Our Wednesday News Analysis | Genocide: The New Normal

And So Castles Made of Sand - by Mr. Fish

Joe Biden’s parting gift of $8 billion in weapons sales to the apartheid state of Israel acknowledges the gruesome reality of the genocide in Gaza. This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. This is a permanent, endless war designed not to destroy Hamas or free Israeli hostages, but to eradicate, once and for all, Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. It is the final push to create a Greater Israel, which will include not only Gaza and the West Bank but chunks of Lebanon and Syria. It is the culmination of the Zionist dream. And it will be paid for with rivers of blood — Palestinian, Lebanese, and Syrian.

Minister of Agriculture and Food Security of Israel Avi Dichter was probably offering conservative estimates when he said “I think that we are going to stay in Gaza for a long time. I think most people understand that [Israel] will be years in some kind of West Bank situation where you go in and out and maybe you remain along Netzarim [corridor].”

Mass extermination takes time. It is also expensive. Fortunately for Israel, its lobby in the U.S. has a stranglehold on Congress, our electoral process and the media narrative. Americans, although 61 percent support ending weapons shipments to Israel, will pay for it. And those that express dissent will be frog-marched into Zionist black holes where their voices are silenced and their careers jeopardized or destroyed. Donald Trump and the Republicans have an open disdain for democracy, but so do the Democrats and Joe Biden.

The U.S. provided $17.9 billion in military aid to Israel from October 2023 to October 2024, a substantial increase from the already $3.8 billion in military aid the U.S. gives Israel annually. This is a record for a single year. The State Department has informed Congress that it intends to approve another $8 billion in purchases of U.S.-made arms by Israel. This will provide Israel with more GPS guidance systems for bombs, more artillery shells, more missiles for fighter jets and helicopters, and more bombs, including 2,800 unguided MK-84 bombs, which Israel has a habit of dropping on densely packed tent encampments in Gaza. The pressure wave from the 2,000-pound MK-84 pulverizes buildings and exterminates life within a 400-yard radius. The blast, which ruptures lungs, rips apart limbs and bursts sinus cavities up to hundreds of yards away, leaves behind a 50-foot-wide and 36-foot-deep crater. Israel appears to have used this bomb to assassinate Hassan Nasrallah, leader of Hezbollah, in Beirut on September 27, 2024...

Read more: Genocide: The New Normal

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JIMMY CARTER: A UTOPIAN DOVE OR A SHREWD DRIVER OF US EMPIRE?

Source: Middle East Eye
https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/us-jimmy-carter-utopian-dove-shrewd-driver-empire

By Nazia Kazi
Published December 30, 2024

The late president's greatest success was his ability to carry out the task assigned to all US presidents: expansion of an empire for the purpose of enriching a ruling elite

Former US President Jimmy Carter attends an interview with Reuters in Cairo, Egypt, on 12 January 2012 (Reuters)

Many remember former President Jimmy Carter, who died on 29 December 2024 at the age of 100, as a peacemaker, a title rarely earned by US heads of state who, regardless of partisan affiliation, expand the global reach of American militarism.

In contrast, the Habitat for Humanity peacenik has garnered what political theorist Corey Robin called a "saintly halo". That he is the first American president to reach triple digits is as much commemorated as his legacy of peace-building and a commitment to human rights.

Carter functioned as a "national grandfather figure - charming, benevolent, and above all, uncontroversial", as Alex Skopic, the associate editor at Current Affairs, described.

This perception was so pervasive that many regarded Carter as too idealistic for the cynical calculations demanded by the executive office. In American common sense, to preside over the country is to expand the country's imperialist reach. Being president is a role that leaves little room for the kind of humanitarian impulses associated with Carter.

Muslim Americans have not shied away from lauding the former president. In 2014, Carter delivered a keynote address at the Islamic Society of North America's annual convention. In 2023, as he entered hospice care, the US Council of Muslim Organisations prayed for him.

Twenty-five years after his presidency, Carter would speak openly about the dispossession of the Palestinian people, endearing him to these voices in the Muslim American ummah...

Read more: Jimmy Carter: A utopian dove or a shrewd driver of US empire?

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ISRAEL CANNOT LOSE A ‘HUMANITY’ IT NEVER HAD

Source: Mondoweiss
https://mondoweiss.net/2025/01/israel-cannot-lose-a-humanity-it-never-had/

By James Ray
Published January 2, 2025

A recent Haaretz editorial claimed, "Israel Is Losing Its Humanity in Gaza," but this ignores the brutal history of the Zionist colonization of Palestine, of which the Gaza genocide is just the latest chapter.

A Palestinian man overlooks the Jaramana Refugee Camp in Damascus, Syria in 1948. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

On December 22, only days before Christmas, Haaretz’s Editorial Board issued an editorial titled, “Israel Is Losing Its Humanity in Gaza”. The short article outlined a fear that has for years been pervasive amongst Liberal Zionists: that the crimes being perpetrated in Gaza are betraying the values of an otherwise upstanding and moral settler colony. The Zionist project, to them, is something of a legitimate state that is only now failing to live up to the standards of conduct it is expected to commit to.

A piece intended to be both an admission of guilt and a call to do better was ultimately nothing more than a fictitious accounting of the colony’s history – one that called upon a better, more moral time. By detracting from the history of violence resulting from the colony and painting a revisionist picture of a morally upstanding (though sometimes problematic) and ultimately legitimate, maybe even reformable, project, they did what many Liberal Zionists have attempted to do for decades: avoid an uncomfortable and inescapable truth about the project they so desperately cling to and support.

There has never been a “good” Israel.

The Zionist movement, and the horrors associated with it, predate the Zionist project itself. The roots of the colonization of Palestine by those who would call themselves Zionists go as far back as the 1880s, with the first settlements being planted in the land before the First Zionist Congress would even meet in 1897. These early efforts, though an abject failure in many senses, laid the foundations for what would soon come.

With the creation and ratification of the Basel Program, the Zionist movement found itself coalescing around a concrete goal: to “establish a home in Palestine for the Jewish people, secured under public law.” Though the proposed location of the project would be challenged somewhat at the Sixth World Zionist Congress in Basel in 1903 with the proposal of the Uganda Scheme, in which a plan to colonize Uganda was assessed and ultimately ruled out, the colonial ambitions of the Zionist movement were always clear...

Read more: Israel cannot lose a ‘humanity’ it never had