Israel and Palestine

My detailed analysis of an important ruling in the District Court in Washington, D.C. by Judge Richard Leon, in a case involving the punitive sanctions that were imposed last August by the Trump administration on Francesca Albanese, the tenacious and formidable UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, which was submitted by her husband, an Italian citizen like her, and their daughter, who is a US citizen. Judge Leon, an appointee of George W. Bush, who can’t be dismissed by the Trump administration as a “left-wing activist judge”, blocked the sanctions via a preliminary injunction, in a robust denunciation of the government’s efforts to justify the sanctions against Albanese — and, by extension, her family — through spurious connections between herself and the ICC (the International Criminal Court), and through an assessment of the unjustifiable harm caused to Albanese and her family through a ban on travel to the US, and undue financial distress. Sanctions on the ICC were imposed last February on behalf of Israel, after Karim Khan KC, the chief prosecutor of the ICC, issued arrest warrants for Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and then-defense minister Yoav Gallant, for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. They were then extended to Albanese, because of her condemnation of Israel and the US, and her recommendations that ICC arrest warrants should be extended to complicit parties in the US, but, as Judge Leon ruled, “Albanese does not work for the ICC, nor does she have any ability to direct action by the ICC”, and therefore the sanctions are an unacceptable suppression of her First Amendment rights, punishing her merely for speaking out. Sadly, the ruling does nothing to lift the punitive and ruinous sanctions on eleven ICC judges and prosecutors, including Karim Khan, or on three Palestinian NGOs who were also targeted. These sanctions must not be allowed to stand, and nor too must Israel and the US succeed in their ultimate aim: to destroy the ICC.

My update on shocking news in the case of the Filton 6, Palestine Action activists who undertook direct action in August 2024 against a factory in Bristol owned by Elbit Systems, the Israeli arms company that manufactures drones and other weapons used in Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. They were then imprisoned on remand (without charge or trial) in punitive conditions that encouraged many of them to undertake hunger strikes, until their trial, which began last November and ended in February, with the jury dismissing some charges and unable to reach a verdict on others. Instead of backing down, the government immediately launched a retrial, in which the jury eventually found four of the six guilty of criminal damage. In a shocking twist, however, after reporting restrictions were lifted on May 12, it was revealed that the judge, Mr. Justice Johnson, had secretly arranged for their sentencing to include terrorism charges that were not disclosed to the jury, which could double their sentences (to be delivered on June 12) and tar them for life as terrorists. The judge, who had already perverted the course of justice by refusing to allow the defendants to tell the jury why they took the action that they did, is basing his unacceptable post-trial intervention on two particular passages in the Terrorism Act 2000 — an ill-defined claim that “serious damage to property” may constitute terrorism, as well as a claim that terrorism may involve “the use or threat of action” that “is designed to influence the government, or an international governmental organisation”; in this case, as he explicitly stated in a hearing last year, the Israeli government. If Mr. Justice Johnson gets his way, adding terrorist convictions to post-trial sentencing, while keeping juries in the dark throughout the whole process, will be shockingly and unacceptably normalized, injecting a poison into the entire legal system that is profoundly unjust and dangerous, as well as creating a template for criticism of Israel’s actions to be viewed as terrorism, and it must be resisted as robustly as possible.

An original 10,000-word report about the 75 Palestinian doctors and medical staff detained by Israeli forces in Gaza and still held in their vile torture prisons, who, for the most part, have been held for between 500 and 900 days without charge or trial, in deeply inhumane conditions involving torture, starvation and medical neglect. I was inspired to write the report because, after regularly joining calls for the release of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, the brave director of Kamal Adwan Hospital, who was finally seized by Israeli forces on December 27, 2004, after keeping the hospital operational for three months during a “genocide within a genocide” in northern Gaza, I realized that most of the world knows nothing about the other doctors and medical staff still held. My report draws on extensive and invaluable research undertaken by Healthcare Workers Watch, a Palestinian-led project monitoring the detention of doctors and other healthcare workers in Gaza, whose latest update confirmed the identities of 75 doctors and medical staff from Gaza who are still held. HWW listed those detained by profession, but I rearranged the information to reflect the dates they were seized, which establishes more clearly the patterns of detention in connection with Israel’s “war” on Gaza’s hospitals, which was particularly prominent in the first 15 months of the genocide. My chronological list highlights three particular phases of detention — at Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis in February 2024, at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City in March 2024, and at Kamal Adwan Hospital in October and December 2024, and it’s noticeable that, while Israel was determined to destroy all of Gaza’s hospitals, to create a genocidal healthcare crisis, its focus on these three hospitals, which were repeatedly attacked, was also because of an obsession with seeking to establish, unsuccessfully, that they were militarily connected to Hamas, and, to a lesser degree, that Israeli hostages from October 7 may have been treated there after they were first seized.

My analysis of how, over the last 30 months, with the support of most of the west, Israel has rewritten the rules of war, unforgivably reimagining genocide as “self-defense”, and pioneering the use of AI-driven military targeting that is so overbroad in its parameters that, in its use in Gaza, it has been indistinguishable from the reviled war crime of carpet-bombing. I also examine the death toll, and Israel’s ongoing attempts to kill the people of Gaza through secondary means — most recently, through facilitating the spread of dangerous vermin through a refusal to allow any clearance or reconstruction to take place in Gaza — and I also examine how its actions have continued to evade any kind of international accountability. Crucially, I also assess how its genocidal model has spread from Gaza to Lebanon, and how it continues to engage in mass destruction in southern Lebanon, even though its actions undermine the ceasefire agreed between the US and Iran, because of the US’s failure to recognize that Iran could and would respond to a “war” by closing the Strait of Hormuz and disabling the world’s essential energy supplies. As I also explain, Israel’s relentless appetite for endless war and for the deadly application of AI technology not only imperils the whole of the Middle East; it also, via pliant governments in the west, and the increasing use of AI for total surveillance and control, threatens everyone everywhere, and it is imperative that both Israel and its backers are, across their many spheres of influence, restrained and disarmed.

Marking Earth Day, which began 56 years ago today, on April 22, 1970, I reflect on the visionary drive of that first event, when 20 million Americans took to the streets to call for the establishment of environmental protections, and how, under neoliberalism and the cult of the individual, the counter-cultural power of the 1970s and ‘80s started to dwindle from the 1990s onwards, even as the realities of man-made climate change were confirmed, and efforts began to get the countries of the world to agree on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. By 2018, when meaningful change was still elusive, Extinction Rebellion and Greta Thunberg managed to galvanize public opinion to recognize the severity of the crisis, although their impetus was lost when the Covid pandemic and its attendant lockdowns took place. Afterwards, I suggest, there was a widespread derangement amongst western leaders, who were unable to accept the threat to the neoliberal order that was glimpsed during Covid, and who were also haunted by the reality of climate collapse, and who responded, as I describe it, by “retreat[ing] into a regressive form of denial, resurrecting a primitive urge to lash out when confronted by problems of our own making, which, throughout human history, has all too often meant a descent into war as a violent and gratifying response that drowns out all other concerns.” When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, this led to Vladimir Putin being defined by western leaders as the personification of evil, and, excruciatingly, they did the same again in October 2023, this time with Hamas. Simultaneously, following on from the passage of laws to suppress dissent following the actions of climate activists, these same leaders passed even more punitive laws to criminalize those who were opposing Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and are now working with AI companies, who are horrifically redefining warfare through AI-driven military targeting, and are also working to implement the surveillance and control of entire populations. The best hope, right now, is that a huge energy crisis, precipitated by the illegal and unprovoked US-Israeli war on Iran, may, inadvertently, push the world into moving away from fossil fuels for renewables, as its unintended impacts may also disrupt the planned expansion of the deadly AI industry and other manifestations of the broken, extractive neoliberal capitalist system that will, otherwise, kill us all.

My reflections on the last five days of horrors, from Donald Trump’s expletive-filled post threatening Iran on Easter Sunday to his even more disturbing post on April 7 when he threatened Iran with nuclear annihilation, stating, “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again”, and the widespread revulsion that greeted both posts, to the ceasefire deal agreed that evening, brokered with Pakistan, establishing a two-week period for negotiations aimed at ensuring a lasting peace. Israel, excluded from the negotiations, immediately launched attacks on Lebanon of unprecedented savagery, even though ending its hostilities in Lebanon was included in the ceasefire deal, either in an effort to sabotage the deal or to indulge in a last burst of sickening genocidal fury before complying. My feeling, as I describe it, is that, “Whatever comes next, it seems pretty clear that Iran has won, and that both Trump and Netanyahu have suffered spectacularly resounding defeats”, from which neither may recover. I can only hope that this will happen. As I explain, although it “wouldn’t fundamentally change the juggernauts of horror in either country, it might be enough of a break to pull us back from what, otherwise, looks like nothing less than an ever-growing and all-compassing darkness of bottomless depravity.”

Linking to and discussing my interview with Chuck Mertz for his weekly show “This Is Hell!”, a Chicago-based “long-form political interview program”, now in its 30th year. Chuck is a well-prepared and knowledgeable host, and the hour-long format is conducive to detailed analysis and commentary, so it was an absolute delight to have the opportunity to discuss my recent articles, “900 Days of Genocide in Gaza”, and, in particular, another recent article, “The Horrors of AI-Driven Military Targeting, From Gaza to Iran”, in a live setting, thinking out loud rather than writing in seclusion, which I always find exhilarating. I was particularly pleased to have been given the time to spell out in detail how Israel’s use of AI-driven military targeting was largely responsible for creating human carnage beyond imagining, as was revealed in the early months of the genocide by Israel’s +972 Magazine, whose reporters spoke to insiders who confirmed how AI was able to generate targets at a speed that was hundreds or thousands of times faster than humans could achieve — but only through sweeping definitions of who was a valid target, which were overbroad and error-strewn, and which, crucially, were subjected to almost no meaningful human oversight whatsoever. This model, eviscerating existing models regulating the conduct of warfare, to falsely justify colossal damage to civilian infrastructure and disproportionate civilian deaths, has now, of course, spread to Iran, with full US commitment, and also to Lebanon.

My analysis of the shameful decision yesterday, by Israel’s Knesset, to pass a new law making the death penalty mandatory for Palestinians convicted of killings in circumstances regarded as terrorism. The law, pushed in particular by Israel’s far-right security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, doesn’t apply retroactively, meaning that it cannot be applied to the 1,329 Palestinian prisoners currently serving prison sentences on “security” grounds, including Marwan Barghouti, “the Palestinian Mandela”, imprisoned since 2002 after a blatantly unfair trial, for whom Ben-Gvir has a particular hatred. At present, however, no one knows how many of the many thousands of other Palestinian prisoners currently undergoing legal proceedings, or held without charge or trial under various lawless states of “exception”, might end up being targeted for execution. It’s also important to recognize that, if this new law isn’t struck down by Israel’s Supreme Court, or via international pressure, it’s reasonable to assume that further laws will be passed extending the death penalty’s reach. It’s also crucial to note that forthcoming legislation — dealing with the “Prosecution of Participants in October 7 Massacre events” — passed its first legislative hurdle on March 24, and is intended to establish special military tribunals for those accused of involvement in the October 7 attacks. This bill, as Amnesty International has explained, “authorizes the tribunal to impose the death penalty on those convicted and allows it to significantly deviate from standard procedural rules and evidentiary laws if it is ‘deemed necessary for the clarification of the truth and performance of justice.’” While the passage of this legislation cannot even begin to overshadow the horrors of Israel’s genocide over the last two and a half years, or the unparalleled brutality of its prisons, where over 9,000 Palestinians are currently held — and where over a hundred have been murdered without even the pretext of a death penalty bill — it does seem to me that this particular gesture, with its specific contempt for so much of the world’s retreat from capital punishment as a brutal anachronism, ought to cement Israel’s status as a pariah state that must no longer be indulged.

Today marks 900 days since Israel began its genocide in the Gaza Strip, a sustained assault of such naked and self-glorifying depravity, shamefully supported by most of the west, that it has left billions of us struggling to cope with what the very notion of our humanity means. It also marks the first anniversary of Israel’s targeted assassination in Gaza of Hossam Shabat, one of over 270 Palestinian journalists murdered by Israel. To mark these grim anniversaries, I cycle though Israel’s atrocities, almost unbroken for two years, with the exception of a six-week ceasefire in January and February last year, noting how every red line regarding appropriate conduct in war has been eviscerated, and how Israel’s crimes are so numerous that it’s hard to even remember them all. I also update the story of Gaza since a supposedly permanent ceasefire was declared on October 10 last year. This brought to an end Israel’s relentless carpet-bombing, but in every other respect the genocide has continued, albeit more slowly. Crucially, humanitarian aid — and especially medical supplies — are still severely restricted, and Israel has retained complete control of 60% of the Gaza Strip, hemming the surviving Palestinian population into the remaining 40%, where they largely live in subsistence-level squalor. Crucially, I note how the template of Gaza’s extermination — the relentless killing of civilians and the destruction of civilian homes and infrastructure — has now expanded to Iran, since the US-Israeli “war” began three weeks ago, while Israel also seeks to replicate the Gaza model in Lebanon, and has also stepped up its violence in the West Bank. Where we go from here is still unknown. While Israel has very clearly descended into a psychotic mania that seeks the death of their “enemies” at every moment, I suggest that Trump’s supreme folly was allowing himself to be talked into joining Netanyahu in his deranged 40-year dream of destroying Iran, and wonder if there can be an “off-ramp” before he is held responsible for what, through the massive disruption to oil and gas supplies, is looking like a looming global economic crisis on an unprecedented scale.

My detailed analysis of a burning topic that ought to be of huge concern to us all — the rise of AI-driven targeting in warfare, which generates military targets hundreds or thousands of times faster than human analysts, but which is both unreliable, and dependent on parameters for targeting that are overly broad, and which, crucially, are generated so fast that, to secure “results”, the essential need for significant human oversight is being ignored. I trace the development of AI in warfare from its roots in Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, as revealed through groundbreaking reports by Israel’s +972 Magazine, which showed how any sense of proportionality in wartime — avoiding the targeting of civilians in military actions, or their deaths as “collateral damage” — has been completely swept aside, along with almost all human checks on the AI’s targeting, leading to an unparalleled situation in which, according to the Israeli military, 83% of those killed in Gaza were civilians — although my own assessment is that it may be closer to 95%. I also examine the deep involvement of US tech and AI companies in Israel’s genocide — including Microsoft, OpenAI, Google, Amazon, Anthropic and Palantir — and bring the story up to date with the US’s direct participation in the genocidal Gaza model of AI targeting in its war on Iran, with inaccurate targeting exposed on the very first day of hostilities, when an elementary school in Minab, in southern Iran, was hit, killing at least 168 people, most of them children, girls aged seven to 12. I conclude by stating that none of the major tech and AI companies can be trusted, because they are all, to varying degrees, embedded within our governments, and are all complicit in implementing, or seeking to implement sweeping programs of surveillance and control, which, as I describe it, “redefine not only war, but also peace; a peace that will not exist unless everyone in the countries they control live lives of quiet and docile obedience, with no dissent allowed.”