Common Grounds

Our Friday News Analysis | What the World Reads Now!

February 15, 2024

Is Israel–Palestine worth a World War III?

The Hague, The Netherlands 16 February 2024 | If you know of any story that is decisive, tell the world. We're still searching.

OPEN LETTER TO PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP (2017)

Our Friday News Analysis | What the World Reads Now!

Please Listen to the Good People of Israel – Palestine, Too

The Hague, 26 January 2017

President Donald J. Trump

The White House

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington DC 20500
The United States of America

Dear Mr President,

Is Israel–Palestine worth a World War III? How would you respond, Mr President, to another East Aleppo, but this time in West Jerusalem or Tel Aviv? Would you have risked an Apocalypse, a world war, to rescue the people of East Aleppo? What about the people in West Jerusalem and Tel Aviv?

Isn’t there a better approach to liberate all the people – the ‘good’ Jews, the ‘good’ Palestinians (17 percent Christian), the ‘good’ Arabs, and the ‘good but lost’ Evangelical Christian Right – from the claws of the Neo-Zionists?

Though Jews, many Neo-Zionists are atheists, not Jewish. Their godless faith is in canons of deception, destruction, and decadence. They sing the praises of greed and self-indulgence. Neo-Zionism (hell on earth) is not the same as biblical Zionism (heaven on earth).

Because they have been outcasts for millennia as socio-economic underdogs, Neo-Zionists surpass their former oppressors by perpetrating an ideology of ethnic cleansing and external expansion by abandoning democratic norms in pursuit of redemptive violence against anyone who stands in their way without ethical or legal restraints, equipped with lethal modern warfare; under the pretense of defense.

Is Neo-Zionism worthy of another world war? They have already lost the war in the World Court of Public Opinion.

The Russian Federation in Concert with the European Union and NATO …

Mr. Trump, this might work. I know it’s like pulling teeth, getting the European Union and the Russian Federation to work with each other. Yes, I have asked President Putin if he would consider joining the European Union and NATO in a Consortium to support the Arab League in bolstering the dialogue between the people of Israel-Palestine to orchestrate reconciliation. And are you ready for this? I want Iran to work together with Saudi Arabia as well. Why not? Why shouldn’t we try to kill three birds with one stone? 1) Peace between the Israelis – and Palestinians! 2) Peace between Saudi Arabia and Iran (and everyone else in the greater region)! 3) Peace, once and for all, between the Russian Federation and the European Union!

I’d rather do something great and fail than succeed in doing nothing at all.

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What is the Side of the Story that is Not Yet Decisive? Edited by Abraham A. van Kempen.

NEW YORK TIMES NEWS ANALYSIS | FAVORING FOES OVER FRIENDS, TRUMP THREATENS TO UPEND INTERNATIONAL ORDER

“You mean, if Russia attacked Lithuania, we would go to war with Russia?” he responded.

“That’s crazy.”

Former President Donald J. Trump has long threatened to withdraw the United States from NATO. Credit...Sean Rayford for The New York Times

By Peter Baker

New York Times
11 February 2024

Soon after former President Donald J. Trump took office, his staff explained how NATO’s mutual defense obligations worked.

“You mean, if Russia attacked Lithuania, we would go to war with Russia?” he responded. “That’s crazy.”

Mr. Trump has never believed in the fundamental one-for-all-and-all-for-one concept of the Atlantic alliance. Indeed, he spent much of his four-year presidency undermining it while strong-arming members into keeping their commitments to spend more on their militaries, threatening that he would not come to their aid otherwise.

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EDITORIAL | THINK! USE YOUR HEAD! NO NATIONAL SUICIDE ON THE HORIZON. THERE IS NO ARMAGEDDON IN SIGHT.

In 1941, 33,771 Jews were shot dead by the Germans in a ravine in Kyiv. A 12-year-old Russian boy who lived around the corner wrote a book about it.

By Abraham A. van Kempen

14 February 2024

Would you sacrifice your city, country, property, and lives for a rogue country? The former President wouldn’t think twice. Why would anyone risk World War III? Who wants a nuclear crater in their backyard?

If Iran were to bomb Tel Aviv back to the Stone Age, the US would proclaim, “I told you so," and wash its hands in innocence, even with President Biden in the White House.

SOUTH AFRICA STILL WANTS TO ENFORCE CEASEFIRE THROUGH THE INTERNATIONAL COURT OF JUSTICE FOLLOWING ISRAELI OFFENSIVE IN RAFAH

On Monday, Public Prosecutor Karim Khan said that the International Criminal Court (ICC) is conducting "an ongoing investigation" into the war in Gaza. He wrote on X that he is "very concerned" about the upcoming offensive in Rafah.

Palestinians try to escape Israeli violence and flee north from Rafah. Photo Mohammed Abed/AFP

By Jorit Verkerk

NRC The Netherlands
13 February 2024

South Africa urgently asked the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on Monday to consider whether Israel's offensive in Rafah is sufficient reason to demand a ceasefire. The South African government announced this in a press statement on Tuesday.

Last month, the ICJ saw sufficient reason to hear a South African genocide charge against Israel. The court ruled that Tel-Aviv must do everything it can to prevent genocide in Gaza. Israel has not taken much notice of that verdict: after a siege of the southern Khan Younis, it is now focusing on Rafah, which is on the border with Egypt. More than a million Palestinians who tried to flee Israeli violence are trapped in Rafah.

On Monday, Public Prosecutor Karim Khan said that the International Criminal Court (ICC) is conducting "an ongoing investigation" into the war in Gaza. He wrote on X that he is "very concerned" about the upcoming offensive in Rafah.

In the request to the ICJ, South Africa states that it is "gravely concerned" that Israel will cause further damage in Rafah. According to South Africa, this violates the 1948 Genocide Convention and the ICJ's interim judgment last month. The International Court of Justice has not yet ruled on the genocide charges against Israel. That process could take years. The court cannot enforce its legally binding rulings either.

NATO MEMBER TO STOP SENDING F-35 PARTS TO ISRAEL

A Dutch court has blocked the exports, citing the risk of human rights violations in Gaza.

File photo: A Lockheed Martin F-35 fighter jet, 22 June, 2022. © Tobias SCHWARZ / AFP

By Abraham A. van Kempen
15 February 2024

The Appeals Court in The Hague ruled on Monday that the Netherlands must stop sending Israel spare parts for its F-35 fighter jets, saying that there is a risk that the US-made aircraft are being used for "serious violations of international humanitarian law" against Palestinians.

Responding to a lawsuit launched by several human rights groups in December, a lower court ruled that selling fighter jet parts was a political decision. The appeals court disagreed.

The Netherlands "must prohibit the export of military goods if there is a clear risk of serious violations of the humanitarian law of war," the judges said on Monday.

The Dutch government might be allowed to export F-35 parts to Israel in the future, but only on condition that they are not used in operations in Gaza, according to Presiding Judge Bas Boele.

"We hope this ruling will strengthen international law in other countries so that the citizens of Gaza are also protected by international law," said Michiel Servaes, director of Oxfam Novib, one of the groups involved in the litigation.

The Dutch government must comply with the court order within seven days. Its request to suspend the order pending appeal to the Supreme Court has been rejected.

The US owns the parts in question, but the Netherlands houses a regional warehouse where they are stored and sent to countries that comprise the F-35 consortium. Israel has received at least one shipment since October last year.

"The delivery of US F-35 parts to Israel, in our view, is not unjustified," said Trade Minister Geoffrey van Leeuwen, adding that the jets allow West Jerusalem to defend itself from threats "from Iran, Yemen, Syria, and Lebanon."

An estimated 1,200 Israelis died in a series of raids by Hamas in the vicinity of Gaza on 7 October. Israel responded by declaring "war" on the Palestinian group and launching an offensive against the enclave. Most of Gaza's two million residents have since been displaced, and more than 28,000 Palestinians were killed in the onslaught, according to local authorities.

Israel has denied committing any war crimes or violations of humanitarian law in Gaza. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has insisted that most of the Palestinians killed were "terrorists" and Hamas fighters.

Last month, the International Court of Justice ordered West Jerusalem to "prevent acts of genocide" in its war against Hamas, acting on a complaint pressed by South Africa. Human rights groups have cited the ruling in calls to block the sale of weapons to Israel.

THE NORD STREAM PIPELINES AND THE PERILS OF CONTAINMENT

The sabotage in the Baltic Sea was the result of a long-standing US policy of driving a wedge between Russia and Western Europe

A handout photo provided by the Swedish Coast Guard shows the release of gas emanating from a leak on the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline in the Baltic Sea on 27 September 2022. / Photo by Swedish Coast Guard via Getty Images.

By Seymour Hersh
Substack.com
6 February 2024

Thursday marks one year since I reported President Joe Biden's decision in the fall of 2022 to send a signal of resolve to Vladimir Putin by destroying Nord Stream 1 and 2, the Russian natural gas pipelines. Nord Stream 1 had turned Germany into Western Europe's most potent economic force.

I won't dwell on the failure of the mainstream media to follow up on that story—some reporters, as I learned decades ago, have inside sources, and others do not. But I will relate a lesson I learned about presidential signaling of the sort that is going on now against the Houthis in Yemen, against the Iranians, who are believed to be behind much of the anti-Americanism in the Middle East, and, of course, against Moscow in the Ukraine war.

It's a Cold War story I was told by someone steeped in the history of the early American intervention in Vietnam. After the Second World War, the United States backed the wrong side in China, and the communist forces led by Mao Zedong declared victory in 1949. This was another setback for America's effort to contain worldwide communism. Containment was the overriding US policy then, and there was worry about Mao's support for Ho Chi Minh, the Vietnamese leader who defeated the French in 1954 in the battle at Diem Bien Phu, despite much off-the-books American help for France. A little-noted international peace conference that year in Geneva concluded, in a triumph for rational diplomacy, that Vietnam would be divided, with Ho dominating the North and a non-communist regime to be set up in the South.

American fear of communism determined what happened next in the South, as the Eisenhower administration, bolstered by support from the Catholic Church and many in the US Congress, including newly elected Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts, as well as his powerful father, businessman Joseph Kennedy, installed the French-speaking devout Catholic southerner Ngo Dinh Diem as president. Diem had little in common with the Buddhists and Catholics in the South who hated the French. Still, his installation as president was a signal to Ho Chi Minh and the Chinese that America was in the South to contain the spread of communism throughout the peninsula to Laos and Cambodia.

We think we understand what happened in the next nineteen years as America fought its war of containment, but mostly, we do not. After the deaths of millions of Vietnamese and more than 58,000 Americans, Saigon fell to the North on 30 April 1975. The brutal scene of desperate Vietnamese clinging to the landing gear of the last American helicopter fleeing the rooftop of the embassy in Saigon is an image my generation will never forget. Cambodia, whose various regimes had been supported by thousands of American bombs, fell to the communist Khmer Rouge in the last days of April, with a new government in place by the end of May. In August, the communist Pathet Lao consolidated a victory won months earlier on the battlefield by formally taking over the government.

And what happened next?

We lost a war, shrugged it off, and moved on.

Cambodia was taken over by the fanatical Khmer Rouge, led by Pol Pot, who initiated a wave of murders and atrocities that horrified the world. The communist winners in South Vietnam began a purge of thousands who were deemed, fairly or not, to be Western sympathizers, many of them Southerners who had been drafted or dragged into the South Vietnamese army. They were flung into re-education camps that combined physical labor with mental torture. The jailed included many members of North's loyal allies known to Americans as the Viet Cong, who were not communists but nationalists.

Today, consolidated Vietnam is non-communist, America is its largest trading partner, and it is a major tourist stop for Americans and Europeans. The same can be said for Cambodia's Angkor Wat, with its thousand-year-old temples. I played golf at a resort a few years ago and went sightseeing with my family. Communist Laos remains relatively remote but is modernizing rapidly and is a significant trading partner of China.

All that America fought, died, and killed for was gone within a few months. So much for containment. And so much for signaling. It was a lesson not known, or not interesting, to the Biden administration in early 2022, when it seemed clear that Vladimir Putin was going to lead Russia to war with Ukraine. Before that, Biden had long been a strong opponent of Russia and Soviet communism. Throughout his political career, he especially reviled Putin.

It is now widely accepted that Putin would have delayed or canceled the invasion if Secretary of State Antony Blinken had assured him that Ukraine would not be permitted to join NATO. That promise was not made. Instead, Biden publicly warned Putin two weeks before the Russians attacked that America would destroy the newly constructed pipeline, Nord Stream 2, that was prepared to funnel Russian gas to Germany. Putin had already slowed down and cut off Nord Stream 1, the pipeline that began delivering gas to Germany a decade earlier.

The cheap gas helped propel Germany into becoming the dominant manufacturing entity in Western Europe. Since the late 1950s, the United States and its Western European allies had worried about the political impact of Russian energy.

The idea of blowing up Nord Stream 1 and 2 had come from the American intelligence community, spearheaded at the time by the CIA. The community had been asked in late 2021 for options—American actions—that could convince Putin to back off. It was with this understanding that a secret CIA unit was organized to find a way to do what President Biden wanted: to present Putin with a threat that could stop the Russian president from going to war. Bolstered by the CIA's confidence, Biden stunned the intelligence community by threatening to blow up Nord Stream at a White House news conference on 7 February 2022, with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz standing at his side.

The CIA team, nestled in secrecy in Norway, continued to work on its assignment and found a way to get the complicated job done by early spring. In the view of some of the planners, the understanding was for Biden to pull the trigger and publicly tell Putin that he had done what he threatened to do. He, Putin, had to understand that he was dealing with an American president whose words were to be taken seriously. But Biden changed his mind at the last minute—a time had been set for the underwater detonation of bombs that had been planted earlier—and the operation was put on hold. The CIA team was not explained, and the American bombs were left in place to be triggered whenever Biden chose to do so.

The American team was disbanded, with some of them angered by the president's refusal to do what they were told was the purpose of their mission: to show Putin that his actions would have immediate consequences. The mines were detonated remotely at Biden's request on 26 September, six months into the Ukraine war, for reasons never made clear—because the Biden White House insisted then, and to this day, that it had nothing to do with the detonations.

After the explosions, which became an international sensation, it took four days for a White House correspondent to bring up the Nord Stream issue. Biden called the bombings "a deliberate act of sabotage" and claimed that the Russians were "pumping out [dis]information and lies about it." At a news conference, A reporter asked National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan whether he and others in the press corps should take the president's statements to mean that "the US now believes that Russia was likely responsible for this sabotage?"

Sullivan—who, as I reported last February, was the major player in generating a secret potential pre-war threat to Russia—provided a breathtaking answer in its obfuscation.

"First," he responded, "Russia has done what it frequently does when it is responsible for something . . . which is to make accusations that it was someone else who did it. We've seen that repeatedly over time."

He said that the president was also clear—which he was not –that "there is more work to do on the investigation before the United States government is prepared to make an attribution in this case."

The White House, he said, would not make a "definitive determination" until its allies in the region concluded their work.

Sullivan said that Russia's suggestion that the US was involved in the bombing was "flat out false. Russians know they're false. But, of course, that is part of their playbook."

Sweden and Denmark, whose governments had every reason to know what had occurred, announced within days of the explosions that they would work and investigate them together. On 2 October, Germany said it would work with Sweden and Denmark on the inquiry. Twelve days later, the Russian foreign ministry expressed its "bewilderment" at being excluded from the inquiry. On that day, Sweden said it would not join in the inquiries because they would involve the transfer of information related to Sweden's national security.

Nothing more about the cause of the underwater bombings has been heard since from either Sweden or Denmark. However, as I have written, both nations knew that the US was practicing underwater diving in the Baltic Sea for months before the explosions. The failure of the two nations to complete their inquiry may have stemmed from the fact, as I was told, that some senior officials in both countries understood precisely what was going on.

The United States has since vetoed at least one attempt by Russia to get an independent United Nations investigation into the explosions. The US intelligence community has provided support, along with German officials, to journalists writing alternative accounts of the pipeline bombing. Such stories invariably cite a 49-foot yacht said to be the vessel for the high-risk technical diving involved.

There is no evidence that President Biden, in the sixteen months since the pipelines were destroyed, has "tasked"—a word of art in the American intelligence community—its experts to conduct an all-source investigation into the explosions. And no senior German leader, including Chancellor Olaf Scholz, known to be close to President Biden, has made any significant push to determine who did what. A subsequent investigation sought by some of Bundestag, Germany's parliament members, was undertaken. Still, its conclusion has been withheld from the public for what are said to be security reasons.

The last word on all of this belongs to Emmanuel Todd, a French demographer and political scientist who became widely known in Europe in 1976, when he was twenty-five years old, for his prediction, based in part on increasing rates of infant mortality, that the Soviet Union was doomed to fail. He has become more and more critical of American foreign policy, especially its continuing support for Ukraine, which he has caustically described as "a defeat for the West without being a victory for Russia."

He argued in a recent interview that "one of the great goals of American politics, and therefore of NATO, was to stop the inevitable reconciliation of Russia and Germany" as Russia, despite American sanctions, was winning the war in Ukraine and once again "evincing economic stability."

"This was a great source of fear," Todd said, "and that is why the Americans"—he cited my Nord Stream exposé—"blew up the Nord Stream pipeline."

At the time Biden ordered the destruction of the pipelines, the American fear was that Chancellor Scholz, who, at the request of Washington, had shut off 750 miles of Russian gas in the new Nord Stream 2 pipeline that was ready in the fall of 2021 to be delivered to a port in Germany, might change his mind and let the gas flow, easing German economic worries and reinstating a vital energy force for German industry. That would not be allowed, and Germany has been in economic and political turmoil since.

YOAV HAIFAWI |THE LAST AMERICAN WAR

The US supports Israel unconditionally because it sees the entire Western project in the Middle East at risk today in Gaza. While it may seem these are our darkest days, it is also clear that the US and Israel are bound to fail.

US President Joe Biden at the Jeddah Security and Development Summit (GCC+3) in Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea coastal city of Jeddah on July 16, 2022. (Photo: Saudi Press Agency)

“The current war has united all the peoples of the region, the entire Third World, and all people of conscience in the imperialist countries in a call for an immediate cessation of hostilities and support for the Palestinian people and their aspirations for justice and freedom.”

By Yoav Haifawi
Mondoweiss.net
February 12, 2024

These are challenging times. Day after day, a shocking genocide is unfolding before the eyes of the whole world. Israel is nurturing a psychotic seizure as its “functional response” to the trauma of October 7. We have already become accustomed to living in the heart of an apartheid regime, oppression, and wars that have shed rivers of blood. Still, the death and destruction that Israel is inflicting today upon the residents of the Gaza Strip are much worse than anything we have seen before in the history of “the conflict.”

At the time of this writing, the United States has not only done nothing to stop the massacre of Gaza’s residents but has increased arms shipments to Israel. It has also directly participated in the war and has recruited its allies to do so as well by demonstrating its power against convenient and non-threatening victims such as Yemen, Syria, and Iraq.

This should not come as a surprise. Much has been written about the danger to world peace when a hegemonic power on a downward trajectory confronts a rising power that seeks to secure its place at the heart of the global order. The situation is even more dangerous because the United States still has a significant advantage in worldwide arms production and military deployment. In contrast, it has nothing to offer in other areas, especially economic development. Attempting to exploit its military advantage to preserve its international hegemony, the US tries to sow conflicts and foster militarization of the global system: gunship diplomacy, par excellence.

Toward this end, “the conflict” in Palestine has never been simply a local matter between Zionist settlers and the native Palestinian population. Britain, followed by the United States and Germany, did not invest their best money in nurturing Zionist settlement and later in building the State of Israel and securing its military supremacy over all countries in the region, with just an aim of suppressing or exploiting a small Arab public in a remote corner that had never threatened their rule or interests. Their goal was, and still is, to use Israel as a spearhead for enforcing imperialist hegemony in the Middle East as a whole – a resource-rich region of central geopolitical importance between Europe, Asia, and Africa. From their perspective, Palestinians have always been “collateral damage,” residents who happened to be on land intended for establishing an imperialist military base; they are an unnecessary disturbance that needs to be eliminated or suppressed to oblivion within the framework of this broader geopolitical grand plan.

And it is that plan that the West sees at risk today in Gaza.

The main reason, or complications, that make the current war appear endless can be first identified in the Second Israeli-Lebanon War in the summer of 2006. In that attack, Israel attempted to restore its regional deterrence, which had been damaged by its withdrawal from Lebanon six years earlier, and to regain its military reputation as a feared servant of its Western masters. The result was a triple failure. In asymmetric warfare between a state military force and a popular resistance movement, all that the resistance movement needs to win is to continue fighting, so Hezbollah’s survival meant Israel’s defeat. Second, Israel did not set achievable political goals for its war and thus could not accomplish them. Lastly, there was a crucial failure for the United States as well. Instead of acting as expected and stopping Israel’s aggression in exchange for political gains, US politics and a lack of constructive strategy turned America into “cheerleaders” for continuing the war. They celebrated the “birth pangs of a new Middle East.” In the absence of a mechanism to stop the war, Israel continued “sinking into Lebanese mud” until the military cost became unbearable for it. In light of this failure, Israel finally declared that simply causing catastrophic harm to civilians and massive destruction of civilian infrastructure were to be considered the significant achievements in this war within what came to be known as “the Dahiya Doctrine.” This strategy failed to defeat the resistance but was intended to send a message.

After failing in Lebanon in 2006, the Israeli/US campaign to project regional power initiated its surprise attack on Gaza on Christmas Eve 2008. They hoped that, against a weaker enemy, they could recover from the trauma caused by their repeated failed adventures in Lebanon. Since then, there have been five rounds of major assaults on Gaza – in 2012, 2014, 2018, 2021, and now again in 2023 – where each one aimed at recovering from the failure of the previous round. The “military” logic behind all is unchanged – maximum impact on the civilian population to “burn consciousness” into those who resist. The latest round is just “more of the same” – much worse than ever.

Might Israel and the US achieve military victory this time? The simple and firm answer is “no.” The declared goal of Israel’s war, as well as that of the United States and European countries supporting it, is the “elimination of Hamas.” However, Hamas was established and became popular in response to the ongoing Israeli occupation in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Hamas is a political party, and “Al-Qassam Brigades” are an armed resistance movement associated with it. Israel is not interested in who opposes the occupation, whether it be Hamas, another faction, or unorganized residents. Therefore, the goal of “eliminating Hamas” should be understood not as eliminating a specific organization but as eliminating all resistance to the occupation. The Israeli-American strategy, then, is to eliminate any attempt to resist the occupation by making it more brutal and terrifying.

I assume that many within the Israeli and American establishments and the public understand that achieving the stated goal of “eliminating Hamas” is impossible. Of course, there are messianic and fascist factions within Israel who believe wholeheartedly that they can kill or expel all Palestinian Arabs, complete the ethnic cleansing in all of Palestine, confiscate Palestinian property, and settle on their land. The less extreme Zionist factions would be happy (or at least agree) to stop this cycle of destruction if they could justify it through an American dictate. As long as the United States and major European countries oppose ending the war, even those in Israel who are aware of the damage and futility of the continuation of mass massacres and war crimes would not dare to stop it.

In previous wars, the United States limited Israeli aggression. It demanded a political price from its Arab rivals, but in this war, the United States is primarily concerned about Israel’s inability to win, and it is pushing it to continue fighting. In order not to bear complete responsibility for Israel’s aggression, the US might issue toothless calls for Israel to limit harm to civilians, abide by the laws of war, and increase humanitarian aid reaching the residents of Gaza. But these are empty words. In practice, the US continues to arm Israel and does not exert any pressure on it except to go on fighting at any price.

With utmost hypocrisy, the US pretends to be a “mediator,” whether on the issue of prisoner exchanges or even on a grand “solution” to end “the conflict.” But in the end, it is always clear that these US-led processes are a cover for maintaining the Zionist occupation of Palestine and, through it, a Western beachhead in the region.

In the current prisoner exchange negotiations, the US is trying to get Hamas to agree to release prisoners without clear assurance of stopping the war or Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. They hope that after the prisoners are exchanged, Israel will be able to act even more lethally. The blockade organized by Biden’s administration against UNRWA, which provides most of the humanitarian services for Gaza residents during an unprecedented humanitarian crisis, illustrates how fully involved and complicit the US and its allies are in committing genocide.

For decades, US-led peace negotiations, with endless talk about the prospect of a Palestinian state in most of the territories occupied by Israel in 1967, have been at the forefront of imperialist foreign policy. In practice, nothing has been done to advance such an agreement, and discussions on this topic have served as a convenient cover for continued support for the occupation of all of Palestine by Zionism, for ongoing ethnic cleansing, and for maintaining a racist apartheid regime throughout the territory between the river and the sea.

Every time someone tries to apply even minimal pressure on Israel to reduce its systematic violations of Palestinian human rights, respected Western politicians claim that “it harms the peace process.” Now, this empty talk about the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside the State of Israel has been repurposed to serve as cover for supporting and encouraging genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza.

Many in the West argue that Hamas is an obstacle to peace agreements that, of course, are just waiting around the corner. Therefore, what needs to be done now, according to this distorted logic, is “to eliminate Hamas for the sake of peace.” After completing the genocide on Gaza’s residents, they promise, of course, to “speak forcefully” with Bibi and Ben-Gvir, and everything will fall into place peacefully.

In the real world, we are trapped in Israel’s Catch-22. When resistance to occupation does not manifest itself violently, it is ignored because “who cares about these Palestinians anyway?” But when resistance erupts again violently, it must be crushed at any cost because “we are against violence, and you cannot make peace with terrorists.”

While it may seem we are in our darkest days, and many ways we are, we can also see that this is the last American war.

The current war, more than any other war I remember, has united all the peoples of the region, the entire Third World, and all people of conscience in the imperialist countries in a call for an immediate cessation of hostilities and support for the Palestinian people and their aspirations for justice and freedom.

Meanwhile, a united front of imperialist countries is supporting a continuing genocide against Gaza’s residents by refusing to pressure Israel while defending it from international law. By doing so, they expose the “values” and “rules-based international order” they claim to protect in the most precise possible way.

As America’s hypocrisy becomes more evident with each atrocity broadcast live worldwide, they push on continuing the war “until victory.” As they lose humanity’s sympathy in this conflict, it becomes all the more vital for them to burn into our consciousness Western weapons’ destructive power and the unbearable price of fighting for freedom.

But battleships can no longer dictate the world order.

Yoav Haifawi is an anti-Zionist activist and maintains the blogs Free Haifa and Free Haifa Extra.

COL. DOUGLAS MACGREGOR: IS WORLD WAR III AROUND THE CORNER?

Click here to view the video (29 minutes, 37 seconds)

Hosted by Judge Napolitano
Judging Freedom
29 January 2024

BUILDING THE BRIDGE! | A WAY TO GETTING TO KNOW THE OTHER AND ONE ANOTHER

Making a Difference – The Means, Methods, and Mechanism for Many to Move Mountains

Photo Credit: Abraham A. van Kempen, our home away from home on the Dead Sea

By Abraham A. van Kempen
Senior Editor
Updated 19 January 2024

Those who commit to 'healing our broken humanity' build intercultural bridges to learn to know and understand one another and others. Readers who thumb through the Building the Bridge (BTB) pages are not mindless sheep following other mindless sheep. They THINK. They want to be at the forefront of making a difference. They're in search of the bigger picture to expand their horizons. They don't need BTB or anyone else to confirm their biases.

Making a Difference – The Means, Methods, and Mechanism for Many to Move Mountains

Accurate knowledge promotes understanding, dispels prejudice, and awakens the desire to learn more. Words have an extraordinary power to bring people together, divide them, forge bonds of friendship, or provoke hostility. Modern technology places unprecedented possibilities for good at our disposal, fostering harmony and reconciliation. Yet its misuse can do untold harm, leading to misunderstanding, prejudice, and conflict.

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