As this is written, Israel has just opened up a war with Iran, with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio disingenuously claiming it is a unilateral action. Nothing Israel does is a unilateral action, because the very state of Israel would collapse almost overnight without massive infusions of US aid.
[It is the] iron law of every colonizing movement, a law which knows of no exceptions, a law which existed in all times and under all circumstances. If you wish to colonize a land in which people are already living, you must provide a garrison on your behalf. Or else – or else, give up your colonization, for without an armed force which will render physically impossible any attempts to destroy or prevent this colonization, colonization is impossible, not “difficult”, not “dangerous” but IMPOSSIBLE! … Zionism is a colonizing adventure and therefore it stands or falls by the question of armed force. It is important to build, it is important to speak Hebrew, but, unfortunately, it is even more important to be able to shoot – or else I am through with playing at colonialization.
—Ze'ev Jabotinsky, 1923
The present government, most political officials, and the matrix of public relations managers in the United States have now and forever surrendered any remaining scrap of moral credibility. History will remember them as enablers of a genocide and careerist cowards.
Those now tentatively critical as ghastly shots of starved children are shoved in their faces may say, “Well, now they’re going too far.” This is, of course, the head fake of disingenuity. Israel has been going too far for seventy-five years, and the US—both parties, most of the media, public schools, and the entertainment/propaganda industry—has, Goebbels-like, covered for them.
Zionism was conceived of as the “ethnic cleansing” of Palestine as early as 1897.
Until the 1917 Balfour Declaration, in which post-war British occupiers of Palestine promised—in the face of 700,000 Palestinians, ninety percent of them Muslims and ten percent of them Christians, who already lived there—promised Palestine to the Zionists as a Jewish homeland. At the time, there were around 60,000 Jews living there.
According to historians living there at the time, prior to the Balfour Declaration, they lived in relative harmony. The Ottomans—whose system had not been founded on the Peace of Westphalia—had given its regions a form of autonomy that accommodated pluralism far more peacefully and effectively than Western nation-states.
During the war, however, in order to swing locals to the British side against the Ottomans, sly Great Britain had promised the Palestinians and other occupied Arabs “self-determination”—a supposed improvement on Ottoman partial autonomy—after the war. While the Ottomans had allowed a great deal of home rule in Palestine and governed with a hands-off approach, the perfidious Brits turned out to be a far different story.
After Balfour, militant Zionists began arriving in Palestine with their colonizing rhetoric and huge European monetary backers. Combined with arbitrary (and often racist) British administration, this led to a riot in Jerusalem in 1920 in which five Jews and four Palestinians were killed.
In 1925, a leading Zioinist, Menachem Ussishkin, gave a fiery speech, saying, “a Jewish state without compromises and without concessions, from Dan to Be’er Sheva, from the great sea to the desert, including Transjordan . . . Let us swear that the Jewish people will not rest and will not remain silent until its national home is built on our Mount Moriah [the Temple Mount].” This speech heightened tensions between Jews and Muslims over the governance of Jerusalem. Arabs protested Jewish violations of British mandate regulation of the Western Wall, and Zionists began passing out their literature in front of the al-Aqsa Mosque. Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, the senior Sunni cleric of Jerusalem—an Arab nationalist—counter-provoked with (actually justifiable) claims, albeit in antisemitic terms, that the Zionists were aiming to displace all Palestinians, provoking outbursts like 1920, and repeat outbursts of violence in 1929.
Jabotinsky
We Jews, thank God, have nothing to do with the East. . . . The Islamic soul must be broomed out of Eretz-Yisrael. . . . [Muslims are] yelling rabble dressed up in gaudy, savage rags.
—Ze'ev Jabotinsky, 1923
The Palin Commission (or Court) of Inquiry, which investigated the causes of the 1920 riot, concluded that the Balfour Declaration was “undoubtedly the starting point of the whole trouble,” and that “outspoken statements of the Zionist extremists” had inflamed the Palestinians. “Turkish [Ottoman] rule had not been onerous, and had been carried out through the leading Arab families. The three sects [Muslim, Christian and Jew] lived in amity.”
The Ottomans had also maintained a security force of 3,000 as a prophylactic measure, whereas in 1929, when the riots spread, the Mandatory Authority governed through a 1,500 strong constabulary (mostly Palestinian, with 41 Jews) under the command of 175 British officers. These forces were quickly overwhelmed. Violence then broke out in other towns, with atrocities committed by both sides; and this was the last time the Palestinians (by dent of sheer numbers) ever “got the best” of the settlers (133 Jews killed, 116 Palestinians—241 Jews injured, 232 Palestinians).
The next Palestinian uprising (1936-1939) was against the British administration. In fact, the British government had flirted with the idea of sending Jews to the region to Europeanize it since 1840; so Palestinian suspicions that the Brits wanted to displace them was understandable, only to be validated by the Balfour Declaration. The Brits killed more than 5,000 Palestinians during the 36-39 uprising.
If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Israel, then I opt for the second alternative.
—David Ben Gurion
Zionist in-migration continued apace.
In 1946, a Jewish terrorist militia, the Irgun, which had declared war on both the Palestinians and the British Mandatory Government, in concert with the Haganah bombed the British Mandatory Headquarters in Jerusalem at the King David Hotel, killing 91 people and wounding 46. Seventeen Jews were among the dead.
The incipient “First Arab-Israeli War” was, in fact, a three-way struggle between the British occupiers, the resident Palestinians, and the euro-Zionist settlers.
“I am sure you will agree that the inhuman crime committed in Jerusalem on 22 July calls for the strongest action against terrorism.” wrote British Prime Minister Atlee to US President Harry Truman, “but having regard to the sufferings of the innocent Jewish victims of Nazism this should not deter us from introducing a policy designed to bring peace to Palestine with the least possible delay.”
The British began to see their self-inflicted position as untenable, and the UN stepped in with the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan for Jewish and Arab Palestine, a plan shaped in no small part by the world’s reaction (and guilt) over the Shoa, where nearly 6 million European Jews had been systematically, and even industrially, massacred by the Nazis. The partition plan divided the proposed state of Israel and a Palestinian state. The Zionists never had any intention of respecting those boundaries or of deviating from their long-term plan to ethnically cleanse the imaginary “Greater Israel.” In 1948, they put their plan into deadly action.
The acceptance of partition does not commit us to renounce Transjordan: one does not demand from anybody to give up his vision. We shall accept a state in the boundaries fixed today, but the boundaries of Zionist aspirations are the concern of the Jewish people and no external factor will be able to limit them.
—David Ben Gurion
Neighboring Arab states, fearful of Zionist expansionism, and concerned about huge Palestinian refugee populations, miscalculated the Zionist post-Mandate forces, and attempted to crush them with an invasion. The Arabs were ill-trained, ill-equipped, and ill-led, whereas the Zionists had secretly been armed by Czechoslovakia with “400 tons of mortars and other heavy equipment, aerial bombs, rifles, ammunition, machine guns, flamethrowers, explosives, tanks and combat vehicles from the Czechs. The quantities were incredibly exorbitant; the country sold more than 34,000 rifles, 5,500 machine guns, 10,000 bayonets and more than 100 million rounds of ammunition,” all paid for by Zionist agencies from abroad.
The invasion was handily defeated, and Israel, feeling empowered, pursued its murderous campaign against the Palestinians apace.
They targeted civilians with massacres before its independence, murdering unarmed men, women, and children in Rashid Abu Laban, the Haifa market, the Haifa refinery, Damascus Gate, and Jaffa. Twelve documented massacres against the defenseless prior to the Balfour Declaration, and thirteen more in its wake. In 1948, a gang led by former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir assassinated the Swedish mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte, for publicizing how Zionists were terrorizing the Palestinian population into fleeing land the Zionists wanted to confiscate. (Assassination, bribery, and blackmail would become essential components of the Israeli armamentarium. There are still speculations that Jeffrey Epstein was running a blackmail operation for the Mossad.)
By 1949, sixty-one percent of the Arab population in Palestine had been thus displaced. 532 Palestinian villages were emptied, more than 400 demolished. Thirty documented Zionist massacres, among them Sa’sa’ (more than 60 men, women, and children), Husayniyya (more than 30), and Deir Yassin—107 killed, and reports of mass rape, led by two future Prime Ministers, led by Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir. The attack was supported by mortar fire from the Hagganah, led by Prime Minister-to-be, David Ben Gurion. Abu Shusha, where at least 57 were murdered. Tantura, 1948, surrendered to the Zionists, who then murdered almost 200 out of pure unadulterated cruelty. Saliha, 1948: massacre numbers range from 60 to 94. Al-Dawayima, 455 dead, 173 women and children among them.
All designed to force mass out-migration. Strategic terrorism. By the time Israel was recognized as a state, it had forcibly seized 78 percent of historic Palestine.
Anyone who tries to start this history on October 7, 2023 is a liar.
In 1950, Israel passed the “Absentee Property Law,” legalizing Israeli expropriation of all property abandoned by the terrorized Palestinians. The same year, they passed the “Law of Return,” allowing anyone who could prove they were Jewish from anywhere in the world to immigrate to Israel, while prohibiting Palestinian refugees from returning. The World Zionist Organization, the Jewish Agency, and the Jewish National Fund—international agencies—financed the relocation and establishment of the new settlers on expropriated Palestinian land. In 1948, 48 percent of the land in what was now Israel was owned by Arabs. By 1953, 98 percent of Israeli land was “owned” by “the Jewish state.”
It turned out that every Palestinian fear leading to the riots of the 20s and 30s had ben valid. The Zionists had said what they were going to do, and then they did it.
In 1953, a group of around 300 Israeli soldiers led by a young officer named Ariel Sharon (yet another future Prime Minister) converged on the village of Qibya in the West Bank and murdered 69 Palestinians—46 of them women and children; then demolished 45 houses, a school, and a mosque.
1956: The Israeli military imposed a curfew on all Arab villages near the border with Jordan, one of them being Kafr Qasim. The Israeli border police told the mayor, at 4:30 PM, the curfew is to begin at 5 PM, even though hundreds of residents travel out of the village for work, and couldn’t possibly make it. Soldiers and police are given the order: “shoot to kill at any person seen outside their home after 17:00, making no distinction between men, women, and children.” The Israelis set up a roadblock west of Kafr Qasim, ordered civilians to get out of their cars and off their bicycles, then massacred 49 men, women, and children.
One month later, Israeli forces rampaged through Gazan towns of Khan Yunis and Rafah, murdering between 275 and 400. The following year, mass graves were uncovered, revealing 40 Palestinian men who’d been bound and shot in the back of the head.
These attacks drove Palestinians into Southern Lebanon, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip . . . and formed generations of bloodthirsty racists as future Israeli leaders.
We need to step back at this point and see how the Cold War figured into the situation. Arab nationalism was on the rise in what was now understood to be a strategic zone in terms of both petroleum reserves and shipping. That nationalism was perceived as a threat to Western interests who’d controlled the region, in one way or another, since the defeat of the Ottomans. This became the raison d’etre for arming the Israelis as a strategic asset for Western (especially US and British) interests.
I’m not going to divert here into the ins and outs of Great Power politics in the period, or of the many and contradictory realpolitik calculations and miscalculations by Arab countries and the West, except to say that this all came to a head (again!) when Egyptian leader Gamal Nasser threatened a 1956 blockade of Israeli ships through the newly nationalized Suez Canal—the passage between the Indian Ocean/Red Sea and the Mediterranean. This was in response to Ariel Sharon’s military unit attacking the Egyptian Army Headquarters in Gaza in 1955.
Among those who most heavily relied on the canal were the French who still had considerable post-colonial assets in Africa (though all of Europe and the United States needed the passage for regional petroleum transport). The French had already begun heavily arming the Israelis in the early 1950s, and on October 29, 1956, Israel invaded Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula with overwhelming force, to be joined in the invasion by British and French forces days later.
Days prior, David Ben Gurion listed his own territorial objectives, which went well-beyond opening the Suez Canal: annexation of Gaza, Sinai, the West Bank, Southern Lebanon, and the division of Jordan between Israel and Iraq (Greater Israel on the march).
(The Israelis had allies in Southern Lebanon—the Katebs, “Christian” Phalangists [fascists]—whose hatred of the Palestinians and willingness to massacre more than matched the Zionists—about whom we’ll learn more further down.)
In 1957, under international pressure, Israel withdrew from the Sinai and Gaza.
In 1960, the Knesset passed a law saying that neither government land holdings nor private could be permitted to transfer ownership if the recipients were not Jewish, effectively codifying the dispossession of Palestinians, including Palestinian citizens or Israel.
While surrounding Arab governments were quick to denounce the Zionists, their actions never matched their words. They uniformly failed to take in Palestinians and to assist Palestinian resistance, fearing it would disrupt deals they were striking with the West or draw sharper Western resistance to Arab nationalism of any kind. (The eventual support of fundamentalist political Islam by both Western governments—especially the US—and Israel itself [a supporter of the development of Hamas] was calculated as a means of disrupting anything resembling Arab unity. The Persians in Iran were already ruled as a US client state.)
Taking this into consideration, Palestinians formed The Palestinian National Liberation Movement—Fatah in 1957 in an attempt to overcome factionalism and build an independent resistance that rooted itself in the population of refugees, who were, frankly, being treated worse than dogs by the Israelis who had stolen their land. Yasir Arafat and Khalil al-Wazir were Fatah’s founding members.
I point this out, because it’s important not to treat Palestinians as pet-victims. Palestinians did resort in some cases to armed struggle (some even terror). This has been portrayed by pro-Zionist Western media (almost all of it) as if it happened in a vacuum, unprovoked. In fact, Palestinian resistance was built upon decades of Zionist abuse—massacres, mass false imprisonment (kidnapping), torture, assassination, dispossession, and daily humiliation. Israel has consistently provoked Palestinian violence, then portrayed itself as victim in order to use that resistance as a pretext for ever more repression and dispossession of the Palestinians. In fact, Fatah (and eventually others) did not ramp up their armed resistance until after 1967.
The Zionists had announced openly, for decades prior to the State of Israel and ever since, their intention of annexing Palestine and as much as possible beyond Palestine. They had followed through with ruthless violence. They had stated again and again their racist view of Palestinians as less than human.
A recent poll by Haaretz revealed that 82 percent of Israelis want to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians (which is how they openly characterize the genocidal actions in Gaza, the West Bank, and Southern Lebanon). Forty-seven percent of Israelis want to exterminate every Palestinian to the last child. That’s why the milquetoast denunciations of Israel from even “progressive” officials, like Senator Bernie Sanders, as a Netanyahu problem, are disingenuous at best and dishonest at worst.
The hatred of Palestinians is pressed into the very cells of Israeli Jewish children (yes, there are a few Arab citizens . . . who are discriminated against by law). Zionists have been brutalizing Palestinians for more than a century. Every generation of Sabras has been indoctrinated from birth into racially dehumanizing Palestinians and accepting their murder and humiliation as normal and even beneficial, making the few Israeli born dissenters all the more remarkable. And when Palestinians—subjected to this brutality against themselves and their families, to this dispossession and humiliation—have the temerity to kick back (futilely in most cases), the Israeli response is always crybullying . . . painting themselves as the victims of the nasty Arabs . . . and the Western establishment has acted as their press agent.
The brutality escalated and expanded after the 1967 surprise attack on Egypt, Syria, and Jordan (called the Six Day War), just as the United Nations Emergency Force in the Sinai was leaving. The heavily armed Israelis seized the Golan Heights, the West Bank, and the entire Sinai Peninsula. Immediately upon seizure, Israel forcibly expelled more than 460,000 Palestinians from their land in the West Bank and Gaza, driving them into squalid refugee camps.
Almost immediately—and against international law—the Israelis began establishing Jewish settlements throughout the West Bank as a means of making “facts on the ground.” That’s when the Zionists began the wholesale application of one of their most sinister dispossession tactics: the systematic expropriation of water. In 1967, after the West Bank and Gaza were effectively occupied, the Zionists published Military Order 158, prohibiting any Palestinian from digging wells, installing pumps, running pipelines, or drawing from springs without a permit from the Israeli military (which were then denied). When Palestinians set up rainwater catchments, the Israeli military destroyed their cisterns.
While more than 180 Palestinian villages in the West Bank have suffered chronic water shortages, illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank have become profligate water wasters, draining local aquifers for fun and profit.
Above is a map of the West Bank Barrier (“The Apartheid Wall”), a 708 kilometer wall surrounding illegal Jewish settlements. Take note that the wall parallels inland waterways and reservoirs.
This Israelis not only expropriated most of the water and arable land. Since 1967, they have destroyed more than 80,000 olive trees, and with them the livelihoods of more than 8,000 Palestinian families.
But let’s return for a moment to June 8, 1967, when, in the course of the so-called Six Day War, the Israeli military attacked the USS Liberty, a US Naval ship, killing 34 US Sailors and wounding 171 (out of a crew of 294). The incident is still mired in secrecy and conflicting accounts, the US and Israel saying it was an accident, and a dozen other theories suggesting it was intentional. Those of us who were in the military, as well as the ships survivors, remain extremely skeptical of the official account (the DOD, NSA, and CIA records are still sealed almost 50 years later). Here’s why.
The USS Liberty was a “signals intelligence” ship, a spy ship if you will. It was actively monitoring the Israeli attacks from international waters between 17 and 28 miles off the Sinai coast. The vessel was a 455-foot converted cargo carrier with a maximum speed of 18 knots (this will become important). It was circling at 8 knots when the attack began. That attack was the only surface naval engagement of the entire war. It lasted 61 minutes . . . a solid hour.
For nine hours prior to the attack, Israeli planes had flown over and near the Liberty eight times. Her position and nationality were well known. She was flying a US flag, and her hull numbers and name were freshly painted. Israeli reconnaissance planes had flown so low the crew members could see them in the cockpits. The claim that this was “fog of war” is utter horseshit. The US Defense Attaché at he US Embassy in Tel Aviv issued Message 0854 on June 10th, confirming that Israeli planes had specifically relayed the nationality of the ship to ground controllers on at least two occasions prior to the attacks.
At 1358 hours (1:58 pm for you civilians), that is, in broad daylight on a clear day, the crew monitored fast-moving incoming aircraft on the radar. Within minutes, the ship was under attack by unmarked Israeli fighter jets (war crime—international law forbids unmarked combat aircraft), firing rockets, napalm bombs, and automatic cannons. The attacks were repeated in wave after wave. The Israelis had jammed their communications, so the Liberty could not contact the Sixth Fleet of which they were a part (another war crime, and days before the war started the vessel had been seconded to the National Security Agency). Thirty-five minutes into the attack, Israeli torpedo boats joined and fired on the Liberty with .50 caliber machine guns, cannons, and five torpedoes, with one finding its mark and killing 25 men in a single explosion. As survivors mounted lifeboats, the Israelis made several more passes at the lifeboats with machine guns (another war crime).
Michelle Kinnucan, an investigative journalist, filed for NSA records under the Freedom of Information Act, and discovered that “on June 7, 1967, the Israeli government threatened to attack the Liberty if the ship was not diverted or moved away from Israel.”
Later claims that the ship was misidentified were given the lie. At 0605 that morning, Israeli recon birds called in the ship’s hull numbers. And days later, the Israelis claimed the torpedo boat attacked because the target was traveling in excess of 25 knots (war ship speed)—another bald faced lie (see speeds above).
The most convincing “reason” I’ve encountered was James Bamford’s “The Cover-up” (an extract from Bamford’s book, Body of Secrets) in which this veteran journalist and expert on the US security and intelligence establishment suggests the Israelis were afraid the USS Liberty might intercept communication from Ras Seder in the Sinai, where the IDF was massacring between 52-60 Egyptian prisoners of war.
Throughout the morning, the ship sailed on, with reconnaissance repeated at approximately 30-minute intervals. At one point, an Israeli air force Noratlas Nord 2501 circled the ship and headed back towards the Sinai. “It had a big Star of David on it and it was flying just a little bit above our mast,” recalled crew member Larry Weaver. “I was actually able to wave to the co-pilot. He waved back and actually smiled at me - I could see him that well. There's no question about it. They had seen the ship's markings and the American flag. They could damn near see my rank. The underway flag was definitely flying, especially when you're that close to a war zone.”
By 9.50am, the minaret at El Arish could be seen with the naked eye like a solitary mast in a sea of sand. Although no one on the ship knew it at the time, the Liberty had suddenly trespassed into a private horror. At that very moment, near the minaret, Israeli forces were engaged in a criminal slaughter.
Three days after Israel had launched the six- day war, Egyptian prisoners in the Sinai had become a nuisance. There was no place to house them, not enough Israelis to watch them, and few vehicles to transport them to prison camps. But there was another way to deal with them.
As the Liberty sat within eyeshot of El Arish, eavesdropping on surrounding communications, Israeli soldiers turned the town into a slaughterhouse, systematically butchering their prisoners. An eyewitness recounted how in the shadow of the El Arish mosque, they lined up about 60 unarmed Egyptian prisoners, hands tied behind their backs, and then opened fire with machine guns until the pale desert sand turned red.
This and other war crimes were just some of the secrets Israel had sought to conceal since the start of the conflict. An essential element in the Israeli battle plan seemed to have been to hide much of the war behind a carefully constructed curtain of lies: lies about the Egyptian threat, lies about who started the war, lies to the US president, lies to the UN Security Council, lies to the press, lies to the public. Thus, as the American naval historian Dr Richard K Smith noted, “any instrument which sought to penetrate this smoke screen so carefully thrown around the normal ‘fog of war’ would have to be frustrated”.
Into this sea of deception and slaughter sailed the USS Liberty, an enormous spy factory loaded with the latest eavesdropping gear.
About noon, as the Liberty was again in sight of El Arish, and while the massacres were taking place, an army commander there reported that a ship was shelling them from the sea. But that was impossible. The only ship in the vicinity was the Liberty, and she was eavesdropping, not shooting. As any observer would have recognised, the ship was a tired old second world war vessel crawling with antennae, and unthreatening to anyone - unless it was their secrets, not their lives, they wanted to protect.
By then the Israeli navy and air force had conducted more than six hours of close surveillance of the Liberty off the Sinai and must have positively identified it as an American electronic spy ship. They knew she was the only military ship in the area. Nevertheless, the order was given to kill her and at 12.05pm, three motor torpedo boats from the port of Ashdod, about 50 miles away, departed. Israeli air force fighters, loaded with 50mm cannon ammunition, rockets and napalm, followed.
Without warning, the Israeli jets - swept-wing Dassault Mirage IIICs - struck. On board Liberty, Lieutenant Painter observed that the aircraft had “absolutely no markings”, their identity unclear. He then attempted to reach the men manning the gun mounts, but it was too late. “I was trying to contact these two kids,” he recalled, “and I saw them both; well, I didn’t exactly see them as such. They were blown apart, but I saw the whole area go up in smoke and scattered metal. At about the same time, the aircraft strafed the bridge area. The quarter-master, Petty Officer Third Class Pollard, was standing right next to me, and he was hit.” (Bamford—read the whole linked article)
The attack was obviously deliberate, unprovoked, and aimed at total destruction of the vessel and its crew. You can scan the internet for all the conspiracy theories, but no self-respecting military veteran is going to buy the claim that this was “fog of war.” A one-hour attack? In broad daylight, with calm seas? Bullshit! Bullshit! Bullshit!
Back in Washington, President Johnson and his advisers gathered in the Situation Room the morning of the attack. While relieved neither Egypt nor the Soviets were responsible, Johnson and his team realized that an attack by Israel—an ally with a loyal domestic following—raised a host of other complicated political issues for the administration. At the time, the United States was bogged down by the Vietnam War, where 26 men died each day in 1967. In May, that number spiked to 38 men a day. Johnson’s approval numbers simultaneously were plummeting from 61 percent in March 1966 to just 39 percent in August 1967. It all came down to Vietnam.
Complicating matters, American Jews—a powerful and important constituency for Johnson, who was facing reelection in 1968—were at the forefront of the antiwar movement. Adding to his frustration was the fact that he had done more than any prior President to improve U.S.-Israeli relations. “If Viet Nam persists,” one memo warned him, “a special effort to hold the Jewish vote will be necessary.”
The Liberty—riddled with cannon blasts, her decks soaked in blood, her starboard side ripped open by a torpedo—evolved in a matter of hours from a top-secret intelligence asset to a domestic political liability. That was evident by one proposal. “Consideration was being given by some unnamed Washington authorities to sink the Liberty in order that newspaper men would be unable to photograph her and thus inflame public opinion against the Israelis,” NSA Deputy Director Louis Tordella wrote in memo for the record. “I made an impolite comment about that idea.”
The day after the attack, Johnson met with his Special Committee of the National Security Council. The Liberty discussion was heated, minutes show, as Johnson’s advisers spurned Israel’s claim that the attack was simply a tragic accident. Clark Clifford, head of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and one of Johnson’s most pro-Israel advisers, demanded the attackers be punished. “Inconceivable that it was an accident,” Clifford said. “Punish Israelis responsible.”
Clifford’s strong comments—echoed by others in the meeting, including the President—reflected just how upset many in Washington were over the attack, a hostility that was never shared with the American public. (James M. Scott)
What was established by the attack on the USS Liberty was that the US government would excuse anything the Israelis did.
And for many years now, apartheid.
Author and political scientist Norman Finkelstein often chastises his interlocutors for using the word Zionism. This son of Holocaust survivors prefers the term “Jewish supremacism,” an association with the more familiar concept of “white supremacy,” that analogizes and emphasizes the “race-making” at the heart of the Zionist project. He has a point, even though I still say Zionism to distinguish it from the various forms of Judaism and Jewish identity apart from Zionism. Finkelstein’s emphasis is particularly clear in Israel’s historic relation to Apartheid South Africa.
The similarity between Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and South Africa’s Apartheid (1948-1994) has been noted often. It shouldn’t be surprising. There were warm relations between Zionists and the arch-racist leader of South Africa, Jan Smuts, who was a close personal friend of Chaim Weizmann, Israel’s first President. In the context of the Cold War, Israel would diplomatically distance itself from South Africa on the world stage, even as South Africa meanwhile became Israel’s biggest trading partner. After 1967, Israel and South Africa’s relationship became more open, as white South Africans and Israeli Jews began seeing themselves in one another as the carriers of European racial superiority dealing with recalcitrant racial inferiors and those horrible anti-racist zealots in the United Nations.
Die Burger, the South African newspaper of record in 1967, published an editorial that said, “Israel and South Africa . . . are engaged in a struggle for existence . . . The anti-Western powers have driven Israel and South Africa into a community of interests which had better be utilized than denied.”
In 1968, the two countries established the Israeli–South African Friendship League and the Israel–South Africa Trade Association. By 1975. they were cooperating in the development of nuclear weapons. Even their national mythologies were coordinated.
“Israelis claim that they are the chosen people, the elect of God, and find a biblical justification for their racism and Zionist exclusivity,” said South African Jew and ANC Intelligence Minister Ronnie Kasrils. “This is just like the Afrikaners of apartheid South Africa, who also had the biblical notion that the land was their God-given right. Like the Zionists who claimed that Palestine in the 1940s was ‘a land without people for a people without land’, so the Afrikaner settlers spread the myth that there were no black people in South Africa when they first settled in the 17th century. They conquered by force of arms and terror and the provocation of a series of bloody colonial wars of conquest.”
South Africa’s Bantustans, areas where black residents lived without autonomy, inspired many in the Israeli elite as a viable model for Palestine. This was the desire to isolate “undesirable” Palestinians in noncontiguous enclaves, Bantustans cut off from the rest of the country – in other words, like today’s West Bank, where 165 Palestinians “enclaves” are strangulated by Israeli colonies, the Israeli Defense Forces and violent settlers.
During the apartheid era, Israeli diplomats were instructed around the world to tell the media that the Jewish state didn’t recognise the Bantustans. This was a lie, as a telegram by the deputy director of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Natan Meron, on 23 November 1983 proved: “It is no secret that Israeli political figures and public figures are involved in one way or another, directly or indirectly, in economic activity in the Bantustans.” (Antony Loewenstein)
As recently as 2020. two former Israeli Ambassadors to South Africa, Alon Liel and Ilan Barch, said that Israel is an “apartheid state” which took its cues directly from pre-1994 South Africa.
One of the architects of apartheid in South Africa, former prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd, wrote in the Rand Daily Mail in 1961 that “Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state” after taking Palestine from the Arabs who “had lived there for a thousand years.” Ariel Sharon was a known fan of Bantustans, and he was one of the biggest advocates of the construction of Israeli settlements from the 1970s and wanted to adapt them into the West Bank.
Former Israeli ambassador Avi Primor wrote in his autobiography about a trip to South Africa in the early 1980s with Sharon, then a defense minister, recalling how much he was taken by the Bantustan enterprise. Former Italian prime minister Massimo D’Alema told Haaretz in 2003 that Sharon had explained to him that the Bantustan model was the most appropriate for Palestine. (Antony Loewenstein)
From 1967 onward, occupied territories were controlled by the Israeli military with a system of permits and checkpoints (just like South Africa’s former Bantustans).
The leading human rights group in Israel, B’Tselem, says Israel is an “apartheid regime.” Amnesty International calls Israel an apartheid state. Human Rights Watch, the International Criminal Court, the United Nations International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid, and even the former Attorney General of Israel, Michael Ben-Yair, say that Israel systematically practices racial apartheid.
As an editorial aside—and speaking now as I was before I became a Christian and committed myself to nonviolence—if I (twenty years ago) had been subjected to this kind of control and abuse, to the destruction of my family’s homes, to the murder of my people’s children, to these daily humiliations . . . I would have killed as many of these uniformed thugs as I possible could. So would most of you! Palestinians, overall, have shown incredible restraint!
Norman Finkelstein narrated a comparison I’m going to steal and paraphrase regarding Israel’s current claim that the genocide in Gaza is “self defense” in the wake of October 7th. Imagine a woman married to an abusive husband. He’s much bigger and stronger than her, he carries a gun, and he’s threatened repeatedly to kill her. When she’s tried to escape with no money, he’s tracked her down and forced her back into the abusive home. He berates her constantly. He locks her in closets, handcuffed. He controls her money and her access to the outside world. He beats her savagely and frequently. She has called for help from the police and various social services agencies and been ignored (only to have the beatings increase in severity). This goes on for years. Then, one day, while he’s giving her a particularly savage beating, she reflexively grabs a kitchen knife and stabs him, whereupon he draws his gun and kills her. Is he technically and legally defending himself?
Yeah, you see? Palestinians have been appealing to the international community for help against Israeli abuses and crimes for decades. The response—with Israel hiding behind the US (who even tolerates Israelis attacks on itself)—has been nothing. The savagery just continues, and now the world stands by while Israel murders a captive population by the tens of thousands behind the United States as a shield and arms merchant.
In 1981, the Israelis illegally annexed Syria’s Golan Heights; and in 2019, Donald Trump issued a Presidential proclamation recognizing Golan as Israeli. That annexation occurred just two years before I became a member of the most secretive unit in the Army.
Being as cautious as I can—that is, not revealing classified information from my own career in Special Operations—I knew a fair number of people who worked closely with the US Embassy in Beirut in the 1980s, when the Israelis were (illegally) occupying Southern Lebanon (murdering Lebanese and Palestinians along the way). To a man, my otherwise very conservative colleagues despised the Israelis, not only from direct observation of Israeli troops’ daily cruelties, but for the history of the USS Liberty, the Israeli-planned assassination attempt on US Ambassador John Gunther Dean, and Israeli participation in the Sabra and Shatila massacres (which we all saw in a classified and horrifying three-hour walk-through film of the aftermath—thousands of men, women, and children rotting in the streets, the alleys, and the buildings).
Yes, the Israelis tried to assassinate a US Ambassador. The US response? Nothing. Cover up and move along! But people behind the scenes—people I knew and worked with—knew; and they also knew the truth about the Sabra and Shatila massacres, where more than 3,000 Palestinian and Lebanese Shia men, women, and children were murdered, with Israeli Defense Forces setting up a cordon around the Palestinian refugee camps on September 15, 1982, to prevent their escape. Then, on September 16th the IDF’s allies. the Bashir Gemayal’s Lebanese Phalangists entered the cordon and began the slaughter, which lasted for 43 harrowing hours, until September 18th.
It’s never really stopped. Israel commits its crimes with US-protected impunity, with US financial aid, with US weapons, and with the collusion of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan who clear their airspace for the weapons to flow.
In 1985, Israel’s Labor government began mass deportations as part of its “Iron Fist” policy, in conjunction with accelerated development of (illegal) Jewish settlements in the West Bank. In 1984, there were around 35,000 settlers. By 1988, it was 64,000. This, among other abuses (assassination of political leaders, summary arrests, mass detentions, beatings, and shootings), provoked the First Intifada. (The number of illegal settlers now is half a million.)
The First Intifada began in 1987 in the occupied territories—a series of non-violent demonstrations, strikes, and acts of civil disobedience.
(Yes, some resorted to Molotov cocktails and rock-throwing; and some Palestinian factions engaged in armed attacks. The question of Palestinian factionalism, and of the internal and external factors impinging on it (including Israeli covert operations), is so complex it would require another long-form essay. Try the following links: A Century of Palestinian Nationalism: “Modes of Political Organization and Representation since 1919,” “THE IMPACT OF THE PALESTINIAN POLITICAL DIVISION ON THE PALESTINIAN FOREIGN POLICY AND THE PATH OF THE PALESTINIAN LIBERATION DIPLOMACY,” “Palestinians want to choose their own leaders – a year of war has distanced them further from this democratic goal.”
Israel responded to the First Intifada with “disproportionate” force.
“During the whole six-year intifada, the Israeli army killed at least 1,087 Palestinians, of which 240 were children.” (Israeli casualties—100 civilians and 60 soldiers killed [with massive consequences].)
In 1990, Israeli forces, unprovoked, attacked the Al-Aqsa Mosque and murdered 22 unarmed civilians. No consequences. The US blocked any international response.
1990: Israeli Border Police opened fire on rock throwers at the Temple Mount, killing 21 Palestinians and wounding at least 150. No consequences. The US blocked any international response.
1993: An Israeli settler murdered 60 Palestinian civilians at the Ibrahimi Mosque. No consequences. The US blocked any international response.
1993: The IDF attacked Lebanon (again), killing more than 120 civilians and displacing over 300,000, destroying thousands of homes, and dozens of churches, mosques, schools, and cemeteries. They (war crime) cut off civilian water and electricity. They attacked ambulances, relief vehicles, and markets. They used illegal munitions. No consequences. The US blocked any international response.
1996: In response to an ineffectual Hezbollah rocket attack, Israel fired more than 25,000 artillery shells into Southern Lebanon, killing 154 civilians and wounding 351. No consequences. The US blocked any international response.
1996: The IDF attacked an ambulance (war crime) carrying 13 civilians in Mansouri, Lebanon, killing two women and four children. No consequences. The US blocked any international response.
1996: Israel bombed Nabatiyya al-Faqwah, Lebanon, killing nine, including a mother and her seven children. Israel claims it was attacked by rockets, but no evidence is forthcoming. No consequences. The US blocked any international response.
1996: Israel shelled a United Nations compound in Qana, Lebanon, killing 106 and wounding 116. No consequences. The US blocked any international response.
On and on it goes. The BBC, Fox News, ABC, NBC, CBS, The New York Times, The Washington Post, et al, dutifully file stories approved by the Zionist government. The US Congress, Republican and Democrat alike, falls into line again and again.
In early 2000, it became evident that the Israelis had entered into the Camp David agreements in bad faith, and that they would refuse to follow through on the peace proposals. Later that year, Ariel Sharon (called by then “the butcher of Beirut”) staged a provocation by marching into the Temple Mount. This was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Protests and riots erupted across the occupied territories and in Jerusalem. Israel responded with massive attacks against civilians, including aerial bombing, mass detentions, targeted assassinations, and—under the pretext, again, of self defense—home demolitions.
Since 1947, as documented by the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, Israel has destroyed more than 175,000 Palestinian homes, using explosives and bulldozers. During the Second Intifada (“uprising,” 2000-2002), as Israel was destroying Palestinian homes in Rafah (Gaza), members of the International Solidarity Movement were protesting, including a young American woman named Rachel Corrie. They were positioning themselves as shields between Israeli snipers and the unarmed civilians they’d been targeting for sport from a nearby watchtower.
As Corrie stood in the open, with a bright orange caution jacket, an armored Israeli bulldozer turned and ran deliberately over her, crushing her to death. The Israelis subsequently claimed the bulldozer operator couldn’t see her (a lie the US blandly accepted). The picture below, moments before her death, show her standing in the open in clear view of the bulldozer, which Israeli officials say was “clearing vegetation.” The Israelis were actively committing a war crime, in front of the whole world, as the US establishment again embraced a lie about an Israeli attack on one of its own citizens. I would ask readers to compare the character and courage of Rachel Corrie to that of US officials.
In Jenin and Nablus (West Bank) that year, the IDF killed at an unknown number (between 52 and 500) Palestinians, and Israel blocked the United Nations from conducting an inquiry.
Israel blocked the United Nations from conducting the first-hand inquiry unanimously sought by the Security Council . . . At the same time human rights organizations charged Israel with war crimes and crimes against humanity. In November, Amnesty International reported that there was “clear evidence” that the IDF committed war crimes against Palestinian civilians in Jenin and Nablus. The report accused Israel of blocking medical care, using people as human shields, shooting and killing unarmed civilians, including one in custody, bulldozing houses with residents inside, in one case knowingly crushing a severely disabled man to death, in another case killing eight members of a family, the reckless killing of civilians with explosives charges on doors, mass arbitrary detentions and beatings of prisoners, which resulted in one death, and preventing ambulances and aid organizations from reaching the areas of combat even after the fighting had reportedly stopped. (Wikipedia)
In 2003, the Knesset approved passage of the Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law, banning “the unification of the family where one spouse is an Israeli citizen (usually applied to Palestinian citizens) and the other is a resident of the Occupied Palestinian Territories. An additional amendment in 2007 expanded the ban to include citizens and residents of Iran, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq. Although the law was originally a temporary order, it has been used repeatedly, making it a permanent law.” (Middle East Monitor)
Between 1967 and 1988 (First Intifada), Israel held more than 600,000 Palestinians in jails and detention camps, most without any due process. Twenty percent of Palestinians and forty percent of male Palestinians had been detained for a minimum of one week. Seventy percent of Palestinian families in the occupied territories have had family members taken. The conviction rate of Palestinians in Israeli courts is 100 percent.
In January 2006, Hamas won elections in Gaza. In February, Israel withheld Palestinian Authority funds from Gaza, intensifying Gaza’s impoverishment and isolation. In March, Israel closed all crossings into Gaza. The US, at Israel’s request, cut off all aid to Palestinians, prohibited any official contact with them, “outlawed” any “unlicensed” transactions with them, and prevailed on its murderous ally in Egypt to close the Rafah border, completing the hermetic seal on Gaza and effectively turning it into an open air prison.
On June 25, 2006, a group of eight Gazan guerrillas crossed the border through a tunnel and captured Israeli tank gunner, Corporal Gilad Shalit. Their demand upon the wounded Shalit’s capture was the exchange of Shalit for twenty detained Palestinians (an exchange finally effected in October 2011). The immediate response, though, was a large scale general attack across Gaza, killing 457, including 112 children.
In December 2007, Israel declared itself within the law to limit water and electricity to Gaza (a clear an unequivocal violation of international law).
February 2008, Israel attacked Gaza, killing 1,383 Palestinians, including 333 children and 114 women, and wounding over 5,300.
In a secret 2008 Israeli document, revealed in 2012, Israel ordered that the amount of food allowed into Gaza could not exceed the minimum caloric intake for the sum of all individuals.
November 2012: Israel conducted a four-day attack on Gaza, “killing 162 Palestinians, injuring 1,300 others, and destroying 200 homes.”
8 July 2014 – Israel launches a devastating 51-day attack on Gaza (Operation Protective Edge), killing 2,147 Palestinians, and wounding 10,870 others. 17,123 homes were hit, of which 2,465 were destroyed.
1 September 2015 – The UN warns that Gaza could become “uninhabitable” by 2020 due to the ongoing “de-development” of the Strip.
10 May 2021 – Israel launches an 11-day attack on Gaza, killing 254 Palestinians, including 66 children, and injuring 1,948 others.
9 May 2023 – Israel launches a 5-day military campaign on Gaza, leaving 33 Palestinians killed, including 6 children and 3 women.
On October 7, 2023, elements of Hamas struck back.
The coordinated attack killed 1,139 Israelis—695 civilians (39 of them children), 373 security forces, and 71 foreigners (mostly Thai laborers). Around 250 were taken hostage. Israel claims the attack involved 3,000 Palestinian fighters, of which around half were killed.
most Western “journalists” are servile careerist dastards
The Western media—which had largely ignored February 2008, when Israel attacked Gaza, killing 1,383 Palestinians, including 333 children and 114 women, and wounding over 5,300 (I include this particular attack because of the somewhat similar casualty figures)—went apeshit after October 7th! This was the outrage of the century.
(Dozens of well-researched articles have been written on reporting disparities with regard to Israel and Palestine, which—because it is such a rich vein—I won’t divert to in this article. The glaringly obvious pro-Israel bias of journalists is particularly remarkable, given that Israel has killed, to date, more than 230 journalists in Gaza. The Cost of War Project noted that “More journalists have been killed in Gaza than in both world wars, Vietnam, Yugoslavia and Afghanistan combined.” Proving beyond any shadow of a doubt—if you had any—that most Western “journalists” are servile careerist dastards.)
Reports of widespread sexual assaults by Hamas and the decapitation of babies during and after the attack have been debunked as Israeli propaganda. What has been confirmed by the evidence is that the IDF was ordered to employ an archaic doctrine called the Hannibal Directive—by which Israeli forces are obliged to bomb and fire upon their own forces and even civilians to prevent Israeli soldiers or civilians being taken captive.
Israeli journalists Ronen Bergman and Yoav Zitun, working for Ha’aretz, concluded after their investigation that hundreds of Israelis had been killed by the IDF after receiving an order that not one vehicle would be permitted to cross back into Gaza.
In November 2003, I wrote how I expected Israel and the United States to respond to October 7th. The title gave it away: “Genocide in Gaza.” It wasn’t a stretch, because I already knew a good deal about Israel’s history.
The fact is, as of October this year, just after the brutal Hamas attack (remember, 1,300 people were killed!) which provided Netanyahu with the pretext for the genocidal Israeli reaction, 77 percent of Republicans, 69 percent of Democrats, and 54 percent of Independents said they “support” the State of Israel. In large part due to decades of single-minded US propaganda on Israel’s behalf. Most Americans couldn’t point to Israel on a map, and yet a majority across demographics support IAG [Israel, anything goes] ideology. Seventy-one percent of “white” adults do. Fifty-one percent of “non-white” adults do.
This is very bad news for the Palestinians now suffering death, maiming, and mass displacement under a rain of Israeli ordnance. Netanyahu’s war crimes will continue with impunity, with the US, the UK, and most of Europe dutifully participating in the cover-up. This doesn’t mean that no price will be paid in the US, even apart from America’s status as an international pariah.
My conclusion: Gaza was well and truly fucked. Unfortunately, this turned out to be true. What I didn’t factor in—not because I was unaware, but because I didn’t want an article as long as this one—was Netanyahu’s singular political circumstance, which gave added impetus to a more general Zionist desire to exterminate Palestinians.
You can scroll through the +972mag website from October 7, 2023 forward for an almost daily account of the actions that followed. It’s a newsreel of horrors.
Netanyahu was in deep political trouble, and prolonging the war merged with his political strategy to remain in power.
In 2016, Israeli police began an intensive investigation of Netanyahu on five counts of corruption (three would result in indictment), i.e., fraud, conflict of interest, and bribery. This ignited mass protests, beginning in September 2017, that filled Petah Tikva district and Rabin Square in Tel Aviv for 41 consecutive weeks, dubbing Netanyahu the “Crime Minister.”
By 2023, these protests were amplified and transfigured in a judicial reform controversy. In response to his own legal and electoral troubles, Netanyahu and his pet Justice Minister, Yariv Levin, launched a campaign to seize control of the Israeli Supreme Court and break up the Israeli Bar Association.
The majority of Israeli Jews do not support the rights of Palestinians; but they jealously guard their own. This was a bald attempt to consolidate nearly dictatorial power for Netanyahu; and the proposed “reforms” would have given him the power to establish more illegal settlements and wage attacks on Palestinians with even greater impunity, adding anti-occupation Israelis to the anti-Netanyahu coalition. By March 2023, the protests morphed into a general strike. By September, the protests were joined by American Jews outside the United Nations.
Netanyahu was in deep political shit.
October 7th was a gift from Hamas to Benjamin Netanyahu. He now had a classic Schmittian state of exception. The Hannibal Directive plumped up the casualty numbers and, thereby, the outrage.
The last year and a half may have been a geopolitical challenge for Israel, but for its prime minister, it has been an opportunity for pursuing long-desired strategies in Gaza and the broader region and boosting his chances of political survival. An end to the war would force an unpopular prime minister to stand the test of the ballot box, because ending the fighting without achieving the far-right’s strategic aims for Gaza likely would cause key coalition partners to defect, bringing down his government and causing him to risk an election. Thus, to prevent any movement towards a lasting ceasefire, Netanyahu has used every opportunity to prolong the negotiations and to keep the war going. For example, he chose to dismiss a December 2023 regional initiative aimed at restoring Palestinian Authority rule in Gaza. In May 2024, he prioritized the Rafah invasion over a ceasefire whose terms closely resembled the eventual January 2025 agreement.
Netanyahu’s criminal behavior in Gaza and his Machiavellian maneuvers on the domestic front may seem desperate. In truth, Israel’s behavior over the last year and a half is reflective of the country’s historic policy towards the Palestinians and their attempts at exercising their own agency. The gross disregard for human life, the intentional war crimes, and the attacks against international organizations such as the United Nations, the International Criminal Court, and humanitarian aid organizations have been at the center of Israel’s policies for decades. (Thair Abu Ras, “A Calculus of Conflict: Netanyahu’s Political Survival Through Extended War”)
It’s hard to even begin cataloguing Israeli war crimes since October 7th. The blockade of Gaza prior to that, as well as the entire post-1967 history of occupation, is a compendium of international law violations, of crimes against humanity, and of war crimes.
Yes, the Hamas attack in 2023 entailed war crimes, to wit, targeting civilians, taking hostages, indiscriminate rocket attacks, and targeting medical facilities. And in retaliation came the grotesquely disproportionate response/plan.
By July 2024, official counts were 37,396 Gazan Palestinians dead—half of them children. But official counts don’t tell the real story. These are discovered bodies. The Lancet medical journal estimates a 41 percent undercount, the rest being vaporized or buried under a mountain range of toxic rubble. (Estimated total deaths by traumatic injury—64,260 at the end of January this year—“the true mortality figures probably exceeded 70,000” [Lancet].)
August 2024 ^^^
The Chamber found reasonable grounds to believe that during the relevant time, international humanitarian law related to international armed conflict between Israel and Palestine applied. This is because they are two High Contracting Parties to the 1949 Geneva Conventions and because Israel occupies at least parts of Palestine. The Chamber also found that the law related to non-international armed conflict applied to the fighting between Israel and Hamas. The Chamber found that the alleged conduct of Mr Netanyahu and Mr Gallant concerned the activities of Israeli government bodies and the armed forces against the civilian population in Palestine, more specifically civilians in Gaza. It therefore concerned the relationship between two parties to an international armed conflict, as well as the relationship between an occupying power and the population in occupied territory. For these reasons, with regards to war crimes, the Chamber found it appropriate to issue the arrest warrants pursuant to the law of international armed conflict. The Chamber also found that the alleged crimes against humanity were part of a widespread and systematic attack against the civilian population of Gaza.
The Chamber considered that there are reasonable grounds to believe that both individuals intentionally and knowingly deprived the civilian population in Gaza of objects indispensable to their survival, including food, water, and medicine and medical supplies, as well as fuel and electricity, from at least 8 October 2023 to 20 May 2024. This finding is based on the role of Mr Netanyahu and Mr Gallant in impeding humanitarian aid in violation of international humanitarian law and their failure to facilitate relief by all means at its disposal. The Chamber found that their conduct led to the disruption of the ability of humanitarian organisations to provide food and other essential goods to the population in need in Gaza. The aforementioned restrictions together with cutting off electricity and reducing fuel supply also had a severe impact on the availability of water in Gaza and the ability of hospitals to provide medical care.
The Chamber also noted that decisions allowing or increasing humanitarian assistance into Gaza were often conditional. They were not made to fulfil Israel’s obligations under international humanitarian law or to ensure that the civilian population in Gaza would be adequately supplied with goods in need. In fact, they were a response to the pressure of the international community or requests by the United States of America. In any event, the increases in humanitarian assistance were not sufficient to improve the population’s access to essential goods.
Furthermore, the Chamber found reasonable grounds to believe that no clear military need or other justification under international humanitarian law could be identified for the restrictions placed on access for humanitarian relief operations. Despite warnings and appeals made by, inter alia, the UN Security Council, UN Secretary General, States, and governmental and civil society organisations about the humanitarian situation in Gaza, only minimal humanitarian assistance was authorised. In this regard, the Chamber considered the prolonged period of deprivation and Mr Netanyahu’s statement connecting the halt in the essential goods and humanitarian aid with the goals of war.
The Chamber therefore found reasonable grounds to believe that Mr Netanyahu and Mr Gallant bear criminal responsibility for the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare.
The Chamber found that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the lack of food, water, electricity and fuel, and specific medical supplies, created conditions of life calculated to bring about the destruction of part of the civilian population in Gaza, which resulted in the death of civilians, including children due to malnutrition and dehydration. On the basis of material presented by the Prosecution covering the period until 20 May 2024, the Chamber could not determine that all elements of the crime against humanity of extermination were met. However, the Chamber did find that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the crime against humanity of murder was committed in relation to these victims.
In addition, by intentionally limiting or preventing medical supplies and medicine from getting into Gaza, in particular anaesthetics and anaesthesia machines, the two individuals are also responsible for inflicting great suffering by means of inhumane acts on persons in need of treatment. Doctors were forced to operate on wounded persons and carry out amputations, including on children, without anaesthetics, and/or were forced to use inadequate and unsafe means to sedate patients, causing these persons extreme pain and suffering. This amounts to the crime against humanity of other inhumane acts.
The Chamber also found reasonable grounds to believe that the above-mentioned conduct deprived a significant portion of the civilian population in Gaza of their fundamental rights, including the rights to life and health, and that the population was targeted based on political and/or national grounds. It therefore found that the crime against humanity of persecution was committed.
Finally, the Chamber assessed that there are reasonable grounds to believe that Mr Netanyahu and Mr Gallant bear criminal responsibility as civilian superiors for the war crime of intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population of Gaza.
Inside the protective shield of Western politicians and “journalists,” consistent with Israel’s barely concealed ambition to rid itself of Palestinians, and with October 7th as the pretext, the (now 20-month) assault on Gaza’s population took on an aspect of joussaint cruelty among Israel’s soldiery, but also its civilian population.
This was encouraged by the government and much of the Israeli media (and kept out of the Western media).
Likud MP Galit Distel Atbaryan said in 2003 that Israel’s “common goal” was “erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth.”
Defence Minister Yoav Gallant called all Palestinians “animals.”
Media commentator Eliyahu Yossian said: “You have to enter Gaza at the height of brutality, with the aim of revenge, zero morality, maximum corpses.”
Ex-MP Moshe Feiglin told the media that Israel’s goal should be “complete destruction of Gaza … destruction like in Dresden and Hiroshima, without a nuclear weapon”.
Netanyahu’s wife’s office manager, Tzipi Navon, proposed torture: “Save their tongues for last, so we can enjoy his screams, his ears so he can hear his own screams, and his eyes so he can see us smiling.”
Sixty percent of Israeli Jews support a complete cut-off of food and water into Gaza and over 94 percent believe the IDF’s action in Gaza are justifiable (43 percent saying it should be even harsher, to include extermination).
“Israeli discourse has dehumanized Palestinians to such an extent,” wrote Israeli historian Lee Mordechai, “that the vast majority of Israeli Jews supports the aforementioned measures. The dehumanization was led by Israel’s highest state officials, and it continues to be supported through the state infrastructure and military. Dehumanization is also widely prevalent in broader civil society. Speaking about Palestinians in genocidal language is legitimate in Israeli discourse. The dehumanization results in widespread abuse of, and violence towards, detained Palestinians and Gazan civilians and their property, all with almost no consequences. The vast majority of dehumanizing content is shared by Israelis themselves, and is confirmed by Palestinian testimonials of their experiences.”
There have been dozens of attacks on Palestinian citizens of Israel, beginning on October 29, 2023, when “a mob of right-wing Israelis stormed a dormitory in the central city of Netanya where Palestinian students were residing, chanting ‘death to Arabs’.”
Racism is baked into the Zionist state, and Israeli propaganda since 1967—when Israel began aggressively instrumentalizing the Shoa for its own purposes—attempts to conflate anti-Zionism, and indeed any criticism of Israel, with antisemitism. Ironically, perhaps, and unfortunately, the State of Israel has done more to resuscitate antisemitism worldwide than Goebbels could have hoped for. Even more paradoxically, the most ardent and politically potent block of Zionist enablers in the US are right-wing “Christians” whose own theology is fundamentally antisemitic (see my earlier article for details).
Video of IDF happily and “humorously” destroying a Mosque.
In March this year, Lee Mordechai released “Bearing Witness to the Israeli-Gaza War,” in which he has carefully documented 176 pages worth of not only Israeli crimes, but the utter moral collapse of the majority of Israeli society.
Israel [is] attempting to destroy the fabric of Palestinian society by deliberately targeting civilian institutions such as universities, libraries, archives, religious buildings, historical sites, farms, schools, cemeteries, museums and markets. So far more than 60% of the buildings in the Gaza Strip have been destroyed or damaged. (Mordechai)
Israeli civilians destroying aid packages for Gaza.
The repeated use of the term “Amaleks” by Netanyahu and other Israeli officials is a clear and well-known biblical reference to genocide: “Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.” (1 Samuel 15:3)
There is no other way to understand this reference.
Using “hostages” as the pretext for the continued bombing, ground attacks, and blockades on the one hand, the Israeli government has systematically rejected every hostage exchange/release deal put on the table. That is to say, Israel has left its own citizens in captivity as propaganda props (even killing some), while it kills, maims, starves, and destroys schools, hospitals, and encampments of the displaced in order to complete its mission—the destruction of Palestinians. After the initial post-October attacks on Gaza, Israel also opened offensives in Lebanon, Syria, and the West Bank, killing thousands more, actions overshadowed by the barbarism in Gaza. For West Bank settlers, it was open season on Palestinians, and they proceeded, in armed gangs, to erase whole villages through murder, mayhem, and forced evacuations.
A former UN’s Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights stated that the Israeli attack on Gaza has probably the highest kill rate of any military killing anybody since the Rwandan Genocide of 1994.
—Lee Mordechai
In the first six weeks of what has been called “a war,” Israel repeatedly (208 times) dropped leaflets telling Palestinians where the safe zones were, then dropped 2,000 pound bombs on them. To so much as carry a Palestinian flag in Israel was criminalized. The US continued arming them, and the US, UK, and Germany jailed protesters. Ignored were the pleas of October 7th survivors, some of whom were anti-occupation activists, for peace.
When Americans began protesting the Gaza genocide, the cynical denunciations and police crackdowns were swift. The Israel lobby went into overdrive. By “the Israel lobby,” I mean a network that includes actual lobbyists, like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), but also a menu of Jewish institutions who’ve allowed themselves to be converted into mouthpieces for the Israeli state, the mainstream media, university officials, corporations, the majority of US politicians, and the massive popular base rooted in US evangelicals. That lobby has always wanted to criminalize any whiff of criticism of the Zionist state.
When pro-Palestinian protests began breaking out on US campuses in April 2024, the crackdowns began almost immediately. More than 3,100 people were arrested, including faculty members, at dozens of universities. One study estimated that fully eight percent of all university students had participated. Half of all students supported the actions, and only one out of four opposed.
Students were expelled, faculty fired, and the cops rolled up on peaceful protesters (97% of protests were totally peaceful), dressed like combat troops, with clubs, pepper spray, horses, tasers, bean-bag shotguns shells, and tear gas, even attacking journalists who were covering their actions. The same response was employed against protests beyond the campuses.
But police crackdowns were pissing in the wind of Israeli brutality. Israeli actions have were so numerous and horrendous that even its propaganda servants in the US, the UK, and Germany had a difficult time keeping a lid on it.
A comparison: Ukraine’s population is 38.7 million, spread over 233,030 square miles. Gaza’s pre-war population was 2,196,407, concentrated in 141 square miles. In the first month of the assault on Gaza, more children were killed in Gaza than in the first year of the Russia-Ukraine war. 275 UN aid workers killed. Over 500 health workers killed. Israeli snipers shoot children for sport. IDF tanks routinely roll over civilians. One social media post was proudly shared throughout Israel of a zip-tied detainee being run over by a tank, with the caption, “You are going to love this!!!”
One popular sport among IDF soldiers is to shoot people—especially children—in the legs.
An average of ten children a day lose one or more limbs In Gaza, Gaza is described as a hellscape by many journalists, populated by thousands of amputees of all ages, and now by hundreds of thousands of people on the cusp of starvation.
Mordechai’s list of confirmed atrocities goes on page after page after hideous page. I need not repeat it here . . . open the link.
As I work on the draft today, more than 100 Palestinian civilians have been murdered by the IDF while trying to access food at aid distribution sites. The latest policy seems to be to drive the Palestinians to the south, concentrate them there along the sealed border, then bomb them.
The global situation vis-a-vis Israel is changing rapidly, but alas not fast enough for Palestinians in Gaza. The genocidal Israeli rampage continues apace.
If the Israeli army needs one thousand soldiers and one hundred armored vehicles to capture a few Palestinian teenagers in a Jenin refugee camp, this is not an invincible army.
—Ilan Pappé
Based on a number of historical contingencies, Palestinians are not (yet) effectively politically united. This is a principle reason for Israel’s detentions and assassinations of any Palestinian who shows promise as a genuine leader. (Israel itself facilitated the creation of Hamas to weaken the Palestinian Liberation Organization.)
As Ilan Pappé has submitted, Israel has forged, through its constant pressure and abuse, an increasingly resilient Palestinian mass with tremendous potential should the right (read: wise, selfless, and strategic) leaders appear. Israel knows this, of course, but the question becomes how much time does Israel have to sustain the sanguinary current model. Unfortunately, as Norman Finkelstein points out, those in Gaza now are on a much shorter timeline, and destroyed Gaza—now a fait accompli—will not be where any Palestinian renewal takes place, and for a long time after this horror is past, the population will be dealing with an unthinkable trauma.
Pappé says, rightly, that Israel’s actions in Gaza have not eroded the post-WWII international legal order so much as driven a final nail into the coffin. That order has been incrementally undermined for decades—especially by the once Soviet Union, the United States, today’s Russia . . . and Israel. Israel’s expansions and occupations are illegal. Its collective punishments are illegal. It’s serial violations of its neighbors’ sovereignty are illegal. Its settlements are illegal. Its apartheid system is illegal. Its transformations of law for Palestinians are illegal. Its separation barriers are illegal. It’s list of violations of human rights laws since its inception is nearly beyond count. Its ethnic cleansing is illegal. Its aid blockade is illegal. And genocide is illegal. And the United States has been an accessory before and after the facts (and US aid to Israel is, in fact, in violation of US law [the “Leahy Law”] prohibiting aid to nations who are intentionally committing human rights violations).
International law, without any force to back it, is effectively reduced to a symbol. This reduction has only accelerated a general loss of confidence in institutions, which bodes ill for all of us, because, as Pappé noted, our biggest problems—nuclear threat, climate disruption, immigration, and poverty in a global economy—cannot find solutions except internationally, and for international solutions, we need international law.
I bring up Pappé and Finkelstein—Pappé, the son of German Jews who fled the Nazis and a former member of the IDF, and Finkelstein, the son of Polish Jews who survived the death camps—because while both of them are harsh critics of Zionism and the Israeli state, they have differences of emphasis on the determinative role of the Zionist lobby, the tactics of organizations like Boycott, Sanctions, and Divestment (BDS), and the theoretical one-state versus two-state solution. (In fact, these interpretive and strategic differences are discussions among many prominent anti-Zionists, including Noam Chomsky, Avi Shlaim, John Mearsheimer, Stephen Walt, and Rashid Khalidi, and bits of each inform my own interpretations.)
Modern/postmodern politics is maneuvering around power with cover from “perception management.” Support for Israel—especially from the US with its veto in the United Nations—was garnered and has been sustained by a sophisticated myth-making effort with regard to Israel. Three pillars of the Israeli myth are (1) a land without a people for a people without a land, (2) David versus Goliath, and (3) Israeli invincibility. Not one of them is even remotely true.
The last pillar has been the most durable; but Israeli actions in Gaza have proven the IDF not to be invincible, but a corrupt force of cowards and bullies, dependent on huge shipments of ultra-modern war materiel from the US to attack refugees in tents.
“If the Israeli army,” said former Israeli soldier Pappé in a recent interview, “needs one thousand soldiers and one hundred armored vehicles to capture a few Palestinian teenagers in a Jenin refugee camp, this is not an invincible army.”
Israel’s genocidal actions in Gaza have triggered an international reaction, with enormous anti-Israel demonstrations across the globe.
The brazen shamelessness of the Israelis has made it increasingly difficult for Israel, the US, the UK, and Germany to continue to sanitize Israeli actions. Perhaps most significantly, the American wall of denial is beginning to crumble.
The first sign was when support for the Democratic Party hemorrhaged, even in the face of Trump’s comeback, after the Biden administration pumped billions in aid and arms into Israel to facilitate the genocide.
In October, soon after the Hamas attack, I wrote (using the available polling data then) that “77 percent of Republicans, 69 percent of Democrats, and 54 percent of Independents said they “support” the State of Israel. In large part due to decades of single-minded US propaganda on Israel’s behalf. Most Americans couldn’t point to Israel on a map, and yet a majority across demographics support IAG [Israel Anything Goes] ideology. Seventy-one percent of “white” adults do. Fifty-one percent of “non-white” adults do.”
By February 2025, a majority of Americans supported a permanent cease fire in Gaza. By March of this year, support for Israel had dropped by 14 percent—an 18 percent drop among Democrats, a seven percent drop among Republicans, and 12 percent down among Independents—with 55 percent of Americans now “disapproving of Israel.” In early June this year, Zeteo released a new poll showing that 71 percent of likely Democratic Primary voters said the US should restrict aid to Israel.
The loss of support for Israel among younger American Jews is remarkable, but it’s not that politically significant in terms of numbers, Jewish voters constituting only 2.4 percent of the US total. In 2021, polls found that one out of four American Jews believed Israel was an Apartheid state. Now, almost half of American Jews say that Israeli actions in Gaza are unacceptable. In fact, many of the campus protest that sprang up against the Gaza genocide had substantial numbers of Jewish students in their leadership, with Jewish Voice for Peace as a prominent presence. Many Hasidic Jews supported them.
It all may be too little, too late; but people of conscience have no alternative but to continue resisting in whatever ways they can.
But the real pro-Israel bloc in the US has always been dispensationalist evangelicals. In February of this year, the Barna Group published research showing support for Israel among 18-19-year-old evangelicals had already fallen from 75 percent in 2018 to 34% in 2021. While I could find no recent polling on this specific demographic set, this age cohort among Republican voters more generally, 38 percent of which are evangelicals, has shown the greatest loss of support for Israel in the wake of Gaza.
Of course, as we said at the very beginning, America’s chickenshit national-level elected officials will buck the trends—and even support unconstitutionally stamping out dissent—to ensure they don’t (carrot) lose campaign cash or (stick) mobilize vast amounts of campaign cash against them. All praise American retail politics!
Not to let the others off the hook. The UK, of course, as America’s poodle, always kowtows to American foreign policy, so just as they supported and enhanced US war crimes during the Bush fils administration (as did American Democrats!), they are throwing their weight behind the genocide of Palestinians. Germany is willing to jail its own citizens for opposing genocide, because Germany will gladly see tens of thousands of dead Palestinians to prove to the world its gotten over its antisemitism.
The fact of the matter is, as historian Ilan Pappé never tires of pointing out, Israel was formally founded after World War II, with massive European aid, as a European settler state in the heart of the Arab world, as a means of “solving” Europe’s long standing “Jewish problem.” It didn’t hurt that it also had value as an Atlantic state strategic asset. (In fact, “diasporic” Jews still outnumber Israeli Jews, with the US having the biggest Jewish population in the world.)
We are seeing now, as Israel opens up a war with Iran—which could easily and dangerously escalate—with the full support (albeit quietly) of the Trump administration.
Why does this vile state governing fewer than ten million people (73.2% Jewish, 21.1% Arab, 5.7% “other”) exercise such outsized influences over American politics?
Apart from the massive support from fever-dreaming evangelical dispensationalists, the answer is strategic spending by the Israel lobby, decades of propaganda, and the all-too-human tendency of all politicians to hold to one’s own past errors in judgement or admit one’s own corruption.
The attack on Iran today (6/13/2025) comes as Trump—in his best tinpot Mussolini style—has ordered a military parade for tomorrow, his birthday, for which he is threatening violence against anyone who protests it.
What do we have to resist with?
It’s sure not the fucking Democratic Party, which has long since become the Zionist neoconservative party of George W. Bush.
The United States and Israel are morally degenerate societies led by degenerates, and we—if there even is a we that’s willing and able to resist—remain disorganized and leaderless.
God help us.
Stan, have you encountered the work of Shaul Magid? He's got a book that might interest you: "The Necessity of Exile: Essays From a Distance," and he's writing now on Substack. For example: https://shaulmagid.substack.com/p/the-prophecy-of-balaam-a-people-that?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=3713325&post_id=166020301&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=2bzhlt&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email