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Showing posts with label ISRAELI OCCUPATION. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ISRAELI OCCUPATION. Show all posts
Sunday, September 8, 2024
Top News: London March Demands Israeli Arms Embargo
Sunday, July 28, 2024
Israel’s Netanyahu Insulted — and endangered — US Protesters against his Gaza Atrocities, Lying that they’re on Iran’s Payroll
AMERICANS HAVE A FIRST AMENDMENT RIGHT TO PROTEST GAZA GENOCIDE!
LAWMAKERS WHO CRIMINALIZE SUCH PROTESTS DEFY REASON AND THE
CONSTITUTION!
ISRAEL IS KILLING UNARMED CIVILIANS WITH US BOMBS!
ALLIES ARE RECOGNIZING THE PALESTINIAN STATE!
PALESTINIANS SHOULD BE GRANTED STATEHOOD WITHOUT ISRAELI
OPPRESSION & APARTHEID!
IT HAS BEEN DETERMINED THAT THE WEST BANK SETTLEMENTS ARE
ARE ILLEGAL.
NEITHER ISRAEL NOR THE ANTI-DEMOCRACY FUNDERS OF AIPAC DETERMINE
US FOREIGN POLICY.....
IT'S TIME TO NEGOTIATE A CEASEFIRE & WITHDRAW FROM GAZA & THE WEST BANK!
OTHERWISE NETANYAHU & ISRAEL IS NOTHING MORE THAN RENEGADES!
IT'S TIME FOR PEACE!
Israel’s Netanyahu Insulted — and endangered — US Protesters against his Gaza Atrocities, Lying that they’re on Iran’s Payroll
Newark, Del. (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – Netanyahu’s speech before a half full of the House of Representatives was a disgrace. It was not just a disgrace because he spewed his lies but because, in the middle of a genocide, those representatives of the American people rose and jubilantly accepted his lies.
Before America went to war in Iraq in 2003, the argument was that Saddam had chemical weapons. The lies were spread by the Neconservatives, including Netanyahu. At that time, the then secretary of state Colin Powell — who later apologized — went before the UN and showed (non-existent) evidence that the Iraqi government had compiled weapons of mass destruction. It was all a hoax. After the invasion, the U.S. military found no stockpiles.
In 2002, Israel also claimed that every suicide bomber was paid $25,000 by Iraq’s Saddam Hussein regime. None of it was true.
The Israeli government under Netanyahu has made many false statements throughout the years about Iran. Iran is an obsession for him. Not that the Islamic Republic is not guilty of many wrong doings however the truth is that more Iranian officials were assassinated by Israel than Iran ever dared to do so vis a vis Israel. Nuclear data was stolen from Iran. No doubt it was the work of Mossad.
On January 3rd, 2020, General Soleimani was assassinated by the U.S. on Iraqi soil on the orders of Trump. But Trump didn’t act alone. The decision was made in Tel Aviv.
All the while, the Trump administration, upon the advice of Netanyahu, got out of the nuclear deal. It was a setback for peace in the region.
Now Netanyahu comes before the U.S. congress while thousands protested his presence. Many hostage families left the chambers in defiance of his lies.
In the last nine months, forty thousand Gazans have been murdered and the people of the world including many Israelis and many Jewish Americans have demanded a cease fire to no avail.
The lying PM whose premiership is held by a threat lied again.
He insulted American protestors as “useful idiots” paid by Iran. The absurdity of this claim is so far-fetched that even a few American media outlets mocked him.
He has zero credibility.
The Islamic Republic may have engaged in many dubious acts against its own citizens, but who is Netanyahu to cry wolf when he and his “humanitarian” IDF has been engaged in a genocide against unarmed civilians, killing babies and children, women, and innocents.
The Palestinians of Gaza are left with nothing. Nowhere to go, no home, no schools, no hospitals, no universities, no mosques, no churches. Only rubble after rubble which according to various estimates, it will take a decade to remove the rubble.
All the while, his right-wing fascist government glorifies this attack and shows no willingness to make a deal for the release of their hostages.
The world is outraged while this clown shows his face in U.S. soil and spews lies about an Iranian hand in the recent protests just like when he did about the danger of Iran obtaining nuclear weapons or when he claimed that in Iran nobody wears jeans! Thousands in Iran posted their photos with their jeans.
This last performance by Netanyahu is most probably the very last even if many in the U.S. congress who are paid by AIPAC loudly clapped and gave him standing ovation.
A shift in the U.S. policy towards Israel is necessary as we see it happening before our eyes. The farcical notion that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East has crumpled with this assault on Gaza.
Maoz Inon, an Israeli who lost his parents in the kibbutzim on October 7 was involved in the DC protests alongside his Palestinian friend who had also lost his brother at the hands of Israeli interrogators ( Inon’s family did not seek revenge). He said Bibi’s brother died in courage, but Bibi will go down in history as the one who could not even defend his own people on October 7. They were busy grabbing land for the settlers.
It is time for him to go away and for the American lawmakers to show real spine and not invite war criminals to address them.
Bonus video added by Informed Comment:
Middle East Eye Video: “Unpacking Netanyahu’s Lies Before Congress”
About the Author
Wednesday, July 24, 2024
Informed Comment daily updates (07/23/2024)
Israeli Parliament Rejects any Palestinian State, Exposing US Gaslighting Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The Biden administration, and all its predecessors, have attempted to deflect questions about the concerted Israeli land theft from Palestinians in the Occupied Territories since 1967 by underlining Washington’s commitment to a “two-state solution” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The last time, however, that a US president put himself on the […] |
US pays Lip Service to a Palestinian State — But Blocks it in Practice By Dennis Jett, Penn State | – Spain, Ireland and Norway recognized a Palestinian state in May 2024, bringing the total number of countries that do so to 144. The United States is not one of them. The U.S. has officially favored a two-state solution, meaning both Israel and a Palestinian state would be recognized […] |
What is the Impact of the Int’l Court of Justice Verdict against Israeli Occupation of Palestinian Territories? By Michael Jansen ( Gulf Today ) – The resolution said a Palestinian state would pose ‘an existential danger (Israel), perpetuate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and destabilise the region.’ This is nonsense, as Israel possesses the region’s most powerful military as well as the only arsenal of nuclear weapons Anticipating last Friday’s International Court of Justice […] |
Old posts you may have missed
Monday, July 22, 2024
Like LBJ, Biden let a Catastrophic Foreign Conflict Stain his Domestic Legacy: He must end the Gaza War Now
Like LBJ, Biden let a Catastrophic Foreign Conflict Stain his Domestic Legacy: He must end the Gaza War Now
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Presidents have two major legacies, on domestic policy and on foreign policy. Big foreign policy mistakes can throw even gargantuan domestic wins into the shade. President Lyndon Baines Johnson reshaped the United States with his Great Society programs, and at least acquiesced in finally ending Jim Crow racial discrimination. Johnson’s obsession with winning the Vietnam War and his investment in the false “domino theory” of the spread of Communism, however, doomed his presidency and harmed the United States for decades. I’m old, so I remember as a teenager watching Johnson on March 31, 1968 come on television and announce that he would not seek another term in office. Unfortunately, the Vietnam War would grind on until 1972, taking two million or more Vietnamese lives and 58,220 US military casualties. By 1975 the US would withdraw entirely, amid chaos.
I was reminded of LBJ’s resignation speech by Biden’s announcement on Sunday that he would not seek another term.
Much to the annoyance of my leftist friends, I once suggested that Biden would be the most consequential president since Lyndon Johnson. I’m reprinting my reasoning below. Those achievements, however, were domestic.
Like Johnson, Biden has provoked massive campus protests by going all in on a ruinous foreign misadventure. In Biden’s case, the great white whale has been the destruction of Hamas, and his albatross has been his “bear hug” of the extremist government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Biden has resupplied Israel with ammunition and weaponry in real time to allow Netanyahu and his far, far right cronies (the Israeli equivalents of Neo-Nazis) to destroy much of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure and to kill over 38,000 Palestinians, the majority of them women and children. Biden’s State Department has avoided concluding that Israel has misused US weaponry to commit war crimes, making a mockery of the Leahy Act. Biden has attempted to create a US shield of impunity for Netanyahu, even calling a UNSC ceasefire resolution “nonbinding” (it was binding). The International Criminal Court found on January 26 that it is plausible that Israel is committing genocide and ordered a halt to such activities, but to no effect. Biden himself disputed the numbers of dead Palestinians at first, but later admitted that 30,000 had been killed, going on to say “it must not be 60,000.” He drew a red line around Rafah, but Netanyahu made a laughingstock out of him by simply ignoring US strictures and destroying Rafah the way he had previously destroyed Gaza City.
Biden’s extreme backing for Netanyahu’s genocide has left an indelible stain on his presidency and has harmed US diplomacy around the world.
The president has only a few months to make at least some amends for his catastrophic Gaza policy. He should restore funding to the UN Reliefs and Works Agency, which Israel falsely accused of being a Hamas front. Even Britain has restored funding, but Biden remains the odd man out.
Biden should cut off shipments to Israel of further munitions unless Netanyahu gets out of Gaza and lets the Palestine Authority move in to govern it.
Biden should massively sanction the Israeli enterprise of squatting on ever more Palestinian land in the West Bank.
As for his domestic legacy, I wrote in 2022:
Biden came into office under the cloud of the pandemic and Trump’s lackadaisical response to it, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths. It is true that Biden had the advantage that the vaccines had been developed, in part with Trump’s investment in Moderna. (Pfizer marketed the German Biontech vaccine).
JARED KUSHNER IS A MISFIT WHO SHOULD BE THOROUGHLY INVESTIGATED! A NATIONAL SECURITY THREAT!
But under Trump, few federal resources had been mobilized and one leak suggested that Jared Kushner deliberately hurt New York’s response to punish it for voting Democratic.
Biden mobilized the US military to provide vaccinators, because there were too few civilian ones, and coordinated with states and localities. In 6 months he got those adults vaccinated who were willing, and began the process whereby getting Covid for most of people was no longer life threatening. As for the die hard Trumpist old people who refuse to get vaccinated, they are harming themselves and those around them.
Biden’s pandemic intervention is estimated to have saved a million lives.
Biden put America back to work, getting the unemployment rate down to levels not seen since the Woodstock Music Festival and the craze for paisley.
So much production had temporarily cut back during the pandemic that when consumers wanted to buy again, there were bottlenecks that caused inflation. These supply problems are easing, though prices of staples remain too high. In some instances, Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine caused spikes that won’t be easy to overcome, both in energy prices and in wheat prices. Still, gasoline prices have fallen steadily for two months now.
Biden charged the Department of the Interior to jumpstart the US offshore wind industry, with a goal of 30 gigawatts by 2030, by leasing federal waters offshore to private companies. We will see some new, enormous wind farms come on line in as little as four years, some of the biggest in the world.
Biden glad-handed and wheedled to get the bipartisan $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act passed, which will among other things build out electric vehicle charging stations throughout the country and help schools buy electric buses, along with investments in bridges (10% of which seem to be on the verge of falling down) and other key infrastructure. It even has $65 billion in it to ease access for all Americans to the internet, which should increase productivity.
Biden got a new industrial policy with the $52 billion in the CHIPS Act for revving up a US-based semi-conductor industry, which is key to progress in fighting climate change, as well. He arranged funding for veterans suffering the after-effects of toxic burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan.
. . . He succeeded in encouraging Democrats in the Senate to pass the Inflation Reduction Act . . . with $369 billion for the green energy transition. It will also make seniors’ medicines cheaper and help the 40% of the country stricken by long-term drought owing to the climate emergency adopt resiliency measures.
Friday, July 19, 2024
US Plays Defense for Israeli Occupation at International Court of Justice DEFENDING GENOCIDE
An attorney from the U.S. State Department told the International Court of Justice on Wednesday that it should not put its weight behind global calls for Israel to withdraw its forces from the occupied Palestinian territories.
Richard Visek, the U.S. State Department's acting legal adviser, argued that "it would not, as some participants suggest, be conducive to the achievement" of lasting peace for the United Nations' highest court to "issue an opinion that calls for the unilateral, immediate, and unconditional withdrawal that does not account for Israel's security needs."
"The court should not find that Israel is legally obligated to immediately and unconditionally withdraw from occupied territory," said the U.S. representative.
Visek reiterated the Biden administration's stated support for a two-state solution but rejected the argument—made by other nations before the International Court of Justice (ICJ)—that an end to Israel's illegal, decadeslong occupation of Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem is a necessary prerequisite to securing peace and a durable political solution.
"International law does not impose specific time limits on an occupation," Visek said Wednesday.
The U.S. presentation came two days after Paul Reichler, an American lawyer representing Palestine during the ICJ proceedings on Israel's occupation, said that "occupation can only be a temporary state of affairs" and criticized the U.S. government for defending "whatever offenses against international law Israel commits."
"A permanent occupation is a legal oxymoron," said Reichler. "What makes Israel's ongoing occupation of the Palestinian territory unlawful is precisely its permanent character."
Among nations participating in the ICJ proceedings on Israel's occupation, only the U.S. and Fiji are urging the court not to issue an opinion that declares the nearly six-decade occupation of Palestinian territory illegal.
Israel has opted not to take part in the hearings, with far-right Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu denouncing them as illegitimate.
The hearings come more than a year after the U.N. General Assembly requested a nonbinding opinion from the ICJ on the "legal consequences" of Israel's open-ended occupation of Palestinian territory. Just last month, the ICJ ruled that Israel's ongoing assault on the Gaza Strip plausibly amounts to genocide—a characterization that the U.S. and other Israeli allies have rejected.
Speaking just before Visek on Wednesday, representatives of Colombia, Cuba, and Egypt condemned the Israeli occupation and implored the ICJ to act decisively.
“The situation that is taking place in the eyes of all confirms the ongoing genocide. Innocent victims—girls, boys, women—number in the thousands," Cuban diplomat Anayansi Rodriguez Camejo said Wednesday, slamming "those who for years have supported each and every one of the policies and practices of Israel, which denied the existence of the Palestinian people and their rights."
"Taken in total," she said, "the unbearable situation of the Palestinian people the honorable International Court of Justice should take a stand in the clearest, strongest, and most forceful legal terms in support of international law."
Saturday, May 18, 2024
Gaza and the war of attrition
Gaza and the war of attrition
After 10 days of fighting in Gaza the Palestinian resistance have destroyed 100 Israeli military vehicles that included tanks, large-scale bulldozers and troop carriers. This is in addition to tens of soldiers killed and injured on the streets of Jabalia, its Camp, Al Zaitoun neigborhood of Gaza City and Rafah.
The figures were given recently by the Izz Al Din Al Qassam military spokesman Abu Obaida, Friday evening. He says the war by the Palestinian resistance on the Israeli army which started a protracted onslaught on these areas of Gaza, is being carried with renewed sense of purpose and destiny.
He adds Palestinian are alive, well and kicking despite the deadly onslaught against them over the last eight months and are ready to meet and stay steadfast against the Israeli invaders. This is not the first time they have entered these places. In Al Zaitoun, they entered the area for the third time. The case is the same for Jabalia. The battle raging now is the second in as many months.
The Israeli army have already said that they already eradicated the presence of Hamas from the north but this is clearly is a wrong assumption. If this was the case, they wouldn’t keep coming back for more with the tactics of the resistance movement far superior, relaying on urban warfare and ease of movement in addition to the deep underground tunnels they are coming out from.
In Al Zaitoun, the Israelis are being hammered with their tanks proving awkward and bulky and resistance fighters having greater edge, moving faster and quicker whilst carrying their “carry on” missiles and shells.
They are already reports the Israeli army had to withdraw from this neigborhood under heavy fire. Now, the battle is continuing in Jabalia and its camp where Palestinian fighters are increasing the tempo through its home-made launchers, missiles, shells, grenades and drones.
Abu Obaida says this is an unequal war between the resistance against one of the strongest armies in the world. However, he adds, the resistance is ready for a long drawn-out conflict if there need be. While he says Hamas is ready for a negotiated settlement in the interest of the Palestinian civilians – over 35,000 killed with 15,000 children and 10,000 women dead – the resistance is ready to continue this war against the Israeli enemy for a long-time if this is what’s required. It is already becoming a war of attrition.
Just before the onslaught on north Gaza, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli army were on the verge of another protracted attack on Rafah which has 1.4 million displaced refugees. Some of them – 600,000 so far – are relocating north to Al Mawasi as per the instructions of the Israeli army before a full-blown attack.
However, the Israeli push into Jabalia – which they are yet to penetrate – means their calculations, especially Netanyahu and his Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi may now be altered. Excluding the fact there are now growing mutterings of grievances about the war, the Israeli army is over-stretching itself after months of fighting all over Gaza and may have pushed the Rafah offensive to a later unknown date.
Netanyahu, while insisting on military incursion into the southern city, maybe holding back due to a number of factors. The Israeli army is one, with the other to do with the fact the Palestinian resistance is putting up a strong fight with Israeli soldiers killed and tanks and troop carriers destroyed daily and Hamas snipers on their trail. The final factor maybe to do with the US President Joe Biden who has repeatedly warned the Israelis not to enter Rafah without a credible plan to protected the displaced Palestinians there.
But can the Americans be trusted since they continue to be the major supplier of weapons to Israel in this drawn-out onslaught. Regardless, Netanyahu might to this as an opportunity not to order a full invasion of Rafah to ease the political heat on him, primarily from the army and the relatives of the 100 and so hostages that continue to be held by Hamas.
He would also be satisfying the call from Biden for the Israeli army is already in east Rafah, hostages’ relatives may continue to be hopeful because they fear a full-scale onslaught will definitely mean their death and dampen voices of dissent among the officers and soldiers. Such manouverings also, may satisfy the extreme rightwing in his coalition cabinet that want him to invade Rafah and end the presence of Hamas.
But this might be a parochial view because of what is happening in northern Gaza which may have indeed pushed back the Israeli offensive in Rafah for further months as the Israeli army is now trying to eradicate Hamas in the north but with no apparent success and is being clobbered daily.
This apparently is becoming a major worry for the Israeli army itself. Some fear if the bloodiness become unbearable soldiers would simply refuse to obey orders if the battles increase and the end of the war is not insight. Already 900 Israeli mothers wrote to Defense Minister Yoav Gallant telling him they don’t want their sons to serve in Gaza.
Gallant, a man who is seen to represent the Israeli army already called on Netanyahu to start looking for a political solution for Gaza rather than continue a war in which the army would lose the “gains” it made in the enclave as he claims, and particularly in light of the fact the army has already said it doesn’t want to stay in Gaza in the so-called “day after”.
Such comments have upset the extreme rightwing lead by Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich who are calling for the resignation of Gallant with the latter accusing for working for Hamas.
This war has proved divisive for the Israelis themselves, right up from the higher political echelons down to the man-in-the street with endless debates of what to do next. Such internal bickering may only end when the guns are down, the Israeli hostages return and a real political solution is found to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands.
Dr Asmar is an Amman-based writer covering Middle East affairs
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