#hamas

Paul Khalifé sur X : « 1-L’ #Iran a fait savoir aux #USA via divers canaux diplomatiques qu’il est prêt à renoncer à sa riposte à la destruction par #Israël de son consulat à Damas en contrepartie d’un accord de cessez-le-feu total à #Gaza #Hamas #GazaWar » / X
▻https://twitter.com/Khalifehpaul/status/1778793587737596384

2-En cas de non conclusion d’un accord, l’ #Iran pourrait riposter par des tirs de missiles balistiques et de drones armés sur des cibles à l’intérieur d’ #Israel .

francois burgat sur X :
▻https://twitter.com/frburgat/status/1755897202499559812

#Gaza : Le mépris des morts et le mépris des mots

Une projection de « La Zone d’intérêt » présentée par un collectif de militants juifs antisionistes suscite la controverse

▻https://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2024/02/05/une-projection-de-la-zone-d-interet-presentee-par-un-collectif-de-militants-

#antisionnisme

Johann Chapoutot, spécialiste du #nazisme, a annulé sa participation à une soirée prévue mardi 6 février autour de la #projection de La Zone d’intérêt, le film de #Jonathan_Glazer sur la vie quotidienne de Rudolf Höss, le commandant d’#Auschwitz. Organisée au Grand Action, dans le 5e arrondissement de Paris, une rencontre entre l’historien et la chercheuse en langues, littératures et cultures arabes et #hébraïques Sadia Agsous-Bienstein devait être animée par le #collectif_juif_antisioniste Tsedek !.

« Je ne peux pas, en conscience, participer à vos activités », a écrit, le 1er février, Johann Chapoutot à Samuel Leter, membre de Tsedek ! chargé de ce ciné-club. En cause : le communiqué du collectif publié le 7 octobre 2023. Dans ce message, toujours en ligne sur Instagram, le groupe écrit : « Il ne nous appartient pas de juger de la stratégie de la résistance palestinienne. Mais il est de notre responsabilité de rappeler sa légitimité fondamentale. »

M. Chapoutot n’en avait pas connaissance avant la parution, le 1er février, d’un article de Télérama consacré à une première annulation de cet événement, lequel aurait dû se tenir le 30 janvier au Majestic Bastille, à Paris, avec Sadia Agsous-Bienstein (#Johann_Chapoutot ayant eu une contrainte d’agenda). « Ce n’était pas possible pour moi, explique le chercheur. Je suis spécialiste du nazisme et de la Shoah, le #Hamas est un mouvement #négationniste. Tuer des enfants et violer des femmes ne sont pas des actes de #résistance. Il s’agit d’un massacre de nature #terroriste, dont la dimension #antisémite ne peut pas être contestée. »

Simon Assoun, un des porte-parole de Tsedek !, dénonce « une lecture malhonnête de ce communiqué », citant également celui que le collectif a publié le 12 octobre : « L’ampleur et la brutalité des massacres commis (…) doivent être dénoncées pour ce qu’ils sont : des crimes de guerre. Les centaines de vies israéliennes et palestiniennes arrachées nous meurtrissent. »

« La Shoah fait partie de notre histoire »
Samuel Leter affirme ne pas comprendre la réaction tardive de l’historien : « Dans le mail où il a accepté de participer à la rencontre, il dit qu’il admire notre courage ! » Dans ce message du 10 janvier 2024, Johann Chapoutot fait notamment référence à l’avocat Arié Alimi : « Je connais bien votre collectif, dont j’admire le courage, tout comme celui d’Arié, qui est, je crois, des vôtres. »

En réalité, l’historien a cru dialoguer avec #Golem, le mouvement cofondé par Arié Alimi dans la foulée de la marche contre l’antisémitisme du 12 octobre. « J’ai fait l’erreur de répondre spontanément, sans vérifier, afin d’aider ce qui me semblait devoir l’être : un collectif de juifs de gauche qui s’était opposé à la participation du RN [Rassemblement national] à la manifestation contre l’antisémitisme, le RN-FN [Front national] ayant été fondé, rappelons-le, par des vétérans de la Waffen-SS et de la Milice », explique-t-il.

#Tsedek ! comme Golem sont marqués à gauche. Tsedek !, #décolonial, affirme « lutter contre le racisme d’Etat en France et pour la fin de l’apartheid et l’occupation en Israël-Palestine ». Golem milite contre tous les racismes et dénonce l’instrumentalisation de la lutte contre l’#antisémitisme. « Tsedek ! est une organisation qui ne dénonce pas l’antisémitisme de la gauche ou de la #France_insoumise, décrypte l’historien #Tal_Bruttmann, proche de Golem. Ils servent de paravent à des gens qui sont ouvertement antisémites et ils dénoncent l’instrumentalisation de la #Shoah dans une seule direction. »

La rencontre du 6 février animée par Tsedek ! au Grand Action est annulée. Le #cinéma explique que « des pressions extérieures ont conduit à l’annulation de la participation des intervenant.e.s prévue.e.s ». Samuel Leter juge que ces annulations équivalent à de la censure : « Nous sommes #juifs, la Shoah fait partie de notre histoire. Il ne peut y avoir de #monopole_de_la_mémoire de la Shoah. »

La pertinence d’un échange avec une spécialiste des littératures #palestinienne et #israélienne au sujet d’un film sur la Shoah a été débattue avant la première annulation du ciné-club, ce que déplore Sadia Agsous-Bienstein : « Tsedek !, que je connais, m’invite à parler d’un film sur la Shoah, un film sur la banalité de la vie d’une famille allemande à côté d’un #camp d’extermination. J’ai travaillé sur la Shoah et c’est un film sur la Shoah. En quoi ne suis-je pas #légitime sur la question ? Parce que je suis #algérienne ? » L’une de ses recherches, « La Shoah dans le #contexte_culturel #arabe », a été cofinancée par le #Mémorial de la Shoah.

Ce n’est pas la première fois qu’un événement animé par Tsedek ! suscite la #controverse. En décembre, une conférence coorganisée par le collectif a été annulée par la #Mairie_de_Paris. Raison invoquée : la présence parmi les organisateurs de l’#association #Paroles_d’honneur, dont est membre la #militante_décoloniale #Houria_Bouteldja.

#Zineb_Dryef

Lire aussi | Article réservé à nos abonnés Jonathan Glazer, cinéaste de « La Zone d’Intérêt » : « Nous avons besoin que le génocide ne soit pas un moment calcifié de l’histoire »

Lire aussi | Article réservé à nos abonnés « La Zone d’intérêt » : à côté d’Auschwitz, une obscène tranquillité

À la frontière égyptienne avec Gaza, des élus de gauche veulent envoyer un « symbole fort » | Mediapart
▻https://www.mediapart.fr/journal/international/060224/la-frontiere-egyptienne-avec-gaza-des-elus-de-gauche-veulent-envoyer-un-sy
Des parlementaires français emmenés par le député LFI Éric Coquerel ont appelé à un cessez-le-feu à Gaza, devant la porte égyptienne du poste-frontière de Rafah. Les élus ont également pu constater les difficultés d’acheminement de l’aide humanitaire.

Justine Babin | 6 février 2024

https://static.mediapart.fr/etmagine/og/journal/files/2024/02/06/240206-la-frontiere-egyptienne-avec-gaza-des-elus-de-gauche-veulent-envoyer-un-symbole-fort-2.jpg

Poste-frontière de Rafah (Égypte).– Les bombardements s’étaient tus, et seul le bourdonnement de quelques drones se faisait entendre, dans l’après-midi du dimanche 4 février, lors du déplacement d’une délégation d’élu·es français·es de gauche, député·es pour la plupart, à la frontière entre l’Égypte et Gaza. Quelques heures plus tôt, pourtant, des frappes israéliennes faisaient plusieurs morts dans un jardin d’enfants à l’est de la ville de Rafah, de l’autre côté du poste-frontière, selon l’agence d’information palestinienne Wafa.

Cessez-le-feu : Retour des élu-es Français-es de Rafah !
mardi 6 février - La France insoumise - Groupe parlementaire
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5T1dGaXDzBY

قراءة في تفاصيل رد المقاومة الفلسطينية على ورقة الاطار “مقترح باريس”.. ما هي كواليس البنود والنقاط والمرحل في رد قيادة حماس.. ولماذا قالت الخارجية القطرية انه إيجابي ويدعو للتفاؤل.. وكيف ستتعامل معه إسرائيل | رأي اليوم
▻https://www.raialyoum.com/%d9%82%d8%b1%d8%a7%d8%a1%d8%a9-%d9%81%d9%8a-%d8%aa%d9%81%d8%a7%d8%b5%d9%8

Très bonne synthèse des négociations en cours à Gaza. (Malheureusement la traduction automatique rend les choses un peu compliquées à comprendre...)

سلمت المقاومة الفلسطينية ردها على ورقة الاطار التي اعدت في باريس وسلمت لحركة حماس عبر الوسطاء لتعطي جوابا عليها، وصيغت الورقة بحضور رئيس الموساد الإسرائيلي ” ديفيد برنياع، وهو ما يدلل ان إسرائيل مشاركة بصياغة الاطار، ولم يسلم لها كورقة للإجابة عليها كما الحال بالنسبة لحركة حماس، على الرغم من ذلك سادت حالة الانقسام داخل كابينيت الحرب حول عناوين ورقة الاطار. اما بالنسبة لحماس اخذت الورقة نحو المناقشة سواء داخل الحركة بشقيها ” غزة والخارج ” او مع باقي الفصائل الفلسطينية.
اتفاق الاطار “ورقة باريس”
هي صيغة فيها خطوط عريضة وهامة لصفقة تفاهم جوهرها اطلاق سراح الاسرى الإسرائيليين لدى المقاومة في غزة مقابل اطلاق سراح اسرى فلسطينيين مع هدنة طويلة نسبيا. وتنقسم الورقة الى ثلاثة مراحل مع أربعة بنود:
ـ المرحلة الأولى: تتضمن وقف اطلاق نار مؤقت لمدة 45 يوما، يتم خلالها اطلاق سراح دفعة من الاسرى الإسرائيليين “الورقة تتحدث عن 35 اسيرا “من المرضى الجرحى والمجندات وكبار السن” دون تحديد عدد الاسرى الفلسطينيين الذين ستفرج إسرائيل عنهم بالمقابل.
ـ المرحلة الثانية: اطلاق سراح اسرى إسرائيليين من الجنود والرجال دون تحديد مدة الهدنة او عدد الاسرى الفلسطينيين الذين ستفرج عنهم إسرائيل.
ـ المرحلة الثالثة: تبادل جثامين مقابل اسرى دون تحديد العدد او المدة الزمنية للهدنة.
ـ البند الرابع: تسهيل ادخال المساعدات ومواد الإغاثة عبر المعابر خلال المراحل الثلاث.
رد المقاومة الفلسطينية:
استغرق رد المقاومة على ورقة الاطار وقتا توزع بين المشاورات الداخلية لحركة حماس، والمشاورات مع قيادة غزة، والمشاورات مع الفصائل الفلسطينية. واختارت المقاومة بدلا من الرد “بنعم او لا” ان تملأ فراغات اتفاق اطار بما يحقق مصالح الشعب الفلسطيني في غزة ويحافظ على مكتسبات المقاومة وفق صيغة “نعم ولكن” وجاء الرد متضمنا الثوابت التالية:

انسحاب الجيش الإسرائيلي من قطاع غزة.
رفع الحصار وفتح المعابر لدخول المساعدات الاغاثية.
إعادة الاعمار والسماح بإدخال بيوت مسبقة الصنع لإيواء السكان بشكل عاجل الى حين إعادة الاعمار.
وقف اطلاق النار الشامل ونهاية العدوان.

ملاحظات وتساؤلات

من خلال إشارة الوسيط القطري ان رد المقاومة إيجابي ويبعث على التفاؤل، ووفق بعض المصادر والتعليقات التي أعقبت الإعلان عن تسليم المقاومة الرد يمكن تسجيل الاستنتاجات التالية:
ـ أولا: يبدو ان المرحلة الأولى في اتفاق الاطار ستمر وفق صيغة باريس كاملة دون أي تعديل “هدنة 45 يوما وتبادل اسرى بعد الاتفاق على عدد من سيفرج عنهم من السجون الإسرائيلية بالإضافة الى دخول المساعدات والمواد الاغاثية عبر المعابر.
ـ ثانيا: مطالب المقاومة في ورقة الرد من المفترض الشروع في تنفيذها في المرحلة الثانية والثالثة. أي الانسحاب من غزة ورفع الحصار وإعادة الاعمار ووقف شامل لاطلاق النار. وهنا سيكون دور الأطراف الضامنة للاتفاق، والتي ستعمل على ضمان ايفاء إسرائيل بالتزاماتها بالمرحلتين بعد هدنة الخمسة وأربعين يوما.
ـ ثالثا: فكرة الضمانات متعددة الأطراف مع الأمم المتحدة فكرة خلاقة، وتضفي شرعية إقليمية ودولية على الاتفاق، ولكنها لا تمنع إسرائيل من النكوص عنه في لحظة ما، اذا ما وقفت هي والولايات المتحدة في كفة وباقي الأطراف الضامنين في الكفة الأخرى.
تبدو الآن الكرة في ملعب الولايات المتحدة وهي من ستعمل على ضمان مروره عند الجانب الإسرائيلي، ستكون هذه من مهام بلينكن الرئيسية في تل ابيب. ولكن هل ستمارس الإدارة الامريكية ضغطا من اجل الحصول على الموافقة الإسرائيلية ؟؟ هل سيكون الرد الإسرائيلي “نعم او لا” ام انهم بدورهم سيضعون تعديلات على الورقة وملاحظات على رد المقاومة المفصل، ثم تعود الورقة ليد المقاومة من جديد لتناقشها؟
كل طرف لديه ما هو اهم ويسعى لتحصيله من الصفقة. بالنسبة للولايات المتحدة الأهم هو هدنة طويلة توقف معها الجبهات المساندة والهجمات على قواعدها وفي البحر الأحمر، وبالنسبة لإسرائيل الأهم إعادة الاسرى وترتيبات امنية في غزة تعيد المستوطنين الى الغلاف وتعيد مستوطنين الشمال، اما هدف القضاء على حماس اصبح من الماضي وان كان ما زال يتكرر على لسان قادة الاحتلال. الأهم بالنسبة للمقاومة وقف الحرب ورفع الحصار وإعادة الاعمار وانسحاب إسرائيل من غزة. هل ستعطي الصفقة لكل طرف ما يريد؟

« Pas un #euro aux #nazis d’#Israël » :-D :-D :-D

Ca vole pas très haut, au niveau des interlocuteurs... particulièrement les #fanatiques #sionistes

« Pas un #shekel aux nazis de #Gaza » : Israël gèle une partie des fonds de l’#Autorité_palestinienne

« Israël a gelé le remboursement de plus de 100 millions de dollars appartenant à l’Autorité palestinienne en affirmant que ces fonds auraient pu servir au #Hamas, le mouvement #islamiste qui contrôle la bande de Gaza.

En Israël, le gouvernement de Benyamin #Netanyahou s’est livré à tour de passe-passe financier. Sous la pression constante de #Bezalel_Smotrich, le ministre des #Finances et chef d’un parti d’#ultradroite, le remboursement de 120 millions de dollars à l’Autorité palestinienne a été gelé sur un compte en Norvège. (...) »

https://resize.marianne.net/r/1540,924/img/var/ceEmzVOiS0/asiOiOGpBwnGjlDM4/asiOiOGpBwnGjlDM4.jpg

#politique #occident #monde #marchands_du_temple #marchandage #confiscation #l_argent_ca_va_ca_vient #seenthis #vangauguin

▻https://www.marianne.net/monde/proche-orient/pas-un-shekel-aux-nazis-de-gaza-israel-gele-une-partie-des-fonds-de-l-auto

AS`AD AbuKHALIL: Hamas’ Official Account
▻https://consortiumnews.com/2024/01/30/asad-abukhalil-hamas-official-account

https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Isr_vs_pla_war.jpg

Israel’s failure to reach Hamas’ leadership and command structure has been because of the security regime installed in Gaza by Sinwar.

He is not a wheeler-dealer like Khalid Mishal, the former Hamas leader, and avoids inter-Arab regime politics and conflicts. He also is a firm believer in the efficacy of the regional axis of resistance and puts that to great effect in how he husbands the movement’s military resources.

Hamas broke with its previous era when Mishal turned Hamas into an arm of Qatari foreign policy. Mishal was closer to Qatar and Turkey while Sinwar is closer to Iran, which supplies the movement with crucial military aid (Qatar supplies Hamas with financial aid, but reportedly in close coordination with Israel).

A party may change by learning from its past mistakes. When Hamas emerged, it had no qualms expressing anti-Jewish sentiments, even citing the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Hamas wasn’t even sensitive to Christian sensibilities at first. But that changed over time.

In this document (and in a political document of 2018) the movement made it clear that it harbors no ideology of hostility against Jews, qua Jews. This is a major shift, which was also articulated by Hizbullah in its political document of 2009.

To be sure, Israel and Western Zionists don’t want to concede that movements change. They want to pigeonhole all Palestinian and Arab resistance groups as Nazi-like, no matter what they do and say. To this day, Western media refers to the political rhetoric of Hamas from its first year and not from its more recent years.

They do the same with Hizbullah: Saudi regime media relish finding very old speeches of Nasrallah in which references to an Islamic state are made to alienate non-Shiite supporters in Lebanon and the Arab world.

Hamas also broke with its history of not trying to distinguish between Israeli military and civilian targets (despite its earliest statements that it does). It’s not easy for Arab resistance groups to make that distinction because: a) Israel and the Zionist movement since the 1930s never bothered to make distinctions between Arab civilians and combatants; b) because many Israelis (males and females) are armed and serve in the reserves.

The wave of suicide attacks by Hamas during the second intifada turned off Arab and non-Arab supporters of the Palestinians. In the new document Hamas enunciates a declared policy of avoiding targeting civilians as part of its religious and ethical doctrine. (I will delve deeper into this question in Part Two of this article.)

There was a similar path in Hizbullah’s history. Hizbullah is now very keen to avoid targeting civilians. Even in the recent months of war between Hizbullah and Israel, Hizbullah strictly targeted military sites in Israel when it would have been much easier to fire randomly.

In contrast, Israel in all its wars, manages to kill many (or mostly) civilians. In fact, Israel — in this recent war of genocide – does not deny that most of its victims in Gaza have been civilians but maintains many of those slaughtered were Hamas combatants.

(U.S. intelligence estimates that Israel has exaggerated the percentage of combatants killed). In the July war of 2006, the overwhelming majority of those killed by Hizbullah were soldiers and officers, while most of those who were killed on the Lebanese side were civilians.

As`ad AbuKhalil is a Lebanese-American professor of political science at California State University, Stanislaus. He is the author of the Historical Dictionary of Lebanon (1998), Bin Laden, Islam and America’s New War on Terrorism (2002), The Battle for Saudi Arabia (2004) and ran the popular The Angry Arab blog. He tweets as @asadabukhalil

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

#Ukraine, #Israël, quand les histoires se rencontrent

Dans son dernier livre, l’historien #Omer_Bartov revient sur l’histoire de sa famille et de son voyage de la Galicie ukraino-polonaise à Israël, à travers les soubresauts de l’histoire de la première partie du 20e siècle.

Alors que les atrocités du conflit israélo-palestinien continuent de diviser les étudiants de prestigieux campus américains, l’universitaire Omer Bartov se propose d’analyser la résurgence de l’#antisémitisme dans le monde à la lumière de sa propre #histoire_familiale.

Un #antisémitisme_endémique dans les campus américains ?

L’historien Omer Bartov réagit d’abord aux polémiques qui ont lieu au sujet des universités américaines et de leur traitement du conflit israélo-palestinien : “il y a clairement une montée de l’antisémitisme aux États-Unis, comme dans d’autres parties du monde. Néanmoins, il y a aussi une tentative de faire taire toute critique de la politique israélienne. Cette tentative d’associer cette critique à de l’antisémitisme est également problématique. C’est un bannissement des discussions. Les étudiants, qui sont plus politisés que par le passé, prennent part à cette histoire”. Récemment, la directrice de l’Université de Pennsylvanie Elizabeth Magill avait proposé sa démission à la suite d’une audition controversée au Congrès américain, lors de laquelle elle n’aurait pas condamné les actions de certains de ses étudiants à l’encontre d’Israël.

De Buczacz à la Palestine, une histoire familiale

Dans son dernier livre Contes des frontières, faire et défaire le passé en Ukraine, qui paraîtra aux éditions Plein Jour en janvier 2024, Omer Bartov enquête sur sa propre histoire, celle de sa famille et de son voyage de la Galicie à la Palestine : “en 1935, ma mère avait onze ans et a quitté #Buczacz pour la #Palestine. Le reste de la famille est restée sur place et quelques années plus tard, ils ont été assassinés par les Allemands et des collaborateurs locaux. En 1995, j’ai parlé avec ma mère de son enfance en Galicie pour la première fois, des grands écrivains locaux comme Yosef Agnon. Je voulais comprendre les liens entre #Israël et ce monde juif qui avait disparu à Buczacz au cours de la #Seconde_Guerre_mondiale”.

À la recherche d’un monde perdu

Cette conversation a mené l’historien à consacrer une véritable étude historique à ce lieu et plus généralement à cette région, la #Galicie : “ce monde avait selon moi besoin d’être reconstruit. Ce qui le singularisait, c’était la diversité qu’il accueillait. Différentes communautés nationales, ethniques et religieuses avaient coexisté pendant des siècles et je voulais comprendre comment il s’était désintégré”, explique-t-il. Le prochain livre qu’il souhaite écrire en serait alors la suite : “je veux comprendre comment ma génération a commencé à repenser le monde dans lequel nous avons grandi après la destruction de la civilisation précédente”, ajoute-t-il.

▻https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceculture/podcasts/france-culture-va-plus-loin-l-invite-e-des-matins/ukraine-israel-quand-les-histoires-se-rencontrent-9022449
#multiculturalisme #histoire #crime_de_guerre #crime_contre_l'humanité #génocide #Gaza #7_octobre_2023 #nettoyage_ethnique #destruction #déplacements_forcés #Hamas #crimes_de_guerre #massacre #pogrom #occupation

When Terrorism and Organ Theft Connect… It’s ‘Israel’ – Al-Manar TV Lebanon
▻https://english.almanar.com.lb/2032032

Day after another, Israeli atrocities committed against the oppressed people of Gaza are being uncovered. Throughout the brutal war, today in its 109th day, Gazans have been informing about acts of savagery against both living and dead people in the war-torn besieged strip.

In the latest heinousness, Israeli occupation forces have been destroying the cemeteries in Gaza and desecrating the deceased people’s final resting place, with Gaza residents reporting that some corpses of their beloved ones have been stolen.

Desecration of at Least 16 Cemeteries in Gaza

In a report on January 20, the CNN reported that the Israeli military has destroyed at least 16 cemeteries in Gaza, citing satellite imagery and social media footage.

Gravestones in Gaza have been ruined and the ground overturned. In some cases, bodies have been unearthed, CNN reported.

Based on its examination of satellite pictures and videos, the US news network concluded that in other situations, the Israeli occupation army appears to have utilized graves as military outposts, with bulldozers converting many graveyards into staging groundsLegal experts quoted in the report emphasized that deliberately destroying religious sites like cemeteries and turning them into military targets violates international law, suggesting that the Israeli occupation’s actions could be considered war crimes.

“There’s huge symbolic meaning to the notion that not even the dead are left in peace,” Janina Dill, co-director at Oxford University’s Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict, told CNN.

The CNN investigative report detailed incidents such as the removal of bodies from graves, underscoring profound disrespect for the deceased and raising serious concerns about human rights violations.

The recent report has shed light on the Israeli occupation army’s illicit activities, including organ harvesting which is considered a severe violation of human rights and international law.

“Israel Harvesting Organs from Victims’ Bodies”

In the same context, a British doctor has supported accusations that the Israeli occupation have been harvesting organs from dead people in Gaza.

The British doctor said that the medics from the Palestinian Red Crescent have recorded incidents of organ harvesting in Gaza, noting that the Zionist entity itself had acknowledged it has the largest skin bank in the world.

“Investigation into Israeli Holding of Dead Bodies”

Earlier in November (2023), Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor expressed concerns about possible organ theft from Palestinian corpses, citing reports by medical professionals in Gaza who examined some bodies after they were released by the Israeli occupation.

The NGO said it has documented Israeli occupation forces confiscating dozens of dead bodies from the Al-Shifa and Indonesian hospitals in northern Gaza, alongside others in the south.

It reported that medical professionals found vital organs, such as livers, kidneys and hearts, alongside cochleas and corneas were missing.

The Euro-Med Monitor described the Zionist entity as one of the “world’s biggest hubs for the illegal trade of human organs under the pretext of ‘security deterrence’”.
Gaza cemeteries

It urged Tel Aviv to abide by international law and reiterated the “necessity of respecting and protecting the bodies of the dead during armed conflicts.”

According to a 2008 investigation by the CNN network, the Zionist entity is thought to be the biggest hub for the illegal global trade in human organs.

“Largest Skin Bank”

Reports have emerged in recent years that ‘Israel’ is unlawfully using Palestinian corpses.

An investigation conducted and aired by Israeli Channel 10 in 2014, high-ranking Israeli officials admitted that skin was taken from the bodies of dead Palestinians and African workers to treat Israelis, such as soldiers with burn injuries.

In it, the director of the Israeli Skin Bank revealed the country’s reserve of “human skin” reached 17 square meters – a huge number relative to the population of the occupation entity.

When asked about the number of those who apply to skin donation, she answered that the number is so low, in a clear indication that attributes to the high number of human skin reserve.

Ce qui s’est passé le 7 octobre 2023 d’après le Hamas (à partir de la page 8)

Our Narrative…
Operation Al-Aqsa Flood
►https://www.palestinechronicle.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/PDF.pdf

L’Union européenne ajoute le chef du Hamas à Gaza Yahya Sinouar à sa liste « terroriste »
RFI - 16 janvier 2024 - 13h31
►https://www.rfi.fr/fr/moyen-orient/20240116-en-direct-la-phase-intensive-des-combats-dans-le-sud-de-gaza-se-termine

L’Union européenne (UE) a ajouté mardi à sa liste « terroriste » Yahya Sinouar, le chef du mouvement islamiste palestinien à Gaza, considéré comme l’architecte de l’attaque du 7 octobre contre Israël. Suite à cette décision des Vingt-Sept, Yahya Sinouar sera soumis à un régime de sanctions impliquant un gel des fonds et avoirs financiers qu’ils détiendraient dans l’UE et une interdiction faite à tout opérateur européen de les financer.

« Cette décision s’inscrit dans le cadre de la réponse de l’Union européenne à la menace posée par le Hamas et ses attaques terroristes brutales et aveugles contre Israël le 7 octobre », a précisé le Conseil européen. Considéré comme l’architecte de cette attaque, Yahya Sinouar, 61 ans, qualifié de « mort en sursis » par l’armée israélienne, entoure ses déplacements du plus grand secret et n’est pas apparu en public depuis octobre.

La décision de l’UE est le résultat de « nos efforts diplomatiques pour étrangler les ressources du Hamas, pour le délégitimer et lui interdire tout soutien. Nous continuerons à éradiquer la racine du mal, à Gaza et partout où il pointe », a réagi le chef de la diplomatie israélienne Israël Katz.

🇪🇺 EU terrorist list : @EUCouncil imposes sanctions on Yahia Sinouar, the political leader of #Hamas as part of the EU’s response to the threat posed by Hamas and its brutal and indiscriminate terrorist attacks in Israel on 7 Oct. 2023.
Learn more 👇▻https://t.co/g3DJrmZf5v
— EU Council Press (@EUCouncilPress) January 16, 2024

#IsraelUE

Demain, 15 janvier 2024 : centième jour du conflit qui oppose Israël au peuple palestinien de Gaza. Cent jours de massacre inconditionnel autorisé par le soutien inconditionnel des nations de l’Occident à un régime sanguinaire qui a dévoyé le message premier et essentiel du judaïsme, à savoir celui de l’émancipation d’un peuple réduit en esclavage. Nous pouvons pleurer tous les défunts et nous consumer de rage. Nous pouvons aussi lire ce texte, méditer sur son message et en partager la force.

▻https://blogs.mediapart.fr/collectif-chronik/blog/140124/sur-la-question-palestinienne-l-inconditionnelle-innocence-occidenta

Par Hassina Mechaï, journaliste.

Il se dit, au fil des transmissions d’un récit encore intact, qu’au 16e siècle, horrifié par les pogroms qui terrorisaient la communauté juive de Prague, un rabbin créa une créature informe, le Golem. Il lui donna vie en insérant dans sa bouche un parchemin portant le nom de Dieu (le Tétragramme hébraïque) et en inscrivant sur son front le mot « Emet », La Vérité en hébreu.

Pour lancer le monstre contre les pogromistes, il suffisait de retirer l’aleph, la première lettre de ce mot. Le mot Met, la mort, marquait alors le front de la créature. L’aleph était ajouté dans l’autre sens, pour le dompter. Mais le Golem avait fini par horrifier son propre créateur, qui lui retira définitivement le parchemin de sa bouche et l’aleph de la vérité pour le ramener à son état premier de glaise informe.

Cette petite lettre, silencieuse, scande la dialectique entre la mort et la vie, lesquelles restent suspendues à l’aleph manquant. Hors ce souffle presque muet, c’est le mensonge et la mort.

How Israeli forces trapped and killed ravers at the Nova Festival
▻https://new.thecradle.co/articles-id/18526

http://thecradle-main.oss-eu-central-1.aliyuncs.com/public/articles/e17ed656-b21b-11ee-a77e-00163e02c055.jpeg

New evidence points to Israeli security forces, not Hamas, for causing the most fatalities at the music festival - civilian deaths that were then utilized to justify Tel Aviv’s Gaza genocide.

Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh: Lawyer’s closing statement in ICJ case against Israel praised

https://www.thenational.scot/resources/images/17634889.jpg

This was the powerful closing statement in South Africa’s genocide case against Israel.

Senior advocate #Blinne_Ní_Ghrálaigh addressed the International Court of Justice on day one of the hearing.

ICJ: Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh’s powerful closing statement in South Africa case against Israel
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttrJd2aWF-Y&embeds_referring_euri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.thenational.sco

▻https://www.thenational.scot/news/24042943.blinne-ni-ghralaigh-lawyers-closing-statement-icj-case-israel

#Cour_internationale_de_justice (#CIJ) #Israël #Palestine #Afrique_du_Sud #justice #génocide

There Was an Iron Wall in Gaza
▻https://jacobin.com/2024/01/iron-wall-gaza-israel-defense-forces-realpolitik-palestine-history

Dans cet article nous apprenons l’histoire du mouvement palestinien, du développement de la politique sioniste et des approches égyptiennes au problème introduit dans la région par la fondation de l’état d’Israël. C’est une lecture obligatoire pour chacune et chacun qui ne sait pas expliquer dans le détail les événements depuis 1945 et le rôle des acteurs historiques. Attention, l’article contient quelques déscriptions d’atrocités qu’on préfère ne pas lire juste avant de prendre son petit déjeuner.

4.1.2024 byy Seth Ackerman - In a 1948 essay, “The Twilight of International Morality,” the international relations theorist Hans Morgenthau looked back at the bygone style of diplomacy practiced by the old aristocratic states of Europe — what might be called “traditional Realpolitik” — and ventured a contrarian argument: that behind its amoral facade and despite its reputation for cynicism and duplicity, it was always grounded in an inviolable ethical code.

He considered Otto von Bismarck, the German avatar of nineteenth-century Realpolitik, and contrasted him with Adolf Hitler. Both men had faced the same stubborn problem: the fact of Germany’s “encirclement” by dangerous neighbors, France to the west and Russia to the east.

But whereas Bismarck “accepted the inevitability of that fact and endeavored to turn it to Germany’s advantage,” through an intricate and sometimes devious Realpolitik diplomacy, Hitler, being “free of the moral scruples which had compelled Bismarck to accept the existence of France and Russia,” set out, quite simply, to annihilate them both.

Whether this difference was really attributable to “moral scruple” or not can be debated; Bismarck’s foreign policy was a practical success, after all, while Hitler’s obviously wasn’t. But Morgenthau had put his finger on a useful and important distinction.

The “Bismarck method” and the “Hitler method” can be thought of as two alternative ways of dealing with danger in the world. The first is the method of Realpolitik, which accepts power realities for what they are; assumes coexistence with enemies to be, for better or worse, permanent and unavoidable; and for that reason prefers, wherever possible, to defuse threats by searching for areas of common interest, employing the minimum quantum of violence necessary to achieve vital objectives.

The second method is animated by an ideologically driven demonology of one type or another — an obsession with monsters that must be destroyed — coupled with an insatiable craving for what Henry Kissinger, in a well-known aphorism, called “absolute security”: “The desire of one power for absolute security,” he wrote in his 1954 doctoral dissertation on the diplomacy of Austrian diplomat Klemens von Metternich, “means absolute insecurity for all the others.”
United Behind Israel

Since October 7, every voice of authority in the West, from Joe Biden on down — in the foreign ministries, the think tanks, the major media — has united behind Israel’s declared objective to “crush and eliminate” Hamas. Its commando strike through Israel’s Gaza “iron wall” and the spree of atrocities against civilians that accompanied it are said to have voided whatever legitimacy the group might once have been accorded. A demand for Hamas’s total defeat and eradication is — for now, anyway — official policy in the United States, the European Union, and the other G7 nations.

The problem, however, is that Hamas, which won 44 percent of the vote in the last Palestinian legislative elections, is a mass political party, not just an armed group, and neither can in fact be eradicated “militarily.” As long as Hamas exists, attempting to permanently exclude it from Palestinian politics by foreign diktat is guaranteed not only to fail but to sow unending chaos.

Because the Hamas-must-go policy is unachievable and unsustainable, it is fated to be temporary, and the only question is how long it will take the world’s leaders to recognize their mistake and how much damage will be done in the meantime.

In Afghanistan it took the United States twenty years, across three administrations, to summon the nerve to admit that it couldn’t defeat the Taliban. Despite the nearly three thousand who died on American soil at the hands of the Taliban’s al-Qaeda “guests,” the US realized in the end that it had no better option than to talk to the group and make a deal. When an accommodation was finally reached, in 2020, it was — in classic Realpolitik fashion — based on a common interest in defeating a mutual enemy, namely ISIS. In exchange for a commitment from the Taliban not to allow its territory to be used as a base for foreign terrorist operations, the United States withdrew its forces in 2021 and the Taliban is now in power in Kabul.

But Gaza can’t afford to wait twenty years for Biden and company to come to their senses; given the pace of Israel’s killing machine, the last surviving Palestinian there will be long dead by then.

All his life, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has spoken publicly and privately of his dream that Israel might someday get an opportunity to finish the job of 1948 and rid the Land of Israel of its masses of Palestinian interlopers. He expounded on this theme one evening in Jerusalem in the late 1970s to an appalled dinner guest, the military historian Max Hastings, who recounted the conversation in his memoirs; and he returned to the theme on the floor of the Knesset a decade later, after the Tiananmen Square massacre, when he lamented Israel’s failure to have seized the moment while the world’s attention was focused on China, to carry out a “mass expulsion of the Arabs.”

Now, thanks to a fortuitous convergence of circumstances — a vengeful public, a far-right governing coalition, and, most importantly, a compliant US president — Netanyahu has been given another chance, and he’s not letting the opportunity slip away.

Israel has explained what it’s doing in plain language. No one can claim they didn’t know. Through a combination of mass-casualty terror bombing — what Robert Pape of the University of Chicago, a leading scholar of coercive air power, has called “one of the most intense civilian punishment campaigns in history” — the destruction of hospitals and other critical infrastructure, and a near-total blockade of humanitarian supplies, it is working “to create conditions where life in Gaza becomes unsustainable,” in the words of Major General (Ret.) Giora Eiland, an adviser to the current defense minister.

Israel, in other words, is grimly marching Morgenthau’s argument to its logical conclusion — proving, before the eyes of the world, that the final and most fundamental alternative to Realpolitik is genocide.
Speak of the Devil

In a 2008 article published by the Israel Council on Foreign Relations, Efraim Halevy, one of the more pragmatic Realpolitikers in Israel’s security establishment, aired his qualms about the prevailing Israeli approach to dealing with Gaza and its rulers.

A former head of the Mossad, director of Israel’s national security council, and ambassador to the European Union, Halevy had worked on the Hamas file for many years, and his message was blunt: Hamas wasn’t going away anytime soon. Israel would therefore do well to find a way to make the group “a factor in a solution” rather than a perpetually “insurmountable problem.”

Since the notion of Hamas as a solution to anything was bound to jar the reader’s preconceptions, Halevy took care to lay out a few relevant facts.

He explained, first, that whatever the group’s founding documents might say, twenty years of contact with real-world politics had educated Hamas in the realities of power, and it was now “more than obvious to Hamas that they have no chance in the world to witness the destruction of the State of Israel.”

Consequently, the group’s leaders had reverted to a more achievable goal: rather than Israel’s destruction, they sought its withdrawal to its 1967 borders, in exchange for which Hamas would agree to an extended armistice — “a thirty-year truce,” Halevy called it — which the group said it would respect and even help enforce, and which could eventually be made permanent if the parties so desired.

Second, although Hamas’s leaders were adamant that Hamas would not recognize Israel or talk to it directly, they didn’t object to Mahmoud Abbas doing so, and they declared themselves ready, according to Halevy, “to accept a solution negotiated [by Abbas] with Israel if it were approved in a national Palestinian referendum.”

Two years earlier, Hamas had prevailed in Palestinian elections by emphasizing its pragmatism and willingness to respect the two-state center-ground of Palestinian public opinion. That decision had represented a victory for the moderates within the organization. One of them, Riad Mustafa, a Hamas parliamentary deputy representing Nablus, explained the group’s position in a 2006 interview:

I say unambiguously: Hamas does not and never will recognize Israel. Recognition is an act conferred by states, not movements or governments, and Palestine is not a state. Nevertheless, the [Hamas-led] government’s program calls for the end of the occupation, not the destruction of Israel, and Hamas has proposed ending the occupation and a long-term truce to bring peace to this region.

That is Hamas’ own position. The government has also recognized President Abbas’ right to conduct political negotiations with Israel. If he were to produce a peace agreement, and if this agreement was endorsed by our national institutions and a popular referendum, then — even if it includes Palestinian recognition of Israel — we would of course accept their verdict. Because respecting the will of the people and their democratic choice is also one of our principles.

According to Halevy, Hamas had conveyed these ideas to the Israeli leadership as far back as 1997 — but it never got a response. “Israel rejected this approach out of hand,” he wrote, “viewing it as a honey trap that would allow Hamas to consolidate its strength and status until such time as it would be capable of confronting Israel in battle, with a chance of winning.”

Halevy regarded this as a serious mistake. “Is the current approach of Hamas genuine or is it a honey trap?” he asked. “Who can say?” Everything would depend on the details — but “such details cannot be pursued unless Hamas is engaged in meaningful discussion.”

Finally — and presciently, it’s now clear — he reminded his readers that refusing to talk brought risks of its own:

The Hamas leadership is by no means unanimous concerning the policies it should adopt. There are the pragmatists, the die-hard ideologues, the politicians, and the commanders in the field. All are now locked in serious debate over the future.

As long as the door to dialogue is closed, there is no doubt as to who will prevail in this continuous deliberation and soul-searching.

Organized Inhumanity

Instead of taking Halevy’s Realpolitik advice, Israel and the United States doubled down on their monster-slaying crusade. Following Hamas’s election victory, they cut off aid to the Palestinian Authority, boycotted its new government, and tried to foment an anti-Hamas coup in Gaza, using forces loyal to elements of Fatah. The coup backfired, however, and when the dust cleared in early 2007, Fatah’s forces in Gaza had been routed, leaving Hamas in full control of the Strip.

In response to that fiasco, Israel’s cabinet designated Gaza a “hostile entity” and prescribed an unprecedented tightening of its blockade, a measure officially referred to as the “closure” — an elaborate system of controls over the movement of people and goods into and out of the enclave, made possible by Israel’s continued grip over Gaza’s borders.
Prime Minister Ismail Haniya, of Hamas (L), and Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, of Fatah, chair the first meeting of the previously attempted Palestinian unity government, on March 18, 2007, in the Gaza Strip.
(Abid Katib / Getty Images)

The closure of Gaza was a unique experiment — a pioneering innovation in organized inhumanity. The United Nations (UN) human rights jurist John Dugard has called it “possibly the most rigorous form of international sanctions imposed in modern times.”

To make it sustainable, the closure was crafted to allow Israel to fine-tune the level of suffering Gazans experienced. The goal, as an adviser to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert put it, was “to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.” Thus, on the one hand, the productive economy was comprehensively wiped out by denying it materials, fuel, and machinery. But on the other hand, Israel would try to estimate how many truckloads of food deliveries per day it would need to approve in order for the minimum caloric requirements of Gaza’s population to be met without producing famine conditions.

The phrase that Israel’s closure administrators used among themselves to summarize their objective was, “No prosperity, no development, no humanitarian crisis.” By October 7, this policy had been in place for sixteen years, and a majority of Gaza’s population could not remember a time before it.

Jamie Stern-Weiner has summarized the effects:

The unemployment rate soared to “probably the highest in the world,” four-fifths of the population were forced to rely on humanitarian assistance, three-quarters became dependent on food aid, more than half faced “acute food insecurity,” one in ten children were stunted by malnutrition, and over 96 percent of potable water became unsafe for human consumption.

The head of the United Nations (UN) agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, observed in 2008 that “Gaza is on the threshold of becoming the first territory to be intentionally reduced to a state of abject destitution, with the knowledge, acquiescence and — some would say — encouragement of the international community.”

The UN warned in 2015 that the cumulative impact of this induced “humanitarian implosion” might render Gaza “unlivable” within a half-decade. Israeli military intelligence agreed.

As time went on, Israel under Netanyahu tried to turn the closure into a tool of coercive statecraft. When Hamas was being cooperative, the restrictions were minutely eased and Gazans’ misery would ever so slightly subside. When Hamas was recalcitrant, Israel would, so to speak, put the Palestinians on a more stringent diet.

But even in the most convivial moments of the Israel-Hamas relationship, conditions in Gaza were maintained at a level of deprivation that, anywhere else, would be considered catastrophic. In the period just prior to October 7, Gazans had electricity for only half the day. Eighty percent of the population relied on humanitarian relief for basic needs, 40 percent suffered from a “severe” lack of food, and 75 percent of the population lacked access to water fit for human consumption.

That was the bad news. The good news was that Israel had recently hinted it might permit repairs to Gaza’s water desalination plants — depending on how Hamas behaved.
Bismarck in Zion

It would be wrong to compare this situation to old-style, nineteenth-century colonialism. It was much worse than that. It was more like a grotesque parody of colonialism — “no prosperity, no development, no humanitarian crisis” — a cartoonishly malevolent version of the kind of foreign domination against which “wars of national liberation” have been fought by people on every continent and in every era — and by the most gruesome means.

One can debate this or that aspect of the academic left’s discourse about Israel as a settler-colonial state. But the colonial dynamic that lies at the root of Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians is not a matter of debate; it’s a fact of history, recognized as such not just by campus social-justice activists but by the leading figures of modern Zionism.

Vladimir Jabotinsky, the erudite and much misunderstood Zionist leader who posthumously became the founding father of the Israeli right (one of his closest aides, Benzion Netanyahu, was the father of the current prime minister) sought to drive home just this point in his famous 1923 essay “The Iron Wall.”

At the time, many on the Zionist left still clung to the pretense that Zionism posed no threat to the Palestinians. They dissembled in public about the movement’s ultimate aims — the creation of a state “as Jewish as England is English,” in the words of Chaim Weizmann — and, even in private, some of them professed to believe that the Jewish presence in Palestine would bring such wondrous economic blessings that the Palestinians themselves would someday be won over to the Zionist cause.

This combination of deception and self-deception put the whole Zionist venture at risk, Jabotinsky believed, and in “The Iron Wall” he set out, in exceptionally lucid and unforgiving prose, to strip away the Left’s illusions.

It’s worth quoting him at length:

My readers have a general idea of the history of colonization in other countries. I suggest that they consider all the precedents with which they are acquainted, and see whether there is one solitary instance of any colonization being carried on with the consent of the native population. There is no such precedent.

The native populations, civilized or uncivilized, have always stubbornly resisted the colonists, irrespective of whether they were civilized or savage.

And it made no difference whatever whether the colonists behaved decently or not. The companions of Cortez and Pizzaro or (as some people will remind us) our own ancestors under Joshua Ben Nun, behaved like brigands; but the Pilgrim Fathers, the first real pioneers of North America, were people of the highest morality, who did not want to do harm to anyone, least of all to the Red Indians, and they honestly believed that there was room enough in the prairies both for the Paleface and the Redskin. Yet the native population fought with the same ferocity against the good colonists as against the bad.

Every native population, civilized or not, regards its lands as its national home, of which it is the sole master, and it wants to retain that mastery always; it will refuse to admit not only new masters but even new partners or collaborators.

This is equally true of the Arabs. Our peace-mongers are trying to persuade us that the Arabs are either fools, whom we can deceive by masking our real aims, or that they are corrupt and can be bribed to abandon to us their claim to priority in Palestine, in return for cultural and economic advantages. I repudiate this conception of the Palestinian Arabs. Culturally they are five hundred years behind us, they have neither our endurance nor our determination; but they are just as good psychologists as we are, and their minds have been sharpened like ours by centuries of fine-spun logomachy.

We may tell them whatever we like about the innocence of our aims, watering them down and sweetening them with honeyed words to make them palatable, but they know what we want, as well as we know what they do not want. They feel at least the same instinctive jealous love of Palestine, as the old Aztecs felt for ancient Mexico, and the Sioux for their rolling Prairies.

To imagine, as our Arabophiles do, that they will voluntarily consent to the realization of Zionism in return for the moral and material conveniences which the Jewish colonist brings with him, is a childish notion, which has at bottom a kind of contempt for the Arab people; it means that they despise the Arab race, which they regard as a corrupt mob that can be bought and sold, and are willing to give up their fatherland for a good railway system.

There is no justification for such a belief. It may be that some individual Arabs take bribes. But that does not mean that the Arab people of Palestine as a whole will sell that fervent patriotism that they guard so jealously, and which even the Papuans will never sell. Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonized.

That is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing, and what they will persist in doing as long as there remains a solitary spark of hope that they will be able to prevent the transformation of “Palestine” into the “Land of Israel.”

What should the Zionists do, then, according to Jabotinsky? First, and most important, he urged the movement to build up its military strength — the “iron wall” of the essay’s title.

Second, under the shield of its armed forces, the Zionists should speed ahead with the colonization of Palestine, against the will of the indigenous Arab majority, by securing a maximum of Jewish immigration in a minimum span of time.

Once a Jewish majority had become a fait accompli (in 1923, Jews still made up only about 11 percent of Palestine’s population), it would only be a matter of time, Jabotinsky thought, before it finally penetrated the minds of the Arabs that the Jews were not going to be chased out of Palestine. Then they would see that they had no better option than to come to terms with Zionism.

And at that point, Jabotinsky concluded, “I am convinced that we Jews will be found ready to give them satisfactory guarantees” — guarantees of extensive civil, political, even national rights, within a Jewish state — “so that both peoples can live together in peace, like good neighbors.”

Whatever one thinks of the morality — or the sincerity — of Jabotinsky’s strategy in “The Iron Wall,” as Realpolitik it made eminent sense. It started from a realistic appraisal of the problem: that the Palestinians could not be expected to give up the fight to preserve their homeland. It proposed a program of focused coercive violence to frustrate their resistance. And it held out a set of assurances safeguarding key Palestinian interests in the context of an overall settlement in which the main Zionist objective would be achieved.

Whether this Bismarckian program could have “worked” (from the Zionist perspective) will never be known, however. For in the years that followed, a very different sort of scenario gained prominence in the thinking of the Zionist leadership.

This was what was known as “transfer”: a euphemism meaning the “voluntary” or involuntary physical removal of the Palestinian population from the “Land of Israel.”

In 1923, when he wrote “The Iron Wall,” Jabotinsky was firmly opposed to transfer. “I consider it utterly impossible to eject the Arabs from Palestine,” he wrote. “There will always be two nations in Palestine.” He maintained this stance quite adamantly until the final years of his life, holding firm even as support for the concept steadily spread through both the mainstream Zionist left and among his own increasingly radicalized right-wing followers.

The Israeli historian Benny Morris chronicled this doctrinal shift in his The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem. He summarized it this way:

As Arab opposition, including violent resistance, to Zionism grew in the 1920s and 1930s, and as this opposition resulted in periodic British clampdowns on Jewish immigration, a consensus or near-consensus formed among the Zionist leaders around the idea of transfer as the natural, efficient and even moral solution to the demographic dilemma.

Thus, by 1948, Morris concluded, “transfer was in the air.”
We Will Attack and Smite the Enemy

In the early morning hours of Friday, April 9, 1948, during the conflict that Israelis call the War of Independence, 132 armed men — mostly from the Irgun, the right-wing paramilitary group that Jabotinsky had led until his death in 1940, but also a few others from a splinter-group offshoot called Lehi — entered a Palestinian village near Jerusalem with the intention of capturing it and requisitioning supplies from its inhabitants.

Six months earlier, the UN had announced its decision to partition Palestine into a Jewish state, which was to be allocated 55 percent of the territory, and a Palestinian Arab state, on the remaining 45 percent. (At the time, there were about 600,000 Jews and 1.3 million Arabs in Palestine.)

The Zionists were delighted to gain such a prize, while the Palestinians — in shock at the prospect of having more than half their homeland torn away from them — rejected the plan in its totality. In response to the announcement, a wave of civil strife between Jews and Arabs erupted, shortly escalating into all-out war.

Amid this violence, the village in question, Deir Yassin, had been faithfully respecting a truce with nearby Jewish settlements. “There was not even one incident between Deir Yassin and the Jews,” according to the local commander of the Haganah, the mainstream Zionist militia that would soon become the core of the newly created Israel Defense Forces (IDF).

Despite this, the rightist paramilitaries had made a decision to carry out the “liquidation of all the men in the village and any other force that opposed us, whether it be old people, women, or children,” according to an Irgun officer, Ben-Zion Cohen, who participated in the operation’s planning. The stated reason for this decision was that it would “show the Arabs what happens” when Jews were united and determined to fight.

(Cohen’s recollections of the operation, as well as those of several other Deir Yassin veterans, were recorded and deposited with the Jabotinsky Institute archives in Tel Aviv in the mid-1950s, where they were discovered decades later by an Israeli journalist.)

That morning, the inhabitants of Deir Yassin awoke to the sound of grenades and gunfire. Some began fleeing in their nightclothes; others scrambled for their weapons or took refuge in the homes of neighbors. The attackers’ initial battle plan quickly fell apart amid equipment failures and communication problems, and they took unexpectedly heavy casualties from the local men armed with rifles. After a few hours of fighting, a decision was made to call a retreat.

Cowering inside their homes at that moment were the Palestinian families who’d been unable to flee in time. As soon as the paramilitary commanders ordered the retreat, these villagers became the targets of the Jewish fighters’ frustrations.

What happened next was recounted by survivors to British police investigators from the Palestine Mandate’s civil administration. Twenty years later, the records of the investigation were obtained by two journalists, Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, for their bestselling 1972 book, O Jerusalem!

The survivors described scenes like the following.

Fahimi Zeidan, a twelve-year-old girl, recalled the door to her house being blasted open as she and her family hid along with members of a neighboring family. The paramilitaries took them outside. “The Jews ordered all our family to line up against the wall and they started shooting us.” After they shot an already wounded man, “one of his daughters screamed, they shot her too. They then called my brother Mahmoud and shot him in our presence, and when my mother screamed and bent over my brother (she was carrying my little sister Khadra who was still being breastfed) they shot my mother too.”

Haleem Eid, a thirty-year-old woman, testified that she saw “a man shoot a bullet into the neck of my sister Salhiyeh who was nine months pregnant. Then he cut her stomach open with a butcher’s knife.” When another village woman, Aiesch Radwas, tried to extricate the fetus from the dead mother’s womb, she was shot, too.

Zeinab Akkel recalled that she tried to save her younger brother’s life by offering the Jewish attackers all her money (about $400). One of them took the money and “then he just knocked my brother over and shot him in the head with five bullets.”

Sixteen-year-old Naaneh Khalil said she saw a man take “a kind of sword and slash my neighbor Jamil Hish from head to toe then do the same thing on the steps to my house to my cousin Fathi.”

Meir Pa’il, a Jewish Agency intelligence official who was on the scene, later described the sight of Irgun and Lehi fighters running frantically through the village, “their eyes glazed over, full of lust for murder.”

When some Irgunists discovered a house that had earlier been the source of fatal gunfire for one of their fallen comrades, they assaulted it, and nine civilians emerged in surrender. One of the paramilitaries shouted: “This is for Yiftach!” and machine-gunned them all to death.

Prisoners were loaded onto trucks and driven through the streets of Jerusalem in a “victory parade.” After a group of male villagers was paraded in this way, they were unloaded from the trucks and executed. Meir Pa’il recalled photographing roughly twenty-five men shot in firing squad formation.

According to Haganah intelligence documents, some of the villagers were taken to a nearby paramilitary base, where Lehi fighters killed one of the babies and then, when its mother fainted in shock, finished off the mother as well.

One of the British officers from the Criminal Investigation Division attached the following note to the investigation file:

I interviewed many of the women folk in order to glean some information on any atrocities committed in Deir Yassin but the majority of those women are very shy and reluctant to relate their experiences especially in matters concerning sexual assault and they need great coaxing before they will divulge any information. The recording of statements is hampered also by the hysterical state of the women who often break down many times whilst the statement is being recorded.

There is, however, no doubt that many sexual atrocities were committed by the attacking Jews. Many young school girls were raped and later slaughtered. Old women were also molested. One story is current concerning a case in which a young girl was literally torn in two. Many infants were also butchered and killed. I also saw one old woman who gave her age as one hundred and four who had been severely beaten about the head by rifle butts. Women had bracelets torn from their arms and rings from their fingers and parts of some of the women’s ears were severed in order to remove earrings.”

The next day, when Haganah forces inspected the village, one of them was shocked to find Jewish guerrillas “eating with gusto next to the bodies.” A doctor who accompanied the detachment noted that “it was clear that the attackers had gone from house to house and shot the people at close range,” adding: “I had been a doctor in the German Army for five years in World War I, but I never saw such a horrifying spectacle.”

The commander of the Jewish youth brigade sent to assist in the cleanup operation entered a number of the houses and reported finding several bodies “sexually mutilated.” A female brigade member went into shock upon discovering the corpse of a pregnant woman whose abdomen appeared to have been crushed.

The cleanup crew burned and buried the bodies in a quarry, later filling it with dirt.

As they did so, a radio broadcast could be heard in Jerusalem delivering the following message:

Accept my congratulations on this splendid act of conquest.

Convey my regards to all the commanders and soldiers. We shake your hands.

We are all proud of the excellent leadership and the fighting spirit in this great attack.

We stand to attention in memory of the slain.

We lovingly shake the hands of the wounded.

Tell the soldiers: you have made history in Israel with your attack and your conquest. Continue thus until victory.

As in Deir Yassin, so everywhere, we will attack and smite the enemy. God, God, Thou hast chosen us for conquest.

The voice delivering the message belonged to the Irgun’s chief commander — the future Nobel Peace Prize winner and prime minister of Israel, Menachem Begin.
Saying No to Yes

“More than any single occurrence in my memory of that difficult period, it was Deir Yassin that stood out in all its awful and intentional fearsomeness,” the late Palestinian American literary scholar Edward Said, who was twelve at the time and living in Cairo, later recalled — “the stories of rape, of children with their throats slit, mothers disemboweled, and the like. They gripped the imagination, as they were designed to do, and they impressed a young boy many miles away with the mystery of such bloodthirsty and seemingly gratuitous violence against Palestinians whose only crime seemed to be that they were there.”

A different memory of Deir Yassin was conveyed by Yaacov Meridor, a former Irgun commander, during a 1949 debate in the Israeli Knesset: to a disapproving mention of the massacre by a left-wing deputy, he retorted: “Thanks to Deir Yassin we won the war, sir!”

Because of the wide publicity it received, Deir Yassin contributed disproportionately to the terrified panic that spurred the Palestinians’ flight in 1948–49. But it was only one of several dozen massacres perpetrated by Jewish forces, most of which had been the work of the mainstream Haganah/IDF. In a few cases, the IDF appears to have matched or even exceeded the depravity of the Irgun in Deir Yassin (as, for example, at al-Dawayima in October 1948).
Palestinian refugees fleeing in October–November 1948. (Wikimedia Commons)

The radicalized heirs of Jabotinsky delighted in reminding the Left of these details. “How many Deir Yassins have you [the Left] been responsible for?” another rightist deputy interjected. “If you don’t know, you can ask the Minister of Defense.” (The minister of defense was David Ben-Gurion, who’d been kept abreast of the atrocities perpetrated by his troops during the war.)

The result was that, by mid-1949, the majority of the Palestinian population had fled for their lives or been expelled from their homes by Jewish forces and were living now as refugees beyond the borders of Palestine. Their abandoned villages would be bulldozed, and they would never be allowed to return. Israel, meanwhile, had expanded its control in Palestine from the 55 percent of the land awarded to it in 1947 by the UN to the 78 percent of the 1949 armistice lines.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the Arab states and Palestinian organizations were unanimous in declaring Israel an illegitimate “Zionist entity” that would be dismantled and destroyed when Palestine was finally liberated. Until then, Arab governments were to have no contacts with Israel of any kind — even purely economic — on penalty of ostracism from the rest of the Arab world. This stance was affirmed and reaffirmed, year after year, in speeches, diplomatic texts, and Arab League communiqués.

But Israel spent these years patiently tending to its iron wall, so that by 1967, when a second general Arab-Israeli war arrived, the wall was so impregnable that Israel was able to defeat the combined forces of all its adversaries in less than a week, conquering vast expanses of Egyptian, Jordanian, and Syrian territory.

From that moment on, the rules of the conflict changed. There was only one feasible way for the Arab states to regain their conquered territories, and that was by coming to terms with the conqueror. Moshe Dayan, Israel’s defense minister, captured the essence of the situation in a laconic remark made three days after the war’s end. “We are quite pleased with what we have now. If the Arabs desire any change, they should call us.”

With the brute physics of military compulsion now forcing the Arabs to rethink their long-held attitude toward the Jewish state, Israel had a unique opportunity to finally pursue the Bismarckian type of settlement that Jabotinsky had advocated fifty years earlier (albeit in a very different context).

But for reasons originating in both the traumas of Jewish history and the political circumstances of the post-1967 world, Israel was unable to do it. Since the war, its political culture — on the Left and the Right, among the secular as well as the religious — had become suffused with a messianic belief in the imperative of Jewish territorial expansion and the illegitimacy of territorial compromise. Israelis clung to a concept of “absolute security” (in Kissinger’s sense) that over the years would drive them into a series of military disasters, most notably the 1982 “incursion” into Lebanon, which was supposed to last a few weeks but ended up dragging on for almost two decades. And a grossly distorted mental image of Israel’s Arab neighbors was cultivated in the nation’s collective psyche, based on the self-fulfilling prophecy of eternal enmity driven by a timeless hatred of Jews.

The mentality was acutely captured by Joshua Cohen in his 2021 novel, The Netanyahus, a fictionalized account of a 1960 sojourn by Benzion Netanyahu and his young family (including a teenage Binyamin) to a bucolic American college town for a faculty job interview.

At one point in the book, a fellow Israeli academic assesses the work of Netanyahu père, who was a scholar of medieval Jewish history:

[There] comes a point in nearly every text he produces where it emerges that the true phenomenon under discussion is not anti-Semitism in Early Medieval Lorraine or Late Medieval Iberia but rather anti-Semitism in twentieth-century Nazi Germany; and suddenly a description of how a specific tragedy affected a specific diaspora becomes a diatribe about the general tragedy of the Jewish Diaspora, and how that Diaspora must end — as if history should not describe, but prescribe — in the founding of the State of Israel.

I am not certain whether this politicization of Jewish suffering would have the same impact on American academia as it had on ours, but, in any milieu, connecting Crusader-era pogroms with the Iberian Inquisitions with the Nazi Reich must be adjudged as exceeding the bounds of sloppy analogy, to assert a cyclicity of Jewish history that approaches dangerously close to the mystical.

The paradoxical result of all this was that the more powerful Israel became, the more power it felt it needed, and the more concessions it extracted from its enemies, the more concessions it required. Jabotinsky had advised the Zionist movement to build up its military strength in order to frustrate its adversaries’ attacks — and Israel became quite adept at this. But absent external duress, it could never bring itself to clinch the culminating step of Jabotinsky’s Bismarckian program: the ultimate accommodation with the defeated enemy.

Put another way, Israel couldn’t take yes for an answer.

In February 1971, Anwar Sadat, the new president of Egypt, the largest and most powerful Arab state, became the first Arab leader to declare his willingness to sign a peace treaty with Israel. He would do so, he said, if Israel committed to withdraw from Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula and agree to a negotiated resolution of the Palestinian issue.

Eventually, Sadat’s persistence in seeking an agreement with Israel paid off: through the good offices of Jimmy Carter, an Egyptian-Israeli agreement on the terms of a peace treaty was signed at Camp David in 1978 — for which Sadat shared the 1978 Nobel Peace Prize — and Israel handed back Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula in stages, ending in 1982.

But it would take eight years, a region-wide war, a US-Soviet standoff that brought the world close to nuclear Armageddon, and a spectacular diplomatic gesture on Sadat’s part — his astonishing 1977 visit to Jerusalem, which led directly to his assassination by Islamic extremists four years later — to overcome Israeli obstructionism and make an Egyptian-Israeli agreement a reality.

For two years following his February 1971 initiative, Sadat fruitlessly tried to advance his peace proposal in the face of Israel’s contemptuous rejection. (In those days, the Israeli sociologist Uri Ben-Eliezer writes, Sadat was still “depicted in Israel as an ignorant Egyptian peasant and a target for mockery.”) By spring 1973, he’d decided that his diplomatic avenues were exhausted, and he resolved to go to war to recover Egypt’s lost territory.

Sadat knew that Egypt couldn’t reconquer the territories in battle. His plan, in essence, was a barroom brawler’s stratagem: he would start a fight with his stronger opponent, quickly get in a few good blows, and then count on onlookers — in this case the United States and the Soviet Union — to step in and break up the scuffle before too much damage could be done. By creating a Cold War crisis, he intended to force the United States, the only power with any leverage over Israel, to drag the Israelis to the negotiating table.

His brilliantly executed surprise attack of October 6, 1973, secretly coordinated with Syria, served its purpose. It caught Israel unaware and unprepared, triggering a national crisis of confidence whose reverberations would be felt throughout Israeli society for years to come. It led to a US-Soviet confrontation that came close to the point of nuclear escalation. And it forced the United States to begin the process of nudging Israel in the direction of a settlement.

Looking back on this sequence of events in his memoirs decades later, the Israeli elder statesman Shimon Peres, not wanting to cast judgment on the decisions of his former colleagues (he’d been a junior minister in government in 1971–73), wrote cautiously about Sadat’s rejected prewar peace terms: “It is hard to judge today whether peace with Sadat might have been possible at that time on the terms that were eventually agreed to five years later.”

But other officials from that era have been less reserved. “I truly believe that it was a historic mistake” to have spurned Sadat’s 1971 overture, wrote Eytan Bentsur, a top aide to then foreign minister Abba Eban, in a judgment now echoed by many Israeli and American analysts. “History will judge if an opportunity had not been missed — one which would have prevented the Yom Kippur War and foreshadowed the peace with Egypt” at Camp David.
“Do Not Be Fooled by Wily Sadat”

If Sadat’s 1971 proposal was killed by negatives quietly conveyed via confidential diplomatic channels, it also fell victim, in the public sphere, to a deeply entrenched mental tic in Western discourse on the Middle East: the reflex of construing any given Arab peace proposal as a trick secretly designed to achieve not peace but the destruction of Israel.

How a peace initiative can even be a trick, and what anyone could hope to gain by announcing a “trick peace proposal,” are questions that lack obvious answers. But to this day, the legend of the “fake Arab peace initiative” continues to exert a powerful psychological hold over many Western and Israeli observers.

For example, shortly after Sadat publicized his 1971 peace offer, the diplomatic historian A. J. P. Taylor — the most famous British historian of his time — warned in a newspaper commentary that the Egyptian leader was attempting an elaborate ruse. “Do not be fooled by wily Sadat,” Taylor cautioned. The telltale clue that exposed Sadat’s real intentions, according to the scholar, was his insistence on the return of all occupied Egyptian territory, including the strategically important city of Sharm e-Shaikh.

Taylor was certain that Sharm el-Shaikh was “a place of no use or importance to Egypt” aside from its dominating position at the mouth of the Gulf of Aqaba. If Sadat wanted it back so badly, that could only mean one thing: he wasn’t really seeking peace; he “merely wants to be in a position to strangle Israel again.”

Obviously, history has not been kind to that conjecture. Fifty-two years later, Sharm el-Shaikh is an upscale resort town, the jewel of Egypt’s tourism industry. An Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty has been in force for more than four decades and has never been breached, by either side. Israel, needless to say, remains unstrangled.

The mentality of Israel’s Western publicists grew more and more detached from reality in this way, with world events interpreted through the increasingly distorted lens of Zionist demonology. A 1973 editorial in what was then the largest-circulation Jewish newspaper in the United States, New York Jewish Week, is illustrative. At that moment, a UN Middle East peace conference was getting underway in Geneva, and there had recently been a spate of press commentary cautiously suggesting that perhaps Sadat might really want peace with Israel after all.

The editorialists of Jewish Week had a question for such naïfs: Had they learned nothing from Hitler?

The Arab leaders have told us that their aims are quite limited. They say they merely want to regain the territories that Israel conquered in 1967. Then they will be satisfied and recognize Israel, to live in peace forever after.

Had Chamberlain and Daladier read “Mein Kampf” and heeded its warnings, they would have known that Hitler was dissembling [about] his real aims.

Were the gullible editors and statesmen who believe the Arab protestations of limited war objectives to read the unrepudiated war aims of the Arab leaders who now profess moderation, they would know that the Yom Kippur War and the subsequent Arab peace offensive were right out of the Munich betrayal.

With the benefit of hindsight and the enormous condescension of posterity, it’s all too easy to laugh at this kind of hysteria. Surely, after fifty years, the jury is in, and we can now say with certainty that no Middle Eastern Czechoslovakia has fallen victim to the battalions of the Egyptian Wehrmacht.

But exactly the same reasoning and rhetoric are routinely deployed today, only now with Hamas replacing Anwar Sadat’s Egypt as the epicenter of the looming Fourth Reich — a dream-logic montage of history in which an interchangeable chorus of Hitlerian Arabs “professes moderation” at an uncannily Munich-like Geneva (or is it a Geneva-like Oslo?) in order to dupe gullible Westerners about their genocidal intentions.

In fairness to the editorialists of Jewish Week, it should be recalled that Sadat — whose saintly memory as a peacemaker is venerated today by everyone in official Washington, from earnest White House speechwriters to flag-pinned congressional yahoos — routinely indulged in antisemitic invective of a virulence that would never be heard from the top leaders of Hamas today.

In a 1972 speech, he called the Jews “a nation of liars and traitors, contrivers of plots, a people born for deeds of treachery” and said that “the most splendid thing that the Prophet Mohammad did was to drive them out of the whole of the Arabian peninsula.” For good measure, he promised that he would “never conduct direct negotiations” with the Jews. (As seen, he soon did just that.)

Nor did Sadat hesitate to verbally evoke the “destruction of Israel” when it suited him; he did so routinely, including in a speech to his ruling Arab Socialist Union party just four months after his February 1971 peace initiative. In that June address, he spoke of his eagerness for the coming battle to destroy the “Zionist intrusion.”

There were two contrasting ways of interpreting this sort of rhetoric from Sadat. On the one hand, there was the approach taken by the editorialists of the English-language Jerusalem Post — a publication deeply in thrall to the legend of the Arab peace fake-out — who gleefully declared that Sadat’s speech had “pulled off the mask of the peace-seeker, to show the true face of the warmonger.” His peace initiative of four months earlier had thereby been exposed as “a calculated fraud.”

But how did the editorialists know it was the February peace proposal that was the fraud and not the June war threat? And if the peace proposal was a “calculated fraud,” why would Sadat expose his own calculated fraud? The Arab-peace-fake-out theory has always had this tendency to run itself into a logical ditch.

An alternative interpretation could be found in a rival Israeli newspaper, Al HaMishmar, the organ of the small, far-left Mapam party, which proposed a much more believable explanation for Sadat’s bellicose rhetoric. The paper simply pointed out that his oration had been an election speech, delivered at a party conference. Most likely, the paper suggested — in the skeptical spirit of clear-eyed Realpolitik — it had just been a bit of electioneering.

Al HaMishmar was right, of course, and the Jerusalem Post was wrong. Sadat’s peace proposal was not a fraud, and the theory of the Sadat peace fake-out had no truth to it.

But more importantly, it was the opposite of the truth.

Recall that Sadat’s position was that he was willing to make peace with Israel, but only on the condition that Israel withdraw from the occupied territories and accept a just solution to the Palestinian question. To Arab audiences, he promised again and again that he would always insist on both — that he would never stoop to anything so dishonorable, so treacherous, as making a separate peace with Israel that failed to address the plight of the suffering Palestinians.

However, in the end, that’s exactly what he did. At Camp David in 1978, when he found himself unable to extract any substantive concessions from Israel on the Palestine file, he yielded to the superior force of Israel’s iron wall and signed an agreement that restored Egypt’s lost territory while offering little more than a fig-leaf gesture toward the Palestinians. (The agreement pledged that Egypt and Israel would continue negotiations on Palestinian “autonomy” under Israeli sovereignty; the brief trickle of pro forma negotiations that followed quickly petered out, as expected.)
President Jimmy Carter shaking hands with Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin at the signing of the Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty at the White House, 1979. (Wikimedia Commons)

The defection of Egypt, the strongest Arab state, from the Arab coalition was a historic disaster for the Palestinian movement, from which it arguably never recovered.

Which means that if Sadat had, in fact, been harboring any dark thoughts in the back of his mind when he put forward his 1971 peace proposal, what they amounted to was not a secret plan to bring about the destruction of the Jewish state, as erroneously proclaimed by Taylor and the American Jewish press and a cavalcade of witting and unwitting propagandists from the pages of Reader’s Digest to the platforms of Meet the Press.

What Sadat was actually concealing was his shamefaced readiness to countenance the defeat of the Palestinian cause — which is how it came to be that Menachem Begin, thirty years after proclaiming, “As in Deir Yassin, so everywhere, we will attack and smite the enemy,” and Sadat, seven years after declaring that he would “never conduct direct negotiations” with Israel but would strive to bring about its “complete destruction,” could stand together on the White House lawn and warmly shake hands while a beaming Jimmy Carter looked on.

That was Realpolitik in action.
“The Language of Lies and Treason”

At that moment, the man who would become the moving spirit behind the creation of Hamas — a forty-three-year-old quadriplegic Gazan named Ahmed Yassin — was on the cusp of an astonishing political ascendancy.

At the time of the Camp David Accords, politics in Israeli-occupied Gaza revolved around two poles. On the Left, there was a constellation of forces grouped around the physician Haidar Abdel-Shafi, a former communist, and his local branch of the Palestinian Red Crescent Society. These included the feminist and labor leader Yusra al-Barbari of the General Union of Palestinian Women; Fayez Abu Rahmeh of the Gaza Bar Association, which aided Gazan political prisoners; and Mousa Saba, the head of the Gaza chapter of the YMCA (Young Men’s Christian Association), which hosted summer camps and discussion seminars for Palestinians of all faiths. Abdel-Shafi, who’d been a founding member of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in the 1960s, was an early proponent of a two-state settlement in which an independent Palestinian state would coexist alongside Israel.

The other pole centered on the Gaza branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, which had been founded in 1946. Yassin, a pious schoolteacher with a thin voice who’d been paralyzed in a sports accident as a child, joined the Brotherhood early on and in the 1960s began attracting a devoted local following for his charismatic lay preaching.

At the end of the 1960s, the local Brotherhood was at a low ebb, its membership no more than a few dozen. But over the course of the 1970s, Yassin and his band of followers would embark on an energetic organizing campaign whose institutional expression was what they called the “Mujama al-Islamiya” (the Islamic “Center,” or “Collective”), a network of religious schools, community centers, children’s nurseries, and the like.

Throughout this process of institution-building, Yassin and his followers rigorously kept their distance from anti-Israel violence — or indeed nationalist agitation of any kind. Jean-Pierre Filiu, a French Arabist scholar and author of a magisterial history of Gaza, writes that Yassin “adhered to the Brotherhood’s moralizing line that prioritized spiritual revival over active militancy.” In Yassin’s view, “the Palestinians had lost Palestine because they were not sufficiently Muslim — it was only by returning to the sources of their faith and to their daily duties as Muslims that they would ultimately be able to recover their land and their rights.”

In a significant political gesture, the Israeli military governor in Gaza attended the 1973 inauguration ceremony of the Jura al-Shams mosque, the central hub and showpiece of the Mujama. As late as 1986, an Israeli governor of Gaza, General Yitzhak Segev, could explain that Israel was giving “financial aid to Islamic groups via mosques and religious schools in order to help create a force that would stand against the leftist forces which support the PLO.”

Occasionally, these connections attracted accusations from PLO partisans that Yassin and his men were puppets or stooges of the Israelis. But the Islamists’ tacit nonaggression pact with the occupier was not the product of manipulation; it reflected a coincidence of interests — an expression of Realpolitik on both sides.

What really drove Yassin and his followers, above all else, was their vision of “Islamization from below”: the creation of a society in which every individual could choose to be a good Muslim and be surrounded by institutions that would nurture that choice. That was the essence of the Muslim Brotherhood’s ideology everywhere, and like the US religious right, its exponents were highly adaptable when it came to the means by which to advance it. American fundamentalists might alternately burn Beatles records or sponsor Christian rock festivals, build suburban megachurches or preach with long hair in hippie conventicles. The Islamists of Gaza would approach their mission with a similar flexibility.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the ethos of the Mujama was defined by a vehement rejection of all politics (“the language of lies and treason,” they liked to say) in favor of priorities like family, education, and a return to traditional mores. Hence the Islamists’ adamancy about abstaining from the national struggle — a choice that had the added benefit of shielding their project from harassment by the Israeli military authorities.

The men of the Mujama were not above using violence against other Palestinians in pursuit of their objectives: in a moment of hubris amid the wave of Arab revulsion at Sadat’s peace treaty, Yassin’s forces tried to take on the local left — “the communists,” “the atheists,” as they contemptuously called all their left-wing rivals — by running a candidate against Abdel-Shafi in elections to the presidency of the Red Crescent Society.

When the Islamist candidate lost in a landslide, “several hundred Islamist demonstrators expressed their anger on 7 January 1980 by ransacking the Red Crescent offices, before moving on to cafés, cinemas, and drinking establishments in the town center,” Filiu reports. (The Israeli army conspicuously refrained from intervening.) In the 1980s, Gaza would be the scene of a vicious and at times violent campaign by the Islamists to impose “modest” dress on women.

It was only after the outbreak of the First Intifada at the very end of 1987 — a spontaneous and massive popular uprising over which PLO cadres quickly assumed leadership — that Yassin overruled his divided advisers and made a strategic decision to join the struggle against Israel.

Amid the explosion of mass strikes and boycotts, stone-throwing demonstrations and confrontations with Israeli soldiers, the men of the Mujama saw which way the wind was blowing. They had a product to sell, and it was obvious what their target market wanted. In contradiction to everything they had preached over the previous decade, they began issuing anonymous leaflets calling on the faithful to resist the occupation. Soon they started signing the leaflets “the Islamic Resistance Movement,” whose Arabic initials spell “Hamas.”

Almost overnight, the notorious quietists of Gaza’s religious right, once ridiculed and condemned by Palestinian nationalists for sitting out the anti-Israel struggle, transformed themselves into armed guerrillas.

By the time of the 1993 Oslo Accords, they had become the unlikely standard-bearers of uncompromising Palestinian nationalism.
Arafat Says Uncle

If the Oslo Accords signing ceremony in 1993 looked like a restaging of the earlier handshake on the White House lawn — a new production of an old play, with Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin in the Sadat and Begin roles, and Bill Clinton typecast as the new Jimmy Carter — that was not the only resemblance between Camp David and Oslo.

Both agreements were by-products of Israel’s congenital inability to take yes for an answer.

If the “yes” in Egypt’s case came in 1971, when Sadat first signaled his willingness to recognize Israel, the “yes” of Yasser Arafat’s PLO was first delivered in December 1973, just before the Geneva peace conference, when Arafat sent a secret message to Washington:

The Palestine Liberation Organization in no way seeks the destruction of Israel, but accepts its existence as a sovereign state; the PLO’s main aim at the Geneva conference will be the creation of a Palestinian state out of the “Palestinian part of Jordan” [i.e., the West Bank and East Jerusalem] plus Gaza.

But Arafat’s private declaration brought no change in the PLO’s formal, public position: officially, the group remained committed, in the words of the 1968 PLO charter, to “the elimination of Zionism in Palestine.”

The reason for this discrepancy stemmed from the fact that “recognizing Israel” meant something very different for the Palestinians than it had for Egypt.

Sadat’s peace initiative had proposed trading recognition of Israel for a full restoration of Egypt’s territorial integrity. For the Palestinians, by contrast, recognition of Israel was tantamount in and of itself to a signing away of their right to 78 percent of their homeland’s territory. What for Egypt had been merely a humbling political concession to a regional military rival was, for the Palestinians, an existential act of renunciation.

Arafat believed the Palestinian masses would nevertheless support such a sacrifice — but only as part of a historic compromise in which recognition of the loss of 78 percent of Palestine would be compensated by assurances that the remaining 22 percent would become a Palestine state.

He therefore adopted what might be called his “American strategy.” For the next fifteen years, Arafat chased the prize of a dialogue with the United States, hoping to strike a deal: in exchange for a formal, public PLO commitment to recognize Israel, Washington would publicly commit to work for Palestinian statehood and apply the necessary pressure on Israel.

The PLO leader pitched this concept to any American who would listen. In a 1976 conversation with a visiting US senator in Beirut, Arafat “said that before he was able to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist as an independent state he must have something to show his people,” a US embassy dispatch reported to State Department headquarters in Washington. “This something could be Israeli withdrawal of a ‘few kilometers’ in the Gaza Strip and on the West Bank,” with a UN force taking control of the evacuated territory.

Israel acted quickly to foil Arafat’s strategy. In 1975, it extracted from Secretary of State Henry Kissinger a signed memorandum of agreement in which Kissinger pledged that the United States would not “negotiate with the Palestine Liberation Organization so long as the Palestine Liberation Organization does not recognize Israel’s right to exist.” By making PLO recognition of Israel a precondition for dialogue with the United States, the agreement ruled out any scenario in which recognition might be granted in exchange for US commitments.

Kissinger had no qualms about signing away his ability to talk to the PLO. He was convinced that nothing could come of such talks — not because the Palestinians were rejectionists, but because the Israelis were. “Once [the PLO] are in the peace process,” he told a meeting of US Middle East ambassadors in June 1976, “they’ll raise all the issues the Israelis can’t handle” — the issues of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem.

According to Kissinger, anyone foolish enough to think a US administration could use its leverage to force Israel to concede on those issues “totally underestimates what it involves in taking on the [Israel] lobby. They never hit you on the issue; you have to fight ten other issues — your credibility, everything.” In short, “We cannot deliver the minimum demands of the PLO, so why talk to them?”

As soon as Kissinger’s memorandum was signed, Israel’s fixers and propagandists went to work transforming it from a mere understanding between foreign ministers into a sacrosanct totem of domestic politics, to which every ambitious US politician had to genuflect. In the 1980 presidential election, all four major candidates — Ted Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, John Anderson, and Ronald Reagan — tried to outdo one another in anathematizing the PLO and promising not to talk to it.

This time the ideological Wurlitzer had to be cranked up to eleven: it wasn’t enough to portray the PLO as a group that currently rejected Israel’s existence (which, if anything, might serve as an argument in favor of US contacts with the group — to try to persuade it to change its stance).

Rather, the PLO had to be depicted as incapable of accepting Israel’s existence, or coexisting with Jews at all. In the popular phrase of the time, endlessly repeated or paraphrased by ostensibly factual news organizations like the Associated Press and the New York Times, the PLO was an organization “sworn to Israel’s destruction.” Or, as Exodus author Leon Uris — the Homer of American Zionism, its bard and ur-mythologist — put it in a 1976 open letter: the PLO was “emotionally and constitutionally bound to the liquidation of Jewish existence in the Middle East.”

Top US officials were forced to ritually repeat this fiction — that the PLO was bent on Israel’s destruction — even though they knew firsthand that it wasn’t true. “We have to consider what the parties’ position is,” Jimmy Carter’s secretary of state, Edmund Muskie, said in June 1980, defending the United States’ increasingly isolated stance opposing PLO involvement in peace talks, “and the PLO’s position is that it is not interested in a negotiated settlement with Israel. It is interested only in Israel’s extinction.”

Meanwhile, privately, the CIA was telling the State Department that, far from refusing to recognize Israel, the PLO was internally debating what to demand in exchange for recognition: “Despite efforts by Fatah moderates [such as Arafat] to convince the rest of the [PLO] leadership that a dialogue with the US entails sufficient long range benefits to justify [recognizing Israel], the PLO leadership remains largely convinced that it must demand more than just talks with the US before giving up what it considers to be its only major ‘card’ in the negotiating process.”
Prime Minister Ehud Barak of Israel and Chairman Yasser Arafat of the Palestinian Authority shake hands at a trilateral meeting at the US ambassador’s residence in Oslo, Norway, November 1999. (Wikimedia Commons)

Like A. J. P. Taylor’s musings about Anwar Sadat, the assessments of the PLO that prevailed in that era have aged poorly. Far from proving “emotionally and constitutionally bound to the liquidation of Jewish existence in the Middle East,” the PLO today not only recognizes Israel, it has a leader, Mahmoud Abbas, whose policy of “security coordination” with the occupation authorities is considered so indispensable to the Israeli army that the country’s lobbyists and diplomats have to periodically remind confused right-wing Republicans that they actually want the United States to keep funding the Palestinian security forces.

Abbas, whose endless concessions to Israel have consigned him to political irrelevance among his own people, has spent the past decade begging for a NATO occupation of the West Bank — an odd way to go about pursuing the “liquidation of Jewish existence in the Middle East.”

Finally, in 1988, Arafat caved. In exile in Tunisia following the PLO’s bloody expulsion from Lebanon, he pushed the Palestinian National Council (PNC) for a unilateral recognition of Israel with no assurance that any movement toward a Palestinian state would be forthcoming. In his memoirs, then Secretary of State George Shultz gleefully summed up the episode this way: “Arafat finally said ‘Uncle.’”

Israel had at last received its “yes” from the Palestinians, signed, witnessed, and notarized. But it had no effect whatsoever on either the United States or the Israeli attitude toward Palestinian statehood.

More than thirty years later, the Palestinian decision of 1988 — which called for peace between an Israel on 78 percent of the land and a Palestinian state on 22 percent — remains an offer on the table, one that no Israeli government has ever expressed a willingness to touch.

Had Arafat stopped there, the Palestinians, in diplomatic terms, would have been positioned as advantageously as could be expected given the circumstances.

Instead, he made a tragic, historic error. He went further than “yes.”

In 1992, fearful of being sidelined from the post–Gulf War flurry of Middle East diplomacy, Arafat secretly authorized back-channel talks in Oslo with representatives of the newly elected Israeli government of Yitzhak Rabin, in the course of which he agreed to concessions that, once made public, were met with outrage and disbelief by the most alert Palestinian observers.

In the Oslo Accords, Arafat not only reaffirmed the PLO’s recognition of Israel without any reciprocal Israeli recognition of Palestinian statehood — or even any mention of the possibility of statehood — he conceded to Israel a veto over Palestinian statehood (“The PLO . . . declares that all outstanding issues relating to permanent status will be resolved through negotiations”).

Not only did Arafat renounce the use of force against Israel — unilaterally, with no reciprocation — and agree to suppress resistance to the occupation on Israel’s behalf, he did so with no commitment from the occupiers to stop confiscating Palestinian land to expand Jewish settlements, roads, or military installations.

The Palestinian-American historian Rashid Khalidi has called Arafat’s move “a resounding, historic mistake, one with grave consequences for the Palestinian people.” Edward Said labeled it “an instrument of Palestinian surrender, a Palestinian Versailles.” Haidar Abdel-Shafi, who headed the official Palestinian delegation to the US-sponsored post–Gulf War peace talks, condemned the deal and its “terrible sacrifices,” calling it “in itself an indication of the terrible disarray in which the Palestinians find themselves.” Mahmoud Darwish, the Palestinian national poet and author of the 1988 Declaration of Independence, resigned from the PLO leadership in protest.

One of the most underappreciated facts about the Oslo agreement, as the quotes above attest, is that among its most vehement Palestinian critics were not just the opponents of the two-state solution but its most committed and long-standing supporters — those like Khalidi, Said, Darwish, or Shafi, who as far back as the early 1970s had taken what was then the lonely step of urging a Palestinian reckoning with the bitter verdict of 1948.
Truth and Consequences

“We learned the lesson of Oslo,” Khaled Meshaal, the Qatar-based head of Hamas’s external politburo, told a reporter from the French daily Le Figaro late last month. “In 1993 Arafat recognized Israel, which gave him nothing in return.”

He contrasted Arafat’s blunder with what he portrayed as Hamas’s shrewder balancing act. In 2017, the group adopted a new charter — a project Meshaal personally spearheaded — which embraced a two-state solution and excised the antisemitic language and apocalyptic bellicosity of the original 1988 founding statement.

But, it did so, he stressed, “without mention of recognition of Israel by Hamas.”

Meshaal “suggests that when the ‘time comes’ — that is, with the creation of a Palestinian state — the question of recognizing Israel will be examined,” Le Figaro reported. “But since not everyone in Hamas is in agreement, he doesn’t want to go any further.”

Hamas’s top political leadership had spent the years leading up to October 7 trying to position Hamas as a respectable diplomatic interlocutor, one that could someday succeed where Arafat had failed in clinching Palestinian statehood. All of that came crashing down with the atrocities of October 7, leaving observers perplexed about what exactly had happened, and why.

Almost immediately there were murmurings among diplomats, journalists, and intelligence officials about some kind of split within Hamas. But only occasionally was the case stated as bluntly as it was by Hugh Lovatt, an expert on Palestinian politics at the European Council on Foreign Relations, who was quoted in late October saying: “The brutal violence deployed by Hamas against Israeli civilians represents a power grab by radicals in the military wing, cornering political moderates who advocated dialogue and compromise.”

Over the last two weeks, more details have surfaced.

In a report late last month for the pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Ehud Yaari, an Israeli specialist on Arab politics with close ties to the country’s security establishment, wrote about “Growing Internal Tensions Between Hamas Leaders,” citing “extensive private conversations with numerous regional sources.”

“The specific details of the [October 7] attack,” Yaari reported, “appear to have come as a complete surprise to [Hamas chairman Ismail] Haniyeh and the rest of the external leadership.” They had given approval for a cross-border attack, but not like the one that ended up being carried out.

Only a “core group of commanders” had been involved in the detailed planning for October 7, Yaari reported. These included Hamas’s Gaza strongman Yahya Sinwar, plus two top commanders of the military wing (known as the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades), one of whom is Sinwar’s brother Mohammed.

It was this group, Yaari alleges, that at the last minute inserted new orders — to “murder as many civilians as possible, capture hostages, and destroy Israeli towns” — into the battle plan. The plan was withheld from Hamas’s field commanders “until a few hours before the operation.” (The October 7 operation was a joint action carried out by a coalition of forces from a number of different Palestinian armed factions, not just Hamas.)

“The scope and brutality of the attack triggered criticism from external leaders” of Hamas, Yaari wrote, some of whom “sharply condemned Sinwar’s ‘megalomaniac’ search for grandeur” in “private conversations.”

The last-minute changes to the battle plan might help to explain the surprising variation in victims’ testimonies about the attackers’ behavior. In an article published in Haaretz last month, for example, a resident of the Nahal Oz kibbutz, Lishay Idan, recounted her family’s ordeal and told of how, at Nahal Oz, “very strange things happened.”

“A terrorist wearing camouflage and a green headband, who looked like he was in charge, told the hostages he was from Hamas’ military wing and it didn’t harm civilians. ‘They said they were only looking for soldiers and they didn’t harm women and children,’ Idan said.” Even as acts of extreme brutality were being committed against civilians by other attackers in the area, she explained, these particular fighters behaved differently.

“It’s no simple thing for me to say this,” she concluded, “but it seems the cells that came to our kibbutz were better focused. In some cases they took humanitarian considerations into account.” They “brought us a blanket and pillows and told us to put the children to sleep,” and when her child needed to be fed, they “asked me to write down exactly where [a bottle of baby formula] was in the house” next door. “Lishay wrote it in Hebrew,” the article recounts, “the terrorists used Google Translate, and off they went.”

A few other October 7 victims have recounted similarly discordant testimonies.

Currently, top Hamas leaders are engaged in intensive “day-after” discussions with counterparts from Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah party about the prospects for a national unity agreement — possibly including the long-discussed scenario of Hamas’s accession to the PLO, the recognized international representative body of the Palestinian people.

According to Yaari, these talks are now exacerbating the split between Sinwar and the rest of the Hamas leadership:

When reports of these talks reached Sinwar, he told Haniyeh that he considers this conduct “outrageous,” demanded that all contacts with the PLO and dissident Fatah factions be discontinued, and insisted that no consultations or statements on the “morning after” take place until a permanent ceasefire is reached.

The external leadership has ignored Sinwar’s directive, however.

A source who spoke to Le Figaro — a knowledgeable “Gazan notable” — went even further, claiming that “Israel isn’t alone in wanting [Sinwar] to lose. His friends in the political wing in Qatar and the Qataris themselves wouldn’t be unhappy if he were killed by Israel.”

In a different world — a world where Israel preferred peace to conquest — one could imagine some devious Bismarck-like leader in Jerusalem watching over these machinations like a chess player, plotting to split Hamas, isolate the irreconcilables, and make a deal with a Palestinian national unity front.

Or one could imagine, perhaps, some international mediator coming along to propose an agreement in which Israel would withdraw to its 1967 borders in exchange for, say, Hamas consenting to the destruction of its Gaza tunnels under UN supervision.

Would Hamas agree to such a plan? Who can say? But it’s easy to guess what Netanyahu’s response would be.

A decade ago, US Secretary of State John Kerry dispatched a team of US military advisers to Jerusalem to work out a plan that might satisfy Israel’s security concerns in the event of a peace agreement with the Palestinians and an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank.

Netanyahu refused to let his generals cooperate with the American visitors.

“You understand the significance of an American security plan that is acceptable to us?” Netanyahu asked his defense minister. “At that moment we’ll have to start talking borders.”

Such are the consequences of Israel’s decades-long quest for Lebensraum. Repelled by the thought of security without conquest, terrified of “talking borders,” and encircled by enemies of its own making, a cornered Israel has finally absolved itself of its last moral obligation. It no longer feels bound to accept its neighbors’ physical existence. Whatever happens next, Israel will share responsibility with its accomplices.

#Israël #Palestine #USA #histoire #OLP #Hamas #Irgun #sionisme #islam

Pendant ce temps, en #Méditerranée sud-orientale, la routine...

"Moyen-Orient : les #incendiaires crient « Au feu ! »
(par Manlio Dinucci)

Alors qu’ils prétendent le contraire, l’#Otan et l’#UE poursuivent ensemble le projet de destruction de l’#État_palestinien. L’attaque du #Hamas n’est qu’un prétexte pour accomplir enfin le plan des « #sionistes #révisionnistes », énoncé dans les années 30 par Vladimir Jabotinsky et son secrétaire particulier, Bension Netanyahu (père de Benjamin #Netanyahu). (...)"

https://www.voltairenet.org/local/cache-vignettes/L617xH463/400_-_1-124-b74ac.jpg?1704010765

▻https://www.voltairenet.org/article220225.html

#politique #international #Israël #États_Unis #Palestine #Proche_Orient #bonne_année #et_surtout_la_santé #caricature #seenthis #vangauguin

Nous assistons à la mort de l’empathie. Au triomphe de la censure et de l’impuissance. A la dissémination des monstres qui accouchent les uns des autres. Pas une alarme n’est de trop pour donner la mesure du danger qui pèse sur le monde‧►https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2023/12/28/guerre-israel-hamas-qui-peut-penser-que-les-israeliens-vivront-en-paix-apres
#Palestine #hamas #Israëll

Non, le « #choc_des_civilisations » n’aide pas à comprendre notre époque

Depuis le 7 octobre, les idées du professeur américain #Samuel_Huntington sont à nouveau vantées, au service d’un idéal de #repli_identitaire. Pourtant, ces thèses fragiles ont été largement démontées, sur le plan empirique comme théorique.

C’est un des livres de relations internationales les plus cités au monde. Publié en 1996, trois ans après un article dans Foreign Affairs, Le Choc des civilisations a fourni un concept qui a proliféré dans le débat public. À la faveur de sa republication en poche aux éditions Odile Jacob, la journaliste et essayiste Eugénie Bastié a eu une révélation : son auteur, le politiste Samuel Huntington (1927-2008), était le prophète de notre époque. Sacrément épatée, elle affirme dans Le Figaro que « chaque jour, l’actualité donne raison » à ce livre « majeur ».

Elle n’est ni la première ni la seule à le penser. À chaque attentat ou chaque guerre mettant aux prises des belligérants de religions différentes, la théorie est ressortie du chapeau comme une grille explicative. Depuis les massacres du Hamas du 7 octobre, c’est à nouveau le cas. Dans Le Point, Franz-Olivier Giesbert n’a pas manqué de la convoquer dans un de ses éditoriaux. Dans la plus confidentielle et vénérable Revue politique et parlementaire, un juriste s’est appuyé sur Huntington pour conclure tranquillement à « une certaine incompatibilité civilisationnelle entre Arabes et Israéliens et, partant, entre Orient et Occident ».

Huntington pensait qu’avec la fin de la Guerre froide, les #facteurs_culturels allaient devenir prédominants pour expliquer la #conflictualité dans le système international. Il ajoutait que les risques de conflictualité seraient maximisés aux points de rencontre entre « #civilisations ». À l’en croire, ces dernières seraient au nombre de neuf. La #religion serait un de leurs traits distinctifs essentiels, parmi d’autres caractéristiques socio-culturelles ayant forgé, selon lui, des différences bien plus fondamentales que celles qui existent entre idéologies ou régimes politiques.

De nombreuses critiques ont été faites aux thèses d’Huntington. Aujourd’hui, ces dernières sont largement considérées comme infirmées et inutilisables dans sa propre discipline. Elles ne sont plus reprises que par des universitaires qui ne sont pas spécialistes de relations internationales, et des acteurs politico-médiatiques qui y trouvent un habillage scientifique aux obsessions identitaires qui les habitent déjà.

Il faut dire que dans la réflexion d’Huntington, la reconnaissance des #identités_civilisationnelles à l’échelle globale va de pair avec un rejet du multiculturalisme à l’intérieur des États. Eugénie Bastié l’a bien compris, se délectant des conclusions du professeur américain, qu’elle reprend à son compte : « La #diversité est bonne au niveau mondial, mortifère au niveau national. L’#universalisme est un danger à l’extérieur, le #multiculturalisme une #menace à l’intérieur. »

Des résultats qui ne collent pas

Le problème, c’est que les thèses d’Huntington ont été largement démontées, sur le plan empirique comme théorique. Comme l’a déjà rappelé Olivier Schmitt, professeur à l’Université du Sud au Danemark, des chercheurs ont « testé » les prédictions d’Huntington. Or ils sont tombés sur des résultats qui ne collent pas : « Les actes terroristes, comme les conflits, ont historiquement toujours eu majoritairement lieu – et continuent d’avoir majoritairement lieu – au sein d’une même civilisation. »

Dans Philosophies du multiculturalisme (Presses de Sciences Po, 2016), le politiste Paul May relève que « les arguments avancés par Huntington pour justifier sa thèse du choc des civilisations ne reposent pas sur de larges analyses empiriques, mais plutôt sur une série d’anecdotes et d’intuitions ». Il dresse le même constat à propos des alertes angoissées d’Huntington sur le supposé moindre sentiment d’appartenance des #minorités à la nation états-unienne, notamment les Hispaniques.

Huntington procède en fait par #essentialisation, en attribuant des #valeurs_figées à de vastes ensembles socio-culturels, sans prendre au sérieux leur #variabilité dans le temps, dans l’espace et à l’intérieur des groupes appartenant à ces ensembles. Par exemple, son insistance sur l’hostilité entre l’#Occident_chrétien et la #civilisation_islamique néglige de nombreux épisodes de coopération, d’influences mutuelles, d’alliances et de renversement d’alliances, qui ont existé et ont parfois répondu à des intérêts politico-stratégiques. Car si les #identités_culturelles ont bien un potentiel mobilisateur, elles sont justement intéressantes à enrôler et instrumentaliser dans une quête de puissance.

Le « #déterminisme_culturaliste » d’Huntington, écrivait le professeur Dario Battistella dès 1994, « mérite une #critique approfondie, à l’image de toutes les explications unifactorielles en sciences sociales ». Au demeurant, les frontières tracées par Huntington entre les civilisations existantes reposent sur des critères peu clairs et discutables. Le chercheur Paul Poast a remarqué, dans un fil sur X, que ses choix aboutissent à une superposition troublante avec une carte des « races mondiales », « produite par Lothrop Stoddard dans les années 1920, [ce dernier étant connu pour être] explicitement un suprémaciste blanc ».

Les mauvais exemples d’#Eugénie_Bastié

Les exemples mobilisés par Eugénie Bastié dans Le Figaro illustrent toutes les limites d’une lecture outrancièrement culturaliste de la réalité.

« Dans le cas du conflit israélo-palestinien, écrit-elle, l’empathie n’est plus dictée par des choix rationnels ou idéologiques mais par des appartenances religieuses et identitaires. » Il était toutefois frappant, avant le 7 octobre, de constater à quel point les États du monde arabe et musulman s’étaient désintéressés de la question palestinienne, l’un des objectifs du #Hamas ayant justement été de faire dérailler la normalisation des relations en cours. Et si la composante islamiste de l’identité du Hamas est indéniable, la situation est incompréhensible sans tenir compte du fait qu’il s’agit d’un conflit pour la terre, que d’autres acteurs palestiniens, laïques voire, socialisants, ont porté avant le Hamas.

Concernant l’#Ukraine, Bastié explique qu’« entre un Ouest tourné vers l’Occident et un Est russophone, Huntington prévoyait trois scénarios : une Ukraine unie pro-européenne, la division en deux avec un est annexé à la Russie, une Ukraine unie tournée vers la Russie. On sait désormais que l’on s’achemine plus ou moins vers le deuxième scénario, le plus proche du paradigme du choc des civilisations. »

Remarquons d’abord la précision toute relative d’une théorie qui « prédit » des issues aussi contradictoires. Soulignons ensuite que malgré tout, Huntington considérait bien que « si la #civilisation est ce qui compte, la probabilité de la #violence entre Ukrainiens et Russes devrait être faible » (raté). Pointons enfin la séparation caricaturale établie par l’essayiste entre les parties occidentale et orientale du pays. Comme l’a montré l’historien Serhii Plokhy, les agressions russes depuis 2014 ont plutôt contribué à homogénéiser la nation ukrainienne, « autour de l’idée d’une nation multilingue et multiculturelle, unie sur le plan administratif et politique ».

Enfin, Bastié devait forcément glisser qu’Huntington a formulé sa théorie du choc des civilisations avant même les attentats du 11 septembre 2001, censés illustrer « la résurgence du conflit millénaire entre l’islam et l’Occident ».

Reprenant sa critique du politiste américain à l’aune de cet événement, Dario Battistella a cependant souligné que « loin de constituer les prémices d’une bataille à venir entre deux grandes abstractions, #Occident et #Islam, les attentats du 11 septembre sont bien l’expression d’une forme pervertie de l’islam utilisée par un mouvement politique dans sa lutte contre la puissance hégémonique américaine ; quant aux bombardements américano-britanniques contre Al-Qaïda et les talibans, ce sont moins des croisades que des opérations de police, de maintien de la “pax americana”, entreprises par la puissance impériale et sa principale alliée parmi les puissances satisfaites de l’ordre existant. »

À ces illustrations guère convaincantes du prophétisme de Samuel Huntington, il faut ajouter les exemples dont Eugénie Bastié ne parle pas, et qui ne collent pas non plus avec sa grille de lecture.

Avec la tragédie du Proche-Orient et l’agression russe en Ukraine, l’autre grand drame historique de cette année s’est ainsi joué en #Arménie et en #Azerbaïdjan, avec le #nettoyage_ethnique du #Haut-Karabakh. Or si ce dernier a été possible, c’est parce que le régime arménien a été lâché par son protecteur russe, en dépit de populations communiant majoritairement dans le #christianisme_orthodoxe.

Cet abandon, à laquelle la difficile révolution démocratique en Arménie n’est pas étrangère, a permis au dirigeant azéri et musulman #Ilham_Aliev de donner libre cours à ses ambitions conquérantes. L’autocrate a bénéficié pour cela d’armes turques, mais il a aussi alimenté son arsenal grâce à l’État d’Israël, censé être la pointe avancée de l’Occident judéo-chrétien dans le schéma huntingtonien interprété par Eugénie Bastié.

Le côté « chacun chez soi » de l’essayiste, sans surprendre, témoigne en parallèle d’une indifférence aux revendications démocratiques et féministes qui transcendent les supposées différences civilisationnelles. Ces dernières années, ces revendications se sont données à voir avec force en Amérique latine aussi bien qu’en #Iran, où les corps suppliciés des protestataires iraniennes témoignent d’une certaine universalité du combat contre la #domination_patriarcale et religieuse. Cela ne légitime aucune aventure militaire contre l’Iran, mais rappelle que toutes les actions de soutien aux peuples en lutte pour leurs droits sont positives, n’en déplaise au fatalisme huntingtonien.

On l’aura compris, la thématique du choc des civilisations n’aide aucunement à comprendre notre chaotique XXIe siècle. Il s’agit d’un gimmick réactionnaire, essentialiste et réductionniste, qui donne une fausse coloration scientifique à une hantise du caractère mouvant et pluriel des identités collectives. Sur le plan de la connaissance, sa valeur est à peu près nulle – ou plutôt, elle est la pire manière d’appeler à prendre en compte les facteurs culturels, ce qui souffre beaucoup moins la contestation.

Sur le plan politique, la théorie du choc des civilisations est un obstacle aux solidarités à construire dans un monde menacé par la destruction de la niche écologique dont a bénéficié l’espèce humaine. Ce sont des enjeux de justice climatique et sociale, avec ce qu’ils supposent de réparations, répartition, redistribution et régulation des ressources, qu’il s’agit de mettre en avant à toutes les échelles du combat politique.

Quant aux principes libéraux et démocratiques, ils méritent également d’être défendus, mais pas comme des valeurs identitaires opposées à d’autres, dont nous serions condamnés à vivre éloignés. L’universalisme n’est pas à congédier parce qu’il a servi d’alibi à des entreprises de domination. Quand il traduit des aspirations à la paix, à la dignité et au bien-être, il mérite d’être défendu, contre tous les replis identitaires.

▻https://www.mediapart.fr/journal/culture-et-idees/231223/non-le-choc-des-civilisations-n-aide-pas-comprendre-notre-epoque
#Palestine #Israël

#Huntington

Quei bambini chiusi in trappola a Gaza. Il racconto di #Ruba_Salih
(une interview de Ruba Salih, prof à l’Université de Bologne, 5 jours après le #7_octobre_2023)

«Mai come in queste ore a Gaza il senso di appartenere a una comune “umanita” si sta mostrando più vuoto di senso. La responsabilità di questo è del governo israeliano», dice Ruba Salih antropologa dell’università di Bologna che abbiamo intervistato mentre cresce la preoccupazione per la spirale di violenza che colpisce la popolazione civile palestinese e israeliana.

Quali sono state le sue prime reazioni, sentimenti, pensieri di fronte all’attacco di Hamas e poi all’annuncio dell’assedio di Gaza messo in atto dal governo israeliano?

Il 7 ottobre la prima reazione è stata di incredulità alla vista della recinzione metallica di Gaza sfondata, e alla vista dei palestinesi che volavano con i parapendii presagendo una sorta di fine dell’assedio. Ho avuto la sensazione di assistere a qualcosa che non aveva precedenti nella storia recente. Come era possibile che l’esercito più potente del mondo potesse essere sfidato e colto così alla sprovvista? In seguito, ho cominciato a chiamare amici e parenti, in Cisgiordania, Gaza, Stati Uniti, Giordania. Fino ad allora si aveva solo la notizia della cattura di un numero imprecisato di soldati israeliani. Ho pensato che fosse una tattica per fare uno scambio di prigionieri. Ci sono più di 5000 prigionieri palestinesi nelle carceri israeliane e 1200 in detenzione amministrativa, senza processo o accusa. Poi sono cominciate da domenica ad arrivare le notizie di uccisioni e morti di civili israeliani, a cui è seguito l’annuncio di ‘guerra totale’ del governo di Netanyahu. Da allora il sentimento è cambiato. Ora grande tristezza per la quantità di vittime, dell’una e dell’altra parte, e preoccupazione e angoscia senza precedenti per le sorti della popolazione civile di Gaza, che in queste ore sta vivendo le ore piu’ drammatiche che si possano ricordare.

E quando ha visto quello che succedeva, con tantissime vittime israeliane, violenze terribili, immagini di distruzione, minacce di radere al suolo Gaza?

Colleghi e amici israeliani hanno cominciato a postare immagini di amici e amiche uccisi – anche attivisti contro l’occupazione- e ho cominciato dolorosamente a mandare condoglianze. Contemporaneamente giungevano terribili parole del ministro della Difesa israeliano Gallant che definiva i palestinesi “animali umani”, dichiarando di voler annientare la striscia di Gaza e ridurla a “deserto”. Ho cominciato a chiamare amici di Gaza per sapere delle loro famiglie nella speranza che fossero ancora tutti vivi. Piano piano ho cominciato a cercare di mettere insieme i pezzi e dare una cornice di senso a quello che stava succedendo.

Cosa può dirci di Gaza che già prima dell’attacco di Hamas era una prigione a cielo aperto?

Si, Gaza è una prigione. A Gaza la maggior parte della popolazione è molto giovane, e in pochi hanno visto il mondo oltre il muro di recinzione. Due terzi della popolazione è composto da famiglie di rifugiati del 1948. Il loro vissuto è per lo più quello di una lunga storia di violenza coloniale e di un durissimo assedio negli ultimi 15 anni. Possiamo cercare di immaginare cosa significa vivere questo trauma che si protrae da generazioni. Gli abitanti di Gaza nati prima del 1948 vivevano in 247 villaggi nel sud della Palestina, il 50% del paese. Sono stati costretti a riparare in campi profughi a seguito della distruzione o occupazione dei loro villaggi. Ora vivono in un’area che rappresenta l’1.3% della Palestina storica con una densità di 7000 persone per chilometro quadrato e le loro terre originarie si trovano a pochi metri di là dal muro di assedio, abitate da israeliani.

E oggi?

Chi vive a Gaza si descrive come in una morte lenta, in una privazione del presente e della capacità di immaginare il futuro. Il 90% dell’acqua non è potabile, il 60% della popolazione è senza lavoro, l’80% riceve aiuti umanitari per sopravvivere e il 40% vive al di sotto della soglia di povertà: tutto questo a causa dell’ occupazione e dell’assedio degli ultimi 15 anni. Non c’è quasi famiglia che non abbia avuto vittime, i bombardamenti hanno raso al suolo interi quartieri della striscia almeno quattro volte nel giro di una decina di anni. Non credo ci sia una situazione analoga in nessun altro posto del mondo. Una situazione che sarebbe risolta se Israele rispettasse il diritto internazionale, né più né meno.

Prima di questa escalation di violenza c’era voglia di reagire, di vivere, di creare, di fare musica...

Certo, anche in condizioni di privazione della liberta’ c’e’ una straordinaria capacità di sopravvivenza, creatività, amore per la propria gente. Tra l’altro ricordo di avere letto nei diari di Marek Edelman sul Ghetto di Varsavia che durante l’assedio del Ghetto ci si innamorava intensamente come antidoto alla disperazione. A questo proposito, consilgio a tutti di leggere The Ghetto Fights di Edelman. Aiuta molto a capire cosa è Gaza in questo momento, senza trascurare gli ovvi distinguo storici.

Puoi spiegarci meglio?

Come sapete il ghetto era chiuso al mondo esterno, il cibo entrava in quantità ridottissime e la morte per fame era la fine di molti. Oggi lo scenario di Gaza, mentre parliamo, è che non c’è elettricità, il cibo sta per finire, centinaia di malati e neonati attaccati alle macchine mediche hanno forse qualche ora di sopravvivenza. Il governo israeliano sta bombardando interi palazzi, le vittime sono per più della metà bambini. In queste ultime ore la popolazione si trova a dovere decidere se morire sotto le bombe in casa o sotto le bombe in strada, dato che il governo israeliano ha intimato a un milione e centomila abitanti di andarsene. Andare dove? E come nel ghetto la popolazione di Gaza è definita criminale e terrorista.

Anche Franz Fanon, lei suggerisce, aiuta a capire cosa è Gaza.

Certamente, come ho scritto recentemente, Fanon ci viene in aiuto con la forza della sua analisi della ferita della violenza coloniale come menomazione psichica oltre che fisica, e come privazione della dimensione di interezza del soggetto umano libero, che si manifesta come un trauma, anche intergenerazionale. La violenza prolungata penetra nelle menti e nei corpi, crea una sospensione delle cornici di senso e delle sensibilità che sono prerogativa di chi vive in contesti di pace e benessere. Immaginiamoci ora un luogo, come Gaza, dove come un rapporto di Save the Children ha riportato, come conseguenza di 15 anni di assedio e blocco, 4 bambini su 5 riportano un vissuto di depressione, paura e lutto. Il rapporto ci dice che vi è stato un aumento vertiginoso di bambini che pensano al suicidio (il 50%) o che praticano forme di autolesionismo. Tuttavia, tutto questo e’ ieri. Domani non so come ci sveglieremo, noi che abbiamo il privilegio di poterci risvegliare, da questo incubo. Cosa resterà della popolazione civile di Gaza, donne, uomini bambini.

Come legge il sostegno incondizionato al governo israeliano di cui sono pieni i giornali occidentali e dell’invio di armi ( in primis dagli Usa), in un’ottica di vittoria sconfitta che abbiamo già visto all’opera per la guerra Russia-Ucraina?

A Gaza si sta consumando un crimine contro l’umanità di dimensioni e proporzioni enormi mentre i media continuano a gettare benzina sul fuoco pubblicando notizie in prima pagina di decapitazioni e stupri, peraltro non confermate neanche dallo stesso esercito israeliano. Tuttavia, non utilizzerei definizioni statiche e omogeneizzanti come quelle di ‘Occidente’ che in realtà appiattiscono i movimenti e le società civili sulle politiche dei governi, che in questo periodo sono per lo più a destra, nazionalisti xenofobi e populisti. Non è sempre stato così.

Va distinto il livello istituzionale, dei governi e dei partiti o dei media mainstream, da quello delle società civili e dei movimenti sociali?

Ci sono una miriade di manifestazioni di solidarietà ovunque nel mondo, che a fianco del lutto per le vittime civili sia israeliane che palestinesi, non smettono di invocare la fine della occupazione, come unica via per ristabilire qualcosa che si possa chiamare diritto (e diritti umani) in Palestina e Israele. Gli stessi media mainstream sono in diversi contesti molto più indipendenti che non in Italia. Per esempio, Bcc non ha accettato di piegarsi alle pressioni del governo rivendicando la sua indipendenza rifiutandosi di usare la parola ‘terrorismo’, considerata di parte, preferendo riferirsi a quei palestinesi che hanno sferrato gli attacchi come ‘combattenti’. Se sono stati commessi crimini contro l’umanità parti lo stabiliranno poi le inchieste dei tribunali penali internazionali. In Italia, la complicità dei media è invece particolarmente grave e allarmante. Alcune delle (rare) voci critiche verso la politica del governo israeliano che per esempio esistono perfino sulla stampa liberal israeliana, come Haaretz, sarebbero in Italia accusate di anti-semitismo o incitamento al terrorismo! Ci tengo a sottolineare tuttavia che il fatto che ci sia un certo grado di libertà di pensiero e di stampa in Israele non significa che Israele sia una ‘democrazia’ o perlomeno non lo è certo nei confronti della popolazione palestinese. Che Israele pratichi un regime di apartheid nei confronti dei palestinesi è ormai riconosciuto da organizzazioni come Amnesty International e Human Rights Watch, nonché sottolineato a più riprese dalla Relatrice speciale delle Nazioni Unite sui territori palestinesi occupati, Francesca Albanese.

Dunque non è una novità degli ultimi giorni che venga interamente sposata la retorica israeliana?

Ma non è una novità degli ultimi giorni che venga interamente sposata la narrativa israeliana. Sono anni che i palestinesi sono disumanizzati, resi invisibili e travisati. Il paradosso è che mentre Israele sta violando il diritto e le convenzioni internazionali e agisce in totale impunità da decenni, tutte le forme di resistenza: non violente, civili, dimostrative, simboliche, legali dei palestinesi fino a questo momento sono state inascoltate, anzi la situazione sul terreno è sempre più invivibile. Persino organizzazioni che mappano la violazione dei diritti umani sono demonizzate e catalogate come ‘terroristiche’. Anche le indagini e le commissioni per valutare le violazioni delle regole di ingaggio dell’esercito sono condotte internamente col risultato che divengono solo esercizi procedurali vuoti di sostanza (come per l’assassinio della reporter Shereen AbuHakleh, rimasto impunito come quello degli altri 55 giornalisti uccisi dall’esercito israeliano). Ci dobbiamo seriamente domandare: che cosa rimane del senso vero delle parole e del diritto internazionale?

Il discorso pubblico è intriso di militarismo, di richiami alla guerra, all’arruolamento…

Personalmente non metterei sullo stesso piano la resistenza di un popolo colonizzato con il militarismo come progetto nazionalistico di espansione e profitto. Possiamo avere diversi orientamenti e non condividere le stesse strategie o tattiche ma la lotta anticoloniale non è la stessa cosa del militarismo legato a fini di affermazione di supremazia e dominio di altri popoli. Quella dei palestinesi è una lotta che si inscrive nella scia delle lotte di liberazione coloniali, non di espansione militare. La lotta palestinese si collega oggi alle lotte di giustizia razziale e di riconoscimento dei nativi americani e degli afro-americani contro società che oggi si definiscono liberali ma che sono nate da genocidi, schiavitù e oppressione razziale. Le faccio un esempio significativo: la prima bambina Lakota nata a Standing Rock durante le lunghe proteste contro la costruzione degli olelodotti in North Dakota, che stanno espropriando e distruggendo i terre dei nativi e inquinando le acque del Missouri, era avvolta nella Kuffyah palestinese. Peraltro, il nazionalismo non è più il solo quadro di riferimento. In Palestina si lotta per la propria casa, per la propria terra, per la liberazione dalla sopraffazione dell’occupazione, dalla prigionia, per l’autodeterminazione che per molti è immaginata o orientata verso la forma di uno stato laico binazionale, almeno fino agli eventi recenti. Domani non so come emergeremo da tutto questo.

Emerge di nuovo questa cultura patriarcale della guerra, a cui come femministe ci siamo sempre opposte…

Con i distinguo che ho appena fatto e che ribadisco – ossia che non si può mettere sullo stesso piano occupanti e occupati, colonialismo e anticolonialismo -mi sento comunque di dire che una mobilitazione trasversale che aneli alla fine della occupazione deve essere possibile. Nel passato, il movimento femminista internazionalista tentava di costruire ponti tra donne palestinesi e israeliane mobilitando il lutto di madri, sorelle e figlie delle vittime della violenza. Si pensava che questo fosse un legame primario che univa nella sofferenza, attraversando le differenze. Ci si appellava alla capacità delle donne di politicizzare la vulnerabilità, convinte che nella morte e nel lutto si fosse tutte uguali. La realtà è che la disumanizzazione dei palestinesi, rafforzata dalla continua e sempre più violenta repressione israeliana, rende impossibile il superamento delle divisioni in nome di una comune umanità. Mentre i morti israeliani vengono pubblicamente compianti e sono degni di lutto per il mondo intero, i palestinesi – definiti ‘terroristi’ (anche quando hanno praticato forme non-violente di resistenza), scudi-umani, animali (e non da oggi), sono già morti -privati della qualità di umani- prima ancora di morire, e inscritti in una diversa classe di vulnerabilità, di non essenza, di disumanità.

Antropologa dell’università di Bologna Ruba Salih si interessa di antropologia politica con particolare attenzione a migrazioni e diaspore postcoloniali, rifugiati, violenza e trauma coloniale, genere corpo e memoria. Più recentemente si è occupata di decolonizzazione del sapere e Antropocene e di politiche di intersezionalità nei movimenti di protesta anti e de-coloniali. Ha ricoperto vari ruoli istituzionali tra cui membro eletto del Board of Trustees del Arab Council for the Social Sciences, dal 2015 al 2019. È stata visiting professor presso varie istituzioni tra cui Brown University, University of Cambridge e Università di Venezia, Ca’ Foscari.

▻https://left.it/2023/10/12/quei-bambini-chiusi-in-trappola-a-gaza-il-racconto-di-ruba-salih

#Gaza #Israël #Hamas #violence #prison #Palestine #violence_coloniale #siège #trauma #traumatisme #camps_de_réfugiés #réfugiés #réfugiés_palestiniens #pauvreté #bombardements #violence #dépression #peur #santé_mentale #suicide #crime_contre_l'humanité #apartheid #déshumanisation #résistance #droit_international #lutte #nationalisme #féminisme #à_lire #7_octobre_2023

Guerre Israël-Hamas : « Le gouvernement israélien poursuit résolument son projet nationaliste et annexionniste »
▻https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2023/12/19/guerre-israel-hamas-le-gouvernement-israelien-poursuit-resolument-son-projet

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Beaucoup l’ignorent, mais il y a quelques mois, le Parlement en offrait la possibilité juridique. Le 21 mars, les députés ont voté une loi mettant fin au plan de désengagement, ouvrant ainsi la voie à la reconstruction des colonies dans les zones concernées : la bande de Gaza et les quatre colonies en Cisjordanie. Alors que l’autorisation de « retourner à Gaza » paraissait purement symbolique, Orit Strock, ministre des missions nationales, déclara le même jour à un média de la droite radicale : « Le retour dans la bande de Gaza impliquera de nombreuses victimes, malheureusement (…), mais il ne fait aucun doute qu’en fin de compte elle fait partie de la terre d’Israël et qu’un jour viendra où nous y reviendrons. » Ses propos semblent plus que jamais d’actualité.

L’expansion de la colonisation ne se limite pas à la bande de Gaza, mais concerne également la Cisjordanie. Bezalel Smotrich, ministre des finances, a appelé à « tirer des leçons des événements du 7 octobre » et à les appliquer en Cisjordanie en créant des « zones de sécurité dépourvues d’Arabes » autour de chaque colonie. Autrement dit, à étendre leur territoire. Bien que sa demande ne soit pas encore mise en œuvre, les colons et l’armée l’appliquent en menaçant les Palestiniens avec des armes, en les contraignent à quitter leurs foyers, causant la mort de 243 personnes selon l’OCHA.
Lire aussi : Article réservé à nos abonnés Bezalel Smotrich, agent du chaos au sein du gouvernement israélien

D’après l’organisation israélienne des droits de l’homme B’Tselem, entre le 7 octobre et le 30 novembre, 1 009 Palestiniens ont été expulsés de leurs maisons en Cisjordanie, affectant seize communautés. Rappelons que le gouvernement de Benyamin Nétanyahou a battu des records en matière d’autorisation de construction dans les colonies, avec 13 000 accordées en sept mois (le record précédent étant de 12 000 pour toute l’année 2020), ainsi que la légalisation de 22 avant-postes, selon l’organisation La Paix maintenant.
L’oppression s’accroît

A l’intérieur du territoire israélien, d’autres processus importants se déroulent depuis le 7 octobre. Le ministre de la sécurité nationale, Itamar Ben Gvir, tire parti de l’anxiété ressentie par les Israéliens pour concrétiser plusieurs projets, notamment la distribution massive d’armes aux citoyens israéliens. Lorsqu’il a pris ses fonctions, il promettait d’introduire 30 000 nouvelles armes dans les rues.

Depuis le 7 octobre, cet objectif a été largement dépassé avec 255 000 nouvelles demandes d’acquisition d’armes en seulement cinq semaines, selon le quotidien Haaretz. Pour cela, Ben Gvir a modifié les critères d’obtention, de sorte que les nouveaux demandeurs ne sont plus tenus de passer un entretien et que, pour certains, notamment ceux ayant effectué le service militaire obligatoire, aucun entretien n’est nécessaire (50 % selon le journal Calcalist). De plus, il organise chaque semaine des distributions d’armes dans de nombreuses villes du pays, encourageant les gens à faire de nouvelles demandes de permis.

Outre ces distributions, Ben Gvir prévoit la création de 700 « unités prêtes », composées de citoyens possédant des armes et prêts à réagir en cas d’urgence. Cette initiative suscite de vives inquiétudes auprès de certains membres de la police, qui trouvent les citoyens recrutés « trop motivés » ou sont préoccupés par leurs positions politiques, en particulier de leur tendance raciste envers les Palestiniens citoyens de l’Etat israélien.
Lire aussi : Article réservé à nos abonnés Les Israéliens de plus en plus nombreux à vouloir détenir une arme

Ici, il faut préciser que depuis le 7 octobre, cette même police surveille de près les réseaux sociaux des Palestiniens citoyens d’Israël et procède à un grand nombre d’arrestations pour chaque partage, publication ou même un simple like exprimant sa solidarité avec les Gazaouis ou sa critique envers la politique du gouvernement. Dans ce contexte, l’oppression envers eux ne cesse de s’accroître, alors que toute expression de solidarité avec les Gazaouis est considérée comme une trahison contre l’Etat.

Les actions entreprises par le gouvernement depuis le 7 octobre, en plus de l’attaque à Gaza, nécessitent une analyse minutieuse. Il semble presque cynique que ce dernier cherche à tirer profit du chaos et de la peur pour faire avancer des projets planifiés de longue date. Ils méritent d’être mis en lumière, car ils auront des conséquences majeures sur l’avenir, de plus en plus incertain, de la question israélo-palestinienne.

Nitzan Perelman est doctorante en sociologie à l’université Paris Cité. Ses travaux portent notamment sur la société israélienne.

Transférer les chefs militaires du Hamas vers Alger : un plan saoudien soumis au Quai d’Orsay
▻https://www.lemonde.fr/international/article/2023/12/20/transferer-les-chefs-militaires-du-hamas-vers-alger-un-plan-saoudien-soumis-

Sur le dossier brûlant de la guerre à Gaza, l’Arabie saoudite joue une partition singulière. Elle préside le comité arabo-islamique, mis en place à l’issue d’un sommet à Riyad, à la mi-novembre, qui fait la tournée des capitales occidentales pour plaider la cause du #cessez-le-feu à Gaza. Dans le même temps, elle multiplie les envois d’#aide_humanitaire vers la bande côtière palestinienne. En deux mois et demi de guerre, trente-trois avions-cargos saoudiens, chargés à ras bord de matériel de première urgence, se sont déjà posés sur l’aéroport d’El-Arich, dans le Sinaï égyptien et quatre bateaux ont accosté à Port-Saïd, sur le canal de Suez.

En coulisses, l’#Arabie_saoudite s’efforce aussi de trouver une solution au conflit, dont le bilan humain, côté palestinien, approche des 20 000 morts. Le Monde s’est procuré un document confidentiel, élaboré par Abdelaziz Al-Sager, le directeur d’un centre de réflexion saoudien, le Gulf Research Center, qui esquisse un plan de sortie de crise. Le texte a été élaboré dans la foulée d’une rencontre, le 19 novembre à Riyad, entre M. Al-Sager et Anne Grillo, la directrice du département Afrique du Nord et Moyen-Orient au Quai d’Orsay. Il a été ensuite transmis au ministère des affaires étrangères français.
Le document suggère des pistes pour arrêter les hostilités à Gaza et stabiliser l’enclave. La plus singulière est l’évacuation vers Alger « des dirigeants militaires et sécuritaires du Hamas », une formule qui désigne probablement Mohammed Deif, le commandant des Brigades Ezzedine Al-Qassam, la branche armée du mouvement islamiste, et possiblement aussi Yahya Sinouar, le chef du Hamas à Gaza, très proche de l’aile militaire.

Déploiement d’une force arabe

L’Algérie est citée comme une possible destination d’exil pour ces hommes en raison de ses bonnes relations avec le Qatar et l’Iran, « les principaux partisans du mouvement Hamas », et de sa « capacité sécuritaire », qui lui permettrait de « contrôler les activités de ces dirigeants ». L’idée n’est pas sans rappeler l’évacuation en bateau, en 1982, de Yasser Arafat et des fedayins #palestiniens, de la ville de Beyrouth, alors assiégée par l’armée israélienne. Le chef de l’Organisation de libération de la Palestine et ses troupes avaient rallié Athènes, sous escorte de la marine française, avant de s’installer à Tunis.
Parmi les autres points évoqués dans l’ébauche de plan de M. Al-Sager figure le déploiement dans #Gaza de forces arabes de maintien de la paix, sous mandat des Nations unies, et la création d’un « conseil de transition conjoint », réunissant les principaux partis de Gaza (#Hamas, Jihad islamique et Fatah), chargé de gérer l’enclave pendant quatre ans et d’organiser des scrutins présidentiel et parlementaire.

Le statut exact de ce document pose question. A-t-il été approuvé par le pouvoir saoudien ou bien s’agit-il d’une initiative purement personnelle ? Quelle suite lui a-t-il été donné ? Ni Mme Grillo ni M. Al-Sager n’ont répondu aux questions du Monde. Le système policier et ultracentralisé mis en place par Mohammed Ben Salman, l’homme fort de la couronne, et le fait que M. Al-Sager ait transmis ses suggestions au Quai d’Orsay incitent à penser que le ministère des affaires étrangères saoudien n’est pas totalement étranger à sa démarche.

« Il semble que la recherche d’un consensus saoudo-français puisse contribuer à l’élaboration d’une vision commune acceptable par toutes les parties et avoir une influence sur la décision de mettre fin à la guerre », affirme le document. Contacté, l’ambassadeur d’#Algérie à Paris n’a pas souhaité faire de commentaire.

Gaza ou la fin de l’humanité
▻https://reporterre.net/Gaza-ou-la-fin-de-l-humanite

https://reporterre.net/local/cache-gd2/dc/a95bdaa52eb18c6ea95b9a53f324fc.jpg?1702659960

Décalons autrement le regard. Dans un livre marquant paru en 2009, Les guerres du climat (éd. Gallimard), l’anthropologue allemand Harald Welzer alertait sur le risque que la crise écologique conduise à une guerre généralisée. Mais l’auteur allait plus loin : alors que le chaos écologique — si on le laisse s’aggraver — créera de plus en plus de désordre géopolitique et de mouvements de population, les populations des pays riches tendront à accepter, pour protéger leur confort, l’abandon, voire la répression brutale des populations livrées à un sort misérable et leur demandant de l’aide. Comme le formule bien Pablo Servigne, « Welzer montre comment une société peut lentement et imperceptiblement repousser les limites du tolérable au point de remettre en cause ses valeurs pacifiques et humanistes, et sombrer dans ce qu’elle considérait comme inacceptable quelques années auparavant. (…) Les habitants des pays riches s’habitueront aussi probablement à des politiques de plus en plus agressives envers les réfugiés ou envers d’autres États, mais surtout ressentiront de moins en moins cette injustice que ressentent les populations touchées par les catastrophes. C’est ce décalage qui servira de terreau à de futurs conflits ». L’inhumanité avec laquelle nous acceptons des milliers de noyés en Méditerranée fait ici écho au silence que fait résonner le drame de Gaza.

Mais prenons garde. Nul ne se relèvera de la barbarie où conduit l’égoïsme ou la lâcheté. Ce qui se passe en Palestine se déroule « aujourd’hui dans un contexte de fascisation mondialisée » constate le chercheur Omar Jabary Salamanca Lemire, cité par Mediapart. Accepter le massacre perpétré par l’État d’Israël, c’est préparer d’autres drames à venir, dans une course inextinguible à l’horreur menée par des monstres convaincus que la force est la seule puissance.

Plus que jamais, la paix s’impose. Il faut le dire, calmement, sans crainte d’aucun discours de haine. La paix, maintenant. Et dire l’espoir, qui vaut pour la Palestine comme pour une humanité confrontée au destin écologique. Le mot nous en vient d’une écrivaine libanaise, Dominique Eddé : « En dehors d’une utopie, il n’y a pas de solution possible. » Nous appelons à l’utopie de la paix.

Guerre au Proche-Orient : à #Beyrouth, #Mona_Fawaz résiste par la #cartographie

Professeure d’urbanisme et cofondatrice du #Beirut_Urban_Lab, la chercheuse cartographie le conflit à la frontière entre le #Liban et Israël. Et montre ainsi le « déséquilibre profond » entre les attaques visant le territoire libanais et celles ciblant le sol israélien.

« Je suis entrée dans le centre de recherche ; tous mes collègues avaient les yeux rivés sur les nouvelles, l’air horrifié. C’est là que nous nous sommes dit que nous ne pouvions pas simplement regarder : il fallait agir, et le faire du mieux possible », se rappelle Mona Fawaz, professeure d’urbanisme à l’Université américaine de Beyrouth (AUB) et cofondatrice du Beirut Urban Lab, un laboratoire de recherche interdisciplinaire créé en 2018 et spécialisé dans les questions d’#urbanisme et d’#inclusivité.

Lundi 4 décembre, dans ce centre de recherche logé à l’AUB, près de deux mois après l’attaque sans précédent du groupe militant palestinien Hamas en Israël et le début des bombardements intensifs de l’armée israélienne sur la bande de Gaza, elle revoit l’élan impérieux qui a alors saisi ses collègues du Beirut Urban Lab, celui de cartographier, documenter et analyser.

« Certains ont commencé à cartographier les dommages à #Gaza à partir de #photographies_aériennes. Personnellement, j’étais intéressée par la dimension régionale du conflit, afin de montrer comment le projet colonial israélien a déstabilisé l’ensemble de la zone », y compris le Liban.

https://pixelfed.zoo-logique.org/storage/m/_v2/578583396227231930/bc40e5d2a-3c51e6/XR49NBh6LT5u/h3xsVmRptr7OmX2w91C9AEZdu6vqjP7bXt0XObiR.png

La frontière sud du pays est en effet le théâtre d’affrontements violents depuis le 8 octobre entre #Israël et des groupes alliés au #Hamas emmenés par le #Hezbollah, une puissante milice soutenue par l’#Iran. Qualifiés de « #front_de_pression » par le chef du Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, les #combats sur le #front_libanais, qui visent notamment à détourner l’effort militaire israélien contre Gaza, ont tué au moins 107 personnes du côté libanais, dont 14 civils. Du côté israélien, six soldats et trois civils ont été tués.

C’est ainsi que l’initiative « Cartographier l’escalade de violence à la frontière sud du Liban » est née. Le projet répertorie le nombre de #frappes quotidiennes et leur distance moyenne par rapport à la frontière depuis le début du conflit, en s’appuyant sur les données collectées par l’ONG Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (Acled : ►https://acleddata.com). Sur son écran d’ordinateur, Mona Fawaz montre une #carte_interactive, une des seules en son genre, qui révèle un déséquilibre saisissant entre les attaques revendiquées par Israël, au nombre de 985 depuis le début du conflit, et celles menées depuis le Liban : 270 frappes répertoriées sur le sol israélien.

L’occasion pour Mona Fawaz de questionner les expressions répétées dans les médias, qui façonnent la compréhension du conflit sans remettre en cause leurs présupposés. « On parle de tirs transfrontaliers, par exemple, alors même qu’il y a un déséquilibre profond entre les deux parties impliquées », souligne-t-elle. « Une distorsion médiatique » que la chercheuse dénonce aussi dans la couverture de l’offensive israélienne contre l’enclave palestinienne.

Une « lutte partagée » avec les Palestiniens

Pour Mona Fawaz, il est important de documenter un conflit dont les racines vont au-delà des affrontements présents. « La création de l’État d’Israël en 1948 a provoqué une perturbation majeure au sud du Liban, brisant [ses] liens historiques, sociaux, politiques et économiques » avec la Galilée, explique-t-elle.

Des bouleversements que la chercheuse, originaire du village de Tibnine, dans le sud du pays, connaît bien, puisqu’ils ont marqué son histoire familiale et personnelle. Elle explique que la proximité entre les populations était telle qu’au cours de la « #Nakba » (la « catastrophe », en arabe) en 1948 – l’exode massif de plus de 700 000 Palestinien·nes après la création de l’État d’Israël –, sa mère a été évacuée de son village aux côtés de Palestinien·nes chassés de leurs terres. « Les déplacés ne savaient pas où s’arrêteraient les Israéliens, raconte-t-elle. Dans cette région du Liban, on a grandi sans sentir de différences avec les Palestiniens : il y a une lutte partagée entre nous. »

En 1982, Mona Fawaz, qui avait alors à peine 9 ans, vit plusieurs mois dans son village sous l’occupation de l’armée israélienne, qui a envahi le pays en pleine guerre civile (1975-1990) afin de chasser du Liban l’Organisation de libération de la Palestine (OLP). Elle se souvient des scènes d’#humiliation, des crosses des fusils israéliens défonçant le mobilier chez son grand-père. « Ce n’est rien par rapport à ce que Gaza vit, mais il y a définitivement un effet d’association pour moi avec cette période », explique-t-elle.

Dans le petit pays multiconfessionnel et extrêmement polarisé qu’est le Liban, l’expérience de la chercheuse n’est cependant pas générale. Si une partie des Libanais·es, notamment dans le sud, est marquée par la mémoire des guerres contre Israël et de l’occupation encore relativement récente de la région – les troupes israéliennes se sont retirées en 2000 du Sud-Liban –, une autre maintient une défiance tenace contre la #résistance_palestinienne au Liban, notamment tenue responsable de la guerre civile.

Celle qui a ensuite étudié au Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), à Boston (États-Unis), pour y faire son doctorat en aménagement urbain à la fin des années 1990, explique ensuite qu’il a fallu des années aux États-Unis pour réaliser que « même le soldat qui est entré dans notre maison avait été conditionné pour commettre des atrocités ». Si l’ouverture à d’autres réalités est une étape indispensable pour construire la paix, c’est aussi un « luxe », reconnaît la chercheuse, qui semble hors de portée aujourd’hui. « L’horreur des massacres à Gaza a clos toute possibilité d’un avenir juste et pacifique », soupire-t-elle.

Le tournant de la guerre de 2006

Peu après son retour au Liban en 2004, Mona Fawaz se concentre sur les questions de l’informalité et de la justice sociale. Un événement majeur vient bouleverser ses recherches : le conflit israélo-libanais de 2006. Les combats entre Israël et le Hezbollah ont causé la mort de plus de 1 200 personnes du côté libanais, principalement des civil·es, en seulement un mois de combat.

Du côté israélien, plus de 160 personnes, principalement des militaires, ont été tuées. Cette guerre va être une expérience fondatrice pour le Beirut Urban Lab. C’est à ce moment que ses quatre cofondateurs, Mona Fawaz, Ahmad Gharbieh, Howayda Al-Harithy et Mona Harb, chercheurs et chercheuses à l’AUB, commencent leurs premières collaborations sur une série de projets visant à analyser l’#impact de la guerre. L’initiative actuelle de cartographie s’inscrit en continuité directe avec les cartes quotidiennes produites notamment par #Ahmad_Gharbieh en 2006. « Le but était de rendre visible au monde entier le caractère asymétrique et violent des attaques israéliennes contre le Liban », explique Mona Fawaz.

Dans les années qui suivent, les chercheurs participent à plusieurs projets en commun, notamment sur la militarisation de l’#espace_public, le rôle des réfugié·es en tant que créateurs de la ville ou la #privatisation des #biens_publics_urbains, avec pour objectif de faire de la « donnée un bien public », explique Mona Fawaz, dans un « pays où la collectivité n’existe pas ». « Nos recherches s’inscrivent toujours en réponse à la réalité dans laquelle nous vivons », ajoute-t-elle. Une réalité qui, aujourd’hui dans la région, est de nouveau envahie par la guerre et les destructions.

►https://www.mediapart.fr/journal/international/121223/guerre-au-proche-orient-beyrouth-mona-fawaz-resiste-par-la-cartographie

#résistance

ping @visionscarto @reka

Hamas’s Goal in Gaza: The Strategy That Led to the War—and What It Means for the Future by Leila Seurat
▻https://www.foreignaffairs.com/israel/hamass-goal-gaza

Article passionnant dont je copie ici les derniers paragraphes conclusifs

In the weeks since Hamas launched its attack, much international attention has focused on the unprecedented massacre of Israeli civilians. Far less noted has been what the assault revealed about strategic shifts within Hamas itself. By forcing Israel to launch a huge war in Gaza, the October 7 operation has overturned the prevailing understanding of Gaza as a territory that had been liberated from Israeli occupation and whose status quo as an isolated enclave could be sustained indefinitely. However great the cost to the Gazans themselves, for Hamas, the war has already achieved the goals of positioning Gaza as a key piece of the Palestinian liberation struggle and of bringing that struggle to the center of international attention.

In turn, for the Palestinians, the war has reconnected Gaza to some of the central traumas of their historical experience. Presented by Israel as an emergency humanitarian measure, the forced displacement of Gaza’s populations to the southern end of the coastal strip—as well as plans mooted within the Netanyahu administration to relocate Gazans to the Sinai Desert—has reframed the situation in Gaza within the much longer history of Palestinian expulsion that has unfolded since 1948. These current efforts to displace or remove the Gazans are all the more significant since most of those being forced to move come from families who were already refugees from the 1948 crisis. For many of them—including hundreds of thousands who have refused to leave the northern part of the strip—the situation is repeating these earlier upheavals. As they see it, the only way to avoid the risk of a second nakba (or “catastrophe”) is to remain in Gaza, no matter how great the destruction. 

With Gaza once more under intense shelling after the collapse of the seven-day cease-fire, Israel and the United States have been discussing various scenarios for the “day after.” Although the two countries disagree on many issues, including the possibility of government by the Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas, which Israel rejects, both countries are adamant about the total eradication of Hamas. But this goal itself may be based on an understanding of the organization that does not take account of its current reality. So far, despite a five-week onslaught by one of the most powerful armies in the world—one in which an overwhelming majority of Gazans have been forced to leave their homes and more than 17,000 have been killed—Hamas shows few signs of having been eradicated. Not only has it managed to maintain itself; it has also asserted its autonomy from the organization’s outside leadership as well as its Arab allies and Iran, which was not warned of the attack. The Gazan organization’s ability to remain a force even now, with a highly structured leadership, a media presence, and a network of support, calls into serious question all the current debates about the future governance of the Gaza Strip. 

For the time being, as its forces have failed to fulfill its objectives in Gaza, Israel has stepped up military operations in the West Bank through daily raids, mass arrests, and sweeping crackdowns. Not only does this raise the prospect of a two-front war after years of Israeli efforts to separate the occupied Palestinian territories from the Gaza Strip. It also suggests that the Israeli military itself may help further Hamas’s own goal of reconnecting Gaza with the broader struggle for Palestinian liberation.

#Gaza #Hamas

Thread mastodor sur le nettoyage ethnique de Gaza par le pouvoir israëlien, par
Erin Conroy @chargrille@progressives.social

Politely (or impolitely) calling my senators and representatives & supposedly anti-fascist president to tell them, repeatedly, to stop backing a corrupt autocrat while he murders hundreds of children every week & conducts a genocide out in the open, & stop giving him tens of billions of $ in weapons to keep at it, makes me fucking miserable and depressed, how about you.

▻https://progressives.social/@pvonhellermannn@mastodon.green/111554226704377285

https://files.mastodon.green/media_attachments/files/111/554/226/023/476/347/original/65b649fcb22227f2.jpeg

Black and white photograph of Eleanor Roosevelt holding up a large printed out sheet of the Declaration of Human Rights. She is holding it to her left side, looking on it herself, face in profile. Taken on 10th December 1948

Either “bear hug diplomacy” is a lie, or else he tried but is so weak he has zero effective power to stop Netanyahu’s ethnic cleansing, or else he wants Netanyahu to starve 2.3 million people to death and bomb the most densely populated place on earth until it is unlivable.

If this is what “self-defense” looks like then I am against self-defense.

George Zimmerman was not supposed to be a role model for anybody.

“Israel’s military is pushing ahead with its punishing air & ground offensive in Gaza, bolstered by a US veto derailing UN Security Council efforts to end the war.

Another boost came Saturday with word that Washington had approved an emergency sale of $106 million worth of tank ammunition.

Unable to leave tiny Gaza, more than 2 million Palestinians faced more bombardment, even in areas that Israel had described as safe zones.”

IDF’s “rounding up” all Palestinian men

▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zR_C5kh8CDs

YouTube
Israel presses on with its Gaza offensive after US veto derails Security Council efforts to halt war
Israel’s military is pushing ahead with its punishing air and ground offensive in Gaza, bolstered by a U.S. veto derailing U.N. Security Council efforts to e.. .

My mental state is of course not the point. The point is all the people that Netanyahu is murdering with our support, despite the fact that 75% of Democratic voters want a permanent cease fire, and 61% of the entire US public wants a permanent #ceasefire.

Yet the Biden Admin just vetoed the UN Security Council effort to achieve such a ceasefire.

Today, the fascists governing Israel are now “rounding up” [cattle term] all Palestinian men in Gaza. Will the West Bank be next?

“Biden administration has opposed an open-ended cease-fire...State Department bypassed Congress...to sell Israel nearly 14,000 rounds of tank ammunition worth over $106m”

“Several men & a teenage boy told the AP Saturday they were beaten by Israeli troops, given only minimal water, & often prevented from using the bathroom while being detained & interrogated for five days. [Photos of] men stripped down to their underwear...hands tied behind their backs in Gazan streets”

▻https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/israel-hamas/2023/12/09/israel-hamas-war-updates/71862557007
The Biden administration has opposed an open-ended cease-fire, arguing it would allow Hamas to continue its fight against Israel. The State Department bypassed Congress under emergency provisions to sell Israel nearly 14,000 rounds of tank ammunition worth over $106 million. Image: Smoke rises following an Israeli bombardment in the Gaza Strip, as seen from southern Israel. December 8, 2023.
ALT

Updated 5:49 AM PST, Dec 9, 2023
“The United States vetoed a United Nations resolution Friday backed by almost all other Security Council members & dozens of other nations demanding an immediate humanitarian cease-fire in Gaza.

The vote in the 15-member council was 13-1, with the United Kingdom abstaining. The United States’ isolated stand reflected a growing fracture between Washington & some of its closest allies over Israel’s monthslong bombardment of Gaza”

AP News · 1 j
US blocks UN resolution demanding humanitarian cease-fire in Gaza
Par EDITH M. LEDERER
►https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-un-resolution-ceasefire-humanitarian-6d3bfd31d6c25168e82
Reporters raise their hands to ask questions as Foreign Ministers, from left, Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan, Palestinian Minister of Foreign Affairs Riyad al-Maliki, Qatari Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al-Thani, Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan, Jordan’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Ayman Safadi, and Egyptian Foreign Affairs Minister Sameh Shoukry, attend a news conference about the Israel-Hamas war, and pressure to reduce civilian casualties, Friday, Dec. 8, 2023, in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

“France and Japan were among those supporting the call for a cease-fire.

In a vain effort to press the Biden administration to drop its opposition to calling for a halt to the fighting, the foreign ministers of Egypt, Jordan, the Palestinian Authority, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey were all in Washington on Friday. But their meeting with Secretary of State Antony Blinken took place only after the U.N. vote.”

US’s “deputy ambassador Robert Wood [complained the resolution] would allow Hamas to continue to rule Gaza...

“Hamas has no desire to see a durable peace, to see a two-state solution,” Wood said”

Netanyahu to Likud 3/2019:

“Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a #Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas & transferring money to #Hamas. This is part of our strategy - to isolate the Palestinians in #Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.”

►https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-un-resolution-ceasefire-humanitarian-6d3bfd31d6c25168e82
@chargrille@progressives.social to @w7/voa on here, Oct 21, 2023 18:15: “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a #Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to #Hamas,” #Netanyahu told a meeting of his #Likud party’s Knesset members in March 2019. “This is part of our strategy - to isolate the Palestinians in #Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.” Link to the Nation article: “We Must Not Let the Truth Become a Casualty...”
ALT

"The council called the emergency meeting to hear from Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who for the first time invoked Article 99...which enables a U.N. chief to raise threats he sees to international peace & security. He warned of an “humanitarian catastrophe” in Gaza & urged the council to demand a humanitarian cease-fire.

Guterres said he raised Article 99 [for the 1st time since 1971] because “there is a high risk of the total collapse of the humanitarian support system in Gaza.”

UN Secretary-General said Gaza is at “a breaking point,” & pointed to desperate risk of mass starvation; defense “can never justify the collective punishment of the Palestinian people.”
...
"intense, widespread & ongoing Israeli attacks from air, land & sea...have hit 339 education facilities, 26 hospitals, 56 health care facilities, 88 mosques & 3 churches...“nowhere in Gaza is safe,” Guterres said

Israeli has destroyed or damaged 60% of Gaza’s housing & forced 85% of Gazans into homelessness.

"Riyad Mansour, the Palestinian U.N. ambassador, told the council that Israel’s objective is “the ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip” & “the dispossession & forcible displacement of the Palestinian people.”

Anyway the Biden Admin had the power to abstain from this vote instead of vetoing it.

It also did not have to rush more weapons to Netanyahu in the midst of the IDF rounding up Palestinians, stripping them to their underwear, & forcing them to kneel in the streets of Gaza.

Biden’s use of emergency powers to avoid Congressional review in order to send Israel more tank rounds “directly contradicts a promise Blinken made to Congress during his confirmation hearing": i.e., that after Trump used the same maneuver to supply Saudi massacres in Yemen, US would “come back to regular order” wrt human rights in arms deals

Also: John Hudson: “NEW: U.S. officials concede that the United States is not conducting real-time assessments of Israel’s adherence to the laws of war”

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Haaretz.com & @haaretzcom “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas,” Netanyahu told his Likud party’s Knesset members in March 2019. “This is part of our strategy" Photo of Netanyahu and other men in control in Israel.
ALT

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Stephen Semler @stephensemler Trump used this emergency authority to enable Saudi war crimes in Yemen. Now Biden’s using the same one to fuel Israeli war crimes in Gaza. During his confirmation hearing, said arms sales would “come back to regular order” re human rights. He was lying. [Text in image: December 9, 2023 5:09 PM UTC US skips congressional review to approve emergency sale of tank shells to Israel By Humeyra Pamuk, Mike Stone] 10:52 AM - Dec 9, 2023 - 5,728 Views
ALT

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Akbar Shahid Ahmed @AkbarSAhmed - 12h Former State official Josh Paul says the last 24 hours should spark more alarm about the US’s Gaza policy. Between the UN veto & sped-up arms transfers, he says it’s time for “serious consideration” of whether Washington’s stated desire to reduce civilian casualties is “sincere.” Akbar Shahid Ahmed @AkbarSAhmed - 12h Paul says Biden’s decision to use emergency powers to send Israel more tank rounds “directly contradicts a promise Blinken made to Congress during his confirmation hearing.” Blinken told senators the US would “come back to regular order” w/ arms deals given human rights concerns. Shahid Ahmed @AkbarSAhmed In October, I broke the news that Paul quit State after > 11 years overseeing arms deals, including hugely controversial ones, like sales to Saudi Arabia amid the Yemen war. He told me then he left because Biden wouldn’t allow any real debate re: Israel. [photo of Biden & Netanyahu surrounded by US & Israeli flags]
ALT

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J ohn Hudson @John Hudson - 6n NEW: U.S. officials concede that the United States is not conducting real-time assessments of Israel’s adherence to the laws of war & John Hudson @John_Hudson - 6h Despite that, the United States has flooded Israel with weapons since Oct. 7, transferring at least 15k bombs, including 2k pound bunker buster bombs. John Hudson @John_Hudson - 6h In the first month and a half, Israel dropped more than 22,000 guided and unguided bombs on Gaza that were supplied by Washington, according to previously undisclosed U.S. intelligence John Hudson @John_Hudson Read more in our report here, with @missy ryan @michaelbirnbaum @ahauslohner: Link to washingtonpost.com 3:54 PM - Dec 9, 2023 from Washington, DC - 24.5K Views
ALT

While doing no checks for compliance with Netanyahu-led coalition’s adherence to the laws of war, “the US has flooded Israel with weapons since Oct. 7, transferring at least 15k bombs, including 2k pound bunker buster bombs”

Worse, HuffPo reporter says “US officials told me they worry Israel is taking arms to attack Lebanon & Israel won’t share its plans for the weapons”

Israel won’t share its plans for the weapons including whether they will use them in Lebanon

The Biden Administration’s decisions over the last 24 hours or so are extremely alarming.

"Former State official Josh Paul says the last 24 hours should spark more alarm about the US’s Gaza policy. Between the UN veto & sped-up arms transfers, he says it’s time for “serious consideration” of whether Washington’s stated desire to reduce civilian casualties is “sincere.”

No one talks enough about Netanyahu cabinet’s intent to starve 2.3 million Gazans to death.

“The hunger war has started.” A bag of flour goes for $120 in Gaza...Thousands of people pounce on aid trucks when they arrive; crowds ransacked a warehouse where food had piled up before distribution."

“Almost no one in #Gaza has enough food. In some areas, 9 out of 10 people have gone a full day & night with nothing to eat” (@WFP_Media)

Read the Gaza Food security report here👉
▻https://www.wfp.org/publications/gaza-food-security-assessment-december-2023

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@ Gregg Carlstrom @glcarlstrom - Dec 8 “The hunger war has started.” A bag of flour goes for $120 in Gaza. There’s a black market for sugar. Forget about eggs. Thousands of people pounce on aid trucks when they arrive; crowds ransacked a warehouse where food had piled up before distribution. [link to ] ©WFPMedia reply: The latest #Gaza Food Security Assessment is out. The results are alarming. Almost no one in #Gaza has enough food. In some areas, 9 out of 10 people have gone a full day and night with nothing to eat. Read the Gaza Food security report here - bit.ly/3NbsB3V 12:06 AM - Dec 9, 2023 - 18.4K Views
ALT

“The suffering is really apocalyptic,” said Khaled Abu Shaban, 38, an aid worker near Khan Younis. Israel’s intensive shelling has forced agonizing choices...Should he venture out to the supermarket or search for well water, at risk of being killed? Or should he let his young daughters go to sleep hungry & thirsty?"

His 7-year-old cheered Wednesday, he said, when he brought home a tomato..."we are searching for water & anything that we can chew in the 21st century”

►https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-war-southern-gaza-humanitarian-conditions-4da8410ab2e849

https://stockage.framapiaf.org/framapiaf/cache/media_attachments/files/111/555/016/824/275/529/original/f8bdd37ed63339c4.png

RAFAH, Gaza Strip (AP) — The roads are so ravaged that the dead and wounded arrive by donkey cart. Desperate relatives rush bloodied and dust-covered people, many of them children, to the hospital. Naseem Hassan, a 48-year-old Palestinian medic in the Gaza Strip’s southern town of Khan Younis, said it had become impossible to walk through Nasser Hospital, with people spread out everywhere. Some patients, terrified or semiconscious, tugged at his sleeve when he squeezed through the halls. They groaned, slept and died on those bloodstained floors, he said. His skeletal staff at the 350-bed hospital has struggled to cope with an influx of over 1,000 patients. Without fresh bandages and gauze, Doctors Without Borders said, patients’ wounds have become seriously infected, in many cases septic.
ALT

That 7 yo is going to starve to death if we let the Israeli government do whatever it wants. We need a #Ceasefire.

“There is hunger, there is nothing: There is no flour, no water,” said Etimad Hassan, who sleeps pressed together with 21 family members in a small tent in Deir al-Balah. Her voice trembled with rage. “We are not animals.”

"Without cooking gas, Palestinians chop down whatever trees they find for firewood.

"Adding to the misery, there is little to no treatment available for the 14% of Gaza’s population suffering from diabetes, high blood pressure & other chronic heart conditions, said the [WHO].

“Asthmatics do not find inhalers. Diabetics do not find insulin,” said Ebraheem Matar, a doctor at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah. “Hypertensive patients do not find receptor blockers.”

“Hassan said her husband abruptly stopped taking his blood pressure medication when he ran out, a withdrawal doctors warned would increase his risk of heart attack. “I’m worried it will kill him,” she said.

Junaid said he spends his days begging for food in the streets & scouring pharmacies & health clinics for any anti-inflammatory medication to blunt his throbbing headaches. He checked five pharmacies Thursday & returned home empty-handed.”

“Tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza, many of whom already fled fighting two or three times, have set off for the southern city of Rafah on the Egyptian border. The Israeli military air-dropped fliers and called and texted evacuation warnings to thousands of civilians across Khan Younis while pressing deeper into the city.

Misery spans the horizon in the southern border town. Thousands of people sleep in the cold outside. Others crowd together wherever they find space.”

“You find displaced [families] in the streets, in schools, in mosques, in hospitals,” said Hamza Abu Mustafa, a schoolteacher in Rafah"

“Chaotic scenes of sickness & filth unfold at the UN shelters in Rafah, bursting at the seams. The UN humanitarian office said Wednesday that poor sanitation has led to rampant cases of scabies, lice & diarrhea, raising fears that more serious diseases may soon spread. Aid workers have reported outbreaks of the liver disease hepatitis A”

►https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-war-southern-gaza-humanitarian-conditions-4da8410ab2e849