Criminal Court (ICC) believe that both Netanyahu and Gallant “bear criminal responsibility” for seven categories of “war crimes and crimes against humanity.”
They say there are reasonable grounds to suspect that both Netanyahu and Gallant have “committed the war crime of using starvation as a method of warfare and crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.”
They are also accused of “intentionally directing attacks against civilians.” These policies have surely affected tens of thousands, if not more, Palestinians.
Far from sending in the SAS, the U.K. government is equivocating on whether it would even arrest the Israelis if they entered Britain, while the Conservative opposition thinks the ICC has no right to accuse them at all.
Behind Enemy Lines
Building where the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia was held in Scheveningen, The Hague. (Julian Ny?a, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0)
Another figure captured by the SAS was Stevan Todorovic, who was seized in September 1998.
The U.K. Ministry of Defence was so determined to arrest Todorovic that it ordered the SAS to carry out this operation inside Serbia itself.
The territory was then still under the control of Slobodan Milosevic, whose policies sparked the Bosnian war and who later became the first sitting head of state charged with war crimes.
Todorovic, the police chief in Bosanski Šamac in north-eastern Bosnia, was removed to The Hague and later sentenced by the Tribunal to 10 years in prison.
His crimes included beating a man who died as a result of this mistreatment, repeatedly beating seven other men over a period of eight months, and ordering three individuals over whom he had superior responsibility to torture a man.
According to the U.K. Elite Forces website,
“On the night of the 27th of September, 1998, the 4-man SAS team, all fluent Serb speakers, stormed Todorovic’s cabin. He was bound, gagged and put into a 4×4 and driven to the Drina River, close to the border with Bosnia.
“Once at the river, the SAS loaded Todorovic into a Zodiac-style inflatable boat and took him across and over the border where he was bundled into a waiting helicopter and flown to Tuzla for formal arrest.”
Others captured by the SAS were Anto Furundzija, a Bosnian Croat commander who was sentenced to 10 years for involvement in torture, and Bosnian Serb general Stanislav Galic.
He was sentenced to life in prison for conducting sniping and shelling attacks on the city of Sarajevo. These attacks, killing hundreds of men and women, were part of the siege of Bosnia’s capital, which some have compared to the situation in Gaza.
Putin
Three of the Russian individuals indicted by the ICC, from left: Valery Gerasimov, President Vladimir Putin and Sergei Shoigu, September 2021. (Kremlin.ru, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0)
Whitehall’s weak reaction to ICC arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant stands in contrast to the exertions it made towards the former Yugoslavia and, more recently, Russia.
When the ICC announced an arrest warrant for Russian ruler Vladimir Putin in March 2023, the U.K. increased funding to the organisation and hosted an international conference in London.
“The ICC plays a vital role in global efforts to end impunity for war crimes,” the U.K. Ministry of Justice said.
A year earlier the U.K. had galvanised a group of governments to refer Russian atrocities in Ukraine to the ICC to enable it to proceed straight to an investigation — a process known as “state party referral.”
David Lammy, [member of Parliament at the time], described the ICC’s arrest warrant for Putin as “an historic step,” adding that “President Putin is now a wanted man.”
By contrast, Lammy now, as the current foreign secretary, has only grudgingly conceded that, in the cases of Netanyahu and Gallant, “there is an obligation on me to transmit to the courts should those named seek to come in to our country”.
When in 2006 former Liberian President Charles Taylor was undergoing a war crimes trial in The Hague for aiding rebels in Sierra Leone notorious for hacking off limbs of civilians, the British government offered to house him in a U.K. jail if convicted.
Sentenced to 50 years imprisonment, Taylor began serving his conviction at HMP Frankland near Durham. It seems inconceivable that Netanyahu and Gallant will ever see the inside of a British jail.
Mark Curtis is the director of Declassified UK, and the author of five books and many articles on U.K. foreign policy.
This article is from Declassified UK.
Views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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