Genocide Blog 46 – A Defiant and Destructive Israel and USA
01.06.2024
I will come back, at the end of this blog, to the ludicrous press conference President Biden held on 31 May. In it, he said Israel is proposing a new peace deal, and he orders Israel to stick with it. No joke! So, it is not even Israel that does its own proposing. To which Netanyahu’s first response was he agrees with his own proposal because it allows him to continue the war as long as he likes. No joke! It seems, however, that Biden is obliged now to twist Netanyahu’s arm. Maybe we should say “at long last”. If only we could believe Genocide Joe.
Hamas, and the Qatari and Egyptian mediators, have to take Joe Biden seriously, of course. As indeed do we. It is a matter of something even worse than “War and Peace”. It is a matter of stopping genocide. And maybe we, all the forces united against the genocide, are collectively about to put a stop to it. We must go on protesting.
Let us see what happened in the past one week so that we can understand the sudden USA-Israel proposal.
Palestine Burns as USA and Israel Fall
For Palestine, this past week was one of the worst in years of a hell where “Worst there is none”. And yet it is Israel and the USA that are the political losers in this past week. Netanyahu is, suddenly, totally destabilized at home and utterly isolated as a Pariah State abroad. Biden is left this past week with only 15% of Democrat electors supporting his view that Israel is not committing genocide in Gaza. Abroad the USA’s credibility, already a shaky vessel, is being dragged down by the sheer weight of its ally Israel’s blatant crimes against humanity.
Yet, this past week saw a defiant and destructive Israel-USA partnership go ahead with massacres in Rafah. They continue to slaughter people in full view of the world.
They bomb, with icy-hearted cruelty, Palestinian families that they forcibly removed into makeshift tents in the sand, and then watch them burn alive on TV screens. The lurid lie Israel invented about supposedly “40 decapitated babies” on the Hamas-led 7 October attack – a lie still being spread by both Israeli and US spokespeople, people who know no remorse once the lies are exposed as lies – has come back to haunt them, as we all, with horror and despair, see a real Palestinian baby decapitated in cold blood by an American bomb dropped by Israeli airmen.
US spokesmen don’t bat an eyelid even at that? For that, too, a crime as heinous as that, they know no remorse?
Genocidal Intent
The shameless spokesmen for the American State, males of the human species falling apart, stand there throughout this past week, stuttering at their podiums like court jesters, their cheeks and jowls on snapping puppet strings. They justify Biden who writes red lines against genocide with disappearing ink. They are getting very near, instead, to the very same moment in their lives, where the ultimate colonizer, the character Kurtz, got to, in Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness
when he uttered the genocidal words, “Exterminate all the brutes!”
As if to prove I am right, Nikki Haley, former USA Representative at the UN, no less, and withdrawn candidate for US President, no less, wrote on an Israeli artillery shell that is designed to kill the next child in Palestine, wrote with her own pen held in her own hand in front of the world’s press in Israel last week, the following words: “Finish them!”
The ICJ can “Go to hell!”
The USA and Israel both tell the International Court of Justice (ICJ) it can say what it likes about Israel having to halt the Rafah invasion. These two bandit states just do not care.
The ICJ can “go to hell” to quote verbatim the senior US Senator Lindsey Graham’s appalling words. This follows the ICJ’s clear and binding judgment that the Rafah invasion must stop. So much for what the US state apparatus view of the world’s top court.
Such is the default mentality of a persistent settler colony like Israel, or like right-wing forces in an older settler colony, the USA. Which is why we quote Lindsey Graham and Nikki Haley. Such is the mentality of a settler colony empire teetering-on-the-brink-of-falling. At that moment, they are dangerous.
Israel and USA Resort to Mafia tactics against ICC leaders
These two, Israel and the USA, act worse still to another Court. According to the US and Israel, the International Criminal Court (ICC) members can just go on suffering more Israeli and USA Mafia-style stings, like what The Guardian and two Israeli news outlets exposed, this past week.
This shocking exposure of the criminal blackmail Israel and the US use against the ICC comes just in time. It is a time of all dangers. The ICC has just sought international arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Defense Minister Gallant for “starvation of civilians as a method of warfare as a war crime … intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population [and] extermination and/or murder” (UN website) so the US and Israeli Mafia tactics can be expected to accelerate.
Remember the threat-letter to ICC top prosecutor, Karim Khan, signed by 12 US Senators, including Mitch McConnell himself? (See Blog 42 and the actual letter in the Documents section of our website.)
All of us of a certain age remember how the South African judge Goldstone, who produced a fine UN report on Israel in 2009, later capitulated shamefully and withdrew it. It is clear now what happened then, too. Though all thinking people suspected at the time that it was blackmail. Now, we know that is the modus operandi of Israel.
The Guardian reports that the then head of the Israeli secret service implicated former DRC President Joseph Kabila, in 2018, in a complex trap laid for the ICC top prosecutor at the time, Ms Fatou Bensouda, at Kabila’s hotel suite in New York. Kabila is reported to have embezzled $138 million and his family invested in real estate in the USA, so the Mossad chief could presumably use blackmail to get his complicity in the laying the trap. So, the Mossad boss Yossi Cohen lay in wait in an adjoining room in Kabila’s hotel suite. Kabila received Ms Bensouda, and then asked her officers to leave the room. The Mossad chief then pounced on her, threatening her and her family. Sources said he used words like“You should help us and let us take care of you. You don’t want to be getting into things that could compromise your security or that of your family.” Plus Mafia que ca, tu meurs.
President Donald Trump and his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo joined the attack against the ICC, in part to protect the USA against possible prosecutions over war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, in part to protect Israel from the investigation already under way.
Three-quarters of States now recognize Palestine
In the same week as the publication of this sordid Mafia-style Israeli and US behavior, four new countries have set in motion recognition of the State of Palestine. Presumably, they see the “wrong side of history” staring them in the face. Spain, Ireland, Slovenia and Norway are part of the European block. There are now three-quarters of UN states that recognize Palestine, i.e. 146 states out of 193 members states. Mauritius was in the first batch of states that recognized Palestine way back in 1988. So this aspect of Palestinian statehood speeds ahead.
More countries Join South African Case against Israel for genocide
At the same time, more countries have joined the South African case against Israel for genocide at the ICJ. Last week saw Mexico join. Others that have joined include important countries like Egypt which is still in an alliance with Israel, Turkey which is a NATO member, and Columbia, one of Latin America’s biggest countries, as well as African countries like Namibia and Libya. The State of Mauritius must join now.
On the military front, Israel in difficulty
And the military coherence of Hamas seems to have remained intact. About 10 days ago, they may even have captured an Israeli soldier. It is not yet clear. And the IDF has suffered losses in Jabalia, where they supposedly “won” long ago. They have also had attacks against them in Rafah. Meanwhile, the Hezbollah’s army has 100,000 rockets, waiting for when it has to use them against Israel. The Houtis in Yemen remain a threat to Israel as long as the Gaza invasion continues, and have shown they can send missiles into Israel.
Young people and workers
And more than anything else, young people and students, workers and organizations, all over the world have stood up for the Palestinian people.
It all comes together against Israel and the US, after years of ordinary people demonstrating, petitioning, planning, educating, writing letters and generally mobilizing. Finally, we get our governments to act, and international organizations to act:
- The International Criminal Court seeks arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his Defense Minister for crimes against humanity.
- The International Court of Justice gives a binding judgment against Israel, saying it must stop the offensive in Rafah, stop the killing, the maiming, the destruction of habitat, and the starvation.
- Increasingly countries in the world recognize a “state of Palestine”, as the UN vowed there would be, in 1948.
- Israeli political forces clash and destabilize the already destabilized Netanyahu Government, and the Israeli economy plummets downwards.
- Young people all over the world rise up against investments in Israel; divestment against Israel grows; workers refuse to handle bombs. Biden’s own staff resign and rise in rebellion against him.
- Hamas, Hezbollah’s army, the Houti “government”, armed factions in Iraq and Syria all surround Israel. Iran stays out of the fray, even when Israel provokes it so as to bring the USA in to fight against Iran for Israel.
Biden announces Israeli Peace Proposal
It is in this context that President Biden has made his strange speech of 31 May in which it is the US and not Israel that announces and I quote from the White House website “Israel has offered a comprehensive new proposal” for peace. To which he adds, “Well, I’ve urged the leadership in Israel to stand behind this deal, despite whatever pressure comes.” But, of course, it is supposed to be Israel’s own proposal, so naturally they have to stand behind it. Or what does the word “proposal” mean then?
The content of the proposal is much like the previous pre-Ramadan proposal that was on the table and that the Israelis re-neged on already. As for the strange phrase that, in the first of three phases, there will be “a withdrawal of Israeli forces from all populated areas of Gaza”. What on earth does that mean? The Palestinians of Gaza have been forced out of all the areas they lived in, so are these areas “populated areas” still? Or not? It is unfathomable that a US President should announce this kind of shoddy proposal.
Obviously Biden is dead scared of losing the November elections because of his support for Israel’s criminality. What does an honest American elector do, given a choice of a criminal lunatic like Trump and a Genocide Joe? When the Israelis announced that they will do “seven more months of fighting”, was this the catalyst? That Israel vowed to fight until a President Biden loses the elections? Just do the arithmetic, end of May plus 7 months. It was Israeli National Security Adviser Tzachi Hanegbi who announced this on 29 May. Two days later we hear the Biden proposal in Israel’s name.
Lindsey Collen, for LALIT
