Fighting Fake Stories: The New Yorker Serves Up A Doozie

HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON IT.

(State Department)

[dropcap]O[/dropcap]n July 8^th, The New Yorker published a short piece by Adam Entous, under the graphic above, titled “The Maps of Israeli Settlements That Shocked Barack Obama.” In the article, Entous purports to tell us the heretofore unknown inside story of how the Obama administration came to the surprising realization that Israeli settlements were taking over the West Bank. In the kind of irony The New Yorker might best appreciate, the magazine’s latest promotional tag line is: “Fighting Fake Stories With Real Ones,” and this Adam Entous article is the epitome of fake.

As Entous narrates it, in 2015, the third year of Obama’s second term, as his “Presidency was winding down,” a gentleman called Frank Lowenstein—who was, and still is, the Special Envoy for Israeli-Palestinian Negotiations and Senior Advisor to the Secretary of State—stumbled upon a map of West Bank settlements “that he had never seen before.” Though Lowenstein—as, you know, Special Envoy for Palestinian Negotiations and all—had seen “hundreds of maps of the West Bank” and had one “adorning” his office, this “new map in the briefing book” was a revelation to him. It showed clearly that “not only were Palestinian population centers cut off from one another but there was virtually no way to squeeze a viable Palestinian state into the areas that remained.”

Shocked, shocked, Lowenstein scurried off to show the map to Secretary of State John Kerry, telling him: “Look what’s really going on here.” After studiously having the map’s information “verified by U.S. intelligence agencies,” Kerry then unfurled the map on a coffee table in the White House for President Obama to see. As Ben Rhodes, “one of Obama’s longest-serving advisers,” recounted, Obama, too, was “shocked” at Israel’s “systematic” use of settlements to “cut off Palestinian population centers from one another.”

All of this shock was then translated into action. Of the rhetorical sort. Kerry “incorporated [the key findings] into …speeches and other documents, and Lowenstein “walk[ed] [the Israelis] through” those findings—though he “didn’t show the maps to the Israelis.” (Because what? He didn’t want to “shock” them? Didn’t want to make the case to them too strongly, lest it upset them? Didn’t want to have to apologize? [see below] Pause for a moment, or more, to consider that demurral, which remains unexplained by Entous or Lowenstein. It’s the kind of withholding of information one would do in the face of an innocent child one wants to protect, or in the face of a more powerful superior one does not want to annoy. What is the place for such reticence in the relation between the United States and Israel?)

Capping off this new wave of decisive rhetorical action, driven by the “alarm” over what he saw in the “maps” (now plural), President Obama “decided to abstain on a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning the settlements.” In the true punchline of the article, Entous presents this abstention as “Obama’s final act of defiance against Benjamin Netanyahu…before Donald Trump took office and put in place policies that were far more accepting of the settlers.”

All in all, this article presents a perfect exemplar of ideological production: it produces without recognizing the bizarre, nearly delusional aspects of liberal ideology in its current state; for the author and his likely readers, it shows the faults of that mindset but does not see them, and in fact turns them into a story re-confirming the virtue of those—whether author, reader, or subject of the story—who hold that mindset. It’s not only fake; it’s a fake-out.

Let’s walk through all the possible meanings of this article.

Either:

1) The story is true. Entous, using his reliable, inside-the-room sources and direct quotes, has accurately reported something that actually happened. Harvard-educated Barack Obama and his team of oh-so-smart and-well-educated foreign-policy wonks—Yale-educated Secretary of State Kerry and Special Envoy for Palestinian Negotiations Frank Lowenstein, and Rice- and NYU-educated Ben Rhodes (whose brother, David, is President of CBS News)—were completely unaware of what the Israelis had been doing for the 48 years before they just happened to see that map. Neither Barack Obama nor John Kerry during their careers as senators and presidential candidates, nor Obama, during over six years as President, had ever imagined any such thing.

They must have missed this UN map, showing in red all the West Bank areas inaccessible to Palestinians, which has been around since 2009:

And they must have missed this one, also widely available since 2009, showing Israel’s relentless theft and pulverization of Palestinian land. This is the map that MSNBC apologized for showing to its viewers:

So, in this case, if this story is true, Obama and his team are as politically stupid as Trump and his, regarding Palestine at least. If this story is true, it means that years of studying in the highest academies of the empire and working in the highest levels of political power may only yield abysmal ignorance regarding one of the most important issues in the world.

Which is, in fact, quite possible.

In a meeting at the Left Forum last year, Andy Trimlett, who produced and directed the fine new documentary, 1948: Creation and Catastrophe (which I supported on Kickstarter), told of how he was able to get a Master’s degree in Middle East Studies from the University of Washington while learning virtually nothing about what the creation of Israel entailed. He’s not the only person I’ve heard that from.

So, in his acerbic tweet, the excellent British journalist Jonathan Cook may be (probably is) right in his skepticism regarding this New Yorker story, but he may also be underestimating the political vacuity of the “educated” American, especially regarding Palestine and Israel:

The New Yorker insults its readers' intelligence with this article claiming that Obama officials only worked out – accidentally – in 2015 that Israeli settlements had taken over 60% of the West Bank. Who could have guessed what Israel was up to?! — Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) July 10, 2018

Or:

2) The story is not true. Obama and Co. knew very well, all along, what Israel was doing, and they are now putting out this story—a flat-out lie--because... Well, maybe because after the Gaza massacre, with the tide turning among the Democratic constituency, to exacerbate the image of Trump as the absolute villain, etc., the Obama team, as an exemplar of establishment Democratic liberalism, wants to pose as naive innocents rather than the conscious collaborators with ethnic cleansing they were and still are. They really want The New Yorker’s readership to have that image of Obama as the one who continually “defied” Netanyahu, versus Trump who is now capitulating to him.

That, too, is a flat-out lie, as anyone who isn’t mis-educated into political stupidity by the media, the politicians, and the highest academies of the empire knows. The whole “Obama’s final act of defiance” punchline, which is in Entous’s voice, makes the story fake, even if it’s true. There was no series of “acts of defiance” by Obama, of which the lame-duck abstention on the Security Council resolution was the “final” one.

It’s fair to say, and to his credit, that Obama acted against Netanyahu’s wishes in accepting the Iran deal, which Trump has abrogated. And Obama made good noises, from early in his administration, about the dangers of Israeli settlement construction—which, of course, indicates that he knew about all those “systematic” problems before he discovered The Map. But he, like his predecessors, did nothing about it. He, like they, enabled and supported the systematic, two-state-destroying settlement of the West Bank, and continually supported Israel in whatever violence it wanted to do to the Palestinians—including bombing the crap out of them in Gaza, twice.

No slouch in that regard, Obama was first American President to give bunker-buster bombs to Israel—secretly, precisely because he had publicly said Israel had to curtail settlement construction in exchange for such gifts and didn’t want it to be known that he was capitulating. He was also the first American President to demand that "Palestinians must recognize that Israel will be a Jewish state"—a new, gratuitous, and excessive demand, insisted upon by Netanyahu. The lame-duck abstention on the Security Council resolution cost Israel nothing. Overall, Obama’s Palestine-Israel policy, consistent with American policy over decades, was one of continual capitulation to the will of Israel--including specifically on settlements. That is not some new policy “put in place” by Donald Trump.

And, if the story is not true, then

Either:

2A) Adam Entous and The New Yorker—that oh-so-intelligent, sophisticated, and "reliable" journal—fully and sincerely believe the fake story the Obama people are putting out, and are communicating that bullshit to you in good faith, as what they think is true, in-depth knowledge of an important aspect of American foreign policy that you should have. In which case, Entous and The New Yorker are as stupid and gullible as any Trump supporter.

Or,

2B) Entous and The New Yorker know very well this is a fake story that Obama and his people are putting out, and they are consciously collaborating with them to get you to believe something they know to be untrue. (And the lite, bad faith version of this—that they can deny that they “know,” even if they suspect, the story is not true, because they take these— i.e., their—people at their word, share their objectives, and don’t ask too many questions—is no less deceptive and pernicious.)

Why would they do this? Because it's the tortured-humanitarian version of Obama’s and the liberal Democrats' implication in the colonization of Palestine that they want you to have. And because it helps enforce the fairy tale of how the good, progressively-intentioned American presidency under Obama has been completely overturned by the bad, anti-American-values presidency of Trump.

So, in any possible reading of this article, it’s a damning indictment of the liberal ideology embodied by Obama Democrats and/or by an iconic media outlet of highbrow culture. In any possible reading, someone’s a political fool. In option 1, it’s a true story, and Obama and his team were terribly ignorant fools who should not have been allowed near the responsibilities of the Presidency; in option 2, it’s a fake story, and Entous and The New Yorker have themselves either been fooled by, or are complicit in trying to fool you with, the Obama team’s mendacious attempt to create a false image of themselves, and a phony nostalgia about American politics. There is no option 3.

In all options, of course, the target of the tomfoolery is the audience, the likely reader of The New Yorker. Indeed, in option 2B, which gets Jonathan Cook’s vote (and mine) and is at least as likely as any other, the reader is the only one being fooled. The article, and the ideology, counts on the reader not noticing that these are its only possible—and all quite damning—meanings. Any reader who doesn’t notice this is totally captured within, and faked-out by, the ideology the article reproduces.

There’s no bigger problem in the United States today than the citizenry’s widespread mis-education into political gullibility, not to say stupidity, and it’s the height of foolishness to think this is only a problem of Republicans and rightists, of those who read Breitbart and not those who read The New Yorker, or of those who finish their education at high school and not those who get it finished off at one of the higher academies of the empire.

As I’ve said before, America is now a ship of fools, with a thousand captains barking fake orders. Reader, beware.

About the Author

Jim Kavanagh is The Polemicist's founding editor.

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The Russian Peace Threat examines Russophobia, American Exceptionalism and other urgent topics

Mainstream Media’s One-Sided Coverage of the Great March of Return: a Case Study

HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON IT.

by RICHARD HARDIGAN

Photo by Jonas Moffat | CC BY 2.0

A Gallup poll of March, 2018 about opinions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict revealed that 64% of Americans sympathize more with Israel, while 19% view the Palestinians more favorably. The fact that the root cause of the conflict is the expulsion of the indigenous population and consequent seizure of much of Palestine by a foreign people seems to be lost on the American public at large. Much of the opinion is a direct result of the generally one-sided coverage of the conflict by the mainstream media.

The coverage of the events of May 14, when the Israeli army killed sixty Palestinians and injured thousands more in Gaza during the Great March of Return, provides a depressing snapshot of the Western media’s treatment of the conflict.

I will focus here on a recent article in the Economist, the British current affairs magazine that has a wide circulation in the United States. It is considered to be conservative economically but liberal politically. The Economist’s article employs many of the tools used by the mainstream media when discussing the conflict. It repeats and accepts as fact Israeli and Western talking points about the conflict without analysis; it uses loaded terminology; it chooses which aspects of the events to focus on in order to present its biased point of view; it almost entirely ignores the larger context in which they have taken place.

The cover of the May 19 – May 24 issue of the Economist depicts a Palestinian boy with a slingshot that is presumably aimed at Israeli soldiers. This choice in itself is already an indicator of the magazine’s slant. Rather than focus on the shooting and killing of mostly unarmed civilians protesting against the inhumane and illegal blockade of Gaza, the editor fixates on the fact that the Palestinians were throwing rocks. It was their fault, the image seems to indicate, not that of the snipers. A reasonable analogy is the beating of a small, helpless child by a large, strong man. The child kicks at him desperately to get away. Should one focus on the child kicking the man or on the man beating the child? The Economist has made its choice clear.

This is only reinforced by the headline. “Gaza, there is a better way,” it reads. The subtitle is “Israel is answerable for this week’s deaths in Gaza. But it is time for Palestinians to take up non-violence.” This is the thrust of the article. Palestinians should take the moral high ground by marching peacefully rather than engaging in violence. A Western observer advising a non-Western people how to conduct its business smacks of the paternalism exhibited by colonialists over the centuries, and it is extremely offensive. The content of the statement—even if we ignore its patronizing tone—is absurd. The notion that the Palestinians are being violent by slinging rocks and throwing Molotov cocktails at the 4^thmost powerful army in the world is misleading and lacks context. Don’t kick the man, the magazine seems to be telling the child being beaten. You don’t want to be violent.

There are many problematic statements made by the author of the article. I will discuss a few of them below.

“…when rockets or other attacks provoke a fully-fledged war…”

In this sentence the author places the blame for the events of May 14, as well as the three recent major Israeli assaults on Gaza, squarely on the shoulders of Hamas. He is repeating Israeli talking points without questioning them. By using the term “war,” he is absolving Israel of any responsibility for the killing of the protestors. After all, it is somewhat acceptable for soldiers to get killed in war. It is much less so, if unarmed protestors are being murdered. But this is not a war. That term connotes a conflict between two more or less equal parties, and in this case, it is extremely misleading. One would never refer to the Holocaust as a war between Nazis and Jews or the eradication of the Native Americans as a war between them and the Europeans.

The mainstream media has largely accepted the Israeli view that the assaults on Gaza—in 2008/2009, 2012 and 2014—were provoked by Hamas’ rocket attacks. But this is false or—at best—highly debatable. Journalist Ben White has studied this question carefully in his book, The 2014 Gaza War: 21 Questions and Answers, and concludes that Hamas’ rocket attacks had little to do with the Israeli assaults.

“…threatening to “return” to the lands their forefathers lost when Israel was created…”

This is the only mention of the Nakba in the entire article, and the Nakba of course represents the reason for the conflict in the first place. Omitting it is analogous to not mention the beating of the child at all, only saying that a child is kicking a man. Moreover, the Palestinians did not “lose” their land, and implying so is revising history. Their land was taken from them by Zionist forces, who expelled roughly three-quarters of a million Palestinians in order to make room for a Jewish homeland.

“…Israel’s army may well have used excessive force. But…”

This is the closest the author comes to condemning the Israeli actions on May 14. Following the “but” is a list excusing these actions. The statement above should be made without qualification. Of course excessive force was used. Thousands of Palestinians were injured, while—according to reports—a single Israeli soldier was lightly wounded when he was struck by a stone.

“…Israel as a thriving democracy…”

A Reminder that a Murderer is Having Tea at Downing Street. (June 6)

Israel’s claim to be the only democracy in the Middle East is generally accepted by the mainstream media in the West without question. But is it true? Certainly any country that withholds rights from one-fifth of its citizens because of their religious identity cannot be considered a full democracy. Indeed, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index for 2017, Israel is classified as a flawed democracy. Its level of democracy is ranked #30 in the world, tied with Estonia. It scores very well in several categories, such as its electoral process and level of political participation, but when it comes to civil liberties, which include human rights and religious tolerance, it is ranked #86 in the world, tied with, among others, Uganda, Malawi and Tunisia. It is of course difficult to compare countries with entirely different cultures and histories, but nevertheless Israel would probably not be happy to be mentioned in the same breath as Uganda when it comes to democracy.

Although it is not stated explicitly, it is likely that Israel’s scores in the Democracy Index are based only on what it does in Israel proper, and not in the West Bank and Gaza. After all, since none of the millions of Palestinians residing therein are allowed to vote, a high score in the category of political participation would be impossible. Since Israel does have nearly complete control in the Occupied Territories, its abominable human rights record there should be taken into account, which would significantly lower its democracy score.

“Many hands are guilty for this tragedy.”

The tragedy here is a reference to the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza, which the United Nations reports will be uninhabitable by the year 2020. The author blames Israel, Egypt, Fatah and Hamas. He neglects to mention that Israel, as the occupying power, bears primary responsibility. Indeed, as legal scholar Noura Erakat explains, “as the occupying power of the Gaza Strip… Israel has an obligation and a duty to protect the civilians under its occupation.” This includes neither using mathematical formulas to keep them on the brink of starvation, nor shooting and killing them indiscriminately. For those who argue that the Israeli occupation of Gaza ended in 2005, Erakat counters that “Israel maintains control of the territory’s air space, territorial waters, electromagnetic sphere, population registry and the movement of all goods and people.” This constitutes a de-facto occupation.

“[Hamas] destroyed the Oslo peace accords through its campaign of suicide bombings in the 1990s and 2000s.”

Gazaian children

This is partly true. While Palestinian violence did contribute to the breakdown of the accords, it is largely Israeli settlement policy that is to blame for their failure, as argued by prominent Israeli historian Avi Shlaim. Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud government came to power after the assassination of Yitzak Rabin, one of the architects of the accords, and did everything it could to undermine them. The Oslo Accords, although they did not explicitly mention so, were intended to lead to the eventual creation of a Palestinian state. By increasing the rate of settlement expansion in the West Bank, Netanyahu ensured that such a state would never come to be. By 2000, Oslo was all but dead.

“[Hamas] stores its weapons in civilian sites, including mosques and schools, making them targets.”

There is no evidence for this, as stated by Erakat. During the 2014 assault, Hamas did store weapons in two United Nations schools, which were empty at the time.

“[Hamas] refuses to fully embrace a two-state solution… If it accepted Israel’s right to exist…”

Hamas’ charter does state that it refuses to accept Israel’s existence. However,scholarNoam Chomsky argues that Hamas long ago renounced this charter, while Hamas does offer de-facto recognition of Israel, since it was willing to enter a unity government with the Palestinian Authority (PA), an action that implies acceptance of all previous PA-Israel agreements. What Zionists often neglect to mention is that it is Netanyahu’s ruling Likud party that refuses to accept the notion of a Palestinian state, not merely by its actions, but in an official platform, which includes the statement: The Government of Israel flatly rejects the establishment of a Palestinian/Arab state west of the Jordan River. Since each party refuses to accept the other, why does the Economist only mention Hamas?

The statements from the article referred to above effectively show the magazine’s bias, but even more revealing are the omissions. No mention is made of the fact that the dead include children, medics and journalists. Would the author be forced to conclude that Israel did, in fact, use excessive force, if he/she had to confront the fact that clearly innocent people were killed? Why is none of the witness testimony available to us about the details of some of the shootings included? In fact, there is little discussion about the victims at all. It is all about Hamas, which is what Israel wants you to think. In reality, Hamas had little to do with the protest.

On a larger scale, there is no mention of the Nakba, the Right of Return or the Occupation, which—as even a beginning history student would tell you—are crucial elements both in the larger conflict and in the events of May 14. By omitting them, the Economist is able to reinforce the Israeli and American version of events without making even a token attempt at providing a balanced point of view.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Richard Hardigan is a university professor based in California. He is the author of The Other Side of the Wall. His website is richardhardigan.com, and you can follow him on Twitter @RichardHardigan.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS

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Things to ponder

While our media prostitutes, many Hollywood celebs, and politicians and opinion shapers make so much noise about the still to be demonstrated damage done by the Russkies to our nonexistent democracy, this is what the sanctimonious US government has done overseas just since the close of World War 2. And this is what we know about. Many other misdeeds are yet to be revealed or documented.

Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found

In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” — acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump — a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all.— Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report

Israel Crosses a Line as IDF Snipers Murder Unarmed Protesters in the Ghetto of Gaza

BE SURE TO PASS THESE ARTICLES TO FRIENDS AND KIN. A LOT DEPENDS ON THIS. DO YOUR PART.

by DAVE LINDORFF

Hong Kong.

Sitting in this peaceful city on the far side of world from the United States can put some things in perspective. For one thing, the local papers, both Chinese-language and the English-language South China Morning Post today featured front-page images of dead Palestinian protesters lying on the ground in Gaza. Accompanying articles focused on them latest day’s slaughter of over 50 (later upped to 61) unarmed Palestinians and the deliberate maiming, often with high-velocity fragmentation bullets that reportedly shatter bones and tear huge holes in their victims, of another 1000 or more, including children. Meanwhile, the international edition of the New York Timesfor two days following the shootings has yet to carry such a photo, and has yet to feature a leading article about the latest IDF massacre in Gaza. Instead page one featured a piece about the risks to Israel posed by the US opening of an Israeli embassy in the supposedly international city of Jerusalem.

The slaughter of protesters in Gaza was a minor point in that article.

Meanwhile, Hong Kong readers are elsewhere seeing and reading about the true horror of what has been happening in Gaza.

The killers and maimers there are soldiers of the Israeli army, all of them sitting safely on earthen berms themselves behind three rows of security fence inside of Gazan territory that keep the protesting Gazan “inmates” at bay, way too far off to even pose a threat by throwing stones. Yet the IDF snipers still kill and maim, often, as the viral videos below shows, laughing at the results or their target practice.

This one-sided violence is not a case of self-defense, though the Israeli government ludicrously tries to claim that because Palestinians are throwing rocks or attempting to, David like, use slings to toss them further, and are flying burning kites over the border in hopes if igniting Israeli farmers’ fields, they pose a serious threat. Nor is it a case of deterrence, as there’s no way Gazans can push through the walls confining them and enter Israeli territory. It is purely a case of asserting authority and attempting to cow a captive population — for Gaza is in reality the world’s largest prison camp, a place where food, medicine, fuel and even water are strictly controlled and limited by the prison owner and operator, Israel. Close to two million Gazans cannot leave this ghetto except with Israeli permission or by stealth — the former a rarity and the latter a deadly project. Recently the IDF even bombed a tunnel that was used to allow a few Gazans to slip into Egypt, and that had also allowed small amounts of scarce goods to be slipped into this hell-hole of Israeli’s making.

This month, the people of Gaza have been engaged in an ongoing and deliberately unarmed protest near the wall that constrains them from leaving their prison. They have continued to do so even as IDF soldiers continue to shoot them with impunity using high-powered rifles, and also firing tear gas and rubber bullets at them.

Let’s be clear: What the IDF is engaged in is exactly what Nazi troops were doing in the early days of the notorious Warsaw Ghetto, when Jews from captured Poland were herded into a walled-off part of the city and left to starve in its confines. If the captive Jews in that ghetto in the early days of its existence had chosen to mass in protest at their wall, they would have been mowed down in the same way that the IDF is slaughtering Palestinian protesters. Instead they tried to survive as best as they could by paying to have food smuggled in to them. Only later, as their captivity dragged on and as the Nazi mass extermination campaign began, did some organize a heroic campaign of armed resistance against their captors.

True, Israel is not actively exterminating the Palestinians (though there are voices in this increasingly religio-fascist state who are calling for just such a thing, referring to Palestinians in the same dehumanizing terms — snakes and vermin — that the Nazis applied to Jews, and calling for their expulsion and even death). But Israel is doing the next worse thing to extermination: slow starvation and the crushing of the spirit. And what it is doing, including the killings, is the very thing that the Nazis did to the Jews of Europe under their control: penning them into ghettos and then starving them and denying them the basic essentials of life…and killing those who dare to protest. This is especially the case in Gaza, where the state of Israel has full control over all entry and egress to and from the little sliver of territory.

Israel, which at least in the US has lobbyists and supporters who tout it shamelessly and dishonestly as the Middle East’s “only democracy,” is not a democracy at all. It is an apartheid state in which people defined as Jews (not a religious term in this case, but a tribal one) are the rulers, and people whose roots go back in that same land at least as far and in many cases many generations farther than the Israelis who rule the land, have little or no power. Gazans, for example, are not Israeli citizens. They are stateless people — people who were themselves, or whose parents or grandparents were residents of Palestine before the founding of the state of Israel, and who were driven from their homes in the Nakhba 70 years ago by the Zionist newcomers, and herded into the Gaza ghetto, where they and their progeny remain trapped.

Israelis themselves bear the most guilt for this horror, but the United States bears plenty of the blame too. It’s not just the Trump administration, which has sucked up to Israel’s right-wing apartheid government shamelessly, most recently with the decision to relocate the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. The US underwrites this wretched situation, currently providing Israel, a first-world nation that could easily pay its own way, with a US taxpayer gift of $3 billion a year to buy arms and other military equipment, making the most powerful military power in the Middle Ease also the largest single recipient in the world of US military aid.

Israel, courtesy of the US taxpayer, boasts the largest fleet of F-16 fighter-bombers outside of the US Air Force. The country also gets top-of-the-line military equipment, not the “dumbed-down” equipment offered to other countries supplied with such US weapons.

When Israel commits war crimes and atrocities, whether it’s the open-seas assault in on a peace flotilla of civilian ships sailing from Turkey to Gaza in 2010 which included the murder of an unarmed Turkish-American youth (a US citizen), or the bombing of schools and hospitals in Gaza in 2014 or some other outrage, the US stays silent, or should there be an effort to pass a UN Security Resolution condemning Israel, the US vetoes it.

True to form, the US government has failed to condemn the current atrocities in Gaza — the killing of well over a hundred unarmed Gazans in the current crisis, and the deliberate targeting of Palestinian journalists.

The silence about these crimes in the US Congress, in the US media, and among the US public is deafening — indeed there is far more protest against them in Israel and more critical reporting in the Israeli media than in the US — and it is reminiscent, I’m sorry to say, of the US silence that accompanied the vicious attacks on European Jews by the Nazis in the years before the actual start of World War II, not to mention the refusal of the US government to accept Jewish refugees from the Holocaust even after the war was underway.

Now it’s not Jews who are the victims. It is the self-described Jewish State of Israel that is the victimizer, with Palestinians now in the position of the Jews of Europe in the late 1930s and early 1940s.

I’ll conclude here with the comments of Rabbi Arthur Waskow, a veteran peace activist and advocate for Palestinian rights who heads the Shalom Center in Philadelphia. I don’t know how Rabbi Waskow would feel about my characterization of Israel’s current government and its military as a kind of reincarnation of the Germany’s Nazis, but his own description of of the plight of the Palestinians in Gaza makes the case itself:

“While in Jerusalem the Netanyahu government and the Designated Daughter of his brother-in-tyranny Trump were drinking champagne to celebrate the new US embassy there, in Gaza, the Netanyahu government was getting drunk on blood.

“And poisoning the bloodstream of Torah as if, God forbid, its Teaching were filled with hatred and contempt.

“Why are thousands of Palestinians willing to risk death? Because especially in Gaza, death is preferable to despair. Despair over the blockade of Gazan goods from being sold abroad; the blockade preventing Gaza’s fishermen from catching the sardines that swarm just outside the line drawn in the Mediterranean where Israelis sink the fishing boats of Gazans; the blockade that prevents the import of goods; the blockade that results in a devastated electrical power system; the blockade that has resulted in an unemployment rate of 40%, the highest in the world.”

As for us in America, let’s engage briefly in one of those Chomsky/Herman mental exercises. Imagine if you will what the reaction of the US government, the US corporate media, and the US public would be if Chinese soldiers of the PLA were, next week, to mow down hundreds of protesting Tibetans, killing hundreds and maiming thousands? Imagine what the reaction would be if Russian Red Army troops, rather than Moscow police, instead of simply arresting protestors on Red Square, massacred hundreds of them and maimed thousands. Imagine for that matter if French gendarmes, instead of busting up a refugee camp in the port of Calais, shot and killed hundreds and maimed thousands more. Even then, in the case of a US ally, the outcry would be enormous, and yet in the case of Israel’s violent, murderous repression of Gaza’s protesters, we get mostly silence or a gentle tut-tutting.

That’s not good enough, especially when the US is financing Israel’s repressive military so lavishly.

The US to be sure has much to answer for in its own history, and even today, as racial oppression, overt and indemic, continues against people of color. But what the US is doing in slavishly supporting Israel’s brutal repression of Palestinians is beyond reprehensible. Even from a selfish point of view, in supporting Israel’s obscene and criminal behavior towards its captive Palestinian population, the US is inviting the righteous fear and loathing of a huge part of the world. How can that support remotely be considered to be in America’s interest? It’s time to call Israel what it is — a repressive religio-fascist state as toxic and violative of acceptable international norms as was the apartheid white regime of South Africa.

Israelis who support such fascist behavior will have only themselves to blame when an inevitable day of reckoning comes, which it surely will someday. But for the US, as Israel’s primary backer, the only answer is to cease being Israel’s enabler, to cancel all military aid, and to demand an end to the repression of Palestinians.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dave Lindorff is a founding member of ThisCantBeHappening!, an online newspaper collective, and is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press).

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS

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Don’t fall for the post-modernist/relativist trap.
The struggle against the system requires lucidity, not narcissistic flim-flam.

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United Nations – Celebrating 70 Years of Human Rights – And Condoning 70 Years of Israel Massacring Palestine

HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON IT.

Leon Uris bestseller Exodus (later a blockbuster with Paul Newman as the mythological hero Ari Ben Canaan), gave a glowing, thoroughly whitewashed, Zionized version of the birth of Israel. Propaganda and US support have always been critical to the success of the Zionist state.

On 14 of May 1948 – Israel declared unilaterally her independence in a foreign land, called Palestine, supported by a UN Resolution sponsored by the UK (the United Nations “Partition Plan of Palestine” at the end of the British Mandate (euphemism for British ‘colony’), was adopted by the UN General Assembly on 29 November 1947 as Resolution 181 II). 1948 was also the year of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights – this year, 2018, the UN declared Human Rights are, like Israel, celebrating their 70^th Birthday (United Nations General Assembly, Paris, 10 December 1948 – General Assembly Resolution 217 A). During 70 years of Human Rights, the UN has tacitly allowed Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, who lived in their own land, Palestine.

The UN has allowed Israel’s massacre of Palestine against dozens of UN Resolution to restrain Israel from their aggressions on Palestine, killing tens of thousands of unarmed Palestinians, women, children and men. Destroying their livelihood, schools, hospitals and living quarters. Worse, confining 2 million Palestinians in an open torture and terror camp, called Gaza.

All this under the “watchful eye” of the United Nations, thousands of Blue Helmets patrolling ‘disputed’ - aka Israeli stolen territory from Palestine and surrounding Arab nations. And the world at large – by now 193 member-nations that make up the UN – watching, observing, but not saying beep loud enough to be heard.

New York Times 1945

It is a shame. Israel is a miserable and criminal disgrace – but a worse shame is the United Nations, the collectivity of 193 countries who collectively hide behind the mantle of the UN. Those who have dared to protest in the defense of human rights and in defense of Palestinians’ self-determination are few and far in between, risking the sword of the emperor and his poodles. Most have bent to and are still bending to – the king bull, Washington – and to its master, Israel. This is what is lamentable, that humanity has become a spineless bunch of nations – all kneeling in front of the big Satan, the torturing and killing monster, the US-armed to the teeth killing machine – the little dog that counts on the unlimited support from the most horrific bulldozer. That is an atrocious and unspeakable shame. – At least one honorable country, South Africa, has expelled Israel’s Ambassador over these most recent bloody atrocities.

That is the ignominy of our humanity in the 21^st Century. – Yes, there are Russia, China, Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, Syria… and a few more sovereign nations that stand-up in protest, trying to use the corrupted UN system to right the wrongs – to no avail. Of course not. The majority counts – and the majority is being blackmailed by Washington on behalf of Israel into submission – or else – sanctions loom, in the form of blocked trade, blocked international monetary transfers, confiscation of assets abroad – or worse.

Where are the all so revered Human Rights that nobody dares to even cite, let alone enforce, in the case of Israel’s atrocities on Palestine, with the explicit support of the United States and most of her puppet “allies”?

When Trump in December 2017 declared that the US will transfer her Embassy to Jerusalem, he endorsed just once more a promise made over the last 30 years by several US Presidents, from the Bush dynasty to Clinton to Obama – but none of them implemented that promise, lest it would undermine peace negotiations. These promises by Washington were, of course, full of hypocrisy, as Washington always knew that peace was not on the table, that neither Israel or Washington were in favor of peace. Peace would have meant, as per the 1993 Oslo Accord, a two-state solution, meaning Israel and Palestine would live side-by-side in peace; two sovereign nations with equal rights.

The Oslo Accords are a number of agreements between the Government of Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization [PLO]. The Oslo I Accord, signed in Washington DC in 1993; and the Oslo II Accord, signed in Taba, Egypt, in 1995. These Accords marked the start of the Oslo process, aimed at achieving a Peace Treaty, based on UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, fulfilling the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination. The Oslo Accords are valid to this day. They counter then and today the larger objective of Israel and the United States – of a “Greater Israel”, stretching from the Euphrates to the Nile, a nuclearized Israel, dominating the Middle East – and disposing of the energy and other mineral riches of the entire region.

Well, Trump, has made his campaign promise true. He – ordered by his darkest handlers – has cut the hypocrisy, using Israel’s 70^th Birthday, 14 May 2018 to make Israel’s obsessive and oppressive dream come true, officially inaugurating the US Embassy in Jerusalem – to the detriment of peace and the total destitution of Palestine. The Oslo Accords saw Jerusalem as the final jewel in the mosaic for peace in a two-state solution – the Capital of both Palestine and Israel.

Trump’s decision – although refuted vehemently by the UN – has not only pushed peace light-years away into a phantom distance, but it has brought about a massacre – an unpardonable massacre – with Israeli soldiers armed to the teeth killing with live ammunition. Tens of thousands of unarmed Palestinians were protesting on the Gaza-Israeli border, in the middle of nowhere, at least 100 km away from the US Embassy inaugural celebration in Jerusalem. Israeli soldiers and police killed at least 60, twenty or more of them children and women, and injuring about 3,000 – people who could not be properly treated at hospitals. Israel has blocked the shipment of medication and is systematically bombing Palestinian health facilities.

The protesters were far away from Jerusalem, where the inaugural US-Embassy celebrations took place, cordoned-off by armed security forces and where the protesters could do no harm. The demonstrations were an expression of anger, of helplessness in the face of so much injustice which nobody, but nobody on this planet manifestly and effectively objected and intervened against. Palestinians know, this will mean more oppression, more subjugation to Israel’s terror tyranny – more killing, more starvation as Israel is blocking vital food shipments to Gaza – where 50% of children below 5, are already chronically malnourished.

What happened on 14 May 2018 in Palestine, those who are behind the apartheid, ethnic cleansing and outright Holocaust Israel has imposed on Palestine during the last 70 years, belong, no doubt, before a Nuremberg-type tribunal – with sentences as harsh as those inflicted by the allies after WWII on the Nazis and their Holocaust.

Trump and his Zion-handlers are responsible for a massacre of unprecedented dimensions since Israel’s war on Gaza in 2014. And how many vassals of the tyrannical and criminal pair, United States and Israel, will now also shift their Embassies from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem just to stay in the limelight of US favors, and, of course, to cement this universal Wrong?

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]nd where are the UN declared Human Rights, ironically also celebrating their 70^th Birthday this year? – Under the Human Rights Act the UN has a right to intervene in countries and situations, where massive human rights infractions are committed, like in Palestine. Dozens of such resolutions had been submitted to the UN Security Council, they were all vetoed by Washington. What good is the UN? None, whatsoever. No longer, not today, the system is totally corrupted, bought and blackmailed into submission to the wishes and political whims of the US and Israel.

Likewise have all the related UN agencies been corrupted and swayed to favor the Exceptional Nation and the Chosen People. There is no way that the International Courts of The Hague would ever prosecute a war crime committed by the west, let alone by the west’s chief criminals, the US and Israel. It’s simply not going to happen. Not while the current power structures are in place. Why then even believe in this fake justice system? And who still dares quote them as beacons of international justice? – This is a farce, if there has ever been one.

The noble ideas behind the creation of the United Nations and the Declaration of universal Human Rights have in the last 70 years been corrupted to the point of non-recognition. Corrupted by political pressure, blackmailing, by fear of sanctions, or actual economic sanctions – all of which is only possible because the west is also living with a totally fraudulent US imposed fiat dollar-based monetary system that controls every financial transaction of every “sovereign” nation, hence can block any monetary move, seize assets abroad, and block international contracts, as they (almost) all are written in US dollars.

The latter is gradually fading, as nations are aware of their vulnerability by sticking to the US dollar. Many are now dealing directly in their own currencies, trying to circumvent the US monetary control. But that recognition, again, is weakened itself by the fear of sanctions, or condemnation by US courts which have in fact absolutely no jurisdiction in another sovereign land. But, since under the current western Ponzi fiat scheme all financial transactions have to flow through a US bank either in New York or London, potential non-adherence to the rule is “punishable”, and that mostly by economic strangulation, regime change or death. – It’s a vicious circle, under which Human Rights are just a slogan and a farce; and under which the rights of sovereign nations, for example of Palestine, remain not more than a pipe dream.

But despite all war crimes and massacres – JUSTICE – as human spirituality is still there, cannot be killed. It may be pushed away, subjugated, ignored, castrated and violated, but it doesn’t go away. It’s in all of us; just deep down and asleep in western minds, indoctrinated and brain washed by daily propaganda lies.

The combined neoliberal onslaught with impunity from all sides reaches a level of increasing awareness and rejection; the fearlessness of diabolical actions by neofascist governments is about to cause an awakening, a consciousness that dares to say – enough is enough. Take France’s Macron’s labor reforms – since February this year France has been plagued by strikes no-end – and no end is in sight. This is the worst – or the best – France has known since the 1968 student up-raisings. France, under Macron, the Rothchild-implant, is also the most militarized country in Europe. The European Union – at least for now – and since Washington’s stepping out from Iran’s Nuclear Deal, is distinctly distancing herself from the extremist, unfettered neoliberal politics of Washington. It’s perhaps too soon to call Victory – but this abject, unjustified and criminal slaughter of Palestinians, of another blow of violent oppression of Palestine (there is no word that can properly describe what happened on 14 May 2018), may signal that the monster vessel on high sea is losing notch-by-little-notch its diabolical North.

About the Author

Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a former World Bank staff and worked extensively around the world in the fields of environment and water resources. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for Global Research, ICH, RT, Sputnik, PressTV, The 4th Media (China), TeleSUR, The Vineyard of The Saker Blog, and other internet sites. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed – fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank experience around the globe. He is also a co-author of The World Order and Revolution! – Essays from the Resistance.

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