Israel

It is impossible to read anything by Mehdi Hasan without hearing it in his voice. Fact.

Consider the record of recent weeks and months:

• Israel’s prime minister, while standing on stage at the UN general assembly, denounced the body as “contemptible”, a “house of darkness” and a “swamp of antisemitic bile”.
• Israel’s outgoing ambassador to the UN shredded a copy of the UN charter with a miniature paper shredder while also standing at the podium of the general assembly, and later said the UN headquarters in New York “should be closed and wiped off the face of the Earth”.
• Israel’s foreign minister falsely accused the UN secretary general of not having condemned Iran’s attacks on Israel, declared him “persona non grata in Israel” and announced that he had “banned him from entering the country”.
• The Israeli government actively obstructed a UN-mandated commission of inquiry trying to collect evidence on the 7 October attacks.
• Israel’s parliament is in the process of designating a longstanding UN agency, Unrwa, as a “terrorist organization”.
• The Israeli military has bombed UN schools, warehouses and refugee camps in Gaza for 12 consecutive months, and killed a record 228 UN employees in the process. “By far the highest number of our personnel killed in a single conflict or natural disaster since the creation of the United Nations,” to quote the UN secretary general.
• The Israeli military is now also attacking UN peacekeepers in southern Lebanon. According to the UN, “five UN ‘Blue Helmets’ serving with UNIFIL in Lebanon have been injured as Israeli forces inflicted damage on UN positions close to the ‘Blue Line’.”

How is any of this OK? Acceptable? Legal?

Perhaps the biggest question of all: how is Israel still allowed to remain a member of the UN? Why has it not yet been expelled from an organization that it is relentlessly and shamelessly attacking and undermining? Sure, there are other human rights abusers that remain card-carrying members of the UN – Syria, Russia and North Korea, to name but a few – but none of them have killed UN employees en masse; none of them have sent tanks to invade a UN base; none of them have “refused to comply with more than two dozen UNSC resolutions”. It has been more than 60 years since any country in the world dared make the UN secretary general himself “persona non grata”.

In retrospect, the most honest and accurate rendering of Biden’s policy was found in his remarks to donors last December, in which he assured them that, while his administration would continue seeking to build a broader regional security architecture, “we’re not going to do a damn thing other than protect Israel in the process. Not a single thing.” If he was willing to constrain Israel at all, it was mainly in preventing the war from spreading beyond Gaza. This was perhaps his true and only red line for many months. Israel would be free to turn Gaza into a killing field, provided it didn’t escalate regionally. Yet today, Netanyahu is rolling over that red line too in Lebanon, and possibly soon in Iran, to the exultation of all of those who have been most stupendously and consistently wrong about the region over the past 20 years.

And why shouldn’t he? By taking the option of suspending military aid off the table, Biden signaled from the outset that his red lines were meaningless. 

[…]

The story that is now being crafted through friendly journalists is that Biden tried his best but his effort to bring the war to an end was ultimately frustrated by Netanyahu’s shenanigans. But Biden wasn’t hoodwinked by Netanyahu any more than he was by George W. Bush when he chose to back the Iraq War. He chose this path, and stayed on it despite constant warnings of exactly where it was leading. Having done so, when he exits the White House, he and his team will leave this world a more dangerous and lawless place, America’s credibility more broken, the so-called “rules-based order” even more “so-called” than when he entered. 

“The costs of these new rules of war” that Biden has co-authored in Gaza, wrote Lara Friedman of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, “will be paid with the blood of civilians worldwide for generations to come, and the U.S. responsibility for enabling, defending, and normalizing these new rules, and their horrific, dehumanizing consequences will not be forgotten.”

Rabbi Danya is fast becoming one of my favourite believers, and this story is just bonkers but also ultimately very, very serious:

Some of you may remember that back in Leviticus, we talked about how you had to be in a special kind of– oh, energetic/ spiritual state (?) – when you went to the Temple. Various things– like contracting certain diseases, emitting semen, menstruating, experiencing pregnancy endings, coming in contact with a corpse, etc. – put you in the "everyday state" (that is, made you tameh). Depending on what it was that made you tameh, different things might need to happen to get you back into that Temple-ready "elevated state," (make you tahor). Some of these required waiting a certain amount of time (eg, waiting a week after the onset of menses), some required washing in water at the end of a prescribed time, some necessitated getting sign-off from a priest, and then there's this:

"God spoke to Moses and Aaron, saying: This is the ritual law that God has commanded: Instruct the Israelite people to bring you a red cow without blemish, in which there is no defect and on which no yoke has been laid...." (Numbers 19:1-2)

[…]

So for the people who want to rebuild the Third Temple, this becomes an issue. 

You can't very well restart animal sacrifice in God's House if you're tameh, dig?

Needless to say, this issue is far from theoretical. 

There are various extremist Jewish and Christian (and Jewish and Christian, together) groups working to rebuild the Third Temple, each for their own aims; an unholy alliance between extremist far-right members of the Israeli government and those with powerful American political sway.

On the Christian side, well, here's how Moral Majority founder Jerry Falwell, sometimes called sometimes the father of contemporary Christian Zionism, once put it:

“I am one of those who believe that the next event on God’s calendar is the rapture of the Church—the coming of Christ to take the Church to itself. I believe there will be a seven-year tribulation period. It is during that time that the new Temple will be built. And I believe that, at the end of the seven years of tribulation, the battle of Armageddon will transpire and the establishment of the one-thousand-year reign of Christ on Earth will begin.”

[…]

In September, 2022, five unblemished Red Heifers were shipped (First Class!) from Texas to, ultimately, the West Bank Israeli settlement of Shiloh.

Palestinians living abroad have accused Microsoft of closing their email accounts without warning - cutting them off from crucial online services.

They say it has left them unable to access bank accounts and job offers - and stopped them using Skype, which Microsoft owns, to contact relatives in war-torn Gaza.

Microsoft says they violated its terms of service - a claim they dispute.

"They killed my life online," said Eiad Hametto, who lives in Saudi Arabia.

"They’ve suspended my email account that I’ve had for nearly 20 years - It was connected to all my work," he told the BBC.

He also said being cut off from Skype was a huge blow for his family.

In early June, Al Jazeera aired a series of disturbing videos revealing what it described as “summary executions”: Israeli soldiers shooting dead several Palestinians walking near the coastal road in the Gaza Strip, on three separate occasions. In each case, the Palestinians appeared unarmed and did not pose any imminent threat to the soldiers.

Such footage is rare, due to the severe constraints faced by journalists in the besieged enclave and the constant danger to their lives. But these executions, which did not appear to have any security rationale, are consistent with the testimonies of six Israeli soldiers who spoke to +972 Magazine and Local Call following their release from active duty in Gaza in recent months. Corroborating the testimonies of Palestinian eyewitnesses and doctors throughout the war, the soldiers described being authorized to open fire on Palestinians virtually at will, including civilians.

The six sources — all except one of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity — recounted how Israeli soldiers routinely executed Palestinian civilians simply because they entered an area that the military defined as a “no-go zone.” The testimonies paint a picture of a landscape littered with civilian corpses, which are left to rot or be eaten by stray animals; the army only hides them from view ahead of the arrival of international aid convoys, so that “images of people in advanced stages of decay don’t come out.” Two of the soldiers also testified to a systematic policy of setting Palestinian homes on fire after occupying them.

Speaking at the McCain Institute on Friday alongside Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Romney lamented Israel’s inability to control the flow of information out of and about Gaza, despite its best efforts to restrict press access. 

“I mean, typically the Israelis are good at P.R. What’s happened here? How have they—how have they, and we, been so ineffective at communicating the realities there and our point of view?” Romney asked Blinken, seemingly in disbelief that images of Israel’s indiscriminate bombing of Gaza have prompted outrage in the United States.

Then Romney explained that the TikTok ban overwhelmingly passed both chambers of Congress because of the widespread Palestinian advocacy on the app.

“Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down potentially TikTok or other entities of that nature. If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians relative to other social media sites, it’s overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts. So I’d note that’s of real interest, and the President will get the chance to make action in that regard,” Romney said.

Atrocities against babies that the head of the Israeli army’s national rescue unit alleged were committed by Hamas fighters when they attacked an Israeli kibbutz on 7 October were in fact lurid tales of the officer’s own invention, intended to provide a pretext for genocide in the Gaza Strip, and to protect the massacre’s actual perpetrators: Israel’s own soldiers, acting on the orders of a top general.

As Israeli forces recaptured territories temporarily taken by Hamas earlier that day, the commander of the national rescue unit of the Israeli army’s Home Front Command Colonel Golan Vach led the recovery of corpses from the region, which spanned an area of hundreds of square kilometers. A week later, Vach began asserting that Hamas fighters had brutally executed “eight babies” in a single house in Kibbutz Be’eri.

“They were concentrated there and they killed them and they burned them,” Vach told a throng of reporters on 14 October, pointing through a smashed window into the charred living room of kibbutz resident Pessi Cohen.

According to the only two captives who survived the bloodbath, however, a total of 13 civilians died at Cohen’s home, including Cohen herself, and none were babies or toddlers.

All of them were middle-aged or older, save for adolescent twins taken captive from next door.

None of the 13 civilians killed were executed and only one of them was certainly killed by Hamas fighters who conquered the kibbutz house by house on the morning of 7 October, the survivors say. The remaining 12 were killed hours later during Israel’s counteroffensive to reconquer the territory.

The sociologist Stanley Cohen, who articulated the first theory of “moral panics” in the late 1960s, summarized their main elements in the introduction to the 2002 third edition of Folk Devils and Moral Panics:

"They are new (lying dormant perhaps, but hard to recognize; deceptively ordinary and routine, but invisibly creeping up the moral horizon)—but also old (camouflaged versions of traditional and well-known evils). They are damaging in themselves—but also merely warning signs of the real, much deeper and more prevalent condition. They are transparent (anyone can see what’s happening)—but also opaque: accredited experts must explain the perils hidden behind the superficially harmless (decode a rock song’s lyrics to see how they led to a school massacre)."

The discourse around the “new antisemitism” shares this three-part structure. First, the theory’s proponents acknowledge that antisemitism has a long history as a mode of hatred and discrimination. Yet there is an explicit attempt to present it as new, modifying its meaning so it can be specifically marshaled to support the Israeli state. Secondly, this “new antisemitism,” the argument goes, is bad in itself, but it is also a warning sign of other social ills—most of all, of the dangerous radicalization of the left, and of the impending rise of other forms of hate. And, finally, the rise of antisemitism is posited as self-evident, clear for anyone to understand; yet the source of antisemitism is presented as opaque, such that expert analysts of the “new antisemitism” are required to reveal the purported threats of left-wing movements.

This script recurs again and again in moments when Israel faces increased international criticism for its violence against Palestinian people. Like other moral panics, this one is a sign of a crisis—in this case, the crisis of Zionism, but also US imperialism more broadly.

AMMAN, Jordan — If the war in Gaza stopped today, it would still take until 2040 to rebuild all the homes that have been destroyed in nearly seven months of Israel’s bombardment and ground offensives in the territory, according to United Nations estimates released Thursday.

“Every additional day that this war continues is exacting huge and compounding costs to Gazans and all Palestinians” said United Nations Development Programme Administrator Achim Steiner.

At least 370,000 housing units in Gaza have been damaged, including 79,000 destroyed completely, according to the new report by the UNDP and the Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia, which details how Israel’s assault, launched after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack, has devastated the economy of the Palestinian territories, and how the impact will increase the longer the conflict goes on.

After previous Israel-Hamas conflicts, housing was rebuilt at a rate of 992 units year. Even if Israel allows a five-fold increase of construction material to enter Gaza, it would take until 2040 to rebuild the destroyed houses, without repairing the damaged ones, the report said.

Formally, the Lavender system is designed to mark all suspected operatives in the military wings of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), including low-ranking ones, as potential bombing targets. The sources told +972 and Local Call that, during the first weeks of the war, the army almost completely relied on Lavender, which clocked as many as 37,000 Palestinians as suspected militants — and their homes — for possible air strikes.

During the early stages of the war, the army gave sweeping approval for officers to adopt Lavender’s kill lists, with no requirement to thoroughly check why the machine made those choices or to examine the raw intelligence data on which they were based. One source stated that human personnel often served only as a “rubber stamp” for the machine’s decisions, adding that, normally, they would personally devote only about “20 seconds” to each target before authorizing a bombing — just to make sure the Lavender-marked target is male. This was despite knowing that the system makes what are regarded as “errors” in approximately 10 percent of cases, and is known to occasionally mark individuals who have merely a loose connection to militant groups, or no connection at all.

Moreover, the Israeli army systematically attacked the targeted individuals while they were in their homes — usually at night while their whole families were present — rather than during the course of military activity. According to the sources, this was because, from what they regarded as an intelligence standpoint, it was easier to locate the individuals in their private houses. Additional automated systems, including one called “Where’s Daddy?” also revealed here for the first time, were used specifically to track the targeted individuals and carry out bombings when they had entered their family’s residences.

The result, as the sources testified, is that thousands of Palestinians — most of them women and children or people who were not involved in the fighting — were wiped out by Israeli airstrikes, especially during the first weeks of the war, because of the AI program’s decisions.

“We were not interested in killing [Hamas] operatives only when they were in a military building or engaged in a military activity,” A., an intelligence officer, told +972 and Local Call. “On the contrary, the IDF bombed them in homes without hesitation, as a first option. It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.”