Meanwhile back in Israel

mickeyrat

https://twitter.com/NaksBilal/status/1742158923623211457?t=rMWoddHrG_MKsCNcxMEjoQ&s=19

Halifax2TheMax

Put the criticism of the Israeli government as the same as being an antisemite to rest. Please.

Opinion 

 Anti-Zionism isn’t the same as antisemitism. Here’s the history.

By Benjamin Moser

Benjamin Moser is the author of “Sontag: Her Life and Work,” for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for biography. His latest book, “The Upside-Down World: Meetings With the Dutch Masters,” was published in October.

In December, amid catastrophic bloodshed in Gaza, the House of Representatives resolved that “anti-Zionism is antisemitism.” The vote was 311 to 14, with 92 members voting present, reflecting a consensus among American political elites that opposition to Zionism is equivalent to the conspiratorial hatred of Jews. If the resolution itself had no immediate practical consequences, the consensus behind it did. The lopsided vote reflected the U.S. government’s absolute diplomatic, military and ideological support of Israel while that state, under the leadership of the most right-wing government in its history, was pursuing a campaign in response to the terrorist attack of Oct. 7 that has resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinians, including, in just a few weeks, at least 7,700 children.

When learning of this vote, many people familiar with Jewish history might have suppressed a sardonic laugh. Anti-Zionism, after all, was a creation of Jews, not their enemies.

Before World War II, Zionism was the most divisive and heatedly debated issue in the Jewish world. Anti-Zionism had left-wing variants and right-wing variants — religious variants and secular variants — as well as variants in every country where Jews resided. For anyone who knows this history, it is astonishing that, as the resolution would have it, opposition to Zionism has been equated with opposition to Judaism — and not only to Judaism, but to hatred of Jews themselves. But this conflation has nothing to do with history. Instead, it is political, and its purpose has been to discredit Israel’s opponents as racists.

Race has always been at the heart of the debate. Many anti-Zionists believed the Jews were, in their parlance, “a church.” This meant that, although they shared certain beliefs, traditions and affinities with coreligionists in other nations, they nonetheless belonged as fully to their own national communities as anyone else. For them, an American Jew was a Jewish American, just as an Episcopalian American or a Catholic American was an American first of all. They were unwilling to subscribe to any idea suggesting that the Jews were a race, separate and, as the antisemites would have it, unassimilable. These people did not consider themselves to be in exile, as the Zionists would have it. They considered themselves to be at home. They feared that the insistence on ethnicity or race could open them to the old accusations of double loyalty, undermining attempts to achieve equality.

In fact, anti-Zionist thinking predates Zionism. It emerges from the possibility that first appeared at the end of the 18th century. In 1790, in his famous letter to the Jews of Newport, R.I., George Washington declared that “all possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights, for, happily, the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens.”

Only a few years later, Napoleon offered the Jews of France the possibility of full citizenship in a secular state — and then brought this principle into the vast territories he conquered. The opening of the ghettos unleashed a burst of creativity. Jewish thinkers began to contend with an idea preserved in traditional prayers: that the Jews would return to Palestine, where, in their ancestral land, they would be ruled by a scion of the House of David, restore the sacrifices under the priesthood of the descendants of Aaron and worship in a rebuilt Temple.

Many modernizing thinkers rejected this, and many other ritual formulas, as antiquated and fanciful. Rather than awaiting a personal messiah — one who would bring about the bodily resurrection of the dead — they hoped instead for a messianic age of peace and brotherhood. This was not conditioned on the mystical hope of a return to Zion. Instead, Jews should work in the here and now of the real world. Along with this idea came the precept that the Jews are, in the words of one rabbi, “citizens and faithful sons of the lands of their birth or adoption. They are a religious community, not a nation.” Though considered radical at first, this precept would eventually be embraced by the majority of Western Jews.

This view would ultimately find its most enthusiastic adherence in the United States. “This country is our Palestine, this city our Jerusalem, this house of God our Temple,” said Rabbi Gustavus Poznanski of Charleston, S.C., in 1841. A century later, during the Holocaust and World War II, Rabbi Samuel Schulman of Temple Emanu-El in New York stated that “the essence of Reform Judaism for me is the rejection of Jewish Nationalism, not necessarily the eating of ham.” Many Jews noted that talk of a “diaspora,” even of a “Jewish people,” resembled the calumnies of antisemites, which held that the Jews were an unassimilable foreign imperium in imperio. They noticed, as they could hardly have failed to notice, that many antisemites were fervently pro-Zionist: the better to get rid of the Jews. After the Balfour Declaration of 1917, promising a Jewish homeland to the tiny minority of Jews then living in Palestine, Edwin Montagu, the only Jew in the British cabinet, observed: “The policy of His Majesty’s Government is anti-Semitic in result and will prove a rallying ground for anti-Semites in every country in the world.”

Only a catastrophe as overwhelming as the Nazi Holocaust could have papered over these divisions. No matter how the Jews thought of themselves, the Zionists argued, the gentiles would never accept them. No matter how much they felt at home, no matter how much loyalty they expressed, no matter how many of them died defending their country, they would always, eventually, be persecuted. It didn’t matter whether they called themselves a people or a race or a church; it didn’t matter whether they thought of themselves as Germans or Romanians or Canadians. The outside world saw only Jews. This calamitous reality proved that the Jews could rely only on themselves, that they needed their own land, their own army, their own state, which needed to exist in Palestine. The Holocaust seemed to prove the Zionist argument. For nearly all Jews, the rise of the state of Israel, only three years after the defeat of Hitler, seemed to be a miraculous resurrection. Israel’s spectacular military victories over its apparently much more powerful enemies were a guarantee that the Jews would never again suffer what they had suffered. For many Jews throughout the world — even Jews who had never set foot in Israel — pride in Israel replaced a faith that many of them had lost. After the long night of exile — galut — brilliant dawn had come at last.

Yet beneath this apparent unanimity, Zionism remained controversial. It was controversial among certain strict religious communities that believed that only the Messiah could usher the Jews back into the Holy Land and rejected what they saw as the materialism and impiety of the Zionist settlers. It was controversial among socialists and communists, who rejected all forms of nationalism. But after the foundation of the state of Israel, the debate took a different turn. The heart of the objection was among those horrified by what Israel had meant for the native population of Palestine. For these people, the lesson of antisemitism was a rejection of all forms of racism, and especially of the kinds of atrocities that had been visited upon the Jews. They were dismayed that another people, one that bore no responsibility for the Nazi crimes, would be forced to pay for them. And their commitment to universalism brought them into conflict with the Jewish state. For decades, and particularly given the danger that Israel continued to face from its neighbors, their arguments were seldom heard and often ignored, and they themselves were described as “self-hating” or even “mentally ill.”

Even thinkers who continued to view the establishment of Israel as a mistake nevertheless hoped that the question could be resolved with a peaceful partition. The Oslo accords pointed toward this possibility. But the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, the direct consequence of those agreements, put paid to that assumption and brought to power a series of increasingly right-wing governments. Their policies rendered a future Palestinian state impossible.

As a result, anti-Zionism, rather than decreasing, has increased. No other state in the world has seen its “right to exist” as frequently questioned. This lack of recognition has been a major, perhaps the major, preoccupation of Israeli diplomacy. It might sometimes be the result of the rejection of people who hate the Jews, but among Jews it is the rejection of the idea of Zionism. It is a rejection of the idea of ethnic nationalism. It is a rejection of the idea of citizenship tied to race. Israel, far more than any other country that defines itself as “Western” or “democratic,” is still based on these ideas. And because it has increasingly, and now officially, come to define itself as a Jewish state, its defenders have often described its opponents as antisemites. The problem with this description? Many of those who share these convictions are, and always have been, Jews.

“There is no debate,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, the chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, in December. “Anti-Zionism is predicated on one concept, the denial of rights to one people.” To people who know nothing about one of the oldest and most persistent debates in Jewish history, this might sound plausible. Anyone who does can only admire the panache required in presenting such a deeply divisive question — one that, for two centuries, has gone to the very heart of the identity of the Jews — as unanimous. Never has the debate been louder than it is now.

Opinion | Anti-Zionism isn’t the same as antisemitism. Here’s the history. - The Washington Post

benjs

Halifax2TheMax said:

Put the criticism of the Israeli government as the same as being an antisemite to rest. Please.

Opinion 

 Anti-Zionism isn’t the same as antisemitism. Here’s the history.

By Benjamin Moser

Benjamin Moser is the author of “Sontag: Her Life and Work,” for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for biography. His latest book, “The Upside-Down World: Meetings With the Dutch Masters,” was published in October.

In December, amid catastrophic bloodshed in Gaza, the House of Representatives resolved that “anti-Zionism is antisemitism.” The vote was 311 to 14, with 92 members voting present, reflecting a consensus among American political elites that opposition to Zionism is equivalent to the conspiratorial hatred of Jews. If the resolution itself had no immediate practical consequences, the consensus behind it did. The lopsided vote reflected the U.S. government’s absolute diplomatic, military and ideological support of Israel while that state, under the leadership of the most right-wing government in its history, was pursuing a campaign in response to the terrorist attack of Oct. 7 that has resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinians, including, in just a few weeks, at least 7,700 children.

When learning of this vote, many people familiar with Jewish history might have suppressed a sardonic laugh. Anti-Zionism, after all, was a creation of Jews, not their enemies.

Before World War II, Zionism was the most divisive and heatedly debated issue in the Jewish world. Anti-Zionism had left-wing variants and right-wing variants — religious variants and secular variants — as well as variants in every country where Jews resided. For anyone who knows this history, it is astonishing that, as the resolution would have it, opposition to Zionism has been equated with opposition to Judaism — and not only to Judaism, but to hatred of Jews themselves. But this conflation has nothing to do with history. Instead, it is political, and its purpose has been to discredit Israel’s opponents as racists.

Race has always been at the heart of the debate. Many anti-Zionists believed the Jews were, in their parlance, “a church.” This meant that, although they shared certain beliefs, traditions and affinities with coreligionists in other nations, they nonetheless belonged as fully to their own national communities as anyone else. For them, an American Jew was a Jewish American, just as an Episcopalian American or a Catholic American was an American first of all. They were unwilling to subscribe to any idea suggesting that the Jews were a race, separate and, as the antisemites would have it, unassimilable. These people did not consider themselves to be in exile, as the Zionists would have it. They considered themselves to be at home. They feared that the insistence on ethnicity or race could open them to the old accusations of double loyalty, undermining attempts to achieve equality.

In fact, anti-Zionist thinking predates Zionism. It emerges from the possibility that first appeared at the end of the 18th century. In 1790, in his famous letter to the Jews of Newport, R.I., George Washington declared that “all possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights, for, happily, the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens.”

Only a few years later, Napoleon offered the Jews of France the possibility of full citizenship in a secular state — and then brought this principle into the vast territories he conquered. The opening of the ghettos unleashed a burst of creativity. Jewish thinkers began to contend with an idea preserved in traditional prayers: that the Jews would return to Palestine, where, in their ancestral land, they would be ruled by a scion of the House of David, restore the sacrifices under the priesthood of the descendants of Aaron and worship in a rebuilt Temple.

Many modernizing thinkers rejected this, and many other ritual formulas, as antiquated and fanciful. Rather than awaiting a personal messiah — one who would bring about the bodily resurrection of the dead — they hoped instead for a messianic age of peace and brotherhood. This was not conditioned on the mystical hope of a return to Zion. Instead, Jews should work in the here and now of the real world. Along with this idea came the precept that the Jews are, in the words of one rabbi, “citizens and faithful sons of the lands of their birth or adoption. They are a religious community, not a nation.” Though considered radical at first, this precept would eventually be embraced by the majority of Western Jews.

This view would ultimately find its most enthusiastic adherence in the United States. “This country is our Palestine, this city our Jerusalem, this house of God our Temple,” said Rabbi Gustavus Poznanski of Charleston, S.C., in 1841. A century later, during the Holocaust and World War II, Rabbi Samuel Schulman of Temple Emanu-El in New York stated that “the essence of Reform Judaism for me is the rejection of Jewish Nationalism, not necessarily the eating of ham.” Many Jews noted that talk of a “diaspora,” even of a “Jewish people,” resembled the calumnies of antisemites, which held that the Jews were an unassimilable foreign imperium in imperio. They noticed, as they could hardly have failed to notice, that many antisemites were fervently pro-Zionist: the better to get rid of the Jews. After the Balfour Declaration of 1917, promising a Jewish homeland to the tiny minority of Jews then living in Palestine, Edwin Montagu, the only Jew in the British cabinet, observed: “The policy of His Majesty’s Government is anti-Semitic in result and will prove a rallying ground for anti-Semites in every country in the world.”

Only a catastrophe as overwhelming as the Nazi Holocaust could have papered over these divisions. No matter how the Jews thought of themselves, the Zionists argued, the gentiles would never accept them. No matter how much they felt at home, no matter how much loyalty they expressed, no matter how many of them died defending their country, they would always, eventually, be persecuted. It didn’t matter whether they called themselves a people or a race or a church; it didn’t matter whether they thought of themselves as Germans or Romanians or Canadians. The outside world saw only Jews. This calamitous reality proved that the Jews could rely only on themselves, that they needed their own land, their own army, their own state, which needed to exist in Palestine. The Holocaust seemed to prove the Zionist argument. For nearly all Jews, the rise of the state of Israel, only three years after the defeat of Hitler, seemed to be a miraculous resurrection. Israel’s spectacular military victories over its apparently much more powerful enemies were a guarantee that the Jews would never again suffer what they had suffered. For many Jews throughout the world — even Jews who had never set foot in Israel — pride in Israel replaced a faith that many of them had lost. After the long night of exile — galut — brilliant dawn had come at last.

Yet beneath this apparent unanimity, Zionism remained controversial. It was controversial among certain strict religious communities that believed that only the Messiah could usher the Jews back into the Holy Land and rejected what they saw as the materialism and impiety of the Zionist settlers. It was controversial among socialists and communists, who rejected all forms of nationalism. But after the foundation of the state of Israel, the debate took a different turn. The heart of the objection was among those horrified by what Israel had meant for the native population of Palestine. For these people, the lesson of antisemitism was a rejection of all forms of racism, and especially of the kinds of atrocities that had been visited upon the Jews. They were dismayed that another people, one that bore no responsibility for the Nazi crimes, would be forced to pay for them. And their commitment to universalism brought them into conflict with the Jewish state. For decades, and particularly given the danger that Israel continued to face from its neighbors, their arguments were seldom heard and often ignored, and they themselves were described as “self-hating” or even “mentally ill.”

Even thinkers who continued to view the establishment of Israel as a mistake nevertheless hoped that the question could be resolved with a peaceful partition. The Oslo accords pointed toward this possibility. But the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, the direct consequence of those agreements, put paid to that assumption and brought to power a series of increasingly right-wing governments. Their policies rendered a future Palestinian state impossible.

As a result, anti-Zionism, rather than decreasing, has increased. No other state in the world has seen its “right to exist” as frequently questioned. This lack of recognition has been a major, perhaps the major, preoccupation of Israeli diplomacy. It might sometimes be the result of the rejection of people who hate the Jews, but among Jews it is the rejection of the idea of Zionism. It is a rejection of the idea of ethnic nationalism. It is a rejection of the idea of citizenship tied to race. Israel, far more than any other country that defines itself as “Western” or “democratic,” is still based on these ideas. And because it has increasingly, and now officially, come to define itself as a Jewish state, its defenders have often described its opponents as antisemites. The problem with this description? Many of those who share these convictions are, and always have been, Jews.

“There is no debate,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, the chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, in December. “Anti-Zionism is predicated on one concept, the denial of rights to one people.” To people who know nothing about one of the oldest and most persistent debates in Jewish history, this might sound plausible. Anyone who does can only admire the panache required in presenting such a deeply divisive question — one that, for two centuries, has gone to the very heart of the identity of the Jews — as unanimous. Never has the debate been louder than it is now.

Opinion | Anti-Zionism isn’t the same as antisemitism. Here’s the history. - The Washington Post

As a Jew, this one is close to my heart. I’ve been disgusted by the way Israel refers to itself as the Jewish state and how their government (in my opinion) are the biggest perpetrator that a good Jew is a Zionist and vice-versa. The intent is clearly to help the two become synonymous and to silence opposition discourse (or frankly anything disagreeing with their official policy). This has been on display for decades. It’s egregious and the only way I would feel right about that is if every Jew was given a vote in Israel’s governance. Not an option? Then stop telling the world you represent me. My moral compass doesn’t permit me to feel that way, and it really doesn’t appear that Israeli politicians have much of a soul with the way they speak.

mickeyrat

is it a coincidence this comes on the heels of reporting how the war has tanked their economy? given the reserves called up etc?

https://apnews.com/article/israel-hamas-war-news-01-07-2024-2122c6290d059b0bb6aaefddcf43baf4   Israel signals it has wrapped up major combat in northern Gaza as the war enters its fourth month

 

Israel signals it has wrapped up major combat in northern Gaza as the war enters its fourth month

By JULIA FRANKEL, SAMY MAGDY and NAJIB JOBAINH

1 hour ago

JERUSALEM (AP) — The Israeli military signaled that it has wrapped up major combat in northern Gaza, saying it has completed dismantling Hamas' military infrastructure there, as the war against the militant group entered its fourth month Sunday.

The military did not address troop deployments in northern Gaza going forward. Its spokesman, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, said late Saturday that forces would “continue to deepen the achievement” there, strengthen defenses along the Israel-Gaza border fence and focus on the central and southern parts of the territory.

The announcement came ahead of a visit to Israel by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Biden administration officials, including Blinken, have repeatedly urged Israel to wind down its blistering air and ground offensive in Gaza and shift to more targeted attacks against Hamas leaders to prevent harm to Palestinian civilians.

---

ISRAEL-HAMAS WAR

Son of veteran correspondent is the fifth member of his family killed by Israeli strikes on Gaza

7 Palestinians, an Israeli policewoman and a motorist are killed in West Bank violence

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In recent weeks, Israel had already been scaling back its military assault in northern Gaza and pressing its offensive in the territory’s south, where most of Gaza’s 2.3 million Palestinians are being squeezed into smaller areas in a humanitarian disaster while being pounded by Israeli airstrikes.

The war was triggered by Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel in which the militants killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took some 250 people hostage.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday again insisted the war will not end until the objectives of eliminating Hamas, getting Israel’s hostages returned and ensuring that Gaza won’t be a threat to Israel are met.

“I say this to both our enemies and our friend,” he told his Cabinet. “This is our responsibility and this is the obligation of all of us.”

Israel's retaliation by air, land and sea has killed more than 22,700 Palestinians and wounded more than 58,000, according to the Health Ministry in Hamas-run Gaza. The count of the dead does not distinguish between combatants and civilians. Health officials say about two-thirds of those killed have been women and minors. Israel blames Hamas for the heavy civilian casualties because the group operates in heavily populated residential areas.

On Sunday, officials at Nasser Hospital in the southern city of Khan Younis received the bodies of 18 people, including 12 children, who were killed in an Israeli strike late Saturday. More than 50 people were injured in the strike on a home in the Khan Younis refugee camp, which was set up decades ago to house refugees from the 1948 Mideast war over Israel's creation and morphed into a neighborhood of the city.

An airstrike near the southern city of Rafah killed two journalists on Sunday, including Hamza Dahdouh, the oldest son of Wael Dahdouh, Al-Jazeera's well-known chief correspondent in Gaza, the Arabic channel and local medical officials said. Al-Jazeera broadcast footage of Dahdouf, weeping next to his son's body and holding his hand, before walking away in a daze. The Israeli military had no immediate comment.

Dahdouh previously lost four other relatives, including his wife, two children and a grandchild, in an Oct. 26 airstrike, and himself was wounded in an Israeli strike last month that killed a co-worker.

Another airstrike hit a house between Khan Younis and the southern city of Rafah, killing at least seven people whose bodies were taken to the nearby European Hospital, according to an Associated Press journalist at the facility.

Israeli forces were also pushing deeper into the central city of Deir al-Balah, where on Saturday residents in several neighborhoods were warned in flyers dropped over the city that they must evacuate their homes.

The international medical charity Doctors Without Borders, known by the acronym MSF, said it was evacuating its medical staff and their families from Deir al-Balah's Al Aqsa Martyrs' Hospital because of the growing danger.

“The situation became so dangerous that some staff living in the neighboring areas were not able to leave their houses because of the constant threats of drones and snipers,” said Carolina Lopez, the group’s emergency coordinator at the hospital.

She said a bullet penetrated a wall of the hospital’s intensive care unit on Friday, and that “drone attacks and sniper fire were just a few hundred meters from the hospital” over the past couple of days.

The group had about 50 Palestinian and international medical staff in the hospital. Lopez said the hospital has received between 150 and 200 injured people daily in recent weeks. “On some days, we have received more dead than injured,” she said. “No one and nowhere is safe in Gaza.”

Hagari, the military spokesman, said the scattered fighting in northern Gaza was to be expected, along with rockets sporadically being launched from there toward Israel. He said Hamas no longer operates in an organized manner in the area, but that militants “without a framework and without commanders” are still present. The military has said it has killed more than 8,000 Hamas fighters, without presenting evidence.

Hagari said Israeli forces would act differently in the south than they had in northern Gaza, where heavy bombardment and ground combat leveled entire neighborhoods.

He said the urban refugee camps currently being targeted by the military are packed with gunmen and that “an underground city of sprawling tunnels” was discovered underneath Khan Younis. He said the military is “applying the lessons we learned,” but did not elaborate. Echoing Israeli political leaders, he said the fighting “will continue throughout 2024.”

His comments about changing the way the forces are fighting appeared to be a nod to Blinken, who is on his fourth Mideast trip in three months.

In addition to appeals for scaling back high-intensity combat, Blinken has called for more aid to reach Gaza and urged Israel's leaders to come up with a vision for post-war Gaza.

Two U.S. senators who inspected aid deliveries over the weekend described a cumbersome process that is slowing relief to the Palestinian population in the besieged territory — largely due to Israeli inspections of cargo trucks, with seemingly arbitrary rejections of vital humanitarian equipment. The system to ensure that aid deliveries within Gaza don’t get hit by Israeli forces is “totally broken,” said Sens. Chris Van Hollen and Jeff Merkley, both Democrats.

Meanwhile, the Biden administration and Netanyahu remain far apart on who should run the territory after the war, with the Israeli leader repeatedly rejecting the Washington-floated idea of having a reformed Palestinian Authority, an autonomy government in parts of the occupied West Bank, eventually administer Gaza.

In a further complication of Blinken's mission, a new escalation of cross-border fighting between Israel and Lebanon's Hezbollah has put strains on a U.S. push to prevent a regional conflagration. Saturday's fighting was described by Hezbollah as an “initial response” to the targeted killing of a top Hamas leader in a Hezbollah stronghold of the Lebanese capital of Beirut last week. The strike was presumed to have been carried out by Israel.

___

Magdy reported from Cairo and Jobain from Rafah, Gaza Strip.

___ Find more of AP’s coverage at: https://apnews.com/hub/israel-hamas-war

nicknyr15

I can’t imagine being disruptive just to be disruptive is getting anybody on their side. Blocking bridges and tunnels should be illegal imo. Protesting is one thing, but this isn’t protesting. This isn’t helping the cause or changing anyone’s mind, probably doing the opposite. 

mickeyrat

gift article....

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/05/opinion/israel-hostage-war-government.html?unlocked_article_code=1.ME0.EOyH.RK52wyhj0LNZ&smid=url-share

 

The Families of Hostages Are Calling on Israel to Do Something Radical

Jan. 5, 2024

Credit...Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

• 
  

• 
  

By Mairav Zonszein

Ms. Zonszein is a journalist and a senior Israel analyst with the International Crisis Group.

Sign up for the Israel-Hamas War Briefing.  The latest news about the conflict. Get it sent to your inbox.

Ido Shamriz turned his eulogy for his brother, Alon, into a protest.

Against all odds, Mr. Shamriz said, his brother had survived 70 days of captivity in Gaza and escaped — only to be shot and killed by Israeli soldiers along with two other hostages waving white flags. Those “who abandoned you also murdered you,” Mr. Shamriz said.

In other words, the state failed to protect Alon on Oct. 7 when Hamas attacked Israel and again on Dec. 15, the day he was killed.

The accidental killing of the three hostages by Israeli troops shifted the public mood in Israel from despair and grief to indignation and fury.

The released hostages, their families and the families of those who remain in Gaza have emerged not only as the Israeli government’s loudest critics in its war effort, a symbol of its failure to guard its people, but also as the main pressure group within Israel pushing for a political path to release the remaining hostages, which many of them say Israel cannot solely achieve by fighting.

The hostages who have returned and are gradually telling their stories also represent a unique group of Israelis: those who have been on the receiving end of Israeli airstrikes and thus have a small sense of what Gazans are going through. You can see on some of their faces the trauma and sense of betrayal.

Several released hostages have said that Israeli airstrikes were one of their greatest fears while being held in Gaza. On their return, some warned the cabinet that Israel’s military offensive is endangering the remaining hostages.

continues.....

Halifax2TheMax

Because people need to know what's being seriously proposed by Bibi and his Zionist enablers:

Israeli calls for Gaza’s ethnic cleansing are only getting louder

Nearly three months of war have left Gaza in ruins. Israel’s quest to eradicate militant group Hamas after it carried out its deadly Oct. 7 attack looks far from finished, no matter the skyrocketing death toll for Palestinians. More than 20,000 people have been killed in the Gaza Strip due to Israeli bombardments and the ongoing offensive. A sprawling humanitarian crisis has seen close to 90 percent of Gazans displaced and the majority of the embattled territory’s more than 2 million population teetering on the brink of famine.

“I’ve been to all kinds of conflicts and all kinds of crises,” Arif Husain, chief economist for the U.N.’s World Food Program, told the New Yorker this week. “In my life, I’ve never seen anything like this in terms of severity, in terms of scale, and then in terms of speed.”

The human misery unfurling across Gaza finds little sympathy in the Israeli public discourse, where the priority remains the vanquishing of Hamas — perpetrators of the single bloodiest slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust — and the freeing of hostages held in Hamas’s Gazan redoubts. Indeed, a steady drumbeat of sound bites from Israeli lawmakers and other politicos has urged an even more devastating fate for the territory.

Members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition have called for the dropping of a nuclear bomb on densely-populated Gaza, the total annihilation of the territory as a mark of retribution, and the immiseration of its people to the point that they have no choice but to abandon their homeland.

This week alone, a parliamentarian from Netanyahu’s Likud party went on television and said it was clear to most Israelis that “all the Gazans need to be destroyed.” Then, Israel’s ambassador in Britain told local radio that there was no other solution for her country than to level “every school, every mosque, every second house” in Gaza to degrade Hamas’s military infrastructure.

This accumulating rhetoric forms part of the 84-page application filed by the government of South Africa at the International Court of Justice, accusing Israel of actions that amount to genocide or failure to prevent genocide. Though it condemns Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack, the South African case argues “no armed attack on a State’s territory no matter how serious — even an attack involving atrocity crimes — can … provide any possible justification for, or defense to, breaches” of the Genocide Convention. Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, it explains, has already “laid waste to vast areas of Gaza, including entire neighborhoods, and has damaged or destroyed in excess of 355,000 Palestinian homes,” rendering swaths of the territory uninhabitable for a long period of time to come. Israeli authorities, claimed the South African complaint, have failed to suppress “direct and public incitement to commit genocide” from a host of Israeli politicians, journalists and public officials.

That includes far-right figures like finance minister Bezalel Smotrich and national security minister Itamar Ben Gvir, who do little to hide their vision of an ethnically-cleansed Gaza. “What needs to be done in the Gaza Strip is to encourage emigration,” Smotrich said in an interview Sunday with Israeli Army Radio. “If there are 100,000 or 200,000 Arabs in Gaza and not 2 million Arabs, the entire discussion on the day after will be totally different.” Ben Gvir separately called for the de facto forced migration of hundreds of thousands out of Gaza.

U.S. and other Western officials condemned these statements as “inflammatory and irresponsible.” But such pushback is doing little to change the tone of the conflict. Netanyahu himself, according to my colleagues, tried to cajole Egypt and other Arab governments and states elsewhere into taking Gazan refugees — a non-starter for many in the Middle East, who fear further Palestinian dispossession of their lands.

Israeli calls for de facto ethnic cleansing and potential Israeli settlement of Gaza may not reflect the actual position of Israel’s wartime cabinet. “In private, Israeli officials say the proposals [to relocate Gazans] stem from the political imperatives of Netanyahu’s coalition and his dependence on far-right parties to maintain power,” my colleagues reported.

“The professionals in the military and the security establishment know this is not even in the realm of possibility,” a person directly familiar with conversations inside the Israeli government told The Washington Post, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly. “They know there is no future without Gazans in Gaza and the [Palestinian Authority] as part of the government.”

But Netanyahu and his allies remain conspicuously vague about their imagined endgame for Gaza. That uncertainty, analysts contend, only deepens concerns about Israel’s intent among its Arab neighbors, including Gulf monarchies that were warming to the Jewish state.

“Nobody is going to take the steps that would precede new normalization agreements when Netanyahu is rebuffing Arab states demands on a two-state political process and also insisting that they should fund Gaza reconstruction with no questions asked or strings attached,” wrote Michael Koplow and David Halperin of the Israel Policy Forum.

“Iran and its proxies are not going to be deterred when visiting high-ranking U.S. officials repeatedly lay out their vision for a postwar Gaza and Israeli cabinet members fall over each other in their rush to the television studios to offer public rebuttals,” they added, arguing that it was vital for the Biden administration to push the Israelis to face up to these realities.

Meanwhile, a group of prominent Israelis, including former lawmakers, top scientists and intellectuals, wrote a joint letter Wednesday condemning Israel’s judicial authorities for not reining in the genocidal rhetoric widely on show. “For the first time that we can remember, the explicit calls to commit atrocious crimes, as stated, against millions of civilians have turned into a legitimate and regular part of Israeli discourse,” they wrote. “Today, calls of these types are an everyday matter in Israel.”

Israeli calls for Gaza’s ethnic cleansing are only getting louder - The Washington Post

Halifax2TheMax

I guess its too early to speak of "ethnic cleansing, eh? Page 3 of 86:

The facts relied on by South Africa in this application and to be further developed in these proceedings establish that — against a background of apartheid, expulsion, ethnic cleansing, annexation, occupation, discrimination, and the ongoing denial of the right of the Palestinian people to selfdetermination — Israel, since 7 October 2023 in particular, has failed to prevent genocide and has failed to prosecute the direct and public incitement to genocide. More gravely still, Israel has engaged in, is engaging in and risks further engaging in genocidal acts against the Palestinian people in Gaza. Those acts include killing them, causing them serious mental and bodily harm and deliberately inflicting on them conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction as a group. Repeated statements by Israeli State representatives, including at the highest levels, by the Israeli President, Prime Minister, and Minister of Defence express genocidal intent. That intent is also properly to be inferred from the nature and conduct of Israel’s military operation in Gaza, having regard inter alia to Israel’s failure to provide or ensure essential food, water, medicine, fuel, shelter and other humanitarian assistance for the besieged and blockaded Palestinian people, which has pushed them to the brink of famine. It is also clear from the nature, scope and extent of Israel’s military attacks on Gaza, which have involved the sustained bombardment over more than 11 weeks of one of the most densely populated places in the world, forcing the evacuation of 1.9 million people or 85% of the population of Gaza from their homes and herding them into ever smaller areas, without adequate shelter, in which they continue to be attacked, killed and harmed. Israel has now killed in excess of 21,110 named Palestinians, including over 7,729 children — with over 7,780 others missing, presumed dead under the rubble — and has injured over 55,243 other Palestinians, causing them severe bodily and mental harm. Israel has also laid waste to vast areas of Gaza, including entire neighbourhoods, and has damaged or destroyed in excess of 355,000 Palestinian homes, alongside extensive tracts of agricultural land, bakeries, schools, universities, businesses, places of worship, cemeteries, cultural and archaeological sites, municipal and court buildings, and critical infrastructure, including water and sanitation facilities and electricity networks, while pursuing a relentless assault on the Palestinian medical and healthcare system. Israel has reduced and is continuing to reduce Gaza to rubble, killing, harming and destroying its people, and creating conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction as a group.

Application instituting proceedings and Request for the indication of provisional measures (icj-cij.org)

Halifax2TheMax

Page 9 & 10:

Since 7 October 2023, Israel has engaged in a large-scale military assault by land, air and sea, on the Gaza Strip (‘Gaza’), a narrow strip of land approximately of 365 square kilometres – one of the most densely populated places in the world.48 Gaza — home to approximately 2.3 million people, almost half of them children — has been subjected by Israel to what has been described as one of the “heaviest conventional bombing campaigns” in the history of modern warfare.49 By 29 October 2023 alone, it was estimated that 6,000 bombs per week had been dropped on the tiny enclave.50 In just over two months, Israel’s military attacks had “wreaked more destruction than the razing of Syria’s Aleppo between 2012 and 2016, Ukraine’s Mariupol, or proportionally, the Allied bombing of Germany in World War II.”51 The destruction wrought by Israel is so extreme that “Gaza is now a different colour from space. It’s a different texture”.

mickeyrat

https://twitter.com/mehdirhasan/status/1744588889027748035?t=zdw2dT12LRYqjzvheiDQAA&s=19

lastexitlondon

Why  is everyone scared of Israel. I'm not really into politics but this is obviously ethnic cleansing yet it's ok? Mind blowing 

mickeyrat

https://apnews.com/article/israel-hamas-war-news-01-09-2024-017066376ac06026622ee0b83dc2b65e   Blinken urges Israel to engage with region on postwar plans that include path to Palestinian state

 

Blinken urges Israel to engage with region on postwar plans that include path to Palestinian state

By MATTHEW LEE, NAJIB JOBAIN and SAMY MAGDY

3 mins ago

TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Tuesday called on Israel to work with moderate Palestinians and neighboring countries on plans for postwar Gaza, saying they were willing to help rebuild and govern the territory but only if there is a “pathway to a Palestinian state.”

The U.S. and Israel are united in the war against Hamas but sharply divided over Gaza's future, with Washington and its Arab allies hoping to revive the long-moribund peace process, an idea that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his coalition partners sharply oppose.

The war in Gaza is still raging, with no end in sight, and fueling a humanitarian catastrophe in the tiny coastal enclave. The fighting has also stoked escalating violence between Israel and Lebanon's Hezbollah militants that has raised fears of a wider conflict.

Speaking at a news conference after meeting with top Israeli leaders, Blinken said Israel “must stop taking steps that undercut the Palestinians' ability to govern themselves effectively.”

---

ISRAEL-HAMAS WAR

Live updates | Blinken presses Israel on Gaza’s postwar future as Lebanon border clashes escalate

Former UK opposition leader Corbyn to join South Africa's delegation accusing Israel of genocide

Hezbollah launches drone strike on base in northern Israel but military says there's no damage

TikTok restricts tool used by researchers - and its critics - to assess content on its platform

Israel, he added “must be a partner of the Palestinian leaders who are willing to lead their people” and live "side by side in peace with Israel.” Settler violence, settlement expansion, home demolitions and evictions “all make it harder, not easier, for Israel to achieve lasting peace and security."

U.S. officials have called for the Palestinian Authority, which currently administers parts of the Israeli-occupied West Bank, to take the reins in Gaza. Israeli leaders have rejected that idea but have not put forward a concrete plan beyond saying they will maintain open-ended military control over the territory.

Blinken has said that Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Turkey agreed to begin planning for the reconstruction and governance of Gaza once the war ends. The leaders of Jordan, Egypt and the Palestinian Authority are set to meet Wednesday in Jordan’s southern Red Sea city of Aqaba.

HEAVY FIGHTING IN GAZA

The United States, which has provided crucial military and diplomatic support for Israel's offensive, has pressed it to shift to more precise operations targeting Hamas. But the pace of death and destruction has remained largely the same, with hundreds killed in recent days.

Israel has vowed to keep going until it destroys Hamas, which triggered the war with its Oct. 7 attack into southern Israel. Palestinian militants killed some 1,200 people, mainly civilians, and abducted around 250 others, nearly half of whom were released during a weeklong cease-fire in November.

The Israeli military says it has dismantled Hamas infrastructure in northern Gaza — where entire neighborhoods have been demolished — but is still battling small groups of militants. The offensive’s focus has shifted to the southern city of Khan Younis and built-up refugee camps in central Gaza.

“The fighting will continue throughout 2024,” said Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, a military spokesman.

Since the war began, Israel’s assault in Gaza has killed more than 23,200 Palestinians, roughly 1% of the territory’s population, and more than 58,000 people have been wounded, according to the Health Ministry in Hamas-run Gaza. About two-thirds of the dead are women and children. The death toll does not distinguish between combatants and civilians.

A strike late Monday hit a house in the central town of Deir al-Balah, killing the mother, three daughters and three small grandchildren of Jamal Naeim, a well-known dentist in Gaza. Outside the hospital, Naeim cradled a small bundle of white cloth containing all that remained of one of his adult daughters, Shaimaa, who was also a dentist.

“This is what we found of her, just the skin of her head and her hair,” he said, breaking into sobs. Naeim is the brother of Bassem Naeim, a political figure in Hamas, but is not a member of the group himself, residents said.

At least eight people were killed when a strike hit a five-story residential building in Rafah in southern Gaza on Tuesday, Palestinian Health officials said. Six of the bodies were taken to nearby Kuwati hospital and were counted by an Associated Press journalist. Two other corpses were transported to Youssef al-Najjar Hospital, also in Rafah, according to Dr. Sohaib al-Hams, who works at al-Kuwati Hospital.

Monday was one of the deadliest days yet for Israeli troops in Gaza, with nine killed, according to the military. Six of them died in an accidental blast when forces were preparing a controlled demolition of a weapons production site in central Gaza, the military said.

It says 185 soldiers have been killed since the ground offensive began in late October.

A HUMANITARIAN CRISIS

Nearly 85% of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million have been driven from their homes by the fighting, and a quarter of its residents face starvation, with only a trickle of food, water, medicine and other supplies entering through an Israeli siege.

The U.N. humanitarian office, known as OCHA, warned that the fighting was severely hampering aid deliveries. Several warehouses, distribution centers, health facilities and shelters have been affected by the military’s evacuation orders, it said.

The situation is even more dire in northern Gaza, which Israeli forces cut off from the rest of the territory in late October. Tens of thousands of people who remain there face shortages of food and water.

The World Health Organization has been unable to deliver supplies to the north for two weeks. OCHA said the military rejected five planned aid convoys to the north over that period, including deliveries of medical supplies and fuel for water and sanitation facilities.

Blinken said more food, water, medicine and other aid needs to enter and be distributed effectively. He called on Israel to “do everything it can to remove any obstacles from crossings to other parts of Gaza."

FEARS OF A WIDER CONFLICT

The war in Gaza has threatened to trigger a wider conflict, with Israel and Lebanon's Hezbollah trading escalating strikes following the killing of Hamas' deputy political leader in Beirut last week.

On Tuesday, Hezbollah said its exploding drones targeted the Israeli army's northern command in the town of Safed — deeper into Israel than previous fire by the group. The Israeli military said a drone fell at a base in the north without causing damage, suggesting it had been intercepted. Military officials did not identify the base.

Israeli strikes in southern Lebanon meanwhile killed at least four Hezbollah members, including one who was killed in the village where a funeral was held for a Hezbollah commander killed the day before.

Israel claimed the man killed ahead of the funeral, Ali Hussein Barji, was in charge of Hezbollah's drones in the south, but a Hezbollah official, speaking on condition of anonymity in accordance with the group’s regulations, said he was only a fighter.

___

Jobain reported reported from Rafah, Gaza Strip, and Magdy from Cairo. Associated Press writers Tia Goldenberg in Jerusalem and Bassem Mroue in Beirut contributed to this report.

___

Find more of AP’s coverage at: https://apnews.com/hub/israel-hamas-war

Halifax2TheMax

Some would like you to believe that Israel was the non-aggressor toward Gaza. Others have a different take. Notice the dates of the tally, 23 years prior to the events of 10/07 and 6 years prior to Hamas being elected. Pages 16-18:

Between 29 September 2000 and 7 October 2023, approximately 7,569 Palestinians,102 including 1,699 children,103 were killed, including in those “four highly asymmetrical wars”, as well as other smaller military assaults, with tens of thousands of others injured. A further 214 Palestinians,  including 46 children were killed during the ‘Great March of Return’,104 a large-scale peaceful protest along the separation fence between Gaza and Israel, in which thousands of Palestinians participated every Friday for over 18 months, demanding that “the blockade imposed on Gaza be lifted and the return of Palestinian refugees” to their homes and villages in Israel.105 On one particularly lethal day alone, Israel killed 60 Palestinian protesters.106 As determined by the Independent Commission of Inquiry on the protests in the occupied Palestinian territory (‘Commission’):

“[D]uring these weekly demonstrations, the Israeli Security Forces (ISF) killed and gravely injured civilians who were neither participating directly in hostilities nor posing an imminent threat to life. Among those shot were children, paramedics, journalists, and persons with disabilities.”107

28. Those killed by Israeli soldiers, firing from behind the separation fence, included three medics and two journalists. A total of over 36,100 Palestinians, including nearly 8,800 children,108 were injured by Israel, including 4,903 people who were shot in the lower limbs, “many while standing hundreds of metres away from the snipers, unarmed”.109 156 of them had to have at least one limb amputated,110 and over 1,200 required specialised limb reconstruction treatment.111 The Commission found that the maiming was not accidental: the rules of engagement adopted by Israel permitted snipers to shoot at the legs of the “major inciters”.112 One Israeli soldier admitted that he shot “42 knees in one day”.113

29. The Commission found that there were reasonable grounds to believe that Israeli snipers “intentionally shot” children, knowing them to be children,114 and they also “intentionally shot” health workers and journalists “despite seeing that they were clearly marked as such”.115 It further found “reasonable grounds to believe” that Israeli snipers shot disabled demonstrators “intentionally, despite seeing that they had visible disabilities” and despite them not presenting an imminent threat.116

Other reports by United Nations bodies and mandates have repeatedly found Israel to have acted in serious violation of international law in its previous military attacks on Gaza. By way of example: — Report of the human rights inquiry commission established pursuant to Commission resolution S-5/1 of 19 October 2000 (16 March 2001): 117

“50. . . . [T]he IDF apparently on grounds of military necessity, has destroyed homes and laid to waste a significant amount of agricultural land, especially in Gaza, which is already land starved. Statistics show that 94 homes have been demolished and 7,024 dunums of agricultural land bulldozed in Gaza. Damage to private houses is put at US$ 9.5 million and damage to agricultural land at about US$ 27 million. . . . Houses situated on this land had been destroyed and families compelled to live in tents. Water wells in the vicinity had also been completely destroyed. The Commission found it difficult to believe that such destruction, generally carried out in the middle of the night and without advance warning, was justified on grounds of military necessity. To the Commission it seemed that such destruction of property had been carried out in an intimidatory manner unrelated to security, disrespectful of civilian well-being and going well beyond the needs of military necessity. The evidence suggests that destruction of property and demolition of houses have been replicated elsewhere in the West Bank and Gaza. Palestinians, like other people, are deeply attached to their homes and agricultural land. The demolition of homes and the destruction of olive and citrus trees, nurtured by farmers over many years, has caused untold human suffering to persons unconnected with the present violence . . .

51. The Commission concludes that the IDF has engaged in the excessive use of force at the expense of life and property in Palestine.”

Application instituting proceedings and Request for the indication of provisional measures (icj-cij.org)

Halifax2TheMax

And for those claiming the West Bank is peacefully Palestinian, where Palestinians are "free," yea, right. And tell me again about violations of "treaties." And "who" started it? Pages 25-28:

The Oslo Accords divided administrative competences over three areas of the West Bank (Areas A, B, and C — not including East Jerusalem) between the Palestinian Authority and Israel, the Occupying Power. Area A, comprising 18 per cent of the West Bank is stated to be under the full administrative control of the Palestinian Authority; Area B, comprising 22 per cent of the West Bank is under the administrative control of the Palestinian Authority and the security control of Israel; and Area C, comprising 60 per cent of the West Bank, is under full Israeli administrative and security control.132 In 1967, Israel purportedly annexed occupied East Jerusalem to its territory, and in 1980, it incorporated a provision into its Basic Law claiming Jerusalem ‘united’ as the capital of Israel, a move censured by the United Nations Security Council as “null and void” and to “be rescinded forthwith”.133 Since 1967, Israel has constructed 279 ‘settlements’ for Israeli civilians across the West Bank — including 14 settlements in East Jerusalem — appropriating 750,000 dunums (185,329 acres) of Palestinian land.134 The United Nations Security Council has repeatedly declared that the establishment of such settlements by Israel has “no legal validity and constitutes a flagrant violation under international law and a major obstacle to the achievement of the two-State solution and a just, lasting and comprehensive peace”.135 Regardless, the number of Israeli settlers transferred into the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) has increased dramatically from an estimated 247,000 at the time of the Oslo Accords,136 to over 700,000 in 2023.137 The Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (‘ICC’) has determined that there is “a reasonable basis to believe” that “members of the Israeli authorities have committed war crimes… in relation, inter alia, to the transfer of Israeli civilians into the West Bank.138

34. The United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, described the situation in the West Bank as follows:

“53. …There, the Palestinians are subject to a harsh and arbitrary legal system quite unequal to that enjoyed by the Israeli settlers. Much of the West Bank is off-limits to Palestinians, and they regularly endure significant restrictions on their freedom of movement through closures, roadblocks, and the need for hard-to-obtain travel permits. 54. Access to the natural resources of the occupied territory, especially to water, is disproportionately allocated to Israel and the settlers. Similarly, the planning system administered by the occupying power for housing and commercial development throughout the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, is deeply discriminatory in favour of settlement construction, while imposing significant barriers on Palestinians, including ongoing land confiscation, home demolitions and the denial of building permits. Israel employs practices that in some cases may amount to the forcible transfer of Palestinians, primarily those living in rural areas, as a means of confiscating land for settlements, military weapons training areas and other uses exclusive to the occupying power that have little or nothing to do with its legitimate security requirements. 55. As for East Jerusalem, the occupation has increasingly detached it from its traditional national, economic, cultural and family connections with the West Bank because of the wall, the growing ring of settlements and related checkpoints, and the discriminatory permit regime. It is neglected by the municipality in terms of services and infrastructure, the occupation has depleted its economy and the Palestinians have only a small land area on which to build housing.”139

35, The institutionalised regime of discriminatory laws, policies and practices applied by Israel subjects Palestinians to what constitutes an apartheid regime.140 Palestinians in the West Bank are contained behind a segregating Wall, subjected to: discriminatory land zoning and planning policies; punitive and administrative house demolitions;141 violent Israeli army incursions into Palestinian villages, towns, cities and refugee camps, including in Area A;142 routine violent Israeli raids on their homes; arbitrary arrests and indefinitely renewable administrative detention (internment without trial); and a dual legal system pursuant to which Palestinians are tried under Israeli military legislation in Israeli military courts, without basic protections of international humanitarian and human rights law, while Israeli settlers living in the same territory are subject to a different legal regime, and tried in Israeli civilian courts with full due process.143 36. Palestinians in the West Bank are also subjected to routine violence by Israeli soldiers and armed settlers. Prior to 7 October 2023, between 1 January and 6 October 2023, 199 Palestinians had been killed by Israeli soldiers or settlers in the West Bank and 9,000 more had been injured.144 By September 2023, Save the Children had already declared 2023 the deadliest year for Palestinian children in the West Bank since 2005 with at least 38 Palestinian children having been killed.145 Since 7 October 2023, a further 295 Palestinians, including 77 children, have been killed by Israeli soldiers and settlers, and a further 3,803, including 576 children, wounded — many seriously.146 A total of 495 Palestinians have been killed in total in the West Bank, making it “the deadliest year for Palestinians” since 2005.147

37. In a wave of arbitrary mass arrests, Israel has detained more than 3,000 Palestinians from the West Bank and East Jerusalem, including for social media posts relating to the situation in Gaza.148 Israel significantly increased the number of Palestinians held in administrative detention, without charge or trial, to 2070.149 Thousands of Palestinians from Gaza working in Israel were also arbitrarily arrested and detained, with 3,200 being forcibly returned to Gaza on 3 November 2023 into intense full scale bombardments. Reports that the Palestinian labourers were mistreated on arrest and subjected to physical violence, abuse and humiliation are widespread.150 Many Palestinian adult and child detainees from the West Bank released in exchange for Israeli hostages report also severe ill-treatment, serious beatings and other outrages to personal dignity since 7 October 2023 in particular, alongside restrictions on access to food, water, medical treatment, and electricity in Israeli detention.151 Six Palestinian detainees from the West Bank have died in Israeli custody since 7 October 2023, in particular.152 19 Israeli prison guards were reportedly questioned for beating to death one of the prisoners, Tha’er Abu Asab, in Ketziot Prison.153

38. Since 7 October 2023, Israeli forces have carried out airstrikes and military raids on refugee camps in the West Bank, killing many Palestinians, bulldozing roads, and imposing severe restrictions on movement.154 There have been 236 attacks on ‘healthcare’ — including hospitals — in the West Bank, with Israeli forces detaining health staff and ambulances and preventing ambulances from accessing the wounded.155 Armed Israeli settler attacks on Palestinians — overtly supported by Israeli politicians — have also escalated dramatically.156 Settlers — often accompanied by Israeli soldiers — have killed at least eight Palestinians and injured at least 85 others, instilling terror among Palestinians, especially farming communities, and damaging property.157 2,186 Palestinians in the West Bank, including 1,058 children, have been internally displaced since 7 October 2023 as a result of extreme Israeli settler violence, alongside punitive or administrative house demolitions carried out by the Israeli army and damage caused to homes during Israeli military raids and operations.158 The Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court indicated in December 2023 that he was “accelerating investigations” into Israeli settler attacks in the West Bank.159

39. Israel’s actions in the West Bank since 7 October 2023 — including its support for and failure to prevent or punish Israeli settlers for incitement and violence against Palestinians and Palestinian property, including the driving out of vulnerable Palestinian communities from their lands — are intrinsically connected to Israel’s actions in Gaza, and provide at the very least important context to Israel’s violations of the Genocide Convention.

Application instituting proceedings and Request for the indication of provisional measures (icj-cij.org)

Halifax2TheMax

Another WWII reference, Still don't consider it "ethnic cleansing?" Page 30:

C. Genocidal Acts Committed against the Palestinian People

43. This section provides an overview of the acts in which Israel has engaged that are genocidal in character, having regard to their nature, scope and context. These acts are ongoing, and ongoing in a conflict context, where Israel is deliberately imposing telecommunications blackouts on Gaza and restricting access by fact-finding bodies173 and the international media.174 At the same time Palestinian journalists are being killed at a rate significantly higher than has occurred in any conflict in the past 100 years. In the two months since 7 October 2023, the number of journalists killed already exceeded that of the entirety of World War II.175 Further detail will be provided regarding these acts over the course of these proceedings. However, such information as is available establishes that Israel: (1) is engaged in killing Palestinians in Gaza — including Palestinian children — in large numbers; (2) is causing serious bodily and mental harm to Palestinians in Gaza, including Palestinian children; and is inflicting on them conditions of life intended to bring about their destruction as a group. Those conditions include: (3) expulsions from homes and mass displacement, alongside the large-scale destruction of homes and residential areas; (4) deprivation of access to adequate food and water; (4) deprivation of access to adequate medical care; (5) deprivation of access to adequate shelter, clothes, hygiene and sanitation; and (6) the destruction of the life of the Palestinian people in Gaza; and (7) imposing measures intended to prevent Palestinian births.

mickeyrat

https://twitter.com/OwenJones84/status/1745053246706610311?t=tjT2G9mRtGCmMXCTlC5iBQ&s=19

mickeyrat

great conversation

Israel/Gaza: A Conversation with David Rothkopf. https://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/pdst.fm/e/chrt.fm/track/537745/pscrb.fm/rss/p/mgln.ai/e/1058/traffic.megaphone.fm/MTH6216199201.mp3?updated=1704826503 . -- Sent from Podcast Republic.

Halifax2TheMax

Sure as hell sounds like ethnic cleansing to me. Pages 53-57:

87. Experts assess that the death toll from disease and hunger “could be multiples of that from fighting and air strikes”.388 Israeli is through its relentless attacks on the Palestinian healthcare system in Gaza is deliberately inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza conditions of life calculated to bring about their destruction.389 Writing in the British medical journal, The Lancet, a group of medics “highlight the health dimensions of violence resulting from the ongoing siege and attacks against Palestinians” rightly warning of a “grave risk of genocide against the Palestinian people”.390 7.

Destruction of Palestinian life in Gaza

88. On 16 November 2023, 15 United Nations Special Rapporteurs and 21 members of United Nations Working Groups, warning of a “genocide in the making” in Gaza, observed that the level of destruction that had by then taken place of “housing units, as well as hospitals, schools, mosques, bakeries, water pipes, sewage and electricity networks . . . threatens to make the continuation of Palestinian life in Gaza impossible”.391 As they note, Israel has in its bombing campaign against Gaza used “powerful weaponry with inherently indiscriminate impacts, resulting in a colossal death toll and destruction of life-sustaining infrastructure.”392 Israel has destroyed not only individual homes, houses, and whole apartment blocks; it has destroyed entire streets, and entire neighbourhoods: Shuja'iyya, a suburb of Gaza City, once home to approximately 110,000 Palestinians, appears to now be a vast wasteland, entirely flattened as far as the eye can see.393 Its shops, schools, vibrant market place, family homes, doctors clinics, historic streets and Ibn Uthman Mosque, and everything that once sustained Palestinian life there has been damaged or destroyed, along with so many of its people.394 Other areas in Gaza appear to have experienced a similar level of destruction, including Beit Hanoun,395 Beit Lahia,396 Gaza Old City,397 Al Rimal,398 and Nuseirat refugee camp in the South.399

89. Across Gaza, Israel has targeted the infrastructure and foundations of Palestinian life, deliberately creating conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction of Palestinian people. In addition to the attacks previously cited on homes, neighbourhoods, hospitals, water systems, agricultural lands, bakeries and mills, Israel has also targeted the foundational civil system in Gaza. Israel has targeted the Palace of Justice, 400 — the main Palestinian court building in Gaza — housing the Palestinian Supreme Court, the Constitutional Court, the Court of Appeal, the Court of First Instance, the Administrative Court and the Magistrates’ Court, as well as an archive of court records and other historical files. Israel has also significantly damaged the Palestinian Legislative Council complex.401 It has targeted Gaza City’s Central Archive building, containing thousands of historical documents and national records dating back over 100 years, and forming an essential archive of Palestinian history, as well as more modern records for Gaza City’s urban development.402

90. Israel has left Gaza City’s main public library in ruins.403 It has also damaged or destroyed countless bookshops, publishing houses, libraries,404 and hundreds of educational facilities.405 Israel has targeted every one of Gaza’s four universities — including the Islamic University of Gaza, the oldest higher education institution in the territory, which has trained generations of doctors and engineers, amongst others, 406 — destroying campuses for the education of future generations of Palestinians in Gaza. Alongside so many others, Israel has killed leading Palestinian academics, including: Professor Sufian Tayeh, the President of the Islamic University — an award-winning physicist and UNESCO Chair of Astronomy, Astrophysics and Space Sciences in Palestine — who died, alongside his family, in an airstrike; Dr Ahmed Hamdi Abo Absa, Dean of the Software Engineering Department at the University of Palestine, reportedly shot dead by Israeli soldiers as he walked away, having been released from three days of enforced disappearance; and Professor Muhammad Eid Shabir, Professor of Immunology and Virology, and former President of the Islamic University of Gaza, and Professor Refaat Alareer, poet and Professor of Comparative Literature and Creative Writing at the Islamic University of Gaza, were both killed by Israel with members of their families. Professor Alareer was a co-founder of ‘We are Not Numbers’, a Palestinian youth project seeking to tell the stories behind otherwise impersonal accounts of Palestinians — and Palestinian deaths — in the news.407

91. Israel has damaged and destroyed numerous centres of Palestinian learning and culture, including: the Al Zafar Dmari Mosque and Center for Manuscripts and Ancient Documents;408 the Orthodox Cultural Centre; the Al Qarara Cultural Museum; the Gaza Centre for Culture and Arts; the Arab Social Cultural Centre; the Hakawi Society for Culture and Arts; and the Rafah Museum — Gaza's newly opened museum of Palestinian heritage, housing hundreds of cultural and archaeological artefacts. Israel’s attacks have destroyed Gaza’s ancient history: eight sites have been damaged or destroyed, including the ancient port of Gaza (known as ‘Anthedon Harbour’ or ‘Al Balakhiya’) — the archaeological site of a 2,000-year-old Roman cemetery listed on both the Islamic Heritage List and the tentative UNESCO World Heritage List. 409 Israel has also destroyed Gaza City’s ‘Old City’, including its 146-year-old historic houses, mosques, churches, markets and schools. It has also destroyed Gaza’s more recent history of more hopeful times, including the Rashad al-Shawa Cultural Center — site of a historic meeting between United States President Bill Clinton and Palestinian President Yasser Arafat 25 years ago — and an important cultural hub for Palestinians in Gaza, with its theatre, library and event space.410 And Israel is destroying Gaza’s future academic and cultural potential: alongside the 352 Palestinian schools it has damaged or destroyed,411 the 4,037 students and 209 teachers and educational staff it has killed, alongside the other 7,259 students and 619 teachers it has injured.412

92. Israel has damaged or destroyed an estimated 318 Muslim and Christian religious sites, demolishing the places where Palestinians have worshipped for generations.413 These include the Great Omari Mosque, originally a fifth century Byzantine church, an iconic landmark of Gaza’s history, architecture and cultural heritage, and a place of worship by Christians and Muslims for over 1,000 years.414 Israeli shelling has also damaged the Church of Saint Porphyrius, founded in 425 AD and believed to be the third oldest church in the world — alongside two other churches that have sustained direct Israeli fire. 415 Gaza’s Christians themselves have been targeted and killed by Israel in the very church compounds where they sought shelter.416

93. Along with its destruction of the physical monuments to the history and heritage of the Palestinians in Gaza, Israel has sought to destroy the very Palestinian people who form and create that heritage: Gaza’s celebrated journalists, its teachers, intellectuals and public figures, its doctors and nurses, its film-makers, writers and singers, the directors and deans of its universities, the heads of its hospitals, its eminent scientists, linguists, playwrights, novelists, artists and musicians. Israel has killed and is killing Palestinian story-tellers and poets, Palestinian farmers and fishermen, alongside Gaza’s local legends: pastry chef Masoud Muhammad al-Qatati, killed in an Israeli airstrike on his house on 3 November 2023, whose shop’s motto ‘let the poor eat’ — and reputation for giving away the popular Palestinian treat ‘knafeh’ to indigent customers — earned him the nickname ‘Father of the Poor’; 84- year-old Elham Farah, from one of Palestine’s oldest Christian families — a reputed accordionist and music teacher, known as ‘Mother Orange’ to generations of Palestinian music students for her shock of red hair, 417 — shot dead by an Israeli sniper outside the Holy Family Church in Gaza City when she returned home for warm clothes, and was left to bleed to death;418 and Al-Shaima Saidam, the student with the highest final high school exam grades in the whole of Palestine, killed with multiple members of her family in a strike on Al Nuseirat refugee camp.419 Just as Israel is destroying the official memory and records of Palestinians in Gaza through its destruction of Gaza’s archives and landmarks, it is obliterating Palestinian personal lives and private memories, histories and futures, through bombing and bulldozing graveyards,420 destroying family records and photographs, wiping out entire multigenerational families,421 and killing, maiming and traumatising a generation of children.422 As a Palestinian man, in a video by UNRWA, succinctly sums up: “These are all our memories, our entire lives . . . Now it’s all gone; everything has turned into ashes.”423

94. The Israeli army — erecting the Israeli flag over the wreckage of devastated Palestinian homes, towns and cities, including in Gaza City’s Palestine Square itself,424 and spurred on by calls from within the Israeli government and without to ‘flatten Gaza’ and re-establish Israeli settlements on the rubble of Palestinian homes, 425 — is destroying the very fabric and basis of Palestinian life in Gaza. Israel is thereby deliberately inflicting on the Palestinian group in Gaza conditions of life calculated to bring about its destruction.

Application instituting proceedings and Request for the indication of provisional measures (icj-cij.org)

Halifax2TheMax

If this doesn't turn your stomach, then you don't have a conscience. But hey, he's only talking about it, right? Page 64:

Israeli Army reservist “motivational speech”:

On 11 October 2023, 95-year old Israeli army reservist Ezra Yachin — a veteran of the Deir Yassin massacre during the 1948 Nakba — reportedly called up for reserve duty to “boost morale” amongst Israeli troops ahead of the ground invasion, was broadcast on social media inciting other soldiers to genocide as follows, while being driven around in an Israeli army vehicle, dressed in Israeli army fatigues: “Be triumphant and finish them off and don’t leave anyone behind. Erase the memory of them. Erase them, their families, mothers and children. These animals can no longer live . . . Every Jew with a weapon should go out and kill them. If you have an Arab neighbour, don't wait, go to his home and shoot him . . . We want to invade, not like before, we want to enter and destroy what’s in front of us, and destroy houses, then destroy the one after it. With all of our forces, complete destruction, enter and destroy. As you can see, we will witness things we’ve never dreamed of. Let them drop bombs on them and erase them.”477

benjs

An honest question - whether or not it’s ethnic cleansing, what is accomplished by calling it that by you or me? No one is swaying hearts or minds on here, and extreme language like this that can be disputed only serves to further alienate each side from the other. Why not horrific, unimaginable, disproportionate, a nightmare, or some other words which are less likely to be disputed?

The kind of language used here just makes me convinced that no one is here to learn or teach, just to prove themselves right and to walk away a bit more smug than they arrived here. Not dissimilar to the state of discourse away from this forum either. Discourse is either venom spewed at your opponents or a circle jerk with those you agree with at this point.