Little has changed in Gaza

US "mainstream" media is happily using Iran in order to avoid giving Israel's continuing behavior much coverage.

The raft of condemnations by Western governments of Israeli Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir’s taunts of flotilla volunteers whom the Israeli military illegally kidnapped from international waters was attended by a good deal of hypocrisy, since the US government despises them as well, and few European governments support them.

What much of the reporting ignores, however, is how necessary the aid flotilla still is, since the Israelis have gone back to blockading key foodstuffs, medicine and fuel, and continue to shell and bomb people in Gaza. In other words, the genocide continues under the cover of the Hormuz crisis. - Informed Comment

The Israeli government is back to doing just what they want

Which was obviously the plan once they got the hostages returned. Anyone with any sense saw this coming. Trump is so easily played and suckered with flattery and bribes.

Amnesty International concludes that, over a month after a ceasefire was agreed upon in Gaza and all living Israeli hostages were returned, the Israeli authorities continue to pursue the textbook definition of genocide “by continuing to deliberately inflict conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction.” Moreover, Israeli leaders continue openly to affirm that this course of action is intentional on their parts…

The Secretary General of Amnesty International, Agnes Calmard, observed that “Palestinians remain held within less than half of the territory of Gaza, in the areas least capable of supporting life, with humanitarian aid still severely restricted.” Amnesty says that the Israeli military continues to occupy on the order of 55% of the Gaza Strip. There has been no move to rehabilitate the farmland that has been deliberately destroyed by the Israelis over two years or rebuild livestock. The Israelis routinely shoot at Palestinian fishing boats, preventing them from harvesting protein from the sea. The report concludes, “Palestinians are left virtually totally deprived of independent access to forms of sustenance.” - Informed Comment

A ceasefire is supposed to mean no more shooting

But corporate media has been desperate for a reason, no matter how spurious, to heap praise on Trump.

On October 10, a ceasefire was declared in the Gaza Strip, where more than 67,000 Palestinians were officially killed in just over two years of Israel’s United States-backed genocide. With an estimated 10,000 bodies still buried under the all-consuming rubble, and indirect deaths unaccounted for, this number is almost certainly a drastic underestimate. Shortly after the ceasefire took effect, US President Donald Trump pronounced the war in Gaza “over,” proclaiming that “at long last we have peace in the Middle East.”

In the ten days following the implementation of the ostensible truce, the Israeli military reportedly killed at least 97 Palestinians in Gaza and wounded 230, violating the ceasefire agreement no fewer than 80 times. One might have expected, then, to see a headline or two along the lines of, I dunno, “Israel Violates Ceasefire”—or maybe “So Much for ‘Peace’ in Gaza.”

No such headlines turned up in the Western corporate media—not that there weren’t some pretty spectacular violations to choose from. - FAIR

The future of Israel in the wake of its governing failures

Its far-right, criminal warmonger government, that is. Parts of this discuss possible parallels between now and the time of the Crusades, and I don’t totally buy stuff like that. But I found the rest very realistic.

Israel faces a further disadvantage. The knights of the Kingdom of Jerusalem could go off to war, wars that at most lasted a few months, while their serfs stayed home to tend the crops, but Israel is reliant on a small professional army supported during a crisis by mass callups of reserves. Given that the Arabs of the occupied territories are not going to step in to replace teachers, factory workers, office managers, and the like, the Israeli economy grinds to a halt for the duration of a serious conflict. The current siege of Gaza entered its second year with a mobilized Israeli army unable to secure a territory about a third the size of a Midwestern American county and Hamas re-emerging to resume governing the territory. The conflict with the much better prepared Hezbollah in Lebanon was surprisingly successful for Israel, but Hezbollah still exists. Continued conflict, especially conflict like the current Gaza war, shows the inability of the State of Israel to protect its citizens and provide peaceful life and is likely to lead to more emigration. Finally, even Israel’s nuclear weapons cannot ensure its security. As one Israeli general remarked, there are only two times to use nuclear weapons: too soon and too late. - Informed Comment

Israeli violence against Palestinians sets a new record

This horrific new mark could well be broken next year, the year after, and so on, unless something changes.

The UN Officer of the High Commissioner on Human Rights has issued a press release detailing the views of its experts on the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians during the past year, which they say has seen the worst death rate among the Occupied population since the organization began systematically tracking fatalities in 2005.

The experts rebuked Israel for the excessive use of force deployed by Israeli forces against Palestinians and the unbridled violence of Israeli squatters on Palestinian land in the West Bank, which have left 150 Palestinians dead this year in the Occupied West Bank, including 33 children...

Fanatical Israeli squatters who have built on land owned by Palestinian families and walk around armed are a particular concern for the UN human rights experts. They say that:

“Armed and masked Israeli settlers are attacking Palestinians in their homes, attacking children on their way to school, destroying property and burning olive groves, and terrorising entire communities with complete impunity.”

Each year has seen more Israeli squatter attacks than the year before since 2016. Ironically, it was in 2016 that the UN Security Council had passed a resolution demanding an end to such Israeli squatting. - Informed Comment

Will the latest election in Israel change things in the U.S.?

One can hope.

The importance of Tom Friedman’s article saying the Israel we knew is gone is not about Palestinians. No, the Israel Palestinians know (it) is the same. It is about American Jews. They are finally catching a clue. That is the importance of (early November's) election, the Itamar Ben-Gvir election, in which his fascistic Religious Zionism party took 14 seats, and hard right wing parties took 74 (per Dahlia Scheindlin). The new ugly Israel will alienate American Jews, as Israel lobbyists Dennis Ross and David Makovsky openly fretted in an Op-Ed...

The disarray is a good thing. Zionism — the ideology Ben-Gvir and Netanyahu embody, one of Jewish supremacy in the Jewish land – is at last becoming problematic for American Jews. They are up to their chins in a discriminatory ideology, and so we begin a war over Zionism that will bring down the Israel lobby in the next ten years. Because Zionism destroys everything in its path. - Mondoweiss

Current reality in the Palestinian West Bank

As is noted, people aren't getting much reality on this, from U.S. corporate "news" media.

The Palestinian West Bank, which is militarily occupied by Israel and which is being steadily colonized by Israeli squatters on Palestinian-owned land, is a seething cauldron. Some sort of gag rule appears to deter American television “news” from covering these dramatic events, which are pregnant with sinister implications for American security. Veteran newsman Tom Fenton once argued that the poor coverage on television news of international events actually forms a security threat to the United States, a republic that depends for its smooth functioning on an informed public.

Far right Israeli politicians such as Binyamin Netanyahu and Naftali Bennett, the two most recent ex-prime ministers, have assiduously cultivated equally far right squatters in the Palestinian West Bank, giving them carte blanche to arm themselves and to terrorize Palestinian townspeople.

When you encourage fascism, you should not be surprised when you get the equivalent of Mussolini’s black shirts, or Trump’s Oath Keepers. - Informed Comment

Israeli assassination of journalist gets the standard U.S. corporate media treatment

Most U.S. Jews don't support Israeli extremism. You'd never know that based on the behavior of our corporate "journalism."

Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, a well-known and much-loved Al Jazeera reporter who covered Palestine for two decades, was shot and killed by an Israeli sniper May 11 while documenting an Israeli raid on the Jenin refugee camp in the Occupied West Bank...

The context of escalating Israeli attacks on freedom of the press and on journalists in the Occupied Territories did not enter the frame of most US news coverage. Instead, many used a back-and-forth blame frame for reporting the murder of a veteran war correspondent who knew well how to negotiate crossfire in the field of battle. This was acknowledged by Ali Samoudi, who said from his hospital bed, if there had been crossfire, they wouldn’t have been there.

Amidst the debunking of the Israeli messaging, by late Wednesday some news outlets, including NBC (5/11/22), noted that Israel “appeared to step back from that claim” that Abu Akleh may have been killed by Palestinian gunmen.

Yet most big media would continue to include Israeli messaging in their reporting, while failing to disclose any of the factchecking done on the Israeli video. They “balanced” on-the-ground testimony with Israeli statements, keeping the propaganda story alive. - FAIR

Biden's Middle East policy shows little, if any, improvement

The demonizing of China is really bad, too. But this is even worse, for now.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken is shaping up to be as much of a disaster as secretary of state as Mike Pompeo. He appears to have nothing to say about Israel’s outrageous new plans to steal more Palestinian land and to further divide Palestinians into Bantustans as was done by Apartheid South Africa to the Bantu population.

He is hobnobbing with the foreign ministers of the United Arab Emirates and Israel, celebrating the “Abraham Accords” that marginalized the Palestinians, and rattling sabers against Iran. He won’t give Iran guarantees of an end to the crippling US financial and trade blockade on Tehran, then blames Iran for declining to give up its civilian nuclear enrichment program in return for nothing. As for Israel’s nuclear arsenal, that bit of proliferation goes unmentioned and never has attracted any sanctions. - Informed Comment

MN-04: Rep. McCollum keeps trying to do something for the Palestinians, but without enough company

From a recent email I got:

Rep. Betty McCollum of Minnesota just reintroduced her legislation in Congress that would prohibit our tax dollars from funding the Israeli military detention of Palestinian children—and this time, it’s an even stronger challenge to occupation and apartheid! The groundbreaking bill is the followup to H.R. 4391 in the last Congress, which boasted 31 cosponsors.

This bill exists because every year, Israel detains and prosecutes between 500 and 700 Palestinian children in military courts that have a conviction rate of 99.74%. Instead of living free and safe childhoods, Palestinian children fear Israeli soldiers pulling them from their beds in the middle of the night to face torture and ill-treatment. - US Campaign for Palestinian Rights

I get that Israel has a “right to exist.” I also get the population and resource pressures that country is facing. But that doesn’t give the country’s politicians, or any of its citizens, any right to treat the Palestinians as subject people without rights - up to and including extremes of exploitation, abuse, and even murder.

MN-05: How dare Rep. Omar tell it like it is!

Perhaps you saw the headline across the top of the Minneapolis Star Tribune this morning, assuring its ornery old subscriber base that someone is being put in her place. The following is quoted from the sort of reality-based item that, in a better world, would be the stock-in-trade of corporate media like the Strib as well.

It should be pointed out that Rep. (Ilhan) Omar (D-MN) has been relentlessly hazed because she is a Somali Muslim and critical of Israeli policy toward their Palestinian semi-chattel. One of her critics is close to the hate figure Frank Gaffney, purveyor of anti-Muslim conspiracy theories of the sort the Nazis used to circulate about Jews...

She may be wrong about the motives of some of her opponents. The anti-Palestinian politicians in the United States may have come by their determination to keep millions of displaced people stateless and without basic human rights honestly. That is, many may just be racists who believe that brown people should be kept down.

Nor should consideration of the Israel lobbies only focus on money. Their propaganda techniques, for instance of equating any criticism of Israeli colonization of the Palestinian West Bank to terrorism, are also extremely effective. - Informed Comment

I get that it's not just Republicans who are spouting off about this. That fact is a big part of the real problem, here.