World Socialist Web Site – April 2, 2024
White House defends Shifa hospital massacre that killed over 400
By Andre Damon
The Israeli army’s withdrawal from Shifa Hospital in Gaza on Monday revealed that the complex had been turned into a killing field, with hundreds of bodies of men, women and children showing signs of mass summary execution, torture and mutilation.
The massacre is among the largest in the nearly six-month-long US-Israeli genocide in Gaza, which has so far killed at least 32,000 people.
According to Gaza’s government media office, the death toll of Israel’s assault on the hospital stands at over 400. In a statement Monday, the Euro-Med Monitor said that the total number killed, missing or injured could number over 1,500, in “one of the largest massacres in Palestinian history.”
Images shared widely on social media showed countless decomposed bodies being exhumed from the hospital’s courtyards, where they had been buried by Israeli bulldozers. The bodies included women and children, as well as men with their hands zip-tied together.
Eyewitnesses told Al Jazeera and other media outlets that hostages were shot while handcuffed or thrown in ditches and buried alive by bulldozers.
The revelations of what could possibly be the largest massacre of the genocide so far prompted widespread popular outrage on social media, with millions of people sharing the documentary evidence.
“The [Israeli] occupation destroyed and burned all buildings inside Al-Shifa Medical Complex. They bulldozed the courtyards, burying dozens of bodies of martyrs in the rubble, turning the place into a mass graveyard,” said Ismail Al-Thawabta, director of Gaza’s government office. He added, “This is a crime against humanity.”
“The medical staff, some of whom were killed, others tortured, others detained, and above all, they have been besieged for two weeks without any medical supplies or even food or water,” Raed al-Nims, a spokesperson for the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, told Al Jazeera.
He continued, “According to eyewitness accounts and official reports, many of the civilians were executed. They were killed by the Israeli occupation forces, including medical staff, doctors, and nurses; they were purposefully executed by the Israeli soldiers.”
In its initial report on the massacre, based on on-the-ground reports, the Euro-Med Monitor reported that “hundreds of dead bodies, including some burned, and others with their heads and limbs severed, have been discovered both inside Al-Shifa Medical Complex and in the hospital’s surrounding area.”
The Biden administration, the leading sponsor of the Israeli genocide, defended the massacre, claiming Shifa hospital was a legitimate military target and alleging, without substantiation, that Hamas was using it as a headquarters.
“There were Hamas fighters hiding in Al Shifa Hospital,” said State Department spokesman Matthew Miller.
“Do not believe that this attack was on the hospital,” Miller added. “The attack was on the Hamas fighters that are hiding inside a hospital.”
He added, “I don’t know why I don’t hear more people calling on Hamas to stop going into hospitals.”
White House spokesman Karine Jean-Pierre added, “So look, Hamas should not be operating out of hospitals, we have said that over and over again, and putting civilians at risk.”
“They’re operating out of hospitals, out of hospitals,” she added. “That’s what they’re doing. They’re embedding themselves in the civilian population. This is what they’re doing.”
The White House responded to the massacre by directly green-lighting Israel’s planned assault on Rafah, where over 1 million displaced people are sheltering.
Miller said that the scenario in which “Israel does nothing about the Hamas fighters that continue to exist in Rafah” is not an “acceptable alternative.”
Jean-Pierre added, “We also know that there are Hamas operatives in Rafah as well. But if they’re going to move forward with military operations, we have to have this conversation. We have to understand how they’re going to move forward.”
According to Euro-Med, Israeli forces cleared the Shifa hospital complex of “all working personnel—particularly medical personnel—either by summary execution or forced displacement or arrest.”
The human rights group said that 22 patients were killed in their hospital beds during the siege, under conditions in which severely ill patients were denied food, water and medical care.
Among the medical workers killed in the attack were two doctors, Yusra Al-Maqadmeh and her son Ahmed Al-Maqadmeh.
In a widely shared tribute, Abu Sitta, a doctor who had previously worked in Gaza, wrote, “A beautiful soul and a great surgeon. We worked together in the Great March of Return and the 2021 war and then this recent war. His dedication was unlike anything I have ever seen. We will never forget.”
He added, “He spent this war going from Shifa hospital to Al Quds Hospital and when he was free he would join me at Al Ahli. Always dedicated, always wanting to learn. He refused to leave the north and kept sending me photos of his surgeries. He leaves behind a wife and baby.”
Earlier this month, Euro-Med reported that Israeli forces were carrying out mass summary executions of detainees. These reports were completely ignored by major media outlets in the United States. But the footage now emerging from Shifa hospital substantiates the allegations that the hospital was turned into a massive killing field by Israeli troops, with the full support of the Biden administration.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/04/02/aauk-a02.html?pk_campaign=newsletter&pk_kwd=wsws
Foreign Policy in Focus – March 31, 2024
The Most Dangerous Wars: When Local Conflicts become Geopolitics
By Walden Bello
The three major wars or conflicts that are ongoing today demonstrate the volatility of the intersection between the local and the global.
In the Hamas-Israeli conflict, we see how the maintenance of the Israeli settler-colonial state is intertwined with the preservation of the global hegemony of the United States.
In the war in Ukraine, a bloody war of attrition between two countries was provoked by Washington’s push to expand NATO to a country of the former Soviet Union.
In the South China Sea, we are witnessing how disputes over territory and natural resources have been elevated to a global conflict by the U.S. effort to maintain its global hegemony against China, to which it is losing the geoeconomic competition but over which it continues to enjoy absolute military superiority.
In short, the main cause of global instability today lies in the fusion of the local and the global, geopolitics and geoeconomics, empire and capitalism.
Balance of Power, Balance of Terror
What makes current conflicts especially volatile is that they are occurring amidst the absence of any effective multilateral coercive authority to impose a peaceful settlement. In Ukraine, it is the balance of military might that will determine the outcome of the war, and here Russia seems to be prevailing over the Ukraine-NATO-U.S. axis.
In the Middle East, there is no effective coercive power to oppose the Israeli-U.S. military behemoth—which makes it all the more remarkable that despite a genocidal campaign that has been going on for nearly four months now, Israel has not achieved its principal war aim of destroying Hamas.
In the South China Sea, what determines the course of events is the balance of power between China and the United States. There are no “rules of the game,” so that there is always a possibility that American and Chinese ships playing “chicken”–or heading for each other, then swerving at the last minute–can accidentally collide, and this collision can escalate to a higher form of conflict such as a conventional war.
Without effective coercive constraints imposed by a multilateral organization on the hegemon and its allies, the latter can easily descend into genocide and mass murder. Whether in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, or Gaza, the Geneva Conventions and the Convention against Genocide, have been shown to be mere pieces of paper.
The Right of Self Defense
Given the absence of a multilateral referee that can impose its will, it is only the development of political, diplomatic, and military counterpower that can restrain the hegemon. This is the lesson that national liberation wars in Algeria and Vietnam taught the world. This is the lesson that the Palestinian resistance today teaches us.
This is why even as we condemn wars of empire waged by the hegemon, we must defend the right of people to resort to armed self-defense.
This does not mean that efforts at peacemaking by global civil society have no role to play. They do. I still remember how shortly before the invasion of Iraq, The New York Times came out with an article on February 17, 2003, in response to massive mobilizations against the planned invasion of Iraq, that said that there were only two superpowers left in the world, and they were the United States and global public opinion, and that then President George W. Bush ignored this outpouring of global resistance at his peril.
Global civil society did contribute to the ending of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq by eroding the legitimacy of those wars among the U.S. public, making them so unpopular that even Donald Trump denounced them–in retrospect that is–as did many personalities that had voted for war in the U.S. Congress.
The recent decision of the International Court of Justice that has ordered Israel to prevent genocide in Gaza is likely to have a similar impact as global civil society’s resistance to Bush, Jr’s, invasion of Iraq. The ICJ decision may not have an immediate impact on the ongoing war, but it will erode the legitimacy of the project of settler colonialism and apartheid in the long run, deepening the isolation of Israel in the long run.
A Just Peace
We often see peace as an ideal state. But the peace of the graveyard is not peace. A peace bought at the price of fascist repression not only is not desirable but it will not last.
Oppressed peoples like the Palestinians will refuse peace at any price, peace that is obtained at the price of humiliation. As they have shown in the 76 years since the Nakba, their massive expulsion from their lands and homes, the Palestinians will not settle for anything less than peace with justice, one that enables them to recover their lands seized by Israelis, establish a sovereign state “from the river to the sea,” and allow them to hold their heads up in pride.
The rest of the world owes them its wholehearted support to realize such a just peace through all possible means, even as we work to oppose wars of empire waged by hegemons in other parts of the world.
Walden Bello is Co-Chair of the Board of Focus on the Global South and Adjunct Professor of Sociology at the State University of New York at Binghamton. He is a prominent voice pushing for the demilitarization and denuclearization of the South China Sea.
https://www.juancole.com/2024/03/dangerous-conflicts-geopolitics.html
Israeli strike on Iran’s consulate in Damscus kills 7, including 2 IRGC generals
Iran has promised to respond after two commanders from its Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) were among seven people killed in an Israeli air strike that flattened the Iranian consulate in Damascus. Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Zahedi, a senior commander in the elite Quds Force of the IRGC and his deputy General Mohammad Hadi Hajriahimi were killed in the attack, the IRGC said in a statement on Monday.
Russia accused Israel of carrying out an “unacceptable” attack. “We strongly condemn this unacceptable attack against the Iranian consular mission in Syria,” the foreign ministry said in a statement.
US State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller told reporters that the United States remained “concerned about anything that would be escalatory or cause an increase in conflict in the region”.
Since Israel launched its war on the besieged Gaza Strip on October 7 following an attack by the Palestinian group Hamas, Israel has ramped up air strikes in Syria against Lebanon’s Iranian-backed Hezbollah militia and Iran’s IRGC, both of which support the government of Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad.
The strike in Damascus comes just days after Israeli air strikes killed dozens of people in Syria’s northern province of Aleppo, amid fears that the Gaza war could lead to a broader regional escalation.
Ali Vaez, director of the International Crisis Group’s Iran Project, says Israel’s alleged attack on Iran’s consulate in Syria is “akin to targeting another country on its own soil”.
“Overall this seems to still be a low-simmer regional war. It’s not yet an all-out regional conflict, but it does appear that Israel is trying to do everything in its power to expand the conflict,” Vaez told Al Jazeera.
“[This] puts Israel in a win-win situation because Israel knows Iran doesn’t want to get dragged into a regional war, so if it escalates its attacks against Iranian assets and personnel in Syria, it probably will be cost free, and if Iran does respond and retaliate, then it becomes a justified pretext for expanding the war.”
Globalvoices.org – April 2, 2024
Secular Opposition Crushes pro-Islam AKP in Turkey’s Local Elections
ARZU GEYBULLAYEVA
Turkey’s local elections which took place on March 31, will go down in history as one of its most surprising. Turkey’s demoralized opposition, namely the [secular] Republican People’s Party (CHP), dominated in what many pundits described as the ruling [center-right] Justice and Development Party’s worst defeat of itsﾠ22-year existence. For the first time since 1977, the CHP took more votes nationwide. In his televised address afterward, the CHP leader Özgür Özel called the elections “historic.” Scores of supporters took to the streets to celebrate the results across Turkey.
Istanbul, where CHP secured victory in 2019, was one of the key cities in this year’s race. At the time, losing control over the municipality in Istanbul was described as a major blow to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his Justice and Development party (AKP), as it was where he started his political career when he was elected mayor in 1994. The results of yesterday’s election nationwide cemented this rejoinder on Erdoğan’s agenda.
In the capital, Ankara, the CHP’s incumbent mayor, Mansur Yavaş, outdid his rival by over 28 percent. In Turkey’s third-largest city, Izmir, opposition candidate Cemil Tugar finished 11 points ahead of the ruling party’s candidate.
Elsewhere across the country, as the results were trickling in, the map was slowly turning red as many of the provinces previously led by the AKP were showing victories for the opposition party candidates.
According to Gönül Tol, Director of the Middle East Institute’s Turkish Program, the change was “notable,” as “opposition CHP [was] not confined to coastal regions but expanding into Anatolia, the conservative/nationalist heartland of the country.”
In total, the opposition won in 35 out of 81 provinces. The rest of the provinces were split between AKP (24 provinces), the Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party (DEM, 10 provinces), the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP, 8 provinces), the New Welfare Party (two provinces), and Iyi Party (Good Party, one province). With some six million eligible voters, the turnout at the time of writing this story was estimated at more than 78 percent across the country’s 81 provinces, with almost all ballots counted. In previous municipal elections, the turnout was 84.5 percent. In Turkey, the voter turnout has always been high ranging between 70 and 90 percent throughout the years.
This victory also reversed political tides ahead of the next general elections scheduled for 2028. There were hints the AKP would be making constitutional changes which could allow incumbent President Erdoğan to stay in power, despite earlier promises these elections would be his last.
While the president cannot legally run in the next presidential race in 2028, according to Turkey’s Constitution, there are two scenarios in which this can change. In the first scenario, Erdoğan and the AKP would need to secure 400 votes in the parliament to change the constitution. Turkey’s parliament, the Grand National Assembly, consists of 600 seats. At the moment, the AKP and its main ally, the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), hold 313 seats. Thus, pushing for a constitutional amendment with a parliamentary vote would largely depend on whether the ruling party and President can secure the support of other political party representatives.
In the second scenario, the parliament can call for an early election. But even in this scenario, 360 parliamentary votes are needed.
With election results in, these plans will likely be put on hold.
While still low, the number of women mayors also increased, rising from four to 11. In Bilecik, a provincial capital of Turkey’s Bilecik Province, in northwestern Anatolia, Melek Mızrak Subaşı who was likened to Daenerys Targaryen, the fictional character in George R. R. Martin’s epic fantasy novel series A Song of Ice and Fire — which was later made into the HBO blockbuster Game of Thrones series, also secured victory.
The elections also saw instances of violence. At least one person was killed and 11 injured in the city of Diyarbakir, and at least sixteen were injured in the province of Sanliurfa, according to media reports.
Critiques against Erdoğan
As results started to trickle in, one of the widely discussed questions was what kind of election results Turkey would see had it been a different opposition candidate running against President Erdoğan.
The local election results also illustrated that the dynamics between the local and general elections were different. Turkey’s ongoing economic crisis, wherein the country’s currency lost 40 percent of its value since last year and over 80 percent in the last five years, did matter, and the voters placed the blame on the ruling government in the local elections. In an interview with Reuters, Hakan Akbaş, a senior adviser at the Albright Stonebridge Group, said, “The economy was the decisive factor. Turkish people demanded change and İmamoğlu is now the default nemesis to President Erdoğan.”
Another surprising result came from the Yeniden Refah (the New Welfare Party), a religious-conservative party which pundits speculated could divide the AKP’s votes among conservative and religious voters disillusioned by Erdoğan’s economic choices. It came third in the race after the ruling AKP secured over six percent of votes.
In his balcony speech delivered past midnight, Erdoğan adopted a less divisive tone than usual, expressing his gratitude to all of his party candidates as well as the people. He also said the party would fix mistakes ahead of the 2028 general elections. Unlike in previous municipal elections in 2019, the ruling party also did not contest election results, with Erdoğan, saying he and his party accept the people’s decision. In 2019, after the CHP’s Ekrem İmamoğlu won against the AKP’s Binali Yıldırım, the latter objected to the results. In the re-run, İmamoğlu won with an even higher margin — some 860,000 votes versus 13,700 votes.
In securing his re-election, İmamoğlu now has a clear shot at becoming the next leader of the opposition CHP as well as a likely candidate in the next presidential race. According to Sinan Ülgen, director of the Istanbul-based Edam think tank, “This outcome has certainly been a watershed for İmamoğlu. He will emerge as the natural candidate of the opposition for the next round of presidential elections.” Whether İmamoğlu will succeed remains to be seen, especially as the popular Istanbul Mayor is stillﾠfacing a charge over allegedly insulting public officials in a speech he made after he won Istanbul’s municipal election in 2019. The higher appeals court must uphold the verdict, but until then, İmamoğlu remains Istanbul’s mayor.
Also important to note is that these elections were free but not fair. Ahead of the vote, Erdoğan relied heavily on his presidential powers as well as the government institutions and media. In a country where 90 percent of traditional media is controlled by the government, it was not surprising to see that much of the air time was devoted to the ruling party and its candidates. There was plenty of disinformation, as was the case during the general elections last year. In December 2023, the Information Technologies and Communications Authority (BTK), Turkey’s top telecommunications watchdog, imposed an access ban on 16 VPN providers. The country has also witnessed a backsliding on human rights, democracy, judicial independence, and the rule of law.
Arzu Geybullayeva is an Azerbaijani columnist and writer, with special focus in digital authoritarianism and its implications on human rights and press freedom in Azerbaijan. Arzu has written for Al Jazeera, Eurasianet, Foreign Policy Democracy Lab, CODA, Open Democracy, Radio Free Europe, and CNN International. She is a regular contributor at IWPR, Osservatorio Balcani e Caucaso and Global Voices. In 2019, Arzu launched Azerbaijan Internet Watch, a platform that documents, and monitors information controls in Azerbaijan. Arzu has contributed to GV since May 2010.
httpvoices.org/2024/04/01/opposition-gains-major-victories-in-turkeys-local-elections/
Turkey’s Erdoğan suffers blow in crucial mayoral elections as secular opposition surges
Opposition’s triumph in Istanbul, where the president had invested significant electoral resources, boosts a party that was left reeling by a general election defeat last year.
BY ELÇIN POYRAZLAR
Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan suffered a major blow on Sunday, with initial results showing the country’s main opposition party notched up regional election victories around the country.
The opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) held onto or captured the country’s five biggest cities in Sunday’s vote, which had been seen as a make-or-break moment for a movement still reeling from Erdoğan’s victory in the Turkish presidential contest in May 2023.
The CHP saw its biggest triumph in Istanbul, where Ekrem Imamoğlu was reelected mayor. Europe’s biggest city, Istanbul accounts for 18 percent of Turkey’s population and a third of its economy.
In his victory speech delivered late Sunday, Imamoğlu said the local election results would have big implications for the country’s political future.
“Turkey will blossom into a new era in democracy as of tomorrow. March 31, 2024 is the day when democratic erosion ends and democracy begins to recover,” he told a big crowd in Istanbul.
Imamoğlu is seen as a future challenger to Erdoğan, and winning the city which catapulted the current president to national prominence when he won the mayorship 30 years ago is a symbolic achievement.
Erdoğan conceded defeat and promised to listen to the message delivered by Turkish voters. “March 31 is not an end for us, but a turning point,” he said.
Turkey’s long-serving leader — in office as president or prime minister since 2003 — had vowed to recapture the city where he had made his political career, and sent no fewer than 17 government ministers to campaign in Istanbul ahead of voting.
The CHP also won in Turkey’s capital, Ankara, as well as Izmir, Bursa and Adana, pushing its support to 37.4 percent nationwide with more than 90 percent of the votes counted.
Erdoğan’s Islamist-based AK party trailed on 35.7 percent, losing conservative strongholds including Adıyaman, Afyonkarahisar and Zonguldak.
Selin Nasi, a visiting fellow at the European Institute of the London School of Economics, said the election suggested economic factors had trumped Erdoğan’s variety of identity politics.
Turkey has been wrestling with sky-high inflation for several years and according to official figures prices are still rising by 67 percent a year.
“Conservative voters punished the AKP at the ballot box for the cost of living crisis,” Nasi said, adding that the CHP had expanded beyond its coastal strongholds, increasing its vote in Turkey’s Anatolian heartlands.
Nasi added that the election would not only “inject new life into the CHP,” but also consolidate the position of Imamoğlu, who previously won the city’s mayorship twice in 2019 after the authorities annulled his initial election.
“He is the only politician who succeeded in beating Erdoğan three times,” Nasi said.
Imamoğlu swept the megacity with more than 51 percent of the votes, with the AKP’s candidate Murat Kurum trailing almost 10 points behind him.
A victory in Istanbul — widely considered a microcosm of Turkey — could have given Erdoğan the political momentum and economic resources to move ahead with his goal to amend the constitution to prolong his time in office.
Utku Çakırözer, a CHP member of parliament, hailed the result as a warning from voters to Erdoğan’s AKP.
“Voters gave a yellow card to the government,” he told POLITICO, arguing that with massive support behind the opposition he now sees early elections as more likely.
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