Comrades, Welcome to the desert of the real. This year, I will endeavour to publish twice a week; politics midweek, culture or bonus obscenities on the weekend. For the time being, my writing on here will be entirely free. If you have the means, and believe in paying for good writing, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.
Slavoj, this is your first piece of writing since October 7th that I am completely in agreement with! I feel that the fierce pushback against your initial response from the Left at the beginning of the onslaught on Gaza, shocked you temporarily into submission however, it seems the dust has settled and so has Žižek! ✊🏼
"A Black American recently visited Hebron to check the prevalent opinion that the situation there is very complex; what he saw is that the situation is very simple: no complexity, just open and brutal apartheid…"
The Palestinians have had decades to make a deal, they had decades even before they were occupied by Israel in Gaza or the West Bank. They have always chosen violence. When Mandela had the opportunity to make a deal, he took it.
Deep down, the Palestinians do not seem to have internalized that Israel will continue to exist, that any deal they make cannot involve repatriation of millions of Arabs to Israel. Therefore, no deal will be had because the Israelis are not suicidal. The Palestinians seem to believe that if they make life too hard for the Israelis, the Israelis will leave for wherever it is they're really from, like the French left Algeria. They do not seem to appreciate that the Israelis don't have anywhere to go.
Israel is a military-colonial, rogue nuclear, apartheid state with near-universal Jewish conscription – (exceptions made for the ultra religious) The state was born in violence - acts of terrorism committed against its ALLIES, the British! Tel Aviv *always* reflexively chooses violence at all times in every situation in the lethal policies aimed toward its militarily colonized peoples. This includes the “offers” of “Peace treaties” which history has proven were in reality ultimatums delivered at gunpoint. Or in the case of Oslo, smokescreens intended to camouflage further military colonial annexations.
By rejecting the Hague Conventions and the Geneva Conventions, Israel is openly declaring that it rejects all modern standards of human rights and natural justice as codified in International Law so that it can commit with impunity whatever war crimes, illegal settlement activity and construction of apartheid that they wish. And yet Zionist ultra-nationalists openly proclaim their rejection of the Hague and Geneva Conventions as if this somehow *improves* the image of Israel rather than being the declaration of belligerent war criminality that it is.
Israel is gross violation of, and open contempt for, EVERY SINGLE article of the International Law of Military Occupation.
“The duties of the occupying power are spelled out primarily in the 1907 Hague Regulations (arts 42-56) and the Fourth Geneva Convention (GC IV, art. 27-34 and 47-78), as well as in certain provisions of Additional Protocol I and customary international humanitarian law.
Agreements concluded between the occupying power and the local authorities cannot deprive the population of occupied territory of the protection afforded by international humanitarian law (GC IV, art. 47) and protected persons themselves can in no circumstances renounce their rights (GC IV, art. 8 ).
The main rules of the law applicable in case of occupation state that:
The occupant does not acquire sovereignty over the territory.
Occupation is only a temporary situation, and the rights of the occupant are limited to the extent of that period.
The occupying power must respect the laws in force in the occupied territory, unless they constitute a threat to its security or an obstacle to the application of the international law of occupation.
The occupying power must take measures to restore and ensure, as far as possible, public order and safety.
To the fullest extent of the means available to it, the occupying power must ensure sufficient hygiene and public health standards, as well as the provision of food and medical care to the population under occupation.
The population in occupied territory cannot be forced to enlist in the occupier's armed forces.
Collective or individual forcible transfers of population from and within the occupied territory are prohibited.
Transfers of the civilian population of the occupying power into the occupied territory, regardless whether forcible or voluntary are prohibited.
Collective punishment is prohibited.
The taking of hostages is prohibited.
Reprisals against protected persons or their property are prohibited.
The confiscation of private property by the occupant is prohibited.
The destruction or seizure of enemy property is prohibited, unless absolutely required by military necessity during the conduct of hostilities.
Cultural property must be respected.
People accused of criminal offences shall be provided with proceedings respecting internationally recognized judicial guarantees (for example, they must be informed of the reason for their arrest, charged with a specific offence and given a fair trial as quickly as possible).”
“2.2 million Palestinian have died from violence, 0.1 million, or from imposed deprivation, 2.1 million, since the British invasion of the Ottoman Empire in 1914 in WW1. The details are set out below in a 2019 update on the ongoing Palestinian Genocide [1].
In 1880 there were about 500,000 Arab Palestinians and about 25,000 Jews living in Palestine of whom half were immigrants [2, 3]. The genocidally racist British invaders and genocidally racist Zionist colonizers have been variously responsible for a Palestinian Genocide involving successive mass expulsions (800,000 in 1948 and 400,00 Arabs in 1967) , ethnic cleansing of 90% of the land of Palestine and an estimated 2.2 million Palestinian deaths since 1914 from violence (0.1 million) or from violently-imposed deprivation (2.1 million) [1, 4-7].
There are now 7 million Palestinian refugees, and of 14 million Palestinians (half of them children, three quarters women and children) about 50% are forbidden to even step foot in their own country on pain of death, only 1.9 million Palestinian Israelis are permitted to vote for the government ruling all of the former Mandated Palestine, and 5 million Palestinians have zero human rights [8] as Occupied Palestinians in West Bank ghettoes or Bantustans (3 million) or in the Gaza Concentration Camp (2.0 million). However the “lucky” Israeli Palestinians are Third Class citizens subject to over 60 Nazi-style, race-based laws [9, 10].
The land of Palestine has now been 90% ethnically cleansed [1, 4-7]. While Indigenous Palestinians represent 50% of Apartheid Israeli subjects, nearly three quarters cannot vote for the government ruling them - egregious Apartheid that is declared by the UN to be a crime against Humanity [11].”
Genocidal scum like you are the last war criminals on Earth to have a reason to be so christdamned smug. Criminal against humanity skinhead insects that you are.
“The picture is that of a colonized people fighting for survival, at a time when its oppressors had elected a government, which is hellbent on accelerating the destruction, in fact the elimination of the Palestinian people – or even their very claim to peoplehood”
They have lived under unlawful blockade for 16 years, and already gone through five major brutal wars, which remain unaccounted for," the group, which includes several U.N. special rapporteurs, said in a statement. This amounts to collective punishment.
We Ukrainian researchers artists political and labour activists stand in solidarity with the people of Palestine who for 75 years have been subjected to and resisted Israeli military occupation separation ethnic cleansing, land dispossession and apartheid
In moments like this, everything becomes clear. It was clear to many of us for a long time, but now there can be no doubt. The imperial West is still firmly committed to the imperial project it launched against the world late in the 15th century. Yes, it has changed and transformed its methods, tactics, strategies, and its apparatus of power and force. The players have changed, some things became more complex, some things less so. And on and on. All of these academic debates are important, but not right now. What is important right now is to say it clearly and loudly – the imperial West is hell-bent on maintaining its supremacy and will kill indiscriminately in order to achieve the only goal it has ever had, the only value it has ever stood for, power and wealth.
The same imperial project that brutalised millions of Black Africans, committed genocide against millions of Indigenous peoples across the Americas, in Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere, colonised Asia and Africa through unfathomable brutality and force, destroyed countless societies full of complexity and beauty, massacred civilians in its imperial wars in places like Vietnam and Iraq, dropped atomic bombs on Japanese civilians, created a neocolonial economic infrastructure that is continuously robbing the majority of the world’s population blind, and I can go on and on, but this project is ongoing and nowhere at this moment is this more visible than in Palestine.
"What Does “From the River to the Sea” Really Mean?
The slogan resists the fragmentation of Palestinian land and people by Israeli occupation and discrimination.
The phrase “from the river to the sea” captures this future as no other can, because it encompasses the entire space in which Palestinian rights are denied. It is in this space that Palestinians seek to live freely. It is across this space—and across the political and geographic divisions that Israeli rule has imposed—that Palestinians must unite to create change. It is this space that Palestinians call home, regardless of what anyone else calls it.
“From the river to the sea” is a rejoinder to the fragmentation of Palestinian land and people by Israeli occupation and discrimination. Palestinians have been divided in a myriad of ways by Israeli policy. There are Palestinian refugees denied repatriation because of discriminatory Israeli laws. There are Palestinians denied equal rights living within Israel’s internationally recognized territory as second-class citizens. There are Palestinians living with no citizenship rights under Israeli military occupation in the West Bank. There are Palestinians in legal limbo in occupied Jerusalem and facing expulsion. There are Palestinians in Gaza living under an Israeli siege. All of them suffer from a range of policies in a singular system of discrimination and apartheid—a system that can only be challenged by their unified opposition. All of them have a right to live freely in the land from the river to the sea.
From the river to the sea’ and the decolonisation of our collective future
True freedom between the river and the sea can only be achieved by breaking free from settler colonialism and the nation-state.
For those still trapped inside binary identities and safely ensconced in an increasingly psychopathic global capitalist system, a free Palestine from the river to the sea – indeed, a truly free, equal and sustainable world – remains an unthinkable proposition.
But as the latest wave of violence confirms, Israel cannot be free until Palestine is free, and the price of that freedom is real decolonisation. This means the creation of a political order, whatever its name or form, in which all people living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea are accorded the same fundamental rights and freedoms.
In the face of the horrors of Gaza, we should be working to encourage real decolonisation not just in Israel/Palestine, but globally, before the violence engulfs us all.
Decolonization, for many activists and thinkers, challenges the economic order whereby wealth is concentrated in the hands of relatively few as the vast majority labour in exchange for very little. At its best — and in this regard it has not been honoured in many post-independence contexts — it envisions the end of economic inequality and imagines a more equitable distribution of resources and wealth. It is fair to say that most post-colonial contexts have failed in this regard to be truly decolonized. Too often colonial elites were replaced by post-colonial elites while life for the majority did not change very much. Those who have thought deeply about decolonization have also recognised that it entails challenging local elites as much as foreign rulers, for the two often collaborate in colonial rule: the old tyrants often got on very well with the new ones, as Césaire puts it.
A fully decolonized world largely remains a vision of a possible future, a horizon of aspiration. These unfulfilled hopes are one reason the term resonates for many people still. And that life-giving set of hopes — and the potential for challenge that they generate — is ultimately why those who have an investment in inequality, racism, & domination fear ‘decolonization’. From the rivers to each shining sea, it insists, starting with Palestine, all of humanity must be free.
The release of 110 civilians by Hamas in the first round of ceasefire negotiations, initially resisted by Israel’s war cabinet, showed that there were other ways to do things. Since Israel released 240 Palestinian women and children as part of the deal, though, it showed the world that Hamas was hardly the only actor kidnapping and detaining civilians. Israel tries Palestinians under a military court, which has a conviction rate of 96-99% for any act of resisting its military occupation. It also holds hundreds as detainees even without conviction, often for years. https://thewire.in/world/netanyahus-supremacist-war
In administrative detention, a person is held without trial without having committed an offense, on the grounds that he or she plans to break the law in the future. As this measure is supposed to be preventive, it has no time limit.
The person is detained without legal proceedings, by order of the regional military commander, based on classified evidence that is not revealed to them. This leaves the detainees helpless – facing unknown allegations with no way to disprove them, not knowing when they will be released, and without being charged, tried or convicted.
Even beyond administrative detention, when charges are brought against Palestinians in the West Bank, they are almost always tried in military courts that have a near-perfect conviction rate. (By contrast, Israelis are usually tried in civil court.) Palestinians, in other words, are sent to a trapdoor instead of a fair trial.
“The power to incarcerate people who have not been convicted or even charged with anything for lengthy periods of time, based on secret ‘evidence’ that they cannot challenge, is an extreme power,” noted Israeli human rights group B’Tselem. “Israel uses it continuously and extensively, routinely holding hundreds of Palestinians at any given moment.”
(Jerusalem) – Israeli authorities held thousands of workers from Gaza in incommunicado detention for several weeks following the October 7 attacks, subjecting at least some of them to inhumane and degrading conditions, Human Rights Watch said. Thousands more remain stranded in the occupied West Bank without valid legal status and vulnerable to arrest.
(...)
[The Israeli forces] “made us undress,” he said. “[We were] completely naked. They handed us Pampers to wear and thin white overalls…. We stayed blindfolded and cuffed [with zip ties on our hands and feet] for 10 days... We kept asking why we are detained. We never got an answer, only verbal assaults and death threats.”
He said he was beaten for hours, then dragged on gravel face down and attached to a wall or fence by his cuffed hands, and then beaten again: “Every time I fell on the ground I was forced to stand up, and again more beatings and I fell on the ground. With every beating and fall the plastic zip ties on my hands became tighter and more painful.”
(...)
Another man who worked in Rahat said he and other workers were arrested and taken to the Rahat police station on or around October 9. While blindfolded with their hands zip-tied behind their backs, “Israeli forces constantly cursed at us…and threatened to kill us.... We were held for 12 hours. We were not allowed water or [to use] the bathroom.”
(...)
The Israeli military spokesperson confirmed to Haaretz two Gaza workers, one with cancer, one with diabetes, died in Israeli custody, saying, “The two died due to […]complex medical condition[s] contracted before they arrived at the facilities. An investigation is being conducted into the circumstances of their death.” Both men were arrested after October 7. One of the men Human Rights Watch interviewed said there was a cancer patient with him in Ofer who died after a few days in pain.
For years, Netanyahu propped up Hamas. Now it’s blown up in our faces
The premier’s policy of treating the terror group as a partner, at the expense of Abbas and Palestinian statehood, has resulted in wounds that will take Israel years to heal from
The concentration of defenceless civilians in areas designated and delimited on a map as protected, can be used and exploited by the actors on the battlefield to manage and direct their use of lethal force.
This was the case in Bosnia, with the infamous Srebrenica “safe zone”. The area was instituted by the United Nations in 1993 in order to protect Bosnian Muslims under attack, but the disarmament of the safe zone transformed it into easy prey for Serb forces. They first obstructed the delivery of humanitarian aid to the area and then rounded up and massacred thousands of Muslim civilians.
Safe areas became lethal also in the case of Sri Lanka, where the government imposed the creation of Tamil safety zones in which it killed thousands of civilians, while blaming the Tamil Tigers for allegedly using the refugees concentrated in the safe zones as “human shields”.
Similarly, in Gaza, Israel is imposing unilaterally what and where is “safe” for Palestinian civilians. In doing so, it is deploying the discourse of safety and its associated legal technologies – warnings, safe zones, safe corridors, evacuation grids – as a lethal tool to implement the ethnic cleansing of different areas of the territory designated as safe/unsafe.
Areas or parts of the territories defined as safe serve to concentrate the displaced population and better manage the military operations and the killing of civilians. As one poignant Reuters headline put it: “Israel orders Gazans to flee, bombs where it sends them”.
Israel has explained what it’s doing in plain language. No one can claim they didn’t know. Through a combination of mass-casualty terror bombing — what Robert Pape of the University of Chicago, a leading scholar of coercive air power, has called “one of the most intense civilian punishment campaigns in history” — the destruction of hospitals and other critical infrastructure, and a near-total blockade of humanitarian supplies, it is working “to create conditions where life in Gaza becomes unsustainable,” in the words of Major General (Ret.) Giora Eiland, an adviser to the current defense minister.
Israel, in other words, is grimly marching Morgenthau’s argument to its logical conclusion — proving, before the eyes of the world, that the final and most fundamental alternative to Realpolitik is genocide.
“It’s really rare for war criminals to just openly announce their actions,” said John Cox, professor of global studies and history at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, who also directs the Center for Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights Studies. That’s what’s “unique about Israel’s bombing in Gaza.”
Cox noted that this month marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of the U.N.’s Genocide Convention. “[The war in Gaza] literally does take on genocidal proportions and potential, along with daily humiliations and affronts to human rights that Israel has been engaging in for 75 years,” Cox said.
(...)
“A December 8 video from Gaza’s Shejaiya neighborhood shows Israeli soldiers setting fire to a truck with food and water in it, fitting Israel’s October 9 declaration of a “complete siege” of Gaza, in which Israel’s defense minister Yoav Gallant said that “no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel” would be allowed into Gaza. This is an unambiguous violation of the second article of the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention, which includes “causing serious bodily or mental harm to members” of a particular group, as well as the deliberate “inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” https://newrepublic.com/article/177749/bibi-netanyahu-war-crimes-palestine
In the geography and history of Palestine Israel conflict/genocide the overwhelming preponderance of *power* is with the two military-colonial, nuclear armed states - the USA and Israel. Searching for *historical causality* we naturally attend to the most powerful historical currents.
Amongst the most damnable of the many Evils of the Palestinian Genocide is the military-colonial generative Evil of Washington and Tel Aviv in creating the belligerent necropolitical conditions that give rise to the very entities and historical effects that are used as a pretext for further kinetic intensifications of the military-colonial mass-slaughter that occurs with sickening regularity.
The imperialist policies of London (of the Balfour Declaration), Washington and Tel Aviv are responsible for the creation and continued existence of Hamas in the same way that French colonialism brought into existence the FLN in Algeria; the Viet Minh in Indochina. In the same way that Britain was responsible for the existence of the Mau Mau in Kenya.
(For further detail, see e.g. Immanuel Wallerstein and his school of World-Systems Analysis)
This is a fortiori the case with regards to Hamas which was *actively* supported and funded by Netanyahu in a reckless divide and conquer strategy that has produced obvious blowback
Colonialism is driven and maintained by the wielding of necropolitical power as a means of inflicting violence in order to maintain control and exert domination. As Achille Mbmebe has described and analyzed, military-colonial necropolitics leads to the creation and maintenance of perpetually violent death-worlds within which both the colonizing power and their colonized subjects `are locked into a symbiotic interrelationship of the living dead.
These belligerent death-worlds are military-colonial zones of killing and apartheid iron walls of segregation that create
“contemporary forms of subjugating life to the power of death (necropolitics) (that) are deeply reconfiguring the relations between resistance, sacrifice, and terror. The notion of biopower is insufficient to account for contemporary forms of the subjugation of life to the power of death. Necropolitics, or necropower, accounts for the various ways in which, in our contemporary world, weapons are deployed in the interest of maximally destroying persons and creating death-worlds , that is, new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to living conditions that confer upon them the status of the living dead . Some of the repressed topographies of cruelty (the plantation and the colony in particular) and today’s form of necropower blurs the lines between resistance and suicide, sacrifice and redemption, martyrdom and freedom.”
There are no activities that Palestinians attempt to engage in that are not immediately brutalized by hateful, arbitrary violence delivered by the iron boot of bloodthirsty Israeli military-colonial Terror.
It is impossible to display the Palestinian flag on Instagram, unaccompanied by any reference whatsoever to the Jewish people, without a barrage of Israeli airstrikes raining upon the poor unfortunate who stepped out of line.
This is the necropolitics of the Israeli military-colony extending all the way back Imperial capital of London from which emanated the original sins of the Balfour Declaration. As was this:
Every moment of every day of every Palestinian life is suffused with the bloody violence of Israeli necropolitical subjugation inflicted through a reign of military-colonial Terror.
“A Threshold Crossed
Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution”
“About 6.8 million Jewish Israelis and 6.8 million Palestinians live today between the Mediterranean Sea and Jordan River, an area encompassing Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), the latter made up of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. Throughout most of this area, Israel is the sole governing power; in the remainder, it exercises primary authority alongside limited Palestinian self-rule. Across these areas and in most aspects of life, Israeli authorities methodically privilege Jewish Israelis and discriminate against Palestinians. Laws, policies, and statements by leading Israeli officials make plain that the objective of maintaining Jewish Israeli control over demographics, political power, and land has long guided government policy. In pursuit of this goal, authorities have dispossessed, confined, forcibly separated, and subjugated Palestinians by virtue of their identity to varying degrees of intensity. In certain areas, as described in this report, these deprivations are so severe that they amount to the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution.”
“Israel’s apartheid against Palestinians: a cruel system of domination and a crime against humanity
The comprehensive report, Israel’s Apartheid against Palestinians: Cruel System of Domination and Crime against Humanity, sets out how massive seizures of Palestinian land and property, unlawful killings, forcible transfer, drastic movement restrictions, and the denial of nationality and citizenship to Palestinians are all components of a system which amounts to apartheid under international law. This system is maintained by violations which Amnesty International found to constitute apartheid as a crime against humanity, as defined in the Rome Statute and Apartheid Convention.
Amnesty International is calling on the International Criminal Court (ICC) to consider the crime of apartheid in its current investigation in the OPT and calls on all states to exercise universal jurisdiction to bring perpetrators of apartheid crimes to justice.
“There is no possible justification for a system built around the institutionalized and prolonged racist oppression of millions of people. Apartheid has no place in our world, and states which choose to make allowances for Israel will find themselves on the wrong side of history. Governments who continue to supply Israel with arms and shield it from accountability at the UN are supporting a system of apartheid, undermining the international legal order, and exacerbating the suffering of the Palestinian people. The international community must face up to the reality of Israel’s apartheid, and pursue the many avenues to justice which remain shamefully unexplored.”
“In moments like this, everything becomes clear. It was clear to many of us for a long time, but now there can be no doubt. The imperial West is still firmly committed to the imperial project it launched against the world late in the 15th century. Yes, it has changed and transformed its methods, tactics, strategies, and its apparatus of power and force. The players have changed, some things became more complex, some things less so. And on and on. All of these academic debates are important, but not right now. What is important right now is to say it clearly and loudly – the imperial West is hell-bent on maintaining its supremacy and will kill indiscriminately in order to achieve the only goal it has ever had, the only value it has ever stood for, power and wealth.
The same imperial project that brutalised millions of Black Africans, committed genocide against millions of Indigenous peoples across the Americas, in Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere, colonised Asia and Africa through unfathomable brutality and force, destroyed countless societies full of complexity and beauty, massacred civilians in its imperial wars in places like Vietnam and Iraq, dropped atomic bombs on Japanese civilians, created a neocolonial economic infrastructure that is continuously robbing the majority of the world’s population blind, and I can go on and on, but this project is ongoing and nowhere at this moment is this more visible than in Palestine.”
The term ‘human shields’ describes a method of warfare prohibited by international humanitarian law (IHL), during which the presence of civilians or the movement of the civilian population, whether voluntary or involuntary, is used to shield military objectives from attack, or to shield, favour or impede military operations. Human shields are always protected from attack unless and for such time as they take a direct part in hostilities.
While the law is clear, the reality can be blurred by the discursive use of human shields. In this instalment of our urban warfare special series, Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini – authors of ‘Human Shields: A History of People in the Line of Fire’ – build upon Zoi Lafazani’s post and discuss what they refer to as ‘proximate shields’, whereby humans are framed as shields merely due to their proximity to belligerents.
According to B'tselem, the IDF repeatedly used Palestinians as human shields. This practice became military policy during the Second Intifada, and was only dropped when Adalah challenged the practice before Israel's High Court of Justice in 2002. However, the IDF persisted in using Palestinians in its 'neighbor procedure', whereby people picked at random were made to approach the houses of suspects and persuade them to surrender, a practice which arguably placed the former's lives in danger. The court ruled in October 2005 "that any use of Palestinian civilians during military actions is forbidden, including the 'prior warning procedure'." According to B'tselem, reports indicate that the practice has continued nonetheless, in military operations like Operation Cast Lead, and Operation Protective Edge, and the "vast majority of these reports were never investigated, and those that did result in no further action".[22] Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini, in their study of the phenomenon, note that Israeli citizens in densely populated areas like Tel Aviv are never spoken of as human shields when Hamas fires rockets towards the Israeli Defense command located in the centre of that city, whereas Palestinians in Gaza are depicted as human shields when Israel fires rockets at, or bombs, equally densely populated cities like Gaza.[23]
Since the beginning of the occupation in 1967, Israeli security forces have repeatedly used Palestinians in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip as human shields, ordering them to perform military tasks that risked their lives. As part of this policy, soldiers have ordered Palestinian civilians to remove suspicious objects from roads, to tell people to come out of their homes so the military can arrest them, to stand in front of soldiers while the latter shoot from behind them, and more. The Palestinian civilians were chosen at random for these tasks, and could not refuse the demand placed on them by armed soldiers.
This use of civilians is not an independent initiative by soldiers in the field, but the result of a decision made by senior military authorities. During the second intifada, and particularly during military incursions into Palestinian population centers, such as Operation Defensive Shield in April 2002, use of Palestinians as human shields became open military policy.
In Gaza: Human Shields, we speak to civilians, academics and human rights advocates who have accused the Israeli military of employing the tactic as they battled Hamas.We hear testimony from Palestinians being forcing them to walk in front of Israeli soldiers at gunpoint and enter potentially hostile buildings.We examine evidence alleging Israel's long-standing practice of human shields and explore whether Hamas used residential buildings and civilian areas to launch attacks."They [the Israeli army] took me and put me on top of a tank", Anas Najjar, a resident of the battered southern town of Khuazaa says; while Ramy Abdu of the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor says there is "enough files to condemn Israel and prove it's committed war crimes by using civilians as human shields."Showing both Israeli and Palestinian perspectives on the use of human shields, Gaza: Human Shields follows on from a recently-published UN enquiry into war crimes during the July-August 2014 war.
The Israeli Radio reported Thursday evening that the Israeli Military Prosecution revealed that one of the “elite” military forces used a Palestinian child as a human shield and forced him to open suspicious objects during the war on Gaza.The Radio said that the military prosecution filed charges against two soldiers of the Golani Brigade, accusing them of using civilians as human shields.
The incident in question took place in January of last year when the two soldiers forced a nine-year old child to open suspicious objects and packages. The incident took place in Tal Al Hawa, south of Gaza city.
A video that went viral on social media on Friday showed the Israeli military using a Palestinian detainee as a human shield in the southern occupied West Bank.
The blindfolded detainee is seen seated on the ground, with military vehicles behind him using him as a shield, and an Israeli soldier aiming his rifle towards a group of Palestinians.
Eyewitnesses reported to Anadolu that the incident took place early Friday in the Fawwar refugee camp near Hebron in the southern occupied West Bank.
The Israeli military raided the camp, arresting several individuals, in the process sparking confrontations with dozens of Palestinians, the eyewitnesses said.
At least 173 Palestinians have been killed and 2,300 others injured by Israeli army fire in the occupied territory since the outbreak of the Gaza conflict, according to Palestinian figures.
A group of Israeli soldiers ambushed and detained a seven-year-old boy during the weekly demonstration in Kafr Qaddum last Friday and used him as a human shield, video footage has shown.
The recording, released by Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem shows Muamen Murad Mahmoud Shteiwi being captured and held in front of soldiers as protection.
During the 10-year period, an estimated 7,000 Palestinian children aged 12 to 17, but some as young as nine, had been arrested, interrogated and detained, the U.N. report said.
Many are brought in leg chains and shackles before military courts, while youths are held in solitary confinement, sometimes for months, the report said.
It voiced deep concern at the "continuous use of Palestinian children as human shields and informants", saying 14 such cases had been reported between January 2010 and March 2013 alone.
Israeli soldiers had used Palestinian children to enter potentially dangerous buildings before them and to stand in front of military vehicles to deter stone-throwing, it said.
"Almost all those using children as human shields and informants have remained unpunished and the soldiers convicted for having forced at gunpoint a nine-year-old child to search bags suspected of containing explosives only received a suspended sentence of three months and were demoted," it said.
What a ridiculous claim that Gaza City and surrounding boroughs have all been deprecated slums requiring gentrification. Before the Hamasmassacrepalooza, Gaza had its own gentrified areas replete with luxurious condos, malls, restaurants, beaches, and hotels. Yes it had its slums too being a dense urban center but you paint an unhistoric broad brush. Only a Trotskyist would paint Gaza as having been in a constant happy state of destruction and chaos to meet the shameful end by gentrification by the Bougies. What’s more interesting than Marxist fiction is why, exactly, have the Palestinian Arab terrorist organizations rejected every land and peace deal?
In 1993 Palestinians, along with millions of people around the world, were led to hope that Israel would withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza within five years and that Palestinians would then be free to establish an independent state. Meanwhile both sides would work out details of Israel’s withdrawal and come to an agreement on the status of Jerusalem, the future of Israeli settlements, and the return of Palestinian refugees.
“Because of the lopsided balance of power, negotiations went nowhere and the Palestinians’ hopes were never fulfilled. The Israelis, regardless of which government was in power, quibbled over wording, demanded revisions of what had previously been agreed to, then refused to abide by the new agreements. Meanwhile successive governments were demolishing Palestinian homes, taking over Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem for Jewish housing, and seizing Palestinian land for new settlements. A massive new highway network built after 1993 on confiscated Palestinian land isolates Palestinian towns and villages from one another and from Jerusalem, forcing many Palestinians to go through Israeli checkpoints just to get to the next town...
“According to President Clinton and most of the media, Prime Minister Ehud Barak conceded at Camp David virtually everything the Palestinians wanted, and Yasser Arafat threw away the opportunity for peace by rejecting Barak’s offer. In fact Arafat could not accept it. Barak, backed by Clinton, wanted assurance of Israel’s continued strategic control over the West Bank and Gaza, including air space and borders, and insisted that Israel retain permanent sovereignty over most of East Jerusalem, including Haram Al-Sharif. This was a deal no Arab would accept.
“As the protests grew, army helicopters rocketed neighborhoods in several Palestinian cities, destroying entire city blocks and causing scores of casualties. Israeli tanks surrounded Palestinian towns with their guns turned toward the town. Armed Israeli civilians within the Green Line rampaged through Arab neighborhoods destroying Arab property and shouting “Death of Arabs’...Israeli police who were quick to use bullets against Palestinian stone throwers failed to restrain the Israelis and instead fired at Arabs trying to defend their homes. Two Arabs were killed.
“The uprising was undoubtedly fueled by the resentment caused by years of daily abuse and humiliation under Israeli occupation. On September 6, a group of Israeli border police stopped three Palestinian workers as they were returning home from Israel and, for no reason at all, subjected them to 40 minutes of torture. The San Francisco Chronicle reported on September 19 that the policemen punched the three men, slammed their heads against a stone wall, forced them to swallow their own blood, and cursed their mothers and sisters. The incident only came to light because the policemen took photographs of themselves with their victims, holding their heads by the hair like hunting trophies. Israeli human rights workers said such beatings are a common occurance, but they are seldom reported.” Rachelle Marshall, “The Peace Process Ends in Protests and Blood”, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, December 2000.
“In the Oslo Agreements, Israel and the West put Palestinian leadership to a test: In exchange for an Israeli promise to gradually dismantle the mechanisms of the occupation in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the Palestinian leadership promised to stop every act of violence and terror immediately. For that purpose, all the apparatus for security coordination was created, more and more Palestinian jails were built, and demonstrators were barred from approaching the [Jewish] settlements.
“The two sides agreed on a period of five years for completion of the new deployment and the negotiations on a final agreement. The Palestinian leadership agreed again and again to extend its trial period...From their perspective, Israel was also put to a test: Was Israel really giving up its attitude of superiority and domination, built up in order to keep the Palestinian people under its control?
“More than seven years have gone by and Israel has security and administrative control of 61.2% of the West Bank and about 20% of the Gaza Strip and security control over another 26.8% of the West Bank. This control is what has enabled Israel to double the number of settlers in 10 years..and to seal an entire nation into restricted areas, imprisoned in a network of bypass roads meant for Jews only...
“Israel has failed the test. Palestinians control of 12% of the West Bank does not mean that Israel has given up its attitude of superiority and domination...The bloodbath that has been going on for three weeks is the natural outcome of seven years of [Israeli] lying and deception.”
Israeli journalist Amira Hass, “Israel Has Failed The Test,” in Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, 10/18/00.
Israel for the first time accepted the principle of repatriation [of the Arab refugees] and the internationalization of Jerusalem. . .[but] they did so as a mere exercise in public relations aimed at strengthening Israel’s international image...Walter Eytan, the head of the Israeli delegation, [stated]..’My main purpose was to begin to undermine the protocol of 12 May, which we had signed only under duress of our struggle for admission to the U.N. Refusal to sign would...have immediately been reported to the Secretary-General and the various governments.’”
Israeli historian, Ilan Pappe, “The Making of the Arab-Israel Conflict, 1947-1951.”
“The fact that the Arabs fled in terror, because of real fear of a repetition of the 1948 Zionist massacres, is no reason for denying them their homes, fields and livelihoods. Civilians caught in an area of military activity generally panic. But they have always been able to return to their homes when the danger subsides. Military conquest does not abolish private rights to property; nor does it entitle the victor to confiscate the homes, property and personal belongings of the noncombatant civilian population. The seizure of Arab property by the Israelis was an outrage.”
“That Ben-Gurion’s ultimate aim was to evacuate as much of the Arab population as possible from the Jewish state can hardly be doubted, if only from the variety of means he employed to achieve his purpose...most decisively, the destruction of whole villages and the eviction of their inhabitants...even [if] they had not participated in the war and had stayed in Israel hoping to live in peace and equality, as promised in the Declaration of Independence.” Israeli author, Simha Flapan, “The Birth of Israel.”
“Joseph Weitz was the director of the Jewish National Land Fund...On December 19, 1940, he wrote: ‘It must be clear that there is no room for both peoples in this country...The Zionist enterprise so far...has been fine and good in its own time, and could do with ‘land buying’ — but this will not bring about the State of Israel; that must come all at once, in the manner of a Salvation (this is the secret of the Messianic idea); and there is no way besides transferring the Arabs from here to the neighboring countries, to transfer them all; except maybe for Bethlehem, Nazareth and Old Jerusalem, we must not leave a single village, not a single tribe’...There were literally hundreds of such statements made by Zionists.” Edward Said, “The Question of Palestine.”
“For the entire day of April 9, 1948, Irgun and LEHI soldiers carried out the slaughter in a cold and premeditated fashion...The attackers ‘lined men, women and children up against the walls and shot them,’...The ruthlessness of the attack on Deir Yassin shocked Jewish and world opinion alike, drove fear and panic into the Arab population, and led to the flight of unarmed civilians from their homes all over the country.” Israeli author, Simha Flapan, “The Birth of Israel.”
“By 1948, the Jew was not only able to ‘defend himself’ but to commit massive atrocities as well. Indeed, according to the former director of the Israeli army archives, ‘in almost every village occupied by us during the War of Independence, acts were committed which are defined as war crimes, such as murders, massacres, and rapes’...Uri Milstein, the authoritative Israeli military historian of the 1948 war, goes one step further, maintaining that ‘every skirmish ended in a massacre of Arabs.’” Norman Finkelstein, “Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict.”
“Arab rejection was...based on the fact that, while the population of the Jewish state was to be [only half] Jewish with the Jews owning less than 10% of the Jewish state land area, the Jews were to be established as the ruling body — a settlement which no self-respecting people would accept without protest, to say the least...The action of the United Nations conflicted with the basic principles for which the world organization was established, namely, to uphold the right of all peoples to self-determination. By denying the Palestine Arabs, who formed the two-thirds majority of the country, the right to decide for themselves, the United Nations had violated its own charter.”
Sami Hadawi, “Bitter Harvest.”
“While the Yishuv’s leadership formally accepted the 1947 Partition Resolution, large sections of Israel’s society — including...Ben-Gurion — were opposed to or extremely unhappy with partition and from early on viewed the war as an ideal opportunity to expand the new state’s borders beyond the UN earmarked partition boundaries and at the expense of the Palestinians.”
Israeli historian, Benny Morris, in “Tikkun”, March/April 1998.
“In internal discussion in 1938 [David Ben-Gurion] stated that ‘after we become a strong force, as a result of the creation of a state, we shall abolish partition and expand into the whole of Palestine’...In 1948, Menachem Begin declared that: ‘The partition of the Homeland is illegal. It will never be recognized. The signature of institutions and individuals of the partition agreement is invalid. It will not bind the Jewish people. Jerusalem was and will forever be our capital. Eretz Israel (the land of Israel) will be restored to the people of Israel, All of it. And forever.” Noam Chomsky, “The Fateful Triangle.”
“Menahem Begin, the Leader of the Irgun, tells how ‘in Jerusalem, as elsewhere, we were the first to pass from the defensive to the offensive...Arabs began to flee in terror...Hagana was carrying out successful attacks on other fronts, while all the Jewish forces proceeded to advance through Haifa like a knife through butter’...The Israelis now allege that the Palestine war began with the entry of the Arab armies into Palestine after 15 May 1948. But that was the second phase of the war; they overlook the massacres, expulsions and dispossessions which took place prior to that date and which necessitated Arab states’ intervention.” Sami Hadawi, “Bitter Harvest.”
“Barak promised peace and brought war, and not by accident.”
“(Barak) promised peace and brought war, and not by accident. While speaking about peace, he enlarged the settlements. Cut the Palestinian territories into pieces by ‘by-pass’ roads. Confiscated lands. Demolished homes. Uprooted trees. Paralyzed the Palestinian economy..Conducted negotiations in which he tried to dictate to the Palestinians a peace that amounts to capitulation. Was not satisfied with the fact that by accepting the Green Line, the Palestinians had already given up 78% of their historic homeland. Demanded the annexation of ‘settlement blocs” and pretended that they amount only to 3% of the territory, while in fact he meant more than 20% would remain under Israeli control. Wanted to coerce the Palestinians to accept a ‘state’ cut off from all its neighbors and composed of several enclaves isolated from each other, each surrounded by Israeli settlers and soldiers...Boasts publicly that he has not given back to the Palestinians one inch of territory...When the intifada broke out, sent snipers to shoot, in cold blood from a distance, hundreds of unarmed demonstrators, adults and children. Blockaded each village and town separately, bringing them to the verge of starvation, in order to get them to surrender. Bombarded neighborhoods. Started a policy of mafia-style ‘liquidations’, causing an inevitable escalation of the violence.” Israeli peace activist, Uri Avnery, February 3, 2001, www.gush-shalom.org
“What is there to be confused about? A conquering army is using tanks and helicopter gunships to disperse demonstrations. What is so hard to understand here?...There is an occupation and there is a struggle against the occupation. There are demonstrators and there is an army that has received orders to shed their blood. And don’t come to me with the story of the rifles, Your glorious war record qualifies you to understand that even CNN reporters understand, that those rifles do not endanger either Israel or the soldiers if they don’t get too close...
“[From 1993 letter]”peace is a tango that takes two equal partners dancing in unity; it is not a dance of one who drags around his partner at will...In your dance of peace you have no partners, only enemies. For your peace is his occupation, your success is his loss...Peace is still far away because peace demands honesty, because peace demands equality. You want to force them to lie, you want of them a peace of surrender, you are celebrating a peace of master and slave. Under such conditions there will perhaps be peace-and-quiet, but Peace, no. Not until you open your eyes and your heart. Not until we are ready for a peace of partnership and equality.” Michael (Mikado) Warschawski, “The Party Is Over: An Open Letter to a Friend In Peace Now,”, from Znet, www.lbbs.org/ZNETTOPnoanimation.html
The 16 year Blockade of Gaza? The apartheid Illegal Settlements in the West Bank *purposely designed to destroy the Oslo Accords?
Jimmy Carter’s simple statement of the facts — November 2000
“An underlying reason that years of U.S. diplomacy have failed and violence in the Middle East persists is that some Israeli leaders continue to ‘create facts’ by building settlements in occupied territory...
“At Camp David in September 1978...the bilateral provisions led to a comprehensive and lasting treaty between Egypt and Israel, made possible at the last minute by Israel’s agreement to remove its settlers from the Sinai. But similar constraints concerning the status of the West Bank and Gaza have not been honored, and have led to continuing confrontation and violence...
“[Concerning UN Resolution 242] Our government’s legal commitment to support this well-balanced resolution has not changed...It was clear that Israeli settlements in the occupied territories were a direct violation of this agreement and were, according to the long-stated American position, both ‘illegal and an obstacle to peace.’ Accordingly, Prime Minister Begin pledged that there would be no establishment of new settlements until after the final peace negotiations were completed. But later, under Likud pressure, he declined to honor this commitment...
“It is unlikely that real progress can be made...as long as Israel insists on its settlement policy, illegal under international laws that are supported by the United States and all other nations.
“There are many questions as we contine to seek an end to violence in the Middle East, but there is no way to escape the vital one: Land or peace?” Former President Jimmy Carter in The Washington Post, November 26, 2000.
“Barak’s plan...ensure(s) that useable land and resources (primarily water) remain largely in Israeli hands while the population is administered by a corrupt and brutal Palestinian Authority (PA), playing the role traditionally assigned to indigenous collaborators under the several varieties of imperial rule: the Black leadership of South Africa’s Bantustans, to mention only the most obvious analagoue...
“It is important to recall that the policies have not only been proposed, but implemented, with the support of the U.S. That support has been decisive since 1971, when Washington abandoned the basic diplomatic framework that it had initiated (UN Security Council Resolution 242), then pursued its unilateral rejection of Palestinian rights in the years that followed, culminating in the ‘Oslo process.’ Since all of this has been effectively vetoed from history in the US., it takles a little work to discover the essential facts. They are not controversial, only evaded,” Noam Chomsky, “Al-Aqsa Intifada”, October 2000, on Znet, www.lbbs.org/meastwatch.
“With the same deadpan, expressionless, emotionless, glazed look, Madam Albright repeated: ‘Those Palestinian rock throwers have placed Israel undeer siege,’ adding that the Israeli army is defending itself...[But] It is Israel that is the belligerent occupant of Palestine (and not the other way around) Israeli tanks and armored vehicles are surrounding Palestinian villages, camps and cities (and not the other way around). Israeli (American-made) Apache gunships are firing Lau and other missiles at Palestinian protestors and homes (and not the other way around). It is Israel that is confiscating Palestinian land and importing Jewish settlers to set up illegal armed settlements in the heart of Palestinian territory (and not the other way around). The settlers on the rampage in the West Bank and Israelis terrorizing Palestinians in their own homes (and not the other way around)...Israel is committing atrocities against the Palestinians with total impunity, and yet you maintain, ‘Israel is beseiged.’” Hanan Ashrawi, in “The Progressive”, December 2000
“Barak appears to be asking for only 10% of the occupied territories. In reality, it’s closer to 30%, taking into account the territories he wants to annex in the Jerusalem area and place under his “security control” in the Jordan Valley. But even worse, in the map submitted to the Palestinians, these percentage points cut the country up from East to West and from North to South, so that the Palestinian state will consist of groups of islands, each surrounded by Israeli settlers and soldiers.
“World opinion is always on the side of the underdog. In this fight, we are Goliath and they are David. In the eyes of the world [outside the US], the Palestinians are fighting a war of liberation against a foreign occupation. We are in their territory, not they on ours. We are the occupiers, they are the victims. This is the objective situation, and no minister of propaganda can change that.” Israeli peace activist. Uri Avnery, “12 Conventional Lies About the Palestine-Israeli Conflict” from Palestine Media Watch, www.pmwatch.org.
Israel is a military-colonial, rogue nuclear, apartheid state with near-universal Jewish conscription – (exceptions made for the ultra religious) The state was born in violence - acts of terrorism committed against its ALLIES, the British! Tel Aviv *always* reflexively chooses violence at all times in every situation in the lethal policies aimed toward its militarily colonized peoples. This includes the “offers” of “Peace treaties” which history has proven were in reality ultimatums delivered at gunpoint. Or in the case of Oslo, smokescreens intended to camouflage further military colonial annexations.
By rejecting the Hague Conventions and the Geneva Conventions, Israel is openly declaring that it rejects all modern standards of human rights and natural justice as codified in International Law so that it can commit with impunity whatever war crimes, illegal settlement activity and construction of apartheid that they wish. And yet Zionist ultra-nationalists openly proclaim their rejection of the Hague and Geneva Conventions as if this somehow *improves* the image of Israel rather than being the declaration of belligerent war criminality that it is.
Israel is gross violation of, and open contempt for, EVERY SINGLE article of the International Law of Military Occupation.
“The duties of the occupying power are spelled out primarily in the 1907 Hague Regulations (arts 42-56) and the Fourth Geneva Convention (GC IV, art. 27-34 and 47-78), as well as in certain provisions of Additional Protocol I and customary international humanitarian law.
Agreements concluded between the occupying power and the local authorities cannot deprive the population of occupied territory of the protection afforded by international humanitarian law (GC IV, art. 47) and protected persons themselves can in no circumstances renounce their rights (GC IV, art. 8 ).
The main rules of the law applicable in case of occupation state that:
The occupant does not acquire sovereignty over the territory.
Occupation is only a temporary situation, and the rights of the occupant are limited to the extent of that period.
The occupying power must respect the laws in force in the occupied territory, unless they constitute a threat to its security or an obstacle to the application of the international law of occupation.
The occupying power must take measures to restore and ensure, as far as possible, public order and safety.
To the fullest extent of the means available to it, the occupying power must ensure sufficient hygiene and public health standards, as well as the provision of food and medical care to the population under occupation.
The population in occupied territory cannot be forced to enlist in the occupier's armed forces.
Collective or individual forcible transfers of population from and within the occupied territory are prohibited.
Transfers of the civilian population of the occupying power into the occupied territory, regardless whether forcible or voluntary are prohibited.
Collective punishment is prohibited.
The taking of hostages is prohibited.
Reprisals against protected persons or their property are prohibited.
The confiscation of private property by the occupant is prohibited.
The destruction or seizure of enemy property is prohibited, unless absolutely required by military necessity during the conduct of hostilities.
Cultural property must be respected.
People accused of criminal offences shall be provided with proceedings respecting internationally recognized judicial guarantees (for example, they must be informed of the reason for their arrest, charged with a specific offence and given a fair trial as quickly as possible).”
“2.2 million Palestinian have died from violence, 0.1 million, or from imposed deprivation, 2.1 million, since the British invasion of the Ottoman Empire in 1914 in WW1. The details are set out below in a 2019 update on the ongoing Palestinian Genocide [1].
In 1880 there were about 500,000 Arab Palestinians and about 25,000 Jews living in Palestine of whom half were immigrants [2, 3]. The genocidally racist British invaders and genocidally racist Zionist colonizers have been variously responsible for a Palestinian Genocide involving successive mass expulsions (800,000 in 1948 and 400,00 Arabs in 1967) , ethnic cleansing of 90% of the land of Palestine and an estimated 2.2 million Palestinian deaths since 1914 from violence (0.1 million) or from violently-imposed deprivation (2.1 million) [1, 4-7].
There are now 7 million Palestinian refugees, and of 14 million Palestinians (half of them children, three quarters women and children) about 50% are forbidden to even step foot in their own country on pain of death, only 1.9 million Palestinian Israelis are permitted to vote for the government ruling all of the former Mandated Palestine, and 5 million Palestinians have zero human rights [8] as Occupied Palestinians in West Bank ghettoes or Bantustans (3 million) or in the Gaza Concentration Camp (2.0 million). However the “lucky” Israeli Palestinians are Third Class citizens subject to over 60 Nazi-style, race-based laws [9, 10].
The land of Palestine has now been 90% ethnically cleansed [1, 4-7]. While Indigenous Palestinians represent 50% of Apartheid Israeli subjects, nearly three quarters cannot vote for the government ruling them - egregious Apartheid that is declared by the UN to be a crime against Humanity [11].”
zizek is dripping in contempt for anything in the middle east resembling a first world. He clearly believes from this post that Gaza was basically an early 20th century eastern european slum. This whole piece is one of the stupidest things I've ever read from someone notable
Hamas slaughter has no context since it has been an indiscriminate killing, raping and kidnapping of civilians. Should this be legitimate fight, any reaction would be legitimate. Simply stated, had Israel applied the same logic underlying Hamas actions, Gaza bombing would have lasted just a couple of days, Israel would have killed most of the palestinians population and war would be ended with extermination. This is not happening because of what you call "hypocrisy" which still means sparing as much human life as possible in the circumstances.
Israel is hitting ravaged hospitals without fuel or light with bombings; their mad "leader" is quoting Biblical bloodbaths, declaring a "holy mission" of annihilation
There IS a context you war criminal skinhead scum of the Earth. Fuck you and your unthinking fascist mother.
In the geography and history of Palestine Israel conflict/genocide the overwhelming preponderance of *power* is with the two military-colonial, nuclear armed states - the USA and Israel. Searching for *historical causality* we naturally attend to the most powerful historical currents.
Amongst the most damnable of the many Evils of the Palestinian Genocide is the military-colonial generative Evil of Washington and Tel Aviv in creating the belligerent necropolitical conditions that give rise to the very entities and historical effects that are used as a pretext for further kinetic intensifications of the military-colonial mass-slaughter that occurs with sickening regularity.
The imperialist policies of London (of the Balfour Declaration), Washington and Tel Aviv are responsible for the creation and continued existence of Hamas in the same way that French colonialism brought into existence the FLN in Algeria; the Viet Minh in Indochina. In the same way that Britain was responsible for the existence of the Mau Mau in Kenya.
(For further detail, see e.g. Immanuel Wallerstein and his school of World-Systems Analysis)
This is a fortiori the case with regards to Hamas which was *actively* supported and funded by Netanyahu in a reckless divide and conquer strategy that has produced obvious blowback
Colonialism is driven and maintained by the wielding of necropolitical power as a means of inflicting violence in order to maintain control and exert domination. As Achille Mbmebe has described and analyzed, military-colonial necropolitics leads to the creation and maintenance of perpetually violent death-worlds within which both the colonizing power and their colonized subjects `are locked into a symbiotic interrelationship of the living dead.
These belligerent death-worlds are military-colonial zones of killing and apartheid iron walls of segregation that create
“contemporary forms of subjugating life to the power of death (necropolitics) (that) are deeply reconfiguring the relations between resistance, sacrifice, and terror. The notion of biopower is insufficient to account for contemporary forms of the subjugation of life to the power of death. Necropolitics, or necropower, accounts for the various ways in which, in our contemporary world, weapons are deployed in the interest of maximally destroying persons and creating death-worlds , that is, new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to living conditions that confer upon them the status of the living dead . Some of the repressed topographies of cruelty (the plantation and the colony in particular) and today’s form of necropower blurs the lines between resistance and suicide, sacrifice and redemption, martyrdom and freedom.”
There are no activities that Palestinians attempt to engage in that are not immediately brutalized by hateful, arbitrary violence delivered by the iron boot of bloodthirsty Israeli military-colonial Terror.
It is impossible to display the Palestinian flag on Instagram, unaccompanied by any reference whatsoever to the Jewish people, without a barrage of Israeli airstrikes raining upon the poor unfortunate who stepped out of line.
This is the necropolitics of the Israeli military-colony extending all the way back Imperial capital of London from which emanated the original sins of the Balfour Declaration. As was this:
Every moment of every day of every Palestinian life is suffused with the bloody violence of Israeli necropolitical subjugation inflicted through a reign of military-colonial Terror.
“A Threshold Crossed
Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution”
“About 6.8 million Jewish Israelis and 6.8 million Palestinians live today between the Mediterranean Sea and Jordan River, an area encompassing Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), the latter made up of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. Throughout most of this area, Israel is the sole governing power; in the remainder, it exercises primary authority alongside limited Palestinian self-rule. Across these areas and in most aspects of life, Israeli authorities methodically privilege Jewish Israelis and discriminate against Palestinians. Laws, policies, and statements by leading Israeli officials make plain that the objective of maintaining Jewish Israeli control over demographics, political power, and land has long guided government policy. In pursuit of this goal, authorities have dispossessed, confined, forcibly separated, and subjugated Palestinians by virtue of their identity to varying degrees of intensity. In certain areas, as described in this report, these deprivations are so severe that they amount to the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution.”
“Israel’s apartheid against Palestinians: a cruel system of domination and a crime against humanity
The comprehensive report, Israel’s Apartheid against Palestinians: Cruel System of Domination and Crime against Humanity, sets out how massive seizures of Palestinian land and property, unlawful killings, forcible transfer, drastic movement restrictions, and the denial of nationality and citizenship to Palestinians are all components of a system which amounts to apartheid under international law. This system is maintained by violations which Amnesty International found to constitute apartheid as a crime against humanity, as defined in the Rome Statute and Apartheid Convention.
Amnesty International is calling on the International Criminal Court (ICC) to consider the crime of apartheid in its current investigation in the OPT and calls on all states to exercise universal jurisdiction to bring perpetrators of apartheid crimes to justice.
“There is no possible justification for a system built around the institutionalized and prolonged racist oppression of millions of people. Apartheid has no place in our world, and states which choose to make allowances for Israel will find themselves on the wrong side of history. Governments who continue to supply Israel with arms and shield it from accountability at the UN are supporting a system of apartheid, undermining the international legal order, and exacerbating the suffering of the Palestinian people. The international community must face up to the reality of Israel’s apartheid, and pursue the many avenues to justice which remain shamefully unexplored.”
There IS a context you war criminal skinhead scum of the Earth. Fuck you and your unthinking fascist mother.
In the geography and history of Palestine Israel conflict/genocide the overwhelming preponderance of *power* is with the two military-colonial, nuclear armed states - the USA and Israel. Searching for *historical causality* we naturally attend to the most powerful historical currents.
Amongst the most damnable of the many Evils of the Palestinian Genocide is the military-colonial generative Evil of Washington and Tel Aviv in creating the belligerent necropolitical conditions that give rise to the very entities and historical effects that are used as a pretext for further kinetic intensifications of the military-colonial mass-slaughter that occurs with sickening regularity.
The imperialist policies of London (of the Balfour Declaration), Washington and Tel Aviv are responsible for the creation and continued existence of Hamas in the same way that French colonialism brought into existence the FLN in Algeria; the Viet Minh in Indochina. In the same way that Britain was responsible for the existence of the Mau Mau in Kenya.
(For further detail, see e.g. Immanuel Wallerstein and his school of World-Systems Analysis)
This is a fortiori the case with regards to Hamas which was *actively* supported and funded by Netanyahu in a reckless divide and conquer strategy that has produced obvious blowback
Colonialism is driven and maintained by the wielding of necropolitical power as a means of inflicting violence in order to maintain control and exert domination. As Achille Mbmebe has described and analyzed, military-colonial necropolitics leads to the creation and maintenance of perpetually violent death-worlds within which both the colonizing power and their colonized subjects `are locked into a symbiotic interrelationship of the living dead.
These belligerent death-worlds are military-colonial zones of killing and apartheid iron walls of segregation that create
“contemporary forms of subjugating life to the power of death (necropolitics) (that) are deeply reconfiguring the relations between resistance, sacrifice, and terror. The notion of biopower is insufficient to account for contemporary forms of the subjugation of life to the power of death. Necropolitics, or necropower, accounts for the various ways in which, in our contemporary world, weapons are deployed in the interest of maximally destroying persons and creating death-worlds , that is, new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to living conditions that confer upon them the status of the living dead . Some of the repressed topographies of cruelty (the plantation and the colony in particular) and today’s form of necropower blurs the lines between resistance and suicide, sacrifice and redemption, martyrdom and freedom.”
There are no activities that Palestinians attempt to engage in that are not immediately brutalized by hateful, arbitrary violence delivered by the iron boot of bloodthirsty Israeli military-colonial Terror.
It is impossible to display the Palestinian flag on Instagram, unaccompanied by any reference whatsoever to the Jewish people, without a barrage of Israeli airstrikes raining upon the poor unfortunate who stepped out of line.
This is the necropolitics of the Israeli military-colony extending all the way back Imperial capital of London from which emanated the original sins of the Balfour Declaration. As was this:
Every moment of every day of every Palestinian life is suffused with the bloody violence of Israeli necropolitical subjugation inflicted through a reign of military-colonial Terror.
“A Threshold Crossed
Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution”
“About 6.8 million Jewish Israelis and 6.8 million Palestinians live today between the Mediterranean Sea and Jordan River, an area encompassing Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), the latter made up of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. Throughout most of this area, Israel is the sole governing power; in the remainder, it exercises primary authority alongside limited Palestinian self-rule. Across these areas and in most aspects of life, Israeli authorities methodically privilege Jewish Israelis and discriminate against Palestinians. Laws, policies, and statements by leading Israeli officials make plain that the objective of maintaining Jewish Israeli control over demographics, political power, and land has long guided government policy. In pursuit of this goal, authorities have dispossessed, confined, forcibly separated, and subjugated Palestinians by virtue of their identity to varying degrees of intensity. In certain areas, as described in this report, these deprivations are so severe that they amount to the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution.”
“Israel’s apartheid against Palestinians: a cruel system of domination and a crime against humanity
The comprehensive report, Israel’s Apartheid against Palestinians: Cruel System of Domination and Crime against Humanity, sets out how massive seizures of Palestinian land and property, unlawful killings, forcible transfer, drastic movement restrictions, and the denial of nationality and citizenship to Palestinians are all components of a system which amounts to apartheid under international law. This system is maintained by violations which Amnesty International found to constitute apartheid as a crime against humanity, as defined in the Rome Statute and Apartheid Convention.
Amnesty International is calling on the International Criminal Court (ICC) to consider the crime of apartheid in its current investigation in the OPT and calls on all states to exercise universal jurisdiction to bring perpetrators of apartheid crimes to justice.
“There is no possible justification for a system built around the institutionalized and prolonged racist oppression of millions of people. Apartheid has no place in our world, and states which choose to make allowances for Israel will find themselves on the wrong side of history. Governments who continue to supply Israel with arms and shield it from accountability at the UN are supporting a system of apartheid, undermining the international legal order, and exacerbating the suffering of the Palestinian people. The international community must face up to the reality of Israel’s apartheid, and pursue the many avenues to justice which remain shamefully unexplored.”
“In moments like this, everything becomes clear. It was clear to many of us for a long time, but now there can be no doubt. The imperial West is still firmly committed to the imperial project it launched against the world late in the 15th century. Yes, it has changed and transformed its methods, tactics, strategies, and its apparatus of power and force. The players have changed, some things became more complex, some things less so. And on and on. All of these academic debates are important, but not right now. What is important right now is to say it clearly and loudly – the imperial West is hell-bent on maintaining its supremacy and will kill indiscriminately in order to achieve the only goal it has ever had, the only value it has ever stood for, power and wealth.
The same imperial project that brutalised millions of Black Africans, committed genocide against millions of Indigenous peoples across the Americas, in Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere, colonised Asia and Africa through unfathomable brutality and force, destroyed countless societies full of complexity and beauty, massacred civilians in its imperial wars in places like Vietnam and Iraq, dropped atomic bombs on Japanese civilians, created a neocolonial economic infrastructure that is continuously robbing the majority of the world’s population blind, and I can go on and on, but this project is ongoing and nowhere at this moment is this more visible than in Palestine.”
The pattern of killing cannot be denied. Is there a lack of sympathy because the victims aren’t American or European?
In 2003, an Israeli soldier shot dead the British documentary cameraman James Miller in Gaza. An inquest in the UK returned a verdict of unlawful killing. Israel declined to prosecute the soldier responsible but it did pay £1.5m in compensation, which Miller’s family said was “probably the closest we’ll get to an admission of guilt on the part of the Israelis”.
Miller’s killing looked to be part of a pattern of ill-disciplined Israeli soldiers shooting whoever they felt like – not only journalists but UN officials and aid workers as well as Palestinian children. The army was usually quick to try to cover up the killings but it did not appear they were coordinated.
Gaza looks very different today. As the CPJ and the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders say, the scale and nature of the deaths of journalists and their families suggests there is more going on than a few ill-disciplined soldiers taking pot shots at reporters, even taking into account the deaths of thousands of other Palestinians, including more than 8,000 children.
Certainly the message from some Israeli leaders is that journalists are fair game. Israeli politicians were quick to call for the “elimination” of a number of Palestinian journalists working for foreign news organisations who were falsely accused by a pro-Israel pressure group in the US of being “embedded with Hamas” on 7 October. Benny Gantz, a member of the Israeli war cabinet, said they should be hunted down as terrorists, reflecting a widely held suspicion among Israeli officials that Palestinian journalists are an appendage of Hamas.
Since the Israel-Gaza war began on October 7, journalists and media across the region have faced a hostile environment that has made reporting on the war exceptionally challenging.
In addition to documenting the growing tally of journalists killed and injured, CPJ’s research to date has found multiple kinds of incidents of journalists being targeted while carrying out their work in Israel and the two Palestinian territories, Gaza and the West Bank. These include 21 arrests, as well as numerous assaults, threats, cyberattacks, and censorship.
Letter to Biden from Press Freedom and Human Rights Organizations (1/10/2024)
According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), more journalists have been killed in the first 10 weeks of the hostilities than have ever been killed in a single country over an entire year. Four journalists were killed in Hamas’ assault on October7, and at least 75journalists have been killed since, almost all of them by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) according to CPJ. The U.S. State Department spokesperson recently said that the United States has not seen any evidence that Israel is intentionally targeting journalists. Yet credible reports by human rights and media organizations indicate that the IDF strikes in southern Lebanon on October13 that killed Reuters journalist Issam Abdallah and injured six other journalists from Reuters, Al Jazeera, and Agence France-Presse were unlawful and apparently deliberate.1The IDF has also acknowledged deliberately targeting a car in which journalists were traveling on January7, killing two journalists and seriously inuring a third. In at least two other cases, journalists reported receiving threats from Israeli officials and IDF officers before their family members were killed in Gaza. Of course, the targeted or indiscriminate killing of journalists, if committed deliberately or recklessly, is a war crime, and the International Criminal Court has said that it will investigate reports of war crimes committed against journalists in Gaza.
Press freedom groups urge Biden to hold Israel accountable for killings of journalists
Letter to US president says more reporters have been killed in Gaza war since October than in any single country over an entire year
“journalists reported receiving threats from Israeli officials and IDF officers before their family members were killed in Gaza”.
“Of course, the targeted or indiscriminate killing of journalists, if committed deliberately or recklessly, is a war crime, and the international criminal court has said that it will investigate reports of war crimes committed against journalists in Gaza,” the letter said.
The letter noted the “longstanding pattern of impunity in the killings of journalists by the IDF”, including over the shooting death last year of the Al Jazeera reporter Shireen Abu Akleh, a US citizen.
The crime of forced displacement (is) a war crime or a crime against humanity, whether the displacement in question is internal or across international borders.
In pictures: the heavy impact of Israeli strikes on Gaza’s children
Since October 7, more than 3,400 children have been reported killed in Gaza, according to Gaza's Hamas-run health ministry. With another 1,000 children reported missing and assumed buried under the rubble, the real death toll is likely much higher. FRANCE 24 looks at the devastating consequences of the Israel-Hamas war on Palestinian children in Gaza. Warning: some of the following images may be distressing to viewers.
'One Palestinian child is killed every 10 minutes': Israel has turned Gaza into a graveyard for thousands of children
Gaza's children are bearing the brunt of Israel's bombs. Over 4,000 children have been killed by Israeli attacks since October 7. While the West continues to debate proportionality, Gaza's children will continue to die.
Number of Gazan children killed in under a month is 10 times higher than that of Ukrainian children killed in entire first year of Russia’s ongoing war
CPJ is investigating all reports of journalists and media workers killed, injured, or missing in the war, which has led to the deadliest month for journalists since CPJ began gathering data in 1992.
Dirty secret of Israel’s weapons exports: They’re tested on Palestinians Weapons tested in each war Israel wages see a spike in global demand. The current Gaza war is the latest laboratory for its arms industry
The term ‘human shields’ describes a method of warfare prohibited by international humanitarian law (IHL), during which the presence of civilians or the movement of the civilian population, whether voluntary or involuntary, is used to shield military objectives from attack, or to shield, favour or impede military operations. Human shields are always protected from attack unless and for such time as they take a direct part in hostilities.
While the law is clear, the reality can be blurred by the discursive use of human shields. In this instalment of our urban warfare special series, Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini – authors of ‘Human Shields: A History of People in the Line of Fire’ – build upon Zoi Lafazani’s post and discuss what they refer to as ‘proximate shields’, whereby humans are framed as shields merely due to their proximity to belligerents.
According to B'tselem, the IDF repeatedly used Palestinians as human shields. This practice became military policy during the Second Intifada, and was only dropped when Adalah challenged the practice before Israel's High Court of Justice in 2002. However, the IDF persisted in using Palestinians in its 'neighbor procedure', whereby people picked at random were made to approach the houses of suspects and persuade them to surrender, a practice which arguably placed the former's lives in danger. The court ruled in October 2005 "that any use of Palestinian civilians during military actions is forbidden, including the 'prior warning procedure'." According to B'tselem, reports indicate that the practice has continued nonetheless, in military operations like Operation Cast Lead, and Operation Protective Edge, and the "vast majority of these reports were never investigated, and those that did result in no further action".[22] Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini, in their study of the phenomenon, note that Israeli citizens in densely populated areas like Tel Aviv are never spoken of as human shields when Hamas fires rockets towards the Israeli Defense command located in the centre of that city, whereas Palestinians in Gaza are depicted as human shields when Israel fires rockets at, or bombs, equally densely populated cities like Gaza.[23]
Since the beginning of the occupation in 1967, Israeli security forces have repeatedly used Palestinians in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip as human shields, ordering them to perform military tasks that risked their lives. As part of this policy, soldiers have ordered Palestinian civilians to remove suspicious objects from roads, to tell people to come out of their homes so the military can arrest them, to stand in front of soldiers while the latter shoot from behind them, and more. The Palestinian civilians were chosen at random for these tasks, and could not refuse the demand placed on them by armed soldiers.
This use of civilians is not an independent initiative by soldiers in the field, but the result of a decision made by senior military authorities. During the second intifada, and particularly during military incursions into Palestinian population centers, such as Operation Defensive Shield in April 2002, use of Palestinians as human shields became open military policy.
In Gaza: Human Shields, we speak to civilians, academics and human rights advocates who have accused the Israeli military of employing the tactic as they battled Hamas.We hear testimony from Palestinians being forcing them to walk in front of Israeli soldiers at gunpoint and enter potentially hostile buildings.We examine evidence alleging Israel's long-standing practice of human shields and explore whether Hamas used residential buildings and civilian areas to launch attacks."They [the Israeli army] took me and put me on top of a tank", Anas Najjar, a resident of the battered southern town of Khuazaa says; while Ramy Abdu of the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor says there is "enough files to condemn Israel and prove it's committed war crimes by using civilians as human shields."Showing both Israeli and Palestinian perspectives on the use of human shields, Gaza: Human Shields follows on from a recently-published UN enquiry into war crimes during the July-August 2014 war.
The Israeli Radio reported Thursday evening that the Israeli Military Prosecution revealed that one of the “elite” military forces used a Palestinian child as a human shield and forced him to open suspicious objects during the war on Gaza.The Radio said that the military prosecution filed charges against two soldiers of the Golani Brigade, accusing them of using civilians as human shields.
The incident in question took place in January of last year when the two soldiers forced a nine-year old child to open suspicious objects and packages. The incident took place in Tal Al Hawa, south of Gaza city.
A video that went viral on social media on Friday showed the Israeli military using a Palestinian detainee as a human shield in the southern occupied West Bank.
The blindfolded detainee is seen seated on the ground, with military vehicles behind him using him as a shield, and an Israeli soldier aiming his rifle towards a group of Palestinians.
Eyewitnesses reported to Anadolu that the incident took place early Friday in the Fawwar refugee camp near Hebron in the southern occupied West Bank.
The Israeli military raided the camp, arresting several individuals, in the process sparking confrontations with dozens of Palestinians, the eyewitnesses said.
At least 173 Palestinians have been killed and 2,300 others injured by Israeli army fire in the occupied territory since the outbreak of the Gaza conflict, according to Palestinian figures.
A group of Israeli soldiers ambushed and detained a seven-year-old boy during the weekly demonstration in Kafr Qaddum last Friday and used him as a human shield, video footage has shown.
The recording, released by Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem shows Muamen Murad Mahmoud Shteiwi being captured and held in front of soldiers as protection.
During the 10-year period, an estimated 7,000 Palestinian children aged 12 to 17, but some as young as nine, had been arrested, interrogated and detained, the U.N. report said.
Many are brought in leg chains and shackles before military courts, while youths are held in solitary confinement, sometimes for months, the report said.
It voiced deep concern at the "continuous use of Palestinian children as human shields and informants", saying 14 such cases had been reported between January 2010 and March 2013 alone.
Israeli soldiers had used Palestinian children to enter potentially dangerous buildings before them and to stand in front of military vehicles to deter stone-throwing, it said.
"Almost all those using children as human shields and informants have remained unpunished and the soldiers convicted for having forced at gunpoint a nine-year-old child to search bags suspected of containing explosives only received a suspended sentence of three months and were demoted," it said.
“The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation”—so George Orwell describes the institutions of Oceana in 1984 (2012, 192). Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini might well add the laws of war as another instance of Orwellian “doublethink” where the concept of human shields operates as if it were the GPS tracker directing you to a human target. Published in 2020 by the University of California Press, Gordon and Perugini’s book, Human Shields: A History of People in the Line of Fire, advances its argument by presenting a series of battlefield case studies in humanitarian doublethink: the Sri Lankan military attacking Tamil civilians, the Israeli military attacking Palestinian civilians, the American military attacking Afghan civilians and many more."
Involuntary shields suffer the same fate, only on a much larger scale, which brings us to the second point: the engorgement of the human shield. In recent decades, we have witnessed what human rights attorney and legal scholar Noura Erakat has called the “shrinking civilian.” This process has “diminished the category of the civilian and expanded the scope of legitimate targets,” with the effect of “permitting the killing of greater numbers of Palestinians [and others] in the language of law.” My own work on United States and Israeli military lawyers confirms Erakat’s important observation and argues that military powers have no shortage of legal options when it comes to selecting from an expansive array of “targets.”
“Dual use” infrastructures and civilians who are said to be “DPH” (directly participating in hostilities) fall into the flexible category of “targets.” Each of these legal formulae is, like the human shield, a double-edged sword. If civilian infrastructures are used for “military purposes” (hence “dual use”), they lose some of their legal protections from attack. If a civilian partakes in any activities that could be construed as supporting military efforts, then they similarly stand to lose their protection. And to be labeled a human shield by an attacking military is to be given a death sentence with no due process or right of appeal. This brings the end of innocence for their civilians, or so our masters of war claim.
In the 20th century, the discourses on human shielding shifted from individual deterrents to entire groups of people. The shift first came into view over the course of World War I and II, where POWs were deployed as shields in significant numbers, but it was in the United States’s war in Vietnam where something altogether grander in scale took place. The Vietnam War was an asymmetric conflict: low-tech rebel fighters of the National Liberation Front (NLF) faced the might of the United States military and Saigon. Outmatched in firepower and technology, the NLF employed the Maoist idea of a people’s war, mobilizing the Vietnamese population against the US invasion and occupation. The civilian population supported the foot soldiers such that the fighters became indistinguishable from the rural population. In response, the United States began a long and ill-fated counterinsurgency program — one marked by mass detention and industrial-scale assassination — that ultimately failed to win over the “hearts and minds” of the people of North Vietnam. Instead, they did as they would years later in Iraq and Afghanistan: they took to the skies and dropped bombs, making very little attempt to distinguish between combatants and civilians and certainly not worrying much about “collateral damage.”
If populations were going to aid the enemy, they were not really civilians, or so the Department of Defense claimed. With juridical sleight of hand, the entire people’s war was reduced to an act of human shielding. The United States did not even spare the jungle, for the canopies too were constituted as shields. The use of napalm against civilians was banned in 1980, but the Vietnam War left an indelible mark not only on the civilian population but on the history of human shields as well.
Israel is a military-colonial, rogue nuclear, apartheid state with near-universal Jewish conscription – (exceptions made for the ultra religious) The state was born in violence - acts of terrorism committed against its ALLIES, the British! Tel Aviv *always* reflexively chooses violence at all times in every situation in the lethal policies aimed toward its militarily colonized peoples. This includes the “offers” of “Peace treaties” which history has proven were in reality ultimatums delivered at gunpoint. Or in the case of Oslo, smokescreens intended to camouflage further military colonial annexations.
By rejecting the Hague Conventions and the Geneva Conventions, Israel is openly declaring that it rejects all modern standards of human rights and natural justice as codified in International Law so that it can commit with impunity whatever war crimes, illegal settlement activity and construction of apartheid that they wish. And yet Zionist ultra-nationalists openly proclaim their rejection of the Hague and Geneva Conventions as if this somehow *improves* the image of Israel rather than being the declaration of belligerent war criminality that it is.
Israel is gross violation of, and open contempt for, EVERY SINGLE article of the International Law of Military Occupation.
“The duties of the occupying power are spelled out primarily in the 1907 Hague Regulations (arts 42-56) and the Fourth Geneva Convention (GC IV, art. 27-34 and 47-78), as well as in certain provisions of Additional Protocol I and customary international humanitarian law.
Agreements concluded between the occupying power and the local authorities cannot deprive the population of occupied territory of the protection afforded by international humanitarian law (GC IV, art. 47) and protected persons themselves can in no circumstances renounce their rights (GC IV, art. 8 ).
The main rules of the law applicable in case of occupation state that:
The occupant does not acquire sovereignty over the territory.
Occupation is only a temporary situation, and the rights of the occupant are limited to the extent of that period.
The occupying power must respect the laws in force in the occupied territory, unless they constitute a threat to its security or an obstacle to the application of the international law of occupation.
The occupying power must take measures to restore and ensure, as far as possible, public order and safety.
To the fullest extent of the means available to it, the occupying power must ensure sufficient hygiene and public health standards, as well as the provision of food and medical care to the population under occupation.
The population in occupied territory cannot be forced to enlist in the occupier's armed forces.
Collective or individual forcible transfers of population from and within the occupied territory are prohibited.
Transfers of the civilian population of the occupying power into the occupied territory, regardless whether forcible or voluntary are prohibited.
Collective punishment is prohibited.
The taking of hostages is prohibited.
Reprisals against protected persons or their property are prohibited.
The confiscation of private property by the occupant is prohibited.
The destruction or seizure of enemy property is prohibited, unless absolutely required by military necessity during the conduct of hostilities.
Cultural property must be respected.
People accused of criminal offences shall be provided with proceedings respecting internationally recognized judicial guarantees (for example, they must be informed of the reason for their arrest, charged with a specific offence and given a fair trial as quickly as possible).”
“2.2 million Palestinian have died from violence, 0.1 million, or from imposed deprivation, 2.1 million, since the British invasion of the Ottoman Empire in 1914 in WW1. The details are set out below in a 2019 update on the ongoing Palestinian Genocide [1].
In 1880 there were about 500,000 Arab Palestinians and about 25,000 Jews living in Palestine of whom half were immigrants [2, 3]. The genocidally racist British invaders and genocidally racist Zionist colonizers have been variously responsible for a Palestinian Genocide involving successive mass expulsions (800,000 in 1948 and 400,00 Arabs in 1967) , ethnic cleansing of 90% of the land of Palestine and an estimated 2.2 million Palestinian deaths since 1914 from violence (0.1 million) or from violently-imposed deprivation (2.1 million) [1, 4-7].
There are now 7 million Palestinian refugees, and of 14 million Palestinians (half of them children, three quarters women and children) about 50% are forbidden to even step foot in their own country on pain of death, only 1.9 million Palestinian Israelis are permitted to vote for the government ruling all of the former Mandated Palestine, and 5 million Palestinians have zero human rights [8] as Occupied Palestinians in West Bank ghettoes or Bantustans (3 million) or in the Gaza Concentration Camp (2.0 million). However the “lucky” Israeli Palestinians are Third Class citizens subject to over 60 Nazi-style, race-based laws [9, 10].
The land of Palestine has now been 90% ethnically cleansed [1, 4-7]. While Indigenous Palestinians represent 50% of Apartheid Israeli subjects, nearly three quarters cannot vote for the government ruling them - egregious Apartheid that is declared by the UN to be a crime against Humanity [11].”
Public Statement: Scholars Warn of Potential Genocide in Gaza
As scholars and practitioners of international law, conflict studies and genocide studies, we are compelled to sound the alarm about the possibility of the crime of genocide being perpetrated by Israeli forces against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
The International Criminal Court must intervene to deter potential genocide in Gaza
In an open letter published on 19 October 2023, over a 100 genocide scholars, Palestinian and international civil society organisations call on Prosecutor Khan to issue arrest warrants, investigate Israeli crimes and intervene to deter incitement to commit genocide in Gaza.
Israeli Ecocide Brings Renewed Interest in the Crime
The severe and long-term impacts on the natural environment in Gaza – including impacts to soil, ground and underground water systems – are both a deliberate act and the predictable outcome of the IDF’s relentless intentional, systematic destruction of Gaza
Historically, the extremist ideology of Zionism has fully and openly sanctioned murder to achieve and maintain its goal of statehood. This includes Jews and non-Jews alike.
"In an Op-Ed titled "Let’s Not be Intimidated by the World," Israeli ret. Major General Giora Eiland argues that all Palestinians in Gaza are legitimate targets and that a “severe epidemic" in Gaza will "bring victory closer.”"
“2.2 million Palestinian have died from violence, 0.1 million, or from imposed deprivation, 2.1 million, since the British invasion of the Ottoman Empire in 1914 in WW1. The details are set out below in a 2019 update on the ongoing Palestinian Genocide [1].
In 1880 there were about 500,000 Arab Palestinians and about 25,000 Jews living in Palestine of whom half were immigrants [2, 3]. The genocidally racist British invaders and genocidally racist Zionist colonizers have been variously responsible for a Palestinian Genocide involving successive mass expulsions (800,000 in 1948 and 400,00 Arabs in 1967) , ethnic cleansing of 90% of the land of Palestine and an estimated 2.2 million Palestinian deaths since 1914 from violence (0.1 million) or from violently-imposed deprivation (2.1 million) [1, 4-7].
There are now 7 million Palestinian refugees, and of 14 million Palestinians (half of them children, three quarters women and children) about 50% are forbidden to even step foot in their own country on pain of death, only 1.9 million Palestinian Israelis are permitted to vote for the government ruling all of the former Mandated Palestine, and 5 million Palestinians have zero human rights [8] as Occupied Palestinians in West Bank ghettoes or Bantustans (3 million) or in the Gaza Concentration Camp (2.0 million). However the “lucky” Israeli Palestinians are Third Class citizens subject to over 60 race-based laws [9, 10].
The land of Palestine has now been 90% ethnically cleansed [1, 4-7]. While Indigenous Palestinians represent 50% of Apartheid Israeli subjects, nearly three quarters cannot vote for the government ruling them - egregious Apartheid that is declared by the UN to be a crime against Humanity [11].”
The concentration of defenceless civilians in areas designated and delimited on a map as protected, can be used and exploited by the actors on the battlefield to manage and direct their use of lethal force.
This was the case in Bosnia, with the infamous Srebrenica “safe zone”. The area was instituted by the United Nations in 1993 in order to protect Bosnian Muslims under attack, but the disarmament of the safe zone transformed it into easy prey for Serb forces. They first obstructed the delivery of humanitarian aid to the area and then rounded up and massacred thousands of Muslim civilians.
Safe areas became lethal also in the case of Sri Lanka, where the government imposed the creation of Tamil safety zones in which it killed thousands of civilians, while blaming the Tamil Tigers for allegedly using the refugees concentrated in the safe zones as “human shields”.
Similarly, in Gaza, Israel is imposing unilaterally what and where is “safe” for Palestinian civilians. In doing so, it is deploying the discourse of safety and its associated legal technologies – warnings, safe zones, safe corridors, evacuation grids – as a lethal tool to implement the ethnic cleansing of different areas of the territory designated as safe/unsafe.
Areas or parts of the territories defined as safe serve to concentrate the displaced population and better manage the military operations and the killing of civilians. As one poignant Reuters headline put it: “Israel orders Gazans to flee, bombs where it sends them”.
Israel has explained what it’s doing in plain language. No one can claim they didn’t know. Through a combination of mass-casualty terror bombing — what Robert Pape of the University of Chicago, a leading scholar of coercive air power, has called “one of the most intense civilian punishment campaigns in history” — the destruction of hospitals and other critical infrastructure, and a near-total blockade of humanitarian supplies, it is working “to create conditions where life in Gaza becomes unsustainable,” in the words of Major General (Ret.) Giora Eiland, an adviser to the current defense minister.
Israel, in other words, is grimly marching Morgenthau’s argument to its logical conclusion — proving, before the eyes of the world, that the final and most fundamental alternative to Realpolitik is genocide.
“It’s really rare for war criminals to just openly announce their actions,” said John Cox, professor of global studies and history at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, who also directs the Center for Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights Studies. That’s what’s “unique about Israel’s bombing in Gaza.”
Cox noted that this month marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of the U.N.’s Genocide Convention. “[The war in Gaza] literally does take on genocidal proportions and potential, along with daily humiliations and affronts to human rights that Israel has been engaging in for 75 years,” Cox said.
(...)
“A December 8 video from Gaza’s Shejaiya neighborhood shows Israeli soldiers setting fire to a truck with food and water in it, fitting Israel’s October 9 declaration of a “complete siege” of Gaza, in which Israel’s defense minister Yoav Gallant said that “no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel” would be allowed into Gaza. This is an unambiguous violation of the second article of the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention, which includes “causing serious bodily or mental harm to members” of a particular group, as well as the deliberate “inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” https://newrepublic.com/article/177749/bibi-netanyahu-war-crimes-palestine
Israel is hitting ravaged hospitals without fuel or light with bombings; their mad "leader" is quoting Biblical bloodbaths, declaring a "holy mission" of annihilation
Israel is not free or democratic which at the end of the essay is revealed to be apartheid. But using free and democratic as a stepping stone to correct the hypocrisy of the enlightened leads to the dogma that the western project can be corrected and put on the right path without sharing power. The dogma masks the chasm of the enlightenment which makes all captive populations Palestinian, i.e. herded, concentrated, then eradicated or cleansed of the original sin brought on by the resource curse on themselves for land water oil copper etc.. The word gentrified at the beginning of the essay dresses the horror of what the enlightened is accomplishing for progress with genocide in Gaza in a demolished, rubblized, urban cliche.
the perspective you bring here is interesting. It could probably apply to various places in the world, such as some African, Arab or Latin American countries.
As a Jew, I'm stunned by the rationale for the occupation and now the genocide. It's as if Jews and liberals received a list of talking points and memorized them verbatim. I heard the from the time I started going to synagogue until now. It's bizarre. Unspeakable atrocities are unfolding on our cell phones as people scroll past. Humanity has lost it's way. I don't know how it ever finds its way back.
The release of 110 civilians by Hamas in the first round of ceasefire negotiations, initially resisted by Israel’s war cabinet, showed that there were other ways to do things. Since Israel released 240 Palestinian women and children as part of the deal, though, it showed the world that Hamas was hardly the only actor kidnapping and detaining civilians. Israel tries Palestinians under a military court, which has a conviction rate of 96-99% for any act of resisting its military occupation. It also holds hundreds as detainees even without conviction, often for years. https://thewire.in/world/netanyahus-supremacist-war
In administrative detention, a person is held without trial without having committed an offense, on the grounds that he or she plans to break the law in the future. As this measure is supposed to be preventive, it has no time limit.
The person is detained without legal proceedings, by order of the regional military commander, based on classified evidence that is not revealed to them. This leaves the detainees helpless – facing unknown allegations with no way to disprove them, not knowing when they will be released, and without being charged, tried or convicted.
Even beyond administrative detention, when charges are brought against Palestinians in the West Bank, they are almost always tried in military courts that have a near-perfect conviction rate. (By contrast, Israelis are usually tried in civil court.) Palestinians, in other words, are sent to a trapdoor instead of a fair trial.
“The power to incarcerate people who have not been convicted or even charged with anything for lengthy periods of time, based on secret ‘evidence’ that they cannot challenge, is an extreme power,” noted Israeli human rights group B’Tselem. “Israel uses it continuously and extensively, routinely holding hundreds of Palestinians at any given moment.”
(Jerusalem) – Israeli authorities held thousands of workers from Gaza in incommunicado detention for several weeks following the October 7 attacks, subjecting at least some of them to inhumane and degrading conditions, Human Rights Watch said. Thousands more remain stranded in the occupied West Bank without valid legal status and vulnerable to arrest.
(...)
[The Israeli forces] “made us undress,” he said. “[We were] completely naked. They handed us Pampers to wear and thin white overalls…. We stayed blindfolded and cuffed [with zip ties on our hands and feet] for 10 days... We kept asking why we are detained. We never got an answer, only verbal assaults and death threats.”
He said he was beaten for hours, then dragged on gravel face down and attached to a wall or fence by his cuffed hands, and then beaten again: “Every time I fell on the ground I was forced to stand up, and again more beatings and I fell on the ground. With every beating and fall the plastic zip ties on my hands became tighter and more painful.”
(...)
Another man who worked in Rahat said he and other workers were arrested and taken to the Rahat police station on or around October 9. While blindfolded with their hands zip-tied behind their backs, “Israeli forces constantly cursed at us…and threatened to kill us.... We were held for 12 hours. We were not allowed water or [to use] the bathroom.”
(...)
The Israeli military spokesperson confirmed to Haaretz two Gaza workers, one with cancer, one with diabetes, died in Israeli custody, saying, “The two died due to […]complex medical condition[s] contracted before they arrived at the facilities. An investigation is being conducted into the circumstances of their death.” Both men were arrested after October 7. One of the men Human Rights Watch interviewed said there was a cancer patient with him in Ofer who died after a few days in pain.
The pattern of killing cannot be denied. Is there a lack of sympathy because the victims aren’t American or European?
In 2003, an Israeli soldier shot dead the British documentary cameraman James Miller in Gaza. An inquest in the UK returned a verdict of unlawful killing. Israel declined to prosecute the soldier responsible but it did pay £1.5m in compensation, which Miller’s family said was “probably the closest we’ll get to an admission of guilt on the part of the Israelis”.
Miller’s killing looked to be part of a pattern of ill-disciplined Israeli soldiers shooting whoever they felt like – not only journalists but UN officials and aid workers as well as Palestinian children. The army was usually quick to try to cover up the killings but it did not appear they were coordinated.
Gaza looks very different today. As the CPJ and the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders say, the scale and nature of the deaths of journalists and their families suggests there is more going on than a few ill-disciplined soldiers taking pot shots at reporters, even taking into account the deaths of thousands of other Palestinians, including more than 8,000 children.
Certainly the message from some Israeli leaders is that journalists are fair game. Israeli politicians were quick to call for the “elimination” of a number of Palestinian journalists working for foreign news organisations who were falsely accused by a pro-Israel pressure group in the US of being “embedded with Hamas” on 7 October. Benny Gantz, a member of the Israeli war cabinet, said they should be hunted down as terrorists, reflecting a widely held suspicion among Israeli officials that Palestinian journalists are an appendage of Hamas.
Since the Israel-Gaza war began on October 7, journalists and media across the region have faced a hostile environment that has made reporting on the war exceptionally challenging.
In addition to documenting the growing tally of journalists killed and injured, CPJ’s research to date has found multiple kinds of incidents of journalists being targeted while carrying out their work in Israel and the two Palestinian territories, Gaza and the West Bank. These include 21 arrests, as well as numerous assaults, threats, cyberattacks, and censorship.
Letter to Biden from Press Freedom and Human Rights Organizations (1/10/2024)
According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), more journalists have been killed in the first 10 weeks of the hostilities than have ever been killed in a single country over an entire year. Four journalists were killed in Hamas’ assault on October7, and at least 75journalists have been killed since, almost all of them by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) according to CPJ. The U.S. State Department spokesperson recently said that the United States has not seen any evidence that Israel is intentionally targeting journalists. Yet credible reports by human rights and media organizations indicate that the IDF strikes in southern Lebanon on October13 that killed Reuters journalist Issam Abdallah and injured six other journalists from Reuters, Al Jazeera, and Agence France-Presse were unlawful and apparently deliberate.1The IDF has also acknowledged deliberately targeting a car in which journalists were traveling on January7, killing two journalists and seriously inuring a third. In at least two other cases, journalists reported receiving threats from Israeli officials and IDF officers before their family members were killed in Gaza. Of course, the targeted or indiscriminate killing of journalists, if committed deliberately or recklessly, is a war crime, and the International Criminal Court has said that it will investigate reports of war crimes committed against journalists in Gaza.
Press freedom groups urge Biden to hold Israel accountable for killings of journalists
Letter to US president says more reporters have been killed in Gaza war since October than in any single country over an entire year
“journalists reported receiving threats from Israeli officials and IDF officers before their family members were killed in Gaza”.
“Of course, the targeted or indiscriminate killing of journalists, if committed deliberately or recklessly, is a war crime, and the international criminal court has said that it will investigate reports of war crimes committed against journalists in Gaza,” the letter said.
The letter noted the “longstanding pattern of impunity in the killings of journalists by the IDF”, including over the shooting death last year of the Al Jazeera reporter Shireen Abu Akleh, a US citizen.
The term ‘human shields’ describes a method of warfare prohibited by international humanitarian law (IHL), during which the presence of civilians or the movement of the civilian population, whether voluntary or involuntary, is used to shield military objectives from attack, or to shield, favour or impede military operations. Human shields are always protected from attack unless and for such time as they take a direct part in hostilities.
While the law is clear, the reality can be blurred by the discursive use of human shields. In this instalment of our urban warfare special series, Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini – authors of ‘Human Shields: A History of People in the Line of Fire’ – build upon Zoi Lafazani’s post and discuss what they refer to as ‘proximate shields’, whereby humans are framed as shields merely due to their proximity to belligerents.
According to B'tselem, the IDF repeatedly used Palestinians as human shields. This practice became military policy during the Second Intifada, and was only dropped when Adalah challenged the practice before Israel's High Court of Justice in 2002. However, the IDF persisted in using Palestinians in its 'neighbor procedure', whereby people picked at random were made to approach the houses of suspects and persuade them to surrender, a practice which arguably placed the former's lives in danger. The court ruled in October 2005 "that any use of Palestinian civilians during military actions is forbidden, including the 'prior warning procedure'." According to B'tselem, reports indicate that the practice has continued nonetheless, in military operations like Operation Cast Lead, and Operation Protective Edge, and the "vast majority of these reports were never investigated, and those that did result in no further action".[22] Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini, in their study of the phenomenon, note that Israeli citizens in densely populated areas like Tel Aviv are never spoken of as human shields when Hamas fires rockets towards the Israeli Defense command located in the centre of that city, whereas Palestinians in Gaza are depicted as human shields when Israel fires rockets at, or bombs, equally densely populated cities like Gaza.[23]
Since the beginning of the occupation in 1967, Israeli security forces have repeatedly used Palestinians in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip as human shields, ordering them to perform military tasks that risked their lives. As part of this policy, soldiers have ordered Palestinian civilians to remove suspicious objects from roads, to tell people to come out of their homes so the military can arrest them, to stand in front of soldiers while the latter shoot from behind them, and more. The Palestinian civilians were chosen at random for these tasks, and could not refuse the demand placed on them by armed soldiers.
This use of civilians is not an independent initiative by soldiers in the field, but the result of a decision made by senior military authorities. During the second intifada, and particularly during military incursions into Palestinian population centers, such as Operation Defensive Shield in April 2002, use of Palestinians as human shields became open military policy.
In Gaza: Human Shields, we speak to civilians, academics and human rights advocates who have accused the Israeli military of employing the tactic as they battled Hamas.We hear testimony from Palestinians being forcing them to walk in front of Israeli soldiers at gunpoint and enter potentially hostile buildings.We examine evidence alleging Israel's long-standing practice of human shields and explore whether Hamas used residential buildings and civilian areas to launch attacks."They [the Israeli army] took me and put me on top of a tank", Anas Najjar, a resident of the battered southern town of Khuazaa says; while Ramy Abdu of the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor says there is "enough files to condemn Israel and prove it's committed war crimes by using civilians as human shields."Showing both Israeli and Palestinian perspectives on the use of human shields, Gaza: Human Shields follows on from a recently-published UN enquiry into war crimes during the July-August 2014 war.
The Israeli Radio reported Thursday evening that the Israeli Military Prosecution revealed that one of the “elite” military forces used a Palestinian child as a human shield and forced him to open suspicious objects during the war on Gaza.The Radio said that the military prosecution filed charges against two soldiers of the Golani Brigade, accusing them of using civilians as human shields.
The incident in question took place in January of last year when the two soldiers forced a nine-year old child to open suspicious objects and packages. The incident took place in Tal Al Hawa, south of Gaza city.
A video that went viral on social media on Friday showed the Israeli military using a Palestinian detainee as a human shield in the southern occupied West Bank.
The blindfolded detainee is seen seated on the ground, with military vehicles behind him using him as a shield, and an Israeli soldier aiming his rifle towards a group of Palestinians.
Eyewitnesses reported to Anadolu that the incident took place early Friday in the Fawwar refugee camp near Hebron in the southern occupied West Bank.
The Israeli military raided the camp, arresting several individuals, in the process sparking confrontations with dozens of Palestinians, the eyewitnesses said.
At least 173 Palestinians have been killed and 2,300 others injured by Israeli army fire in the occupied territory since the outbreak of the Gaza conflict, according to Palestinian figures.
A group of Israeli soldiers ambushed and detained a seven-year-old boy during the weekly demonstration in Kafr Qaddum last Friday and used him as a human shield, video footage has shown.
The recording, released by Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem shows Muamen Murad Mahmoud Shteiwi being captured and held in front of soldiers as protection.
During the 10-year period, an estimated 7,000 Palestinian children aged 12 to 17, but some as young as nine, had been arrested, interrogated and detained, the U.N. report said.
Many are brought in leg chains and shackles before military courts, while youths are held in solitary confinement, sometimes for months, the report said.
It voiced deep concern at the "continuous use of Palestinian children as human shields and informants", saying 14 such cases had been reported between January 2010 and March 2013 alone.
Israeli soldiers had used Palestinian children to enter potentially dangerous buildings before them and to stand in front of military vehicles to deter stone-throwing, it said.
"Almost all those using children as human shields and informants have remained unpunished and the soldiers convicted for having forced at gunpoint a nine-year-old child to search bags suspected of containing explosives only received a suspended sentence of three months and were demoted," it said.
“The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation”—so George Orwell describes the institutions of Oceana in 1984 (2012, 192). Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini might well add the laws of war as another instance of Orwellian “doublethink” where the concept of human shields operates as if it were the GPS tracker directing you to a human target. Published in 2020 by the University of California Press, Gordon and Perugini’s book, Human Shields: A History of People in the Line of Fire, advances its argument by presenting a series of battlefield case studies in humanitarian doublethink: the Sri Lankan military attacking Tamil civilians, the Israeli military attacking Palestinian civilians, the American military attacking Afghan civilians and many more."
Involuntary shields suffer the same fate, only on a much larger scale, which brings us to the second point: the engorgement of the human shield. In recent decades, we have witnessed what human rights attorney and legal scholar Noura Erakat has called the “shrinking civilian.” This process has “diminished the category of the civilian and expanded the scope of legitimate targets,” with the effect of “permitting the killing of greater numbers of Palestinians [and others] in the language of law.” My own work on United States and Israeli military lawyers confirms Erakat’s important observation and argues that military powers have no shortage of legal options when it comes to selecting from an expansive array of “targets.”
“Dual use” infrastructures and civilians who are said to be “DPH” (directly participating in hostilities) fall into the flexible category of “targets.” Each of these legal formulae is, like the human shield, a double-edged sword. If civilian infrastructures are used for “military purposes” (hence “dual use”), they lose some of their legal protections from attack. If a civilian partakes in any activities that could be construed as supporting military efforts, then they similarly stand to lose their protection. And to be labeled a human shield by an attacking military is to be given a death sentence with no due process or right of appeal. This brings the end of innocence for their civilians, or so our masters of war claim.
In the 20th century, the discourses on human shielding shifted from individual deterrents to entire groups of people. The shift first came into view over the course of World War I and II, where POWs were deployed as shields in significant numbers, but it was in the United States’s war in Vietnam where something altogether grander in scale took place. The Vietnam War was an asymmetric conflict: low-tech rebel fighters of the National Liberation Front (NLF) faced the might of the United States military and Saigon. Outmatched in firepower and technology, the NLF employed the Maoist idea of a people’s war, mobilizing the Vietnamese population against the US invasion and occupation. The civilian population supported the foot soldiers such that the fighters became indistinguishable from the rural population. In response, the United States began a long and ill-fated counterinsurgency program — one marked by mass detention and industrial-scale assassination — that ultimately failed to win over the “hearts and minds” of the people of North Vietnam. Instead, they did as they would years later in Iraq and Afghanistan: they took to the skies and dropped bombs, making very little attempt to distinguish between combatants and civilians and certainly not worrying much about “collateral damage.”
If populations were going to aid the enemy, they were not really civilians, or so the Department of Defense claimed. With juridical sleight of hand, the entire people’s war was reduced to an act of human shielding. The United States did not even spare the jungle, for the canopies too were constituted as shields. The use of napalm against civilians was banned in 1980, but the Vietnam War left an indelible mark not only on the civilian population but on the history of human shields as well.
This paper is an attempt to identify what is unique about the political theology of Zionism. It also explores what the consequences of this uniqueness might be, particularly with regard to future decolonization projects of Israel-Palestine. Dealing with the case of Zionism and Israel is interesting because it allows us – in fact, it forces us – to ask questions about the nature of modernity, liberalism, secularism, colonialism and nationalism writ large. Zionism itself combines many aspects of modern Europe, including nationalism, colonialism, religion, liberalism, and socialism; this raises the question of whether we can offer a critique of Zionism that is not also a critique of the modern Europe that invented all of these categories and practices. All these issues raise the question of how we are to judge Zionism. Can we offer a critique of Zionism that is not at the same time a critique of Europe?
At the same time, Zionism and extreme religiosity come together to expose again and again that the Israeli state, referring to itself as the only democracy in the Middle East, is built upon Jewish supremacy. No dialogue between Jewish settlers and Indigenous Palestinians seems to be on the horizon. Yet, the close ties between race and religion, and the settler colonial structures that support these ties, are now part of the mainstream political discourse on Palestine/Israel, whereas before such discourse was only possible in certain activist and academic circles.
This article considers how ongoing Palestinian dispossession, _manifold Nakbas_ (catastrophes), stemming from the active frontiers of Israeli settler colonialism and catalyzed by religious nationalism and international impunity, continues to extend and expand the Palestinian diaspora into the Americas and other regions. This also structures Palestinian personhood beyond the active space of the settler-colony. I utilize three seemingly disparate cases to make this argument. I begin with Israel’s military onslaught on Gaza in May 2021. I then offer a personal account, followed by ethnographic research conducted with Palestinian Iraq War refugees resettled in Brazil and also examine other military conflicts in the Middle East that have resulted in continual forced Palestinian displacements. Throughout, I demonstrate how Israeli settler colonialism is not an event but a structure (Wolfe. _Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event_. London: Cassell, 1999) which impacts Palestinian life far outside of the original space of displacement.
In 1948, more than 700000 Palestinian Arabs – about half of prewar Mandatory Palestine's Arab population – fled from their homes or were expelled by Zionist militias and, later, the Israeli army[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8] during the 1948 Palestine war,[9] following the Partition Plan for Palestine. The expulsion and flight was a central component of the fracturing, dispossession, and displacement of Palestinian society, known as the Nakba.[10][11] Dozens of massacres were conducted by Israeli military forces and between 400 and 600 Palestinian villages were destroyed. Village wells were poisoned in a biological warfare programme and properties were looted to prevent Palestinian refugees from returning.[12][13] Other sites were subject to Hebraization of Palestinian place names.[14] These activities were not necessarily limited to the year 1948.[15]
The precise number of Palestinian refugees, many of whom settled in Palestinian refugee camps in neighboring states, is a matter of dispute.[16] Around 80 percent of the Arab inhabitants of what became Israel (half of the Arab total population of Mandatory Palestine) left or were expelled from their homes.[17][18] About 250000–300000 Palestinians fled or were expelled during the 1947–1948 civil war in Mandatory Palestine, before the Israeli Declaration of Independence in May 1948, a fact which was named as a casus belli for the entry of the Arab League into the country, sparking the 1948 Arab–Israeli War.
The causes of the 1948 Palestinian exodus are also a subject of fundamental disagreement among historians. Factors involved in the exodus include Jewish military advances, destruction of Arab villages, psychological warfare, fears of another massacre by Zionist militias after the Deir Yassin massacre,[19]: 239–240 which caused many to leave out of panic, direct expulsion orders by Israeli authorities, the demoralizing impact of wealthier classes fleeing,[20] the typhus epidemic in some areas caused by Israeli well-poisoning,[21] collapse in Palestinian leadership and Arab evacuation orders,[22][23] and a disinclination to live under Jewish control.[24][25]
Later, a series of land and property laws passed by the first Israeli government prevented Arabs who had left from returning to their homes or claiming their property. They and many of their descendants remain refugees.[26][27] The expulsion of the Palestinians has since been described by some historians as ethnic cleansing,[28][13][29] while others dispute this charge.[30][31][32] Nevertheless, the existence of the so-called Law of Return allowing for immigration and naturalization of any Jewish person and their family to Israel, while a Palestinian right of return has been denied, has been cited as an evidence for the charge that Israel practices apartheid.[33][34]
The status of the refugees, and in particular whether Israel will allow them the right to return to their homes, or compensate them, are key issues in the ongoing Israeli–Palestinian conflict.[citation needed] The events of 1948 are commemorated by Palestinians both in the Palestinian territories and elsewhere on 15 May, a date known as Nakba Day.
Zionists really do swarm like a drone-like mass of hasbara pricks, don't they?
To pre-empt their usual spew of military agit-prop, contra to the horrific lotus-eating crap that Simon Montefiore has written recently, Israel is SETTLER COLONIAL state that has been committing a decades-long criminal against humanity Palestinian Genocide from the original sins of the Balfour Declaration to the present day.
On Zionist Settler-Colonialism, more properly Zionist necropolitical MILITARY-Colonialism, see for example the following:
From “Introduction” to “The Routledge Handbook of the History of Settler Colonialism”
Settler colonialism as a mode of domination thinks geopolitically. It is significant that William
Gilpin, the ‘inventor’ of modern geopolitics should be a committed and prominent settler
colonialist of the nineteenth century and that Carl Schmitt should have developed his theory of
‘large spaces’ with reference to US President Monroe’s enunciation of the ultimate incompatibility
between colonial and settler colonial forms.2 Epitomising a continental approach, in The
Winning of the West, future US President Theodore Roosevelt wrote in 1889: ‘It is of incalculable
importance that America, Australia, and Siberia should pass out of the hands of their red, black,
and yellow aboriginal owners, and become the heritage of the dominant world races’.3 But this
global continent-shaped vision had significant antecedents and would have important successors.
The rebelling settlers of what would become the US built a ‘continental’ army, their representatives
met in a ‘continental’ congress, the settlers of South Africa met undifferentiated ‘Africans’
and self-defined their collective and language as ‘Afrikaner’, US President James Monroe developed his doctrine to fence off clearly defined continental limits, Australian Federation united an ‘island-continent’ and Canada was built around a ‘continental’ railroad from ‘sea to sea’. There
are probably more examples of these ‘continents of the mind’. Coherently, when it comes to decolonisation, settlers generally
(...)historian Partha Chatterjee insightfully defined as ‘the colonial rule of difference’.15 As such, they all related to colonialism as a set of social phenomena that is characterised by the ability to reproduce itself by maintaining difference and inequality between coloniser and colonised. Conversely, analyses that adopted ‘settler colonialism’ as paradigm emphasised circumstances primarily characterised by a determination to erase colonised subjectivities rather than reproduce their subordination. Unlike the other colonial formations, settler colonialism supersedes rather than reproduces the colonial rule of difference; settlers win by discontinuing unequal relationships rather than maintaining them. Settler colonial studies was a relative newcomer in this genealogy and only consolidated in the 1990s and 2000s to designate the ‘settler societies’ and the fraught relations they entertained with colonised indigenous minorities.
THEORIZING ZIONIST SETTLER COLONIALISM IN PALESTINE
Gershon Shafir
Colonization is a project with a distinct aim, the formation of a new society, eventually to
become independent of a great power’s colonial control. Israel, begotten through colonization,
consequently was fashioned as a settler colonial project. In this, Israel is not different from Canada,
Argentina, Brazil, the United States or South Africa. What makes Israel unique is that it is a
belated settler colony which was launched in the last two decades of the nineteenth century and,
even more so, that it continues the colonization through which it was formed into the twentieth
and twenty-first centuries. It is Zionism’s belated nature, past the heyday of other effective settler
colonial movements, that requires us to understand its distinct character and corresponding theories on how to accomplish its goal.
Though the masses of settlers in Palestine hailed from Eastern European Jewry, the Zionist
movement’s sources of inspiration and models for emulation were drawn, by and large, from central and western Europe, in particular from the UK, Germany and the Habsburg Empire.
(...)
British proto-Zionism doubled as a justification for the expansion of British power in Palestine
at a time when all European Great Powers became involved in the affairs of the ‘sick man of
Europe’, the Ottoman Empire, through a system of capitulations, as protectors of its minorities,
even generating a construction boom of churches and hospitals in Jerusalem. A particularly
intriguing method for gaining influence was archeological excavation, but since the known
Christian sites of Palestine were already under the control of either Orthodox or Catholic Christians,
by associating themselves with Jewish ruins, British Protestants were able to tap into a
remaining but also the oldest pedigree of the land. Thus, in 1865, the Palestine Exploration Fund
(PEF) was established in London with the aim of excavating Palestine’s Jewish heritage. In this
field, the British could not only sideline other Christian powers but also best the Ottomans, who
could not justify their presence in the land with reference to ancient archeology; as an empire,
they had ties everywhere and nowhere. Archeology made the Ottomans the occupiers of Palestine
and the British, the Protestant inheritors of Jews, its ‘rightful’ possessors.
There were several decades in which fantastic ideas for making ‘common cause’ with Jewry
were aired; to cite just a single example, Charles Warren, the great excavator of Jerusalem on
behalf of the PEF, suggested the formation of a company in the model of the British East India
Company and task it with settling in Palestine North African Jews who, in the racialized view
of colonial officials, were of sufficient stature to undertake such a task.
Slavoj, this is your first piece of writing since October 7th that I am completely in agreement with! I feel that the fierce pushback against your initial response from the Left at the beginning of the onslaught on Gaza, shocked you temporarily into submission however, it seems the dust has settled and so has Žižek! ✊🏼
"A Black American recently visited Hebron to check the prevalent opinion that the situation there is very complex; what he saw is that the situation is very simple: no complexity, just open and brutal apartheid…"
The Palestinians have had decades to make a deal, they had decades even before they were occupied by Israel in Gaza or the West Bank. They have always chosen violence. When Mandela had the opportunity to make a deal, he took it.
Deep down, the Palestinians do not seem to have internalized that Israel will continue to exist, that any deal they make cannot involve repatriation of millions of Arabs to Israel. Therefore, no deal will be had because the Israelis are not suicidal. The Palestinians seem to believe that if they make life too hard for the Israelis, the Israelis will leave for wherever it is they're really from, like the French left Algeria. They do not seem to appreciate that the Israelis don't have anywhere to go.
Israel is a military-colonial, rogue nuclear, apartheid state with near-universal Jewish conscription – (exceptions made for the ultra religious) The state was born in violence - acts of terrorism committed against its ALLIES, the British! Tel Aviv *always* reflexively chooses violence at all times in every situation in the lethal policies aimed toward its militarily colonized peoples. This includes the “offers” of “Peace treaties” which history has proven were in reality ultimatums delivered at gunpoint. Or in the case of Oslo, smokescreens intended to camouflage further military colonial annexations.
By rejecting the Hague Conventions and the Geneva Conventions, Israel is openly declaring that it rejects all modern standards of human rights and natural justice as codified in International Law so that it can commit with impunity whatever war crimes, illegal settlement activity and construction of apartheid that they wish. And yet Zionist ultra-nationalists openly proclaim their rejection of the Hague and Geneva Conventions as if this somehow *improves* the image of Israel rather than being the declaration of belligerent war criminality that it is.
Israel is gross violation of, and open contempt for, EVERY SINGLE article of the International Law of Military Occupation.
“The duties of the occupying power are spelled out primarily in the 1907 Hague Regulations (arts 42-56) and the Fourth Geneva Convention (GC IV, art. 27-34 and 47-78), as well as in certain provisions of Additional Protocol I and customary international humanitarian law.
Agreements concluded between the occupying power and the local authorities cannot deprive the population of occupied territory of the protection afforded by international humanitarian law (GC IV, art. 47) and protected persons themselves can in no circumstances renounce their rights (GC IV, art. 8 ).
The main rules of the law applicable in case of occupation state that:
The occupant does not acquire sovereignty over the territory.
Occupation is only a temporary situation, and the rights of the occupant are limited to the extent of that period.
The occupying power must respect the laws in force in the occupied territory, unless they constitute a threat to its security or an obstacle to the application of the international law of occupation.
The occupying power must take measures to restore and ensure, as far as possible, public order and safety.
To the fullest extent of the means available to it, the occupying power must ensure sufficient hygiene and public health standards, as well as the provision of food and medical care to the population under occupation.
The population in occupied territory cannot be forced to enlist in the occupier's armed forces.
Collective or individual forcible transfers of population from and within the occupied territory are prohibited.
Transfers of the civilian population of the occupying power into the occupied territory, regardless whether forcible or voluntary are prohibited.
Collective punishment is prohibited.
The taking of hostages is prohibited.
Reprisals against protected persons or their property are prohibited.
The confiscation of private property by the occupant is prohibited.
The destruction or seizure of enemy property is prohibited, unless absolutely required by military necessity during the conduct of hostilities.
Cultural property must be respected.
People accused of criminal offences shall be provided with proceedings respecting internationally recognized judicial guarantees (for example, they must be informed of the reason for their arrest, charged with a specific offence and given a fair trial as quickly as possible).”
https://www.icrc.org/eng/resources/documents/misc/634kfc.htm
The results speak for themselves:
“2.2 million Palestinian have died from violence, 0.1 million, or from imposed deprivation, 2.1 million, since the British invasion of the Ottoman Empire in 1914 in WW1. The details are set out below in a 2019 update on the ongoing Palestinian Genocide [1].
In 1880 there were about 500,000 Arab Palestinians and about 25,000 Jews living in Palestine of whom half were immigrants [2, 3]. The genocidally racist British invaders and genocidally racist Zionist colonizers have been variously responsible for a Palestinian Genocide involving successive mass expulsions (800,000 in 1948 and 400,00 Arabs in 1967) , ethnic cleansing of 90% of the land of Palestine and an estimated 2.2 million Palestinian deaths since 1914 from violence (0.1 million) or from violently-imposed deprivation (2.1 million) [1, 4-7].
There are now 7 million Palestinian refugees, and of 14 million Palestinians (half of them children, three quarters women and children) about 50% are forbidden to even step foot in their own country on pain of death, only 1.9 million Palestinian Israelis are permitted to vote for the government ruling all of the former Mandated Palestine, and 5 million Palestinians have zero human rights [8] as Occupied Palestinians in West Bank ghettoes or Bantustans (3 million) or in the Gaza Concentration Camp (2.0 million). However the “lucky” Israeli Palestinians are Third Class citizens subject to over 60 Nazi-style, race-based laws [9, 10].
The land of Palestine has now been 90% ethnically cleansed [1, 4-7]. While Indigenous Palestinians represent 50% of Apartheid Israeli subjects, nearly three quarters cannot vote for the government ruling them - egregious Apartheid that is declared by the UN to be a crime against Humanity [11].”
https://sites.google.com/site/palestiniangenocide/
Genocidal scum like you are the last war criminals on Earth to have a reason to be so christdamned smug. Criminal against humanity skinhead insects that you are.
“The picture is that of a colonized people fighting for survival, at a time when its oppressors had elected a government, which is hellbent on accelerating the destruction, in fact the elimination of the Palestinian people – or even their very claim to peoplehood”
https://www.palestinechronicle.com/my-israeli-friends-this-is-why-i-support-palestinians-ilan-pappe/
They have lived under unlawful blockade for 16 years, and already gone through five major brutal wars, which remain unaccounted for," the group, which includes several U.N. special rapporteurs, said in a statement. This amounts to collective punishment.
https://www.reuters.com/world/un-experts-say-israels-strikes-gaza-amount-collective-punishment-2023-10-12/
We Ukrainian researchers artists political and labour activists stand in solidarity with the people of Palestine who for 75 years have been subjected to and resisted Israeli military occupation separation ethnic cleansing, land dispossession and apartheid
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/11/8/ukrainian-letter-of-solidarity-with-the-palestinian
The principle of human dignity must apply to all people
https://publicseminar.org/2023/11/a-response-to-principles-of-solidarity-a-statement/
In moments like this, everything becomes clear. It was clear to many of us for a long time, but now there can be no doubt. The imperial West is still firmly committed to the imperial project it launched against the world late in the 15th century. Yes, it has changed and transformed its methods, tactics, strategies, and its apparatus of power and force. The players have changed, some things became more complex, some things less so. And on and on. All of these academic debates are important, but not right now. What is important right now is to say it clearly and loudly – the imperial West is hell-bent on maintaining its supremacy and will kill indiscriminately in order to achieve the only goal it has ever had, the only value it has ever stood for, power and wealth.
The same imperial project that brutalised millions of Black Africans, committed genocide against millions of Indigenous peoples across the Americas, in Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere, colonised Asia and Africa through unfathomable brutality and force, destroyed countless societies full of complexity and beauty, massacred civilians in its imperial wars in places like Vietnam and Iraq, dropped atomic bombs on Japanese civilians, created a neocolonial economic infrastructure that is continuously robbing the majority of the world’s population blind, and I can go on and on, but this project is ongoing and nowhere at this moment is this more visible than in Palestine.
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/11/2/a-genocide-is-under-way-in-palestine
from "Jewish Currents
"What Does “From the River to the Sea” Really Mean?
The slogan resists the fragmentation of Palestinian land and people by Israeli occupation and discrimination.
The phrase “from the river to the sea” captures this future as no other can, because it encompasses the entire space in which Palestinian rights are denied. It is in this space that Palestinians seek to live freely. It is across this space—and across the political and geographic divisions that Israeli rule has imposed—that Palestinians must unite to create change. It is this space that Palestinians call home, regardless of what anyone else calls it.
“From the river to the sea” is a rejoinder to the fragmentation of Palestinian land and people by Israeli occupation and discrimination. Palestinians have been divided in a myriad of ways by Israeli policy. There are Palestinian refugees denied repatriation because of discriminatory Israeli laws. There are Palestinians denied equal rights living within Israel’s internationally recognized territory as second-class citizens. There are Palestinians living with no citizenship rights under Israeli military occupation in the West Bank. There are Palestinians in legal limbo in occupied Jerusalem and facing expulsion. There are Palestinians in Gaza living under an Israeli siege. All of them suffer from a range of policies in a singular system of discrimination and apartheid—a system that can only be challenged by their unified opposition. All of them have a right to live freely in the land from the river to the sea.
https://jewishcurrents.org/what-does-from-the-river-to-the-sea-really-mean
From the river to the sea’ and the decolonisation of our collective future
True freedom between the river and the sea can only be achieved by breaking free from settler colonialism and the nation-state.
For those still trapped inside binary identities and safely ensconced in an increasingly psychopathic global capitalist system, a free Palestine from the river to the sea – indeed, a truly free, equal and sustainable world – remains an unthinkable proposition.
But as the latest wave of violence confirms, Israel cannot be free until Palestine is free, and the price of that freedom is real decolonisation. This means the creation of a political order, whatever its name or form, in which all people living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea are accorded the same fundamental rights and freedoms.
In the face of the horrors of Gaza, we should be working to encourage real decolonisation not just in Israel/Palestine, but globally, before the violence engulfs us all.
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/11/15/from-the-river-to-the-sea-and-the-decolonisation-of-our-collective-future
Decolonization, for many activists and thinkers, challenges the economic order whereby wealth is concentrated in the hands of relatively few as the vast majority labour in exchange for very little. At its best — and in this regard it has not been honoured in many post-independence contexts — it envisions the end of economic inequality and imagines a more equitable distribution of resources and wealth. It is fair to say that most post-colonial contexts have failed in this regard to be truly decolonized. Too often colonial elites were replaced by post-colonial elites while life for the majority did not change very much. Those who have thought deeply about decolonization have also recognised that it entails challenging local elites as much as foreign rulers, for the two often collaborate in colonial rule: the old tyrants often got on very well with the new ones, as Césaire puts it.
A fully decolonized world largely remains a vision of a possible future, a horizon of aspiration. These unfulfilled hopes are one reason the term resonates for many people still. And that life-giving set of hopes — and the potential for challenge that they generate — is ultimately why those who have an investment in inequality, racism, & domination fear ‘decolonization’. From the rivers to each shining sea, it insists, starting with Palestine, all of humanity must be free.
https://zen-catgirl.medium.com/is-decolonization-genocide-lets-see-de91184cb8af
The release of 110 civilians by Hamas in the first round of ceasefire negotiations, initially resisted by Israel’s war cabinet, showed that there were other ways to do things. Since Israel released 240 Palestinian women and children as part of the deal, though, it showed the world that Hamas was hardly the only actor kidnapping and detaining civilians. Israel tries Palestinians under a military court, which has a conviction rate of 96-99% for any act of resisting its military occupation. It also holds hundreds as detainees even without conviction, often for years. https://thewire.in/world/netanyahus-supremacist-war
In administrative detention, a person is held without trial without having committed an offense, on the grounds that he or she plans to break the law in the future. As this measure is supposed to be preventive, it has no time limit.
The person is detained without legal proceedings, by order of the regional military commander, based on classified evidence that is not revealed to them. This leaves the detainees helpless – facing unknown allegations with no way to disprove them, not knowing when they will be released, and without being charged, tried or convicted.
https://www.btselem.org/administrative_detention
Even beyond administrative detention, when charges are brought against Palestinians in the West Bank, they are almost always tried in military courts that have a near-perfect conviction rate. (By contrast, Israelis are usually tried in civil court.) Palestinians, in other words, are sent to a trapdoor instead of a fair trial.
https://www.vox.com/world-politics/2023/11/22/23972908/palestinian-prisoners-israel-administrative-detention
“The power to incarcerate people who have not been convicted or even charged with anything for lengthy periods of time, based on secret ‘evidence’ that they cannot challenge, is an extreme power,” noted Israeli human rights group B’Tselem. “Israel uses it continuously and extensively, routinely holding hundreds of Palestinians at any given moment.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/11/27/israel-palestine-detention-adminstrative-prisoners-jail/
‘Threatened with rape’: Lama Khater recalls horrors while in Israeli jails
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2024/1/10/threatened-with-rape-lama-khater-recalls-horrors-while-in-israeli-jails
‘It would’ve been better if they shot us’: Palestinians recount prison abuse
Newly released inmates detail cases of humiliation, torture, rape threats, and a prisoner beaten to death by Israeli forces
https://www.972mag.com/palestinians-abused-israeli-prisons-torture/
Israel/OPT: Horrifying cases of torture and degrading treatment of Palestinian detainees amid spike in arbitrary arrests
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2023/11/israel-opt-horrifying-cases-of-torture-and-degrading-treatment-of-palestinian-detainees-amid-spike-in-arbitrary-arrests/
Palestinian writer and activist Ahed Tamimi detained amid surge in arbitrary arrests by Israeli forces
https://www.pen-international.org/news/palestinian-writer-and-activist-ahed-tamimi-detained-amid-surge-in-arbitrary-arrests-by-israeli-forces
PEN International Condemns Arrest of Palestinian Activist Ahed Tamimi; Demands Immediate Release Amid Concerns of Torture and Ill-Treatment
https://www.newsclick.in/pen-international-condemns-arrest-palestinian-activist-ahed-tamimi-demands-immediate-release-amid
(Jerusalem) – Israeli authorities held thousands of workers from Gaza in incommunicado detention for several weeks following the October 7 attacks, subjecting at least some of them to inhumane and degrading conditions, Human Rights Watch said. Thousands more remain stranded in the occupied West Bank without valid legal status and vulnerable to arrest.
(...)
[The Israeli forces] “made us undress,” he said. “[We were] completely naked. They handed us Pampers to wear and thin white overalls…. We stayed blindfolded and cuffed [with zip ties on our hands and feet] for 10 days... We kept asking why we are detained. We never got an answer, only verbal assaults and death threats.”
He said he was beaten for hours, then dragged on gravel face down and attached to a wall or fence by his cuffed hands, and then beaten again: “Every time I fell on the ground I was forced to stand up, and again more beatings and I fell on the ground. With every beating and fall the plastic zip ties on my hands became tighter and more painful.”
(...)
Another man who worked in Rahat said he and other workers were arrested and taken to the Rahat police station on or around October 9. While blindfolded with their hands zip-tied behind their backs, “Israeli forces constantly cursed at us…and threatened to kill us.... We were held for 12 hours. We were not allowed water or [to use] the bathroom.”
(...)
The Israeli military spokesperson confirmed to Haaretz two Gaza workers, one with cancer, one with diabetes, died in Israeli custody, saying, “The two died due to […]complex medical condition[s] contracted before they arrived at the facilities. An investigation is being conducted into the circumstances of their death.” Both men were arrested after October 7. One of the men Human Rights Watch interviewed said there was a cancer patient with him in Ofer who died after a few days in pain.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/01/03/israel-gaza-workers-held-incommunicado-weeks
For years, Netanyahu propped up Hamas. Now it’s blown up in our faces
The premier’s policy of treating the terror group as a partner, at the expense of Abbas and Palestinian statehood, has resulted in wounds that will take Israel years to heal from
https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up-hamas-now-its-blown-up-in-our-faces
The concentration of defenceless civilians in areas designated and delimited on a map as protected, can be used and exploited by the actors on the battlefield to manage and direct their use of lethal force.
This was the case in Bosnia, with the infamous Srebrenica “safe zone”. The area was instituted by the United Nations in 1993 in order to protect Bosnian Muslims under attack, but the disarmament of the safe zone transformed it into easy prey for Serb forces. They first obstructed the delivery of humanitarian aid to the area and then rounded up and massacred thousands of Muslim civilians.
Safe areas became lethal also in the case of Sri Lanka, where the government imposed the creation of Tamil safety zones in which it killed thousands of civilians, while blaming the Tamil Tigers for allegedly using the refugees concentrated in the safe zones as “human shields”.
Similarly, in Gaza, Israel is imposing unilaterally what and where is “safe” for Palestinian civilians. In doing so, it is deploying the discourse of safety and its associated legal technologies – warnings, safe zones, safe corridors, evacuation grids – as a lethal tool to implement the ethnic cleansing of different areas of the territory designated as safe/unsafe.
Areas or parts of the territories defined as safe serve to concentrate the displaced population and better manage the military operations and the killing of civilians. As one poignant Reuters headline put it: “Israel orders Gazans to flee, bombs where it sends them”.
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/1/6/safe-zones-israels-technologies-of-genocide
Damning evidence of war crimes as Israeli attacks wipe out entire families in Gaza
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2023/10/damning-evidence-of-war-crimes-as-israeli-attacks-wipe-out-entire-families-in-gaza/
Trauma and terror: What we are seeing from Gaza
https://www.aljazeera.com/program/the-listening-post/2023/12/16/trauma-and-terror-what-we-are-seeing-from-gaza
President Biden, stop vetoing peace!
My and my fellow rabbis’ urgent pleas for a ceasefire stem from our religious convictions as Jewish spiritual leaders.
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/1/9/president-biden-stop-vetoing-peace
Israel has explained what it’s doing in plain language. No one can claim they didn’t know. Through a combination of mass-casualty terror bombing — what Robert Pape of the University of Chicago, a leading scholar of coercive air power, has called “one of the most intense civilian punishment campaigns in history” — the destruction of hospitals and other critical infrastructure, and a near-total blockade of humanitarian supplies, it is working “to create conditions where life in Gaza becomes unsustainable,” in the words of Major General (Ret.) Giora Eiland, an adviser to the current defense minister.
Israel, in other words, is grimly marching Morgenthau’s argument to its logical conclusion — proving, before the eyes of the world, that the final and most fundamental alternative to Realpolitik is genocide.
https://jacobin.com/2024/01/iron-wall-gaza-israel-defense-forces-realpolitik-palestine-history
“It’s really rare for war criminals to just openly announce their actions,” said John Cox, professor of global studies and history at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, who also directs the Center for Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights Studies. That’s what’s “unique about Israel’s bombing in Gaza.”
Cox noted that this month marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of the U.N.’s Genocide Convention. “[The war in Gaza] literally does take on genocidal proportions and potential, along with daily humiliations and affronts to human rights that Israel has been engaging in for 75 years,” Cox said.
(...)
“A December 8 video from Gaza’s Shejaiya neighborhood shows Israeli soldiers setting fire to a truck with food and water in it, fitting Israel’s October 9 declaration of a “complete siege” of Gaza, in which Israel’s defense minister Yoav Gallant said that “no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel” would be allowed into Gaza. This is an unambiguous violation of the second article of the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention, which includes “causing serious bodily or mental harm to members” of a particular group, as well as the deliberate “inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” https://newrepublic.com/article/177749/bibi-netanyahu-war-crimes-palestine
In the geography and history of Palestine Israel conflict/genocide the overwhelming preponderance of *power* is with the two military-colonial, nuclear armed states - the USA and Israel. Searching for *historical causality* we naturally attend to the most powerful historical currents.
Amongst the most damnable of the many Evils of the Palestinian Genocide is the military-colonial generative Evil of Washington and Tel Aviv in creating the belligerent necropolitical conditions that give rise to the very entities and historical effects that are used as a pretext for further kinetic intensifications of the military-colonial mass-slaughter that occurs with sickening regularity.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/10/18/america-root-cause-war-israel-gaza-palestine/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/18/israel-killing-rage-fuel-conflict-50-years-warns-ex-uk-defence-secretary-ben-wallace
The imperialist policies of London (of the Balfour Declaration), Washington and Tel Aviv are responsible for the creation and continued existence of Hamas in the same way that French colonialism brought into existence the FLN in Algeria; the Viet Minh in Indochina. In the same way that Britain was responsible for the existence of the Mau Mau in Kenya.
(For further detail, see e.g. Immanuel Wallerstein and his school of World-Systems Analysis)
This is a fortiori the case with regards to Hamas which was *actively* supported and funded by Netanyahu in a reckless divide and conquer strategy that has produced obvious blowback
https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up-hamas-now-its-blown-up-in-our-faces
https://www.thenation.com/article/world/why-netanyahu-bolstered-hamas/
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/10/world/middleeast/israel-qatar-money-prop-up-hamas.html
Colonialism is driven and maintained by the wielding of necropolitical power as a means of inflicting violence in order to maintain control and exert domination. As Achille Mbmebe has described and analyzed, military-colonial necropolitics leads to the creation and maintenance of perpetually violent death-worlds within which both the colonizing power and their colonized subjects `are locked into a symbiotic interrelationship of the living dead.
These belligerent death-worlds are military-colonial zones of killing and apartheid iron walls of segregation that create
“contemporary forms of subjugating life to the power of death (necropolitics) (that) are deeply reconfiguring the relations between resistance, sacrifice, and terror. The notion of biopower is insufficient to account for contemporary forms of the subjugation of life to the power of death. Necropolitics, or necropower, accounts for the various ways in which, in our contemporary world, weapons are deployed in the interest of maximally destroying persons and creating death-worlds , that is, new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to living conditions that confer upon them the status of the living dead . Some of the repressed topographies of cruelty (the plantation and the colony in particular) and today’s form of necropower blurs the lines between resistance and suicide, sacrifice and redemption, martyrdom and freedom.”
(grammar of quote slightly modified)
https://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=93E4DDDA3887FEB0B3EC196302C39739
There are no activities that Palestinians attempt to engage in that are not immediately brutalized by hateful, arbitrary violence delivered by the iron boot of bloodthirsty Israeli military-colonial Terror.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjA6qqtTJB8
It is impossible to display the Palestinian flag on Instagram, unaccompanied by any reference whatsoever to the Jewish people, without a barrage of Israeli airstrikes raining upon the poor unfortunate who stepped out of line.
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20220108-emma-watson-post-shows-israels-anti-semitism-smears-are-beginning-to-break-down/
This is the necropolitics of the Israeli military-colony extending all the way back Imperial capital of London from which emanated the original sins of the Balfour Declaration. As was this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sergeants_affair
Every moment of every day of every Palestinian life is suffused with the bloody violence of Israeli necropolitical subjugation inflicted through a reign of military-colonial Terror.
“A Threshold Crossed
Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution”
“About 6.8 million Jewish Israelis and 6.8 million Palestinians live today between the Mediterranean Sea and Jordan River, an area encompassing Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), the latter made up of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. Throughout most of this area, Israel is the sole governing power; in the remainder, it exercises primary authority alongside limited Palestinian self-rule. Across these areas and in most aspects of life, Israeli authorities methodically privilege Jewish Israelis and discriminate against Palestinians. Laws, policies, and statements by leading Israeli officials make plain that the objective of maintaining Jewish Israeli control over demographics, political power, and land has long guided government policy. In pursuit of this goal, authorities have dispossessed, confined, forcibly separated, and subjugated Palestinians by virtue of their identity to varying degrees of intensity. In certain areas, as described in this report, these deprivations are so severe that they amount to the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution.”
https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/israeli-authorities-and-crimes-apartheid-and-persecution
“Israel’s apartheid against Palestinians: a cruel system of domination and a crime against humanity
The comprehensive report, Israel’s Apartheid against Palestinians: Cruel System of Domination and Crime against Humanity, sets out how massive seizures of Palestinian land and property, unlawful killings, forcible transfer, drastic movement restrictions, and the denial of nationality and citizenship to Palestinians are all components of a system which amounts to apartheid under international law. This system is maintained by violations which Amnesty International found to constitute apartheid as a crime against humanity, as defined in the Rome Statute and Apartheid Convention.
Amnesty International is calling on the International Criminal Court (ICC) to consider the crime of apartheid in its current investigation in the OPT and calls on all states to exercise universal jurisdiction to bring perpetrators of apartheid crimes to justice.
“There is no possible justification for a system built around the institutionalized and prolonged racist oppression of millions of people. Apartheid has no place in our world, and states which choose to make allowances for Israel will find themselves on the wrong side of history. Governments who continue to supply Israel with arms and shield it from accountability at the UN are supporting a system of apartheid, undermining the international legal order, and exacerbating the suffering of the Palestinian people. The international community must face up to the reality of Israel’s apartheid, and pursue the many avenues to justice which remain shamefully unexplored.”
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/02/israels-apartheid-against-palestinians-a-cruel-system-of-domination-and-a-crime-against-humanity/
“In moments like this, everything becomes clear. It was clear to many of us for a long time, but now there can be no doubt. The imperial West is still firmly committed to the imperial project it launched against the world late in the 15th century. Yes, it has changed and transformed its methods, tactics, strategies, and its apparatus of power and force. The players have changed, some things became more complex, some things less so. And on and on. All of these academic debates are important, but not right now. What is important right now is to say it clearly and loudly – the imperial West is hell-bent on maintaining its supremacy and will kill indiscriminately in order to achieve the only goal it has ever had, the only value it has ever stood for, power and wealth.
The same imperial project that brutalised millions of Black Africans, committed genocide against millions of Indigenous peoples across the Americas, in Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere, colonised Asia and Africa through unfathomable brutality and force, destroyed countless societies full of complexity and beauty, massacred civilians in its imperial wars in places like Vietnam and Iraq, dropped atomic bombs on Japanese civilians, created a neocolonial economic infrastructure that is continuously robbing the majority of the world’s population blind, and I can go on and on, but this project is ongoing and nowhere at this moment is this more visible than in Palestine.”
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/11/2/a-genocide-is-under-way-in-palestine
The term ‘human shields’ describes a method of warfare prohibited by international humanitarian law (IHL), during which the presence of civilians or the movement of the civilian population, whether voluntary or involuntary, is used to shield military objectives from attack, or to shield, favour or impede military operations. Human shields are always protected from attack unless and for such time as they take a direct part in hostilities.
While the law is clear, the reality can be blurred by the discursive use of human shields. In this instalment of our urban warfare special series, Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini – authors of ‘Human Shields: A History of People in the Line of Fire’ – build upon Zoi Lafazani’s post and discuss what they refer to as ‘proximate shields’, whereby humans are framed as shields merely due to their proximity to belligerents.
https://blogs.icrc.org/law-and-policy/2021/11/18/proximate-human-shields/
According to B'tselem, the IDF repeatedly used Palestinians as human shields. This practice became military policy during the Second Intifada, and was only dropped when Adalah challenged the practice before Israel's High Court of Justice in 2002. However, the IDF persisted in using Palestinians in its 'neighbor procedure', whereby people picked at random were made to approach the houses of suspects and persuade them to surrender, a practice which arguably placed the former's lives in danger. The court ruled in October 2005 "that any use of Palestinian civilians during military actions is forbidden, including the 'prior warning procedure'." According to B'tselem, reports indicate that the practice has continued nonetheless, in military operations like Operation Cast Lead, and Operation Protective Edge, and the "vast majority of these reports were never investigated, and those that did result in no further action".[22] Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini, in their study of the phenomenon, note that Israeli citizens in densely populated areas like Tel Aviv are never spoken of as human shields when Hamas fires rockets towards the Israeli Defense command located in the centre of that city, whereas Palestinians in Gaza are depicted as human shields when Israel fires rockets at, or bombs, equally densely populated cities like Gaza.[23]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_shields_in_the_Israeli%E2%80%93Palestinian_conflict#:~:text=Use%20by%20Israeli%20forces,-See%20also%3A%20Criticism&text=According%20to%20B'tselem%2C%20the,Court%20of%20Justice%20in%202002
Since the beginning of the occupation in 1967, Israeli security forces have repeatedly used Palestinians in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip as human shields, ordering them to perform military tasks that risked their lives. As part of this policy, soldiers have ordered Palestinian civilians to remove suspicious objects from roads, to tell people to come out of their homes so the military can arrest them, to stand in front of soldiers while the latter shoot from behind them, and more. The Palestinian civilians were chosen at random for these tasks, and could not refuse the demand placed on them by armed soldiers.
This use of civilians is not an independent initiative by soldiers in the field, but the result of a decision made by senior military authorities. During the second intifada, and particularly during military incursions into Palestinian population centers, such as Operation Defensive Shield in April 2002, use of Palestinians as human shields became open military policy.
https://www.btselem.org/human_shields
In Gaza: Human Shields, we speak to civilians, academics and human rights advocates who have accused the Israeli military of employing the tactic as they battled Hamas.We hear testimony from Palestinians being forcing them to walk in front of Israeli soldiers at gunpoint and enter potentially hostile buildings.We examine evidence alleging Israel's long-standing practice of human shields and explore whether Hamas used residential buildings and civilian areas to launch attacks."They [the Israeli army] took me and put me on top of a tank", Anas Najjar, a resident of the battered southern town of Khuazaa says; while Ramy Abdu of the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor says there is "enough files to condemn Israel and prove it's committed war crimes by using civilians as human shields."Showing both Israeli and Palestinian perspectives on the use of human shields, Gaza: Human Shields follows on from a recently-published UN enquiry into war crimes during the July-August 2014 war.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oed1s5jv3Cc
The Israeli Radio reported Thursday evening that the Israeli Military Prosecution revealed that one of the “elite” military forces used a Palestinian child as a human shield and forced him to open suspicious objects during the war on Gaza.The Radio said that the military prosecution filed charges against two soldiers of the Golani Brigade, accusing them of using civilians as human shields.
The incident in question took place in January of last year when the two soldiers forced a nine-year old child to open suspicious objects and packages. The incident took place in Tal Al Hawa, south of Gaza city.
https://imemc.org/article/58197/
A video that went viral on social media on Friday showed the Israeli military using a Palestinian detainee as a human shield in the southern occupied West Bank.
The blindfolded detainee is seen seated on the ground, with military vehicles behind him using him as a shield, and an Israeli soldier aiming his rifle towards a group of Palestinians.
Eyewitnesses reported to Anadolu that the incident took place early Friday in the Fawwar refugee camp near Hebron in the southern occupied West Bank.
The Israeli military raided the camp, arresting several individuals, in the process sparking confrontations with dozens of Palestinians, the eyewitnesses said.
At least 173 Palestinians have been killed and 2,300 others injured by Israeli army fire in the occupied territory since the outbreak of the Gaza conflict, according to Palestinian figures.
https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/israeli-army-in-west-bank-uses-palestinian-detainee-as-human-shield/3049924
A group of Israeli soldiers ambushed and detained a seven-year-old boy during the weekly demonstration in Kafr Qaddum last Friday and used him as a human shield, video footage has shown.
The recording, released by Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem shows Muamen Murad Mahmoud Shteiwi being captured and held in front of soldiers as protection.
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20161230-israeli-soldiers-use-palestinian-child-as-human-shield/
During the 10-year period, an estimated 7,000 Palestinian children aged 12 to 17, but some as young as nine, had been arrested, interrogated and detained, the U.N. report said.
Many are brought in leg chains and shackles before military courts, while youths are held in solitary confinement, sometimes for months, the report said.
It voiced deep concern at the "continuous use of Palestinian children as human shields and informants", saying 14 such cases had been reported between January 2010 and March 2013 alone.
Israeli soldiers had used Palestinian children to enter potentially dangerous buildings before them and to stand in front of military vehicles to deter stone-throwing, it said.
"Almost all those using children as human shields and informants have remained unpunished and the soldiers convicted for having forced at gunpoint a nine-year-old child to search bags suspected of containing explosives only received a suspended sentence of three months and were demoted," it said.
https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSBRE95J0FR/
You punch hard, Zizek.
Seriously confused, as usual.
I wish I had the time to dissect it, but I am certain that you will provide me with plenty of new material in the future when I will have the time. 😉
What a ridiculous claim that Gaza City and surrounding boroughs have all been deprecated slums requiring gentrification. Before the Hamasmassacrepalooza, Gaza had its own gentrified areas replete with luxurious condos, malls, restaurants, beaches, and hotels. Yes it had its slums too being a dense urban center but you paint an unhistoric broad brush. Only a Trotskyist would paint Gaza as having been in a constant happy state of destruction and chaos to meet the shameful end by gentrification by the Bougies. What’s more interesting than Marxist fiction is why, exactly, have the Palestinian Arab terrorist organizations rejected every land and peace deal?
Israel has failed the test
In 1993 Palestinians, along with millions of people around the world, were led to hope that Israel would withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza within five years and that Palestinians would then be free to establish an independent state. Meanwhile both sides would work out details of Israel’s withdrawal and come to an agreement on the status of Jerusalem, the future of Israeli settlements, and the return of Palestinian refugees.
“Because of the lopsided balance of power, negotiations went nowhere and the Palestinians’ hopes were never fulfilled. The Israelis, regardless of which government was in power, quibbled over wording, demanded revisions of what had previously been agreed to, then refused to abide by the new agreements. Meanwhile successive governments were demolishing Palestinian homes, taking over Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem for Jewish housing, and seizing Palestinian land for new settlements. A massive new highway network built after 1993 on confiscated Palestinian land isolates Palestinian towns and villages from one another and from Jerusalem, forcing many Palestinians to go through Israeli checkpoints just to get to the next town...
“According to President Clinton and most of the media, Prime Minister Ehud Barak conceded at Camp David virtually everything the Palestinians wanted, and Yasser Arafat threw away the opportunity for peace by rejecting Barak’s offer. In fact Arafat could not accept it. Barak, backed by Clinton, wanted assurance of Israel’s continued strategic control over the West Bank and Gaza, including air space and borders, and insisted that Israel retain permanent sovereignty over most of East Jerusalem, including Haram Al-Sharif. This was a deal no Arab would accept.
“As the protests grew, army helicopters rocketed neighborhoods in several Palestinian cities, destroying entire city blocks and causing scores of casualties. Israeli tanks surrounded Palestinian towns with their guns turned toward the town. Armed Israeli civilians within the Green Line rampaged through Arab neighborhoods destroying Arab property and shouting “Death of Arabs’...Israeli police who were quick to use bullets against Palestinian stone throwers failed to restrain the Israelis and instead fired at Arabs trying to defend their homes. Two Arabs were killed.
“The uprising was undoubtedly fueled by the resentment caused by years of daily abuse and humiliation under Israeli occupation. On September 6, a group of Israeli border police stopped three Palestinian workers as they were returning home from Israel and, for no reason at all, subjected them to 40 minutes of torture. The San Francisco Chronicle reported on September 19 that the policemen punched the three men, slammed their heads against a stone wall, forced them to swallow their own blood, and cursed their mothers and sisters. The incident only came to light because the policemen took photographs of themselves with their victims, holding their heads by the hair like hunting trophies. Israeli human rights workers said such beatings are a common occurance, but they are seldom reported.” Rachelle Marshall, “The Peace Process Ends in Protests and Blood”, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, December 2000.
“In the Oslo Agreements, Israel and the West put Palestinian leadership to a test: In exchange for an Israeli promise to gradually dismantle the mechanisms of the occupation in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the Palestinian leadership promised to stop every act of violence and terror immediately. For that purpose, all the apparatus for security coordination was created, more and more Palestinian jails were built, and demonstrators were barred from approaching the [Jewish] settlements.
“The two sides agreed on a period of five years for completion of the new deployment and the negotiations on a final agreement. The Palestinian leadership agreed again and again to extend its trial period...From their perspective, Israel was also put to a test: Was Israel really giving up its attitude of superiority and domination, built up in order to keep the Palestinian people under its control?
“More than seven years have gone by and Israel has security and administrative control of 61.2% of the West Bank and about 20% of the Gaza Strip and security control over another 26.8% of the West Bank. This control is what has enabled Israel to double the number of settlers in 10 years..and to seal an entire nation into restricted areas, imprisoned in a network of bypass roads meant for Jews only...
“Israel has failed the test. Palestinians control of 12% of the West Bank does not mean that Israel has given up its attitude of superiority and domination...The bloodbath that has been going on for three weeks is the natural outcome of seven years of [Israeli] lying and deception.”
Israeli journalist Amira Hass, “Israel Has Failed The Test,” in Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, 10/18/00.
Israel for the first time accepted the principle of repatriation [of the Arab refugees] and the internationalization of Jerusalem. . .[but] they did so as a mere exercise in public relations aimed at strengthening Israel’s international image...Walter Eytan, the head of the Israeli delegation, [stated]..’My main purpose was to begin to undermine the protocol of 12 May, which we had signed only under duress of our struggle for admission to the U.N. Refusal to sign would...have immediately been reported to the Secretary-General and the various governments.’”
Israeli historian, Ilan Pappe, “The Making of the Arab-Israel Conflict, 1947-1951.”
“The fact that the Arabs fled in terror, because of real fear of a repetition of the 1948 Zionist massacres, is no reason for denying them their homes, fields and livelihoods. Civilians caught in an area of military activity generally panic. But they have always been able to return to their homes when the danger subsides. Military conquest does not abolish private rights to property; nor does it entitle the victor to confiscate the homes, property and personal belongings of the noncombatant civilian population. The seizure of Arab property by the Israelis was an outrage.”
Sami Hadawi, “Bitter Harvest.”
“That Ben-Gurion’s ultimate aim was to evacuate as much of the Arab population as possible from the Jewish state can hardly be doubted, if only from the variety of means he employed to achieve his purpose...most decisively, the destruction of whole villages and the eviction of their inhabitants...even [if] they had not participated in the war and had stayed in Israel hoping to live in peace and equality, as promised in the Declaration of Independence.” Israeli author, Simha Flapan, “The Birth of Israel.”
“Joseph Weitz was the director of the Jewish National Land Fund...On December 19, 1940, he wrote: ‘It must be clear that there is no room for both peoples in this country...The Zionist enterprise so far...has been fine and good in its own time, and could do with ‘land buying’ — but this will not bring about the State of Israel; that must come all at once, in the manner of a Salvation (this is the secret of the Messianic idea); and there is no way besides transferring the Arabs from here to the neighboring countries, to transfer them all; except maybe for Bethlehem, Nazareth and Old Jerusalem, we must not leave a single village, not a single tribe’...There were literally hundreds of such statements made by Zionists.” Edward Said, “The Question of Palestine.”
“For the entire day of April 9, 1948, Irgun and LEHI soldiers carried out the slaughter in a cold and premeditated fashion...The attackers ‘lined men, women and children up against the walls and shot them,’...The ruthlessness of the attack on Deir Yassin shocked Jewish and world opinion alike, drove fear and panic into the Arab population, and led to the flight of unarmed civilians from their homes all over the country.” Israeli author, Simha Flapan, “The Birth of Israel.”
“By 1948, the Jew was not only able to ‘defend himself’ but to commit massive atrocities as well. Indeed, according to the former director of the Israeli army archives, ‘in almost every village occupied by us during the War of Independence, acts were committed which are defined as war crimes, such as murders, massacres, and rapes’...Uri Milstein, the authoritative Israeli military historian of the 1948 war, goes one step further, maintaining that ‘every skirmish ended in a massacre of Arabs.’” Norman Finkelstein, “Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict.”
“Arab rejection was...based on the fact that, while the population of the Jewish state was to be [only half] Jewish with the Jews owning less than 10% of the Jewish state land area, the Jews were to be established as the ruling body — a settlement which no self-respecting people would accept without protest, to say the least...The action of the United Nations conflicted with the basic principles for which the world organization was established, namely, to uphold the right of all peoples to self-determination. By denying the Palestine Arabs, who formed the two-thirds majority of the country, the right to decide for themselves, the United Nations had violated its own charter.”
Sami Hadawi, “Bitter Harvest.”
“While the Yishuv’s leadership formally accepted the 1947 Partition Resolution, large sections of Israel’s society — including...Ben-Gurion — were opposed to or extremely unhappy with partition and from early on viewed the war as an ideal opportunity to expand the new state’s borders beyond the UN earmarked partition boundaries and at the expense of the Palestinians.”
Israeli historian, Benny Morris, in “Tikkun”, March/April 1998.
“In internal discussion in 1938 [David Ben-Gurion] stated that ‘after we become a strong force, as a result of the creation of a state, we shall abolish partition and expand into the whole of Palestine’...In 1948, Menachem Begin declared that: ‘The partition of the Homeland is illegal. It will never be recognized. The signature of institutions and individuals of the partition agreement is invalid. It will not bind the Jewish people. Jerusalem was and will forever be our capital. Eretz Israel (the land of Israel) will be restored to the people of Israel, All of it. And forever.” Noam Chomsky, “The Fateful Triangle.”
“Menahem Begin, the Leader of the Irgun, tells how ‘in Jerusalem, as elsewhere, we were the first to pass from the defensive to the offensive...Arabs began to flee in terror...Hagana was carrying out successful attacks on other fronts, while all the Jewish forces proceeded to advance through Haifa like a knife through butter’...The Israelis now allege that the Palestine war began with the entry of the Arab armies into Palestine after 15 May 1948. But that was the second phase of the war; they overlook the massacres, expulsions and dispossessions which took place prior to that date and which necessitated Arab states’ intervention.” Sami Hadawi, “Bitter Harvest.”
“Barak promised peace and brought war, and not by accident.”
“(Barak) promised peace and brought war, and not by accident. While speaking about peace, he enlarged the settlements. Cut the Palestinian territories into pieces by ‘by-pass’ roads. Confiscated lands. Demolished homes. Uprooted trees. Paralyzed the Palestinian economy..Conducted negotiations in which he tried to dictate to the Palestinians a peace that amounts to capitulation. Was not satisfied with the fact that by accepting the Green Line, the Palestinians had already given up 78% of their historic homeland. Demanded the annexation of ‘settlement blocs” and pretended that they amount only to 3% of the territory, while in fact he meant more than 20% would remain under Israeli control. Wanted to coerce the Palestinians to accept a ‘state’ cut off from all its neighbors and composed of several enclaves isolated from each other, each surrounded by Israeli settlers and soldiers...Boasts publicly that he has not given back to the Palestinians one inch of territory...When the intifada broke out, sent snipers to shoot, in cold blood from a distance, hundreds of unarmed demonstrators, adults and children. Blockaded each village and town separately, bringing them to the verge of starvation, in order to get them to surrender. Bombarded neighborhoods. Started a policy of mafia-style ‘liquidations’, causing an inevitable escalation of the violence.” Israeli peace activist, Uri Avnery, February 3, 2001, www.gush-shalom.org
“What is there to be confused about? A conquering army is using tanks and helicopter gunships to disperse demonstrations. What is so hard to understand here?...There is an occupation and there is a struggle against the occupation. There are demonstrators and there is an army that has received orders to shed their blood. And don’t come to me with the story of the rifles, Your glorious war record qualifies you to understand that even CNN reporters understand, that those rifles do not endanger either Israel or the soldiers if they don’t get too close...
“[From 1993 letter]”peace is a tango that takes two equal partners dancing in unity; it is not a dance of one who drags around his partner at will...In your dance of peace you have no partners, only enemies. For your peace is his occupation, your success is his loss...Peace is still far away because peace demands honesty, because peace demands equality. You want to force them to lie, you want of them a peace of surrender, you are celebrating a peace of master and slave. Under such conditions there will perhaps be peace-and-quiet, but Peace, no. Not until you open your eyes and your heart. Not until we are ready for a peace of partnership and equality.” Michael (Mikado) Warschawski, “The Party Is Over: An Open Letter to a Friend In Peace Now,”, from Znet, www.lbbs.org/ZNETTOPnoanimation.html
What "peace deals" are you talking about??
The 16 year Blockade of Gaza? The apartheid Illegal Settlements in the West Bank *purposely designed to destroy the Oslo Accords?
Jimmy Carter’s simple statement of the facts — November 2000
“An underlying reason that years of U.S. diplomacy have failed and violence in the Middle East persists is that some Israeli leaders continue to ‘create facts’ by building settlements in occupied territory...
“At Camp David in September 1978...the bilateral provisions led to a comprehensive and lasting treaty between Egypt and Israel, made possible at the last minute by Israel’s agreement to remove its settlers from the Sinai. But similar constraints concerning the status of the West Bank and Gaza have not been honored, and have led to continuing confrontation and violence...
“[Concerning UN Resolution 242] Our government’s legal commitment to support this well-balanced resolution has not changed...It was clear that Israeli settlements in the occupied territories were a direct violation of this agreement and were, according to the long-stated American position, both ‘illegal and an obstacle to peace.’ Accordingly, Prime Minister Begin pledged that there would be no establishment of new settlements until after the final peace negotiations were completed. But later, under Likud pressure, he declined to honor this commitment...
“It is unlikely that real progress can be made...as long as Israel insists on its settlement policy, illegal under international laws that are supported by the United States and all other nations.
“There are many questions as we contine to seek an end to violence in the Middle East, but there is no way to escape the vital one: Land or peace?” Former President Jimmy Carter in The Washington Post, November 26, 2000.
“Barak’s plan...ensure(s) that useable land and resources (primarily water) remain largely in Israeli hands while the population is administered by a corrupt and brutal Palestinian Authority (PA), playing the role traditionally assigned to indigenous collaborators under the several varieties of imperial rule: the Black leadership of South Africa’s Bantustans, to mention only the most obvious analagoue...
“It is important to recall that the policies have not only been proposed, but implemented, with the support of the U.S. That support has been decisive since 1971, when Washington abandoned the basic diplomatic framework that it had initiated (UN Security Council Resolution 242), then pursued its unilateral rejection of Palestinian rights in the years that followed, culminating in the ‘Oslo process.’ Since all of this has been effectively vetoed from history in the US., it takles a little work to discover the essential facts. They are not controversial, only evaded,” Noam Chomsky, “Al-Aqsa Intifada”, October 2000, on Znet, www.lbbs.org/meastwatch.
“With the same deadpan, expressionless, emotionless, glazed look, Madam Albright repeated: ‘Those Palestinian rock throwers have placed Israel undeer siege,’ adding that the Israeli army is defending itself...[But] It is Israel that is the belligerent occupant of Palestine (and not the other way around) Israeli tanks and armored vehicles are surrounding Palestinian villages, camps and cities (and not the other way around). Israeli (American-made) Apache gunships are firing Lau and other missiles at Palestinian protestors and homes (and not the other way around). It is Israel that is confiscating Palestinian land and importing Jewish settlers to set up illegal armed settlements in the heart of Palestinian territory (and not the other way around). The settlers on the rampage in the West Bank and Israelis terrorizing Palestinians in their own homes (and not the other way around)...Israel is committing atrocities against the Palestinians with total impunity, and yet you maintain, ‘Israel is beseiged.’” Hanan Ashrawi, in “The Progressive”, December 2000
“Barak appears to be asking for only 10% of the occupied territories. In reality, it’s closer to 30%, taking into account the territories he wants to annex in the Jerusalem area and place under his “security control” in the Jordan Valley. But even worse, in the map submitted to the Palestinians, these percentage points cut the country up from East to West and from North to South, so that the Palestinian state will consist of groups of islands, each surrounded by Israeli settlers and soldiers.
“World opinion is always on the side of the underdog. In this fight, we are Goliath and they are David. In the eyes of the world [outside the US], the Palestinians are fighting a war of liberation against a foreign occupation. We are in their territory, not they on ours. We are the occupiers, they are the victims. This is the objective situation, and no minister of propaganda can change that.” Israeli peace activist. Uri Avnery, “12 Conventional Lies About the Palestine-Israeli Conflict” from Palestine Media Watch, www.pmwatch.org.
Israel is a military-colonial, rogue nuclear, apartheid state with near-universal Jewish conscription – (exceptions made for the ultra religious) The state was born in violence - acts of terrorism committed against its ALLIES, the British! Tel Aviv *always* reflexively chooses violence at all times in every situation in the lethal policies aimed toward its militarily colonized peoples. This includes the “offers” of “Peace treaties” which history has proven were in reality ultimatums delivered at gunpoint. Or in the case of Oslo, smokescreens intended to camouflage further military colonial annexations.
By rejecting the Hague Conventions and the Geneva Conventions, Israel is openly declaring that it rejects all modern standards of human rights and natural justice as codified in International Law so that it can commit with impunity whatever war crimes, illegal settlement activity and construction of apartheid that they wish. And yet Zionist ultra-nationalists openly proclaim their rejection of the Hague and Geneva Conventions as if this somehow *improves* the image of Israel rather than being the declaration of belligerent war criminality that it is.
Israel is gross violation of, and open contempt for, EVERY SINGLE article of the International Law of Military Occupation.
“The duties of the occupying power are spelled out primarily in the 1907 Hague Regulations (arts 42-56) and the Fourth Geneva Convention (GC IV, art. 27-34 and 47-78), as well as in certain provisions of Additional Protocol I and customary international humanitarian law.
Agreements concluded between the occupying power and the local authorities cannot deprive the population of occupied territory of the protection afforded by international humanitarian law (GC IV, art. 47) and protected persons themselves can in no circumstances renounce their rights (GC IV, art. 8 ).
The main rules of the law applicable in case of occupation state that:
The occupant does not acquire sovereignty over the territory.
Occupation is only a temporary situation, and the rights of the occupant are limited to the extent of that period.
The occupying power must respect the laws in force in the occupied territory, unless they constitute a threat to its security or an obstacle to the application of the international law of occupation.
The occupying power must take measures to restore and ensure, as far as possible, public order and safety.
To the fullest extent of the means available to it, the occupying power must ensure sufficient hygiene and public health standards, as well as the provision of food and medical care to the population under occupation.
The population in occupied territory cannot be forced to enlist in the occupier's armed forces.
Collective or individual forcible transfers of population from and within the occupied territory are prohibited.
Transfers of the civilian population of the occupying power into the occupied territory, regardless whether forcible or voluntary are prohibited.
Collective punishment is prohibited.
The taking of hostages is prohibited.
Reprisals against protected persons or their property are prohibited.
The confiscation of private property by the occupant is prohibited.
The destruction or seizure of enemy property is prohibited, unless absolutely required by military necessity during the conduct of hostilities.
Cultural property must be respected.
People accused of criminal offences shall be provided with proceedings respecting internationally recognized judicial guarantees (for example, they must be informed of the reason for their arrest, charged with a specific offence and given a fair trial as quickly as possible).”
https://www.icrc.org/eng/resources/documents/misc/634kfc.htm
The results speak for themselves:
“2.2 million Palestinian have died from violence, 0.1 million, or from imposed deprivation, 2.1 million, since the British invasion of the Ottoman Empire in 1914 in WW1. The details are set out below in a 2019 update on the ongoing Palestinian Genocide [1].
In 1880 there were about 500,000 Arab Palestinians and about 25,000 Jews living in Palestine of whom half were immigrants [2, 3]. The genocidally racist British invaders and genocidally racist Zionist colonizers have been variously responsible for a Palestinian Genocide involving successive mass expulsions (800,000 in 1948 and 400,00 Arabs in 1967) , ethnic cleansing of 90% of the land of Palestine and an estimated 2.2 million Palestinian deaths since 1914 from violence (0.1 million) or from violently-imposed deprivation (2.1 million) [1, 4-7].
There are now 7 million Palestinian refugees, and of 14 million Palestinians (half of them children, three quarters women and children) about 50% are forbidden to even step foot in their own country on pain of death, only 1.9 million Palestinian Israelis are permitted to vote for the government ruling all of the former Mandated Palestine, and 5 million Palestinians have zero human rights [8] as Occupied Palestinians in West Bank ghettoes or Bantustans (3 million) or in the Gaza Concentration Camp (2.0 million). However the “lucky” Israeli Palestinians are Third Class citizens subject to over 60 Nazi-style, race-based laws [9, 10].
The land of Palestine has now been 90% ethnically cleansed [1, 4-7]. While Indigenous Palestinians represent 50% of Apartheid Israeli subjects, nearly three quarters cannot vote for the government ruling them - egregious Apartheid that is declared by the UN to be a crime against Humanity [11].”
https://sites.google.com/site/palestiniangenocide/
zizek is dripping in contempt for anything in the middle east resembling a first world. He clearly believes from this post that Gaza was basically an early 20th century eastern european slum. This whole piece is one of the stupidest things I've ever read from someone notable
The Horror!
Oh dear Christ in Heaven!!
Won't some dainty bourgeois socialite darling pleeease spare a thought for the Middle Eastern "first world"!!
All this handwringing about Genocide and Apartheid, whilst beachfront penthouses go unappraised!
Pitiable creatures like you spend the entirety of your benighted reptilian existence chained to mental and moral marble bidets and epistemic urinals.
Hamas slaughter has no context since it has been an indiscriminate killing, raping and kidnapping of civilians. Should this be legitimate fight, any reaction would be legitimate. Simply stated, had Israel applied the same logic underlying Hamas actions, Gaza bombing would have lasted just a couple of days, Israel would have killed most of the palestinians population and war would be ended with extermination. This is not happening because of what you call "hypocrisy" which still means sparing as much human life as possible in the circumstances.
You are Genocidal war criminal scum of the earth
Israel is hitting ravaged hospitals without fuel or light with bombings; their mad "leader" is quoting Biblical bloodbaths, declaring a "holy mission" of annihilation
Murdering children is not "war."
https://www.commondreams.org/further/in-what-is-called-a-war
Only the most debased genocidal racists can observe the Israeli systematic campaign of military mass slaughter and not bat a reptilian eyelid
"Child casualties in Gaza a ‘stain on our conscience’: UNICEF"
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/25/over-2000-children-killed-in-gaza-a-stain-on-our-collective-conscience
There IS a context you war criminal skinhead scum of the Earth. Fuck you and your unthinking fascist mother.
In the geography and history of Palestine Israel conflict/genocide the overwhelming preponderance of *power* is with the two military-colonial, nuclear armed states - the USA and Israel. Searching for *historical causality* we naturally attend to the most powerful historical currents.
Amongst the most damnable of the many Evils of the Palestinian Genocide is the military-colonial generative Evil of Washington and Tel Aviv in creating the belligerent necropolitical conditions that give rise to the very entities and historical effects that are used as a pretext for further kinetic intensifications of the military-colonial mass-slaughter that occurs with sickening regularity.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/10/18/america-root-cause-war-israel-gaza-palestine/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/18/israel-killing-rage-fuel-conflict-50-years-warns-ex-uk-defence-secretary-ben-wallace
The imperialist policies of London (of the Balfour Declaration), Washington and Tel Aviv are responsible for the creation and continued existence of Hamas in the same way that French colonialism brought into existence the FLN in Algeria; the Viet Minh in Indochina. In the same way that Britain was responsible for the existence of the Mau Mau in Kenya.
(For further detail, see e.g. Immanuel Wallerstein and his school of World-Systems Analysis)
This is a fortiori the case with regards to Hamas which was *actively* supported and funded by Netanyahu in a reckless divide and conquer strategy that has produced obvious blowback
https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up-hamas-now-its-blown-up-in-our-faces
https://www.thenation.com/article/world/why-netanyahu-bolstered-hamas/
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/10/world/middleeast/israel-qatar-money-prop-up-hamas.html
Colonialism is driven and maintained by the wielding of necropolitical power as a means of inflicting violence in order to maintain control and exert domination. As Achille Mbmebe has described and analyzed, military-colonial necropolitics leads to the creation and maintenance of perpetually violent death-worlds within which both the colonizing power and their colonized subjects `are locked into a symbiotic interrelationship of the living dead.
These belligerent death-worlds are military-colonial zones of killing and apartheid iron walls of segregation that create
“contemporary forms of subjugating life to the power of death (necropolitics) (that) are deeply reconfiguring the relations between resistance, sacrifice, and terror. The notion of biopower is insufficient to account for contemporary forms of the subjugation of life to the power of death. Necropolitics, or necropower, accounts for the various ways in which, in our contemporary world, weapons are deployed in the interest of maximally destroying persons and creating death-worlds , that is, new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to living conditions that confer upon them the status of the living dead . Some of the repressed topographies of cruelty (the plantation and the colony in particular) and today’s form of necropower blurs the lines between resistance and suicide, sacrifice and redemption, martyrdom and freedom.”
(grammar of quote slightly modified)
https://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=93E4DDDA3887FEB0B3EC196302C39739
There are no activities that Palestinians attempt to engage in that are not immediately brutalized by hateful, arbitrary violence delivered by the iron boot of bloodthirsty Israeli military-colonial Terror.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjA6qqtTJB8
It is impossible to display the Palestinian flag on Instagram, unaccompanied by any reference whatsoever to the Jewish people, without a barrage of Israeli airstrikes raining upon the poor unfortunate who stepped out of line.
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20220108-emma-watson-post-shows-israels-anti-semitism-smears-are-beginning-to-break-down/
This is the necropolitics of the Israeli military-colony extending all the way back Imperial capital of London from which emanated the original sins of the Balfour Declaration. As was this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sergeants_affair
Every moment of every day of every Palestinian life is suffused with the bloody violence of Israeli necropolitical subjugation inflicted through a reign of military-colonial Terror.
“A Threshold Crossed
Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution”
“About 6.8 million Jewish Israelis and 6.8 million Palestinians live today between the Mediterranean Sea and Jordan River, an area encompassing Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), the latter made up of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. Throughout most of this area, Israel is the sole governing power; in the remainder, it exercises primary authority alongside limited Palestinian self-rule. Across these areas and in most aspects of life, Israeli authorities methodically privilege Jewish Israelis and discriminate against Palestinians. Laws, policies, and statements by leading Israeli officials make plain that the objective of maintaining Jewish Israeli control over demographics, political power, and land has long guided government policy. In pursuit of this goal, authorities have dispossessed, confined, forcibly separated, and subjugated Palestinians by virtue of their identity to varying degrees of intensity. In certain areas, as described in this report, these deprivations are so severe that they amount to the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution.”
https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/israeli-authorities-and-crimes-apartheid-and-persecution
“Israel’s apartheid against Palestinians: a cruel system of domination and a crime against humanity
The comprehensive report, Israel’s Apartheid against Palestinians: Cruel System of Domination and Crime against Humanity, sets out how massive seizures of Palestinian land and property, unlawful killings, forcible transfer, drastic movement restrictions, and the denial of nationality and citizenship to Palestinians are all components of a system which amounts to apartheid under international law. This system is maintained by violations which Amnesty International found to constitute apartheid as a crime against humanity, as defined in the Rome Statute and Apartheid Convention.
Amnesty International is calling on the International Criminal Court (ICC) to consider the crime of apartheid in its current investigation in the OPT and calls on all states to exercise universal jurisdiction to bring perpetrators of apartheid crimes to justice.
“There is no possible justification for a system built around the institutionalized and prolonged racist oppression of millions of people. Apartheid has no place in our world, and states which choose to make allowances for Israel will find themselves on the wrong side of history. Governments who continue to supply Israel with arms and shield it from accountability at the UN are supporting a system of apartheid, undermining the international legal order, and exacerbating the suffering of the Palestinian people. The international community must face up to the reality of Israel’s apartheid, and pursue the many avenues to justice which remain shamefully unexplored.”
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/02/israels-apartheid-against-palestinians-a-cruel-system-of-domination-and-a-crime-against-humanity/
There IS a context you war criminal skinhead scum of the Earth. Fuck you and your unthinking fascist mother.
In the geography and history of Palestine Israel conflict/genocide the overwhelming preponderance of *power* is with the two military-colonial, nuclear armed states - the USA and Israel. Searching for *historical causality* we naturally attend to the most powerful historical currents.
Amongst the most damnable of the many Evils of the Palestinian Genocide is the military-colonial generative Evil of Washington and Tel Aviv in creating the belligerent necropolitical conditions that give rise to the very entities and historical effects that are used as a pretext for further kinetic intensifications of the military-colonial mass-slaughter that occurs with sickening regularity.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/10/18/america-root-cause-war-israel-gaza-palestine/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/18/israel-killing-rage-fuel-conflict-50-years-warns-ex-uk-defence-secretary-ben-wallace
The imperialist policies of London (of the Balfour Declaration), Washington and Tel Aviv are responsible for the creation and continued existence of Hamas in the same way that French colonialism brought into existence the FLN in Algeria; the Viet Minh in Indochina. In the same way that Britain was responsible for the existence of the Mau Mau in Kenya.
(For further detail, see e.g. Immanuel Wallerstein and his school of World-Systems Analysis)
This is a fortiori the case with regards to Hamas which was *actively* supported and funded by Netanyahu in a reckless divide and conquer strategy that has produced obvious blowback
https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up-hamas-now-its-blown-up-in-our-faces
https://www.thenation.com/article/world/why-netanyahu-bolstered-hamas/
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/10/world/middleeast/israel-qatar-money-prop-up-hamas.html
Colonialism is driven and maintained by the wielding of necropolitical power as a means of inflicting violence in order to maintain control and exert domination. As Achille Mbmebe has described and analyzed, military-colonial necropolitics leads to the creation and maintenance of perpetually violent death-worlds within which both the colonizing power and their colonized subjects `are locked into a symbiotic interrelationship of the living dead.
These belligerent death-worlds are military-colonial zones of killing and apartheid iron walls of segregation that create
“contemporary forms of subjugating life to the power of death (necropolitics) (that) are deeply reconfiguring the relations between resistance, sacrifice, and terror. The notion of biopower is insufficient to account for contemporary forms of the subjugation of life to the power of death. Necropolitics, or necropower, accounts for the various ways in which, in our contemporary world, weapons are deployed in the interest of maximally destroying persons and creating death-worlds , that is, new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to living conditions that confer upon them the status of the living dead . Some of the repressed topographies of cruelty (the plantation and the colony in particular) and today’s form of necropower blurs the lines between resistance and suicide, sacrifice and redemption, martyrdom and freedom.”
(grammar of quote slightly modified)
https://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=93E4DDDA3887FEB0B3EC196302C39739
There are no activities that Palestinians attempt to engage in that are not immediately brutalized by hateful, arbitrary violence delivered by the iron boot of bloodthirsty Israeli military-colonial Terror.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjA6qqtTJB8
It is impossible to display the Palestinian flag on Instagram, unaccompanied by any reference whatsoever to the Jewish people, without a barrage of Israeli airstrikes raining upon the poor unfortunate who stepped out of line.
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20220108-emma-watson-post-shows-israels-anti-semitism-smears-are-beginning-to-break-down/
This is the necropolitics of the Israeli military-colony extending all the way back Imperial capital of London from which emanated the original sins of the Balfour Declaration. As was this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sergeants_affair
Every moment of every day of every Palestinian life is suffused with the bloody violence of Israeli necropolitical subjugation inflicted through a reign of military-colonial Terror.
“A Threshold Crossed
Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution”
“About 6.8 million Jewish Israelis and 6.8 million Palestinians live today between the Mediterranean Sea and Jordan River, an area encompassing Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), the latter made up of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. Throughout most of this area, Israel is the sole governing power; in the remainder, it exercises primary authority alongside limited Palestinian self-rule. Across these areas and in most aspects of life, Israeli authorities methodically privilege Jewish Israelis and discriminate against Palestinians. Laws, policies, and statements by leading Israeli officials make plain that the objective of maintaining Jewish Israeli control over demographics, political power, and land has long guided government policy. In pursuit of this goal, authorities have dispossessed, confined, forcibly separated, and subjugated Palestinians by virtue of their identity to varying degrees of intensity. In certain areas, as described in this report, these deprivations are so severe that they amount to the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution.”
https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/israeli-authorities-and-crimes-apartheid-and-persecution
“Israel’s apartheid against Palestinians: a cruel system of domination and a crime against humanity
The comprehensive report, Israel’s Apartheid against Palestinians: Cruel System of Domination and Crime against Humanity, sets out how massive seizures of Palestinian land and property, unlawful killings, forcible transfer, drastic movement restrictions, and the denial of nationality and citizenship to Palestinians are all components of a system which amounts to apartheid under international law. This system is maintained by violations which Amnesty International found to constitute apartheid as a crime against humanity, as defined in the Rome Statute and Apartheid Convention.
Amnesty International is calling on the International Criminal Court (ICC) to consider the crime of apartheid in its current investigation in the OPT and calls on all states to exercise universal jurisdiction to bring perpetrators of apartheid crimes to justice.
“There is no possible justification for a system built around the institutionalized and prolonged racist oppression of millions of people. Apartheid has no place in our world, and states which choose to make allowances for Israel will find themselves on the wrong side of history. Governments who continue to supply Israel with arms and shield it from accountability at the UN are supporting a system of apartheid, undermining the international legal order, and exacerbating the suffering of the Palestinian people. The international community must face up to the reality of Israel’s apartheid, and pursue the many avenues to justice which remain shamefully unexplored.”
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/02/israels-apartheid-against-palestinians-a-cruel-system-of-domination-and-a-crime-against-humanity/
“In moments like this, everything becomes clear. It was clear to many of us for a long time, but now there can be no doubt. The imperial West is still firmly committed to the imperial project it launched against the world late in the 15th century. Yes, it has changed and transformed its methods, tactics, strategies, and its apparatus of power and force. The players have changed, some things became more complex, some things less so. And on and on. All of these academic debates are important, but not right now. What is important right now is to say it clearly and loudly – the imperial West is hell-bent on maintaining its supremacy and will kill indiscriminately in order to achieve the only goal it has ever had, the only value it has ever stood for, power and wealth.
The same imperial project that brutalised millions of Black Africans, committed genocide against millions of Indigenous peoples across the Americas, in Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere, colonised Asia and Africa through unfathomable brutality and force, destroyed countless societies full of complexity and beauty, massacred civilians in its imperial wars in places like Vietnam and Iraq, dropped atomic bombs on Japanese civilians, created a neocolonial economic infrastructure that is continuously robbing the majority of the world’s population blind, and I can go on and on, but this project is ongoing and nowhere at this moment is this more visible than in Palestine.”
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/11/2/a-genocide-is-under-way-in-palestine
The pattern of killing cannot be denied. Is there a lack of sympathy because the victims aren’t American or European?
In 2003, an Israeli soldier shot dead the British documentary cameraman James Miller in Gaza. An inquest in the UK returned a verdict of unlawful killing. Israel declined to prosecute the soldier responsible but it did pay £1.5m in compensation, which Miller’s family said was “probably the closest we’ll get to an admission of guilt on the part of the Israelis”.
Miller’s killing looked to be part of a pattern of ill-disciplined Israeli soldiers shooting whoever they felt like – not only journalists but UN officials and aid workers as well as Palestinian children. The army was usually quick to try to cover up the killings but it did not appear they were coordinated.
Gaza looks very different today. As the CPJ and the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders say, the scale and nature of the deaths of journalists and their families suggests there is more going on than a few ill-disciplined soldiers taking pot shots at reporters, even taking into account the deaths of thousands of other Palestinians, including more than 8,000 children.
Certainly the message from some Israeli leaders is that journalists are fair game. Israeli politicians were quick to call for the “elimination” of a number of Palestinian journalists working for foreign news organisations who were falsely accused by a pro-Israel pressure group in the US of being “embedded with Hamas” on 7 October. Benny Gantz, a member of the Israeli war cabinet, said they should be hunted down as terrorists, reflecting a widely held suspicion among Israeli officials that Palestinian journalists are an appendage of Hamas.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/10/israel-murdering-palestinian-journalists-in-gaza
Since the Israel-Gaza war began on October 7, journalists and media across the region have faced a hostile environment that has made reporting on the war exceptionally challenging.
In addition to documenting the growing tally of journalists killed and injured, CPJ’s research to date has found multiple kinds of incidents of journalists being targeted while carrying out their work in Israel and the two Palestinian territories, Gaza and the West Bank. These include 21 arrests, as well as numerous assaults, threats, cyberattacks, and censorship.
https://cpj.org/2024/01/attacks-arrests-threats-censorship-the-high-risks-of-reporting-the-israel-hamas-war/
As of January 10:
• 79 journalists and media workers were confirmed dead: 72 Palestinian, 4 Israeli, and 3 Lebanese.
• 16 journalists were reported injured.
• 3 journalists were reported missing.
• 21 journalists were reported arrested.
• Multiple assaults, threats, cyberattacks, censorship, and killings of family members.
https://cpj.org/2024/01/journalist-casualties-in-the-israel-gaza-conflict/
Letter to Biden from Press Freedom and Human Rights Organizations (1/10/2024)
According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), more journalists have been killed in the first 10 weeks of the hostilities than have ever been killed in a single country over an entire year. Four journalists were killed in Hamas’ assault on October7, and at least 75journalists have been killed since, almost all of them by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) according to CPJ. The U.S. State Department spokesperson recently said that the United States has not seen any evidence that Israel is intentionally targeting journalists. Yet credible reports by human rights and media organizations indicate that the IDF strikes in southern Lebanon on October13 that killed Reuters journalist Issam Abdallah and injured six other journalists from Reuters, Al Jazeera, and Agence France-Presse were unlawful and apparently deliberate.1The IDF has also acknowledged deliberately targeting a car in which journalists were traveling on January7, killing two journalists and seriously inuring a third. In at least two other cases, journalists reported receiving threats from Israeli officials and IDF officers before their family members were killed in Gaza. Of course, the targeted or indiscriminate killing of journalists, if committed deliberately or recklessly, is a war crime, and the International Criminal Court has said that it will investigate reports of war crimes committed against journalists in Gaza.
https://knightcolumbia.org/documents/f5d85kzjxf
Press freedom groups urge Biden to hold Israel accountable for killings of journalists
Letter to US president says more reporters have been killed in Gaza war since October than in any single country over an entire year
“journalists reported receiving threats from Israeli officials and IDF officers before their family members were killed in Gaza”.
“Of course, the targeted or indiscriminate killing of journalists, if committed deliberately or recklessly, is a war crime, and the international criminal court has said that it will investigate reports of war crimes committed against journalists in Gaza,” the letter said.
The letter noted the “longstanding pattern of impunity in the killings of journalists by the IDF”, including over the shooting death last year of the Al Jazeera reporter Shireen Abu Akleh, a US citizen.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/11/biden-israel-gaza-war-killing-reporters-press-freedom
More civilian casualties recorded in 2023 than any year since 2010
Action on Armed Violence says 33,846 were killed or wounded by airstrikes, bombs or artillery, the most it has recorded
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/09/more-civilian-casualties-recorded-in-2023-than-any-year-since-2010-gaza
A devastating new term has emerged in Gaza's hospitals: Wounded Child, No Surviving Family
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-12-06/inside-gaza-a-devastating-new-term-has-emerged-wcnsf/103161184
The IDF’s Conduct in Gaza Should Prompt Scrutiny of U.S. Arms Transfers
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/israel/washington-responsible-what-israel-does-american-weapons
Israel’s slaughter of Palestinian children must end
Every Israeli bomb dropped on the densely-populated Gaza Strip is a potential war crime.
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/11/19/israels-slaughter-of-palestinian-children-must-end
Deadliest period for Palestinians in the West Bank in 15 years
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/10/07/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-maps.html
"Forced displacement" is happening in Gaza, said UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini
https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/forced-displacement-continues-to-happen-in-gaza-says-unrwa-chief/3038320
Why Israel’s Gaza Evacuation Order is So Alarming
the order risks forced displacement, which is a war crime.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/10/16/why-israels-gaza-evacuation-order-so-alarming
The crime of forced displacement (is) a war crime or a crime against humanity, whether the displacement in question is internal or across international borders.
https://www.ictj.org/sites/default/files/ICTJ-Research-Brief-Displacement-Criminal-Justice-Andreu-Guzman.pdf
The Forcible Transfer of 85% of Palestinians in Gaza Is a Crime Against Humanity
The biased chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court condemns Hamas but ignores Israel’s atrocious crimes.
https://truthout.org/articles/the-forcible-transfer-of-85-of-palestinians-in-gaza-is-a-crime-against-humanity/
UNWRA chief: Gaza’s ‘population is being dehumanized’
https://www.newsdirectory3.com/unwra-chief-gazas-population-is-being-dehumanized/
UN: Collective punishment of Gaza population must immediately cease
https://donare.info/en/news/un_collective_punishment_of_gaza_population_must_immediately_cease
‘Threatened with rape’: Lama Khater recalls horrors while in Israeli jails
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2024/1/10/threatened-with-rape-lama-khater-recalls-horrors-while-in-israeli-jails
Emissions from Israel’s war in Gaza have ‘immense’ effect on climate catastrophe
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/09/emissions-gaza-israel-hamas-war-climate-change
In pictures: the heavy impact of Israeli strikes on Gaza’s children
Since October 7, more than 3,400 children have been reported killed in Gaza, according to Gaza's Hamas-run health ministry. With another 1,000 children reported missing and assumed buried under the rubble, the real death toll is likely much higher. FRANCE 24 looks at the devastating consequences of the Israel-Hamas war on Palestinian children in Gaza. Warning: some of the following images may be distressing to viewers.
https://www.france24.com/en/slideshow/20231031-in-pictures-the-brutal-impact-of-israeli-strikes-on-gaza-s-children
'One Palestinian child is killed every 10 minutes': Israel has turned Gaza into a graveyard for thousands of children
Gaza's children are bearing the brunt of Israel's bombs. Over 4,000 children have been killed by Israeli attacks since October 7. While the West continues to debate proportionality, Gaza's children will continue to die.
https://www.newarab.com/features/gazas-children-are-living-hell-or-buried-beneath-rubble
The 'horrendous toll' on children caught in the Israel-Gaza conflict
Hundreds of children have been killed so far, with the true total still unclear.
https://abcnews.go.com/International/horrendous-toll-children-caught-israel-gaza-conflict/story?id=103873428
Number of Gazan children killed in under a month is 10 times higher than that of Ukrainian children killed in entire first year of Russia’s ongoing war
https://euromedmonitor.org/en/article/5903/Number-of-Gazan-children-killed-in-under-a-month-is-10-times-higher-than-that-of-Ukrainian-children-killed-in-entire-first-year-of-Russia%E2%80%99s-ongoing-war
"Hundreds & hundreds of children have been killed and injured" in Gaza, UNICEF says
https://edition.cnn.com/middleeast/live-news/israel-news-hamas-war-10-13-23/h_a224f96f06be015d3ec8ae67e64d545d
‘Bearing the brunt’: the suffering of children in the Gaza-Israel conflict – photo essay
Children in their early teens have lived through four wars, with the fear, loss and trauma that brings
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/19/bearing-the-brunt-the-suffering-of-children-in-the-gaza-israel-conflict-photo-essay
Over 10,000 infants and children killed in Israel’s Gaza genocide, hundreds of whom are trapped beneath debris
https://euromedmonitor.org/en/article/6020/Over-10,000-infants-and-children-killed-in-Israel%E2%80%99s-Gaza-genocide,-hundreds-of-whom-are-trapped-beneath-debris#:~:text=ARMED%20CONFLICTS-,Over%2010%2C000%20infants%20and%20children%20killed%20in%20Israel's%20Gaza%20genocide,whom%20are%20trapped%20beneath%20debris&text=Geneva%20%2D%20Israel%20has%20killed%20more,in%20a%20statement%20issued%20Saturday.
Two Thirds of Gaza War Dead Are Women and Children, Briefers Say, as Security Council Debates Their Plight
https://press.un.org/en/2023/sc15503.doc.htm
Gaza children being killed or mutilated in ‘very extreme’ numbers, Australian doctor says
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/dec/21/gaza-children-being-killed-or-mutilated-in-very-extreme-numbers-australian-doctor-says
Palestinian children tortured, used as shields by Israel: U.N.
https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSBRE95J0FR/
Israel pummels Gaza as 500 Palestinian children confirmed dead
https://www.itv.com/news/2023-10-12/israel-targets-network-of-tunnels-in-gaza-as-death-toll-rises
Dead Palestinian children in Gaza tell story of impunity
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-soueif-gaza-israel-20140801-story.html
No end to suffering of Gaza children as Israeli attacks rage on
Thousands of children and minors killed and missing under the rubble amid relentless Israeli bombardment.
https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2023/12/4/no-end-to-suffering-of-gaza-children-as-israeli-attacks-rage-on
‘A curse to be a parent in Gaza’: Inside the region where more than 3,600 children have been killed
https://www.euronews.com/2023/11/02/a-curse-to-be-a-parent-in-gaza-inside-the-region-where-more-than-3600-children-have-been-k
Gaza is becoming a 'graveyard for children', UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres says
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-11-07/israel-gaza-war-death-toll-estimate-surpasses-ten-thousand/103072006
Why Israel's push into Gaza is killing so many children
https://www.businessinsider.com/israel-gaza-hamas-civilian-casualties-children-deaths-airstrikes-palestinian-2023-10
Child casualties in Gaza “a growing stain on our collective conscience”
UNICEF is calling for an immediate ceasefire and for sustained and unimpeded access for humanitarian assistance
https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/child-casualties-gaza-growing-stain-our-collective-conscience
What trauma do children suffer in Israel’s war on Gaza?
https://www.aljazeera.com/program/inside-story/2023/10/27/what-trauma-do-children-suffer-in-israels-war-on-gaza
Death and trauma stalk Palestinian children
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/palestinian-children-death-trauma-israel-bombing-hamas-rcna122113
Over 1,600 children killed in Gaza in two weeks - Palestine's DCI
https://www.nst.com.my/world/world/2023/10/969937/over-1600-children-killed-gaza-two-weeks-palestines-dci
The Cost of War Will Be Counted in Children’s Lives
Thousands of kids have reportedly died since this war began. Those who survive might be scarred forever.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/10/unicef-cost-gaza-war-children/675780/
West Bank: Spike in Israeli Killings of Palestinian Children
End Systematic Impunity for Unlawful Lethal Force
https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/08/28/west-bank-spike-israeli-killings-palestinian-children
“The Settlers Can Do Whatever They Want With Us”
https://jewishcurrents.org/the-settlers-can-do-whatever-they-want-with-us
“Things are different now: The soldiers and settlers are just waiting for a chance to kill you.”
https://jewishcurrents.org/dispatches-from-the-west-bank
Al-Shifa Hospital under Israeli control, turned into center for 'detention and torture'
“Israeli drones are shooting anything moving inside the hospital,”
https://new.thecradle.co/articles-id/12536
‘Terror’ amid Israel’s raid on Gaza’s al-Shifa Hospital
Israel’s army raids Gaza’s largest hospital, visiting violence and humiliation on patients, staff and displaced people trapped inside, witnesses say
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/15/terror-witnesses-recount-israels-raid-inside-gazas-al-shifa-hospital
Journalist casualties in the Israel-Gaza war
CPJ is investigating all reports of journalists and media workers killed, injured, or missing in the war, which has led to the deadliest month for journalists since CPJ began gathering data in 1992.
https://cpj.org/2023/11/journalist-casualties-in-the-israel-gaza-conflict/
Attacking hospitals tells the population that nowhere for [Palestinians] is safe
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2023/11/20/why-does-israel-target-palestinian-hospitals-psyops-say-analysts
Dirty secret of Israel’s weapons exports: They’re tested on Palestinians Weapons tested in each war Israel wages see a spike in global demand. The current Gaza war is the latest laboratory for its arms industry
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2023/11/17/israels-weapons-industry-is-the-gaza-war-its-latest-test-lab
Israel’s war crimes in Gaza are by design
For Israel, violence is not incidental, accidental or coincidental. It is part and parcel of its colonial DNA
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/11/9/israels-war-crimes-in-gaza-are-by-design-not-default
The term ‘human shields’ describes a method of warfare prohibited by international humanitarian law (IHL), during which the presence of civilians or the movement of the civilian population, whether voluntary or involuntary, is used to shield military objectives from attack, or to shield, favour or impede military operations. Human shields are always protected from attack unless and for such time as they take a direct part in hostilities.
While the law is clear, the reality can be blurred by the discursive use of human shields. In this instalment of our urban warfare special series, Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini – authors of ‘Human Shields: A History of People in the Line of Fire’ – build upon Zoi Lafazani’s post and discuss what they refer to as ‘proximate shields’, whereby humans are framed as shields merely due to their proximity to belligerents.
https://blogs.icrc.org/law-and-policy/2021/11/18/proximate-human-shields/
According to B'tselem, the IDF repeatedly used Palestinians as human shields. This practice became military policy during the Second Intifada, and was only dropped when Adalah challenged the practice before Israel's High Court of Justice in 2002. However, the IDF persisted in using Palestinians in its 'neighbor procedure', whereby people picked at random were made to approach the houses of suspects and persuade them to surrender, a practice which arguably placed the former's lives in danger. The court ruled in October 2005 "that any use of Palestinian civilians during military actions is forbidden, including the 'prior warning procedure'." According to B'tselem, reports indicate that the practice has continued nonetheless, in military operations like Operation Cast Lead, and Operation Protective Edge, and the "vast majority of these reports were never investigated, and those that did result in no further action".[22] Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini, in their study of the phenomenon, note that Israeli citizens in densely populated areas like Tel Aviv are never spoken of as human shields when Hamas fires rockets towards the Israeli Defense command located in the centre of that city, whereas Palestinians in Gaza are depicted as human shields when Israel fires rockets at, or bombs, equally densely populated cities like Gaza.[23]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_shields_in_the_Israeli%E2%80%93Palestinian_conflict#:~:text=Use%20by%20Israeli%20forces,-See%20also%3A%20Criticism&text=According%20to%20B'tselem%2C%20the,Court%20of%20Justice%20in%202002
Since the beginning of the occupation in 1967, Israeli security forces have repeatedly used Palestinians in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip as human shields, ordering them to perform military tasks that risked their lives. As part of this policy, soldiers have ordered Palestinian civilians to remove suspicious objects from roads, to tell people to come out of their homes so the military can arrest them, to stand in front of soldiers while the latter shoot from behind them, and more. The Palestinian civilians were chosen at random for these tasks, and could not refuse the demand placed on them by armed soldiers.
This use of civilians is not an independent initiative by soldiers in the field, but the result of a decision made by senior military authorities. During the second intifada, and particularly during military incursions into Palestinian population centers, such as Operation Defensive Shield in April 2002, use of Palestinians as human shields became open military policy.
https://www.btselem.org/human_shields
In Gaza: Human Shields, we speak to civilians, academics and human rights advocates who have accused the Israeli military of employing the tactic as they battled Hamas.We hear testimony from Palestinians being forcing them to walk in front of Israeli soldiers at gunpoint and enter potentially hostile buildings.We examine evidence alleging Israel's long-standing practice of human shields and explore whether Hamas used residential buildings and civilian areas to launch attacks."They [the Israeli army] took me and put me on top of a tank", Anas Najjar, a resident of the battered southern town of Khuazaa says; while Ramy Abdu of the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor says there is "enough files to condemn Israel and prove it's committed war crimes by using civilians as human shields."Showing both Israeli and Palestinian perspectives on the use of human shields, Gaza: Human Shields follows on from a recently-published UN enquiry into war crimes during the July-August 2014 war.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oed1s5jv3Cc
The Israeli Radio reported Thursday evening that the Israeli Military Prosecution revealed that one of the “elite” military forces used a Palestinian child as a human shield and forced him to open suspicious objects during the war on Gaza.The Radio said that the military prosecution filed charges against two soldiers of the Golani Brigade, accusing them of using civilians as human shields.
The incident in question took place in January of last year when the two soldiers forced a nine-year old child to open suspicious objects and packages. The incident took place in Tal Al Hawa, south of Gaza city.
https://imemc.org/article/58197/
A video that went viral on social media on Friday showed the Israeli military using a Palestinian detainee as a human shield in the southern occupied West Bank.
The blindfolded detainee is seen seated on the ground, with military vehicles behind him using him as a shield, and an Israeli soldier aiming his rifle towards a group of Palestinians.
Eyewitnesses reported to Anadolu that the incident took place early Friday in the Fawwar refugee camp near Hebron in the southern occupied West Bank.
The Israeli military raided the camp, arresting several individuals, in the process sparking confrontations with dozens of Palestinians, the eyewitnesses said.
At least 173 Palestinians have been killed and 2,300 others injured by Israeli army fire in the occupied territory since the outbreak of the Gaza conflict, according to Palestinian figures.
https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/israeli-army-in-west-bank-uses-palestinian-detainee-as-human-shield/3049924
A group of Israeli soldiers ambushed and detained a seven-year-old boy during the weekly demonstration in Kafr Qaddum last Friday and used him as a human shield, video footage has shown.
The recording, released by Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem shows Muamen Murad Mahmoud Shteiwi being captured and held in front of soldiers as protection.
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20161230-israeli-soldiers-use-palestinian-child-as-human-shield/
During the 10-year period, an estimated 7,000 Palestinian children aged 12 to 17, but some as young as nine, had been arrested, interrogated and detained, the U.N. report said.
Many are brought in leg chains and shackles before military courts, while youths are held in solitary confinement, sometimes for months, the report said.
It voiced deep concern at the "continuous use of Palestinian children as human shields and informants", saying 14 such cases had been reported between January 2010 and March 2013 alone.
Israeli soldiers had used Palestinian children to enter potentially dangerous buildings before them and to stand in front of military vehicles to deter stone-throwing, it said.
"Almost all those using children as human shields and informants have remained unpunished and the soldiers convicted for having forced at gunpoint a nine-year-old child to search bags suspected of containing explosives only received a suspended sentence of three months and were demoted," it said.
https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSBRE95J0FR/
“The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation”—so George Orwell describes the institutions of Oceana in 1984 (2012, 192). Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini might well add the laws of war as another instance of Orwellian “doublethink” where the concept of human shields operates as if it were the GPS tracker directing you to a human target. Published in 2020 by the University of California Press, Gordon and Perugini’s book, Human Shields: A History of People in the Line of Fire, advances its argument by presenting a series of battlefield case studies in humanitarian doublethink: the Sri Lankan military attacking Tamil civilians, the Israeli military attacking Palestinian civilians, the American military attacking Afghan civilians and many more."
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41312-022-00138-0
Involuntary shields suffer the same fate, only on a much larger scale, which brings us to the second point: the engorgement of the human shield. In recent decades, we have witnessed what human rights attorney and legal scholar Noura Erakat has called the “shrinking civilian.” This process has “diminished the category of the civilian and expanded the scope of legitimate targets,” with the effect of “permitting the killing of greater numbers of Palestinians [and others] in the language of law.” My own work on United States and Israeli military lawyers confirms Erakat’s important observation and argues that military powers have no shortage of legal options when it comes to selecting from an expansive array of “targets.”
“Dual use” infrastructures and civilians who are said to be “DPH” (directly participating in hostilities) fall into the flexible category of “targets.” Each of these legal formulae is, like the human shield, a double-edged sword. If civilian infrastructures are used for “military purposes” (hence “dual use”), they lose some of their legal protections from attack. If a civilian partakes in any activities that could be construed as supporting military efforts, then they similarly stand to lose their protection. And to be labeled a human shield by an attacking military is to be given a death sentence with no due process or right of appeal. This brings the end of innocence for their civilians, or so our masters of war claim.
In the 20th century, the discourses on human shielding shifted from individual deterrents to entire groups of people. The shift first came into view over the course of World War I and II, where POWs were deployed as shields in significant numbers, but it was in the United States’s war in Vietnam where something altogether grander in scale took place. The Vietnam War was an asymmetric conflict: low-tech rebel fighters of the National Liberation Front (NLF) faced the might of the United States military and Saigon. Outmatched in firepower and technology, the NLF employed the Maoist idea of a people’s war, mobilizing the Vietnamese population against the US invasion and occupation. The civilian population supported the foot soldiers such that the fighters became indistinguishable from the rural population. In response, the United States began a long and ill-fated counterinsurgency program — one marked by mass detention and industrial-scale assassination — that ultimately failed to win over the “hearts and minds” of the people of North Vietnam. Instead, they did as they would years later in Iraq and Afghanistan: they took to the skies and dropped bombs, making very little attempt to distinguish between combatants and civilians and certainly not worrying much about “collateral damage.”
If populations were going to aid the enemy, they were not really civilians, or so the Department of Defense claimed. With juridical sleight of hand, the entire people’s war was reduced to an act of human shielding. The United States did not even spare the jungle, for the canopies too were constituted as shields. The use of napalm against civilians was banned in 1980, but the Vietnam War left an indelible mark not only on the civilian population but on the history of human shields as well.
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-politics-of-humane-violence/
Israel is a military-colonial, rogue nuclear, apartheid state with near-universal Jewish conscription – (exceptions made for the ultra religious) The state was born in violence - acts of terrorism committed against its ALLIES, the British! Tel Aviv *always* reflexively chooses violence at all times in every situation in the lethal policies aimed toward its militarily colonized peoples. This includes the “offers” of “Peace treaties” which history has proven were in reality ultimatums delivered at gunpoint. Or in the case of Oslo, smokescreens intended to camouflage further military colonial annexations.
By rejecting the Hague Conventions and the Geneva Conventions, Israel is openly declaring that it rejects all modern standards of human rights and natural justice as codified in International Law so that it can commit with impunity whatever war crimes, illegal settlement activity and construction of apartheid that they wish. And yet Zionist ultra-nationalists openly proclaim their rejection of the Hague and Geneva Conventions as if this somehow *improves* the image of Israel rather than being the declaration of belligerent war criminality that it is.
Israel is gross violation of, and open contempt for, EVERY SINGLE article of the International Law of Military Occupation.
“The duties of the occupying power are spelled out primarily in the 1907 Hague Regulations (arts 42-56) and the Fourth Geneva Convention (GC IV, art. 27-34 and 47-78), as well as in certain provisions of Additional Protocol I and customary international humanitarian law.
Agreements concluded between the occupying power and the local authorities cannot deprive the population of occupied territory of the protection afforded by international humanitarian law (GC IV, art. 47) and protected persons themselves can in no circumstances renounce their rights (GC IV, art. 8 ).
The main rules of the law applicable in case of occupation state that:
The occupant does not acquire sovereignty over the territory.
Occupation is only a temporary situation, and the rights of the occupant are limited to the extent of that period.
The occupying power must respect the laws in force in the occupied territory, unless they constitute a threat to its security or an obstacle to the application of the international law of occupation.
The occupying power must take measures to restore and ensure, as far as possible, public order and safety.
To the fullest extent of the means available to it, the occupying power must ensure sufficient hygiene and public health standards, as well as the provision of food and medical care to the population under occupation.
The population in occupied territory cannot be forced to enlist in the occupier's armed forces.
Collective or individual forcible transfers of population from and within the occupied territory are prohibited.
Transfers of the civilian population of the occupying power into the occupied territory, regardless whether forcible or voluntary are prohibited.
Collective punishment is prohibited.
The taking of hostages is prohibited.
Reprisals against protected persons or their property are prohibited.
The confiscation of private property by the occupant is prohibited.
The destruction or seizure of enemy property is prohibited, unless absolutely required by military necessity during the conduct of hostilities.
Cultural property must be respected.
People accused of criminal offences shall be provided with proceedings respecting internationally recognized judicial guarantees (for example, they must be informed of the reason for their arrest, charged with a specific offence and given a fair trial as quickly as possible).”
https://www.icrc.org/eng/resources/documents/misc/634kfc.htm
The results speak for themselves:
“2.2 million Palestinian have died from violence, 0.1 million, or from imposed deprivation, 2.1 million, since the British invasion of the Ottoman Empire in 1914 in WW1. The details are set out below in a 2019 update on the ongoing Palestinian Genocide [1].
In 1880 there were about 500,000 Arab Palestinians and about 25,000 Jews living in Palestine of whom half were immigrants [2, 3]. The genocidally racist British invaders and genocidally racist Zionist colonizers have been variously responsible for a Palestinian Genocide involving successive mass expulsions (800,000 in 1948 and 400,00 Arabs in 1967) , ethnic cleansing of 90% of the land of Palestine and an estimated 2.2 million Palestinian deaths since 1914 from violence (0.1 million) or from violently-imposed deprivation (2.1 million) [1, 4-7].
There are now 7 million Palestinian refugees, and of 14 million Palestinians (half of them children, three quarters women and children) about 50% are forbidden to even step foot in their own country on pain of death, only 1.9 million Palestinian Israelis are permitted to vote for the government ruling all of the former Mandated Palestine, and 5 million Palestinians have zero human rights [8] as Occupied Palestinians in West Bank ghettoes or Bantustans (3 million) or in the Gaza Concentration Camp (2.0 million). However the “lucky” Israeli Palestinians are Third Class citizens subject to over 60 Nazi-style, race-based laws [9, 10].
The land of Palestine has now been 90% ethnically cleansed [1, 4-7]. While Indigenous Palestinians represent 50% of Apartheid Israeli subjects, nearly three quarters cannot vote for the government ruling them - egregious Apartheid that is declared by the UN to be a crime against Humanity [11].”
https://sites.google.com/site/palestiniangenocide/
A Jewish Plea: Stand Up to Israel’s Act of Genocide
https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/2023/10/jewish-plea/
From “Jewish Currents”
“A Textbook Case of Genocide
Israel has been explicit about what it’s carrying out in Gaza. Why isn’t the world listening?”
https://jewishcurrents.org/a-textbook-case-of-genocide
The Genocide of the Palestinian People: An International Law and Human Rights Perspective
https://ccrjustice.org/genocide-palestinian-people-international-law-and-human-rights-perspective
Israel’s Unfolding Crime of Genocide of the Palestinian People & U.S. Failure to Prevent and Complicity in Genocide
Emergency Legal Briefing Paper
https://ccrjustice.org/israel-s-unfolding-crime-genocide-palestinian-people-us-failure-prevent-and-complicity-genocide
The Israeli military has been making good on its promise to “open the gates of hell” on the two million Palestinians trapped under Israeli siege
https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/2023/10/all-eyes-on-gaza/
Let us be clear: This is genocide.
It’s a war on the Palestinian people.
https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/2023/10/24/palestine-under-attack/
Public Statement: Scholars Warn of Potential Genocide in Gaza
As scholars and practitioners of international law, conflict studies and genocide studies, we are compelled to sound the alarm about the possibility of the crime of genocide being perpetrated by Israeli forces against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
https://opiniojuris.org/2023/10/18/public-statement-scholars-warn-of-potential-genocide-in-gaza/
Gaza: UN experts call on international community to prevent genocide against the Palestinian people
https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2023/11/gaza-un-experts-call-international-community-prevent-genocide-against
Genocide in Gaza: A call to urgent global action. What is happening in Gaza fits the definition of genocide.
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/11/12/genocide-in-gaza-a-call-for-urgent-global-action
“We remain convinced that the Palestinian people are at grave risk of genocide,”
https://www.un.org/unispal/document/gaza-is-running-out-of-time-un-experts-warn-demanding-a-ceasefire-to-prevent-genocide/
Genocide and settler colonialism
Israel is conceivably a settler colonial project then by implication its relationship with the Palestinian people can be analysed through the genocide lens. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13642987.2012.735494
Nakba Memoricide: Genocide Studies and the Zionist/Israeli Genocide of Palestine
https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/hls.2014.0076
The International Criminal Court must intervene to deter potential genocide in Gaza
In an open letter published on 19 October 2023, over a 100 genocide scholars, Palestinian and international civil society organisations call on Prosecutor Khan to issue arrest warrants, investigate Israeli crimes and intervene to deter incitement to commit genocide in Gaza.
https://www.fidh.org/en/region/north-africa-middle-east/israel-palestine/the-international-criminal-court-must-intervene-to-deter-potential
Israeli Ecocide Brings Renewed Interest in the Crime
The severe and long-term impacts on the natural environment in Gaza – including impacts to soil, ground and underground water systems – are both a deliberate act and the predictable outcome of the IDF’s relentless intentional, systematic destruction of Gaza
https://forsea.co/israeli-ecocide-brings-renewed-interest-in-the-crime/
More than Genocide
The law occludes the abhorrent violence routinely perpetrated by states in the name of self-defense.
https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/more-than-genocide/
Israel’s Failed Bombing Campaign in Gaza. Collective Punishment Won’t Defeat Hamas
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/israel/israels-failed-bombing-campaign-gaza
‘A mass assassination factory’: Inside Israel’s calculated bombing of Gaza
https://www.972mag.com/mass-assassination-factory-israel-calculated-bombing-gaza/
Israel, then and now: 'kill, kill them all'
Historically, the extremist ideology of Zionism has fully and openly sanctioned murder to achieve and maintain its goal of statehood. This includes Jews and non-Jews alike.
https://new.thecradle.co/articles-id/12474
Israel hits Gaza Strip with the equivalent of two nuclear bombs
https://euromedmonitor.org/en/article/5908/Israel-hits-Gaza-Strip-with-the-equivalent-of-two-nuclear-bombs
Israel has waged one of this century’s most destructive wars in Gaza
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/interactive/2023/israel-war-destruction-gaza-record-pace/
Israel: think tank linked to Netanyahu promotes ‘unique opportunity’ to ethnically cleanse Gaza
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20231024-israel-think-tank-linked-to-netanyahu-promotes-unique-opportunity-to-ethnically-cleanse-gaza/
Why Israel wants to erase context and history in the war on Gaza
The dehistoricisation of what is happening helps Israel pursue genocidal policies in Gaza
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/11/5/why-israel-wants-to-erase-context-and-history-in-the-war-on-gaza
What if a quarter of Jews really do think Israel is a genocidal, apartheid state?
https://forward.com/news/473044/what-if-a-quarter-of-jews-really-do-think-israel-is-a-genocidal-apartheid/
Fighting Amalek in Gaza: What Israelis Say and Western Media Ignore
https://normanfinkelstein.substack.com/p/fighting-amalek-in-gaza-what-israelis
‘Human Animals’: The Sordid Language behind Israel’s Genocide in Gaza
The shocking parallels between Israel's dehumanizing rhetoric and historical genocides are now translating into real-life horrors in Gaza.
https://english.ahram.org.eg/News/511144.aspx
"In an Op-Ed titled "Let’s Not be Intimidated by the World," Israeli ret. Major General Giora Eiland argues that all Palestinians in Gaza are legitimate targets and that a “severe epidemic" in Gaza will "bring victory closer.”"
https://mondoweiss.net/2023/11/influential-israeli-national-security-leader-makes-the-case-for-genocide-in-gaza/
“2.2 million Palestinian have died from violence, 0.1 million, or from imposed deprivation, 2.1 million, since the British invasion of the Ottoman Empire in 1914 in WW1. The details are set out below in a 2019 update on the ongoing Palestinian Genocide [1].
In 1880 there were about 500,000 Arab Palestinians and about 25,000 Jews living in Palestine of whom half were immigrants [2, 3]. The genocidally racist British invaders and genocidally racist Zionist colonizers have been variously responsible for a Palestinian Genocide involving successive mass expulsions (800,000 in 1948 and 400,00 Arabs in 1967) , ethnic cleansing of 90% of the land of Palestine and an estimated 2.2 million Palestinian deaths since 1914 from violence (0.1 million) or from violently-imposed deprivation (2.1 million) [1, 4-7].
There are now 7 million Palestinian refugees, and of 14 million Palestinians (half of them children, three quarters women and children) about 50% are forbidden to even step foot in their own country on pain of death, only 1.9 million Palestinian Israelis are permitted to vote for the government ruling all of the former Mandated Palestine, and 5 million Palestinians have zero human rights [8] as Occupied Palestinians in West Bank ghettoes or Bantustans (3 million) or in the Gaza Concentration Camp (2.0 million). However the “lucky” Israeli Palestinians are Third Class citizens subject to over 60 race-based laws [9, 10].
The land of Palestine has now been 90% ethnically cleansed [1, 4-7]. While Indigenous Palestinians represent 50% of Apartheid Israeli subjects, nearly three quarters cannot vote for the government ruling them - egregious Apartheid that is declared by the UN to be a crime against Humanity [11].”
https://sites.google.com/site/palestiniangenocide/
The concentration of defenceless civilians in areas designated and delimited on a map as protected, can be used and exploited by the actors on the battlefield to manage and direct their use of lethal force.
This was the case in Bosnia, with the infamous Srebrenica “safe zone”. The area was instituted by the United Nations in 1993 in order to protect Bosnian Muslims under attack, but the disarmament of the safe zone transformed it into easy prey for Serb forces. They first obstructed the delivery of humanitarian aid to the area and then rounded up and massacred thousands of Muslim civilians.
Safe areas became lethal also in the case of Sri Lanka, where the government imposed the creation of Tamil safety zones in which it killed thousands of civilians, while blaming the Tamil Tigers for allegedly using the refugees concentrated in the safe zones as “human shields”.
Similarly, in Gaza, Israel is imposing unilaterally what and where is “safe” for Palestinian civilians. In doing so, it is deploying the discourse of safety and its associated legal technologies – warnings, safe zones, safe corridors, evacuation grids – as a lethal tool to implement the ethnic cleansing of different areas of the territory designated as safe/unsafe.
Areas or parts of the territories defined as safe serve to concentrate the displaced population and better manage the military operations and the killing of civilians. As one poignant Reuters headline put it: “Israel orders Gazans to flee, bombs where it sends them”.
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/1/6/safe-zones-israels-technologies-of-genocide
Damning evidence of war crimes as Israeli attacks wipe out entire families in Gaza
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2023/10/damning-evidence-of-war-crimes-as-israeli-attacks-wipe-out-entire-families-in-gaza/
Trauma and terror: What we are seeing from Gaza
https://www.aljazeera.com/program/the-listening-post/2023/12/16/trauma-and-terror-what-we-are-seeing-from-gaza
President Biden, stop vetoing peace!
My and my fellow rabbis’ urgent pleas for a ceasefire stem from our religious convictions as Jewish spiritual leaders.
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/1/9/president-biden-stop-vetoing-peace
Israel has explained what it’s doing in plain language. No one can claim they didn’t know. Through a combination of mass-casualty terror bombing — what Robert Pape of the University of Chicago, a leading scholar of coercive air power, has called “one of the most intense civilian punishment campaigns in history” — the destruction of hospitals and other critical infrastructure, and a near-total blockade of humanitarian supplies, it is working “to create conditions where life in Gaza becomes unsustainable,” in the words of Major General (Ret.) Giora Eiland, an adviser to the current defense minister.
Israel, in other words, is grimly marching Morgenthau’s argument to its logical conclusion — proving, before the eyes of the world, that the final and most fundamental alternative to Realpolitik is genocide.
https://jacobin.com/2024/01/iron-wall-gaza-israel-defense-forces-realpolitik-palestine-history
“It’s really rare for war criminals to just openly announce their actions,” said John Cox, professor of global studies and history at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, who also directs the Center for Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights Studies. That’s what’s “unique about Israel’s bombing in Gaza.”
Cox noted that this month marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of the U.N.’s Genocide Convention. “[The war in Gaza] literally does take on genocidal proportions and potential, along with daily humiliations and affronts to human rights that Israel has been engaging in for 75 years,” Cox said.
(...)
“A December 8 video from Gaza’s Shejaiya neighborhood shows Israeli soldiers setting fire to a truck with food and water in it, fitting Israel’s October 9 declaration of a “complete siege” of Gaza, in which Israel’s defense minister Yoav Gallant said that “no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel” would be allowed into Gaza. This is an unambiguous violation of the second article of the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention, which includes “causing serious bodily or mental harm to members” of a particular group, as well as the deliberate “inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” https://newrepublic.com/article/177749/bibi-netanyahu-war-crimes-palestine
You are Genocidal war criminal scum of the earth
Israel is hitting ravaged hospitals without fuel or light with bombings; their mad "leader" is quoting Biblical bloodbaths, declaring a "holy mission" of annihilation
Murdering children is not "war."
https://www.commondreams.org/further/in-what-is-called-a-war
Only the most debased genocidal racists can observe the Israeli systematic campaign of military mass slaughter and not bat a reptilian eyelid
"Child casualties in Gaza a ‘stain on our conscience’: UNICEF"
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/25/over-2000-children-killed-in-gaza-a-stain-on-our-collective-conscience
Israel is not free or democratic which at the end of the essay is revealed to be apartheid. But using free and democratic as a stepping stone to correct the hypocrisy of the enlightened leads to the dogma that the western project can be corrected and put on the right path without sharing power. The dogma masks the chasm of the enlightenment which makes all captive populations Palestinian, i.e. herded, concentrated, then eradicated or cleansed of the original sin brought on by the resource curse on themselves for land water oil copper etc.. The word gentrified at the beginning of the essay dresses the horror of what the enlightened is accomplishing for progress with genocide in Gaza in a demolished, rubblized, urban cliche.
the perspective you bring here is interesting. It could probably apply to various places in the world, such as some African, Arab or Latin American countries.
Well
Spoken
And
POINT ON
As a Jew, I'm stunned by the rationale for the occupation and now the genocide. It's as if Jews and liberals received a list of talking points and memorized them verbatim. I heard the from the time I started going to synagogue until now. It's bizarre. Unspeakable atrocities are unfolding on our cell phones as people scroll past. Humanity has lost it's way. I don't know how it ever finds its way back.
The release of 110 civilians by Hamas in the first round of ceasefire negotiations, initially resisted by Israel’s war cabinet, showed that there were other ways to do things. Since Israel released 240 Palestinian women and children as part of the deal, though, it showed the world that Hamas was hardly the only actor kidnapping and detaining civilians. Israel tries Palestinians under a military court, which has a conviction rate of 96-99% for any act of resisting its military occupation. It also holds hundreds as detainees even without conviction, often for years. https://thewire.in/world/netanyahus-supremacist-war
In administrative detention, a person is held without trial without having committed an offense, on the grounds that he or she plans to break the law in the future. As this measure is supposed to be preventive, it has no time limit.
The person is detained without legal proceedings, by order of the regional military commander, based on classified evidence that is not revealed to them. This leaves the detainees helpless – facing unknown allegations with no way to disprove them, not knowing when they will be released, and without being charged, tried or convicted.
https://www.btselem.org/administrative_detention
Even beyond administrative detention, when charges are brought against Palestinians in the West Bank, they are almost always tried in military courts that have a near-perfect conviction rate. (By contrast, Israelis are usually tried in civil court.) Palestinians, in other words, are sent to a trapdoor instead of a fair trial.
https://www.vox.com/world-politics/2023/11/22/23972908/palestinian-prisoners-israel-administrative-detention
“The power to incarcerate people who have not been convicted or even charged with anything for lengthy periods of time, based on secret ‘evidence’ that they cannot challenge, is an extreme power,” noted Israeli human rights group B’Tselem. “Israel uses it continuously and extensively, routinely holding hundreds of Palestinians at any given moment.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/11/27/israel-palestine-detention-adminstrative-prisoners-jail/
‘Threatened with rape’: Lama Khater recalls horrors while in Israeli jails
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2024/1/10/threatened-with-rape-lama-khater-recalls-horrors-while-in-israeli-jails
‘It would’ve been better if they shot us’: Palestinians recount prison abuse
Newly released inmates detail cases of humiliation, torture, rape threats, and a prisoner beaten to death by Israeli forces
https://www.972mag.com/palestinians-abused-israeli-prisons-torture/
Israel/OPT: Horrifying cases of torture and degrading treatment of Palestinian detainees amid spike in arbitrary arrests
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2023/11/israel-opt-horrifying-cases-of-torture-and-degrading-treatment-of-palestinian-detainees-amid-spike-in-arbitrary-arrests/
Palestinian writer and activist Ahed Tamimi detained amid surge in arbitrary arrests by Israeli forces
https://www.pen-international.org/news/palestinian-writer-and-activist-ahed-tamimi-detained-amid-surge-in-arbitrary-arrests-by-israeli-forces
PEN International Condemns Arrest of Palestinian Activist Ahed Tamimi; Demands Immediate Release Amid Concerns of Torture and Ill-Treatment
https://www.newsclick.in/pen-international-condemns-arrest-palestinian-activist-ahed-tamimi-demands-immediate-release-amid
(Jerusalem) – Israeli authorities held thousands of workers from Gaza in incommunicado detention for several weeks following the October 7 attacks, subjecting at least some of them to inhumane and degrading conditions, Human Rights Watch said. Thousands more remain stranded in the occupied West Bank without valid legal status and vulnerable to arrest.
(...)
[The Israeli forces] “made us undress,” he said. “[We were] completely naked. They handed us Pampers to wear and thin white overalls…. We stayed blindfolded and cuffed [with zip ties on our hands and feet] for 10 days... We kept asking why we are detained. We never got an answer, only verbal assaults and death threats.”
He said he was beaten for hours, then dragged on gravel face down and attached to a wall or fence by his cuffed hands, and then beaten again: “Every time I fell on the ground I was forced to stand up, and again more beatings and I fell on the ground. With every beating and fall the plastic zip ties on my hands became tighter and more painful.”
(...)
Another man who worked in Rahat said he and other workers were arrested and taken to the Rahat police station on or around October 9. While blindfolded with their hands zip-tied behind their backs, “Israeli forces constantly cursed at us…and threatened to kill us.... We were held for 12 hours. We were not allowed water or [to use] the bathroom.”
(...)
The Israeli military spokesperson confirmed to Haaretz two Gaza workers, one with cancer, one with diabetes, died in Israeli custody, saying, “The two died due to […]complex medical condition[s] contracted before they arrived at the facilities. An investigation is being conducted into the circumstances of their death.” Both men were arrested after October 7. One of the men Human Rights Watch interviewed said there was a cancer patient with him in Ofer who died after a few days in pain.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/01/03/israel-gaza-workers-held-incommunicado-weeks
The pattern of killing cannot be denied. Is there a lack of sympathy because the victims aren’t American or European?
In 2003, an Israeli soldier shot dead the British documentary cameraman James Miller in Gaza. An inquest in the UK returned a verdict of unlawful killing. Israel declined to prosecute the soldier responsible but it did pay £1.5m in compensation, which Miller’s family said was “probably the closest we’ll get to an admission of guilt on the part of the Israelis”.
Miller’s killing looked to be part of a pattern of ill-disciplined Israeli soldiers shooting whoever they felt like – not only journalists but UN officials and aid workers as well as Palestinian children. The army was usually quick to try to cover up the killings but it did not appear they were coordinated.
Gaza looks very different today. As the CPJ and the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders say, the scale and nature of the deaths of journalists and their families suggests there is more going on than a few ill-disciplined soldiers taking pot shots at reporters, even taking into account the deaths of thousands of other Palestinians, including more than 8,000 children.
Certainly the message from some Israeli leaders is that journalists are fair game. Israeli politicians were quick to call for the “elimination” of a number of Palestinian journalists working for foreign news organisations who were falsely accused by a pro-Israel pressure group in the US of being “embedded with Hamas” on 7 October. Benny Gantz, a member of the Israeli war cabinet, said they should be hunted down as terrorists, reflecting a widely held suspicion among Israeli officials that Palestinian journalists are an appendage of Hamas.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/10/israel-murdering-palestinian-journalists-in-gaza
Since the Israel-Gaza war began on October 7, journalists and media across the region have faced a hostile environment that has made reporting on the war exceptionally challenging.
In addition to documenting the growing tally of journalists killed and injured, CPJ’s research to date has found multiple kinds of incidents of journalists being targeted while carrying out their work in Israel and the two Palestinian territories, Gaza and the West Bank. These include 21 arrests, as well as numerous assaults, threats, cyberattacks, and censorship.
https://cpj.org/2024/01/attacks-arrests-threats-censorship-the-high-risks-of-reporting-the-israel-hamas-war/
As of January 10:
• 79 journalists and media workers were confirmed dead: 72 Palestinian, 4 Israeli, and 3 Lebanese.
• 16 journalists were reported injured.
• 3 journalists were reported missing.
• 21 journalists were reported arrested.
• Multiple assaults, threats, cyberattacks, censorship, and killings of family members.
https://cpj.org/2024/01/journalist-casualties-in-the-israel-gaza-conflict/
Letter to Biden from Press Freedom and Human Rights Organizations (1/10/2024)
According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), more journalists have been killed in the first 10 weeks of the hostilities than have ever been killed in a single country over an entire year. Four journalists were killed in Hamas’ assault on October7, and at least 75journalists have been killed since, almost all of them by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) according to CPJ. The U.S. State Department spokesperson recently said that the United States has not seen any evidence that Israel is intentionally targeting journalists. Yet credible reports by human rights and media organizations indicate that the IDF strikes in southern Lebanon on October13 that killed Reuters journalist Issam Abdallah and injured six other journalists from Reuters, Al Jazeera, and Agence France-Presse were unlawful and apparently deliberate.1The IDF has also acknowledged deliberately targeting a car in which journalists were traveling on January7, killing two journalists and seriously inuring a third. In at least two other cases, journalists reported receiving threats from Israeli officials and IDF officers before their family members were killed in Gaza. Of course, the targeted or indiscriminate killing of journalists, if committed deliberately or recklessly, is a war crime, and the International Criminal Court has said that it will investigate reports of war crimes committed against journalists in Gaza.
https://knightcolumbia.org/documents/f5d85kzjxf
Press freedom groups urge Biden to hold Israel accountable for killings of journalists
Letter to US president says more reporters have been killed in Gaza war since October than in any single country over an entire year
“journalists reported receiving threats from Israeli officials and IDF officers before their family members were killed in Gaza”.
“Of course, the targeted or indiscriminate killing of journalists, if committed deliberately or recklessly, is a war crime, and the international criminal court has said that it will investigate reports of war crimes committed against journalists in Gaza,” the letter said.
The letter noted the “longstanding pattern of impunity in the killings of journalists by the IDF”, including over the shooting death last year of the Al Jazeera reporter Shireen Abu Akleh, a US citizen.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/11/biden-israel-gaza-war-killing-reporters-press-freedom
The term ‘human shields’ describes a method of warfare prohibited by international humanitarian law (IHL), during which the presence of civilians or the movement of the civilian population, whether voluntary or involuntary, is used to shield military objectives from attack, or to shield, favour or impede military operations. Human shields are always protected from attack unless and for such time as they take a direct part in hostilities.
While the law is clear, the reality can be blurred by the discursive use of human shields. In this instalment of our urban warfare special series, Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini – authors of ‘Human Shields: A History of People in the Line of Fire’ – build upon Zoi Lafazani’s post and discuss what they refer to as ‘proximate shields’, whereby humans are framed as shields merely due to their proximity to belligerents.
https://blogs.icrc.org/law-and-policy/2021/11/18/proximate-human-shields/
According to B'tselem, the IDF repeatedly used Palestinians as human shields. This practice became military policy during the Second Intifada, and was only dropped when Adalah challenged the practice before Israel's High Court of Justice in 2002. However, the IDF persisted in using Palestinians in its 'neighbor procedure', whereby people picked at random were made to approach the houses of suspects and persuade them to surrender, a practice which arguably placed the former's lives in danger. The court ruled in October 2005 "that any use of Palestinian civilians during military actions is forbidden, including the 'prior warning procedure'." According to B'tselem, reports indicate that the practice has continued nonetheless, in military operations like Operation Cast Lead, and Operation Protective Edge, and the "vast majority of these reports were never investigated, and those that did result in no further action".[22] Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini, in their study of the phenomenon, note that Israeli citizens in densely populated areas like Tel Aviv are never spoken of as human shields when Hamas fires rockets towards the Israeli Defense command located in the centre of that city, whereas Palestinians in Gaza are depicted as human shields when Israel fires rockets at, or bombs, equally densely populated cities like Gaza.[23]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_shields_in_the_Israeli%E2%80%93Palestinian_conflict#:~:text=Use%20by%20Israeli%20forces,-See%20also%3A%20Criticism&text=According%20to%20B'tselem%2C%20the,Court%20of%20Justice%20in%202002
Since the beginning of the occupation in 1967, Israeli security forces have repeatedly used Palestinians in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip as human shields, ordering them to perform military tasks that risked their lives. As part of this policy, soldiers have ordered Palestinian civilians to remove suspicious objects from roads, to tell people to come out of their homes so the military can arrest them, to stand in front of soldiers while the latter shoot from behind them, and more. The Palestinian civilians were chosen at random for these tasks, and could not refuse the demand placed on them by armed soldiers.
This use of civilians is not an independent initiative by soldiers in the field, but the result of a decision made by senior military authorities. During the second intifada, and particularly during military incursions into Palestinian population centers, such as Operation Defensive Shield in April 2002, use of Palestinians as human shields became open military policy.
https://www.btselem.org/human_shields
In Gaza: Human Shields, we speak to civilians, academics and human rights advocates who have accused the Israeli military of employing the tactic as they battled Hamas.We hear testimony from Palestinians being forcing them to walk in front of Israeli soldiers at gunpoint and enter potentially hostile buildings.We examine evidence alleging Israel's long-standing practice of human shields and explore whether Hamas used residential buildings and civilian areas to launch attacks."They [the Israeli army] took me and put me on top of a tank", Anas Najjar, a resident of the battered southern town of Khuazaa says; while Ramy Abdu of the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor says there is "enough files to condemn Israel and prove it's committed war crimes by using civilians as human shields."Showing both Israeli and Palestinian perspectives on the use of human shields, Gaza: Human Shields follows on from a recently-published UN enquiry into war crimes during the July-August 2014 war.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oed1s5jv3Cc
The Israeli Radio reported Thursday evening that the Israeli Military Prosecution revealed that one of the “elite” military forces used a Palestinian child as a human shield and forced him to open suspicious objects during the war on Gaza.The Radio said that the military prosecution filed charges against two soldiers of the Golani Brigade, accusing them of using civilians as human shields.
The incident in question took place in January of last year when the two soldiers forced a nine-year old child to open suspicious objects and packages. The incident took place in Tal Al Hawa, south of Gaza city.
https://imemc.org/article/58197/
A video that went viral on social media on Friday showed the Israeli military using a Palestinian detainee as a human shield in the southern occupied West Bank.
The blindfolded detainee is seen seated on the ground, with military vehicles behind him using him as a shield, and an Israeli soldier aiming his rifle towards a group of Palestinians.
Eyewitnesses reported to Anadolu that the incident took place early Friday in the Fawwar refugee camp near Hebron in the southern occupied West Bank.
The Israeli military raided the camp, arresting several individuals, in the process sparking confrontations with dozens of Palestinians, the eyewitnesses said.
At least 173 Palestinians have been killed and 2,300 others injured by Israeli army fire in the occupied territory since the outbreak of the Gaza conflict, according to Palestinian figures.
https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/israeli-army-in-west-bank-uses-palestinian-detainee-as-human-shield/3049924
A group of Israeli soldiers ambushed and detained a seven-year-old boy during the weekly demonstration in Kafr Qaddum last Friday and used him as a human shield, video footage has shown.
The recording, released by Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem shows Muamen Murad Mahmoud Shteiwi being captured and held in front of soldiers as protection.
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20161230-israeli-soldiers-use-palestinian-child-as-human-shield/
During the 10-year period, an estimated 7,000 Palestinian children aged 12 to 17, but some as young as nine, had been arrested, interrogated and detained, the U.N. report said.
Many are brought in leg chains and shackles before military courts, while youths are held in solitary confinement, sometimes for months, the report said.
It voiced deep concern at the "continuous use of Palestinian children as human shields and informants", saying 14 such cases had been reported between January 2010 and March 2013 alone.
Israeli soldiers had used Palestinian children to enter potentially dangerous buildings before them and to stand in front of military vehicles to deter stone-throwing, it said.
"Almost all those using children as human shields and informants have remained unpunished and the soldiers convicted for having forced at gunpoint a nine-year-old child to search bags suspected of containing explosives only received a suspended sentence of three months and were demoted," it said.
https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSBRE95J0FR/
“The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation”—so George Orwell describes the institutions of Oceana in 1984 (2012, 192). Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini might well add the laws of war as another instance of Orwellian “doublethink” where the concept of human shields operates as if it were the GPS tracker directing you to a human target. Published in 2020 by the University of California Press, Gordon and Perugini’s book, Human Shields: A History of People in the Line of Fire, advances its argument by presenting a series of battlefield case studies in humanitarian doublethink: the Sri Lankan military attacking Tamil civilians, the Israeli military attacking Palestinian civilians, the American military attacking Afghan civilians and many more."
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41312-022-00138-0
Involuntary shields suffer the same fate, only on a much larger scale, which brings us to the second point: the engorgement of the human shield. In recent decades, we have witnessed what human rights attorney and legal scholar Noura Erakat has called the “shrinking civilian.” This process has “diminished the category of the civilian and expanded the scope of legitimate targets,” with the effect of “permitting the killing of greater numbers of Palestinians [and others] in the language of law.” My own work on United States and Israeli military lawyers confirms Erakat’s important observation and argues that military powers have no shortage of legal options when it comes to selecting from an expansive array of “targets.”
“Dual use” infrastructures and civilians who are said to be “DPH” (directly participating in hostilities) fall into the flexible category of “targets.” Each of these legal formulae is, like the human shield, a double-edged sword. If civilian infrastructures are used for “military purposes” (hence “dual use”), they lose some of their legal protections from attack. If a civilian partakes in any activities that could be construed as supporting military efforts, then they similarly stand to lose their protection. And to be labeled a human shield by an attacking military is to be given a death sentence with no due process or right of appeal. This brings the end of innocence for their civilians, or so our masters of war claim.
In the 20th century, the discourses on human shielding shifted from individual deterrents to entire groups of people. The shift first came into view over the course of World War I and II, where POWs were deployed as shields in significant numbers, but it was in the United States’s war in Vietnam where something altogether grander in scale took place. The Vietnam War was an asymmetric conflict: low-tech rebel fighters of the National Liberation Front (NLF) faced the might of the United States military and Saigon. Outmatched in firepower and technology, the NLF employed the Maoist idea of a people’s war, mobilizing the Vietnamese population against the US invasion and occupation. The civilian population supported the foot soldiers such that the fighters became indistinguishable from the rural population. In response, the United States began a long and ill-fated counterinsurgency program — one marked by mass detention and industrial-scale assassination — that ultimately failed to win over the “hearts and minds” of the people of North Vietnam. Instead, they did as they would years later in Iraq and Afghanistan: they took to the skies and dropped bombs, making very little attempt to distinguish between combatants and civilians and certainly not worrying much about “collateral damage.”
If populations were going to aid the enemy, they were not really civilians, or so the Department of Defense claimed. With juridical sleight of hand, the entire people’s war was reduced to an act of human shielding. The United States did not even spare the jungle, for the canopies too were constituted as shields. The use of napalm against civilians was banned in 1980, but the Vietnam War left an indelible mark not only on the civilian population but on the history of human shields as well.
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-politics-of-humane-violence/
More on Zionist military-colonialism
Zionism and Political Theology
This paper is an attempt to identify what is unique about the political theology of Zionism. It also explores what the consequences of this uniqueness might be, particularly with regard to future decolonization projects of Israel-Palestine. Dealing with the case of Zionism and Israel is interesting because it allows us – in fact, it forces us – to ask questions about the nature of modernity, liberalism, secularism, colonialism and nationalism writ large. Zionism itself combines many aspects of modern Europe, including nationalism, colonialism, religion, liberalism, and socialism; this raises the question of whether we can offer a critique of Zionism that is not also a critique of the modern Europe that invented all of these categories and practices. All these issues raise the question of how we are to judge Zionism. Can we offer a critique of Zionism that is not at the same time a critique of Europe?
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1462317X.2023.2262226
At the same time, Zionism and extreme religiosity come together to expose again and again that the Israeli state, referring to itself as the only democracy in the Middle East, is built upon Jewish supremacy. No dialogue between Jewish settlers and Indigenous Palestinians seems to be on the horizon. Yet, the close ties between race and religion, and the settler colonial structures that support these ties, are now part of the mainstream political discourse on Palestine/Israel, whereas before such discourse was only possible in certain activist and academic circles.
https://politicaltheology.com/decolonization-at-the-intersection-of-political-theology-and-settler-colonial-studies/
This article considers how ongoing Palestinian dispossession, _manifold Nakbas_ (catastrophes), stemming from the active frontiers of Israeli settler colonialism and catalyzed by religious nationalism and international impunity, continues to extend and expand the Palestinian diaspora into the Americas and other regions. This also structures Palestinian personhood beyond the active space of the settler-colony. I utilize three seemingly disparate cases to make this argument. I begin with Israel’s military onslaught on Gaza in May 2021. I then offer a personal account, followed by ethnographic research conducted with Palestinian Iraq War refugees resettled in Brazil and also examine other military conflicts in the Middle East that have resulted in continual forced Palestinian displacements. Throughout, I demonstrate how Israeli settler colonialism is not an event but a structure (Wolfe. _Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event_. London: Cassell, 1999) which impacts Palestinian life far outside of the original space of displacement.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1462317X.2023.2257466
In 1948, more than 700000 Palestinian Arabs – about half of prewar Mandatory Palestine's Arab population – fled from their homes or were expelled by Zionist militias and, later, the Israeli army[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8] during the 1948 Palestine war,[9] following the Partition Plan for Palestine. The expulsion and flight was a central component of the fracturing, dispossession, and displacement of Palestinian society, known as the Nakba.[10][11] Dozens of massacres were conducted by Israeli military forces and between 400 and 600 Palestinian villages were destroyed. Village wells were poisoned in a biological warfare programme and properties were looted to prevent Palestinian refugees from returning.[12][13] Other sites were subject to Hebraization of Palestinian place names.[14] These activities were not necessarily limited to the year 1948.[15]
The precise number of Palestinian refugees, many of whom settled in Palestinian refugee camps in neighboring states, is a matter of dispute.[16] Around 80 percent of the Arab inhabitants of what became Israel (half of the Arab total population of Mandatory Palestine) left or were expelled from their homes.[17][18] About 250000–300000 Palestinians fled or were expelled during the 1947–1948 civil war in Mandatory Palestine, before the Israeli Declaration of Independence in May 1948, a fact which was named as a casus belli for the entry of the Arab League into the country, sparking the 1948 Arab–Israeli War.
The causes of the 1948 Palestinian exodus are also a subject of fundamental disagreement among historians. Factors involved in the exodus include Jewish military advances, destruction of Arab villages, psychological warfare, fears of another massacre by Zionist militias after the Deir Yassin massacre,[19]: 239–240 which caused many to leave out of panic, direct expulsion orders by Israeli authorities, the demoralizing impact of wealthier classes fleeing,[20] the typhus epidemic in some areas caused by Israeli well-poisoning,[21] collapse in Palestinian leadership and Arab evacuation orders,[22][23] and a disinclination to live under Jewish control.[24][25]
Later, a series of land and property laws passed by the first Israeli government prevented Arabs who had left from returning to their homes or claiming their property. They and many of their descendants remain refugees.[26][27] The expulsion of the Palestinians has since been described by some historians as ethnic cleansing,[28][13][29] while others dispute this charge.[30][31][32] Nevertheless, the existence of the so-called Law of Return allowing for immigration and naturalization of any Jewish person and their family to Israel, while a Palestinian right of return has been denied, has been cited as an evidence for the charge that Israel practices apartheid.[33][34]
The status of the refugees, and in particular whether Israel will allow them the right to return to their homes, or compensate them, are key issues in the ongoing Israeli–Palestinian conflict.[citation needed] The events of 1948 are commemorated by Palestinians both in the Palestinian territories and elsewhere on 15 May, a date known as Nakba Day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Palestinian_expulsion_and_flight#
Zionists really do swarm like a drone-like mass of hasbara pricks, don't they?
To pre-empt their usual spew of military agit-prop, contra to the horrific lotus-eating crap that Simon Montefiore has written recently, Israel is SETTLER COLONIAL state that has been committing a decades-long criminal against humanity Palestinian Genocide from the original sins of the Balfour Declaration to the present day.
On Zionist Settler-Colonialism, more properly Zionist necropolitical MILITARY-Colonialism, see for example the following:
From “Introduction” to “The Routledge Handbook of the History of Settler Colonialism”
Settler colonialism as a mode of domination thinks geopolitically. It is significant that William
Gilpin, the ‘inventor’ of modern geopolitics should be a committed and prominent settler
colonialist of the nineteenth century and that Carl Schmitt should have developed his theory of
‘large spaces’ with reference to US President Monroe’s enunciation of the ultimate incompatibility
between colonial and settler colonial forms.2 Epitomising a continental approach, in The
Winning of the West, future US President Theodore Roosevelt wrote in 1889: ‘It is of incalculable
importance that America, Australia, and Siberia should pass out of the hands of their red, black,
and yellow aboriginal owners, and become the heritage of the dominant world races’.3 But this
global continent-shaped vision had significant antecedents and would have important successors.
The rebelling settlers of what would become the US built a ‘continental’ army, their representatives
met in a ‘continental’ congress, the settlers of South Africa met undifferentiated ‘Africans’
and self-defined their collective and language as ‘Afrikaner’, US President James Monroe developed his doctrine to fence off clearly defined continental limits, Australian Federation united an ‘island-continent’ and Canada was built around a ‘continental’ railroad from ‘sea to sea’. There
are probably more examples of these ‘continents of the mind’. Coherently, when it comes to decolonisation, settlers generally
(...)historian Partha Chatterjee insightfully defined as ‘the colonial rule of difference’.15 As such, they all related to colonialism as a set of social phenomena that is characterised by the ability to reproduce itself by maintaining difference and inequality between coloniser and colonised. Conversely, analyses that adopted ‘settler colonialism’ as paradigm emphasised circumstances primarily characterised by a determination to erase colonised subjectivities rather than reproduce their subordination. Unlike the other colonial formations, settler colonialism supersedes rather than reproduces the colonial rule of difference; settlers win by discontinuing unequal relationships rather than maintaining them. Settler colonial studies was a relative newcomer in this genealogy and only consolidated in the 1990s and 2000s to designate the ‘settler societies’ and the fraught relations they entertained with colonised indigenous minorities.
https://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=3BB5C60DDC6D02F7198FDD217769B8F5
Settler Citizenship in the Jewish Colonization of Palestine
GERSHON SHAFIR
“Though Zionism was the result of a nationalist impetus, in following the
colonial path Zionists encountered the choices faced by other colonists. All
European settlement colonies were not alike.5 In most, settler-immigrants sought
direct control of land but differed in their attitudes toward labor. The major
division lies between plantation colonies like those in South Africa and the
southern United States that relied heavily on cheap labor and erected color bars
to separate the races and elevate all whites over blacks, and societies like those
in Australia and the northern United States that sought to exclude nonwhite
workers altogether and create a pure settlement type colony. Which of these two models—plantation colony or homogenous settlement colony—Palestine
would become was the crux of the dilemma for Zionist settler-immigrants.
The institutions and character of Jewish settlement in Palestine were initially
formed in imitation of other colonial models. Rothschild recruited French colonial
agronomists from Northern Africa to reorganize the failing settlements of
the first aliyah by copying the model of French colonial agriculture in Africa,
particularly in Algeria, Egypt, and Tunisia. His first envoy and director of agriculture,
Justin Dugourd, who had worked in Algeria and Egypt, recommended
developing viticulture in Palestine. Gerard Ermens gained his experience in
Senegal and Egypt and became the Inspector General of Agriculture after 1888.
These early directors and the technical advisors, in Simon Schama’s view, were
“in the mold of the French ‘service colonial’ and imbued with their share of
‘la mission civilisatrice.’”6 Giladi and Naor point out that “as foreign experts,
they considered Palestine to be a colonial domain, in which they had to carry
out well-defined technical assignments.”7 The rain-fed field-crop cultivation
typical of Arab agriculture was held in contempt by these experts and replaced
in Rishon Letzion and part of Petach Tikva by viticulture. These moshavot were
in turn imitated in the early 1890s by Rechovot and Hedera, the settlements of
the first aliyah’s second wave.”
https://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=FB7432AE94B63D35A716884533B597B5
THEORIZING ZIONIST SETTLER COLONIALISM IN PALESTINE
Gershon Shafir
Colonization is a project with a distinct aim, the formation of a new society, eventually to
become independent of a great power’s colonial control. Israel, begotten through colonization,
consequently was fashioned as a settler colonial project. In this, Israel is not different from Canada,
Argentina, Brazil, the United States or South Africa. What makes Israel unique is that it is a
belated settler colony which was launched in the last two decades of the nineteenth century and,
even more so, that it continues the colonization through which it was formed into the twentieth
and twenty-first centuries. It is Zionism’s belated nature, past the heyday of other effective settler
colonial movements, that requires us to understand its distinct character and corresponding theories on how to accomplish its goal.
Though the masses of settlers in Palestine hailed from Eastern European Jewry, the Zionist
movement’s sources of inspiration and models for emulation were drawn, by and large, from central and western Europe, in particular from the UK, Germany and the Habsburg Empire.
(...)
British proto-Zionism doubled as a justification for the expansion of British power in Palestine
at a time when all European Great Powers became involved in the affairs of the ‘sick man of
Europe’, the Ottoman Empire, through a system of capitulations, as protectors of its minorities,
even generating a construction boom of churches and hospitals in Jerusalem. A particularly
intriguing method for gaining influence was archeological excavation, but since the known
Christian sites of Palestine were already under the control of either Orthodox or Catholic Christians,
by associating themselves with Jewish ruins, British Protestants were able to tap into a
remaining but also the oldest pedigree of the land. Thus, in 1865, the Palestine Exploration Fund
(PEF) was established in London with the aim of excavating Palestine’s Jewish heritage. In this
field, the British could not only sideline other Christian powers but also best the Ottomans, who
could not justify their presence in the land with reference to ancient archeology; as an empire,
they had ties everywhere and nowhere. Archeology made the Ottomans the occupiers of Palestine
and the British, the Protestant inheritors of Jews, its ‘rightful’ possessors.
There were several decades in which fantastic ideas for making ‘common cause’ with Jewry
were aired; to cite just a single example, Charles Warren, the great excavator of Jerusalem on
behalf of the PEF, suggested the formation of a company in the model of the British East India
Company and task it with settling in Palestine North African Jews who, in the racialized view
of colonial officials, were of sufficient stature to undertake such a task.
https://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=3BB5C60DDC6D02F7198FDD217769B8F5