Gaza

‘Waiting to die’: Layla Moran raises plight of NHS surgeon who fears for parents in Gaza

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/30/waiting-to-die-layla-moran-raises-plight-of-nhs-surgeon-who-fears-for-parents-in-gaza

Mohammad also had a message for the government: “I’ve given 20 years of my life to the NHS saving the British public’s lives, which I’m grateful for. Don’t use my tax money to support, in any shape or form, a genocidal government that is killing my own people.”

I just read this, posted by a friend:

Hind Hassan posted about that on Twitter a few days ago, Dr Hassam previously attempted to speak from the the hospital gates to the IDF laying seige but was driven back inside under gunfire, the murder of his 8yr old son by the IDF was to show Dr Hassam that his family are considered a legitimate target – he buried his son in the hospital courtyard

The IDF deserve what’s coming to them in The Hague

I have just read about the Palestinian medic who was sent to pick up the body of someone who had been killed in an Israeli airstrike, it wasn’t until he got back to the hospital and pulled the sheet back that he discovered it was his own mother.

Gaza really is Hell on Earth.

As someone said on the “woke freezer” thread

There must surely, surely come a point where you think to yourself, “what the actual **** am I doing?”

Gaza really is Hell on Earth.

But some far-right Israeli government supporters intend changing Gaza into some sort of zionist paradise. Presumably once the genocide has been completed and Gaza has been ethnically cleansed  :

https://twitter.com/YinonMagal/status/1736376764442526073

The translation from Hebrew is “A house on the beach is not a dream!”

Hamas rejected another ceasefire proposal today:

“Senior Hamas official Taher al-Nunu told Agence France-Press (AFP) that the group rejected the idea of a short-term pause in the fighting mooted by US and Qatari mediators. Mediators had hoped that a short pause would create a window to bring in humanitarian aid to Gaza’s desperate civilian population and to negotiate a permanent ceasefire. “The idea of a temporary pause in the war, only to resume aggression later, is something we have already expressed our position on. Hamas supports a permanent end to the war, not a temporary one,” he said.“

https://amp.theguardian.com/world/live/2024/oct/31/middle-east-lebanon-israel-gaza-war-hezbollah-hamas

Hamas rejected another ceasefire proposal today:

Hamas insisted on a permanent ceasefire today.

There is no need for a ceasefire for Israel to immediately address the “catastrophic humanitarian situation” in Gaza, according to the United States.

US warns Israel over Gaza aid as deadline nears

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2n4x9dlz7o

The US has given its ally until 12 November to “surge” all assistance, with a minimum of 350 lorries entering Gaza daily. But the UN says only 10% of that number have crossed each day on average since then.

Ms Thomas-Greenfield said the Biden administration had made clear to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Israel must address the humanitarian crisis in Gaza immediately and that the US “rejects any Israeli efforts to starve Palestinians in Jabalia, or anywhere else”.

“The US has stated clearly that Israel must allow food, medicine and other supplies into all of Gaza – especially the north, and especially as winter sets in – and protect the workers distributing it,” she added.

Ms Thomas-Greenfield also expressed US concern about the two laws adopted by Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, forbidding Israeli state officials from contact with Unrwa and prohibiting Unrwa operations in Israel and annexed East Jerusalem in three months’ time.

US warns Israel over Gaza aid as deadline nears

The israelis will take that deadline to the wire. and only implement it in the last few seconds at midnight on the last day, just so they can maximize the damage it will do to the Palestinian people.

The israelis will take that deadline to the wire. and only implement it in the last few seconds at midnight on the last day, just so they can maximize the damage it will do to the Palestinian people.

More likely they will completely ignore it, like they completely ignored every other deadline or demand, knowing full well that the US are not serious in their claims that they want the genocide to stop.

^^^

Basically this.

The UK (as a lap dog to the US who haven’t got the balls to rein Netanyahu in) might as well adopt a policy of shutting the door and averting our eyes to whatever Israel wants to do to the Palestinian people.

We can use the time making sure our internal and external intelligence services are as fit for purpose as they can be – given the inevitable backlash here, when Israel is happy with its body count.

About 11 months ago I would have argued that the sheer intensity of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, and the accompanying slaughter of men, women, and children, was down to the fact that Israel’s far-right government knew that they had a limited window of opportunity before global opinion would make it impossible for them to carry on. So better to destroy and kill as much as you can whilst the world lets you get away with it.

If I had been forced to to suggest how long this window of opportunity might last I would probably have suggested somewhere in the region of about three months before the headlines became too damaging for Israel.

How wrong I was. Certainly global public opinion has shifted massively against Israel as too have the positions of governments such as those in Ireland and Spain, but there appears to be no limit to what the governments of the United States, the UK, Germany, etc, are prepared to tolerate.

Indeed it would appear that this inaction and tolerance by Western governments has achieved the opposite and simply emboldened the apartheid regime to commit even more war crimes and crimes against humanity, as evidenced by the expulsion of UNRWA and the implementation of the “general’s plan”.

None of this will bring peace and security to Israel of course. There will never be peace in the absence of justice.

Bil Clinton speaking to Arab Americans. The Democrats really do want to lose, don’t they ?

https://x.com/mehdirhasan/status/1851847099056291892?s=46&t=0EdQH2VaJpSkNmaw8CsUvg

Here’s a link to the full segment. He makes a lot of good points.

He makes a lot of good points.

For example ?  It’s just an orgy of revisionism, lies and victim-blaming from beginning to end.

I would probably have suggested somewhere in the region of about three months before the headlines became too damaging for Israel.

The Middle East has been on fire for most of my lifetime, literally millions have been killed by any number of hate filled anti democratic and autocratic regimes. The death tolls for the Yemeni and Syrian civil wars are approaching 20 times what they are in Gaza, and those conflicts are virtually invisible in western media, Netenyahu’s awful gamble- that people killing each other in the region is ubiquitous to the point of invisibility, has mostly turned out to be correct.

that people killing each other in the region is ubiquitous to the point of invisibility, has mostly turned out to be correct.

Mostly correct? Maybe the problem is the people who live in that region of the world.

Unless you can think of one war in the Middle East, in your lifetime, in which “literally millions have been killed”, that didn’t involve the United States or Europe in some way?

Some people might argue that “the West” should perhaps **** off and stop military interventions, stoking up civil wars, organising coups, and general political interference, in the Middle East.

Although that might run counter to vital Western interests obviously. So maybe better to just blame the victims of Western sponsored violence instead.

He makes a lot of good points

Not really, otherwise Arafat would have accepted the two states solution.

There were there first?  The Banu/Bani Israeli were there first (“original”) but they were expelled or banished twice and their blood line almost disappeared after centuries of banishment. The current ones are not Banu/Bani Israeli nor people from the region but Zionists supported by oppressive regimes.  Eventually, they (Zionists) will be expelled again but this time there will be no return, and that’s the reason why they try to eradicate the Palestinian population to avoid being banished for good.

It is astonishing that some Western politicians, including the current UK Foreign Secretary (who is a member of Labour Friends of Israel) are still refusing to call this a genocide:

‘Death is everywhere’: fears grow that Israel plans to seize land in Gaza

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/nov/02/fears-grow-israel-plans-seize-land-gaza-siege-netanyahu-war-aims

In the past week, Kamal Adwan was raided by the IDF, its medics detained, and then, after the soldiers withdrew, the hospital was bombed, destroying supplies recently delivered by the World Health Organization (WHO).

Idan Landau, a Tel Aviv University linguistics professor and political commentator, wrote on his blog, Don’t Die Stupid, that “the ultimate goal of the plan is not military but political – resettling Gaza”.

The UN secretary general, António Guterres, called on Wednesday for the international community to stand firm to prevent “ethnic cleansing” in Gaza, but the US and other western allies of Israel have so far been reluctant to use the leverage of their arms supplies to influence policy.

Western politicians obviously have no serious interest in stopping genocide and ethnic cleansing, as long as the country doing it is Israel.

Unless you can think of one war in the Middle East, in your lifetime, in which “literally millions have been killed”, that didn’t involve the United States or Europe in some way?

Given that historically most Arabic states in the region are armed with ex-Soviet and Russian military equipment, in an decades long propaganda attempt to turn pan-Arabic Ba’athist parties into clients after the USSR’s failure to ‘win-over’ Isreali in the early 60’s – hence the common place anti Israeli rhetoric, it’s a pretty safe bet to say all the wars in the middle east have had their cold-war origins outside the region.

Western politicians obviously have no serious interest in stopping genocide and ethnic cleansing, as long as the country doing it is Israel.

That can’t be right. Sir Keir has told us many times that he is “concerned “ about the “loss of life”. Are you suggesting that he’s …. lying ?

it’s a pretty safe bet to say all the wars in the middle east have had their cold-war origins outside the region.

Nonsense. Are you seriously suggesting that the US sponsored Iraq-Iran War, for example, had anything to do with the Cold War??

If you are desperate to find a common denominator I would suggest that  “oil” is a more realistic one.

Sorry for the cut&paste post, but this post by Michael Rosen made me even more depressed than i was before, and I thought I’d share the misery

I was on the demonstration today and listened to the speeches. I think that plenty of people are getting it wrong. I don’t think that the US and the UK are ‘complicit’ with what Israel is doing. I don’t the the US and the UK are ‘collaborating’. I don’t even really think that the US and the UK are ‘supplying arms’. To me, these words don’t explain what has happened this last year and is happening right now. For those words to make sense (‘complicit’, ‘collaborate’, ‘supply’), it would suggest that the US and the UK are doing Israel a favour, or are leaping in to ‘help’ Israel.

But objectively, the US (and its allies) have gone beyond being complicit, collaborating, and supplying. The vast tonnage of bombs, the massive use of US aircraft, drones, munitions and high tech back-up, can, to my mind, only be interpreted as the US (and allies including us) doing this for its own reasons. What’s going on is an enactment of US policy.

If I’m right (and I accept I may not be), it would mean a realignment of how we view what’s going on. It would mean dropping the pretence that the US is a mediator, and/or a supporter. What’s going on would not be a matter of Israel drawing up new boundaries, carrying out mass slaughter, widening the area of conflict to include all the surrounding areas, but it would be US policy. It would mean us seeing what’s going on as stages in how the US would like the Middle East to be this year, next year and for the next years.

If true, this would take me to thinking ahead to something else. Many in the US administration now accept that the Iraq War was a mistake. It was a sudden, unprovoked, blitz-type war. Perhaps, the US is envisaging something different this time: a long-term war fought in terms of constant small-scale warfare against Iran and its allies, exhausting and crushing them under the weight of superior, almost inexhaustible firepower. Unlike the Iraq War, this time the US has a skilled, experienced, highly motivated ally on the ground. Note: not like the decaying, corrupt puppets of the South Vietnam government, but an ideological force, (Israel) whose views hold sway in most of the western governments and western populations. But to the point, they’re there, on the ground, ready and able to do the bombing, to seize the land, and to justify it.

Behind all this, lies a question why? This can’t feasibly be, (as people like Douglas Murray insist it is) about ‘values’ ie Judeo-Christianity vs Islam. Would a modern state feasibly spend billions on fighting for Christianity against Islam? There must be material reasons lying behind this onslaught, which the ideological stuff about ‘values’ can be used to justify what’s going on. Clearly the Middle East holds within it vast resources that the US and allies believe (‘know’?) they need and/or have some control over its production and distribution. In addition is the power of what we’ve come to call the ‘military-industrial’ complex. Built into the US government and economy is this huge chunk of never-ending production and profit-making. What we call ‘tech’ is a huge part of this complex too. In one sense, the US administration and government serves the purpose of making sure that the military-industrial complex gets its contracts, uses up its ‘products’ (guns, bombs, planes, drones, tech), gets new contracts, on and on and on. In other words, when the government commits to war, it gives the complex what it wants.
So, coming back to where I started, I think we’re getting it wrong, if we think the US is ‘complicit’ or ‘collaborating’. Instead, we should think of it as ‘pursuing’, ‘driving’, ‘carrying out’ war (or wars) in the Middle East, informed by what didn’t work before, trying to make this one (these ones) work better.
And, if we turn that round 180 degrees, it means that in effect, the Palestinians are fighting against the mercenary forces of the US.
I understand why the left has tended to construct ‘Israel’ or ‘Zionism’ and ‘Zionists’ as the enemy but I’m now of the feeling that this is misleading. Thinking of what’s going on in that way, draws us into how Israel and Zionism sees it – a local fight for the self-determination of the Jews. I see the left dragged into endless arguments about the nature of the Israeli state, the origins of Zionism, or the nature of the Balfour Agreement etc etc. I’m now of the view even if that was all relevant before, it’s no longer relevant. What’s going on now is much more like the Vietnam War, other than that US pilots are not actually flying the planes, and US men and women are not ‘on the ground’. They don’t need to be because the aims and objectives of the people who are on the ground are a perfect match for the aims and objectives of the US, with none of the flakiness of the South Vietnamese.

As I say, this is only me thinking aloud. I know there are strong disagreements with this view. I know there are people who would prefer something more nuanced – and I accept that it may have been more nuanced in the past. However, this is my view of where we are now as of 2024.

Sorry for the cut&paste post, but this post by Michael Rosen made me even more depressed than i was before, and I thought I’d share the misery

Ilan Pappe has been saying much the same for the previous year, all too depressing to consider the outcome of all this

made me even more depressed than i was before, and I thought I’d share the misery

I am not sure why it might have made you more depressed than before as he seems to be saying something which appears fairly obvious imo, ie, Israel serves US interests. It is not the other way round as many seem to think.

US foreign policy isn’t dictated by the”zionist lobby” it is  dictated by US interests. I can’t remember which anti-zionist Israeli Jew it was, maybe Ilan Pappe, who made the point that Israelis are used to serve US interests whether they realise it or not.

The problem for Israel is that although it has existed in a region which has been of vital importance to the United States for the last 50 years that importance is diminishing and it is likely to continue doing so in the future. I can see a point in the future when the US no longer feels that propping up Israel makes a lot of political and financial sense. US capitalism doesn’t do nostalgia.

Edit :

Ilan Pappe has been saying much the same for the previous year

Yeah, was waylaid whilst writing my comment and didn’t see that

Nonsense. Are you seriously suggesting that the US sponsored Iraq-Iran War, for example, had anything to do with the Cold War??

I suppose it depends on your definition of “Cold War”. Does global proxy warfare between US (+allies) and USSR (+allies) 1947-1991 work?

If you are desperate to find a common denominator I would suggest that “oil” is a more realistic one.

It certainly was for the USSR, who had a 1967 agreement for Iraq to supply USSR with oil in exchange for weapons

After the 1979 Iranian revolution USSR saw the opportunity to get Iran onside as well and was officially neutral.

The 1980 war was a huge problem to the USSR in fostering relations with both sides, although they allowed allies to continue their trade in Soviet arms.

When Iran got the upper hand in 1982 the USSR increased support to Iraq to protect their interests there and directly increased the arms trade again in 1986 leading to Iraq’s victory

Cold War? Yes

Oil? Yes

Just the US (+allies)? No

The Iraq-Iran War had no more to do with the Cold War than the Algerian War or the First Gulf War or other wars which involved Western powers. Western military and political interference in the Middle East was/is motivated primarily by a desire for cheap oil and compliant, preferably undemocratic, regimes.

The Soviet Union and the Cold War are no longer but Western military and political interference continues unabated. The Middle East has the unfortunate disadvantage of being strategically and economically important to the advanced capitalist countries, that is why  post ottoman empire there have been so many wars in the region. It has nothing to do with the claim that “people killing each other in the region is ubiquitous to the point of invisibility”.

The Soviet Union and the Cold War are no longer but Western military and political interference continues unabated.

All true. But pretending that only “Western” powers are involved is misrepresentation (you know enough for it not to be ignorance or naivety).

I am not pretending anything. I am challenging the concept that the peoples of the Middle East are somehow inherently committed to war and violence.

It smacks of islamophobia and conveniently ignores decades of Western military and political interference in the region.

Edit : Just for clarity I fully accept that Cold War politics has undeniably played a part in the past. But to suggest that it is the only reason for Western inference in the region is both false and misleading.

All I see is you suggesting that Russia isn’t involved, or implicated.

See my edit. I thought the role of competing powers was self-evident and not really necessary to acknowledge.

What isn’t self-evident to me is the claim that the people in the region have an innate tendency to go war. Unless you believe that Islam fosters a culture of war and violence.

A good edit. But it’s not just about “the past”, Russia is a key player in the region right now, and Western powers don’t have the option to stop “interfering” without leaving the door wide open for other powers from outside the region to take advantage.

What isn’t self-evident to me is the claim that the people in the region have an innate tendency to go war.

The “people”, no. But stability in the region has been rare, and the point being made was that the Cold War, and what has come since it, has played a part in that, and still does. It’s not just “western powers” and “capitalism” that is uniquely to blame, far from it.

Cold War? Yes

Oil? Yes

Just the US (+allies)? No

All this is easy to agree with.

Slightly buried in the news by the US election but I find this interesting. Gallant seems to be less extreme than Netanyahu (all things bring relative) and had a lot of public support the last time he was fired. Too much to hope that he could provide an alternative to Netanyahu with his preference to get the hostages back?

BBC News – Israel PM Netanyahu fires defence minister Gallant
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cqj07jdzzgno

I believe that Netanyahu is currently enjoying very high approval ratings, which I guess might the reason why he felt that it was now safe to sack Gallant.

I can’t see how Gallant could now be in a position to challenge Netanyahu.

Ireland approves first Palestine ambassador after recognising Palestinian state

https://www.firstpost.com/world/united-states/ireland-approves-first-palestine-ambassador-after-recognising-palestinian-state-13832324.html

After Dublin formally recognised a Palestinian state earlier this year, Ireland on Tuesday accepted the appointment of a full Palestinian ambassador for the first time.

Spain and Norway made the same declaration on the same day as Ireland, with Slovenia following a week later, prompting retaliatory measures from Israel.

Bit by bit Israel’s international isolation grows.

Good news with the ambassador, and the UK should be doing the same.

That shouldn’t have to mean isolation for Israel, but it is a step towards proper recognition for Palestine.

Whether it should or should not is a moot point, Israel’s growing international isolation is clear and obvious.

BBC ran an article on perceptions of either a Harris or Trump presidency.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2yv9k3mpmo

And as it’s looking like a Trump win.

Mr Trump has framed ending the war in terms of Israel’s “victory”, and has opposed an immediate ceasefire in the past, reportedly telling Netanyahu “do what you have to do”.

I’m not sure when they made that statement, but I dont see much for optimism for the next 4 years (not that either candidate offered me much hope).

So the announcement went down well:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cqj07jdzzgno

If nothing else, it exposes that recovering the hostages (sadly I can’t imagine many are still alive) is not a priority for Netanyahu.

Bit by bit Israel’s international isolation grows.

So what? How many Palestinian (and now Lebanese. And Syrian. And Iranian) lives does that save ?