$14 Billion US Aid Package for Israel Crafted to Prepare for ‘Multi-Front War,’ Not Just Gaza
The $14 billion is included in the $95 billion foreign military aid that was recently passed by the Senateby Dave DeCamp February 22, 2024 at 1:26 pm ET CategoriesNewsTagsIsrael, Palestine
The $14 billion in additional military aid for Israel that President Biden is seeking was designed not just for operations in Gaza but also to prepare Israel for a “multi-front war,” The Times of Israel has reported.
A senior Biden administration official told The Jewish Telegraphic Agency that the $14 billion is “for Israel to defend itself in a multi-front war and to be sure it can deter a multi-front war.”
Israel has been escalating airstrikes in Lebanon against Hezbollah, though many strikes have killed civilians. The fire across the border risks a full-blown war, and there are no signs tensions will ease anytime soon. Israeli officials have been threatening to invade if Hezbollah doesn’t move back from the Israel-Lebanon border.
US officials have acknowledged to The Washington Post that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu might view war in Lebanon as key to his political survival, as polling has shown Israelis want him to step down after the current conflict.
Israel also appears to be attempting to provoke Iran as several members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) have been killed by Israeli airstrikes in Syria since October 7. According to The New York Times, Israel was also behind a covert attack on two natural gas pipelines inside Iran.
The $14 billion is packed into the $95 billion foreign military aid bill that passed through the Senate but has yet to be brought to the House floor for a vote as Republicans are still looking for a border deal. The legislation also includes about $60 billion for Ukraine, and $4.8 billion for Taiwan and other spending in the Asia Pacific.
The $14 billion for Israel is on top of the $3.8 billion the country receives from the US each year. According to The Times of Israel, It includes $5.2 billion to go toward Israeli missile defense, which is seen as a critical necessity for a war with Hezbollah.
Another $3.5 billion will replenish munitions Israel has used in Gaza. The US will use $4 billion US to refill its own stockpiles, including a contingency stockpile located in Israel that the Israeli military has been allowed to use for its operations in Gaza.
Since October 7, the US has been shipping bombs and other types of weapons on a near-daily basis. According to the Israeli news site Ynet, the US has shipped over 25,000 tons of military equipment to support the Israeli slaughter in Gaza, which has killed over 29,000 Palestinians.
Biden Casts 3rd UN Veto Allowing Israeli Genocide in Gaza To Continue
by Walt Zlotow , https://www.antiwar.com/blog/2024/02/21/biden-casts-3rd-un-veto-allowing-israeli-genocide-in-gaza-to-continue/
No surprise President Biden cast his third veto in the UN Security Council to prevent a full, permanent ceasefire in Gaza. Biden’s depraved support of Israeli genocide in Gaza has no limits. Over 25,000 tons of US weapons have contributed to over 100,000 deaths and injuries, displacement of nearly 2,000,000 Palestinians and destruction of nearly all medical, educational and cultural institutions. The appropriate word for all that? Genocide.
President Biden ludicrously claims his veto was cast because it interfered with the US ceasefire plan and efforts to get aid to beleaguered Palestinians. Biden’s first reason is ghoulish. His plan calls for a temporary ceasefire to get all the hostages out, after which Israeli ethnic cleansing, with unlimited US aid, can resume till complete. His second reason is preposterous The UN accurately states Israel blocks virtually all aid from reaching sick, starving and wounded Palestinians.
President Biden may not be in mental and physical decline severe enough to prevent his functioning as president. But his enabling of Israel’s genocidal ethnic cleansing of Gaza for 5 months now, makes Biden’s moral decline a disqualifier for further serving as president.
Walt Zlotow became involved in antiwar activities upon entering University of Chicago in 1963. He is current president of the West Suburban Peace Coalition based in the Chicago western suburbs. He blogs daily on antiwar and other issues at www.heartlandprogressive.blogspot.com.
US Threatens to Veto New Gaza Ceasefire Resolution at UN Security Council
The US has vetoed two similar resolutions
by Dave DeCamp February 18, 2024, https://news.antiwar.com/2024/02/18/us-threatens-to-veto-new-gaza-ceasefire-resolution-at-un-security-council/
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The US is threatening to veto a resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza at the UN Security Council as the US continues to provide political cover for the Israeli massacre of Palestinians.
US Ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield said in a statement that if the resolution, which is being drafted by Algeria, was brought to a vote, it would not be adopted.
Thomas-Greenfield justified US opposition to a ceasefire by pointing to US efforts to push for a new hostage deal between Israel and Hamas. However, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vetoed hostage talks last week, and Qatar, the mediator of the negotiations, said Saturday that things were not looking “promising.”
Thomas-Greenfield said Algeria’s resolution would “run counter” to US efforts on the hostage deal. “We have communicated this concern repeatedly to our colleagues on the Council. For that reason, the United States does not support action on this draft resolution. Should it come up for a vote as drafted, it will not be adopted,” she said.
The US has already used its veto power on the Security Council to veto two resolutions calling for an end to the onslaught. The Biden administration has also dismissed the International Court of Justice’s ruling that it’s “plausible” Israel is committing genocide and continues to provide unconditional military support for the slaughter.
Thomas-Greenfield said the resolution would get in the way of US “diplomacy” related to pushing for a hostage deal. “It is critical that other parties give this process the best odds of succeeding, rather than push measures that put it — and the opportunity for an enduring resolution of hostilities — in jeopardy,” she said.
ICJ Hearings to Examine 57 Years of Israeli Occupation of Palestine
“Decades of injustice will finally face scrutiny,” said U.N. human rights official Francesca Albanese ahead of next week’s Hague hearings on the legal consequences of Israel’s illegal occupation.
Brett Wilkins, Common Dreams, 16 Feb 24 ,
https://www.commondreams.org/news/israeli-occupation
More than 50 countries are set to participate in next week’s hearings at the International Court of Justice focusing on Israel’s illegal 57-year occupation of Palestine, a forum that follows the Hague tribunal’s finding last month that Israel is “plausibly” committing genocide in occupied Gaza.
The ICJ—also known as the World Court—will hold a week of hearings on the legal consequences of Israel’s occupation of Palestine, which dates to the Israeli conquest of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza Strip, Syrian Golan Heights, and Egyptian Sinai Peninsula during the 1967 Six-Day War.
“The International Court of Justice is set for the first time to broadly consider the legal consequences of Israel’s nearly six-decades-long occupation and mistreatment of the Palestinian people,” Human Rights Watch senior legal adviser Clive Baldwin said in a statement. “Governments that are presenting their arguments to the court should seize these landmark hearings to highlight the grave abuses Israeli authorities are committing against Palestinians, including the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution.”
The West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Golan Heights remain under Israeli military occupation six decades after their conquest. The United Nations—to which the ICJ belongs—and many international NGOs contend that, despite removing its troops and settlers from Gaza two decades ago, Israel continues to occupy Gaza by controlling the besieged enclave’s airspace, territorial waters, and the entry and exit of people and goods.
Since the October 7 Hamas-led attacks on Israel, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) have killed or wounded more than 100,000 Palestinians in Gaza while forcibly displacing around 90% of the population. Numerous Israeli leaders have called for the renewed physical occupation, Jewish resettlement, and ethnic cleansing of the strip.
During the current assault on Gaza, occupation forces have also killed at least 388 Palestinians, including 99 children, in the West Bank, according to U.N. human rights officials.
Israeli settlers have for decades been steadily colonizing the occupied territories under the protection of the IDF, while ethnically cleansing Palestinians whose lands and homes they steal.
Next week’s hearings come on the heels of the ICJ’s provisional ruling last month in a case led by South Africa—which will be the first nation after Palestine to present at next week’s hearing—that Israel is “plausibly” committing genocide in Gaza. The tribunal ordered Israel to “take all measures within its power” to adhere to its obligations under Article II of the Genocide Convention.
Earlier this week, South Africa urgently appealed to the ICJ to act amid the looming threat of an Israeli ground invasion of Rafah. More than 1.5 million Palestinians, most of them refugees ordered to flee to the south of Gaza by invading Israeli forces, are crammed into what is now one of the world’s most densely populated places.
On Friday, the ICJ declined to take any additional action against Israel, while reiterating that the “perilous situation” in Rafah “demands immediate and effective implementation of the provisional measures indicated by the court” in last month’s ruling.
Biden disparages Netanyahu in private but hasn’t significantly changed U.S. policy toward Israel and Gaza
As the reported Palestinian death toll in the Gaza Strip reaches 28,000, the president continues to believe that unequivocally supporting Israel is the right policy.
Yet, even as Biden has escalated his rhetoric, he is not yet prepared to make significant policy changes, officials said. He and his aides continue to believe his approach of unequivocally supporting Israel is the right one.
As the reported Palestinian death toll in the Gaza Strip reaches 28,000, the president continues to believe that unequivocally supporting Israel is the right policy.
NBC News, Feb. 12, 2024, By Carol E. Lee, Jonathan Allen, Peter Nicholas and Courtney Kube
WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden has been venting his frustration in recent private conversations, some of them with campaign donors, over his inability to persuade Israel to change its military tactics in the Gaza Strip, and he has named Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as the primary obstacle, according to five people directly familiar with his comments.
Biden has said he is trying to get Israel to agree to a cease-fire, but Netanyahu is “giving him hell” and is impossible to deal with, said the people familiar with Biden’s comments, who all asked not to be named.
“He just feels like this is enough,” one of the people said of the views expressed by Biden. “It has to stop.”
Biden has in recent weeks spoken privately about Netanyahu, a leader he has known for decades, with a candor that has surprised some of those on the receiving end of his comments, people familiar with them said. His descriptions of his dealings with Netanyahu are peppered with contemptuous references to Netanyahu as “this guy,” these people said. And in at least three recent instances, Biden has called Netanyahu an “asshole,” according to three of the people directly familiar with his comments……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
Yet, people familiar with Biden’s private comments said he has told them he believes it would be counterproductive for him to be too harsh on Netanyahu publicly.
Biden’s frustrations with Netanyahu have also not led to a major policy shift, but his administration has begun to consider such options. Two weeks ago, officials told NBC News that the administration was discussing delaying or slowing U.S. weapons sales to Israel as leverage to get Netanyahu to dial down Israeli military operations in Gaza and do more to protect civilians………………….
Yet, even as Biden has escalated his rhetoric, he is not yet prepared to make significant policy changes, officials said. He and his aides continue to believe his approach of unequivocally supporting Israel is the right one…………………………
“I’m a Zionist,” Biden said, reiterating his views that Hamas must be destroyed and that Israel must be protected, according to the supporter……………………………………………….. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/investigations/biden-disparages-netanyahu-private-hasnt-changed-us-policy-israel-rcna138282
US Gives Israel the Green Light to Kill Civilians in Rafah
US officials told POLITICO that there would be no consequences for Israel if it invades Rafah, by Dave DeCamp February 13, 2024, https://news.antiwar.com/2024/02/13/us-gives-israel-the-green-light-to-kill-civilians-in-rafah/
The US has given Israel the green light to kill civilians in Rafah despite public comments from US officials calling for Israel to come up with a plan to protect civilians in the city, which is packed with an estimated 1.5 million Palestinians.
US officials told POLITICO that the Biden administration was not planning any consequences for Israel if it went ahead with a major assault on Rafah, which would inevitably kill a huge number of civilians. “No reprimand plans are in the works, meaning Israeli forces could enter the city and harm civilians without facing American consequences,” the report reads.
White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby made clear at a press conference on Monday that the US wasn’t thinking about cutting off Israel from military aid if it went ahead with the assault. When asked if the US has threatened to withhold aid, Kirby said, “We’re going to continue to support Israel … And we’re going to continue to make sure they have the tools and the capabilities to do that.”
President Biden is also not reconsidering his full-throated support for the Israeli slaughter in Gaza despite reports of him disparaging Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in private conversations.
Congress is also on board with continuing to support the mass killing of Palestinians as the Senate voted to pass a $95 billion foreign military aid bill that includes $14 billion for Israel. Only 20 Republicans voted for the bill, but the opposition is due to the lack of a border deal, as virtually all Republicans are in favor of unconditional support for Israel, even more so than Democrats in Congress.
Rafah’s pre-war population was 275,000, meaning Palestinians displaced from other areas of the Strip increased the population fivefold. The majority of the Palestinians in the city are sheltering in tents in the streets, leaving them especially vulnerable to an Israeli attack. Israeli airstrikes on Rafah on Sunday night into Monday morning killed 27 children and 22 women.
The War on Gaza: Public Relations vs. Reality
Wednesday, February 14th, 2024, By Robert C. Koehler, m http://commonwonders.com/the-war-on-gaza-public-relations-vs-reality/
For its victims, war is . . . yes, hell. For the rest of us — the onlooking and supportive patriots — war is an abstraction embedded in ignorance, a.k.a., public relations, served up for public consumption.
At least that’s the way it’s supposed to be. The reality of war should never directly confront the official PR of those waging it. If it does, God help the war industry!
But that’s what’s happening now, as public support for U.S. complicity in Israel’s devastation of Gaza diminishes, indeed, starts turning to outrage. Official spokesmen for the Biden administration, such as John Kirby, strategic communications coordinator for the National Security Council, are forced to start mixing apologetic language in with their unwavering support for the bombing and murder of civilians . . . excuse me, Israel’s right to defend itself.
“Civilian deaths are happening, and happening at a rate that obviously we’re not comfortable with,” Kirby said in a New Yorker interview. “But,” he quickly added, “it doesn’t mean that they are intentionally trying to wipe the people of Gaza off the map the same way that Hamas wants to wipe the Israeli people off the map.”
Wow, Israel’s actions and official declarations of intent to obliterate Palestine are making the U.S. government uncomfortable. (But Hamas is still the bad guy.) Oh, if only fragments of actual truth about the war could penetrate such an interview. For instance:
And it was mostly — I mean, the majority of the patients that I treated were children, anywhere from the age of 2 to 17. I mean, I saw horrific eye and facial injuries that I’ve never seen before, eyes shattered in two 6-year-old children with shrapnel that I had to take out, eyes with shrapnel stuck inside, facial injuries. I saw orthopedic injuries where — you know, limbs just cut off and dangling. I saw abdominal injuries that were just horrific. And it was just mass chaos. There were children on the floor, unattended to, with head trauma, people suturing patients without anesthesia on the ground. It was just mass chaos and really horrific, horrific scenes.”
The speaker is Dr. Yasser Khan, a Canadian ophthalmologist recently back from a humanitarian mission at the European Hospital in Khan Younis, in southern Gaza, near Rafah. He was interviewed by Democracy Now! I wish John Kirby could have been there.
The hospital, he said, was “about 300, 400 percent over capacity. There was patients and bodies lying all over the hospital floor, inside and outside. They had orthopedic devices coming from their legs or their arms. They were getting infected, they were in pain, because they were on the floor, so the conditions weren’t very sterile. And if they survived amputation the first time, the infection would get them . . .”
His words go on and on. OK, you (I mean Kirby) might say, this is war. People get hurt. But Israel has to “defend itself.”
This is self-defense?
“They have killed over 300 or 400 healthcare workers, doctors, nurses, paramedics. Ambulances have been bombed. This has all been a systematic sort of — you know, by destroying the healthcare system, you’re contributing to the genocide.”
Khan also notes: “They’ve attacked the sewage system, the water system, so the sewage mixes with the drinking water. And you get diarrheal diseases, bacterial diseases. You know, cholera, typhoid is not far away. Hepatitis A is epidemic there now. They’re living in cramped spaces.”
And it gets even more insane: “What’s going on is now there’s 10,000 to 15,000 bodies that are decomposing. So, it’s raining season right now in Gaza. So all the rainwater mixes with the decomposing bodies, and that bacteria mixes with the drinking water supply, and you get further disease.”
Israel has the right to defend itself. But come on, guys, be a little bit more careful. Kill fewer children. Try not to poison the water. You might say this is public relations with a limp. Meanwhile, the International Court of Justice has ordered Israel to “refrain” from taking action that could be considered genocidal and, good God, “take measures to improve the humanitarian situation for Palestinian civilians in the enclave,” as Reuters reports.
But it’s war itself — regardless of “intent” — that is causing this hell. The act of war, the weapons of war, the political-economic structure of the globe that is based on endless war and domination, seems never to face serious condemnation, at least not in any official sense. But if we feed war, we feed hell.
Perhaps there’s one bit of recent news about a challenge to the global war industry, and its public relations perpetrators, that isn’t simply a scream from the political margins or cries from the victims. It’s the Transatlantic Civil Servants’ Statement on Gaza, a statement, released on Feb. 2, signed by more than 800 civil servants from the United States, the European Union and about a dozen European countries, declaring: “It Is Our Duty To Speak Out When Our Governments’ Policies Are Wrong.”
The statement declares the Gaza pummeling “one of the worst human catastrophes of this century.” And it calls on its countries to halt all military support to Israel and use their leverage “to secure a lasting ceasefire and full humanitarian access in Gaza and a safe release of all hostages” and “develop a strategy for lasting peace.”
A strategy for lasting peace? That’s another way of calling for an end to war. It’s about time.
Israel, USA, the “West” can’t hide their atrocious guilt any more.
Look – it was sort of OK in the 1930s – for Western political leaders, and their people, to sort of “didn’t know” what was going on in Germany. Hell, they had the lovely 1936 Olympics, and workers were getting a good deal, and Hitler was lovely to dogs.
If there were atrocities going on, – like millions of Jews, homosexuals, dissidents, mentally ill…. getting tortured and murdered – well, we “found out” about it only years later, didn’t we?
BUT. It’s different now. There is ample evidence – first hand real photography, real videos and film, real firsthand aural and written accounts of the mass cruelties being inflicted by Israel on the people of Gaza.
“War against Hamas” – what nonsense ! It’s massacre of Palestinians, and everybody knows it.
President Joe Biden and co. can bleat all they like about “urging Israel to be humanitarian to the Gazan people”, AT THE SAME TIME AS BIDEN AND CO ARE SUPPLYING WEAPONS TO ISRAEL TO DO THE KILLING!
US officials told POLITICO that the Biden administration was not planning any consequences for Israel if it went ahead with a major assault on Rafah, which would inevitably kill a huge number of civilians. “No reprimand plans are in the works, meaning Israeli forces could enter the city and harm civilians without facing American consequences,” the report reads.
“We’re going to continue to support Israel … And we’re going to continue to make sure they have the tools and the capabilities to do that.”
Of course the only thing that Biden really cares about is himself getting elected again in November. That might make him, and USA’s sycophantic allies, care a little bit about the miseries in Gaza.
But the world is appalled. We are not taken in by pious bleatings about “humanitarian aid” – while the Genocide finding of the International Court of Justice is ignored by the powerful, and while the one agency of support to the Gazans is closed down by the powerful.
Perhaps they’ll try to pretend that all the mass of evidence of genocide is “fake news”, and produced by artificial intelligence, and critics are just “tools of Russia” – or some other rubbish that the CIA and nuclear-military-industrial complex think up.
Their hypocrisy is boundless. Now they’re all alarmed because Iran might make a nuclear bomb. Israel has about 90 nuclear bombs, according to some experts. Israel has had nuclear bombs for decades, and the “Western powers” just pretend that they don’t know this. Israel is OK, safe to manage its nuclear weapons. Really?
‘Operation Al-Aqsa Flood’ Day 127: Growing international alarm over Israeli plans to invade Rafah
Israel has announced its intention to push ahead with its plans to invade Rafah in the southernmost Gaza Strip, where 1.3 million Palestinians are sheltering. Rafah’s mayor, Ahmed al-Sufi, warns any military action there would result in a “massacre”.
By Mondoweiss Palestine Bureau / Mondoweiss, 10 Feb 24 https://mondoweiss.net/2024/02/operation-al-aqsa-flood-day-127-growing-international-alarm-over-israeli-plans-to-invade-rafah/
Casualties:
- At least 28,064 people have been killed and 67,611 wounded in the Gaza Strip*
- More than 380 Palestinians have been killed in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem
- The death toll in Israel from the October 7th attacks stands at 1,139, according to Al Jazeera
- 564 Israeli soldiers killed since October 7, and at least 3,221 injured.**
*This figure was confirmed by Gaza’s Ministry of Health on its Telegram channel. Some rights groups put the death toll number at more than 35,000 when accounting for those presumed dead.
** This figure is released by the Israeli military, showing the soldiers whose names “were allowed to be published.”
Key Developments
- Israel has committed 16 massacres, killing 117 Palestinians and injuring 152 in Gaza over the past 24 hours, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health
- Despite U.S. criticisms, Netanyahu pushes ahead with planned invasion of Rafah to “take out four remaining [Hamas] battalions” in the southernmost Gaza Strip city, Haaretz reported.
- As Netanyahu allegedly makes plans for “civilian evacuation” in Rafah in preparation for Israeli ground invasion, Israeli army kills 28 Palestinians in Gaza in raid on residential homes in Rafah, including 10 children, the youngest of whom was a three-year-old child, Al Jazeera reported.
- The body has been found of missing 6-year-old Palestinian girl Hind Rajab, who made headlines after her desperate calls to be rescued after her family came under attack by an Israeli tank. The Palestinian medics who were dispatched to rescue her were also declared dead.
- UN relief chief expresses outcry over planned invasion of Rafah: “Many of the well over 1 million people who make up Rafah’s population today have endured unthinkable suffering. Where are they supposed to go? How are they supposed to stay safe?”
- Mayor of Rafah warns any invasion of the city “will lead to a massacre.”
- Biden to send CIA director to Egypt to continue negotiations on ceasefire deal and potential exchange of captives. This comes on the heels of Israel rejected a proposed ceasefire deal by Hamas, which Netanyahu called ‘crazy’ and Biden dubbed as ‘over the top’.
- Biden issues new directive requiring countries receiving U.S. military aid to prove that they are “in compliance with international humanitarian law and human rights law and other standards,” AP reported.
- Israeli forces and snipers are firing at civilians and medical personnel in and outside of the Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis, in southern Gaza. Doctors Without Borders says two people have been killed and five others have been injured over the past 48 hours.
- Claims surface of abducted Palestinian doctor and Director of Al-Shifa’ Hospital Muhammad Abu Salmiya is being tortured by Israeli forces and treated ‘like a dog’.
- Israeli forces kill a 17-year-old Palestinian boy in the northern occupied West Bank district of Nablus during a raid on the town of Beita.
- Israel conducts airstrikes and artillery shelling in southern Lebanon, no injuries were reported.
- Senior Biden administration aide reportedly apologizes for “missteps” in the administration’s handling of Israel’s war on Gaza in closed-door meeting with Arab-American political leaders in Michigan.
Growing chorus of international alarm over Israel’s plans to invade Rafah
Despite warnings and criticisms from the Biden administration, Israel is announcing its intention to push ahead with its plans to invade Rafah, the southernmost part of the Gaza Strip where an estimated 1 million Palestinians, half of Gaza’s population, are sheltering.
Israeli news daily Haaretz reported that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the army and defense establishment on Friday to “present plans to defeat the Hamas battalions” that are allegedly operating in Rafah.
Quoting a statement from the Prime Minister, Haaretz reported Netanyahu as saying: “It is impossible to achieve the goal of the war of eliminating Hamas while leaving four Hamas battalions in Rafah.”
In an effort seemingly meant to appease vocal warnings from the Biden administration that the U.S. wouldn’t support an “unplanned” military operation in Rafah without considerations to “protect civilians,” Netanyahu also said that a military operation in Rafah would “require the evacuation of the civilian population from combat zones.”
It is not clear how Israel plans to evacuate the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who have sought shelter in Rafah due to Israeli bombardment and Israeli orders to evacuate the north, central, and other areas of southern Gaza.
Inside Rafah’s city center, tens of thousands of displaced Palestinians shelter in buildings, schools, and hospitals. Meanwhile, on the outskirts of Rafah, near the Egyptian border, entire tent cities have been erected to house the growing population of displaced Palestinians.
According to Save the Children, an estimated 1.3 million Palestinians, including 610,000 children are currently displaced and sheltering in the Rafah area.
Given the current reality that Israel has destroyed its way through the rest of Gaza, obliterating more than half of Gaza’s infrastructure in the process, the question remains: where will the 1.3 million Palestinians in Rafah go if the army invades?
Since the start of the genocidal Israeli campaign on Gaza, Palestinians have been warning of Israeli desires to ethnically cleanse them, and push Palestinians from the small besieged enclave into Egypt. Those fears were intensified when, in late October, documents were leaked from the Israeli Ministry of Intelligence outlining plans to push the Palestinian civilian population in Gaza into the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula, which borders Gaza to the south.
Egypt’s borders, however, have remained firmly closed, save the entry and exit of minimal humanitarian aid. The Egyptian government and other Arab nations have also remained firmly opposed to Israeli ideations of mass expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza.
Despite the growing threat of an invasion in Rafah, many Palestinians sheltering there say they will not leave their shelters. “We have come to the border area with Egypt because we thought it would be the safest place, the last place where Israel would push the residents. Now it is not possible to push them any farther, it is not possible for us to move anywhere else. We will only move from here to the grave. This is our last resort,” a Palestinian woman in Rafah told Middle East Eye.
As Israel continues to promote its plans of an invasion into Rafah, a growing chorus of outcry is emerging both locally and on the international stage.
According to Al Jazeera, the mayor of Rafah, Ahmed al-Sufi, has warned that any military action in Rafah would result in a “massacre”.
Martin Griffiths, the UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, posted on X warning that Palestinians in Rafah would have nowhere to go in the case of an Israeli invasion.
“Many of the well over 1 million people who make up Rafah’s population today have endured unthinkable suffering. Their homes have been destroyed, their streets mined, their neighborhoods shelled. They’ve been on the move for months, braving bombs, disease and hunger.
Where are they supposed to go? How are they supposed to stay safe? There’s nowhere left to go in Gaza. Civilians must be protected and their essential needs, including shelter, food and health must be met,” Griffiths wrote.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres also posted on X, saying: “Half of Gaza’s population is now crammed into Rafah with nowhere to go. Reports that the Israeli military intends to focus next on Rafah are alarming.
Such an action would exponentially increase what is already a humanitarian nightmare with untold regional consequences.”
Amnesty International posted satellite images showing vast displacement camps in Rafah, saying” “Many have already faced successive waves of displacement. If these mass ‘evacuation orders’ are indeed issued they may amount to the crime of forcible transfer.”
UNICEF also warned against a ground invasion in Rafah, saying it would “mark another devastating turn. The agency’s director also called for an “immediate humanitarian ceasefire,” saying it would save lives.
Avril Benoit, the executive director of Doctors Without Borders (MSF)-USA also responded to Israel’s planned invasion of Rafah, saying it would be “catastrophic and must not proceed.”
“As aerial bombardment of the area continues, more than a million people—many living in tents and makeshift shelters—now face a dramatic escalation in this ongoing massacre.”
“Nowhere in Gaza is safe,” she continued, “and repeated forced displacements have pushed people to Rafah, where they are trapped in a tiny patch of land and have no options.”
Jordan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs alo issued a statement, saying it “rejects the displacement of Palestinians inside or outside their territories and stresses the need to end the war on the Gaza Strip.”
As Israel mulls over plans to ‘protect civilians’, Israel kills more civilians in Gaza
Just hours after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced his intentions to evacuate civilians in Rafah, Israeli forces killed 28 Palestinians in air attacks on residential homes in Rafah.
Continue reading“In The War Of Propaganda, It Is Very Difficult To Defeat The United States”
“Highly emotive terms for the killing of civilians like ‘slaughter,’ ‘massacre,’ and ‘horrific’ were reserved almost exclusively for Israelis who were killed by Palestinians, rather than the other way around,”
Got it? In Ukraine people die from bombs because Russia launched Russian airstrikes and killed them very Russianly, whereas in Gaza people get hurt by explosions because they got too close to some type of explosive material.
CAITLIN JOHNSTONE, FEB 11, 2024
“…………………… “In the war of propaganda it is very difficult to defeat the United States because the United States controls all the world’s media and many European media,” Putin replied, adding, “The ultimate beneficiary of the biggest European media are American financial institutions.”
… Putin is definitely correct about the strength of the American propaganda machine. Of all the fronts one could possibly choose to challenge the United States on, propaganda is surely the least favorable. The US empire has by far the most sophisticated and effective propaganda machine ever to have existed, operating with such complexity that most people don’t even know it exists.
…………………………………………………………………In reality the nature of the US-centralized empire allows it to run a massive, nonstop international propaganda campaign through mass media platforms which are mostly privately owned. A diverse network of factors feeds into this dynamic which I’ve detailed in my unusually lengthy article “15 Reasons Why Mass Media Employees Act Like Propagandists”, but the gist of it is that anyone who’s wealthy enough to control a mass media platform is going to have a vested interest in preserving the status quo upon which their wealth is premised, and they will cooperate with establishment power structures in various ways toward that end.
The fact that these mass media outlets look independent but function as propaganda organs for the US empire allows its propaganda to fly into people’s minds without triggering any gag reflex of critical thinking or skepticism, which wouldn’t be the case if people knew those outlets were feeding them propaganda. Propaganda only really has persuasive power if you don’t know it’s happening to you.
The invisibility of US propaganda is further aided by the subtle methods by which it is administered, which we’ve seen exemplified beautifully in the coverage of Israel’s ongoing US-backed mass atrocity in Gaza.
In an article titled “Coverage of Gaza War in the New York Times and Other Major Newspapers Heavily Favored Israel, Analysis Shows,” The Intercept reports that a review of 1,000 articles from the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times about Israel’s war on Gaza found that the outlets consistently used word choices which served Israeli information interests.
“Highly emotive terms for the killing of civilians like ‘slaughter,’ ‘massacre,’ and ‘horrific’ were reserved almost exclusively for Israelis who were killed by Palestinians, rather than the other way around,” The Intercept’s Adam Johnson and Othman Ali report. “The term ‘slaughter’ was used by editors and reporters to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 60 to 1, and ‘massacre’ was used to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 125 to 2. ‘Horrific’ was used to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 36 to 4.”
This is the sort of manipulation that a casual news consumer wouldn’t notice. Unless you’re on alert for bias and are keeping track of what words are and aren’t being used where, you’re probably not going to notice the absence of emotionally-charged words when reporting on Palestinians who are killed by Israelis.
This type of slant shows up in all sorts of ways, like today’s headlines about the IDF killing a six year-old Palestinian girl named Hind Rajab along with her family. Reliable propaganda organs of the empire like CNN, The New York Times and the BBC have respectively gone with the headlines “Five-year-old Palestinian girl found dead after being trapped in car under Israeli fire”, “Missing 6-Year-Old and Rescue Team Found Dead in Gaza, Aid Group Says,” and “Hind Rajab, 6, found dead in Gaza days after phone calls for help”. In contrast, Al Jazeera reports on the same story with the headline “Body of 6-year-old killed in ‘deliberate’ Israeli fire found after 12 days,” and Middle East Eye goes with “Hind Rajab: Palestinian girl found dead after being trapped under Israeli fire for days”.
It’s easy to spot the difference when they’re placed next to each other like I just did, but unless you’re really watching out for it and have a good background on what’s going on here you’re likely to miss what’s happening. If you’re like most people and don’t read past the headline, you’d never know from the imperial media headlines that the child was killed by Israel, and you’d certainly never know about her terrified phone call for help while trapped by IDF fire and surrounded by the bodies of her dead relatives. If you look to the legacy media and its algorithmically-boosted online iterations for information about the world, you went one more day with a distorted perspective of what’s happening in Gaza.
The western press constantly write headlines like this when trying to minimize the impact of someone’s death at the hands of a party they sympathize with, particularly with regard to Palestinians. Last month the BBC published an article titled “Record number of civilians hurt by explosives in 2023”, as though they were mishandling fireworks or something instead of being actively killed by Israeli bombs. The BBC later revised their atrocious headline, but revised it in the opposite direction, replacing “Record number” with “High number” to further minimize the impact.
Contrast this with the BBC’s headlines when it’s reporting on Ukrainians killed by Russian airstrikes . Here’s a recent one titled “Ukraine war: Russian air strikes claim five lives in Kyiv and Mykolaiv”, and another titled “Ukraine war: Baby killed in Russian strike on Kharkiv hotel”.
Got it? In Ukraine people die from bombs because Russia launched Russian airstrikes and killed them very Russianly, whereas in Gaza people get hurt by explosions because they got too close to some type of explosive material.
Last week The Washington Post ran an opinion piece titled “Is America complicit in Israel’s bloody war in Gaza?”, which is already a ridiculously skewed headline because the answer is self-evidently yes — implying that there’s any question of this skews things in America’s favor. But even this was too much for the Post’s editors, who re-titled the piece “Has the Israel-Gaza war changed your feelings about being American?” to keep Americans from thinking too hard about Israel’s bloody war in Gaza and their country’s complicity in it.
In a Wednesday article titled “Biden Tries Again With Arab Americans in Michigan”, New York Times editorial board member Farah Stockman wrote the absolutely insane line “The Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel seems to be affecting Biden’s election prospects.” And then The New York Times actually printed it.
Read that line again. She’s saying Arab Americans are rejecting Biden because of the October 7 Hamas attack, which is of course absurd; they’re rejecting Biden because he’s backing a genocide in Gaza. She wrote this nonsensical line because in the New York Times you can’t say things like “Israel’s genocide in Gaza” or “the president’s facilitation of crimes against humanity”, and you won’t be hired if you’re the sort of person who’d be inclined to. Instead we’re pretending that for some inexplicable reason Arab Americans are just hopping mad at Biden because October 7 happened.
But again, these little manipulations fly under the radar if you’re not on the lookout for them. Such is the brilliance of the US empire’s invisible propaganda machine. That’s why it’s very difficult to win a propaganda war against the United States, that’s why westerners have been so successfully manipulated into accepting a status quo of endless war, ecocide, injustice and exploitation, and that’s why the world looks the way it looks right now.
Absence of Evidence: Israel’s Case Against UNRWA
We got hold of Israel’s dossier against UNRWA – why did the donors including the UK withdraw funding on such flimsy unproven allegations before an investigation?”
the summary did “not provide evidence to support its claims.”
February 11, 2024 by: Dr Binoy Kampmark,
https://theaimn.com/absence-of-evidence-israels-case-against-unrwa/
Statistics are often given lanky legs that take their user far. But how they are used, and how they are received, is striking. The current figure of 27,500 dead is a blighting, grotesque fact. But as they are Palestinians, the issue is less significant to certain parties than, say, 140 Israeli hostages being held in Gaza.
As with much in the noisy clatter of Middle Eastern violence, the value attributed to numbers alters in the shade of ideology and self-interest. Massacres become acts of self-defence; acts of self-defence become unconscionable inflictions of murder. It also follows that an organisation of 30,000 employees, working in the field of humanitarianism, aid and salvation, can be plastered as terrorist sponsors for having 12 individuals in their service allegedly involved in a murderous assault on Israel on October 7, 2023. Despite the relative smallness of this figure, the entire organisation itself becomes a target.
Israel was initially adamant that 12 such individuals in UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East) had participated in the October 7 attacks by Hamas, sharing the details on January 29 with several media outlets. The accusations were made via a thin dossier amounting to no more than six pages. Little by way of evidence was supplied, though Israel was content to make further claims that almost 10% of the agency’s staff had ties to Hamas. As UN Crisis Group expert Daniel Forti writes, “Thus far, Israel has not provided evidence in writing to the UN to substantiate its allegations.”
For a gaggle of Western states and donors, that hardly mattered. The mere mention of the Satanic Twelve had made their way into public and political consciousness, and something had to be done about it. Funding to the aid body was swiftly suspended by the United States, Germany, the European Union, Sweden, Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom. The organisation was smeared and threatened with functional incapacity and prospective oblivion, an outcome that would also, inevitably, doom Palestinians. Unchallenged accusations that the agency had long been a Hamas front – an article of faith among Israeli nationalists – were bandied about with abandon.
The United Nations, for its part, was unusually fleet footed in responding to the dossier. Contracts were terminated. Inquiries were announced, along with promises of stern self-examination, purging and cleansing. On February 5, the UN Secretary General António Guterres announced that an independent panel had been created with the specific purpose of assessing “whether the agency is doing everything within its power to ensure neutrality and to respond to allegations of serious breaches when they are made.” The panel will be chaired by former French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna, who will work alongside a Scandinavian complement of the Raoul Wallenberg Institute in Sweden, the Chr. Michelsen Institute in Norway and the Danish Institute for Human Rights.
With the setting up of such heavy machinery, the picture started getting foggier. Then a smiting report from the British news outlet Channel 4 took issue with the scanty material supplied in the document. As the network’s Lindsey Hilsum stated, “We got hold of Israel’s dossier against UNRWA – why did the donors including the UK withdraw funding on such flimsy unproven allegations before an investigation?”
Channel 4 goes on to reveal that the dossier “contains no evidence to support Israel’s explosive new claim other than stating, ‘From intelligence information, documents, and identity cards seized during the course of the fighting, it is now possible to flag around 190 Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihadi terrorist operatives who serve as UNRWA employees. More than 10 UNRWA staffers took part in the events of October 7.”
Even the usually less than critical CNN network reported that it had “not seen the intelligence that underlies the summary of allegations”, going on to mention that the summary did “not provide evidence to support its claims.”
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When Ophir Falk, an advisor to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, was asked by CNN anchor Anna Coren to provide evidence of the claims, he refused to do so. When asked why the alleged culprits had not been arrested, he merely replied that “the first step is for them to be fired.”
Outlets such as The New York Times and Wall Street Journal were less than concerned by the gaping lacunae and skimpiness of Israel’s case. Instead, the latter could even go so far as to claim that the dossier provided “the most detailed look yet at the widespread links between the UNRWA employees and militants.” The ABC World News Tonight was clumsy enough to suggest that the UN had “not denied the claims”, implying a veneer of veracity.
Now, other countries are finding absence of evidence from the Israeli side more than awkward. Australia’s Foreign Minister, Penny Wong, had to also admit that she had not been furnished with much in the way of evidence. “We have spoken to the Israelis and we have asked for further evidence,” she told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s 7.30. When asked why she did not ask UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini about the subject, she simply reiterated the point that she had asked the Israelis directly and was not aware if Lazzarini had evidence. “He may, I don’t know what he has.”
With trademark oiliness, Wong countered that the allegations were what mattered. “I think it is clear from UNRWA’s own actions that they regard these allegations as serious.” They had done so by “terminating the employment of a number of employees and putting in place an inquiry – in fact, there are two inquiries.” Effectively, the agency was to be punished for its own enterprising efforts to investigate the claims, leaving the accusers free to level whatever charges they saw fit.
In the meantime, Lazzarini has been scrambling to fill the funding void, making visits to the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Kuwait. The dying and starvation in Gaza continue with the prospect of even more horror as Israel’s armed forces prepare their offensive on Rafah. A fine thing, then, to see donor countries for UNRWA, some of whom continue funding Israel’s military efforts, to moralise about terrorists and the agency.
100 Jewish Cease-Fire Supporters Arrested Blocking Biden’s NYC Motorcade Route
“As Jewish New Yorkers we want to make crystal clear that President Biden is not welcome in our city while he continues to fund and arm the Israeli government’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza,” said one protester.
Brett Wilkins, 8 Feb 24 , https://www.commondreams.org/news/jewish-protest-cease-fire—
Around 100 Jewish American and allied activists were arrested in New York City Wednesday after they blocked President Joe Biden’s motorcade route to protest U.S. complicity in Israel’s genocidal war against the Palestinian people and to demand an immediate Gaza cease-fire.
The group Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) led the Upper East Side demonstration, during which activists sat down in the intersection of Fifth Avenue and 82nd Street, where the president was attending a nearby fundraiser.
As Jewish New Yorkers we want to make crystal clear that President Biden is not welcome in our city while he continues to fund and arm the Israeli government’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza,” saidJVP’s Jay Saper.
JVP activist Maya Edery noted that this is Biden’s first visit to New York since the October 7 Hamas-led attacks on Israel.
“Instead of answering to the majority of his base that is calling for a cease-fire, he is meeting with corporate donors behind closed doors,” Edery said.
Biden’s staunch support for Israel—which includes asking for an additional $14.3 billion in U.S. military aid atop the nearly $4 billion the country already receives from Washington and repeatedly bypassing Congress to expedite armed assistance to the key ally—has prompted many activists to call him “Genocide Joe.”
JVP activist Maya Edery noted that this is Biden’s first visit to New York since the October 7 Hamas-led attacks on Israel.
“Instead of answering to the majority of his base that is calling for a cease-fire, he is meeting with corporate donors behind closed doors,” Edery said.
Biden’s staunch support for Israel—which includes asking for an additional $14.3 billion in U.S. military aid atop the nearly $4 billion the country already receives from Washington and repeatedly bypassing Congress to expedite armed assistance to the key ally—has prompted many activists to call him “Genocide Joe.”
The president has also come under fire for casting doubt on the number of Palestinians killed and wounded by Israeli forces.
As JVP noted:
The Israeli military has killed over 27,000 Palestinians in Gaza, over 11,000 of whom were children, in four months of bombing and military assault. Gaza has been made uninhabitable by design, with Israeli airstrikes destroying 70% of infrastructure, including hospitals, universities, and the electricity and water grids.
Nearly 2 million people have been forced to flee their homes; 1.9 million are sheltering in the southern city of Rafah, where the Israeli military has lately launched airstrikes.
“Biden says that he is funding and arming Israel for Jewish safety. We’re here to call his bluff,” said JVP’s Eve Feldberg. “The president is advancing the U.S.’ own military interests.”
Wednesday’s demonstration was the latest in a wave of Jewish-led protests by groups including JVP and IfNotNow that have shut down transportation hubs, taken over the Statue of Liberty, and disrupted speeches by Biden and other administration officials.
Also on Wednesday, dozens of members of the peace group CodePink were arrested for blocking entrances to the Woodward weapons manufacturing plant in suburban Chicago.
“Woodward is a weapons manufacturer. They supply arms to Israel,” said one protester. “So we are here today to prevent workers from going in and from building bombs that have been dropped on Palestinians in Gaza.”
Five CodePink activists were also arrested after blocking an entrance to Travis Air Force Base in northern California on Wednesday, a day after members of the group including Jewish co-founder Medea Benjamin confronted Democratic California Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi over an Israel aid bill in the House.
Gaza: Chris Hedges: Let Them Eat Dirt
The final stage of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, an orchestrated mass starvation, has begun. The international community does not intend to stop it.
By Chris Hedges ScheerPost, 8 Feb 24, https://scheerpost.com/2024/02/08/chris-hedges-let-them-eat-dirt/—
There was never any possibility that the Israeli government would agree to a pause in the fighting proposed by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, much less a ceasefire. Israel is on the verge of delivering the coup de grâce in its war on Palestinians in Gaza – mass starvation. When Israeli leaders use the term “absolute victory,” they mean total decimation, total elimination. The Nazis in 1942 systematically starved the 500,000 men, women and children in the Warsaw Ghetto. This is a number Israel intends to exceed.
Israel, and its chief patron the United States, by attempting to shut down the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), which provides food and aid to Gaza, is not only committing a war crime, but is in flagrant defiance of the International Court of Justice (ICJ). The court found the charges of genocide brought by South Africa, which included statements and facts gathered by UNWRA, plausible. It ordered Israel to abide by six provisional measures to prevent genocide and alleviate the humanitarian catastrophe. The fourth provisional measure calls on Israel to secure immediate and effective steps to provide humanitarian assistance and essential services in Gaza.
UNRWA’s reports on conditions in Gaza, which I covered as a reporter for seven years, and its documentation of indiscriminate Israeli attacks illustrate that, as UNRWA said, “unilaterally declared ‘safe zones’ are not safe at all. Nowhere in Gaza is safe.”
UNRWA’s role in documenting the genocide, as well as providing food and aid to the Palestinians, infuriates the Israeli government. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused UNRWA after the ruling of providing false information to the ICJ. Already an Israeli target for decades, Israel decided that UNRWA, which supports 5.9 million Palestinian refugees across the Middle East with clinics, schools and food, had to be eliminated. Israel’s destruction of UNRWA serves a political as well as material objective.
The evidence-free Israeli accusations against UNRWA that a dozen of the 13,000 employees had links to those who carried out the attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, which saw some 1,200 Israelis killed, did the trick. It led 16 major donors, including the United States, the U.K., Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland, Finland, Australia, Canada, Sweden, Estonia and Japan, to suspend financial support for the relief agency on which nearly every Palestinian in Gaza depends for food. Israel has killed 152 UNRWA workers and damaged 147 UNRWA installations since Oct. 7. Israel has also bombed UNRWA relief trucks.
More than 27,708 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, some 67,000 have been wounded and at least 7,000 are missing, most likely dead and buried under the rubble.
More than half a million Palestinians – one in four – are starving in Gaza, according to the U.N. Starvation will soon be ubiquitous. Palestinians in Gaza, at least 1.9 million of whom have been internally displaced, lack not only sufficient food, but clean water, shelter and medicine. There are few fruits or vegetables. There is little flour to make bread. Pasta, along with meat, cheese and eggs, have disappeared. Black market prices for dry goods such as lentils and beans have increased 25 times from pre-war prices. A bag of flour on the black market has risen from $8.00 to $200 dollars. The healthcare system in Gaza, with only three of Gaza’s 36 hospitals left partially functioning, has largely collapsed. Some 1.3 million displaced Palestinians live on the streets of the southern city of Rafah, which Israel designated a “safe zone,” but has begun to bomb. Families shiver in the winter rains under flimsy tarps amid pools of raw sewage. An estimated 90 percent of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been driven from their homes.
“There is no instance since the Second World War in which an entire population has been reduced to extreme hunger and destitution with such speed,” writes Alex de Waal, executive director of the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University and the author of “Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine,” in the Guardian. “And there’s no case in which the international obligation to stop it has been so clear.”
The United States, formerly UNRWA’s largest contributor, provided $422 million to the agency in 2023. The severance of funds ensures that UNRWA food deliveries, already in very short supply because of blockages by Israel, will largely come to a halt by the end of February or the beginning of March.
Israel has given the Palestinians in Gaza two choices. Leave or die.
I covered the famine in Sudan in 1988 that took 250,000 lives. There are streaks in my lungs, scars from standing amid hundreds of Sudanese who were dying of tuberculosis. I was strong and healthy and fought off the contagion. They were weak and emaciated and did not. The international community, as in Gaza, did little to intervene.
The precursor to starvation – undernourishment – already affects most Palestinians in Gaza. Those who starve lack enough calories to sustain themselves. In desperation people begin to eat animal fodder, grass, leaves, insects, rodents, even dirt. They suffer from diarrhea and respiratory infections. They rip up tiny bits of food, often spoiled, and ration it.
Soon, lacking enough iron to produce hemoglobin, a protein in red blood cells that carries oxygen from the lungs to the body, and myoglobin, a protein that provides oxygen to muscles, coupled with a lack of vitamin B1, they become anemic. The body feeds on itself. Tissue and muscle waste away. It is impossible to regulate body temperature. Kidneys shut down. Immune systems crash. Vital organs – brain, heart, lungs, ovaries and testes — atrophy. Blood circulation slows. The volume of blood decreases. Infectious diseases such as typhoid, tuberculosis and cholera become an epidemic, killing people by the thousands.
It is impossible to concentrate. Emaciated victims succumb to mental and emotional withdrawal and apathy. They do not want to be touched or moved. The heart muscle is weakened. Victims, even at rest, are in a state of virtual heart failure. Wounds do not heal. Vision is impaired with cataracts, even among the young. Finally, wracked by convulsions and hallucinations, the heart stops. This process can last up to 40 days for an adult. Children, the elderly and the sick expire at faster rates.
I saw hundreds of skeletal figures, specters of human beings, moving forlornly at a glacial pace across the barren Sudanese landscape. Hyenas, accustomed to eating human flesh, routinely picked off small children. I stood over clusters of bleached human bones on the outskirts of villages where dozens of people, too weak to walk, had laid down in a group and never gotten up. Many were the remains of entire families.
In the abandoned town of Mayen Abun bats dangled from the rafters of the gutted Italian mission church. The streets were overgrown with tussocks of grass. The dirt airstrip was flanked by hundreds of human bones, skulls and the remnants of iron bracelets, colored beads, baskets and tattered strips of clothing. The palm trees had been cut in half. People had eaten the leaves and the pulp inside. There had been a rumor that food would be delivered by plane. People had walked for days to the airstrip. They waited and waited and waited. No plane arrived. No one buried the dead.
Now, from a distance, I watch this happen in another land in another time. I know the indifference that doomed the Sudanese, mostly Dinkas, and today dooms the Palestinians. The poor, especially when they are of color, do not count. They can be killed like flies. The starvation in Gaza is not a natural disaster. It is Israel’s masterplan.
There will be scholars and historians who will write of this genocide, falsely believing that we can learn from the past, that we are different, that history can prevent us from being, once again, barbarians. They will hold academic conferences. They will say “Never again!” They will praise themselves for being more humane and civilized. But when it comes time to speak out with each new genocide, fearful of losing their status or academic positions, they will scurry like rats into their holes. Human history is one long atrocity for the world’s poor and vulnerable. Gaza is another chapter.
TODAY . Why we get distorted, unreliable, news about Ukraine and Israel
Israel
Every now and then, some journalist steps out of the accepted line, and spills the beans on what is going on in critical news.
This week, the Guardian’s Guardian’s Chris McGreal did just that. He exposed the journalistic turmoil in CNN, over its very biased coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza
It’s got particularly important right now. Most of us are probably still believing in the Hamas massacre story of, “bodies of babies with their heads cut off” – despite not one shred of evidence of this. With the whole Middle East now a tinderbox, the media is still pushing the Israel storyline that goes like this:
The Israelis suffered the brutal massacre of 1200 citizens on October 7, 2023. That justifies the massacre of 27,365 Palestinians in Gaza. In the continuing massacre of Palestinians, the Israelis are the victims. To allow humanitarian aid to the desperate , hungry, Gazan survivors is to support terrorism.
Chris McGeal explains the long, complicated, and disgraceful background of media succumbing to pressure – “the CNN network repeatedly aired inflammatory rhetoric and propaganda from Israeli officials and American supporters, often without challenge in interviews.”
He also notes the restrictions on journalists, with the Israeli block on foreign journalists, and with all CNN’s copy on the Israel-Palestine situation having be first approved by the Jerusalem bureau.
And it’s not new – this subservience - it was the same thing with the coverage of the post 9/11 time, and the unbalanced and ultra-negative coverage of the Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, and the killing of Afghan civilians by US forces.
Caitlin Johnstone, the not-so-mainstream, and intrepid, excavator of the truth, has also dug up the troubling realities on the biased news that we are fed.
She aims her blowtorch on the careers of media executives moving through corporate media – New York Times – BBC – CNN – “ The corporate media are owned and controlled by plutocrats who have a vested interest in preserving the status quo power structure upon which their kingdoms are built, and state broadcasters like the BBC have the same interest for the same reason. They decide who the executives of those outlets will be, and those executives make policy and hiring decisions which cause the outlet to function in a way that is indistinguishable from state propaganda.”
UKRAINE
Caitlin Johnstone is also one of the few writers (apart from Russian journalists) who also shine a light on the media coverage of the Ukraine war. She has examined ”the brazen propaganda push to normalize war profiteering in Ukraine “, quoting CNN anchor Erin Burnett ………. pausing to explain to her audience that this funding is actually good for Americans, because it goes straight into the US arms industry.“
She points out not only the advantages to American weapons companies of continuing the Ukraine war indefinitely, but the way in which the media report this – with approval! “western officials are now going out of their way to communicate to the public that this war will stretch on for many more years to come.”
She quotes the Wall Street Journal, Reuters, and CNN - all positively gushing over how good this war is for America - jobs, share prices, company profits - all good!
When it comes to coverage of the actual war and its battles - well, we hear a lot about the dedicated President Zelensky. We hear about the Ukrainian counter-offensive (though it did not seem to work). We get genuinely sad stories about victims of Russian strikes, and rather more dubious stories about Russian atrocities. On the whole, we really don’t hear much about the actual progress of the war, and get a stunning silence about the Ukrainian troop casualties. And there’s little attempt to explain the background to this war. As with the Gaza story, it’s as though the hostilities were new and unprovoked, and the grievances are solely on the side that the USA supports
Mostly the Ukraine coverage is about how world democracy requires more weapons to be bought (by Western tax-payers) and given to Ukraine.
The media – journalists hanging on to their jobs, companies hanging on to their advertisers, and their profits – dance to the corporate line. Are we all dancing along with them, to World War 3 ?
CNN staff say network’s pro-Israel slant amounts to ‘journalistic malpractice’
The push for more balanced coverage has been complicated by Israel’s block on foreign journalists entering Gaza except under IDF control and subject to censorship. That has helped keep the full impact of the war on Palestinians off of CNN and other channels while ensuring that there is a continued focus on the Israeli perspective.
Insiders say pressure from the top results in credulous reporting of Israeli claims and silencing of Palestinian perspectives
Insiders say pressure from the top results in credulous reporting of Israeli claims and silencing of Palestinian perspectives
Guardian, Chris McGreal, 4 Feb 24
CNN is facing a backlash from its own staff over editorial policies they say have led to a regurgitation of Israeli propaganda and the censoring of Palestinian perspectives in the network’s coverage of the war in Gaza.
Journalists in CNN newsrooms in the US and overseas say broadcasts have been skewed by management edicts and a story-approval process that has resulted in highly partial coverage of the Hamas massacre on 7 October and Israel’s retaliatory attack on Gaza.
“The majority of news since the war began, regardless of how accurate the initial reporting, has been skewed by a systemic and institutional bias within the network toward Israel,” said one CNN staffer. “Ultimately, CNN’s coverage of the Israel-Gaza war amounts to journalistic malpractice.”
According to accounts from six CNN staffers in multiple newsrooms, and more than a dozen internal memos and emails obtained by the Guardian, daily news decisions are shaped by a flow of directives from the CNN headquarters in Atlanta that have set strict guidelines on coverage.
They include tight restrictions on quoting Hamas and reporting other Palestinian perspectives while Israel government statements are taken at face value. In addition, every story on the conflict must be cleared by the Jerusalem bureau before broadcast or publication.
CNN journalists say the tone of coverage is set at the top by its new editor-in-chief and CEO, Mark Thompson, who took up his post two days after the 7 October Hamas attack. Some staff are concerned about Thompson’s willingness to withstand external attempts to influence coverage given that in a former role as the BBC’s director general he was accused of bowing to Israeli government pressure on a number of occasions, including a demand to remove one of the corporation’s most prominent correspondents from her post in Jerusalem in 2005.
CNN insiders say that has resulted, particularly in the early weeks of the war, in a greater focus on Israeli suffering and the Israeli narrative of the war as a hunt for Hamas and its tunnels, and an insufficient focus on the scale of Palestinian civilian deaths and destruction in Gaza.
One journalist described a “schism” within the network over coverage they said was at times reminiscent of the cheerleading that followed 9/11.
“There’s a lot of internal strife and dissent. Some people are looking to get out,” they said.
Another journalist in a different bureau said that they too saw pushback.
“Senior staffers who disagree with the status quo are butting heads with the executives giving orders, questioning how we can effectively tell the story with such restrictive directives in place,” they said.
“Many have been pushing for more content from Gaza to be alerted and aired. By the time these reports go through Jerusalem and make it to TV or the homepage, critical changes – from the introduction of imprecise language to an ignorance of crucial stories – ensure that nearly every report, no matter how damning, relieves Israel of wrongdoing.”
CNN staff say that some journalists with experience of reporting the conflict and region have avoided assignments in Israel because they do not believe they will be free to tell the whole story. Others speculate that they are being kept away by senior editors.
“It is clear that some who don’t belong are covering the war and some who do belong aren’t,” said one insider.
Edicts from on high
………………. In late October, as the Palestinian death toll rose sharply from Israeli bombing with more than 2,700 children killed according to the Gaza health ministry, and as Israel prepared for its ground invasion, a set of guidelines landed in CNN staff inboxes.
……………….CNN staff members said the memo solidified a framework for stories in which the Hamas massacre was used to implicitly justify Israeli actions, and that other context or history was often unwelcome or marginalised.
“How else are editors going to read that other than as an instruction that no matter what the Israelis do, Hamas is ultimately to blame? Every action by Israel – dropping massive bombs that wipe out entire streets, its obliteration of whole families – the coverage ends up massaged to create a ‘they had it coming’ narrative,” said one staffer.
The same memo said that any reference to casualty figures from the Gaza health ministry must say it is “Hamas-controlled”, implying that reports of the deaths of thousands of children were unreliable even though the World Health Organization and other international bodies have said they are largely accurate. CNN staff said that edict was laid down by Thompson at an earlier editorial meeting.
Broader oversight of coverage from the CNN headquarters in Atlanta is directed by “the Triad” of three CNN departments: news standards and practices, legal and fact-checking.
David Lindsay, the senior director of news standards and practices, issued a directive in early November effectively barring the reporting of most Hamas statements, characterising them as “inflammatory rhetoric and propaganda”.
………. one CNN staffer noted that the network repeatedly aired inflammatory rhetoric and propaganda from Israeli officials and American supporters, often without challenge in interviews.
They noted that other channels have carried interviews with Hamas leaders while CNN has not, including one in which the group’s spokesman, Ghazi Hamad, cut short questions from the BBC when he was challenged about the murder of Israeli civilians. One staffer said there is a view among correspondents that it is “agony to get a Hamas interview past the Triad
…………………………………………………….. In addition to the edicts from Atlanta, CNN has a longstanding policy that all copy on the Israel-Palestine situation must be approved for broadcast or publication by the Jerusalem bureau. In July, the network created a process it called “SecondEyes” to speed up those approvals.
…………… One result of SecondEyes is that Israeli official statements are often quickly cleared and make it on air on the principle that that they are to be trusted at face value, seemingly rubber-stamped for broadcast, while statements and claims from Palestinians, and not just Hamas, are delayed or never reported.
One CNN staffer said edits by SecondEyes often seemed aimed at avoiding criticism from pro-Israel groups……………………………..
Some CNN staff fear that the result is a network acting as a surrogate censor on behalf of the Israeli government.
“The system results in chosen individuals editing any and all reporting with an institutionalised pro-Israel bias, often using passive language to absolve the [Israel Defense Forces] of responsibility, and playing down Palestinian deaths and Israeli attacks,” said one of the network’s journalists.
……………………………………………………………. Another presenter, Sara Sidner, drew criticism for her excitable report on unverified Israeli claims that Hamas beheaded dozens of babies on 7 October.
“We have some really disturbing new information out of Israel,” she announced four days after the attack.
“The Israeli prime minister’s spokesman just confirmed, babies and toddlers were found with their heads decapitated in Kfar Aza in southern Israel after Hamas attacks in the kibbutz over the weekend. That has been confirmed by the prime minister’s office.”
………………… Gold, who was part of the SecondEyes team approving stories, again said the report had been confirmed by Netanyahu’s office and she drew parallels with the Holocaust. She responded to a Hamas denial that it had decapitated babies as unbelievable “when we literally have video of these guys, of these militants, of these terrorists doing exactly what they say they’re not doing to civilians and to children”.
Except, as a CNN journalist pointed out, the network did not have such video and, apparently, neither did anyone else………………………………….
By the time of Sidner’s broadcast there were already good reasons for CNN to treat the claims with caution.
Israeli journalists who toured Kfar Aza the day before said they had seen no evidence of such a crime and military officials there had made no mention of it. Instead, Tim Langmaid, the Atlanta-based CNN vice-president and senior editorial director, sent an instruction that President Biden’s claims to have seen pictures of the alleged atrocity “back up what the Israeli government said”.
…….. CNN insiders said senior editors should have treated the story with caution from the beginning because the Israeli military has a track record of false or exaggerated claims that subsequently fall apart.
Other networks, such as Sky News, were considerably more sceptical in their reporting and laid out the tenuous origins of the story, which began with a reporter for an Israeli news channel saying soldiers had told her that 40 children had been killed in the Hamas massacre and that one soldier had said he had seen “bodies of babies with their heads cut off”. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) then used the claim to liken Hamas to the Islamic State.
Even after the White House admitted that neither the president nor his officials had themselves seen pictures of beheaded babies, and that they had been relying on Israeli claims, Langmaid told the newsroom it could still report the Israeli government assertions alongside a denial from Hamas.
CNN did report on the rolling back of the claims as Israeli officials backtracked, but one staffer said that by then the damage had been done, describing the coverage as a failure of journalism.
“The infamous ‘beheaded babies’ claim, attributed to the Israeli government, made it to air for roughly 18 hours – even after the White House walked back on Biden’s statement that he had seen the nonexistent photos. CNN had no access to photographic evidence, nor any ability to independently verify these claims,” they said.
……….. Some CNN staff raised similar issues with reporting on Hamas tunnels in Gaza and claims they led to a sprawling command centre under al-Shifa hospital.
The push for more balanced coverage has been complicated by Israel’s block on foreign journalists entering Gaza except under IDF control and subject to censorship. That has helped keep the full impact of the war on Palestinians off of CNN and other channels while ensuring that there is a continued focus on the Israeli perspective………………………………
The only foreign journalist to report from Gaza without an Israeli escort has been CNN’s Clarissa Ward, who entered for two hours with a humanitarian team from the United Arab Emirates.
……………. she was being prevented from conveying a fuller picture of the tragedy unfolding in Gaza because of the Israeli block on foreign journalists, putting the burden solely on a limited number of courageous Palestinian reporters who are being killed in disproportionate numbers.
“We must now be able to report on the horrific death and destruction being meted out in Gaza in the same way – on the ground, independently – amid one of the most intense bombardments in the history of modern warfare,” she wrote.
“The response to our report on Gaza in Israeli media suggests an unspoken reason for denying access. When asked on air about our piece, one reporter from the Israeli Channel 13 replied, ‘If indeed Western reporters begin to enter Gaza, this will for sure be a big headache for Israel and Israeli hasbara.’ Hasbara is a Hebrew word for pro-Israel advocacy.
Some at CNN fear that its coverage of the latest Gaza war is damaging a reputation built up by its reporting of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which led to a surge in viewers. But others say that the Ukraine war may be part of the problem because editorial standards grew lax as the network and many of its journalists identified clearly with one side – Ukraine – particularly at the beginning of the conflict.
One CNN staffer said that Ukraine coverage set a dangerous precedent that has come back to haunt the network because the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is far more divisive and views are much more deeply entrenched.
“The complacency in our editorial standards and journalistic integrity while reporting on Ukraine has come back to haunt us. Only this time, the stakes are higher and the consequences much more severe. Journalistic complacency is an easier pill for the world to swallow when it’s Arab lives lost instead of European,” they said.
Another CNN employee said the double standards are glaring…………………………………………………
Years of pressure
Journalists working at CNN have varied explanations……………………………………………………….. more https://www.theguardian.com/media/2024/feb/04/cnn-staff-pro-israel-bias
1 This month
of the week – Disrupting War & Militarism in Oceania. Active solidarity. Radical practice.
Antinuclear 