Gaza: The Strategic Imperative

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Michael Hudson
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Ania K.

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Gaza: The Strategic Imperative

By Michael Sunday, April 14, 2024 Interviews Middle East Permalink

PROF. MICHAEL HUDSON, THE TRUTH ABOUT THE DESTRUCTION OF GAZA. – Ania K

ANIA: Hello, everyone. Welcome back to my channel. Today I have with me for the fourth time, I’m still counting, a very, very special guest, one of the best professors in economics and financial analysts in the world. And I’m very glad we are reconnecting with Professor Hudson again.

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Welcome back, Professor Hudson. Thank you so much for joining me today for this conversation.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Thanks for having me back again.

ANIA: And I would like to say to the audience as well that this video is dedicated to what is taking place, especially in Gaza and Israel. Of course, we will address other countries related to this situation, but Professor Hudson has sent me a very in-depth email after our last live stream a week ago, also on Friday, and we actually decided after we ended that live stream to have this particular topic to be the main topic of this video. So, I give this to you, Professor Hudson, where would you like to start this conversation, please?

MICHAEL HUDSON: I think I should start with my own background, because 50 years ago, in 1974, I was working with the Hudson Institute, with Herman Kahn, and my colleagues there were a number of Mossad agents who were being trained. Uzi Arad was there, and he became the head of Mossad and is currently the main advisor to Benjamin Netanyahu.

So, all of what is happening today was discussed 50 years ago, not only with the Israelis, but with many of the U.S. defense people, because I was with the Hudson Institute, which was a national security agency, because I’d written Super Imperialism, and I was a balance of payments expert, and the Defense Department used my book Super Imperialism not as an expose, but a how-to-do-it book. And they brought me there as a specialist in the balance of payments. Herman brought me back and forth to the White House to meet with cabinet members and to discuss the balance of payments. He also brought me to the War College and to the Air Force think tanks.

So, all of what is happening now was described a long time ago, and Herman was known as a futurist. He was Dr. Strangelove in the movie. That was all based for him on his theories of atomic war, but he was also the main theorist behind Vietnam. And nobody seems to have noticed that what is happening in Gaza and the West Bank now is all based on what was the U.S. strategy during the Vietnam War. And it was based on the “strategic hamlets” idea, the fact that you could cut back, you could just divide all of Vietnam into little parts, having guards at all the transition points from one part to another. Everything that Israel is doing to the Palestinians in Gaza and elsewhere throughout Israel was all pioneered in Vietnam.

And Herman had me meet with some of the generals there to explain it. And I think I mentioned I flew to Asia twice with Uzi Arad. We had a chance to [get to] know each other very much. And I could see that the intention from the very beginning was to get rid of the Palestinians and indeed to use Israel as the basis for U.S. control of Near Eastern oil. That was the constant discussion of that from the American point of view. It was Israel as a part of the oil.

So, Herman’s analysis was on systems analysis. You define the overall aim and then you work backward. How do you do it? Well, you can see what the Israeli policy is today. First of all, you isolate the Palestinians and strategic hamlets. That’s what Gaza had already been turned into for the last 15 years. It’s been carved up into districts requiring electronic passes from one sector to another to go into Israel, to go to Jerusalem, or to go to Israel for jobs to work.

The aim all along has been to kill them. Or first of all, to make life so unpleasant for them that they’ll emigrate. That’s the easy way. Why would anyone want to stay in Gaza when what’s happening to them is what’s happening today? You’re going to leave. But if they don’t leave, you’re going to have to kill them, ideally by bombing because that minimizes the domestic casualties. Israel doesn’t want its soldiers to die any more than Americans do. So, the American form of war, as it was in Vietnam, is bombing them. You don’t want person-to-person contact because people fighting for their lives and liberty tend to be better fighters because for them it’s really essential. For the others, they’re just doing soldier’s work.

So, the genocide that you’re seeing today is an explicit policy, and that was a policy of the forefathers, the founders of Israel. The idea of a land without people was a land without Arabs in it, the land without non-Jewish people. That’s really what it meant. They were to be driven out starting even before the official funding of Israel, the first Nakba, the Arab Holocaust. And the two of the Israeli prime ministers were members of the Stern gang of terrorists. The terrorists became the rulers of Israel. They escaped from British jail and they joined to found Israel. So, what you’re seeing today is the final solution to this plan. And the founders of Israel were so obsessed with the Nazis, essentially, they wanted to do to them what they did to us, is how they explained it to people.

For the United States, what they wanted was the oil reserves in the Middle East. And again and again, I heard the phrase, ‘you’re our landed aircraft carrier in Israel’. Uzi Arad, the future Mossad head, would be very uncomfortable at this because he wanted Israel to be run by the Israelis. But they realized that for Israel to get by with the money that it needed for its balance of payments, it had to be in a partnership with the United States.

So, what you’re seeing today isn’t simply the work of one man, of Benjamin Netanyahu. It’s the work of the team that President Biden has put together. It’s the team of Jake Sullivan, the National Security Advisor, Lincoln, and the whole deep state, the whole neocon group behind them, Victoria Nuland, and everyone. They’re all self-proclaimed Zionists. And they’ve gone over this plan for essentially America’s domination of the Near East for decade after decade.

But as the United States learned in the Vietnam War, populations protest, and the U.S. population protested against the Vietnam War. What the Biden administration wants to avoid is the situation that President Johnson had in 1968. Any hotel, any building that he went to, to give a speech for his re-election campaign, there were crowds shouting, LBJ, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today? President Johnson had to take the servants entrance to get away from the press so that nobody would see what he was doing. And essentially, he went on television and resigned.

Well, to prevent this kind of embarrassment, and to prevent the embarrassment of journalists who were doing all this, Seymour Hersh described the [Mai Lai] massacre, and that helped inflame the opposition to Johnson. Well, President Biden, who’s approved Netanyahu’s plan, the first people you have to kill are the journalists. If you’re going to permit genocide, you have to realize that you don’t want the domestic U.S. population or the rest of the world to oppose the U.S. and Israel. You kill the journalists. And for the last, ever since the October 2nd Al-Aqsa event, you’ve had one journalist per week killed in Israel. That’s part of it.

The other people you don’t want, if you’re going to bomb them, you have to start by bombing the hospitals and all of the key centers. That also was part of the idea of the Vietnam War. How do you destroy a population? This was all worked out in the 1970s, when people were trying to use systems analysis to think, how do you work back and see what you need? And the idea, if you bomb a population, you can’t really hide that, even if you kill the journalists. How do you kill a population passively? So you minimize the visible bombing. Well, the line of least resistance is to starve them. And that’s been the Jewish, the Israeli policy since 2008.

You had a piece by Sarah Roy in the New York Review, citing a cable from 2008, from Tel Aviv to the embassy saying, as part of their overall embargo plan against Gaza, Israeli officials have confirmed to the embassy officials on multiple occasions that they intend to keep the Gaza economy on the brink of collapse without quite pushing it over the edge. Well, now they’re pushing it over the edge.

Amoral —even sociopathic—careerism is inherent in capitalist culture as America so eloquently proves.

And so Israel has been especially focusing after the journalists, after the hospitals, you bomb the greenhouses, you bomb the trees, you sink the fishing boats that have supplied food to the population. And then you aim at fighting the United Nations relief people.

And you’ve read, obviously, the whole news of the last week has been the attack on the seven food providers that were not Arabs. And this was, again, from a systems analyst point, this is exactly what the textbook says to do strategically. If you can make a very conspicuous bombing of aid people, then you will have other aid suppliers afraid to go, because they think, well, if these people, aid suppliers, are just shot at, then we would be too.

Well, the United States is fully behind this. And to help starve the Gazan people, Biden immediately, right after the ICJ finding of plausible genocide, withdrew all funding from the United Nations relief agencies. The idea, again, the hope was to prevent the United Nations from having the money to supply food.

So when the United States is now trying to blame one person, and Biden goes on a television recorded call with Netanyahu saying, please be humane when you’re dropping your bombs, do it in a humane way. That’s purely for domestic consumption. It’s amazing how nakedly hypocritical all this.

And ever since the Al-Aqsa Mosque was raided by Israeli settlers on October 2, leading to Hamas’s Al-Aqsa Flood retaliation on October 7, it was closely coordinated with the Biden administration. All the bombs have been dropped day after day, week after week, with the whole of the US. And Biden has said on a number of occasions, the Palestinians are enemies.

So I think I want to make it clear that this is not simply an Israeli war against Hamas. It’s an American-backed Israeli war. Each of them have their own objectives. Israel’s objective is to have a land without non-Jewish population. And America’s aim is to have Israel acting as the local coordinator, as it has been coordinating the work with ISIS and the ISIS commanders to turn them against targets provided by the United States.

Basically, that’s the duopoly that’s been created.

And I think Alastair Crooke has cited Trita Parsi, [the US-Iranian relations scholar], saying the objective really in all this, of Israel’s conflict and Biden’s acquiescence to it, is that Israel is engaged in a deliberate and systematic effort to destroy existing laws and norms about warfare. And that’s really it.

You have people, you have reporters, such as Pepe Escobar, saying that the United States is a chaos agent. But there’s a logic in this. The United States is looking forward to what it’s going to be doing in the Near East, in Ukraine, and especially in the China Sea and Taiwan. Looking forward, the United States says, how do we prevent other nations moving against us in the international court or suing or somehow putting sanctions against us? Israel is the test case, not simply for what’s happening there in Israel and Palestine itself, but against anything that the United States will be doing through the rest of the world.

That’s why the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., echoed by [Blinken] and other U.S. officials, said there’s no court of justice ruling against genocide, that it was a non-binding ruling. Well, of course it was binding, but it has no means of enforcement. And both [Blinken] and yesterday, the head of the army said, there is no genocide taking place in Gaza. Well, what that means is you have to go to a court, and that’s going to take years and years. And by the time the court case is over and there’s any judgment of reparations due, then you’re going to, by then the Gazans will all be dead. So the U.S. aim is to end the rule of international law that is why the United Nations was founded in 1945.

And in fact, this international law goes way back to 1648 with the peace of Westphalia in Germany to end the 30 years war. All the European nations agreed not to interfere with the internal affairs of other countries. Well, that also was part of the United Nations principle.

And yet you have the United States explicitly advocating regime change in other countries, and most specifically in Russia and throughout the Middle East. So if you can end the whole kind of rule of law, then there’s really no alternative to the United States rules-based order, which means we can do whatever we want, chaos.

And if you look at what’s happening in Gaza is facilitating a transition from a orderly world of the United Nations to chaos, then you’re going to understand basically what the whole, the big picture, the long range picture that’s been put in place really over a series of decades. That’s why the United States, and the United States has no plan B. It only has the plan A to do this. It’s not taking into account the counter reactions and the feedback. Maybe we can discuss that a little later. I’d better leave the questions up to you.

ANIA: Thank you. You actually have already answered many of my questions in that intro, but I want to ask you this now. I will jump a little bit now. I have a question about something that you wrote to me in your email.

I believe looking at many, many situations that are taking place in the world, that sometimes all you really need to do is to follow the money and it will give you a lot of answers. So as you said in your email that, let me check, where is it? The Israeli developers already are planning to turn Gaza into luxury beachfront properties.

So let me ask you here, Professor Hudson, What is really the main goal for Israel’s existence? And in this case, is this really about their luxurious properties, oil? What else is this region really about? Why is it so crucial?

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, it’s not just about beach properties. It’s what’s off the beach, the gas, the natural gas that they’ve discovered right offshore the Mediterranean that belongs to Gaza. So the Israelis are after the gas.

But your basic question, you’d sent me a list of questions you were going to go through. And I think if you keep to that sequence, it’s good. What you’re really asking is, you know, what’s the main goal for Israel’s existence? And I think if people don’t really, their sense of justice is so strong that they can’t believe what the original goal was. And the initial goal in the 19th century was formed in a period where Europe was anti-Semitic. The most anti-Semitic part of all was Ukraine. If you read Leon Trotsky’s autobiography of growing up in Odessa, he described the pogroms there. And so the Zionists, the first wave of Zionists, were looking for how can the Jewish people escape from this anti-Semitism.

Here’s the problem. By 1947, when Israel was formed, anti-Semitism was passé. Most Jews in the United States, certainly who I grew up with, they were all assimilated. Of course, they had well wishes for Israel. There was very little talk of the Arabs. But you had two arms of Judaism.

The one arm were the people who remembered with a vengeance what was done for them against them in Ukraine and Russia, and especially by Hitler and the Holocaust. They wanted to be separate and to have just to be protected.

But most of the Jewish population in America and Europe was thoroughly assimilated. And the last thing they wanted was to be separate. They wanted just the opposite. They wanted anti-Semitism to end.

But the Zionists who were in charge of Israel, the Stern Gang leaders, were obsessed with the old antagonisms. And in a way, they were obsessed with Nazism and said, well, we want to do to them what they did to us.

And again, the idea of a land without a people meant a land— we intend to make Israel into a land without non-Jewish people. That’s what a land without people, their slogan, meant. And from the very beginning, they started by driving Arabs out of Palestine, destroying their olive trees, destroying their orchards, taking their houses, and just killing them. That’s why the English threw them in jail before turning around and said, well, it’s true that we’ve thrown all the leaders in jail, but let’s recognize Israel and make Israel a whole country to do what these leaders that we were before throwing in jail were doing.

ANIA: Thank you.

You said also in your email that ISIS is part of America’s foreign legion. Can you please elaborate on that?

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, ISIS was organized originally to fight in Afghanistan against the Russians. And al-Qaeda, which was the parent of ISIS, was simply the roster of people who were willing to fight under the U.S. command.

Well, part of al-Qaeda turned against America on 9-11, but most, especially the Sunni followers of Wahhabi theology, were very eager to fight against the Shiites. Islam is divided into two parts, the Sunni Islam of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Republics, and much of the Near East, and the Shiites from Iran and maybe half of Iraq and parts of Syria also.

So you had these two sectarian groups fighting each other, and the United States provided the funding and the organization to them and essentially delegated to Israel much of the organization of organizing ISIS to fight against Assad, to fight against whomever the United States designated as our enemies, meaning we want to take their oil lands. America has taken Iraqi oil and won’t leave, is taking Syrian oil and won’t leave.

So essentially, the U.S. has used ISIS to fight against all of the Shiites on the theory that the Shiite Islam is all controlled by Iran, and they want to essentially wipe out the Shiites as they’re doing in Gaza, even though I think the Palestinians are mainly Sunni, but you should think of the ISIS as America’s foreign legion. They’ve hired them, they pay them, and they recruit from them.

You’ve just seen in what happened in Russia from the Ukrainians, Oregon recruited Sunni terrorists from Tajikistan. You’ve seen the United States trying to use ISIS to recruit, to fight in Russia’s southern periphery in Central Asia and to fight in the Uyghur territories of Xinjiang in Western China. They’re using ISIS to try to essentially attack the integrity of China, Russia, and Syria and any other area where the United States wants a regime change to put in the usual client oligarchy.

ANIA: So interesting, and they sell it under the description that this is the enemy and terrorist, and they are founding it. And the public is still buying this, Professor Hudson. How is this possible?

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, this is hypocritical. Everybody throughout the world is appalled by the cruelty and the barbarism of ISIS. The United States is not going to come right out and say, hey, that’s us that they’re fighting. We’re directing ISIS from the presidential office. We love ISIS.

Well, Biden loves ISIS, and Blinken loves ISIS, and the entire neocons, the CIA loves ISIS because they’re all running it, but they can’t say it to the American public. They have to pretend just like they’re pretending with Netanyahu that, oh my heavens, look at [what] ISIS is doing. We’ve really got to fight against it.

And for instance, when it put in the white helmets in ISIS, these were the American supplied public relations unit to essentially do false propaganda, false images, make false flag attacks. All of these false flag attacks, all of the white helmets and the propaganda has all been coordinated by the United States.

ANIA: I want to ask you now a question that to some extent you actually answered already. Does Israel make any independent decisions that are not consulted with the United States in regards to bombing Gaza?

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, the question is, what is the United States or what do you mean by the United States? They don’t need official approval. There’s already a broad agreement in principle. Do whatever you have to do.

The United States has given them a free hand saying, we’re not going to interfere. You’re our managers on site. Just as you’re managing ISIS, you can manage certainly your own country. The U.S. has given blanket approval for Israel’s genocide. That’s why it says there’s no genocide there.

And it shares the aim of extending the war to fight Iran. Again and again, what Netanyahu is saying, we’re not going to be safe until we defeat Iran. Well, the United States has, that’s America, that’s the neocon plan outlined in the 1990s. It was spelled out, I think, by General Petraeus of first Afghanistan, then Iraq, then Syria, and then Iran. All of this was worked out from the beginning. The United States is trying to figure out, how do we do it?

Well, there’s a general expectation that one way to do it is to have Israel mount a false flag attack, something Iran does that is so bad that Israel retaliates and then, as it just bombed the Iranian embassy in Syria, that Iran is going to then do something to Israel and the United States will come to protect our Israeli brothers and world peace and prevent the genocide that the Gazans are trying to do against Israel and that Iran is trying to do against the rest of the world and bomb Iran.

Back in 1970s, there were discussions of what do you do? What will Iran do to fight back? Well, there’s one thing that Iran can do, that it doesn’t have to bomb American troops in Syria or Iraq. It doesn’t have to bomb Israel. All it has to do is sink a ship in the Strait of Hormuz. That’s the big strait. You’ve seen what happened, what the Houthis have done with the Red Sea. The big traffic is the Strait of Hormuz. That’s where Saudi Arabian oil and we could call it the oil gulf. It’s called the Persian Gulf, but it’s really the oil gulf. That’s where all the oil trade is. If you sink a ship or two in the oil gulf, that’s going to push oil prices way, way up because that’s going to cut most of the world off for as long as Iran wants from the Middle Eastern oil supply.

Well, that’s what really terrifies Biden because he’s pretending that there’s no inflation in the United States and that the economy is quite heavy. The inflation that would follow from Iran sinking a ship in Hormuz will essentially be crowning the American opposition to Biden, which is growing.

It’s one thing to be against genocide and killing people, but much more important is if your gas prices go up, the American people think that that’s really much more important than the fact of genocide and crimes against humanity. That’s really what is frightening the US.

The question is right now, how do they make the Israeli provocation against Iran— an excuse for the United States to come in with all of NATO’s and European support and somehow prevent Iran from having the power to close down the Straits of Hormuz. That’s what they’re trying to figure out now. I don’t know what they’re going to do, but when Blinken has said, Israel has not broken any rules. It’s all okay. What the United States really is [saying], if they can get away with this, they can say there are really no rules at all for the whole world. We can do whatever we want. Right now is coming to a peak. It’s the follow-up that was all thought in advance of the whole Israeli movement against Gaza.

ANIA: Thank you, Professor Hudson.

Next question that is about targeting civilians, journalists, and workers. Again, you’ve addressed this already, but I will ask you this. Why is the Israeli army targeting all those groups?

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, it’s targeting everyone. It’s targeting all civilians because it wants a land without Palestinian people. It’s targeting the most critical people necessary for a Gazan society to survive. It targets the journalists because it doesn’t want the world to see what it’s doing, because Israel has already lost its standing in the world. The United States tells them, especially, you’ve got to kill the journalists because if you don’t kill them, we, the Biden administration, are going to look bad. We already have the Americans turning against the war.

There’s only one anti-war candidate running in the presidential elections for this November. That’s Jill Stein. Every other candidate is completely backing Israel in the war, but the American people, the majority of Americans look at what’s happening in Israel as genocide and as a crime against humanity. They’re not going to vote for Biden. Biden is going to lose the election or certainly not win it. It may go into the House of Representatives if nobody wins it.

In order to drive the rest of the Gazan populations out, you have to, number one, get rid of the journalists. Number two, you want to get rid of the hospitals. As you’re bombing the people, a lot of them are going to get injured. You want all the injured people from the bombs to die. For that, you have to bomb the hospitals. You especially have to target the doctors for killing. Not only will there not be doctors to heal the wounded people, but other doctors, doctors without borders from other countries, will be afraid to go into Gaza because if you go there, you know that if you’re a food worker bringing aid or a doctor or an aid worker, you’re going to get shot because you’re at the top of the target list.

ANIA: It’s horrible. Just listening to this, you know, it’s very hard to…

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, imagine how I used to feel sitting in meetings and all of this was just said as if this is part of a game and this is how we’re planning it all out. All of this was what was discussed. How do we do evil? I mean, this…

ANIA: Yeah, but those are not humans to me. They are not humans to me.

MICHAEL HUDSON: That’s right.

ANIA: Soulless beings that are not humans. That’s all I say here.

Professor Hudson, next question is about those Israeli developers who, as you said in your email, are already planning to turn Gaza into luxury beachfront properties. So what do you really know about this? They are already planning this? Like they have plans for those properties?

MICHAEL HUDSON: The Americans made a start. They began by building docks. You not only want beachfront property, you want docks for the buyers to have a place to tie up their yachts or their sailboats.

And so the United States is building these piers. One reason it’s doing it is it can pretend that it can say, we’re not building the piers for Israeli property owners to have yachts, we’re going to deliver food. But by the time we finish building the piers, there’ll be no more Gazans. I mean, that’s the whole point. By building the piers, they’ve enabled Israel to prevent the food trucks from coming in from the south. So building the piers is a means of pretending to help without doing anything at all to help actually [deliver] food to Israel.

So yes, all throughout the news, there have been statements by the Israeli real estate companies saying, Gaza could have been a nice place to live if there weren’t Arabs in it. And now if we can clear the land of Arabs, make it a land without those people, then this is a wonderful property. And it has natural gas to help the Israeli balance of payments. So the whole idea is to make this a center of Israel luxury development.

ANIA: Again, absolutely disgusting to me, just listening to this. I want to ask you now about, were Gaza [to cease] to exist completely, what will happen to all the Palestinians who survived?

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, the land is going to be there, and it’ll be beachfront property. Alastair Crooke has been, I think, the clearest writer. He was one of the negotiators between Israel and the Palestinians. He’s explained that there cannot be a two-state solution anymore.

The Israelis say, we are going to kill all of the Palestinians. The Palestinians say, well, we can’t exist with the Israelis, and we have to defend ourselves. If we don’t kill them, they’re going to kill us. So Israel has to be either Palestinian or Israeli. It can’t be both. That is ended forever. So anyone who talks of a two-state solution, they’re just not looking it up.

So the question is, how is Gaza going to exist? Either it’s going to be all Israeli, and the Gazans will be forced to flee. The Israelis want them to flee by boats and to be sunk, most of them will be sunk in the Mediterranean, just like after America and France destroyed Libya. The Libyans tried to flee in boats, and they were sunk.

So either they will drown, or they will somehow work their way into a prison camp that Egypt and its leader is setting up for Gazan refugees. And then the Gazans will somehow try to gain entry into Europe or other countries. So you can expect a huge influx of Gazans into Europe.

Some people have suggested, well, now that Ukraine is turning into a land without a people, maybe either the Gazans can turn Ukraine over to the Palestinians, or we could give it to the Israelis, saying, well, this is your ancestral land, this is where all of the pogroms that started Zionism began. Now you can go back and there are no more Ukrainians. They have programs against you. Maybe the Israelis should go to Ukraine. One population or the other has to emigrate.

Well, Israelis already have been losing a huge chunk of their population, especially their working age population, especially those who have jobs in information technology or highly paying jobs. So, you’re already seeing a population outflow.

So, Gaza will exist geographically, but we have no idea about what is going to be the demographic composition.

And I think the Israeli Defense Forces Chief, Herzi Halevi, said just last Sunday that Israel, he announced Israel knows how to handle Iran, just as they’re handling Gaza, that they’ve prepared for this. They have good defensive systems. And he said, we are operating and cooperating with the USA and strategic problems partners in this region. So, the US is going to be putting pressure on Egypt to expand the concentration camps that it’s setting up and to pressure the Europeans. Maybe so many Germans are leaving their country now that there’s no more work for them. Maybe the Palestinians will go to Germany and other European countries, and wherever they can find some kind of refuge.

America was willing to give the Jewish population refuge as long as the Jewish population served European imperialist aims of controlling the Near Eastern oil. But what can Palestine offer to be protected? If the Palestinians don’t have anything to offer the Europeans or the Americans, their governments simply do not care. They’ve done absolutely nothing to protect the Palestinians because they don’t care if there’s no money in it for them. And the Arab countries with money, the Saudi Arabians, the United Arab Republics have not really lifted a hand to help this. Even though a large labor force in Saudi Arabia is already Palestinian, they don’t need more Palestinians there. So, that’s basically what’s happening.

ANIA: Thank you, Professor Hudson. You know, before I ask you my last question, you know, people’s beliefs that the governments care about them. This is the most… I don’t understand how people can still believe that any government really cares about them in the world, looking at the situation like this. It’s heartbreaking. Just listening to what you said is a lot for me to take in.

The last question is when the bombing will stop and who is going to rebuild Gaza Strip?

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, the bombing will stop when there are no more Palestinians to bomb. Israel doesn’t have the money to rebuild it or the intention of rebuilding. And even if Israel wants to rebuild it with nice homes all the way to the beachfront, who is going to do the building?

Well, already Israel has made a deal with India to get a lot of Indian construction workers from the poorest provinces of India coming over there. But again, who’s going to pay them? You can give them work permits, but the answer is who will pay them will be the contractors who are given the contracts to rebuild homes and offices and the new Israeli compound in Gaza, unless the world works and says, no, the Israelis have to give back all the land and it’s Israel that will be a minority under a Palestinian government.

You cannot have an Israeli government that is over the whole region because its policy is to kill the Palestinians. So I don’t see that, again, you can’t have a two-state solution. It doesn’t look like anyone’s supporting the Palestinians right now.

Who would help rebuild it? Well, the Turkish builders might come in and build it. Other Middle Easterners would rebuild it. Saudi Arabia could finance huge developments there. The United Arab Republics could buy land. American investors, maybe Blackstone could help develop there, but it’ll be foreign investment.

And if you look at the fact that the foreign investors of all these countries are looking for what they can get out of the genocide against Palestinians, you realize why there’s no real opposition to the genocide that’s taking place.

And the great benefit to the U.S. of all this is that as a result of this absence of any kind of the moral feeling that you’ve just expressed, no claims can be brought against the United States for any of the warfare, any of the regime change, interference that it’s planning for Iran, China, Russia, and as it’s been doing in Africa and Latin America. So Israel and Gaza and the West Bank should be seen, I think, as an opening of the new Cold War. And whatever you see happening in Gaza after the Gazans are driven out, you see this is really the plan for what the United States wants to do in China, in Russia, in Africa, in the whole rest of the world. You’re seeing a plan for basically how to financialize and make money out of genocide and the destruction of society. And in order to do that, you have to prevent anything like the United Nations of having any authority at all.

And the irony in all this is that the United States is creating just the opposite of what it wanted to do. I mean, obviously, while this is happening in Gaza, most of the global majority that we’ve spoken before, the world outside of NATO, America and Europe, are appalled. And the only way of stopping what’s happening in Gaza happening in the rest of the world is to create an alternative to the United Nations, an alternative to the World Bank, to the IMF, an alternative to all the organizations that the United States has controlled to turn the whole rest of the world into Gaza, if it can.

ANIA: Dr. Hudson, Professor Hudson, I want to thank you for coming back. I want to thank you for telling me after our last live stream to address this, because you shared it with me and with the audience. And I really hope that you will spread this video, guys, you will share it.

So I personally believe that we are fighting evil. And the way that I feel I am in a small way contributing to this is to trying to seek the truth and bring people who have knowledge and understanding and can share the facts and the truth with the world. Because if you don’t know what you’re fighting against, what you’re fighting with, then you’re like Don Quixote. You have to know what is the problem. And I am immensely grateful for guests like yourself to be on my channel and to share your knowledge with the audience. I can only imagine knowing all of this, what you shared with us today, living with this for so many years and watching the [unfolding] of those events in the world. For someone who has feelings and emotions, it’s very hard to bear. I can only imagine. So thank you for your contribution.

MICHAEL HUDSON: I’m on your show, Ania, because you see that this is evil, and it is evil.

ANIA: Yes. Thank you so much. I know you have to go. And I want to invite you again, of course, in the near future. Hopefully, you find time for our next conversation. To everyone who’s watching, make sure to check all the links to Professor Hudson that are already attached down below this live stream. And like I said, please share the video. Hit this like. It’s free of charge, and it helps the channel also. And more people can hear this information in the world. Thank you, everyone. And until next time.

hosny salah from Pixabay

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Things to keep in mind...

Neo-Nazi ideology has become one of the main protagonists of political and social life in Ukraine since the 2014 coup d'état. Meanwhile, fascist ideology and blatant lies also permeate the consciousness of most people in the West. Those in the comfortable top 10%, the "PMCs" (Professional Managerial Class), are especially vulnerable. They support and disseminate such ideas. They are the executors of the actual ruling class' orders, those in the 0.001%, who remain largely invisible. The PMCs are the political class, the media whores, the top military brass, some people in academia, and the "national security/foreign policy" industry honchos. Push back against these unethical, contaminated people with the truth while you can.

AND...where the US Government is at:

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ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS

SCOTT RITTER: The Missiles of April

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Scott Ritter
VIEWPOINTS

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The Missiles of April

An Iranian missile is launched. Scores of these missiles were used to attack Israel.

I’ve been writing about Iran for more than two decades. In 2005, I made a trip to Iran to ascertain the “ground truth” about that nation, a truth which I then incorporated into a book, Target Iran, laying out the US-Israeli collaboration to craft a justification for a military attack on Iran designed to bring down its theocratic government. I followed this book up with another, Dealbreaker, in 2018, which brought this US-Israeli effort up to date.

Back in November 2006, in an address to Columbia University’s School of International Relations, I underscored that the United States would never abandon my “good friend” Israel until, of course, we did. What could precipitate such an action, I asked? I noted that Israel was a nation drunk of hubris and power, and unless the United States could find a way to remove the keys from the ignition of the bus Israel was navigating toward the abyss, we would not join Israel in its lemming-like suicidal journey.

The next year, in 2007, during an address to the American Jewish Committee, I pointed out that my criticism of Israel (which many in the audience took strong umbrage against) came from a place of concern for Israel’s future. I underscored the reality that I had spent the better part of a decade trying to protect Israel from Iraqi missiles, both during my service in Desert Storm, where I played a role in the counter-SCUD missile campaign, and as a United Nations weapons inspector, where I worked with Israeli intelligence to make sure Iraq’s SCUD missiles were eliminated.

Scott will discuss this article and answer audience questions on Ep. 151 of Ask the Inspector.

“The last thing I want to see,” I told the crowd, “is a scenario where Iranian missiles were impacting on the soil of Israel. But unless Israel changes course, this is the inevitable outcome of a policy driven more by arrogance than common sense.”

On the night of 13-14 April 2024, my concerns were played out live before an international audience—Iranian missiles rained down on Israel, and there was nothing Israel could do to stop them. As had been the case a little more than 33 years prior, when Iraqi SCUD missiles overcame US and Israeli Patriot missile defenses to strike Israel dozens of times over the course of a month and a half, Iranian missiles, integrated into a plan of attack which was designed to overwhelm Israeli missile defense systems, struck designated targets inside Israel with impunity.

Despite having employed an extensive integrated anti-missile defense system comprised of the so-called “Iron Dome” system, US-made Patriot missile batteries, and the Arrow and David’s Sling missile interceptors, along with US, British, and Israeli aircraft, and US and French shipborne anti-missile defenses, well over a dozen Iranian missiles struck heavily-protected Israeli airfields and air defense installations.

The Iranian missile attack on Israel did not come out of the blue, so to speak, but rather was retaliation for an April 1 Israeli attack on the Iranian consulate building, in Damascus, Syria, that killed several senior Iranian military commanders. While Israel has carried out attacks against Iranian personnel inside Syria in the past, the April 1 strike differed by not only killing very senior Iranian personnel, but by striking what was legally speaking sovereign Iranian territory—the Iranian consulate.

From an Iranian perspective, the attack on the consulate was a redline which, if not retaliated against, would erase any notion of deterrence, opening the door for even more brazen Israeli military action, up to and including direct attacks on Iran. Weighing against retaliation, however, were a complex web of interwoven policy objectives which would probably be mooted by the kind of large-scale conflict between Israel and Iran that could be precipitated by any meaningful Iranian retaliatory strike on Israel.

First and foremost, Iran has been engaged in a strategic policy premised on a pivot away from Europe and the United States, and toward Russia, China, and the Eurasian landmass. This shift has been driven by Iran’s frustration over the US-driven policy of economic sanctions, and the inability and/or unwillingness on the part of the collective West to find a path forward that would see these sanctions lifted. The failure of the Iranian nuclear deal (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA) to produce the kind of economic opportunities that had been promised at its signing has been a major driver behind this Iranian eastward pivot. In its stead, Iran has joined both the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and the BRICS forum and has directed its diplomatic energies into seeing Iran thoroughly and productively integrated into both groups.

A general war with Israel would play havoc on these efforts.

Secondly, but no less important in the overall geopolitical equation for Iran, is the ongoing conflict in Gaza. This is a game-changing event, where Israel is facing strategic defeat at the hands of Hamas and its regional allies, including the Iranian-led axis of resistance. For the first time ever, the issue of Palestinian statehood has been taken up by a global audience. This cause is further facilitated by the fact that the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu, formed from a political coalition which is vehemently opposed to any notion of Palestinian statehood, finds itself in danger of collapse as a direct result of the consequences accrued from the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, and the subsequent failure of Israel to defeat Hamas militarily or politically. Israel is likewise hampered by the actions of Hezbollah, which has held Israel in check along its northern border with Lebanon, and non-state actors such as the pro-Iranian Iraqi militias and the Houthi of Yemen which have attacked Israel directly and, in the case of the Houthi, indirectly, shutting down critical sea lines of communication which have the result of strangling the Israeli economy.

But it is Israel that has done the most damage to itself, carrying out a genocidal policy of retribution against the civilian population of Gaza. The Israeli actions in Gaza are the living manifestation of the very hubris and power-driven policies I warned about back in 2006-2007. Then, I said that the US would not be willing to be a passenger in a policy bus driven by Israel that would take us off the cliff of an unwinnable war with Iran.

Through its criminal behavior toward the Palestinian civilians in Gaza, Israel has lost the support of much of the world, putting the United States in a position where it will see its already-tarnished reputation irreparably damaged, at a time when the world is transitioning from a period of American-dominated singularity to a BRICS-driven multipolarity, and the US needs to retain as much clout in the so-called “global south” as possible.

The US has tried—unsuccessfully—to take the keys out of the ignition of Netanyahu’s suicide bus ride. Faced with extreme reticence on the part of the Israeli government when it comes to altering its policy on Hamas and Gaza, the administration of President Joe Biden has begun to distance itself from the policies of Netanyahu and has put Israel on notice that there would be consequences for its refusal to alter its actions in Gaza to take US concerns into account.

Any Iranian retaliation against Israel would need to navigate these extremely complicated policy waters, enabling Iran to impose a viable deterrence posture designed to prevent future Israeli attacks while making sure that neither its policy objectives regarding a geopolitical pivot to the east, nor the elevation of the cause of Palestinian statehood on the global stage, were sidetracked.

The Iranian attack on Israel appears to have successfully maneuvered through these rocky policy shoals. It did so first and foremost by keeping the United States out of the fight. Yes, the United States participated in the defense of Israel, helping shoot down scores of Iranian drones and missiles. This engagement was to the benefit of Iran, since it only reinforced the fact that there was no combination of missile defense capability that could, in the end, prevent Iranian missiles from hitting their designated targets.

The targets Iran struck—two air bases in the Negev desert from which aircraft used in the April 1 attack on the Iranian consulate had been launched, along with several Israeli air defense sites—were directly related to the points Iran was trying to make in establishing the scope and scale of its deterrence policy. First, that the Iranian actions were justified under Article 51 of the UN Charter—Iran retaliated against those targets in Israel directly related to the Israeli attack on Iran, and second, that Israeli air defense sites were vulnerable to Iranian attack. The combined impact of these two factors is that all of Israel was vulnerable to being struck by Iran at any time, and that there was nothing Israel or its allies could do to stop such an attack.

This message resonated not only in the halls of power in Tel Aviv, but also in Washington, DC, where US policy makers were confronted with the uncomfortable truth that if the US were to act in concert with Israel to either participate in or facilitate an Israeli retaliation, then US military facilities throughout the Middle East would be subjected to Iranian attacks that the US would be powerless to stop.

This is why the Iranians placed so much emphasis on keeping the US out of the conflict, and why the Biden administration was so anxious to make sure that both Iran and Israel understood that the US would not participate in any Israeli retaliatory strike against Iran.

The “Missiles of April” represent a sea-change moment in Middle Eastern geopolitics—the establishment of Iranian deterrence that impacts both Israel and the United States. While emotions in Tel Aviv, especially among the more radical conservatives of the Israeli government, run high, and the threat of an Israeli retaliation against Iran cannot be completely discounted, the fact is the underlying policy objective of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the course of the past 30-plus years, namely to drag the US into a war with Iran, has been put into checkmate by Iran.

Moreover, Iran has been able to accomplish this without either disrupting its strategic pivot to the east or undermining the cause of Palestinian statehood. “Operation True Promise,” as Iran named its retaliatory attack on Israel, will go down in history as one of the most important military victories in the history of modern Iran, keeping in mind that war is but an extension of politics by other means. The fact that Iran has established a credible deterrence posture without disrupting major policy goals and objectives is the very definition of victory.

See Scott's bioblurb at the bottom of this page.

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ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS

Idiot Republicans Are Saying Genocide Joe Has ‘Abandoned Israel’

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Caitlin Johnstone
ROGUE JOURNALIST

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Idiot Republicans Are Saying Genocide Joe Has 'Abandoned Israel'

Dopey Republican pundits and politicians have begun claiming that Joe Biden has “abandoned Israel” and has fallen under the control of Hamas, because this is a presidential election year and everything needs to be ten times dumber than usual.

Donald Trump said on the campaign trail on Wednesday that “Any Jewish person that votes for a Democrat or votes for Biden should have their head examined,” saying of Biden, “He totally abandoned Israel.”

Trump’s comments were made in response to Biden saying that Israel should declare a ceasefire of six to eight weeks, seemingly suggesting that Israel should do so without conditioning the ceasefire on the release of Israeli hostages. This hopeful statement was swiftly dispelled by Biden himself, however, with the president reiterating the same keep-killing-children-until-Hamas-gives-us-everything-we-want position that this administration has stood by for six months. Apparently Biden’s dementia-addled brain is just struggling to keep its story straight.

Meanwhile Daily Wire founder Ben Shapiro has been pushing the narrative that Biden has “saved” Hamas by capitulating to demands from the left on Gaza, going so far as to declare that “Hamas is now in control of the Biden administration.”

We've reached the moment you've all been waiting for: "Joe Biden is Hamas" pic.twitter.com/mWmh6PJbTF

— Read Let This Radicalize You (@JoshuaPHilll) April 9, 2024

To be clear, this is all foam-brained nonsense. Biden has spent six months pouring weapons of mass murder into Israel without any conditions whatsoever, and his administration has been justifying and spinning and making excuses for all of Israel’s heinous actions in Gaza this entire time. No US president in history has done more to directly serve the murderousness of the Israeli war machine than Joe Biden.

Right to this very day the president is declaring “ironclad” support for Israel as fears mount that Iran may retaliate for the Israeli strike on its consulate building in Syria which killed multiple Iranian military officers, despite the fact that Iran has made it clear to the White House that if the US comes to Israel’s defense it will make the US a target as well. Biden is so fanatically pro-Israel that we could be near the precipice of the worst-case nightmare scenario of all possible middle eastern conflicts because of his unwavering support for the genocidal apartheid state.

If Republicans and Democrats were forced to campaign against each other solely on issues in which they truly disagreed, they’d have very little to talk about, and it would give the whole two-party scam away.

In reality, the only reason Republicans have begun trying to frame Biden as anti-Israel is because only through fiction and fantasy can America’s two mainstream parties pretend there are any significant differences between them. They’re both insanely supportive of Israel and its crimes. They both support war, militarism, imperialism, capitalism and oligarchy. The only areas in which there’s any meaningful disagreement between them are the issues that don’t inconvenience the powerful in any way like whether or not you’re allowed to have an abortion or whether it’s good or bad to be mean to trans people — and even those issues are only used to keep everyone’s interest and attention locked into mainstream politics and diverted from revolutionary sentiment.

So they make up these moronic fictional battlegrounds to fight on, because that’s the only way they can actually have anything to fight about. Joe Biden is a Hamas agent. Donald Trump is a Kremlin agent. Joe Biden is controlled by “the CCP”. Donald Trump is going to be another Hitler instead of another shitty Republican. The Democrats want to steal your guns and make your son wear a dress. The Republicans want to dismantle NATO and let Vladimir Putin take over the world.

Below, the Don. How's this for colossal dishonesty or colossal ignorance? Or both?

Absolutely none of this is real, but if Republicans and Democrats were forced to campaign against each other solely on issues in which they truly disagreed, they’d have very little to talk about, and it would give the whole two-party scam away. Before you know it you’d have them arguing about things like whether it would be best to ramp up nuclear aggressions with China first or prioritize taking out Russia, and people would start to notice that neither of these parties have the interests of normal human beings at heart.

So they keep up their kayfabe combat schtick, and sell it as hard as they can to make sure as many Americans as possible are clapping along to the pretend drama of the two-handed puppet show.

Can’t wait til this election is over and done with so we can go back to the normal levels of stupid.

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This is a dispatch from our ongoing series by Caitlin Johnstone

Caitlin Johnstone is a brave journalist, political junkie, relentless feminist, champion of the 99 percent. And a powerful counter-propaganda tactician.

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Israel’s Strike on Iran’s Embassy & How the US Seeks to Trigger a Wider War

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Brian Berletic
THE NEW ATLAS

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A Provocative analysis by Brian Berletic. Plus, courtesy of Brookings, a primer on US devious policymaking.

Israel's Strike on Iran's Embassy & How the US Seeks to Trigger a Wider War

The New Atlas

Apr 5, 2024
US policymakers have sought to use Israel as a proxy to provoke a full-scale war with Iran for years. - While the US attempts to distance itself from Israeli provocations and atrocities including attacks on embassies and the killing of aid workers, the US is chief in enabling Israeli in continuing to carry out such attacks. - Just as the US created a large-scale conflict in Ukraine to reassert itself over Europe, it is attempting to use conflict to reassert itself in the Middle East and at a minimum prevent the region from uniting and moving out from under Western hegemony. - The window of opportunity for the US and proxies like Israel to fight and win a military conflict against Iran and its allies in the region is quickly closing, thus efforts are being made to provoke such a conflict sooner rather than later. - Even in US policy papers in 2009, it was admitted that Iran would likely ignore US-Israeli provocations, including air strikes on Iran itself, meaning that the possibility of a false flag attack blamed on Iran to usher in Washington’s desired war is a possibility.

References:
Reuters - UN Security Council fails to condemn strike on Iran in Syria (April 4, 2024): https://www.reuters.com/world/un-secu...
Newsweek - White House 'Very Concerned' About Prospect of Israel-Iran War (April 4, 2024): https://www.newsweek.com/white-house-...
Washington Post - U.S. approved more bombs to Israel on day of World Central Kitchen strikes (April 4, 2024): https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation...
Guardian - ‘We’re focused on maximum damage’: ground offensive into Gaza seems imminent (October 10, 2023): https://www.theguardian.com/world/202...
DW - Israel-Hamas war: 136 UN staff killed in Gaza, says Guterres (December 2023): https://www.dw.com/en/israel-hamas-wa...
AP - Israeli strike on Iran’s consulate in Syria killed 2 generals and 5 other officers, Iran says (April 2, 2024): https://apnews.com/article/israel-syr...
Reuters - Hamas ditches Assad, backs Syrian revolt (February 2012): https://www.reuters.com/article/us-sy...
Haaretz - A Brief History of the Netanyahu-Hamas Alliance (October 2023): https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2...
UN - Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations (1961): https://legal.un.org/ilc/texts/instru... Brookings Institution -
Which Path to Persia? Options for a New American Strategy Toward Iran (PDF, 2009): https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/...
Haaretz - A Brief History of the Netanyahu-Hamas Alliance (October 2023): https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2...
Reuters - Hamas ditches Assad, backs Syrian revolt (2012): https://www.reuters.com/article/us-sy...

https://landdestroyer.blogspot.com/
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Twitter: / brianjberletic

PLUS: Must read, must have:

Which Path to Persia?
Few things prove better the malignant and arrogant nature of the US imperialist machine, than think tank papers like these, authored by morally degenerate careerists with degrees from the top universities in the West.

Click on the image to download this PDF document, or CLICK HERE.

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ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS

Israel’s murderous attack on WCK, an starvation relief organization, reported as “unintentional accident of war”

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Patrice Greanville
EYE ON MEDIA

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"Accidents happen in war," says shameless war criminal Netanyahu, knowing he enjoys full US support.

FIRST: Covering up Israel's deliberate starvation policy

The whole report takes pains to give Israel and the IDF the benefit of the doubt, stressing time and again the idea this was a "regrettable" and "unintentional" incident. Said claim is easily contradicted by the facts. In its short duration, the Israelis have killed in this "Gaza war" —by bombs, firing squad, sniper fire, etc.— more healthcare personnel of all types than any other power engaged in any other conflict since the end of WW2. As journalism, this is a disgrace. Thinly disguised p.r. for Israel and its prime sociopath, Netanyahu. But that's par for the course when it comes to Western media, and especially its Anglo component.

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The following (as well as the video above) are by ABC News. The words and passages we regard as shameless propaganda are marked in red. Contextually, the US media, in most if not all its reports on the Gaza genocide, fail to ask the critical question: If the White House, and the rest of the collective West leaders and officials are so deeply moved and concerned about the suffering of Palestinians, if this or that act by the IDF is "intolerable", "outrageous," "unacceptable", etc, etc., why do they never simply stop the flow of weapons and money to the depraved Zionist regime?

By ABC News

Seven aid workers with World Central Kitchen [WCK] were killed during an Israel Defense Forces attack in Gaza, the food-relief organization said, adding that it plans to pause its operations in the region.

a statement. "This is unforgivable."

The dead included Australian, Polish, British and Palestinian aid workers, WCK said. One worker was a dual American-Canadian citizen, the organization said.

A Palestinian inspects a vehicle where employees from the World Central Kitchen were killed in an Israeli airstrike, in Deir Al-Balah, in the central Gaza, Strip Apr. 2, 2024.© Ahmed Zakot/Reuters

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made his first comments about the deadly incident as he was leaving a hospital after undergoing successful hernia surgery.

"Unfortunately, in the last day, there was a tragic case of our forces unintentionally hitting innocent people in the Gaza Strip," Netanyahu said. "It happens in war, we check it to the end. We are in contact with the governments, and we will do everything so that this thing does not happen again."

World Central Kitchen workers gather around the bodies of their colleagues after they were transferred to Al-Najjar Hospital in Rafah, southern Gaza Strip, Apr. 2, 2024.© Haitham Imad/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock

WCK, a non-governmental organization, has been operating in Gaza for months and has said it's served more than 33 million meals since the start of the conflict. It operates over 60 community kitchens in Gaza with the help of about 400 Palestinians on the ground.

U.S. officials are "heartbroken and deeply troubled" by the strike, Adrienne Watson, spokesperson for the White House National Security Council, said in a statement on social media.

"Humanitarian aid workers must be protected as they deliver aid that is desperately needed, and we urge Israel to swiftly investigate what happened," Watson said.
[As we said earlier, these pronouncements are ridiculous, transparently hypocritical. Contrary to appearances, the US controls the script in the Middle East, not Israel. So why doesn't the US simply stop all aid to Israel? Not to mention compel it to open the gates to food, medical supplies and other essentials, pronto1, in fact yesterday. As well as cease all indiscriminate air strikes?—Ed]

Note how ABC News is quick to plant a misleading disclaimer right on the first screen of this report. According to most MSM this attack was an "unintentional" event.

A representative from the organization said WCK was still gathering details about the incident that took place early Tuesday morning.

"This is a tragedy. Humanitarian aid workers and civilians should NEVER be a target. EVER," the representative said in a statement.

The IDF said in a statement that it was conducting a "thorough review at the highest levels to understand the circumstances of this tragic incident." [Yea, believe that if you like. It's pure yada yada.—Ed]

"The IDF makes extensive efforts to enable the safe delivery of humanitarian aid, and has been working closely with WCK in their vital efforts to provide food and humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza," the statement said. [Bullshit—Ed]

Also on Tuesday, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant referred to the tragic nature of the incident and emphasized the importance of conducting a thorough, professional investigation, which will be followed by the implementation of lessons learned. Gallant highlighted the important work undertaken by international aid organizations, as well as Israel’s commitment to working closely with partner countries and organizations and facilitating the distribution of humanitarian aid. [More bullshit]

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Tuesday in Paris that the U.S. has spoken to the Israeli government about the missile strike on the WCK team.

"We've spoken directly to the Israeli government about this particular incident we've urged the swift, thorough and impartial investigation to understand exactly what happened," Blinken said.

Blinken said the seven victims "join a record number of humanitarian workers who have been killed in this particular conflict." (Yea, guess why and by whom.)

"I can only say that for so many of us, we extend our condolences to the loved ones, to the families, friends, colleagues of those who lost their lives, or who were injured," Blinken said. "They have been doing extraordinary, brave work day-in and day-out, and critical work ... starting with the most basic thing of all: food. These people are heroes. They run into the fire. They show the best of what humanity has to offer. They have to be protected." (More bullshit.)

Officials in the United Kingdom were "urgently working" to verify whether British citizens had been killed, David Cameron, the U.K.'s foreign secretary, said in a statement. [More bullshit, or shall we say, bollocks!]

"We have called on Israel to immediately investigate and provide a full, transparent explanation of what happened," he said. (More bullshit. Toothless yapping to appease the public.)

Jose Andres, the chef and founder of WCK, said he was "heartbroken" and "grieving" for the families and friends of the WCK workers who were killed.

he wrote on X.

He added, "I am heartbroken and grieving for their families and friends and our whole WCK family. These are people…angels…I served alongside in Ukraine, Gaza, Turkey, Morocco, Bahamas, Indonesia. They are not faceless…they are not nameless. The Israeli government needs to stop this indiscriminate killing. It needs to stop restricting humanitarian aid, stop killing civilians and aid workers, and stop using food as a weapon. No more innocent lives lost. Peace starts with our shared humanity. It needs to start now."

a taped message that he had spoken with Andres and "expressed the deepest condolences." (More bullshit)

"We will be opening a probe to examine this serious incident further. This will help us reduce the risk of such an event from occurring again," he said, adding, "We will get to the bottom of this and we will share our findings transparently." (Yea. You do that. While you are at it, tell us also why the Israeli soldiers murdered hundreds of people and medical personnel at the Al Shifa hospital. See below for more on that particular outrage.)

ABC News' Joe Simonetti and Bill Hutchinson contributed to this story.

SECOND: Israel's deliberate destruction of Gaza's healthcare system
That includes the systematic murdering of medical personnel —doctors, nurses, orderlies, medical technicians, etc.-anyone wearing scrubs or connected with health services—and destroying all hospitals and clinics to the ground by bombing and fire, including their expensive diagnostic and therapeutic equipment.

This video packs an excellent and unusually frank interview with a highly respected British surgeon, Dr Nick Maynard, about the criminal Israeli actions toward Palestinian medical personnel and facilities. Note that the interviewer —Nick Ferrari—is not a liberal but a conservative chauvinist British media personality. (See below). Such is the world today. It is indeed a sad moment when humanity must rely on rightwingers and right wing media—flaws and all—to rescue vital truths, while liberals are too busy bolstering the globalist imperialist agenda. Despite such shortcomings, usually caused by reading too much official history uncritically, Ferrari is honest enough to want to present the unvarnished truth to his audience.

IDF spokesperson pulls out of interview with Nick Ferrari | LBC

LBC

Apr 2, 2024#NickFerrari #Israel #IDF

World Central Kitchen have confirmed reports that seven of their aid workers have been killed by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza, amongst them a British national. Nick Ferrari was due to question the IDF's Peter Lerner on this and more. He has pulled out of the interview... Ferrari was also joined by Dr Nick Maynard, a consultant surgeon who regularly works in Gaza with Medical Aid for Palestinians as the IDF report that they have withdrawn from Al-Shifa Medical Complex in Gaza after two weeks of violent destruction. Listen to the full show on Global Player: https://app.af.globalplayer.com/Br0x/...

Nicolo (Nick) Ferrari (born 31 January 1959) is a conservative British radio host, television presenter and broadcast journalist.^{He is best known as the host of the weekday breakfast show on the London-based radio station LBC.^{He also has a regular column in the Sunday Express and was previously a regular guest on The Alan Titchmarsh Show. He regularly appears on ITV's programme This Morning and has presented the Sky News debate show The Pledge since 2016.}}

‘The single worst thing I’ve seen’: Top Oxford surgeon recounts horrors of Gaza hospital

A British doctor encountered one tragedy after another as he operated in the 'appalling' conditions of a central Gazan hospital

Lilia Sebouai / The Telegraph / 12 January 2024 •

Prof Nick Maynard said that the “huge numbers” of wounded children would “never, ever leave [him]." CREDIT: Prof Nick Maynard/MAP

“It was the single worst thing I’ve seen in my 35-year medical career,” he told the Telegraph on Wednesday shortly after arriving home in Oxford.

Amid the chaos consuming the emergency department on New Year’s Day, the British consultant spotted a six-year-old boy wrapped in a blanket, lying alone and semi-conscious on the ground.

“He had no family with him and he hadn’t been seen by any nurses or doctors,” he said.

The child had a head injury, his body was covered with “appalling burns,” and his chest was torn open by a shrapnel wound. “You could see air being sucked in and then bubbling out again,” he said.

Prof Maynard scooped the boy up and rushed him into a corner. There were no beds, so he and a colleague laid him on the ground, working on hands and knees to try and resuscitate him.

“We were putting drips into him to drain the bleeding in his chest, we tried to cover his burns because he was shivering. It was awful. The tragedy is, I don’t know whether he survived”.

Prof Maynard, 61, is a consultant gastrointestinal surgeon at Oxford University Hospital and has been visiting Gaza to teach surgery since 2010.

But this was the first time he had entered the enclave during wartime. Speaking from Cairo and then Oxford, he said there was nothing that could have prepared him for his latest visit.

As an experienced surgeon, Prof Maynard Maynard mainly dealt with severe blast injuries to the abdomen and chest on his most recent trip to Gaza. CREDIT: Prof Nick Maynard /MAP

“It was much worse than we could possibly have imagined. I couldn’t compare it to anything, it was just like nothing I’ve seen on Earth,” he said.

His trip, organised through UK charity Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP), was unexpectedly cut short on Sunday when he and his colleagues were told to evacuate the hospital by the IDF.

Strikes in the vicinity of the Al-Aqsa Hospital meant the vast majority of its medical staff, along with 600 patients, were forced to leave.

Prof Maynard’s last day working in the hospital was last Friday, when there was a reported missile attack that damaged the hospital’s intensive care unit. He was in surgery when the strike happened. There was “a big hole in the wall of the ICU,” he said.

He said there were rumours of IDF snipers in the nearby Deir al Balah neighbourhood shooting people and directing fire at the hospital.

“I didn’t see that, but I certainly saw the gunshot wounds on patients,” he said.

He and his team also heard quadcopters – remote-controlled drones – “incessantly” circling the hospital ground and making “the most appalling, very loud buzzing noise”. There have been allegations from others that the drones are armed with sniper rifles.

Prof Maynard is a consultant gastrointestinal surgeon at Oxford University Hospital and has been visiting Gaza to teach surgery since 2010. CREDIT: Prof Nick Maynard/MAP

Nearly all hospitals in Gaza have been forced to close because of the fighting. Al-Shifa, the Strip’s largest hospital, which Israel says sits above a Hamas command and control centre, closed in November.

Maynard has worked in Al-Shifa many times over the years and says, “unequivocally”, that he saw no evidence of the hospital being used by Hamas.

“I know many doctors who’ve been there for many years, who I would trust implicitly, who are quite clear that there’s never been any evidence of military activity,” he said.

“There can be certainly no doubt in my mind from what I’ve recently witnessed that [Israel] are directly targeting healthcare structures with a view to completely disabling the healthcare system in Gaza.”

Prof Maynard said the extreme crowing of hospitals in Gaza was not evident from the images and videos that were being released.

The Al-Aqsa hospital has capacity for roughly 150 patients but there were nearly 700 in need of treatment when Maynard left, he said. Hundreds more were taking refuge in the hospital grounds.

“There’s a whole new sort of town built up, with makeshift tents and shelters. It was just huge, completely impoverished people living there in the most appalling situations,” he said. “No running water. No sanitation systems at all. Just appalling.

Prof Nick Maynard with a colleague in Al-Aqsa hospital in central Gaza CREDIT: Prof Nick Maynard /MAP

He said there were days there was no running water in the operating theatres, so they could only scrub up using alcohol gel.

“The doctors and nurses were wonderful there, but they just simply couldn’t maintain a sterile environment,” he said.

“Sanitation was horrendous. Just appalling infections. There were flies in the operating theatre, flies resting on the open abdomen when we were operating.”

There were several hundred new patients coming into the emergency department every day. The sheer number of admissions was causing “a breakdown of the triage system,” Maynard said.

When there are large aerial bombardments in the area, many of the casualties are brought to the hospital by family members, as it is becoming increasingly difficult for ambulances to locate and reach the strike areas, he explained.

Some casualties are dragged helplessly on donkey carts to the hospital and others are carried for up to 2 kilometres by relatives.

“The reality is that many people haven’t been discovered yet, and when they are discovered, they’re dead,” he said.

His trip to Al-Aqsa, organised through UK charity Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP), was unexpectedly cut short when he and his colleagues were told to evacuate the hospital by the IDF. CREDIT: Prof Nick Maynard/MAP

As an experienced surgeon, Maynard mainly dealt with severe blast injuries to the abdomen and chest, which caused “horrific” wounds, as the “very small and extremely hot” pieces of shrapnel passed through the bodily tissues with ease.

“When you open up the abdomen or the chest and then you just see the havoc these small fragments have caused - they rip through all the different internal organs,” he said.

But it was the “huge numbers” of wounded children that he said would “never, ever leave me.”

He saw many malnutrition cases amongst the surgical patients in Al-Aqsa and paediatrician colleagues told him they were seeing around two cases of Kwashiorkor a week.

Kwashiorkor typically affects children in famine hit areas, where a lack of protein causes fluid retention and their bellies to swell.

“I remember one child vividly. He was about eight or nine, and kept coming up to us asking for food because his whole family had been killed and he hadn’t eaten for three days. It was deeply distressing,” Prof Maynard said.

Four out of five of the hungriest people anywhere in the world are in Gaza, according to the World Food Programme, which recently warned that the spectre of famine now looms in the territory, where more than half a million people are facing “catastrophic” levels of hunger.

Prof Maynard said that he fell in love with the people of Gaza. CREDIT: Prof Nick Maynard/MAP

When The Telegraph spoke again with Prof Maynard on Wednesday, from his home in Oxford, he said he was having trouble sleeping.

“We were all affected very emotionally by what we saw and really struggled leaving. I didn’t sleep much the last couple of nights, we have these very mixed emotions about having left,” he said.

“Part of that is guilt. Guilt that we had to leave Gaza, our friends and colleagues, and knowing that we may not see them again.”

However, Maynard is already planning his next trip to the Al-Aqsa hospital where he hopes to stay as a resident with his team - rather than travelling back and forth to a safehouse.

“The people are unique in my view, I love them dearly, they are just indescribably wonderful,” he says. “I fell in love with the place…it’s just become such a huge part of me, that I have to go back and help them.”

THIRD: Summing up.

In the span of just a few hours we learned that Israel committed a horrific massacre at al-Shifa hospital, struck an Iranian consulate in Syria killing multiple Iranian military officers, and killed a vehicle full of international aid workers in an airstrike. This murderous… pic.twitter.com/VS0dVnEeFZ

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) April 2, 2024

The devastating Israeli airstrikes that killed @WCKitchen personnel yesterday bring the number of aid workers killed in this conflict to 196 – including more than 175 members of our own @UN staff.

This is unconscionable.

— António Guterres (@antonioguterres) April 2, 2024

Shia Muslims commemorate Youm-e-Ali in Karachi, show solidarity with Palestinians

Follow us on Odysee: https://t.co/c0xwhsedAe pic.twitter.com/jhogW1hTx7

— RT (@RT_com) April 2, 2024

There is no overstating just how absolutely insane this is. There is no precedent - NONE - of a state deliberately bombing an embassy. It didn't even happen during WW1, WW2 or even the 19th century. Heck even during the medieval era and Roman empire, the protection of envoys and… pic.twitter.com/dRWPWZagIF

— Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) April 2, 2024

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Neo-Nazi ideology has become one of the main protagonists of political and social life in Ukraine since the 2014 coup d'état. And that's a fact.

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Gaza: The Strategic Imperative

Michael Hudson with Ania K.

Amoral —even sociopathic—careerism is inherent in capitalist culture as America so eloquently proves.

AND...where the US Government is at:

Print this article

The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of The Greanville Post. However, we do think they are important enough to be transmitted to a wider audience.

Since the overpaid media shills will never risk their careers to report the truth, the world must rely on citizen journalists to provide the facts that explain reality.

ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS

SCOTT RITTER: The Missiles of April

Scott Ritter VIEWPOINTS

The Missiles of April

Neo-Nazi ideology has become one of the main protagonists of political and social life in Ukraine since the 2014 coup d'état. And that's a fact.

No Comment

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The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of The Greanville Post. However, we do think they are important enough to be transmitted to a wider audience.

Since the overpaid media shills will never risk their careers to report the truth, the world must rely on citizen journalists to provide the facts that explain reality.

ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS

Idiot Republicans Are Saying Genocide Joe Has ‘Abandoned Israel’

Idiot Republicans Are Saying Genocide Joe Has 'Abandoned Israel'

If Republicans and Democrats were forced to campaign against each other solely on issues in which they truly disagreed, they’d have very little to talk about, and it would give the whole two-party scam away.

Israel’s Strike on Iran’s Embassy & How the US Seeks to Trigger a Wider War

Brian Berletic THE NEW ATLAS

A Provocative analysis by Brian Berletic. Plus, courtesy of Brookings, a primer on US devious policymaking.

Israel's Strike on Iran's Embassy & How the US Seeks to Trigger a Wider War

PLUS: Must read, must have:

Neo-Nazi ideology has become one of the main protagonists of political and social life in Ukraine since the 2014 coup d'état. And that's a fact.

No Comment

Print this article

The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of The Greanville Post. However, we do think they are important enough to be transmitted to a wider audience.

Since the overpaid media shills will never risk their careers to report the truth, the world must rely on citizen journalists to provide the facts that explain reality.

ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS

Israel’s murderous attack on WCK, an starvation relief organization, reported as “unintentional accident of war”

Patrice Greanville EYE ON MEDIA

"Accidents happen in war," says shameless war criminal Netanyahu, knowing he enjoys full US support.

FIRST: Covering up Israel's deliberate starvation policy

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By ABC News

IDF spokesperson pulls out of interview with Nick Ferrari | LBC

THIRD: Summing up.

Neo-Nazi ideology has become one of the main protagonists of political and social life in Ukraine since the 2014 coup d'état. And that's a fact.

Print this article

The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of The Greanville Post. However, we do think they are important enough to be transmitted to a wider audience.

Since the overpaid media shills will never risk their careers to report the truth, the world must rely on citizen journalists to provide the facts that explain reality.

ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS

Michael Hudson
with
Ania K.

Scott Ritter
VIEWPOINTS

Brian Berletic
THE NEW ATLAS

Patrice Greanville
EYE ON MEDIA