I have no words to adequately express my horror and outrage. As a Jew, it is impossible not to feel responsible. I don't know what to do other than to continue to speak out and attend protests. NOT IN MY NAME!
It's also worth noting the continued crisis of democracy this US policy represents. There have been in the span of just a few months to massive, historic demonstrations on Washington DC, each time with hundreds of thousands of participants including myself, demanding an end to us support for this ethnic cleansing. These protests rivaled those opposing George Bush's surge of the year 2007. But the will of many millions of Americans is not being heated.
This is why South Africa went to the ICJ- if the west can immolate a captive population for their land resources under the auspices of self defense then no oppressed peoples are safe from unilaterally overwhelming state violence.
I support Israel; I do NOT support Netanyahu and his right wing goons. Netanyahu is a Jewish Trump. 99% of Israelis want him gone. The barbarism against the Palestinians is pointless; trying to kill an idea by shooting it doesn't work. Hamas is partly as strong as it is because Netanyahu helped to funnel Millions of dollars to them, to help prevent establishing of a palestinian state. Tens of thousands of dead civilians will not help Israel to 'win'. But it may well help Hamas to grow.
I suppose by "apartheid ethnostate" you mean Israel. Realistically speaking, I think it's not possible to go before 1948. For anyone. So the only sensible solution must be based on the Palestinians accepting that Israel will be their neighbour and the Israelis accepting that the Palestinians will be their neighbour.
If by the "apartheid ethnostate" you meant only the specific laws that israel has, which I believe are not equal to everyone living in Israel, I do not have anything to add.
But what of the woebegone idiots who have been guilt-tripped into committing Genocide *again*? Only this time in a farcical, absent-minded, but for all that no less Evil manner.
It is noteworthy that all of the major powers that have signed up to play the role of lickspittle lapdogs to Tel Aviv all have their own imperialist histories of Genocidal Colonialism. For them, the Palestinian Genocide is simply History as usual. So just what is all this vulgar, noisy fuss being made from those dark-skinned sub-alterns from the semi-periphery and periphery of the capitalist world-system (the "Global South")?? Why, as self-righteous, self-stroking Israel never tires of whining, is the UN so "biased"? Whatever the self-deceiving, moralistic self-justifications that have been conjured up by Western political leaders in their support of Israel's Gaza Genocide, there is a greater world-systemic historical logic that is the greater causative force that determines their actions.
"A genocide is under way in Palestine. And the imperial West is an active participant."
This is how we can make sense of the Faustian dark comedy of the genocidaires in Berlin pathetically attempting to atone for the Holocaust by lending their support to the Nakba and to the subsequent Palestinian Genocide. The bizarre "moral" calculus that the mass-slaughter of Palestinian infants will somehow redeem Germany for the historical sins of Auschwitz.
Is Germany somehow damned to commit Genocide forever?? And then to awakening in the cold sweat of horror as the realization of their damnation sinks in far too late??
"Der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland"
Paul Celan
"When Germany pledged to oppose South Africa’s genocide case against Israel, the Namibian government reminded German politicians of their state’s genocidal record in Africa. Rosa Luxemburg exposed the crimes of German colonialism while they were happening."
"Namibia, a southern African country where the first genocide of the 20th century took place under German colonial rule, “rejects Germany’s support of the genocidal intent of the racist Israeli state,” the presidency said in a statement late Saturday.
Lamenting “Germany’s inability to draw lessons from its horrific history,” Namibian President Hage Geingob expressed “deep concern” for the German government’s announcement Friday that it “rejected the morally upright indictment brought forward by South Africa.”
Geingob accused Berlin of “ignoring” the “deaths of over 23,000 Palestinians in Gaza” and defending in front of the ICJ “the genocidal and gruesome acts of the Israeli Government.”"
"Berlin still has a monument commemorating German soldiers who died as “heroes” during the Namibian campaign, which resulted in the genocide of the Herero and Nama about 120 years ago. This tombstone shows how dominant and resistant to change Germany’s narrative is about its colonial past, according to scholar Anne van Mourik, who reflects on the controversial monument located in the German capital’s Columbiadamm garrison cemetery that may be soon removed."
Historical and moral consciousness if it occurs at all, typically arrives far too late. As does the final reckoning of the perpetrators of historical Evils as they are forced to confront the full destruction wrought by their actions.
The major powers who are currently meeting at the Munich Security Conference are *both* the parties that systematically destroyed any possibility of a Two-State Solution *and* the very same feckless war-criminal skinheads who are trying to revive this dead horse by flogging its bloodied, rotting carcass. All whilst idiotically dancing like puppets to Netanyahu's marching songs of perpetual War.
It is not that decency and common sense are non-existent in international diplomacy. It's just that such qualities are in fatally short supply and easily marginalized.
"Norwegian FM: Palestinian state essential for Middle East peace
Espen Barth Eide discusses Norway’s peace efforts in the Israel-Palestine conflict – from Oslo Accords to advocating Gaza truce."
It is in Netanyahu's political self-interest that the Gaza War continue for as long as possible. Damn the hostages. Damn regional peace and stability. If war with Lebanon, Yemen and Iran can be provoked and these conflicts can be fought with NATO backing then this is the conflagration that Zionist military-colonialism has always sought.
And damn POTUS Biden. Biden has always been Tel Aviv's second choice behind the more easily led, easily flattered and easily manipulated Trump.
"Biden’s Israel-Palestine Policy Could Cost Him the Election
The president’s blank-check support of Israel’s war on Gaza is alienating many of the Black and brown voters he needs to win reelection."
Most indications are that significant sections of the Democrat voting base amongst the young, amongst Arab-Americans and amongst Black Americans will refuse the liberal blackmail and will follow through on their threat to # AbandonBiden
When Biden the mentally sclerotic and morally feebly dotard FINALLY wakes up to the Genocide he has been committing for all of his benighted existence, when Biden realizes the destruction that his bourgeois concessional Centrism has wrought upon the American republic as he wakes up in November to a Trump presidency, will Biden survive this train-crash with material reality with his senescent psyche still intact?
The discussion around the case against Israel at the International Court of Justice has been around the problems of establishing, firstly, Genocidal **Intent**. Secondly the problem of the current limitations of the legal definition and scope of which acts of military mass-killings should fall within the scope of the Genocide Convention. And the hence necessity of expanding these definitions. Thirdly, that the ICJ act with sufficient urgency when judging and possibly preventing current events.
Of the Israeli *intent* to commit Genocide, there is a profound abyss of Evil from which evidence can be drawn. The below link is to a website that collates evidence only dating from Oct 7 2023 and after. But of course we can also examine the entire history of Zionist military-colonialism from the ethnic cleansing of the Nakba to Golda Meir's infamous act of *conceptual* genocide - "The Palestinians are an invented people" - to the present-day acts of systematic mass-slaughter.
"Since the commencement of our investigative efforts on October 7th, 2023, Law for Palestine has meticulously amassed a compelling body of evidence exposing the proliferation of incitement to violence and genocidal intent perpetrated by Israeli officials and public figures, against Palestinians. Our documentation encompasses over 500 incitements of violence and genocidal incitement, appearing in the forms of social media posts, television interviews, and official statements from Israeli politicians, army personnel, journalists, and other influential personalities.
These reprehensible incitements have been categorized into significant thematic areas, including genocidal intent, forced displacement, and collective punishment. What makes this evidence all the more disconcerting is its origin, emanating from the upper echelons of the Israeli government, including the President, Prime Minister, Knesset members, military personnel, and law enforcement.
Law for Palestine now publishes this database as a crucial resource for use by the international community, resolute in our commitment to combat the impunity that Israel enjoys and work to bring an end to the ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people."
"Even so, proving that individual Israelis have committed acts of genocide is extraordinarily difficult given the parameters set by international law. That is no accident. When state parties to the UNGC (the United Nations Convention on the Punishment and Prevention of Genocide) negotiated in 1947 and 1948, they distinguished genocidal intent from military necessity, so that states could wage the kind of wars that Russia and Israel are conducting today and avoid prosecution for genocide. The high legal standard stems from the restrictive UNGC definition of genocide, which was modeled on the Holocaust and requires that a perpetrator intend to “destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such” (the dolus specialis) in at least one of five prescribed ways (the actus reus). The words “as such” are widely regarded as imposing a stringent intent requirement: an act counts as genocide only if individuals are targeted solely by virtue of their group membership—like Jews during World War II—and not for strategic reasons like suppressing an insurgency. Despite many assertions of Palestinian collective guilt by Israeli leaders, they also insist that the IDF targets Hamas as a security threat, and not Palestinians “as such.” If the Holocaust is unique, as commonly asserted, how are other cases of mass violence against civilians supposed to measure up? The point is that it is very difficult to do so.
In other words, states would not permit the UNGC to inhibit their right to pursue permanent security, whether against internal or external enemies. The staggering scale of postwar violence perpetrated with impunity testifies to their success. It is true that states agreed on other instruments, like the Geneva Conventions, as a “restraint in war,” but they have also done their best to avoid such restraints. Together, the United States and Russia have killed many millions of civilians in their respective imperial wars in Korea, Vietnam, and Chechnya; so have postcolonial states like Nigeria and Pakistan in fighting secessions. Genocide allegations were leveled in some of these cases in global campaigns like the one we see now, but none stuck, and they are largely forgotten in the annals of mass violence against civilians. That prospect faces Palestine advocates today, because successful analogies with the Holocaust are virtually impossible to make—especially Palestinians against Israel, for which the Holocaust memory is a state project."
Tayab Ali, the head of international law at Bindmans, said the significance of the UK’s submission on Myanmar “lay in showing the importance the UK attaches to adherence to the [UN] Genocide Convention and in showing the UK took a wide, and not a narrow, definition of acts of genocide, and the intent to commit genocide. It also made clear that the court should take into account risks to life after a ceasefire caused by disabilities, inability to reside in their homes and wider injustices.
“It would be wholly disingenuous if the UK, six week after advancing such a significant and broad definition of genocide in the case of Myanmar, now adopts a narrow one in the case of Israel.”
South Africa is likely to highlight the UK’s arguments about Myanmar, submitted in conjunction with Canada, Germany, Denmark, France and the Netherlands, when it makes its high-stakes accusation of genocide against Israel.
Open Letter to the ICJ Urgent Appeal for Provisional Measure to Prevent Genocide in Gaza on Behalf of Bosnian Genocide Survivors
As survivors of the genocide and war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, we urgently appeal to you to implement necessary provisional measures swiftly to protect Palestinians in Gaza. The unfolding atrocities since October 7th demand immediate action to prevent further loss of life, injuries, and human suffering. We are deeply troubled by the apparent impunity of the State of Israel for these crimes, reminiscent of the tragic circumstances we endured during the Bosnian war and genocide.
The international community's failure to protect us during the Bosnian Genocide remains a stark chapter in history. We, firsthand, experienced the consequences of a lack of decisive action. Today, as we bear witness to the horrors in Gaza, we implore the Court not to repeat this grievous mistake.
Parallel to the Burmese Military Junta, the Zionist military-colonialists of Tel Aviv will behave in the sickeningly familiar manner of criminals who are Guilty but who will attempt to dodge the charge regardless. Tel Aviv will attempt deny their crimes, dispute the evidence, outright hide and destroy the evidence, indulge in high-handed moralistic wank ("self-defense" against the barbaric Untermenschen), dispute the authority of the court, ignore the rulings of the court, engage in legalistic gymnastics etc. etc.
It is now confirmed that the IDF was not operating in the area the 6 year old was killed. So that makes it likely that she is another casualty of the 15-20% of misfired Hamas or PIJ rockets that fell in Gaza.
Of course, no mention of Israeli hostages and no demand for their immediate and unconditional release - something even the International Court of Justice ordered while it took a pass on South Africa’s main demand for relief, a unilateral ceasefire by Israel.
Apparently it’s not enough that such outlier fanatics such as Ben Gvir and Smotrich are denounced by the vast majority of Israelis, their mere existence seems to rankle. Yet, no similar revulsion at members of the PA and Hamas (the two governing Palestinian groups) who leaders - not marginal officials - continue to spew far more vile garbage against Jews (not simply Israelis), including of the luridly and openly genocidal type.
The apologia here cannot but make on feel that tarring the Israelis with beyond the pale conduct will somehow mitigate or, to use the more fashionable world, contextualize the Holocaust. It’s a bad faith attempt at rewriting history as there is zero comparison. The Holocaust will remain a shocking and indelible stain on the history of Europe, not just Germany.
The impulse to remove this stain is understandable. Trying to do so by vilifying today’s Jews in Israel is not only reprehensible but shows that it is the current crop of bien-pensants who have learned nothing from the Holocaust.
In a similar vein Colin Woodard has shown how U.S. policy cannot be cartooned as a metronome swinging. But has these cultures, 11 maybe, who self describe as-against each other. In other words how much zealotry of self regard it takes not to want every cessation of hostilities for all concerned to have a very stagey opportunity to show that all our consciences are dirty. If a generation here was raised believing there were sects at work with special pleading ncssrly going to be their public agenda, the way forward is different, involving either having real live friends in high places, or expecting to be positively misrepresented. No offense, because it is a bad choice of words, but we Balkanize into destruction for no creative purpose by failing to keep an image of innocents in the other camps having a decent meal with ourselves as the butt of jokes. I needed a youtuber to explain the hyperreal to me. He said t is a booster trying to make his ideas real. What Israel is doing is sabatoging a city in order to speak a 19th century trope: these subhumans donot know how to live high in a credit economy.
Realising western civilisation is dying is possibly the shock some of us need to wake up; but we’re sewn up in a system where the human is a mere externality, a meaningless brainwashed object. The idf tell the Palestinians to go there, and then they kill them there, in the place they offered safety. This is a sickening, disheartening prospect and i’m horrified to see in real time the way the german people supported the hunting of jews in their midst- I never could imagine how that happened and then this new genocide is happening now in Palestine and the Israelis are showing the same bloodlust as was seen in Nazi Germany. I feel sick, physically sick, emotionally sick, and psychologically terrorised by this appalling spectacle of evil.
The weekend after Octo7 stayed home. With a brilliant 15 minute time lapse from PBS of big events like the first rockets used in intifada and the Camp David accords and every moment seemed crucial. In 20 hours with so much to think abt gave myself flu symptoms coming to find the words for what I wanted to happen. The Israeli high ups are offering the U.S. here have a million of these dispossessed. A real statesman like Angela Merckel would play the game as the pieces are and say yes! Send them. Instead we receive snuff films from butchers.
Zizek’s writings on the Israeli invasion of Gaza and on the Ukraine War share the one notable characteristic that is found in most other major commentators. Namely, the *absence* of any discussion of Peace, peace-making and of pacifism. Notice how that most craven of neo-liberal, oligarchical lickspittles, Steven Pinker of the “better angels” fantasy, notably has *nothing* to say, no columns that appear in even the most ideological of power-elite rags, whenever any conflict around the world flares up?
A notable recent exception (that comes close to illustrating if not proving the rule) is this piece from Stephen Walt in Foreign Policy Magazine. Essentially Walt's arguments here are that it is necessary for the States of the modern world-system to break with the set of belligerent logics that Walt and his fellow IR Realists have documented and theorized is one of the most essential ontological natures of the modern inter-state world system, or at least has been heretofore.
In other words, to seek out precisely the higher forms of Rationality that Michael Mann has argued is the rarest of rare qualities in the calculus relied upon when states and other groups have chosen the path of armed conflict.
The modern inter-state system is inherently warlike. This is central lesson to be learnt from the school of IR Realism - E.H. Carr; John Mearsheimer; George Kennan et.al. So long as states and the modern interstate system continues to exist we will be imprisoned within Turchin's cycle of war and peace (or rather, frozen fighting) and war. Whether the state of fighting manifests as outright kinetic fields of fire or is frozen into a cold war of interstitial tensions, Virilio’s war model still applies.
This is the fatal flaw in Kant. As a Prussian public servant, a post- interstate world-system was inconceivable for Kant and hence he relied upon states as the basic actors and agents that could bring about Perpetual Peace. (This may lead us to e.g. Chomsky; the anti- and post-systemic prescriptions of Immanuel Wallerstein). It can noted further that a full 228 years after its publication, we’re still poring over the contents of Kant’s Essay. The immediate historical occasion that prompted Kant to write his Essay was the 1795 Treaty of Basel. As bad as the Treaty of Basel was, as much as it was "the suspension of hostilities, not a peace" as Kant put it, matters have only gotten much when we compare e.g. the Minsk Agreements.
Even more hideous are the horrendous ultimatums delivered at gunpoint that have been the various military-colonial Treaties that the Palestinians have had forced upon them from the Balfour Declaration to the Oslo Accords. All of which were cynical smokescreens intended to (barely) camouflage ever more openly genocidal periods of Israeli military-colonial annexation.
Juan Cole’s Informed Comment website can be taken as a contemporaneous record of the Palestinian Genocide.
“The Map: The Story of Palestinian Nationhood Thwarted After the League of Nations Recognized It”
are waking up to the evil truths that have always been there. But to which they have blinded themselves to due to a combination of self-deceiving romanticism and vested material and perceived geo-strategic interests. But now the USA wants out of the MENA region to focus on East Asia and Europe/Russia. AIPAC and its assassination attempts continue to poison American democracy but a tiny minority of Democrats have grown sickened by this lobby group.
"Americans who give money to Canary Mission are potentially committing a serious crime by acting as agents of a foreign power."
Most unexpectedly, but still long overdue and likely far too late, the world-historical Evil of the decades-long Palestinian Genocide seems to impinging upon the even the all but non-existent moral conscience of that traditionally most reptilian and nihilistic of mass-murderous groups: the Washington foreign policy establishment.
U.S. diplomats slam Israel policy in leaked memo
The document offers a window into internal fury at the State Department over President Joe Biden’s Middle East policies.
An internal State Department dissent memo accuses President Biden of "spreading misinformation" on the Israel-Hamas war and alleges that Israel is committing "war crimes" in Gaza,
In the meantime, oceans of blood and human suffering have been spilt and there is inevitably even more genocidal Israeli military mass-slaughter to come. The alliance with Israel will be recorded as an especially horrendous chapter in the Black Book of American Foreign Policy.
As Aluf Benn points out in the above article the violent, militaristic nature of Zionism was there from the beginning, even before 1948.
Zionism is the militaristic obscenity of a Shoah (anti)Theology bastardized into a Genocidal program of a Holocaust 2.0 in the form of the Nakba or Palestinian Genocide. This is a militaristic, ethno-nationalist doctrine of a universally conscripted Jewish-Israeli people permanently under arms, in a permanent state of Carl Schmittian exception.
Every Jewish wound or death is exploited by the Israeli state apparatus for its agitational capacity to excite bellicosity in the Israeli population of universal Jewish military conscription.
The Holocaust was ideologically militarized by Zionists from the very beginning. The Shoah was immediately seized upon as one more reason to strengthen and arm the necropolitical, military-colonial State into a permanently belligerent state of arms.
Whilst the sentimental fairy-tale of Israel as a Jewish sanctuary served to guilt-trip people around the world into the ethno-nationalist conception of Israel that served Zionist military-colonial ends, the reality was often instead a tale of cruel rejection. Significant numbers of warlike Israelis were deeply ashamed of Jewish survivors and treated them with exceptional cruelty and disdain.
“Sabonim - Sabra mistreatment of Holocaust Survivors
The Holocaust survivors, who came to Israel after WWII, were called "sabonim" by local Zionists, which has a double meaning of "cowards" and "soaps" (meaning the narrative that Nazis made soap out of Jewish corpses). Below are several links to what it felt like and what it led to. “It’s all lies,” she shouted. “They didn’t want us, any of us, didn’t matter where we came from, what we had been through. On the contrary, it was precisely because of what had happened to us that they wanted nothing to do with us.
“They even discussed building a second dining hall so they wouldn’t have to eat with us, the sabonim. That’s what they called us: sabonim, nothing but bars of soap. Because the Germans are supposed to have made soap out of Jewish corpses.”
I was shocked into silence. It seemed beyond belief, such a level of hostility, such cruel contempt. Perhaps she had misunderstood? Edith shook her head. I had never seen her look so grim.
“In a way, I wish they had put us in a different dining room. As it was, the sabras, the old-timers, always kept themselves to themselves, joking in Hebrew. They would glance across at us from time to time, so it was obvious they were talking about us.”
“‘Us’? So you weren’t quite alone.” “Yes and no. There was a woman from one of the camps who had lost her husband and two children. She didn’t last long: hanged herself in the kitchen one night."”
"“They called us the sabonim,” he says — using Hebrew slang for “cowards.”
But it also sounds like the Hebrew word “sabon,” or soap, which survivors perceived as a reference to the soap the Nazis made from Jewish corpses.“ The emphasis is on the Zionist lessons of the Holocaust, such as the need to have a strong state.
In opposition is the Shoah Theology of anti-war, pacifist, humanist-universalism promulgated by Jewish Voices for Peace and similar groups around the world. The Shoah Theology of tikkun olam.
“‘Jews against genocide’ protesters disrupt Austrian parliament
“Never again for anyone.” The ‘Not in Our Name Vienna’ group is at odds with Austria’s support for Israel and wants to see an end to the killing of Palestinians.”
“The critic Roland Barthes used the word “punctum” to describe an eye-catching detail in an image that establishes a relationship between a viewer and the objects and people in the image. In these “kidnapped” posters, the punctum is the word “Israeli,” an insistence that the most important thing about the kidnapped is not their humanity, but their nationality. In this sense, they differ from their Latin American and 9/11 forebears, which stressed a universality, a shared human vulnerability and collective mourning. The nationalism of the “kidnapped” flyers is underscored by the artists’ decision not to include, in some form or other, Palestinians in Gaza in their art project. A few posters do make mention of “Argentines” and other nationalities, including unidentified “migrant workers,” taken by Hamas. Yet amassed together on a wall, they don’t — as did past projects to visually eulogize victims of political terror in Latin America, New York, and during the Holocaust itself, including Skapski’s memorials — seem concerned with transmuting terror into a deeper commitment to a shared universalism. The statement of the “kidnapped” posters is instead that of military-colonial agit-prop: We want you to share our outrage against Hamas’s atrocities, but the pain and right of retribution, unlimited, belongs to Israel alone.”
I have no words to adequately express my horror and outrage. As a Jew, it is impossible not to feel responsible. I don't know what to do other than to continue to speak out and attend protests. NOT IN MY NAME!
We need more people like you! Really
It's also worth noting the continued crisis of democracy this US policy represents. There have been in the span of just a few months to massive, historic demonstrations on Washington DC, each time with hundreds of thousands of participants including myself, demanding an end to us support for this ethnic cleansing. These protests rivaled those opposing George Bush's surge of the year 2007. But the will of many millions of Americans is not being heated.
When it all comes crashing down, Americans will have no one to blame but themselves.
This is why South Africa went to the ICJ- if the west can immolate a captive population for their land resources under the auspices of self defense then no oppressed peoples are safe from unilaterally overwhelming state violence.
I support Israel; I do NOT support Netanyahu and his right wing goons. Netanyahu is a Jewish Trump. 99% of Israelis want him gone. The barbarism against the Palestinians is pointless; trying to kill an idea by shooting it doesn't work. Hamas is partly as strong as it is because Netanyahu helped to funnel Millions of dollars to them, to help prevent establishing of a palestinian state. Tens of thousands of dead civilians will not help Israel to 'win'. But it may well help Hamas to grow.
So you support an apartheid ethnostate?
I suppose by "apartheid ethnostate" you mean Israel. Realistically speaking, I think it's not possible to go before 1948. For anyone. So the only sensible solution must be based on the Palestinians accepting that Israel will be their neighbour and the Israelis accepting that the Palestinians will be their neighbour.
If by the "apartheid ethnostate" you meant only the specific laws that israel has, which I believe are not equal to everyone living in Israel, I do not have anything to add.
(Part 2)
But what of the woebegone idiots who have been guilt-tripped into committing Genocide *again*? Only this time in a farcical, absent-minded, but for all that no less Evil manner.
It is noteworthy that all of the major powers that have signed up to play the role of lickspittle lapdogs to Tel Aviv all have their own imperialist histories of Genocidal Colonialism. For them, the Palestinian Genocide is simply History as usual. So just what is all this vulgar, noisy fuss being made from those dark-skinned sub-alterns from the semi-periphery and periphery of the capitalist world-system (the "Global South")?? Why, as self-righteous, self-stroking Israel never tires of whining, is the UN so "biased"? Whatever the self-deceiving, moralistic self-justifications that have been conjured up by Western political leaders in their support of Israel's Gaza Genocide, there is a greater world-systemic historical logic that is the greater causative force that determines their actions.
"A genocide is under way in Palestine. And the imperial West is an active participant."
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/11/2/a-genocide-is-under-way-in-palestine
https://imgur.com/a/aqgtC0x
This is how we can make sense of the Faustian dark comedy of the genocidaires in Berlin pathetically attempting to atone for the Holocaust by lending their support to the Nakba and to the subsequent Palestinian Genocide. The bizarre "moral" calculus that the mass-slaughter of Palestinian infants will somehow redeem Germany for the historical sins of Auschwitz.
https://imgur.com/a/Cxvju17
Is Germany somehow damned to commit Genocide forever?? And then to awakening in the cold sweat of horror as the realization of their damnation sinks in far too late??
"Der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland"
Paul Celan
"When Germany pledged to oppose South Africa’s genocide case against Israel, the Namibian government reminded German politicians of their state’s genocidal record in Africa. Rosa Luxemburg exposed the crimes of German colonialism while they were happening."
https://jacobin.com/2024/02/rosa-luxemburg-namibia-genocide-imperialism-capitalism
"Namibia, a southern African country where the first genocide of the 20th century took place under German colonial rule, “rejects Germany’s support of the genocidal intent of the racist Israeli state,” the presidency said in a statement late Saturday.
Lamenting “Germany’s inability to draw lessons from its horrific history,” Namibian President Hage Geingob expressed “deep concern” for the German government’s announcement Friday that it “rejected the morally upright indictment brought forward by South Africa.”
Geingob accused Berlin of “ignoring” the “deaths of over 23,000 Palestinians in Gaza” and defending in front of the ICJ “the genocidal and gruesome acts of the Israeli Government.”"
https://www.timesofisrael.com/namibia-pans-former-colonial-ruler-germany-for-defending-israel-from-genocide-claim/
"Berlin still has a monument commemorating German soldiers who died as “heroes” during the Namibian campaign, which resulted in the genocide of the Herero and Nama about 120 years ago. This tombstone shows how dominant and resistant to change Germany’s narrative is about its colonial past, according to scholar Anne van Mourik, who reflects on the controversial monument located in the German capital’s Columbiadamm garrison cemetery that may be soon removed."
https://www.justiceinfo.net/en/121871-stroll-germany-conflicted-postcolonial-memory.html
Historical and moral consciousness if it occurs at all, typically arrives far too late. As does the final reckoning of the perpetrators of historical Evils as they are forced to confront the full destruction wrought by their actions.
The major powers who are currently meeting at the Munich Security Conference are *both* the parties that systematically destroyed any possibility of a Two-State Solution *and* the very same feckless war-criminal skinheads who are trying to revive this dead horse by flogging its bloodied, rotting carcass. All whilst idiotically dancing like puppets to Netanyahu's marching songs of perpetual War.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/02/15/palestine-demilitarized-israel-postwar/
https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/02/14/biden-middle-east-plan-gaza-hamas-israel-netanyahu/
https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/02/14/gaza-war-israel-civilian-deaths-urban-warfare-hamas/
It is not that decency and common sense are non-existent in international diplomacy. It's just that such qualities are in fatally short supply and easily marginalized.
"Norwegian FM: Palestinian state essential for Middle East peace
Espen Barth Eide discusses Norway’s peace efforts in the Israel-Palestine conflict – from Oslo Accords to advocating Gaza truce."
https://www.aljazeera.com/program/talk-to-al-jazeera/2024/2/4/norwegian-fm-palestinian-state-essential-for-middle-east-peace
"Irene Khan: Gaza, ‘a genocide in the making’
UN special rapporteur highlights global challenges faced by free speech and advocacy.
In an era where freedom of expression faces unprecedented challenges globally, Irene Khan stands as a beacon of hope."
https://www.aljazeera.com/program/talk-to-al-jazeera/2024/2/11/irene-khan-gaza-a-genocide-in-the-making
It is in Netanyahu's political self-interest that the Gaza War continue for as long as possible. Damn the hostages. Damn regional peace and stability. If war with Lebanon, Yemen and Iran can be provoked and these conflicts can be fought with NATO backing then this is the conflagration that Zionist military-colonialism has always sought.
And damn POTUS Biden. Biden has always been Tel Aviv's second choice behind the more easily led, easily flattered and easily manipulated Trump.
"Biden’s Israel-Palestine Policy Could Cost Him the Election
The president’s blank-check support of Israel’s war on Gaza is alienating many of the Black and brown voters he needs to win reelection."
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/biden-israel-palestine-policy-election/
Most indications are that significant sections of the Democrat voting base amongst the young, amongst Arab-Americans and amongst Black Americans will refuse the liberal blackmail and will follow through on their threat to # AbandonBiden
When Biden the mentally sclerotic and morally feebly dotard FINALLY wakes up to the Genocide he has been committing for all of his benighted existence, when Biden realizes the destruction that his bourgeois concessional Centrism has wrought upon the American republic as he wakes up in November to a Trump presidency, will Biden survive this train-crash with material reality with his senescent psyche still intact?
https://imgur.com/a/A1vXkg6
(Part 1)
The discussion around the case against Israel at the International Court of Justice has been around the problems of establishing, firstly, Genocidal **Intent**. Secondly the problem of the current limitations of the legal definition and scope of which acts of military mass-killings should fall within the scope of the Genocide Convention. And the hence necessity of expanding these definitions. Thirdly, that the ICJ act with sufficient urgency when judging and possibly preventing current events.
Of the Israeli *intent* to commit Genocide, there is a profound abyss of Evil from which evidence can be drawn. The below link is to a website that collates evidence only dating from Oct 7 2023 and after. But of course we can also examine the entire history of Zionist military-colonialism from the ethnic cleansing of the Nakba to Golda Meir's infamous act of *conceptual* genocide - "The Palestinians are an invented people" - to the present-day acts of systematic mass-slaughter.
"Since the commencement of our investigative efforts on October 7th, 2023, Law for Palestine has meticulously amassed a compelling body of evidence exposing the proliferation of incitement to violence and genocidal intent perpetrated by Israeli officials and public figures, against Palestinians. Our documentation encompasses over 500 incitements of violence and genocidal incitement, appearing in the forms of social media posts, television interviews, and official statements from Israeli politicians, army personnel, journalists, and other influential personalities.
These reprehensible incitements have been categorized into significant thematic areas, including genocidal intent, forced displacement, and collective punishment. What makes this evidence all the more disconcerting is its origin, emanating from the upper echelons of the Israeli government, including the President, Prime Minister, Knesset members, military personnel, and law enforcement.
Law for Palestine now publishes this database as a crucial resource for use by the international community, resolute in our commitment to combat the impunity that Israel enjoys and work to bring an end to the ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people."
https://law4palestine.org/law-for-palestine-releases-database-with-500-instances-of-israeli-incitement-to-genocide-continuously-updated/
"Even so, proving that individual Israelis have committed acts of genocide is extraordinarily difficult given the parameters set by international law. That is no accident. When state parties to the UNGC (the United Nations Convention on the Punishment and Prevention of Genocide) negotiated in 1947 and 1948, they distinguished genocidal intent from military necessity, so that states could wage the kind of wars that Russia and Israel are conducting today and avoid prosecution for genocide. The high legal standard stems from the restrictive UNGC definition of genocide, which was modeled on the Holocaust and requires that a perpetrator intend to “destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such” (the dolus specialis) in at least one of five prescribed ways (the actus reus). The words “as such” are widely regarded as imposing a stringent intent requirement: an act counts as genocide only if individuals are targeted solely by virtue of their group membership—like Jews during World War II—and not for strategic reasons like suppressing an insurgency. Despite many assertions of Palestinian collective guilt by Israeli leaders, they also insist that the IDF targets Hamas as a security threat, and not Palestinians “as such.” If the Holocaust is unique, as commonly asserted, how are other cases of mass violence against civilians supposed to measure up? The point is that it is very difficult to do so.
In other words, states would not permit the UNGC to inhibit their right to pursue permanent security, whether against internal or external enemies. The staggering scale of postwar violence perpetrated with impunity testifies to their success. It is true that states agreed on other instruments, like the Geneva Conventions, as a “restraint in war,” but they have also done their best to avoid such restraints. Together, the United States and Russia have killed many millions of civilians in their respective imperial wars in Korea, Vietnam, and Chechnya; so have postcolonial states like Nigeria and Pakistan in fighting secessions. Genocide allegations were leveled in some of these cases in global campaigns like the one we see now, but none stuck, and they are largely forgotten in the annals of mass violence against civilians. That prospect faces Palestine advocates today, because successful analogies with the Holocaust are virtually impossible to make—especially Palestinians against Israel, for which the Holocaust memory is a state project."
https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/more-than-genocide/
Tayab Ali, the head of international law at Bindmans, said the significance of the UK’s submission on Myanmar “lay in showing the importance the UK attaches to adherence to the [UN] Genocide Convention and in showing the UK took a wide, and not a narrow, definition of acts of genocide, and the intent to commit genocide. It also made clear that the court should take into account risks to life after a ceasefire caused by disabilities, inability to reside in their homes and wider injustices.
“It would be wholly disingenuous if the UK, six week after advancing such a significant and broad definition of genocide in the case of Myanmar, now adopts a narrow one in the case of Israel.”
South Africa is likely to highlight the UK’s arguments about Myanmar, submitted in conjunction with Canada, Germany, Denmark, France and the Netherlands, when it makes its high-stakes accusation of genocide against Israel.
https://www.theguardian.com/law/2024/jan/07/uk-accused-of-hypocrisy-in-not-backing-claim-of-genocide-in-gaza-before-icj
Open Letter to the ICJ Urgent Appeal for Provisional Measure to Prevent Genocide in Gaza on Behalf of Bosnian Genocide Survivors
As survivors of the genocide and war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, we urgently appeal to you to implement necessary provisional measures swiftly to protect Palestinians in Gaza. The unfolding atrocities since October 7th demand immediate action to prevent further loss of life, injuries, and human suffering. We are deeply troubled by the apparent impunity of the State of Israel for these crimes, reminiscent of the tragic circumstances we endured during the Bosnian war and genocide.
The international community's failure to protect us during the Bosnian Genocide remains a stark chapter in history. We, firsthand, experienced the consequences of a lack of decisive action. Today, as we bear witness to the horrors in Gaza, we implore the Court not to repeat this grievous mistake.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1M5J0MK5LlKjlAZX4cPNNiEGMJZHLM8Qa/edit
Parallel to the Burmese Military Junta, the Zionist military-colonialists of Tel Aviv will behave in the sickeningly familiar manner of criminals who are Guilty but who will attempt to dodge the charge regardless. Tel Aviv will attempt deny their crimes, dispute the evidence, outright hide and destroy the evidence, indulge in high-handed moralistic wank ("self-defense" against the barbaric Untermenschen), dispute the authority of the court, ignore the rulings of the court, engage in legalistic gymnastics etc. etc.
It is now confirmed that the IDF was not operating in the area the 6 year old was killed. So that makes it likely that she is another casualty of the 15-20% of misfired Hamas or PIJ rockets that fell in Gaza.
Of course, no mention of Israeli hostages and no demand for their immediate and unconditional release - something even the International Court of Justice ordered while it took a pass on South Africa’s main demand for relief, a unilateral ceasefire by Israel.
Apparently it’s not enough that such outlier fanatics such as Ben Gvir and Smotrich are denounced by the vast majority of Israelis, their mere existence seems to rankle. Yet, no similar revulsion at members of the PA and Hamas (the two governing Palestinian groups) who leaders - not marginal officials - continue to spew far more vile garbage against Jews (not simply Israelis), including of the luridly and openly genocidal type.
The apologia here cannot but make on feel that tarring the Israelis with beyond the pale conduct will somehow mitigate or, to use the more fashionable world, contextualize the Holocaust. It’s a bad faith attempt at rewriting history as there is zero comparison. The Holocaust will remain a shocking and indelible stain on the history of Europe, not just Germany.
The impulse to remove this stain is understandable. Trying to do so by vilifying today’s Jews in Israel is not only reprehensible but shows that it is the current crop of bien-pensants who have learned nothing from the Holocaust.
In a similar vein Colin Woodard has shown how U.S. policy cannot be cartooned as a metronome swinging. But has these cultures, 11 maybe, who self describe as-against each other. In other words how much zealotry of self regard it takes not to want every cessation of hostilities for all concerned to have a very stagey opportunity to show that all our consciences are dirty. If a generation here was raised believing there were sects at work with special pleading ncssrly going to be their public agenda, the way forward is different, involving either having real live friends in high places, or expecting to be positively misrepresented. No offense, because it is a bad choice of words, but we Balkanize into destruction for no creative purpose by failing to keep an image of innocents in the other camps having a decent meal with ourselves as the butt of jokes. I needed a youtuber to explain the hyperreal to me. He said t is a booster trying to make his ideas real. What Israel is doing is sabatoging a city in order to speak a 19th century trope: these subhumans donot know how to live high in a credit economy.
Realising western civilisation is dying is possibly the shock some of us need to wake up; but we’re sewn up in a system where the human is a mere externality, a meaningless brainwashed object. The idf tell the Palestinians to go there, and then they kill them there, in the place they offered safety. This is a sickening, disheartening prospect and i’m horrified to see in real time the way the german people supported the hunting of jews in their midst- I never could imagine how that happened and then this new genocide is happening now in Palestine and the Israelis are showing the same bloodlust as was seen in Nazi Germany. I feel sick, physically sick, emotionally sick, and psychologically terrorised by this appalling spectacle of evil.
The weekend after Octo7 stayed home. With a brilliant 15 minute time lapse from PBS of big events like the first rockets used in intifada and the Camp David accords and every moment seemed crucial. In 20 hours with so much to think abt gave myself flu symptoms coming to find the words for what I wanted to happen. The Israeli high ups are offering the U.S. here have a million of these dispossessed. A real statesman like Angela Merckel would play the game as the pieces are and say yes! Send them. Instead we receive snuff films from butchers.
Zizek’s writings on the Israeli invasion of Gaza and on the Ukraine War share the one notable characteristic that is found in most other major commentators. Namely, the *absence* of any discussion of Peace, peace-making and of pacifism. Notice how that most craven of neo-liberal, oligarchical lickspittles, Steven Pinker of the “better angels” fantasy, notably has *nothing* to say, no columns that appear in even the most ideological of power-elite rags, whenever any conflict around the world flares up?
A notable recent exception (that comes close to illustrating if not proving the rule) is this piece from Stephen Walt in Foreign Policy Magazine. Essentially Walt's arguments here are that it is necessary for the States of the modern world-system to break with the set of belligerent logics that Walt and his fellow IR Realists have documented and theorized is one of the most essential ontological natures of the modern inter-state world system, or at least has been heretofore.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/12/19/realist-guide-world-peace/
In other words, to seek out precisely the higher forms of Rationality that Michael Mann has argued is the rarest of rare qualities in the calculus relied upon when states and other groups have chosen the path of armed conflict.
https://annas-archive.org/md5/3f3363749982057ed33f69e6714c5435
The modern inter-state system is inherently warlike. This is central lesson to be learnt from the school of IR Realism - E.H. Carr; John Mearsheimer; George Kennan et.al. So long as states and the modern interstate system continues to exist we will be imprisoned within Turchin's cycle of war and peace (or rather, frozen fighting) and war. Whether the state of fighting manifests as outright kinetic fields of fire or is frozen into a cold war of interstitial tensions, Virilio’s war model still applies.
This is the fatal flaw in Kant. As a Prussian public servant, a post- interstate world-system was inconceivable for Kant and hence he relied upon states as the basic actors and agents that could bring about Perpetual Peace. (This may lead us to e.g. Chomsky; the anti- and post-systemic prescriptions of Immanuel Wallerstein). It can noted further that a full 228 years after its publication, we’re still poring over the contents of Kant’s Essay. The immediate historical occasion that prompted Kant to write his Essay was the 1795 Treaty of Basel. As bad as the Treaty of Basel was, as much as it was "the suspension of hostilities, not a peace" as Kant put it, matters have only gotten much when we compare e.g. the Minsk Agreements.
Even more hideous are the horrendous ultimatums delivered at gunpoint that have been the various military-colonial Treaties that the Palestinians have had forced upon them from the Balfour Declaration to the Oslo Accords. All of which were cynical smokescreens intended to (barely) camouflage ever more openly genocidal periods of Israeli military-colonial annexation.
Juan Cole’s Informed Comment website can be taken as a contemporaneous record of the Palestinian Genocide.
“The Map: The Story of Palestinian Nationhood Thwarted After the League of Nations Recognized It”
https://www.juancole.com/2010/03/map-story-of-palestinian-nationhood.html
“The Hateful Likud Charter Calls for Destruction of Any Palestinian State”
https://www.juancole.com/2014/08/charter-destruction-palestinian.html
“Israel Moves toward “Dictatorship” and Polarization, as one Likud Activist lauds the Targeting of Ashkenazi Jews in the Holocaust”
https://www.juancole.com/2023/07/dictatorship-polarization-holocaust.html
“The Israeli Right Wing’s Genocidal Dream of the “River to the Sea””
https://www.juancole.com/2023/11/israeli-netanyahus-dream.html
Finally - FINALLY - some of the intelligentsia in the Washington foreign policy establishment, such as the writers at Foreign Affairs magazine
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/israel/israels-netanyahu-self-destruction
are waking up to the evil truths that have always been there. But to which they have blinded themselves to due to a combination of self-deceiving romanticism and vested material and perceived geo-strategic interests. But now the USA wants out of the MENA region to focus on East Asia and Europe/Russia. AIPAC and its assassination attempts continue to poison American democracy but a tiny minority of Democrats have grown sickened by this lobby group.
"Americans who give money to Canary Mission are potentially committing a serious crime by acting as agents of a foreign power."
https://www.thenation.com/article/world/canary-mission-israel-covert-operations/
Most unexpectedly, but still long overdue and likely far too late, the world-historical Evil of the decades-long Palestinian Genocide seems to impinging upon the even the all but non-existent moral conscience of that traditionally most reptilian and nihilistic of mass-murderous groups: the Washington foreign policy establishment.
U.S. diplomats slam Israel policy in leaked memo
The document offers a window into internal fury at the State Department over President Joe Biden’s Middle East policies.
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/11/06/u-s-diplomats-slam-israel-policy-in-leaked-memo-00125538
An internal State Department dissent memo accuses President Biden of "spreading misinformation" on the Israel-Hamas war and alleges that Israel is committing "war crimes" in Gaza,
https://www.axios.com/2023/11/13/biden-gaza-hamas-policy-state-department-memo
In the meantime, oceans of blood and human suffering have been spilt and there is inevitably even more genocidal Israeli military mass-slaughter to come. The alliance with Israel will be recorded as an especially horrendous chapter in the Black Book of American Foreign Policy.
As Aluf Benn points out in the above article the violent, militaristic nature of Zionism was there from the beginning, even before 1948.
Zionism is the militaristic obscenity of a Shoah (anti)Theology bastardized into a Genocidal program of a Holocaust 2.0 in the form of the Nakba or Palestinian Genocide. This is a militaristic, ethno-nationalist doctrine of a universally conscripted Jewish-Israeli people permanently under arms, in a permanent state of Carl Schmittian exception.
Every Jewish wound or death is exploited by the Israeli state apparatus for its agitational capacity to excite bellicosity in the Israeli population of universal Jewish military conscription.
The Holocaust was ideologically militarized by Zionists from the very beginning. The Shoah was immediately seized upon as one more reason to strengthen and arm the necropolitical, military-colonial State into a permanently belligerent state of arms.
Whilst the sentimental fairy-tale of Israel as a Jewish sanctuary served to guilt-trip people around the world into the ethno-nationalist conception of Israel that served Zionist military-colonial ends, the reality was often instead a tale of cruel rejection. Significant numbers of warlike Israelis were deeply ashamed of Jewish survivors and treated them with exceptional cruelty and disdain.
“Sabonim - Sabra mistreatment of Holocaust Survivors
The Holocaust survivors, who came to Israel after WWII, were called "sabonim" by local Zionists, which has a double meaning of "cowards" and "soaps" (meaning the narrative that Nazis made soap out of Jewish corpses). Below are several links to what it felt like and what it led to. “It’s all lies,” she shouted. “They didn’t want us, any of us, didn’t matter where we came from, what we had been through. On the contrary, it was precisely because of what had happened to us that they wanted nothing to do with us.
“They even discussed building a second dining hall so they wouldn’t have to eat with us, the sabonim. That’s what they called us: sabonim, nothing but bars of soap. Because the Germans are supposed to have made soap out of Jewish corpses.”
I was shocked into silence. It seemed beyond belief, such a level of hostility, such cruel contempt. Perhaps she had misunderstood? Edith shook her head. I had never seen her look so grim.
“In a way, I wish they had put us in a different dining room. As it was, the sabras, the old-timers, always kept themselves to themselves, joking in Hebrew. They would glance across at us from time to time, so it was obvious they were talking about us.”
“‘Us’? So you weren’t quite alone.” “Yes and no. There was a woman from one of the camps who had lost her husband and two children. She didn’t last long: hanged herself in the kitchen one night."”
[https://search-for-emes.blogspot.com/2011/08/sabonim-sabra-mistreatment-of-holocaust.html](https://search-for-emes.blogspot.com/2011/08/sabonim-sabra-mistreatment-of-holocaust.html)
"“They called us the sabonim,” he says — using Hebrew slang for “cowards.”
But it also sounds like the Hebrew word “sabon,” or soap, which survivors perceived as a reference to the soap the Nazis made from Jewish corpses.“ The emphasis is on the Zionist lessons of the Holocaust, such as the need to have a strong state.
[https://www.jta.org/archive/behind-the-headlines-holocaust-restitution-deals-fail-to-engross-israeli-public-2](https://www.jta.org/archive/behind-the-headlines-holocaust-restitution-deals-fail-to-engross-israeli-public-2)
In opposition is the Shoah Theology of anti-war, pacifist, humanist-universalism promulgated by Jewish Voices for Peace and similar groups around the world. The Shoah Theology of tikkun olam.
“Never again means never again — for anyone.”
https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/2023/10/11/statement23-10-11/
“‘Jews against genocide’ protesters disrupt Austrian parliament
“Never again for anyone.” The ‘Not in Our Name Vienna’ group is at odds with Austria’s support for Israel and wants to see an end to the killing of Palestinians.”
https://www.aljazeera.com/program/newsfeed/2024/1/16/protests-distrupt-austrian-parliament
“The critic Roland Barthes used the word “punctum” to describe an eye-catching detail in an image that establishes a relationship between a viewer and the objects and people in the image. In these “kidnapped” posters, the punctum is the word “Israeli,” an insistence that the most important thing about the kidnapped is not their humanity, but their nationality. In this sense, they differ from their Latin American and 9/11 forebears, which stressed a universality, a shared human vulnerability and collective mourning. The nationalism of the “kidnapped” flyers is underscored by the artists’ decision not to include, in some form or other, Palestinians in Gaza in their art project. A few posters do make mention of “Argentines” and other nationalities, including unidentified “migrant workers,” taken by Hamas. Yet amassed together on a wall, they don’t — as did past projects to visually eulogize victims of political terror in Latin America, New York, and during the Holocaust itself, including Skapski’s memorials — seem concerned with transmuting terror into a deeper commitment to a shared universalism. The statement of the “kidnapped” posters is instead that of military-colonial agit-prop: We want you to share our outrage against Hamas’s atrocities, but the pain and right of retribution, unlimited, belongs to Israel alone.”
https://theintercept.com/2023/11/28/kidnapped-posters-israel-latin-america/
Hahahaha since when do Israeli politics have goals
What a piece!