Countercurrent – August 23, 2024
Gaza: Expanding Israeli operations in Deir al-Balah threatens the lives of one million people
by Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor
Palestinian Territory – The illegal evacuation orders that the Israeli army has been enforcing in Deir al-Balah, in the central Gaza Strip, and Mawasi al-Qarara, west of Khan Yunis, in the southern Gaza Strip, have raised fear of additional forced displacement and an attack on an area in which nearly two million people are crammed.
The Israeli army has continued its pattern of issuing illegal evacuation orders in the Strip. One such order was issued yesterday, on Wednesday morning, and targets all civilians, including those who have already been forcibly displaced, who are living in Blocks 129 and 130 in the area of Al-Mahta and Deir al-Balah. This area is home to 10s of thousands of people and is close to the Aqsa Martyrs Hospital. The Israeli orders, along with earlier ones that targeted residents of eastern and southern Deir al-Balah, show that Israel is continuing to expand its attack on Deir al-Balah, which is home to one million people, the majority of whom have previously been displaced to the centre of the Strip from northern or southern Gaza.
Nearly half of the people living in the Gaza Strip are currently living in Deir al-Balah. They had been forced to flee their homes and relocate there from locations across the entire Gaza Strip, particularly from northern Gaza and Rafah. Those sheltering in Deir al-Balah travelled there under Israeli bombing from the air, land, and sea, and Israel’s deliberate destruction of entire residential areas, hospitals, shelter centres, and public and private civilian facilities. Now, the military evacuation orders are asking residents of Deir al-Balah to move south, and targeting Deir al-Balah and the southern town of Al-Mawasi with illegal evacuation orders and bombing.
The Israeli army’s targeting of large areas within what it refers to as the “humanitarian zone” with illegal evictions, as has occurred in Mawasi al-Qarara and Deir al-Balah, suggests that Israel is trying to squeeze nearly two million people into an increasingly smaller area, until the population density reaches globally unprecedented levels, and displaced people are unable to even find a place to pitch their tents.
Given that Deir al-Balah is home to numerous national and international humanitarian organisations, the intensifying attack on the city raises the possibility that some humanitarian efforts may cease, putting Gaza Strip residents at further existential risk.
Since the Israeli army had previously declared that it had finished its military operations in the Gaza Strip, the expansion of operations towards Deir al-Balah and the increasing systematic destruction of Rafah’s residential areas as well as Khan Yunis’ Hamad City and Qarara areas is evidence of Israel’s ongoing quest to completely eradicate any Palestinian life there, whether now or in the future.
Israeli planes struck a number of Gaza City structures on Tuesday, including the Al-Jazeera Hotel, in spite of the fact that military operations had supposedly ended there and the majority of the area’s buildings had already been destroyed during ten months of incursions and aerial bombardment.
The Israeli army is still bombing makeshift shelters inside Gaza City schools. Just two days ago, it bombed the Mustafa Hafez School, which was home to thousands of displaced people. Twelve people were killed and numerous others were injured in the attack. Since the beginning of August, 11 schools have been bombed and destroyed, resulting in the deaths of displaced individuals.
There is no possible military need or justification for bombing and demolishing schools above the heads of the displaced people who are sheltering inside them, nor for expanding military operations in the aforementioned areas.
Observing the Israeli strategy of bombing followed by illegal evacuation orders shows that there is a deliberate policy in place to deny security to Palestinians across the entire Gaza Strip by temporarily depriving them of shelter or stability. This policy consists of continuing to bomb the entire Strip and concentrating on targeting shelter centres, such as UNRWA schools.
Israel’s systematic policy of targeting the civilian population of the Gaza Strip is prohibited by international humanitarian law. Yet, Israel continues to intensify its bombing of shelter and displacement centres, targeting areas specifically designated as humanitarian spaces, and denying these people any stability, even temporarily, thereby carrying out long-term forced displacement and demolishing all necessities of life as part of its genocide that has been ongoing since 7 October 2023.
The ongoing Israeli military operations in the Gaza Strip suggest that efforts are being made to maintain and strengthen the occupation’s hold on the besieged enclave. This is further demonstrated by the announcement made by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has said that he will not leave Philadelphi Corridor or Netzarim Axis despite enormous pressure to do so.
This is all taking place following a green light expressed in United States Secretary of State Anthony Blinken’s declaration that the US will not tolerate a long-term Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip; in other words, the US has approved a short-term occupation without putting a time limit on it. Notably, the US approved $20 billion in arms sales to Israel earlier this month.
Israel’s military actions gravely breach international humanitarian law—particularly the principles of distinction, proportionality, and military necessity—and have a negative impact on all Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip.
As part of their international obligations, all nations must impose strong sanctions on Israel and halt all forms of military, political, and financial assistance. This includes immediately cutting off all arms transfers to Israel, including export permits and military aid; otherwise, these nations will be complicit in and partners in the Israeli crimes committed in the Gaza Strip, including the crime of genocide.
Without US cover, cooperation, and silence, the crime of genocide would not have continued and escalated. The majority of the world’s nations must accept their responsibilities and take concrete action to protect civilians, halt the mass killing, and stop the crime of genocide from being completed.
Since the crimes committed by Israel in the Gaza Strip are international crimes under the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, it is imperative that the Court move forward with its investigation into all crimes committed by Israel in the Gaza Strip, broaden its investigation into individual criminal responsibility for these crimes in order to include all those responsible, and issue arrest warrants against them.
Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor is a Geneva-based independent organization with regional offices across the MENA region and Europe
Countercurrent – August 23, 2024
Prolonging Genocide as a Smokescreen: On Israel’s Other War in the West Bank
By DrRamzy Baroud
Promises of “absolute victory” in Gaza are nothing but “gibberish”, according to Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. Gallant’s comments were not meant to be public, but somehow were leaked and published by Israeli media on August 12.
The explanation of why Netanyahu is pursuing a losing war in Gaza has been largely confined to the prime minister’s personal interests: avoiding the outcome of his corruption trials, preserving his extremist government coalition and avoiding early elections.
Still, none of these rationales explain the absurdity of continuing with a war, which, in the words of former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak is “the worst failure in Israel’s history”.
What else could explain Netanyahu’s motive behind the war? And why are his most crucial government allies, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister BezalelSmotrich determined to prolong it?
The answer may not lie in Gaza, but in the West Bank.
While Israel is extending its failed military campaign in the Strip with no clear strategic objectives, its war on the West Bank is driven by clear strategic motives: the annexation of the West Bank and the ethnic cleansing of large sectors of the Palestinian population.
This is not only obvious through Israel’s daily actions in the West Bank but also because of the clear statements made by Israel’s extremist government officials.
This includes a commitment by Netanyahu’s own Likud party to “advance and develop settlement in all parts of the land of Israel – in the Galilee, Negev, Golan Heights, and Judea and Samaria.”
An audio recording, obtained by the Israeli group, Peace Now, conveyed the following remarks by Smotrich at a June 9 conference: “My goal is to settle the land, to build it, and to prevent, for God’s sake, its division … and the establishment of a Palestinian state.”
To do so, the far-right politician has assigned himself the job of “change(ing) the DNA of the system.” This ‘system’ was put in place decades ago.
Following its military occupation of the West Bank, Israel began a slow but determined process of the illegal annexation of Palestinian territories. This process included the establishment, in 1981, of the so-called Civil Administration.
The latter was essentially a branch of the Israeli military but was designated as ‘civil’ as part of a greater government effort to convert a temporary military occupation into the permanent colonization of Palestine. This entailed the practical annexation and continued expansion of the illegal Israeli Jewish settlements built on Palestinian land after the war.
The Oslo Accords in 1993-94 gave Palestinians nominal administrative control over small areas in the West Bank, designated as areas A and B. This necessitated the transfer of some of the Civil Administration’s responsibility to the newly formed Palestinian Authority, based on the understanding the PA will continue essentially to prioritize Israel’s security.
The new arrangement allowed Israel to expand, unhindered, its illegal settlements in most of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, tripling both the size and population of the settlements between 1993 and 2023.
As Israel’s colonial plan in the West Bank reached its zenith, Netanyahu sought, in 2020, to reinforce Israeli gains with the annexation of more than 30 percent of the West Bank.
Due to international pressure and growing Palestinian resistance, Netanyahu postponed his plan, though with the understanding that “annexation remains on the table”.
Without much fanfare, however, Israel swapped its hope for a sweeping de jure annexation of the West Bank with de facto control, through rapid seizure of Palestinian land and the expanding of settlements.
Though the Israeli military is faltering in Gaza, the war is being used as the perfect smokescreen to finalize old colonial plans in the West Bank.
This scheme was dubbed by Smotrich in 2017 as a “victory by settlement”. Now in a position of power and with access to a massive budget, he is making his life’s goal a reality.
For Smotrich’s dream to be realized, he needed to revitalize the once central role of the Civil Administration. In May, he invented a new position called ‘deputy head’ of the administration, granting the position to his close associate Hillel Roth.
Now, both have unparalleled sweeping rights to expand the settlements. Since the start of its term in power, Netanyahu’s government has approved 12,000 new housing units for illegal settlements, while ordering the demolition of thousands of Palestinian homes and other civilian infrastructure.
In the first three months of 2024, Israel declared nearly 6,000 as ‘state-owned land’, therefore eligible for settlement construction. The decision was described by the Israeli watchdog Peace Now as the ‘largest West Bank land grab in 30 years’.
The ethnic cleansing of Palestinians is already under way. According to the Norwegian Refugee Council, in the first half of 2024 alone, at least 1,000 Palestinians have been forcefully displaced while nearly 160,000 have been affected by home demolitions.
The Israeli war on the West Bank has come at a high price of blood. As of August 12, at least 632 Palestinians were killed and 5,400 were wounded in the West Bank, according to the Ministry of Health.
When the war on Gaza is over, the war on the West Bank shall grow more intense and bloodier, but with clear strategic goals of annexing the whole of the area.
On July 19, the International Court of Justice resolved that Israel’s “annexation and .. assertion of permanent control” in the West Bank, is illegal.
To avoid a greater war and genocide, the international community must use all available means to enforce international law and to end the Israeli occupation of Palestine.
Dr. RamzyBaroud is a journalist, author and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of six books. His latest book, co-edited with IlanPappé, is ‘Our Vision for Liberation: Engaged Palestinian Leaders and Intellectuals Speak Out’. His other books include ‘My Father was a Freedom Fighter’ and ‘The Last Earth’. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA). His website is www.ramzybaroud.net
Lebanon says 564 killed in Israeli attacks since Oct. 8
Over 110,000 people displaced due to Israeli attacks in Lebanon, Health Ministry says
At least 564 people have been killed and 1,848 others injured in Israeli attacks in Lebanon since Oct. 8, the Health Ministry said on Thursday.
A ministry statement added that nearly 110,099 people have been displaced from their areas due to Israeli bombardment.
Israel still occupies the Shebaa Farms in southern Lebanon as well as the Golan Heights in Syria and the Palestinian West Bank.
Tension has escalated along the Lebanese-Israeli border since last October amid an exchange of cross-border attacks between Hezbollah and Tel Aviv.
The escalation comes against the backdrop of a deadly Israeli onslaught on Gaza which has killed nearly 40,300 people since Oct. 7, 2023 following an attack by the Palestinian resistance group Hamas.
https://www.yenisafak.com/en/news/lebanon-says-564-killed-in-israeli-attacks-since-oct-8-3689734
Yemen’s million-man rallies demand 'devastating' Resistance response
Participants hail the Palestinian people's "legendary resilience that has defied expectations and disappointed the enemies and normalizers."
Several Yemeni provinces saw Friday million-man demonstrations in solidarity with the Palestinian people and in rejection of the ongoing Israeli genocide against the people of Gaza.
Under the slogan "With Gaza and Al-Aqsa... Jihad and Steadfastness Until Victory," mass rallies were held Friday afternoon in the al-Sabeen Square in the capital, Sanaa, as well as in over 200 main and subsidiary locations across Yemeni provinces, reiterating solidarity with the Palestinian people and support for the Yemeni Armed Forces’ operations in defense of Gaza.
Morning demonstrations were also held in the provinces of Saada, Raymah, and Marib, as well as in several districts of Taiz, Amran, and Ibb provinces.
Participants reaffirmed their continued support for Gaza and its Resistance through military operations, various official and popular activities, and economic boycotts against enemies.
The statement issued at the rallies called on the "Axis of al-Quds, Jihad, and Resistance to strike at the enemies of God, the prophets, and humanity," urging that the response to Israeli crimes be "devastating and satisfying to the hearts of the believers."
The statement addressed the Arab and Islamic nations, telling them that "Gaza is a test of your faith and a measure of your humanity, and abandoning it is betrayal."
According to the statement, responsibility and religious duty increase in proportion to the magnitude of the Palestinian people's suffering. It also warned against the dangers of complacency and neglect.
The participants also expressed pride and honor for the Palestinian people and their fighters, hailing their "legendary resilience that has defied expectations and disappointed the hopes of enemies and normalizers."
On Thursday, the leader of the Yemeni Ansar Allah movement, Sayyed Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, highlighted during a speech that the number of rallies, demonstrations, and solidarity events held in Yemen in solidarity with Gaza since the onset of the Israeli war on the besieged Strip has reached 652,175.
Sayyid al-Houthi affirmed that the weekly marches and rallies held in support of Gaza will continue in the capital Sanaa, as well as in different Yemeni governorates and countrysides, regardless of the circumstances and weather conditions.
"The stance of our beloved people is one of honor and valor, and it will be remembered by the coming generations as such; never stained with the shame of failure, as is the case with many peoples and regimes," the Yemeni Resistance leader indicated.
https://english.almayadeen.net/news/politics/yemen-s-million-man-rallies-demand--devastating--resistance
World Socialist Web Site – August 23, 2024
Bangladesh’s right-wing interim government moves to consolidate its power
By Keith Jones
Two-and-a-half weeks after a popular uprising forced the flight of long time Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, Bangladesh’s military-installed interim government continues to consolidate its authority and press for the resumption of “normal life” in a country marked by grinding poverty, savage worker exploitation, and gaping social inequality.
It is doing so with the support of the Students Against Discrimination (SAD), the student movement whose agitation triggered the mass protests that led to the fall of Hasina’s 16-year-old Awami League regime. The ostensible left parties, many of which are grouped together in the Left Democratic Alliance, and the trade unions are also backing and pledging to work with the interim government, as are the principal opposition party, the right-wing Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), and big business.
The interim government includes two SAD leaders among its 21 “special advisors” or ministers, and has otherwise tried to give itself “progressive” airs.
However, it is manifestly a right-wing capitalist government. It is back-stopped by the military, which oversaw its formation and remains very much the power behind the throne.
The government’s first orders of business are ensuring that capitalist “law and order” is re-established, Bangladesh’s garment industry resumes pumping out profits for global investors, and the IMF austerity measures Hasina agreed to in Jan. 2023 in exchange for a $4.7 billion emergency loan are implemented.
The government’s right-wing, anti-working-class character is personified by the “chief special advisor,” Muhammad Yunus. The 84-year-old Yunus is a former banker and an internationally-celebrated advocate of micro-finance and petty-bourgeois entrepreneurship as the path to capitalist development. He has close connections to Washington, international capital, and various European imperialist powers.
In addition to taking the role of de facto prime minister, Yunus has given himself direct charge over numerous important ministries, including defence, energy, textiles and jute, education, and information and broadcasting.
With the support of the SAD, the BNP, and last but not least the military, Yunus is replacing various Awami League loyalists and appointees at the top of key state institutions. Their replacements are almost invariably persons associated with the BNP or technocrats with ties to domestic big business and/or international organizations like the IMF and World Bank.
In a move which is no doubt gaining it some popular support, the interim government has also taken action against certain crony capitalists who profited enormously from their corrupt ties with the previous government. The S. Alim Group, which is accused of siphoning off billions from the country’s largest private bank to support its global operations, has been stripped of its control over the Islami Bank.
Earlier this week, Yunus met with the newly-appointed head of Bangladesh’s central bank and former leading IMF official Ahsan H. Mansur. They agreed that the bank should move to curb rising inflation by adopting a “restrictive” monetary policy. That is, that it should tighten the money supply and raise interest rates, thereby reducing access to credit, slowing economic activity and driving up unemployment. Under capitalism the brunt of such a “war on inflation” inevitably falls on the working class and rural toilers.
The Yunus-led interim government has been warmly welcomed by the western powers, especially Washington. The latter clearly hopes that it can leverage its close ties with Yunus to prevail on Bangladesh to put greater distance between itself and Beijing.
While Hasina enjoyed very close ties to India—America’s principal South Asian/Indian Ocean region ally—Washington deemed her too ready to pursue a policy of “strategic non-alignment,” using the US-China rivalry to play one off against the other so as to extract maximum favours from both.
For this reason, Washington became increasingly critical of Hasina and vocal in its criticisms of her government’s use of state violence and politically-manipulated court cases to suppress its political opponents, including the BNP and its Islamist ally, the Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami.
At an August 20 press briefing, Pentagon Press Secretary Major-General Pat Ryder lauded the US-Bangladesh “defence relationship.” He went on to say that Washington looks “forward to working” with the Bangladesh military and interim government “to support our shared values and interests, such as a free and open Indo-Pacific”—code-words for upholding US dominance of the world’s most populous and rapidly growing economic region.
According to numerous reports, the Biden administration pressed the previous Hasina-led government to allow it to build a military base on Saint Martin Island, a coral reef situated close to shipping lanes in the Bay of Bengal.
To pave the way for the interim government’s formation, the military had the president, a largely ceremonial figure, dissolve the parliament the day after it hustled Hasina out of the country, having concluded her attempt to cling to power through mass violence had dangerously destabilized bourgeois rule.
Legally the interim government’s raison d’etre is to organize fresh elections to replace the previous Awami League-dominated parliament, which was chosen in a vote last January that most of the opposition boycotted on the grounds it was rigged.
However, as yet the interim government has said nothing about when new elections will be held; only that it will not be within the three-month period given for a “caretaker” government to do so in a constitutional clause that Hasina abrogated. Nor has Yunus announced when the interim government will outline its timetable for new elections.
He and other government representatives, along with much of the capitalist media, are claiming that key state institutions were so corrupted under Hasina’s “fascist rule” that time must be given to fundamentally reform them.
Everything suggests that Yunus and the military intend to use a prolonged period of rule by the unelected interim government to implement IMF-dictated austerity, privatization, and other “structural reforms” demanded by domestic and global capital.
In a dangerous development, 19 public post-secondary institutions, including 11 universities and six medical colleges, have imposed a blanket ban on student politics. Thirteen of these have also prohibited teachers and staff from engaging in political activity. SAD and many of the student groups affiliated with it are wrongheadedly supporting these bans on the grounds that the student wings of the traditional political parties have long bullied students and wielded inordinate control over campus life.
Last week, the UN said that, based on reports from the media and protesters, it concluded some 650 people were killed between July 16, when Hasina ordered police and Awami League thugs to initiate a campaign of mass violence against students protesting against a regressive, discriminatory government-job allocation system, and August 6.
On Tuesday, the non-governmental Human Rights Support Society (HRSS) released a report that said at least 819 people had been killed in political violence between July 16 and August 18, and a further 25,000 had been injured, mostly by police bullets, rubber bullets, tear gas and pellets.
According to the HRSS, the majority of the deaths came in the final days of the Hasina regime and the immediate aftermath of its fall, when dozens of police stations were attacked, and reactionary elements took advantage of the breakdown in authority to mount communal attacks on temples, homes and businesses of Bangladesh’s Hindu minority. As across South Asia, the Bangladeshi ruling class has a long and vile record of using communalism and communal violence to divert social anger along reactionary lines.
The HRSS said that of the 293 dead whose professional identity it could establish, 144 were students, 57 labourers, 5 journalists, 35 of other professions, and 51 were police or other security personnel.
The Hasina regime, long lauded on the financial pages of the western media for supposedly presiding over rapid capitalist growth, fell victim to mass popular anger over joblessness, poverty, state repression and an ever-widening chasm between a small layer of Bangladeshi capitalists and their managerial enforcers and other hangers-on, and the vast majority of the population, comprised of workers and rural toilers.
What began as a student protest over the limited issue of government job quotas exploded into a popular uprising in response to the Awami League government’s brutal repression of the students.
However, the working class—and this remains the great danger—was effectively reduced to the role of a spectator and then part of the supporting cast in these events. Workers and their families joined in the mass protests. But the working class did not intervene as an independent force, under its own class banner, advancing its own democratic and social demands, and using the methods of class struggle, strikes, factory occupations and general strikes. For this, the various Stalinist and other left parties and the trade unions are responsible.
For decades, that have orbited around the two main capitalist parties, the Awami League and the BNP, arguing that workers can advance their interests by pressuring and even openly aligning in electoral blocs with these right-wing capitalist and pro-imperialist parties.
Today, under conditions of social upheaval and ferment in the streets, these organizations are redoubling their efforts to subordinate the working class to the bourgeoisie by boosting the legitimacy of the right-wing capitalist government hastily improvised by the military. The Stalinist parties and union leaders are also joining Yunus and the military in unduly flattering the student protesters.
That the students showed great courage is indisputable. Nor is their sincerity in question. But if the ruling class is today hailing them as “martyrs” and “heroes” and leaders of a “revolution,” it is with the aim of exploiting their petty-bourgeois naiveté, delusions and aspirations.
The entire history of South Asia over the past century demonstrates that in the imperialist epoch, genuine democracy cannot be established under the rule of the bourgeoisie. The struggle for democracy is inseparable from the struggle against imperialism and for social equality—that is, socialism—and must be based upon the working class.
The most class conscious Bangladeshi workers, students and professionals must begin the struggle to build a revolutionary workers party, based on Trotskyism, the Marxism-Leninism of the 21st Century, to fight for the independent political mobilization of the working class, rallying the rural toilers behind it, in the fight for a workers and peasants government and international socialism.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/08/23/jrqk-a23.html?pk_kwd=wsws-daily-newsletter
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The Journal of America Team:
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