Sending them to Gaza would be better but firing is also goodMeanwhile Here In Canada...
A List Of Some People In Canada Fired For Pro-Palestine Views
In recent weeks, many people in Canada have been investigated, suspended and/or fired by their employer for posting about Palestine.
ResourcesLabourInternational
by Davide Mastracci
November 10, 2023 ∙ 11 min read
Photo via Beyzaa Yurtkuran on Pexels.
In recent weeks, many people within Canada have been investigated, suspended and/or fired by their employer for expressing pro-Palestine views on social media and elsewhere. The Maple intends to document and share as many examples of such cases — where the person was disciplined for posts or comments made on or after October 7 — as possible.
To start, I’ve compiled particularly well known incidents that have already been made public. Based on preliminary tips we’ve received from human rights organizations and lawyers, we know the cases below are just a fraction of the overall incidents. For example, here’s how an open letter from legal organizations described the state of retaliation in that industry: “Lawyers are openly advocating on social media to blacklist law students and lawyers who have voiced support for Palestine; Lawyers are contacting the employers of lawyers and encouraging they be fired for their pro-Palestinian advocacy. Law firms (many of which issued unprecedented, political statements in support of Israel) are rescinding interview offers to students who sign open letters condemning Israel. Law schools are threatening those students with expulsion.”
However, non-public examples will take time and resources to research and share, so I’ve chosen to put this out for now while The Maple team continues our work to create a more comprehensive resource.
The incidents below are listed in alphabetical order, and each one contains the name of the person, their position, their employer, the status of the action against them and what happened. Confirmed incidents where the targeted people have remained anonymous are listed at the end.
If you know of any more incidents, and/or have been personally investigated, suspended, or fired by your employer due to expressing pro-Palestine views since October 7, please get in touch with us at opinion@readthemaple.com
This list will be updated going forward.
Zahraa Al-Akhrass
On October 17, Global News fired Zahraa Al-Akhrass for pro-Palestine posts she made on social media.
- Position: Online video journalist
- Employer: Global News
- Status: Fired
Here are a couple of the posts she cited as being brought up in her employer’s talks with her:
On October 29, Al-Akhrass posted about the incident on her Instagram page.
On November 1, she posted about it again, this time writing, “My termination of employment was with cause, meaning the company wasn’t legally required to pay me any severance, however, I was offered an amount of money to stay quiet and not go public with my story. This is only to further silence me and I find myself forced to use say it in public in defense of some accusations being circulated to discredit me. This pattern of oppression of Palestinian voices must stop.”
Al-Akhrass has since stated that she is filing a lawsuit against Global for firing her while she was on maternity leave.
Aarij Anwer
On October 26, Western University announced that Sh. Aarij Anwer would be removed from his volunteer position where he counselled and supported Muslim students because of a comment he made online. The comment is below:
- Position: Muslim chaplain
- Employer: Western University
- Status: Fired
Anwer has since tweeted that he is “considering all legal options available.”
Sabreina Dahab
On November 14, Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board trustee Sabreina Dahab released a statement noting, “At the end of October, the Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board of Trustees launched an external investigation into my social media activity as it relates to my posts on Palestine, alleging that my advocacy is a breach of the Trustee Code of Conduct. I am concerned that this investigation is an attempt to silence me for my vocal condemnation of Israeli apartheid and reprimand me for my posts about protests that were calling for the end to the siege of Gaza.”
- Position: School board trustee
- Employer: Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board
- Status: Investigation
The statement didn’t specify the posts in question, but news reporting on the incident mentioned the following tweet from Dahab as an example:
Dahab’s statement adds, “As this investigation is underway, I have been advised by my legal counsel to not make any further comments as it relates to the alleged breach of the code of conduct. I will provide updates at the appropriate time.”
The school board has declined to comment on specifics of the investigation.
Javier Dávila
On November 13, Toronto District School Board (TDSB) student equity adviser Javier Dávila tweeted, “I was just suspended from my job at [TDSB] & put under investigation. This happened minutes after I called out [Centre For Israel and Jewish Affairs] for fabricating lies about students at [Marc Garneau Collegiate Institute] & for the TDSB not publicly standing up for its students who received threats. I refuse to be complicit.”
- Position: Student equity adviser
- Employer: Toronto District School Board
- Status: Suspended
Dávila sent several tweets earlier that day in support of students from the school that had walked out in protest demanding a ceasefire.
Here are a couple of them:
Dávila later noted on Twitter, “This is the 4th time I've been suspended by the TDSB for supporting Palestinian liberation. I’ve been investigated by their Human Rights Office, employee services, the Integrity Commissioner, the Ontario College of Teachers and Toronto Police and cleared each time. I won’t stop!”
The TDSB has yet to comment on the suspension.
Mostafa Ezzo
On October 10, Air Canada announced that pilot Mostafa Ezzo had been “taken out of service” the day before due to “unacceptable posts.” In the days prior, four screenshots of posts by Ezzo were spread online by pro-Israel groups. Those screenshots have been included below.
- Position: Pilot
- Employer: Air Canada
- Status: Fired
Sarah Jama
On October 23, the Ontario legislature voted to censure Sarah Jama, who was also kicked out of the Ontario NDP’s caucus that day.
- Position: MPP
- Party: Ontario NDP
- Status: Removed from caucus and censured in the legislature
The controversy began on October 10 when Jama tweeted the following statement calling for a ceasefire:
The ONDP, which now supports a ceasefire, forced Jama to apologize the next day. Jama is now sitting as an independent MPP that isn’t able to speak in the legislature. She has announced that she will challenge the censure, and also threatened to sue Ontario Premier Doug Ford for allegedly defamatory comments he made about her.
Yara Jamal
On October 26, a CTV News spokesperson told the Toronto Sun: “While we don’t comment on specific staffing matters we can confirm that Yara Jamal is no longer with CTV News.” On October 22, Jamal had attended a pro-Palestine protest in downtown Halifax. She was interviewed by a journalist from the SaltWire Network, and is quoted as follows: “‘Jews can continue to exist, the Zionist ideology cannot,’ said Yara Jamal of Free Palestine Halifax which organized the march. Pressed for whether by ‘Zionist ideology’ she meant Israel, she said, ‘The state, no, cannot exist.’” Several pro-Israel groups targeted Jamal after this.
- Position: Web writer and production assistant
- Employer: CTV Atlantic
- Status: Fired
In an October 26 Instagram post on the Free Palestine Halifax page, Jamal wrote, “Recently, a SaltWire journalist decided to take a quote out of context. I was asked if Jews can exist in a Free Palestine in which I had replied saying, ‘Jews can exist, Zionist ideology cannot.’ Elaborating on what I meant by Zionist ideology, I told the journalist I meant the state of Israel. Israel is labeled by many reputable human rights organizations as an apartheid state. When international and national world leaders call Palestinians ‘animals’ and Israeli politicians call for the extermination of Palestinians it is not publicized, but when a Palestinian says ‘a Free Palestine cannot exist with an apartheid, Zionist state’ it is publicized as anti-Semitic.”
Natalie Knight
On October 31, Langara College announced that they had placed Natalie Knight on leave and launched an investigation into her conduct. On October 28, Knight had given a speech at a pro-Palestine rally in Vancouver. The full, three-minute speech can be viewed here.
- Position: English instructor
- Employer: Langara College
- Status: Placed on leave
The pro-Israeli Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver has called for Knight to be fired.
Shumail Mian
On October 12, Toronto Police Service spokesperson Stephanie Sayer told press that their Professional Standards department was investigating Shumail Mian for a post on social media. The Toronto Sun described the post as showing “a cartoon of media cameras videoing an Israeli man wearing a blue shirt and Star of David chain while on the other side of the border in ‘Gaza’ there are severed bodies, decapitated heads, and pools of blood. Under all of it is the hashtag #freepalestine.”
- Position: Constable
- Employer: Toronto Police Service
- Status: Under investigation
The Maple reached out to Toronto Police for an update on the investigation but has yet to hear back.
Mustafa Rahmanzadeh
On October 12, Toronto Police Service spokesperson Stephanie Sayer told press that their Professional Standards department was investigating Mustafa Rahmanzadeh for a post on social media. A screenshot of the post is below:
- Position: Special constable
- Employer: Toronto Police Service
- Status: Under investigation
The Maple reached out to Toronto Police for an update on the investigation but has yet to hear back.
Nisam Siddiqui
On October 11, The Globe and Mail reported that the federal government’s Privy Council Office (PCO) was investigating Nisam Siddiqui for pro-Palestine posts on social media. The Globe claims that one of his posts “accused Canada and other Western countries of aiding Israel in ‘war crimes and crimes against humanity’ against Palestinians in Gaza.” Another post was described as reading: “They are acting as enablers to allow Israel to continue murdering Semitic Palestinians in an open-air prison in the Gaza Ghetto to maintain its brutal racist apartheid occupation.”
- Position: Senior analyst
- Employer: Privy Council Office
- Status: Under investigation
The Maple reached out to the PCO for an update on the investigation. Their media spokesperson replied: “We disagree in the strongest possible terms with the remarks posted. These remarks do not reflect the values and expected behaviours of the public service. Adherence to the Values and Ethics Code of the Public Service is a condition of employment for all federal public servants. While, in accordance with the Privacy Act, we are unable to provide details in relation to the employee or the status of any investigation, a breach of the values or expected behaviours described in the Values and Ethics Code of the Public Service may result in disciplinary measures, up to and including termination of employment.”
Ben Thomson
On October 13, Mackenzie Richmond Hill Hospital announced in a statement that it was “addressing social media posts from a few physicians and staff that do not reflect our views or values as an organization.”
- Position: Nephrologist
- Employer: Mackenzie Richmond Hill Hospital
- Status: Suspended
That day, Ben Thomson was given a one month suspension without pay. Thomson had attracted criticism from pro-Israel groups and anonymous callers who threatened the hospital with violence, and had his home address leaked, due to this post.
CBC has reported that the hospital denied Thomson’s posts were the reason for his suspension, without elaborating any further.
The hospital has added several updates to its original announcement since then, including that they were working with police to heighten security measures as a result of online threats and also “working with Dr. Thomson on his plan to return to work once it is deemed safe to do so.”
They eventually posted a statement from Thomson, which you can read in full:
“After innocent civilians in Israel and Gaza were killed, I posted to social media in an effort to correct what I believed was misinformation and to oppose language that was dehumanizing to Palestinians. That post was then retweeted and subsequently threats of violence were made against me and my colleagues at Mackenzie Health. I did not intend for these consequences when I posted on social media. I acknowledge the harm that was caused. These threats against me and Mackenzie Health are unacceptable. Patients, staff, physicians, and others need to feel safe when attending Mackenzie Health. I recognize that the circumstances were unprecedented and I acknowledge Mackenzie Health’s position that it acted with urgency in order to keep everyone, including myself, at Mackenzie Health safe. As a physician and humanitarian, I deplore all loss of life, including that of Palestinian and Israeli civilians. I deplore all forms of discrimination. I have always and continue to oppose all forms of racism including antisemitism and anti-Palestinian racism. I am committed to providing the best care to all my patients regardless of race, creed or religion. I have and will continue to provide care that upholds this commitment. I join with others who call for peace and safety for all. I am committed to working with Mackenzie Health to safely resume my work as a doctor and to caring for all of my patients at Mackenzie Health.”
Anonymous #1
On November 2, pro-Israel group B’nai Brith posted: “Following further discussions with the restaurant, we are happy to report that the employees in question ‘are no longer working at Moxies.’”
- Position: Restaurant employees
- Employer: Moxies
- Status: Fired
On October 21, a pro-Palestine march in downtown Toronto passed a location of the Moxies restaurant chain. Four Moxies employees stood at the front steps of the restaurant and applauded as the march passed. Video footage of the incident was shared online.
Pro-Israel groups put pressure on the restaurant to fire the employees. On October 22, the restaurant’s Twitter account posted: “We sincerely apologize to anyone impacted negatively by these actions. We ask that our team behaves respectfully & demonstrate empathy & sensitivity & can assure you that a formal investigation has been launched & appropriate disciplinary actions will be taken for all involved.”
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Canadians With A Conscience Denounce Zionist "McCarthyism"
- Thread starter niniveh
- Start date
Western Leaders Covering Up The Carnage With Two State LegerdemainMeanwhile Here In Canada...
A List Of Some People In Canada Fired For Pro-Palestine Views
In recent weeks, many people in Canada have been investigated, suspended and/or fired by their employer for posting about Palestine.
ResourcesLabourInternational
by Davide Mastracci
November 10, 2023 ∙ 11 min read
Photo via Beyzaa Yurtkuran on Pexels.
In recent weeks, many people within Canada have been investigated, suspended and/or fired by their employer for expressing pro-Palestine views on social media and elsewhere. The Maple intends to document and share as many examples of such cases — where the person was disciplined for posts or comments made on or after October 7 — as possible.
To start, I’ve compiled particularly well known incidents that have already been made public. Based on preliminary tips we’ve received from human rights organizations and lawyers, we know the cases below are just a fraction of the overall incidents. For example, here’s how an open letter from legal organizations described the state of retaliation in that industry: “Lawyers are openly advocating on social media to blacklist law students and lawyers who have voiced support for Palestine; Lawyers are contacting the employers of lawyers and encouraging they be fired for their pro-Palestinian advocacy. Law firms (many of which issued unprecedented, political statements in support of Israel) are rescinding interview offers to students who sign open letters condemning Israel. Law schools are threatening those students with expulsion.”
However, non-public examples will take time and resources to research and share, so I’ve chosen to put this out for now while The Maple team continues our work to create a more comprehensive resource.
The incidents below are listed in alphabetical order, and each one contains the name of the person, their position, their employer, the status of the action against them and what happened. Confirmed incidents where the targeted people have remained anonymous are listed at the end.
If you know of any more incidents, and/or have been personally investigated, suspended, or fired by your employer due to expressing pro-Palestine views since October 7, please get in touch with us at opinion@readthemaple.com
This list will be updated going forward.
Zahraa Al-Akhrass
On October 17, Global News fired Zahraa Al-Akhrass for pro-Palestine posts she made on social media.
- Position: Online video journalist
- Employer: Global News
- Status: Fired
Here are a couple of the posts she cited as being brought up in her employer’s talks with her:
On October 29, Al-Akhrass posted about the incident on her Instagram page.
On November 1, she posted about it again, this time writing, “My termination of employment was with cause, meaning the company wasn’t legally required to pay me any severance, however, I was offered an amount of money to stay quiet and not go public with my story. This is only to further silence me and I find myself forced to use say it in public in defense of some accusations being circulated to discredit me. This pattern of oppression of Palestinian voices must stop.”
Al-Akhrass has since stated that she is filing a lawsuit against Global for firing her while she was on maternity leave.
Aarij Anwer
On October 26, Western University announced that Sh. Aarij Anwer would be removed from his volunteer position where he counselled and supported Muslim students because of a comment he made online. The comment is below:
- Position: Muslim chaplain
- Employer: Western University
- Status: Fired
Anwer has since tweeted that he is “considering all legal options available.”
Sabreina Dahab
On November 14, Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board trustee Sabreina Dahab released a statement noting, “At the end of October, the Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board of Trustees launched an external investigation into my social media activity as it relates to my posts on Palestine, alleging that my advocacy is a breach of the Trustee Code of Conduct. I am concerned that this investigation is an attempt to silence me for my vocal condemnation of Israeli apartheid and reprimand me for my posts about protests that were calling for the end to the siege of Gaza.”
- Position: School board trustee
- Employer: Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board
- Status: Investigation
The statement didn’t specify the posts in question, but news reporting on the incident mentioned the following tweet from Dahab as an example:
Dahab’s statement adds, “As this investigation is underway, I have been advised by my legal counsel to not make any further comments as it relates to the alleged breach of the code of conduct. I will provide updates at the appropriate time.”
The school board has declined to comment on specifics of the investigation.
Javier Dávila
On November 13, Toronto District School Board (TDSB) student equity adviser Javier Dávila tweeted, “I was just suspended from my job at [TDSB] & put under investigation. This happened minutes after I called out [Centre For Israel and Jewish Affairs] for fabricating lies about students at [Marc Garneau Collegiate Institute] & for the TDSB not publicly standing up for its students who received threats. I refuse to be complicit.”
- Position: Student equity adviser
- Employer: Toronto District School Board
- Status: Suspended
Dávila sent several tweets earlier that day in support of students from the school that had walked out in protest demanding a ceasefire.
Here are a couple of them:
Dávila later noted on Twitter, “This is the 4th time I've been suspended by the TDSB for supporting Palestinian liberation. I’ve been investigated by their Human Rights Office, employee services, the Integrity Commissioner, the Ontario College of Teachers and Toronto Police and cleared each time. I won’t stop!”
The TDSB has yet to comment on the suspension.
Mostafa Ezzo
On October 10, Air Canada announced that pilot Mostafa Ezzo had been “taken out of service” the day before due to “unacceptable posts.” In the days prior, four screenshots of posts by Ezzo were spread online by pro-Israel groups. Those screenshots have been included below.
- Position: Pilot
- Employer: Air Canada
- Status: Fired
Sarah Jama
On October 23, the Ontario legislature voted to censure Sarah Jama, who was also kicked out of the Ontario NDP’s caucus that day.
- Position: MPP
- Party: Ontario NDP
- Status: Removed from caucus and censured in the legislature
The controversy began on October 10 when Jama tweeted the following statement calling for a ceasefire:
The ONDP, which now supports a ceasefire, forced Jama to apologize the next day. Jama is now sitting as an independent MPP that isn’t able to speak in the legislature. She has announced that she will challenge the censure, and also threatened to sue Ontario Premier Doug Ford for allegedly defamatory comments he made about her.
Yara Jamal
On October 26, a CTV News spokesperson told the Toronto Sun: “While we don’t comment on specific staffing matters we can confirm that Yara Jamal is no longer with CTV News.” On October 22, Jamal had attended a pro-Palestine protest in downtown Halifax. She was interviewed by a journalist from the SaltWire Network, and is quoted as follows: “‘Jews can continue to exist, the Zionist ideology cannot,’ said Yara Jamal of Free Palestine Halifax which organized the march. Pressed for whether by ‘Zionist ideology’ she meant Israel, she said, ‘The state, no, cannot exist.’” Several pro-Israel groups targeted Jamal after this.
- Position: Web writer and production assistant
- Employer: CTV Atlantic
- Status: Fired
In an October 26 Instagram post on the Free Palestine Halifax page, Jamal wrote, “Recently, a SaltWire journalist decided to take a quote out of context. I was asked if Jews can exist in a Free Palestine in which I had replied saying, ‘Jews can exist, Zionist ideology cannot.’ Elaborating on what I meant by Zionist ideology, I told the journalist I meant the state of Israel. Israel is labeled by many reputable human rights organizations as an apartheid state. When international and national world leaders call Palestinians ‘animals’ and Israeli politicians call for the extermination of Palestinians it is not publicized, but when a Palestinian says ‘a Free Palestine cannot exist with an apartheid, Zionist state’ it is publicized as anti-Semitic.”
Natalie Knight
On October 31, Langara College announced that they had placed Natalie Knight on leave and launched an investigation into her conduct. On October 28, Knight had given a speech at a pro-Palestine rally in Vancouver. The full, three-minute speech can be viewed here.
- Position: English instructor
- Employer: Langara College
- Status: Placed on leave
The pro-Israeli Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver has called for Knight to be fired.
Shumail Mian
On October 12, Toronto Police Service spokesperson Stephanie Sayer told press that their Professional Standards department was investigating Shumail Mian for a post on social media. The Toronto Sun described the post as showing “a cartoon of media cameras videoing an Israeli man wearing a blue shirt and Star of David chain while on the other side of the border in ‘Gaza’ there are severed bodies, decapitated heads, and pools of blood. Under all of it is the hashtag #freepalestine.”
- Position: Constable
- Employer: Toronto Police Service
- Status: Under investigation
The Maple reached out to Toronto Police for an update on the investigation but has yet to hear back.
Mustafa Rahmanzadeh
On October 12, Toronto Police Service spokesperson Stephanie Sayer told press that their Professional Standards department was investigating Mustafa Rahmanzadeh for a post on social media. A screenshot of the post is below:
- Position: Special constable
- Employer: Toronto Police Service
- Status: Under investigation
The Maple reached out to Toronto Police for an update on the investigation but has yet to hear back.
Nisam Siddiqui
On October 11, The Globe and Mail reported that the federal government’s Privy Council Office (PCO) was investigating Nisam Siddiqui for pro-Palestine posts on social media. The Globe claims that one of his posts “accused Canada and other Western countries of aiding Israel in ‘war crimes and crimes against humanity’ against Palestinians in Gaza.” Another post was described as reading: “They are acting as enablers to allow Israel to continue murdering Semitic Palestinians in an open-air prison in the Gaza Ghetto to maintain its brutal racist apartheid occupation.”
- Position: Senior analyst
- Employer: Privy Council Office
- Status: Under investigation
The Maple reached out to the PCO for an update on the investigation. Their media spokesperson replied: “We disagree in the strongest possible terms with the remarks posted. These remarks do not reflect the values and expected behaviours of the public service. Adherence to the Values and Ethics Code of the Public Service is a condition of employment for all federal public servants. While, in accordance with the Privacy Act, we are unable to provide details in relation to the employee or the status of any investigation, a breach of the values or expected behaviours described in the Values and Ethics Code of the Public Service may result in disciplinary measures, up to and including termination of employment.”
Ben Thomson
On October 13, Mackenzie Richmond Hill Hospital announced in a statement that it was “addressing social media posts from a few physicians and staff that do not reflect our views or values as an organization.”
- Position: Nephrologist
- Employer: Mackenzie Richmond Hill Hospital
- Status: Suspended
That day, Ben Thomson was given a one month suspension without pay. Thomson had attracted criticism from pro-Israel groups and anonymous callers who threatened the hospital with violence, and had his home address leaked, due to this post.
CBC has reported that the hospital denied Thomson’s posts were the reason for his suspension, without elaborating any further.
The hospital has added several updates to its original announcement since then, including that they were working with police to heighten security measures as a result of online threats and also “working with Dr. Thomson on his plan to return to work once it is deemed safe to do so.”
They eventually posted a statement from Thomson, which you can read in full:
“After innocent civilians in Israel and Gaza were killed, I posted to social media in an effort to correct what I believed was misinformation and to oppose language that was dehumanizing to Palestinians. That post was then retweeted and subsequently threats of violence were made against me and my colleagues at Mackenzie Health. I did not intend for these consequences when I posted on social media. I acknowledge the harm that was caused. These threats against me and Mackenzie Health are unacceptable. Patients, staff, physicians, and others need to feel safe when attending Mackenzie Health. I recognize that the circumstances were unprecedented and I acknowledge Mackenzie Health’s position that it acted with urgency in order to keep everyone, including myself, at Mackenzie Health safe. As a physician and humanitarian, I deplore all loss of life, including that of Palestinian and Israeli civilians. I deplore all forms of discrimination. I have always and continue to oppose all forms of racism including antisemitism and anti-Palestinian racism. I am committed to providing the best care to all my patients regardless of race, creed or religion. I have and will continue to provide care that upholds this commitment. I join with others who call for peace and safety for all. I am committed to working with Mackenzie Health to safely resume my work as a doctor and to caring for all of my patients at Mackenzie Health.”
Anonymous #1
On November 2, pro-Israel group B’nai Brith posted: “Following further discussions with the restaurant, we are happy to report that the employees in question ‘are no longer working at Moxies.’”
- Position: Restaurant employees
- Employer: Moxies
- Status: Fired
On October 21, a pro-Palestine march in downtown Toronto passed a location of the Moxies restaurant chain. Four Moxies employees stood at the front steps of the restaurant and applauded as the march passed. Video footage of the incident was shared online.
Pro-Israel groups put pressure on the restaurant to fire the employees. On October 22, the restaurant’s Twitter account posted: “We sincerely apologize to anyone impacted negatively by these actions. We ask that our team behaves respectfully & demonstrate empathy & sensitivity & can assure you that a formal investigation has been launched & appropriate disciplinary actions will be taken for all involved.”
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Israel-Palestine war: Don’t be fooled. Biden is fully signed up to genocide in Gaza
2 Votes
The White House needs a cover story to obscure its complicity. In desperation, it is once again resurrecting the long-dead two-state solution
By Jonathan Cook
US President Joe Biden disembarks Air Force One on 9 November 2023 (AFP)
The White House faces a dilemma. It has the power to stop the death and destruction in Gaza in its tracks, at any time of its choosing. But it chooses not to.
The US is determined to back its client state to the hilt, giving Israel licence to wreck the tiny coastal enclave, seemingly whatever the cost in Palestinian lives.
But the optics – and that is all that concerns Washington – are disastrous.
TV images have shown hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fleeing their destroyed homes, on a scale unseen since Israel’s earlier mass ethnic cleansing operations of 1948 and 1967.
Even the western media is struggling to obscure the veritable mountain of crushed and bleeding bodies in Gaza. The known death toll has now surpassed 11,000, with thousands more buried under rubble. Those who survive face a genocidal policy, starving them of food, water and power.
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Views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
By the weekend, Israel’s declared war on Hamas had shifted into an open war on Gaza’s hospitals. Medicins San Frontieres reported that al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City had been bombed repeatedly and its power cut off, with horrific scenes of premature babies dying after their incubators had stopped functioning. Staff who tried to evacuate, as Israel had ordered them to, were shot at. Similar scenes unfolded at al-Rantisi hospital.
Western publics are growing increasingly incensed. Protest marches have attracted numbers not seen since the mass demonstrations against the Iraq war 20 years ago.
Western allies are finding it harder to obscure and justify their complicity in what are indisputable Israeli crimes against humanity. French President Emmanuel Macron broke ranks at the weekend. His message was summed up bluntly by the BBC: “Macron calls on Israel to stop killing Gaza’s women and babies.”
In private, US allies in the Middle East are pleading with the US to use its leverage to restrain Israel.
Meanwhile, Washington is only too aware of how quickly Israel’s regional opponents could get dragged in, dangerously expanding and escalating the conflict.
Its immediate response has been desperate, and preposterous, stop-gaps to ease the criticism, including from 500 administration staff who submitted a letter to Biden on Tuesday protesting the White House’s blanket support for Israel.
Those measures have included the president calling for “less intrusive action” from Israel towards the hospitals, shortly before Israeli forces were reported storming al-Shifa, and rumours that Tony Blair, the former British prime minister who joined the US attack on Iraq in 2003 in violation of international law, might serve as the West’s “humanitarian coordinator” in Gaza.
Never-ending occupation
But what the Biden administration really needs is a cover story to justify the fact that it is continuing to supply the weapons and funding needed by Israel to carry out its crimes in broad daylight.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken set out his stall last week at the G7 summit. The goal is to shift the focus away from Israel’s genocidal policies in Gaza, and Washington’s backing for them, to a purely theoretical discussion about what might happen after the fighting ends.
Outlining his post-war “vision” for Gaza, Blinken said: “It’s also clear that Israel cannot occupy Gaza. Now, the reality is that there may be a need for some transition period at the end of the conflict… We don’t see a reoccupation and what I’ve heard from Israeli leaders is that they have no intent to reoccupy Gaza.”
James Cleverley, Britain’s former foreign secretary, echoed his US counterpart, insisting power would in Gaza be handed to “a peace-loving Palestinian leadership”.
Both appear to favour the Palestinian Authority’s Mahmoud Abbas taking over Gaza – or what’s left of it.
This bad-faith manoeuvre is off the charts, even by the pair’s usual mendacious standards. Both the US and Britain want us to believe, at least while Palestinians are being massacred day after day, that they are serious about reviving the long-cold cadaver of the two-state solution.
The layers of deceit are so plentiful they need to be peeled away one by one.
The first glaring deception is Washington’s insistence that Israel avoid “reoccupying” Gaza. Blinken wants us to believe that the strip’s occupation ended long ago, when Israel dismantled its Jewish colonies in 2005 and pulled out the soldiers who protected the settlers.
But if Gaza was not actually occupied before Israel’s current ground invasion, how does Washington explain the Israeli blockade of the tiny enclave for the past 16 years? How did Israel manage to seal off Gaza’s land borders, block access to Gaza’s territorial waters, and patrol Gaza’s skies 24/7?
The reality is that Gaza has not experienced a day free of Israeli occupation since 1967. All that Israel did 18 years ago when it pulled out its Jewish settlers, was to run the occupation more remotely, exploiting new developments in weapons and surveillance technologies.
Israel developed and refined a very sophisticated, arm’s length occupation, using Israeli teenagers with joysticks at distant sites to play God with the lives of 2.3 million imprisoned Palestinians.
Israel is not in danger of “reoccupying” Gaza. It never stopped occupying it.
Make-believe confrontation
Another deceit is the impression Blinken is intentionally creating that the US is preparing for a confrontation with Israel over Gaza’s future.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made clear he is in no mood to sit down with Palestinian leaders, even of the “peace-loving” kind. At the weekend, he once again declared that Israel would take “security control” of the enclave as soon as Hamas was gone.
“There will be no Hamas,” he told Israelis on Saturday evening. “There will be no civilian authority that educates their children to hate Israel, to kill Israelis, to destroy the state of Israel.”
He added that Israeli troops would be able to “go in [to Gaza] whenever we want in order to kill terrorists”.
Certainly, Israeli military commanders seem to be taking this message to heart, vowing that they are back in Gaza for good.
But the suggestion that Israel and Washington are not on the same page is pure trickery. The “row” is entirely confected, designed to make it look like the Biden administration, in pushing for negotiations, is taking the Palestinians’ side against Israel. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The pretence is a boon to both sides. The US wants to look like one day – after all Gaza’s homes are destroyed and its people ethnically cleansed – it will drag Netanyahu to the negotiating table kicking and screaming.
An embattled Netanyahu, meanwhile, is able to score popularity points with the Israeli right by posturing defiantly against the Biden administration.
It is pure theatre. The confrontation will never materialise. The US “vision” is nothing more than make-believe.
The no-state solution
The truth is that Washington formally abandoned the so-called two-state solution years ago, aware that Israel would never allow even the most circumscribed of Palestinian states.
Over the past three decades, Israel has gone from the pretence – maintained during the Oslo process – that it might one day concede a sham, demilitarised Palestinian state, cut off from the rest of the Middle East, to outright rejection of Palestinian statehood on any terms at all.
Back in July, before Hamas’ 7 October attack, Netanyahu was widely reported to have told a closed Israeli parliamentary meeting that Palestinian hopes of a sovereign state “must be eliminated”.
Will the same Israel that refused to countenance a state under Abbas, the Palestinian leader who called security coordination with Israel “sacred”, really be ready to hand over the keys to the kingdom after its latest rampage?
Remember, it was Netanyahu who explained to his ruling Likud party in 2019 that “bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas” were the best way for Israel to “thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state”.
This was not some rogue position. It was shared across the military and security establishments.
The strategy was achieved through Israeli policies designed to permanently split, physically and politically, the two main territorial components of any future Palestinian state: the West Bank and Gaza.
Movement between the two was made all but impossible, and Israel cultivated different, antagonistic local leaderships for each territory so neither could claim to represent the Palestinian people.
At the July parliamentary meeting, Netanyahu also insisted it was a vital Israeli interest that the PA be propped up in the West Bank.
At the same time, the necessary capital of a Palestinian state, Jerusalem, has been physically sealed off from both territories, and stripped of any Palestinian political representation.
As the Biden administration knows only too well, Israel would never allow a “moderate” Palestinian leadership to become established in Gaza, uniting it with the West Bank and strengthening the case for a sovereign Palestinian state.
But talk of a revived two-state solution does serve as a useful distraction from the actual solution Israel is implementing in plain view.
Israeli actions tell that story. The bombing into rubble not only of Gaza’s homes but of the civilian infrastructure – hospitals, schools, United Nations compounds, bakeries, mosques and churches – needed to support one of the most overcrowded places on earth.
The population in Gaza’s north has been forcibly dislocated to create an even smaller, even more overcrowded holding pen in southern Gaza, ensuring the enclave is “a place where no human being can exist”, as Giora Eiland, a former Israeli national security adviser, phrased it.
The goal is transparent: to expel Gaza’s population into the neighbouring Egyptian territory of Sinai. And given Israel’s previous form, the only reasonable conclusion to draw is that Gaza’s refugee families – some of them about to be exiled by Israel for a second or third time – will never be allowed to return to the ruins.
The Biden administration can pretend to be resurrecting a non-existent two-state solution. But the reality is that Israel has had just such an expulsion plan – called the Greater Gaza Plan – on the drawing board for decades.
According to reports, Washington has been signed up to the creation of a Palestinian enclave in Sinai since at least 2007.
No eradicating Hamas
But perhaps the most fraudulent of the White House deceptions is the assumption that Hamas – and by extension, all Palestinian resistance – can be eradicated from Gaza.
Palestinian fighters are not some alien force that invaded the enclave. They are not occupiers, even though that is the way they are portrayed by every western government and media outlet.
They emerged organically out of a population that has endured decades of military abuse and oppression from Israel. Hamas is the legacy of that suffering.
Israel’s genocidal policies – unless it intends to wipe out every Palestinian in Gaza – will not moderate that impulse for resistance. Israel will simply inflame more anger and resentment, and a stronger motive for vengeance.
Even were Hamas to be wiped out, another, probably more desperate and vicious resistance group would surface to take its place.
Most of the Palestinian children now being bombed and terrorised, made homeless along with their families, and witnessing loved ones being killed, will not grow up over the next few years to become young peace ambassadors.
Their birthright will be the gun and the rocket. Their ambition will be to avenge their families and restore their honour.
Israel and the US know all this, too. History is crammed full of such lessons taught to greedy, arrogant colonisers and occupiers.
But their goal, whatever they claim, is not a solution or a resolution. It is permanent war. It is perpetuating the “cycle of violence”. It is greasing the tank treads of the West’s profitable war machine by spawning the very enemies that western publics are told they need protecting from.
Whether Palestinians are returned to the Stone Age in Gaza, as Israeli military commanders have long desired, or expelled to live in refugee camps in Sinai, they will not accept a fate in which they are treated as “human animals”.
Their fight will go on. And Israel and Washington will have to keep inventing new, ever more fanciful stories to try to persuade us that the West’s hands are clean.
Jonathan Cook is the author of three books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His website and blog can be found at http://www.jonathan-cook.net Via Middle East Eye
Western Leaders Covering Up The Carnage With Two State Legerdemain
Israel-Palestine war: Don’t be fooled. Biden is fully signed up to genocide in Gaza
Good! Continue to make sure Biden doesn’t win and see how you will like trump.
2 Votes
The White House needs a cover story to obscure its complicity. In desperation, it is once again resurrecting the long-dead two-state solution
By Jonathan Cook
US President Joe Biden disembarks Air Force One on 9 November 2023 (AFP)
The White House faces a dilemma. It has the power to stop the death and destruction in Gaza in its tracks, at any time of its choosing. But it chooses not to.
The US is determined to back its client state to the hilt, giving Israel licence to wreck the tiny coastal enclave, seemingly whatever the cost in Palestinian lives.
But the optics – and that is all that concerns Washington – are disastrous.
TV images have shown hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fleeing their destroyed homes, on a scale unseen since Israel’s earlier mass ethnic cleansing operations of 1948 and 1967.
Even the western media is struggling to obscure the veritable mountain of crushed and bleeding bodies in Gaza. The known death toll has now surpassed 11,000, with thousands more buried under rubble. Those who survive face a genocidal policy, starving them of food, water and power.
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Views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
By the weekend, Israel’s declared war on Hamas had shifted into an open war on Gaza’s hospitals. Medicins San Frontieres reported that al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City had been bombed repeatedly and its power cut off, with horrific scenes of premature babies dying after their incubators had stopped functioning. Staff who tried to evacuate, as Israel had ordered them to, were shot at. Similar scenes unfolded at al-Rantisi hospital.
Western publics are growing increasingly incensed. Protest marches have attracted numbers not seen since the mass demonstrations against the Iraq war 20 years ago.
Western allies are finding it harder to obscure and justify their complicity in what are indisputable Israeli crimes against humanity. French President Emmanuel Macron broke ranks at the weekend. His message was summed up bluntly by the BBC: “Macron calls on Israel to stop killing Gaza’s women and babies.”
In private, US allies in the Middle East are pleading with the US to use its leverage to restrain Israel.
Meanwhile, Washington is only too aware of how quickly Israel’s regional opponents could get dragged in, dangerously expanding and escalating the conflict.
Its immediate response has been desperate, and preposterous, stop-gaps to ease the criticism, including from 500 administration staff who submitted a letter to Biden on Tuesday protesting the White House’s blanket support for Israel.
Those measures have included the president calling for “less intrusive action” from Israel towards the hospitals, shortly before Israeli forces were reported storming al-Shifa, and rumours that Tony Blair, the former British prime minister who joined the US attack on Iraq in 2003 in violation of international law, might serve as the West’s “humanitarian coordinator” in Gaza.
Never-ending occupation
But what the Biden administration really needs is a cover story to justify the fact that it is continuing to supply the weapons and funding needed by Israel to carry out its crimes in broad daylight.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken set out his stall last week at the G7 summit. The goal is to shift the focus away from Israel’s genocidal policies in Gaza, and Washington’s backing for them, to a purely theoretical discussion about what might happen after the fighting ends.
Outlining his post-war “vision” for Gaza, Blinken said: “It’s also clear that Israel cannot occupy Gaza. Now, the reality is that there may be a need for some transition period at the end of the conflict… We don’t see a reoccupation and what I’ve heard from Israeli leaders is that they have no intent to reoccupy Gaza.”
James Cleverley, Britain’s former foreign secretary, echoed his US counterpart, insisting power would in Gaza be handed to “a peace-loving Palestinian leadership”.
Both appear to favour the Palestinian Authority’s Mahmoud Abbas taking over Gaza – or what’s left of it.
This bad-faith manoeuvre is off the charts, even by the pair’s usual mendacious standards. Both the US and Britain want us to believe, at least while Palestinians are being massacred day after day, that they are serious about reviving the long-cold cadaver of the two-state solution.
The layers of deceit are so plentiful they need to be peeled away one by one.
The first glaring deception is Washington’s insistence that Israel avoid “reoccupying” Gaza. Blinken wants us to believe that the strip’s occupation ended long ago, when Israel dismantled its Jewish colonies in 2005 and pulled out the soldiers who protected the settlers.
But if Gaza was not actually occupied before Israel’s current ground invasion, how does Washington explain the Israeli blockade of the tiny enclave for the past 16 years? How did Israel manage to seal off Gaza’s land borders, block access to Gaza’s territorial waters, and patrol Gaza’s skies 24/7?
The reality is that Gaza has not experienced a day free of Israeli occupation since 1967. All that Israel did 18 years ago when it pulled out its Jewish settlers, was to run the occupation more remotely, exploiting new developments in weapons and surveillance technologies.
Israel developed and refined a very sophisticated, arm’s length occupation, using Israeli teenagers with joysticks at distant sites to play God with the lives of 2.3 million imprisoned Palestinians.
Israel is not in danger of “reoccupying” Gaza. It never stopped occupying it.
Make-believe confrontation
Another deceit is the impression Blinken is intentionally creating that the US is preparing for a confrontation with Israel over Gaza’s future.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made clear he is in no mood to sit down with Palestinian leaders, even of the “peace-loving” kind. At the weekend, he once again declared that Israel would take “security control” of the enclave as soon as Hamas was gone.
“There will be no Hamas,” he told Israelis on Saturday evening. “There will be no civilian authority that educates their children to hate Israel, to kill Israelis, to destroy the state of Israel.”
He added that Israeli troops would be able to “go in [to Gaza] whenever we want in order to kill terrorists”.
Certainly, Israeli military commanders seem to be taking this message to heart, vowing that they are back in Gaza for good.
But the suggestion that Israel and Washington are not on the same page is pure trickery. The “row” is entirely confected, designed to make it look like the Biden administration, in pushing for negotiations, is taking the Palestinians’ side against Israel. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The pretence is a boon to both sides. The US wants to look like one day – after all Gaza’s homes are destroyed and its people ethnically cleansed – it will drag Netanyahu to the negotiating table kicking and screaming.
An embattled Netanyahu, meanwhile, is able to score popularity points with the Israeli right by posturing defiantly against the Biden administration.
It is pure theatre. The confrontation will never materialise. The US “vision” is nothing more than make-believe.
The no-state solution
The truth is that Washington formally abandoned the so-called two-state solution years ago, aware that Israel would never allow even the most circumscribed of Palestinian states.
Over the past three decades, Israel has gone from the pretence – maintained during the Oslo process – that it might one day concede a sham, demilitarised Palestinian state, cut off from the rest of the Middle East, to outright rejection of Palestinian statehood on any terms at all.
Back in July, before Hamas’ 7 October attack, Netanyahu was widely reported to have told a closed Israeli parliamentary meeting that Palestinian hopes of a sovereign state “must be eliminated”.
Will the same Israel that refused to countenance a state under Abbas, the Palestinian leader who called security coordination with Israel “sacred”, really be ready to hand over the keys to the kingdom after its latest rampage?
Remember, it was Netanyahu who explained to his ruling Likud party in 2019 that “bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas” were the best way for Israel to “thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state”.
This was not some rogue position. It was shared across the military and security establishments.
The strategy was achieved through Israeli policies designed to permanently split, physically and politically, the two main territorial components of any future Palestinian state: the West Bank and Gaza.
Movement between the two was made all but impossible, and Israel cultivated different, antagonistic local leaderships for each territory so neither could claim to represent the Palestinian people.
At the July parliamentary meeting, Netanyahu also insisted it was a vital Israeli interest that the PA be propped up in the West Bank.
At the same time, the necessary capital of a Palestinian state, Jerusalem, has been physically sealed off from both territories, and stripped of any Palestinian political representation.
As the Biden administration knows only too well, Israel would never allow a “moderate” Palestinian leadership to become established in Gaza, uniting it with the West Bank and strengthening the case for a sovereign Palestinian state.
But talk of a revived two-state solution does serve as a useful distraction from the actual solution Israel is implementing in plain view.
Israeli actions tell that story. The bombing into rubble not only of Gaza’s homes but of the civilian infrastructure – hospitals, schools, United Nations compounds, bakeries, mosques and churches – needed to support one of the most overcrowded places on earth.
The population in Gaza’s north has been forcibly dislocated to create an even smaller, even more overcrowded holding pen in southern Gaza, ensuring the enclave is “a place where no human being can exist”, as Giora Eiland, a former Israeli national security adviser, phrased it.
The goal is transparent: to expel Gaza’s population into the neighbouring Egyptian territory of Sinai. And given Israel’s previous form, the only reasonable conclusion to draw is that Gaza’s refugee families – some of them about to be exiled by Israel for a second or third time – will never be allowed to return to the ruins.
The Biden administration can pretend to be resurrecting a non-existent two-state solution. But the reality is that Israel has had just such an expulsion plan – called the Greater Gaza Plan – on the drawing board for decades.
According to reports, Washington has been signed up to the creation of a Palestinian enclave in Sinai since at least 2007.
No eradicating Hamas
But perhaps the most fraudulent of the White House deceptions is the assumption that Hamas – and by extension, all Palestinian resistance – can be eradicated from Gaza.
Palestinian fighters are not some alien force that invaded the enclave. They are not occupiers, even though that is the way they are portrayed by every western government and media outlet.
They emerged organically out of a population that has endured decades of military abuse and oppression from Israel. Hamas is the legacy of that suffering.
Israel’s genocidal policies – unless it intends to wipe out every Palestinian in Gaza – will not moderate that impulse for resistance. Israel will simply inflame more anger and resentment, and a stronger motive for vengeance.
Even were Hamas to be wiped out, another, probably more desperate and vicious resistance group would surface to take its place.
Most of the Palestinian children now being bombed and terrorised, made homeless along with their families, and witnessing loved ones being killed, will not grow up over the next few years to become young peace ambassadors.
Their birthright will be the gun and the rocket. Their ambition will be to avenge their families and restore their honour.
Israel and the US know all this, too. History is crammed full of such lessons taught to greedy, arrogant colonisers and occupiers.
But their goal, whatever they claim, is not a solution or a resolution. It is permanent war. It is perpetuating the “cycle of violence”. It is greasing the tank treads of the West’s profitable war machine by spawning the very enemies that western publics are told they need protecting from.
Whether Palestinians are returned to the Stone Age in Gaza, as Israeli military commanders have long desired, or expelled to live in refugee camps in Sinai, they will not accept a fate in which they are treated as “human animals”.
Their fight will go on. And Israel and Washington will have to keep inventing new, ever more fanciful stories to try to persuade us that the West’s hands are clean.
Jonathan Cook is the author of three books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His website and blog can be found at http://www.jonathan-cook.net Via Middle East Eye
Tell me, leimonis, would you feel safer now walking with an Israeli flag?
Do you think zionism has made Jews around the world safer?
(Not to mention the millions of Palestinians whose lives zionism has fucked over)
Its worth posting the full text
I will never ever forget you. I will never forgive your killers.
And I will keep your memory alive.
My father, Nasri Alnaouq, age 75
My sister, Walaa Alazayizi, age 36
Her children: -Raghd Alazayizi, age 13
-Eslam Alazayizi, age 12
-Sara Alazayizi, age 9
-Abdullah Alazayizi, age 6
My brother, Muhammad Alnaouq, age 35
His children: -Bakr Alnaouq, age 11 -
Basema Alnaouq, age 9
My sister, Alaa Salman, age 35
Her children: -Eslam Salman, age 13 -
Dima Salman, age 12 -
Tala Salman, age 8 -
Noor Salman, age 4
-Nasmah Salman, age 2
My sister, Aya Bashir, age 33
Her children -Malak Bashir, age 12 -
Mohammed Bashir, age 9 -
Tamim Bashir, age 6
My brother, Mahmoud Alnaouq, age 25
Why?
Zionists are 10x the terrorists.
They kill 10x the number of civlians.
And they are a foreign colonial, settler movement committing genocide on the indigenous population.
You actually brought up an interesting point. There never was a day since 1948 when it was safe to walk with an Israeli flag anywhere except israel. That’s why they will win this war.
Last edited:
So Zionism has made Jews less safe everywhere, including Israel.
Maybe its time to change.
Maybe trying to be the toughest shits around and becoming the new nazis isn't really the secret path to happiness and security.
Maybe its time to try something other than ethnic cleansing and genocide.
You're saying the war on Gaza is as bad as the Syrian war?
Israel has killed more journalists.
Congrats on killing 40 more terrorists.
When it comes to Palestine, Arnold Toynbee Once Said: The West Has Moral Myopia
Where is the West's Moral Courage.
An expert's point of view on a current event.
Where Is the West’s Moral Courage on Israel?
Eliminating Hamas doesn’t justify the destruction Israel is inflicting on Gaza.
By Howard W. French, a columnist at Foreign Policy.
People stand outside the emergency ward of Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City on Nov. 10. AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
My FP: Follow topics and authors to get straight to what you like. Exclusively for FP subscribers. Subscribe Now | Log In
NOVEMBER 17, 2023, 2:54 PM
The footage from inside Gaza’s Al-Shifa Hospital, which the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) posted to social media on Wednesday following its operation to take control of the medical complex, was presented as something of a coup. In it, an IDF officer takes viewers on a brief tour of an MRI facility, pointing out several spots where he says IDF troops found “grab bags”—small, personal-sized duffel bags that contained weapons and military-style gear—allegedly stored there by Hamas. At one point, he shows what he says are the contents of one such bag, laid out for display on what looks like a gurney in a hallway. Items include ammunition, a live grenade, a tactical vest, boots, and an AK-47—what the officer describes as “full military kit for one Hamas terrorist.”
Israel-Hamas War
News, analysis, and background on the ongoing conflict.
Here, viewers were being asked to believe, lay the supposed proof of the justness of Israel’s siege within a siege: its military targeting of the largest hospital in Gaza, which it and the United States have maintained has served as a base for Hamas fighters.
The IDF also invited journalists from the BBC and another television crew into the MRI facility to view what Israeli forces said they found. The same IDF officer from the social media video showed the BBC reporter “three small stashes of Kalashnikovs, ammunition, and bullet-proof vests” as well as “some military booklets and pamphlets, and a map that he says is marked with potential entry and exit routes from the hospital.” The reporter noted: “He says they have found around 15 guns in all, along with some grenades.” “Our visit was tightly controlled; we had very limited time on the ground and were not able to speak to doctors or patients there,” she added.
Later on Wednesday, the IDF deleted the video and reposted a slightly edited version that omits a few seconds of footage at the end that had appeared in the original version. That footage showed a captured laptop whose screen featured a photo of what the IDF officer said was an Israeli soldier being held hostage by Hamas. In the edited version, the laptop screen is blurred out, and the video cuts off before the officer mentions anything about a hostage. No reason for the edit was given, but it fed into existing doubts about the footage’s accuracy. Those doubts were further explored in a subsequent BBC report that pointed out discrepancies between what the IDF video showed and what the BBC reporting team saw during its walkthrough.
With Israel finally entering and beginning its inspection of the hospital on Wednesday, it will take more time to arrive at a conclusive assessment of the evidence behind this depiction of the hospital as a base. But as propaganda coups go, this first sally from inside Al-Shifa was underwhelming. That is because the capture of what appeared to be a relatively small number of weapons must be weighed against the pain and peril that Israel has inflicted on hundreds of hospitalized Palestinians as Al-Shifa has been cut off from electricity, fuel, and medical supplies while the noose around the hospital slowly grew tighter.
During the seizure of the hospital, communication with hundreds of patients, doctors, and staff inside the hospital was also largely cut off. One can imagine several purposes for severing contact with the people working, being cared for, dying, and simply being trapped inside a place like this, including valid security concerns. But regardless of the reason, one significant outcome is that it denies journalists and other observers real-time access to what is happening on the ground and deprives the world of independent sources of information about what is really going on inside.
As insistently as Israel and the United States have sustained claims that Al-Shifa has been used as a major base of operations for Hamas, the militant group—as well as hospital staff—has denied it. The early yield of publicly available evidence, such as the video of a purported weapons cache, would seem to fall well short of the idea that the hospital is anything resembling a military base. Nor has Israel provided any evidence yet of the underground command center and tunnels it said Hamas was operating beneath the hospital. More time, coupled with information from independent journalists who are able to perform their jobs freely, could, of course, eventually generate a different picture. That, in fact, is the only way of credibly establishing the truth.
International institutions such as the World Health Organization and civil society groups such as Human Rights Watch have denounced the Israeli siege of the hospital as a demonstration of wanton disregard for the lives of innocents, and in the case of the latter, something worthy of a formal investigation for war crimes. International law is not as helpful as one would like in defining what is or is not a war crime or when it is permissible to target a hospital as part of a military operation. There are too many gray zones where key questions are left open to interpretation.
Common sense and decency, though, are different matters. Depriving the seriously ill of electricity, or premature babies of incubators, or surgical patients of anesthetics and proper lighting rightly strike many people as a bridge too far. In recent days, as the hospital’s care has ground to a halt, it has had to resort to burying the dead in mass graves, and the hospital’s manager said dogs had begun feeding on corpses strewn on open ground. Unless there was heavy and active armed resistance to Israel from inside or underneath the hospital itself, it will be hard to justify the Israeli campaign against Al-Shifa, which is likely why U.S. President Joe Biden has very belatedly come around to publicly calling on Israel to protect human life there.
In a larger sense, though, Al-Shifa might be judged as almost beside the point. That is because of the nature of the broader Israeli campaign in Gaza, which has razed huge numbers of buildings there; killed as many as one out of every 200 inhabitants of Gaza; and driven a huge exodus of civilians out of the north into the overcrowded and also dangerous, if only somewhat less so, south of this embattled territory. Whether Al-Shifa is proved to have been a major operational base for Hamas or not, this broader Israeli campaign has taken on the quality of a collective and almost indiscriminate punishment on a scale that is rare in recent warfare.
As journalist Amos Harel recently wrote in Haaretz, “Most of the battlefields in northern Gaza will be unfit for human habitation for months, if not years. Entire neighborhoods of Gaza City and its suburbs have been destroyed, not to mention the quantity of ordnance that will be left in the area.”
READ MORE
A view shows an explosion in the distance with buildings in the foreground.Israel’s Gaza Campaign Is Entering a Moral Abyss
The country must be held to the laws and conventions that regulate warfare.
Biden dressed in a dark blue suit walks with his head down past a row of alternating U.S. and Israeli flags.Biden Owns the Israel-Palestine Conflict Now
In tying Washington to Israel’s war in Gaza, the U.S. president now shares responsibility for the broader conflict’s fate.
An illustration shows a peace dove with a rocket in its beak tangled in barbed wire atop a border wall between Gaza and Israel.Vengeance Is Not a Policy
Emotionally driven reactions from Washington won’t prevent future violence. Dismantling the Gaza prison could.
There are no perfect analogies, but one of the best is Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. There, Moscow’s tactics caused U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken to declare before the United Nations, “We can never let the crimes Russia’s committing become our new normal. … Bombing schools and hospitals and apartment buildings to rubble is not normal.”
In Gaza over the last six-plus weeks, these very things have become normal, as has a wave of Israeli rhetoric that openly proclaims a desire to flatten Gaza, while the United States has continued to show great reticence toward speaking out about what it would almost certainly denounce if similar tactics with a similar toll were being employed in any other conflict anywhere else in the world.
A curated selection of FP’s must-read stories.
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This brings me to the moral conundrum at the heart of this conflict. I am not calling it a war, because we usually think of wars as unfolding between states, and as monstruous as Hamas is, and as tactically impressive as its abhorrent murder and kidnapping spree into Israel on Oct. 7 was, Hamas has few of the attributes of a state and certainly does not represent the Palestinian people broadly.
In a terrible irony, what put me into mind of this conundrum was my reading recently of a famous work of Holocaust literature, Man’s Search for Meaning, published in 1946 by the concentration camp survivor and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl. A story Frankl tells, about the psychological state he and other recently liberated concentration camp prisoners were experiencing, has the power of a timeless parable and packs a universal meaning.
“During this psychological phase one observed that people with natures of a more primitive kind could not escape the influences of the brutality which had surrounded them in camp life,” Frankl writes. He continues:
Where Frankl invokes the horrors of the Holocaust, we should think of the wanton murder and kidnapping of Oct. 7. If the Frankl of this anecdote were alive today, it is hard to imagine him agreeing with the “erase Gaza” spirit that has been voiced by many in Israel recently and which goes to the heart of tactics that raze entire neighborhoods. It is just such dehumanizing language and military tactics that have caused experts on the Holocaust and genocide to warn about the real danger that Israel’s campaign against Hamas in Gaza could slide into genocide.
The only way to prevent this is to stop justifying any violent action the Israeli military takes in Gaza as legitimate, because its ultimate aim is to eliminate Hamas. Israelis whose society was the victim of the terrible events of Oct. 7 must not allow themselves to exult in more crude revenge, and the West, which rushed to support Israel in the wake of this horror, must find the moral courage to prevent the furthering of horror by speaking clearly about the unjust toll being inflicted on the vast majority of Palestinians in Gaza who had no part in these events.
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Howard W. French is a columnist at Foreign Policy, a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and a longtime foreign correspondent. His latest book is Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War. Twitter: @hofrench
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When it comes to Palestine, Arnold Toynbee Once Said: The West Has Moral Myopia
Where is the West's Moral Courage.
An expert's point of view on a current event.
Where Is the West’s Moral Courage on Israel?
Eliminating Hamas doesn’t justify the destruction Israel is inflicting on Gaza.
Howard FrenchHoward W. French
By Howard W. French, a columnist at Foreign Policy.
People stand outside the emergency ward of Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City on Nov. 10.
People stand outside the emergency ward of Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City on Nov. 10. AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
My FP: Follow topics and authors to get straight to what you like. Exclusively for FP subscribers. Subscribe Now | Log In
NOVEMBER 17, 2023, 2:54 PM
The footage from inside Gaza’s Al-Shifa Hospital, which the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) posted to social media on Wednesday following its operation to take control of the medical complex, was presented as something of a coup. In it, an IDF officer takes viewers on a brief tour of an MRI facility, pointing out several spots where he says IDF troops found “grab bags”—small, personal-sized duffel bags that contained weapons and military-style gear—allegedly stored there by Hamas. At one point, he shows what he says are the contents of one such bag, laid out for display on what looks like a gurney in a hallway. Items include ammunition, a live grenade, a tactical vest, boots, and an AK-47—what the officer describes as “full military kit for one Hamas terrorist.”
Israel-Hamas War
News, analysis, and background on the ongoing conflict.
Here, viewers were being asked to believe, lay the supposed proof of the justness of Israel’s siege within a siege: its military targeting of the largest hospital in Gaza, which it and the United States have maintained has served as a base for Hamas fighters.
The IDF also invited journalists from the BBC and another television crew into the MRI facility to view what Israeli forces said they found. The same IDF officer from the social media video showed the BBC reporter “three small stashes of Kalashnikovs, ammunition, and bullet-proof vests” as well as “some military booklets and pamphlets, and a map that he says is marked with potential entry and exit routes from the hospital.” The reporter noted: “He says they have found around 15 guns in all, along with some grenades.” “Our visit was tightly controlled; we had very limited time on the ground and were not able to speak to doctors or patients there,” she added.
Later on Wednesday, the IDF deleted the video and reposted a slightly edited version that omits a few seconds of footage at the end that had appeared in the original version. That footage showed a captured laptop whose screen featured a photo of what the IDF officer said was an Israeli soldier being held hostage by Hamas. In the edited version, the laptop screen is blurred out, and the video cuts off before the officer mentions anything about a hostage. No reason for the edit was given, but it fed into existing doubts about the footage’s accuracy. Those doubts were further explored in a subsequent BBC report that pointed out discrepancies between what the IDF video showed and what the BBC reporting team saw during its walkthrough.
With Israel finally entering and beginning its inspection of the hospital on Wednesday, it will take more time to arrive at a conclusive assessment of the evidence behind this depiction of the hospital as a base. But as propaganda coups go, this first sally from inside Al-Shifa was underwhelming. That is because the capture of what appeared to be a relatively small number of weapons must be weighed against the pain and peril that Israel has inflicted on hundreds of hospitalized Palestinians as Al-Shifa has been cut off from electricity, fuel, and medical supplies while the noose around the hospital slowly grew tighter.
During the seizure of the hospital, communication with hundreds of patients, doctors, and staff inside the hospital was also largely cut off. One can imagine several purposes for severing contact with the people working, being cared for, dying, and simply being trapped inside a place like this, including valid security concerns. But regardless of the reason, one significant outcome is that it denies journalists and other observers real-time access to what is happening on the ground and deprives the world of independent sources of information about what is really going on inside.
As insistently as Israel and the United States have sustained claims that Al-Shifa has been used as a major base of operations for Hamas, the militant group—as well as hospital staff—has denied it. The early yield of publicly available evidence, such as the video of a purported weapons cache, would seem to fall well short of the idea that the hospital is anything resembling a military base. Nor has Israel provided any evidence yet of the underground command center and tunnels it said Hamas was operating beneath the hospital. More time, coupled with information from independent journalists who are able to perform their jobs freely, could, of course, eventually generate a different picture. That, in fact, is the only way of credibly establishing the truth.
International institutions such as the World Health Organization and civil society groups such as Human Rights Watch have denounced the Israeli siege of the hospital as a demonstration of wanton disregard for the lives of innocents, and in the case of the latter, something worthy of a formal investigation for war crimes. International law is not as helpful as one would like in defining what is or is not a war crime or when it is permissible to target a hospital as part of a military operation. There are too many gray zones where key questions are left open to interpretation.
Common sense and decency, though, are different matters. Depriving the seriously ill of electricity, or premature babies of incubators, or surgical patients of anesthetics and proper lighting rightly strike many people as a bridge too far. In recent days, as the hospital’s care has ground to a halt, it has had to resort to burying the dead in mass graves, and the hospital’s manager said dogs had begun feeding on corpses strewn on open ground. Unless there was heavy and active armed resistance to Israel from inside or underneath the hospital itself, it will be hard to justify the Israeli campaign against Al-Shifa, which is likely why U.S. President Joe Biden has very belatedly come around to publicly calling on Israel to protect human life there.
In a larger sense, though, Al-Shifa might be judged as almost beside the point. That is because of the nature of the broader Israeli campaign in Gaza, which has razed huge numbers of buildings there; killed as many as one out of every 200 inhabitants of Gaza; and driven a huge exodus of civilians out of the north into the overcrowded and also dangerous, if only somewhat less so, south of this embattled territory. Whether Al-Shifa is proved to have been a major operational base for Hamas or not, this broader Israeli campaign has taken on the quality of a collective and almost indiscriminate punishment on a scale that is rare in recent warfare.
As journalist Amos Harel recently wrote in Haaretz, “Most of the battlefields in northern Gaza will be unfit for human habitation for months, if not years. Entire neighborhoods of Gaza City and its suburbs have been destroyed, not to mention the quantity of ordnance that will be left in the area.”
READ MORE
Israel’s Gaza Campaign Is Entering a Moral Abyss
The country must be held to the laws and conventions that regulate warfare.
Biden Owns the Israel-Palestine Conflict Now
In tying Washington to Israel’s war in Gaza, the U.S. president now shares responsibility for the broader conflict’s fate.
Vengeance Is Not a Policy
Emotionally driven reactions from Washington won’t prevent future violence. Dismantling the Gaza prison could.
There are no perfect analogies, but one of the best is Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. There, Moscow’s tactics caused U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken to declare before the United Nations, “We can never let the crimes Russia’s committing become our new normal. … Bombing schools and hospitals and apartment buildings to rubble is not normal.”
In Gaza over the last six-plus weeks, these very things have become normal, as has a wave of Israeli rhetoric that openly proclaims a desire to flatten Gaza, while the United States has continued to show great reticence toward speaking out about what it would almost certainly denounce if similar tactics with a similar toll were being employed in any other conflict anywhere else in the world.
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This brings me to the moral conundrum at the heart of this conflict. I am not calling it a war, because we usually think of wars as unfolding between states, and as monstruous as Hamas is, and as tactically impressive as its abhorrent murder and kidnapping spree into Israel on Oct. 7 was, Hamas has few of the attributes of a state and certainly does not represent the Palestinian people broadly.
In a terrible irony, what put me into mind of this conundrum was my reading recently of a famous work of Holocaust literature, Man’s Search for Meaning, published in 1946 by the concentration camp survivor and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl. A story Frankl tells, about the psychological state he and other recently liberated concentration camp prisoners were experiencing, has the power of a timeless parable and packs a universal meaning.
“During this psychological phase one observed that people with natures of a more primitive kind could not escape the influences of the brutality which had surrounded them in camp life,” Frankl writes. He continues:
Where Frankl invokes the horrors of the Holocaust, we should think of the wanton murder and kidnapping of Oct. 7. If the Frankl of this anecdote were alive today, it is hard to imagine him agreeing with the “erase Gaza” spirit that has been voiced by many in Israel recently and which goes to the heart of tactics that raze entire neighborhoods. It is just such dehumanizing language and military tactics that have caused experts on the Holocaust and genocide to warn about the real danger that Israel’s campaign against Hamas in Gaza could slide into genocide.
The only way to prevent this is to stop justifying any violent action the Israeli military takes in Gaza as legitimate, because its ultimate aim is to eliminate Hamas. Israelis whose society was the victim of the terrible events of Oct. 7 must not allow themselves to exult in more crude revenge, and the West, which rushed to support Israel in the wake of this horror, must find the moral courage to prevent the furthering of horror by speaking clearly about the unjust toll being inflicted on the vast majority of Palestinians in Gaza who had no part in these events.
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Howard W. French is a columnist at Foreign Policy, a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and a longtime foreign correspondent. His latest book is Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War. Twitter: @hofrench
READ MORE ON GAZA | ISRAEL | MIDDLE EAST AND NORTH AFRICA | TORTURE & WAR CRIMES | WAR
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Max Blumenthal on Bibi's Lies...Oft Repeated By Biden and Blinken
Gaza: A Graveyard For Children
The War Turns Gaza Into a ‘Graveyard’ for Children
Khaled Joudeh, 9, mourning over the body of his baby sister, Misk, last month in Deir al Balah, Gaza.Credit...Samar Abu Elouf for The New York Times
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By Raja Abdulrahim
Photographs by Samar Abu Elouf and Yousef Masoud
Nov. 18, 2023
Barefoot and weeping, Khaled Joudeh, 9, hurried toward the dozens of bodies wrapped in white burial shrouds, blankets and rugs outside the overcrowded morgue.
“Where’s my mom?” he cried next to a photographer for The New York Times. “I want to see my mom.”
“Where is Khalil?” he continued, barely audible between sobs as he asked for his 12-year-old brother. A morgue worker opened a white shroud, so Khaled could kiss his brother one final time.
Then, he bid farewell to his 8-month-old sister. Another shroud was pulled back, revealing the blood-caked face of a baby, her strawberry-red hair matted down. Khaled broke into fresh sobs as he identified her to the hospital staff. Her name was Misk, Arabic for musk.
“Mama was so happy when she had you,” he whispered, gently touching her forehead, tears streaming down his face onto hers.
She was the joy of his family, relatives later said — after three boys, his parents were desperate for a girl. When she was born, they said, Khaled’s mother delighted in dressing Misk in frilly, colorful dresses, pinning her tiny curls in bright hair clips.
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Misk JoudehCredit...via Joudeh family
Through his tears, Khaled bid farewell to his mother, father, older brother and sister, their bodies lined up around him. Only Khaled and his younger brother, Tamer, 7, survived what relatives and local journalists said was an airstrike on Oct. 22 that toppled two buildings sheltering their extended family.
A total of 68 members of the Joudeh family were killed that day as they slept in their beds in Deir al Balah, in central Gaza, three of Khaled’s relatives recounted in separate interviews.
Several branches and generations of the Joudehs, a Palestinian family, had been huddling together before the strike, relatives said, including some who had fled northern Gaza, as Israel had ordered residents to do. The Israeli military said it could not address questions about a strike on the family.
In the end, members of the family were buried together, side by side in a long grave, relatives said, showing footage of the burial and sharing a picture of Misk before she was killed.
Gaza, the United Nations warns, has become “a graveyard for thousands of children.”
Determining the precise number of children killed in Gaza — in the midst of a fierce bombing campaign, with hospitals collapsing, children missing, bodies buried under rubble and neighborhoods in ruins — is a Sisyphean task. Health officials in Gaza say that 5,000 Palestinian children have been killed since the Israeli assault began, and possibly hundreds more. Many international officials and experts familiar with the way death tolls are compiled in the territory say the overall numbers are generally reliable.
If the figures are even close to accurate, far more children have been killed in Gaza in the past six weeks than the 2,985 children killed in the world’s major conflict zones combined — across two dozen countries — during all of last year, even with the war in Ukraine, according to U.N. tallies of verified deaths in armed conflict.
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A wounded child arriving at Al-Nasr Hospital in Khan Younis, Gaza.Credit...Yousef Masoud for The New York Times
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The body of a child pulled from rubble in Khan Younis.Credit...Yousef Masoud for The New York Times
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The funeral of a child in Khan Younis on Oct. 26.Credit...Yousef Masoud for The New York Times
The Israeli military says that, unlike the “murderous assault against women, children, elderly and the disabled” by Hamas on Oct. 7, Israeli forces take “all feasible precautions” to “mitigate harm” to civilians.
Hamas, the military said, deliberately caused “the maximum amount of harm and brutality possible to civilians.” During the attack on Israel, parents and their children were gunned down inside their homes, witnesses and officials say, with children taken as hostages.
In response, the Israeli military says, it is waging a war “forcefully to dismantle Hamas military and administrative capabilities.” It notes that Israeli forces have told residents to flee to southern Gaza, and says that they issue warnings before airstrikes “when possible.”
But the furious pace of the strikes — more than 15,000 to date, according to the Israeli military, including in southern Gaza as well — makes the Israeli bombing campaign on the Palestinian territory one of the most intense of the 21st century. And it is happening in a dense urban enclave under siege with high concentrations of civilians, particularly children, setting off mounting global alarm, even from some of Israel’s closest allies.
After initially questioning the death toll reported by health officials in Gaza, the Biden administration now says that “far too many” Palestinians have been killed, conceding that the true figures for civilian casualties may be “even higher than are being cited.”
So many children are brought into the morgue at Al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir al Balah that the morgue director, Yassir Abu Amar, says he has to cut his burial shrouds into child-size fragments to handle the influx of corpses.
“The children’s bodies come to us broken and in pieces,” he said. “It’s chilling.”
“We’ve never seen this number of children killed,” he added. “We cry every day. Every day, we cry while we’re working to prepare the children.”
During previous wars, parents in Gaza, a crowded strip with more than two million people, sometimes put their children to bed in different rooms of their homes. If an airstrike damaged one part of the house, the other children might live.
Given the scale of the bombardment this time — which many Gazans describe as indiscriminate and without warning — some parents have put much greater distances between their children, splitting them up and sending them to relatives in different parts of the Gaza Strip to try to increase their odds of survival. Others have taken to scrawling names directly onto their children’s skin, in case they are lost, orphaned or killed and need to be identified.
In the emergency room of Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah said that many children had been brought in alone and in shock, with burns, shrapnel wounds or severe injuries from being crushed by rubble. In many cases, he said, no one knew who they were.
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Waiting for treatment at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City.Credit...Samar Abu Elouf for The New York Times
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A wounded child was treated at Al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir al Balah.Credit...Samar Abu Elouf for The New York Times
Instead of looking at tweets, try looking at actual stories because Hamas has in no way offered to return all hostages.
And fucking pathetic that you have never even hinted that Hamas was wrong for kidnapping a bunch of elderly women and children.
The term started being used in the 50's and 60's when Jordan and Egypt were occupying the West Bank/Gaza and explicitly meant removal of the Jewish presence. Many people still use the term that way; to promote genocide or ethnic cleansing.
Anyone with a background in anti-racist education know that the intent is not as important as the impact it has. Or does racism against Jews not matter?
p.s. The Harvard group got in trouble for celebrating Hamas' attack.
Netanyahu has an approval rating of 4%, which is probably close to yours here.
He can't make a deal cuz then he's done.
This is all on Netanyahu, not Hamas.
Could be the only good thing that will come out of Hamas' terror war. And if you 96% hate me, I'm probably doing something right.
Now where are these statements you claimed exist saying Hamas offered all the hostages back immediately after the 7th? Can't your twitter bubble provide something for you?
I've posted them multiple times, you can check.
There is a ceasefire today, finally.
Israel-Hamas war live: Temporary Gaza truce agreed; 50 captives to be freed
Now time for the real work.
