Tag: Israel

On the profound question of historical circumstances Palestine demands a hearing

On By Tony TaylorIn History, Politics2 Comments

I was then I wasn’t going to say anything about the heart-breaking events unfolding in the continuing tragedy, that is the brutal occupation by Israel of Palestine and most immediately Gaza. Simply to venture such an understanding is at odds with the version dominating our screaming screens, mobile or fixed. My empathy with the Palestinian cause, which goes back to the 1970s and refers to my critical allegiance to the secular Palestine Liberation Organisation [PLO] is to be dismissed, forgotten or ridiculed. To my shame, I was in danger of remaining silent.

Then, only a few hours ago the Home Secretary, Suella Braverman tells senior police officers that waving a Palestinian flag or singing a chant advocating freedom for Arabs in the region may be a criminal offence. In a letter to chief constables in England and Wales, she opines:

“It is not just explicit pro-Hamas symbols and chants that are cause for concern. I would encourage police to consider whether chants such as: ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ should be understood as an expression of a violent desire to see Israel erased from the world, and whether its use in certain contexts may amount to a racially aggravated section 5 public order offence.”

In this Manichean simplistic obscenity, whereby it is demanded that we agree without a murmur what and who is Good or Evil, how long before even Facebook comments or even ‘likes’ not toeing the line are deemed heinous? Or even this innocuous questioning of the mainstream narrative is seen as unacceptable?

Whilst in accord with Marx himself I am no longer a Marxist I learned much from my days under the ideology’s influence. I remain indebted enormously to the insistence that all events must be grounded,, need to be understood in both their specific and historically intertwined circumstances. This profound, even obvious observation engages with the past and present, with contradiction and complexity, with the dilemma of defining the ethical and the moral, with what is right or wrong. It precludes shallow, immediate and opportunistic readings of what’s going on. It demands, following Aristotle, ‘phronesis’, the thoughtful interrogation of what is happening and what we might do for the best.

For now, if you have the time or inclination, I offer the following links to articles of a dissenting character, although themselves, perchance, too hasty and superficial, which I hope you will read in full.

The West’s hypocrisy towards Gaza’s breakout is stomach-turning – Jonathan Cook

The current outpouring of sympathy for Israel should make anyone with half a heart retch.

Not because it is not awful that Israeli civilians are dying and suffering in such large numbers. But because Palestinian civilians in Gaza have faced repeated rampages from Israel decade after decade, producing far more suffering, but have never elicited a fraction of the concern currently being expressed by western politicians or publics.

The West’s hypocrisy over Palestinian fighters killing and wounding hundreds of Israelis and holding dozens more hostage in communities surrounding and inside besieged Gaza is stark indeed.

This is the first time Palestinians, caged in the coastal enclave, have managed to inflict a significant strike against Israel vaguely comparable to the savagery Palestinians in Gaza have faced repeatedly since they were entombed in a cage in 2007, when Israel began its blockade by land, sea and air.

Western media are calling the jailbreak and attack by Palestinians from Gaza “unprecedented” – and the most dismal intelligence failing by Israel since it was caught off-guard during the Yom Kippur War exactly 50 years ago.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has accused Hamas, which nominally runs the open-air prison of Gaza, of starting “a cruel and evil war”. But the truth is that the Palestinians have “started” nothing. They have managed, after so much struggle, to find a way to hurt their tormentor.

Inevitably for the Palestinians, as Netanyahu also observed, “the price will be heavy” – especially for Hamas is Israel’s creation. Israel will inflict on the prisoners the severest punishment for their impudence.

Hamas is Israel’s creation -Thomas Fazi

Many people don’t know this but Hamas is largely a creation of the Jewish state. For years, Israel encouraged Gaza’s Islamists as a counterweight to the secular nationalists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and its dominant faction, Yasser Arafat’s Fatah, helping to turn a bunch of fringe Palestinian Islamists in the late 1970s into one of the world’s most notorious militant groups, which has killed far more Israeli civilians than any secular Palestinian militant group.

Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, who was the Israeli military governor in Gaza in the early 1980s, later told the New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief that he was giving money to the Muslim Brotherhood, the precursor of Hamas, on the instruction of the Israeli authorities. The funding was intended to tilt power away from both Communist and Palestinian nationalist movements in Gaza, and especially from Arafat (who himself referred to Hamas as “a creature of Israel”), which Israel considered more threatening than the fundamentalists. “The Israeli government gave me a budget”, the retired brigadier general confessed, “and the military government gives to the mosques”.

“Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation”, Avner Cohen, a former Israeli religious affairs official who worked in Gaza for more than two decades, told the Wall Street Journal in 2009. Back in the mid-1980s, Cohen even wrote an official report to his superiors warning them not to play divide-and-rule in the Occupied Territories, by backing Palestinian Islamists against Palestinian secularists. “I… suggest focusing our efforts on finding ways to break up this monster before this reality jumps in our face”, he wrote. They didn’t listen to him. What we’re witnessing is a classic case of blowback.

Israeli Bombing of Gaza, “I have ordered a “Complete Siege”… “We are fighting human animals”, Israeli Defence Minister SaysI – Global Research

Israel‘s defence minister described Palestinians as “human animals” and vowed to “act accordingly,” as fighter jets unleashed a massive bombing campaign on the Gaza Strip.

Yoav Gallant announced a “complete siege” of the Gaza Strip, an area of about 365 square km, and home to 2.3 million Palestinians, which has been under an Israeli-led blockade since 2007.

“I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed,” Gallant said.

“We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly,” he added.

The Israeli air force has dropped 2,000 munitions and more than 1,000 tonnes of bombs on Gaza in the last 20 hours, the army said on Monday morning, having shelled 20 high-rise residential buildings, mosques, hospitals, banks and other civilian infrastructure.

What Is the Gaza Strip?

Gaza was part of historic Palestine prior to the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.

Some 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from historic Palestine in what is known as Al-Nakba, or “The Catastrophe”.

More than 60 percent of Palestinians in Gaza are refugees, following the expulsion of families from other parts of Palestine in 1948.

Bordered by Israel and Egypt on the Mediterranean coast, the Gaza Strip is one of the most densely populated areas in the world.

Gaza was captured by Egypt during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and was under Egyptian control until the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, when the territory was seized and occupied along with the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

In 2005, Israel purportedly pulled out of Gaza and relocated around 8,000 Jewish settlers and Israeli soldiers living in 21 settlements around Gaza to the occupied West Bank.

But in 2007, following the Hamas movement’s election victory in Gaza, Israel responded by imposing an air, land and sea blockade of the Gaza Strip.

According to international law, the blockade amounts to an occupation of the strip.

Since 2008, Israel has launched four invasions of Gaza, in 2008, 2012, 2014 and 2021, which resulted in the deaths of thouands of Palestinians, mostly civilians and many children.

The campaigns resulted in the destruction of homes and offices, damage to pipelines and sewage treatment infrastructure, impacting drinking water and spiking waterborne diseases.

In the last major operation in 2021, at least 260 Palestinians were killed in Gaza while 13 people were killed in Israel.

Open-air Prison
Israel’s blockade systematically denies Palestinians access to services, hospitals, banks and other vital infrastructure, leaving the population to exist in fraught living conditions.

The blockade has also resulted in a perennial shortage of clean water, electricity, and medical supplies in what is often dubbed the world’s largest open-air prison.

Roughly 97 percent of Gaza’s drinking water is contaminated, and residents are forced to live with constant power outages due to a power grid that has been heavily damaged in repeated Israeli attacks.

Meanwhile, close to 60 percent of Palestinians live in poverty, and youth unemployment sits at 63 percent.

According to UNRWA, the UN agency that cares for Palestinian refugees, years of conflict and blockade have left 80 percent of Gaza’s population dependent on international assistance.

Professor Ehud Qimron: “Ministry of Health, it’s time to admit failure”

On By Tony TaylorIn Politics1 Comment

I’m in the middle of writing a post pursuing the clatter of contradictions sounding through the COVID consensus. In doing so I came across this brave and resounding rebuttal of both the Israeli and global responses to the perceived pandemic. It was published on the Swiss Policy Research website.

Professor Ehud Qimron, head of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Tel Aviv University and one of the leading Israeli immunologists, has written an open letter sharply criticizing the Israeli – and indeed global – management of the coronavirus pandemic.

Professor Ehud Qimron (centre) at Tel Aviv University (Haaretz)

Original letter in Hebrew: N12 News (January 6, 2022); translated by Google/SPR. See also: Professor Qimron’s prediction from August 2020: “History will judge the hysteria” (INN).

Ministry of Health, it’s time to admit failure

In the end, the truth will always be revealed, and the truth about the coronavirus policy is beginning to be revealed. When the destructive concepts collapse one by one, there is nothing left but to tell the experts who led the management of the pandemic – we told you so.

Two years late, you finally realize that a respiratory virus cannot be defeated and that any such attempt is doomed to fail. You do not admit it, because you have admitted almost no mistake in the last two years, but in retrospect, it is clear that you have failed miserably in almost all of your actions, and even the media is already having a hard time covering your shame.

You refused to admit that the infection comes in waves that fade by themselves, despite years of observations and scientific knowledge. You insisted on attributing every decline of a wave solely to your actions, and so through false propaganda “you overcame the plague.” And again you defeated it, and again and again and again.

You refused to admit that mass testing is ineffective, despite your own contingency plans explicitly stating so (“Pandemic Influenza Health System Preparedness Plan, 2007”, p. 26).

You refused to admit that recovery is more protective than a vaccine, despite previous knowledge and observations showing that non-recovered vaccinated people are more likely to be infected than recovered people. You refused to admit that the vaccinated are contagious despite the observations. Based on this, you hoped to achieve herd immunity by vaccination — and you failed in that as well.

You insisted on ignoring the fact that the disease is dozens of times more dangerous for risk groups and older adults than for young people who are not in risk groups, despite the knowledge that came from China as early as 2020.

You refused to adopt the “Barrington Declaration”, signed by more than 60,000 scientists and medical professionals, or other common-sense programs. You chose to ridicule, slander, distort and discredit them. Instead of the right programs and people, you have chosen professionals who lack relevant training for pandemic management (physicists as chief government advisers, veterinarians, security officers, media personnel, and so on).

You have not set up an effective system for reporting side effects from the vaccines, and reports on side effects have even been deleted from your Facebook page. Doctors avoid linking side effects to the vaccine, lest you persecute them as you did with some of their colleagues. You have ignored many reports of changes in menstrual intensity and menstrual cycle times. You hid data that allows for objective and proper research (for example, you removed the data on passengers at Ben Gurion Airport). Instead, you chose to publish non-objective articles together with senior Pfizer executives on the effectiveness and safety of vaccines.

Irreversible damage to trust

However, from the heights of your hubris, you have also ignored the fact that in the end the truth will be revealed. And it begins to be revealed. The truth is that you have brought the public’s trust in you to an unprecedented low, and you have eroded your status as a source of authority. The truth is that you have burned hundreds of billions of shekels to no avail – for publishing intimidation, for ineffective tests, for destructive lockdowns and for disrupting the routine of life in the last two years.

You have destroyed the education of our children and their future. You made children feel guilty, scared, smoke, drink, get addicted, drop out, and quarrel, as school principals around the country attest. You have harmed livelihoods, the economy, human rights, mental health and physical health.

You slandered colleagues who did not surrender to you, you turned the people against each other, divided society and polarized the discourse. You branded, without any scientific basis, people who chose not to get vaccinated as enemies of the public and as spreaders of disease. You promote, in an unprecedented way, a draconian policy of discrimination, denial of rights and selection of people, including children, for their medical choice. A selection that lacks any epidemiological justification.

When you compare the destructive policies you are pursuing with the sane policies of some other countries — you can clearly see that the destruction you have caused has only added victims beyond the vulnerable to the virus. The economy you ruined, the unemployed you caused, and the children whose education you destroyed — they are the surplus victims as a result of your own actions only.

There is currently no medical emergency, but you have been cultivating such a condition for two years now because of lust for power, budgets and control. The only emergency now is that you still set policies and hold huge budgets for propaganda and psychological engineering instead of directing them to strengthen the health care system.

This emergency must stop!

Professor Udi Qimron, Faculty of Medicine, Tel Aviv University

∗∗∗

A crucial moment in the struggle to save Sheikh Jarrah

On By Tony TaylorIn Children and Young People, PoliticsLeave a comment

A message with determination from Suhad Babaa of Just Vision

Increasing the power and reach of Palestinians and Israelis working to end the occupation and build a future of equality for all.


I’m coming up for air after a long week to provide an update on the campaign to save Sheikh Jarrah, a neighborhood in East Jerusalem.

Last fall, Israeli courts ruled to evict several Palestinian families from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah, a continuation of a devastating and violent takeover by Israeli settlers — backed by the Israeli police and judicial system — that we documented in our 2012 short, My Neighbourhood. Early this week, the Israeli Supreme Court postponed their ruling on the evictions until May 6, asking the residents to “come to an agreement” with the settlers who are trying to take over their homes. The suggested “agreement” – based on Palestinians forfeiting ownership of their homes to the settlers – was, of course, refused by the families who have lived in Sheikh Jarrah for decades. Yesterday, the courts postponed the hearing once again until May 10.
 
As Mohammed El Kurd, a resident of Sheikh Jarrah, youth organizer and protagonist of My Neighbourhood often reflects, while there are lengthy “legal processes” playing out, what’s happening in Sheikh Jarrah is political and systemic. Moreover, the “pattern of elongating the legal process is a common practice to dull popular resistance” to Israel’s expansionist policies. 

But the resistance of the community has not been dulled. Sheikh Jarrah’s youth have been holding nightly vigils to demonstrate against the evictions, raise awareness of their struggle and save the neighborhood. The community’s nonviolent protests have been met by brute force, with Israeli police violently storming Palestinian homes, spraying skunk (putrid liquid) at demonstrators, attacking residents and protestors with batons and mounted horses and arresting youth. Meanwhile, Israeli settlers continue to be backed by police and government officials, including a lawmaker from the far-right Kahanist party who temporarily set up a makeshift office in the neighborhood and the Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem who goaded violence against Palestinians. 
May 3: Three Palestinian youth arrested, including Mohammed El Kurd’s brother, Mahmoud, and Omar Al-Khatib, pictured above.
May 7: Israeli police block activists from entering Sheikh Jarrah to demonstrate alongside residents. Thanks to Oren Ziv for the photos
The coming days in Sheikh Jarrah are crucial. The community’s campaign has gained momentum with press coverage starting to pick up steam and numerous US political leaders speaking out in support including: Rep. Cori Bush, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, Rep. Chuy Garcia, Rep. Debbie Dingle, Rep. Marie Newman, Rep Ilhan Omar, Rep. Mark Pocan and more. Representatives Newman and Pocan are also leading an effort to urge the Biden Administration to oppose the evictions and a grassroots petition has also been widely circulated. Still, the majority of international press outlets have remained silent, and there has yet to be substantive action taken by the US, which could help pressure Israeli authorities to stop the forced displacement of Palestinian families in East Jerusalem.
We hope you will share this note far and wide. If you know journalists or decision-makers who can bring attention to what’s happening in Sheikh Jarrah, please reach out to them. And to get the latest updates, follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, along with #SaveSheikhJarrah.

Even the Guardian is forced to cover the situation, athough the coverage itself is a cut and paste Reuters piece.

Israeli police clash with protesters over Palestinian evictions

Up to 178 Palestinians and six officers injured in skirmishes at al-Aqsa mosque and around east Jerusalem