Dispatch #111 White Lesbian Age 71 Considers US Position that Israel Can Continue Their Palestinian Genocide without Restraint – Dissenters Beware!
- Kathleen A. Maloy
- Oct 23, 2023
- 8 min read
Updated: Aug 31
Oct. 24th 2023
976 Days Since Inauguration of First Woman Vice-President
119 Days Until the 2024 Presidential Primaries Begin
487 Days Since Supreme Court Ruled Women Don’t Have Human Rights
At least 5,791 Palestinians have been killed in the Israeli carpet bombing on Gaza since October 7th, according to the Gaza health ministry. This number includes at least 2,360 children. However, this number does not account for 1,550 reports of missing people, including 870 children. During the previous 24 hours Israel intensified its bombardment killing 704 Palestinians.
On Tuesday the White House national security spokesperson, John Kirby, said at a press briefing that the time wasn’t right to pursue a general ceasefire
I think you’ve heard us say, a cease fire right now really only benefits Hamas. That’s where we are right now. And I understand the question, but I’m just not going to get ahead of where things are.
Kirby did warn that the situation in Gaza was “going to be messy and innocent civilians are going to be hurt going forward:”
I wish that that wasn’t going to happen. But it is. It is going to happen. And that doesn’t make it right. Doesn’t make it dismissible. It doesn’t mean that we aren’t going to still express concerns about that and do everything we can to help the Israelis, do everything they can to minimize it. But that’s unfortunately the nature of conflict.
Uh-Huh, more chilling Orwellian doublespeak. Let’s see, the nature of this conflict is that Israel gets as much time as Israel deems necessary to take barbaric revenge on 2.2 million Palestinians – in full view of the world and with the support of US and Western powers.
Pro-Palestinian views face suppression in US amid Israel-Hamas war www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/oct/21/israel-hamas-conflict-palestinian-voices-censored
‘An atmosphere of fear’: free speech under threat in Israel, activists say
Blessed Be the Peacemakers, Unless They Raise their Voices in Washington www.thenation.com/article/politics/congress-ceasefire-gaza/
Israel is destroying all urban living infrastructure in Northern Gaza where 1.2 million Palestinians lived – clean water supply, sewer system, electricity and power, roads, housing, schools, hospitals and health centers. So, whenever this horror-show ends, displaced Gazans will not be able to return to an utterly obliterated urban landscape – leaving 2.2 million Palestinians crammed into ½ of the Gaza Strip?
Israel is clear about its intentions in Gaza – world leaders cannot plead ignorance of what is coming. www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/24/israel-gaza-world-leaders-un-genocide-palestinians
Israel must stop weaponizing the Holocaust www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/24/israel-gaza-palestinians-holocaust
The eyes of the world are on Gaza – but Palestinians are under attack in the West Bank too
‘The most successful land-grab strategy since 1967’ as settlers push Bedouins off West Bank territory www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/21/the-most-successful-land-grab-strategy-since-1967-as-settlers-push-bedouins-off-west-bank-territory
Since the US is stage-managing this humanitarian catastrophe and purposefully erasing the historical context that led to this moment, educating ourselves about the past 75 years of the Palestinian struggle for freedom, self-determination and their stolen homeland against the colonial-occupier Israel is our collective moral responsibility. Read, Learn, Share.
‘Toward Peace in the Holy Land’ Foreign Affairs 1988 by Walid Khalidi
This thorough review of Israel-Palestine conflict is heartbreaking to read for the author’s aspirational optimism – 25 years ago – that peace would/had to be achieved. Khalidi concludes: Important sectors of Israeli public opinion, not only on the left of center but at the center itself, favor a settlement that might be acceptable to most Palestinians. They are aware of the dangers of indefinite domination of another people, but this is not the thrust of popular Israeli sentiment nor of the thinking of the Israeli leadership. The Israeli scorpion is determinedly uncognizant of the Palestinian fellow creature in the same bottle. Paradoxically, a Palestinian state in the occupied territories within the 1967 frontiers in peaceful coexistence alongside Israel is the only conceptual candidate for a historical compromise of this century-old conflict. Without it the conflict will remain an open-ended one between the maximalist concepts of Zionism and those of its Arab and Muslim hinterland, whatever palliative measures are taken in the meantime…..One would have thought the Jewish genius capable of grasping effortlessly the need for an honorable and viable settlement in light of the geographic, demographic and ideological realities of the Middle East. Even archaeology adds its imperative plea in the form of the debris of so many past regional empires. The path to integration into a region would not seem to be via emphasis on extraneousness and escalating dependence on the outside. The breaking of bones is no passport to peace. www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/israel/toward-peace-holy-land-palestine-khalidi
‘The Many and the Few’ by Fintan O’Toole New York Review of Books
O’Toole considers the tendency for colonial powers to view resistance as collective barbarism and concludes: In his televised address to the American people on October 19, Biden explicitly disowned the idea of collective Palestinian guilt: “Hamas does not represent the Palestinian people.” He also said, “President Netanyahu and I discussed again, yesterday, the critical need for Israel to operate by the laws of war. That means protecting civilians in combat as best as they can. The people of Gaza urgently need food, water, and medicine.” He did not say, however, that Netanyahu had accepted this repudiation of collective guilt or the need to obey international law. Nor did he say what the US will do if Israel does not obey the laws of war or facilitate the provision of food, water, and medicine to civilians in Gaza. Are the principles Biden laid down exhortations or conditions, entreaties or imperatives? The fate of the Middle East may turn on the answer. Biden began his address by saying, “We’re facing an inflection point in history. One of those moments where the decisions we make today are going to determine the future for decades to come.” In this at least he may well be right. There is either, in the crucible of this unfolding catastrophe, a definitive return to the colonial principle that humanity is fundamentally divided between those who deserve the protection of morality and law and those who do not, or there is a recognition that the line between civilization and barbarism runs not between different societies but within them. www.nybooks.com/online/2023/10/21/the-many-and-the-few-israel-gaza/
‘Heading Toward a Second Nakba’ by David Shulman
Shulman reviews Nathan Thrall’s book titled “A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy” wherein Thrall examines the death of Salama’s 6-year old son in a bus accident. Shulman begins with this comment: Nathan Thrall has made the story of that accident and that family the thread that binds together A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, a penetrating, wide-ranging, heart-wrenching exploration of life in Palestine under Israeli occupation. I know of no other writing on Israel and Palestine that reaches this depth of perception and understanding. www.nybooks.com/articles/2023/10/19/heading-toward-a-second-nakba-a-day-in-the-life-of-abed-salama/
Sadly, at this moment Nathan Thrall’s book tour in the US has been halted due to widespread threats and violent recriminations aimed at anyone or anything perceived as pro-Hamas or pro-Palestine and thus anti-Israel. (More than 900 events so far have been cancelled during the last 2 weeks.) An earlier version of Thrall’s book appeared in the New York Review of Books in March 2021 – read and weep at how Palestinians must live.
A Day in the Life of Abed Salama by Nathan Thrall
‘Enforcing Apartheid in the West Bank’ by Tareq Baconi
Armed settlers are Zionism’s contemporary pioneers. Most of them are religious ethnonationalists, full of messianic zeal and determined to facilitate Israel’s expansion. That mission has a system that predates the Nakba and the establishment of the state of Israel: to frighten Palestinians off their land and create outposts for taking over the territory. The state does not officially plan these settlements, but it legitimizes most of them after the fact. For those Israelis and their allies who have normalized the events of 1948, accepted them as a necessary fait accompli in their state’s formation, the stories from Huwara are an important reminder that settler violence remains central to Israeli nation-building…..Such violence has been rising over the past decade, reaching a peak last year, according to UN figures. Human rights organizations have been documenting almost daily settler attacks throughout the West Bank, many of which take place under the army’s watch. Armed settlers descend on Palestinian fields, steal livestock, uproot olive trees, and chase farmers away, cutting them off from their livelihood. In recent years, armed settler militias have patrolled roads, targeted Palestinian cars, and even invaded smaller towns and villages next to their settlements. B’Tselem, Israel’s leading human rights group, notes that “continuous, systemic violence meted out by settlers is part of Israel’s official policy, driving massive takeover of Palestinian farmland and pastureland.” www.nybooks.com/online/2023/03/03/enforcing-apartheid-in-the-west-bank/
Both Israelis and Palestinians Are Victims of Israel’s Apartheid System
‘Gaza Without Pretenses’ by Tareq Baconi
For years Israel and Hamas maintained an unstable equilibrium that kept the Gaza Strip contained. But it was always likely to be temporary…Since 1948 Israel has used bombardment, invasion, arrests, collaboration networks, and economic strangulation to control the Gaza Strip and suppress the demand of Palestinians there to return to the homes from which they had been expelled from 1947 on, many merely a few miles away. When Hamas—the Islamist party originally founded in 1987 from the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood—rose to power in 2006 and took control of Gaza in 2007, Israel used the group’s commitment to armed resistance against occupation as an excuse to hermetically seal off Gaza for sixteen years, in what the UN and human rights groups have condemned as an illegal form of collective punishment of the 2.3 million Palestinians who live there, the vast majority of them refugees... Since the start of the [October 7] offensive, Western leaders have rallied uncritically to the Israeli government’s side. It has been hard to miss the hypocrisy of statements condemning Hamas’s bloodletting from politicians who declined to criticize months of brazen and bloody attacks by Israel’s occupying army and its settlers against Palestinians. Under the most right-wing government in its history, Israel has carried out large-scale invasions of Palestinian refugee camps and towns in the West Bank, killing and wounding scores of people. Armed Israeli fighters have burst into Palestinian streets and homes on an almost nightly basis, often picking children out of their beds in the middle of the night to be taken into administrative detention—acts of terror that have gone largely unreported in the Western press. www.nybooks.com/online/2023/10/11/gaza-without-pretenses/
For decades, US has shielded Israel from accountability for violations of UN resolutions and international law thereby establishing Netanyahu’s experience/belief that Israel can act with impunity as it subjects Palestinians to a devastating occupation and apartheid system.
The U.N. Failed on Gaza as It Failed on Ukraine — Just as Intended
In 2002, the Council of Arab States adopted Arab Peace Initiative, a Saudi-inspired peace plan that conditioned recognition for Israel on Palestinian statehood. www.kas.de/c/document_library/get_file?uuid=a5dab26d-a2fe-dc66-8910-a13730828279&groupId=268421
In 2020, the Abraham Accords, courtesy of Jared Kushner and the Trump Administration, established the precedent for Arab countries to disregard this condition on normalizing relations with Israel, and rewarded the participating Arab states -- Morrocco, Sudan, UAE – with various diplomatic favors, economic aid, and substantial military hardware.
The Institute for Middle East Understanding Policy Analysis #5 titled ‘Abraham Accords Isolate Palestinians, Solidify Israel’s Apartheid Rule’ noted that:
The Abraham Accords are business and weapons deals with authoritarian regimes… Not only did the Trump administration’s deals deepen US complicity in the commission of war crimes, ignore human rights abuses, complicate democratic transitions, and undermine self-determination; by design, these agreements also are meant to politically isolate the Palestinian people from the natural ties of solidarity expressed by Arab people by concluding deals over their heads between their undemocratic governments and Israel. https://imeu.org/article/imeu-policy-analysis-5-abraham-accords-isolate-palestinians-solidify-israel
Despite this deeply troubling context, the Biden Administration has relied on the Abraham Accords to persuade Saudi Arabia to normalize relations with Israel. The reward for Saudi Arabia includes permission for the Saudis to enrich their uranium supplies. The US and Israel get a substantial counterweight against Iran. Palestinian lives are pawns, discarded human beings, in the Middle East Great Game that will only ‘entrench the violence of the status quo.’
‘A Deal Signed in Blood’ by Spencer Ackerman 10 October 2023 www.thenation.com/article/world/israel-us-saudi-arabia-deal-palestine-gaza/
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