Al Mayadeen – June 10, 2024
Day 248 of Israeli aggression: 37,124 killed, 84,712 injured in Gaza
Al Mayadeen's correspondent says the number of injuries reaching the Nasser Medical Hospital is on the rise due to the Israeli aggression on Rafah city.
The number of Palestinians killed since the start of the Israeli aggression on Gaza on October 7 has risen to 37,124 and those injured to 84,712, the Ministry of Health in the Gaza Strip confirmed on Monday.
In its daily report, the Health Ministry mentioned that the Israeli occupation forces committed five massacres within 24 hours only, killing a total of 40 and injuring 814 others.
It noted that several victims remain under the rubble and on the roads, as ambulance and civil defense crews are unable to reach them.
In a separate statement, the ministry cautioned that the only station supplying oxygen to healthcare facilities and chronic patients in Gaza Governorate is at risk of shutting down within hours.
According to the statement, this would endanger the lives of dozens of patients and risk the spoilage of medicines in refrigerators due to the lack of diesel to operate the generator that powers the oxygen station and medicine refrigerators.
The Ministry of Health in Gaza appealed to all relevant, international, and humanitarian organizations to intervene swiftly regarding this matter.
Al Mayadeen's correspondent in Gaza reported that the number of injuries reaching the Nasser Medical Hospital is on the rise due to the Israeli aggression on the city of Rafah in southern Gaza.
He confirmed that the aggression is ongoing in areas west of Rafah, which the Israeli occupation military had previously claimed were "safe".
In eastern Khan Younis, eight people were killed and several others were injured after the Israeli occupation forces bombarded an inhabited house, our correspondent mentioned.
Following the withdrawal of the Israeli occupation forces from eastern Deir al-Balah to reposition, some Palestinian citizens attempted to return to their homes, but the occupation forces targeted them with artillery shelling and opened fire on them from quadcopter drones.
Later, Al Mayadeen's correspondent confirmed that the Israeli occupation forces repositioned in the eastern areas of Deir al-Balah, as medical teams began retrieving the bodies of several martyrs.
Countercurrent – June 10, 2024
Nusseirat Massacre:
The Story of a Palestinian Massacre Disguised as Israeli Rescue
Dr. Marwan Asmar
It’s a criminal act under the eyes of the world. Israel’s Nusseirat massacre with the active cooperation of American help is grotesque by any standard for the 250 Israeli strikes made on the camp during this flagrant military operation.
The number of innocent Palestinians killed kept climbing up on the day of the massacre, Saturday, with the final death toll reaching 274 martyrs. These included 64 children, 57 women and 37 elderly people. Shameful is the fact, the massacre was carried out by Israeli soldiers, Shabak agents and members of the police who had been planning this for weeks.
The number of injuries was equally horrific as 698 people were injured during this killing spree that was backed from the air, sea and with ground tanks helping the infiltrators who went into the camp camouflaged in an aid truck and a car with Israeli tanks behind. Among the injured were 153 children, 161 women 54 elderly people according to the Gaza Government Media Office.
The shooting begun after the disguised aid lorry and a vehicle stopped in the middle of the housing area just outside the central market and begun the bloody mayhem. The lorry was at first thought to carry displaced people with their belongings but soon got out their machine guns and started shooting. According to the Media Office soldiers were disguised in civilian clothing in ambulances with medical and health signals.
Hostages
The massacre was all made to rescue four Israeli hostages taken by Hamas on 7 October when they pushed through the barrier fence that blocked Gaza from the so-called Israeli territories. The four hostages, three men and a woman, were part of the 250 Israelis and foreigners that were taken back to Gaza by members of the Islamic organization on the fateful month and day.
Their rescue was seen as a major victory by Israel after 245 days of war destroying the Gaza Strip and killing its civilian population, earmarked at over 36,000 dead. The Israeli media was jubilant, ignoring the fact the operation was nearly botched with a major fight in getting to the four captives resulting in at least one Israeli soldier and at least three other captives getting killed, one of them an American citizen, though massive Israeli gunfire.
This fact is not yet receiving much attention in the media because it is given by a credible source from Hamas but it has become known the Nusseirat “rescue” operation was a heinous, diabolical affair for the Israeli occupation army bombed 89 houses and residential buildings inhabited by residents in the early hours of committing this massacre.
Eye witness reports say many of the houses were bombed over the heads of their residents without prior warning. Residents were shocked at the sudden bombs and missiles stuck from the air. These were made simultaneously to distract civilians from the underground operation to get to the four hostages reportedly held in different building and flats.
Women, children, men and old people, passerby were all in the line of fire for this was a busy area in between houses and the central market in West Nusseirat.
It is being described as another area genocide with a great impact on central Gaza and executed with dozens of warplanes, quadcopters, helicopters and drones with espionage and intelligence purposes, and tanks in more than four axes and directions, the Gaza Media office stated.
At the time of writing the Government Media office said it is yet to confirm which soldiers from different countries were used in the mass attacks on the camp but there is already confirmation that thousands of American soldiers have been stationed in Israel shortly after 7 October and are providing technical and logistical advice to the Israeli army.
Disturbing however, and as reported is the fact that the aid truck that was used to enter the Nusseirat camp was from the recently constructed American pier where US officials previously said they made this construct to make it easier to bring food to the starving Gazans imposed by Israel.
Social media commentators couldn’t but help make the comparison of the treatment between the Israeli hostages and those “limp” Palestinians coming out of Israeli prisons, spotlighting Noa Argamani with her father in a happy state.
One blogger commented on how Noa was treate and how Israelis treat Palestinians in their prisons. The latter are old and haggard because they are denied basic things, are beaten, tortured and denied food.
Dr Marwan Asmar is a writer based in Amman covering Middle East affairs
Countercurrent – June 10, 2024
The War on Gaza:
The Twilight of the Western Settler Colonialist Project in Palestine
By Amir Nour
“Colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native’s brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures and destroys it”
(Frantz Fanon)[2]
Uncomfortable Truths
In October 2003, late New York University professor and internationally renowned historian Tony Judt wrote an essay in The New York Review of Books (NYRB) entitled “Israel: The Alternative”.[3] The reaction to this outstanding article was swift and vicious and, in the case of the American response, verged on hysteria. In effect, within a week of its publication, the editor of NYRB had received several thousand letters on Judt’s essay – more than on any in its history – and the Jewish Professor, who, up to then, had been widely respected for his core commitment to justice and intellectual honesty and loudly acclaimed for his lucid studies of 19th and 20th century social history, in particular his panoramic study[4] of Europe after World War II, became, almost overnight, the object of great furor, defamation and ostracism.
Readers, among whom numerous renowned scholars and heads of Jewish organizations, accused him of belonging to the “Nazi Left”, of hating Jews, of denying Israel’s right to exist; distinguished professors at American universities canceled their NYRB subscriptions; Andrea Levin, executive director of the “Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America” accused him of “pandering to genocide” and being “party to preparations for a final solution”; Alan Dershowitz of Harvard made the analogy with Adolf Hitler’s “one-state solution for all of Europe”, and David Jeffrey Frum, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, charged him with advocating “genocidal liberalism”.
Judt’s essay opened with the sentence: “The Middle East peace process is finished. It did not die: it was killed”, followed by the notion that “The president of the United States of America has been reduced to a ventriloquist’s dummy, pitifully reciting the Israeli cabinet line”. He went on to contend that Israel “has imported a characteristically late-nineteenth-century separatist project into a world that has moved on, a world of individual rights, open frontiers, and international law. The very idea of a ‘Jewish state’, a state in which Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are forever excluded is rooted in another time and place. Israel, in short, is an anachronism”; that it “remains distinctive among democratic states in its resort to ethnoreligious criteria with which to denominate and rank its citizens. It is an oddity among modern nations, not as its more paranoid supporters assert because it is a Jewish state and no one wants the Jews to have a state; but because it is a Jewish state in which one community, Jews, is set above others, in an age when that sort of state has no place”; and that “In a world where nations and peoples increasingly intermingle and intermarry at will; where cultural and national impediments to communication have all but collapsed; where more and more of us have multiple elective identities and would feel falsely constrained if we had to answer to just one of them; in such a world Israel is truly an anachronism. And not just an anachronism but a dysfunctional one”. He also cited the prominent Labor politician Avraham Burg who wrote: “After two thousand years of struggle for survival, the reality of Israel is a colonial state, run by a corrupt clique which scorns and mocks law and civic morality’.[5] Unless something changes, Judt declared, “Israel in half a decade will be neither Jewish nor democratic”. He then uttered the “anathema” that “the time has come to think the unthinkable”, that is “the bringing to an end of Israel as a Jewish state, and the establishment in its place of a binational state of Israelis and Palestinians”.
In his essay, Prof. Judt explained that, in one vital attribute, Israel is quite different from previous insecure, defensive microstates born of imperial collapse in so far as it is a democracy, hence its present dilemma due to its occupation of the lands conquered in 1967. Israel, he said, faces the following three “unattractive choices”:
- It can dismantle the Jewish settlements in the Occupied Territories, return to the 1967 state borders within which Jews constitute a clear majority, and thus remain both a Jewish state and a democracy, albeit one with a constitutionally anomalous community of second-class Arab citizens;
- It can continue to occupy “Samaria”, “Judea” and Gaza, whose Arab population added to that of present-day Israel will become the demographic majority, in which case Israel will be either a Jewish state (with an ever-larger majority of unenfranchised non-Jews) or it will be a democracy. But logically it cannot be both;
- It can keep control of the Occupied Territories but get rid of the overwhelming majority of the Arab population, either by forcible expulsion or else by starving them of land and livelihood, leaving them no option but to go into exile. In this way Israel could indeed remain both Jewish and at least formally democratic, but at the cost of becoming the first modern democracy to conduct full-scale ethnic cleansing as a state project, something which would condemn Israel forever to the status of an outlaw state, an international pariah.
- As Judt put it, the historian’s task is precisely “to tell what is almost always an uncomfortable story and explain why the discomfort is part of the truth we need to live well and live properly. A well-organized society is one in which we know the truth about ourselves collectively, not one in which we tell pleasant lies about ourselves”. Driven by such a principled position, he reacted to the flood of criticism of his contradictors by reiterating his conviction that the solution to the crisis in the Middle East lies in Washington. On this, he said, “there is widespread agreement. For that reason, and because the American response to the Israel-Palestine conflict is shaped in large measure by domestic considerations, my essay was directed in the first instance to an American audience, in an effort to pry open a closed topic. Many readers have castigated me for heedlessly engaging so volatile a subject without due regard for the sensitivities affected. I respect those feelings. But, like Yael Dayan, I am very worried about the direction in which the American Jewish community is moving; reaction to the essay suggests that this anxiety is well founded”. He added that “Actually, Zionism has always been at war and its very identity is a function of conflict, struggle, and mutually exclusive claims on history. From the outset, and long before the Holocaust could be invoked in mitigation, the leaders of the Zionist project regarded the indigenous Arab population of Palestine as their enemy. More than a century ago, the Zionist writer Ahad Ha’Am[6] observed that the settlers ‘treat the Arabs with hostility and cruelty, trespass unjustly on their territories, beat them shamelessly for no sufficient reason, and boast at having done so’. To the extent that little has changed, it is understandable that many readers would dismiss my reflections on a binational state as a crazy fantasy”.
Until his death in 2010, Judt remained faithful to his principles. For him, “an injustice was committed: How should we acknowledge this and move forward? Indeed, even the very existence of Palestinians was once hotly disputed. In the later 1960s, at a public meeting in London, I was tartly informed by Golda Meir, Israel’s future prime minister, that I could not speak of ‘Palestinians’ since they did not exist”.
In the aftermath of Judt’s death, Mark Levine wrote an article[7] in which he expressed his sorrow for the scope of the loss, not just of the man, but of the type of scholarship, of the way Professor Judt taught those willing to learn about how to approach and utilize history. He pointed out that the historian’s willingness to tell “uncomfortable stories” was not embraced by US government, and informed that few politicians paid much attention to Judt or invited his counsel; no evidence is found of his ever having been called to testify before the US congress, and the White House made no mention of his passing, even though Barack Obama, the US president, has during his tenure invited well-known historians to the White House to help provide him with historical perspective on the numerous crises he faced. Levine concluded his piece by saying that Judt’s writings can inspire a new generation of scholars and activists in other cultures, including in the many societies of the global south: “It is there, in Latin America, Africa, and the Muslim world, where the legacy of Judt’s call for a critically reflective social democratic political discourse might well be found. If American militarism, European myopia, corporate greed and the militant ideologies of numerous stripes do not doom them first”.
The Settler Colonialist and Ethno-Nationalist Roots of Zionism
An extensive examination of Theodor Herzl’s wittings and movement shows clearly that from its very beginnings to the politics and policies of the state of Israel today, Zionism thought has permanently and resolutely embraced the dominant European discourses of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including anti-Semitism.
In his 1896 Der Judenstaat – “state ‘for’, or ‘of’ Jews” would be a literal and more accurate English translation – Theodor Herzl articulated his vision and blueprint for a future “Jewish state” in Palestine by highlighting his scheme as a venture beneficial to both the “current sovereign authority” – then embodied by the Ottoman sultan – and the European colonial powers “under whose protectorate” the new state would come into being and continue to exist: “If His Majesty the Sultan were to give us Palestine” he wrote, “we could offer to resolve Turkey’s finances. For Europe, we would form part of a bulwark against Asia there, we would serve as the advance post of civilization against barbarism”.
As recalled by Nora Scholtes in her thoughtful and thoroughly-researched study submitted for the Degree of Ph.D. in Postcolonial Studies[8], French Marxist historian and sociologist Maxime Rodinson is commonly said to be the first contemporary “Western” scholar to have re-placed Zionism/Israel within its colonial, and more specifically settler colonial, context. Rodinson recognized in Herzl’s propositions a clear manifestation of Zionism as a “colonialist phenomenon”: “It would have been difficult to place Zionism any more clearly within the framework of European imperialist policies (…) The [Zionist] perspective was inevitably placed within the framework of the European assault on the Ottoman Empire, this ‘sick man’ whose complete dismemberment was postponed by the rivalries of the great powers but who, in the meantime, was subjected to all kinds of interference, pressures, and threats. An imperialist setting if there ever was one (…) The Europeanism of the Zionists made it possible for them to present their plan as part of the same movement of European expansion that each power was developing on its own behalf”.
In effect, throughout his writings and speeches, Herzl never missed an opportunity to present the Zionist idea as a quintessentially colonial project, one that would also serve the interests of the Europeans, and more broadly the whole of the “civilized” world. In his Der Judenstaat he wrote: “The world will be liberated by our freedom, enriched by our wealth, magnified by our greatness”, and in a speech he delivered in London in 1891, he declared: “We want to carry culture to the East. And once again, Europe will in turn profit from this work of ours. We will create new trade routes − and none will be more interested in this than England with its Asiatic possessions. The shortest route to India lies through Palestine (…) What could I, poor barbarian from the Continent, tell the inhabitants of England about these things [progress and industry]. They are our superiors in all technical achievements, just as their great politicians were the first to see the necessity for colonial expansion. That is why the flag of Greater-Britain waves over every sea (…) And so I should think that here in England, the Zionist idea, which is a colonial one, should be easily and quickly understood in England, and this in its most modern form”.[9]
For Desmond Stewart, there is no doubt that “Herzl’s stencil for obtaining a territory and then clearing it for settlement was cut after the Rhodesian model”.[10] Mark Levene equally argues that Herzl “had an agenda that closely followed and sought to emulate the essential contours of European empire-building in Africa”.[11]
It was thus within the context of Western colonialism in Africa that the idea of acquiring a territorial basis for the establishment of a “Jewish entity” was most contemplated, more precisely in the Uasi Ngishu plateau, near Nairobi, Kenya, and not in Uganda as is commonly reported.
Nevertheless, although Herzl did not exclude the option that “The Society”[12] would “take what it will be given under a charter” in what he called a “neutral land” in order to materialize his colonial-Zionist project – since Argentina was another country envisioned for a possible mass settlement for the Jews – he was convinced that Palestine would be the most powerful asset in attracting a Jewish mass following. As the Jews’ “ever-memorable historic home”, he writes in Der Judenstaat, “that name alone would be a tremendously stirring rallying cry for our people”. Furthermore, it is reported that when it was known that Herzl was wavering on the option of Palestine as a Jewish homeland in favor of East Africa or South America, he received a Bible from William Blackstone, an American Christian Zionist, in which every reference to “Israel” or “Zion” had been underlined in red, together with a letter urging him to insist Zionists settle only in Palestine.[13]
Ultimately, the East-Africa scheme proposed by the British, which was indeed hotly debated during the 6th Zionist Congress held in Basel on 23 August 1903, was rejected, both because of a lack of support by the critical mass of Russian Jews and because the British government faced a strong local opposition on the part of British settlers in its African territories to the idea of a Jewish colony in the area.
And so, by the time of Herzl’s death the following year, the East-Africa and Argentina options had all but vanished from the agenda of the Zionist leadership. In a 1914 article of German newspaper Die Welt, a special issue on the tenth anniversary of Herzl’s death, Herzl’s East-Africa proposal is described by Bernstein as a “historical derailment”, a desperate and well-intentioned, but ultimately misguided attempt at providing emergency help to Eastern Europe’s persecuted Jews. Herzl, he indicated, “grasped the Uganda-straw immediately after the pogrom in Kishinev (…) He impatiently searched for a quick rescue (…) even if only in the form of a ‘night shelter’. It was the greatest sacrifice that Herzl has made for his people. He sacrificed, even if only for a moment, his life’s ideal”.[14]
From that point onwards, the new leadership concentrated all its efforts on the implementation of the most preferred solution, that is the creation of a purely Jewish state in Palestine, mainly by way of ethnic cleansing. The terminology of “ethnic cleansing” only in recent times entered popular vocabulary. The concept used by Zionist thinkers was “transfer”, and Herzl’s true plans with regard to Palestine’s non-Jewish population are well-documented in his diary, where as early as 1895 he put forward this idea, writing: “We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country”.
The same can be said about David Ben-Gurion, the primary national founder of the State of Israel as well as its first prime minister. Indeed, in a letter[15] dated 5 October 1937 he sent to his son Amos – who appeared to be critical of his father’s decision to support a partition plan put forward by the Peel Commission – Ben-Gurion describes how he sees partition of Palestine and expulsion of Palestinians fitting into the Zionist movement’s long term goals: “My assumption (which is why I am a fervent proponent of a state, even though it is now linked to partition) is that a Jewish state on only part of the land is not the end but the beginning (…) The establishment of a state, even if only on a portion of the land, is the maximal reinforcement of our strength at the present time and a powerful boost to our historical endeavors to liberate the entire country (…) We shall organize an advanced defense force – a superior army which I have no doubt will be one of the best armies in the world. At that point I am confident that we would not fail in settling in the remaining parts of the country, through agreement and understanding with our Arab neighbors, or through some other means (…) We must expel Arabs and take their place (…) But if we are compelled to use force (…) in order to guarantee our right to settle there, our force will enable us to do so (…) Because of all the above, I feel no conflict between my mind and emotions. Both declare to me: A Jewish state must be established immediately, even if it is only in part of the country. The rest will follow in the course of time. A Jewish state will come”.
Maxime Rodinson asserts that the root cause of all of Zionism’s future failings is consubstantial with its very colonial founding vision: “Once the premises were laid down, the inexorable logic of history determined the consequences. Wanting to create a purely Jewish, or predominantly Jewish, state in an Arab Palestine in the twentieth century could not help but lead to a colonial-type situation and to the development (completely normal, sociologically speaking) of a racist state of mind, and in the final analysis to a military confrontation between the two ethnic groups”. Gabriel Piterberg agrees with Rodinson’s early analysis: “From the moment Zionism’s goal became the resettlement of European Jews in a land controlled by a colonial European power, in order to create a sovereign political entity, it could no longer be understood just as a central or east European nationalism; it was also, inevitably, a white-settler colonialism”.[16]
The unavoidable consequence of such a vision is what Ahad Ha’am warned against back in 1891 already: “if the time comes when the life of our people in Eretz Israel develops to the point of encroaching upon the native population, they will not easily yield their place”.[17] A decade before Ha’am made his prescient comment, Palestine’s population was some 460,000. Of these, around 400,000 were Muslim Arabs; about 40,000 were Christian, mostly Greek Orthodox; and the remainder, Jews.
How challenging these figures are to the falsehood of one of Zionism’s most cherished founding myths – that of “a land without people for a people without land”– and how shockingly ill-intentioned was Herzl’s omission of any reference to “Arabs” or “Palestinians” in his 30,000-word pamphlet!
Assuredly, Herzl’s dream of a national home for the Jews that would end both their own age-old insecurity within the diaspora and Gentiles’ anti-Semitism has inexorably transformed into a nightmare both for Jews and Palestinians and for the world which is still held hostage to their struggle, with no apparent solution in a completely transformed and blood-soaked “Holy Land”.
Nightmare is precisely the key word in the title of the brilliant book[18] Peter Rodgers, a former Australian journalist and ambassador to Israel, devoted to the tragic drama caused by the pursuit of Herzl’s dream by his Zionist followers, to the present day. Whatever their historical or emotional attachment to the land they came to rule, Rodgers asserts, the Jews of Israel had supplanted another people, a people who would not forget. The making of one nationalist dream has indeed involved the unmaking of another. But for how long and for what price?
The Aussie ambassador’s very well-researched study tells a story of sorrow and anger in a balanced manner – insofar as this is possible – which, obviously entails the risk of drawing fire from both Jews and Palestinians, but this, he says, is sadly part of the twisted logic of the conflict. The story told shows how little the dynamics of the conflict between Jew and Palestinian have changed; how eerily reminiscent today’s antagonisms and falsehoods are of yesteryear’s; how “modern” leadership is anything but; and how much today’s self-righteous intransigence owes to what went before. Furthermore, it poses the vital question: “have the nationalist dreams of both peoples been doomed by the determined refusal of Jew and Palestinian to contemplate what life must be like for the other?”
To epitomize the opposing views of the protagonists, Rodgers, in his concluding remarks, quotes Yasser Arafat as saying that “the womb of the Arab woman” is one of the Palestinians’ most potent weapons, and Shimon Peres, who, writing of a deepening chasm between Israelis and Palestinians, commented typically: “We are sorry but not desperate”. Rodgers reacted to these last words by saying: “He might perhaps have added wisely, not yet”.
Amir NOUR is Algerian researcher in international relations, author of the books “L’Orient et l’Occident à l’heure d’un nouveau Sykes-Picot” (The Orient and the Occident in Time of a New Sykes-Picot) Editions Alem El Afkar, Algiers, 2014 and “L’Islam et l’ordre du monde” (Islam and the Order of the World), Editions Alem El Afkar, Algiers, 2021.
'Israel cannot win against Hezbollah or Hamas': Israeli general
Source: Israeli media
Israeli Major General Yitzhak Brik says the Israeli occupation is doomed to fail in the face of Hezbollah and Hamas due to its ever-growing weakness.
The Israeli occupation forces will be met with failure in their war with Hamas, and they will certainly meet the same fate in a war against Hezbollah, Israeli Reserve Major General and military analyst Yitzhak Brik said Friday in an op-ed for the Jerusalem Post.
Brik stressed that the IOF couldn't beat either Resistance faction, not because they do not seek victory, but simply because they can not emerge victorious, citing the "small and weak" army that has "no surplus of forces."
"Every day the war continues, our situation worsens," he said, decrying that both the IOF and the Israeli occupation in and of itself were heading toward internal collapse.
Brik had no one else but the war cabinet to blame for this, seeing as they are responsible for the management of the Israeli entity at such times, condemning the body by saying that its members had "only one daily goal", which was to continue the war no matter the cost so long as it safeguards their political positions.
"They must be stopped. They are leading the people of Israel like sheep to the slaughter," he said, reiterating that they did not care about the Israeli occupation itself but rather their own ranks within it.
The Israeli brigadier general underlined that he had envisioned all that is happening in the invasion of Rafah before it happened, highlighting that "Israel" is "losing control of the world's nations" in a way the Israelis had never known, including their ties with Egypt.
The Israeli occupation "needs to stop the destruction and immediately distance themselves from these warmongers who are leading us astray."
According to Brik, the Israeli government is leading settlers into the abyss, once again stressing that the leaders of the Israeli regime were sacrificing the settler colonial project for their own personal gains.
He underlined that the only solution at this time was for the cabinet to declare a ceasefire and realize that they could not bring back the Israeli captives through violence.
Rafah was a 'tragic mistake'
Entering the city of Rafah in southern Gaza did not benefit "Israel", Brik pointed out earlier in an op-ed forﾠMaariv.
Brik considered that entering Rafah was a "tragic mistake" that isolated "Israel" from the rest of the world and risked peace with Egypt, suggesting that this move would forever prevent the Israeli occupation entity from retrieving the captives held by the Palestinian Resistance in Gaza.
Touching on his meetings with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Reserve Brigadier General said that he repeatedly explained to the premier the reasons why entering Rafah should be avoided.
He revealed that Netanyahu deceived him into believing he was convinced by the reasons, but as soon as the meeting ended, Netanyahu prioritized his own interests over "Israel's".
Brik told the Israeli public radio that the Israeli military is "spreading illusions, throwing dust in the eyes of Israelis, and not telling the truth."
Reiterating the need to halt the fighting, Brik acknowledged that "Israel" has "a small army incapable of defeating Hamas" and that this army will certainly face a problem if it launches a full-scale war.
Anadolu Agency – June 10, 2024
US officials discuss negotiating with Hamas to free American hostages
Such negotiations would exclude Israel and be mediated by Qatari interlocutors, as has been case with ongoing discussions, NBC News reports
Muhammed Enes Calli |
US officials have discussed the possibility of arranging a unilateral agreement with Hamas to secure the release of five American captives in Gaza if the ongoing negotiations with Israel for a cease-fire fail.
Such negotiations would exclude Israel and would be mediated by Qatari interlocutors, as has been the case with the ongoing discussions, according to NBC News on Monday, citing two current and two former US officials.
The Joe Biden administration believes that Hamas is holding five American hostages who were kidnapped during the Oct. 7 attack.
The officials also seek to retrieve the remains of three additional US citizens who are believed to have been killed on the same day by Hamas, which then transported their bodies into Gaza.
The officials were uncertain about what the US might give Hamas in return for the release of American captives, the report said.
"But, the officials said, Hamas could have an incentive to cut a unilateral deal with the U.S. because doing so would likely further strain relations between the U.S. and Israel and put additional domestic political pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu," it added.
"One of the former officials said the internal discussions have also taken place in the context of whether the possibility of the U.S. cutting a unilateral deal with Hamas might pressure Netanyahu to agree to a version of the current cease-fire proposal," the report also said.
On Saturday, the Israeli army freed four hostages during a military operation in the Nuseirat refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip.
During the operation, at least 274 Palestinians were killed and 700 others injured in a bombardment of the camp, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
The Israeli operation will likely make even more difficult US Secretary of State Antony Blinken's endeavors to secure an agreement and release the remaining hostages, a senior administration official told NBC News.
Securing the release of the Israeli hostages has only bolstered Netanyahu’s resolve to persist with military operations in Gaza, rather than committing to cease the conflict, according to the official.
"The current senior U.S. official, though, said the idea of a trying to negotiate a deal between the Biden administration and Hamas remained a 'very real option' if the current proposed ceasefire deal fails to advance," the report noted.
More than 37,100 Palestinians have since been killed in Gaza, most of them women and children, and nearly 84,700 others injured, according to local health authorities.
Eight months into the Israeli war, vast tracts of Gaza lay in ruins amid a crippling blockade of food, clean water, and medicine.
https://www.aa.com.tr/en/americas/us-officials-discuss-negotiating-with-hamas-to-free-american-hostages/3245593
Countercurrent – June 10, 2024
Impunity For 1984 Sikh Genocide Set Precedent For India Today
by Pieter Friedrich
This past week, India’s General Election results shocked most people who follow political trends in that country.
India’s Bharatiya Janata Party first won a majority in 2014. They returned in 2019 with a far larger majority. After a decade in power, and years of autocratization leading to virtual criminalization of dissent (even threatening to jail the top leader of the Indian National Congress, the foremost opposition party), expectations were that the BJP would not only once again win a majority but do it with an absolute landslide. The BJP failed, miserably, and lost its majority so badly that, as the New York Times puts it, “It now finds itself at the mercy of its coalition partners…. [Not all of whom] share [its] Hindu nationalist ideology.
As the United States draws India closer — unconditionally closer — into its embrace, this unexpected election outcome is particularly important considering the rabidly authoritarian direction in which the BJP has rapidly taken India.
Any amateur student of Indian politics could have predicted the BJP’s destination. As the political wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a Hindu nationalist paramilitary, the BJP shares the RSS’s goal of destroying the the country’s officially pluralistic and secular ethos and officially turning it into an ethno-nationalist state. Into a Hindu nation of, for, and only for Hindus. Since the RSS’s origin a hundred years ago, its founding ideologues explicitly detailed their hatred of non-Hindus living in the Indian subcontinent and their desire to exterminate them. Their goals, social outlook, and nationalistic ideals mirrored those of the original European fascists in Italy and Germany, which is not surprising considering that the RSS was directly inspired by — and directly interacted with — those original European fascists.
The religious minorities which the RSS ideologues hated the most were — and are — Indian Christians and Muslims. But they also despised — and despise — followers of Sikhi, a religion and social movement indigenous to the subcontinent. In particular, the RSS hated how Sikhs asserted their separate and unique identity, and how the Sikhs propagated doctrines about the universal equality, dignity, and self-worth of all people.
Well, one outcome of India’s recent election is that, as the opposition coalition won seats in parliament on par with the BJP and not too far from parity with the BJP’s coalition, dissenting voices may now have a strong voice at the national political table in India. Dissent may become safer. Moreover, while prominent BJP supporters have repeatedly, publicly issued calls for genocide of minorities, particularly Muslims, and international experts have repeatedly warned that Indian religious minorities are on the verge of suffering a genocide, it’s quite possible the impending threat of such will, for now, become far less dire.
The reality of genocide at the hands of the BJP is very real considering its bloody history.
Modi, of course, is case in point. In 2002, when he was Chief Minister of the state of Gujarat, the RSS and the BJP staged a three-day massacre of Muslims, slaughtering approximately 2,000 or more Muslim men, women, and children. Modi was implicated in a myriad of different ways as variously allowing or even orchestrating the pogrom. He was banned from entering the US for a decade due to his involvement.
That ban was never actually lifted. The ban on Modi entering the US was never lifted, he was just able to circumvent it because he got diplomatic immunity after becoming prime minister.
Of course, 2002 was far from the only major incident of anti-minority violence perpetrated by the RSS/BJP. There was 1992, when they destroyed the historic Babri Mosque and slaughtered 2,000 or so Muslims across northern India. There was 2008, when they torched churches, raped nuns, and killed around 100 Christians in Kandhamal District of Odisha state in eastern India. And a host of other incidents, both small and large-scale.
There has been, essentially, zero justice meted out for any of these atrocities. In essence, the perpetrators have received total impunity.
Yet, as the BJP loses its majority in this recent election, and the opposition coalition — with the Indian National Congress as the leading partner — surges, it’s worth remembering what happened in 1984.
You see, according to the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, as they put it 15 years ago in 2009: “The failure to provide justice to religious minorities targeted in violent riots in India is not a new development and has helped foster a climate of impunity.” USCIRF traces this “climate of impunity” back to the November 1984 Sikh Genocide when, with the lead of Indian National Congress officials, 3,000 Sikhs — according to official numbers — were slaughtered over three days in Delhi.
The 40th anniversary of the Sikh Genocide falls this year.
Impunity for the Sikh Genocide set the precedent for impunity for the RSS/BJP’s killing of Muslims in 1992 in the Bombay riots, its killing of Muslims in 2002, and its killing of Christians in 2008 — as well as for impunity for its supporters’ current and ongoing calls for genocide of Indian minorities.
That was a crime committed not only under the watch of the Indian National Congress but even under its direction. For those concerned about human rights in India, it should serve as a reminder that state-sponsored atrocities against innocent Indian citizens are not a fresh phenomenon.
The BJP, yes, has an ideologically fascistic framework. Yet the Indian National Congress also has blood on its hands. Whether under Congress or the BJP, the Indian government has, with impunity, perpetrated a host of atrocities for decades.
Torture. Arbitrary arrests. Shutting down newspapers. Extrajudicial executions. Mass graves. Killing of human rights defenders. Blanket suspension of democracy — that happened under the Indian National Congress. The subjugation of Kashmir and of many other regions of the country, including Punjab.
As USCIRF — the US Commission on International Religious Freedom — has noted, impunity for the 1984 Sikh Genocide set the precedent for impunity for future massacres committed by the RSS/BJP. Yet the November 1984 killings were not the first act but rather the final act of that 1984 Sikh Genocide. No, that first act, that began in Punjab in June 1984 with “Operation Bluestar” when the Indian government launched full-scale military invasion of Darbar Sahib (otherwise known as the Golden Temple), the beating heart of the Sikh religion.
The attack coincided, “coincidentally,” with one of the most important Sikh holidays: the commemoration of their Guru, Arjan, who, in 1606, was himself martyred by a government that perceived him as a sociopolitical threat to its power because he was standing up for the human rights and dignity of all people.
The hundreds of thousands of Sikhs who flocked to the festival in 1984 were caught in the crosshairs of the Indian Army and thousands — several, several thousands — died during that attack, which was not solely confined to Darbar Sahib in Amritsar, Punjab.
The massacre in June 1984 was followed by the massacre in November 1984. This was followed by ten years of a broad — and deeply bigoted — crackdown on Sikhs which targeted basically any Sikh man wearing a turban. The crackdown included a program of systematically disappearing, killing, and illegally cremating thousands. When this program was exposed by human rights defender Jaswant Singh Khalra, he was disappeared, killed, and his body was dumped in a canal.
In total, Sikh leaders estimate that up to 250,000 — a quarter of a million — Sikhs were murdered over the last 40 years, since the genocide began in 1984.
Now here in America, since 2018, multiple states including California, Connecticut, and New Jersey have recognized the 1984 Sikh Genocide. Recognized it as “genocide.” That is a great start.
It did take decades, but we should look to the example of the 1915 Armenian Genocide, which it took the US Congress over a century to recognize. We should also learn from that example and not wait a century: it’s long past time for the US Congress to recognize the 1984 Sikh Genocide.
It’s also time for the US to look to 1984 — and other incidents of mass violence — to learn, especially by listening to the warnings of Indians, about the true state of democracy in India. While the BJP has autocratized India so deeply that it has pushed Indian democracy almost to the brink of extinction, the democratic ethos there has been under threat for decades. In the words, for instance, of Indian author Arundhati Roy:
“There has not been a single day since Independence in 1947 when the Indian Army and other security forces have not been deployed within India’s borders against what are meant to be their ‘own’ people — in Kashmir, Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram, Assam, Junagadh, Hyderabad, Goa, Punjab, Telangana, West Bengal…. Chhattisgarh, Orissa, and Jharkhand…. If you take a hard look at the list of places within India’s current borders in which its security forces have been deployed, an extraordinary fact emerges — the populations in those places are mostly Muslim, Christian, Adivasi [that is, tribal], Sikh, and Dalit.”
Now, fsor the longest time, whether it be BJP or Indian National Congress, the Indian government has been incessantly at war with its own citizens — and typically with its own citizens who are religious minorities or historically marginalized people.
From a US foreign policy perspective, however, there used to be a difference before the BJP came to power in 2014. Before the US started choosing to turn totally blind eyes after the rise of the BJP, dozens of members of US Congress — for 20 or 30 years, since the 1980s — were willing to routinely call out the reality of the human rights situation in India.
They were doing it left and right. Speaking on the House floor, floating resolutions calling for US-India dialogues to foreground human rights and religious freedom issues, even proposing bills to slash foreign aid to India in response to its culture of impunity towards perpetrators of atrocities. That was all thanks, in large part, to the tireless advocacy by American Sikhs launched after 1984 — advocacy which encouraged the US Congress to speak not just for Sikhs but for the human rights of ALL Indians equally.
Well, that all changed after 2014. We got, and we mostly still have, a deafening silence from Congress. But beyond that, we got bipartisan embrace of Modi, a man whom our government formerly banned from this country.
Across the spectrum, our leaders reached out to shake Modi’s blood-soaked hands. Last year, Republican Mike Waltz and Democrat Ro Khanna invited him to a joint session address. Trump did his little dance of love with Modi, but Biden also rolled out the red carpet for him.
For the past decade, while Modi did have a stranglehold on political power in India, our congressional leaders here have bowed, scraped, flattered, and jumped over each other to be the first one to grab a selfie with the man.
Of course, to be a cynic (or rather, a realist), we all know that the political tendency everywhere is, generally, to put profits over people and give deference to power rather than principles. That’s the name of the game in politics.
Well, this week the power dynamics have radically shifted in India.
Modi’s still in power, but he took a major blow that weakened him rather severely. For anyone who’s only interested in putting profits over people, the news flash is that the BJP’s profitability is dwindling.
Something else also changed in the past year.
You see, when challenged on human rights, the BJP’s constant fallback phrase is “this is our internal matter and you have no right to talk about it.” Well, India’s “internal matters” are now spilling into our North American front yard.
First, the Modi regime assassinated a Canadian citizen. Then they plotted to murder an American citizen and got caught red-handed. India has now jumped the shark, crossed the red line, and embraced transnational repression of its critics abroad — even of citizens right here in the US.
Even before that, they were going after Modi’s critics abroad in many other ways. I’ve experienced this personally when, as the Washington Post exposed, Indian intelligence ran a disinformation campaign against me because of my vocal criticism of Hindu nationalism, the RSS, and the BJP, in particular.
The Modi regime has been threatening the democratic rights of Indian citizens within India, but now — thanks to being coddled by the US government for a decade — it feels emboldened to even go after us here in America. Yet with the Modi regime overplaying its hand so ineptly, and now that it’s weakened after the current recent election, there has never been a better time for the US Congress to start actually saying something about human rights and religious freedom in India.
As we mark the 40th anniversary of the Sikh Genocide, it is imperative that we recognize just how completely worthless “remembrance” is if we don’t translate into action. Tears and hollow “never agains” are worth as much as dirt if our emotions don’t catalyze proactive efforts.
We didn’t stop the Sikh Genocide, or the Gujarat Genocide, or the ethnic cleansing in Manipur. But if our “never agains” mean anything, we could still stop the next genocide of India’s religious minorities. You know, that very same genocide that BJP associates have spent the past two years openly telling the world, on camera, that they want to commit.
In honor of the Sikhs who died in 1984 and after, a real remembrance looks like Congress formally recognizing the Sikh Genocide; finding, trying, and convicting those responsible for targeting and killing Sikhs in North America in the past year; and also censuring the Indian government for even daring to think about trying to murder a US citizen on US soil.
In honor of the Sikhs who died in 1984, truly meaning “never again” means, today, being brave enough to make even the smallest peep against the genocide the RSS/BJP still wants to commit.
From a pragmatic perspective, the time is ripe to do that. From a humanitarian perspective, the time to do that was every day over the past decade.
Pieter Friedrich is a freelance journalist specializing in analysis of South Asian affairs. He is the author of Sikh Caucus: Siege in Delhi, Surrender in Washington and Saffron Fascists: Indiaﾒs Hindu Nationalist Rulers as well as co-author of Captivating the Simple-Hearted: A Struggle for Human Dignity in the Indian Subcontinent. Discover more by him at PieterFriedrich.net.
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