Gilbert Doctorow
SPUTNIK

The Hegemon's nominal head set the tone for this exhibition of profuse hypocrisy. But as you can see below, the West's behaviour is so repugnant, that cracks are showing up inside the US government and even among its EU vassals.

Russia’s ‘Sputnik’ on the succession of Western leaders visiting Israel for photo ops

I was pleased to respond in writing to questions posed by the Russian news agency Sputnik as it prepared a report on the past week’s visits to Tel Aviv by Scholz, Biden and now Sunak.   See,

https://sputnikglobe.com/20231019/western-leaders-posturing-shuttle-visits-to-israel-an-effort-to-buoy-hold-on-power-at-home–1114325687.html

Of course, Western censorship being what it is, this link may not be accessible in certain countries. [Editor's Note: Google has now deep sixed this page; it cannot be found.] Please accept my apologies. Also note that the points raised in the article were explored in greater depth during a live interview on WION, the Indian English language global broadcaster, which seems to be taking a far more objective and critical stance on Israel than the Modi government. When the link becomes available later today, I will post it separately.

G.D.

Full transcript of the Sputnik text in the link for those who do not have access (Andreas Mylaeus)

Svetlana Ekimenko

Western Leaders’ ‘Posturing’ Shuttle Visits to Israel an Effort to Buoy ‘Hold on Power at Home’

UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak followed in the heels of US President Joe Biden to descend upon Tel Aviv on Thursday, telling his counterpart Benjamin Netanyahu that he “absolutely” supported Israel’s right to defend itself. Meanwhile, over 3,300 people have been killed in the Gaza Strip since Israel began retaliatory air strikes on the enclave.

Sunak's pathetic photo-op. He's just being a good boy for Washington, and to appease Britain's powerful Zionist lobby. Lack of principles and opportunism define this class of toadyism. Like the US, the EU is largely bereft of real leaders.

As they embark upon a flurry of visits to Tel Aviv amid the latest flare-up of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, European leaders are “demonstrating once again that their only concern is to strengthen their hold on power at home by photo ops in Israel,” and “posturing” alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Gilbert Doctorow, an international relations and Russian affairs analyst, told Sputnik.

“These visits are meaningful for demonstrating publicly that the leaders are backing fully one side to the conflict and so disqualify themselves as peacemakers. They also attract the attention of the Global South, heightening their contempt for Europe,” Doctorow underscored.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen (left), German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, US President Joe Biden, and now UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak have all made successive visits to Tel Aviv amid the latest violent escalation of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. At the same time, ongoing hostilities in the Gaza Strip region show no signs of abating, with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) pounding what they claim are Hamas targets inside the Palestinian enclave.

On October 7, the Palestinian group Hamas launched a surprise large-scale attack against Israel from the Gaza Strip. After it breached the border, killing and seizing people in neighboring Israeli communities, Tel Aviv launched retaliatory strikes and ordered a complete blockade of the Gaza Strip, home to more than two million people, cutting off supplies of food, water, and fuel. Thousands of dead and injured have been reported on both sides as a result of the escalation.

The Gaza death toll has already exceeded 3,300, according to Palestinian authorities. One million people have been displaced in the span of 10 days, according to the United Nations. Furthermore, since the start of the complete blockage of the Gaza Strip by Israel, the Palestinian Ministry of Health warned of a severe shortage of medicines, water, and growing risk of an outbreak of disease in the besieged enclave. On Tuesday, even European Council President Charles Michel admitted that the siege of the Gaza Strip by Israel violates international humanitarian law.

Scholtz: Israel can do no wrong. A blank check of support.

“When you cut the basic infrastructure, when you cut access to water, when you cut electricity, if you do not allow food to be delivered, this is not in line with the international law,” Michel told reporters in Brussels after an extraordinary video conference of the European Council on the situation in the Middle East.

Furthermore, over 500 perished in a blast at the Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in northern Gaza on Tuesday night, where locals were sheltering from Israeli airstrikes. The Israeli and Palestinian authorities have blamed each other for the fatal incident. Hamas said that a missile was launched by the IDF, while Israeli officials put the blame on the Palestinian Islamic Jihad movement – something the latter denied in a statement. US President Joe Biden, during a meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday, laid the responsibility for the Gaza hospital blast on the “other team,” and not on Israel. [Editor's Note: Hamas does NOT possess the kind of high-explosive munitions used in the airstrike-not just a blast—that devastated the Al-Ahli Hospital.]

‘Gesture Politics’

As for European leaders, they “have nothing to offer to the parties to the conflict except some small donations that are meaningless in the face of the total devastation that Israel is now dealing out to Gaza,” Gilbert Doctorow emphasized.

The repugnant German toady Olaf Scholz doing his duty to stay in the game. "We feel your pain, we have your back", they say. Conveniently forgetting the long history of Israel's depraved criminality toward the Palestinians.

“I’m not sure whether Europe or European leaders can do anything. It is just gesture politics when it comes to their visits to Israel and having discussions and talks with Benjamin Netanyahu. So by doing this and traveling to Israel and meeting with the Israeli politicians, they reaffirm and show their support and they pledge allegiance to Israel and to the Israeli course,” Adriel Kasonta, a London-based foreign affairs analyst and former chairman of the International Affairs Committee at the Bow Group think tank, told Sputnik.

This flurry of shuttle diplomacy cannot but call to mind the eagerness with which all these Western leaders have been making forays to Kiev. As they made a bee-line for Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, the aforementioned politicians have offered him successive vast weapons packages that have failed to impact the stuttering counteroffensive, while only further fanning the flames of the ongoing NATO proxy war against Russia. The same Western leaders have made no bones about being ready to prop up Kiev “to the last Ukrainian.”

So the optics of another round of such so-called “peacemaking” shuttling, with vows to “absolutely” support Israel’s right to defend itself (sic), while the death toll accumulates in the enclave, feed into speculation that, similar to Ukraine, the back-and-forth visits will fail to defuse tensions.

Weighing in on speculation whether there are tools to influence Israel with regard to its mulled ground operation in Gaza, Doctorow said:

“On one side of the equation, the USA has such tools if it ever wished to use them, which so far it seems they do not. By offering $20 billion (or quite possibly more) in aid to Israel, Washington just has to add conditions. If it were at all serious in defending Israel, the first condition would be the immediate replacement of the entire Netanyahu Cabinet and its replacement from among the opposition parties. Netanyahu and company are personally responsible for negligence arising from hubris that enabled the Hamas attack on October 7. Netanyahu personally is responsible for having aided and abetted the Hamas control of Gaza as a counterbalance to the Palestinian Authority of [President Mahmoud] Abbas.”

Adriel Kasonta voiced the opinion that the only country that “holds cards as far as the Israel and Palestine conflict is concerned is the United States.” Underscoring that Washington was the greatest supporter of the Israeli state, “especially when the sale of armaments is concerned and also providing money for Israel,” Kasonta, however, pointed to the recent move by the US to oppose the United Nations motion to establish a humanitarian corridor to Gaza.

“So I think that the United States have already made their decision to allow Israel to do whatever they want with regards to the Palestinian people and Gaza itself,” said the foreign affairs analyst.

Adriel Kasonta speculated that Russia and China were emerging as two countries that “oppose what is happening with the Palestinian people and what is happening in Gaza.” He voiced the opinion that these two countries could “support the outcome of this conflict by using their powers, their soft power.”

“I think that these two… great powers, as I said, China and Russia, can influence and should influence global opinion and somehow influence Israel itself. We know that many expats from Russia are living in Israel. We know that Israel is very much interested in having good economic relations with China. So I think that these two countries have certain leverages to use and to influence Israel to spare the lives of the Palestinian people. As we can see at the moment, this doesn’t look very well. And I’m not sure whether the two-state solution is still on the table. It certainly doesn’t look this way at the moment,” Kasonta underscored.

According to the ex-chairman of the International Affairs Committee at the Bow Group think tank, there is currently little “will on the side of the Israeli government to spare lives of the Palestinian people, because they are using its bogus arguments of trying to raze Gaza to the ground in order to destroy Hamas.” Adriel Kasonta deplored the huge humanitarian crisis which is already unfolding, and warned that the actions of Israel would “destroy the two-state solution project completely.”

“Certainly, if the United State would not greenlight the actions of the Israeli government, Israel would not conduct this annihilation of the Palestinian population,” Kasonta believed.

The US has readily used the escalation of hostilities to assemble a show of force in the region, sending to the eastern Mediterranean near Israel two US Navy carrier strike groups led by the USS Gerald Ford and the USS Dwight D Eisenhower. Furthermore, another navy ship – US 6th Fleet Blue Ridge-class command and control ship the USS Mount Whitney LCC 20 – was deployed from its homeport in the central Italian coastal city of Gaeta to support US operations in the aforementioned area. President Biden’s moves do nothing for de-escalation, Gilbert Doctorow argued, saying:

“Biden wrongfully believes that the presence of the US aircraft carrier task forces off of Israeli shores ensures de-escalation, because it deters Iran and Syria from entering the conflict in a second front against Israel. On the contrary, the US naval presence heightens regional tensions and sets the stage for a regional, if not global war.”

Addendum

How the Putin talks with Xi have been reported on Russian state television

gilbertdoctorow Uncategorized 4 Minutes

ABOVE: Putin simply points out in his usual calm, non-inflammatory way, that Russia now has high-performance jets in the Black Sea flying Kinzhal hypersonic missiles capable of hitting the US carrier groups massed near Israel. 

The talks on the second and final day of Vladimir Putin’s visit to Beijing did not result in a big joint declaration with respect to either the ongoing hot conflict between Hamas and Israel nor with respect to the Ukraine war.  Indeed, there was no joint press conference today. No doubt the Chinese President was busy in talks with the other twenty or more participants in the celebratory Forum dedicated to the 10^th anniversary of the Belt and Road Initiative.

Instead, Vladimir Putin had a press conference of his own, held outdoors on the lawn before his compound. There were numerous questions and some very important answers, including one with which I will begin: his confirmation that Russia is now permanently patrolling the neutral waters of the Black Sea with jets that are carrying its Kinzhal hypersonic missiles. They reportedly have a range of 1,500 km and fly at a speed of 9 Mach. If my arithmetic is correct, this means that from the southern coast of the Black Sea they could reach and destroy any part of the U.S carrier fleet parked in the Eastern Mediterranean for the protection of Israel, per the American administration.  Mention of these patrols was given in an offhand manner, but one may well suppose that the Pentagon was listening closely.

The context for these remarks was a question about what response Russia will give to the ATACMS which Washington has delivered to Kiev and which Zelensky said were used against Russian air bases yesterday. Putin’s direct answer to that is that ATACMS will only prolong the war while at the same time drawing the United States deeper into the Ukrainian conflict.

One wonders whether this kind of response will be applied to Germany should it deliver the TAURUS cruise missiles to Kiev and, as German politician Roderich Kiesewetter said yesterday to reporters, help the Ukrainians to destroy the Crimean bridge.

In his statement at the start of the press conference, Vladimir Putin said that he and Xi reiterated their call for all sides in the Hamas-Israeli war to enter into an immediate cease-fire and open direct talks. He noted that in his telephone calls with Benjamin Netanyahu and with leaders across the Gulf States two days ago he was certain that no one wants the conflict to spread further in the region.

Putin said that earlier in the day he had one-on-one talks with Xi that lasted almost two hours. He called them productive and substantive, but also confidential so that there was no more to be said about them. Then came a longer session when they were joined by their respective delegations. Putin had with him all of the key ministers in the Russian government as well as top business executives in the fields of greatest importance in Russian-Chinese trade development.

The early afternoon edition of Sixty Minutes interviewed several of these key Russian participants and reported on several points worth repeating here. One, by Finance Minister Siluanov, is that 90% of Russian-Chinese trade is now conducted in national currencies, of course with the greater part in yuan. Removal of the dollar from the exchanges means that Washington no longer has any usable intelligence on who is buying and selling what to whom.  As we know otherwise from Putin himself, the bilateral trade is expected to exceed 200 billion dollars in value by year’s end.

Another valuable data point aired on Sixty Minutes was that grain sales to China are expected to reach 70 million tons, which would represent almost 50% of the entire Russian harvest this year. And Alexei Miller, head of Gazprom, said that China is on course to buy as much natural gas annually as Russia was previously exporting to Europe.

                                                                     *****

Quite apart from the television coverage of Putin’s visit to China, Sixty Minutes had some commentary on other events that readers in Europe, and in Germany in particular, may be interested to hear. The most piquant pertain to Chancellor Scholz’s brief trip to Tel Aviv yesterday.  He was reported to say to his Israeli hosts that he came to reaffirm Germany’s solidarity with Israel at this critical time and its concern to ensure Israeli security. This, he went on to explain, is a natural consequence of Germany’s feelings of responsibility for the Holocaust. 

As program host Yevgeny Popov asked rhetorically:  and do the Germans not remember their responsibility for killing 27 million Soviet citizens in WWII? Do they not feel a responsibility to ensure Russia’s security today?

The other remark pertaining to Scholz was shock that he arrived in Israel in a plane bearing the legend “Luftwaffe” and the iron cross symbol.  This seemed to be tactless under the circumstances.

As for Biden’s arrival in Israel and public statement to Netanyahu that he came to show America’s support for Israel, the Sixty Minutes presenter said that Washington in one stroke, by its alignment with one side in the conflict, forfeited any role as a possible peacemaker in the region. This is in stark contrast with Russia, which has kept lines of communication open with all sides.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023

Postscript, 19 October:  on his show last night, Vladimir Solovyov decrypted   for his audience Vladimir Putin’s announcement about the Kinzhal-equipped air patrols that Russia now has established over the Black Sea: the intent is a clear warning to Washington that any attack on Syria or Iran from these vessels in the Eastern Mediterranean will result in a Russian attack on the fleet. For those unfamiliar with the technical characteristics of the Kinzhal, suffice it to say that it does have the force to sink an aircraft carrier. Brinksmanship, anyone?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR / SOURCE

Gilbert Doctorow is an independent political analyst based in Brussels and an expert in Russian affairs.