Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – US Representative Tim Walberg (R-MI), a former pastor, called this week for a genocide, the Final Solution of the Palestinian Problem..
Michigan’s 5th congressional district stretches across the far bottom of the state, encompassing cities such as Albion and Jackson and abutting Ohio and Indiana. I don’t have any reason to think that the district is full of merciless psychopaths and mass murderers. Jackson has a famous ice cream shop, The Parlour, where the portions are to say the least generous, and which is pleasant to visit on a hot summer day. The district has a population of 768,000 and a median household income of $64,000 (for the US as a whole it is $74,580). It is about 85% white, with Hispanics, African Americans and mixed-race persons making up most of the other 15%. It has voted for a Democratic president in every election in this century and even favored Hilary Clinton over Trump. That Walberg represents this district demonstrates the axiom that Americans buy peanut butter more intelligently than they vote.
That is, the district is represented in Congress by a cruel would-be mass murderer. His soul lacks any hint of the milk of human kindness. Walberg, a fundamentalist former Christian pastor, once ran the homophobic, far right Moody Bible Institute in Chicago while supposedly representing a Michigan district, Walberg is against everything— a woman’s right to choose, the Affordable Care Act, gay marriage, and any attempt to counter the climate crisis. He went to Uganda to voice support for that country’s Anti-Homosexuality Act, which prescribes executions for gay people.
So genocidal tendencies were already apparent. Some 14 million American adults identify as LGBT in polling and apparently Rep. Walberg would happily see them all murdered. It should be remembered that some 90,000 gay men were rounded up in Nazi Germany, with as many as 15,000 sent to death camps, where perhaps 60% were killed. The only difference between Walberg and Heinrich Himmler, who created the Reich Central Office for Combating Homosexuality and Abortion, is that Walberg hasn’t yet found a way to implement his sadistic dreams.
At a meeting in Dundee with constituents on March 25, Walberg said that President Biden had spoken of our need to get aid into Gaza. He said, “I don’t think we should. I don’t think any of our aid that goes to Israel, to support our greatest ally, arguably maybe in the world, to the feet of Hamas, and Iran, and Russia. Probably North Korea is in there and China, too — with them, helping Hamas. We shouldn’t be spending a dime on humanitarian aid. It should be like Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Get it over quick.”
“Nuking Gaza,” by Juan Cole, Digital, Dream / Dreamland v. 3 / IbisPaint, 2024.
Unfortunately for Walberg, who likely talks like this all the time with his inner circle of fellow sociopaths, his remarks were recorded.
It is worth noting the bizarre conspiracy theory that any US aid money sent to Gaza would somehow benefit Russia, China and North Korea or that those three countries back Hamas. I might once have called such paranoid fever dreams abnormal, but I see them and their like normalized all around me these days.
The 2.2 million Gaza noncombatants cannot be blamed for the actions of a small Hamas guerrilla group. These civilians are in imminent danger of mass starvation and some are already dying of hunger. Half of them are children. Most of the rest are women and noncombatant men. Some 70% of them are in Gaza because Zionist gangs chased them out of their homes in 1948 in what became southern Israel, and made them stateless refugees. Now they are being killed on a scale unseen in any conflict in this century.
And, again, mass starvation was a key Nazi technique of war.
Palestinian woman reacts as she cradles a wounded boy after Israeli bombardment in central Gaza City, last week. Credit: AFP
Mar 28, 2024 11:58 pm IST
UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese, released a report this week claiming that the nature and scope of attacks by Israeli Defense Forces in the Gaza Strip, as well as the ruinous living conditions created there by Israel, “can only be interpreted as constituting prima facie evidence of an intention to systematically destroy the Palestinians as a group.”
One Israeli told me he believes there is no need for such explosive terminology, while another asked whether there was any proof of these claims.
A woman who, until October 7 was affiliated with the left wing and has since sobered up, or awakened, had somehow seen – from beyond the Israeli iron curtain – a photograph of a Gazan child who was all skin and bones. She told me: “If these images are true, we must see them.”
So Israelis may wonder, raise questions, doubt, downplay or revoke Palestinians and their tragedy, even when it is clear as day, published in a United Nations report, or broadcast live on a non-Israeli news channel. I recalled how back after October 7, Palestinians and others were forbidden from asking questions, from questioning “facts” or from asking for proof.
It is well known that claims by the Israeli side are viewed as gospel, and that whoever rejects them is an antisemitic supporter of Hamas. But when it happens on the Palestinian side, all claims are an exaggeration, a conspiracy, fake-news, and Israelis can and are even obligated to ask about their authenticity.
It is interesting just how important is it to ask whether the photographs are real, or whether these claims are supported by any shred of proof, when there is an abundance of evidence of children dying of malnutrition in Gaza.
This doubt that is cast on every Palestinian image, or video, or report, is part of the Israeli iron curtain, with the underlying assumption that all Palestinians are liars.
It is gaslighting of tremendous proportions that Israelis are inflicting upon themselves and on Palestinians, in order to go on ignoring the genocide the entire world has been continually warning about. Israelis refuse to see or listen, and are still convinced that everything is all right.
Israelis are addicted to the iron curtain, and this practice of denying reality is deeply embedded into the Israeli DNA. It is an integral part of the knotted problems Israelis bring upon themselves through their arrogance and boastfulness.
This denial of reality is present at almost every aspect. Are most Israelis aware, for example, that at the core of the current negotiations between Israel and Hamas, or rather at the core of lack of progress in these negotiations, lies the refugee problem? Israel does not want to allow evacuated Palestinians to return to the northern area of the Gaza Strip.
Are Israelis asking themselves what the purpose of permanently uprooting them from the north is and of leaving the area under Israel’s control? That perhaps Israel wants an ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip, to be accompanied by establishing settlements just like in the West Bank, which would lead to the same inescapable state of constant warfare and the destruction of relationships with Palestinians everywhere?
From beyond the Israeli iron curtain, reality seems to most Israelis to be essentially good. However, the more they go on looking from behind that iron curtain, so will their distance from reality continue growing, until the inevitable fall into the gaping chasm. Will they still be able to break that curtain?
March 27, 2024 | Read Online Source : Palestine Nexus
Heba Almaqadma
It was the evening of Oct. 10, 2023. My family and I were sitting in our home in the Al-Tawam neighborhood of north Gaza. That night, we were trying to find peace of mind, worried about what the future had in store for us.
All of a sudden, bombs started raining from the sky. The windows of our home all shattered as glass, rocks, and concrete went flying everywhere. We lost electricity as smoke and debris filled our home, reducing visibility to zero. We ran to the basement, fearing the next bomb was for us.
That’s when I realized our lives would never be the same again. As we sat in the basement, we looked at each other in silence. My whole family was trembling in fear. Little did we know, a genocide was awaiting us.
If only I had known to plan for a genocide, I would have cherished those last moments at home, my last night in a bed, my last morning coffee, my last kibbe dipped in hummus, my last day at work, my last laugh, my last birthday celebration, my last everything. If only I had known, I would have packed up a few of those memories with me.
But I didn’t have a chance to do that, because we decided to evacuate immediately. That’s one of the horrible things we have to do all the time: Try to guess the least worst option among terrible options.
But we decided to evacuate. My family of 10 squeezed into our car, kids on top of adults. Within a few seconds, there was another massive explosion in front of us.
The next thing I can remember, blood was everywhere in the car. I grabbed my 9 year old brother, Adam, who is handicapped, and I held him tightly.
I still remember the sound of my mom’s voice at that moment. “Adam is dead Heba, I can’t feel him!” she said. I looked at Adam, and told her that he was okay, that he was just in shock. We were all shocked. Somehow, we survived.
I held Adam as we got out of the car and started running back home. My dad was in front of me, the rest of my family was behind me. Who was I supposed to look after?
Adam was too scared to be left alone even for a few seconds, and so I couldn’t leave him. I could feel my hands going numb from holding him so tight. “Dad,” I said. “Help me, I can’t hold Adam anymore.”
My Dad shouted: “My finger is cut Heba, I can’t.” I realized my dad’s hand sliced open and blood was gushing everywhere.
Debris littered the streets, almost looking like an earthquake. But it was not an earthquake. It was a bomb sent to kill us. Maybe it was a dumb bomb, an imprecise bomb, that can land 100 feet away from its target. Half the bombs Israel sends to kill us are dumb bombs.
Israel exports sophisticated military technology to the world, but when it comes to us Palestinians in Gaza, the latest technology is not needed, since Israel’s “focus is on (creating) damage, not on precision.” That’s what an Israeli army spokesperson said on Oct. 10th, 2023, the same day Israel bombed our home.
We rushed to our neighbors house hoping and praying they were home. Their son is a nurse and treated my dad while we waited for an ambulance. Hours passed with no ambulance. We later found out that two of the ambulances that tried to reach us were bombed. Eventually, an ambulance arrived, al-hamdullilah.
We sheltered at al-Shifa hospital while my family was being treated. My 1-year old niece, Sarah, needed stitches in her head and hand. She was in so much shock she couldn’t even cry. My brother Mohammed had a splint in his head, and needed surgery, which we were eventually able to get for him 76 days later. My dad’s hand was so badly wounded the doctors thought they might have to amputate it. But thank god, we cared for it, and cleaned it every day, and he still has his hand.
We took refuge in al-Shifa hospital for a month. We barely had anywhere to sleep and we did not have access to clean water. Every day, hundreds of people would arrive at the hospital, some severely injured, some already dead. The agony of the families of the victims was too much too bare. The only thing I can remember now from al-Shifa was the never ending screams of pain that filled the hallways of the hospital.
Then, we were forced to move to the south, to Khan Younis. We made the dangerous journey on foot. For the first time, I felt what my grandparents must have felt during the Nakba in 1948. I understood why they kept the keys to their homes. Those keys were filled with memories.
We stayed in Khan Younes for 24 days, where we had almost nothing. We had no gas for cooking, no electricity, no means of transportation and no safe place to shelter in. We were among the lucky ones just to be able to take a shower. Then, we were ordered by the Israeli military to leave. We moved again, this time to Rafah.
As I walk through the streets of Rafah today, all I see is fear. The fear of life and the fear of death. We are living in fear every moment of the day. We now also fear that we will never have our lives back.
In this war, who am I? To the world, it seems I am just a number. A person who is counted on a list of people displaced, people injured or people hungry and thirsty. And if the next bomb is for me, I will be another number to add to the number of people killed in the genocide, and then I will be forgotten.
Meet the Palestinian Hostages Taken by Israel, Known as “Administrative Detainees”Meet Omar al-Khatib, a research partner at The Institute of Development Studies, affiliated with the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK. Omar al-Khatib, a Palestinian hostage abducted by Israel (source)On 1 March 2024, Omar was taken hostage by Israel. He was not charged with anything. He was not told why he was taken to prison, nor why his imprisonment could be renewed forever.Omar’s colleagues described him as empathic, passionate and brilliant. Omar was robbed of his freedom and will likely be subjected to untold abuses such as harassment, assault, solitary confinement, torture, sexual abuse or possibly worse: at least 7 Palestinian prisoners have mysteriously “died” in Israel’s custody since Oct. 7th. So why was Omar taken hostage? In all likelihood, he will be leveraged as a bargaining chip in hostage negotiations with Hamas. In other words, he was taken for the same reason that Hamas took Israeli civilians hostage on Oct. 7th, as leverage in a prisoner swap. But there is at least one key difference between Israel’s actions and Hamas’s actions: Hamas took a few hundred civilians hostage on Oct. 7th, while Israel has taken 3,558 civilians hostage, and continues to take more hostages every day.In fact, the 3,558 Palestinians taken hostage includes only those known as “administrative detainees,” the term Israel uses to whitewash its policy of hostage taking. [This figure does not include an additional 5,519 Palestinian prisoners, classified as “Security Prisoners”, “Security Detainees” or “Unlawful Combatants”] The phrase “administrative detainee” typifies the sanitizing language that has become a hallmark of Western media coverage of Israel’s genocidal war on the people of Gaza. Palestinians aren’t killed, but they do seem to die a lot; they aren’t attacked, although there are a lot of explosions, and they definitely aren’t hostages, they are administrative detainees.Meet Diala Ayesh, a Palestinian human rights lawyer. On Jan. 17th, Israel took Diala hostage. Diala Ayesh, a Palestinian hostage abducted by Israel (source)Much like Omar, Diala was not charged with anything nor told why she was taken to prison, nor explained why she could be imprisoned forever without ever getting an answer about what she did wrong.“Whenever I cry at night in bed…I try to remember how extremely strong she is,” her 26-year-old sister, Aseel, told Al Jazeera. Diala’s abduction appears to have been designed to maximize the number of Palestinian lives destroyed via “administrative detention.” That’s because Diala was herself a lawyer defending the rights of other Palestinians abducted by Israel. In fact, she not only defended Palestinian abductees, she was training other lawyers in how to defend Palestinian administrative detainees in Israel’s military courts. For Israel, if there are fewer lawyers to defend the Palestinian hostages, and fewer lawyers to train other lawyers to defend the Palestinian hostages, there will be fewer impediments to taking more Palestinians hostage.Israel’s policy of abducting Palestinians, unsurprisingly, goes back many decades: Source: B’tselem Today, Israel is currently holding 3X more Palestinian hostages than at any point in the past two decades, a policy that relies on a simple principle. If you are an Israeli living in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, you are entitled to due process, but if you are a Palestinian living in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, you are not entitled to due process.No surprise that this what-the-fuck policy has triggered the most visceral and self-sacrificial form of resistance: hunger strikes.For decades, Palestinians denied basic due process have been at the forefront of the hunger protests. In May 2023, Khader Adnan died in his prison cell after he went on a hunger strike protesting his imprisonment. Adnan had been arrested at least 12 times in the past and spent around eight years in prison, mostly in “administrative detention.” This was the fifth and final time he was to go on a hunger strike.In Dec. 2021, Israel abducted Khalil Awawdeh, a Palestinian father of four who went on a six-month hunger strike in 2022 until Israel agreed to release him–pressing no further charges against him.It’s time to regard Israel’s policy of hostage taking for what it is, hostage taking.
Violent abuse, humiliation, appalling overcrowding, cold and barren cells, shackles for days on end. A Palestinian who spent three months in Israeli administrative detention amid the Gaza war describes his experience at Ofer Prison
Amira, at home in the Aida camp this week, after release from Ofer Prison. “I was in Ofer before, but it was never like this.”Credit: Alex Levac Gideon LevyAlex Levac
Mar 23, 2024 5:31 am IST
Munther Amira has been released from “Guantanamo.” He’d already been arrested a few times in the past, but what he experienced during incarceration in an Israeli prison during the Gaza war is unlike anything he has ever gone through. A friend who spent 10 years in an Israeli prison told him that the impact of his own incarceration during the past three months was the equivalent of 10 years in jail during more normal times.
The detailed testimony we heard this week from Amira in his home in the Aida refugee camp, in Bethlehem, was shocking. He expressed his ordeal with his body, kneeling on the floor repeatedly, describing things in minute detail, without any feeling, until the words became unbearable. It was impossible to go on listening to the harrowing descriptions.
But it seemed as though he had been waiting for the opportunity to relate what he endured in an Israeli prison over the past several months. The descriptions poured from him in an unbroken flow – horror heaped on horror, humiliation after humiliation – as he described the hell he had been put through, in fluent English interspersed with Hebrew prison terminology. Over three months, he had lost 33 kilos (73 pounds).
There are two large pictures in his living room. One is of his friend Nasser Abu Srour, who has been imprisoned for 32 years for murdering a Shin Bet security service agent; the other is of him on the day of his release, exactly two weeks ago. This week Amira appeared to be physically and mentally resilient, looking like a different person than he did on the day he left prison.
Amira is 53, married and a father of five; he was born in this refugee camp, whose population includes descendants of the residents of 27 destroyed Palestinian villages. He designed the large key of return that hangs from the camp’s entry gate and bears the inscription, “Not for sale.” Amira is a political activist who believes in a nonviolent struggle, a principle he still holds even after the enormous number of deaths in Gaza in the war, he emphasizes. He is a member of Fatah who works in the Palestinian Authority’s Office for Settlements and the Fence, and a graduate of the social sciences faculty of Bethlehem University.
December 18, 2023, 1 A.M. Loud noises. Amira looks out the window and sees Israeli soldiers hitting his younger brother Karim, who is 40. The troops drag Karim up to the second floor, to Amira’s apartment, and throw him down in the middle of the living room. Amira says his brother fainted. Karim is the administrative director of the cardiac department in Al-Jumaya al-Arabiya Hospital in Bethlehem, and he’s not accustomed to this sort of violence.
The room was packed with soldiers, dozens perhaps. Amira’s daughter, Yomana, was standing behind him. The officer said, “Take her,” and Amira’s heart skipped a beat. Had they come to arrest his 18-year-old student daughter? What was her transgression? The soldiers then bound his 13-year-old son Mohammed and his son Ghassan, who’s 22. Mohammed was wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with a map of the whole of Palestine – soldiers tore it off him.
Amira didn’t understand what was happening. The soldiers took his picture and sent it to wherever they sent it. “It’s him,” he heard them say afterward. He was bound and taken to a military base, where he was thrown onto the floor and kicked by soldiers, he relates. About an hour later, he was taken back home. He was blindfolded, but in the dark he heard Yomana shouting “I love you.” That fleeting, sweet moment would accompany him during the next three months in prison. He replied, “I love you, and don’t be afraid.” For that he was punished, but at least he felt calmer, knowing that Yomana had not been arrested.
He was again taken away and thrown into a military vehicle, where he was stepped on kicked by soldiers incessantly. He’s the age of the fathers of many of those same soldiers. He was then placed in the trunk of the car, and they started to move. After about half an hour, they reached a military base, where he was left outside on a cold winter night. The soldiers spoke among themselves about Gaza. One of them said to him, “Today we will fulfill your dream. You wanted to be a shahid [religious martyr]? We will send you to Gaza.” Amira shuddered, and answered, “I want to live, not die.” He was afraid that the troops would do what they threatened and already imagined his death in Gaza.
Morning came and he found himself in the Etzion detention center. “Now the show begins,” the soldiers said. Amira was taken into an office, where the handcuffs, which were already leaving blue bruises on his wrists, were removed, and he was ordered to strip. When he got to his underpants, he refused to continue. The soldiers kicked him and he fell to the ground. “Suddenly I understood what rape is, what sexual harassment is. They wanted to strip me and take my picture.” He stood naked, the soldiers told him to spread his legs, he felt humiliated as never before in his life. He was afraid that they would post the videos they took. Finally he was taken to a cell.
Supper consisted of a small plate of cream cheese and a slice of bread. But it was the next day’s lunch that truly flabbergasted Amira. Soldiers placed four trays in the four corners of the room, and eight detainees were ordered to kneel and eat off the trays with their hands. The image that came to mind was street cats, he recalls. The food consisted of unrecognizable and inedible mush. He says it was a mixture of leftovers from the soldiers’ meals. He asked what the white part was and was told that it was from an egg. He’s ready to swear that it was not an egg. Amira didn’t touch the food.
The next day he was moved to Ofer Prison, near Ramallah, where he was questioned about a few posts that the interrogators claimed he had uploaded and which he denied. “There is nothing in my Facebook [feed] that supports violence,” he says. The posts included identification with the fate of the residents of Gaza. “‘Mabruk [congratulations],’ the interrogator said. ‘You’re going to administrative detention'” – incarceration without a trial.
That was Amira’s lot for the next three months. He was sentenced to four months in prison, on the basis of no evidence, let alone a trial. “I was in Ofer before, but it was never like this.” The combination of a war during which Palestinians everywhere can be subjected to abuse, and the fact that the Israel Prison Service is under the purview of Itamar Ben-Gvir, the national security minister, is leaving its mark. Amira decided not to resist anything, in order to survive.
He received a brown prison service uniform, with no underwear and with no connection to his size. Later, he exchanged clothes with another inmate. He had a mattress 5 centimeters (about 2 inches) thick and a wool blanket; he slept with 12 other detainees in a cell designed for five. “That is contrary to a High Court of Justice decision,” he notes. Eight inmates slept on the floor; because of his age he was given the use of a bed.
Amira discovered that he was in Wing 24 of the prison, which is earmarked for problematic detainees. “And I thought I was a good person,” he says with a smile. New prisoners who arrived from Gaza were held in the adjacent wing. He thinks some of them were from Hamas’ Nukhba unit. He will not soon forget their shouts. “People are screaming, people are barking, people are crying, locked up 24 hours a day, blindfolded, and the guards beat them nonstop.”
Not that things were easy in his wing. Five times during the three months, prison service special ops officers employing acute violence raided their cell, each time on a different pretext. The cell didn’t look the way an Ofer cell used to appear: It was completely bare. The television, the electric kettle, the burner, the radio, the books, the pen and paper, the chess, the backgammon – nothing remained, and of course there was no canteen. I came to terms with it, Amira says. This is the price of resistance to the occupation and the war in Gaza.
They assembled a backgammon board using a bread carton, and drew the markings for the game with a solution made from one prisoner’s crushed-up anti-anxiety tablets and water. The pieces were made from eggshells. Then one night, the patrol confiscated the improvised game. Punishment came swiftly. At 6 A.M., the special ops force Keter Ofer showed up with two dogs, and assaulted the inmates. Then they took them to the showers and washed them down in their clothes. The next morning they took away the blankets and mattresses, keeping them until 10 P.M. The cold was brutal.
No coffee, no cigarettes. It was a nightmare for smokers. Sometimes the prisoners would walk by and smoke into the cell to exacerbate their suffering. The aroma of the guards’ coffee also drove the inmates crazy. Two small dishes of jam for 13 prisoners, who fought just to get a taste.
“I counted the seconds,” Amira says, but time seemed to stand still in prison. For the first time he saw an inmate who tried to kill himself by throwing himself from the second floor onto the fence outside. Lately there have been more attempts at suicide in the prison, he says, which goes completely against the ethos of Palestinians who have decided to struggle against the occupation. The inmate who jumped was bleeding, his fellow inmates tried to call for a paramedic. But in Ofer you’re not allowed to call for anyone – so again they were punished. The Keter Ofer squad reappeared and this time made them all lie on the floor and beat them with truncheons. They hit Amira in the testicles, too. That too is sexual assault, in his view. “I said to myself: I am going to die. I have a blood pressure problem, and my heart was pounding. Some of us were bleeding from the nose.”
The eggs that were served were not cooked. A few days later, he decided he would eat everything, in order to survive. On one occasion, when they were taken to “waiting” cells (solitary cells for those about to be transferred), and he was handcuffed for an entire day and night. He had to relieve himself in his pants because he wasn’t able to lower them. “And everything has to do with October 7. Everything I asked for, they said ‘October 7.’ When we asked for the eggs to be cooked, they said: ‘October 7.’ It’s Guantanamo, I tell you.”
The Israel Prison Service spokesperson stated this week in response to an inquiry from Haaretz: “We are not aware of the allegations that are described, and as far as we know they are incorrect. If a proper complaint is submitted, it will be examined by the appropriate persons.”
The IDF Spokesperson’s Unit told Haaretz: “The suspect was arrested on December 18, 2023, on suspicion of incitement and activity in a hostile organization. During a hearing in the military court on the military prosecutor’s request to extend his confinement, the suspect raised claims regarding his treatment by the soldiers during his imprisonment. The claims are being clarified.”
Amira was released after three months, a month ahead of schedule. No one told him anything, he was just given clothing supplied by the Red Cross and thought he was being freed as part of a deal (that didn’t happen). He told us in his home this week: “Mahmoud Darwish wrote that the prisoners are the source of hope of the Palestinian people. That is no longer true. It’s the first time that detainees are trying to commit suicide. The first time I felt that the door of the cell is the door of a grave. An Israeli prison is now a graveyard for the living.”
Jabaliya refugee camp in Gaza.Credit: Mahmoud Essa / AP Gideon Levy
Mar 13, 2024 11:40 pm IST
Dear friends and former friends: It’s time to sober up from the sobering up.
It was baseless to begin with, but now, nearly half a year after your “eyes were opened,” it’s time to return to reality. It’s time to go back to seeing the whole picture, to reactivate the conscience and the moral compass that were shut off and stored away on October 7, and to see what has happened since then to us and, yes, to the Palestinians.
It’s time to remove the blindfolds you put on, not wanting to see and not wanting to know what we’re doing to Gaza, because you said that Gaza deserves it and its catastrophes no longer interest you.
You were angry, you felt humiliated, you were stunned, you were terrified, you were shocked, and you grieved on October 7. This was fully justified. It was a huge shock for everyone.
But the conclusions you derived from this shock were not just mistaken, they were the opposite of the conclusions that should have been drawn from the disaster.
You don’t come after people in their sorrow, certainly not Zionist leftists whose sorrow is their art, but it’s time to shake off the shock and wake up. You thought that what happened on October 7 justifies anything? Well, it doesn’t. You thought that now Hamas must be destroyed at all costs? Well, no. It’s not just about justice, but about recognizing the limits of force.
It’s not that you are evil and sadistic, or racist and messianic, like the right. You only thought that October 7 suddenly proved what the right always said: that there is no partner because the Palestinians are savages.
Five months should be enough for you to get over not only your gut reaction, but also your conclusions. October 7 needn’t have changed any of your moral principles or your humanity. But it turned them inside out, which is a serious cause for concern about the steadfastness of your moral principles.
Hamas’s vicious, barbaric attack on Israel does not change the basic situation in which we live: of a people that has been harassing and tyrannizing another people in different ways and at varying intensities for over a century now.
Gaza didn’t change on October 7. It was one of the most miserable places on the planet before October 7 and became even more miserable after it.
Israel’s responsibility for the fate of Gaza and its guilt did not change on that terrible day. It is not the only guilty party and does not bear full responsibility, but it has a decisive role in Gaza’s fate.
The left cannot evade this responsibility and guilt. After the shock and anger and sorrow, it’s time now to sober up from the sobering up and to look not only at what was done to us, as the Israeli media commands us to do day and night, but also at what we are doing to Gaza, and to the West Bank, since October 7.
No, our catastrophe does not make up for that, nothing in the world can make up for that. The right is celebrating Palestinian suffering, reveling in it and wanting more, while the left looks away and keeps dreadfully silent. It is still “sobering up.” It’s time to stop that.
What the whole world sees and understands should also be understood by at least part of what was once the camp of conscience and humanity. We won’t go into the Zionist left’s part in the occupation and apartheid, or dwell on its hypocrisy.
But how can an entire people avert its eyes from the horrors it is committing in its backyard, with no camp remaining that will cry out against them? How can such a brutal war go on and on without any opposition within Israeli society?
The Zionist left, which always wants to feel good about itself and consider itself enlightened, democratic and liberal, needs to remember that one day it will ask itself, or be asked by others: Where were you when it all happened? Where? You were still sobering up? It’s time for that to end, because it’s already getting late. Very late.
GazaThe moral bankruptcy of the West is no longer a metaphor or a figure of speech. It’s a reality. It’s a reality that’s confirmed every day, wherever you look.
This West, with its incessant lessons in good governance hammered into the world’s ears through grand speeches, its doxa of self-righteousness, its beacon of civilization handing out good and bad points to obedient states or those who dare to raise their heads, has just demonstrated, in the space of a few years, all its hypocrisy, all its spinelessness, leading irreparably to its bankruptcy.
Firstly, in its calamitous management of Covid-19 and the many deceptions and untruths repeated ad nauseam by the media, the fallout from which will continue to affect the most gullible for years to come. Then, in the war that NATO has in fact been fomenting for a long time and is waging against Russia through the Ukraine and its pompous president. And now in its abject support for the colony called ‘Israel’, denounced for decades by numerous NGOs and activists who have been on the ground to bear witness to the odious apartheid system perfected by the Zionist regime against the indigenous population. All these political leaders and their servile entourage have proved to be impostors, manipulators, swindlers and often as corrupt as they are corrupting.
These last three major events in the convulsions of a sick world, one after the other, bear witness to the imposture of a system that is collapsing before our very eyes, largely because its political leaders, whose probity was supposed to be exemplary, have proved to be champions in every category in their propensity to lie, distort facts and cheat in every possible way, and what’s more, in an increasingly outspoken manner, having taken justice hostage and the public for idiots incapable of discerning between truth and deception. Fortunately, against these ill winds, there are still a few people of integrity and activity, who do their investigative work as it should be done, in order to disentangle truth from falsehood, without succumbing to the multiple advantages offered to them to divert them from their task. But our government thugs ignore them, when they don’t hunt them down and leave them to rot in prison, like Julian Assange who revealed what compromises them.
The conclusion for Western citizens is therefore bitter: it’s our governments and their system, not those appointed by our governing bodies, who are on the wrong side of history and are dragging us down with them. It is our governments and their systems that are the examples we must never follow. It’s our governments, their systems and the institutions they have set up to control everything that doesn’t belong to them, but which they covet by any means, including the most unworthy, the most brutal, the most unjust, that must be overthrown, because they are the absolute barbarians in their ways and practices with our peers. And when Western leaders talk about the axis of evil, pointing the finger at others, it’s definitely themselves they’re talking about. The very people who will have to take the initiative to depose them, willingly or by force!
As for the most urgent situation that should mobilize us all, so many innocent lives are being sacrificed before our very eyes, how can we add to all that has already been written on the ongoing Palestinian drama, without falling into repetition and duplication? The news floods us every day, every hour, with its unbearable stories. To the point of reaching the unspeakable… when words can no longer say… when words fail… when they choke in our throats with impotence, unable to translate the desolation, suffering and death that lurk at every moment, every blink of an eyelid, thanks to the murderous complicity of our governments. Shouldn’t we step back and take a cooler, more detached look at the situation, and ask ourselves what authorizes such crimes, without most of our political and media leaders, who are usually so quick to deliver their sentences from the heights of their certainties when no one asks them anything? And to begin with, don’t we have to point out here, perhaps more than anywhere else, the incalculable number of lies that have been told about this whole tragic story, right from the start? Should we not point out the countless falsifications that have been propagated by the conniving media, which have fed a story riddled with deception – and continue to do so, shamelessly? Shouldn’t we be taking apart piece by piece an affabulation that has been presented to us as ‘truth’, when all the clues and testimonies prove the opposite of what we’re being told?
In reality, historic Palestine is the truth, while the Israeli colony is a delusion, an invention, a virtual projection. And it’s to this truth that we must return. We need to reconcile ourselves with geography and history. And to abandon once and for all all the misleading and fallacious narratives that turn a so-called divine promise, which everyone can interpret in their own way, into a tangible reality on which to base the life and evolution of a people.
We in the West are collectively bankrupt! Our lofty principles, our fine words, our erudite and convoluted texts, our complex articles of law and our pointed law that we want to impose on all nations in the name of our ‘universal values’ are nothing but hot air, the inanity of which the peoples of the world are discovering and verifying every day through the inadequacy between what we proclaim loud and clear, and our variable-geometry actions during our interventions. And the more time passes, the more we are seen as liars, profiteers and impostors. Unable to apply the law and justice we pride ourselves on, when they don’t suit us. A permanent double standard. Without the slightest coherence. We are in constant contradiction. We respect neither our words nor our writings. Nor our partners, of course. We lie, we cheat, we bias constantly. We have no honor, no dignity. We deny ourselves again and again. And we think we can continue to get away with it. Well thought-out. Well-oiled. But our only compass, our only obsession, is to maximize profits… whatever the cost, including human lives, when in the eyes of the powerful few who control this deadly system, they are worth nothing. Is one life worth another? In their eyes, of course not! Whatever they may say, a white supremacist’s life is worth much more, infinitely more than the life of any swarthy person, condemned from the start.
Gaza
A bloodless people has been fighting for nearly a century for its land, its rights and its dignity, in the name of justice. We look on, multiply empty and useless declarations, and think that this situation can continue as long as our military powers are in control and guarantee our security. Well, that’s the end of it! Whether you accept it or not, things will never be the same again as they were before the armed revolt of the Gazan resistance factions united under the banner of Hamas. The settlement ‘Israel’ will never again be what it thought it was and projected for itself. Despite its victorious declarations, it will not recover from the fateful blows of determined Palestinian resistance. And in the process, the collective West, which for decades supported the deceptive myth of Israel’s “right to exist” and never forced it to comply with UN Resolutions, will also collapse. The axis of resistance will gain ground and numbers, and the Atlanticist forces that thought they were invincible will be defeated. Like the Israeli army. The wheel turns, history goes on and doesn’t repeat itself. Back home, the mess will be such that the far-right, always on the lookout to re-establish a new order after a troubled period, will be voted in by crowds disoriented and lost from having believed in a promising future that will not have kept its promises, since these were nothing but illusions, lies and betrayals by those who used them to rise to power and stay there. And perhaps a few will then remember that promises are only binding on those who believe them… and will have plenty of time to ponder the lessons and take the measure of the change that lies ahead.
In the meantime, while the illusionists who distract us here in our still somewhat unspoiled latitudes quibble about which words to use and which not to use in declarations that nobody listens to or takes seriously anymore, the real resistance fighters over there long ago realized that they had to rely solely on themselves and their ability to fight against our failing but still well-armed states. And since the West only hears the language of force, they have organized themselves accordingly. They have patiently armed themselves, trained and hardened themselves for what lies ahead. The fight will be tough, severe and no-holds-barred. They know this and are ready to give their lives. And they give it… convinced that, in the end, victory will be theirs.
We no longer have that capacity. We no longer have that inner strength. We no longer have that determination. We think that our words and a few peaceful demonstrations – of course! – are enough. We’re at the end of civilization, busy with our leisure, our individual well-being, our futile distractions, our ego-centric interests, our extra day off, our few fewer wrinkles, our pension plans, our ‘coached’ self-fulfilment. We no longer have the slightest notion of solidarity. Nor the slightest capacity for revolt. We were fooled by the crooks at Covid, who then supported the Nazi party in Kiev, and are now fuelling the genocide in Gaza, which has us numb without standing up to them as we should. Our struggles are at the margins, on the periphery of the essential. To the point where we no longer know who we are: man or woman? We still imagine ourselves to be the center of the world, envied by all those who would dream of joining our lands. But given the opportunity and the right conditions, most of these poor wretches would like nothing more than to stay at home, with their families, their customs and their cultures, which often have nothing to envy to ours.
Palestine: settlers storm the Al-Aqsa mosque again …
A few years ago, I wrote that the countdown to the end of Israeli colonial rule had begun. But before it did, the pain and agony would be terrible, no doubt culminating in the destruction of the al-Aqsa Mosque in favor of the rebuilding of the Zionist Temple… and would be the detonator of the great overthrow. We’re almost there. While all eyes are focused on the horrors in the Gaza Strip, the racist settlers are lashing out with impunity at what’s left of the West Bank, and the stranglehold on al-Aqsa Mosque is tightening dangerously. The deadline is approaching. The world will be turned upside down and the current order of things will never be the same again. The Knesset has just voted by a large majority against the establishment of any Palestinian state. At least things are clear. But, contrary to what they believe, the settlement ‘Israel’ and its deleterious ramifications will be wiped out and swallowed up by the forces of the axis of resistance, for whom the red line has been crossed. And our states, the hodgepodge of technocrats and zealous civil servants who unconditionally support this suicidal madness, may well be swept away by this hurricane.
Meet the Palestinian Hostages Taken by Israel, Known as “Administrative Detainees”
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