Our Wednesday News Analysis | Our complicity in Gaza has set the stage for a second genocide - in the West Bank

Smotrich … "E1 is necessary because it will “bury the idea of a Palestinian state”. It is the prelude to his ambition, one shared by the rest of the Israeli government and a large part of the public, to annex the West Bank formally.”

The plan was formally frozen in 2009 only after the US exerted massive pressure on Israel. Why?

Because the realisation of E1 could mean only one thing:
a permanent end to the pretence of a two-state solution.

Israel's interest in "peacemaking" would be exposed
as the hollow charade it always was, even under Rabin.

Which is why the Guardian and other media are calling the E1 Plan "hugely controversial" – a predictable and hugely controversial understatement.

In fact, E1 is utterly illegal.

There is a revealing back story to Israel's so-called E1 Plan, a massive settlement project that includes the building of many thousands of new homes. The plan’s goal is to irreversibly sever the illegally annexed eastern, Palestinian side of Jerusalem from the West Bank, and then break the illegally occupied West Bank into two separate territorial cantons, destroying any hope of future Palestinian statehood.

That back story utterly undermines Israel's "self-defence" narrative in Gaza.

The media are playing up the role of Bezalel Smotrich, the self-declared fascist minister in Netanyahu's government, in the E1 Plan – as though it somehow reflects his ugly and malign influence. That is pure misdirection.

In fact, this plan has been around since the 1990s and was first formulated by the supposedly "peacenik" Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. It was intended as a parallel move to the “peace accords” of that time negotiated in Oslo.

The Oslo accords had incited huge divisions in Israeli society because it was assumed that they would cede back to the Palestinians significant pieces of territory Israel was illegally occupying and colonising in the West Bank. Domestic opposition ultimately led to Rabin’s assassination.

In Rabin's eyes, E1 overrode those objections. It would protect the then largest of the illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank, Maale Adumim, incorporating it into the eastern side of Jerusalem, which Israel had already annexed and was furiously settling with Jews while displacing Palestinian communities there.

As an aside, let us note that Rabin, who won the Nobel peace prize along with Yasser Arafat for signing the Oslo accords, was expressly against the creation of a real Palestinian state. He wanted “an entity which is less than a state” – a vision that appears to have viewed that “entity” as little more than a glorified local authority running schools and collecting the rubbish...

Read more: Our complicity in Gaza has set the stage for a second genocide - in the West Bank
___________________

ISRAEL’S STARVATION DENIAL IS AN ORWELLIAN FARCE

Source: Arab News
https://www.arabnews.com/node/2612239

By Dr. Ramzy Baroud
Published August 18, 2025

A protester holds a sign in memory of Al Jazeera correspondent Anas Al-Sharif in New York City, US, August 15, 2025. (Reuters)

Since the Nakba in 1948, Palestinian society in Gaza has invested heavily in education, seeing it as a crucial tool for liberation and self-determination.

Early footage shows lessons being given in tents and open spaces,
a testament to this community’s tenacious pursuit of knowledge.

This focus on education transformed the Strip into a regional hub for intellectual and cultural production, despite the schools being poorly funded by UNRWA.

Israel’s campaign of destruction is a deliberate attempt to erase this generational achievement, a practice known as “scholasticide,” and Gaza is the most deliberate example of this horrific act.

The killing of seven Palestinian journalists and media workers in Gaza last week has prompted verbal condemnations, yet has inspired little to no substantive action.

This has become the predictable and horrifying trajectory of the international community's response to the ongoing Israeli genocide.

By eliminating Palestinian journalists like Anas Al-Sharif and Mohammed Qraiqeh, Israel has made a sinister statement that the genocide will spare no one. According to the monitoring website Shireen.ps, Israel has killed nearly 270 journalists since October 2023.

More Palestinian journalists are likely to die covering the genocide of their own people in Gaza, especially since Israel has manufactured a convenient and easily deployed narrative that every Gazan journalist is simply a “terrorist.” This is the same cruel logic offered by numerous Israeli officials in the past, including President Isaac Herzog, who declared that “an entire nation” in Gaza “is responsible” for not having rebelled against Hamas, effectively stating that there are no innocent people in the Strip.

This Israeli discourse, which dehumanizes an entire population based on a vicious logic, is frequently repeated by officials who fear no accountability. Even Israeli diplomats, whose job in theory is to improve their country’s image internationally, frequently engage in this brutal ritual. In comments made in January 2024, Israeli Ambassador to the UK Tzipi Hotovely callously argued that “every school, every mosque, every second house has access to tunnels,” implying that all of Gaza is a valid military target.

This cruel language would be easily dismissed as mere rhetoric except that Israel has, in fact, according to Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor reports, destroyed more than 70 percent of Gaza’s infrastructure...

Read more: Israel’s starvation denial is an Orwellian farce
___________________

NETANYAHU IS ON A MISSION TO SEIZE THE MIDDLE EAST. WILL ANYONE STOP HIM?

Source: Jews for Justice for Palestinians
https://jfjfp.com/netanyahu-is-on-a-mission-to-seize-the-middle-east-will-anyone-stop-him/

David Hearst writes in Middle East Eye on 18 August 2025:

The Israeli prime minister's vision of the Promised Land means that the Gaza genocide heralds the beginning of a vicious territorial campaign

Israeli troops deploy near the Gaza border on 1 August 2025

… arrest warrants against two other ministers in the Israeli cabinet,
National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich,
were lying on the desks of two deputy prosecutors, gathering dust.

They are fully prepared, according to our sources,
and if served, would represent the first time that the crime of apartheid was prosecuted at the ICC.

When South Africa brought the charge of genocide against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the court gave Israel nine months to present its rebuttal. That expired at the end of July.

The panel of 17 judges accepted Israel’s argument that it needed more time to prepare its case because of “evidentiary issues” in South Africa’s case. Accordingly, Israel’s impunity before the ICJ was extended by another six months. It is now thought that the ICJ will not rule on the issue before 2027 at the earliest.

In those nine months, more than 250 Palestinians, nearly half of them children, have died of starvation created expressly as a weapon of war by Israel’s cabinet. The carnage has continued unabated. Thousands more civilians have been killed by bombings, and tens of thousands are set to die if Israeli forces retake Gaza City.

A leak of the minutes of a cabinet meeting on 1 March, published recently by Channel 13, revealed how Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer, who now heads Israel’s negotiating team, argued successfully – against the advice of top Israeli military and security officials – that Israel should starve Gaza into submission.

Netanyahu decided to break the ceasefire that was at the time functioning, and to cut off all aid to Gaza to “force Hamas to surrender”, the leak noted.

Last week, however, Netanyahu claimed none of this has happened. The policy of starvation that he voted on at that cabinet meeting in March was a fiction, part of a mass vilification of Jews. Days later, the Israeli army joined in the campaign of denial, claiming there were no signs of widespread malnutrition in Gaza.

In other words, Unicef, the World Food Programme, and all the other experts who say that a famine is playing out in Gaza, are lying. The images of children reduced to skin and bones are fake. It’s all part of a “blood libel” against Jews...

Read more: Netanyahu is on a mission to seize the Middle East. Will anyone stop him?