FILE PHOTO: Two US Air Force F-35 Lightning II aircraft at the international airport Petrovec near Skopje, on June 17 2022. (c) Robert ATANASOVSKI / AFP
Recently, the Pentagon admitted it couldn’t account for trillions of dollars of US taxpayer money, having failed a massive yearly audit for the sixth year running.
The process consisted of the 29 sub-audits of the Department of Defence’s (DoD’s) various services, and only seven passed this year – no improvement over the last. These audits only began taking place in 2017, meaning that the Pentagon has never successfully passed one.
This year’s failure made some headlines, was commented upon briefly by the mainstream media, and then just as quickly forgotten by an American society accustomed to pouring money down the black hole of defense spending.
The defense budget of the United States is grotesquely large, its $877 billion dwarfing the $849 billion spent by the next ten nations with the largest defense expenditures. And yet, the Pentagon cannot fully account for the $3.8 trillion in assets and $4 trillion in liabilities it has accrued at US taxpayer expense, ostensibly in defense of the United States and its allies. As the Biden administration seeks $886 billion for next year’s defense budget (and Congress seems prepared to add an additional $80 billion to that amount), the apparent indifference of the American collective- government, media, and public – to how nearly $1 trillion in taxpayer dollars will be spent speaks volumes about the overall bankrupt nature of the American establishment.
Audits, however, are an accountant’s trick, a series of numbers on a ledger that, for the average person, do not equate to reality. Americans have grown accustomed to seeing big numbers when it comes to defense spending, and as a result, we likewise expect big things from our military. But the fact is, the US defense establishment increasingly physically resembles the numbers on the ledgers the accountants have been trying to balance – it just doesn’t add up.
Despite spending some $2.3 trillion on a two-decade military misadventure in Afghanistan, the American people witnessed the ignominious retreat from that nation live on TV in August 2021. Likewise, a $758 billion investment in the 2003 invasion and subsequent decade-long occupation of Iraq went south when the US was compelled to withdraw in 2011 – only to return in 2014 for another decade of chasing down ISIS, itself a manifestation of the failures of the original Iraqi venture. Overall, the US has spent more than $1.8 trillion on its 20-year nightmare in Iraq and Syria.
These numbers are mind-numbingly large – so large that they become meaningless to the average person. The US defense enterprise is so massive that it is literally a mission impossible to speak of balancing the books. The American people might be willing to shrug off an accounting error or two. However, the defense budget equates to American military power and the perceptions of national worth that translate into notions of American exceptionalism.
The fact of the matter is that our cavalier approach to defense spending has resulted in fraud of a massive scale. The American people were sold a bill of goods – a military capable of projecting power world-wide to sustain the so-called “rules based international order” upon which the notion of American exceptionalism has been premised. As it turns out, the US military is as hollow as the numbers on the Pentagon ledgers. The American people have bought an apparatus that is incapable of fighting and winning a major war against any of the potential opponents arrayed against it. We failed to defeat Al Qaeda, ISIS, and the Taliban. And we are not able to defeat either China or Russia, let alone regional powers like North Korea and Iran. And yet we will simply continue to invest, in seemingly unquestioning fashion, into this enterprise, expecting somehow that a system that cannot pass an audit will somehow magically produce a different result despite the fact that we, the American people, are doing nothing to demand such a result.
In short, the defense budget is the equivalent of “pay-to-play”, in which the American people pay the US government to produce the results necessary to sustain their overinflated sense of self-worth. We Americans have become so accustomed to being the biggest, baddest bully in the global arena that we assume that simply by pouring money into a system that had produced the desired results for more than seventy years we could keep the good times rolling. But when you allocate money to a system that has been allowed to become conditioned to operate without accountability, don’t be surprised when the shiny mansion on the hill you thought you were buying turns out to be little more than a house of cards.
_____
Scott Ritter is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer and author of Disarmament in the Time of Perestroika: Arms Control and the End of the Soviet Union (2022). He served in the Soviet Union as an inspector implementing the INF Treaty, in General Schwarzkopf’s staff during the Gulf War, and from 1991 to 1998 as a UN weapons inspector.
The notion that the war would end if Hamas was overthrown or surrenders is as ahistorical as it is false.
Jeremy Scahill
THE EVENTS OF the past week should obliterate any doubt that the war against the Palestinians of Gaza is a joint U.S.–Israeli operation. On Friday, as the Biden administration stood alone among the nations of the world in vetoing a United Nations Security Council resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire, Secretary of State Antony Blinken was busy circumventing congressional review to ram through approval of an “emergency” sale of 13,000 tank rounds to Israel. For weeks, Blinken has been zipping across the Middle East and appearing on scores of television networks in a PR tour aimed at selling the world the notion that the White House is deeply concerned about the fate of Gaza’s 2.2 million residents. “Far too many Palestinians have been killed; far too many have suffered these past weeks, and we want to do everything possible to prevent harm to them,” Blinken declared on November 10. A month later, with the death toll skyrocketing and calls for a ceasefire mounting, Blinken assured the world Israel was implementing new measures to protect civilians and that the U.S. was doing everything it could to encourage Israel to employ a tiny bit more moderation in its widespread killing campaign. Friday’s events decisively flushed those platitudes into a swirling pool of blood.
Over the past two months, Benjamin Netanyahu has argued, including on U.S. news channels, “Our war is your war.” In retrospect, this wasn’t a plea to the White House. Netanyahu was stating a fact. From the moment President Joe Biden spoke to his “great, great friend” Netanyahu on October 7, in the immediate aftermath of the deadly Hamas-led raids into Israel, the U.S. has not just supplied Israel with additional weapons and intelligence support, it has also offered crucial political cover for the scorched-earth campaign to annihilate Gaza as a Palestinian territory. It is irrelevant what words of concern and caution have flowed from the mouths of administration officials when all of their actions have been aimed at increasing the death and destruction.
The propaganda from the Biden administration has been so extreme at times that even the Israeli military has suggested they tone it down a notch or two. Biden falsely claimed to see images of “terrorists beheading children” and then knowingly relayed that unverified allegation as fact — including over the objections of his advisers — and publicly questioned the death toll of Palestinian civilians. None of this is by accident, nor can it be attributed to the president’s propensity to exaggerate or stumble into gaffes.
Everything we know about Biden’s 50-year history of supporting and facilitating Israel’s worst crimes and abuses leads to one conclusion: Biden wants Israel’s destruction of Gaza — with more than 7,000 children dead — to unfold as it has.
The horrifying nature of the October 7 attacks led by Hamas do not in any way — morally or legally — justify what Israel has done to the civilian population of Gaza, more than 18,000 of whom have died in a 60-day period. Nothing justifies the killing of children on an industrial scale. What the Israeli state is engaged in has far surpassed any basic principles of proportionality or legality. Israel’s own crimes dwarf those of Hamas and the other groups that participated in the October 7 operations. Yet Biden and other U.S. officials continue to defend the indefensible by rolling out their well-worn and twisted notion of Israel’s right to “self-defense.”
If we apply that rationale — promoted by both the U.S. and Israel — to the 75 years of history before October 7, how many times throughout that period would the Palestinians have been “justified” in massacring thousands of Israeli children, systematically attacking its hospitals and schools? How many times would they have been acting in “self-defense” as they razed whole neighborhoods to rubble, transforming the apartment buildings Israeli civilians once called home into concrete tombs? This justification only works for Israel because the Palestinians can enact no such destruction upon Israel and its people. It has no army, no navy, no air force, no powerful nation states to provide it with the most modern and lethal military hardware. It does not have hundreds of nuclear weapons. Israel can burn Gaza and its people to the ground because the U.S. facilitates it, politically and militarily.
Despite all the airtime consumed by Blinken and other U.S. officials playing make-believe on the issue of protecting Palestinian civilians, what has unfolded on the ground is nothing less than a corralling of the population of Gaza into an ever-shrinking killing cage. On December 1, Israel released an interactive map of Gaza dividing it into hundreds of numbered zones. On the Israel Defense Forces’ Arabic language website, it encouraged Gaza’s residents to scan a QR code to download the map and to monitor IDF channels to know when they need to evacuate to a different zone to avoid being murdered by Israeli bombs or ground operations. This is nothing short of a dystopian Netflix show produced by Israel in which its participants have no choice to opt out and a wrong guess will get you and your children maimed or killed. On a basic level, it is grotesque to tell an entrapped population that has limited access to food, water, health care, or housing — and whose internet connections have repeatedly been shut down — to go online to download a survival map from a military force that is terrorizing them.
Throughout Blinken’s one-man parade proclaiming that the U.S. had made clear to Israel that it needs to protect civilians, Israel has repeatedly struck areas of Gaza to which it had told residents to flee. In some cases, the IDF sent SMS messages to people just 10 minutes before attacking. One such message read: “The IDF will begin a crushing military attack on your area of residence with the aim of eliminating the terrorist organization Hamas.” U.N. Secretary General António Guterres said Palestinians were being treated “like human pinballs – ricocheting between ever-smaller slivers of the south, without any of the basics for survival.” Blinken attributed the continuously mounting pile of Palestinian corpses to “a gap” between Israel’s stated intent to lessen civilian deaths and its operations. “I think the intent is there,” he said. “But the results are not always manifesting themselves.”
National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby got visibly irritated when asked on December 6 about Israel’s widespread killing of civilians. “It is not the Israeli Defense Forces strategy to kill innocent people. It’s happening. I admit that. Each one is a tragedy,” he said. “But it’s not like the Israelis are sitting around every morning and saying ‘Hey, how many more civilians can we kill today?’ ‘Let’s go bomb a school or a hospital or a residential building and just—and cause civilian casualties.’ They’re not doing that.” One problem with Kirby’s rant is that attacks against civilians, schools, and hospitals are exactly what Israel is doing—repeatedly. It is irrelevant what Kirby believes the IDF’s intent to be. For two months, numerous Israeli officials and lawmakers have said that their intent is to collectively strangle the Palestinians of Gaza into submission, death, or flight.
Kirby’s claims are also decimated by the revelations in a recent investigative report by the Israeli media outlets 972 and Local Call. The story, based on interviews with seven Israeli military and intelligence sources, described in detail how Israel knows precisely the number of civilians present in buildings it strikes and at times has knowingly killed hundreds of Palestinian civilians in order to kill a single top Hamas commander. “Nothing happens by accident,” one Israeli source said. “When a 3-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it’s because someone in the army decided it wasn’t a big deal for her to be killed — that it was a price worth paying in order to hit [another] target. We are not Hamas. These are not random rockets. Everything is intentional. We know exactly how much collateral damage there is in every home.”
As Israel ratchets up its killing machine, giving lie to all of Blinken’s pronouncements, it continues to wage a propaganda war that is consistent with its overarching campaign of mass killing. No lie is too obscene to justify the wholesale slaughter of people that Israel’s defense minister has called “human animals.” According to this campaign, there are no Palestinian children, no Palestinian hospitals, no Palestinian schools. The U.N. is Hamas. Journalists are Hamas. The prime ministers of Belgium, Spain, and Ireland are Hamas. Everything and everyone who dissents in the slightest from the genocidal narrative is Hamas.
Israel has quite understandably grown accustomed to many Western media outlets accepting its lies — no matter how outrageous or vile — when they are told about Palestinians. But even news outlets with a long track record of promoting Israel’s narrative unchecked have inched toward incredulity. Not because they have had a change of conscience, but because the Israeli propaganda is so farcical that it would be embarrassing to pretend it is otherwise.
Israeli forces have distributed multiple images and videos in recent days of Palestinian men stripped to their underwear — sometimes wearing blindfolds — and claimed they are all Hamas terrorists surrendering. These claims, too, fell apart under the most minimal scrutiny: Some of the men have been identified as journalists, shop owners, U.N. employees. In one particularly ridiculous piece of propaganda, a video filmed by IDF soldiers and distributed online depicted naked Palestinian captives laying down their alleged rifles.
Government spokesperson Mark Regev defended the practice of stripping detainees. “Remember, it’s the Middle East and it’s warmer here. Especially during the day when it’s sunny, to be asked to take off your shirt might not be pleasant, but it’s not the end of the world,” Regev told Sky News. “We are looking for people who would have concealed weapons, especially suicide bombers with explosive vests.” Regev was asked about this clear violation of the Geneva Conventions’s prohibition against publishing videos of prisoners of war. “I’m not familiar with that level of international law,” he said, adding (as though it matters) that he did not believe the videos were distributed by official Israeli government channels. “These are military aged men who were arrested in a combat zone,” he said.
Despite Israeli claims of mass surrenders by Hamas fighters, Haaretz reported that “of the hundreds of Palestinian detainees photographed handcuffed in the Gaza Strip in recent days, about 10 to 15 percent are Hamas operatives or are identified with the organization,” according to Israeli security sources. Israel has produced no evidence to support its claim that even this alleged small pool of the stripped prisoners were Hamas guerrillas.
So what we have here is both a violation of the Geneva Conventions and an immoral production in which Palestinian civilians are forced at gunpoint to play Hamas fighters in an Israeli propaganda movie.
It has become indisputably clear over these past two months that there are not actually two sides to this horror show. Without question, the perpetrators who meted out the horrors against Israeli civilians on October 7 should be held accountable. But that is not what this collective killing operation is about. And journalists should stop pretending it is.
Any analysis of the Israeli state’s terror campaign against the people of Gaza cannot begin with the events of October 7. An honest examination of the current situation must view October 7 in the context of Israel’s 75-year war against the Palestinians and the past two decades of transforming Gaza first into an open-air prison and now into a killing cage. Under threat of being labeled antisemitic, Israel and its defenders demand acceptance of Israel’s official rationale for its irrational actions as legitimate, even if they are demonstrably false or they seek to justify war crimes. “You look at Israel today. It’s a state that has reached such a degree of irrational, rabid lunacy that its government routinely accuses its closest allies of supporting terrorism,” the Palestinian analyst Mouin Rabbani recently told Intercepted. “It is a state that has become thoroughly incapable of any form of inhibition.”
Israel has imposed, by lethal force, a rule that Palestinians have no legitimate rights of any form of resistance. When they have organized nonviolent demonstrations, they have been attacked and killed. That was the case in 2018-2019 when Israeli forces opened fire on unarmed protesters during the Great March of Return, killing 223 and wounding more than 8,000 others. Israeli snipers later boasted about shooting dozens of protesters in the knee during the weekly Friday demonstrations. When Palestinians fight back against apartheid soldiers, they are killed or sent into military tribunals. Children who throw rocks at tanks or soldiers are labeled terrorists and subjected to abuse and violations of basic rights — that is, if they are not summarily shot dead. Palestinians live their lives stripped of any context or any recourse to address the grave injustices imposed on them.
You cannot discuss the crimes of Hamas or Islamic jihad or any other armed resistance factions without first addressing the question of why these groups exist and have support. One aspect of this should certainly probe Netanyahu’s own role — extending back to at least 2012 — in propping up Hamas and facilitating the flow of money to the group. “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas,” Netanyahu told his Likud comrades in 2019.
But in the broader sense, a sincere examination of why a group such as Hamas gained popularity among Palestinians or why people in Gaza turn to armed struggle must focus on how the oppressed, when stripped of all forms of legitimate resistance, respond to the oppressor. It should be focused on the rights of people living under occupation to assert and defend their self-determination. It should allow Palestinians to have their struggle placed in the context of other historical battles for liberation and independence and not relegated to racist polemics about how all Palestinian acts of resistance constitute terrorism and there are not really any innocents in Gaza. Israel’s president said as much on October 13. “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible,” Isaac Herzog declared. “It is not true this rhetoric about civilians not being aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true. They could have risen up. They could have fought against that evil regime which took over Gaza in a coup d’etat.”
The notion that the Palestinians of Gaza could end all of their suffering by overthrowing Hamas is just as ahistorical and false as the oft-repeated claims that the war against Gaza would end if Hamas surrendered and released all Israeli hostages. “Look, this could be over tomorrow,” Blinken said December 10. “If Hamas got out of the way of civilians instead of hiding behind them, if it put down its weapons, if it surrendered.” That, of course, is a crass lie. With or without Hamas, Israel’s war against the Palestinians would endure precisely because of Blinken and his ilk in elite bipartisan U.S. foreign policy circles.
Throughout the years of U.S. support for Israel’s apartheid regime, it has consistently facilitated Israel’s “mowing the grass” in Gaza. This is not a series of periodic assaults on Hamas — it is a cyclical campaign of terror bombings largely aimed at civilians and civilian infrastructure. The Biden administration is not — and Biden personally has never been — an outside observer or a friend encouraging moderation during an otherwise righteous crusade. None of this slaughter would be occurring if Biden valued Palestinian lives over Israel’s false narratives and its bloody ethnonationalist wars of annihilation repackaged as self-defense. We should end the charade that this is an Israeli war against Hamas. We should call it what it is: a joint U.S.–Israeli war against the people of Gaza.
I left The New York Times in 1979, after many good stories and some not-so-good times, to write a book, The Price of Power (1984), about Henry Kissinger and his years as a manipulating and dissembling national security adviser and secretary of state.
I interviewed no less than one thousand officials, including scores who had worked for Henry, as he was known to all, and the 698-page book was published in 1983. It was a success in terms of sales, publicity and led to a year’s worth of speeches at colleges and universities throughout America. But the book did little to diminish the mainstream press’s intense love affair with all things Henry.
The obituaries that followed his death last week were as fawning as the coverage when he lied and manipulated his way to fame while in office. The reality is that his role in weaning Russia and China from their support of North Vietnam at the height of that horrific war has often been overstated. He was a facilitator of diplomatic realities that were initially promulgated by President Richard Nixon, whose public awkwardness masked a shrewd insight into the willingness of great powers to betray even the closest of allies. (Forget about my tome if you want the deepest insights into the most deadly of Nixon and Kissinger’s scheming: in 2013, Gary Bass, a professor at Princeton and former reporter for The Economist, published The Blood Telegram, a focused account of the mass murder that Nixon and Kissinger made inevitable in 1971 in what was then known as East Pakistan, with only the slightest of acknowledgment by the international media.)
My dance with Kissinger did not begin until early 1972 when I was asked by Abe Rosenthal, the executive editor of The Times, to join the newspaper’s staff in Washington and write what I wanted as an investigative reporter about the Vietnam War – with the proviso that I had better be damn sure I was right. By then, I had won lots of prizes, including the Pulitzer, for my reporting on the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and published two books, enough to land me a job at the best place in the world for a writer: as a reporter for The New Yorker. But Rosenthal’s offer and my hatred for the war led me to leave the magazine for the daily rush of a newspaper.
When I arrived at the Washington bureau in the spring of 1972, my desk was directly across from the paper’s main foreign policy reporter, a skilled journalist who was a master at writing coherent stories for the front page on deadline. I learned that around 5 pm on days when there were stories to be written about the war or disarmament – Kissinger’s wheelhouse – the bureau chief’s secretary would tell my colleague that “Henry” was on the phone with the bureau chief and would soon call him. Sure enough, the call would come and my colleague would frantically take notes and then produce a coherent piece reflecting what he had been told would invariably be the lead story in the next morning’s paper. After a week or two of observing this, I asked the reporter if he ever checked what Kissinger had told him – the stories he turned out never cited Kissinger by name but quoted senior Nixon administration officials – by calling and conferring on background with William Rogers, the secretary of state, or Melvin Laird, the secretary of defense.
“Of course not”, my colleague told me. “If I did that, Henry would no longer deal with us”.
Please understand – I am not making this up.
Kissinger, who had made no public remarks about my writings on the My Lai massacre and its cover-up, suddenly invited me to the White House for a private chat. I had just returned from a reporting trip to North Vietnam for the Times – I was the second mainstream American reporter in six years to be given a visa by Hanoi – and we were to discuss it. I had written about North Vietnam’s view of the secret peace talks Kissinger was conducting with the Vietnamese in Paris, but that was not the issue. He wanted, so I concluded, to stroke me. There was no question that, as a total loose cannon suddenly installed at the Times, I was of special interest.
He asked me about my impressions of the North Vietnamese, as seen in a closely watched three-week visit to Hanoi and elsewhere in the North. I had been taken to areas that were under heavy American bombing attacks and witnessed the North’s amazing ability to repair bombed-out rail lines within a few hours after an attack. Extra rails and the equipment needed to make repairs were hidden every few hundred yards along the tracks from Hanoi to the main harbour in Haiphong.
He asked about the morale of the residents in Hanoi. I told him I had seen no signs of panic, fear, or desperation in my many unguarded (so I believed) walks throughout the city. Every morning, in fact, a group of schoolboys en route to class who had seen me when I first arrived would walk by my hotel in central Hanoi at the same hour – I made a point of being outside then – and cheerfully say ‘Good morning, sir!” in English to me. But I was always aware that I was in enemy territory.
The schoolboys and other anecdotes prompted Kissinger to summon a prominent former ambassador who was his senior aide for matters related to the war and say to him, in front of me, in obvious mock anger: “This fellow is giving me more information about the morale in the North than I get from the CIA”. I remember thinking, “Is this it? Is this all he’s got? Does the guy really think this kind of obvious flattery is going to win me over?”
Over the next few years, Kissinger continued to take my calls, with the proviso that all of our conversations must be, as he once said, “off the record”. I was not allowed to quote him by name and learned years later that I was the only one on our phone calls who played by the rules. An academic doing research on Kissinger told me that my allegedly private chats with the man were transcribed within hours – he had obtained copies through the Freedom of Information Act – and made available to Kissinger or his longtime aide, Army General Alexander Haig.
I was pulled off the Vietnam beat by Rosenthal in late 1972, despite my heated objections, when the Watergate scandal broke and the Times was being pummeled by the reporting of The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Once again I found myself reporting on Kissinger, whose willingness to do anything to stay in Nixon’s good graces knew no limit.
In the spring of 1973, a soon-to-retire high-level FBI official, who clearly shared my obvious distaste for Kissinger, invited me to lunch at a joint near the FBI headquarters that was a haunt for senior bureau honchos. It was a truly astonishing invitation but those were days of nothing but such moments as the Nixon administration unraveled, and so off I went. We had a pleasant talk about the vagaries of Washington and as lunch ended, he asked me to pause for a moment or two before leaving the restaurant: I would find a packet on his chair.
It contained sixteen highly classified FBI wiretap authorisations, all but two signed by Kissinger. Those taps included a few reporters, ten or so members of Kissinger’s own national security staff, and the senior aides to the secretary of state and the secretary of defense. The documents specified that the wiretaps were to be installed on the targets’ home telephones, and they included the names of the FBI technicians who would install the taps.
It took me a day or two to track down a few of the installers and corroborate that the documents were real. I knew I had to do so before telling the senior editors at the Times what I had. With Nixon on the ropes, Kissinger was the go-to guy on all foreign policy issues, including a crisis then emerging in the Middle East.
First came a call to Kissinger. The immediate response was total denial and anger at being accused of such police-state tactics. Then came a not-unexpected second call saying that he had had it with constantly being maligned by the press and was going to resign. A half-hour later James Reston, known to all as Scotty, the wonderful Times columnist who was close to Kissinger, although aware of his shortcomings, padded up to my desk in the slipper-like shoes he sometimes wore in the office and asked if I realized that Henry was serious about resigning.
It was impossible not to like Scotty, but he clearly was not sure that my kind of reporting belonged in the Times. Being Jewish, I had volunteered the winter before to work a double shift in the Washington bureaus on Christmas Eve, which usually meant I only had to write a weather story or something equally trivial. Just me, a good book, and a teletypist from morning to late at night. At one point Scotty, dressed in black tie, with his wife and a prominent Washington diplomat and his wife in tow, swooped into the bureau. My guess was the liquor stores in the city were closed and Scotty, who was clearly a bit tipsy, was there to retrieve a bottle or two from his office. Reston gave me a very cool look and said – I still laugh recalling it – “Hey Hersh, aren’t you going to get that exclusive interview with Jesus for the second edition?”
Maybe you had to be there to appreciate the story, but Scotty was the real thing. He was where he was – as the most respected columnist for the Times – because presidents and their minions knew he could be counted on to relay their point of view in a crisis. And I was writing stories, especially about Kissinger’s possible link to Nixon’s wrongdoing, that Scotty did not think the paper needed to publish.
I mumbled something to Scotty – about how whether or not Kissinger quit was none of my business – and continued filing the story to New York. The deadline for the front page was around 7 pm, and close to that time, Al Haig telephoned me. “Seymour”, he said, which got my attention – those who knew me, including Al, called me Sy – and said the following words, which I will never forget:
Do you believe that Henry Kissinger, a Jewish refugee from Germany who lost thirteen members of his family to the Nazis, could engage in police state tactics such as wiretapping his own aides? If there is any doubt, you owe it to yourself and your beliefs and your nation to give us one day to prove your story is wrong.
Of course, I understood that Kissinger had begged Haig to make the foolish call, but he had done it. The story ran on the front page the next morning, and Kissinger survived, as I was sure he would. He’d have to be caught with a knife in his hand, blood dripping from it, and the body still twitching to ever suffer consequences for his actions.
But he did hurt the careers of some of those who did dirty work for him inside the bureaucracy, as I learned a few months after joining the Times. There was a scandal involving a four-star Air Force general named John Lavelle, who had been publicly sacked and demoted after acknowledging that he had secretly authorized his Air Force crews in Thailand to conduct bombing missions on unauthorized targets in North Vietnam. Lavelle’s disgrace had become public, which was unusual, and he was nowhere to be found.
At an early point in the ongoing Lavelle mystery, I was called by Otis Pike, a New York Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee. Pike had been a Marine Corps bomber pilot in the Pacific during World War Two, and he urged me to get into the story. He told me he could not say all that he knew but that I had to find Lavelle and get him to talk.
I had learned during years covering the Pentagon for the Associated Press in the mid-1960s of the value of the Pentagon telephone directories. I also knew that Lavelle, who had been assigned to the Pentagon years earlier as a two- or three-star general, undoubtedly had a very bright Air Force captain or two assigned as his personal aides. Odds were that one of his hotshot aides was back in the Pentagon as a major or lieutenant colonel.
Sure enough, I found one who was living in a suburb. I called him at home that night and made sure to tell him who I was and what I wanted: to find out where Lavelle was living and just what in hell was going on. He gave me the information I needed. I tracked down Lavelle the next day playing golf with his two sons at a course in rural Maryland. I always loved golf, and I hit a few irons with him and the boys – reporters will do anything to get someone to talk. Lavelle, who knew nothing about me other than the fact that I could hit a five-iron, told his boys to wait in the car and walked me to a bar in the clubhouse.
It was very warm, I remember, and we both had cold bottles of Miller High Life. I took a swig, and I asked Lavelle to tell me what the hell happened. He was cool, like fighter pilots are, and he told me that for six months or so, he had indeed authorised bombing raids inside the North that were off-limits. He protected his deputies, he said, by not telling them that he did not have specific authorisation from Washington to do so.
I remember the next exchange well. I said: “C’mon general, if you did what you said, you and I both know you would have been court-martialed”.
Lavelle gave me a cool look and said: “Tell me when was the last time a four-star Air Force general or admiral has ever been court-martialed?”
I didn’t know the answer.
At that point, I really began to like the guy. I sensed – just knew it – that he had been given backchannel orders to do the illegal bombing and that those orders had to have come from Kissinger and Nixon. I told him so, and he said nothing.
I told the general I was going to report his explanation but would suggest that he had taken the fall for the White House because the president and his national security adviser wanted to expand the war against the North without officially doing so.
And so I did. I kept on writing about the Lavelle mess in the Times for weeks. Eventually, there were hearings organised by Senator John Stennis, the conservative Democrat from Mississippi who was chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Stennis was a hawk on the Vietnam War and a bigot when it came to African Americans, but he suspected that Kissinger was behind the Lavelle disgrace and was all for me doing what I could. He and I continued to talk – I could reach him anytime I wished via a private phone line in his office – until Nixon was out of office. We were another odd couple.
I wrote a series of stories about Lavelle that were full of insinuations that the general did what he did for Kissinger and Nixon, but the general chose to honor his commitment to the men in the White House. A decade later, when Nixon and Kissinger’s White House tapes became public – Lavelle died in 1979 – there were a few chats between Nixon and Kissinger about Lavelle’s plight as my first stories on him were being published in the Times.
To his credit, Nixon felt guilty about the railroading of the general, as I noted in a memoir I wrote a few years ago. “I don’t want him to be made a goat”, he told Kissinger. A few days later, when there were newspaper reports about possible Senate hearings into Lavelle’s dismissal, Nixon again told Kissinger: “I just do not feel right about pushing him into this thing and then he takes a bad rap”. Kissinger urged him to stay out of it. Nixon agreed to do so but again said, almost plaintively: “I do not want to hurt an innocent man”.
It was as if the president believed, or chose to believe, that he had no power to intervene. He was, in that moment of duplicity, in Kissinger’s hands.
Seymour Hersh at the 2004 Letelier-Moffitt Human Rights Award.
Seymour Hersh is an American investigative journalist and political writer. He gained recognition in 1969 for exposing the My Lai massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War, for which he received the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting.
It is journalistic malpractice for the media to still be repeating so credulously the Israeli military’s account of that day
The BBC’s Lucy Williamson was taken once again this week to view the terrible destruction at a kibbutz community just outside Gaza attacked on October 7. As we have been shown so many times before, the Israeli homes were riddled with automatic fire, both inside and out. Sections of concrete wall had holes in them or had collapsed entirely. Parts of the buildings that were still standing were deeply charred. It looked like a small snapshot of the current horrors in Gaza.
There is a possible reason for those similarities – one that the BBC is studiously failing to report, despite mounting evidence from a variety of sources, including the Israeli media. Instead, the BBC is sticking resolutely to a narrative crafted for them, and the rest of the Western media, by the Israeli military: that Hamas alone caused all this destruction.
Simply repeating that narrative without any caveats has by now reached the level of journalistic malpractice. And yet that is precisely what the BBC does night after night.
Just a cursory look at the wreckage in the various kibbutz communities that were attacked that day should raise questions in the mind of any good reporter. Were Palestinian militants in a position to actually inflict physical damage to that degree and extent with the kind of light weapons they carried?
And if not, who else was in a position to wreak such havoc other than Israel?
A separate question that good journalists ought to be asking is this: What was the purpose of such damage? What did the Palestinian militants hope to achieve by it?
The implicit answer the media is supplying is also the answer the Israeli military wants Western publics to hear: that Hamas engaged in an orgy of gratuitous killing and savagery because … well, let’s say the quiet part out loud: because Palestinians are inherently savage.
With that as the implicit narrative, Western politicians have been handed a licence to cheerlead Israel as it murders a Palestinian child in Gaza every few minutes. Savages only understand the language of savagery, after all.
Brutal tango
For this reason alone, any journalist who wishes to avoid colluding in the genocide unfolding in Gaza ought to be increasingly wary of simply repeating the Israeli military’s claims about what happened on October 7. Certainly, they should not credulously regurgitate the latest agitation and propaganda from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) press office, as the BBC is so evidently doing.
What we know from a growing body of evidence gleaned from the Israeli media and Israeli eyewitnesses – carefully laid out, for example, in this report from Max Blumenthal – is that the Israeli military was completely blindsided by that day’s events. Heavy artillery, including tanks and attack helicopters, was called in to deal with Hamas. That appears to have been a straightforward decision in regard to the military bases Hamas had overrun.
Israel has a long-standing policy of seeking to prevent Israeli soldiers from being taken captive – chiefly, because of the high price Israeli society insists on paying to ensure soldiers are returned. For decades, the military’s so-called “Hannibal procedure” has directed Israeli troops to kill fellow soldiers rather than allow them to be taken captive. For the same reason, Hamas expends a great deal of energy in trying to find innovative ways to seize soldiers.
The two sides are essentially engaged in a brutal tango in which each understands the other’s dance moves.
Given Hamas’ situation, effectively managing the Israeli-controlled concentration camp of Gaza, it has limited resistance strategies available to it. Capturing Israeli soldiers maximises its leverage. They can be traded for the release of many of the thousands of Palestinian political prisoners held in jails inside Israel, in breach of international law. In addition, in the negotiations, Hamas usually hopes to win an easing of Israel’s 16-year siege of Gaza.
To avert this scenario, Israeli commanders reportedly called in the attack helicopters on the military bases overwhelmed by Hamas on October 7. The helicopters appear to have fired indiscriminately, despite the risk posed to the Israeli soldiers in the base who were still alive. Israel’s was a scorched-earth policy to stop Hamas from achieving its aims. That may, in part, explain the very large proportion of Israeli soldiers among the 1,300 killed that day.
Charred bodies
But what about the situation in the kibbutz communities? By the time the army arrived and was in position, Hamas was well dug in. It had taken the inhabitants as hostages inside their own homes. Israeli eyewitness testimony and media reports suggest Hamas was almost certainly trying to negotiate safe passage back into Gaza, using the Israeli civilians as human shields. The civilians were the Hamas fighters’ only ticket out, and they could be converted later into bargaining chips for the release of Palestinian prisoners.
The evidence – from Israeli media reports and eyewitnesses, as well as a host of visual clues from the crime scene itself – tell a far more complex story than the one presented nightly on the BBC.
Did the Israeli military fire into the Hamas-controlled civilian homes in the same fashion as it had fired into its own military bases, and with the same disregard for the safety of Israelis inside? Was the goal in each case to prevent at all costs Hamas from taking hostages whose release would require a very high price from Israel?
Kibbutz Be’eri has been a favoured destination for BBC reporters keen to illustrate Hamas’ barbarity. It is where Lucy Williamson headed again this week. And yet none of her reporting highlighted comments made to the Israeli Haaretz newspaper by Tuval Escapa, the kibbutz’s security coordinator. He said Israeli military commanders had ordered the “shelling [of] houses on their occupants in order to eliminate the terrorists along with the hostages”.
That echoed the testimony of Yasmin Porat, who sought shelter in Be’eri from the nearby Nova music festival. She told Israeli Radio that once Israeli special forces arrived: “They eliminated everyone, including the hostages, because there was very, very heavy crossfire”.
Are the images of charred bodies presented by Williamson, accompanied by a warning of their graphic, upsetting nature, incontrovertible proof that Hamas behaved like monsters, bent on the most twisted kind of vengeance? Or might those blackened remains be evidence that Israeli civilians and Hamas fighters burned alongside each other after they were engulfed in flames caused by Israeli shelling of the houses?
Israel will not agree to an independent investigation so a definitive answer will never be forthcoming. But that does not absolve the media of their professional and moral duty to be cautious.
‘Hamas as savages’
Consider for a moment the stark contrast in the Western media’s treatment of events on October 7 and its treatment of the strike on the car park at Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in northern Gaza on October 17, in which hundreds of Palestinians were reported killed.
In the case of Al-Ahli, the media were only too ready to cast aside all the evidence that the hospital had been hit by an Israeli strike [when] immediately Israel contested the claim. Instead, journalists hurriedly amplified Israel’s counter-allegation that a Palestinian rocket had fallen on the hospital. Most of the media moved on after concluding “The truth may never be clear”, or even less credibly, that Palestinian militants were the most likely culprits.
In telling contrast, the Western media have not been willing to raise even a single question about what happened on October 7. They have enthusiastically attributed every horror that day to Hamas. They have ignored the reality of utter chaos that reigned for many hours and the potential for poor, desperate, and morally dubious decision-making by the Israeli military.
In fact, the media have gone much further. In advancing the narrative of “Hamas as savages”, they have promoted obvious fiction, such as the story that “Hamas beheaded 40 babies”. That piece of fake news was even taken up briefly by US President Joe Biden before it was quietly walked back by his officials.
Similarly, it is still a popular throwaway line among the Western commentariat that “Hamas carried out rapes” though, once again, the allegation is evidence-free so far.
We should be clear. If Israel had serious evidence for either of these claims, it would be aggressively promoting it. Instead, it is doing the next best thing: letting innuendo gently sink into the audience’s subconscious, settling there as a prejudice that cannot be interrogated.
Hamas undoubtedly committed war crimes on October 7 – not least, by taking civilians as human shields. But that kind of crime is one we are familiar with, one “ordinary” enough that the Israeli military has been regularly documented carrying it out too. The practice of Israeli soldiers taking Palestinians as human shields goes under various names, such as the “neighbor procedure” and the “early warning procedure”.
Worse atrocities may have happened too, especially given the unexpected scale of Hamas’ success in breaking out of Gaza. Large numbers of Palestinians escaped the enclave, some of them doubtless armed civilians with no connection to the operation. In such circumstances, it would be surprising if there were no examples of the headline-grabbing atrocities being committed.
The issue is whether such atrocities were planned and systematic, as Israel claims and the Western media repeats, or examples of rogue actions by individuals or groups. If the latter, Israel would be in no position to judge. Israel’s own history is littered with examples of such crimes, including the documented case of an Israeli army unit taking captive a Bedouin girl in 1949 and repeatedly gang-raping her.
Savagery would certainly not be a uniquely Hamas trait. Following the October 7 attack, videos have been emerging of systematic abuses of any Hamas fighters captured, whether alive or dead. Images show them being beaten and tortured in public for the gratification of onlookers when there is clearly not even the pretence of information gathering. Others show the bodies of Hamas fighters being defiled and mutilated.
No one can claim the moral high ground here.
What the media’s uncritical promotion of Israel’s “Hamas as savages” narrative has achieved is something sinister – and all too familiar from the West’s long colonial history. It has been used to demonise a whole people, presenting them either as barbarians or as willing protectors and enablers of barbarism.
The “savages” narrative is being weaponised by Israel to justify its mounting campaign of atrocities in Gaza. This is why it is so important that journalists don’t simply allow themselves to be spoonfed. Far too much is at stake.
Hamas committed war crimes on October 7 on a scale that is unprecedented for any Palestinian group. But there is little more than Israeli narrative spin so far to suggest that there was an unparalleled depravity to Hamas’ actions. Certainly, from what we know, it is hard to see that anything Hamas did that day was worse, or more savage, than what Israel has been doing daily in Gaza for weeks.
And Israel’s actions – from bombing Palestinian families to starving them of food and water – have the blessing of every major Western politician.
</form
(Republished from Jonathan Cook by permission of author or representative)
‘Nobody Believes in Our Victory Like I Do’. Inside Volodymyr Zelensky’s Struggle to Keep Ukraine in the Fight – Time – October 30 2023 {1}
That offensive has proceeded at an excruciating pace and with enormous losses, making it ever more difficult for Zelensky to convince partners that victory is around the corner. With the outbreak of war in Israel, even keeping the world’s attention on Ukraine has become a major challenge.
Quoting a soldier on the front of the counter-offensive, The Economist agrees {2}:
“Left Handed”, an infantryman fighting at the front between Robotyne and Verbove, says Ukrainian losses have increased to alarming levels, in part due to the work of drones. The plains of Zaporizhia have turned their back on life, he says. “It’s hellish. Corpses, the smell of corpses, death, blood and fear. Not a whiff of life, just the stench of death.” Those in units such as his own had more chance of dying than surviving. “Seventy-thirty. Some don’t even see their first battle.”
Still, Zelenski is urging them on {3}:
But his convictions haven’t changed. Despite the recent setbacks on the battlefield, he does not intend to give up fighting or to sue for any kind of peace.
On the contrary, his belief in Ukraine’s ultimate victory over Russia has hardened into a form that worries some of his advisers. It is immovable, verging on the messianic. “He deludes himself”, one of his closest aides tells me in frustration. “We’re out of options. We’re not winning. But try telling him that.”
Zelensky’s stubbornness, some of his aides say, has hurt their team’s efforts to come up with a new strategy, a new message. As they have debated the future of the war, one issue has remained taboo: The possibility of negotiating a peace deal with the Russians. Judging by recent surveys, most Ukrainians would reject such a move, especially if it entailed the loss of any occupied territory.
The war is lost. They know it. But they are unwilling to give up.
Zelenski’s people put the blame everywhere but on those who have caused the mess. It was the ‘victory’ messaging by Zelenski and his crew that has led the public into utter complacency.
As Strana headlines (machine translation):
Ukraine is losing the war with the Russian Federation due to the inadequate perception of the situation by society – commander of the Armed Forces of Ukraine – Strana.news – October 30 2023 {4}
Strategically, Ukraine is losing the war because of the inadequate perception of the situation by society.
This opinion was expressed by the commander of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Dmitry Kukharchuk in an interview with Channel Five.
He claims that at the beginning of the war, all Ukrainians were ready to defend the country, there were many volunteers. But after the withdrawal of Russian troops from Kiev, the situation changed.
“Immediately after that, I noticed that there were theses in the media that we are fighting with homeless people, that the Russian army does not know how to fight, that in principle victory will be in a week or two, a maximum of a month. That first in the spring, then in the summer, then in the autumn, then in the winter, without specifying which winter, we will go to the Crimea. That the victory is basically victorious. So people were put in a warm bathroom. We have broken down the vision of reality. But it didn’t happen in Russia. They began to realize that the war was not going to be easy for them. They realized that they would have to fight for a long time”, Kukharchuk believes.
He also says that the Russians are “getting stronger” every day, and if Ukraine really fought the “degenerates”, it would have defeated them long ago.
“That’s why we’re losing. They have these processes going on, and their public readiness is much higher than that of our society. And when they talk about a nuclear bomb, a war of all against all, for some reason it seems to me that they are ready for these processes”, the battalion commander added.
Napoleon, Hitler, and several other folks who had sought war with Russia had to learn to never underestimate the depth of its resources. Now Nato, the US, and its European proxies are learning that lesson.
Zelenski still hasn’t. He won’t concede {5}:
The cold will also make military advances more difficult, locking down the front lines at least until the spring. But Zelensky has refused to accept that. “Freezing the war, to me, means losing it”, he says. Before the winter sets in, his aides warned me to expect major changes in their military strategy and a major shake-up in the President’s team. At least one minister would need to be fired, along with a senior general in charge of the counteroffensive, they said, to ensure accountability for Ukraine’s slow progress at the front. “We’re not moving forward”, says one of Zelensky’s close aides. Some front-line commanders, he continues, have begun refusing orders to advance, even when they came directly from the office of the President. “They just want to sit in the trenches and hold the line”, he says. “But we can’t win a war that way”.
When I raised these claims with a senior military officer, he said that some commanders have little choice in second-guessing orders from the top. At one point in early October, he said, the political leadership in Kyiv demanded an operation to “retake” the city of Horlivka, a strategic outpost in eastern Ukraine that the Russians have held and fiercely defended for nearly a decade. The answer came back in the form of a question: With what? “They don’t have the men or the weapons”, says the officer. “Where are the weapons? Where is the artillery? Where are the new recruits?”
In some branches of the military, the shortage of personnel has become even more dire than the deficit in arms and ammunition. One of Zelensky’s close aides tells me that even if the US and its allies come through with all the weapons they have pledged, “we don’t have the men to use them”.
Since the start of the invasion, Ukraine has refused to release official counts of dead and wounded. But according to US and European estimates, the toll has long surpassed 100,000 on each side of the war. It has eroded the ranks of Ukraine’s armed forces so badly that draft offices have been forced to call up ever older personnel, raising the average age of a soldier in Ukraine to around 43 years. “They’re grown men now, and they aren’t that healthy to begin with”, says the close aide to Zelensky. “This is Ukraine. Not Scandinavia.”
Ukraine’s old problems, foremost corruption, persist:
Amid all the pressure to root out corruption, I assumed, perhaps naively, that officials in Ukraine would think twice before taking a bribe or pocketing state funds. But when I made this point to a top presidential adviser in early October, he asked me to turn off my audio recorder so he could speak more freely. “Simon, you’re mistaken”, he says. “People are stealing like there’s no tomorrow”.
Knowing that the ship is sinking, this is probably what I would do too. Bring anything available onto my personal life raft and prepare for cutting its lines to the mother ship.
The Time piece is a signal. It announces the end of Zelenski’s regime. I am sure that the National Security Council, as well as the State Department, is feverishly looking for an alternative – and for a face-saving way to install it.
Someone seems to protect and promote Alexey Arestovich {6} for exactly that purpose (machine translation):
After leaving the Presidential Office with a scandal in January 2023, Arestovich, although he began to criticize the actions of the authorities, nevertheless did it carefully until recently. But right now, he’s just slamming the ruling team.
Arestovich focuses on two things: the military decisions of the country’s leadership and its domestic policy.
…
The second version: Arestovich enlisted the support of Americans who want to see more political diversity in Ukraine and are not interested in Zelensky’s monopolization of power.
In favor of this version, they also use the fact mentioned above that the tightening of the rhetoric of the ex-adviser to the president’s Office began after his trip to the United States. Also in this regard, they recall his interview with Gordon in early October {7}, where he says that if the West decides to end the war without reaching the borders of 1991 and Zelensky resists this, then the president of Ukraine will be “changed” in the elections.
…
“It is possible that Arestovich is supported by a certain part of the Western elites, who care about the breadth of opinions in Ukraine. They say that the country can speak not only with Zelensky’s voice, but there are also different critical opinions”, political analyst Ruslan Bortnik comments to Strana.
In its grand strategy, the White House had sought to pivot to Asia. But the US is – first in Ukraine, in a completely unnecessary conflict the US itself has caused, and, with Gaza in flames, again in the Middle East.
In a recent talk in Australia, John Mearsheimer takes a deep dive into this dilemma {8} (video). He doesn’t foresee a good outcome.
The Israel vs Arab Children War, which doubles as the Hegemon vs Axis of Resistance War, both a sub-branch of the Nato vs Russia and Nato vs China Wars, is veering totally out of control.
By now, it’s firmly established that with China brokering peace all across West Asia, and Russia & China going all out on BRICS 11, complete with facilitating energy trade settlements outside the US dollar, The Empire Strikes Back would be totally predictable:
Let’s set West Asia on fire
The immediate goal of Straussian neocon psychos and their silos across the Beltway is to go for Syria, Lebanon – and, ultimately, Iran.
That’s what explains the presence in the Central and Eastern Mediterranean of a fleet of at least 73 US/Nato warships – ranging from two American aircraft carrier groups to 30+ ships from 14 Nato members involved in the ongoing Dynamic Mariner war games {1} off the coast of Italy.
That’s the largest concentration of US/Nato warships since the 1970s.
Anyone believing this fleet is being assembled to “assist” Israel in its Final Solution project of imposing Nakba 2.0 on Gaza must read some Lewis Carroll. The shadow war already in play aims to smash all the Axis of Resistance nodes in Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq – with Iran kept as the culminating piece de resistance.
Any military analyst with an IQ over room temperature knows all those expensive American iron bathtubs are destined to become sub-oceanic coral reef designs – especially if visited by hypersonic missiles.
Of course, this could all be just your average American Power Projection/Deterrence Show. The main actors – Iran and Russia – are not impressed. All it takes is a backward glance over the shoulders at what a bunch of mountain goat herders with fake Kalashnikovs did to Nato in Afghanistan.
Moreover, the Hegemon would need to rely on a serious network of bases on the ground if it ever considered launching a war against Iran. No West Asia actor would allow the US to use bases in Qatar, Kuwait, Iraq, or even Jordan. Baghdad is already engaged, for quite a while, in getting rid of all American bases.
Where’s my new Pearl Harbor?
Plan B is, what else, setting up yet another Pearl Harbor (the last one was only a few weeks ago, according to Tel Aviv). After all organizing such a lavish display of gunboat diplomacy in an inland sea unveils a mouth-watering choice of sitting ducks.
It’s idle to expect Pentagon head Lloyd “Raytheon” Austin to factor in the possible, cosmic humiliation of the Hegemon having one of its multibillion-dollar bathtubs sunk by an Iranian missile. Were that to happen, they would go – literally – nuclear.
Alastair Crooke – the gold, platinum, and rare earth analytical standard – has warned {2} that all hot spots may blow up all at once, destroying the entire (italics mine) US “alliance system”.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, as usual, nailed it, when he said that if Gaza is destroyed, the resulting catastrophe will last “decades, if not centuries”.
What started as a roll of the dice in Gaza is now expanding to all of West Asia and, afterward, inevitably, to Europe, Africa, and Asia.
Everyone remembers the preamble to the current incendiary circumstances: the Brzezinski-tinged gambit played out in Ukraine to cut off Europe from Russian natural resources.
This has metastasized into the greatest world crisis since 1939. The Straussian neocon psychos in Washington DC have no clue how to back off. So as it stands, there is less than zero hope for a peaceful solution for both intertwined wars.
As I previously stressed {3}, the leaders of major oil producers – Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, and Kuwait – can cut off almost half of the oil production in the world in one fell swoop, demolishing the entire economies of the EU and US without firing a shot. Diplomatic sources assure this is being seriously considered.
As an old-school Deep State source, now in Europe, told me, serious players are actively involved in sending this message to the Beltway “to make the US think twice about igniting a war that they cannot control. When they go to Wall Street to check out the derivative exposure, they will already have had time to think it over as documents were sent to folks like Larry Fink at Blackrock and Michael Bloomberg.”
In parallel, a serious discussion is evolving in intelligence circles across the “new axis of evil” (Russia-China-Iran) about the necessity of consolidating a unified Islamic pole.
The prospects are not good – even if key poles such as Russia and China have clearly identified the common enemy of the whole Global South/Global Majority. Turkey under Erdogan is just posing. Saudi Arabia will not invest itself in defending/protecting Palestine no matter what. American clients/minions in West Asia are just scared. That leaves only Iran and the Axis of Resistance.
When in doubt, remember Yahwe
Meanwhile, the vengeful, narcissistic tribe of conquistadors, masters of political deception and moral exemption, is deep into consolidating its Nakba 2.0 {4} – which doubles as the perfect solution to illegally gobble up all that gas offshore Gaza.
The Israeli Ministry of Intelligence’s deportation directive affecting 2.3 million Palestinians is quite clear. It has been officially endorsed {5} by the Ministry on October 13.
It starts with expelling all Palestinians from northern Gaza, followed by serial “land operations”, leaving routes open across the Egyptian border in Rafah; and establishing “tent cities” in northern Sinai and, later on, even new cities to “resettle Palestinians” in Egypt.
Humanitarian Law and Policy Consultant Itay Epshtain has noted {6}, “I have not been able to detect, as of yet, an agenda item or government decision endorsing the directive of the Ministry. If it was indeed presented and approved, it would not likely be in the public domain.”
Several of Tel Aviv’s own extremists are confirming it in their outbursts, anyway.
As for the wider war, it has already been written. A long time ago. And they want to follow it to the letter, in tandem with American Christian Zio-cons.
Everyone remembers General Wesley Clark going to the Pentagon two months after 9/11 and learning about the neocon/Christian Zio-con plan to target 7 countries in 5 years for destruction:
Those were Iraq, Libya, Lebanon, Syria, Somalia, Sudan – and Iran.
All of them were destabilized, destroyed, or plunged into chaos.
The last one on the list is Iran.
Now go back to Deuteronomy 7:1-2, 24:
“Yahweh told Israel that he has identified “SEVEN NATIONS GREATER AND STRONGER THAN YOURSELF” (caps mine), that “you must put under curse of destruction”, and not “show them any pity”. As for their kings, “you will blot out their names under heaven”.
Israelis describe their strategy as being based on deterrence. To avoid fighting wars they must show how well they can fight if necessary. Potential adversaries must be persuaded not to take aggressive action by warning them of the consequences if they do.
The conceptual framework surrounding deterrence developed around nuclear weapons. This is deterrence of a special kind, because of the absolute nature of the weapons and how hard it is to use them to win a war because of the threat of retaliation in kind. We can see the caution this induces at work in the Russo-Ukraine War. NATO has not engaged directly on Ukraine’s behalf; Russia has not attacked NATO countries.
Israel also practices nuclear deterrence. It has its own arsenal, which it prefers not to talk about. It is one geared to deterring Arab governments, and now Iran, from starting wars intended to destroy the Jewish state. As with all nuclear deterrence, it does not require demonstrations of what the weapons can do or a readiness to use them. All that is required is that potentially hostile governments are aware of what could happen if an inter-state war escalates too far.
For lesser contingencies, including the threats posed by Hamas, operating out of Gaza, and Hezbollah, operating out of Lebanon, deterrence looks quite different. It is not based on absolute weapons and nor does it offer constant relief from danger. There is no guarantee of success and so when it fails, if only slightly, it must be restored, more like a fence that easily breaks but can then be mended than a solid brick wall. So, unlike nuclear deterrence, there can be no sole reliance on threats but instead a readiness to respond forcefully to any challenge to bring home to adversaries the folly of attacking Israel.
It is this deterrence that failed on 7 October 2023 and which may now never be restored. An enemy so irredeemably hostile that it will always be looking for ways to attack, whatever the severity of the likely response, appears beyond deterrence. Instead of deterring Hamas, Israel now wants to eliminate it as a political and military force, but any relief achieved by this approach might also be only temporary.
Why Deterrence?
Prior to becoming so dependent on deterrence Israel sought to control the threats directly by maintaining a substantial presence in the territories, which it did in both Gaza and Lebanon. The costs of maintaining that presence was too high.
In the case of Lebanon, Israel became fully engaged in the 1970s after the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) took up residence there, after being kicked out of Jordan in 1970. Because Lebanon was being used to mount raids, Israel occasionally went into Lebanon in response to push the guerrilla bases further away from its northern border. Then, in 1982, it entered in force, moving up the country, until it laid siege to Beirut. The aim was to push the PLO out (where they had some success) and also to install a government willing to make peace with Israel (where they failed completely). Hezbollah in its current form is a lasting consequence of those events.
The Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) eventually withdrew until they reached a strip of southern Lebanon, which they policed with a Christian militia. In 2000, after Prime Minister Ehud Barak decided that the Israeli presence there was doing more harm than good, they withdrew unilaterally. Hezbollah concluded that this was a great victory because this was the result of their constant harassment.
Five years later Israel left Gaza, again unilaterally. Ariel Sharon, a hardliner who had made his career by being tough on Arabs and was most responsible for the debacle in Lebanon, now as Prime Minister decided that the effort to hold on to Gaza was futile because Israel’s position could only be sustained an at inordinate cost. He ordered withdrawal. The IDF closed down the settlements, in the face of protests from their residents. (Sharon went into a coma before he could reveal what he had in mind for the West Bank).
The withdrawal was not negotiated with the Palestinians. No plans were made for what could follow. There were hopes that Gaza might turn a corner, replacing its seething resentment at occupation with economic development, but such hopes did not last long. Within two years Hamas was in control, first as a result of an election victory and then having won a short civil war with the Palestinian Authority.
With only rejectionist parties active in the territory, and no interest in coexistence with Israel, Hamas turned Gaza into its base for continuing its struggle, using all available resources, including those obtained from Iran, to manufacture rockets and build tunnels for smuggling and getting fighters into Israel.
Deterrence by Denial or Punishment
With two implacably hostile neighbours in positions to attack Israel at any time, and having abandoned the idea that they could be occupied, deterrence became the centrepiece of Israeli strategy.
Conceptually deterrence is usually described as taking one of two forms. The first is deterrence by denial, which basically means that, whatever the target’s aggressive intent, it is unable to act upon it because it will be thwarted if it tries. The other is deterrence by punishment. In this case the target can act on hostile intent and even do some real harm, but the punishment will be severe, and whatever the gains the costs suffered will be far higher. When an adversary is not deterred, and decides to attack, the costs must be sufficient to ensure that it does not try again. In this way deterrence can be restored.
Israel follows both forms of deterrence. For denial it constructs large fences to prevent incursions into its territory. Against the rockets of both Hamas and Hezbollah the fences were useless. So Israel also developed an elaborate and advanced air defence system – the Iron Dome – to prevent rocket attacks doing too much damage. The population can also access air raid shelters to protect them from those rockets that are not intercepted. The success rate of this system is impressive but not complete, and the attacks are cheaper to mount than to stop. So Israel normally seeks to add to the price for the perpetrators with air raids against the places from where they have been launched. There is always an element of punishment.
The punishment comes in three forms. First, it attempts to assassinate those responsible, whether political or military. Israel has conducted many ‘targeted killings’ over the years. These may have had short-term effects in disrupting the enemy’s command structures and operations, but their long-term effects are at most marginal. Others step up to take the place of those killed, and there is no guarantee that these replacements will be less capable or effective.
Second, it targets the military assets that make this possible. Again, in the short-term this can make a difference but in the long-term more rockets can be built, more tunnels dug, and more fighters recruited.
Third, because these assets are to be found in the middle of urban areas, often deliberately by schools and hospitals, civilians will suffer. Israel denies that it engages in collective punishment and the deliberate targeting of civilians. It is not a war crime to attack areas where civilians may be present if armed units are also there in the name of self-defence and military necessity. Hamas can be blamed for fighting out of such populated areas and Israel urges civilians to move away from areas where fighting is likely to be intense.
But intense strikes against military targets, especially when this includes tunnels believed to be below occupied buildings, or against individuals hiding in residential areas, are going to involve many civilian casualties and wider suffering. For onlookers the distinction between collateral and deliberate damage is often one without much difference.
Another feature of deterrence is that it appears as all stick and no carrot. There is no reason in principle why negative threats cannot be combined with positive inducements, but it is not a requirement of the strategy. And if the threats are working there is less reason to find incentives to encourage a potential adversary to coexist peacefully.
Does it Work? (i) Hezbollah
In July 2006 Hezbollah conducted a raid into Israel, combining rockets being fired into border towns and an attack on an Israeli patrol which left three soldiers dead and two abducted and taken into Lebanon. A failed rescue attempt led to three more deaths. Israel refused Hezbollah’s demand to swap Lebanese prisoners in Israeli jails for the abducted soldiers. Instead it responded with air and artillery strikes, not only against Hezbollah military targets but also civilian targets including Beirut airport. It also launched a land attack into southern Lebanon, which turned out to be costly and difficult as Hezbollah had well prepared positions.
Eventually the UN arranged a cease-fire. Much later the remains of the two soldiers were returned as part of a prisoner exchange. The operation was widely considered a failure in Israel, having exposed the country’s weaknesses to rocket attacks and a determined militia. Yet in an interview not long after the cease-fire, Hezbollah’s’ leader Hassan Nasrallah, acknowledged that the Israelis had killed up to 12 of his commanders. He went on to make an interesting comment about the initial operation.
‘If there was even a 1 percent chance that the July 11 capturing operation would have led to a war like the one that happened, would you have done it? I would say no, absolutely not, for humanitarian, moral, social, security, military, and political reasons.’
He then followed that up by saying that Israel was just waiting for an excuse for a planned attack, yet this admission, and the fact that there have been clashes since but nothing quite comparable, has been taken as evidence that perhaps deterrence can work.
But while Hezbollah is undoubtedly antagonistic towards Israel, it is not to the same degree as with Hamas. One reason for this is that Hezbollah is part of the Lebanese political system. While the most substantial force in the country, it still has to be responsive to other factions and persuasions who are less interested in its feud with Israel, and present itself as serving Lebanese interests. With the country in an economic mess, aggravated by the massive blast at the Beirut port in 2020, and only a caretaker government, it is not in a position to cope well with a war with Israel. Nor is Israel angling for a war with Lebanon.
Hezbollah’s agenda is as much set by Iranian considerations as Lebanese. For example it sent its fighters into Syria during the civil war there, where they worked with Iranian and Russian forces to prop up the Assad regime, although they were not assessed to have performed particularly effectively. (It is perhaps worth noting that the Sunni Hamas did not support Assad). It depends on Iran for its military assets, including its large number of missiles, which are much more capable than those of Hamas. This is therefore not straightforward Israeli deterrence. Hezbollah has no particular incentive to go to war with Israel other than as part of a larger Iranian project.
Does it Work? (ii) Gaza
The Gaza experience has been different. Ever since Hamas took over the territory there have been few periods of calm on the border. The clashes have varied in intensity and frequency, with big ones every few years. In all cases there was rocket fire from Hamas (and its junior partner Islamic Jihad) and air and artillery strikes from the Israelis; in all the casualties were starkly asymmetric with those on the Palestinian side far greater than those on the Israeli, especially civilians; in all the suffering of Palestinians led to Israel being denounced by international organizations, governments, as well as campaigning groups, for acting disproportionality. Other than in in 2021, when unrest spread even to Arab communities in Israel, there were always supporting protests elsewhere in the West Bank and elsewhere, but not much more. In all, after weeks of fighting there was a cease-fire of some sort and nothing much changed once the fighting subsided.
Given the regularity of the clashes, deterrence has worked poorly. From the Israeli perspective the priority was mainly to show that it was not rattled by any provocations and would respond forcefully each time. These responses were described as ‘mowing the lawn’ – which captured the idea of an indefinite conflict but one which could be contained through occasional forceful action.
Part of the shock of 7 October was that the Israeli government had convinced itself that this was working, to the extent that they were starting to ease the restrictions on Gaza. There was a problem with Islamic Jihad but Hamas did not seem too interested in any more violence. What happened then, in Israeli eyes, was not only a failure of intelligence but also of deterrence, and the extent of the failure meant that restoring deterrence no longer seemed an option.
The response followed the same pattern as before, except with more intensity – many individuals connected with the organisation and in particular the attacks of 7 October have been targeted and killed. Military infrastructure has been hit mercilessly, and the consequences of Hamas’s actions have been brought home to the suffering population, far more ferociously than in past episodes and with far more civilian casualties and general distress. This has led to international anger and demands for a cease-fire, despite the original provocation from Hamas.
So we can question whether deterrence was ever very much in operation with Hamas but it certainly is not now. Israel has no interest in persuading Hamas not to attack again. It wants to make sure that it can never do so again.
But it does need to deter Hezbollah, and in practice Iran. And a lot of effort has gone into that, including by the US, which has sent warships to the region. All of Iran’s network has been busy, including the Houthis in Yemen. Much of this so far has been largely posturing with the aim of demonstrating what might happen if the war continues at its current pace. In this respect it might be argued that from the Iran/Hezbollah perspective, deterrence has failed, because Israel has pressed on regardless with its ground war. They might still claim that they are tying down Israeli forces that might otherwise be used against Hamas.
If Hezbollah wanted to get involved it would have had more effect if it had sone so early on. Israel is now geared up for a two-front war, including evacuating people from the border with Lebanon and restocking the Iron Dome. This does not mean that it won’t get involved, especially if the accusations of letting Hamas down start to get to the leadership. The key decisions will be taken in Teheran, which will have to consider whether this is the issue on which to take on the US. A tweet from Iran’s President, Ebrahim Raisi, suggests that no decision has yet been made: ‘Zionist regime’s crimes have crossed the red lines, which may force everyone to take action.’
The pressure will also grow on other Arab countries to do more than issue statements, especially those who have already are, or were preparing to, ‘normalise’ relations with Israel. It is hard to assess how they will act, but if they look ahead, for reasons I come to below, they should see a significant role for themselves in shaping the new order that might yet emerge.
Next Steps
Israel’s land invasion of Gaza, that began on Friday evening, was undertaken despite US misgivings and in the face of strong Saudi objections, one a country upon which it relies and another which it has been courting. The Foreign Ministry has insulted the numerous countries supporting the cease-fire resolution in the General Assembly, and refused to talk to the UN Secretary- General because he saw equivalence between the unprovoked attacks on its people and it ruthless response undertaken in the name of self-defence.
Israel can note that it is hardly the only state in the region that puts its security needs above humanitarian considerations. The past decade has seen extraordinary loss of life in the battles against ISIS, and in the civil wars in Syria and Yemen (the last two with hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths). But the pressure on it to stop is only to grow. Israel is used to treading a lonely path, and it may find its position gets lonelier. As with its previous wars it will be resisting pressure for a cease-fire until its objectives have been achieved.
Can its objectives be achieved? That is not yet a given. Information on what is going on in the battles in northern Gaza and towards Gaza City are sketchy so it is unwise to speculate. It is also unclear how much humanitarian assistance will be able to get into Gaza in these conditions, and whether countries like Qatar are still playing a role as potential mediators, including in their efforts to get hostages released. In all of this, the biggest uncertainty away from the battlefield and the potential widening of the war is the future governance of Gaza.
Israel now has been forced to look beyond deterrence. It has now concluded that it is dealing with an entity that has never truly been deterred and can’t be deterred in the future. Wilder elements in Israel may fantasise about pushing all the Gazans out of the territory but that is not a serious option. This where the other flaw in Israel’s past deterrence strategy becomes painfully evident. It has not been accompanied by a more positive political strategy. The only long-term vision Israel offers is a Gaza without Hamas. The chaos and instability that would result if Gaza was turned into an ungovernable space without anyone in charge would serve nobody’s interests. A way will have to be found to fill the space.
The way that Israel has defined its objectives, success for Hamas simply requires surviving in a commanding position in Gaza. Even if is forced to evacuate its positions, Hamas will not disappear. It represents a strong political tradition in the Arab world and whatever happens to it over the coming weeks it will have the capacity to regenerate, and return to power if there is no alternative government in place.
There is no evidence of great love for Hamas among Gazans and at some point they will reflect on the missed opportunities to develop the territory and the wisdom of constantly provoking Israel into attacks which it is unable to mitigate. Nor is there much respect for the Palestinian Authority, which is generally considered to be inept and corrupt and unable to stand up at all to the Israelis. Though constitutionally the PA’s return to Gaza would seem the best option, this would be greeted suspiciously in the best of circumstances and even more so if it arrived behind Israeli tanks. Any government installed by Israel would lack legitimacy and would be a natural target for assassins.
So if Israel can’t find a government for Gaza someone else will have to. Here the main initiative will have to come from the Arab world, probably in concert with the US. This seems to be the conclusion of many of the analyses of those thinking about the aftermath of this war. It is possible, for example, to imagine at some point a multilateral conference including the main Arab and Western players, with Israel on the sidelines, tasked to come up with a viable government for Gaza, and manage the influx of aid necessary if the territory is to recover from the traumas of the past weeks as well as look to the possibilities for future development. It would also need to consider both Gaza’s internal security and how to stop it causing trouble to its neighbours (Egypt as well as Israel) in the future.
In principle this could be confined to Gaza but Arab governments are unlikely to go along with this unless the future of the West Bank is also addressed. The trade Israel faces in return for insisting that Hamas plays no part in the territory’s government is that the ‘two-state solution’ is put back on the agenda. Most western governments have already been quite explicit on this matter.
Netanyahu has been around long enough to know not to dismiss the two-state solution out of hand, even though he has built his career on subverting the idea, which is why up to now he was content to leave the rejectionist Hamas in charge in Gaza as he made life difficult for the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. The encroachment of settlements on the West Bank has made the prospect of a viable Palestinian state there seem even more remote. All one can say is that this war changes a lot. Up to now when the issue has come up, as it did for example in the pre-war talks with Saudi Arabia, Netanyahu has paid lip service to the idea while intending to do nothing to make it come about, pointing to the rivalry between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority as why progress is impossible.
But that excuse won’t work if a way can be found to get Hamas to evacuate Gaza. Netanyahu is unlikely to be on the scene for much longer. After all this Israel’s Western and Arab partners are not going to want to let the situation drift away into catastrophe again. In the end if there is to be any resolution of the current conflict the starting point will be taking the fate of Gaza away from both Hamas and Israel.
In a white paper {1} released over a week after the Hamas-led surprise attack on Israeli military bases and kibbutzes, The Institute for National Security and Zionist Strategy outlined “a plan for resettlement and final rehabilitation in Egypt of the entire population of Gaza”, based on the “unique and rare opportunity to evacuate the entire Gaza Strip” that Israel’s latest assault on the besieged coastal enclave provided.
Published in Hebrew on the organization’s website, the paper was authored by Amir Weitman, “an investment manager and visiting researcher” at the Institute who also leads the libertarian caucus of Israel’s ruling Likud Party. The document began by noting that there are 10 million vacant housing units in neighboring Egypt that could be “immediately” filled with Palestinians. Weitman then assured readers that the “sustainable plan … aligns well with the economic and geopolitical interests of the State of Israel, Egypt, the USA and Saudi Arabia”.
Weitman’s ethnic cleansing proposal echoes forced transfer plans advanced in recent days by former Israeli officials while capitalizing on evacuation orders delivered to the entire civilian population of northern Gaza by the Israeli military.
Weitman’s sinister blueprint imagined Israel purchasing these properties at a cost of $5~8 billion dollars, a whopping price-tag that reflects just 1~1.5 percent of Israel’s GDP.
“These sums of money [required to cleanse Gaza] in relation to the Israeli economy, are minimal”, Weitman posits. “Investing individual billions of dollars to solve this difficult issue is an innovative, cheap, and sustainable solution”.
Weitman acknowledged that his plan virtually amounts to Israel “buying the Gaza Strip”, arguing the move would be “a very worthwhile investment” for Zionists because it would “add a lot of value over time”. He asserted local “land conditions” in the area would provide “many” Israeli settlers a high standard of living, therefore allowing for an expansion of settlements in Gush Dan near the Egyptian border, giving “a tremendous impetus to settlement in the Negev”.
In December 2021, Tel Aviv approved plans to establish four settlements in the Negev to house 3,000 settler families.
A genocidal war to end all wars
Though Egypt has so far rejected Israeli pressure for a mass exodus of Gaza residents through the southern Rafah crossing, Weitman argued Cairo will welcome the mass exodus of Palestinian refugees as “an immediate stimulus” that will “provide a tremendous and immediate benefit to al-Sisi’s regime”.
Weitman claimed that Cairo’s major creditors – including France, Germany, and Saudi Arabia – are likely to welcome a revitalized Egyptian economy, courtesy of “Israeli investment” in the Palestinians’ permanent removal. He surmizes that Western Europe will welcome “the transfer of the entire Gaza population to Egypt”, because it will significantly “reduce the risk of illegal immigration … a tremendous advantage”. Meanwhile, he expects Riyadh to embrace the move because the “evacuation of the Gaza Strip means the elimination of a significant ally of Iran”.
The ethnic cleansing of Gaza would mean an end to “ceaseless, repeated rounds of fighting, which inflame the fires of hatred against Israel”. Moreover, “closing the Gaza issue will ensure a stable and increased supply of Israeli gas to Egypt and its liquefaction”, from the vast reserves seized by Israel near Gaza’s shores.
Palestinians in turn are expected to jump at the chance to be forcibly transferred from their homes rather than “living in poverty under the rule of Hamas”. It is therefore necessary for Israel to “create the right conditions” for them to “immigrate” from Gaza to Cairo. Weitman noted that Gaza’s two million inhabitants “constitute less than 2% of the total Egyptian population, which today already includes 9 million refugees. A drop in the ocean.”
The paper ominously concluded: “There is no doubt that in order for this plan to come to fruition, many conditions must exist at the same time. Currently, these conditions are met, and it is unclear when such an opportunity will arise again, if ever. This is the time to act. Now.”
“If we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill”
As barbarous as these proposals might seem, they reflect what many Israeli officials appear to be murmuring in private, and what at least one former government spinmeister has openly pushed as an altruistic solution to the Palestinian “problem”.
“There is a huge expanse, almost endless space in the Sinai Desert, just on the other side of Gaza”, former Deputy Foreign Minister of Israel, Danny Ayalon, echoed the genocidal Zionist logic behind Weitman’s proposal in an interview with Al Jazeera’s Marc Lamont Hill. “The idea is – and this is not the first time it will be done – for them to leave over to the open areas where we and the international community will prepare the infrastructure – you know, 10 cities with food and water – just like for the refugees of Syria”.
"There is almost endless space in the Sinai Desert…this is not the first time it has been done…we & the international community will prepare tent cities…"
Israeli politician Danny Ayalon describes the their vision for another Nakba today in Gaza.
In 2004, Zionist demographer Arnon Sofer of Haifa University laid out detailed plans {2} for the isolation of Gaza directly to Ariel Sharon’s government. This entailed withdrawing Israeli forces from the area entirely and constructing a stringent system of surveillance and security to ensure nothing and no one went in or out without Zionist proviso. He predicted a perpetual bloodbath:
When 2.5 million people live in a closed-off Gaza, it’s going to be a human catastrophe. Those people will become even bigger animals than they are today … The pressure at the border will be awful. It’s going to be a terrible war. So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day … the only thing that concerns me is how to ensure the boys and men who are going to have to do the killing will be able to return home to their families and be normal human beings.
The Institute has put forward a clean and easy fantasy of achieving the same goal put forward by Sofer. For it to succeed, all Palestinians have to do is put down their weapons and head toward the desert of permanent exile.
Arnon Sofer is an academic who helped devise Israel's siege of Gaza to engineer a one-way peace
Sofer said, "If we want to remain alive, we have to kill and kill and kill, all day, every day. If we don't kill, we will cease to exist."
I want to look at two questions – what will happen internationally, and what is happening in Western societies.
Israel plainly is on the course of further escalation and intends to kill many thousands more Palestinians. More than 2,000 Palestinian children alone have now been killed by Israeli aerial attacks in the last fortnight.
Gaza has no defence from bombs and missiles, and there is no military reason why Israel cannot keep this up for months and simply rely upon aerial massacre. We are perhaps within a week of thirst, starvation, and disease killing even more people per day than bombardment.
The population of Gaza is simply defenceless. Only international intervention can stop Israel from doing whatever it wishes, and those countries that have influence with Israel are actively abetting and encouraging the genocide.
The question is, what is Israel’s aim? Do they intend to reduce the Gaza Strip still further, annexing half or more of it? Will starvation and horror enable the international community to force Egypt to accept the expulsion of the population of Gaza into the Sinai Desert as a “humanitarian” move?
That appears to be the end game: the expulsion of population and territorial expansion into Gaza. That would require a ground invasion, but probably not until after even more intense aerial bombardment to eliminate all resistance. This territorial ambition of course accords with the violent expansion of illegal settlement in the West Bank which is currently under way, with the world paying almost no attention. It is very hard indeed to comprehend the passivity of Fatah and Mahmoud Abbas at the moment.
Netanyahu’s political stock within Israel is so low, that the only way he can recover is by making a major step towards the complete genocide of the Palestinian people and the achievement of Greater Israel. Netanyahu now knows that there is no violence against Palestinians so extreme that the Western political elite will not support it under the mantra of “Israel’s right to self-defence”.
I do not see any salvation for Gaza coming from Hezbollah. If Hezbollah were to employ its vaunted missile strike capabilities, the moment to do it would be now when the Israeli armour is drawn up in massive parks outside Gaza, a perfect target even for longer-range missiles of limited accuracy. Once dispersed into Gaza, the armour would be far harder for Hezbollah to hit at range.
Hezbollah is even better equipped now to fight a defensive war in Lebanon than it was when it defeated the Israeli advance in 2006. But it is not configured or equipped to fight an aggressive ground war in Israel, which would be a disaster. It also has to worry about hostile militias in its rear. If Hezbollah can provoke an Israeli incursion into Southern Lebanon, that would enable it to inflict substantial casualties, but Israel is not going to do that in a way that detracts from its capabilities in Gaza.
Iran has greatly improved its diplomatic position in the last year. The Chinese-brokered lessening of hostility with Saudi Arabia has the potential to revolutionise Middle Eastern politics, and the benefits of this will not lightly be laid aside by Tehran. Iran had also made real progress with the Biden administration in overcoming the blind hostility of the Trump years.
Iran has no desire to throw away these gains. That is why it seems to me extremely improbable that Iran had endorsed the 7 October attacks by Hamas. Iran is now restraining Hezbollah. But there are limits to the patience of Iran. The extraordinary truth is that Iran is probably the only state under discussion here with a genuine humanitarian concern for the lives of Palestinians. If the genocide unfolds as horribly as I anticipate, Iran can be pushed too far.
That said, I offer just a cautionary footnote that Saudi Arabia is not, under MBS, quite the reliable US/Israeli puppet it has historically been. I do not have much time for MBS, as you know, but his high opinion of the importance of the Al Saud and their leadership role among Arabs makes him a different proposition from his predecessor.
Saudi Arabia has leverage. The Biden administration has gone all in on regional domination, sending two aircraft carrier groups into a situation which should it escalate, could send oil prices to highest-ever levels, with Russia blocked from the market. Biden is risking a huge gas price hike in an election year.
Biden’s calculation, or that of his security services, is that nobody can or will intervene to save the Palestinians. They judge the genocide as containable. That is an extraordinary gamble.
There has been an extraordinary amount of vitriol aimed at Qatar by pro-Israel commentators, for hosting the Hamas office and leadership. This is extraordinarily ignorant.
Qatar hosts Hamas, just as Qatar hosted the Taliban Information Office, at the direct request of the United States. It provides a means of dialogue between the United States and Hamas (exactly as it did with the Taliban) both at a deniable level, and through third parties, including of course the government of Qatar. Thus when Blinken arrived in Qatar one day and the Iranian foreign minister the next, these were in fact “proximity talks” involving Hamas.
How do I know? Well, at Julian’s request, I visited Qatar about five years ago to discuss whether Julian and Wikileaks, might potentially relocate to Qatar, which Julian had described as “the new Switzerland” in terms of being a neutral diplomatic venue.
It was explained to me by the Qataris, at a very senior level, that Qatar hosted the Taliban Information Office and Hamas because the United States government had asked them to do so. Qatar hosted a major US military base and depended on US support against a Saudi takeover. If I could generate a request from then President Trump for Qatar to host Wikileaks, then they would do so. Otherwise, no.
So I know what I am talking about.
One tiny but good result of this brokering in Qatar was the release of two American national hostages. British diplomats have told me that discussions in Qatar have so far held back the Israeli ground offensive, but I am not convinced that Israel really wished to do this yet. They are having sadistic fun shooting children in a barrel.
Qatar has also been the origin of deals allowing in a tiny amount of aid to Gaza, but this is so small as to be almost irrelevant. It is performative humanitarianism by the West.
I have frequently praised China for the fact that its economic dominance has been unaccompanied by any aggressive desire for world hegemony, but this also has its downside. China sees no benefit in assisting the Palestinians in practice. Hopeful reports of China sending warships refer simply to pre-planned exercises, largely in the Gulf. That China is carrying out such joint exercises with Gulf states is indeed part of a long-term increasing of influence, but is not relevant to the immediate reality.
Russia of course has its hands full in Ukraine. It is allowing its Syrian bases to be used as a conduit following increased Israeli bombing of Syrian airports, but there is not a great deal more that it can do. Erdoğan is genuinely furious at what is happening in Gaza, but Turkey is struggling to find any way to apply pressure, barring linkage to Ukraine shipping issues (which Erdoğan is considering).
That is a very rough and ready tour d’horizon, but the net effect is that I see no current hope for averting the atrocity that is unfolding before our horrified eyes.
Most of our eyes are indeed horrified. The gap between the Western political and media elites and their people on this issue is simply enormous. Western leaders have not only failed to restrain Israel, they have almost unanimously egged Netanyahu on, with the continued repetition of the phrase “Israel’s right to self-defence” as justification for the mass bombing, removal, and starvation of an entire civilian population.
The Western leadership’s glee in vetoing every attempt at a ceasefire resolution at the UN is astonishing.
Massive demonstrations have been taking place across Europe against this unspeakable massacre, and the knee-jerk reaction of politicians at their isolation from public opinion has been to try to make such shows of dissent illegal. In the UK people have been arrested for displaying Palestinian flags. In Germany, pro-Palestinian demonstrations have been entirely banned. Something similar has been attempted in France, with predictable failure.
I have myself attended pro-Palestinian demonstrations in three different countries, and the most striking thing on each occasion was the strong support of passers-by, and the number of people spontaneously coming out to join the demo as it passed.
A wave of racism has been unleashed in the UK and elsewhere. I am astonished by the Islamophobia and racial hatred released online, with no apparent comeback. UK Ministers claim to be alarmed at the “terrorist sympathies” of pro-Palestinian demonstrators, yet it is perfectly legal to call for Palestinians to be exterminated, to compare them to different types of animals and vermin, and suggest they should be driven into the sea. That does not horrify ministers at all.
I am personally now subject to a police investigation for “terrorism” merely for suggesting that the Palestinians too have a right to self-defence and may offer armed resistance to genocide – a right they enjoy beyond doubt in international law. Remember, Israel has formally declared war. Is it the position in British law that the only belief it is legal to hold and express, is that in this war the Palestinians must simply line up quietly to be killed?
The step change in Western authoritarianism is likely to be met by blowback.
After 20 years, we had finally come through the vicious cycle of the “War on Terror”, where terrorism, repression, and institutionalised Islamophobia all boosted each other across the Western world. Outrage at the appalling genocide in Gaza is very likely to result in isolated incidences of, also appalling, Islamist-inspired violence in Western countries, including the UK, particularly because of the UK’s military support of Israel.
That consequential terrorism in itself will be cited by the political elite as justifying their stance. And so the vicious cycle will restart. This will of course be welcome to the agents of the security state, whose power, budgets, and prestige will be boosted. Once again we have to be on the lookout for radicalisation and real terrorism, but also for agent-provocateur-led terrorism and for false flag terrorism.
If we descend back into that nightmare again, the direct cause will be elite support for the genocide of the Palestinian people and the Islamophobic narrative. The major cause of terrorism here is Israel, the terrorist apartheid state.
A decade ago, while on a trip to the Middle East, my wife and I were sharing a pizza dinner in a Jerusalem hotel with an American journalist and a photographer who had just returned from a reporting visit to Gaza City. An anchorman for one of America’s television networks and his wife joined us. The journalist and photographer chatted at some point in Arabic with our waiter, and that chatter prompted a middle-aged gentleman in a suit and tie who was dining alone to approach our table and ask if he could join. He explained that he was a US Army intelligence officer, a colonel, assigned to the American consulate in Jerusalem and his mission was to report on Gaza. The only problem, he said, was that he was not allowed to actually travel to Gaza and so when he overheard the journalists talking about their visit there, he wanted to know more.
We invited him to join, and the colonel got what was in effect a briefing on the deprivation and despair that the reporters had found.
Gaza and Hamas – the Islamist group that has led the territory since 2007 – remain murky, confounding subjects today. Why did Hamas stage an early morning raid on October 7 in what turned out to be a series of unguarded kibbutzim in Israel’s south? Why were only a few Israeli soldiers on duty that morning?
We in the media do not know the full story. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is saying nothing about Israel’s failure to defend its citizens, although a number of leading generals have publicly apologized for their lapse, and Hamas has insisted that the mission it authorized was solely aimed at the capture of a few Israeli soldiers to be used for a possible prisoner exchange. Hamas operatives began the operation early on the morning of October 7 by blowing up the unguarded fences separating Gaza from Israel.
Hamas also has claimed that the bulk of the mayhem was caused by other terrorist groups and the aggrieved citizens of Gaza who flooded across the downed gates and fences, with no Israeli soldiers to stop them. It has been widely reported that Israel, at the instigation of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, was financing Hamas, via funds supplied by Qatar, in the belief that a strong Hamas would make a two-state solution, long sought by some in Washington, unlikely.
That is where we are today. Israel is now in the process of turning Gaza City into rubble, via constant bombing, and is also planning to begin a ground invasion in the near future. A well-informed American official told me that the Israeli leadership is known to be considering flooding Hamas’s vast tunnel system before sending in its troops, many of whom have had only a few weeks of training in the maneuvers and coordination required for the invasion. Such an act could mean that Israel was prepared to write off the hostages still in jeopardy.
Where the estimated two hundred-plus hostages are is an open question. Israel is only talking about the end of the Hamas regime, and Hamas has so far released four hostages. Two elderly Israelis were released yesterday, with no known demands.
The release was the second in three days. The first involved two Americans, a mother and her teenage daughter, who appeared to be in good health. All four were given over to the International Committee of the Red Cross. The American official told me that the Israel leadership expects more to come soon. The releases could be a sign that the Hamas leadership is feeling pressure because of the incessant bombing, which is widely assumed to be a precursor to an all-out Israel ground attack. They could also be a sign that Hamas is not going to let the Israeli bombing dictate its hostage policy. There have been secret talks about a larger release of Israeli prisoners since the first United Nations relief trucks began flowing from Egypt into southern Gaza, where up to a million hungry and thirsty refugees were waiting.
The complete aid shipment should have been delivered directly to the Red Cross representatives who are already in Gaza City, the American official told me, “but the Egyptian UN officials wanted a cut and so did Hamas”. The official said that after much back and forth late last week a deal was worked out. The distribution of the goods would be left in the hands of Red Cross officials in Gaza City, and Hamas would forward its share, the official said, to its fighters “in the tunnels and their families. The rest would go to cronies” – that is, to senior members of the Hamas leadership. In return, Hamas would release ten more hostages when the actual transfer of goods took place. It is not known whether the hostages to be released were to include any Americans.
The American official who outlined the bargaining involved did not know why the agreement fell apart. But he was dismissive of the greed involved. “The Egyptians and Palestinian factions were fighting for the relief goods”, he told me, “while the needy living without clean water and food will continue to suffer”.
One serious complication that has not been publicly discussed since the October 7 attack is that the Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, were not the sole attackers or collectors of hostages on a day in which there was no Israeli Army presence in the kibbutzim and villages under attack for at least eight hours.
“We know”, the American official told me, “that the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade participated”. He was referring to a coalition of Palestinian armed groups that have been designated as a terrorist organization by the United States, Israel, the European Union, and a number of other nations worldwide. (Hamas has also been designated a terrorist group by the US and the EU.)
Was the attack a surprise to the Hamas civilian leadership? No. It was long in the planning and coordinated. The other crazies with a history of terrorism were enlisted to join forces. Did they expect success? No. Did the attacking force commit egregious atrocities? Yes. Was it unanticipated by Hamas? No. All involved proclaimed their intention and proved it in their tactics over the past twenty years. Will Israel react and destroy Hamas? Yes. Are they justified? Was the creation of a Jewish state justified? One person’s answer to the second question answers the first.
He went on:
Will the refugees die of starvation? No. Public sympathy for their genuine suffering will save the day.
I heard a similar account of how the long-planned October 7 attack got out of control from a long-standing expert on Middle Eastern politics who has no access to American intelligence assessments. “The goal of the Palestinian operation”, he told me, “was exactly what happened – a shocking and inspired military operation that humiliated the Israelis and shook them to their foundation. Hamas military commanders had a map of bases [inside Israel] and wanted to take computer servers with all of the potentially compromising information they contained and would probably have sent them to Iran for analysis.”
Another Hamas goal, I was told, was to take Israeli Army prisoners and force Israel to trade for the release of thousands of Gazan and West Bank prisoners, break the siege of Gaza, and continue to compete with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) that was initially designated by the 1993 Oslo Accords to control the West Bank and Gaza. “A further bonus of a successful attack”, the expert said, “would have been to stifle the ongoing normalization talks between Saudi Arabia and Israel”.
The Qassam wing of Hamas initiated the attack by launching rockets to distract the Israeli military and then disarmed the electronic system that provided round-the-clock surveillance of the fence around Gaza. The Hamas fighters who poured through the destroyed fence were soon followed by local residents of Gaza City who, in their ongoing anger at Israel, were eager to join in on the assault, as were members of other resistance groups in the Gaza Strip. The expert said he was told that attacking the all-night dance party – 260 young Israelis were slaughtered that morning – was not part of the initial plan, but no one is denying that, planned or not, the murders at the dance party and in the Israeli settlements ultimately are the responsibility of Hamas.
From the Hamas point of view, the expert added, “no matter what the Israelis do” in response to the slaughter triggered by Hamas – attack in force with ground troops or continue the saturation bombing of Gaza City – the October 7 raid was one from which the Israeli Defense Force cannot recover. The expert told me that “Israel calling in the US to make threats and send carriers and make threats only makes Israel look weaker”. The expert added that the Hamas leadership understands that Israel may have to invade Gaza on the ground in the immediate future and declare victory no matter how many casualties are incurred, if only to reassure its traumatized population.
The expert said that the critical issue for the Israeli military today, in the view of the Hamas leadership, is that a planned Hamas commando raid aimed at seizing Israeli Defense Force (IDF) soldiers “turned into a prison break”. News of the unchallenged penetration of the initial Hamas attackers quickly spread throughout Gaza, and spontaneous groups of Gazans and hastily formed martyr hit teams poured through the downed fence. The result, said the expert, turned “the operation into a catastrophic success”.
More than 200 hostages were carted off – one can see their abduction in various videos that have emerged – on the backs of a motorcycle or a bicycle or jammed into autos, and now are believed to be scattered in underground tunnels or in private homes throughout Gaza. Their fate may never be known.
There are scores of videos providing evidence of what clearly was a fly-by-night attack that succeeded because of a stunning IDF failure that thus far has not led to the punishment of a single Israeli army officer. That possibility – that the initially limited Hamas goal turned into the horror that took place essentially because of the IDF failure – has yet to be acknowledged by Israel’s military and political leadership. They believe, as the expert said, that Hamas and other factions broke out of Gaza into Israel with specific orders to kill and abduct as many civilians and soldiers as possible.
On October 11, Tal Heinrich, the spokesman for Netanyahu, added to the furor by telling CNN that the IDF found Israeli infants and toddlers with their “heads decapitated”, presumably while going house to house searching for survivors. Netanyahu was reported to have conveyed such to President Biden during one of their meetings this month. Hamas immediately denied the subsequent reports, which briefly dominated the news in America. A spokesman for the Israeli government announced a day later that it could not confirm that Hamas attackers cut off the heads of babies.
Whatever the truth, the Israeli public is rattled as never before with questions about the ability of the Israeli government to protect its citizenry. In return, they are subjected to braying and bellicosity by their prime minister who, unlike his senior generals and the head of Shin Bet, the Israeli internal security agency, has refused so far to publicly take responsibility for the military and intelligence failures on October 7. A recent public opinion poll in Israel showed that Netanyahu has the support of 29 percent of his country.
TRUTH TIME 