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2021-05-14
Israel is not exercising "the right to defend itself” in the occupied Palestinian territories. It is carrying out mass murder, aided and abetted by the U.S.
”Israel's indiscriminate use of modern, industrial weapons to kill thousands of innocents, wound thousands more and make tens of thousands of families homeless is not a war: It is state-sponsored terror. And, while I oppose the indiscriminate firing of rockets by Palestinians into Israel, as I oppose suicide bombings, seeing them also as war crimes, I am acutely aware of a huge disparity between the industrial violence carried out by Israel against innocent Palestinians and the minimal acts of violence capable of being waged by groups such as Hamas.”
Read more: Chris Hedges: Israel, the Big Lie,
consortiumnews.com
Phyllis Bennis, 2021-05-16
Prime Minister Netanyahu is on trial and facing years in jail for a wide range of corruption charges. As long as he remains prime minister, he can't be jailed — but if he loses his ruling coalition, as he was on the verge of doing just before this crisis, he could go to prison.
Netanyahu's political capital is also bound up with his claim to be the only Israeli leader who can maintain the key levels of absolute impunity and uncritical economic and political support from the United States. ( $3.8 billion in military support every year! )
Beyond the political advantages, there are strategic advantages for Israel to go to war against Gaza. [Control over Gaza - "put them on a diet”]
These frequent attacks on Gaza have provided a critically valuable testing ground for the Israeli weapons manufacturers whose export deals — worth $7.2 billion in 2019 — represent a huge component of Israel's GDP.
Read more: Understanding Israel's Latest Attack on Gaza — And Who Benefits,
juancole.com
Ramzy Baroud, 2021-05-16
Tellingly, it was Africa, not the West, that first began coining today's terminology concerning Israel's racism and apartheid. In 1975, the Organisation of African Unity passed Resolution 77 (XII), condemning Israel's founding ideology, Zionism, as it considered it "a danger to world peace”. Then, it launched a global campaign aimed at unmasking "the racist aggressive nature of the Zionist entity”. This condemnation was made within the larger context of condemning racist apartheid regimes in South Africa and elsewhere.
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The UN General Assembly Resolution 3379 of 1975, which was revoked in 1991 under intense American pressure, had recognized Zionism as "a form of racism and racial discrimination”.
Read more: Israel's Discourse on Palestine is Crumbling
juancole.com
2021-05-18 Israeli airstrikes level a 6-storey residential building which was also home to the Nafha Centre for Israeli Studies in Gaza City
B'Tselem continued: "The Israeli airstrikes are targeting one of the most densely populated places in the world, already gripped by a humanitarian crisis caused, in part, by 14 years of Israeli blockade imposed on its roughly two million residents."
The rights group pointed out that "Gaza's besieged civilians have nowhere to run to hide from the strikes," noting that tens of thousands of families cannot protect themselves.
Regarding the targets of the Israeli attacks, B'Tselem said: "Israel repeatedly boasts that it takes care to safeguard civilians' lives and claims all its actions are lawful … Israel has claimed they were empty as it had warned the occupants prior to the strike. This claim ignores the fact that the buildings in question cannot be considered legitimate military targets, both because they are inhabited by civilians and because their destruction provides Israel with no military advantage."
The rights group reiterated that "targeting civilian objects is prohibited and constitutes a war crime."
Read more: Israel is committing war crimes in Gaza Strip
middleeastmonitor.com
Palestinians inspect the damage after israel- air strikes in khan younis in the southern gaza strip on may 19, 2021. (photo: yasser qudih/apa images)
2021-05-19, Israeli Jews release an open letter calling on the international community to intervene to stop current Israeli aggression, and work toward long-term justice and decolonization in the region.
Jewish supremacy is the cornerstone of the Israeli regime, and its consistent objective is to transfer and obliterate the Palestinian people, their history, and their national identity.
Read more: - expired link (before 2023-02-04) mondoweiss.net/2021/ 200+ Israeli Jews call for external intervention to stop Israeli aggression
2021-05-12, Philip Weiss
Excerpt:
Haim Saban[1] is one of the biggest donors to the Democratic Party and he has lately teamed up with Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner to push the normalization deals between Israel and Arab countries. You'd think that any Democrat having anything to do with the Trump team would become persona non grata. No; Haim Saban has too much money to ever be marginal. He loves Kushner because Kushner loves Israel. And here the two of them are working hard at one goal, to destroy Palestinians as a political force — which is the only point of the "Abraham Accords.”
Joe Biden will do nothing to alienate Haim Saban, just as Barack Obama would do everything to keep Saban on his side. Just as Hillary Clinton shaped her campaign stances in 2015 to please Saban.
Then there's Stacy Schusterman. Schusterman is a megadonor to the Democratic Party who also gave more than $1.2 million to Democratic Majority for Israel, the Israel lobby group that is trying to ensure that the left doesn't push the party toward a progressive stance on Israel.
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The American Jewish community is still attached to Israel; and pro-Israel donors are the power that be when it comes to Middle East policy in the Democratic Party.
Read more: - expired link (before 2023-02-04) mondoweiss.net/2021/05 Why Biden can't condemn Israeli violence
Related texts
Defending Humanity in Palestine, Jerusalem, Gaza and Everywhere!
And, airing a grievance he had been nursing ever since the President's (Obama's) Cairo speech, last June, Saban insisted that Biden correct what he considered to be Obama's cardinal error—the implication that Israel's creation was justified by the Holocaust, rather than by millennia of Jewish history.
- expired link (before 2023-02-04) newyorker.com/magazine/2010/ The Influencer, An entertainment mogul sets his sights on foreign policy. By Connie Bruck, 2010-05-03
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