Tag Archives: Israel

Twisting UK Law to Criminalize Dissent on Palestine, by Craig Murray

Posted on June 3, 2021 | Leave a comment

The British have destroyed their traditional freedom of speech and the press, even more so than the US. From Craig Murray at consortiumnews.com:

raig Murray denounces the U.K.’s persecution of Richard Barnard for calling out his country’s role in the manufacture of instruments for the death and maiming of Palestinians. 

Matam high-tech park in Haifa, Israel, where military manufacturer Elbit Systems has one of the buildings in the foreground. (Zvi Roger, Haifa Municipality, CC BY 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)

Once you have been active in politics for a few decades, you get used to the popular convulsions of support for Palestine every few years when Israel military action against Gaza becomes particularly intense. Then follows a ceasefire, the media move on and Israel resumes the daily routine of low-level evictions, destruction of tree crops, imprisonments and murders that accomplishes the gradual extinction of the territories that the Western powers pretended to intend for a Palestinian state.

For the media, 50 Palestinian children killed in a week has been a story. The regular killing of 50 a year is not; and anybody who thinks it is must be labeled an anti-Semite and hounded from political life.

As a young man, the two great injustices we campaigned on were South Africa and Palestine. I never dreamt the latter abuse would possibly outlast me. These two issues resonated so much because they were both remnants of European colonial arrogance, founded on racism and a sense of cultural superiority.

Nowadays I cannot even think myself into a mindset that says that for the greater good of the United Kingdom, it is O.K. to deport the entire population of the Chagos Islands to make way for a military base. But that was the view not just of governments, but of Labour governments, inside my own lifetime.

I should like to think that the undeniable openness of Israeli apartheid rule has made a fundamental shift in thinking towards Palestine, but I do not think much has in fact changed. The media and political class remain bought and paid for on the issue.

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Recantations Are All the Rage, by Philip Giraldi

Posted on June 1, 2021 | Leave a comment

Israel has an unmatched propaganda, influence, and retribution operation, but it’s losing ground, at least temporarily, on the Palestinian conflict. From Philip Giraldi at unz.com:

Several things are happening simultaneously. Most important, Israel has lost the public opinion war in much of the world through its brutality during the recent attack on Gaza and it continues to lose ground even in the wake of a cease fire due to mass arrests of Palestinians and armed police intrusions in and around the al-Aqsa mosque. The government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is by its actions making clear that the ethnic cleansing of Palestine will continue at a time that he chooses. This in turn has produced a storm of criticism, including from Jewish groups and individuals, that is condemning the bloodshed and also sometimes explicitly seeking to distance Judaism the religion from Zionism, the political movement.

Some have suggested that we have finally reached a tipping point in which Israel has gone too far, evident in the Irish Government’s condemnation of Israeli “de facto annexation” of Palestinian land. Foreign Minister Simon Coveney told the Dial that “The scale, pace and strategic nature of Israel’s actions on settlement expansion and the intent behind it have brought us to a point where we need to be honest about what is actually happening on the ground …”

The Jewish state has even succeeded in alienating many who are normally supporters in countries like the United States, quite possibly leading to an eventual shift in policy in Congress and at the White House. That view might be exaggerated given the power of the Israel Lobby and its ability to make past atrocities go away, but it might obtain some back-handed credibility from the ferocity of the counter-attack being waged by Israel and its friends against the celebrities and politicians who have finally developed backbones and have spoken out in defense of Palestinian rights.

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Israel and Palestine: What Else Is New? by Taki

Posted on June 1, 2021 | Leave a comment

Israel is essentially an occupying power, created after World War II, displacing Palestinians who already lived there, and eventually confining many of them to Gaza under brutal restrictions. The problem with taking up the Palestinian side is its corrupt leadership, but ordinary Palestinians deserve a better break than the one history and its own leadership have dealt them. From Taki at takimag.com:

Back in 1967, during the Six-Day War, I was living in Paris, and such was my pro-Israel ardor, I actually went to some dump and put my name down as a volunteer in case the state of Israel ran out of soldiers. I was asked by the man in charge if I was Jewish, I answered in the negative, and he jumped up and shook my hand. As everyone knows, my services were not needed that June 54 years ago, and the war was over while I was still contemplating which Parisian girl I would invite to go with me while I gallantly defended Israel’s right to exist.

Two years later, as a freelance photographer for Newsweek and Paris Match, I was in Jordan covering the aftermath of that famous victory, and what I saw made me ashamed to have ever contemplated fighting for Israel. I had been shown around the refugee camps by Farris Glubb, son of Sir John Glubb, or Glubb Pasha, as the Arabs called him, the British general who created and headed the Arab Legion when it fought for Arab independence from the Turks during World War I. Farris clued me in on what had been happening since 1948, when Israel expelled 700,000 Palestinians and created its modern state. These 700,000 were living in outdoor camps and in dire conditions and had been there since 1948. After the 1967 war, hundreds of thousands were added, and the number has grown exponentially since.

I covered the Yom Kippur War of 1973 from the Israeli side, and witnessed the Syrian and Egyptian armies giving a good account of themselves during the first week of fighting. The Egyptians used wire-guided hand-carried missiles to attack Israeli armor in the Sinai, while Syrian tanks held the “invincible” Israeli armor to a standstill in the Golan. I spent my nights in Tel Aviv and drove to the front either in the desert or the Golan every morning. Peter Townsend, a famous Battle of Britain pilot and erstwhile lover of Princess Margaret, writing for Paris Match, was my constant companion. He had never seen a dead body before, having done his fighting up in the air. It was an education for him.

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From the Notebook: A Critical Shift in the War for Oil, by Tom Luongo

Posted on May 29, 2021 | Leave a comment

The Russia-China-Iran axis is now the strongest entity in the Middle East, and that will of course effect the supply and price of oil. From Tom Luongo at tomluongo.me:

Davos really do think they are too clever by half. Despite prognostications to the contrary, negotiations with Iran over a new JCPOA are nearing completion which Biden/Obama will sign off on after putting up a bit more token resistance to lifting sanctions.

Why do I say this? Nordstream 2.

Biden backed down on Nordstream 2 and, at The Davos Crowd’s insistence, he will back down on the JCPOA.

Davos needs cheap energy into Europe. That’s ultimately what the JCPOA was all about. The basic framework for the deal is still there. While the U.S. will kick and scream a bit about sanctions relief, Iran will be back into the oil market and make it possible for Europe to once again invest in oil/gas projects in Iran.

Now that Benjamin Netanyahu is no longer going to be leading Israel, the probability of breakthrough is much much higher than last week. The Likudniks in Congress and the Senate just lost their raison d’etre. The loss of face for Israel in Bibi’s latest attempt to bludgeon Gaza to retain power backfired completely.

U.S. policy towards Israel is shifting rapidly as the younger generations, Gen-X and Millennials, simply don’t have the same allegiance to Israel that the Baby Boomers and Silent generations did. It is part of a geopolitical ethos which is outdated.

So, with some deal over Iran’s nuclear capability in the near future, Europe will then get gas pipelines from Iran through Turkey as well as gain better access to the North South Transport Corridor which is now unofficially part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

Russia, now that Nordstream 2 is nearly done, will not balk at this. In fact, they’ll welcome it. It forms the basis for a broader, sustainable peace arrangement in the Middle East. What’s lost is the Zionist program for Greater Israel and continued sowing dissent between exhausted participants.

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Israel Narrative Management Is Getting Incredibly Desperate And Brazen, by Caitlin Johnstone

Posted on May 29, 2021 | Leave a comment

The narrative battle is following the one on the ground. From Caitlin Johnstone at caitlinjohnstone.com:

The National Director Emeritus for the Anti-Defamation League has announced on Twitter that he is cancelling his subscription to The New York Times, claiming that a front-page story featuring the photos of children killed in Israel’s assault on Gaza this month constitutes “blood libel” against Jews.

“I am cancelling my subscription to NYTimes,” tweeted Abraham Foxman. “I grew up in America on the NYT- I delivered the NYT to my classmates- I learned civics- democracy and all the news ‘fit to print’ for 65 years but no more. Today’s blood libel of Israel and the Jewish people on the front page is enough.”

Foxman’s statement drew criticism from all corners, including from loyal establishment pundits like Jonathan Chait, for his ridiculous assertion that merely humanizing Palestinian children killed by Israel is the same as promoting the ancient antisemitic canard known as blood libel.

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From Here On, Palestine Calls the Shots, by Taxi

Posted on May 28, 2021 | 1 comment

Can Israel defend itself short of nuclear weapons? From Taxi at unz.com:

From rocks to rockets. This is now the recorded evolution of the armed Palestinian Resistance. From throwing Intifada rocks that barely scratched occupation tanks, to lobbing rockets that can now reach anywhere in Israel: this is presently the undeniable status of the Palestinian Resistance. Hard, therefore, not to deduce that some impressive progress has been achieved by the armed Palestinian Resistance in Gaza, despite Gaza being under a severe land, sea and air siege. Right under the very noses of the bulky Israeli military and its lauded hi-tech Intel, the Palestinian Resistance has managed to arm itself in a significant way – and indeed, it continues to improve its arsenal, undetected. Of course, Israel’s weaponry remains by far more superior to that of the Palestinians, but this superiority in arms became meaningless during the recent ‘Sword of Jerusalem’ combat: a small war that found the Israeli forces unilaterally withdrawing from the battlefield after only some ten days. In normal military parlance, this would be defined as a defeat, yet this defeat is being referred to in the West as a ‘ceasefire’. Well, semantics aside, the simple takeaway is that Israel’s mighty military lost to pitiful Gaza rockets. The biblical story of David and Goliath repeated itself right before our modern eyes. And from here on, the hulking Israeli military will be powerless to protect Israeli Jews and their properties in the holy land.

In 1948, Zionism had promised the Jews of Israel two vital services: security and prosperity. Indeed, it had kept good on its promise for some 73 years. But now, in 2021 and post the ‘Sword of Jerusalem’ war, it can no longer provide either. From here on, Zionism cannot guarantee either security or prosperity for its Jewish population – not with Gaza rockets now permanently looming and ready to disrupt daily Jewish life in the holy land. It used to be that the Israeli military was the one capriciously disrupting the security and prosperity of Palestinians, but overnight, the success of the ‘Sword of Jerusalem’ has turned the tables on Israel. From here on, Palestine calls the shots. From here on, Israel will pay a very heavy price for any significant aggression against the suffering, occupied Palestinian people. This equation is now fixed; immovable. This is the new status quo.

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“America First” Conservatives Declare: “Actually, We Meant Israel First”, by Michael Tracey

Posted on May 28, 2021 | Leave a comment

Most conservatives are in Israel’s pocket. From Michael Tracey at mtracey.substack.com:
Photo by MOHAMMED ABED/AFP via Getty Images

After the conclusion of the Derek Chauvin trial a few weeks ago, it became apparent that across the worlds of culturally left/liberal US corporations, non-profits, academia, professional sports, and electoral politics, certain slogans were mandatory to recite. The phrase “There Is Still Much Work To Be Done,” or some slight variation thereof, was repeated ad nauseam by politicians, CEOs, and other public-facing individuals who had the misfortune of being obliged to release a statement under the circumstances. You’d almost think some creepy blackmail-esque memo had been distributed with an attached script so that these people could swiftly complete the requisite PR task.

Whenever there’s an outbreak of deadly violence in Israel-Palestine, a very similar dynamic plays out; although in this instance it’s concentrated in different sectors of society. While a handful of Republicans joined in on the “Much Work To Be Done” refrain after the Chauvin trial, cultural left/liberals comprised the largest share of offenders. Now though, it’s time for public-facing conservative figures — joined by a sizable portion of liberals — to mindlessly recite the same slogans and phrases over and over again as a signaling mechanism and, conveniently, a substitute for even a modicum of independent thinking.

Usually the formulation is to triumphantly proclaim that so-and-so person, place, or thing “stands with” Israel. Like the state of Arkansas “stands with Israel,” or Rep. Dusty Johnson of South Dakota “stands with Israel,” or some random New York State Senator “stands with Israel.” What it means to “stand with” a foreign military force is seldom precisely defined — no one appears to be physically standing, for one thing. This incantation is quickly followed by a rote affirmation that Israel has a “right to defend itself,” as if that’s responsive at all to the actual details of the situation unfolding.

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Blinken on Used-Car-Sales Trip to Mideast, by Finian Cunningham

Posted on May 27, 2021 | Leave a comment

The American two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israel conflict is long dead, and the US only flogs it for propaganda purposes. From Finian Cunningham at strategic-culture.org:

Blinken’s used-car-sales trip to the Middle East is proof that the American model is on the scrap heap of history, Finian Cunningham writes.

If ever American foreign policy looked like a tacky brochure from a dodgy car dealer, then U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken delivered on the image with his trip to the Middle East this week.

Washington’s top diplomat flew to the region to flog the “two-state solution” for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, asserting that it was the only way to find peace. This was after nearly two weeks of an Israeli blitzkrieg on the Gaza Strip, the coastal enclave where two million Palestinians subsist in chronic poverty. Blinken said the purpose of his trip was to shore up a ceasefire and to jump-start a long-defunct peace process predicated on a two-state solution.

The fact is that the American model of peace is long dead. For more than three decades since Washington brokered the Oslo Accord the endless talk about two states coexisting has been a chimera and a fallacy. The Israelis never believed in such a settlement, despite occasional cynical lip service. And the Americans never seriously held the Israelis to their supposed commitments. Occupation and annexation of the Palestinian homeland have been allowed to continue unabated with Washington’s acquiescence.

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How To Sabotage The Pro-Palestine Movement, by Caitlin Johnstone

Posted on May 27, 2021 | 1 comment

Is the antisemitism issue being used to divert attention from the plight of the Palestinians? From Caitlin Johnstone at caitlinjohnstone.com:

The US-centralized power alliance is losing control of the Palestine narrative as awareness continues to spread of the injustice of Israeli apartheid, and it’s one of the most interesting things happening in the narrative matrix today.

It’s very encouraging to see an entirely grassroots activist campaign get this far off the ground, where ordinary people online and in demonstrations around the world overpower an official establishment narrative by sheer numbers and force of will until the imperial media are forced to acknowledge the legitimacy of their position. Rather than waiting for the corporate media to begin covering the plight of the Palestinians in a just manner, the people simply seized control of the narrative by speaking the truth with their own voices and becoming the dominant perspective on the matter, forcing everyone else to play catch-up.

And now we see Ireland passing a parliamentary motion condemning the “de facto annexation” of Palestinian land. After the oligarchic empire expended all that effort sabotaging Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign in the UK to keep Palestinian rights from going mainstream in the western world, Israel’s own actions have sent them mainstream anyway.

This loss of narrative control is a problem for Israel, whose nature is premised upon keeping Palestinians from attaining equality which would effectively end the Jewish ethnostate. This in turn is a problem for the empire, who needs to keep the Middle East fractured, imbalanced, and as far under its control as possible so long as human civilization is dependent on fossil fuels; if it hadn’t done that the region could have seen the rise of its own global superpower decades ago, or fallen into alignment with some other power not aligned with Washington and London. The nuclear-armed military force of Israel has consistently played a key role in bashing Middle Eastern affairs into alignment with imperial interests; as Joe Biden once said, “Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interests in the region.”

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To distract from Gaza slaughter, Israel lobby manufactures antisemitism freakout, by Max Blumenthal

Posted on May 27, 2021 | 1 comment

Israel and its US lobby certainly know how to shape propaganda narratives. From Max Blumenthal at thegrayzone.com:

With deceptively edited videos and dubious allegations, the Israel lobby has manufactured an antisemitism epidemic to turn the media’s gaze away from dead children in Gaza.

Following an 11-day assault on the Gaza Strip in which the Israeli army killed over 220 people, including more than 65 children, and days of videotaped rampages of Jewish extremist mobs against Palestinian people and property inside Israeli cities, Israel lobbyists in the US and Canada have launched a carefully coordinated public relations campaign to deflect outrage.

Having failed to successfully defend massacres of entire families in their homes and the deliberate demolition of civilian residential towers and media offices in Gaza City, the US Israel lobby and the Israeli government it advocates for have manufactured an epidemic of antisemitic violence with the goal of portraying American Jewry as the true victim of the crisis.

Led by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), Israel lobbyists have portrayed a series of street scuffles between supporters of Palestine and pro-Israel activists as anti-Jewish pogroms. In nearly every case, no evidence exists to substantiate claims that Jews were targeted as Jews for violent assault. There is ample proof of deception, however, as video and photographic evidence reveals pro-Israel elements provoking demonstrators, initiating violence and falsifying or embellishing their testimonies.

Since the Israeli government and Palestinian political factions signed a ceasefire, the media has provided Israel lobbyists with an uncritical platform to baselessly accuse Palestine solidarity activists of triggering a wave of antisemitic violence, and even claim without a shred of evidence that Jews are being hunted in their homes.

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