Home Blog Page 2

Eugene Doyle: How centrifugal forces have been unleashed in Iran

0

COMMENTARY: By Eugene Doyle

The surprise US-Israeli attack on Iran is literally and figuratively designed to unleash centrifugal forces in the Islamic Republic.

Two nuclear powers are currently involved in the bombing of the nuclear facilities of a third state. One of them, the US has — for the moment — limited itself to handling mid-air refuelling, bombs and an array of intelligence.

If successful they will destroy or, more likely, destabilise the uranium enrichment centrifuges at Natanz and possibly the Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant, causing them to vibrate and spin uncontrollably, generating centrifugal forces that could rupture containment systems.

Spinning at more than 50,000 rpm it wouldn’t take much of a shockwave from a blast or some other act of sabotage to do this.

There may be about half a tonne of enriched uranium and several tonnes of lower-grade material underground.

If a cascade of bunker-busting bombs like the US GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrators got through, the heat generated would be in the hundreds, even thousands, of degrees Celsius. This would destroy the centrifuges, converting the uranium hexafluoride gas into a toxic aerosol, leading to serious radiological contamination over a wide area.

The head of the IAEA, the UN’s nuclear watchdog, warned repeatedly of the dangers over the past few days. How many people would be killed, contaminated or forced to evacuate should not have to be calculated — it should be avoided at all cost.


Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s Iran nuclear warnings      Video: Al Jazeera

Divided opinions
Some people think this attack is a very good idea; some think this is an act of madness by two rogue states.

On June 18, Israeli media were reporting that the US had rushed an aerial armada loaded with bunker busters to Israel while the US continued its sham denials of involvement in the war.

Analysts Professor Jeffrey Sachs and Sybil Fares warned this week of “Israel bringing the world to the brink of nuclear Armageddon in pursuit of its illegal and extremist aims”.  They point out that for some decades now Netanyahu has warned that Iran is weeks or even days away from having the bomb, begging successive presidents for permission to wage Judeo-Christian jihad.

In Donald Trump — the MAGA Peace Candidate — he finally got his green light.

The centrifugal forces destabilising the Iranian state
The other — and possibly more significant — centrifugal force that has been unleashed is a hybrid attack on the Iranian state itself.  The Americans, Israelis and their European allies hope to trigger regime change.

There are many Iranians inside and outside the country who would welcome such a development.  Other Iranians suggest they should be careful of what they wish for, pointing to the human misery that follows, as night follows day, wherever post 9/11 America’s project to bring “democracy, goodness and niceness” leads.  If you can’t quickly think of half a dozen examples, this must be your first visit to Planet Earth.

. . . ABut after a brief interruption on screen as debris fell from a bomb strike, Sahar Emami was back presenting the news
Iranian news presenter Sahar Emami during the Israeli attack on state television which killed three media workers . . . Killing journalists is both an Israeli speciality and a war crime. Image: AJ screenshot APR

Is regime change in Iran possible?
So, are the Americans and Israelis on to something or not? This week prominent anti-regime writer Sohrab Ahmari added a caveat to his long-standing call for an end to the regime.  Ahmari, an Iranian, who is the US editor of the geopolitical analysis platform UnHerd said:  “The potential nightmare scenarios are as numerous as they are appalling: regime collapse that leads not to the restoration of the Pahlavi dynasty and the ascent to the Peacock Throne of its chubby dauphin, Reza, but warlordism and ethno-sectarian warfare that drives millions of refugees into Europe.

“Or a Chinese intervention in favour of a crucial energy partner and anchor of the new Eurasian bloc led by Beijing . . .  A blockade of the Strait of Hormuz and attacks on the Persian Gulf monarchies.”

Despite these risks, there are indeed Iranians who are cheering for Uncle Bibi (Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu).  Some have little sympathy for the Palestinians because their government poured millions into supporting Hamas and Hezbollah — money that could have eased hardship inside Iran, caused, it must be added, by both the US-imposed sanctions and the regime’s own mismanagement, some say corruption.

As I pointed out in an article The West’s War on Iran shortly after the Israelis launched the war: the regime appears to have a core support base of around 20 percent.  This was true in 2018 when I last visited Iran and was still the case in the most recent polling I could find.

I quoted an Iranian contact who shortly after the attack told me they had scanned reactions inside Iran and found people were upset, angry and overwhelmingly supportive of the government at this critical moment.  Like many, I suggested Iranians would — as typically happens when countries are attacked — rally round the flag.  Shortly after the article was published this statement was challenged by other Iranians who dispute that there will be any “rallying to the flag” — as that is the flag of the Islamic Republic and a great many Iranians are sick to the back teeth of it.

Some others demur:

“The killing of at least 224 Iranians has once again significantly damaged Israel’s claim that it avoids targeting civilians,” Dr Shirin Saeidi, author of Women and the Islamic Republic, an associate professor of political science at the University of Arkansas, told The New Arab on June 16.  “Israel’s illegal attack on the Iranian people will definitely not result in a popular uprising against the Iranian state. On the contrary, Iranians are coming together behind the Islamic Republic.”

To be honest, I can’t discern who is correct. In the last few of days I have also had contact with people inside Iran (all these contacts must, for obvious reasons, be anonymous).  One of them welcomed the attack on the IRGC (Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps).  I also got this message relayed to me from someone else in Iran as a response to my article:

“Some Iranians are pro-regime and have condemned Israeli attacks and want the government to respond strongly. Some Iranians are pro-Israel and happy that Israel has attacked and killed some of their murderers and want regime change, [but the] majority of Iranians dislike both sides.

They dislike the regime in Iran, and they are patriotic so they don’t want a foreign country like Israel invading them and killing people. They feel hopeless and defenceless as they know both sides have failed or will fail them.”

Calculating the incalculable: regime survival or collapse?
Only a little over half of Iran is Persian. Minorities include Azerbaijanis, Kurds, Arabs, Balochis, Turkmen, Armenians and one of the region’s few post-Nakba Jewish congregations outside of Israel today.

Mossad, MI6 and various branches of the US state have poured billions into opposition groups, including various monarchist factions, but from a distance they appear fragmented. The Mojahedin-e-Khalq (MEK) armed opposition group has been an irritant but so far not a major disruptor.

The most effective terrorist attacks inside Iran have been launched by Israel, the US and the British — including the assassination of a string of Iranian peace negotiators, the leader of the political wing of Hamas, nuclear scientists and their families, and various regime figures.

How numerous the active strands of anti-regime elements are is hard to estimate. Equally hard to calculate is how many will move into open confrontation with the regime. Conversely, how unified, durable — or brittle — is the regime? How cohesive is the leadership of the IRGC and the Basij militias? Will they work effectively together in the trying times ahead? In particular, how successful has the CIA, MI6 and Mossad been at penetrating their structures and buying generals?

Both Iran’s nuclear programme and its government — in fact, the whole edifice and foundation of the Islamic Republic — is at the beginning of the greatest stress test of its existence.  If the centrifugal forces prove too great, I can’t help but think of the words of William Butler Yeats:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity.

Peace and prosperity to all the people of Iran.  And let’s never forget the people of Palestine as they endure genocide.

Eugene Doyle is a writer based in Wellington. He has written extensively on the Middle East, as well as peace and security issues in the Asia Pacific region. He contributes to Asia Pacific Report and Café Pacific, and hosts the public policy platform solidarity.co.nz

Egyptian crackdown on Gaza blockade busters but Kiwi activists vow to ‘defeat genocide’

0

SPECIAL REPORT: By Saige England in Ōtautahi and Ava Mulla in Cairo

Hope for freedom for Palestinians remains high among a group of trauma-struck New Zealanders in Cairo.

In spite of extensive planning, the Global March To Gaza (GMTG) delegation of about 4000 international aid volunteers was thwarted in its mission to walk from Cairo to Gaza to lend support.

The land of oranges and pyramids became the land of autocracy last week as peace aid volunteers — young, middle-aged, and elderly — were herded like cattle and cordoned behind fences.

Arab members of the Global March To Gaza were the targets of the most dramatic and violent excesses committed by the Egyptian authorities
Arab activists on the Global March To Gaza were targets of the most dramatic and violent excesses committed by Egyptian authorities. Image: Democracy Now! screenshot APR

Their passports were initially seized — and later returned. Several New Zealanders were among those dragged and beaten.

While ordinary Egyptians showed “huge support” for the GMTG, the militant Egyptian regime showed its hand in supporting Israel rather than Palestine.

A member of the delegation, Natasha*, said she and other members pursued every available diplomatic channel to ensure that the peaceful, humanitarian, march would reach Gaza.

Moved by love, they were met with hate.


Egypt stops pro-Palestine activists in Egypt on their march to Gaza     Video: Al Jazeera

Violently attacked
“When I stepped toward the crowd’s edge and began instinctually with heart break to chant, ‘Free Palestine,’ I was violently attacked by five plainclothes men.

“They screamed, grabbed, shoved, and even spat on me,” she said.

Tackled, she was dragged to an unmarked van. She did not resist, posed no threat, yet the violence escalated instantly.

“I saw hatred in their eyes.”

Egyptian state security forces and embedded provocateurs were intent on dismantling and discrediting the Global March
Egyptian state security forces and embedded provocateurs were intent on dismantling and discrediting the Global March activists. Image: GMTG screenshot APR

Another GMTG member, a woman who tried to intervene was also “viciously assaulted”. She witnessed at least three other women and two men being attacked.

The peacemakers escaped from the unmarked van the aggressors were distracted, seemingly confused about their destination, she said.

It is now clear that from the beginning Egyptian State forces and embedded provocateurs were intent on dismantling and discrediting the GMTG.

Authorities as provocateurs
The peace participants witnessed plainclothed authorities act as provacateurs, “shoving people, stepping on them, throwing objects” to create a false image for media.

New Zealand actor Will Alexander
New Zealand actor Will Alexander . . . “This is only a fraction of what Palestinians experience every day.” Image: GMTG screenshot APR

New Zealand actor Will Alexander said the experience had inflated rather than deflated his passion for human rights, and compassion for Palestinians.

“This is only a fraction of what Palestinians experience everyday. Palestinians pushed into smaller and smaller areas are murdered for wanting to stand on their own land,” he said.

“The reason that ordinary New Zealanders like us need to put our bodies on the line is because our government has failed to uphold its obligations under the Genocide Convention.

“Israel has blatantly breached international law for decades with total impunity.”

While the New Zealanders are all safe, a small number of people in the wider movement had been forcibly ‘disappeared’,” said GMTG New Zealand member Sam Leason.

Their whereabouts was still unknown, he said.

Arab members targeted
“It must be emphasised that it is primarily — and possibly strictly — Arab members of the March who are the targets of the most dramatic and violent excesses committed by the Egyptian authorities, including all forced disappearances.”

The Global March to Gaza activists
Global March to Gaza activists being attacked . . . the genocide cannot be sustained when people from around the world push against the Israeli regime and support the people on the ground with food and healthcare. Image: GMTG screenshot APR

This did, however, continuously add to the mounting sense of stress, tension, anxiety and fear, felt by the contingent, he said.

“Especially given the Egyptian authorities’ disregard to their own legal system, which leaves us blindsided and in a thick fog of uncertainty.”

Moving swiftly through the streets of Cairo in the pitch of night, from hotel to hotel and safehouse to safehouse, was a “surreal and dystopian” experience for the New Zealanders and other GMTG members.

The group says that the genocide cannot be sustained when people from around the world push against the Israeli regime and support the people on the ground with food and healthcare.

“For 20 months our hearts have raced and our eyes have filled in unison with the elderly, men, women, and children, and the babies in Palestine,” said Billie*, a participant who preferred, for safety reasons, not to reveal their surname.

“If we do not react to the carnage, suffering and complete injustice and recognise our shared need for sane governance and a liveable planet what is the point?”

Experienced despair
Aqua*, another New Zealand GMTG member, had experienced despair seeing the suffering of Palestinians, but she said it was important to nurture hope, as that was the only way to stop the genocide.

“We cling to every glimmer of hope that presents itself. Like an oasis in a desert devoid of human emotion we chase any potential igniter of the flame of change.”

Activist Eva Mulla
Activist Eva Mulla . . . inspired by the courage of the Palestinians. Image: GMTG screenshot APR

Ava Mulla, said from Cairo, that the group was inspired by the courage of the Palestinians.

“They’ve been fighting for freedom and justice for decades against the world’s strongest powers. They are courageous and steadfast.”

Mulla referred to the “We Were Seeds” saying inspired by Greek poet Dinos Christianopoulos.

“We are millions of seeds. Every act of injustice fuels our growth,” she said.

Helplessness an illusion
The GMTG members agreed that “impotence and helplessness was an illusion” that led to inaction but such inaction allowed “unspeakable atrocities” to take place.

“This is the holocaust of our age,” said Sam Leason.

“We need the world to leave the rhetorical and symbolic field of discourse and move promptly towards the camp of concrete action to protect the people of Palestine from a clear campaign of extermination.”

Saige England is an Aotearoa New Zealand journalist, author, and poet, member of the Palestinian Solidarity Network of Aotearoa (PSNA), and a contributor to Asia Pacific Report.

*Several protesters quoted in this article requested that their family names not be reported for security reasons. Ava Mulla was born in Germany and lives in Aotearoa with her partner, actor Will Alexander. She studied industrial engineering and is passionate about innovative housing solutions for developing countries. She is a member of the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA).

New Zealand and other activists with Tino Rangatiratanga and Palestine flags
New Zealand and other activists with Tino Rangatiratanga and Palestine flags taking part in the Global March To Gaza. Will Alexander (far left) is in the back row and Ava Mulla (pink tee shirt) is in the front row. Image: GMTG screenshot APR

Iran war: from the Middle East to America, history shows you cannot assassinate your way to peace

0
Iranians hold posters of late Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps head Hossein Salami (left), and late Iranian Armed Forces Chief of Staff General Mohammad Bagheri (right), who were killed in Israeli airstrikes in recent days
Iranians hold posters of late Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps head Hossein Salami (left), and late Iranian Armed Forces Chief of Staff General Mohammad Bagheri (right), who were killed in Israeli airstrikes in recent days. Image: Abedin Taherkenareh/EPA/The Conversation

ANALYSIS: By Matt Fitzpatrick

In the late 1960s, the prevailing opinion among Israeli Shin Bet intelligence officers was that the key to defeating the Palestinian Liberation Organisation was to assassinate its then-leader Yasser Arafat.

The elimination of Arafat, the Shin Bet commander Yehuda Arbel wrote in his diary, was “a precondition to finding a solution to the Palestinian problem.”

For other, even more radical Israelis — such as the ultra-nationalist assassin Yigal Amir — the answer lay elsewhere. They sought the assassination of Israeli leaders such as Yitzak Rabin who wanted peace with the Palestinians.

Iranians hold posters of late Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps head Hossein Salami (left), and late Iranian Armed Forces Chief of Staff General Mohammad Bagheri (right), who were killed in Israeli airstrikes in recent days
Iranians hold posters of late Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps head Hossein Salami (left), and late Iranian Armed Forces Chief of Staff General Mohammad Bagheri (right), who were killed in Israeli airstrikes in recent days. Image: Abedin Taherkenareh/EPA/The Conversation

Despite Rabin’s long personal history as a famed and often ruthless military commander in the 1948 and 1967 Arab-Israeli Wars, Amir stalked and shot Rabin dead in 1995. He believed Rabin had betrayed Israel by signing the Oslo Accords peace deal with Arafat.

It has been 20 years since Arafat died as possibly the victim of polonium poisoning, and 30 years after the shooting of Rabin. Peace between Israelis and the Palestinians has never been further away.

What Amnesty International and a United Nations Special Committee have called genocidal attacks on Palestinians in Gaza have spilled over into Israeli attacks on the prominent leaders of its enemies in Lebanon and, most recently, Iran.

Since its attacks on Iran began on Friday, Israel has killed numerous military and intelligence leaders, including Iran’s intelligence chief, Mohammad Kazemi; the chief of the armed forces, Mohammad Bagheri; and the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Hossein Salami. At least nine Iranian nuclear scientists have also been killed.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly said:

We got their chief intelligence officer and his deputy in Tehran.

Iran, predictably, has responded with deadly missile attacks on Israel.

Far from having solved the issue of Middle East peace, assassinations continue to pour oil on the flames.

A long history of extrajudicial killings
Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman’s book Rise and Kill First argues assassinations have long sat at the heart of Israeli politics.

In the past 75 years, there have been more than 2700 assassination operations undertaken by Israel. These have, in Bergman’s words, attempted to “stop history” and bypass “statesmanship and political discourse”.

This normalisation of assassinations has been codified in the Israeli expression of “mowing the grass”. This is, as historian Nadim Rouhana has shown, a metaphor for a politics of constant assassination.

Enemy “leadership and military facilities must regularly be hit in order to keep them weak”.

The point is not to solve the underlying political questions at issue. Instead, this approach aims to sow fear, dissent and confusion among enemies.

Thousands of assassination operations have not, however, proved sufficient to resolve the long-running conflict between Israel, its neighbours and the Palestinians. The tactic itself is surely overdue for retirement.

Targeted assassinations elsewhere
Israel has been far from alone in this strategy of assassination and killing.

Former US President Barack Obama oversaw the extrajudicial killing of Osama Bin Laden, for instance.

After what Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch denounced as a flawed trial, former US President George W. Bush welcomed the hanging of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein as “an important milestone on Iraq’s course to becoming a democracy”.

Current US President Donald Trump oversaw the assassination of Iran’s leader of clandestine military operations, Qassem Soleimani, in 2020.

More recently, however, Trump appears to have baulked at granting Netanyahu permission to kill Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

And it’s worth noting the US Department of Justice last year brought charges against an Iranian man who said he had been tasked with killing Trump.

Elsewhere, in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, it’s common for senior political and media opponents to be shot in the streets. Frequently they also “fall” out of high windows, are killed in plane crashes or succumb to mystery “illnesses”.

A poor record
Extrajudicial killings, however, have a poor record as a mechanism for solving political problems.

Cutting off the hydra’s head has generally led to its often immediate replacement by another equally or more ideologically committed person, as has already happened in Iran. Perhaps they too await the next round of “mowing the grass”.

But as the latest Israeli strikes in Iran and elsewhere show, solving the underlying issue is rarely the point.

In situations where finding a lasting negotiated settlement would mean painful concessions or strategic risks, assassinations prove simply too tempting. They circumvent the difficulties and complexities of diplomacy while avoiding the need to concede power or territory.

As many have concluded, however, assassinations have never killed resistance. They have never killed the ideas and experiences that give birth to resistance in the first place.

Nor have they offered lasting security to those who have ordered the lethal strike.

Enduring security requires that, at some point, someone grasp the nettle and look to the underlying issues.

The alternative is the continuation of the brutal pattern of strike and counter-strike for generations to come.The Conversation

Dr Matt Fitzpatrick is professor in international history, Flinders University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The story of the journalist on the Rainbow Warrior’s last voyage, David Robie

0

In April 2025, several of the Greenpeace crew visited Matauri Bay, Northland, the final resting place of the original flagship, the Rainbow Warrior. This article was one of the reflections pieces written by an oceans communications crew member.

COMMENTARY: By Emma Page

I was on the track maintenance team, on the middle level. We were mostly cleaning up the waterways. I was with my son Wilbur who’s 11, and he was there with his friend Frankie, who’s 12, and they were also knee deep in digging out all of the weeds.

It was my first time at Matauri Bay. One of the things it made me really think about, which is not only specific to the oceans campaign I work on, was really feeling for the first time what being part of Greenpeace as a community or a movement or family means and feels like.

Other reflections:

  1. Juan: Diving the Rainbow Warrior
  2. Emma: The story of the journalist on the last voyage, David Robie
  3. Fleur: The incredible vision of sculptor Chris Booth
  4. Moira: Connecting with the people and the land
David Robie's tent talk about the Rainbow Warrior on the Rongelap voyage in May 1985
David Robie’s tent talk about the Rainbow Warrior on the Rongelap voyage in May 1985 . . . the two men on the sheet screen are the late Senator Jetin Anjain (left) and Greenpeace campaigner Steve Sawyer who were key to the success of the relocation. Image: Greenpeace Aotearoa

Looking back 40 years
David Robie gave us a really great presentation of what it was like on board the Rainbow Warrior as a freelance journalist on that final voyage in 1985. David is a journalist and was actually one of my journalism lecturers when I went to journalism school at AUT, like 15 plus years ago!

At that time on the Rainbow Warrior he was reporting on the journey to Rongelap and helping the people move from their island home.

When you’re hearing people like David talking about being on that last voyage and sharing those memories — then thinking about how all of us here now are continuing the work — and that in the future, there will be people who join and keep campaigning for oceans and for all the other issues that we work on — I had this really tangible feeling of how it all fits together.

The work goes behind us and before us – I think I described it in my reflection on the day, ‘looking back and moving forward’. And that it’s bigger than me right now or bigger than all of us right now. 

Russel [Norman, executive director] said it in a way too, about feeling the challenge from the past when you’re looking at those photos of the people who were on that last voyage, and the really brave work that they did. You see them looking out at you and it does feel motivational, but also like a challenge to keep being courageous.


Dr David Robie’s talk about the Rainbow Warrior and Rongelap. Video: Greenpeace

We can get caught up in the everyday of trying to do something. And this was one of those moments where you get more of a bird’s eye view, and that felt significant.

Connecting with the people in the photos
I think one of the most moving things was hearing David talk about the people in the photographs, making them come alive with the stories of the people and what they were like, including when he talked about his favourite photo that he thought best represented Fernando sitting on a boat with his camera in mid-conversation.

Two people sitting in the back of a small boat, the man on the right has a camera round his neck
The photographer Fernando Pereira (right) and Rongelap Islander Bonemej Namwe ride ashore in the ‘bum bum’. Born on Kwajalein, Namwe, 62, had lived most of her life on Rongelap. The Rainbow Warrior I was in Rongelap to assist in the evacuation of islanders to Mejatto. © David Robie / Eyes of Fire / Greenpeace

David has written in his book about being on the Rainbow Warrior (Eyes of Fire), putting it in the political context of the time.

He  talked to us about the difficulties and all the challenges back 40 years ago, getting content to the media from a boat, and sending radio reports — how important it was to get the story out there.

The Greenpeace photographer — that was Fernando — would have to develop the photos himself on board, then transmit them to media outlets. He was one of the people who was key in getting the story of that final voyage to the media and to the wider public.

I found it interesting also talking with David about the different struggles for journalism training these days — there’s less outlets now to train as a journalist in New Zealand.

That’s because there’s less jobs and there’s so much pressure on the media at the moment. Lots of outlets closing down, people losing their jobs and then the impact of that in terms of being able to get stories out.

Emma Page is oceans communications lead for Greenpeace Aotearoa. Republished with permission.

Is genocide the new normal? Could Israel and the US destroy Iran?

0
"Isn’t it time we woke from our deep slumber? Generations of people in Western countries were lied to for generations about the Zionist project." Image: YouGov screenshot APR

COMMENTARY: By Eugene Doyle

“Just do it, before it is too late,” US President Donald Trump said.

The Western media described Trump’s and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s threats after the first wave of attacks on Iran as “warnings”. They were, in fact, expressions of genocidal intent.

“The United States makes the best and most lethal military equipment anywhere in the World, BY FAR, and Israel has a lot of it, with much more to come.

“And they know how to use it. Iran must make a deal, before there is nothing left, and save what was once known as the Iranian Empire … JUST DO IT, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE.”

As Pascal Lottaz and a number of other analysts pointed out on Friday, preemptive war or just war theory requires imminent threats not conceptual ones. As I also pointed out on Friday, the United States’ own intelligence agencies have consistently determined that Iran does not have an active nuclear weapons programme and there has been no change to the regime’s position since the Grand Ayatollah issued a fatwa against such weapons in 2003.

Israel and the US may now have forced a change in that theology or calculus.

What we are witnessing is a war of aggression designed to trigger regime change and destroy Iran — to reduce it to the kind of chaos that Israel and the US have inflicted on Iraq, Libya, Lebanon and many other countries.

This is only possible because of the collusion of the Collective West. At the core of this project of endless violence towards non-white people is racism: contempt for people who are not like us.

Nearly half of Israelis support army killing all Palestinians in Gaza, poll finds.
Today an overwhelming majority of Israelis want to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians — one of the very definitions of genocide — not just from Gaza but from Israel itself. Nearly half of Israelis support the army killing all Palestinians in Gaza, a recent US Penn State University poll finds.

Genocide has been normalised in Israel. Yet our political leaders and much of our media tell us we share values with these people.

One of the sickest, most profoundly tragic ironies of history is that the long suffering of the Jewish people at the hands of Western racism has culminated in a triumphalist Jewish State doing to the Palestinians what the Plantagenets and the Popes, the Medicis and the Russian boyars, the Italian Fascists and the Nazis did to the Jews.

Europeans perpetrated the Holocaust not the Palestinians or the Iranians. Israel, dominated as it is by Ashkenazi Jews, has now been incorporated into the Western project to maintain global hegemony.

They are today’s uber Aryans lording it over the untermenschen. It is the grim fulfillment of what the Israeli scholar Yeshayahu Leibowitz warned back in the 1980s was Israel’s incipient slide into what he termed “Judeo Nazism”.

‘We, the Israelis, are the victims’
Isn’t it time we woke from our deep slumber? Generations of people in Western countries were lied to for generations about the Zionist project. We were bombarded with propaganda that the Israelis were the victims, the plucky battlers; the Palestinians were somehow a nation of terrorists in their own land.

So too, the propaganda goes, are pretty much all of Israel’s neighbours, particularly Iran.

The propaganda shredded our minds, particularly people of my generation. It made most of our populations and all of our governments totally indifferent to the constant killing, repression and land thieving by generations of Israelis.

“We, the Israelis, are the victims.” They weep for themselves as they rape Palestinian prisoners — and call themselves heroes for doing so. In researching stories like this I had the unpleasant experience of watching videos of both the rape of Palestinians prisoners at Sde Temein (gloatingly shared by the perpetrators) and the repellent sight of Benjamin Netanyahu’s rabbi blessing one of these rapists and praising him for his work.

We are repeatedly told we share values with these people. I believe our governments really do share those values. I do not.

‘Hath not a Palestinian eyes? If you prick an Iranian do they not bleed?’
I’m a student of Shakespeare and have spent hours every month reading, watching and studying his plays. The Merchant of Venice, a complex play with highly contested interpretations, can be viewed as a masterful exploration of a dominant society enforcing its own double standards on a Hated Other.

The last time I watched it was a Royal Shakespeare Company performance with Palestinian actor Makram Khoury in the role of Shylock (the Jew).

Over the centuries Shylock had morphed from a pantomime villain, to an arch-villain to, in the 19th Century, a figure of pathos, dignity and loss, through to 20th Century interpretations of him as a powerful, albeit highly flawed, figure of resistance in the face of a supremacist society.

Palestinian Makram Khoury’s performance capped this transition and was an eloquent plea to see our common humanity whether we be Jewish, Muslim, Christian or any other slice of humanity.

“Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?”

How would our reading of this passage change if we changed “Jew” to “Palestinian” or “Iranian”?

Only an utterly incoherent and damaged mind can continue to believe the propaganda coming out of the White House, the Pentagon, and out of the mouths of psychotic madmen like Netanyahu, Smotrich and the rest of Team Genocide.

It’s time to wake up. If not, we ourselves become victims. Only a hollowed-out heart and mind could content themselves with turning a blind eye to genocide, to turn a blind eye to the war of aggression just launched against Iran.

How will this end?

Eugene Doyle is a writer based in Wellington. He has written extensively on the Middle East, as well as peace and security issues in the Asia Pacific region. He contributes to Asia Pacific Report and Café Pacific, and hosts the public policy platform solidarity.co.nz.

Caitlin Johnstone: We are, of course, being lied to about Iran

0

COMMENTARY: By Caitlin Johnstone

Iran and Israel are at war, with the US already intimately involved and likely to become more so. Which of course means we’ll be spending the foreseeable future getting bashed in the face with lies from the most powerful people in the world.

The most immediately obvious of these is the Netanyahu-promoted narrative that Israel initiated this conflict because Iran was on the brink of developing a nuclear weapon.

With absolutely no self-consciousness or sense of irony, the Israeli prime minister followed the attacks with a statement accusing Iran of “genocidal rhetoric” which it has backed up “with a programme to develop nuclear weapons.”


We are, of course, being lied to about Iran           Video: Caitlin Johnstone

Israel, as we all know, has an unacknowledged nuclear arsenal, and its leaders are presently committing genocide in Gaza while spouting genocidal rhetoric.

“And if not stopped, Iran could produce a nuclear weapon in a very short time,” Netanyahu claimed. “It could be a year. It could be within a few months  —  less than a year. This is a clear and present danger to Israel’s very survival.”

The Western political/media class have been dutifully promoting this line and uncritically parroting Israel’s claim that its unprovoked attack on Iran was “pre-emptive”, but there is absolutely no evidence that any of this is true.

Benjamin Netanyahu has spent literally decades falsely claiming that Iran was a year or two away from developing a nuke, only to have the calendar prove him wrong with the passage of time over and over again.

Iran and Israel (and the US) at war.         Video: Anti-war News

US intelligence chief Tulsi Gabbard testified just weeks ago that “The IC [Intelligence Community] continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorised the nuclear weapons programme he suspended in 2003.”

As journalist Séamus Malekafzali recently noted on Twitter, one of the strongest arguments that Iran had not reversed its decision to refrain from obtaining nuclear weapons is that Iranian nuclear scientists have been publicly expressing frustration about the fact that their government won’t allow them to construct a nuke.

They want to do it, but Tehran won’t let them.

US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth helped pave the way for Netanyahu’s claims this past Wednesday when he told the Senate that “there have been plenty of indications” Iran has been “moving their way toward something that would look a lot like a nuclear weapon.”

This claim by Hegseth was swiftly scooped up and promoted by warmongers like Tom Cotton who said that Hegseth had “confirmed that Iran’s terrorist regime is actively working towards a nuclear weapon”.

Cotton’s claim was then picked up by war pundit Mark Levin, who has been personally lobbying Trump to green light an attack on Iran, sarcastically quipping on Twitter, “So, SecDef Hegseth must by lying, too. Everyone’s lying except the isolationists, Koch-heads, Islamists, Chatsworth Qatarlson and their media propagandists.”

But let’s back up and look at what Hegseth actually said. He did not say “Iran is building a nuclear weapon.” He said “there have been plenty of indications” Iran has been “moving their way toward something that would look a lot like a nuclear weapon”.

If the US had intelligence that Iran was building a nuke, Hegseth would have just said so. But instead he performed this freakish verbal gymnastics stunt muttering about indications of something that might kinda sorta look like a nuclear weapon, which his fellow Iran hawks then falsely took and ran with as a positive assertion that Iran was building a nuke.

There are other lies being circulated to help market this war as well. As Moon of Alabama notes, the Washington Post’s odious war propagandist David Ignatius is pushing the narrative that Iran has been cultivating a relationship with de-facto al-Qaeda leader Saif al-Adel. The lie that Saddam Hussein was in league with al-Qaeda was used two decades ago to sell the invasion of Iraq.

At the same time, Trumpian pundits are currently circulating the narrative that the United States is full of Iranian “sleeper cells” who could activate at any moment and begin attacking Americans.

The most egregious of these is Laura Loomer’s repeated claims that there are “millions” of such cells awaiting Iran’s orders to strike  — possibly the single most bat shit insane claim I have ever seen anyone with any major platform make, since it would mean a very sizable percentage of the US population is actually a secret Iranian proxy army.

The fountain of lies is just getting started. There will be more. Believe nothing unless it is substantiated by mountains of evidence. These freaks have been caught lying to sell wars to the public far too many times for any of their claims to be taken on faith.

Caitlin Johnstone is an Australian independent journalist and poet. Her articles include The UN Torture Report On Assange Is An Indictment Of Our Entire Society. She publishes a website and Caitlin’s Newsletter. This article is republished with permission.

Twyford condemns weak action by NZ over Israel’s ‘ruthless’ apartheid

0
Labour MP Phil Twyford speaking at the Henderson pro-Palestinian humanitarian rally today
Labour MP Phil Twyford speaking at the Henderson pro-Palestinian humanitarian rally today . . . Palestinians are subjected by Israel to “the most ruthless, most brutal, system of apartheid.” Image: Asia Pacific Report

Asia Pacific Report

Labour MP for Te Atatu Phil Twyford criticised the New Zealand government today for failing to take stronger action against Israel over its genocide and starvation strategy in Gaza, saying that NZ should implement comprehensive sanctions and recognise Palestine.

Speaking at a rally in Henderson organised by the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa in West Auckland suburbs for the first time in the 88th week of protest, Twyford said: “The Israeli government is operating in an apartheid state.

“They subject the Palestinian people under their military.

Protesters against genocide with a "Free Palestine" watermelon placard
Protesters against genocide with a “Free Palestine” watermelon placard at the ceasefire rally in the West Auckland suburb of Henderson today. Image: David Robie/Asia Pacific Report

“People who are under international law they are obliged to protect,” he told about 500 protesters.

“They are subjecting them to the most ruthless, most brutal system of apartheid.”

It was a story of “ethnic cleansing, dispossesion, terror routinely visited upon Palestinian people on a daily basis in their land”, said Twyford, who is Labour Party spokesperson on immigration, disarmament and foreign affairs.

“And it is being done, not only by the forces of Zionism, but by the Western world complicit, knowing, understanding and actively conniving in that dispossession and repression.”

Widely condemned move
Twyford referred to the government’s move this week alongside four other countries to impose sanctions on two far-right ministers in the the Israeli cabinet, illegal settlers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir, which has been widely condemned as too little and too late.

Labour MP Phil Twyford speaking at the Henderson pro-Palestinian humanitarian rally today
Labour MP Phil Twyford speaking at the Henderson pro-Palestinian humanitarian rally today . . . Palestinians are subjected by Israel to “the most ruthless, most brutal, system of apartheid.” Image: Asia Pacific Report

Leading British journalist Jonathan Cook this week criticised Britain, Australia, Canada and Norway along with New Zealand, saying they may have been “seeking strength in numbers” to withstand retaliation from Israel and the United States.

“But in truth, they have selected the most limited and symbolic of all the possible sanctions they could have imposed on the Israeli government.”

Israel was also condemned by speakers at the rally for its “unprovoked attack” on Iran and its strategy of forced starvation on the Palestinian people in Gaza and the repression in occupied West Bank.

The death toll in Gaza was almost 62,000 Palestinians — more than 17,000 of them children — and Israel had also killed at least 78 people in the first waves of attacks on Iran.

Meanwhile, in a statement today, the PSNA said it was appalled at the deportation of a Palestinian New Zealander from Egypt.

PSNA said it had conveyed to the Egyptian government its “shock and anger” at the deportation of Rana Hamida who had travelled to Egypt to take part in the Global March to Gaza.

"This Jew stands for Palestine" and "Sanction Israel now"
“This Jew stands for Palestine” and “Sanction Israel now” placards at today’s Henderson rally. Image: APR

Egyptian deportations over ‘global march’
Egyptian authorities have deported dozens of people, including Spanish, Swedish, Finnish, Moroccan, Greek and US citizens.

The Global March to Gaza is due to start this weekend in Egypt with thousands of people from throughout the world taking part.

PSNA co-chair John Minto said the march was to “express humanity’s outrage” at the ongoing Gaza-wide bombing and starving of the Palestinian population by Israel.

“Egypt’s action in deporting activists can only be seen as assisting Israel’s attacks against the Palestinian population,” he said.

“Unfortunately, Egypt has a long history of collaboration with the US and Israel to stifle the Palestine liberation struggle. This is in sharp contrast to the Egyptian people who are as appalled and angry as the rest of humanity at Israel’s horrendous war crimes.”

Artist and Palestinian freedom campaigner Rana Hamida - with her arm raised - welcomed by Kia Ora Gaza freedom flotilla supporters at Auckland International Airport
Artist and Palestinian freedom campaigner Rana Hamida – crouched with her arm raised – welcomed by Kia Ora Gaza freedom flotilla supporters at Auckland International Airport today. Image: Kia Ora Gaza

Minto said the following message from Hamida was sent as she returned to New Zealand — she was welcomed by Kia Ora Gaza freedom flotilla supporters at Auckland International Airport this afternoon:

‘The more we will roar’
“The Egyptian authorities, along with other governments, think that blocking humanity from this act of solidarity will stop because of them blocking people from being there and doing the job that they continue failing to do.

“They are so mistaken — the more complicit and enabling they get in their inaction and in this case their active participation, the more we will rise, and roar.

“We are escalating as you awaken the dragons within us.

“We will sing louder and we will walk longer — with our hiking shoes in the Sinai desert, or barefoot towards your embassies.

“We will disrupt your meetings, we will crowd your phone with calls and emails, and we will be the light that blinds your robotic heart and melts it alongside the lies you stand for.

“This is not about us, it is about HUMANITY within us that is dying and being oppressed in various forms, it is about the humans enduring hell in Gaza, West Bank and Falastine as a whole.

“Muslims, Jews and Christians together.

“It is about NEVER AGAIN.

“Boycott, divest — we will not stop we will not rest.”

Pro-Palestinian and anti-genocide protesters at the Henderson rally
Pro-Palestinian and anti-genocide protesters at the Henderson rally today with Te Atatu MP Phil Twyford speaking. Image: APR

Expel Israeli ambassador call
In an earlier statement in the wake of Israel’s attack on Iran, PSNA called on the government to immediately expel the Israeli ambassador from New Zealand.

Minto said Israel’s strikes on Iran were “unprovoked, unilateral and a massive threat to humanity everywhere”.

“This is such a dangerous action, that diplomatic weasel words about Israel are not acceptable. Israel is an out-of-control rogue state playing with the future of humanity. We must send it the strongest possible message.”

“Israel’s using its often repeated lies and misinformation to attempt to justify it’s unconscionable violence and aggression.”

Minto pointed to Iran’s right to enrich uranium for civilian purposes.

“Even US intelligence officials have made is clear very recently that Iran is NOT on the way to produce a nuclear weapon.”

“And neither is Iran committed to the ‘annihilation’ of Israel.

‘Liberation for Palestine’
“Iran does not support Israel as a racist, apartheid state and wants to see liberation for Palestine.

“In this, Iran has, along with the overwhelming majority of countries in the world, called for an end to Israel’s military occupation of Palestine, the end of its apartheid policies directed against Palestinians and the return of Palestinian refugees.”

New Zealand had the same policies, Minto said.

However, he condemned NZ’s “appeasement of this apartheid state, as our government and other Western countries have done over 20 months”.

A "Save the world from evil Zionism" placard
A “Save the world from evil Zionism” placard at the Henderson rally today. Image: APR

Eugene Doyle: Team Genocide and the West’s war on Iran

0
How Al Jazeera reported the Israeli attacks on Iran
How Al Jazeera reported the Israeli attacks on Iran as Tehran vows a "powerful response". Image: AJ screenshot APR

COMMENTARY: By Eugene Doyle

I have visited Iran twice. Once in June 1980 to witness an unprecedented event: the world’s first Islamic Revolution. It was the very start of my writing career.

The second time was in 2018 and part of my interest was to get a sense of how disenchanted the population was — or was not — with life under the Ayatollahs decades after the creation of the Islamic Republic.

I loved my time in Iran and found ordinary Iranians to be such wonderful, cultured and kind people.

When I heard the news today of Israel’s attack on Iran I had the kind of emotional response that should never be seen in public. I was apoplectic with rage and disgust, I vented bitterly and emotively.

Then I calmed down. And here is what I would like to say:

Just last week former CIA officer Ray McGovern, who wrote daily intelligence briefings for the US President during his 27-year career, reminded me when I interviewed him that the assessment of the US intelligence community has been for years that Iran ceased its nuclear weapons programme in 2003 and had not recommenced since.

The departing CIA director William Burns confirmed this assessment recently.  Propaganda aside, there is nothing new other than a US-Israeli campaign that has shredded any concept of international laws or norms.

I won’t mince words: what we are witnessing is the racist, genocidal Israeli regime, armed and encouraged by the US, Germany, UK and other Western regimes, launching a war that has no justification other than the expansion of Israeli power and the advancement of its Greater Israel project.

How Al Jazeera reported the Israeli attacks on Iran
How Al Jazeera reported the Israeli attacks on Iran as Tehran vows a “powerful response”. Image: AJ screenshot APR

This year, using American, German and British armaments, supported by underlings like Australia and New Zealand, the Israelis have pursued their genocide against the Palestinians in both the West Bank and Gaza, and attacked various neighbours, including Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Iraq and Iran.

They represent a clear and present danger to peace and stability in the region.

Iran has operated with considerable restraint but has also shown its willingness to use its military to keep the US-Israeli menace at bay. What most people forget is that the project to secure Iran’s borders and keep the likes of the British, Israelis and Americans out is a multi-generational project that long predates the Islamic Revolution.

I would recommend Iran: A modern history by the US-based scholar Abbas Amanat that provides a long-view of the evolution of the Iranian state and how it has survived centuries of pressure and multiple occupations from imperial powers, including Russia, Britain, the US and others.

Hard-fought independence
The country was raped by the Brits and the Americans and has won a hard-fought independence that is being seriously challenged, not from within, but by the Israelis and the Western warlords who have wrecked so many countries and killed millions of men, women and children in the region over recent decades.

I spoke and messaged with Iranian friends today both in Iran and in New Zealand and the response was consistent. They felt, one of them said, 10 times more hurt and emotional than I did.

Understandable.

A New Zealand-based Iranian friend had to leave work as soon as he heard the news.  He scanned Iranian social media and found people were upset, angry and overwhelmingly supportive of the government.

“They destroyed entire apartment buildings! Why?”, “People will be very supportive of the regime now because they have attacked civilians.”

“My parents are in the capital. I was so scared for them.”

Just a couple of years ago scholars like Professor Amanat estimated that core support for the regime was probably only around 20 percent.  That was my impression too when I visited in 2018.

Nationalism, existential menace
Israel and the US have changed that. Nationalism and an existential menace will see Iranians rally around the flag.

Something I learnt in Iran, in between visiting the magnificent ruins of the capital of the Achaemenid Empire at Persepolis, exploring a Zoroastrian Tower of Silence, chowing down on insanely good food in Yazd, talking with a scholar and then a dissident in Isfahan, and exploring an ancient Sassanian fort and a caravanserai in the eastern desert, was that the Iranians are the most politically astute people in the region.

Many I spoke to were quite open about their disdain for the regime but none of them sought a counter-revolution.

They knew what that would bring: the wolves (the Americans, the Israelis, the Saudis, and other bad actors) would slip in and tear the country apart. Slow change is the smarter option when you live in this neighbourhood.

Iranians are overwhelmingly well-educated, profoundly courteous and kind, and have a deep sense of history. They know more than enough about what happened to them and to so many other countries once a great power sees an opening.

War is a truly horrific thing that always brings terrible suffering to ordinary people. It is very rarely justified.

Iran was actively negotiating with the Americans who, we now know, were briefed on the attack in advance and will possibly join the attack in the near future.

US senators are baying for Judeo-Christian jihad. Democrat Senator John Fetterman was typical: “Keep wiping out Iranian leadership and the nuclear personnel. We must provide whatever is necessary — military, intelligence, weaponry — to fully back Israel in striking Iran.”

We should have the moral and intellectual honesty to see the truth:  Our team, Team Genocide, are the enemies of peace and justice.  I wish the Iranian people peace and prosperity.

Eugene Doyle is a writer based in Wellington. He has written extensively on the Middle East, as well as peace and security issues in the Asia Pacific region. He contributes to Asia Pacific Report and Café Pacific, and hosts the public policy platform solidarity.co.nz.

Jonathan Cook: Greta Thunberg tried to shame Western leaders – and found they have no shame

0
Proof of the failure of Western media came this week with the coverage of Israel’s brazen act of piracy
Proof of the failure of Western media came this week with the coverage of Israel’s brazen act of piracy against a UK-flagged ship, the Madleen, trying to break Israel’s genocidal aid blockade. Image: www.jonathan-cook.net

ANALYSIS: By Jonathan Cook in Middle East Eye

If you imagined Western politicians and media were finally showing signs of waking up to Israel’s genocide in Gaza, think again.

Even the decision this week by several Western states, led by the UK, to ban the entry of Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir, two far-right Israeli cabinet ministers, is not quite the pushback it is meant to seem.

Britain, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Norway may be seeking strength in numbers to withstand retaliation from Israel and the United States. But in truth, they have selected the most limited and symbolic of all the possible sanctions they could have imposed on the Israeli government.

Their meagre action is motivated solely out of desperation. They urgently need to deter Israel from carrying through plans to formally annex the Occupied West Bank and thereby tear away the last remnants of the two-state comfort blanket — the West’s solitary pretext for decades of inaction.

And as a bonus, the entry ban makes Britain and the others look like they are getting tough with Israel on Gaza, even as they do nothing to stop the mounting horrors there.

Even the Israeli Ha’aretz newspaper’s senior columnist Gideon Levy mocked what he called a “tiny, ridiculous step” by the UK and others, saying it would make no difference to the slaughter in Gaza. He called for sanctions against “Israel in its entirety”.

“Do they really believe this punishment will have some sort of effect on Israel’s moves?” Levy asked incredulously.

2500 sanctions on Russia
Remember as Britain raps two cabinet ministers on the knuckles that the West has imposed more than 2500 sanctions on Russia.

While David Lammy, the UK’s Foreign Secretary, worries about the future of a non-existent diplomatic process — one trashed by Israel two decades ago — Palestinian children are still starving to death unseen.

The genocide is not going to end unless the West forces Israel to stop. This week more than 40 Israeli military intelligence officers went on an effective strike, refusing to be involved in combat operations, saying Israel was waging a “clearly illegal” and “eternal war” in Gaza.

Yet Starmer and Lammy will not even concede that Israel has violated international law.  

What is clear is that British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s sighs of regret last month — expressing how “intolerable” he finds the “situation” in Gaza — were purely performative.

Starmer and the rest of the Western establishment have continued tolerating what they claim to find “intolerable”, even as the death toll from Israel’s bombs, gunfire and starvation campaign grow day by day.

Those emaciated children — profoundly malnourished, their stick-then legs covered by the thinnest membrane of skin — aren’t going to recover without meaningful intervention. Their condition won’t stabilise while Israel deprives them of food day after day. Sooner or later they will die, mostly out of our view.

Parents must risk lives
Meanwhile, desperate parents must now risk their lives, forced to run the gauntlet of Israeli gunfire, in a — usually forlorn — bid to be among the handful of families able to grab paltry supplies of largely unusable, dried food. Most families have no water or fuel to cook with.

As if mocking Palestinians, the Western media continue to refer to this real-life, scaled-up Hunger Games — imposed by Israel in place of the long-established United Nations relief system — as “aid distribution”.

We are supposed to believe it is addressing Gaza’s “humanitarian crisis” even as it deepens the crisis.

On the kindest analysis, Western capitals are settling back into a mix of silence and deflections, having got in their excuses just before Israel crosses the finishing line of its genocide.

They have readied their alibis for the moment when international journalists are allowed in — the day after the population of Gaza has either been exterminated or violently herded into neighbouring Sinai.

Or more likely, a bit of both.

Truth inverted
What distinguishes Israel’s ongoing slaughter of the two million-plus people of Gaza is this. It is the first stage-managed genocide in history. It is a Holocaust rewritten as public theatre, a spectacle in which every truth is carefully inverted.

That can best be achieved, of course, if those trying to write a different, honest script are eliminated. The extent and authorship of the horrors can be edited out, or obscured through a series of red herrings, misdirecting onlookers.

Israel has murdered more than 220 Palestinian journalists in Gaza over the past 20 months, and has been keeping Western journalists far from the killing fields.

Like the West’s politicians, the foreign correspondents finally piped up last month — in their case, to protest at being barred from Gaza. No less than the politicians, they were keen to ready their excuses.

They have careers and their future credibility to think about, after all.

The journalists have publicly worried that they are being excluded because Israel has something to hide. As though Israel had nothing to hide in the preceding 20 months, when those same journalists docilely accepted their exclusion — and invariably regurgitated Israel’s deceitful spin on its atrocities.

If you imagine that the reporting from Gaza would have been much different had the BBC, CNN, The Guardian or The New York Times had reporters on the ground, think again.

The truth is the coverage would have looked much as it has done for more than a year and a half, with Israel dictating the story lines, with Israel’s denials foregrounded, with Israel’s claims of Hamas “terrorists” in every hospital, school, bakery, university, and refugee camp used to justify the destruction and slaughter.

British doctors volunteering in Gaza who have told us there were no Hamas fighters in the hospitals they worked in, or anyone armed apart from the Israeli soldiers that shot up their medical facilities, would not be more believed because Jeremy Bowen interviewed them in Khan Younis rather than Richard Madeley in a London studio.

Breaking the blockade
If proof of that was needed, it came this week with the coverage of Israel’s brazen act of piracy against a UK-flagged ship, the Madleen, trying to break Israel’s genocidal aid blockade.

Israel’s law-breaking did not happen this time in sealed-off Gaza, or against dehumanised Palestinians.

Israel’s slaughter of the two million-plus people of Gaza is the first stage-managed genocide in history. It is a Holocaust rewritten as public theatre

Israel’s ramming and seizure of the vessel took place on the high seas, and targeted a 12-member Western crew, including the famed young Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg. All were abducted and taken to Israel.

Thunberg was trying to use her celebrity to draw attention to Israel’s illegal, genocidal blockade of aid. She did so precisely by trying to break that blockade peacefully.

The defiance of the Madleen’s crew in sailing to Gaza was intended to shame Western governments that are under a legal — and it goes without saying, moral — obligation to stop a genocide under the provisions of the 1948 Genocide Convention they have ratified.

Western citizens wring hands
Western capitals have been ostentatiously wringing their hands at the “humanitarian crisis” of Israel starving two million people in full view of the world.

The Madleen’s mission was to emphasise that those states could do much more than tell two Israeli cabinet ministers they are not welcome to visit. Together they could break the blockade, if they so wished.

Britain, France and Canada — all of whom claimed last month that the “situation” in Gaza was “intolerable” — could organise a joint naval fleet carrying aid to Gaza through international waters. They would arrive in Palestinian territorial waters off the coast of Gaza.

At no point would they be in Israel territory.

Any attempt by Israel to interfere would be an act of war against these three states — and against Nato. The reality is Israel would be forced to pull back and allow the aid in.

But, of course, this scenario is pure fantasy. Britain, France and Canada have no intention of breaking Israel’s “intolerable” siege of Gaza.

None of them has any intention of doing anything but watch Israel starve the population to death, then describe it as a “humanitarian catastrophe” they were unable to stop.

The Madleen has preemptively denied them this manoeuvre and highlighted Western leaders’ actual support for genocide — as well as let the people of Gaza know that a majority of the Western public oppose their governments’ collusion in Israel’s criminality.

‘Selfie yacht’
The voyage was intended too as a vigorous nudge to awaken those in the West still slumbering through the genocide. Which is precisely why the Madleen’s message had to be smothered with spin, carefully prepared by Israel.

The Israeli Foreign Ministry issued statements calling the aid ship a “celebrity selfie yacht“, while dismissing its action as a “public relations stunt” and “provocation”. Israeli officials portrayed Thunberg as a “narcissist” and “antisemite”.

When Israeli soldiers illegally boarded the ship, they filmed themselves trying to hand out sandwiches to the crew — an actual stunt that should appall anyone mindful that, while Israel was concern-trolling Western publics about the nutritional needs of the Madleen crew, it was also starving two million Palestinians to death, half of them children.

Did the British government, whose vessel was rammed and invaded in international waters, angrily protest the attack? Did the reliably patriotic British media rally against this humiliating violation of UK sovereignty?

No, Starmer and Lammy once again had nothing to say on the matter.

They have yet to concede that Israel is even breaking international law in denying the people of Gaza all food and water for more than three months, let alone acknowledge that this actually constitutes genocide.

Instead, Lammy’s officials — 300 of whom have protested against the UK’s continuing collusion in Israeli atrocities — have been told to resign rather than raise objections rooted in international law.

Bypass legal advisers
According to sources within the Foreign Office cited by former British ambassador Craig Murray, Lammy has also insisted that any statements relating to the Madleen bypass the government’s legal advisers.

Why? To allow Lammy plausible deniability as he evades Britain’s legal obligation to respond to Israel’s assault on a vessel sailing under UK protection.

The media, meanwhile, has played its own part in whitewashing this flagrant crime — one that has taken place in full view, not hidden away in Gaza’s conveniently engineered “fog of war”.

Much of the press adopted the term “selfie yacht” as if it were their own. As though Thunberg and the rest of the crew were pleasure-seekers promoting their social media platforms rather than risking their lives taking on the might of a genocidal Israeli military.

They had good reason to be fearful. After all, the Israeli military shot dead 10 of their predecessors — activists on the Mavi Marmara aid ship to Gaza — 15 years ago. Israel has killed in cold blood American citizens such as Rachel Corrie, British citizens such as Tom Hurndall, and acclaimed journalists such as Shireen Abu Akleh.

And for those with longer memories, the Israeli air force killed more than 30 American servicemen in a two-hour attack in 1967 on the USS Liberty, and wounded 170 more. The anniversary of that crime — covered up by every US administration — was commemorated by its survivors the day before the attack on the Madleen.

‘Detained’, not abducted
Israel’s trivialising smears of the Madleen crew were echoed uncritically from Sky News and The Telegraph to LBC and Piers Morgan. 

Strangely, journalists who had barely acknowledged the tsunami of selfies taken by Israeli soldiers glorifying their war crimes on social media were keenly attuned to a supposed narcissistic, selfie culture rampant among human-rights activists.

As Thunberg headed back to Europe on Tuesday, the media continued with its assault on the English language and common sense. They reported that she had been “deported” from Israel, as though she had smuggled herself into Israel illegally rather than being been forcibly dragged there by the Israeli military.

But even the so-called “serious” media buried the significance both of the Madleen’s voyage to Gaza and of Israel’s lawbreaking. From The Guardian and BBC to The New York Times and CBS, Israel’s criminal attack was characterised as the aid ship being “intercepted” or “diverted”, and of Israel “taking control” of the vessel.

For the Western media, Thunberg was “detained”, not abducted.

The framing was straight out of Tel Aviv. It was a preposterous narrative in which Israel was presented as taking actions necessary to restore order in a situation of dangerous rule-breaking and anarchy by activists on a futile and pointless excursion to Gaza.

The coverage was so uniform not because it related to any kind of reality, but because it was pure propaganda — narrative spin that served not only Israel’s interests but that of a Western political and media class deeply implicated in Israel’s genocide.

Arming criminals
In another glaring example of this collusion, the Western media chose to almost immediately bury what should have been explosive comments last week from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

He admitted that Israel has been arming and cultivating close ties with criminal gangs in Gaza.

He was responding to remarks from Avigdor Lieberman, a former political ally turned rival, that some of those assisted by Israel are affiliated to the jihadist group Islamic State. The most prominent is named Yasser Abu Shabab.

The Western media either ignored this revelation or dutifully accepted Netanyahu’s self-serving characterisation of these ties as an alliance of convenience: one designed to weaken Hamas by promoting “rival local forces” and opening up new “post-war governing opportunities”.

The real aim — or rather, two aims: one immediate, the other long term — are far more cynical and disturbing.

More than six months ago, Palestinian analysts and the Israeli media began warning that Israel — after it had destroyed Gaza’s ruling institutions, including its police force – was working hand in hand with newly reinvigorated criminal gangs.

Israel’s immediate aim of arming the criminals — turning them into powerful militias — was to intensify the breakdown of law and order. That served as the prelude to a double-barrelled Israeli disinformation campaign.

Instead of the UN’s trusted and wide distribution network across Gaza, the GHF’s four “aid hubs” were perfectly designed to advance Israel’s genocidal goals

Prime looting position
These gangs were put in a prime position to loot food from the United Nations’ long-established aid distribution system and sell it on the black market. The looting helped Israel falsely claim both that Hamas was stealing aid from the UN and that the international body had proven itself unfit to run humanitarian operations in Gaza.

Israel and the US then set about creating a mercenary front group — misleadingly called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation — to run a sham replacement operation.

Instead of the UN’s trusted and wide distribution network across Gaza, the GHF’s four “aid hubs” were perfectly designed to advance Israel’s genocidal goals.

They are located in a narrow strip of territory next to the border with Egypt. Palestinians are forced to ethnically cleanse themselves into a tiny area of Gaza — if they are to stand any hope of eating — in preparation for their expulsion into Sinai.

They have been herded into a massively congested area without the space or facilities to cope, where the spread of disease is guaranteed, and where they can be more easily massacred by Israeli bombs.

An increasingly malnourished population must walk long distances and wait in massive crowds in the heat in the hope of small handouts of food. It is a situation engineered to heighten tensions, and lead to chaos and fighting.

All of which provide an ideal pretext for Israeli soldiers to halt “aid distribution” pre-emptively in the interests of “public safety” and shoot into the crowds to “neutralise threats”, as has happened to lethal effect day after day.

Repeated ‘aid hub’ massacres
The repeated massacres at these “aid hubs” mean that the most vulnerable — those most in need of aid — have been frightened off, leaving gang members like Abu Shabab’s to enjoy the spoils.

On Wednesday, Israel massacred at least 60 Palestinians, most of them seeking food, in what has already become normalised, a daily ritual of bloodletting that is already barely making headlines.

And to add insult to injury, Israel has misrepresented its own drone footage of the very criminal gangs it arms, looting aid from trucks and shooting Palestinian aid-seekers as supposed evidence of Hamas stealing food and of the need for Israel to control aid distribution.

All of this is so utterly transparent, and repugnant, it is simply astonishing it has not been at the forefront of Western coverage as politicians and media worry about how “intolerable the situation” in Gaza has become.

Instead, the media has largely taken it as read that Hamas “steals aid”. The media has indulged an entirely bogus Israeli-fuelled debate about the need for aid distribution “reform”.

And the media has equivocated about whether it is Israeli soldiers shooting dead those seeking aid.

Of course, the media has refused to draw the only reasonable conclusion from all of this: that Israel is simply exploiting the chaos it has created to buy time for its starvation campaign to kill more Palestinians.

Calibrated warlordism
But there is much more at stake. Israel is fattening up these criminal gangs for a grander, future role in what used to be termed the “day after” — until it became all too clear that the period in question would follow the completion of Israel’s genocide.

It comes as no surprise to any Palestinian to hear confirmation from Netanyahu that Israel has been arming criminal gangs in Gaza, even those with affiliations to Islamic State.

It should not surprise any journalist who has spent serious time, as I have, living in a Palestinian community and studying Israel’s colonial control mechanisms over Palestinian society.

For years, Israel’s ultimate vision for the Palestinians – if they cannot be entirely expelled from their historic homeland – has been of carefully calibrated warlordism

Palestinian academics have understood for at least two decades — long before Hamas’ lethal one-day break-out from Gaza on 7 October 2023 — why Israel has invested so much of its energy in dismantling bit by bit the institutions of Palestinian national identity in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.

The goal, they have been telling me and anyone else who would listen, was to leave Palestinian society so hollowed out, so crushed by the rule of feuding criminal gangs, that statehood would become inconceivable.

As the Palestinian political analyst Muhammad Shehada observes of what is taking place in Gaza: “Israel is NOT using [the gangs] to go after Hamas, they’re using them to destroy Gaza itself from the inside.”

For years, Israel’s ultimate vision for the Palestinians — if they cannot be entirely expelled from their historic homeland — has been of carefully calibrated warlordism. Israel would arm a series of criminal families in their geographic heartlands.

Each would have enough light arms to terrorise their local populations into submission, and fight neighbouring families to define the extent of their fiefdom.

None would have the military power to take on Israel. Instead they would have to compete for Israel’s favour — treating it like some inflated Godfather —  in the hope of securing an advantage over rivals.

In this vision, the Palestinians — one of the most educated populations in the Middle East – are to be driven into a permanent state of civil war and “survival of the fittest” politics. Israel’s ambition is to eviscerate Palestinian social cohesion as effectively as it has bombed Gaza’s cities “into the Stone Age”.

Divinely blessed
This is a simple story, one that should be all too familiar to European publics if they were educated in their own histories.

For centuries, Europeans spread outwards — driven by a supremacist zealotry and a desire for material gain — to conquer the lands of others, to steal resources, and to subordinate, expel and exterminate the natives that stood in their way.

The native people were always dehumanised. They were always barbarians, “human animals”, even as we — the members of a supposedly superior civilisation — butchered them, starved them, levelled their homes, destroyed their crops.

Our mission of conquest and extermination was always divinely blessed. Our success in eradicating native peoples, our efficiency in killing them, was always proof of our moral superiority.

We were always the victims, even while we humiliated, tortured and raped. We were always on the side of righteousness.

Israel has simply carried this tradition into the modern era. It has held a mirror up to us and shown that, despite all our grandstanding about human rights, nothing has really changed.

There are a few, like Greta Thunberg and the crew of the Madleen, ready to show by example that we can break with the past. We can refuse to dehumanise. We can refuse to collude in industrial savagery. We can refuse to give our consent through silence and inaction.

But first we must stop listening to the siren calls of our political leaders and the billionaire-owned media. Only then might we learn what it means to be human.

Jonathan Cook is a writer, journalist and self-appointed media critic and author of many books about Palestine. Winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. Republished from the author’s blog with permission.

Chris Hedges: The last days of Gaza

0
"The last piece." Illustration: Mr Fish

The genocide is almost complete. When it is concluded it will have exposed the moral bankruptcy of Western civilisation, writes Chris Hedges.

ANALYSIS: By Chris Hedges

This is the end. The final blood-soaked chapter of the genocide.

It will be over soon. Weeks. At most.

Two million people are camped out amongst the rubble or in the open air. Dozens are killed and wounded daily from Israeli shells, missiles, drones, bombs and bullets.

They lack clean water, medicine and food. They have reached a point of collapse. Sick. Injured. Terrified. Humiliated. Abandoned. Destitute. Starving. Hopeless.

In the last pages of this horror story, Israel is sadistically baiting starving Palestinians with promises of food, luring them to the narrow and congested nine-mile ribbon of land that borders Egypt. Israel and its cynically named Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), allegedly funded by Israel’s Ministry of Defense and the Mossad, is weaponising starvation.

It is enticing Palestinians to southern Gaza the way the Nazis enticed starving Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto to board trains to the death camps. The goal is not to feed the Palestinians. No one seriously argues there is enough food or aid hubs. The goal is to cram Palestinians into heavily guarded compounds and deport them.

What comes next? I long ago stopped trying to predict the future. Fate has a way of surprising us. But there will be a final humanitarian explosion in Gaza’s human slaughterhouse. We see it with the surging crowds of Palestinians fighting to get a food parcel, which has resulted in Israeli and US private contractors shooting dead at least 130 and wounding over seven hundred others in the first eight days of aid distribution.

We see it with Benjamin Netanyahu’s arming ISIS-linked gangs in Gaza that loot food supplies. Israel, which has eliminated hundreds of employees with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), doctors, journalists, civil servants and police in targeted assassinations, has orchestrated the implosion of civil society.

I suspect Israel will facilitate a breach in the fence along the Egyptian border. Desperate Palestinians will stampede into the Egyptian Sinai. Maybe it will end some other way. But it will end soon. There is not much more Palestinians can take.

We — full participants in this genocide — will have achieved our demented goal of emptying Gaza and expanding Greater Israel. We will bring down the curtain on the live-streamed genocide. We will have mocked the ubiquitous university programmes of Holocaust studies, designed, it turns out, not to equip us to end genocides, but deify Israel as an eternal victim licensed to carry out mass slaughter.

The mantra of never again is a joke. The understanding that when we have the capacity to halt genocide and we do not, we are culpable, does not apply to us. Genocide is public policy. Endorsed and sustained by our two ruling parties.

There is nothing left to say. Maybe that is the point. To render us speechless. Who does not feel paralyzed? And maybe, that too, is the point. To paralyse us. Who is not traumatised? And maybe that too was planned. Nothing we do, it seems, can halt the killing. We feel defenceless. We feel helpless. Genocide as spectacle.

I have stopped looking at the images. The rows of little shrouded bodies. The decapitated men and women. Families burned alive in their tents. The children who have lost limbs or are paralyzed. The chalky death masks of those pulled from under the rubble. The wails of grief. The emaciated faces. I can’t.

This genocide will haunt us. It will echo down history with the force of a tsunami. It will divide us forever. There is no going back.

Palestinians under the rubble in 2023 after Israeli airstrike of homes in the Gaza Strip
Palestinians under the rubble in 2023 after Israeli airstrike of homes in the Gaza Strip. Image: Ashraf Amra /United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East/ Wikimedia Commons /CC BY-SA 4.0

And how will we remember? By not remembering.

Once it is over, all those who supported it, all those who ignored it, all those who did nothing, will rewrite history, including their personal history. It was hard to find anyone who admitted to being a Nazi in post-war Germany, or a member of the Klu Klux Klan once segregation in the southern United States ended.

A nation of innocents. Victims even. It will be the same. We like to think we would have saved Anne Frank. The truth is different. The truth is, crippled by fear, nearly all of us will only save ourselves, even at the expense of others. But that is a truth that is hard to face. That is the real lesson of the Holocaust. Better it be erased.

In his book One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, Omar El Akkad writes:

“Should a drone vaporize some nameless soul on the other side of the planet, who among us wants to make a fuss? What if it turns out they were a terrorist?

“What if the default accusation proves true, and we by implication be labeled terrorist sympathisers, ostracised, yelled at? It is generally the case that people are most zealously motivated by the worst plausible thing that could happen to them.

“For some, the worst plausible thing might be the ending of their bloodline in a missile strike. Their entire lives turned to rubble and all of it preemptively justified in the name of fighting terrorists who are terrorists by default on account of having been killed. For others, the worst plausible thing is being yelled at.”

You can see my interview with El Akkad here.

You cannot decimate a people, carry out saturation bombing over 20 months to obliterate their homes, villages and cities, massacre tens of thousands of innocent people, set up a siege to ensure mass starvation, drive them from land where they have lived for centuries and not expect blowback.

The genocide will end. The response to the reign of state terror will begin. If you think it won’t you know nothing about human nature or history. The killing of two Israeli diplomats in Washington and the attack against supporters of Israel at a protest in Boulder, Colorado, are only the start.

Chaim Engel, who took part in the uprising at the Nazis’ Sobibor death camp in Poland, described how, armed with a knife, he attacked a guard in the camp.

“It’s not a decision,” Engel explained years later. “You just react, instinctively you react to that, and I figured, ‘Let us to do, and go and do it.’ And I went.

“I went with the man in the office and we killed this German. With every jab, I said, ‘That is for my father, for my mother, for all these people, all the Jews you killed.’”

The Sobibor extermination camp gate in the spring of 1943
The Sobibor extermination camp gate in the spring of 1943. The pine branches, braided into the fence to make it difficult to see in from the outside. Image: Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain

Does anyone expect Palestinians to act differently? How are they to react when Europe and the United States, who hold themselves up as the vanguards of civilisation, backed a genocide that butchered their parents, their children, their communities, occupied their land and blasted their cities and homes into rubble? How can they not hate those who did this to them?

What message has this genocide imparted not only to Palestinians, but to all in the Global South?

It is unequivocal. You do not matter. Humanitarian law does not apply to you. We do not care about your suffering, the murder of your children. You are vermin. You are worthless. You deserve to be killed, starved and dispossessed. You should be erased from the face of the earth.

“To preserve the values of the civilised world, it is necessary to set fire to a library,” El Akkad writes:

“To blow up a mosque. To incinerate olive trees. To dress up in the lingerie of women who fled and then take pictures.

“To level universities. To loot jewelry, art, food. Banks. To arrest children for picking vegetables. To shoot children for throwing stones.

“To parade the captured in their underwear. To break a man’s teeth and shove a toilet brush in his mouth. To let combat dogs loose on a man with Down syndrome and then leave him to die.
“Otherwise, the uncivilised world might win.”

There are people I have known for years who I will never speak to again. They know what is happening. Who does not know? They will not risk alienating their colleagues, being smeared as an antisemite, jeopardising their status, being reprimanded or losing their jobs.

They do not risk death, the way Palestinians do. They risk tarnishing the pathetic monuments of status and wealth they spent their lives constructing. Idols.

They bow down before these idols. They worship these idols. They are enslaved by them.

At the feet of these idols lie tens of thousands of murdered Palestinians.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor and NPR.  He is the host of show The Chris Hedges Report. This article was first published in Scheerpost.