The Human Shield mantra about Gaza

November 17, 2023 The Human Shield mantra about Gaza2024-02-20T16:11:40+01:00 14 Comments apocalypse, idiocy, israel, varoufakis

If you look at my posts tagged Israel, you’ll notice how my stance has gradually changed in these 6 weeks of war in Gaza. To explain it, I’ll quote a story about Gandhi (personality which I generally dislike, as he was a hypocrite, but if that guy ever said something meaningful, this was it):

Mahatma Gandhi often changed his mind publicly. An aide once asked him how he could so freely contradict this week what he had said just last week. He replied that it was because this week he knew better.

Truth be told, I understand that the primary concern of most governments here in Europe is the sharp increase of the antisemitism, and I sympathize with the Jewish communities around the globe if they’re persecuted and hated for the actions of the state of Israel. Any form of collective punishment is disgraceful. At the same time, and precisely for the reason expressed in the previous sentence, I’m afraid I’m not totally against everything that Israel is doing in the historic region of Palestine, specifically in Gaza and the (occupied) West Bank.

Maybe the Hamas government of Gaza isn’t to be trusted to give honest counts of victims. But “BBC Verify” has investigated about How the dead are counted in Gaza, and the surprising conclusion is that, with the notable exception of the death toll after a blast at al-Ahli hospital in Gaza City on October 17, the count is pretty much correct, with the error marge normally to be expected in such situations. By the way, Israel itself had to revise its own death figures down from 1,400 to about 1,200.

11,000 deaths or not, does it make and difference if they’re only 8,000? Of which, let’s say that women and children were only 5,000. Is that “acceptable collateral damage”?

How about the over 200 killed and over 2,600 arrested in the occupied West Bank? Israel continues his policy of apartheid, as if its goal would be to never achieve any kind of peace and to sabotage any peaceful cohabitation with the Palestinians. Most likely, this has been the policy of most, if not all governments of Israel since forever.

I watched See what CNN reporter saw inside hospital basement in Gaza, and I wasn’t impressed (here’s the associated article). “A battle with Hamas.” Heck, Hamas is (or was) the governing force in Gaza. The administration is Hamas. The police is Hamas. The army is Hamas. The terrorists are Hamas. Everything is Hamas. Even in the context of the October 7 raid in Israel, Gaza is now an attacked pseudo-sovereign territory. Even those who aren’t terrorists might feel the legitimate urge to fight the IDF.

Daniel Hagary, IDF’s spokesman, didn’t inspire me any trust, as in never. The hospital in question is the Al-Rantissi Paediatric Hospital. We’re shown a tunnel entrance, which however wasn’t explored and doesn’t prove much, then a basement with a motorcycle with a bullet hole, ropes and other items suggesting that a hostage had been tied to a chair, baby bottles and materials. As I said, Gaza being the Home for Hamas, why wouldn’t some of them being there? They or the Islamic Jihad.

More recently, BBC went inside the Al-Shifa hospital with the Israeli army, which wasn’t an impressing reporting either. IDF say they recovered the body of one of the 240 hostages taken by Hamas terrorists on October 7th. The body is said to have been found in a building near the hospital. They also have uncovered a tunnel shaft and a car filled with weapons. Given the size of the Al-Shifa hospital, the extent of what they revealed is pathetic.

So far, tunnels or not, I don’t see any compelling evidence that the Al-Shifa hospital has been used as a HQ for Hamas, as Israel and the US claim. Oh, and let’s not forget the infamous ambassador of Israel in the UK, Tzipi Hotovely. Every single time she shows up on Sky News, I’m pretty sure a lot of people are getting nauseous.

Here’s a recent example. She claims that Israel has offered its full support to evacuating the children from the hospital. As if evacuating such a large hospital would be a piece of cake. A similar displacement of population and evacuation of hospitals would create a catastrophic situation anywhere in the world, even in New York City, London, Paris, or Berlin. But Tzipi acts as if the IDF already had dozens and dozens of ambulances equipped with incubators, waiting to take over the patients. This is utterly ridiculous: the so-called offer from the IDF was a symbolic, propagandistic one, and I never saw any images proving the contrary.

As always, Tzipi insist that, if terrorists are under the hospital or in the hospitals, the hospital is a legitimate target. Let’s ignore what the international law says, i.e. that targeting any hospital is a war crime, plain and simple, and let’s focus on the human shield theory used by Israel.

The question whether Hamas is using people in Gaza as human shields is irrelevant. (Yes, they probably do that.) Also, whether those tunnels are used or not for military purposes, is of secondary importance. The real question is:

What do you do with a human shield? Just kill them?

Consider the following scenario, so common in the movies of the 60s, 70s and 80s:

Bank robbers or terrorists take hostages. The police, the SWAT, the FBI are surrounding the building. Either when the criminals get out holding the hostages as human shields, or when the law enforcement considers storming the building, what do they do? If they shoot to kill the criminals, they’d kill the hostages too. Sometimes, it’s possible to kill such a criminal without killing the human shield, if you’re shooting right, if the criminal doesn’t kill the victim as a last reflex, and if you’re SFPD Inspector “Dirty” Harry Callahan, portrayed by Clint Eastwood. In real life, the law enforcement tries to negotiate, to lure the criminals, to avoid hurting the human shield. Shooting to indiscriminately kill everyone, criminals and their human shields altogether, is not an option.

Unless you’re Israel, that is. To them, everything is justified. They are no better than Hamas. Or than Hitler, Stalin, Mao.

The IDF pretends they tried very hard to avoid any civilian casualties. This holds as much water as Putin’s claims that the Russian troops in Ukraine have used “surgical precision” as not to kill innocent civilians. Yeah, sure.

The only way to avoid those killings were a ceasefire. The UN Secretary General asked for it. The WHO asked for it. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) asked for it. Biden and Blinken asked for it. Emmanuel Macron and Ursula von der Leyen asked for it. Are they all bloody Muslims to be ignored to such an extent by Israel?

There is a shift in the public opinion in Europe, but not so much in the United States. The 74th Annual National Book Awards had this issue on November 15:

As the cultural fallout from the war in the Middle East continues, several finalists for the National Book Award plan to call for a cease-fire in Gaza during the ceremony on Wednesday. Two sponsors have decided not to attend the ceremony after learning authors were planning a political statement.
…
Rumors that authors would take a stand regarding the Israel-Gaza conflict during the ceremony were flying in the days leading up to the event, but it was unclear what the statement would include, leaving several sponsors concerned.

One of the sponsors that withdrew after learning that some authors were planning a political statement was Zibby Media. Zibby Owens, the company’s founder, wrote in an essay published on Substack that her company had withdrawn because she was afraid the remarks at the ceremony would take a stance against Israel, noting that “we simply can’t be a part of anything that promotes discrimination, in this case of Israel and the Jewish people.”

Another sponsor, Book of the Month, has also decided not to attend.

This is Kafkaesque, ubuesque, grotesquely absurd. Has everyone got mentally retarded all of a sudden? If Biden and Blinken ask for a ceasefire, they’re not canceled, but when a couple of writers wish to do the same, sponsors are withdrawing from the event?

In a statement, the National Book Foundation declared:

Political statements, if made, are by no means unprecedented in the history of the National Book Awards, or indeed any awards ceremony. We are working with the venue to ensure a safe environment for all our guests. We of course hope that everyone attending the National Book Awards, in person or tuning in online, comes in a spirit of understanding, compassion, and humanity—the very things that the books we love inspire.

“Safe environment.” That’s snowflake, wokist language. Were it “unsafe” for Zibby Owens, an American Jew, to merely listen to a couple of statements? This world is fucking mental.

A couple of days ago, Yanis Varoufakis had an interview with Al Jazeera: “We Europeans have created this.”

In brief, his stance is that Europe is responsible, historically, for the mess in Israel, in these major steps:

Europe has invented the antisemitism, and has experienced pogroms against the Jews, long before the Holocaust.
Europe has promised a new land to the Jews, even before the Holocaust, but after the World War II this promise looked even more legitimate. In doing so, everyone acted as if Palestine were an empty, unpopulated land.
Europe, alongside the United States, supported the creation of the state of Israel. Once again, who cares about the Arabs? The Jews needed a land, now they’ll have it.

Varoufakis is much more political in his analysis, and it attacks Ursula von der Leyen, it then attacks the European “far-right” which is now supporting Israel out of “Islamophobia” and hatred against the “islamo-gauchisme” attributed to the far-left. I find his views partially unreasonable, but he’s far-left himself.

Either way, I previously mentioned the French former Prime-Minister and former Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin’s diatribe against Israel. I don’t see how could anyone still give carte blanche to Israel, when even before this war, things were anything but kosher in Gaza and in the West Bank.

UPDATE: On PoliticsJOE, a segment from a longer interview: Yanis Varoufakis on Israel Palestine. «The genocide started in 1948.»

It’s difficult for most Europeans to become pro-Palestinian. We have here the memory of decades of Islamist acts of terror. We also have a phenomenon called by some “invasion” if not even “The Great Replacement”; also, the unsafe neighborhoods, typically suburbs (banlieues) are usually of Islamic (as in Muslim, not as in Islamist) extraction. Then, of course, there are bad guys in the Middle-East, from Hamas and Hezbollah to the Islamic regime in Iran.

But two wrongs don’t make a right. And Israel is making a terrible mistake, if war crimes can be called a mistake.

People in Gaza don’t even have clean water anymore. They surely deserve it.

apocalypse, idiocy, israel, varoufakis

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Béranger - November 18th, 2023 at 2:12 AM none Comment author #91086 on The Human Shield mantra about Gaza by Homo Ludditus

■ EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, on November 17, in Ramallah, West Bank: “A horror doesn’t justify another horror. The best friends of Israel are the ones who ask them not to be driven by rage.”

■ The Guardian: Why are European governments clamping down on the right to protest?

In the first weeks that followed 7 October, when Hamas’s killing of 1,400 people in Israel triggered the bloody war with Israel, about a quarter of the pro-Palestine marches registered with the authorities in Germany’s main cities were banned. According to the newspaper Der Spiegel, 90% of those that went ahead had conditions imposed upon them.

In France, it took the intervention of the highest administrative court to stymy a plan by that country’s interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, to prohibit all protests organised by those calling for a ceasefire. Since then, local prefects are making an assessment on a case-by-case basis.

Elsewhere in Europe, protests have been prohibited in Austria, Switzerland and Hungary, to name a few, while a row in the UK over a pro-Palestine march that took place in London on Armistice Day led to a rupture between Downing Street and the Metropolitan police.

This is yet one more proof that “democracy” and “freedom of expression” are just words. But “real democracy” doesn’t exist anywhere, and the freedom of expression, even if protected by many Constitutions, can still be restricted (yes, even the First Amendment to the United States Constitution is useless!) when things like “Top Secret” (“Secret d’État”) or “Classified Defense Information” (“Secret défense”) can be invoked (or just NDAs), or when “public security” (or “public safety”) is at stake. But is there such a case?

In Germany, authorities can prohibit an assembly if it could endanger public safety or order, albeit the risk must come from the demonstration as a whole, not just some participants. In Berlin, two large protests with five-digit numbers of participants took place in recent days but German responsibility for the Holocaust has been cited as a reason for a lack of tolerance of protest that risks fuelling antisemitism.

Holocaust denial is illegal in Germany, as are slogans that directly reference nazism. Berlin police said they had prohibited a large number of proposed pro-Palestine protests based on “an imminent danger that the gatherings would lead to incitement to hatred, antisemitic statements, glorification of violence, incitement to violence and thus to intimidation and violence”.

Sort like in the Minority Report (2002) film. Let’s prevent any possible antisemitism. But how did they know that “glorification of violence” was on the agenda?

So, the glorification of Hamas, hence of terrorism, is rightfully unacceptable, but the glorification of Netanyahu’s actions in Gaza (and in the West Bank) are perfectly fine, right? The ambassador of Israel in the UK, Tzipi Hotovely, is doing exactly that, yet nobody saw her words for what they are: a glorification of violence, more exactly the justification of genocide.

■ However, there is another problem: too many people are too stupid and too uneducated. Euronews: TikTok takes down videos promoting Osama bin Laden’s ‘letter to America’ after text went viral:

TikTok has banned the promotion of content related to a 2002 letter written by al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden after the document went viral among American users earlier this week, with many finding the text to be “mind-blowing” for what it says about their own country.

The document, which was published by The Guardian in November 2002 but has since been removed from the newspaper’s website, was written by bin Laden only months after the Saudi-born militant masterminded the 9/11 attacks in the eastern US.

In the letter, bin Laden sheds light on the ideology that pushed him to organise the attacks on the US, which destroyed New York’s Twin Towers on 11 September 2001, killed nearly 3,000 people and injured thousands of others.

According to bin Laden, the attacks were justified by the US role in supporting Israel and what he called the oppression of Palestinian people, adding that Palestinians will have to be “revenged,” the same as the people of Afghanistan.

“The creation and continuation of Israel is one of the greatest crimes, and you are the leaders of its criminals,” bin Laden argued in the letter, as quoted by Rolling Stones. “Each and every person whose hands have become polluted in the contribution towards this crime must pay its price, and pay for it heavily.”

Many young, left-wing TikTok users in America found the letter to contain a truth they were never told about the US role in the Middle East. Some said their entire viewpoint on the world had changed, and many agreed that bin Laden was “right.”

With such morons, it looks like censorship is the first thing the powers that be could think of. Ideally, nothing should be censored (I argued in the past against banning the Russian propaganda in the EU, as long as analysts were still translating and posting on Twitter the very same Russian propaganda, for people to know how Putin’s sycophants are thinking), but apparently, the risk of Islamic terrorism is perceived as fully justifying any censorship.

The future is bleak, to use a euphemism.

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Béranger - November 18th, 2023 at 1:08 PM none Comment author #91097 on The Human Shield mantra about Gaza by Homo Ludditus

■ Israel, caught with their pants down! Julian Borger, the Guardian’s world affairs editor: IDF evidence so far falls well short of al-Shifa hospital being Hamas HQ: Footage to date fails to prove Gaza complex was nerve centre for attacks on Israel, as military has claimed (also reported here):

Prior to their capture of Dar al-Shifa hospital, the Israel Defence Forces went to great lengths to depict the medical complex as a headquarters for Hamas, from where its attacks on Israel were planned.

The evidence produced so far falls well short of that. IDF videos have shown only modest collections of small arms, mostly assault rifles, recovered from the extensive medical complex.

That suggests an armed presence, but not the sort of elaborate nerve centre depicted in animated graphics presented to the media before al-Shifa was seized, portraying a network of well-equipped subterranean chambers.

Even the videos produced so far have raised questions under scrutiny. A BBC analysis found the footage of an IDF spokesperson showing the apparent discovery of a bag containing a gun behind an MRI scanning machine, had been taped hours before the arrival of the journalists to whom he was supposedly showing it.

In a video shown later, the number of guns in the bag had doubled. The IDF claimed its video of what it found at the hospital was unedited, filmed in a single take, but the BBC analysis found it had been edited.
…
“Israel has failed to provide anywhere even close to the level of evidence required to justify the narrow exception under which hospitals can be targeted under the laws of war,” said Mai El-Sadany, a human rights lawyer and the executive director of the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy, in Washington.

“In the rare case that protection is lifted, Israel would have to provide civilians with a meaningful chance to evacuate and even still, any civilians who remain in the hospital following an evacuation order would still be protected by the rules of proportionality,” El-Sadany added. “At every stage of this legal assessment, Israel has fallen abysmally short. It has provided photo and video footage that is far from commensurate with its initial claims.”

At some point, these issues could be submitted to formal judgment. Israel does not recognise the international criminal court, but the court recognises Palestine as a member, and has been conducting an investigation into possible war crimes and crimes against humanity in the occupied Palestinian territories since 2021.
…
Countries such as the UK, Germany and most importantly, the US, have resisted calls for a ceasefire on the grounds that Israel’s actions constitute legitimate self-defence. Every day without convincing evidence from the raid makes that argument harder to pursue.

The Biden administration has not only defended Israel’s operations but presented independent claims based on its own intelligence about the hospital. John Kirby, the White House national security spokesperson, framed the alleged Hamas facility there as a command “node” rather than a centre, and a possible weapons store.

The absence of evidence so far, is beginning to recall past US intelligence failures, most dramatically those preceding the Iraq invasion. It further isolates Washington on the world stage, and deepens already significant rifts within the administration itself.

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Béranger - November 18th, 2023 at 1:57 PM none Comment author #91098 on The Human Shield mantra about Gaza by Homo Ludditus

■ How Israel’s lies have spread, and how hospitals became ‘fair game’ in Gaza.

■ Information missteps have led to questions about Israel’s credibility.
Israel has released several pieces of incorrect or disputed information, leading to weakened credibility and online ridicule.

Most notably, IDF spokesman Daniel Hagari showed what he said was evidence that the Al-Rantisi hospital had been used by Hamas to detain hostages. He pointed to a piece of paper, saying that it showed a rota for guarding the captives. “Every terrorist has his own shift,” he said.

Written above the document in pen was “Al-Aqsa Flood,” Hamas’ name for its Oct. 7 assault. But Arabic speakers pointed out that the rest of the paper merely showed days of the week, with no trace of the Hamas captors’ names described by Hagari.

Elsewhere in the hospital, he pointed out curtains had been hung on a wall with no window. There was “no reason” to do this “unless you want to film hostages and deliver movies,” Hagari said.

Some people from the region pointed out that this is a common interior decor theme among Palestinian households.
…
Israel has been accused of spreading misinformation before. Last week, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s spokesperson for Arab media, Ofir Gendelman, posted to X a video that he claimed showed Gazans faking their injuries with makeup. Despite countless people correcting him that the footage was in fact from a Lebanese film, it had not been deleted as of Friday.

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Aldus - November 19th, 2023 at 9:31 AM none Comment author #91116 on The Human Shield mantra about Gaza by Homo Ludditus

O perspectivă ce aduce și nuanțează niște elemente noi:

Israel-Hamas War: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO).

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- Béranger - November 22nd, 2023 at 8:12 PM none Comment author #91143 on The Human Shield mantra about Gaza by Homo Ludditus
  
  The great Israeli democracy has censored it: John Oliver’s HBO show went dark in Israel because of ‘technical mishap’: TV firm.
  
  Reply
Béranger - November 25th, 2023 at 8:12 PM none Comment author #91189 on The Human Shield mantra about Gaza by Homo Ludditus

■ However little of the following “investigation” were true, the Hannibal Directive and the “neighbor procedure” (or policy) are real and known since decades. So what you should ask yourself is this: if Israel’s government and military don’t give a shit if they kill Jews alongside Palestinian combatants, how are we to believe that they did “whatever they could” to minimize the civil casualties while bombing Gaza?

The purpose of the manipulative “selective” screening of the “documentary about the October 7 atrocities” (screened for some Israeli journalists; then for 300 UN diplomats; also in a “secret session” of the Parliament of Romania) would then be a way to reinforce the narrative that Israel is always a victim, no matter how indiscriminately its army kills civilians. Ironically, this is exactly what they say about the Palestinians who justify terrorism and other violent actions against Israel: that they seize upon the fact that they’re victims of an occupation, of discrimination, and of a blockade.

SIDE NOTE: This being said, nothing justifies the antisemitism! Once again, collective punishment is anything but justice!

VIDEO: What really happened on October 7?

The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal joins Chris Hedges to discuss his investigation into Israel’s indiscriminate use of heavy weapons against Israeli citizens on October 7, and the shock-and-awe campaign of misinformation it subsequently employed to create political space for its brutal assault on Gaza.

[Editor’s note: Since the publication of this interview, an Israeli police investigation has confirmed that Israeli Apache helicopters killed numerous Israeli citizens at and around the Nova electronic music festival, and that Hamas did not know in advance about the festival. The Israeli government has also acknowledged that 200 of those it counted as Israeli casualties were, in fact, Hamas militants killed by its forces on October 7, and that it may have marketed images of their charred bodies to the public as proof of Hamas’ brutality.]

[EXCERPTS:]

Chris Hedges: There’s growing evidence that in the chaotic fighting that took place once Hamas militants entered Israel on October 7, the Israeli military decided to target not only Hamas fighters but the Israeli captives with them. Tuval Escapa, a member of the security team for Kibbutz Be’eri, told the Israeli press, that he set up a hotline to coordinate between kibbutz residents and the Israeli army. Escapa told the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, that his desperation began to set in. “The commanders in the field made difficult decisions, including shelling houses on their occupants in order to eliminate the terrorists along with the hostages.” The newspaper reported that Israeli commanders were, “Compelled to request an aerial strike against its own facility inside the Erez Crossing to Gaza in order to repulse the terrorists who had seized control.”

That base housed Israeli Civil Administration officers and soldiers. Israel, in 1986, instituted a military policy called the Hannibal Directive, apparently named for the Carthaginian general who poisoned himself rather than be captured by the Romans following the capture of two Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah. The directive is designed to prevent Israeli troops from falling into enemy hands through the maximum use of force, even at the cost of killing the captured soldiers and civilians. The directive was executed during the 2014 Israeli assault on Gaza, known as Operation Protective Edge. Hamas fighters on August 1, 2014, captured an Israeli soldier, Lieutenant Hadar Golden. In response, Israel dropped more than 2,000 bombs, missiles, and shells on the area where he was being held. Golden was killed along with over 100 Palestinian civilians. The directive was supposedly rescinded in 2016.

Max Blumenthal: … in the face of so much death and destruction caused by Israel’s military in Gaza … the Israeli military and the Prime Minister’s office, Netanyahu’s office, are recycling October 7 atrocities and they’re also introducing new deceptions in order to try to keep the media’s lens focused on October 7.

… We have all these new stories about babies baked in ovens, we’ve heard stories about babies cut out of mother’s wombs by so-called Hamas terrorists, rape, gang rape, women after being taken, gang raped in the streets in Gaza City. All of these lies were spun out. The 40 beheaded babies repeated by Biden, who claimed he’d seen photographs. All of these lies were repeated and put forward in order to give Israel the latitude to carry out this genocidal assault that we’re now witnessing. And we can see Biden was so stunned by the propaganda that was being pushed on him by Netanyahu’s office and the pro-Israel media that he immediately caved. Tony Blinken in his recent Senate testimony also repeated some of these lies.

… lies that went beyond the actual killings and atrocities that were committed by gunmen from the Gaza Strip on October 7 that have made it possible for Israel to target and exterminate hundreds of entire families in the Gaza Strip as well as hospitals and medical centers.

And the official story, which has been told to Americans and Israelis, is that Hamas “terrorists” stormed into Southern Israel and began shooting and killing people at random. Then burned them alive, tied up entire families in their homes, and then burned them all, somehow, melted cars and burned people in their cars as they were trying to flee, and carried out this gigantic mass shooting. It does appear clear that many Israeli non-combatants were shot by Hamas gunmen but that’s where the official story stops.

… Israel used disproportionate force on its own citizens in order to dislodge a politically driven military offensive by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which was aimed at extracting political concessions from the state of Israel, which had been besieging the Gaza Strip for 15 years.

It’s important to understand that the main goal in this Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad military offensive was to gather as many captives as possible, particularly Israeli soldiers, in order to trigger the prisoner exchange that was witnessed when Gilad Shalit in 2011 was released; the Israeli soldier who was taken in 2006, who was operating a tank outside Gaza, was taken in exchange for 1,027 Palestinian prisoners, including the current prime minister of Gaza, Yahya Sinwar.

So this entire Al Aqsa Flood operation is understood against the backdrop of the Gilad Shalit prisoner exchange. So gunmen were sent with detailed maps to population centers and to military bases. In the military bases, they were obviously given instructions to attack and kill Israeli soldiers who were maintaining the siege of Gaza. Much of the Gaza division, which has also been responsible for so many massacres inside Gaza over the years, was wiped out.

The Erez Crossing… It is the nexus, the nerve center of the siege of Gaza. It’s not only where you cross through if you want to enter Gaza and return to, or if you’re a resident of Gaza you’ll have to pass through there to get medical treatment outside. It’s the home of the civil administration, the bureaucracy of the panopticon style occupation of Gaza. So that was immediately overrun by gunman as a military target, and with all these soldiers inside, the head of the Gaza division actually went into an underground bunker. He recounted this story to Haaretz and made the tough decision to bomb Erez Crossing and they sent hellfire missiles onto the Erez Crossing from Apache helicopters. And this was basically the beginning of the Iron Swords Operation that Netanyahu declared several days later, which is essentially the carpet bombing of Gaza.

But Apache helicopters were scrambled in the morning. The assault began around like 6:00AM at daybreak, and by 10:30AM, according to Israeli media accounts, all of the special force’s commando teams, the well-trained Hamas teams had already left. By that point there were two squadrons of Apache helicopters that had been scrambled, and they were not even at full strength until 12:00PM. So you have action at Erez Crossing, then you have Kibbutz Be’eri, which is the site that registered the most casualties of non-combatants. Something like 150 among the confirmed death toll printed at Haaretz and most of them, they were not soldiers. These were people who were caught in crossfire, Hamas gunman had tried to take them captive, and there were standoffs in their homes.

And by the time Israeli special forces arrived, many of those standoffs had either ended or they ended them simply by shelling people’s homes with tanks. According to Yasmin Porat, who had fled the electronic music festival — Which had come under attack, which was held right between Kibbutz Be’eri and Kibbutz Rahim, which also have military bases essentially embedded within them — it was held on the road between these two kibbutzim, and came under attack. Many captives were taken. This woman, Yasmin Porat, fled to Kibbutz Be’eri, went into a home with her partner, and then they were then taken captive momentarily by gunmen.

She recounted to Israeli National Radio that when the Israeli special forces arrived, they started shooting everyone and that most of the captives, along with the Hamas gunmen, were caught in the crossfire. And that everyone was killed except for her and her captor, who used her as a human shield in order to guarantee his own safety when he surrendered. She saw her own partner, whose hands had been bound by her captors, get shot by Israeli special forces, and then they lobbed two tank shells into the home that she had been in.

So if you look at the pictures of Kibbutz Be’eri, they look like the homes in Gaza that I’ve seen, or you may have seen that came under shelling from Israeli tanks and Israeli artillery. There’s no way that Hamas gunman could have done that much structural damage to this entire kibbutz with the small arms that they were equipped with: Kalashnikovs and some RPGs. I24, Israeli foreign ministry sponsored propaganda network, actually went to this kibbutz on a guided tour and said they saw tank tracks everywhere. It’s obvious what happened there and it was stated clearly by the security coordinator of Kibbutz Be’eri, who you quoted at the top of this interview. He was on a hotline with the Israeli military command and they decided to shell houses on top of their occupants, including Israeli civilians.

Now, why were they doing this? There’s the Hannibal Directive, this once secret directive that was introduced after Israel entered into a major prisoner swap with I believe the PFLPGC, which operates out of Syria in exchange for Ahmed Jabril and hundreds of other prisoners in order to get back some Israeli soldiers who had been taken in the Lebanese Civil War. It was only three. So this is a politically painful prisoner swap, and the Israeli public was furious, and the right-wing politicians were furious. So they introduced this directive named for the Carthaginian General Hannibal — who took his own life, he took poison rather than being taken captive by the enemy — and it authorizes Israeli commanders to kill their own soldiers if they’re taken captive by the enemy in order to prevent such a prisoner swap from taking place. And it was used again, this is when it got exposed in 2014 — August 1, 2014, what’s known as Black Friday in Southern Gaza. A lieutenant named Hadar Golden was taken by Hamas fighters. He was in the field, Israel broke a ceasefire, and started attacking around the southern city of Rafa. And the Israeli Military Command authorized airstrikes, artillery strikes, and tank fire to bring the full wrath of the Israeli military onto this area in order to make sure that this soldier did not get taken alive. Over 100 people in Rafa were killed in this massacre. The morgues were filling up. It was hideous. The Kuwaiti Hospital, which is now under attack again, and because the mortuaries were so full of bodies on this day, they actually had to bring in ice cream coolers to store the bodies of babies.

But back to the Hannibal directive. We have to question whether it was put into play on October 7. Because we not only have the Erez Crossing where many soldiers were killed — and if you look at the aftermath, the roof was clearly brought down. There’s serious structural damage to the roof of Erez Crossing — you have Kibbutz Be’eri where there was tank shelling, and then you have these Apache helicopter pilots in the air who were stating in their testimonies in Hebrew to Israeli media that they had no intelligence, no way of distinguishing civilian from combatant on the ground. And yet they were told to empty their tanks, completely unload their ammo, then head back to the base, get filled up again, reload, and then go shoot as many cars and people as they can on the ground. Pure chaos.

These testimonies have been totally ignored, by the way, by Western media. Were they encouraged to kill captives or shoot cars that they thought contained captives? We don’t know. What we do know is there were orders from the top to kill Israeli civilians if Hamas gunmen were around them in order to get the gunmen. And it’s like the same military doctrine that’s being employed in Gaza: any civilian is a target if they are the “terrorist’s nextdoor neighbor.”

Israel actually calls it the Neighbor Policy. They don’t know any other doctrine. They don’t have any other means of targeting and they weren’t prepared, obviously, for this military onslaught. So they went to their core doctrine of bombing everything in sight.

That brings us to the third scenario. We talked about Erez Crossing and Kibbutz Be’eri, then you have the chaos of the Nova Electronic Music Festival. And it’s there that it appears clear that after a lot of these Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad commando teams had left — this is an element that’s left out in a lot of western media — many people from Gaza started streaming in, including lower level characters from the armed factions who may have had weapons but weren’t part of the operation or weren’t trained, onlookers, people who wanted to see what Israel looked like, to see the land that their families had been kicked off. And there were some heinous killings, and you could see actual captives being taken by guys on motorcycles who didn’t even have weapons. They were grabbing people. A lot of this happened around the Nova Music Festival. There was a lot of shooting between festival security guards and various gunmen, and a lot of people were killed, but many people were fleeing the festival by car. There is video of some Hamas gunmen stopping cars and shooting people.

But then you have all of these images that the Israeli Foreign Ministry put out of cars that are completely melted, and their corpses inside are charred. And those to me are telltale signs of hellfire missile strikes from Apache helicopters, and the Apache crews, the squadrons. They put out video afterwards of themselves shooting cars, hitting cars with hellfire missiles, and shooting people who were pedestrians walking on the ground with cannon fire. We don’t know who those people were, but if you look, a lot of the cars were heading back to Gaza. So they were very likely cars of people from Gaza who may have been taking captives and so many captives or would be captives were killed. Was one of them Shawnee Luke? This woman who the Israeli Foreign Ministry has been making such a big deal of who was a festival party goer, who was attractive, and was a German citizen. There’s some video of her being taken. They say they found a skull fragment from her. Was she in a car that was hit by a hellfire missile? Unclear. But it’s very clear that many of these cars were hit by Apache helicopters and the helicopter pilots said they had no idea who was in them. They were shooting people also on the other side in Gaza after they entered, by the afternoon of October 7. It’s very clear that many people were killed.

Many Israelis were killed by Israeli forces, along with many active duty, uniformed Israeli soldiers who were actively engaged in the siege of Gaza who were combatants.

Some of these images which were disseminated by the IDF have been removed. … The Israeli Foreign Ministry has a website called hamas-massacre.com. And the UN Ambassador — this unhinged character named Gilad Iradan, who used to be in charge of Israel’s meddling operations to attack college students who were organizing to boycott, divest and sanction Israel, or forming Palestine solidarity student groups — Gilad Iradan whipped out this QR code at his UN address, about two weeks ago, and the QR code was supposed to lead to a Google Drive folder that contained all these images of charred cars, melted bodies, and all sorts of other atrocities that Hamas had committed. But all the pictures eventually disappeared.

… But it’s worked. It’s been very successful in convincing Brussels and Washington that Hamas was ISIS. That is Israel’s message: Hamas is ISIS, they’re irrational, they aim to simply kill Jews, they don’t have any political demands, and the only response to them is the response that the US waged on ISIS.

… a character named Ellie Beir appears on stage, who is a volunteer rescuer and a religious nationalist orthodox Jew from New York, who is living in Israel and had arrived as a first responder in October 7 through a group called United Hatzalah. And he declares that a baby had been burned in an oven, had been baked in an oven by Hamas “terrorists.”

He actually had not seen any baby in an oven. It was someone named Ellie Moskowitz, who is from his first responder United Hatzalah team. And Ellie Moskowitz had not seen any baby baked in an oven. He said that he found a small bag with contents of body parts that had been apparently pressed against a heating element. And these body parts were displayed by Netanyahu and filtered out on Twitter and sent to influencers by the Israeli Foreign Ministry in the PM’s office after Netanyahu was embarrassed by the retraction of the story about 40 beheaded babies. So if we go back to October 8, CNN and Biden begin telling this phony story about 40 beheaded babies, they are both forced to retract, Netanyahu puts out an image of some burned body parts, says it’s a baby, and then flash forward to this fundraiser in Las Vegas where these first responders are saying that there was a baby baked in an oven based on body parts they had in a bag which were pressed against a heating element.

Now, put two and two together. What heating element could have created that much heat to char a body part, which didn’t even belong to a baby, but was put forward by Netanyahu to save face? It was likely a Hellfire missile and body parts that had been blown to bits by a Hellfire missile, which were likely an Israeli citizen but could have been someone from Gaza, are being put forward as an Israeli baby.

But if you look at the confirmed death count, only one Israeli baby was killed. It’s horrible and tragic. It was a 10-month-old baby named Millie Cohen, who was accidentally shot by a Hamas gunmen in an exchange of fire. And more reporting will come out about this, but you can look at the confirmed death toll at Haaretz. There’s no other baby. There’s no baby burned in an oven, no one’s even saying that.

So what we’re looking at is the most horrific, lurid propaganda, which is bogus, all derives from apparent friendly fire, and is being spun in order to justify the actual beheading of babies with missiles in the Gaza Strip and the systematic extermination of an entire society. A senior Israeli security source told Yedioth Ahronoth, the top Israeli tabloid, that 20,000 people had been killed in Gaza. I personally think that could be an overcount, and they’re trying to boast to the Israeli public about how many people they’ve killed to satisfy the bloodlust of the public after October 7. But if that’s true, that’s like 1% of the entire population, which definitely qualifies as genocide. So this propaganda has been used to justify the realization of the lie.

Many Israelis who are involved in this military operation or who are seen torturing people in the West Bank, workers in the West Bank on camera, they’re reenacting the lurid propaganda that they believe to be true about October 7, and it could lead to regional war. Because the genocidal fury has so overwhelmed Israeli society, the propagandas, the shock and awe campaign, has prevented Brussels and Washington from being able to put any check on it.

What do you think this means for the hostages that are in Gaza? That’s a great question, and one of the hostages answered it. She appears to be from one of the kibbutzim that had the most captives taken, it’s called near Nir Oz, and that’s where two of the elderly captives were released came from. And it’s a kibbutz that has many people more from the left of the Israeli political spectrum who would be critics of Netanyahu, come from. So he may not be — Netanyahu, his government, and the Israeli population — very favorably disposed to them. But one of these hostages, an older woman, appeared on camera from wherever she was being held inside Gaza and excoriated Netanyahu, and said, “you have no desire to get us. What are you doing? Have a ceasefire and negotiate for our release and get us out here. You’ve already killed 50 of us.” And that is correct. At least 50 captives have already been killed in these blitzkrieg-like Israeli bombings where they’re using 2,000 pound bombs and Mark 82 bunker buster bombs.

It would be a miracle if they made it out alive. Everyone wants them to make it out alive, whether they’re on the anti-Zionist side, or …

Because what about this operation suggests that they’re actually trying to rescue hostages? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. And the political dynamics that have been put in play by assaulting everyone in the Gaza Strip, are sending the message that no negotiations are possible whatsoever.

… So the only objective that can be put forward, which has been reinforced by Tony Blinken, is regime change in Gaza. And regime change in Gaza means months and months of grinding, genocidal war in which no captive could possibly survive. Isn’t it straightforward? They took the captives because they wanted a prisoner exchange? Netanyahu could empty the Israeli prisons of four or five, six, I don’t know, 10,000 Palestinian prisoners, and they would get there. The hostages would go home, wouldn’t they?

This isn’t about Hamas per se. Hamas does have the political mandate to carry out an armed struggle. That’s why it was elected in 2006, including by people who are not necessarily Islamists outside of its base. They actually won cities across the West Bank. It wasn’t that they won Gaza, they won all of Palestine that was able to vote. So their mandate is to do armed struggle to resist where the Fatah and the Palestinian authority basically gave up, and they’re going to continue doing that. But Palestinian armed struggle has always been driven by political demands that were essentially rational and were related to ending ethnic cleansing and ending the military occupation of Palestinians. The leadership of Hamas put forward clear political demands at the beginning of Al Aqsa Flood as they did in 2014 during Operation Cast Lead. And they relate to preventing the incursions of fanatical religious nationalists to the Al Aqsa Compound, the third holiest site in Islam, they relate to ending the siege of Gaza so that they can actually determine they can enjoy some sovereignty. They can actually fish in their own seas. They can have an economy, they can visit Jerusalem. Emptying the Israeli prisons, where something like 1,500 Palestinians are now held without charges, 700 Palestinian children pass in and out of these prisons every year. There are currently at least 150, now there’s probably 200 Palestinian children being held in these jails. They’re hostages. They’ve been kidnapped. …

And so it relates to the whole occupation. And the only way that they could trigger some negotiation, they believe, was by taking captives, because all diplomatic channels had been cut off. The entire West had declared Hamas a terrorist organization that could not be negotiated with. So the only way to spur negotiations is through violence. And that’s what they did.

And what they’ve done is forced the essential dynamics of Zionism into an accelerated mode. Because Zionism, as a settler colonial movement based on an anachronistic ideology, Heron Volk ideology from turn of the century Europe, has demonstrated its unwillingness to accommodate with the native population as it seeks to consolidate its settler-colonial presence. And so it must move towards genocide as all other settler-colonial movements have done.

And so that’s where we’re at right now, is the phase of whether Israel will be able to finish the job that it began in 1948 or not. And any negotiations that could have taken place with a rational authority are off limits.

This is also an obvious failure of American and Western leadership to recognize not only what they’re dealing with in the Gaza Strip, which is yet another Palestinian faction that is using violence to spur political momentum because all diplomatic means had been cut off for them, but also what they’re dealing with in Israel. Where they’re dealing with a fundamentally genocidal political movement, and a genocidal society. This Israeli society is primed for genocide.

… I don’t think Israel will stop before it believes that it has finished the job that it began in 1948.

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Béranger - November 26th, 2023 at 12:40 AM none Comment author #91190 on The Human Shield mantra about Gaza by Homo Ludditus

■ Norman Finkelstein: “Israel wants to shove the entire population of Gaza in a place the size of the Los Angeles Airport.”

Norm Finkelstein GOES OFF: Israel, Hillary, Human Shields & Ben Shapiro.

Finkelstein, born to parents who are both Jewish Holocaust survivors, is an American political scientist and activist focusing on the politics of the Holocaust and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. In 2008, he was banned from entering Israel for 10 years.

He criticized the 1982 invasion of Lebanon by Israel, in which, he maintains, Israel killed 15 to 20,000 Lebanese and Palestinians, overwhelmingly civilians.

Regarding the indiscriminate bombing in Gaza, which he names “targeted murder,” because “70% of those killed in Gaza are children and women,” he says: “Israel mows the lawn in Gaza.”

He mentions previous operations of “mowing the lawn”:
2008 Dec. 27 – 2009 Jan. 18: Operation Cast Lead, Israel killed 1,400 people, 350 of whom were children, demolished 6,300 homes.
2012: Operation Pillar of Defense.
2014: Operation Protective Edge, 2,200 people killed, 550 of them children, 18,000 homes vaporized.

Under International humanitarian law, the blockade of Gaza is illegal, it’s a war crime, it is collective punishment, a war crime in fact since it’s lasted nearly 20 years, it began in January 2006.

You couldn’t find a single word by me in which I condone what happened on October 7th. I have repeatedly said I won’t condone, but I won’t condemn. Now, you might say that that doesn’t sound consistent. If you acknowledge atrocities have occurred, then how can you not condemn the perpetrators of those atrocities, and I do see a logical problem there. And that’s why, when I was trying to think through this question, I went back and looked at how the abolitionists, those white folks, not entirely white folks, obviously they were black abolitionists, but the celebrated white abolitionists … how they reckoned morally. The Nat Turner rebellion, in which, as I said, 60 white people were hacked to pieces, the heads of babies were chopped off, that’s a fact, and William Lloyd Garrison in the journal he edited, the Liberator, he had an article in that Turner and he acknowledged atrocities occurred, but you can and look through that, read every sentence of that article, he does not condemn the turn of rebellion, he couldn’t, he couldn’t in morally good conscience, because every day of his life he bore witness to the degradation, to the humiliation, to the laceration of the black slaves, he bore witness to the auction blocks where these slaves were measured, examined and sold off, and in good conscience he couldn’t find it in him to condemn; he condemned the atrocities for sure, but he would not condemn Nat Turner.

And when I read that I have to say, it morally resonated with me, because unlike a lot of people who are now weighing in and judging the young men who burst free the walls of Gaza concentration camp, and unlike like myself, who spent 40 years reading those human rights reports on what has been done to the people of Gaza, they’re all quick to pass judgment on those 1,500 maybe 2,000, we really don’t know, men who burst free. I in good conscience could not. The difference between myself and others is one, the knowledge. I find it very painful to this day, when I read reread my own book, my own book, in preparation for the past month, to speaking on what happened on October 7, my … in disgust at the whole world passing judgment on this godforsaken people. So, if my position seems contradictory, it’s, number one, because I don’t think it’s an easy moral question to resolve, and number two, unlike everyone else, I don’t have in my mind this image of ‘Hamas, this evil criminal organization’; in my mind I see the young people with no past, no present, no future; periodically this satanic power mows the lawn of Gaza, kills their mother, or kills their father, or kills their sister, or kills their child.

Would I on October 7th not be filled with rage, would I on October 7th not be determined to exact revenge for that horror, that nightmare that had been inflicted on me for no reason on God’s Earth, from the day I was born, you know the biblical adage, ‘there for the grace of God go I’? I don’t know how I would have reacted, and I won’t pretend to be better than the people of Gaza. I won’t.”

Of course, I disagree with Finkelstein on the acceptability of indiscriminate fury in certain contexts. Emancipation of slaves, of Palestinians, or even the French Revolution: no, all kinds of massacres are unacceptable.

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Béranger - December 1st, 2023 at 1:40 PM none Comment author #91285 on The Human Shield mantra about Gaza by Homo Ludditus

■ The Hungarian-Canadian physician and former Zionist Gabor Maté (“Scattered Minds: A New Look at the Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder”; “When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress”; “The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture”) now supports the people of Palestine even whilst having a Jewish family and being a Holocaust survivor:

Israel-Hamas War: Gabor Mate vs Piers Morgan On Palestine and Gaza | The Full Interview.

Indeed, while mentioning the Hamas charter, let’s not forget the Likud charter: “between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.”

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Béranger - December 5th, 2023 at 2:26 AM none Comment author #91351 on The Human Shield mantra about Gaza by Homo Ludditus

■ Israel’s new theory: UNWRA = Hamas = ISIS (UNWRA being the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East.) Here: Troops in Gaza find dozens of rockets under UNRWA boxes.

A rabid comment:

Israel military found the vest of a Hamas terrorist next to his UNRWA 🇺🇳 identification badge. 95% of the UN workers in Gaza are Hamas people. Helping the UN is helping Hamas. UN vehicles transport Hamas terrorists and UN schools and compounds are sheltering Hamas militants.

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Béranger - December 7th, 2023 at 12:42 AM none Comment author #91393 on The Human Shield mantra about Gaza by Homo Ludditus

■ The spokesperson for the United States Department of State suggested that Hamas doesn’t want to release the female hostages so that they don’t tell that they have been abused and raped. I don’t deny that such situations might exist (after all, taking hostages is a hostile act), but here’s a funny thing about sexual abuse in Israel:

A former US State Department official, Josh Paul, said Israel declared a charity a terrorist entity after it raised allegations about the rape of a 13-year-old boy in an Israeli prison. Paul made the comments while speaking with Christiane Amanpour on CNN on Monday.

According to Paul, the charity’s allegations were believed to be credible by the State Department, who then passed them on to the Israeli government. Israel then responded by raiding the charity’s offices, taking their computers and labelling them a terrorist entity.

The former State Department official resigned in October over moral objections to the US deciding to transfer arms to Israel during its assault on Gaza.

■ Otherwise, Tzahal has become a “Mass Assassination Factory”: Israel Using AI to Generate Targets in Gaza, Increasing Civilian Toll:

The report’s author, journalist Yuval Abraham, has found that the IDF’s increasing use of AI is partly a response to previous operations in Gaza when Israel quickly ran out of military targets, causing it to loosen its constraints on attacks that could kill civilians. In other words, the “civilian devastation that is happening right now in Gaza” is the result of a “war policy that has a very loose interpretation of what a military target is.” This targeting of private homes and residences to kill alleged combatants means that “when a child is killed in Gaza, it’s because somebody made a decision it was worth it.” It has turned the Israeli military into a “mass assassination factory,” with a “total disregard for Palestinian civil life,” continues Abraham, who also notes that, as an Israeli journalist, his reporting is still subject to military censors.

■ Meanwhile, Israel orders more evacuations in Gaza but Palestinians have nowhere to go:

Some two million people – most of the territory’s population – are stuck inside southern and central Gaza, where Israel’s ground offensive is now moving.

Israeli warplanes heavily bombarded an area around Khan Younis in southern Gaza on Monday as the military ordered mass evacuations from the city in the face of a widening ground offensive.

Palestinians are being pushed into a progressively shrinking portion of the besieged territory, raising sharp questions about what will happen to them.

There’s only one thing I can say to that:

Israel, go fuck yourself!

You are on the same level of abjection with Hitler’s Third Reich, with Stalin’s Soviet Union, and with Putin’s dictatorship.

You are a failed state, and a murderous one. If you’re a democracy, then I’m the Pope.

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Béranger - December 12th, 2023 at 11:43 AM none Comment author #91505 on The Human Shield mantra about Gaza by Homo Ludditus

So Israel actually wants to kill Yahya Sinwar, and for that reason the IDF has killed roughly 18,000 Palestinians in Gaza?

When the US vetoed a United Nations resolution calling for a ceasefire last Friday (with the UK abstaining), they revealed the hypocrisy of them pretending to care about civilian deaths, no matter what Blinken, Biden, and Kamala Harris ever said. The Human Rights Watch (HRW) was right to say that the US risks “complicity in war crimes” by continuing to provide Israel with weapons and “diplomatic cover” as it commits “atrocities” in Gaza.

Last week, Israel has designated the unique “safe zone” (if at all) for the entire population of Gaza: Al Mawasi, having 6.5 square kilometers!

Fuck you, Israel.

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Béranger - December 19th, 2023 at 2:18 AM none Comment author #91646 on The Human Shield mantra about Gaza by Homo Ludditus

■ How ridiculous is that? Israel hostages: IDF says it mistakenly killed three men held in Gaza.

You know the story. Does anyone still believe that the IDF “made all the efforts” to minimize the civilian casualties among the civilians in Gaza when they managed to kill Israeli hostages? They were bare chested and carrying a white flag when they were shot, so you have the answer to a question you should have asked: what would the IDF do, should Hamas surrender? “Kill them all” is the answer. How about non-Hamas Palestinians who surrender? Who cares? They even killed their own Jews!

■ How Israel jails hundreds of Palestinians without charge. The great Middle-East democracy, right.

■ December 17: The head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) has said of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza: “By any account, I haven’t seen anything of this scale.” Philippe Lazzarini went on to say in an interview with Al Jazeera: “Everything is absolutely unprecedented and staggering. The number of people who have been killed … in 40 days, more women and children killed than the number of civilians in the Ukraine war.”

■ Masha Gessen made controversial comments in an article published in the New Yorker, writing that Gaza is “like a Jewish ghetto in an Eastern European country occupied by Nazi Germany.”

Gessen, who was born Jewish in the Soviet Union, has been an outspoken critic of Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, and is critical of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.
…
German leaders have repeatedly stressed their support for the country’s Jews and for Israel as they have denounced antisemitic incidents.
The nonbinary and trans author was originally due to receive the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought on Friday in the city hall of Bremen, in northwest Germany, but the sponsoring organization, the Heinrich Böll Foundation, and the Senate of the city of Bremen withdrew from the ceremony.
…
In Gessen’s article, titled “In the Shadow of the Holocaust,” published on 9 December, … Gessen condemned the atrocities committed by Hamas in the October 7 attack, but also is critical of Israel’s relationship with Palestinians, writing that Gaza is “like a Jewish ghetto in an Eastern European country occupied by Nazi Germany.”

“The ghetto is being liquidated,” the article added.
…
The Böll Foundation, affiliated with Germany’s Green party, called the comparison “unacceptable.”

A jury decided in the summer to award Gessen, and the foundation said it wasn’t canceling the award itself.

From Masha’s article:

There are now dozens of antisemitism commissioners throughout Germany. They have no single job description or legal framework for their work, but much of it appears to consist of publicly shaming those they see as antisemitic, often for “de-singularizing the Holocaust” or for criticizing Israel. Hardly any of these commissioners are Jewish. Indeed, the proportion of Jews among their targets is certainly higher. These have included the German-Israeli sociologist Moshe Zuckermann, who was targeted for supporting the B.D.S. [Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions] movement, as was the South African Jewish photographer Adam Broomberg.
…
The B.D.S. movement, which is inspired by the boycott movement against South African apartheid, seeks to use economic pressure to secure equal rights for Palestinians in Israel, end the occupation, and promote the return of Palestinian refugees. Many people find the B.D.S. movement problematic because it does not affirm the right of the Israeli state to exist—and, indeed, some B.D.S. supporters envision a total undoing of the Zionist project. Still, one could argue that associating a nonviolent boycott movement, whose supporters have explicitly positioned it as an alternative to armed struggle, with the Holocaust is the very definition of Holocaust relativism. But, according to the logic of German memory policy, because B.D.S. is directed against Jews—although many of the movement’s supporters are also Jewish—it is antisemitic. One could also argue that the inherent conflation of Jews with the state of Israel is antisemitic, even that it meets the I.H.R.A. definition of antisemitism.
…
Germany’s anti-B.D.S. resolution, for example, has had a distinct chilling effect on the country’s cultural sphere. The city of Aachen took back a ten-thousand-euro prize it had awarded to the Lebanese-American artist Walid Raad; the city of Dortmund and the jury for the fifteen-thousand-euro Nelly Sachs Prize similarly rescinded the honor that they had bestowed on the British-Pakistani writer Kamila Shamsie. The Cameroonian political philosopher Achille Mbembe had his invitation to a major festival questioned after the federal antisemitism commissioner accused him of supporting B.D.S. and “relativizing the Holocaust.” (Mbembe has said that he is not connected with the boycott movement; the festival itself was cancelled because of covid.) The director of Berlin’s Jewish Museum, Peter Schäfer, resigned in 2019 after being accused of supporting B.D.S.—he did not, in fact, support the boycott movement, but the museum had posted a link, on Twitter, to a newspaper article that included criticism of the resolution. The office of Benjamin Netanyahu had also asked Merkel to cut the museum’s funding because, in the Israeli Prime Minister’s opinion, its exhibition on Jerusalem paid too much attention to the city’s Muslims. (Germany’s B.D.S. resolution may be unique in its impact but not in its content: a majority of U.S. states now have laws on the books that equate the boycott with antisemitism and withhold state funding from people and institutions that support it.)

What a wonderful world, that of the Big Democracies!

■ Susan Neiman, American philosopher and writer, about the way in which German guilt about the Holocaust blocks the capacity to feel empathy for Palestinians now dying in Gaza: Historical Reckoning Gone Haywire.

■ A translation from an opinion article by Lelia Munteanu:

Hamas counts, according to Israeli estimates, 30,000 fighters. How many more civilians will die before they are all killed? How many Israeli soldiers?
And how will we know that Hamas will not be replaced by another Hamas?

I have said it before and I say it, let it be said: the two-state solution, demanded by the overwhelming majority of world leaders, cannot be achieved. First of all, the far-right government in Jerusalem does not want it. It cannot even be sketched theoretically on the map: on the territory of the West Bank there are Jewish settlements, extremely radicalized starting from October 7, supported morally, but also logistically, by the Executive. On the other hand, what will be left of Gaza but a pile of ruins and an unlivable environment?

Something will remain, in the minds of the children and young people, who and how many will survive, something that cannot be flooded like the tunnels, with sea water: the consciousness of belonging and the desire for freedom. Which, in conditions of despair and madness, can turn into a new October 7.

■ Israel ‘still far from toppling Hamas’ in Gaza Strip, expert says

“We have seen extensive damage,” said Dr. Michael Milstein, head of the Palestinian Studies Forum at the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies. “But Israel is still far from toppling Hamas. The majority of its fighters are still alive; it still possesses rockets.”
…
“For Hamas, resistance is much more important than governance. As long as it has weapons and fighters, it doesn’t care whether it can govern Gaza or hand out humanitarian aid.”
…
“There is a gap between what is being described by the political level as Hamas being on the verge of collapse, but the countdown to the end of Hamas is premature,” said Milstein. “Even after Sinwar will be assassinated, there will still be resistance.”
…
“There are so many goals on the way,” said Milstein. “There is a lot of expectation in the Israeli public, but this will be a long and exhausting war. We will not see a mass surrender of Hamas, and there will not be a specific point in time in which Israel will be able to say it has reached its goal.”

With such a heavy price being paid by both sides, neither side will truly be victorious, though both will surely strive to stake this claim.

■ On YT, Chris Hedges, about “The Genocide in Gaza”.

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Béranger - December 28th, 2023 at 12:40 AM none Comment author #91890 on The Human Shield mantra about Gaza by Homo Ludditus

Francesca Albanese, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories (she’s an Italian international lawyer and academic, Affiliate Scholar at the Institute for the Study of International Migration at Georgetown University, and a Senior Advisor on Migration and Forced Displacement for the think tank Arab Renaissance for Democracy and Development), speaking for Al Jazeera English:

Israel has devastated Gaza. Israel has destroyed Gaza, and we are still blaming the U.N.? I still wonder how the international community gives credit to Israel and how international media still give credit to what Israeli leaders, political and military leaders say. Israel should be held accountable for what it does.

Israel has not done anything to keep civilians safe. Let me give you three examples:

– First of all, Israel has used ammunitions that are meant to create huge destruction. Even The Washington Post and The New York Times have given a sense, have produced investigative reports saying that Israel has used over 80 days the level of ammunitions that are equal to more than two nuclear bombs in the Gaza Strip.

– Second, Israel has been targeting hospitals, which are sacred, sacred under international humanitarian law. And again, the health system is devastated, which is not just critical in itself, it’s critical in order to provide support to people who are injured at a time of war.

– And third, Israel has arrested and detained medical personnel, doctors, nurses, abusing them and even torturing them. How can these be explained?

This is why special rapporteurs have denounced through and through the risk of genocide, and the health system speaks clearly to the intent to destroy the Palestinian people in Gaza.

This was an excerpt from a longer interview.

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Béranger - April 10th, 2024 at 3:11 PM none Comment author #94548 on The Human Shield mantra about Gaza by Homo Ludditus

That’s an odd place to post this update, but I’ve cited Finkelstein here, so I’ll cite him again.

● Al Jazeera English: Norman Finkelstein on Gaza: The US could have stopped Israel on day one | UpFront (Apr 5, 2024)

For context on the person, Wikipedia:

Finkelstein was born in New York City to Jewish Holocaust-survivor parents. … Finkelstein rose to prominence in 2000 after writing his book The Holocaust Industry, in which he claims that some exploit the memory of the Holocaust as an “ideological weapon” to provide Israel “immunity to criticism”. A critic of Israel, he was denied entry to Israel and banned from entering the country for ten years in 2008. Finkelstein has called Israel the “Jewish supremacist state”, and views it as committing the crime of apartheid against the Palestinian people. …

When asked [in 2009] how he, as the son of Holocaust survivors, felt about Israel’s operation in Gaza, Finkelstein replied: “It has been a long time since I felt any emotional connection with the state of Israel, which relentlessly and brutally and inhumanly keeps these vicious, murderous wars. It is a vandal state. There is a Russian writer who once described vandal states as Genghis Khan with a telegraph. Israel is Genghis Khan with a computer. I feel no emotion of affinity with that state. I have some good friends and their families there, and of course I would not want any of them to be hurt. That said, sometimes I feel that Israel has come out of the boils of the [sic] hell, a satanic state.”

The Anti-Defamation League has called Finkelstein an “obsessive anti-Zionist” filled with “vitriolic hatred of Zionism and Israel.” Of being called an anti-Zionist, Finkelstein has said: “It’s a superficial term. I am opposed to any state with an ethnic character, not only to Israel.”

Finkelstein believes that the main reason the conflict isn’t resolved is “the refusal of Israel, backed by the United States government, to abide by international law, to abide by the opinion of the international community.” …

In an interview with Emanuel Stoakes, he answered the question “Do you unequivocally condemn Palestinian attacks against innocent civilians?” as follows: “It is impossible to justify terrorism, which is the targeting of civilians to achieve a political goal. But it’s also difficult to make categorical statements of the kind you suggest. I do believe that Hezbollah has the right to target Israeli civilians if Israel persists in targeting civilians until Israel ceases its terrorist acts.” Finkelstein has said that Hamas and Hezbollah have the right to defend their countries from what he sees as Israeli aggression, and that both Israel and Hamas are guilty of targeting civilians. Israel, he claims, indiscriminately kills Palestinians, which he says is the same thing as targeting civilians. There is an equivalence between these groups and Israel, he argues: “If Hezbollah is a terrorist organization, if you want to make that claim, I won’t argue with you so long as you say further that Israel is a terrorist organization by probably, at least, 25-fold greater.”

● Al Jazeera English: In Gaza now, it’s worse than ethnic cleansing | Centre Stage | UpFront” (Feb 25, 2024)

In this episode of Centre Stage, our guest is Ilan Pappé. He’s an Israeli historian and professor at the University of Exeter. Pappé is known for his outspoken views on the Israeli-Palestinian question – drawing both praise and criticism. He’s the author of several books including “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine”, in which he challenges the traditional Israeli narrative over the establishment of Israel in 1948.

In today’s episode, Pappé discusses the dangers of the Zionist ideology and its impact on Israel and Palestine, the historical context of October 7, and his vision for a one-state solution.

Wikipedia:

Pappé was born in Haifa, Israel. Prior to coming to the UK, he was a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Haifa (1984–2007) and chair of the Emil Touma Institute for Palestinian and Israeli Studies in Haifa (2000–2008). … Pappé is one of Israel’s New Historians who, since the release of pertinent British and Israeli government documents in the early 1980s, have offered an unconventional view of Israel’s creation in 1948, and the corresponding flight and expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians in the same year. He has written that the expulsions were not decided on an ad hoc basis, as other historians have argued, but constituted the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, in accordance with Plan Dalet, drawn up in 1947 by Israel’s future leaders. …

He blames the creation of Israel for the lack of peace in the Middle East, arguing that Zionism is more dangerous than Islamic militancy, and has called for an international boycott of Israeli academics. Pappé supports the one-state solution, which envisages a unitary state for Palestinians and Israelis. His work has been both supported and criticized by other historians. Before he left Israel in 2008, he had been condemned in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament; a minister of education had called for him to be sacked; his photograph had appeared in a newspaper at the centre of a target; and he had received several death threats.

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The Human Shield mantra about Gaza

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