Biden takes a tougher stance on Israel's 'indiscriminate bombing' of Gaza
By COLLEEN LONG and AAMER MADHANI
41 mins ago
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden on Tuesday warned that Israel was losing international support because of its “indiscriminate bombing" of Gaza, speaking out in unusually strong language as the United Nations neared a vote on demanding a cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war.
“Israel's security can rest on the United States, but right now it has more than the United States. It has the European Union, it has Europe, it has most of the world supporting them,” Biden said to donors during a fundraiser Tuesday.
“They’re starting to lose that support by indiscriminate bombing that takes place,” he said.
The president said he thought Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu understood, but he wasn't so sure about the Israeli war cabinet. Israeli forces were carrying out punishing strikes across Gaza, crushing Palestinians in homes as the military presses ahead with an offensive that officials say could go on for weeks or months.
Biden offered a harder-than-usual assessment of Israel's decisions since the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas and the moves by his conservative government. Meanwhile, Biden's top national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, is heading to Israel this week to consult directly about timetables for ending major combat.
The president also renewed his warnings that Israel should not make the same mistakes of overreaction that the U.S. did following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
He recounted a familiar anecdote about inscribing on a photo with Netanyahu decades ago, “Bibi, I don't agree with a damn thing you have to say.” This time, the president added to his retelling of the story: “That remains to be the case.”
The 2024 campaign fundraiser was part of a gathering of Jewish donors, many of whom attended a White House Hanukkah reception on Monday evening; Biden's fundraisers are open to some reporters on the condition that no audio or video be shared.
His rhetoric to donors tracks his more candid and private messaging to Netanyahu on their frequent calls, according to two White House officials, where he reasserts U.S. support for Israel before pushing for Israel to do more to help civilians in Gaza.
“Israel has a tough decision to make. Bibi has a tough decision to make. There’s no question about the need to take on Hamas. There’s no question about that. None. Zero,” Biden said. But he added, of Israel’s leader, “I think he has to change his government. His government in Israel is making it very difficult.”
Biden specifically called out Itamar Ben-Gvir, the leader of a far-right Israeli party and the minister of national security in Netanyahu’s governing coalition, who opposes a two-state solution and has called for Israel to reassert control over all of the West Bank and Gaza. Ben-Gvir sits on Israel’s security cabinet, but is not a member of the country’s three-person war cabinet.
The comments prompted responses from both the Israeli military and also Hamas.
“We know to explain exactly how we operate with precision, based on intelligence, even when we are operating on the ground," said Israeli military spokesperson Daniel Hagari. “We know how to operate against the Hamas strongholds in such a way that best separates the uninvolved civilians from terrorism targets."
Asked about Biden’s comments, a senior Hamas official said in Beirut that “the resistance and the steadfastness of the Palestinian people have made Biden understand that the Israeli military operation is a crazy act.”
“The repercussions (of the war) will be catastrophic on the entity (Israel) and on the results of elections in which Biden might lose his seat in the White House,” Osama Hamdan, member of Hamas’ political bureau said during a news conference.
During the fundraiser, Biden said that when he has warned Netanyahu of a loss of international support over the bombing, the Israeli leader has mentioned that the U.S. had “carpet-bombed Germany" in World War II and dropped the atomic bomb on Japan.
“That's why all these institutions were set up after World War II, to see that it didn't happen again,” he said. “Don't make the same mistakes we made in 9/11. There's no reason we had to be in a war in Afghanistan. There's no reason we had to do so many things that we did.”
The U.N. General Assembly was set to hold a vote Tuesday on a nonbinding resolution demanding an immediate humanitarian cease-fire, days after the U.S. vetoed a similar measure at the U.N. Security Council. The U.K abstained from the 13-1 vote, but France and Japan were among those supporting the call for a cease-fire. Only Security Council resolutions are legally binding under the terms of the international body’s charter.
Before Biden's comments at the fundraiser, Netanyahu said in a statement that he appreciated American support and that he'd received “full backing for the ground incursion and blocking the international pressure to stop the war.”
“Yes, there is disagreement about ‘the day after Hamas’ and I hope that we will reach agreement here as well. I would like to clarify my position: I will not allow Israel to repeat the mistake of Oslo. Gaza will be neither Hamastan nor Fatahstan.”
Speaking at a forum hosted by The Wall Street Journal before either leader's comments, Sullivan reiterated the Biden administration’s position that it does not want to see Israel reoccupy Gaza or further shrink its already small territory.
The U.S. has repeatedly called for a return of the internationally recognized Palestinian Authority and the resumption of peace talks aimed at establishing a Palestinian state alongside Israel. Sullivan said he would also speak to Netanyahu about his recent comments that Israel Defense Forces would maintain open-ended security control of Gaza after the war ends.
“I will have the opportunity to talk to Prime Minister Netanyahu about what exactly he has in mind with that comment, because that can be interpreted in a number of different ways,” Sullivan said. “But the U.S. position on this is clear.”
___ Associated Press writers Will Weissert, Zeke Miller in Washington and Bassem Mroue in Beirut contributed to this report.
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Biden takes a tougher stance on Israel's 'indiscriminate bombing' of Gaza
By COLLEEN LONG and AAMER MADHANI
41 mins ago
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden on Tuesday warned that Israel was losing international support because of its “indiscriminate bombing" of Gaza, speaking out in unusually strong language as the United Nations neared a vote on demanding a cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war.
“Israel's security can rest on the United States, but right now it has more than the United States. It has the European Union, it has Europe, it has most of the world supporting them,” Biden said to donors during a fundraiser Tuesday.
“They’re starting to lose that support by indiscriminate bombing that takes place,” he said.
The president said he thought Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu understood, but he wasn't so sure about the Israeli war cabinet. Israeli forces were carrying out punishing strikes across Gaza, crushing Palestinians in homes as the military presses ahead with an offensive that officials say could go on for weeks or months.
Biden offered a harder-than-usual assessment of Israel's decisions since the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas and the moves by his conservative government. Meanwhile, Biden's top national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, is heading to Israel this week to consult directly about timetables for ending major combat.
The president also renewed his warnings that Israel should not make the same mistakes of overreaction that the U.S. did following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
He recounted a familiar anecdote about inscribing on a photo with Netanyahu decades ago, “Bibi, I don't agree with a damn thing you have to say.” This time, the president added to his retelling of the story: “That remains to be the case.”
The 2024 campaign fundraiser was part of a gathering of Jewish donors, many of whom attended a White House Hanukkah reception on Monday evening; Biden's fundraisers are open to some reporters on the condition that no audio or video be shared.
His rhetoric to donors tracks his more candid and private messaging to Netanyahu on their frequent calls, according to two White House officials, where he reasserts U.S. support for Israel before pushing for Israel to do more to help civilians in Gaza.
“Israel has a tough decision to make. Bibi has a tough decision to make. There’s no question about the need to take on Hamas. There’s no question about that. None. Zero,” Biden said. But he added, of Israel’s leader, “I think he has to change his government. His government in Israel is making it very difficult.”
Biden specifically called out Itamar Ben-Gvir, the leader of a far-right Israeli party and the minister of national security in Netanyahu’s governing coalition, who opposes a two-state solution and has called for Israel to reassert control over all of the West Bank and Gaza. Ben-Gvir sits on Israel’s security cabinet, but is not a member of the country’s three-person war cabinet.
The comments prompted responses from both the Israeli military and also Hamas.
“We know to explain exactly how we operate with precision, based on intelligence, even when we are operating on the ground," said Israeli military spokesperson Daniel Hagari. “We know how to operate against the Hamas strongholds in such a way that best separates the uninvolved civilians from terrorism targets."
Asked about Biden’s comments, a senior Hamas official said in Beirut that “the resistance and the steadfastness of the Palestinian people have made Biden understand that the Israeli military operation is a crazy act.”
“The repercussions (of the war) will be catastrophic on the entity (Israel) and on the results of elections in which Biden might lose his seat in the White House,” Osama Hamdan, member of Hamas’ political bureau said during a news conference.
During the fundraiser, Biden said that when he has warned Netanyahu of a loss of international support over the bombing, the Israeli leader has mentioned that the U.S. had “carpet-bombed Germany" in World War II and dropped the atomic bomb on Japan.
“That's why all these institutions were set up after World War II, to see that it didn't happen again,” he said. “Don't make the same mistakes we made in 9/11. There's no reason we had to be in a war in Afghanistan. There's no reason we had to do so many things that we did.”
The U.N. General Assembly was set to hold a vote Tuesday on a nonbinding resolution demanding an immediate humanitarian cease-fire, days after the U.S. vetoed a similar measure at the U.N. Security Council. The U.K abstained from the 13-1 vote, but France and Japan were among those supporting the call for a cease-fire. Only Security Council resolutions are legally binding under the terms of the international body’s charter.
Before Biden's comments at the fundraiser, Netanyahu said in a statement that he appreciated American support and that he'd received “full backing for the ground incursion and blocking the international pressure to stop the war.”
“Yes, there is disagreement about ‘the day after Hamas’ and I hope that we will reach agreement here as well. I would like to clarify my position: I will not allow Israel to repeat the mistake of Oslo. Gaza will be neither Hamastan nor Fatahstan.”
Speaking at a forum hosted by The Wall Street Journal before either leader's comments, Sullivan reiterated the Biden administration’s position that it does not want to see Israel reoccupy Gaza or further shrink its already small territory.
The U.S. has repeatedly called for a return of the internationally recognized Palestinian Authority and the resumption of peace talks aimed at establishing a Palestinian state alongside Israel. Sullivan said he would also speak to Netanyahu about his recent comments that Israel Defense Forces would maintain open-ended security control of Gaza after the war ends.
“I will have the opportunity to talk to Prime Minister Netanyahu about what exactly he has in mind with that comment, because that can be interpreted in a number of different ways,” Sullivan said. “But the U.S. position on this is clear.”
___ Associated Press writers Will Weissert, Zeke Miller in Washington and Bassem Mroue in Beirut contributed to this report.
Too little, too late. He’s lost the far left wing of the party. Unfortunately, it’s enough to make a difference at the polls, even a year out.
JERUSALEM — Israeli forces killed two women who were taking shelter at a church in the Gaza Strip on Saturday afternoon, Catholic authorities said.
The Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem, an ecclesiastical office for the Latin Catholics in the region, in a statement identified the victims — a mother and daughter — by their first names only and said they were “shot in cold blood.”
A sniper from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) shot the women at the Holy Family Parish in Gaza, where the majority of Christian families in Gaza have taken refuge during the war, according to the patriarchate’s statement.
“Nahida and her daughter Samar were shot and killed as they walked to the Sister’s Convent,” the patriarchate said, referring to a building in the parish complex. “One was killed as she tried to carry the other to safety. Seven more people were shot and wounded as they tried to protect others inside the church compound. No warning was given, no notification was provided. They were shot in cold blood inside the premises of the Parish, where there are no belligerents.”
The IDF did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and The Washington Post could not immediately verify the details of the patriarchate’s report.
Cellular and internet networks have been largely down across Gaza since Thursday evening, the latest in a series of near-total blackouts to hit the Palestinian territory. Gazans with eSIM cards, or with the Oredoo carrier in the north, have retained limited access.
The outages have made it difficult for those inside the church to be reached.
An aid worker in Gaza, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect his privacy as he was not authorized to speak by the organization, said one of his colleagues was hit by shrapnel in her legs during the attack.
A doctor in the church operated quickly on her to remove shrapnel from one leg, the aid worker said, but was unable to dislodge shrapnel from the second leg, which may have sustained a fracture.
The aid worker said he was initially able to get updates from another colleague, who has as an eSIM. But then the colleague’s phone died.
“I am wondering if the accusations will be ‘these were Catholic branch of Hamas!,’” he told The Post by WhatsApp message. “Not only the families, there are 50 kids with physical and mental disabilities that sisters are nursing.”
British lawmaker Layla Moran said her relatives are among the hundreds of civilians trapped in the church. Moran told the BBC that her family members are “days away from dying” without access to water or food.
“I’m now no longer sure they are going to survive until Christmas,” Moran told the BBC.
The Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem said that in addition to the midday sniper attack, a rocket from an IDF tank hit the Convent of the Sisters of Mother Teresa, a mission that is home to more than 54 people with disabilities.
The strike destroyed fuel reserves and the generator supplying the building’s sole source of electricity. The explosion and fire resulting from the strikes also damaged the home at the mission, rendering it “uninhabitable,” and displacing the disabled residents, including those who need respirators to survive, the patriarchate said.
Saturday’s strike echoes an attack in October after an attack on the historic Greek Orthodox Church of St. Porphyrius, Gaza’s oldest active church. About two weeks into the war, hundreds of Palestinian civilians were sheltering in the church when Israeli forces launched a strike that killed 18 people and wounded 20 others.
The IDF said at the time that a strike targeting a Hamas control center “damaged the wall of a church in the area” and that the church was not a target.
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Guess it won’t be over until the blood lust is quenched and with the ultra orthodox, who are exempt from serving in the Israeli military, signing up and serving for the first time, it’ll be a while. But don’t worry, US taxpayers will bail Israel out.
How the costs of Israel’s war on Hamas in Gaza are mounting
JERUSALEM — It might seem obscene to assess the mounting financial cost of Israel’s war in Gazawhile the bombs are still falling on the besieged enclave, when hundreds of Palestinians, on average, are dying each day — alongside smaller, but historic, numbers of Israeli soldiers.
And yet, the economics behind the weeks-long assault have powerful implications for Israel, the Palestinians and the Middle East.
The cost to Gaza, while clearly devastating, has not yet begun to be calculated. About half of the buildings and two-thirds of the homes in the Strip have been damaged or destroyed, 1.8 million people have been displaced and more than 21,000 people are dead, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
The Israeli economy has been damaged, too — and it is Israel more than Hamas that will decide when the shooting stops. Some economists compare the shock to the Israeli economy to the coronavirus pandemic in 2020. Others say it might be worse.
Since Oct. 7, when Hamas and allied fighters streamed out of Gaza to kill about 1,200 people in Israel and take 240 more hostage, government spending and borrowing have soared, tax revenue has plummeted and credit ratings could take a hit.
And gross domestic product will fall — from forecasts of 3 percent growth in 2023 to 1 percent in 2024, according to the Bank of Israel. Some economists predict contraction.
The impact on Israel’s high-tech sector — the engine of the economy — is sobering.
Many Israel Defense Forces reservists work in the tech sector. Every day they fight in Gaza, their employers struggle to continue investing in research and development and maintain market share.
Policymakers and opinion leaders are now asking: How will the cost of the war influence its duration? When will the government decide to declare victory, stop the fiscal hemorrhaging and resume efforts to grow the economy?
What has been the cost of war?
During the long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. leaders familiarized Americans with the concept of blood and treasure.
Israel is spending treasure deploying more than 220,000 reservists into battle on average over the past three months and subsidizing their salaries.
Many of these reservists are high-tech workers in cyber, agriculture, finance, navigation, artificial intelligence, pharmaceuticals and climate solutions. Israel’s tech sector relies on foreign investment. But that was diminishing even before the war, in part out of concern for the instability that investors believed the right-wing prewar government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu brought to Israel — notwithstanding Intel’s recent announcement that it was going ahead with a $25 billion chip factory in southern Israel, the largest investment ever by a company in Israel.
Israel needs to pay for the reservists, the bombs and the bullets, but it is also supporting 200,000 evacuees who have been displaced from Israeli villages along the Gaza border and the northern border with Lebanon, which Hezbollah is bombarding daily.
Many of these evacuees are being housed and fed in hotels in the north and south — at government expense.
Many are traumatized.
Many are not working.
What else?
Tourism has flatlined. The Tel Aviv beaches and the Old City in Jerusalem are bereft of foreigners. Christmas celebrations in Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank this year were canceled.
Construction, which ordinarily relies on Palestinian labor from the West Bank, has ground to a near-halt. Since Israel launched its assault to eradicate Hamas, it has suspended the work permits of more than 100,000 Palestinians.
Exports are down across the board. Production from Israel’s gas fieldsin the Mediterranean Sea was shut down early in the war but is now partially operating.
What has the war cost Israel so far?
Economists interviewed by The Washington Post estimate the war has cost the government about $18 billion — or $220 million a day.
Zvi Eckstein, a former deputy governor of the Bank of Israel and an economist at Reichman University, recently ran the numbers with colleagues and reported that the impact on the government budget — including decreased tax revenue — for the fourth quarter of 2023 was $19 billion and would probably be $20 billion in the first quarter of 2024.
That assumes the war does not expand to Lebanon.
What happens if a wider war breaks out with Hezbollah?
Costs will skyrocket.
What’s the total cost going to be?
A war that lasts five to 10 more months could cost Israel as much as $50 billion, according to the financial newspaper Calcalist. That would equal 10 percent of the country’s GDP.
The war could end sooner — or not. The Biden administration expects Israel to pivot in the new year from high-intensity bombardment and fierce street combat to more targeted assaults. But Netanyahu warned last week that the war “isn’t close to finished.”
“The war will last for many more months,” he said on Saturday.
How are the these costs measured?
Ono Academic College professor Yaron Zelekha, a former economist at the Israeli Ministry of Finance, says it’s important to understand the war’s ripple effects.
There’s the cost of waging the war, the steep decline in economic activity and a resulting drop in revenue. Deficit spending produces borrowing costs, which will weigh on budgeting long after the shooting stops.
What do ordinary Israelis think?
Forty-five percent of Israelis acknowledge worrying that the war will bring them economic hardship, polling by the charity group Latetshows.
The Hamas attacks were a catastrophe, eroding the trust of citizens, businesses, and investors in the government and in the military, economists told The Post. That trust will take time to win back.
How does this Gaza war compare with past conflicts?
Economists speak of the modern Israeli economy as remarkably resilient. The country has fought regional wars on its territory in 1967 and 1973, wars in Lebanon and along its northern border in 1982 and 2006, a 50-day battle in Gaza in 2014 and two intifadas in the occupied West Bank, which saw sustained fighting between Palestinians and Israeli soldiers.
“In the second intifada, a significant part of the damage was caused by misguided economic management,” said Zelekha. “There was significant government overspending and a simultaneous tax increase.
“The main difference between then and today is that back then, the government debt reached 100 percent of GDP, not 60 percent as it is today. Our current situation is much better.”
What’s the cost to workers?
Reserve duty, displacement and knock-on effects of the war have idled as many as 20 percent of Israeli workers.
“Israel’s economy experienced a shock wave comparable to the peak of the covid-19 pandemic,” said Michal Dan-Harel, the managing director of Manpower Israel, the country’s largest employment agency. “Significant portions of the economy came to a shutdown for nearly two weeks. People were in shock. Each day revealed the magnitude of the crisis, and discussions about normalcy, such as work or earning a living, became almost illegitimate.”
The impact of reservist deployments has been especially dramatic, Dan-Harel said, because“the individuals are called up without knowing when they will return to work. … No one anticipated that people would be enlisted for a period of three months or more.”
Is the economy resilient enough to weather the war?
“For the last 25 years, Israel has run up the mountain with weights on its legs,” said Erel Margalit, a high-tech entrepreneur and venture capitalist.
He was talking about the wars and intifadas — and more recent challenges. The Netanyahu government’s attempt before the war to limit the power of the judiciary — which sparked massive, months-long protests — hurt international investment, said Margalit, a former member of the Israeli parliament.
“The war is an additional blow,” he said. He’s pushing for an FDR-style New Deal to establish innovation, education and new businesses in the hard-hit north and south after the war ends.
How important is U.S. aid for the Israeli economy?
Very.
The United States gives Israel $3.8 billion in military support each year. The countries share defense technology to give Israel a strategic edge over its adversaries. The United States also sells Israel hundreds of millions of dollars in bombs, missiles and shells.
The White House is pushing a supplemental funding bill that would include $14 billion in aid to Israel in early 2024. The bill has stalled in Congress as Republicans and Democrats debate funding for the U.S. border.
Itai Ater, an economist at Tel Aviv University and a senior fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute, called the U.S. funding “crucial.”
“We are talking about approximately 50 billion shekels [$13.8 billion],” he said. “If the expenditure on the war reaches around 150 to 200 billion shekels, it would constitute a quarter of the war costs. This is a hugely significant sum and also provides the American government the option to exert diplomatic pressure on us, which is a good thing, considering our government.”
Zelekha added: “If we had to fund that ourselves, it would pose an even greater problem. Secondly, the very fact of receiving aid signals to financial markets that we have economic backing, which reassures the markets.”
“We need to send a big thank you to President Biden for this assistance,” he said.
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Israel's Supreme Court overturns a key component of Netanyahu's polarizing judicial overhaul
By JOSEF FEDERMAN and MELANIE LIDMAN
34 mins ago
JERUSALEM (AP) — Israel’s Supreme Court on Monday struck down a key component of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s contentious judicial overhaul, a decision that threatens to reopen the fissures in Israeli society that preceded the country’s ongoing war against Hamas.
Those divisions were largely put aside while the country focuses on the war in Gaza, which was triggered by a bloody cross-border attack by Hamas. Monday’s court decision could reignite those tensions, which sparked months of mass protests against the government and had rattled the cohesion of the powerful military.
There was no immediate reaction from Netanyahu.
In Monday’s decision, the court narrowly voted to overturn a law passed in July that prevents judges from striking down government decisions they deem “unreasonable.” Opponents had argued that Netanyahu’s efforts to remove the standard of reasonability opens the door to corruption and improper appointments of unqualified cronies to important positions.
The law was the first in a planned overhaul of the Israeli justice system. The overhaul was put on hold after Hamas militants carried out their Oct. 7 attack, killing some 1,200 people and kidnapping 240 others. Israel immediately declared war, and is pressing forward with an offensive that Palestinian health officials say has killed nearly 22,000 people in Gaza.
In an 8-7 decision, the Supreme Court justices struck down the law because of the “severe and unprecedented harm to the core character of the State of Israel as a democratic country.”
The justices also voted 12-3 that they had the authority to overturn so-called “Basic Laws,” major pieces of legislation that serve as a sort of constitution for Israel.
It was a significant blow to Netanyahu and his hard-line allies, who claimed the national legislature, not the high court, should have the final word over the legality of legislation and other key decisions. The justices said the Knesset, or parliament, does not have “omnipotent” power.
Netanyahu and his allies announced their sweeping overhaul plan shortly after taking office a year ago. It calls for curbing the power of the judges, from limiting the Supreme Court’s ability to review parliamentary decisions to changing the way judges are appointed.
Netanyahu and his allies said the changes aim to strengthen democracy by limiting the authority of unelected judges and turning over more powers to elected officials. But opponents see the overhaul as a power grab by Netanyahu, who is on trial for corruption charges, and an assault on a key watchdog.
Before the war, hundreds of thousands of Israelis took to the streets in weekly protests against the government. Among the demonstrators were military reservists, including fighter pilots and members of other elite units, who said they would stop reporting for duty if the overhaul was passed. The reservists make up the backbone of the military.
While the reservists quickly returned to duty after the Oct. 7 attacks in a show of unity, it remains unclear what will happen if the overhaul efforts are revived. A resumption of the protests could undermine national unity and affect the military’s readiness if soldiers refuse to report for duty.
Under the Israeli system, the prime minister governs through a majority coalition in parliament — in effect giving him control over the executive and legislative branches of government.
As a result, the Supreme Court plays a critical oversight role. Critics say that by seeking to weaken the judiciary, Netanyahu and his allies are trying to erode the country’s checks and balances and consolidate power over the third, independent branch of government.
Netanyahu’s allies include an array of ultranationalist and religious parties with a list of grievances against the court.
His allies have called for increased West Bank settlement construction, annexation of the occupied territory, perpetuating military draft exemptions for ultra-Orthodox men, and limiting the rights of LGBTQ+ people and Palestinians.
The U.S. had previously urged Netanyahu to put the plans on hold and seek a broad consensus across the political spectrum.
The court issued its decision because its outgoing president, Esther Hayut, is retiring and Monday was her last day on the job.
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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.
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.
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.
'05 - TO, '06 - TO 1, '08 - NYC 1 & 2, '09 - TO, Chi 1 & 2, '10 - Buffalo, NYC 1 & 2, '11 - TO 1 & 2, Hamilton, '13 - Buffalo, Brooklyn 1 & 2, '15 - Global Citizen, '16 - TO 1 & 2, Chi 2
EV
Toronto Film Festival 9/11/2007, '08 - Toronto 1 & 2, '09 - Albany 1, '11 - Chicago 1
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.
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.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
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.
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.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
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.”
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.
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”.
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Comments
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden on Tuesday warned that Israel was losing international support because of its “indiscriminate bombing" of Gaza, speaking out in unusually strong language as the United Nations neared a vote on demanding a cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war.
“Israel's security can rest on the United States, but right now it has more than the United States. It has the European Union, it has Europe, it has most of the world supporting them,” Biden said to donors during a fundraiser Tuesday.
“They’re starting to lose that support by indiscriminate bombing that takes place,” he said.
The president said he thought Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu understood, but he wasn't so sure about the Israeli war cabinet. Israeli forces were carrying out punishing strikes across Gaza, crushing Palestinians in homes as the military presses ahead with an offensive that officials say could go on for weeks or months.
JOE BIDEN
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Biden offered a harder-than-usual assessment of Israel's decisions since the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas and the moves by his conservative government. Meanwhile, Biden's top national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, is heading to Israel this week to consult directly about timetables for ending major combat.
The president also renewed his warnings that Israel should not make the same mistakes of overreaction that the U.S. did following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
He recounted a familiar anecdote about inscribing on a photo with Netanyahu decades ago, “Bibi, I don't agree with a damn thing you have to say.” This time, the president added to his retelling of the story: “That remains to be the case.”
The 2024 campaign fundraiser was part of a gathering of Jewish donors, many of whom attended a White House Hanukkah reception on Monday evening; Biden's fundraisers are open to some reporters on the condition that no audio or video be shared.
His rhetoric to donors tracks his more candid and private messaging to Netanyahu on their frequent calls, according to two White House officials, where he reasserts U.S. support for Israel before pushing for Israel to do more to help civilians in Gaza.
“Israel has a tough decision to make. Bibi has a tough decision to make. There’s no question about the need to take on Hamas. There’s no question about that. None. Zero,” Biden said. But he added, of Israel’s leader, “I think he has to change his government. His government in Israel is making it very difficult.”
Biden specifically called out Itamar Ben-Gvir, the leader of a far-right Israeli party and the minister of national security in Netanyahu’s governing coalition, who opposes a two-state solution and has called for Israel to reassert control over all of the West Bank and Gaza. Ben-Gvir sits on Israel’s security cabinet, but is not a member of the country’s three-person war cabinet.
The comments prompted responses from both the Israeli military and also Hamas.
“We know to explain exactly how we operate with precision, based on intelligence, even when we are operating on the ground," said Israeli military spokesperson Daniel Hagari. “We know how to operate against the Hamas strongholds in such a way that best separates the uninvolved civilians from terrorism targets."
Asked about Biden’s comments, a senior Hamas official said in Beirut that “the resistance and the steadfastness of the Palestinian people have made Biden understand that the Israeli military operation is a crazy act.”
“The repercussions (of the war) will be catastrophic on the entity (Israel) and on the results of elections in which Biden might lose his seat in the White House,” Osama Hamdan, member of Hamas’ political bureau said during a news conference.
During the fundraiser, Biden said that when he has warned Netanyahu of a loss of international support over the bombing, the Israeli leader has mentioned that the U.S. had “carpet-bombed Germany" in World War II and dropped the atomic bomb on Japan.
“That's why all these institutions were set up after World War II, to see that it didn't happen again,” he said. “Don't make the same mistakes we made in 9/11. There's no reason we had to be in a war in Afghanistan. There's no reason we had to do so many things that we did.”
The U.N. General Assembly was set to hold a vote Tuesday on a nonbinding resolution demanding an immediate humanitarian cease-fire, days after the U.S. vetoed a similar measure at the U.N. Security Council. The U.K abstained from the 13-1 vote, but France and Japan were among those supporting the call for a cease-fire. Only Security Council resolutions are legally binding under the terms of the international body’s charter.
Before Biden's comments at the fundraiser, Netanyahu said in a statement that he appreciated American support and that he'd received “full backing for the ground incursion and blocking the international pressure to stop the war.”
“Yes, there is disagreement about ‘the day after Hamas’ and I hope that we will reach agreement here as well. I would like to clarify my position: I will not allow Israel to repeat the mistake of Oslo. Gaza will be neither Hamastan nor Fatahstan.”
Speaking at a forum hosted by The Wall Street Journal before either leader's comments, Sullivan reiterated the Biden administration’s position that it does not want to see Israel reoccupy Gaza or further shrink its already small territory.
The U.S. has repeatedly called for a return of the internationally recognized Palestinian Authority and the resumption of peace talks aimed at establishing a Palestinian state alongside Israel. Sullivan said he would also speak to Netanyahu about his recent comments that Israel Defense Forces would maintain open-ended security control of Gaza after the war ends.
“I will have the opportunity to talk to Prime Minister Netanyahu about what exactly he has in mind with that comment, because that can be interpreted in a number of different ways,” Sullivan said. “But the U.S. position on this is clear.”
___ Associated Press writers Will Weissert, Zeke Miller in Washington and Bassem Mroue in Beirut contributed to this report.
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https://www.dailymail.co.uk/video/israelhamasconflict/video-3081049/Video-Israeli-armys-disrespectful-behaviour-Gaza-viral-clips.html
Prague Krakow Berlin 2018. Berlin 2022
EV, Taormina 1+2 2017.
I wish i was the souvenir you kept your house key on..
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IDF kills two women taking shelter at Gaza church, Catholic authorities say
JERUSALEM — Israeli forces killed two women who were taking shelter at a church in the Gaza Strip on Saturday afternoon, Catholic authorities said.
The Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem, an ecclesiastical office for the Latin Catholics in the region, in a statement identified the victims — a mother and daughter — by their first names only and said they were “shot in cold blood.”
A sniper from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) shot the women at the Holy Family Parish in Gaza, where the majority of Christian families in Gaza have taken refuge during the war, according to the patriarchate’s statement.
“Nahida and her daughter Samar were shot and killed as they walked to the Sister’s Convent,” the patriarchate said, referring to a building in the parish complex. “One was killed as she tried to carry the other to safety. Seven more people were shot and wounded as they tried to protect others inside the church compound. No warning was given, no notification was provided. They were shot in cold blood inside the premises of the Parish, where there are no belligerents.”
The IDF did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and The Washington Post could not immediately verify the details of the patriarchate’s report.
Cellular and internet networks have been largely down across Gaza since Thursday evening, the latest in a series of near-total blackouts to hit the Palestinian territory. Gazans with eSIM cards, or with the Oredoo carrier in the north, have retained limited access.
The outages have made it difficult for those inside the church to be reached.
An aid worker in Gaza, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect his privacy as he was not authorized to speak by the organization, said one of his colleagues was hit by shrapnel in her legs during the attack.
A doctor in the church operated quickly on her to remove shrapnel from one leg, the aid worker said, but was unable to dislodge shrapnel from the second leg, which may have sustained a fracture.
The aid worker said he was initially able to get updates from another colleague, who has as an eSIM. But then the colleague’s phone died.
“I am wondering if the accusations will be ‘these were Catholic branch of Hamas!,’” he told The Post by WhatsApp message. “Not only the families, there are 50 kids with physical and mental disabilities that sisters are nursing.”
British lawmaker Layla Moran said her relatives are among the hundreds of civilians trapped in the church. Moran told the BBC that her family members are “days away from dying” without access to water or food.
“I’m now no longer sure they are going to survive until Christmas,” Moran told the BBC.
The Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem said that in addition to the midday sniper attack, a rocket from an IDF tank hit the Convent of the Sisters of Mother Teresa, a mission that is home to more than 54 people with disabilities.
The strike destroyed fuel reserves and the generator supplying the building’s sole source of electricity. The explosion and fire resulting from the strikes also damaged the home at the mission, rendering it “uninhabitable,” and displacing the disabled residents, including those who need respirators to survive, the patriarchate said.
Saturday’s strike echoes an attack in October after an attack on the historic Greek Orthodox Church of St. Porphyrius, Gaza’s oldest active church. About two weeks into the war, hundreds of Palestinian civilians were sheltering in the church when Israeli forces launched a strike that killed 18 people and wounded 20 others.
The IDF said at the time that a strike targeting a Hamas control center “damaged the wall of a church in the area” and that the church was not a target.
Israel has faced growing criticism, including from President Biden, that its “indiscriminate bombing” is eroding support for its war in Gaza as the human toll climbs.
Israeli forces kill two women at Holy Family Parish in Gaza, Catholic authorities say - The Washington Post
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How the costs of Israel’s war on Hamas in Gaza are mounting
JERUSALEM — It might seem obscene to assess the mounting financial cost of Israel’s war in Gazawhile the bombs are still falling on the besieged enclave, when hundreds of Palestinians, on average, are dying each day — alongside smaller, but historic, numbers of Israeli soldiers.
And yet, the economics behind the weeks-long assault have powerful implications for Israel, the Palestinians and the Middle East.
The cost to Gaza, while clearly devastating, has not yet begun to be calculated. About half of the buildings and two-thirds of the homes in the Strip have been damaged or destroyed, 1.8 million people have been displaced and more than 21,000 people are dead, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
The Israeli economy has been damaged, too — and it is Israel more than Hamas that will decide when the shooting stops. Some economists compare the shock to the Israeli economy to the coronavirus pandemic in 2020. Others say it might be worse.
Since Oct. 7, when Hamas and allied fighters streamed out of Gaza to kill about 1,200 people in Israel and take 240 more hostage, government spending and borrowing have soared, tax revenue has plummeted and credit ratings could take a hit.
And gross domestic product will fall — from forecasts of 3 percent growth in 2023 to 1 percent in 2024, according to the Bank of Israel. Some economists predict contraction.
The impact on Israel’s high-tech sector — the engine of the economy — is sobering.
Many Israel Defense Forces reservists work in the tech sector. Every day they fight in Gaza, their employers struggle to continue investing in research and development and maintain market share.
Policymakers and opinion leaders are now asking: How will the cost of the war influence its duration? When will the government decide to declare victory, stop the fiscal hemorrhaging and resume efforts to grow the economy?
What has been the cost of war?
During the long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. leaders familiarized Americans with the concept of blood and treasure.
Israel is spending treasure deploying more than 220,000 reservists into battle on average over the past three months and subsidizing their salaries.
Many of these reservists are high-tech workers in cyber, agriculture, finance, navigation, artificial intelligence, pharmaceuticals and climate solutions. Israel’s tech sector relies on foreign investment. But that was diminishing even before the war, in part out of concern for the instability that investors believed the right-wing prewar government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu brought to Israel — notwithstanding Intel’s recent announcement that it was going ahead with a $25 billion chip factory in southern Israel, the largest investment ever by a company in Israel.
Israel needs to pay for the reservists, the bombs and the bullets, but it is also supporting 200,000 evacuees who have been displaced from Israeli villages along the Gaza border and the northern border with Lebanon, which Hezbollah is bombarding daily.
Many of these evacuees are being housed and fed in hotels in the north and south — at government expense.
Many are traumatized.
Many are not working.
What else?
Tourism has flatlined. The Tel Aviv beaches and the Old City in Jerusalem are bereft of foreigners. Christmas celebrations in Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank this year were canceled.
Construction, which ordinarily relies on Palestinian labor from the West Bank, has ground to a near-halt. Since Israel launched its assault to eradicate Hamas, it has suspended the work permits of more than 100,000 Palestinians.
Exports are down across the board. Production from Israel’s gas fieldsin the Mediterranean Sea was shut down early in the war but is now partially operating.
What has the war cost Israel so far?
Economists interviewed by The Washington Post estimate the war has cost the government about $18 billion — or $220 million a day.
Zvi Eckstein, a former deputy governor of the Bank of Israel and an economist at Reichman University, recently ran the numbers with colleagues and reported that the impact on the government budget — including decreased tax revenue — for the fourth quarter of 2023 was $19 billion and would probably be $20 billion in the first quarter of 2024.
That assumes the war does not expand to Lebanon.
What happens if a wider war breaks out with Hezbollah?
Costs will skyrocket.
What’s the total cost going to be?
A war that lasts five to 10 more months could cost Israel as much as $50 billion, according to the financial newspaper Calcalist. That would equal 10 percent of the country’s GDP.
The war could end sooner — or not. The Biden administration expects Israel to pivot in the new year from high-intensity bombardment and fierce street combat to more targeted assaults. But Netanyahu warned last week that the war “isn’t close to finished.”
“The war will last for many more months,” he said on Saturday.
How are the these costs measured?
Ono Academic College professor Yaron Zelekha, a former economist at the Israeli Ministry of Finance, says it’s important to understand the war’s ripple effects.
There’s the cost of waging the war, the steep decline in economic activity and a resulting drop in revenue. Deficit spending produces borrowing costs, which will weigh on budgeting long after the shooting stops.
What do ordinary Israelis think?
Forty-five percent of Israelis acknowledge worrying that the war will bring them economic hardship, polling by the charity group Latetshows.
The Hamas attacks were a catastrophe, eroding the trust of citizens, businesses, and investors in the government and in the military, economists told The Post. That trust will take time to win back.
How does this Gaza war compare with past conflicts?
Economists speak of the modern Israeli economy as remarkably resilient. The country has fought regional wars on its territory in 1967 and 1973, wars in Lebanon and along its northern border in 1982 and 2006, a 50-day battle in Gaza in 2014 and two intifadas in the occupied West Bank, which saw sustained fighting between Palestinians and Israeli soldiers.
“In the second intifada, a significant part of the damage was caused by misguided economic management,” said Zelekha. “There was significant government overspending and a simultaneous tax increase.
“The main difference between then and today is that back then, the government debt reached 100 percent of GDP, not 60 percent as it is today. Our current situation is much better.”
What’s the cost to workers?
Reserve duty, displacement and knock-on effects of the war have idled as many as 20 percent of Israeli workers.
“Israel’s economy experienced a shock wave comparable to the peak of the covid-19 pandemic,” said Michal Dan-Harel, the managing director of Manpower Israel, the country’s largest employment agency. “Significant portions of the economy came to a shutdown for nearly two weeks. People were in shock. Each day revealed the magnitude of the crisis, and discussions about normalcy, such as work or earning a living, became almost illegitimate.”
The impact of reservist deployments has been especially dramatic, Dan-Harel said, because“the individuals are called up without knowing when they will return to work. … No one anticipated that people would be enlisted for a period of three months or more.”
Is the economy resilient enough to weather the war?
“For the last 25 years, Israel has run up the mountain with weights on its legs,” said Erel Margalit, a high-tech entrepreneur and venture capitalist.
He was talking about the wars and intifadas — and more recent challenges. The Netanyahu government’s attempt before the war to limit the power of the judiciary — which sparked massive, months-long protests — hurt international investment, said Margalit, a former member of the Israeli parliament.
“The war is an additional blow,” he said. He’s pushing for an FDR-style New Deal to establish innovation, education and new businesses in the hard-hit north and south after the war ends.
How important is U.S. aid for the Israeli economy?
Very.
The United States gives Israel $3.8 billion in military support each year. The countries share defense technology to give Israel a strategic edge over its adversaries. The United States also sells Israel hundreds of millions of dollars in bombs, missiles and shells.
The White House is pushing a supplemental funding bill that would include $14 billion in aid to Israel in early 2024. The bill has stalled in Congress as Republicans and Democrats debate funding for the U.S. border.
Itai Ater, an economist at Tel Aviv University and a senior fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute, called the U.S. funding “crucial.”
“We are talking about approximately 50 billion shekels [$13.8 billion],” he said. “If the expenditure on the war reaches around 150 to 200 billion shekels, it would constitute a quarter of the war costs. This is a hugely significant sum and also provides the American government the option to exert diplomatic pressure on us, which is a good thing, considering our government.”
Zelekha added: “If we had to fund that ourselves, it would pose an even greater problem. Secondly, the very fact of receiving aid signals to financial markets that we have economic backing, which reassures the markets.”
“We need to send a big thank you to President Biden for this assistance,” he said.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/12/31/gaza-war-costs-israel-economy/
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JERUSALEM (AP) — Israel’s Supreme Court on Monday struck down a key component of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s contentious judicial overhaul, a decision that threatens to reopen the fissures in Israeli society that preceded the country’s ongoing war against Hamas.
Those divisions were largely put aside while the country focuses on the war in Gaza, which was triggered by a bloody cross-border attack by Hamas. Monday’s court decision could reignite those tensions, which sparked months of mass protests against the government and had rattled the cohesion of the powerful military.
There was no immediate reaction from Netanyahu.
In Monday’s decision, the court narrowly voted to overturn a law passed in July that prevents judges from striking down government decisions they deem “unreasonable.” Opponents had argued that Netanyahu’s efforts to remove the standard of reasonability opens the door to corruption and improper appointments of unqualified cronies to important positions.
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The law was the first in a planned overhaul of the Israeli justice system. The overhaul was put on hold after Hamas militants carried out their Oct. 7 attack, killing some 1,200 people and kidnapping 240 others. Israel immediately declared war, and is pressing forward with an offensive that Palestinian health officials say has killed nearly 22,000 people in Gaza.
In an 8-7 decision, the Supreme Court justices struck down the law because of the “severe and unprecedented harm to the core character of the State of Israel as a democratic country.”
The justices also voted 12-3 that they had the authority to overturn so-called “Basic Laws,” major pieces of legislation that serve as a sort of constitution for Israel.
It was a significant blow to Netanyahu and his hard-line allies, who claimed the national legislature, not the high court, should have the final word over the legality of legislation and other key decisions. The justices said the Knesset, or parliament, does not have “omnipotent” power.
Netanyahu and his allies announced their sweeping overhaul plan shortly after taking office a year ago. It calls for curbing the power of the judges, from limiting the Supreme Court’s ability to review parliamentary decisions to changing the way judges are appointed.
Netanyahu and his allies said the changes aim to strengthen democracy by limiting the authority of unelected judges and turning over more powers to elected officials. But opponents see the overhaul as a power grab by Netanyahu, who is on trial for corruption charges, and an assault on a key watchdog.
Before the war, hundreds of thousands of Israelis took to the streets in weekly protests against the government. Among the demonstrators were military reservists, including fighter pilots and members of other elite units, who said they would stop reporting for duty if the overhaul was passed. The reservists make up the backbone of the military.
While the reservists quickly returned to duty after the Oct. 7 attacks in a show of unity, it remains unclear what will happen if the overhaul efforts are revived. A resumption of the protests could undermine national unity and affect the military’s readiness if soldiers refuse to report for duty.
Under the Israeli system, the prime minister governs through a majority coalition in parliament — in effect giving him control over the executive and legislative branches of government.
As a result, the Supreme Court plays a critical oversight role. Critics say that by seeking to weaken the judiciary, Netanyahu and his allies are trying to erode the country’s checks and balances and consolidate power over the third, independent branch of government.
Netanyahu’s allies include an array of ultranationalist and religious parties with a list of grievances against the court.
His allies have called for increased West Bank settlement construction, annexation of the occupied territory, perpetuating military draft exemptions for ultra-Orthodox men, and limiting the rights of LGBTQ+ people and Palestinians.
The U.S. had previously urged Netanyahu to put the plans on hold and seek a broad consensus across the political spectrum.
The court issued its decision because its outgoing president, Esther Hayut, is retiring and Monday was her last day on the job.
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Opinion
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
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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
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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
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The Families of Hostages Are Calling on Israel to Do Something Radical
By Mairav Zonszein
Ms. Zonszein is a journalist and a senior Israel analyst with the International Crisis Group.
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.....
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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
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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)
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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”.
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