A Welcome Ceasefire in Lebanon, But No End to Gaza’s Genocidal Agony
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While I was overjoyed, on Wednesday, to see displaced Lebanese people returning to their homes — or the ruins of them — in southern Lebanon as a fragile ceasefire began, following ten weeks of brutal attacks by Israel, my heart sank with the realization that it would make no difference whatsoever to Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, where, predictably, the non-stop atrocities of the last 14 months have continued.
Political maneuvering — particularly on the part of the Biden administration — brought about the ceasefire in Lebanon, harking back to earlier, pre-genocidal days, when it was acknowledged by all sides, however begrudgingly, that military conflicts almost always, eventually, have to come to an end through negotiation. For Gaza, however, no such option seems to exist anymore.
After a brief break in hostilities last November, when Israeli and foreign hostages taken to Gaza after the October 7 attacks in southern Israel were exchanged for Palestinian prisoners in Israel’s brutal, lawless prisons for Palestinians, attempts ever since to broker another, more permanent ceasefire have persistently failed. Even though Hamas has regularly agreed to the terms, Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has deliberately scuppered any deal, although the twisted western media and its politicians have relentlessly spun this as either being Hamas’ fault, or, if they’ve been feeling slightly less deceptive, a failure on both sides.
Israel’s Collective Genocidal Sickness, the West’s Complicity, and the Messianic Colonialism Behind It All
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If your son or daughter was murdered, and you responded, in your grief, by suggesting that 2.3 million people should be murdered in retaliation, and if, moreover, you had the means to fulfil your vengeful fantasies, mental health experts would be alarmed, and would seek an urgent intervention.
This, however, is what happened not just to individuals, but, collectively, to almost the whole of Israeli society after the deadly attacks by Hamas and other militants on October 7 last year, in which, according to official Israeli figures, 1,068 Israeli citizens and 71 foreign citizens were killed, and 251 others were taken back to the Gaza Strip as hostages.
That is a significant number of people, and no excuse can be made for it — although strenuous efforts to claim that it occurred in a vacuum, as if through the exercise of pure evil for its own sake, fail, crucially, to recognize that it happened as the result of a multi-generational conflict between a colonial oppressor (the State of Israel) and an oppressed and occupied people (the Palestinians) that has been ongoing for 76 years, and that has involved, over the years, and before the latest horrors, the murder of tens of thousands of Palestinians, in numbers that dwarf the number of Israelis killed over that same period.
An Extraordinary Day for International Justice: ICC Issues Arrest Warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant for War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity
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In what will forever be remembered as an extraordinary day for international justice, the International Criminal Court (ICC) today issued arrest warrants, for war crimes and crimes against humanity, for Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minster, and Yoav Gallant, who, until recently, was the defense minister in Netanyahu’s coalition government.
In its press release, the Court stated that it had “issued warrants of arrest for two individuals, Mr. Benjamin Netanyahu and Mr. Yoav Gallant, for crimes against humanity and war crimes committed from at least 8 October 2023 until at least 20 May 2024, the day the Prosecution filed the applications for warrants of arrest.”
The announcement in May, by Karim Khan KC, the chief prosecutor of the ICC, that arrest warrants would be sought for Netanyahu and Gallant, as well as for three Hamas leaders (two of whom have subsequently been murdered by Israel), was greeted at the time with huge enthusiasm, and a great sense of relief, by those who had been calling, since 2015, for the ICC to hold Israel accountable for its long history of grave crimes against the Palestinians.
World on Fire: I Discuss Gaza, Climate Collapse and the Collective Derangement of Western Politicians with Andy Bungay
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If you have an hour to spare, and want to listen to the kind of political analysis of current events that is completely absent from mainstream media, I hope you’ll listen to me discussing the situation in the Gaza Strip, climate collapse and the collective psychic derangement of our politicians in the west with Andy Bungay, recorded last weekend and broadcast on Andy’s show on Riverside Radio, a community radio station in Wandsworth, in south west London.
Andy has interviewed me numerous times over the years, in connection with a variety of topics including Guantánamo and London’s housing crisis, and in July we spoke at length about the UK General Election, Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the right to protest and the release of Julian Assange, leading to a new arrangement whereby, once a month, we’ll discuss topic of concerns in a new hourly slot on Andy’s show.
In this first monthly interview, posted below via YouTube, and featured as part of Andy’s whole show here, we began by discussing Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, which allowed me to discuss at length the “genocide within a genocide” that has been taking place for the last month in northern Gaza, via a truly abhorrent new plan that mixes starvation with extermination, the destruction of hospitals and efforts to displace the surviving population through ethnic cleansing, prior to Israeli colonization.
Gaza: The Normalization of Genocide Through the Complete Complicity of the West and Its Colonization by Israel
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For a year and three weeks, all decent people around the world have been shocked and disturbed, to an extent unprecedented in our lifetimes, by the intensity of the genocidal fury unleashed by the State of Israel on the 2.3 million Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip, the Chicago-sized “reservation”, into which they were squeezed in 1948, as the nascent Israeli state, in a blood-soaked orgy of extraordinary violence, seized most of what had, for centuries, been Palestinian land.
For a year and three weeks, we have had to watch, powerlessly, as Israel has revisited the messianic genocidal intent that it first unleashed in an unfettered manner 76 years ago, when it erased Palestinian cities, towns and villages, murdering 15,000 civilians and expelling 750,000 others, based on an absurd historical and pseudo-religious claim to the land, dating back 2,000 years. Contextualizing this absurdity, some commentators have pointed out that Israel’s actions are the equivalent to the Italians laying claim to England because it was conquered by their ancestors — the Romans — 2,000 years ago.
This violent supremacism has underpinned the actions of the State of Israel ever since. Throughout the long years from 1948, Israel has refused to ever seriously consider that it should share this contested land with those who called it home. Those expelled — to refugee camps in neighbouring countries — were forbidden the right to return (despite that being a demand agreed upon by the United Nations from the very beginning), those in Israel had to struggle for years to even establish their right to exist as second-class citizens, while those in Gaza and the West Bank have been persistently targeted for marginalization, division, isolation and persistent depredation. Israel claims, risibly, to be “the only democracy in the Middle East”, whereas the objective reality is that it is a violent European settler colonial project enforcing a repulsive system of apartheid.
Who's still at Guantánamo?
