In Wag the Dog Move, Indicted Israeli PM Netanyahu Moves to Annex 25% of Palestinian West Bank

Netanyahu is brazenly planning to steal a quarter of all the land in the Palestinian West Bank, forever ending any chance of a Palestinian state.

by

Juan Cole

This second case really is about destroying freedom of the press and entirely undermining what little is left of Israeli democracy. (Photo: Ben Amos Gershom/Prime Minister of Israel)

Interim Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu committed again on Sunday that his government will steal the entire Jordan Valley from the Palestinians. He had floated this plan two months ago but now seems to be determined to move ahead. It makes up 25% of the Palestinian West Bank. Israel is forbidden to annex militarily occupied territory by the 1949 Geneva Convention and by the charter of the United Nations, which were enacted to forestall a repeat of Nazi atrocities. Netanyahu would also annex the 5% of Palestinian territory on which Israeli squatter settlements have been built on land stolen from its Palestinian owners.

Netanyahu is in a world of trouble. He has been indicted on criminal offenses. The only thing that might keep him out of jail is to stay in office and tinker with the law for his own benefit. But he can’t remain prime minister because he lost the last election and hasn’t been able to form a government.

You don’t need to be a really suspicion person to see this announcement as a form of wagging the dog by Netanyahu in hopes of making himself so popular in Israel that he can manage to find a way to fix the system and stay out of jail. Of course, he has made this pledge before, and he nevertheless couldn’t win the election and form a government.

The US Congress, which tacitly supports Israeli colonization efforts, has clung to a fig leaf of an imaginary peace process and a two-state solution for decades during which far right wing Israeli governments have energetically worked to forestall any such thing.

It is rumored that Trump will announce his support for Netanyahu’s massive piece of grand larceny. Trump made waves of his own Sunday, addressing a Jewish audience and telling them that they are “not nice people” but that they will vote for him because they care about money above all else and will reject Elizabeth Warren’s plan to raise taxes. He also insisted that Jewish Americans must give Israel their blind support. He managed to hit all the highlights of anti-Semitism, from caricatures of Jews as money-grubbers with no thought for the public weal to inaccurate charges of dual loyalty.

Israel may well go to the polls again for a third time in a year this spring. The electorate is divided between the far-far-right Likud Party of Netanyahu and the center-right Blue and White coalition of Benny Gantz. So it keeps returning a hung parliament. Gantz refuses to form a government of national unity with Netanyahu. Actually, either of the two blocs could form a government if they allied with the largely Palestinian-Israeli Joint List, but the racist rules of Israeli politics do not permit allowing persons of Palestinian heritage into the cabinet.

If Netanyahu loses again, it is possible that his party will dump him or that his enemies will form a government without him, leaving him in the dragnet of the police.

I explained earlier two of the cases against him:

In one case, Netanyahu allegedly accepted a couple hundred thousand dollars in bribes from an Australian businessmen in return for favorable treatment of his business and attempting to get him a US visa.

In the other case, Netanyahu is alleged to have offered a deal to Arnon Mozes, the publisher of Israel’s biggest-circulation newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth. Netanyahu supporter and shady casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson had begun a free pro-Netanyahu newspaper, Yisrael Ha-Yom, and it obviously was eating into the profits of the other newspapers in the country. (How this is not illegal as “dumping” baffles me.) Netanyahu allegedly told Mozes that he could persuade Adelson to reduce the publication run of Yisrael Ha-Yom, which would help his bottom line. In return, Mozes should report more favorably on Netanyahu.

This second case really is about destroying freedom of the press and entirely undermining what little is left of Israeli democracy.

Israel never had a claim on the Palestinian West Bank or the Gaza Strip. In 1967 Israel invaded these areas and occupied them even though the Palestinians took no role in the 1967 War. Nearly 3 million Palestinians now live in the West Bank under Israeli military control. Another 2 million live in the Gaza Strip, which is occupied via blockade. Violating international law, Israel long since annexed some of this Palestinian territory and added it to the Israeli district of Jerusalem, settling some 350,000 Israelis on this stolen Palestinian land. Israel has also sent 400,000 squatters to take property away from Palestinian families in what is left of the West Bank.

Now Netanyahu is brazenly planning to steal a quarter of all the land in the Palestinian West Bank, forever ending any chance of a Palestinian state.

The US Congress, which tacitly supports Israeli colonization efforts, has clung to a fig leaf of an imaginary peace process and a two-state solution for decades during which far right wing Israeli governments have energetically worked to forestall any such thing.

Juan Cole teaches Middle Eastern and South Asian history at the University of Michigan. His new book, The New Arabs: How the Millennial Generation Is Changing the Middle East (Simon and Schuster), will officially be published July 1st. He is also the author of Engaging the Muslim World and Napoleon's Egypt: Invading the Middle East (both Palgrave Macmillan). He has appeared widely on television, radio and on op-ed pages as a commentator on Middle East affairs, and has a regular column at Salon.com. He has written, edited, or translated 14 books and has authored 60 journal articles.

Trump Flees in Disgrace from Syria But Brags of War Crimes

Kevin Barrett

Loudmouthed, egotistical, and ignorant, Donald Trump embodies the “ugly American” stereotype to the dot. When he recently reversed himself and said that instead of leaving Syria the US would stay “only to secure the oil,” he inadvertently confessed to a war crime.

All US presidents commit war crimes. But most of them are smart enough not to admit it. They invade sovereign states, slaughter millions of people, plundering resources, overthrowing governments, and wreaking international mayhem, but claim to “defend human rights and democracy.” Trump, who is rightly reviled by his opponents as a serial liar, is actually no more of a liar than other American rulers. The difference is that Trump is a bad liar, an incompetent liar, a liar so brazenly shameless that he seemingly neither knows nor cares what the truth might be and how a more skillful politician might cleverly hide it.

Ironically, the legendarily mendacious Trump occasionally blurts out truths or near-truths that the mainstream regards as unspeakable: the US is ruled by a criminal Deep State; George W. Bush was responsible for 9/11; dancing Middle Easterners in New Jersey (Israeli Mossad agents, as it happens) wildly celebrated those attacks; Bill Clinton is a credibly-accused serial rapist; Obama and Hillary Clinton created Da‘ish; and more. Trump’s admission that the war of Syrian destabilization was largely a scramble for energy resources takes its place in a long line of embarrassingly truthful utterances.

Ironically, Trump’s undisguised unpleasantness may help bring peace to Syria and the region. The American occupation intends to use a mere 2,000 US soldiers to “secure the oil.” Those soldiers are sitting ducks for attacks by irregular forces. Virtually all parties in the region, including most of America’s erstwhile allies, now loathe Trump and the US and want them to leave. Trump is setting up himself and the US as the universally-hated scapegoat whose expulsion could unify the region and bring a modicum of peace.

Though the Syrian government cannot directly attack the American plunderers, it is likely to recover its oil as predicted by Russian military strategist Konstantin Sivkov. In his article “Donald Trump’s Syrian crossroads: Americans will be driven out by the ‘dehkan farmers’” Sivkov explains that Syrian President Bashar al-Asad’s first order of business is to finish taking back Idlib. Thereafter he and his allies can focus on ending the American occupation by working with their former enemies, including Turkey and its Arab tribal friends who have suffered from encroachments by US-supported Kurds. Sivkov predicts an eruption of attacks on the small American oil-stealing contingent:

Irregular armed formations can force them [the Americans] to leave by causing unacceptable damages… For strikes they will use drones and shells (both industrial and artisanal production). Routes of movement of the American troops and convoys will be mined. Flank attacks using MANPADS and rocket launchers are expected.

The bloated US military-industrial sector has wasted trillions of dollars trying to build “Star Wars” defenses against ICBMs. Yet as the Houthis showed in recent attacks against US-protected Saudi oil facilities, the Americans have no effective air defenses against cheap artisanal drones! US air defense systems typically rely on Stinger-style heat-seeker systems that work against jet and turboprop aircraft engines, but can’t find the simplest drones.

Likewise the US cannot defend against short-range rockets. Sivkov writes,

The Americans have no antidote against rockets at all. Meanwhile, as experience shows, the militants may use single launchers of industrial production on a simple tripod, for example for 122-mm shells from “Grad” or similar models and make their own makeshift rockets. They can get help from irregular armed groups who already have such experience, such as Hizbullah, which is itself willing to join the fight against the Americans. At the same time, as in the example with the UAV, the requirements for accuracy are extremely lax — the target is large and you just need to hit it.

Just as the US bases themselves are vulnerable, so are the communications and supply routes they depend on. Even if Iraq’s government doesn’t decide to retaliate against US destabilization efforts by ejecting the US andthereby closing its supply lines to Syria, anti-US Syrian insurgent forces, covertly supported not only by Damascus but also by Turkey, Russia, Iran, and Hizbullah, should be able to win their anti-US-occupation insurgency much more quickly and decisively than have the anti-occupation insurgents in Afghanistan and Iraq, whose victory has taken the better part of two decades.

One factor that will help Syria win quickly is the looming US presidential elections. Trump’s announced exit from Syria was motivated (like all of Trump’s behavior) not by ethical considerations but by selfish political expediency. Trump knows that Americans are sick of the 9/11 wars. He understands, like most Americans, that those wars were launched on lies, and will be remembered as the “worst single mistake in US history.” Trump may not be the “very stable genius” he fancies himself, but he is not so stupid as to think that dragging the US into yet another quagmire would do anything but doom his re-election effort. So when the anti-Syrian-oil-theft insurgency starts inflicting serious damage on the American pillagers, Trump will likely seek to win political points by finally keeping his promise to completely withdraw US forces.

The coming insurgency against US occupation of Syrian oil will likely erupt just as US election season kicks into high gear in mid-2020. Until then Damascus will need to continue securing control of Idlib and environs, while quietly laying the groundwork for the coming effort to push the US out of the oilfields and other areas in the south near the Jordan and Iraq borders. As of late November 2019 Syria has been continuing to recover portions of Idlib province from the takfiri mercenaries, liberating village after village, with new small victories coming on a weekly or even daily basis.

The US is stealing Syrian oil and supporting secessionist Kurds in hopes of gaining leverage over an eventual diplomatic settlement of the Syrian conflict. But Damascus has no reason to take the Geneva so-called peace process seriously, least of all the American “Asad must go” position, when all of the important players agree that the Americans can, should, and will be forced to comply with Trump’s promise to fully and unconditionally exit from Syria. So unfortunately the world will probably have to wait another year or so for the US to flee Syria under fire, thereby establishing facts on the ground that will allow Damascus to reestablish control of its territory and resources.

How to Commit War Crimes and Get Away With It

Vijay PRASHAD

U.S. President Donald Trump sacked his Navy secretary on Twitter. The main reason is that the Navy secretary did not follow Trump’s advice regarding Navy Special Warfare Operator Edward Gallagher. Trump wanted Gallagher to retain his position as a Navy Seal. Gallagher was accused of stabbing to death a wounded fighter of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) in 2017; he was also accused of other incidents of murder (of a schoolgirl and an elderly man), and then of obstruction of justice. In July 2019, a military court acquitted Gallagher of most of the charges but found him guilty of posing with the body of the fighter who had been stabbed to death.

Gallagher’s situation emerged onto the front pages only because of the intervention of Trump. Otherwise, these accusations of war crimes or “misconduct” emerge, they are sometimes investigated, and then they just dissipate. Report upon report has accumulated over the past 16 years of war crimes committed in Afghanistan and Iraq. The U.S.-NATO war on Afghanistan began in 2001, while the U.S. war on Iraq began in 2003. Hardly a day goes by in these countries where their combatants aren’t committing war crimes.

As early as December 21, 2001, the United Nations inquired about reports of “summary execution of prisoners after capture”; the immediate news was that about 2,000 Taliban prisoners at Qala-i-Jangi, near Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan, had been “suffocated to death or shot in container trucks,” according to a report by the Physicians for Human Rights. In 2009, it became clear that the administration of George W. Bush had obstructed any investigation into this particular atrocity. Not one person has seen the inside of a court for this war crime.

What is a “war crime”? The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court—which went into effect in 2002 but was drafted in 1998—defines war crimes as “serious violations of the laws and customs applicable in international armed conflict.” These include attacks against civilians, attacks against those who have surrendered, attacks with biological and chemical weapons, and attacks against medical and cultural institutions.

The Rome Statute builds on 100 years of legal precedent established in the Geneva Conventions and the Hague Conventions. There is no ambiguity in the Statute, which should be read by schoolchildren in countries that are prone to prosecute wars.

International Criminal Court

The United States is not a party to the International Criminal Court (ICC). It had helped establish the Court, but then reversed course and refused to allow itself to be under the ICC’s jurisdiction. In 2002, the U.S. Congress passed the American Service-Members’ Protection Act, which allows the U.S. government to “use all means” to protect its troops from the ICC prosecutors. Article 98 of the Rome Statute does not require states to turn over wanted personnel from a third party if these states had signed an immunity agreement with the third party; the U.S. government has therefore encouraged states to sign these “article 98 agreements” to give its troops immunity from prosecution.

The enormity of evidence of war crimes by U.S. troops and U.S.-affiliated troops in Afghanistan and Iraq weighed on the credibility of the ICC. In 2016, after a decade of investigation, the ICC released a report that offered hope to the Afghan people. The ICC said that there is “a reasonable basis” to pursue further investigation of war crimes by various forces inside Afghanistan—such as the Taliban, the Haqqani network, and the United States military forces alongside the Central Intelligence Agency. The next year, the ICC went forward with more detailed acknowledgment of the possibility of war crimes. Pressure on the ICC’s prosecutor mounted.

Pressure on the Court

This is where everything seemed to end. The Trump administration, via John Bolton and Mike Pompeo, made it clear to the ICC that if they pursued a case against the U.S., then the Trump administration would go after the ICC prosecutor and judges personally. An application for a U.S. visa by Fatou Bensouda, the ICC prosecutor, was denied; she had intended to come to the U.S. to appear before the United Nations. This was a shot across the bow of the Court. The U.S. was not going to play nice. Not long thereafter, in April 2019, the ICC said that it would not go ahead with a war crimes case against the United States, or indeed against any of the belligerents in Afghanistan. The Court said it would “not serve the interests of justice” to pursue this investigation.

Trump responded to this decision by calling the ICC “illegitimate” and—at the same time—that the ICC’s judgment was “a victory, not only for these patriots, but for the rule of law.”

Staff at the ICC were dismayed by the ICC’s decision. They were eager to challenge it, fearing that if they let the U.S. mafia tactics prevent their own procedures then the ICC would lose whatever shred of legitimacy remains. As it is, the ICC is seen as being deployed mainly against the enemies of the United States; there have been no serious investigations of any power that is closely aligned with the United States.

In June, Fatou Bensouda, the ICC prosecutor, filed a request inside the cumbersome system of the ICC to essentially appeal the decision not to pursue the investigation of the war crimes in Afghanistan. Bensouda’s appeal was joined by various groups from Afghanistan, including Afghan Victims’ Families Association and the Afghanistan Forensic Science Organization. In September, the Pre-Trial Chamber of the Court said it would allow the appeal to go forward. Bensouda’s office is now going to have to assemble an enormous case for her appeal; this could itself take the better part of six months. It is likely that the Trump administration has already begun to pressure the Court, which the Court’s staff worries will have an impact on the appeal as it did on the first filing.

Britain and the Court

The main U.S. ally in these wars in Afghanistan and Iraq has been the United Kingdom. A recent television program in the UK provided chilling evidence of British war crimes in Iraq. In 2017, the ICC said it had “credible” evidence that UK armed forces had committed horrific war crimes—including murder, torture, and rape—between 2003 and 2009. Reports piled up, but action was not taken. Now, given the new revelations on BBC’s “Panorama,” the ICC says that it will likely take up the case again.

There is no doubt that if the UK’s case is fairly adjudicated, it will raise many issues about the senior partner in these wars, namely the United States. Boris Johnson, the prime minister of the UK for now, says that he wants to pass legislation that—like in the U.S.—gives immunity for its troops. Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party has said, on the other hand, that it welcomes the scrutiny.

No soldier should be above the law. Nor should those who sent the soldiers into battle. None of these inquiries asks that more fundamental question.

Former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan called the U.S. war on Iraq “illegal.” No one, not even Bensouda, has suggested that George W. Bush, his Cabinet, and Tony Blair be brought into the dock.

If justice is to be sought, it is not at the level of someone like Edward Gallagher alone; it should be his superiors on the political side who need to answer questions about not just this or that war crime, but about the entire war and the crime of it all.

Globetrotter via counterpunch.org

Will the ICC Prosecute Perpetrators of the ‘War on Terror’?

Ramona WADI

On May 13 2014, the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) Chief Prosecutor announced it would reopen the investigations into alleged war crimes committed by British soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, following additional submitted information pertaining to the investigation which had been concluded in 2006.

A recent BBC Panorama investigation, in collaboration with the Sunday Times, ascertained a cover-up by the UK government of British soldiers torturing and murdering Iraqi and Afghan civilians, including children since 2003, when the UK participated alongside the US in invading Iraq under the pretext of the so-called “war on terror”.

In 2010, the Iraq Historic Allegations Team (IHAT) was tasked with investigating allegations of abuse in Iraq, with the possibility of prosecuting the perpetrators. However, mismanagement and corruption within the body, including claims that solicitor Phil Shiner had paid people to find clients for IHAT, failed to open a single case from its investigations. For the UK’s Ministry of Defence, the allegations against IHAT were an opportune moment to discredit the claims of human rights violations committed by British troops. Rather than prioritise the allegations of human rights violations, IHAT was deemed harmful and “making soldiers on the battlefield anxious about later legal repercussions.”

In a 2018 report issued by the ICC, UK soldiers are alleged to have committed war crimes against 61 Iraqis in custody, including killings, torture, rape and sexual violence. Seven deaths occurred in custody and 54 victims died of “mistreatment”. The ICC report specifies: “At this stance, these incidents should not be considered as either complete or exhaustive, but rather illustrative of the alleged criminal conduct.”

In July 2019, the European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) submitted a follow-up to the ICC Prosecutor, informing the office about the UK’s failure to investigate or prosecute those responsible for war crimes, “despite significant and growing evidence indicating that liability extends up the chain of command to senior military and civilian officials.” The ECCHR also described the closing down of IHAT as a politically motivated decision to avoid ICC prosecution.

The UK’s intention was clearly to preserve its impunity. During the course of the BBC investigation, it was revealed that “The Ministry of Defence (MoD) had no intention of prosecuting any soldier of whatever rank he was unless it was absolutely necessary, and they couldn’t wriggle their way out of it.” Among the concealed crimes, a soldier from an SAS unit shot 4 Afghan civilians, three of them children, in the head, while they were in their own home, drinking tea. “When I entered the room, the bones, teeth, blood and brain were all over the place,” a witness to the aftermath stated. The UK government dismissed the war crime allegation by stating the four Afghans were Taliban suspects and commanders.

Other war crimes were concealed through fabricated evidence in order to evade such classification. Evidence of sexual abuse was also revealed to have occurred at Camp Stephen in Basra, Iraq, which was under the command of the Black Watch.

If the ICC does investigate the UK government for these violations of the Geneva Convention, it would have set a precedent, given that the Court has, so far, focused on investigating the leaders of African nations as opposed to the crimes of Western governments and foreign intervention. The “war on terror” is characterised by two main factors – perpetual aggression and extended impunity for the perpetrators. Justice for the Iraqi and Afghan people, by now, is worse than a macabre farce. Yet the ICC must fulfil its duty to lay bare the dynamics that have so far shielded the UK military and governmental collaboration from judicial scrutiny.

Ramona WADI

Ramona Wadi is an independent researcher, freelance journalist, book reviewer and blogger. Her writing covers a range of themes in relation to Palestine, Chile and Latin America.

How Western Media Bias Allows Israel to Get Away with Murder in Gaza

By Ramzy Baroud 

It is obvious that the Western media have maintained their blindspot on fairly reporting on Gaza and intentionally kept the truth from their readers.

An Israeli attack on Gaza was imminent, and not because of any provocations by Palestinian groups in the besieged, impoverished Gaza Strip. The Israeli military escalation was foreseeable because it factors neatly in Israel’s contentious political scene. The war was not a question of “if”, but “when”.

The answer came on November 12, when the Israeli military launched a major strike against Gaza, killing an Islamic Jihad Commander, Bahaa Abu al-Ata, along with his wife Asma.

More strikes followed, targeting what the Israeli military described as Islamic Jihad installations. However, the identities of the victims, along with damning social media footage, pictures, and eyewitness accounts indicate that civilians and civilian infrastructure were bombed and destroyed as well.

As of November 14, when a truce was announced, 32 Palestinians have been killed and over 80 wounded in the Israeli aggression.

What truly frustrates any meaningful discussion on the horrific situation in Gaza is the feeble response, whether by international organizations that exist with the sole purpose of ensuring world peace or by Western mainstream media, that ceaselessly celebrates its own accuracy and impartiality.

A most disappointing response to the Israeli violence was offered by Nickolay Mladenov, the United Nations Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process.

Mladenov, whose job should have long been deemed pointless considering that no “peace process” actually exists, expressed his “concern” about the “ongoing and serious escalation between Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Israel”.

Not only Mladenov’s statement creates a moral equivalence between an occupying power, which instigated the war in the first place, and a small group of a few hundred armed men, it is also dishonest.

“The indiscriminate launching of rockets and mortars against population centres is absolutely unacceptable and must stop immediately,” Mladenov elaborated, putting great emphasis on the fact that “there can be no justification for any attacks against civilians”.

Shockingly, Mladenov was referring to Israeli, not Palestinian civilians. At the time that his statement was released to the media, there were already dozens of Palestinian civilians that had been killed and wounded, while Israeli media reports spoke of few Israelis who had been treated for “anxiety”.

The European Union did not fare any better. The EU parroted the same American knee-jerk response by condemning “the barrage of rocket attacks reaching deep into Israel”.

“The firing of rockets on civilian populations is totally unacceptable and must immediately stop,” a statement by the European bloc read.

Is it not possible that Mladenov and top EU foreign policymakers do not truly comprehend the political context of the latest Israeli onslaught—that embattled Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is using military escalation as a way of fortifying his weakening grip on power.

Considering this, what is one to make of the poor media coverage, the inept analyses and the absence of balanced reports in major Western news media?

In a report published by the BBC on November 13, the British broadcaster referred to “cross-border violence between Israel and militants in Gaza”.

But Gaza is not an independent country and, per international law, it is still under Israeli occupation. Israel declared Gaza a “hostile territory” in September 2007, arbitrarily establishing a “border” between it and the besieged Palestinian territory. For some reason, the BBC finds this designation acceptable.

CNN, on the other hand, reported on November 13 that “Israel’s military campaign against Islamic Jihad” is entering its second day, while emphasizing the UN condemnation of the rocket attacks.

CNN, like most of its American mainstream counterparts, reports on Israeli military campaigns as a part and parcel of some imagined “war on terror”. Therefore, analyzing the language of US mainstream media with the purpose of underlining and emphasizing its failures and biases, is a useless exercise.

Sadly, US bias regarding Palestine has extended to mainstream media in European countries that were, to some degree, fairer, if not somewhat sympathetic, with the Palestinian peoples’ situation.

El Mundo of Spain, for example, spoke of a number of Palestinians—making sure to emphasize that they were “mostly militants”,—who “died” as opposed to “were killed” by the Israeli military.

“The escalation followed the death of Gaza’s armed branch leader,” El Mundo reported, failing once more to pinpoint the culprits in these seemingly mysterious deaths.

La Repubblica, which is perceived in Italy as a “leftist” outlet, sounded more like a rightwing Israeli newspaper, in its description of the events that led to the death and wounding of many Palestinians. The Italian newspaper used a fabricated timeline that only exists in the mind of Israeli military and decision-makers.

“Violence continued. Several rockets were thrown towards Israel by Gaza’s Islamic Jihad (militants), breaking the brief truce, according to (rightwing Israeli newspaper) The Jerusalem Post and to the Israeli army”.

It remains unclear what “truce” La Repubblica was referring to.

France’s Le Monde followed suit, reporting the same deceptive and cliched Israeli lines and emphasizing statements by the Israeli military and government. Interestingly, the death and wounding of many Palestinians in Gaza did not deserve a place on the French newspaper’s homepage. Instead, it chose to highlight a comparatively irrelevant news item where Israel denounced the labeling of illegal settlement products as “discriminatory”.

Maybe, one could have excused these across-the-board journalistic and moral failings if it were not for the fact that the Gaza story has been one of the most covered news topics anywhere in the world for over a decade.

It is obvious that the West’s “newspapers of record” have maintained their blindspot on fairly reporting on Gaza and intentionally kept the truth from their readers for many years so as not to offend the sensibilities of the Israeli government and its powerful allies and lobbies.

While one cannot help but bemoan the death of good journalism in the West, it is also important to acknowledge with much appreciation the courage and sacrifices of Gaza’s young journalists and bloggers who, at times, are targeted and killed by the Israeli army for conveying the truth on the plight of the besieged but tenacious Strip.

Ramzy Baroud

Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and editor of Palestine Chronicle. His latest book is The Last Earth: A Palestinian Story (Pluto Press, 2018). His latest book is The Last Earth: A Palestinian Story (Pluto Press, 2018). He earned a Ph.D. in Palestine Studies from the University of Exeter, and is a former Non-Resident Scholar at Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies, UCSB.

Reports of War Crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan Highlight the Failures of Both Wars

Patrick COCKBURN

The alleged bid by the British government and army to close down investigations into torture and murder in Iraq and Afghanistan appears to be the latest aspect of a widespread desire in the UK to forget all about these failed wars. Joining the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 is commonly blamed on Tony Blair, but there is little interest in the desperate situation into which British troops were plunged post-invasion, first in southern Iraq and then, three years later, in Helmand province in Afghanistan.

The gravity of the miscalculations in each case is not in doubt. Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, the British ambassador in Kabul at the time, wrote in his memoirs that the worst mistake made by the Foreign Office in the previous 30 years was the invasion of Iraq, and the second worst was “its enthusiastic endorsement of Britain’s half-baked effort to occupy Helmand in 2006”.

The allegation that war crimes were committed – to be claimed in a BBC Panorama programme on Monday evening – is in keeping with Britain’s dismal record in these conflicts.

The ICC has said it is considering opening an investigation into the claims, based on leaked documents. The Ministry of Defence (MoD) has said the allegations are unsubstantiated.

After the capture of Baghdad, the British army stayed in the south of Iraq, mostly in and around Basra, apparently under the impression that this would be quieter than the Sunni Arab provinces that had more strongly supported Saddam Hussein.

It swiftly became clear that, while the Shia population of the south was glad to be rid of Saddam, they were not about to accept a British occupation. An ominous sign of this came on 24 June 2003 when six British Royal Military Police were shot dead in a town called Majar al-Kabir near the city of Amara.

They died because they were advising local police at the same moment as British paratroopers were carrying out an aggressive patrol in another part of the same town and had had an exchange of fire in which several locals had died. The RMPs were killed soon afterwards in a revenge attack.

The incident sums up the fatal contradiction facing the British expeditionary force in Iraq. Their numbers and dispositions were suitable for a country in which most of the population was friendly, but if the opposite were true, as it certainly was, then the soldiers were vastly outnumbered and in danger. British officers used to annoy their American counterparts by claiming prior expertise in this type of warfare, drawing on British experience in Malaya and Northern Ireland. A captain in military intelligence stationed for a year in Basra later said that “I kept trying to explain without success to my superiors that in Malaya and Northern Ireland we had local allies while in Basra we had none”.

The weakness of the British position was exposed in detail by the Chilcot Report in 2016, but its findings were masked by the media obsession with finding a “smoking gun” that would prove the culpability of Tony Blair and by the shock result of the Brexit referendum that had taken place at the same time.

The report explains that by 2007 the British forces in Basra had run out of ideas and “it was humiliating that the UK reached a position in which an agreement with a militia group [the Mahdi Army], which had been actively targeting UK forces, was considered the best option available.”

According to Chilcot, the one consistent British strategy between 2003 and complete withdrawal in 2009 was “to reduce the level of deployed forces” and to do so without offending the US. The means of doing so was to redeploy the troops to Afghanistan, which was supposedly safer, but where they arrived just as the Taliban were restarting their guerrilla war and where 405 British troops were to be killed in the coming years.

Those who may have committed war crimes in these conflicts have been investigated, even if they were not prosecuted. It would be good if those responsible for these doomed military forays should also be held responsible for their actions.

counterpunch.org

Fascists R Us: Trump and Pompeo’s Deny That Israeli Squatting on Palestinian Land Is Illegal

A combination of US Evangelical lawlessness and white supremacy with incessant lobbying by the Zionist far right has finally put the United States in the position of supporting the policies of the Axis in World War II.

by

Juan Cole

Pompeo has become Mussolini, in the same way that Israeli prime minister Benyamin Netanyahu long since had. (Photo: Guardian Screenshot) 

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced Monday that the US no longer considers Israeli squatter settlements on Palestinian land to be illegal.

A combination of US Evangelical lawlessness and white supremacy with incessant lobbying by the Zionist far right has finally put the United States in the position of supporting the policies of the Axis in World War II.

That is the historical meaning of Pompeo’s position.

In 1940, Italy’s Mussolini (the idol of Steve Bannon, Trump’s former White House chief strategist) grabbed Nice from France. Mussolini intended to permanently annex this territory, and had designs on the port city of Marseilles, as well.

Given that the whole creation of the international-law category of war crimes with the Geneva Conventions was in part intended to ensure that never again could the Jewish people be genocided, it is a supreme and ugly irony that no one has done more to undermine and destroy international law concerning occupied populations than the State of Israel.

Do you think that is right, that Mussolini could just march into France and gobble up part of it? What kind of world would it be if Mussolinis were constantly stealing other people’s territory?

When Mussolini was defeated (and shot to death by a leftist partisan in 1945), the non-Fascist countries created the United Nations and enacted the Geneva Conventions to try to stop Mussolini-like behavior in the future.

The United Nations Charter forbids any country to acquire the territory of others by military force. It is illegal for Italy to march into France and just take Nice for itself.

Mussolini’s imperialism did not stop at the shores of the Mediterranean. In 1911 Italy had launched a war of aggression on Libya and made it a colony. But it wasn’t enough to rule the lives of Libyans with a fascist iron fist and to steal their resources. Beginning in 1938 and continuing into WW II, Mussolini began sending Italians in to Occupied Libya.

Wikipedia notes,

"A project initiated by Libya’s governor, Italo Balbo, brought the first 20,000 settlers — the “Ventimila” – to Libya in a single convoy in October 1938. More settlers followed in 1939, and by 1940 there were approximately 110,000 Italians in Libya, constituting about 12 percent of the total population.[8]

Plans envisioned an Italian colony of 500,000 settlers by the 1960s: so, the Italians would be 2/3 of the population in coastal Libya by then. Libya’s best land was allocated to the settlers to be brought under productive cultivation, primarily in olive groves.”

After World War II, not only was aggressively annexing your neighbor’s land made illegal but so too was flooding your own population into an Occupied territory to deprive locals of the fruits of their own resources and grab them for the metropole.

The Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 governs the treatment of populations in Occupied territories during wartime, and it forbids transplanting people from the Occupying Power’s population into the subjected region. Remember, the United Nations Charter envisages that at the cessation of hostilities, the Occupier would have to give back the territory. It cannot be annexed.

The Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 on the treatment of populations in occupied territories contains these prohibitions:

Art. 31 Prohibition of coercion
Art. 32 Prohibition of corporal punishment, torture, etc.
Art. 33 Individual responsibility, collective penalties, pillage, reprisals
Art. 34 Hostages

Israel is in extensive violation of all of these provisions.

Article 49, Fourth Geneva Convention, says, “The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population in the territory it occupies.”

So here’s the thing. There isn’t any difference in this regard between the Israeli government and Mussolini. Just as Mussolini invaded and annexed Nice and Corsica, the Israelis invaded Gaza and the West Bank in 1967, at a time when the civilian Palestinian population was not militarized and not directly involved in the Egyptian-Jordanian-Syrian war with Israel. Israel has annexed large tracts of the Palestinian West Bank.

And it has flooded some 600,000 squatters into Palestine (not to mention all the squatters around Jerusalem on annexed territory), just as Mussolini sent all those Italians into Libya. This is just naked aggression and colonialism.

Israelis like to take the 1947 UN General Assembly partition plan for British Mandate Palestine as their charter of legitimacy, even though the UNGA does not have any legal authority to decide such things. But even so, that plan did not award the West Bank and Gaza to Israel, and that denial was implicit in the 1949 Armistice among the belligerents.

Given that the whole creation of the international-law category of war crimes with the Geneva Conventions was in part intended to ensure that never again could the Jewish people be genocided, it is a supreme and ugly irony that no one has done more to undermine and destroy international law concerning occupied populations than the State of Israel.

So what Pompeo said is that the French who lost their lives fighting Mussolini’s invasion were on the wrong side of history, and that the United States now ex post facto regrets George W. Patton’s assault on Italy and US backing for Libyan independence.

The official policy of the United States is now that it is all right to annex neighbors’ land and to settle it with your own squatters.

Pompeo has become Mussolini, in the same way that Israeli prime minister Benyamin Netanyahu long since had.

Ezra Pound began his Pisan Canto LXXIV lamenting the death of “Ben” Mussolini, hung by his heels. The US military wanted to execute him for his active support of Italian Fascism. In turn, it was the aggressive militarism and severe human rights abuses of the fascist Italian state that provoked that animus.

I know what Gen. Patton and Gen. Omar Bradley and Gen. Ike Eisenhower thought of Mussolini. I know what they would think of Pompeo running up the white flag of surrender to Fascist policy.

We have met the Fascists and they are us.

Juan Cole teaches Middle Eastern and South Asian history at the University of Michigan. His new book, The New Arabs: How the Millennial Generation Is Changing the Middle East (Simon and Schuster), will officially be published July 1st. He is also the author of Engaging the Muslim World and Napoleon's Egypt: Invading the Middle East (both Palgrave Macmillan). He has appeared widely on television, radio and on op-ed pages as a commentator on Middle East affairs, and has a regular column at Salon.com. He has written, edited, or translated 14 books and has authored 60 journal articles.