israel – Radio Free

"Let Gaza Live": 50 Jewish Activists Arrested Protesting Schumer & Gillibrand for Arming Israel

Democracy Now! — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 21:36:08 +0000

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

In a Biden-era retread, media push bogus narrative that Trump is helpless to stop Gaza genocide

Adam Johnson — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 20:03:07 +0000

Once again, US media is helping take pressure off of the White House by parroting US officials and pro-Israel talking heads insisting that the president is more or less helpless to stop anything Israel is doing in the Middle East, up to and including their ongoing mass starvation campaign and genocide in Gaza.

“‘He’s a madman’: Trump’s team frets about Netanyahu after Syria strikes,” Axios’s Barak Ravid breathlessly reported on July 20. “Trump was agitated all around…in a call with Bibi,” alleged Sohrab Ahmari, citing “sources in and near the administration.”

“Trump’s frustration with the devastation in Gaza is real,” Semafor insists. “After angry call from Trump, PM says Israel deeply regrets mistaken shelling of Gaza church,” The Times of Israel claimed on July 18. “Washington Struggles to Rein In an Emboldened Israel: Trump administration has expressed frustration with Israeli actions in recent days,” The Wall Street Journal reported on July 26.

If this particular genre of reportage looks familiar it’s because it’s a pared-down version of a PR campaign pushed out by former President Biden, his aides, and pro-Israel media allies. I wrote about the trope—Fuming/Helpless Biden—in both TRNN, and, in greater detail, for the Nation the following year. Now that it’s spanned party and administration we can simply call it Fuming/Helpless President. Put simply: it’s any report, analysis, or opinion that describes the president as unable to do anything to stop Israel from committing war crimes or end the genocide overall or, relatedly, any reporting that gives readers the impression that not only is the president helpless, but is very upset/angry/sad at not being able to change Israel’s behavior. It’s an essential media convention because it allows the president to continue all material support to Israel—the endless flow of bombs, military and intelligence support, vetoes at the United Nations—while distancing themselves from the deep unpopularity of Israel’s campaign of indiscriminate bombing and mass starvation.

The primary conduit for Fuming/Helpless President nonstories is Axios’s Ravid, who, as I noted in the Nation last year, had written 25 different examples of this genre up to that point for then-President Biden, quoting either US officials directly or a string of anonymous “US officials”—often as alleged scoops—claiming that Biden and White House officials were some variation of “breaking with Netanyahu,” “increasingly frustrated,” “running out of patience,” or “deeply concerned” about civilian casualties. Ravid, a former member of Unit 8200, Israel’s “secretive cyber warfare unit,” was awarded for his endless Fuming/Deeply Concerned reports with the White House Correspondents’ Association’s award for journalistic excellence in April 2024.

Ravid has emerged again as the most aggressive practitioner of the Fuming/Helpless President routine for the new Trump administration. In just the last two weeks, he has published:

Israel bombs Syrian capital despite U.S. pressure to “stand down” July 16 2025
“He’s a madman”: Trump’s team frets about Netanyahu after Syria strikes July 20 2025
White House confirms Trump objected to Israeli strikes in Syria July 21 2025
Trump team rethinks Gaza strategy after six months of failure July 26 2025
Trump says kids in Gaza are starving in break with Netanyahu July 29 2025

What Ravid did for Biden he is now doing for Trump, permitting the White House to distance itself from the more extreme and unpopular of Israel’s policies while maintaining the status quo of unfettered material support. Obviously, demand for this genre of low-effort propaganda is far less than it was under Biden, especially when 71 percent of Republicans continue to support Israel’s genocide. But there is a nontrivial faction of MAGA media world—from Tucker Carlson to Theo Von to Dave Smith—that have pushed back on the president’s lockstep support. They have done so for many reasons—principled libertarianism, humanitarian instincts, or, in Tucker’s case, genuine white nationalism—but there’s a modest revolt in the ranks nonetheless, and one that increasingly needs to be damped down by the Trump-aligned Right.

No doubt feeling the heat from this contingent, and recognizing that being associated with countless images of emaciated and maimed children is not good for the brand in general, the White House and zionist groups in their orbit have dusted off the Biden-era playbook of Helpless/Frustrated President and seek to use it to distance Trump from the horrors emanating from Gaza just as the Biden White House did with great success. It’s easy, low effort, panders to antisemitic tropes of our otherwise benevolent leaders being manipulated by a foreign other, and provides what any head of a criminal enterprise seeks: plausible deniability.

… it allows the president to continue all material support to Israel—the endless flow of bombs, military and intelligence support, vetoes at the United Nations—while distancing themselves from the deep unpopularity of Israel’s campaign of indiscriminate bombing and mass starvation.

Trump’s passing acknowledgement Monday that there’s mass starvation in Gaza was widely reported as a “break from Netanyahu” despite it being pure rhetoric. “What reporting in Gaza shows amid Trump’s break from Netanyahu on starvation,” NPR tells its listeners. “Trump, breaking with Netanyahu, acknowledges ‘real starvation’ in Gaza,” Politico insists. “Trump raises pressure on Netanyahu, Israel,” the Hill reports.

This narrative, born entirely from off-the-cuff comments by Trump, was quickly rejected by US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee who, it’s worth noting, is playing to a different audience. Huckabee went on Fox News’s “America’s Newsroom” Tuesday, and when asked about the supposed “break” with Netanyahu said, “Let me assure you that there is no break between the prime minister of Israel and the president. Their relationship I think to be stronger than it’s ever been. And I think the relationship between the US and Israel is as strong as it has ever been.”

So why did so many mainstream outlets rush to distance Trump from the horrific images of starving children coming out of Gaza of starving children? Because preservation of American Innocence is an ideological force greater than common sense and “mounting tensions” between US Presidents and Netanyahu is a genre of reportage requiring little evidence and even less effort.

Another recent masterclass in Fuming/Helpless President stenography is a front page story in the Wall Street Journal, “Washington Struggles to Rein In an Emboldened Israel: Trump administration has expressed frustration with Israeli actions in recent days,” by Shayndi Raice and Alexander Ward. The article is littered with every cliche of the genre: Fuming Behind Closed Doors (“The Trump administration in recent days has expressed frustration with Israeli actions in Syria and Gaza”), Trump Forced to Do Israel’s Bidding Against His Will (“So far, they see Netanyahu leading Trump to act against his instincts”), and Out of the Loop (“The White House said this past week that Trump was “caught off guard” by the bombing in Syria and the strike that hit the Catholic church.”)

The piece even doubles as a means for ex-Biden officials Amos Hochstein and Phil Gordon to wash their hands of Gaza and insist they, too, were powerless, helping Trump officials and allies paint a picture of a White House getting run over by an increasingly powerful and willful ally. Kamala Harris foreign policy adviser Phil Gordon, who, on the eve of the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, explicitly promised to never condition aid to Israel, wants WSJ readers to know that Trump is unable to do anything to “rein in” Israel for the same reason Biden was:

Others say the reality of the relationship is far more complex. While the U.S. sells Israel advanced weapons and actively defends it against attacks, no American president would fully cut off the support to send Israel a message. Netanyahu knows this and operates knowing he can’t really lose U.S. backing for whatever it does. “Every president thinks they have some ability to constrain him and shape him, and they do,” said Philip Gordon, who in the previous administration was national-security adviser to Vice President Kamala Harris. “But in the end, Netanyahu is an experienced, wily actor, and knows he can get away with a lot.”…

But this, of course, is simply argument by tautology: “No American president would fully cut off the support to send Israel a message” is a moral choice Biden and Trump decided to make, not a law of nature. It’s not imposed upon them by any outside force. They are not “forced” to back Israel anymore than any war criminal is forced to carry out any war crime in the history of war crimes. They support Israel because, despite some bickering around the margins over tactics and PR, they agree with and support what Israel is doing. This basic fact is simply hand-waved away, lampshaded with a throwaway line by friendly reporters about how the US cannot ever possibly condition aid to Israel without any explanation, treated as an unquestioned axiom.

But it’s not. Both Trump and Biden are and were more than capable of “reining in” Israel. They can do so by conditioning military support or cutting it off altogether. But clearly laying out how those conditions would work is awkward and associates the US government, and leadership in both parties, with the 21st century’s most horrific and well documented genocide. A much easier approach, consistent with the increasingly popular Politics of Feigned Helplessness, is to manage perception and use court reporters to wash one’s hands of the consequences of their policies and actions. Actually cutting off Israel is difficult and would require a president who opposes what they’re doing. It’s far easier to paint the most powerful empire in the history of the world as bumbling, out of the loop, getting “played” by a country the size of New Jersey, and ultimately frame the US as a spectator that funds and arms countless war crimes but, somehow, is not responsible for any of them.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Adam Johnson.

UK’s Starmer and Lammy Prepare Ground for Dubious “Peace Plan”

Stuart Littlewood — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 14:58:46 +0000

Public opinion and party pressure have forced Sir Keir Starmer and David Lammy to speak warm words about Palestinian statehood. But these guys are a Zionist double-act and will do the Palestinians no favours if they can help it.

UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy, addressing the UN Conference on The Peaceful Settlement of the Question of Palestine and the Implementation of the Two-State Solution, said it was “660 days since the Israeli hostages were first cruelly taken by Hamas terrorists. There is no possible justification for this suffering.” Lammy had spent most of that time deliberately misinterpreting the Genocide Convention and insisting that no genocide was being committed.

“Our support for Israel, its right to exist and the security of its people is steadfast,” he said. Considering Israel’s massacres and other crimes against humanity since the first day of its statehood in 1948 this frequently repeated statement has never convinced anyone.

“However, the Balfour declaration came with the solemn promise ‘that nothing shall be done, nothing which may prejudice the civil and religious rights’ of the Palestinian people’…. This has not been upheld and it is a historical injustice which continues to unfold.” True, but he misquotes Balfour even here. That part of the declaration actually reads: “… it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine….”

The Balfour declaration also came with dire warnings. Lord Edwin Montagu, the only Jew in the Cabinet at the time, called Zionism “a mischievous political creed, untenable by any patriotic citizen of the United Kingdom”. Lord Sydenham remarked: “What we have done, by concessions not to the Jewish people but to a Zionist extreme section, is to start a running sore in the East, and no-one can tell how far that sore will extend.”

Well, we know now. And it will stain Britain’s reputation forever.

Lammy continued: “Hamas must never be rewarded for its monstrous attack on October 7.” Of course, he said nothing about Israel having been continuously rewarded for its monstrous attacks on Palestinians over the last 77 years and will likely be rewarded again for its genocide.

“It [Hamas] must immediately release the hostages, agree to an immediate ceasefire, accept it will have no role in governing Gaza and commit to disarmament.” Coincidentally Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Egypt have also called on Hamas to disband. Along with a number of other countries they’ve just signed a statement saying, “Hamas must end its rule in Gaza and hand over its weapons to the Palestinian Authority, with international engagement and support, in line with the objective of a sovereign and independent Palestinian State.” Quite how this squares with international law isn’t clear, and no-one explains. It is for the Palestinian people to decide who governs their sovereign state.

Lammy: “His Majesty’s Government therefore intends to recognise the State of Palestine when the UN General Assembly gathers in September…. unless the Israeli government acts to end the appalling situation in Gaza, ends its military campaign and commits to a long-term sustainable peace based on a two-state solution. Our demands on Hamas also remain absolute and unwavering.” So what happens if Israel actually complies, or appears to comply? Does HMG then see no reason to recognise statehood? That would suit Israel very well. Note that there’s no requirement in all this for Israel to immediately end its illegal occupation of Palestinian territories, which is central to the whole problem. So the Starmer-Lammy proposal purposely misses the point.

Lammy maintains “there is no better vision for the future of the region than two states. Israelis living within secure borders, recognised and at peace with their neighbours, free from the threat of terrorism. And Palestinians living in their own state, in dignity and security, free of occupation.” Just a minute: how about Palestinians, whose land this is, “living within secure borders, free from the threat of Israeli terrorism and occupation”, the terrorists being (as if he didn’t know) the Israelis and their backers the US? Furthermore, UK leaders have banged the drum about a two-state solution for decades without ever describing what it would look like – especially now that Israel has been allowed to establish irreversible ‘facts on the ground’ that make a proper, workable Palestinian state almost impossible.

“The decades-long conflict between Israelis and Palestinians cannot be managed or contained,” he says. True, and that’s been obvious for decades.

“It must now be resolved.” True, and that too has been obvious for decades.

That same day, 29 July, Prime Minister Starmer was delivering “words on Gaza” from Downing Street.

“On the 7th of October 2023 Hamas perpetrated the worst massacre in Israel’s history. Every day since then, the horror has continued.” He makes it sound like the 660 days of horror have been Hamas’s doing.

“Ceasefire must be sustainable and it must lead to a wider peace plan, which we are developing with our international partners. This plan will deliver security and proper governance in Gaza and pave the way for negotiations on a Two State Solution”. Yes, but under international law Palestinians should not have to ‘negotiate’ their freedom and independence, it’s theirs by right regardless of what other nations think or say.

“Our goal remains a safe and secure Israel, alongside a viable and sovereign Palestinian state.” Oh dear, the same old lopsided spiel. Parity isn’t on the West’s agenda.

“Now, in Gaza because of a catastrophic failure of aid, we see starving babies, children too weak to stand: Images that will stay with us for a lifetime.” The horror is not due to “a catastrophic failure of aid” but failure over the years to end Israel’s illegal occupation and, in particular, its cruel 18-year siege and blockade of Gaza and the sickening practice of ‘mowing the grass’. The UK especially has been complicit in enabling Israel to maintain its stranglehold.

Starmer: “I’ve always said we will recognise a Palestinian state as a contribution to a proper peace process, at the moment of maximum impact for the Two State Solution.” UK governments have been saying that for years. Britain was supposed to grant Palestinians provisional statehood under its Mandate responsibilities back in 1923 and failed to do so. We’ve been ducking the issue ever since while eagerly recognising Israeli statehood with their terrorist militia and Ben-Gurion’s plan to take over the entire Holy Land by force.

“This is the moment to act,” Starmer continued. “So today – as part of this process towards peace I can confirm the UK will recognise the state of Palestine by the United Nations General Assembly in September unless the Israeli government takes substantive steps to end the appalling situation in Gaza, agree to a ceasefire and commit to a long-term, sustainable peace, reviving the prospect of a Two State Solution. And this includes allowing the UN to restart the supply of aid, and making clear there will be no annexations in the West Bank.” This is unbelievable vague and gives Israel endless wriggle-room. Much of the West Bank, of course, is already annexed. To give peace any kind of chance conditions must include Israel withdrawing its squatters, quitting all annexed lands and ending its illegal military occupation forthwith.

Starmer ends with the familiar mantra: “Our message to the terrorists of Hamas is unchanged and unequivocal. They must immediately release all the hostages, sign up to a ceasefire, disarm and accept that they will play no part in the government of Gaza.” No mention of the Israeli terrorists disarming and no ban on Likud (Netanyahu’s demented party) from any future government of Israel.

Starmer and Lammy never use the terms ‘international law’ or ‘justice’. Don’t they understand that there can be no peace without justice? Perhaps they do but won’t admit it because their friends and allies Israel and the US, for selfish strategic reasons, don’t want peace and never have.

Starmer and Lammy compromised and untrustworthy

Starmer told The Times of Israel, “I support Zionism without qualification”. Lammy has made similar declarations. The Ministerial Code and Principles of Public Life state very clearly (seer ‘Integrity’): “Holders of public office should not place themselves under any financial or other obligation to outside individuals or organisations that might seek to influence them in the performance of their official duties.” How do they get away with it?

So it’s hardly surprising that Lammy and Starmer show no concern for the 7,200 Palestinian hostages, including 88 women and 250 children, held in Israeli jails on 7 October under appalling conditions. Over 1,200 were under ‘administrative detention’ without charge or trial and denied ‘due process’. Or the fact that in the 23 years up to October 7 Israel had been slaughtering Palestinians at the rate of 8:1 and children at the rate of 16:1. Actual figures: Palestinians killed by Israelis 10,651 including 2,270 children and 6,656 women. Israelis killed by Palestinians 1,330 including 145 children and 261 women (source: Israel’s B’Tselem). Were they and their friends in Israel expecting Palestinians to take all that lying down?

Our dynamic duo were not so appalled by the sight of “starving babies and children too weak to stand” that they provided protection for the British-flagged aid vessel Madleen and the Handala bringing much-needed supplies to Gaza. They allowed these vessels to be hijacked in international waters, their cargo stolen and crews abducted by Israel’s thugs, just as the Mavi Marmara, the Al-Awda and other mercy ships had been similarly assaulted. Israeli piracy is the new normal in the eastern Mediterranean and Western nations don’t give a damn. The British government are more than happy, though, to instruct the RAF to fly surveillance missions over Gaza in support of Israel’s genocide programme and to continue sharing intelligence with the apartheid regime.

And if their concerns about the suffering and devastation were ever genuine, why didn’t they proposed forming a UN multi-nation intervention force to take over the Gaza crossings to ensure aid gets through as it should? They have now been shamed and their ‘no genocide’ stance utterly discredited by two of Israel’s own human rights organisations – B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights – who declare that Israel is indeed committing genocide in Gaza and its Western allies have a legal and moral duty to put a stop to it. B’Tselem’s summing-up of the situation is worth sharing:

Since October 2023, Israel has shifted its policy toward the Palestinians. Its military onslaught on Gaza, underway for more than 21 months, has included mass killing, both directly and through creating unlivable conditions, serious bodily or mental harm to an entire population, decimation of basic infrastructure throughout the Strip, and forcible displacement on a huge scale, with ethnic cleansing added to the list of official war objectives.

This is compounded by mass arrests and abuse of Palestinians in Israeli prisons, which have effectively become torture camps, and tearing apart the social fabric of Gaza, including the destruction of Palestinian educational and cultural institutions. The campaign is also an assault on Palestinian identity itself, through the deliberate destruction of refugee camps and attempts to undermine the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA).

An examination of Israel’s policy in the Gaza Strip and its horrific outcomes, together with statements by senior Israeli politicians and military commanders about the goals of the attack, leads to the unequivocal conclusion that Israel is taking coordinated, deliberate action to destroy Palestinian society in the Gaza Strip. In other words: Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

The term genocide refers to a socio-historical and political phenomenon involving acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. Both morally and legally, genocide cannot be justified under any circumstance, including as an act of self-defense.

Genocide always occurs within a context: there are conditions that enable it, triggering events, and a guiding ideology. The current onslaught on the Palestinian people, including in the Gaza Strip, must be understood in the context of more than seventy years in which Israel has imposed a violent and discriminatory regime on the Palestinians, taking its most extreme form against those living in the Gaza Strip. Since the State of Israel was established, the apartheid and occupation regime has institutionalized and systematically employed mechanisms of violent control, demographic engineering, discrimination, and fragmentation of the Palestinian collective. These foundations laid by the regime are what made it possible to launch a genocidal attack on the Palestinians immediately after the Hamas-led attack on 7 October 2023.

The assault on Palestinians in Gaza cannot be separated from the escalating violence being inflicted, at varying levels and in different forms, on Palestinians living under Israeli rule in the West Bank and within Israel. The violence and destruction in these areas is intensifying over time, with no effective domestic or international mechanism acting to halt them. We warn of the clear and present danger that the genocide will not remain confined to the Gaza Strip, and that the actions and underlying mindset driving it may be extended to other areas as well.

The recognition that the Israeli regime is committing genocide in the Gaza Strip, and the deep concern that it may expand to other areas where Palestinians live under Israeli rule, demand urgent and unequivocal action from both Israeli society and the international community, and use of every means available under international law to stop Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people.

The post UK’s Starmer and Lammy Prepare Ground for Dubious “Peace Plan” first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Stuart Littlewood.

“Let Gaza Live”: 50 Jewish Peace Activists Arrested Protesting Sens. Schumer, Gillibrand for Vote to Keep Arming Israel

Democracy Now! — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 12:00:00 +0000

Some 200 activists with Jewish Voice for Peace protested at the Manhattan offices of New York Senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand on Friday to denounce their votes against halting arms shipments to Israel. Banging pots and pans to highlight Israel’s starvation of Palestinians, the activists chanted “Stop starving Gaza!” and “Never again for anyone!” JVP says 50 Jewish New Yorkers were arrested by police. Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman and Charina Nadura covered the protest. Earlier this week, the Senate voted 70-27 against a measure introduced by Vermont’s Bernie Sanders to block $675 million in additional U.S. arms sales to Israel. Both Schumer and Gillibrand voted no. At least 159 Palestinians in Gaza have starved to death amid Israel’s ongoing siege blocking most humanitarian aid from entering the territory.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! Audio and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Iran arrests 98 ‘citizen-journalists’ for contact with UK-based outlet

CPJ Staff — Thu, 31 Jul 2025 17:15:48 +0000

Paris, July 31, 2025—The Committee to Protect Journalists calls on Iranian authorities to explain the grounds on which they have summoned and arrested 98 “so-called citizen-journalists” for having contact with a London-based Persian-language television channel.

“Iranian authorities must immediately clarify the legal basis for this mass detention of its citizens and cease treating those who communicate with the media as criminals,” said CPJ Chief Programs Officer Carlos Martinez de la Serna. “Labeling ordinary Iranians as ‘operational agents’ simply for their association with a news outlet is a dangerous tactic of intimidation and a blatant escalation in Iran’s violations of press freedom.

Iran’s intelligence ministry had been monitoring “the so-called citizen-journalists of the Zionist-Terrorist International Network” – a term the government uses to describe London-based Iran International – during the June 13 to 24 Iran-Israel war, state-owned Mehr News Agency reported. The ministry then “arrested and summoned 98 affiliated operational agents,” the agency said on July 28.

The ministry provided no evidence to support its allegations and did not disclose the names, locations, or legal status of those detained or summoned.

The Islamic Republic has previously arrested Iranians working with international media on vague charges, such as for “collaborating with hostile states” or “propaganda against the state.”

Iran’s reformist Ham Mihan newspaper reported that more than 100 journalists had been fired in the aftermath of the 12-day war, as authorities have cracked down on critical voices, with hundreds of arrests and several executions.

CPJ emailed Iran’s mission to the United Nations in New York for comment but received no response.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

Trump’s top Gaza negotiator reveals Israel bias

The Grayzone — Thu, 31 Jul 2025 15:51:03 +0000

This content originally appeared on The Grayzone and was authored by The Grayzone.

Genocide is Psychopathy

Kim Petersen — Thu, 31 Jul 2025 15:02:20 +0000

Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau declares, “I am a Zionist.”

Genocide is the deliberate and systematic destruction of a particular group. When it is your country, your troops, your government and its officials committing genocide, many people will stubbornly refuse to acknowledge such a fact. Such is the propagandic effect of patriotism that it erodes critical thought processes and even causes people to overlook extreme evil.

On 28 July 2025, NPR wrote, “Two prominent Israeli rights groups on Monday said their country is committing genocide in Gaza, the first time that local Jewish-led organizations have made such accusations against Israel during nearly 22 months of war.”

The genocide is undeniable as Afkār noted, “Since October 7, 2023, Israeli cabinet ministers, political figures, military officers and media pundits have openly and endlessly incited for the destruction of Gaza and its Palestinian inhabitants.”

Moreover, Israel is trying to spin this genocide as a necessary transfer of the Gazan population: “In recent months, Israel has shifted its messaging on Gaza, acknowledging that it has rendered the territory unlivable and is pushing for the removal of its surviving population. ”

What explains the thinking that leads to the carrying out of such a hideous crime?

Psychopathy is a personality disorder rooted in a lack of empathy and remorse, manipulation, and antisocial behavior. That clearly describes people committing genocide and people aiding and abetting genocide.

Thus, people perpetuating or enabling the commission of a genocide fit the definition of psychopaths.

It is undeniable that Israeli Jews are committing genocide in Palestine. Their prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is therefore a genocidaire and a psychopath, as well as the many supportive establishment types in Israel. (For more on this read Hamid Dabashi’s After Savagery) The genocide of Gazans has much support among Jewish Israelis. This begs the question of whether psychopathology is widespread among Israeli Jews?

And, when a state or agency knowingly aids and abets Israeli Jews in committing genocide against the Palestinians, then such complicit governments and responsible authorities ought also to be considered genocidaires and psychopaths. Legally, as well:

… one can be held liable for aiding and abetting genocide, even if one does not share the specific genocidal intent of the principal perpetrator.

The Rome Statute contains a provision about criminal responsibility that is not found in either of the U.N. ad hoc tribunal statutes or the Genocide Convention but which further illuminates the mens rea of genocide. Under Article 30 of the Rome Statute, “knowledge” and “intent” are the two components of mens rea. A person has “intent” when the person “means to engage in the conduct” and “means to cause that consequence or is aware that it will occur in the ordinary course of events.” (Grant Dawson and Rachel Boynton, “Reconciling Complicity in Genocide and Aiding and Abetting Genocide in the Jurisprudence of the United Nations Ad Hoc Tribunals,” Harvard Human Rights Journal, 21, 2008: 250.)

Consequently, Israel is not alone in executing its genocide of Palestinians. Countries are called upon to “Stop Arming Israel and Abetting Its Crimes.” Among those governments supplying armaments to Israel are the US and Europeans (“How top arms exporters have responded to the war in Gaza,” and that “European countries use 3rd-party countries to keep arming Israel: British journalist,” “Australia,” “Report suggests arms still flow from Canada to Israel despite denials,” “Infrastructure of genocide: the case confronting Dutch support for Israel’s war machine,” etc) giving political cover, the companies seeking profit from the genocide. Hence, their actions reveal them to be genocidaires.

Many of the common people in many of these countries are opposing the genocide-supporting stance of their governments; for example, Sweden, Netherlands, Canada, even in the US, and worldwide. The leaders are out of touch with masses of their citizens.

Therefore, Canada’s Mark Carney, France’s Emmanuel Macron, Britain’s Keir Starmer, Germany’s Friedrich Merz, Denmark’s Mette Frederiksen, and others are joining avowed Zionists Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump. Are Netanyahu and Trump really the people other country’s “leaders” should follow in making common cause to wipe Palestinians off the map?

Why is this psychopathy exhibited as a common trait among many Western government heads?

Worse, it seems to point to there being something inherently malevolent in the so-called democratic systems of these countries, such that it promotes psychopaths into leadership positions.

The post Genocide is Psychopathy first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kim Petersen.

Canada’s Complicity Laid Bare

Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East — Thu, 31 Jul 2025 14:43:00 +0000

We will not have any form of arms or parts of arms be sent to Gaza, period.
— Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly, March 20 2024

It was a cynical lie. Now we have the evidence.

A damning new report from the Arms Embargo Now coalition traces hundreds of shipments of Canadian-made weapons and military tech that continued to reach Israel during its ongoing genocidal assault on Gaza.

Bullets. Explosives. Aircraft parts. High‑end surveillance and targeting systems. All from here — from factories in Montreal, Vancouver, Calgary, the GTA, Halifax — to the runways and ports in Israel that feed Israel’s war machine.

Most of us already understood this was happening. Individual contracts and bits of evidence kept slipping through the cracks. But every time they did, the government would play whack-a-mole. This report ends that game. We now have ironclad evidence that Canadian weapons never stopped flowing to Israel. It shows a sustained, ongoing pipeline that continues to this day. It also exposes how the government systematically deceived Canadians about arming Israel.

In the frantic first three months after October 7th, the Trudeau government quietly approved a record-breaking number of export permits to Israel. Then you — and tens of thousands of people like you across the country — roared in protest. The pressure worked. By March 2024, then Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly announced a “pause” on new permits. She publicly insisted that no more arms would reach Gaza.

However Joly’s “pause” froze only new licences, leaving every previous permit untouched. Ottawa tried to soothe the public, claiming the ongoing shipments were only for “non-lethal” or “defensive” goods (i.e. Iron Dome parts, bullet-proof vests). In reality, a steady stream of lethal cargo kept moving: bullets, explosives, aircraft and helicopter parts, F-35 targeting tech. All funnelled from 21 suppliers in seven Canadian cities to Israeli arms companies like Elbit Systems.

Let’s be clear: this isn’t some bureaucratic oversight. It is a calculated breach of the Export and Import Permits Act, the Arms Trade Treaty, and the ICJ’s warning not to aid genocide.

Ottawa’s claim that it was no longer arming Israel served as a diplomatic fig leaf: soothing words that hid uninterrupted weapons shipments. This report rips that fig leaf away. The government must now own its complicity and decide — end the exports, or stand exposed before the world.

This report also shows something else: the power of civil society. A small group of researchers — activists with day jobs, family responsibilities, and limited resources — spent hundreds of hours digging through tax records, shipping manifests, flight records, and obscure government PDFs. They followed the paper trail and uncovered the reality that our government was trying to hide.

In the UK, a similar report created a political scandal that is still reverberating. This Canadian report is arguably even more damning and the potential impact is enormous—if we seize this moment.

On Tuesday, CJPME, Independent Jewish Voices, World Beyond War, and the Palestinian Youth Movement held a press conference in Parliament to share the findings. You can watch the recording of the press conference here.

The post Canada’s Complicity Laid Bare first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East.

As Canada, U.K. & France Move to Recognize Palestine, Two-State Solution Remains Taboo Inside Israel

Democracy Now! — Thu, 31 Jul 2025 13:53:18 +0000

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Israel Blocks UNRWA from Distributing Aid in Gaza as Palestinians Starve

Democracy Now! — Thu, 31 Jul 2025 13:49:51 +0000

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

As Canada, U.K. & France Move to Recognize Palestine, Two-State Solution Remains Taboo Inside Israel

Democracy Now! — Thu, 31 Jul 2025 12:33:51 +0000

Canada became the latest Western country this week to announce it will recognize the state of Palestine, joining the United Kingdom and France, as well as over 147 other countries that already recognize Palestinian statehood. Palestinian writer and analyst Muhammad Shehada says that while the recent moves are “largely symbolic” and filled with caveats and loopholes, it shows that global opinion is rapidly shifting. He says that despite Israel’s growing diplomatic isolation over its starvation of Gaza, the only thing that will stop the genocide is if the United States uses its leverage.

“Netanyahu and the Israeli government are terrified of Trump. They don’t want to anger him,” says Shehada. “The only thing it would take is Trump making a phone call to Netanyahu and saying, 'End this now.'”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

"Beyond Atrocious": Arwa Damon on Desperation & Hunger in Gaza as Israel Continues Blocking Most Aid

Democracy Now! — Wed, 30 Jul 2025 14:44:00 +0000

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

It Shouldn’t Have Taken This Much For Mainstream Voices To Start Speaking Up About Gaza

Caitlin Johnstone — Wed, 30 Jul 2025 13:30:44 +0000

Israel’s top human rights group B’Tselem has finally declared that Israel is committing genocide, as has the Israel-based Physicians for Human Rights. The Israeli organizations join Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, UN human rights experts, and the overwhelming majority of leading authorities on the subject of genocide in their conclusion.

The debate is over. The Israel apologists lost. And we are seeing this reflected in mainstream discourse.

Pop megastar Ariana Grande has started speaking out in support of Gaza, telling her social media followers that “starving people to death is a red line.” This is a new threshold. Opposing Israel’s genocide is now the most mainstream as it has ever been.

MSNBC just ran a piece explicitly titled “Israel is starving Gaza. And the U.S. is complicit.”, featuring a segment with the virulently pro-Israel Morning Joe slamming the mass atrocity. CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, himself a former AIPAC employee, has done a 180 and is now raking Israel over the coals on the air for its deliberately engineered starvation campaign. The New York Times finally overcame its phobia of the g-word with an op-ed titled “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It.”

We’re now seeing notoriously Zionist swamp monsters in the Democratic Party like Barack Obama, Hakeem Jeffries, Cory Booker and Amy Klobuchar changing their tune and attacking Netanyahu and Trump for their joint genocide project in Gaza, with increasingly forceful pushback from some on the right like Marjorie Taylor Greene as well.

As western pundits, politicians, and celebrities suddenly pivot to denouncing Israel’s genocidal atrocities after two years of silence, it’s hard to believe that just a few weeks ago, we were being told that saying “death to the IDF” is a hate crime.

People who’ve been staring at this genocide from the beginning have been asking the entire time, what is it going to take? What will it take for our society to stop sleepwalking through inane trivialities and vapid distractions and start opposing the holocaust of our day?

Raining military explosives on a giant concentration camp packed full of children wasn’t enough.

Burning children alive wasn’t enough.

Systematically destroying Gaza’s entire healthcare infrastructure — up to and including entering hospitals they’ve attacked and destroying individual pieces of medical equipment one by one — wasn’t enough.

Killing more journalists than were killed in both World Wars, plus the US Civil War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Yugoslav Wars, the War in Afghanistan, and the ongoing war in Ukraine wasn’t enough.

The systemic rape and torture of prisoners wasn’t enough.

https://x.com/MaxBlumenthal/status/1949587236434931921

IDF soldiers routinely sharing photos and videos of themselves mockingly dressing in the clothes of dead and displaced Palestinian women and playing with the toys of dead and displaced Palestinian children wasn’t enough.

Israeli officials openly expressing genocidal intent for the people of Gaza wasn’t enough.

The US president and Israeli prime minister openly declaring their goal of the complete ethnic cleansing of a Palestinian territory wasn’t enough.

Field testing new weapons of war on Palestinians like they’re guinea pigs in a laboratory wasn’t enough.

Leaving countless civilians to slowly suffocate or die of dehydration, trapped under the rubble of bombed buildings, wasn’t enough.

Creating an AI system to ensure that suspected Hamas fighters are bombed when they’re at home with their children and naming it “Where’s Daddy?” wasn’t enough.

Using Palestinians as human shields wasn’t enough.

Burying injured civilians alive with bulldozers wasn’t enough.

https://x.com/GozukaraFurkan/status/1949232008216887774

The IDF admitting to running a popular Telegram channel called “72 Virgins,” which posted extremely gory and sadistic snuff films of people in Gaza being butchered by Israeli forces, wasn’t enough.

IDF snipers routinely shooting children in the head and chest throughout the Gaza Strip wasn’t enough.

The IDF flying drones, which play the sounds of crying babies at night in order to lure out hiding civilians to murder them, wasn’t enough.

IDF troops telling the Israeli press that they’re being ordered to massacre starving civilians seeking food from aid sites wasn’t enough.

Israeli snipers targeting different body parts of starving civilians on designated days — leg day, head day, genitals day, etc — wasn’t enough.

Far right Israeli citizens setting up blockades to stop aid trucks from entering Gaza while they enjoyed parties and barbecues at the blockade sites wasn’t enough.

https://x.com/mamoun_linda/status/1949190406211825696

Using lies and propaganda to dismantle the aid system for bringing essential food and life-supporting supplies into Gaza, to replace it with a US/Israeli op where aid seekers are massacred every single day, wasn’t enough.

Using siege warfare to starve Gaza for the previous 22 months deliberately wasn’t enough.

But now that starvation has hit a critical point and deaths from malnutrition are skyrocketing, now that images of dead skeletal children are filling our screens, now that the damage to organs and brains from starvation will be irreversible in many cases — now it’s enough.

That was the line, apparently. That’s what mainstream Western consciousness has decided is too much. Everything up until that line was fine, but now it’s not fine anymore.

And the killing is still going on. The sudden awakening of conscience hasn’t translated into any material actions or changes at all yet. If it had come in October or November 2023, like it should have, we might be seeing that opposition translate into actually saving Gaza by now, but the light has only just been switched on. It’s not even guaranteed that those who are speaking up will continue to do so.

https://x.com/d_boeckner/status/1949137485776265514

I’m glad people are waking up to the cruel reality of this nightmare. I’m grateful to each and every influential voice who uses their platform to speak out, even at this late date. I truly am.

But I also think we need to take a very hard, very uncomfortable look at ourselves as a society right now. If all those monstrous abuses were tolerable for us over these last two years, there’s something deeply and profoundly sick about our civilization.

We are not living right. We are not thinking right. We are not feeling right. We are warped and twisted. The information we consume and the norms we’ve been conditioned to accept have corrupted our souls.

We have been made into something bad. Something ugly. Something shameful. Something we need to do everything in our power to change.

We need to rescue ourselves from what we have become. We need to transform, deeply and radically, into something that could never again allow something like this to occur.

https://x.com/BlakPantherBabe/status/1949834226343293339

The way things are clearly isn’t working. The mainstream worldview is clearly a lie. Everything we’ve been taught to believe about our society, our nation, our government, and our world was clearly false.

We need to fight our way through the cognitive dissonance of recognizing that our entire way of looking at things as a collective has failed, and we need to find a new way of being.

Otherwise, we’re going to keep being smashed in the face with increasingly horrifying reminders of what we have allowed ourselves to become.

The lessons will repeat until they are learned.

We had better start learning them.

The post It Shouldn’t Have Taken This Much For Mainstream Voices To Start Speaking Up About Gaza first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Caitlin Johnstone.

“Beyond Atrocious”: Arwa Damon on Desperation & Hunger in Gaza as Israel Continues Blocking Most Aid

Democracy Now! — Wed, 30 Jul 2025 12:37:41 +0000

In Gaza, “the situation is beyond atrocious.” Aid worker Arwa Damon, a former CNN journalist and the founder of INARA, a nonprofit currently providing medical and mental healthcare to children in Gaza, describes the deadly lack of access to food, water and medicine in the besieged territory. The situation on the ground conflicts with the claims of Israeli officials, who are denying the existence of starvation conditions. “If anyone goes into Gaza, within 15 minutes, the vast majority of what Israel is claiming just unravels before your very eyes,” says Damon. She is currently helping to facilitate aid access from outside of Gaza, which she and many other humanitarian workers have been barred from accessing since February.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Israel denies its undeniably deliberate starvation of Gaza

The Grayzone — Wed, 30 Jul 2025 04:31:22 +0000

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American youth are turning on Israel, left and right

The Grayzone — Wed, 30 Jul 2025 04:27:21 +0000

This content originally appeared on The Grayzone and was authored by The Grayzone.

Israeli human rights group accuses Israel of genocide against Palestinians

Democracy Now! — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 20:00:41 +0000

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Activist who helped film ‘No Other Land’ shot and killed by Israeli settler

Sharon Zhang — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 16:26:31 +0000

This story originally appeared in Truthout on July 28, 2025. It is shared here with permission.

Palestinian activist who helped film the No Other Land documentary highlighting Israel’s violent occupation of the West Bank, Awdah Hathaleen, was shot and killed by an Israeli settler on Monday, according to one of the film’s directors.

Israeli co-filmmaker Yuval Abraham posted about Hadalin’s death on social media on Monday. “An Israeli settler just shot [Hathaleen] in the lungs, a remarkable activist who helped us film No Other Land in Masafer Yatta,” Abraham wrote. About an hour later, Abraham wrote that Hathaleen had succumbed to the shooting. “[Awdah] just died. Murdered,” said Abraham.

“I can hardly believe it. My dear friend Awdah was slaughtered this evening. He was standing in front of the community center in his village when a settler fired a bullet that pierced his chest and took his life. This is how Israel erases us — one life at a time,” said Basel Adra, activist and Palestinian co-director of No Other Land.

Accompanying Abraham’s post was a video of the settler angrily facing a group, wielding a handgun. He waves the gun around, firing it, and keeping his hand on the trigger as he paces and angrily pushes those trying to confront him.

Hathaleen was previously targeted by the U.S. government. Last month, he flew to the U.S. to do a speaking tour with his cousin, Eid Hathaleen, to speak in synagogues and churches. However, U.S. authorities detained and deported them upon arrival at the San Francisco airport.

He had previously reported about Israeli settler violence, and was a leader in his community advocating against Israel’s occupation of his village, Umm al-Khair in Masafer Yatta.

Wafa reported that two Palestinians had been injured in Umm al-Khair by Israeli settlers, who invaded the village with a bulldozer in an attack on Monday evening.

Palestinian activist Issa Amro, from Hebron, mourned the loss of Hathaleen.

“Israeli settlers have murdered our beloved hero, Awdah Hathaleen, from the Um Al-Khair community in Masafer Yatta,” Amro wrote on social media. “Awdah stood with dignity and courage against oppression. His loss is a deep wound to our hearts and our struggle for justice. May he rest in peace. We will never forget him.”

To know Awda Hathaleen is to love him.

Awda Hathaleen was an activist and a resident in Umm al-Khair, an indigenous Bedouin Palestinian community in the South Hebron Hills within the occupied West Bank. He was an English teacher and activist. Awda has always been a pillar… pic.twitter.com/3Pf5Q8CxFA
— Jewish Voice for Peace (@jvplive) July 28, 2025

Abraham said that local residents identified Hathaleen’s killer as Yinon Levi, who lives in an illegal Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank. Levi was sanctioned by the Treasury Department under the Biden administration in April 2024, with officials saying that he “regularly led groups of violent extremists” in assaults on Palestinian and Bedouin communities in the West Bank. He was also sanctioned by the European Union around the same time.

President Donald Trump lifted the U.S. sanction on Levi and other Israeli settlers and settler groups on his first day in office this January. Even before that, however, the Biden administration’s and other international authorities’ sanctions on Israeli settlers were criticized as weak and ineffective, with Israeli leaders who are backing and often funding settler groups going unpunished.

In fact, Levi told The Associated Press last June that he only felt the financial impact of sanctions for a few weeks after banks froze his accounts. His community raised thousands of dollars for him, and Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a key architect of Israel’s de facto annexation of the West Bank, pledged to intervene to personally help take care of sanctioned settlers. The bank, which was supposed to freeze his assets, slowly lifted restrictions until he was able to access his money for whatever he wanted again.

“America thought it would weaken us, and in the end, they made us stronger,” Levi said at the time. Indeed, The Associated Press reported that local rights groups and settlers said that the sanctions only emboldened them.

This is just the latest settler attack on someone involved in making No Other Land. In March, just weeks after the documentary won an Oscar, an Israeli settler mob attacked and beat Palestinian filmmaker and activist Hamdan Ballal, in his home village of Susiya in Masafer Yatta. While he was in an ambulance to be treated for his injuries, Israeli soldiers invaded the vehicle and took him into custody. He emerged, bloody and bruised, saying that he has faced increased violence from settlers due to his role in making the film.

Israeli settlers and soldiers have intensified their violence in Masafer Yatta since the film won an Oscar, and Israeli authorities have now ordered a large swath of the region to be turned into a live-fire zone — effectively ordering the forcible transfer of over 1,200 Palestinians living in the region. Palestinians in the region report that Israel’s demolition of their homes is being fast-tracked by authorities.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Sharon Zhang.

Amazon Union Leader Chris Smalls Detained & Beaten by IDF, But US Media Ignores It

Mike Elk — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 15:30:08 +0000

This week, the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) boarded the Handala, a ship associated with the Flotilla Freedom Coalition, that was attempting to reach Gaza with supplies for starving Palestinians. The IDF detained 20 activists, who had their hands held up, in graphic images that the Freedom Flotilla Coalition captured.

Among those on the ship was Chris Smalls, who gained fame when he led a successful union drive at Amazon in Staten Island in 2022. Not only was Smalls detained, but he was physically beaten by the IDF. He was the only Black member on the Handala.

“The Freedom Flotilla Coalition confirms that upon arrival in Israeli custody, U.S. human rights defender, Christian Smalls, was physically assaulted by seven uniformed individuals,” wrote the Freedom Flotilla Coalition on Instagram. “They choked him and kicked him, leaving visible signs of violence on his neck and back”.

Despite Smalls having been profiled by every major media outlet in the U.S. when he successfully led the union drive at Amazon, not a single major media outlet has covered his beating at the hands of the IDF.

In 2022, The New York Times even ran a Style section profile on his fashion choices among more than a dozen pieces that they ran on his organizing efforts, but the paper has not said anything about the beating of a high-profile labor activist at the hands of the IDF. Only three smaller, left-leaning outlets, Zeteo, The Grio, and Jezebel, covered it.

“This totally makes sense,” wrote University of New Brunswick Professor Nathan Kalman-Lamb on Bluesky. “A notable public figure in the US (Amazon labor organizer Christian Smalls) is illegally arrested by Israel and subjected to severe physical violence while on a hunger strike… and not one US media outlet of any type has decided that is news.”

This article is a cross-post from Payday Report and is a developing story. Payday Report will update it as more information becomes available.

You can donate to help Payday Report Cover Labor Activists for a Free Palestine.

The post Amazon Union Leader Chris Smalls Detained & Beaten by IDF, But US Media Ignores It first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Mike Elk.

"Our Genocide": Israeli Human Rights Groups Accuse Israel of Destroying Palestinian Society in Gaza

Democracy Now! — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 14:22:36 +0000

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

When Israelis Call It Out: Finding Genocide in Gaza

Binoy Kampmark — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 13:00:52 +0000

It’s been almost an article of faith among Israeli officials: the state they represent is incapable of genocide, their actions always spurred by the noblest, necessary motivations of self-defence against satanic enemies who wish genocide upon Jews. Over time, as Holocaust scholar Omer Bartov writes, “Ethical concerns and moral qualms were brushed aside as either marginal or distracting in the face of the ultimate cataclysm that is the genocide of the Jews.”

This form of reasoning, known otherwise as “Holocaust-ism” or “Shoah-tiyut”, is a moral conceit left bare in the war of annihilation being waged in Gaza against the Palestinian populace. Israeli human rights groups have taken note of this, despite the drained reserves of empathy evident in Israel proper. (A Pew Research Center poll conducted last month found that a mere 16% of Jewish Israelis thought peaceful coexistence with Palestinians was possible.)

In its latest report pointedly titled Our Genocide, the Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem offers a blunt assessment: “Israel’s policy in the Gaza Strip and its horrific outcomes, together with statements by senior Israeli politicians and military commanders about the goals of the attack, leads us to the unequivocal conclusion that Israel is taking coordinated action to intentionally destroy Palestinian society in the Gaza Strip. In other words: Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.”

The infliction of genocide, the organisation acknowledges, is a matter of “multiple and parallel practices” applied over a period of time, with killing being merely one component. Living conditions can be destroyed, concentration camps and zones created, populations expelled, and policies to systematically prevent reproduction enacted. “Accordingly, genocidal acts are various actions intended to bring about the destruction of a distinct group, as part of a deliberate, coordinated effort by a ruling authority.”

Our Genocide suggests that certain conditions often precede the sparking of a genocide. Israel’s relations with Palestinians had been characterised by “broader patterns of settler-colonialism”, with the intention of ensuring “Jewish supremacy over Palestinians – economically, politically, socially, and culturally.”

B’Tselem draws upon three crucial elements centred on ensuring “Jewish supremacy over Palestinians”: “life under an apartheid regime that imposes separation, demographic engineering, and ethnic cleansing; systemic and institutionalized use of violence against Palestinians, while the perpetrators enjoy impunity; and institutionalized mechanisms of dehumanization and framing Palestinians as an existential threat.” The attacks on Israel by Hamas and other militant groups on October 7, 2023 was a violent event that created a “sense of existential threat among the perpetrating group” enabling the “ruling system to carry out genocide.” As B’Tselem Executive Director Yuli Novak notes, this sense of threat was promoted by an “extremist, far-right messianic government” to pursue “an agenda of destruction and expulsion.”

Israeli policy in the Strip since October 2023 could not be rationalised as a focused, targeted attempt to destroy the rule of Hamas or its military efficacy. “Statements by senior Israeli decision-makers about the nature and assault in Gaza have expressed genocidal intent throughout.” Ditto Israeli military officers of all ranks. Gaza’s residents had been dehumanized, with many Jewish-Israelis believing “that their lives are of negligible value compared to Israel’s national goals, if not worthless altogether.”

The report also notes the use of certain terminology that haunts the literature of genocidal euphemism: the creation of “humanitarian zones” that would still be bombed despite supposedly providing protection for displaced civilians; the use of “kill zones” by the Israeli military and the absence of any standardized rules of engagement through the Strip, often “determined at the discretion of commanders on the ground or based on arbitrary criteria.”

Wishing to be comprehensive, the authors of the report do not ignore Israel’s actions in the West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem. Airstrikes have regularly taken place against refugee camps in the northern part of the territory since October 2023. Even more lethal open-fire policies have been used in the West Bank, with the use of kill zones suggesting “the broader ‘Gazafication’ of Israel’s methods of warfare.”

Another group, Physicians for Human Rights-Israel (PHRI), has also published a legal-medical appraisal on the intentional destruction of Gaza’s healthcare system, finding that the Israeli campaign in Gaza “constitutes genocide under the 1948 Genocide Convention.” The evidence examined by the group “shows a deliberate and systematic dismantling of Gaza’s healthcare system and other vital systems necessary for the population’s survival.” The evolving nature of the campaign suggested a “deliberate progression” from the initial bombing and the forced evacuation of hospitals in the northern part of the Strip to the calculated collapse of the healthcare system across the entire enclave. The dismantling of the health system involved rendering hospitals “non-functional”, the blocking of medical evaluations, and the elimination of such vital services as trauma care, surgery, dialysis, and maternal health.

Added to this has been the direct targeting of health care workers, involving the death and detention of over 1,800 members, “including many senior specialists”, and the deliberate restriction of humanitarian relief through militarized distribution points that pose lethal risks to aid recipients. “This coordinated assault has produced a cascading failure of health and humanitarian infrastructure, compounded by policies leading to starvation, disease, and the breakdown of sanitation, housing, and education systems.”

PHRI contends that, at the very least, three core elements of Article II of the Genocide Convention are met: the killing of members of a group (identified by nationality, ethnicity, race or religion); causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of that group and deliberately inflicting on the group those conditions of life to bring about its destruction in whole or in part.

In accepting that genocide is being perpetrated against the Palestinians, Our Genocide makes that most pertinent of points: the dry legal analysis of genocide tends to be distanced from a historical perspective. “The legal definition is narrow, having been shaped in large part by the political interests of the states whose representatives drafted it.” The high threshold of identifying genocide, and the international jurisprudence on the subject, had produced a disturbing paradox: genocide tends to be recognised “only after a significant portion of the targeted group has already been destroyed and the group as such has suffered irreparable harm.” The thrust of these clarion calls from B’Tselem and PHRI is urgently clear: end this state of affairs before the Palestinians become yet another historical victim of such harm.

The post When Israelis Call It Out: Finding Genocide in Gaza first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

“Our Genocide”: Israeli Human Rights Groups Accuse Israel of Destroying Palestinian Society in Gaza

Democracy Now! — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 12:51:29 +0000

For the first time, two leading Israeli human rights groups — B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights Israel — have accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. B’Tselem’s report, “Our Genocide,” says, “Israel is taking coordinated action to intentionally destroy Palestinian society in the Gaza Strip.” We speak with B’Tselem’s outreach director, Sarit Michaeli, in Tel Aviv, who says Israel’s actions in Gaza are “the textbook definition of genocide.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

How Israel became the symbol of Brazil’s Evangelical and far-right movements

Michael Fox — Mon, 28 Jul 2025 20:21:19 +0000

Support for Israel’s genocidal slaughter of Palestinians has become a critical political dividing line, not just in the United States, but in countries around the globe. At a recent pro-Donald Trump rally in São Paulo, Brazil, for instance, a protester waving an Israeli flag fought with a man in a Palestinian shirt. In this on-the-ground report, Brazil-based journalist Michael Fox shows how Israel’s US-backed war on Gaza and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians is playing out in South America’s largest country.

Additional resources:

Michael Fox, Brazil on Fire podcast

Filming / Post-Production: Michael Fox

Transcript

Starvation spreads in Gaza as Israel continues blocking most aid

Democracy Now! — Mon, 28 Jul 2025 17:58:23 +0000

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Before, During, and After Savagery

Kim Petersen — Mon, 28 Jul 2025 15:11:21 +0000

“But the state of Israel was not created for the salvation of the Jew; it was created for the salvation of Western interests.”

— James Baldwin, “Open Letter to the Born Again” (September 29, 1979). Quoted in Hamid Dabashi, After Savagery: Gaza, Genocide, and the Illusion of Western Civilization (Haymarket Books, 2025): 159.

Baldwin’s assessment is shared by many others, such as Noam Chomsky, who discussed in his book (The Fateful Triangle, 1999 edition) Israel’s role as a “strategic asset.” (p. 69, 70, 103, 137) However, others, such as Jean Bricmont and Diana Johnstone countered that assessment in a 2024 article, “The Myth of Israel as ‘US Aircraft Carrier’ in Middle East.” They write:

But the crucial evidence, totally missing from their analysis, is the slightest example of Israel actually serving American interests in the region.

If no examples are given, it’s simply because there are none. Israel has never fired a shot on behalf of the United States or brought a drop of oil under U.S. control.

We can start with a common sense argument: If the U.S. is interested in Middle East oil, why would it support a country that is hated (for whatever reasons) by all the populations of the oil producing countries?

Bricmont and Johnstone attribute the unstinting US support of Israel as being influenced by money injected into the US political arena by the Jewish lobby, in particular AIPAC.

The question of which side leads in determining US support for Israel is debatable. What is indisputable is that the US and Israel are in lockstep despite all the violations of international law by Israel (US is a serial violator of international law, as well), despite several massacres carried out by Israel, and despite the mightily ramped up genocide being perpetrated by Israeli Jews against Palestinians currently.

Genocide and the understanding of what unleashes the bloodshirtiest of human actions is the subject of Hamid Dabashi’s After Savagery, scheduled for release by Haymarket Books on 30 September — while the savagery is ongoing. The urgency for a worldwide response calls for informing those unaware or those insouciant to the Jewish Israeli genocide that is being perpetrated on Palestine (It is not just a genocide in Gaza, as a 1 July 2025 Al Jazeera headline makes clear: “Israel has killed 1,000 Palestinians in the West Bank since October 7, 2023.”). After Savagery, however, is not just about the genocide in Gaza, it is about why some humans commit genocide. So After Savagery is also about “before savagery.” What are the conditions that lead to savagery today. And most importantly, how genocide can be prevented from happening.

Dabashi quotes many sources to attest to the genocide that is happening now in Palestine.

“What we are seeing in Gaza is a repeat of Auschwitz,” says the Burmese genocide expert and Nobel Peace Prize nominee Maung Zarni. “This is a collective white imperialist man’s genocide,” he further explains. (154-155)

Asked to describe what he witnessed in Gaza, Dr. Perlmutter replied, “All of the disasters I’ve seen, combined—forty mission trips, thirty years, Ground Zero, earthquakes, all of that combined—doesn’t equal the level of carnage that I saw against civilians in just my first week in Gaza.” And the civilian casualties, he said, are almost exclusively children. “I’ve never seen that before,” he said. “I’ve seen more incinerated children than I’ve ever seen in my entire life, combined. I’ve seen more shredded children in just the first week … missing body parts, being crushed by buildings, the greatest majority, or bomb explosions, the next greatest majority. We’ve taken shrapnel as big as my thumb out of eight-year-olds. And then there’s sniper bullets. I have children that were shot twice.” (103-104)

“Yes, it is genocide,” has affirmed Amos Goldberg, a professor of Holocaust history at the department of Jewish history and contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem: “It is so difficult and painful to admit it, but despite all that, and despite all our efforts to think otherwise, after six months of brutal war we can no longer avoid this conclusion.” (142)

Dabashi traces the roots of Zionism to a longstanding settler-European colonialism. And the author lays bare the insidiousness of Zionism and how this racism impacted Palestinians:

Today, the birth of Palestine as a “question” rather than a nation-state marks precisely the birth of Palestine as a constellation of refugee camps. The land was stolen from Palestinians, the state stealing the land was a European settler colony garrison state that rules over Palestinians with cruelty, the rules for the inscription of life were dictated to Palestinians in draconian terms, and the camps as the fourth inseparable element are precisely where generations of Palestinians are born and raised, before being killed by the Israeli military. (127-128)

Part of this racism towards Muslims, of which the majority of Palestinians are, is the use of term “Muselmann.” Writes Dabashi, “This is perhaps a mini encyclopedia of European ignorance, Islamophobia and antisemitism all wrapped up in an attempt to unpack the word ‘Muselmann,’ but in fact loading it with more racist dimensions.” (120) And the new Muselmann, is the Palestinian, “the Untestifiable, the human animal, as Israeli warlords have said.” (xxvi)

Zionist Israel and its racism and discrimination is compellingly described. My colleague B.J. Sabri and I needed no convincing of Israeli racism.¹

And this racism, not exclusive to Israeli Jews, points to “what ultimately matters for the world at large is the categorical inability to fathom a Palestinian as a human being.” (96) Thus, “Witnessing this savagery in Gaza, we can clearly link the Jewish Holocaust to the Palestinian genocide, and see genocidal Zionism as the logical colonial extension of European fascism.” (xv)

Before Savagery

Many personages appear in After Savagery, such as, to name a few, Sven Lindqvist, Frantz Fanon, Joseph Conrad, and James Baldwin who opposed racism; Edward Said, Giorgio Agamben, Ghassan Kanafani and his Danish wife Anni Kanafani (née Høver), Mario Rizzi, Mahmoud Darwish who spoke to the beauty of Orientalism and Arab culture; others such as Ilan Pappe and UN special rappateur Francesca Albanese who denounce unflinchingly the depredations of Israeli Jews against Palestinians. Dabashi delves deeply into the Eurocentric perspective on colonialism, borne of Western philosophy and figures like Immanuel Kant, Hegel Heidegger, and others who thinking was impoverished by being shackled by their own racism.

Dabashi writes:

“According to Hegel, Africans, or any other people, can only become civilized to the degree and so far as they abandoned their own cultures and convert to Christianity, founding a state according to Christian principles.” (91)

How are “we” to escape the indoctrination of feted philosophers and the inculcation of Western thought? How do “we” humanize Palestinians? The mere fact that the humanity of Palestinians requires affirmation for so many people points to the pervasiveness of racist Eurocentric narratives.

After the unbridled savagery in Gaza, it is not only European philosophy that reaches its ignoble ends. We need equally to think of the modes of knowledge production about Gaza itself, about Palestine, as the simulacrum of the world outside the purview of the discredited Eurocentric imagination. We no longer need to worry about the critique of Orientalism. We need to think of how to produce knowledge about Gaza and Palestine and the rest of the world. We need to reverse the anthropological gaze, to produce an anthropology of Zionism and Western Philosophy. (105)

The book covers a lot of ground. It delves deeply into ontology, epistemology, semantics, literature, art, filmmaking, poetry, politics, religion, exilism, and — especially — philosophy. After Savagery is not focused solely on the here and now of what is transpiring in historical Palestine. The book goes into the history, background, and philosophy that enables genocide. The book is scholarly and is well footnoted. If that is what the reader is looking for, then Hamid Dabashi’s After Savagery is well worth the read.

NOTE:

The post Before, During, and After Savagery first appeared on Dissident Voice.

1 Kim Petersen and B.J. Sabri, Defining Israeli Zionist Racism, Dissident Voice: Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kim Petersen.

"Stop This Genocide": Gaza Aid Worker Warns of Imminent Starvation, Urges Israel to Lift Blockade

Democracy Now! — Mon, 28 Jul 2025 14:41:33 +0000

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

“Stop This Genocide”: Gaza Aid Worker Warns of Imminent Starvation, Urges Israel to Lift Blockade

Democracy Now! — Mon, 28 Jul 2025 12:14:10 +0000

We speak with Eyad Amawi, an aid coordinator in Gaza, who tells Democracy Now! about the “rapid deterioration” inside the besieged territory as Israel’s blockade causes mass starvation. Health officials in Gaza say at least 14 Palestinians have starved to death over the past day, bringing the total to at least 147, including 88 children. Israel has allowed some additional aid into the territory, including by airdrops, but the United Nations says it’s still just a “drop in the ocean” of what is needed. Israel also said it would pause attacks for periods of the day in parts of Gaza, but the death toll has kept rising, with Israeli forces continuing to fire on unarmed civilians seeking aid. Two leading Israeli human rights groups, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights Israel, issued reports on Monday accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza, joining a growing international consensus.

“We have no time to wait,” says Amawi, who calls Israel’s restrictions on food, water, medicine and other essentials “collective punishment.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Dystopian Killing Fields and Starvation in Gaza

Binoy Kampmark — Mon, 28 Jul 2025 07:32:58 +0000

Starvation as a way of life. Starvation as a way of death. Starvation as policy, justification and vengeance. As the state of Israel hums along frittering, scratching and violating international human rights conventions, the chroniclers are kept busy on the morgue’s relentlessly growing inventory and peace’s loss. Of late, a vast number of humanitarian organisations have decided to express their collective outrage in a statement at what is happening in Gaza.

The statement as run by Doctors Without Borders on July 23 is stark: “As the Israel government’s siege starves the people of Gaza, aid workers are now joining the same food lines, risking being shot just to feed their families. With supplies now totally depleted, humanitarian organisations are witnessing their own colleagues and partners waste before their eyes.” Two months after the implementation of the controlled aid scheme by Israel, utilising the grotesquely named Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, over 100 organisations were “sounding the alarm and urging governments to act: open all land crossings; restore the full flow of food, clean water, medical supplies, shelter items, and fuel through a principled, UN-led mechanism; end the siege; and agree to a ceasefire now.”

Outside Gaza, and even within the Strip, abundant supplies of food, clean water, medical supplies, shelter items and fuel sat untouched. Humanitarian organisations had been prevented from accessing them. “The Government of Israel’s restrictions, delays, and fragmentation under its total siege have created chaos, starvation, and death.” A paltry figure of 28 trucks a day were being allowed into the Strip.

The relevant gore is recounted: massacres at food sites in the Gaza Strip are impossible to ignore; the figures from the UN suggest that 875 Palestinians had been slaughtered while seeking sustenance as of July 13. The frequency of these “flour massacres” is also receiving comment from those in the employ of the operation being run by GHF, policed by private contractors and the IDF. Retired US special forces officer Anthony Aguilar, who resigned from working with the GHF, told the BBC that he had “witnessed the Israeli Defense Forces shooting at crowds of Palestinians.” During his entire career, he had never seen such “brutality and use of indiscriminate and unnecessary force against a civilian population, an unarmed, starving population.”

The NGO statement goes on to note the rise of cases of acute malnutrition, most prevalent among children and the elderly. (The World Food Programme has warned that one in three Gazans do not eat for days at a time, with 90,000 women and children requiring treatment.) “Illnesses like acute watery diarrhea are spreading, markets are empty, waste is piling up, and adults are collapsing on the streets from hunger and dehydration.”

In the face of this, international law’s decrees appear like the neglected statues of a distant land. The three sets of Provisional Measures Orders from the International Court of Justice, handed down since 2024, have warned Israel to observe its obligations under the UN Genocide Convention and address the humanitarian crisis in the Strip. In its modifying order of provisional measures handed down on March 28, 2024, the ICJ instructed Israel to “take immediate and effective measures to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance to address famine and starvation and the adverse conditions of life faced by Palestinians in Gaza”. These include the provision of “food, water, electricity, fuel, shelter, clothing, hygiene and sanitation requirements, as well as medical supplies and medical care” and “increasing the capacity of land crossing points and maintaining them open for as long as necessary”.

The latest concession from Israel to deal with this engineered humanitarian catastrophe is a promise to open humanitarian corridors to permit UN convoys into the Strip. In addition to that, COGAT, the Israeli military agency overseeing humanitarian affairs in Gaza, has announced that Jordan and the United Arab Emirates will be permitted to parachute humanitarian aid to those in Gaza. UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has made a small team of British military planners and logisticians available to assist Jordan in this endeavour. On July 27, the IDF also released a statement claiming it had made the first airdrop including “seven packages of aid containing flour, sugar, and canned food”. These efforts, in their practical futility, are a reiteration of the humanitarian airdrops conducted by the US military and Jordan’s air force in March last year.

These drops will do little to alter the cruel, strangulating model of aid delivery in place, emboldening the fittest recipients capable of outpacing their adversaries. Those recipients will also be fortunate not to be injured or killed by the dropped packages, instances of which were recorded in March last year. “Why use airdrops,” asks Juliette Touma, chief spokeswoman for the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, “when you can drive hundreds of trucks through the borders?” Using trucks was “much easier, more effective, faster, cheaper.” Precisely why using them is so unappealing to the IDF.

Instead of focusing on isolating Israel, its allies prefer piecemeal approaches that prolong the suffering of the Palestinians. Measures such as those announced by Starmer to “evacuate children from Gaza who need medical assistance, bringing them to the UK for specialist and medical treatment” only serve to encourage the Israeli war machine. The aid drops serve to do much the same. The objective is one of inflicting a sufficient degree of harm that will encourage the eventual depopulation of the enclave. Israel’s allies, with intentional or unintentional complicity, will clean up.

The post Dystopian Killing Fields and Starvation in Gaza first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

Debunking Israeli Propaganda in Times of Genocide

Paul de Rooij — Sat, 26 Jul 2025 15:02:39 +0000

We live in interesting but brutal times. It is evident that myths are biting the dust with long held narratives dissolving when exposed to the harsh and bloody reality. Nowhere is this more evident than with all the myths that propped up Israel for many decades. Israel was portrayed as a fragile yet resilient little country living in a “bad neighbourhood.” But now, given Israel’s incessant wars, much of this mythology is being jettisoned; it is no longer needed when arrogance, hubris and sadism drive the Israeli ethos. The image of the little David is giving way to a vengeful genocidal creature infused with a dash of the Old Testament….

Below is a discussion of some of the collapsing myths. Myths are built on narratives which in turn are built on descriptive words. Much of the discussion centres around clarifying the deceptive nature of words, which in turn will expose the false narratives.

Rabble really

The army is venerated in Israel, and a lot of effort is put into glorifying the military; there are festivals with singers, balloons, and blue and white pom-poms galore.¹ American Jewish girls go giddy when meeting the tanned and smiling soldiers. Of course, if one glorifies the military, then all the units can only be “élite”; even the lowliest soldier is given a sergeant rank; and of course they must be “the most moral ” in the world. It is also known by its incongruous acronym: IDF.

Contrast the glamorous image of the Israeli military with its actions in Gaza, West Bank and beyond. Israeli snipers are targeting children – extra-points for pregnant women (you can even purchase a T-shirt with “one shot, two kills ” logo on it). Soldiers are cheering when blowing up hospitals, universities, mosques, schools,…. it is no secret, it is all visible in Telegram videos or on Al_Jazeera’s newscasts. To make matters worse, GHF, the so-called Israeli “humanitarian ” group, dispenses food and water in Gaza today in such a way as to concentrate refugees, and then target them.² Soldiers are looting everywhere, and even one unit has been set up with the express intention of looting areas they’ve conquered. Looting is tolerated throughout, and even made part of its tactics on the ground.³

The Israeli military is engaged in genocide and doesn’t hide the fact. Groups of soldiers engaged in ecstatic dancing chanting “death to the Amalek ” – a biblical term for the one to be killed en masse; including women and children.⁴ Early in October 2023, the Israeli military put a 95-year-old veteran of the infamous 1948 massacres on tour to lecture the soldiers. Dressed in a military uniform, he engaged in some motivational speeches: “Be triumphant and finish them off and don’t leave anyone behind. Erase the memory of them. Erase them, their families, mothers and children. These animals can no longer live.”⁵ The pronouncements made by the military official rabbis are even worse. And one cannot forget (former Minister of Defence) Yoav Gallant’s statement: “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.”⁶

The Israeli airforce regularly drops huge bombs in the middle of densely populated refugee camps. According to Euromed, the total number of bombs dropped on Gaza are equivalent to all the bombs dropped on several of the major cities during WWII. And in order not to waste bombs, Israeli warplanes which couldn’t drop their ordnance in Iran during the June 2025 attack were instructed to bomb Gaza. Israelis also never miss an opportunity to profit from such events; Israelis flock to the border area to sit on sofas to witness the bombing spectacle. These war tourists have to pay extra for a cappuccino.

Israeli sadism only escalates; everyday there must be a new turn of the screw – it is not satisfied with merely bombing or shooting civilians. The latest Israeli military order is that from now on Palestinians will not be allowed to bathe in the sea.⁷ Israeli snipers, warships… will target civilians entering the sea. One Telegram video shows a gleeful Israeli soldier using mortar bombs to target civilians sitting on a beach.

The Israeli military used to be well organised and soldiers operated on the basis of strict orders. Today, the ethical rot has set in at all levels. Officers and lower soldiers alike murder, steal, torture everywhere. Soldiers perpetrate heinous crimes in full camera view, yet the perpetrators expect full impunity.

Simply put: the Israeli military can no longer be referred to as an army, but it must be described for what it actually is: a criminal rabble.

Israeli way of war

Israelis like to say that they “live in a bad neighbourhood.” In fact, it is so bad that Israel has bombed most of its neighbouring countries numerous times and attempted to murder most of the leadership in those countries.⁸ “Decapitation strikes” are deemed a great success and yet another proof of the Israeli cunning and prowess. Another target are the potential or actual negotiators. The Israeli military has murdered several negotiators in Lebanon, Gaza, Tehran (Ismael Haniyeh), and during the June 2025 attack against Iran the lead negotiator with the Americans was also murdered. And then Israel declares “ceasefires ” that impose conditions on the victims, but Israel continues to murder and bomb – there have been over 1,000 violations of the so-called ceasefire in Lebanon. Drones and warplanes fly overhead without regard to any declared ceasefire. Maybe all this is not surprising given the official Israeli (especially Netanyahu’s) disdain for “peace” which is considered to be a dirty word; they prefer “conflict management.” Ceasefires are merely meant to provide time for the Israeli military to reorganise and then bomb and murder in their “business as usual” fashion.

The Israeli military’s brutality even gets pompous sounding names like the Dahiya Doctrine. This refers to the levelling of the Dahiya neighbourhood in Beirut 2006 – it is a disproportionate level of violence “in response” to Hezbollah daring to resist the Israeli attack. And of course, Israelis justify this by seeking to reestablish “deterrence” which is yet another fraudulent military concept.⁹ But then the Israeli military applies other fraudulent and morally reprehensible doctrines, e.g., the Hannibal directive. This directive orders the Israeli military to kill Israeli Jews who may have been captured by Palestinians or other enemies. Officials prefer to kill Israelis rather than to have them taken as hostages. In fact, about half of the Israeli civilians killed on 7 October 2023 were killed by the Israeli military.¹⁰

The Israeli military justifies its actions because it is “at war.” The resistance in Gaza has no tanks, airplanes, etc. Thus the best equipped army in the world is attacking a mostly defenceless population; maybe it is a bit of a stretch to call this a “war.” Norman Finkelstein, the great historian, once made the same point and suggested that the Israeli “mowing the lawn ” attacks should be referred to as “massacres.” That is a rather more accurate and succinct descriptor; in the current historical context “genocidal actions” is perhaps more accurate.

Squatters really

A mythology surrounding the early Israeli colonists became pervasive early on. The brave sun tanned pioneers were “making the desert bloom”¹¹ conveying the notion that they were just taking over empty and unproductive land. The word that went along with this myth was that the Jewish interlopers were “settlers ” – another rather neutral word that has no association with the native population they came to displace. For some time while communal living had romantic appeal, settlers lived in kibbutzim. Young Europeans would flock to experience this only to find out a less glamorous picture often involving corruption and sexual abuse.¹²

After the 1940s, the program of ethnic cleansing saw hundreds of Palestinian towns and villages razed to the ground or simply taken over. Many Israelis took over houses and even helped themselves to furniture, carpets, etc. The takeover of houses is an on-going project with zealot usurpers using advanced mapping technology to target houses, especially in East Jerusalem. While a Palestinian family is out of a house doing normal daily chores, they find upon their return that their house has been taken over, and it is impossible to eject the squatters because the police sides with the latter.

During the late 1960s and early 1970s saw a wave of land confiscation in the West Bank, and the building of “settlements ” on top of hills. The real zealots went to Al Khalil/Hebron to take over houses, hotels, and other buildings.¹³ They even set about closing off streets so they could go undisturbed to the Ibrahimi mosque which also had been usurped by the zealots. The zealots’ aim is to constantly steal houses, and to make the life of ordinary Palestinians intolerable.

Other settlements were built as suburbs of Jerusalem or as cities with all the amenities provided at subsidised rates. Purpose-built “apartheid” roads connected these developments to the main Israeli cities, but also were meant to sever the links between Palestinian communities. And although the residents of such places are portrayed as mere suburbanites, they often clash with Palestinians when they seek to annex more land. Although annexation is such a neutral word, it hides the violence dispensed by the suburbanites to achieve their aims. The Jews recently arrived from Venezuela sought to expand the borders of their development and requested the zealots to do the dirty violent work.¹⁴ The condition for this assistance was that new arrivals would also participate in the violent eviction and usurpation of the neighbouring Palestinian land. Even the “suburbanites ” participate in violence; the soldiers are on standby to protect the usurpers.

It is important to avoid propaganda-tainted language, and to use words that clearly describe a reality and associated power relationships. For this reason many words cry out for an alternative description. The word “settler” demands a more accurate substitution, and the word “squatter” would certainly be a more suitable and accurate descriptor. It is time to stop calling the armed violent young men who harass and brutalise Palestinians in the West Bank “settlers”!

Where has “proper” gone?

Israel always has been a country with flexible and expanding borders. Yet, when it suited them, they would make a distinction between “Israel proper” and the occupied areas. The implication was that there could be negotiations regarding the occupied areas, there couldn’t possibly be negotiations about anything in Israel proper – this was conceded land, and there was nothing to talk about. And the “proper” areas expanded! After the wars of 1948, 1967, 2006… the borders of Israel “proper” expanded to incorporate newly stolen land.¹⁵ What the current batch of wars have revealed is that there is no more talk about “Israel proper”, and the reason for that is that Israel is expanding at present – stealing land in Lebanon, Syria, Gaza and the West Bank. While the borders keep expanding, the “proper” hasn’t incorporated the newly usurped land.

A feature of the “Israel proper” concept is that Israel desires to have buffer zones or no-man’s land between its “recognised” borders and its neighbours. But the buffer zones have to be on Lebanese or Syrian soil; the buffer is never on the Israeli side. The Israeli military has created a no-man’s land on the border with Gaza, but all the bulldozed land and acreage sprayed with herbicide is on the Palestinian side of the military-imposed border. And if the UN feels that it needs to conduct some face-saving military patrols, then the UN can defend Israel by sitting in the Lebanese “buffer zone”; UNIFIL shouldn’t even dream of sitting right on the border or having its soldiers cross into Israel for some R&R.

Never again?

All western societies have been indoctrinated with holocaust mythology; one constant refrain has been “never again”. Fair enough. But if any lessons were learnt then this slogan should apply to all; it should read Never again for Everybody. The Gazan population certainly should not be the victim of genocide today – yet there is no doubt that that is exactly what is going on. A brief perusal of the so-called “holocaust studies centres” around the world reveal that they have been silent during this period – they are immersed in studying the 1940s; there seem to be no lessons for the current situation. One such centre features a large “Find memory; Find humanity” slogan on its website, yet (July 2025) has absolutely nothing to say about the genocide in Gaza. It is all about selective memory and humanity.

Pogroms were violent attacks against a religious or ethnic group in the Russian Empire and usually depicted as criminal in nature. Yet today young armed Israeli Jews regularly invade Palestinian villages and towns and brutalise or murder the native population. If violence was deemed intolerable in the past, then why the silence about the ongoing pogroms in the West Bank today?

Careful what you wish for

Several so-called influencers, the contemptible creatures appearing on TikTok/Instagram, etc., called for genocide in Gaza. One of the influencers went so far as to state that if there were a button to get rid of all the Palestinians, he would press the button.¹⁶The calls for genocide are also commonly found at the podium of the Knesset. The wife of an Israeli soldier, hysterically shouted from podium not to let the sacrifice of her husband’s effort (having to work overtime) be wasted, and thus “don’t stop before…” the Israeli army exterminates all Palestinians.¹⁷

Israeli society is rather warped, and it is constantly polled about all sorts of unusual issues. One of the recent questions was “are Palestinian children in Gaza innocent?” 75% of the respondents said “no.” In one motivational speech given to the soldiers about to invade Gaza, a high ranking officer also stated “the children are not innocent” – this follows Deuteronomy’s edict to kill the women and the children.

After the first hearing about Gaza was held at the ICJ (26 January 2024) at a demonstration in London, dozens of counter-demonstrators wearing Israeli flag capes were chanting “no ceasefire.” By this time several hospitals and universities had already been destroyed. Is this what the counter-demonstrators wished to continue?

Maybe a thought experiment will demonstrate the extreme hypocrisy of these influencers and counter-demonstrators. Imagine that a Palestinian influencer were to ask for a button get rid of all Israeli Jews, or that a Palestinian politician were to utter a similar statement. What do you think the reaction would be? The ultimate hypocrisy is for Jews who bow to the mere mention of the holocaust to call for genocide against Palestinians.

While the London police did nothing to suppress the counter-demonstrators yelling support for the genocide, they do actively suppress pro-Palestinian statements against the genocide! In a recent video, the police in Scotland are even tearing down Palestinian flags.¹⁸ And in the US, Trump is actually suppressing all protests and commentary against Israeli brutality by labelling it as antisemitism.

My holy vs. your holy

About one thousand mosques and several churches have been obliterated since 2023.¹⁹ Some of the mosques/churches were centuries old and could be deemed cultural heritage sites – of course, they didn’t receive a UNESCO label because Israel blocked such designations.²⁰ The media tends to ignore the destruction of mosques or refers to Israeli justifications for their destruction. The few christian churches bombed in Gaza did elicit mention, and after the bombing of a Catholic church even Pope Leo XIV stated that “he was deeply saddened…” by the loss of life.²¹ What makes the Pope’s comment memorable is the fact that he didn’t mention that it was Israel that bombed the church. Anonymous bombs just seem to fall out of the sky.

While the intentional destruction of Palestinian holy sites or mosques doesn’t seem to merit any mention, when a synagogue is damaged this elicits a major outcry. But to highlight the double standard, the establishment of a synagogue, or purportedly finding a reference to a Tomb or mere place of sojourn by a well known rabbi, then Israeli Jews consider this to be a claim to the land. Thus an enterprising religious scholar found a reference to a Tomb of Rabbi Ashi in Lebanon, then this became a land claim.²² Israelis grab any justification to steal yet more land however flimsy the claim to the land may be.

Mind their comfort please

The many wars that Israel has waged recently have outraged many around the world giving rise to demonstrations and the like. Yet, the frequent media concern is with the “comfort ” of Jews witnessing the demonstrations! Although Israel is conducting a genocide, Jews should feel comfortable and not reminded of sordid events. Even a bake sale meant to raise funds for Gaza was deemed to interfere with Jewish comfort.²³ Did white South Africans living in Europe object to anti-apartheid demonstrations on the basis that it made them feel uncomfortable? Fat chance! However, in the current context several governments have appointed “anti-semitism ambassadors ” who will work to ban demonstrations or manifestations of support for the Palestinians. Maybe a case can be made that supporters of the Israeli genocide in Gaza or the unprovoked attack against Iran should be made to feel uncomfortable.

Western values and Israel

Much is made of “western values” purportedly freedom of speech, association, respect for the rule of law, and respecting immigrants. These values are what makes Europe a “garden” and everywhere else a “jungle.”²⁴ These values have also been used to justify the continued EU assistance to Ukraine, and thus war. Russia has invariably been castigated for not observing “western norms.” But, when it comes to genocidal Israel and its violent tendencies, the same insufferable politicians are silent or connive to send weapons and assistance to Israel.

Europe is meant to absorb huge migrant flows, yet Israel imposes a discriminatory migrant policy – only Jews need to apply. Israel’s incessant wars are creating migrant flows that inevitably end in Europe, and no European official seems willing to point this out. What we witness instead is that European officials travel to Egypt to offer enticements for Egypt to absorb Palestinian refugees; a few years ago the same gang offered several billion Euros to Erdogan to reduce the Syrian and Iraqi migrant flows.

Myopic history

Reading the mainstream media one would get the impression that Palestinian history started on 7 October 2023. Everything before that doesn’t seem to merit mentioning. All the “mowing the lawn” military operations aren’t a thing of the past, they are in a memory hole. The Goldstone report documenting the mass crimes committed in 2009 is also in the memory hole. Of course, it is too much to expect the mainstream media to even mention relevant history that goes back a few more years. The media don’t report on the caged nature of Gaza, surrounded by razor wire and watchtowers. And as Dov Weissglas, the advisor to Ariel Sharon, stated the residents of Gaza would be kept “on a diet” – that is, Israeli bureaucrats would calculate the minimum caloric intake needed to survive, and they would allow just this amount of aid to trickle into Gaza.

Watch our words!

While it is important to use accurate words to describe Israeli state policy, it is also important for pro-Palestinian activists to change the words they use to refer to the current reality. One finds that the word “occupation” is used often to describe the Israeli military, and even to the extent that it is used as a synonym. Similarly, the “apartheid” descriptor is used without much reflection, e.g., apartheid wall, apartheid roads, etc. Both occupation and apartheid indicate a co-existence with the native population. Apartheid meant coexisting economically, but living separately – there was an interaction between blacks and whites. The word occupation suggests that it is temporary, and that interaction is possible. But the genocide in Gaza indicates that Israel prefers erasing the Palestinians, and that way ending the occupation. The three strategists drawing up the path of the wall built in the West Bank were explicit about the temporary nature of the structure. It would remain in place to control the Palestinian population, but they foresaw that the wall will be removed once the Palestinian population has been expelled.

There is another problem with the word “apartheid.” While much effort was placed to declare that Israel was guilty of the “crime of apartheid,” it only referred to the “occupied territories.” The third class status of Palestinians living in Israel was unmentionable to those drawing up the legal case. Apartheid was deemed a crime on one side of the line, but just fine on the other side (in “Israel proper”).

Worse than 1960s apartheid in South Africa

The so-called West slowly adopted some sanctions and divestment of South Africa beginning in the 1970s; the public had engaged in some form of boycott of South African products before that. Ronnie Kasrils, the great anti-apartheid fighter and member of the African National Congress, stated that the situation now for the Palestinians is worse than that experienced by the black population at the height of the oppressive apartheid years. While Western countries grudgingly sanctioned and divested from South Africa, one wonders when will there be some official opposition to Israel’s genocidal actions.

Tough times for the propagandists

The Israelis and their supporters spent much effort painting Israel as a valiant little country trying to become a success story surrounded by hostile neighbours. Israelis were portrayed as pioneers thriving despite the odds. The propagandists working for Israel had appropriated victimhood, and justified Israel’s actions as “self defence.” Alas, all this mythology has been ruined because Israeli officialdom chose to wage wars, expel the native population, commit genocide in Gaza, attack Iran, attack Yemen, and steal yet more land from its neighbours. It requires more than lipstick to doll up this pig. Today Israeli propaganda relies on threats, and strong armed techniques to censor and muzzle dissent. Much of this is done by control over the media which seems to work in tandem with Israeli propagandists. Student protestors are threatened and even imprisoned; conscientious journalists are fired….

For all moral world citizens, the task is to oppose all the ghastly things Israel does every day, to reject their sorry justifications ( “self defence”); reject the portrayal of Israel’s proclaimed enemies (demonising Hamas, and the Palestinians in general); reject the portrayal of the Israeli military (why should anyone want to be an “ally” of this country?), reject Israel as a ethnocracy where rights and status are determined by whether or not one is Jewish (reject “Jewish democracy” if it excludes or discriminates against segment of the population; it is not much different from “white democracy” during South Africa’s apartheid years). In many ways, if one appeals to “western values”, the mantra often repeated by western officialdom, then one must also be willing to judge Israeli’s actions and institutions by the same standard. Just because Israel holds a gay pride parade doesn’t make them a beacon of shared values. Our opposition can start with acts as simple as challenging the manager of our local supermarket why they stock Israeli avocados and oranges; indeed, the boycott against apartheid in South Africa started by boycotting their oranges. But these are small steps when bolder action is needed – it is long overdue.

Notes:

The post Debunking Israeli Propaganda in Times of Genocide first appeared on Dissident Voice.

1 Erin Axelman and Sam Eilertsen’s Israelism shows this cultural phenomenon.

2 Nir Hasson, Yaniv Kubovich and Bar Peleg, “’It’s a Killing Field’: IDF Soldiers Ordered to Shoot Deliberately at Unarmed Gazans Waiting for Humanitarian Aid,” Haaretz, 27 June 2025.

3 MEE Staff, “Report reveals vast loot Israeli soldiers took from Gaza, Lebanon and Syria,” Middle East Eye, 28 February 2025. And Oren Ziv, “Rugs, cosmetics, motorbikes: Israeli soldiers are looting Gaza homes en masse,” +972 Magazine, 20 February 2024.

4 Evidence presented in January 2024 at the ICJ.

5 Rayhan Uddin, “Israel-Palestine war: Israeli veteran, 95, rallies troops to ‘erase’ Palestinian children”, Middle East Eye, 14 October 2023.

6 For a collection of genocidal statements made by Israeli officials or members of the Knesset see: “Specific Intent of Genocide: Statements made by Israeli officials indicating their clear intent to exterminate Palestinians in the Gaza Strip,” Euromed, 21 Oct 2024. A much longer list could be obtained by quoting influential rabbis in Israel.

7 Nagham Zbeedat, “’Are They Going to Ban the Air Next?’ | IDF Reiterates Ban on Gazans Entering the Sea, Last Remaining Source of Relief for Many Palestinians”, Haaretz, 13 July 2025.

8 At last count ten countries in the area had been bombed; the most recent ones are Iran and Yemen. Imagine if, say, Belgium, didn’t get along with its neighbours, and set about bombing them to the same extent – this would require bombing all of Europe.

9 The great scientist and organiser of Peace Studies programs, Anatol Rapoport, stated that the notion of deterrence is a sham because it fails due to a fallacy of composition (post hoc, propter ergo hoc). Deterrence is like the talisman effect. That is, a man was wearing a large talisman, and had this exchange with his friend:
“why are you wearing that talisman?”
“it is to keep the elephants at bay!”
“But I see no elephants.”
“You see, the talisman works!”

10 Yaniv Kubovich, “IDF Ordered Hannibal Directive on October 7 to Prevent Hamas Taking Soldiers Captive”, Haaretz, 7 July 2024. Subtitle: “there was crazy hysteria, and decisions started being made without verified information: Documents and testimonies obtained by Haaretz reveal the Hannibal operational order, which directs the use of force to prevent soldiers being taken into captivity, was employed at three army facilities infiltrated by Hamas, potentially endangering civilians as well.”

11 The “making the desert bloom” sham is wonderfully exposed in Michel Khleifi and Eyal Sivan’s “Route 181: Fragments of a Journey in Palestine-Israel”, 2003.

12 The late Israel Shahak exposed the kibbutz sham. He revealed in one of his lectures the exploitative nature of the kibbutz, the fact Palestinian labourers wouldn’t be hired, and the sexual harassment of the volunteers. Often the kibbutzim were built on stolen Palestinian land.

13 One should read about rabbi Moshe Levinger and his zealot followers to appreciate the level of brutality involved in stealing Palestinian land.

14 Article in Haaretz, but unfortunately the link to the article has expired.

15 When the Israel-Hezbollah 2006 war ended, Israeli engineering units moved the razor wire fences several hundred meters into Lebanese territory. A few days later a United Nations surveyor entered the coordinates of the fence to demarcate the newly UN approved border – it is called the Blue Line.

16 Here is one example, “Two Nice Jewish Boys” advocating for genocide in Gaza.

17 t.me/mintpress_news/7228

18 Craig Murray, “The Big Chill,” Craig Murray’s website, 17 July 2025. View the video at the bottom of the article.

19 Indlieb Farazi Saber, “A ‘cultural genocide’: Which of Gaza’s heritage sites have been destroyed?”, Al Jazeera, 14 January 2024.

20 UNESCO members who vote for the heritage site designations must be UN-states, and since the Palestinians aren’t a state, they have no standing at the UNESCO deliberations. There have been appeals to include the Church of the Nativity, Al Aqsa mosque, and a few others, but they all were blocked by the Israelis. Source: UNESCO official talking at SOAS, a university in London.

21 Ayah El-Khaldi, “Pope Leo under fire for ‘vague’ statement on Israel’s bombing of Gaza Catholic church”, Middle East Eye, 18 July 2025.

22 “Israeli settlers storm purported rabbi’s shrine in Lebanon”, Middle East Eye, 7 March 2025.

23 James Crisp, Bake sales for Gaza could stoke Jew hatred, EU warns
Fundraisers for Gaza make ‘Jews feel uncomfortable’, says Europe’s anti-Semitism tsar, 14 July 2025.

24 Just to borrow from a statement made by Josep Borrell, the former Foreign Minister of the EU.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul de Rooij.

Did Israel attempt to sabotage the Gaza Freedom Flotilla?

Democracy Now! — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 18:58:28 +0000

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

CPJ, 35 others urge Israel to allow free movement of journalists in and out of Gaza

CPJ Staff — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 16:19:12 +0000

CPJ joined 35 members of the International News Safety Institute in a July 25 letter calling for Israel to respect the freedom of movement of journalists.

The joint letter called for Israeli authorities to allow Gazan journalists and their families – many of whom, like the rest of the population, are starving and facing extraordinary challenges to their health and ability to report – to leave Gaza, and allow other journalists to enter Gaza to continue their work. Nearly two years into the war, no international journalists have independently been able to access Gaza.

“Protecting those who report from conflict is a duty shared by all,” the letter said. “Our local journalists have done their jobs with unimaginable resilience and bravery. Letting them leave Gaza if they wish to do so and allowing others in to offer respite and continue their work is a humanitarian obligation we cannot ignore.”

Read the full letter here.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

The Civilized World Must Act Immediately over Mass Starvation in Gaza

Gideon Polya — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 13:32:38 +0000

Over 23 horrific months the people of Gaza (47% children before the present Gaza Massacre) have suffered bombing, shooting, burying under rubble, near-total devastation of homes and infrastructure, and substantial deprivation from water, food, shelter, fuel, electricity, medicine, and medical care. The mass murder of 680,000 Gazans by violence and imposed deprivation has now transmuted to man-made famine and mass starvation that has galvanized the global conscience.

As estimated from data published by a succession of expert epidemiologists in the leading medical journal The Lancet, 136,000 Gazans died violently by 25 April 2025 with a “conservatively estimated” 4 times that number (544,000) dying from imposed deprivation for a shocking total of 680,000 deaths that is under-reported 10 fold by Western Mainstream media. In impoverished countries about 70% of avoidable deaths from deprivation are those of under-5 year old infants (see Gideon Polya, “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950” that includes an avoidable mortality-related history of every country). It is estimated that the 680,000 dead Gazans (28% of the pre-war Gaza population of 2.4 million) included 380,000 under-5 year old infants, 479,000 children in total, 63,000 women and 138,000 men (Gideon Polya, “Gaza Genocide By Numbers: Apply BDS Over 0.7 Million Gaza Deaths From Violence And Imposed Deprivation”, 4 July 2025 ).

Now the surviving Gazans are suffering man-made famine and mass starvation while the world looks on. This crime has been perpetrated many times in history, notably in the “forgotten” WW2 Bengali Holocaust (WW2 Indian Holocaust, WW2 Bengal Famine; 6-7 million Indians deliberately starved to death in 1942-1945 for strategic reasons in Bengal, Bihar, Assam and Odisha by the British under fervent Zionist Winston Churchill with food-denying Australian complicity) (for details of this and some 70 other genocide and holocaust atrocities see Gideon Polya, “Jane Austen and the Black Hole of British History. Colonial rapacity, holocaust denial & the crisis in biological sustainability”).

The World’s major powers must (a) order Apartheid Israel to immediately leave the Occupied Palestinian Territories (as demanded by the International Court of Justice), (b) immediately provide life-sustaining food and medical services to Gaza (as demanded of any Occupier for its Occupied Subjects “to the fullest extent of the means available to it” by Articles 55 and 56 of the Fourth Geneva Convention), and (c) immediately impose rigorous Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Apartheid Israel and all its racist supporters, notably the US and neo-Nazi Germany, until reparations and war crimes trials are delivered.

28 countries (all European except for Japan) have issued a statement demanding aid to Gaza, an immediate end to the killing and condemning the Zionist Israeli-imposed killing, deprivation, starving and ethnic cleansing of Gaza and Palestine. Words are cheap but something is better than nothing. Of these 28 countries (Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Cyprus, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the UK) only 9 actually recognize the State of Palestine (Cyprus, Iceland, Ireland, Malta, Norway, Poland, Sweden, Slovenia, and Spain). France will recognize Palestine at the September UN General Assembly.

Notably absent from this list of 28 concerned countries were the Zionist-perverted and fervently pro-Apartheid Israel US, neo-Nazi Germany and the perpetrator, nuclear terrorist and genocidally racist Apartheid Israel itself. The US has supplied most of Israel’s weaponry, supplied the bombs and bullets that have killed 28% of Gaza’s pre-war population, and vetoed any action by the UN Security Council. Neo-Nazi Germany has supplied 30% of Israel’s weapons imports and like the US, the UK and Australia has a rotten record of persecuting humanitarians demanding human rights for Palestinians.

Australia is second only to the US as a fervent supporter of Apartheid Israel and is complicit in the Gaza Genocide in 20 ways and lies for Apartheid Israel in 35 ways but has merely applied sanctions against 2 far-right Israeli extremist politicians – something is better than nothing. The Zionist-perverted and fervently pro-Apartheid Israel US, UK, German and Australian Governments assiduously refrained from criticizing Apartheid Israel for the nearly 2 years of the Gaza Massacre and actively sought to hide the horrors of the Gaza Genocide by hysterical and false campaigns alleging “antisemitism” by anti-racist Jewish and non-Jewish humanitarians demanding equal and full human rights for the sorely oppressed Palestinians.

Australians are repeatedly told by Zionists and the fervently pro-Zionist Australian Labor Government and Coalition Opposition that there has been an asserted increase in “antisemitism” in Australia. A Jewish Zionist “Antisemitism Envoy” and a Christian Egyptian Australian “Islamophobia Envoy” were appointed to inform the government. Antisemitism occurs in 2 equally repugnant forms, anti-Jewish anti-Semitism and anti-Arab anti-Semitism (including Islamophobia) but these 3 key terms (and indeed about 80 related terms) were not mentioned in the recently released “[Antisemitism] Special Envoy’s plan to combat antisemitism” sent to the Australian Government.

I individually addressed the following Letter to major Mainstream Australian media under the Subject heading “Aussie anti-Jewish anti-Semitism against anti-racist Jews” and copied it to all Federal and Victorian State MPs (however, it was not published and the Silence has been Deafening in Australia):

Dear Editor,

For 3 decades I have been researching “deaths from violence and imposed deprivation” of subjugated peoples in the global South due to European-imposed war and hegemony, with the findings reported in a thousand huge and exhaustively referenced articles and 9 huge books (this including massively updating editions). However Google the phrase “deaths from violence and imposed deprivation” and you will find that the West simply doesn’t want to know, even though UN demographic data show that 1,500 million people have died avoidably from deprivation since 1950, 70% of them under-5 infants.

Data published by expert epidemiologists in the leading medical journal The Lancet indicate that 136,000 Gazans died violently by 25 April 2025 with a “conservatively estimated” 4 times that number (544,000) dying from imposed deprivation for a shocking total of 680,000 deaths. In Australia (as well as the US and UK) this carnage has been under-counted by a factor of 10 and deliberately masked by a massive “antisemitism hysteria” campaign that now threatens a McCarthyist curb on free speech in Australia. Also ignored by Mainstream Australian media and politicians are 30 ways Aussie anti-Jewish anti-Semitism against anti-racist Jews (anti-Zionist Jews) is entrenched in Zionist-perverted Australia (cc Mps).

Yours sincerely, Dr Gideon Polya

The post The Civilized World Must Act Immediately over Mass Starvation in Gaza first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Gideon Polya.

Israel is changing the legal system governing the West Bank to accelerate annexation: report

Jeff Wright — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 17:33:43 +0000

This story originally appeared in Mondoweiss on July 24, 2025. It is shared here with permission.

Israel is accelerating its efforts to cement its permanent control over the West Bank through a number of sweeping legal and institutional changes, according to a new report from Adalah, The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel.

The 87-page report, Legal Structures of Distinction, Separation, and Territorial Domination, describes the ways in which the Netanyahu government is rapidly building on a long-standing legal matrix that further threatens Palestinians’ right to self-determination.

“These developments are not something new to us,” Dr. Suhad Bishara, Legal Director of Adalah and lead author of the report, told Mondoweiss. “All eyes are on Gaza, justifiably so,” she said. “However… it is important to highlight the intensity of the structural changes that have taken place since the current government took over in December 2022.”

“What is happening in the West Bank is dangerously fast-forwarding annexation policies in a blatant violation of international law,” Bishara said. “Israel is intensifying measures to change the status of the West Bank, the status of many Palestinians living in Area C who are subject to intensified displacement induced by settler violence and Israeli policies.” She said, “This is in addition to settler expansion and further restrictions on Palestinian development in the area.”

Thoroughly researched and footnoted, the report documents how the current extremist government has built on what Adalah describes as “foundational mechanisms through which Israel has entrenched a land regime that facilitates territorial domination and racial segregation.”

Area C comprises over 60 percent of the West Bank, and is under full Israeli military control.

Here are the mechanisms of territorial domination Adalah examines in these areas.

Civilian governance for Israeli settlers; military rule over Palestinians

Beginning in the late 1970s, Israel abandoned its security-based justifications for approving settlements and adopted a policy based on civil, not military grounds. The report describes how, soon after, the Civil Administration — the Israeli body governing the West Bank — was established to formalize the division between military and civilian affairs.

As a result, “Israel has steadily transferred governance over Israeli settlers in the West Bank from military to civilian control, entrenching permanent territorial dominance and greatly expanding the settlement enterprise,” according to the report.

Most recently, structural reforms — such as the appointment of Bezalel Smotrich to serve as both Finance Minister and a Minister in the Defense Ministry — have resulted in increasing legal authority for the pro-settler civil servants working with Smotrich in the West Bank. These reforms have cemented the two distinct legal structures that govern life in Palestinian villages and Israeli settlements: the former, in which the military rules, and the latter, administered according to Israeli law.

1. Administration by local authorities

Adalah’s report dives into the weeds as it describes one of the more concerning mechanisms that reveals Israel’s intent to annex the whole of the West Bank. Having transitioned the settlements from military administration to civilian rule — and having handed over significant legal and administrative decision-making to pro-settler civil servants — Israel can argue that the settlements operate now under Israeli sovereignty. But applying Israeli law in occupied territory, Adalah maintains, is a violation of international human rights law and constitutes “a measure of de facto annexation.”

2. Financial incentives for settlements

Readers of the report won’t be surprised to learn that, as Adalah writes, “Israeli settlements receive extensive financial benefits through direct government subsidies, preferential policies, and financial incentives… [covering] multiple sectors, including land allocation, housing, infrastructure, and agriculture.”

Still, it is remarkable—as documented in the Adalah report—how in contravention of international law, Israel continues each year to pour billions of shekels into the development of settlements in the West Bank. Readers of the report will learn of “the legal mechanisms behind these incentives and how Israeli law facilitates their distribution.”

3. Declaring State land

According to Adalah, Israel’s designation of State Land in the West Bank is “the primary legal mechanism through which Israeli authorities have taken possession of Palestinian land since the late 1970s.” Those already familiar with Israel’s use of this means of de facto annexation will be surprised by the extraordinary amount of Palestinian land so designated. The report includes information obtained by Peace Now through a Freedom of Information Act request that shows a shocking fact: in under a one-year period, Israel has designated more Palestinian land as State Land than it had in an 18-year period.

From 1998 to 2016, just over 21,000 dunams were declared as State Land. But in just over nine months (from the end of February 2024 through early December 2024), over 24,200 dunams were declared as State Land. This acceleration is historically unprecedented.

The planning system in Area C

Adalah includes an entire section on the legal and structural framework in place in Area C to further expand Israel’s settlement project, fulfilling one of the Netanyahu government’s guiding principles shared the day before his swearing-in as Prime Minister in December 2022: “The Jewish people have an exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of the Land of Israel,” promising to expand settlements throughout “Judea and Samaria,” the Israeli term for the occupied West Bank.

Paralleling the judgments of the ICJ, UN experts, and international, Palestinian, and Israeli human rights groups, the report ends by listing the five international crimes that Adalah finds Israel guilt of: violations of International Humanitarian Law; the deepening of the illegal mechanism of de facto annexation; the denial of Palestinian people’s right to self-determination; the deepening of the apartheid system in the occupied Palestinian territory; and the commission of war crimes and crimes of aggression on the part of Israel.

The most recent newsletter from Ir Amim, an Israeli NGO, describes Israel’s expanding control over illegally annexed East Jerusalem. Asked to comment, Tess Miller, Public Outreach staff at Ir Amim (“City of Nations” or “City of Peoples” in Hebrew) told Mondoweiss that “the mechanisms of displacement that we monitor and advocate against within Jerusalem are not separate from the mechanisms seen today in Gaza and the West Bank.”

“What we are witnessing,” Miller said, “time after time, place after place, is violent control granted to those willing to advance the state’s agenda of expanding Jewish presence and diminishing Palestinian presence.” Ir Amim’s newsletter documents home demolitions, evictions, and starkly discriminatory housing and land confiscation policies.

“Together,” Miller said, “they all contribute to the accelerating erasure of the Palestinian people from their own cities, neighborhoods, and lands — enabled by the complicity of an increasingly radicalized Israeli public and the international community’s persistent refusal to take meaningful action.”

According to Adalah’s Dr. Bishara, it is hoped that the Adalah report, read by advocates for Palestinian rights, stakeholders, and states alike, “will generate international pressure against these long-term changes in the West Bank that violate international law and threaten the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination.”

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Jeff Wright.

How Not to Reform a University: Trump’s Harvard Obsession

Binoy Kampmark — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 13:00:41 +0000

The messy scrap between the Trump administration and Harvard University was always more than a touch bizarre. On June 4, President Donald Trump issued a proclamation claiming that the university was “no longer a trustworthy steward of international student and exchange visitor programs.” It had not pursued the Student Exchange Visa Program (SEVP) in good faith and with transparency, nor adhered “to the relevant regulatory frameworks.” The university had failed to furnish the government with sufficient information “to identify and address misconduct”, thereby presenting “an unacceptable risk to our Nation’s security”.

The nature of that misconduct lay in foreign students supposedly engaged in any number of scurrilous acts vaguely described as “known illegal activity”, “known dangerous and violent activity”, “known threats to other students or university personnel”, “known deprivation of rights of other classmates or university personnel”, and whether those activities “occurred on campus”. Harvard had failed to provide any useful data on the “disciplinary records” of such students. (The information on the three miscreants supplied in the lists was not just inadequate but useless.) Just to make Trump foam further, Harvard had “also developed extensive entanglements with foreign countries, including our adversaries” and flouted “the civil rights of students and faculty, triggering multiple Federal investigations.” While the proclamation avoids explicitly mentioning it, the throbbing subtext here is the caricatured concern that the university has not adequately addressed antisemitism.

In various splenetic statements, the President has made no secret of his views on the university. On Truth Social, we find him berating the institution for “hiring almost all woke, Radical left, idiots and ‘birdbrains’”. The university was also hectored through April by the multi-agency Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism to alter its governance processes, admissions and hiring policies, and academic programs. The administration demanded via an April 11 letter to Harvard’s president that a third party be hired to “audit” the views of students, faculty, and staff to satisfy government notions of “viewpoint diversity” that would also include the expulsion of specific students and the review of “faculty hires”. Extraordinarily, the administration demanded that the audit “proceed on a department-by-department, field-by-field, or teaching-unit-by-teaching-unit basis as appropriate.” Harvard’s refusal to accede to such demands led to a freezing of over $2.2 billion in federal funding.

On May 22, the Department of Homeland Security cancelled Harvard’s means of enrolling students through the SEVP program or employing J-1 non-immigrants under the Exchange Visitor Program (EVP). In its May 23 filing in the US District Court for Massachusetts, the university contended that such actions violated the First Amendment, the Due Process Clause, and the Administrative Procedure Act. They were “in clear retaliation for Harvard exercising its First Amendment rights to reject the government’s demands to control Harvard’s governance, curriculum, and the ‘ideology’ of its faculty and students.”

The June 4 proclamation proved to be another sledgehammer wielded by the executive, barring non-immigrants from pursuing “a course of study at Harvard University [under the SEVP program] or to participate in an exchange visitor program hosted by Harvard University”. The university successfully secured a temporary restraining order on June 5, preventing the revocation from taking effect. On June 23, US District Judge Allison D. Burroughs granted the university’s request for a preliminary injunction, extending the temporary order. “The case,” wrote Burroughs, “is about core constitutional rights that must be safeguarded: freedom of thought, freedom of expression, and freedom of speech, each of which is a pillar of a functioning democracy and an essential hedge against authoritarianism.” The “misplaced efforts” by the government “to control a reputable academic institution and squelch diverse viewpoints seemingly because they are, in some instances, opposed to this Administration’s own views, threaten these rights.”

On July 21, the parties again clashed, this time over the issue of restoring the funds frozen in federal research grants. Burroughs made no immediate decision on the matter but barely hid her scepticism about the government’s actions and inclinations. “If you can make decisions for reasons oriented around free speech,” she put to Justice Department senior attorney Michael Velchik, “the consequences are staggering to me.”

Harvard’s attorney Steve Lehotsky also argued that the demands of the government impaired the university’s autonomy, going beyond even that of dealing with antisemitism. These included audits of viewpoint diversity among faculty and students, as well as changes to the admissions and hiring processes. The demands constituted “a blatant, unrepentant violation of the First Amendment.” The issue of withdrawing funding was also argued to be a violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which requires an investigation, the holding of a hearing, and the release of findings before such a decision is made.

Velchik, very much in the mood for sophistry, made less of the antisemitism issue than that of contractual interpretation. Under government contracts with institutions, language always existed that permitted the withdrawal of funding at any time.

If Trump were serious about the MAGA brand, then attacking universities, notably those like Harvard, must count as an act of monumental self-harm. Such institutions are joined hip and all to the military-industrial-education complex, keeping America gorged with its complement of engineers, scientists, and imperial propagandists.

Harvard has also shown itself willing to march to the music of the Israel lobby, which happily provides funds for the institution. The extent of that influence was made clear by a decision by the university’s own Kennedy School to deny a fellowship to Kenneth Roth, the former head of Human Rights Watch, in early 2023. While the decision by the morally flabby dean, Douglas Elmendorf, was reversed following much outrage, the School had displayed its gaudy colours. Little wonder, given the presence of the Wexner Foundation, which is responsible for sponsoring the attendance of top-ranked Israeli generals and national security experts in a Master’s Degree program in public administration at the university.

Trump is partially right to claim that universities and their governance structures are in need of a severe dusting down. But he has shown no interest in identifying the actual problem. How wonderful, yet unlikely, it would be to see actual reforms in university policies that demilitarize funding in favor of an enlightened curriculum that abhors war.

The post How Not to Reform a University: Trump’s Harvard Obsession first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

Palestinians fight for survival is at the forefront of a worldwide struggle against global fascism: An interview with Prof. David Klein

Rick Sterling — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 12:00:42 +0000

Q: How long did you teach mathematics at Cal State University, Northridge?

DK: I was there for a little more than three decades. Before that, I taught at UCLA and USC, and before that at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. There, I got into some trouble. I was arrested for taking over a U.S. Senator’s office along with half a dozen Quakers in protest of weapons to the Nicaraguan Contras. I also had a little run-in with the Ku Klux Klan and was sued by right-wing Central American students for bringing in speakers they didn’t like. They sued me for “mental anguish”. Of course, the suit was thrown out of court, but it was a distraction. So, when I got the position at CSUN, I was very happy to get a permanent position there.

Q: So “mental anguish” …. that’s a recurring theme of the critics.

DK: Yes, it’s one of their tools. Claiming to feel bad about what we talk about.

Q: How did you become interested in Israel-Palestine?

DK: Well, it was kind of gradual. When I was a kid, I was very pro-Israel. And then in college, I started to have doubts and talked to more people. And the more I learned, the more obvious it was that this was a settler colonial state that was engaged in pretty much what the United States did to the Native Americans. And then there was a real spike in my understanding and activity with the 2009 “Cast Lead” assault on Gaza by Israel. That really increased my activism. It was just a new level of outrage that I and many people felt.

Q: I understand you didn’t talk about politics in your mathematics classes, but that you were otherwise active. What did you do, and what attacks or censorship did you experience?

DK: That’s right. I was careful not to bring it up in my classes since it didn’t really have direct relevance. But I was the faculty advisor for Students for Justice in Palestine and for the Student Green Party and a few other student groups. So, I created a webpage, a BDS resource webpage on the university server from my faculty webpage. Then, I wrote an open letter that was signed by many CSU faculty, administrators, and students to the chancellor of the entire CSU system, demanding that CSU end the study abroad program in Israel for a variety of reasons.

That got some news coverage and brought a lot of attention to my website. So, that was the start of a lot of attacks.

There were hundreds of calls to my university president that I be fired. There were some threats, some kind of death threats. There were some threats to the administration to withhold financial contributions. There was just lots of slander. Some of it came from the campus itself, but it was mostly outside from the Zionist Organization of America, a group called AMCHA, and other groups. And then there were some politicians who joined in the attacks. The local congressman, Brad Sherman, and a California assembly member, Bob Blumenfield, who later became a city council member.

An Israeli-supported law firm pressured then Attorney General Kamala Harris to prosecute me. And they separately asked the Los Angeles City attorney to do that. But those requests came to nothing. Still, I was required to produce massive amounts of emails, anything regarding Israel-Palestine, and regarding logistical planning to bring in guest speakers Ilan Pappe and Norman Finkelstein. These threats and demands went on and on for a long time. And on my website, I posted a page of the threats, the nasty comments, and the calls for my removal. They were signed by doctors and other professionals, but used really low-level language. The ugliness that it brought out was amazing.

Q: So you were part of organizing and hosting famous academics such as Norman Finkelstein and Ilan Pappe. How did those visits go, and what were the results?

DK: The Norman Finkelstein visit lasted a week. He gave three lectures, and there was a group of us who wanted to hire him at CSUN after he lost tenure at DePaul University. And so that included 30 faculty members from various departments, including the science departments and social studies, social science departments, and a wide range. And it was going well. We got the approval of a department that wanted to hire him, the journalism department, and it went up to the top, and we were all set to go. And then, at the last minute, it was vetoed by the campus president. Norman asked me to write an article about the whole thing, which I did.

The visit of Ilan Pappe came later in 2012. We had to have campus police escorts because of the threats. But he was very persuasive and compelling. Both of these guests were. The students were very engaged and it went well.

Q: I know that there was a big campaign to prevent the tour by Ilan Pappe, but ultimately, the presidents of several CSU universities defended his right to speak. Is that correct?

DK: Three of the campus presidents wrote a letter defending academic freedom. It was an open letter, but it went to the chancellor of the entire CSU system. The visits went smoothly logistically because of that. And it was pretty rare that campus presidents would stand up for academic freedom and freedom of speech for speakers like Ilan Pappe, who very strongly promotes Palestinian human rights.

Q: You’ve been an active supporter of the cultural and academic boycott of Israel. Why do you think this is important?

DK: It’s an important part of the general Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement. Academics and culture are very important within Israel. And so this particular aspect of BDS lends what we think is special leverage to isolate the Zionist state because of its actions. Israeli universities are deeply complicit in the persecution and genocide of Palestinians. Maya Wind’s new book, “Towers of Ivory and Steel”, documents that very clearly. Focusing on academics is very pertinent to what’s going on. And the cultural boycott has a very large impact. Everybody recognizes when a famous artist, a singer, or a musician refuses to go to Israel and states the reasons.

Q: But critics of Israel and supporters of BDS are under attack. Do you think the censorship and attacks are the same as in the past? Or is it getting worse?

DK: It’s getting much worse. The accusation of anti-semitism has been weaponized. Students, teachers, and professors are facing frivolous lawsuits. Students are facing expulsions. Faculty are facing job loss. Both are facing arrests and deportations for opposing genocide because it might hurt the feelings of the killers. Zionist students and outside advocates of genocide claim to feel unsafe because of demonstrations against Israel’s genocide. And they call human rights activists “anti-semitic”. Even the Jewish activists. And so it’s much more intense now than in the past. They were just sort of getting warmed up on people like me, and now they’ve really sharpened their knives.

Q: Do you have any strategy suggestions for campus activists who oppose the genocide happening in Gaza?

DK: Yes. I think we would do well to be less defensive and go on the offense. Pleading academic freedom and denying that we’re anti-semites is not really going very far. I think we need to move in the direction of accusing the accusers. Israeli soldiers are intentionally killing babies and children, shooting boys in their testicles, torturing doctors to death, and more broadly, carrying out the extermination of the entire Palestinian people. These are the worst of the worst. And we need to point to them, not just defend ourselves from their empty accusations.

By defining opposition to genocide as antisemitic, they’ve turned antisemitism into a virtue. Hitler could have only dreamed of this kind of linguistic transformation. And in this sense, the Zionists are the biggest antisemites on the planet. They’re the worst of humanity. So I think that the least vulnerable among us should take the lead, especially US-born tenured professors.

And we should focus on where the real power is. For K-12 schools, it is the school boards. But for almost all colleges and universities in the United States, whether they’re public or private, the board of trustees is the institution’s highest decision-making or governance body.

Members of the board are typically very rich. They have a lot of political power within the country, not just in universities. To give one example, Miriam Adelson is on the USC Board of Trustees. Miriam Adelson was married to the late Sheldon Adelson. He was a very rich billionaire. Both of them are rich billionaires. And Miriam Adelson’s Foundation contributes $200 million each year to Israel. And she was one of the biggest Trump donors as well. So, there are a lot of university trustees like that. They come from weapons manufacturers, the oil and gas industry, and other major corporations. And they’re overwhelmingly Zionist.

University presidents, who appear to be in charge of their campuses, serve at the pleasure of the boards and can be hired and fired at the whim of these boards of trustees. So the boards of trustees are the real power at universities. They are behind the persecution of opponents of genocide. The college presidents who do cave in to the Zionist censors should face no-confidence votes from their faculty senate on campus. But, there really hasn’t been enough focus on the boards of trustees. And I think that’s the next step. There are a number of people who are coming to the same conclusion on campuses and universities.

A lot of research would be involved to find out who these people are, what their background is, expose them to the public, and show what they’re doing, and try to get them kicked out. Replace them with decent human beings. It’s like you’re either for genocide or against it. If you don’t care, that doesn’t say much good about you. So being anti genocide is the minimal criterion for human decency. After all, if they’re going after and attacking people who are trying to stop a genocide, that makes them horrible human beings, and they shouldn’t be in charge of anything.

Q: Do you have any final comments?

DK: I think the importance of the Palestinians’ fight for survival can hardly be overstated. Their struggle is not only for themselves, but it’s at the forefront of a worldwide struggle against global fascism. And that includes the climate catastrophe, because global fascism can only accelerate planetary suicide.

David Klein is Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at California State University, Northridge (CSUN).

The post Palestinians fight for survival is at the forefront of a worldwide struggle against global fascism: An interview with Prof. David Klein first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Rick Sterling.

Israel waging ‘horror show’ starvation campaign in Gaza, says UN chief

APR editor — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 06:30:28 +0000

This is Democracy Now!. I’m Amy Goodman.

More than 100 humanitarian groups are demanding action to end Israel’s siege of Gaza, warning mass starvation is spreading across the Palestinian territory.

The NGOs, including Amnesty International, Oxfam, Doctors Without Borders, warn, “illnesses like acute watery diarrhea are spreading, markets are empty, waste is piling up, and adults are collapsing on the streets from hunger and dehydration.”

Their warning came as the Palestinian Ministry of Health said the number of starvation-related deaths has climbed to at least 111 people.

This is Ghada al-Fayoumi, a displaced Palestinian mother of seven in Gaza City.

GHADA AL-FAYOUMI: “[translated] My children wake up sick every day. What do I do? I get saline solution for them. What can I do?

“There’s no food, no bread, no drinks, no rice, no sugar, no cooking oil, no bulgur, nothing. There is no kind of any food available to us at all.”

AMY GOODMAN: Thousands of antiwar protesters marched on Tuesday in Tel Aviv outside Israel’s military headquarters, demanding an end to Israel’s assault and a lifting of the Gaza siege. This is Israeli peace activist Alon-Lee Green with the group Standing Together.

ALON-LEE GREEN: “We are marching now in Tel Aviv, holding bags of flour and the pictures of these children that have been starved to death by our government and our army.

“We demand to stop the starvation in Gaza. We demand to stop the annihilation of Gaza. We demand to stop the daily killing of children and innocent people in Gaza.

“This cannot go on. We are Israelis, and this does not serve us. This only serves the Messianic people that lead us.”

AMY GOODMAN: This comes as the World Health Organisation has released a video showing the Israeli military attacking WHO facilities in central Gaza’s Deir al-Balah. A WHO spokesperson condemned the attack, called for the immediate release of a staff member abducted by Israeli forces.

TARIK JAŠAREVIĆ: “Male staff and family members were handcuffed, stripped, interrogated on the spot and screened at gunpoint.

“Two WHO staff and two family members were detained.”

AMY GOODMAN: Meanwhile, health officials in Gaza say Israeli attacks over the past day killed more than 70 people, including five more people seeking food at militarised aid sites. Amid growing outrage worldwide, UN Secretary-General António Guterres said on Tuesday the situation in Gaza right now is a “horror show”.

UN SECRETARY-GENERAL ANTÓNIO GUTERRES: “We need look no further than the horror show in Gaza, with a level of death and destruction without parallel in recent times.

“Malnourishment is soaring. Starvation is knocking on every door.”

AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined by Michael Fakhri, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food. He is a professor of law at University of Oregon, where he leads the Food Resiliency Project.

Israel waging ‘fastest starvation campaign’ in modern history Video: Democracy Now!

Dr Michael Fakhri, welcome back to Democracy Now! If you can respond to what’s happening right now, the images of dying infants starving to death, the numbers now at over 100, people dropping in the streets, reporters saying they can’t go on?

Agence France-Presse’s union talked about they have had reporters killed in conflict, they have had reporters disappeared, injured, but they have not had this situation before with their reporters starving to death.

DR MICHAEL FAKHRI: Amy, the word “horror” — I mean, we’re running out of words of what to say. And the reason it’s horrific is it was preventable. We saw this coming. We’ve seen this coming for 20 months.

Israel announced its starvation campaign back in October 2023. And then again, Prime Minister Netanyahu announced on March 1 that nothing was to enter Gaza. And that’s what happened for 78 days. No food, no water, no fuel, no medicine entered Gaza.

And then they built these militarised aid sites that are used to humiliate, weaken and kill the Palestinians. So, what makes this horrific is it has been preventable, it was predictable. And again, this is the fastest famine we’ve seen, the fastest starvation campaign we’ve seen in modern history.

AMY GOODMAN: So, can you talk about what needs to be done at this point and the responsibility of the occupying power? Israel is occupying Gaza right now. What it means to have to protect the population it occupies?

DR FAKHRI: The International Court of Justice outlined Israel’s duties in its decisions over the last year. So, what Israel has an obligation to do is, first, end its illegal occupation immediately. This came from the court itself.

Second, it must allow humanitarian relief to enter with no restrictions. And this hasn’t been happening. So, usually, we would turn to the Security Council to authorise peacekeepers or something similar to assist.

But predictably, again, the United States keeps vetoing anything to do with a ceasefire. When the Security Council is in a deadlock because of a veto, the General Assembly, the UN General Assembly, has the authority to call for peacekeepers to accompany humanitarian convoys to enter into Gaza and to end Israel’s starvation campaign against the Palestinian people.

AMY GOODMAN: People actually protested outside the house of UN Secretary-General António Guterres yesterday. People protested all over the world yesterday against the Palestinians being starved and bombed to death. Those in front of the UN Secretary-General’s house said they don’t dispute that he has raised this issue almost every day, but they say he can do more.

Finally, Michael Fakhri, what does the UN need to do — the US, Israel, the world?

DR FAKHRI: So, as I mentioned, first and foremost, they can authorise peacekeepers to enter to stop the starvation. But, second, they need to create consequences.

The world has a duty to prevent this starvation. The world has a duty to prevent and end this genocide. And as a result, then, what the world can do is impose sanctions.

And again, this is supported by the International Court of Justice. The world needs to impose wide-scale sanctions against the state of Israel to force it to end the starvation and genocide of civilians, of Palestinian civilians in Gaza today.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you so much for being with us, Michael Fakhri, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, speaking to us from Eugene, Oregon.

Republished under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States Licence.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Chris Smalls: Sabotage attempts and death threats won’t stop Gaza Freedom Flotilla

Maximillian Alvarez — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 20:47:40 +0000

More than a hundred aid organizations warned Wednesday that “mass starvation” is spreading in Gaza, as Israel’s genocidal ethnic cleansing of Palestinians reaches an unspeakable turning point. As the crisis of humanity deepens, another Gaza Freedom Flotilla has set sail in the hopes of breaking Israel’s blockade and bringing life-saving supplies to the besieged Gaza Strip. Calling from the Handala ship while en route to Gaza, American labor organizer Chris Smalls, co-founder and former president of the Amazon Labor Union, speaks with TRNN editor-in-chief Maximillian Alvarez about the threats and sabotage attempts the Freedom Flotilla has already faced on its journey—and why that won’t deter the crew from their humanitarian mission.

Additional resources:

Chris Smalls X account and Instagram
Gaza Freedom Flotilla linktree
Ann Wright, Common Dreams, “Despite 2 sabotage attempts, the Gaza Flotilla Ship Handala sails onward”
Marium Ali, Al Jazeera, “Freedom Flotillas: A history of attempts to break Israel’s siege of Gaza”

Credits:

Studio Production: Maximillian Alvarez
Post-Production: David Hebden

Transcript

Yes, goddamnit, it’s genocide!: A conversation with Norman Solomon

Marc Steiner — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 20:03:11 +0000

“With only rare exceptions,” Norman Solomon writes, “US news media and members of Congress continue to dodge the reality of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, normalizing atrocities on a mass scale.” How did we end up in this Orwellian situation, where the reality of genocide is so thoroughly denied by pundits and politicians even as that genocide is unfolding in front of our eyes? How do we combat this level of inhumane violence and propaganda? Solomon, co-founder of Roots Action, joins The Marc Steiner Show for an urgent discussion about Israel’s manufactured genocide of Palestinians and how the media manufactures consent to, at best, hide and, at worst, justify Israel’s heinous actions.

Guests:

Norman Solomon is the cofounder of RootsAction.org, executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, and the author of numerous books, including War Made Easy: How Presidents & Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death and War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of the Military Machine.

Additional resources:

Norman Solomon, Common Dreams, “In too much of the US, Israel’s Gaza genocide has been made invisible”
Norman Solomon, Common Dreams, “Who’s afraid of Zohran Mamdani? Billionaires”
Norman Solomon, Common Dreams, “Bombing Iran Is part of the USA’s repetition compulsion for war, war, war”

Credits:

Producer: Rosette Sewali
Studio Production: David Hebden
Audio Post-Production: Stephen Frank

Transcript

CPJ: Israel is starving Gazan journalists into silence

CPJ Staff — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 16:38:11 +0000

New York, July 23, 2025—The Committee to Protect Journalists added its voice to Wednesday’s urgent appeal from more than 100 aid agencies to end to Israel’s starvation of journalists and other civilians in Gaza, as they called on states to “save lives before there are none left to save.”

“Israel is starving Gazan journalists into silence. They are not just reporters, they are frontline witnesses, abandoned as international media were pulled out and denied entry,” said CPJ Regional Director Sara Qudah. “The world must act now: protect them, feed them, and allow them to recover while other journalists step in to help report. Our response to their courageous 650 plus-days of war reporting cannot simply be to let them starve to death.”

On Tuesday, CPJ launched its Voices From Gaza video series of Palestinian journalists describing their challenges working in Gaza. In the first video, Moath al Kahlout said his cousin was shot dead while waiting for humanitarian aid.

As Israel partially eased its 11-week total blockade of Gaza in May, CPJ published the testimony of six journalists who described how starvation, dizziness, brain fog, and sickness threatened their ability to report.

Since then, more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, while trying to get food aid, the majority near sites where Israel and the United States’ controversial, militarized Gaza Humanitarian Foundation was delivering supplies.

‘Gaza is dying’

In recent days, numerous Palestinian journalists have spoken out about their desperation:

On June 20, Al Jazeera correspondent Anas Al Sharif posted online, “I am drowning in hunger, trembling in exhaustion, and resisting the fainting that follows me every moment… Gaza is dying. And we die with it.”

Sally Thabet, correspondent for Al-Kofiya satellite channel, told CPJ that she fainted consciousness after doing a live broadcast on July 20 because she had not eaten all day. She regained consciousness in Al-Shifa hospital, where doctors gave her an intravenous drip for rehydration and nutrition. In an online video, she described how she and her three daughters were starving.

Another Palestinian journalist, Shuruq As’ad said Thabet was the third journalist to collapse on air from starvation that week, and posted a photograph of Thabet with the drip in her hand.

A Palestinian woman carries a five-year-old child at Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis in April 2025. (Photo: Reuters/Hatem Khaled)

During a live broadcast on July 20, Al-Araby TV correspondent Saleh Al-Natour said,

“We have no choice but to write and speak; otherwise, we will all die. At some point, journalists will collapse too, and they will fall to the ground in front of you, in front of the cameras, and on air … Today, the feeling of fainting came again, and to prevent that from happening, I ate some sugar that I had been saving for a while.”

On July 21, CPJ International Press Freedom Awardee Shrouq Al Aila told CPJ that she was continuously losing weight due to lack of food and experiences severe weakness, fatigue, and dizziness.

On July 21, Agence France-Presse’s union said that the news agency’s 10 freelance journalists reporting from Gaza were all threatened by famine, gunfire, and disease. “Without immediate intervention, the last reporters in Gaza will die,” it said.

APF and France’s foreign minister later said that Jean-Noël Barrot later said that they hoped Israel would allow the journalists to be evacuated.

On July 22, a photo and video of Algerian state TV correspondent Wesam Abu Zaid taking part in a protest denouncing starvation of Gaza went viral online. Zaid held up a sign saying, “A hungry journalist reporting on hunger.”

“We have all suffered from weight loss, dizziness, and an inability to stand or walk as a result of not eating,” Zaid told CPJ, adding that it was hard for him to keep working.

On July 23, Al Jazeera Media Network called for an end to “this forced starvation that does not spare journalists who are the bearers of truth.”

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) told CPJ via email that, “Despite the false claims that are being spread, the State of Israel does not limit the number of humanitarian aid trucks entering the Gaza Strip.” It said that delays in the collection of aid from crossing points into Gaza by international aid organizations “harm the situation and the food security of Gaza’s residents.”

COGAT, the Israeli unit responsible for humanitarian initiatives, told CPJ via email that, “Despite Hamas’s false propaganda campaign, the IDF, through COGAT, continues to work in coordination with international actors to allow and facilitate the continued entry of humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip, in accordance with international law.”

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

Israel Waging “Fastest Starvation Campaign” in Modern History: U.N. Special Rapporteur on Food

Democracy Now! — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 15:55:06 +0000

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Trump’s Latin American Policies Go South

John Perry and Roger D. Harris — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 14:00:03 +0000

With the Trump imperium passing the half-year mark, the posture of the US empire is ever clearer. Whether animated by “America First” or globalism, the objective remains “full spectrum dominance.” And now with the neocon capture of the Democrats, there are no guardrails from the so-called opposition party.

Call it the “new cold war,” the “beginning of World War III,” or – in Trump’s words – “endless war,” this is the era that the world has entered. The US/Zionist war against Iran has paused, but no one has any illusions that it is over. And it won’t likely be resolved until one side decisively and totally prevails. Ditto for the proxy war with Russia in Ukraine. Likely the same with Palestine, where the barbarity of war worsened to genocide. Meanwhile, since Obama’s “pivot to Asia,” the empire is building up for war with China.

In Latin America and the Caribbean, the empire’s war on the world assumes a hybrid form. The carnage is less apparent because the weapons take the form of “soft power” – sanctions, tariffs, and deportations. These can have the same lethal consequences as bombs, only less overt.

Making the world unsafe for socialism

Some Western leftists vilify the defensive measures that Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua must take to protect themselves from the empire’s regime-change schemes. In contrast, Washington clearly understands that these countries pose “threats of a good example” to the empire. Each subsequent US president, from Obama on, has certified them as “extraordinary threats to US national security.” Accordingly, they are targeted with the harshest coercive measures.

In this war of attrition, historian Isaac Saney uses the example of Cuba to show how any misstep by the revolutionary government or societal deficiency is exaggerated and weaponized. The empire’s siege, he explains, is not merely an attempt to destabilize the economy but is a deliberate strategy of suffocation. The empire aims to instigate internal discontent, distort people’s perception of the government, and ultimately erode social gains.

While Cuba is affected the worst by the hybrid war, both Venezuela and Nicaragua have also been damaged. All three countries have seen the “humanitarian parole” for their migrants in the US come to an end. Temporary Protected Status (TPS) was also withdrawn for Venezuelans and Nicaraguans. The strain of returning migrants, along with cuts in the remittances they had sent (amounting to a quarter of Nicaragua’s GDP), further impacts their respective economies.

Higher-than-average tariffs are threatened on Venezuelan and Nicaraguan exports to the US, together with severe restrictions on Caracas’s oil exports. Meanwhile, the screws have been tightened on the six-decade US blockade of Cuba with disastrous humanitarian consequences.

However, all three countries are fighting back. They are forming new trade alliances with China and elsewhere. Providing relief to Cuba, Mexico has supplied oil, and China is installing solar panel farms to address the now-daily power outages. High levels of food security in Venezuela and Nicaragua have strengthened their ability to resist US sanctions, while Caracas successfully defeated one of Washington’s harshest migration measures by securing the release of 252 of its citizens who had been incarcerated in El Salvador’s torturous CECOT prison.

Venezuela’s US-backed far-right opposition is in disarray. The first Trump administration had recognized the “interim presidency” of Juan Guaidó, followed by the Biden administration declaring Edmundo González the winner of Venezuela’s last presidential election. But the current Trump administration has yet to back González, de facto recognizing Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

Nicaragua’s right-wing opposition is also reeling from a side-effect of Trump’s harsh treatment of migrants – many are returning voluntarily to a country claimed by the opposition to be “unsafe,” while US Homeland Security has even extolled their home country’s recent achievements. And some of Trump’s prominent Cuban-American supporters are now questioning his “maximum pressure” campaign for going too far.

Troubled waters for the Pink Tide

The current progressive wave, the so-called Pink Tide, was initiated by Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s landslide victory in 2018. His MORENA Party successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, won by an even greater margin in 2024. Mexico’s first woman president has proven to be perhaps the world’s most dignified and capable sparring partner with the buffoon in the White House, who has threatened tariffs, deportations, military interdictions, and more on his southern neighbor.

Left-leaning presidents Gabriel Boric in Chile and Gustavo Petro in Colombia are limited to a single term. Both have faced opposition-aligned legislatures and deep-rooted reactionary power blocs. Chilean Communist Party candidate Jeanette Jara is favored to advance to the second-round presidential election in November 2025, but will face a challenging final round if the right unifies, as is likely, around an extremist candidate.

As the first non-rightist in Colombia’s history, Petro has had a tumultuous presidential tenure. He credibly accuses his former foreign minister of colluding with the US to overthrow him. However, the presidency could well revert to the right in the May 2026 elections.

Boric, Petro, Uruguay’s Yamandú Orsi, and Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva met in July as the region’s center-left presidents, with an agenda of dealing with Trump, promoting multilateralism, and (we can assume) keeping their distance from the region’s more left-wing governments.

With shaky popularity ratings, Lula will likely run for reelection in October 2026. As head of the region’s largest economy, Lula plays a world leadership role, chairing three global summits in a year. Yet, with less than a majority legislative backing, Lula has triangulated between Washington and the Global South, often capitulating to US interests (as in his veto of BRICS membership for Nicaragua and Venezuela). Regardless, Trump is threatening Brazil with a crippling 50% export tariff and is blatantly interfering in the trial of former right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro, accused of insurrection. So far, Trump’s actions have backfired, arousing anger among Brazilians. Lula commented that Trump was “not elected to be emperor of the world.”

In 2021, Honduran President Xiomara Castro took over a narcostate subservient to Washington and has tried to push the envelope to the left. Being constitutionally restricted to one term, Castro hands the Libre party candidacy in November’s election to former defense minister Rixi Moncada, who faces a tough contest with persistent US interference.

Bolivia’s ruling Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) Party is embroiled in a self-destructive internal conflict between former President Evo Morales and his former protégé and current President, Luis Arce. The energized Bolivian right wing is spoiling for the August 17^th presidential election.

Israeli infiltration accompanies US military penetration

Analyst Joe Emersberger notes: “Today, all geopolitics relates back to Gaza where the imperial order has been unmasked like never before.” Defying Washington, the Hague Group met in Colombia for an emergency summit on Gaza to “take collective action grounded in international law.” On July 16, regional states – Bolivia, Cuba, Colombia, Nicaragua, and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines – endorsed the pledge to take measures in support of Palestine, with others likely to follow. Brazil will join South Africa’s ICJ complaint against Israel.

At the other end of the political spectrum are self-described “world’s coolest dictator” Nayib Bukele of El Salvador and confederates Javier Milei of Argentina and Daniel Noboa of Ecuador. As well as cozying up to Trump, they devotedly support Israel, which has been instrumental in enabling the most brutal reactionaries in the region. Noboa duly tells Israel’s Netanyahu that they “share the same enemies.”

In February, the US Southern Command warned: “Time is not on our side.” The perceived danger is “methodical incursion” into our “neighborhood” by both Russia and China. Indeed, China has become the region’s second-largest trading partner after the US, and even right-wing governments are reluctant to jeopardize their relations with Beijing. The empire’s solution is to “redouble our efforts to nest military engagement,” using humanitarian assistance as “an essential soft power tool.”

Picking up where Biden left off, Trump has furthered US military penetration, notably in Ecuador, Guyana, Brazil, Panama, and Argentina. The pandemic of narcotics trafficking, itself a product of US-induced demand, has been a Trojan Horse for militarist US intervention in Haiti, Ecuador, Peru, and threatened in Mexico.

In Panama, President José Mulino’s obeisance to Trump’s ambitions to control the Panama Canal and reduce China’s influence provoked massive protests. Trump’s collaboration in the genocide of Palestinians motivated Petro to declare that Colombia must leave the NATO alliance and keep its distance from “militaries that drop bombs on children.” Colombia had been collaborating with NATO since 2013 and became the only Latin American global partner in 2017.

Despite Trump’s bluster – what the Financial Times calls “imperial incontinence” – his administration has produced mixed results. While rightist political movements have basked in Trump’s fitful praise, his escalating coercion provokes resentment against Yankee influence. Resistance is growing, with new alliances bypassing Washington. As the empire’s grip tightens, so too does the resolve of those determined to break free from it.

The post Trump’s Latin American Policies Go South first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John Perry and Roger D. Harris.

Israel Waging “Fastest Starvation Campaign” in Modern History in Gaza: U.N. Special Rapporteur on Food

Democracy Now! — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 12:41:33 +0000

“The world needs to impose wide-scale sanctions against the state of Israel to force it to end the starvation and genocide of civilians.” More than 100 humanitarian organizations are demanding action to end Israel’s siege of Gaza, warning mass starvation is spreading across the Palestinian territory. Michael Fakhri, the U.N. special rapporteur on the right to food, says Israel’s 78-day-long extreme blockade of Gaza constitutes “the fastest starvation campaign we’ve seen in modern history.” Fakhri says the mass suffering has been both “preventable” and “predictable,” thanks to the impunity Israel has received from the international community, and calls on the United Nations to impose sanctions on Israel and ensure humanitarian aid delivery into Gaza.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Israel Settlers Stage Violent Assaults on Palestinian Oscar Winner’s Hometown

Sam Stein — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 05:00:00 +0000

Months after filmmaker Hamdan Ballal received an Academy Award for his work on ‘No Other Land,’ nearby Israeli settlers continue to terrorize the West Bank village of Susiya.

This content originally appeared on The Progressive — A voice for peace, social justice, and the common good and was authored by Sam Stein.

Israel Settlers Stage Violent Assaults on Palestinian Oscar Winner’s Hometown

Sam Stein — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 05:00:00 +0000

Months after filmmaker Hamdan Ballal received an Academy Award for his work on ‘No Other Land,’ nearby Israeli settlers continue to terrorize the West Bank village of Susiya.

This content originally appeared on The Progressive — A voice for peace, social justice, and the common good and was authored by Sam Stein.

How one Israeli company controls – and cuts off – Palestinians’ access to water in the West Bank

Qassam Muaddi — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 20:00:01 +0000

This story originally appeared in Mondoweiss on July 22, 2025. It is shared here with permission.

For 100 days, Palestinians in the occupied West Bank town of Idna have been surviving without running water. The town of some 40,000 inhabitants has been relying on rain reservoirs and water tanks sold by vendors. The town’s water crisis was provoked by the April decision of Israeli national water company Mekorot to reduce the daily provision of water to the Hebron governorate of the southern West Bank. The water supply shrank from 32,000 cubic meters to 26,000, which included completely shutting down Mekorot’s water line for Idna.

This water crisis isn’t new, and it isn’t limited to Idna. Every summer, multiple parts of the West Bank experience prolonged water cuts that can extend for up to a month, mainly due to the lack of water supply by Mekorot, which controls most of the water resources in Palestine.

In Idna, residents met in the municipality hall on Monday to discuss the crisis. The mayor of the town shared the Israeli company’s argument for cutting off their water: that some residents were “illegally stealing water.”

“The mayor said that it is not the municipality’s responsibility to look for those who steal water, but to provide water to residents, which is being made impossible,” Rami Nofal, a local journalist and resident of Idna, told Mondoweiss. “Every summer, we go through water cuts, and the argument that some individuals steal water from the main line is not an excuse to leave 40,000 people without water for three months,” he said.

The mayor went on to assure the crowd that the Palestinian Authority is trying to fix the crisis with Mekorot, but no news of a solution was forthcoming. “In Idna, like in the rest of the West Bank, we receive water on specific days of the week, and my neighborhood’s turn was in April, just a few days before the complete cut was scheduled,” Nofal went on. “I bought a water tank of 13 cubic meters for 180 shekels, and this is the water that my family and I are saving to survive on.”

Tanks of this sort dot the roofs of all buildings in the West Bank, as water shortages are chronic. “We have to watch for every instance of water consumption,” Nofal explained. “Every time my children open the faucet, I tell them to close it back as soon as they can. We economize while washing and even when flushing the toilet.”

Palestinian people with empty jerrycans wait in long queues to receive clean water amid the ongoing Israeli attacks in Khan Yunis, southern Gaza on September 08, 2024. Photo by Abed Rahim Khatib/Anadolu via Getty Images

How the water system works on the West Bank

Mekorot was established in the 1930s under the British Mandate. After the establishment of the State of Israel, the company was given the exclusive right to explore and exploit water in the country. After 1967, that included the lands of the West Bank and Gaza, which Israel occupied. Mekorot expanded its operations and was assigned to build the national carrier, a line of water pipes that transports water from the northern part of the country, around the West Bank through Israel’s 1948 proper, to the southern dry areas of the Naqab desert. A large part of this water used to feed the Jordan river before the construction of the carrier in the 1960s.

Ihab Sweiti, of the Palestinian water authority, told Mondoweiss that “natural water sources in Palestine are mostly underground, and they classify into four natural reservoirs; the eastern and western acquifers on both sides of the central hill country, the Jordan Valley Basin, and the coastal acquifer, which is the main water source for Israel and the Gaza Strip. The eastern and Jordan Valley reservoirs are mainly in the West Bank, and the western reservoir extends into Israel, too.”

“Since the occupation of 1967, Mekorot dug more wells in the West Bank, ending up controlling about 25 wells, which it uses to provide water to Israeli settlements and to sell water to many Palestinian municipalities, like Idna,” Sweiti continued.

“When the Mekorot company informed us that they were cutting the water supply from the west Hebron area, including Idna, they said that the reason was that there were too many illegal extensions made by Palestinians along the water line.”

Sweiti says that the Israeli company claims the stealing of water for the towns and villages in the area reduced the water share for the Israeli settlements. Sweiti admits that Palestinians make irregular extensions along Mekorot’s line, but the data belies the claim that the share of Israeli settlements has been reduced.

According to the Palestinian Hydrology Group, Palestinians consume an average of 70 liters of water per person per day, while Israelis consume 300. For Israeli settlers in the West Bank, however, the average rises to 800 liters per person a day.

According to the World Health Organization, the healthy average for daily water consumption is 100 to 120 liters per individual per day, which is far above the Palestinian average consumption rate and much further below the daily average consumption of Israeli settlers. According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics figures from March 2023, the individual water share of Israeli settlers in the West Bank compared to that of Palestinians is seven to one.

Under international law, both Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Israel’s exploitation of the West Bank’s water are illegal. The 4th Geneva Convention, which regulates cases of occupation, explicitly prohibits both the transfer of the citizens of the occupying power to the occupied territory and the exploitation of natural resources of the occupied territory unless it is to the benefit of the occupied population.

When the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993 between the PLO and Israel, water rights were classified as part of the strategic “final status” negotiations phase, along with Palestinian refugees, borders, the status of Jerusalem, and Israeli settlements. The final status negotiations were supposed to conclude in Camp David in the year 2000, but the accords collapsed. Since then, the administration of water distribution continues to take place according to the Oslo Accords’ provisional mechanism: vastly unequal distribution, and total Israeli control.

This mechanism is based on the formation of a joint committee in which Israeli and Palestinian water authorities regularly review and update the number of wells that Palestinians are allowed to dig or exploit and the quantity of water they can extract and distribute based on population growth.

This regular meeting of the joint committee is supposed to take place every few years. According to Ihab Sweiti, the last meeting happened in 2023, before the war on Gaza started. “We, the Palestinian Water Authority, had several new wells on the agenda that we wanted to get Israeli approval to dig and operate, and there were two other wells that had already received Israeli approval, including in the west of Hebron.”

Only technical discussions were left, Sweiti says, but the war on Gaza paralyzed everything. “It is all still pending.”

Palestinians, including children, carry water jerry cans from mobile tanks as families who fled their homes to live in Nasser Hospital due to the Israeli attacks continue in Khan Yunis, Gaza on November 12, 2023. Photo by Abed Zagout/Anadolu via Getty Images

‘People will literally go thirsty’

In Idna, even the irregular extraction of water by Palestinians was cut short by the Israeli army. “On Sunday, occupation forces raided the area outside Idna where the water line passes, dug the ground, and destroyed all the irregular extensions made by some Palestinians,” Rami Nofal noted. “ As a result, now even water tanks are no longer available. If this continues, in two weeks the crisis will get out of control.”

“People in Idna will literally go thirsty,” Nofal stressed.

Sweiti maintains that irregular extensions to the main line are a problem for Palestinians, not just Israeli settlements. “The water extracted, which is not accounted for, is eventually deducted from Palestinians’ share,” Sweiti says. “But the area where the line passes is located in Area C, where Israel doesn’t allow the Palestinian Authority to have any presence.”

This means that the Palestinian Authority has no powers to impose order or maintain water infrastructure for Palestinian communities, Sweiti explains.

“Cutting water off from an entire area or city is not a solution,” he says. “The solution is to allow us Palestinians to run our own water supply and have our own water sources.”

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Qassam Muaddi.

Impotent Effusions: The Joint Statement on Gaza

Binoy Kampmark — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 07:04:36 +0000

Impotence takes various forms. Before the daily massacres, incidents of starvation and dispossession of Palestinians taking place in the Gaza Strip with primeval cruelty, international impotence in the face of actions by the Israeli state has become a mockery of itself. The calls to end the war in Gaza grow in number, even among Israel’s allies, but little in substance is being done about it. What matters are statements that speak to a wounded conscience that do little to alter anything on the ground.

One such statement, released on July 21, proved to be yet another one of those flossy effusions made by, as Macbeth might have said, idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. The idiots numbered many: 28 international partners, including the foreign ministers of 27 states and, obviously not wanting to miss out, the EU Commissioner for Equality, Preparedness and Crisis Management. All, bar Australia, were from Europe. “We, the signatories listed below, come together with a simple, urgent message: the war in Gaza must end now.”

The statement goes on to mention the drearily obvious. “The Israeli government’s aid delivery model is dangerous, fuels instability and deprives Gazans of human dignity.” The “drip feeding of aid and inhumane killing of civilians, including children, seeking to meet their most basic needs of food and water” deserved condemnation. The deaths of over 800 Palestinians (the numbers are most certainly higher) while seeking aid was “horrifying”. Even here, the language lacked rage. Israel’s “denial of essential humanitarian assistance to the civilian population is unacceptable.” The government “must comply with its obligations under international humanitarian law.”

To that end, Israel was called upon to restore the flow of aid and enable the work of the United Nations and humanitarian NGOs to resume in the Strip. This is obviously something that the Netanyahu government is conscious of avoiding, given the systematic program of controlled starvation and deprivation being inflicted.

To add balance, the statement also notes the plight of the Israeli hostages still held by Hamas, their continued detention also something to be condemned. They were to be immediately and unconditionally released with a negotiated ceasefire being the best way of doing so.

The signatories do go so far as to acknowledge the dangers and intentions of Israel’s administrative measures that seek “territorial or demographic change in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The E1 settlement plan announced by Israel’s Civil Administration, if implemented, would divide a Palestinian state in two, marking a flagrant breach of international law and critically undermine the two-state solution.” The West Bank is also recognised in similar light, with the signatories urging a cessation to the violence taking place against Palestinians and a halt to the building of settlements across the territory “including East Jerusalem”.

These statements are always interesting for what they omit. No toothy measures to address the maltreatment of Palestinian civilians are stipulated, other than an encouragement of “a common effort to bring this terrible conflict to an end”. A benign, most unthreatening promise is made: the prospect of taking “further action to support an immediate ceasefire and a political pathway to security and peace for Israelis, Palestinians and the entire region.” This may be code for recognition of a Palestinian state, fanciful given the systematic pulverisation of the people who would inhabit it. The signatory list also omits Germany and, most importantly of all, the United States, Israel’s arch guardian and evangelical sponsor.

The US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, gave us a flavour of feelings in Washington about the signatories in a post on X. “How embarrassing for a nation to side [with] a terror group like Hamas & blame a nation whose civilians were massacred for fighting to get hostages released.” In another post that made a vague shot at justifying the unjustifiable, the ambassador absolved Israel in its conduct; only the militant group Hamas deserved exclusive blame. The nations in question had “put pressure on @Israel instead of savages of Hamas! Gaza suffers for 1 reason: Hamas rejects EVERY proposal. Blaming Israel is irrational.”

The Israeli foreign minister Gideon Sa’ar, ever lurking in the twilight of alternative reality, reasoned the statement away, much as relatives would the views of a demented, unloved aunt. “If Hamas embraces you – you are in the wrong place.” Praise from the group was itself “proof of the mistake they [the signatory countries] made – part of them out of good intentions and part of them out of an obsession against Israel.”

While the various foreign ministers were flashing their plumage of principles and international humanitarian law, the Israeli Defense Forces had busily commenced an operation on a part of Gaza they have yet to level: Deir al-Balah. Given its importance as a humanitarian hub that still houses UN staff and guesthouses, more slaughter is imminent.

Till Israel assumes the status of a pariah state it seemingly craves to become, its rogue army confined and depleted, its economy humbled and isolated, the industrial appetite for slaughter and dispossession will only continue. The Palestinians will be left to be relics of moral anguish, banished to the footnotes of bloodied history along with many more statements of concern and sheer impotence.

The post Impotent Effusions: The Joint Statement on Gaza first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

Gaza: Empty rhetoric from New Zealand and other Western countries

APR editor — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 06:39:57 +0000

In a joint statement, more than two dozen Western countries, including New Zealand, have called for an immediate end to the war on Gaza. But the statement is merely empty rhetoric that declines to take any concrete action against Israel, and which Israel will duly ignore.

AGAINST THE CURRENT: By Steven Cowan

The New Zealand government has joined 27 other countries calling for an “immediate end” to the war in Gaza. The joint statement says “the suffering of civilians in Gaza has reached new depths”.

It goes on to say that the drip feeding of aid and the inhumane killing of civilians, including children, seeking to meet their most basic needs of water and food.

But many of the countries that have signed this statement stand condemned for actively enabling Israel to pursue its genocidal assault on Gaza. Countries like Britain, Canada and Australia, continue to supply Israel with arms, have continued to trade with Israel, and have turned a blind eye to the atrocities and war crimes Israel continues to commit in Gaza.

It’s more than ironic that while Western countries like Britain and New Zealand are calling for an end to the war in Gaza, they continue to be hostile toward the anti-war protest movements in their own countries.

The British government recently classified the protest group Palestine Action as a “terrorist” group.

In New Zealand, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Winston Peters, has denounced pro-Palestine protesters as “left wing fascists” and “communist, fascist and anti-democratic losers”. He has pushed back against the growing demands that the New Zealand government take direct action against Israel, including the cutting of all diplomatic ties.

The New Zealand government, which contains a number of Zionists within its cabinet, including Act leader David Seymour and co-leader Brooke van Velden, will be more than comfortable with a statement that proposes to do nothing.

‘Statement lacks leadership’
Its call for an end to the war is empty rhetoric, and which Israel will duly ignore — as it has ignored other calls for its genocidal war to end. As Amnesty International has said, ‘the statement lacks any resolve, leadership, or action to help end the genocide in Gaza.’

“This is cruelty – this is not a war,” says this young girl’s placard quoting the late Pope Francis in an Auckland march last Saturday . . . this featured in an earlier report. Image: Asia Pacific Report

New Zealand has declined to join The Hague Group alliance of countries that recently met in Colombia.

It announced six immediate steps it would be taking against Israel. But since The Hague Group has already been attacked by the United States, it’s never been likely that New Zealand would join it.

The National-led coalition government has surrendered New Zealand’s independent foreign policy in favour of supporting the interests of a declining American Empire.

Republished from Steven Cowan’s blog Against The Current with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

“Like a Video Game”: How Israel Deploys Grenade-Firing Drones in Gaza to Kill, Threaten and Displace

Democracy Now! — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 15:48:41 +0000

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

“Like a Video Game”: How Israel Deploys Grenade-Firing Drones in Gaza to Kill, Threaten and Displace

Democracy Now! — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 12:32:52 +0000

The independent news outlets +972 Magazine and Local Call are reporting that Israel is increasingly using grenade-firing drones to enforce evacuation orders. Israeli soldiers have admitted that they deliberately target civilians and likened their use of the weapons to a “video game.” Israeli journalist Meron Rapoport explains how soldiers are instructed to initiate strikes on all residents, not just belligerent targets. “Once a commander defines an imaginary red line that no one is allowed to cross, anyone who does is marked for death,” says Rapoport.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Syria’s sectarian slaughter deepens as Israel attacks

The Grayzone — Sat, 19 Jul 2025 21:53:49 +0000

This content originally appeared on The Grayzone and was authored by The Grayzone.

BBC isn’t Failing. Its Job is to Obscure the UK’s Partnership in Israel’s Genocide

Jonathan Cook — Sat, 19 Jul 2025 14:50:14 +0000

After months of a confected furore over a BBC documentary supposedly demonstrating pro-Hamas bias, followed by the shelving of a second film on Gaza, an independent review found last week that the broadcaster had not breached impartiality guidelines.

A long list of complaints against Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone – all pushed for months by the Israel lobby, and amplified by the British establishment media – were dismissed one after the other by Peter Johnston, director of the editorial complaints and review body that reports to the BBC director general.

Not that you would know any of this from the eagerness of BBC executives to continue apologising profusely for the failings the corporation had just been cleared of. It almost sounded as if they wanted to be found guilty.

The row is now set to drag on for many months more after Ofcom, the UK’s communications regulator, announced it too would investigate the programme.

All of this is exactly what the Israel lobby and the billionaire-owned media had hoped for.

The aim of manufacturing this protracted storm in a teacup was twofold.

First, the furore was designed to distract from what the documentary actually showed: the horrors facing children in Gaza as they have had to navigate a tiny strip of land in which Israel has trapped them, bombed their homes, levelled their schools, exposed them to relentless carnage for 21 months, destroyed the hospitals they will need in time of trouble, and is starving them and their loved ones.

Second, it was intended to browbeat the BBC into adopting an even more craven posture towards Israel than it had already. If it was reluctant before to give Palestinians a voice, now it will avoid doing so at all costs.

True to form, executives hurriedly removed How to Survive a Warzone from its iPlayer catch-up service the moment the lobby went into action.

Dangerous consequences

The BBC’s ever greater spinelessness has real-world, and dangerous, consequences.

Israel will feel even freer to intensify what the International Court of Justice already suspected back in January 2024 was a genocide and what leading genocide and Holocaust scholars have subsequently concluded is a genocide.

There will be even less pressure on the British government to stop partnering Israel in its genocide by supplying weapons, intelligence and diplomatic cover.

The enduring row will also hand a bigger stick to Rupert Murdoch and other media moguls with which to beat the BBC, making it cower even further.

Signs of the BBC’s defensiveness were already all too evident. While it was waiting for the Johnston report, the corporation ditched a separate documentary, Gaza: Doctors Under Attack, on Israel’s systematic destruction of Gaza’s hospitals and murder of some 1,600 health workers.

It has since been shown by Channel 4.

The BBC argued that – even though this second programme had repeatedly passed its editorial checks – airing it risked contributing to a “perception of partiality”.

What that bit of BBC gobbledygook actually meant was that the problem was not “partiality”. It was the perception of it by vested interests – Israel, its apologists, the Starmer government and the British corporate media – who demand skewed BBC coverage of Gaza so that Israel can carry on with a genocide the British establishment is utterly complicit in.

In other words, truth and accuracy be damned. This is about Israel – and the Starmer government – dictating to the BBC the terms of what can be said about Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.

Caving in to pressure

Which brings us back to the Johnston report. The only significant finding against the BBC was on a single issue in its documentary on Gaza’s children, How to Survive a Warzone.

The film had not disclosed that its 13-year narrator was the son of an official in Gaza’s Hamas-run government.

Even in the current febrile atmosphere, Johnston found no grounds to uphold the manifold accusations of a breach by the BBC of impartiality rules. Nothing in the film, he concluded, was unfair to Israel.

Instead, he stated that it was a breach of “full transparency” not to have divulged the child-narrator’s tenuous connection to Hamas through his father’s governmental work.

Paradoxically, the BBC’s coverage of Johnston’s findings has been far more inaccurate about the child-narrator than the original documentary. But there has been no uproar because this particular inaccuracy from the BBC squarely benefits Israel.

On the News at Ten last week, reporting on the Johnston report, presenter Reeta Chakrabati claimed that the film’s narrator was “the son of an official in the militant group Hamas.”

He is nothing of the sort. He is the son of a scientist who directed agricultural policy in Gaza’s government, which is run by Hamas.

There is zero evidence that Ayman Alyazouri was ever a member of the militant wing of Hamas. He doesn’t even appear to have been a member of its political wing.

In fact, since 2018 Israel had set up a system to vet most officials in Gaza like Alyazouri to ensure they were not linked to Hamas before they were able to receive salaries funded by Qatar.

Johnston himself concedes as much, noting that the programme makers failed to inform the BBC of 13-year-old Abdullah’s background because their checks showed Alyazouri was a civilian technocrat in the government, not involved in its military or political arms.

The team’s only failing was an astounding ignorance of how the Israel lobby operates and how ready the BBC is to cave in to its pressure tactics.

In reality, Johnston’s finding against the BBC was over little more than an editorial technicality, one intentionally blown up into a major scandal.

Johnston himself gave the game away when he noted in his executive summary the need for “full transparency” when the BBC makes programmes “in such a contested setting”.

In other words, special, much stricter editorial rules apply when the corporation intends to make programmes likely to upset Israel.

From now on, that will mean that, in practice, such programmes are not made at all.

Glaring double standard

The double standard is glaring. The BBC aired a documentary last year, Surviving October 7: We Will Dance Again, offering eyewitness testimony from Israeli survivors of 7 October 2023 at the Nova music festival, where hundreds of Israelis were killed during Hamas’ one-day break-out from Gaza.

Did the BBC insist that the backgrounds of the Israelis interviewed were checked and disclosed to the audience as part of the broadcast? Were viewers told whether festivalgoers had served in the Israeli military, which for decades has been enforcing an illegal occupation and a system of apartheid over Palestinians, according to a ruling last year by the world’s highest court?

And what would it have indicated to audiences had the BBC included such contextual information about its Israeli eyewitnesses? That their testimonies had less validity? That they could not be trusted?

If it was not necessary to include such background details for Israeli eyewitnesses, why is it more important to do so for a 13-year-old Palestinian?

And even more to the point, if the BBC needs to give details of 13-year-old Abdullah Alyazouri’s background before he can be allowed to read a script written by the programme makers, why is the BBC not also required to give important background about Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he appears in reports: such as that he is wanted for arrest by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity.

Exactly how trustworthy a narrator of events in the devastated enclave does the BBC consider Netanyahu to be that it does not think this context needs including?

Both-sidesing genocide

The gain from this manufactured row for the Israel lobby – and for a Starmer government desperate to silence criticism of its complicity in genocide – were set out in stark detail last week by the makers of the second documentary, about Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s health sector.

In an article in the Observer newspaper, they recounted a series of startling admissions and demands from BBC executives made in script meetings.

The corporation insisted that Doctors Under Attack could not be aired so long as the award-winning investigative reporter leading the programme, Ramita Navai, was given top billing. They demanded that she be downgraded to a mere “contributor” – her role effectively disappeared – because she had supposedly made “one-sided” social media posts criticising Israel for breaking international law.

She was considered unacceptable, according to the BBC, because she had not been “supportive enough of the other side”: that is, of Israel and its military carrying out systematic war crimes by destroying Gaza’s hospitals, as documented in great detail in her film.

In a statement to Middle East Eye on its decision to shelve the documentary, the BBC spokesperson stated that, after Navai appeared on its Today radio programme and “called Israel a ‘rogue state that’s committing war crimes and ethnic cleansing and mass murdering Palestinians’, it was impossible for the BBC to broadcast the material without risking our impartiality.

“The BBC holds itself to the highest standards of impartiality and it would never be acceptable for any BBC journalist to express a personal opinion in this way. We believe this is one of the reasons we’re the world’s most trusted news provider. We were left with no choice but to walk away.”

Seen another way, offering apologias for genocide, as the BBC has been doing for the past 21 months, is apparently a requirement before the corporation is willing to give journalists a platform to criticise Israel.

Also revealing is who the state broadcaster looks to when deciding how to apply its editorial standards.

BBC executives told the film-makers they should not reference the United Nations or Amnesty International because they were supposedly not “trusted independent organisations”.

Meanwhile, the corporation openly and obsessively worried to the film-makers about what fanatically pro-Israel lobbyists – such as social media activist David Collier and Camera, a pro-Israel media monitoring organisation – would say about their film on Gaza.

The team were told BBC News executives were “very jumpy and paranoid” about coverage of Gaza.

This follows a long and dishonorable tradition at the state broadcaster. In their 2011 book More Bad News from Israel, media scholars Greg Philo and Mike Berry reported a BBC producer telling them: “We all fear the phone call from the Israeli embassy.”

If you had been wondering why the BBC has been reflexively both-sidesing a genocide, here is a large part of the answer.

Skewed coverage

A damning report by the Centre for Media Monitoring last month analysed in detail the BBC’s Gaza coverage in the year following Hamas’ one-day attack on 7 October 2023.

It found a “pattern of bias, double standards and silencing of Palestinian voices”.

These included the BBC running over 30 times more victim profiles of Israelis than Palestinians; interviewing more than twice as many Israelis as Palestinians; asking 38 interviewees to condemn Hamas but asking no one to condemn Israel’s mass killing of civilians, or its attacks on hospitals and schools; and shutting down more than 100 interviewers who tried to refer to events in Gaza as a genocide.

Only 0.5% of BBC articles provided any context for what was happening before 7 October 2023: that Israel had been illegally occupying the Palestinian territories for decades and besieging the enclave for 17 years.

Similarly, the BBC has barely reported the endless stream of genocidal statements from Israeli political and military leaders – a crucial ingredient in legally determining whether military actions constitute genocide.

Nor has it mentioned other vital context: such as Israel’s invocation of the Hannibal directive on 7 October 2023, licensing it to kill its own citizens to prevent them being taken captive; or its military’s long-established Dahiya doctrine, in which the mass destruction of civilian infrastructure – and with it, the likelihood of slaughtering civilians – is viewed as an effective way to deter resistance to its aggressions.

In the specified time period, the BBC covered Ukraine with twice as many articles as Gaza, even though the Gaza story was newer and Israeli crimes even graver than Russian ones. The corporation was twice as likely to use sympathetic language for Ukrainian victims than it was for Palestinian victims.

Palestinians were usually described as having “died” or been “killed” in air strikes, without mention of who launched those strikes. Israeli victims, on the other hand, were “massacred”, “slaughtered” and “butchered”.

None of these were editorial slip-ups. They were part of a systematic, long-term skewing of editorial coverage in Israel’s favour – a clear breach of the BBC’s impartiality guidelines and one that has created a permissive environment for genocide.

Journalists in revolt

Journalists at the BBC are known to be in revolt. More than 100 signed a letter – anonymously for fear of reprisals – condemning the decision to censor the documentary Doctors under Attack. They said it reflected a mix of “fear” and “anti-Palestinian racism” at the corporation.

The BBC told MEE: “Robust discussions amongst our editorial teams about our journalism are an essential part of the editorial process. We have ongoing discussions about coverage and listen to feedback from staff, and we think these conversations are best had internally.”

The journalists, it seems, would prefer that these discussions are had out in the open. They wrote: “As an organisation we have not offered any significant analysis of the UK government’s involvement in the war on Palestinians. We have failed to report on weapons sales or their legal implications. These stories have instead been broken by the BBC’s competitors.”

And they added: “All too often it has felt that the BBC has been performing PR for the Israeli government and military.”

They could have added, even more pertinently, that in the process the BBC has been doing PR for the British establishment too.

A former BBC press officer, Ben Murray, last week gave broader context to the meaning of the corporation’s famed editorial “impartiality”. His role, he wrote, had been a rearguard one to placate the Times, Telegraph, Sun, and most of all, the Daily Mail.

Those establishment outlets are owned by corporations and billionaires heavily invested in the very oil, “defence” and tech industries Israel is central to lubricating.

BBC executives, Murray noted, “were rightfully fearful of these publications’ influence, and often reacted in ways to appease them. Their task was to protect the BBC’s funding model, and by extension, their prestigious jobs and generous salaries.”

None of this went against the grain. As Murray pointed out, most senior BBC staff enjoyed private educations, have Oxbridge degrees, and have been “fast-tracked up the corporate ladder”. They see their job as being “to reinforce and maintain establishment viewpoints”.

Editorial smokescreen

If this weren’t enough, senior BBC staff also have to look over their shoulders to the British government, which sets the corporation’s funding through the TV licence fee.

The government, no less than the BBC, needs to keep its main constituencies happy.

No, not voters. Ministers, keen for favourable coverage, similarly dare not antagonise Israel-aligned media moguls. And equally they cannot afford to alienate powerful US administrations that pledge an undying, unshakeable bond to Israel as it projects western power into the oil-rich Middle East.

Which is precisely why Lisa Nandy, the culture secretary, was only too keen to jump on the Daily Mail bandwagon in calling for heads to roll at the BBC over the supposed “failings” in its Gaza coverage.

“It makes me angry on behalf of the BBC staff and the whole creative industries in this country,” she said, apparently oblivious to the fact that many BBC journalists’ fury is not over the confected scandals generated by the Israel lobby and billionaire-owned media.

They are appalled at the corporation’s refusal to hold Israel or Nandy’s own government accountable for the genocide in Gaza.

In such circumstances, the BBC’s professed commitment to “impartiality” serves as nothing more than a smokescreen.

In reality, the corporation acts as an echo chamber, amplifying and legitimising the interests of media tycoons, the British government and the Washington consensus, however much they flout the foundational principles of international law, human rights and basic decency.

Anybody who stands outside that circle of influence – such as the Palestinians and their supporters, anti-genocide activists, human rights advocates, and increasingly the UN and its legal organs, such as the International Criminal Court – is assumed by the BBC to be suspect.

Such voices are likely to be marginalised, silenced or vilified.

The BBC has not failed. It has done exactly what it is there to do: help the British government conceal the fact that there is a genocide going on in Gaza, and one that the UK has been knee-deep in assisting.

The post BBC isn’t Failing. Its Job is to Obscure the UK’s Partnership in Israel’s Genocide first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jonathan Cook.