Tag Archives: Palestinians

Refusing Erasure: Palestinian Resistance, Israel’s Hopeless Fury, and a Coming Cataclysm, by Danny Sjursen

Posted on May 18, 2021 | Leave a comment

The Palestinians are prisoners in the tiny portion of their ancestral homeland to which they’ve been relegated and they’re rebelling against it. From Danny Sjursen at antiwar.com:

There hadn’t been much talk of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Nor had there been serious attempts at diplomacy, of Washington brokering a settlement. The reasons were manifold: part apathy, part outrage-exhaustion, part Donald Trump’s intentionally ditching the illusion of America-the-honest-broker and decisively swinging support to one side (Israel), and part Joe Biden’s desire to avoid the controversy of getting embroiled in seemingly hopeless Mideast conflict third-rails. Yet despite increasingly right-wing Israeli intransigence, and American apathy or antagonism, the Palestinian people – not their divided and corrupt Fatah or Hamas “leaders” – refused to be silenced. Few Western commentators counted on that. They should have.

These are resilient people, the Palestinians, and they’ve never gone gently into that good erasure or apartheid night. Just as their youths surprised Israel, the world, and their own exiled leaders, and rose in response to decades of structural disenfranchisement and security force-brutality – in the First Intifada (“Shaking Off”) of 1987 – today a new generation of stateless, open air prisoners are again willing their way into the global spotlight.

On (and Off ) Script

The current uprising – and cruelly disproportionate Israeli military response – has both followed and strayed from the standard script of modern Holy Land conflict. It began with heavy-handed police suppression – including a violent raid on the Al Aqsa Mosque during Ramadan – of Palestinians protesting far-right Israeli extremist provocations and (illegal) government-backed eviction efforts spearheaded by (illegal) Israeli settlers in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of (illegally) occupied East Jerusalem.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Collapse, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, History, Privacy

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The ‘Self-Defense’ Mantra Is a Green Light for War Crimes, by Daniel Larison

Posted on May 17, 2021 | Leave a comment

The devil is in the details trying to assess who’s at fault in the Israel-Palestine conflict, but both sides have the right to self-defense and neither side has the right to engage in wanton slaughter not arguably necessary for self-defense. From Daniel Larison at daniellarison.substack.com:

Self-defense does not give a government license to commit war crimes at will.

Every time that the Israeli military carries out indiscriminate attacks on civilian areas in the occupied territories and kills Palestinian civilians, there is inevitably the rote response from American politicians and pundits that Israel has the “right to defend itself.” In almost all cases, this invocation of the right of self-defense is an all-purpose permission slip that gives any Israeli military action a stamp of approval. We heard this when Israeli snipers were gunning down and maiming unarmed protesters at the barrier between Gaza and Israel, and we have heard it every few years when the Israeli government uses its massive military superiority to bludgeon the imprisoned inhabitants of the Gaza Strip. What makes this all the more tedious is that no one actually disputes that Israel is permitted to defend itself. But self-defense does not give a government license to commit war crimes at will. Unfortunately, because the Israeli government knows that it can act with impunity and faces no practical consequences for its many violations of international law, the “self-defense” mantra serves as a green light for more needless killing of innocents.

The State Department spokesman, Ned Price, recently found himself flailing as he tried to hide behind the standard line in the face of persistent questioning from the journalists in the room. Price recited the usual lines about the right to self-defense, and then he was asked if the same applied to the Palestinians who were coming under attack from Israeli forces:

QUESTION: Thank you, Ned. I want to ask you about East Jerusalem, but let’s talk about what you said about the principle of self-defense. Does that in any way apply to the Palestinians? Do they have a right to self-defense? Do Palestinians have a right to self-defense?

MR PRICE: I’m – in – broadly speaking, Said, we believe in the concept of self-defense. We believe it applies to any state. I don’t think that —

QUESTION: All right. I —

MR PRICE: I certainly wouldn’t want my words to be construed as —

QUESTION: No, I understand. I want to ask on East Jerusalem. I don’t want to harp on this either. But the Israelis killed 13 people just now, including maybe five or six children. Do you condemn that? Do you condemn the killing of children?

MR PRICE: Said —

QUESTION: I’m asking: Do you condemn the killing of Palestinian children?

MR PRICE: Obviously – and these reports are just emerging. And I understand – I was just speaking to the team. I understand we don’t have independent confirmation of facts on the ground yet, so I’m very hesitant to get into reports that are just emerging.

Obviously, the deaths of civilians, be they Israeli or Palestinians, are something we would take very seriously.

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Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, History, Military, Propaganda, War

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The Israel Narrative Is Crumbling Because Of Phone Cameras And The Internet, by Caitlin Johnstone

Posted on May 11, 2021 | Leave a comment

Who are you going to believe, official explanations or actual videos and photographs shot be people at the scene? From Caitlin Johnstone at caitlinjohnstone.com:

“Twenty-four people, including nine children, were killed in Gaza overnight, most of them in Israeli strikes,” reads a new report from AP.

Nine children, killed with the help of United States funding to the tune of $3.8 billion a year.

Remember kids, the US loves Muslims and just wants to protect their human rights.

The Monday night airstrikes were in response to rocket attacks by Gaza resistance groups which had reportedly injured six Israelis, and those rocket attacks were in turn were a response to a deluge of Israeli police brutality footage in Jerusalem in preceding days. Electronic Intifada reports:

This came at the end of a day of violence that began in occupied East Jerusalem, where Israeli forces assaulted worshippers at the al-Aqsa mosque compound, injuring hundreds.

Scenes of brutality in Jerusalem generated outrage and solidarity among Palestinians and around the world.

The military wing of the Palestinian resistance organization Hamas issued an ultimatum giving Israel an hour – until 6 pm local time – to withdraw its forces from al-Aqsa and the occupied East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, and free detainees.

When the deadline passed, resistance groups in Gaza fired volleys of rockets towards Jerusalem for the first time since the summer 2014 war, prompting celebrations from some Palestinians.

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Time To Put Americans Back In Charge Of America, by Chuck Baldwin

Posted on February 23, 2020 | 1 comment

The only people who can say anything critical of Israel and the Jewish lobby are those in the alternative media who receive nothing from those sources and thus have nothing to lose. From Chuck Baldwin at chuckbaldwinlive.com:

Members of the “right” and “alt-right” love to use terms such as “the establishment,” “Deep State,” “globalists,” etc., in describing freedom’s political enemies. And, yes, I often use those terms too. For the sake of brevity, I will refer to the above as simply “the ruling class.”

Seldom, however, do conservatives identify who actually comprises the ruling class. Typically when using those terms, conservatives are attacking Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and liberal Democrats in general.

While it is doubtlessly true that many liberal Democrats are pawns of the ruling class, so are many conservative Republicans. The ruling class monopolizes the philosophies, priorities and policies of both major parties in Washington, D.C.

The ruling class has mastered the phony left-right paradigm to perfection. The entire political debate in America centers on the left-right paradigm. If you are a Republican, Democrats are the enemy; if you are a Democrat, Republicans are the enemy. The entire political world revolves around this notion.

It’s all a game, a façade, a hoax.

Here’s how it works: When the ruling class wants to focus on building a socialist Welfare state, dismantling traditional cultural and religious norms and enacting gun control, it puts liberal Democrats in power. And when it wants to focus on building the Warfare State and creating foreign enemies for the purpose of expanding the “war on terror” and a global surveillance state, it puts conservative Republicans in charge.

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Jared Kushner Reveals Trump’s Plan Won’t Create a Palestinian State, by Jonathan Cook

Posted on February 6, 2020 | Leave a comment

Neither the US nor Israel has ever had much interest in creating a Palestinian state, but Trump is the first US president to come right out and say it. From Jonathan Cook at antiwar.com:

Maybe something good will come out of the Trump plan, after all. By pushing the Middle East peace process to its logical conclusion, Donald Trump has made crystal clear something that was supposed to have been obscured: that no US administration has ever really seen peace as the objective of its “peacemaking”.

The current White House is no exception – it has just been far more incompetent at concealing its joint strategy with the Israelis. But that is what happens when a glorified used-car salesman, Donald Trump, and his sidekick son-in-law, the schoolboy-cum-businessman Jared Kushner, try selling us the “deal of the century”. Neither, it seems, has the political or diplomatic guile normally associated with those who rise to high office in Washington.

During an interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria this week, Kushner dismally failed to cloak the fact that his “peace” plan was designed with one goal only: to screw the Palestinians over.

The real aim is so transparent that even Zakaria couldn’t stop himself from pointing it out. In CNN’s words, he noted that “no Arab country currently satisfies the requirements Palestinians are being expected to meet in the next four years – including ensuring freedom of press, free and fair elections, respect for human rights for its citizens, and an independent judiciary.”

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Pompeo Gives Away the Palestinian West Bank, by Philip Giraldi

Posted on November 27, 2019 | Leave a comment

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has been a true and faithful servant of Israel. From Philip Giraldi at unz.com:

A story has been circulating suggesting that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will soon be resigning because he needs to focus on planning for his campaign to become a Senator from Kansas in 2020. This is good news for the United States, as Senator Lindsey Graham has had no one he is able to talk to about exporting democracy by blowing up the planet since Joe Lieberman retired and John McCain died. And the tale even has a bit of palace intrigue built into it, with an interesting back story as Pompeo is apparently considering his move because he fears that staying in harness with Donald Trump for too long might damage his reputation. There are also reports that he has been traveling to Kansas frequently on the State Department’s dime to test the waters, a violation of the Hatch Act which prohibits most government officials from engaging in self-promotional political activities unrelated to their actual jobs.

If one is seeking evidence to suggest that Pompeo, a man who lies with a fluency that takes one’s breath away, is delusional, it would certainly have to include his self-assessment that he has a reputation to protect. It is possible to cite many instances in which Pompeo has asserted something that is absolutely contrary to the truth, though one might also have to concede that he could often be saying what his factually challenged boss wants to hear. When Pompeo was Director of the CIA he even joked openly about how “We lied, we cheated, we stole.”

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We Are All Palestinians, by Philip Giraldi

Posted on November 6, 2019 | 1 comment

Israel and the Jewish lobby are the elephants in the room of American politics. From Philip Giraldi at unz.com:

In spite of the fact that Israeli snipers continue to shoot scores of unarmed protesting Gazans every Friday with virtually no coverage from the media, there are some signs that the ability of Israel and its friends to control the narrative regarding the Jewish state’s appalling human rights violations is beginning to weaken. To be sure, The Lobby still has sharp teeth and is prepared to use them as in last week’s report of a Florida high school principal with 26 years of experience and an otherwise impeccable record who was fired because he said that “Not everyone believes in the holocaust.”

Questioning the established view of Israel is long overdue. It was first challenged by Illinois ex-congressman Paul Findley in his 1985 book They Dare to Speak: People and Institutions Confront Israel’s Lobby, but received a considerable boost when two leading academics John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of Harvard wrote The Israel Lobby And U.S. Foreign Policy in 2006. Virtually overnight it became acceptable in some circles to begin to discuss the powerful influence that the Israel Lobby has over foreign policy formulation in the United States. More recently, the final taboo was broken when two junior congresswomen began to talk about Israel’s baleful influence and linked it to its obvious source: the Benjamins. Jews and money and political power exercised on behalf of Israel, something that had been clear for many years but forbidden territory, suddenly became a hotly debated issue, even in some of the mainstream media.

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Exactly Like Its Predecessors, Trump’s Peace Plan Has Been Designed To Fail, by Jonathan Cook

Posted on July 4, 2019 | Leave a comment

Trump’s plan will fail and it will be blamed on the Palestinians. From Jonathan Cook at antiwar.com:

The Palestinians may have refused this time to stumble into the trap set by the president and his son-in-law Jared Kushner, but they will find themselves the fall guys, whatever happens

Donald Trump’s supposed “deal of the century,” offering the Palestinians economic bribes in return for political submission, is the endgame of western peacemaking, the real goal of which has been failure, not success.

For decades, peace plans have made impossible demands of the Palestinians, forcing them to reject the terms on offer and thereby create a pretext for Israel to seize more of their homeland.

The more they have compromised, the further the diplomatic horizon has moved away – to the point now that the Trump administration expects them to forfeit any hope of statehood or a right to self-determination.

Even Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and architect of the peace plan, cannot really believe the Palestinians will be bought off with their share of the $50 billion inducement he hoped to raise in Bahrain last week.

That was why the Palestinian leadership stayed away.

But Israel’s image managers long ago coined a slogan to obscure a policy of incremental dispossession, masquerading as a peace process: “The Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.”

It is worth examining what those landmark “missed opportunities” consisted of.

The first was the United Nations’ Partition Plan of late 1947. In Israel’s telling, it was Palestinian intransigence over dividing the land into separate Jewish and Arab states that triggered war, leading to the creation of a Jewish state on the ruins of most of the Palestinians’ homeland.

But the real story is rather different.

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Russian Mediation: The Critical Messages of the Hamas-Fatah Talks in Moscow, by Ramzy Baroud

Posted on February 20, 2019 | Leave a comment

With the US government completely in Israel’s pocket, the Palestinian factions can’t look to the US as an honest broker in the mystical “peace process.” Perhaps Russia can fill that role. From Ramzy Baroud at antiwar.com:

The Russian-sponsored Palestinian unity talks in Moscow on February 11 were neither a success nor failure. Uniting Palestinian factions was not the main objective of the Moscow conference, in the first place.

Instead, the nature of the event, the host country and the clear messages sent to Washington and Tel Aviv were all meant to communicate something else entirely. And they did.

The head of the Fatah delegation to the conference, Azzam al-Ahmed, apologized to his hosts on behalf of Palestinians for failing to achieve political reconciliation.

But that apology could have been prepared in advance. It would not have been rational to expect that a conference organized in such haste, with few preliminary meetings or intense prior consultations, could have achieved the coveted unity.

If one is to also consider the various unity agreements, signed between Fatah and Hamas in the past – but never honored – and bearing in mind the additional punitive measures slapped by the Palestinian Authority against Gaza recently, a unity deal in Russia would be nothing less than a miracle.

So why did the Russians hold the conference in the first place and why did the Palestinians agree to attend, if its failure was a foretold conclusion?

The answer lies elsewhere, specifically in Warsaw, Poland.

Around the same time that Palestinians met in Moscow under the auspices of the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, the US was holding its own conference in Warsaw, Poland.

The Warsaw meet was the US’ attempt at drawing a new political paradigm to replace the defunct “peace process”, which, itself, was an American political invention.

While the “peace process”, thanks to US blind support of Israel, has failed terribly, Warsaw, too, is unlikely to deliver any meaningful or long-term political vision in the Middle East. The conference was the equivalent of a public American declaration that only Israel matters and that Washington’s commitment to Tel Aviv is paramount to all else.

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When All You’ve Got Is Bullying: A New Way of Dealing With America, by Ted Snider

Posted on October 2, 2018 | Leave a comment

The world is figuring out workarounds for US insistence that the world play by its rules. From Ted Snider at antiwar.com:

The secret comments that Donald Trump made off the record leaked. He was not sincerely negotiating a compromise: he was bullying his opponent. If any deal was to be made, he boasted, it would be “totally on our terms.” America’s negotiating partner was “working their ass off,” Trump admitted, but “every time we have a problem with a point, I just put up a picture of a Chevrolet Impala.” The Impala is a car that would be affected by U.S. auto tariffs. Imposing auto tariffs would “be the ruination” of that country: “all I have to do is tax their cars, it would be devastating,” Trump said. Trump would only boast off the record about his threat to ruin the country if they dare to negotiate rather than yield because if he says publicly what he threatens privately, it’s going to be so insulting they’re not going to be able to make a deal.”

Trump’s negotiating partner was not Iran. It was not North Korea. It was Canada. Canada! Not America’s enemy, but, historically, one of America’s closest friends. And the negotiations were not over a nuclear weapons program: they were over a free trade agreement. But, even here, the president who boasts that he is a great deal maker had nothing but bullying. No negotiating, no diplomacy: “totally on our terms” or it will be the “ruination” of you.

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