QUNFUZ

The Background

Security prisons, and the terror they inspire in the Syrian population, have underpinned the Assad regime’s rule from the start.

The history of such prisons stretches back before Hafez al-Assad’s seizure of power in 1970, though his regime expanded and intensified the system. From 1946 on, Syria was racked by a series of military coups and counter-coups, interspersed with brief episodes of parliamentary democracy. Whenever a coup succeeded, the new rulers would round up the previous government and its supporters and detain them in prison.

The numbers of people held in security prisons increased during the United Arab Republic (UAR) of 1958 to 1961, and the conditions of detention worsened. The UAR brought the Syrian and Egyptian states together under the dictatorship of the Egyptian president, Gamal Abdul Nasser. Abd al-Hamid al-Sarraj, Nasser’s preferred Syrian secret policeman, is credited with introducing two particular torture methods to Syrian prisons during this period: the doulab, or tire, in which victims are stuffed, and then whipped; and the shabah, or ghost, by which victims are strung by their wrists from the ceiling for hours or days. Both methods are still applied in the Assad regime’s prisons today. ISIS inherited them from Assad, and also routinely applied such tortures in its own security prisons.

The UAR was widely seen as an economic as well as a political disaster, and was soon ended by a coup led by conservative army officers. When, in turn, a secret Military Committee of Baathist officers seized control in March 1963, it quickly set about rounding up and detaining those it considered a potential security threat. These included first the conservative officers who had seceded from Abdul Nasser’s UAR, then supporters of Abdul Nasser, then anyone who dissented from the ruling party’s line. As the Baathists had banned all media and all forms of civil organization beyond Baath Party control, this category covered many members of civil society.

READ ON HERE

Israel’s Support for Apartheid, War Crimes and Genocide Around the World, a Brief History

PALESTINE NEXUS /ZACHARY FOSTER

audio version on spotify

For decades, Israel has supplied weapons and military technology to the world’s most brutal military regimes. This is a brief history of Israel’s support for apartheid, atrocities, war crimes and genocide around the world. 

Chile

In the 1970s-80s, Israel supplied arms to Chile’s Augusto Pinochet during its 17-year long military rule in which civilians were routinely targeted, tortured, and disappeared. The Israeli military trained the Chilean secret service, the DINA, described by the CIA in 1974 as a “Gestapo-type police force,” which tortured at least 35,000 and disappeared over 3,000 people. Meanwhile, Israel maintained excellent relations with Chile throughout Pinochet’s rule, sponsoring Chilean leaders on many state visits.

Now, an Israeli-Chilean family seeks justice for their father, who was tortured and killed by the dictatorship. They have sued the Attorney General to open investigations into the involvement of Israeli government institutions in arms deals with Pinochet. The Israeli lawyer and human rights activist Eitay Mack has filed a series of freedom of information petitions for the release of documents that would detail the nature of Israel’s involvement. “The human rights issue is not part of the consideration of the officials in the Ministry of Defense and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, unless there is big public pressure on them,” Mack said. Israeli leaders are unconcerned with how the weapons are used so long as they improve Israel’s diplomatic ties abroad.

Guatemala

In 1977, Israel became Guatemala’s principal weapons supplier, providing the country’s authoritarian leaders with $6 million worth of Galil rifles and Uzi submachine guns. Israel also supplied spyware and electronic surveillance and designed and operated the radar system at Guatemala City’s international airport. Guatemalan officials have even bragged their soldiers carry Israeli weapons and underwent training from Israeli soldiers. Guatemalan leaders have also embraced Israeli military tactics, such as using the theoretical presence of guerilla forces in an area as a pretext to indiscriminately kill civilians. During the civil war, right wing supporters of the regime even spoke about the “Palestinianization” of Guate’s indigenous population.

Then, in 1982, Israeli officials helped Guatemala’s Efraín Ríos Montt carry out a military coup. Montt, who later thanked over 300 Israeli advisors for their help in the takeover, ruled during the bloodiest period of Guatemala’s civil war — known as the Mayan genocide or the Silent Holocaust. In 30 years, over 200,000 Mayan people were killed, tortured, and disappeared. Montt’s rule lasted from 1982-83 during which time his regime disappeared some 70,000 people.

South Africa

In the 1970s and 1980s, Israel became one of apartheid South Africa’s most important arms suppliers. In 1988, South Africa saved Israel’s cash-starved defense industry after it purchased 60 Kfir combat planes for $1.7 billion. Israel was then able to launch a reconnaissance satellite that was only made possible after the weapons sales to the apartheid regime.

South Africa operated an apartheid state, a racist legal system that segregated social and civil life in South Africa, privileging the white minority and condemning the Black majority. Apartheid security forces killed between 11,000 and 21,000 people and detained more than 80,000 people without trial over the course of the regime’s four decades of rule. Today, South Africa continues to suffer from the ramifications of apartheid rule.

Serbia

In 1991, Israel made one of the largest arms deals with Serbia during the Bosnian Genocide,  concealing the weapons transfers in violation of a UN arms embargo that same year. Israel’s military relationship with Serbia continued through at least 1995, with Serbian soldiers having received covert Israeli training in Greece and toting Israeli Uzis, snipers, shells and missiles. In 2016, the Israeli Supreme Court declined to release documents despite a petition filed by Mack and others because it would pose a risk to Israeli foreign relations.  To this day the extent of Israeli support for the Bosnian genocide remains unknown.

The Serbian wars waged against Muslims in Bosnia and Croatia after the dissolution of Yugoslavia have been described as the most egregious acts of ethnic cleansing “Europe had seen since the Holocaust.” Between 1991 and 1995 over 250,000 people were killed, and many more injured, raped, and held in concentration camps.

Rwanda

Israel provided arms to Hutu government forces during the Rwandan Genocide. Israeli weapons manufacturing companies sent 7 shipments of bullets, rifles and grenades to Rwanda between April and July 1994 alone despite an international arms embargo. In 2014, human rights lawyer Mack, alongside others, once again petitioned for documents on the arms trade but were denied because the information might harm “Israel’s state security and foreign relations.”

In 1994, Hutu militias killed more than half a million Tutsis in Rwanda in less than 100 days. It was the culmination of decades of tension between Rwanda’s majority ruling ethnic group, the Hutus, and the Tutsi minority. In total, over 1 million people perished in what is considered to be the fastest genocide in human history.

The Philippines

Israel supplied weapons to the Philippines during President Rodrigo’s Duterte’s infamous drug war in which government forces and death squads killed over 12,000 people. Philippine Security forces carried out the executions with Israeli rifles and handguns in largely poor, urban neighborhoods of the country.

In a 2018 visit to Israel, Duterte openly acknowledged that he favored purchasing Israeli weapons because there are virtually no restrictions on the sales while boastfully comparing himself to Hitler. In 2016, Duterte ran on a presidential campaign promising to kill 100,000 people in his first six months in office. He won by a landslide.

Myanmar

Since 2018, Israeli companies have supplied at least four shipments of weapons to the military junta in Myanmar, including patrol boats, advanced radar systems, air combat maneuvering instrumentation and drones.

Israel Aerospace Industries and Elbit Systems, for instance, continued pre-existing trade relations with the regime, ignoring both an international arms embargo and a 2017 Israeli Supreme Court ban. Israel’s government claimed it had stopped sending weapons to Myanmar in 2018, but arms shipments continued as late as 2022, after the junta overthrew the country’s democratically elected leaders a year earlier. In addition, Israel CAA Industries sold millions worth of arms-manufacturing equipment to Myanmar while an Israeli cyber firm supplied the country with spyware to surveil civilian populations.

In 2017, Israeli weapons and equipment were used to carry out a genocide of Rohingya Muslims. That year, Myanmar’s military Junta killed 9,000 Rohingya between August and September alone, with over 500,000 having fled to Bangladesh.

South Sudan

An Israeli general has been accused of trafficking $150 million worth of arms to the South Sudanese government under the guise of an agricultural firm. Israel provided assault rifles and operated surveillance equipment that has been used to target journalists and opposition figures. This was in spite of a 2018 UN Security Council arms embargo, a 2015 UN Report detailing Israeli violations of a previous ban of weapon sales and Israel’s ongoing promises since 2011 to suspend transfers of lethal equipment.

Years of political unrest and conflict between ethnic and militia groups in South Sudan have culminated in what some say is the “biggest hunger crisis” in recent history. Since 2018, some 400,000 people have been killed due to violence, starvation and disease, and between 4 and 11 million people have been displaced.

Azerbaijan

Israel has sold billions of dollars worth of arms to Azerbaijan since 2012. The Azerbaijani military even published videos displaying Israeli missiles and suicide drones and a factory producing these drones on Azeri soil. Meanwhile, the government has also used the Israeli company NSO’s spyware to target journalists and opposition activists.

In 2023, Azerbaijani forces continued to use Israeli arms to institute a 9-month blockade of Nagorno-Karabakh after decades of fighting that had left tens of thousands dead. They starved out the region’s 120,000 ethnic Armenians, blocking access to food, medicine, and fuel until January 24, 2024 when Azerbaijani forces ethnically cleansed the last remaining Armenians in the beleaguered enclave.

——

Israeli arms dealers have been intimately involved in many of the world’s most horrific acts of violence over the past half-century. In addition to the cases cited above, Israel has also reportedly supplied weapons to Argentina, Venezuela, Equatorial Guinea, and Nicaragua. In each of these cases as well, Israeli arms have been used to carry out atrocities. The Israeli firm Pegasus is also distributing its spyware to authoritarian states, where the technology will almost certainly be used to crack down on journalists and opposition figures.

Israeli human rights lawyer Mack emphasizes that the sales are intended to boost Israel’s diplomatic standing in the world. “In my opinion, economic incentive should never be above the moral issues and the human rights issues.”

yt  

Free Syria’s First Days: Good, Bad and Ugly

Qunfuz

Robin Yassin-Kassab

leave a comment »

This was published at the New Arab (link here)

We feared the regime’s end would be accompanied by a bloodbath. Thank God, that hasn’t happened. In the end the regime collapsed without a fight, even in its supposed heartland on the coast.

There has been some looting in Damascus, which has been somewhat more chaotic than the northern cities, perhaps because there has been a smaller rebel presence. Otherwise, the news coming from liberated Syria has been surprisingly good.

On the social level, Syrians are talking the language of reconciliation. One typical video shows a bearded rebel admonishing surrendered regime fighters for standing with the side that slaughtered women and children. Then he tells them, “Go! You are free!” The rebels have issued a general amnesty for military personnel. This does not extend to those guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The intention is to hold those people to account.

Meanwhile, Muhammad al-Bashir, who was the prime minister in Idlib’s Salvation Government, has been appointed to form a Transitional Government in Damascus. The Salvation Government ruled in HTS territory, but was civilian, largely technocratic, and fairly independent. It looks as if a similar logic is going to apply to the Transitional Government.

Having shed his nom de guerre, Abu Muhammad al-Jolani is now known by his real name, Ahmad al-Sharaa. Instead of ‘leader of HTS’, he has been rebranded as ‘commander of military operations’. He wants to be seen as a national figure rather than a Sunni jihadist. Some fear that he will change direction as soon as western states stop branding him a terrorist, but for now at least his direction is tolerant and democratic. Rebels have been told not to interfere in women’s clothing choices, for instance. And prominent opposition figures say that UN Resolution 2254 will be implemented. This will involve drafting a new constitution and holding free and fair elections under UN supervision.

So far so good. All of it inspires confidence in Syrians at home as well as the millions who were driven from their homes. Huge streams of people are leaving the tented camps on the country’s borders, and returning from Turkey and Lebanon, where so often they were subjected to racist abuse and violence. The result is thousands of emotional reunions between siblings, or between parents and children, who in many cases haven’t seen each other in over a decade. This is a blessing that nobody expected a fortnight ago, and it culminates a drama that has lasted almost 14 years. In 2011, millions of Syrians screamed Irhal! – Get out! – at Assad. His response was to drive them out instead. But today, at last, the Assad family are the refugees.

It’s also very good that tens of thousands of prisoners have been liberated from Assad’s dungeons. But it’s bad – profoundly depressing, in fact – that so many are in such a bad state. Lots of women and children have been found behind bars. The children were either arrested by the regime along with their parents, or were born in these dungeons to mothers who had been raped.

Some people have been found who were presumed to be dead. Many Lebanese have been liberated, and Jordanians and Palestinians, including Hamas members. Some of the prisoners had been “behind the sun”, as Syrians say, for over four decades. Some who were liberated thought Hafez al-Assad was still president (he died in 2000). Many of those coming blinking into the light are emaciated or disabled by torture. Some seem to have lost their memories or their sanity.

The worst images are coming from Sednaya Prison. Amnesty International called Sednaya ‘the human slaughterhouse’, and estimated that between 5,000 and 13,000 people were extra-judicially executed there between September 2011 and December 2015 alone. It now seems the total numbers of murdered are much higher than that.

At least 130,000 people were estimated lost in the Assadist gulag. Fadel Abdul Ghany, head of the Syrian Network for Human Rights, said yesterday (December 9) he believes that the vast majority of prisoners have been murdered.

The well-known activist Mazen Hamada has been found dead in Sednaya. Rooms full of discarded clothes and shoes, presumably belonging to the murdered, have been discovered. One room was filled with bags of noosed rope, for hangings. An ‘execution press’ for crushing bodies has been found, and a mass grave packed with bodies partially dissolved in acid. Piles of corpses have also been uncovered at Harasta Military Hospital. It is thought that these people were murdered at Sednaya, and then their bodies moved. It seems that very many were murdered very recently, even as the regime was collapsing.

After over half a century, Syrians are finally emerging from the horror of one of history’s worst torture states. The legacy of death camps like Sednaya is added – along with the cratered economy and the war-ravaged infrastructure – to the list of traumatizing challenges facing the country. Syrians need help, solidarity and understanding from the rest of the world.

Zionists advancing into Syria.

But what is the ill-named ‘international community’ giving Syrians instead?

Israel – armed by the US, UK, Germany and others – is giving them crazy bombing. The Zionist state has struck hundreds of targets, not only weapons sites – so that a free and independent Syria will be defenceless – but also buildings containing documentation. It aims to destroy, one must presume, evidence of its collaborations with the regime, and perhaps its American ally’s collaborations too.

Israel is also advancing further into the Golan Heights, creating ‘a buffer zone’ to protect the illegally occupied territory which Bashar’s father Hafez al-Assad withdrew from without a fight in 1967 (he was defence minister at the time). The Assad regime under both father and son protected Israeli security on the border better than the states which had signed peace agreements with Israel. The regime also locked up any Syrian who organized against Zionism in any way at all. One of the prisoners freed yesterday was Tal al-Mallouhi. Tal was arrested in 2009, aged 19, merely for writing poems and blog posts which urged solidarity with Palestine. This is why the fall of Assad has enraged Israel.

No western power has condemned Israel’s unprovoked assault on free Syria. They have made their enmity to Syrians clear from the first minutes of the liberation. And this potentially makes all of our futures not just bad, but very ugly indeed. May the Syrian people prevail.

Share this:

Plan Dalet

Absolutely remarkable

The Dark History of the Kibbutz | How “Socialist” Zionists colonized Palestine

STEREOTYPING ARABS – A Timeless Hollywood Tradition

A HYPOCRISY OF VALUES – Exposing the Duality of the Arab Personality

Once Arabs began the shift in their way of life, of their nomadic tendencies and slowly became urbanised, the internal conflict between their tribal belief and behavioural systems continued for many centuries. In actuality, it continues today through the recent incorporation of many Bedouin tribes into new nation states within the Middle East.

There hasn’t been enough time elapsed to gradually migrate the mindset from one shaped in the desert versus the new mentality that required a new set of rules, civil rules and behaviour. Even those that had been modernised for many decades or centuries, to this day, retain certain fundamental traditions of the collective tribal consciousness.

This video illustrates the internal conflict that characterizes modern Arabs in many various nations, the challenges that confront them and the resolutions that need to be realised. #duality #civilisation #tribalism #clanhood #arab #middleeast #arabsociology #arabbehaviour #hypocrisy #honour #pride #bedouin #urban #nomad #tribe #internalconflict #themodernarabman #civillaw #blooddebt #justice #modernity Subscribe: https://bit.ly/3jCXuCw: Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/tareqkandari Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/tareqkandari Patreon.com/TheKandariChronicles

Zionism’s Transference of Trauma

33 770 vues 27 oct. 2024 #colonialism#catastrophe#hateIs it ok to use the Holocaust and its perpetrators as analogy for recent potential threats? Is it ok for Israel to label whoever is her enemy as Nazis or identify them as monsters about to commit another genocide of the Jews?

This is the approach by the leadership of Israel over the last 50 years. To inject fear into its own people. To remind those international nations who looked away when the events of the Holocaust took place. To remind them of their guilt so that they may accept all the hostility and inhumanity that Israel will reign down on its enemies. µ

It’s a touchy subject, but analogies can be misguiding and misrepresent both the reality of any threat as well as diminish the real significance and uniqueness of the Holocaust tragedy. This video addresses the methodology of how the Holocaust was transitioned from an event Jews wanted to forget to a weapon used on a daily basis.

Subscribe: https://bit.ly/3jCXuCw: Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/tareqkandari Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/tareqkandari Patreon.com/TheKandariChronicles

SAMSON AND CASSANDRA

(April 16, 2024)

Norman Finkelstein

Apr 19, 2024

1949

Share

My Mother once told me the story of an emaciated woman in the Warsaw Ghetto who would wail from her window sill that all the Jews in the ghetto would be killed. She came to be called Cassandra, after the prophetess of doom in Greek mythology. Everyone just assumed that she was mad. My Mother speculated in retrospect that somehow she had become privy to the truth: Jews weren’t being “relocated” in the East; they were being transported to their deaths.

I have hesitated thus far to sound the alarm. But at the risk of being thought mad, it must, as an act of political responsibility, be said out loud: Israel is hurling toward the precipice and dragging the rest of the world with it.

A rational analysis of the current predicament must begin with this bedrock fact: Israel is a crazy state. Not a “bad actor.” Not a “rogue” regime. A crazy state. The full range of Israeli elite opinion, itself reflective of Israeli society at large (which overwhelmingly supports the genocidal war in Gaza; only a handful of Israelis have refused to serve), spans a mere flea’s hop:

AT ONE POLE stand “crackpot realists,” of whom sociologist C. Wright Mills wrote in the American context: “they have come to believe that there … is no other solution but war, even when they sense that war can be a solution to nothing … they still believe that ‘winning’ means something, although they never tell us what.” (1) Professor Benny Morris is cut squarely from this mold. He is urbane, educated, secular—and a crackpot. He once even “proved” that Israeli Jews couldn’t coexist with barbarian Palestinians by inter alia mustering stats on how many more road accidents Palestinians got into! (2) Morris exhorts the US to join in an attack on Iran and then rattles the threat that if Washington doesn’t rise to the occasion, Israel will go it alone by nuking Iran. He must be cognizant as he breezily proffers such counsel that an attack would not only incinerate tens of millions of Iranians—he reckons they have it coming—but also trigger a terminal retaliation. Hezbollah alone is alleged to possess 150,000 missiles. It’s a circuitous auto-da-fé. That prospect, however, doesn’t appear to faze Morris one bit.

AT THE OTHER POLE stand full-blown crazies—or those just one step short of this threshold. “The greatest danger facing Israel right now,” Noam Chomsky presciently observed already four decades ago, “is the ‘collective version’ of Samson’s revenge against the Philistines—‘Let me perish with the Philistines’—as he brought down the Temple in ruins.” The Samson clones ensconced in Jerusalem have either already gone mad—“we shall kill and bury the Gentiles around us while we ourselves shall die with them”—or pretend to “go crazy” so as to terrify enemies and allies alike into submission. Feigned lunacy, be it noted, easily transmutes into the real thing as the imaginary phantoms one repeatedly conjures seep into the psyche’s inner chambers. The upshot is that this madness, real or contrived, “renders rational calculations … questionable” as Israel “may behave in the manner of what have sometimes been called ‘crazy states.’” (3) A report in yesterday’s paper fleshes out in real time this Israeli propensity to unhinged outbursts: when one senior Israeli official counseled caution, if only in the immediate term, after Iran’s symbolic retaliation, a far-right cabinet minister demanded on the contrary that Israel go “crazy.” (4)

*

The April 14 speech at the Security Council emergency session by Israel’s representative, Gilad Erdan, brought home just how lunatic Israel has become. Presenting a master class in—if nothing else—proximate projection, Erdan was seemingly persuaded to the bone of his being that “the Islamic regime of today is … no different than Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich…. Just like the Nazi regime, the Ayatollah regime sows death and destruction everywhere…. For years, the world has watched the rise of this Shite Islamist Reich, yet just like during the rise of Nazism, the world has been silent”; that “Iran’s hegemonic ambitions of global domination must be stopped before it drives the world to a point of no return, to a regional war that can escalate to a world war”; that Iran was “barreling towards nuclear capabilities … its breakout time to produce an arsenal of nuclear weapons is now weeks, mere weeks.” If the world didn’t rein in Iran, then Israel had no recourse except to bear this crushing burden on its own of stopping Hitler’s Third Reich: “We are being fired upon from all fronts, from every border. We are surrounded by Iran’s terror proxies…. All of the terror groups attacking Israel are tentacles of the same Shiite octopus, the Iranian octopus. So, I ask you, and be honest with yourselves, what would you do? What would you do if you were in Israel’s shoes? How would you react if your existence was threatened every single day? Israel cannot settle for inaction. We will defend our future.” Holding up his iPad to display an image of Israel allegedly intercepting an Iranian drone over al-Aqsa mosque, Erdan even claimed for Israel the mantle of the true guardian of Islam’s holy sites—“look at this video that shows how Israel intercepts Iranian drones above the Temple Mount and al-Aqsa mosque”—against the defilers of them in Teheran. The tonal register of his rhetorical delivery was as if a defiant accusation, Who dares doubt me?! “In every speech and in countless letters,” Erdan further recalled, “I rang the warning bell regarding Iran.” He got right that the bell must be sounded; but he got wrong from whence the madness emanates. Medice, cura te ipsum. If Erdan represents even half of the Israeli state and society—the fraction is arguably much higher—a catastrophe looms. True, Israeli leaders have in the past uttered certifiable lunacies. It is sufficient to recall Prime Minister Netanyahu holding up a Loony Tunes-like cartoon of the Iranian bomb at the UN and his pronouncement that it was not Hitler but the Palestinian Mufti of Jerusalem who masterminded the Final Solution. Indeed, already as far back as the 1978 Camp David negotiations, President Carter mused about Israel’s head of state, “It’s becoming clearer that the rationality of [Menachem] Begin is in doubt.” (5) All the same, a civilizational leap backwards separates the Israel that once was from what it has become. Israel’s UN representative at the time of the 1967 (“Six-Day”) war, Abba Eban, could serially prevaricate—albeit with consummate eloquence, as befitted the triple-first graduate of Cambridge—without batting an eyelash. But still, it was possible to rationally parse his propositions (as I once endeavored) to prove them wrong. (6) It is no more possible to parse Erdan’s speech than a psychopath’s rant.

*

It might be urged upon Iran to tread lightly so as not to agitate the lunatic in the room. But alas, that is not, in my opinion, a viable option. The documentary record demonstrates that, once Israel has fixed a country in its crosshairs, nothing short of abject submission will bring it to desist. If the “enemy” power resists initial provocation, Israel will keep escalating with another and another provocation until it proves politically untenable for the targeted entity to passively absorb further blows. That’s what happened when Israel targeted Egypt’s Gamel Abdel Nasser in the early 1950s. (7) (It was feared by Israeli Prime Minister Ben-Gurion that the “radical nationalist” Egyptian president might one day preside over a modern state able to check Israel’s regional ambitions.) That’s what happened when Israel targeted the Palestine Liberation Organization in Lebanon in the early 1980s. (8) (It was feared by Israeli Prime Minister Begin that the PLO’s “peace offensive”—the Palestinians supported but Israelis opposed a two-state settlement—would bring international pressure on Israel to withdraw from the West Bank.) That’s what happened in 2002 during the second intifada when Israel carried out targeted assassinations of Palestinian leaders. (9) (It was feared by Prime Minister Sharon that the Palestinians would stop armed attacks in exchange for a negotiated ceasefire.) That’s what happened in 2008 when Israel broke a ceasefire with Hamas in order to launch Operation Cast Lead. (10) (It was feared by Israeli Prime Minister Olmert that Hamas would gain international legitimacy as it moderated its political program.) The lamentable truth is that, short of national suicide, Iran cannot exercise the option of inaction: Israel will almost certainly keep ratcheting up the provocations until Teheran has no choice but to respond. It wouldn’t surprise were Israel to assassinate Ayatollah Khamenei then (wink, wink) deny it.

*

The Israeli government has ever been on the alert to exploit opportunities in order to implement its preconceived plans. In 1989, during the Tiananmen Square massacre, Benjamin Netanyahu urged his government to exploit this media distraction by carrying out a mass expulsion of Palestinians in the West Bank. On November 4, 2008, when the United States elected its first Black president, Prime Minister Olmert exploited this media distraction by breaking the ceasefire with Hamas. On July 17, 2014, when a Malaysian airliner flying over Ukraine was downed, Prime Minister Netanyahu exploited this media distraction by launching the murderous ground invasion of Gaza in Operation Protective Edge. The pretexts of October 7 and now Iran’s “retaliation” present the lunatics in Jerusalem with an unprecedented opportunity to rid Israel of the triple challenge to its regional domination: by destroying Gaza, Hezbollah, and Iran; the “fog” of such an explosion would also enable Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the West Bank. If it is hoped that a sane cabal among the Israeli leadership will crystallize to stop this headlong lurch over the precipice, then it must be said that the odds are against it. Hitler’s biographer, Ian Kershaw, observed that, if it took so long for coup plans to hatch against the Fuhrer, it was because of “a deep sense of obedience to authority and service to the state,” the belief that it was “not merely wrong, but despicable and treacherous to undermine one’s own country in war,” and “even as the military disasters mounted and ultimate catastrophe beckoned, the fanatical backing for Hitler had by no means evaporated and continued, if as a minority taste, to show remarkable resilience and strength.”(11) It’s hard not to notice cognate factors at play in elite Israeli circles. On the last point, whereas Netanyahu’s critics have been writing his political obituary for years, he too keeps bouncing back notwithstanding his missteps. Why? Because Israelis see their reflection in him. Indeed, Netanyahu IS Israel: an obnoxious, narcissistic Jewish supremacist for whom only Jews reckon in God’s grand design. It must, finally, be acknowledged that not all Israeli fears are unfounded—the wish is by now widespread that Israel vanish from the map while its capacity has diminished to terrorize its neighbors into submission. But, for the most part, it is a corner that Israel has boxed itself into. Before October 7 Hamas had gestured toward a two-state settlement while Iran consistently voted with the UN General Assembly majority in support of the two-state consensus. Israel rebuffed it.

Will Prime Minister Netanyahu resist the irresistible temptation to cut the Gordian regional knot or, like Samson, will he bring down the Temple—the rest of us—with him? Cassandra would probably say: All bets are off!

References

1. Mills, Causes of World War III.

2. Morris, One State, Two States.

3. Chomsky, Fateful Triangle. Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh later elaborated on Chomsky’s insights in The Samson Option.

4. New York Times, April 15, 2024.

5. Carter, White House Diary.

6. Finkelstein, Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict.

7. Benny Morris, Border Wars.

8. Robert Fisk, Pity the Nation.

9. Norman Finkelstein, Beyond Chutzpah.

10. Norman Finkelstein, Gaza.

11. Kershaw, Hitler, 1936-1945: Nemesi

Thanks for reading Norman Finkelstein! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Source