UN food agency suspends operations in Gaza after car hit by gunfire at Israeli checkpoint
World Food Programme says it is the first time that one of its vehicles has been directly shot at near a checkpoint despite having security clearance
The Guardian 29. august 2024:
"Israeli military launches fatal airstrike on humanitarian aid convoy in Gaza"
"IDF claims ‘armed assailants’ tried to hijack vehicle leading convoy of medical supplies, but aid organiser says those killed were transport company staff."
To kolonner med klarering fra IDF om å passere og levere. Allikevel skutt på, 5 drepte i det siste tillfelle.
David Sirota skriver i The Guardian om "Project 2025. Utgangspunktet er 1971 da skrev Lewis Powell et memo for "The Us Chanber of Commerce, som beskrev hvordan man detaljert og konkret kunneta styring med den politiske utviklingen i USA:
"Project 2025 started a half-century ago. A Trump win could solidify it forever"
Utdrag:
"This connection to the Heritage Foundation isn’t incidental. It tells us that conservatives see a Trump presidency as the final stage of their grand half-century scheme to destroy the legacy of the New Deal and the Great Society – a scheme first outlined a half-century ago.
Heritage was originally launched in the early 1970s with seed funding from the beer magnate Joseph Coors. He told a historian that his political activism at the time was specifically “stirred” by a 1971 memo authored by the soon-to-be supreme court justice Lewis Powell. That memo written for the US Chamber of Commerce implored corporations and oligarchs to be “far more aggressive” in influencing the political system, which he feared was becoming far too responsive to popular demands for the regulation of business.
“It is essential that spokesmen for the enterprise system – at all levels and at every opportunity – be far more aggressive than in the past,” wrote Powell, who would soon after author a landmark supreme court ruling giving corporations new rights to spend money influencing elections. “There should be not the slightest hesitation to press vigorously in all political arenas for support of the enterprise system. Nor should there be reluctance to penalize politically those who oppose it.”
Trump sier han ikke kjenner til Project 2025. Hans visepresidentkantidat derimot: “The Heritage Foundation isn’t some random outpost on Capitol Hill,” wrote the Republican vice-presidential nominee, JD Vance. “It is and has been the most influential engine of ideas for Republicans from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump.”
Klar kritikk av USA's forhandlingsopplegg for å få slutt på krigeni Gaza. Spesielt kritiseres Blinken.
"The US diplomatic strategy on Israel and Gaza is not working"
Utdrag:
"Netanyahu’s ideological preference is for displacing Palestinians and eviscerating their rights, alongside pulling the US more actively into a regional clash with Iran; his short-term political goal is to maintain an open-ended war which can accommodate varying degrees of intensity, but not a deal."
"Repackaging Israeli proposals and presenting them as a US position may have a retro feel to it, but that does not make it cool. And it won’t deliver progress (it can’t even sustain Israeli endorsement given Netanyahu’s constant shifting of the goalposts to avoid a deal). That the US has zero credibility as a mediator is a problem. That it has conspired to make its contributions not only ineffective but counterproductive is devastating. Even Itamar Eichner, a diplomatic correspondent for the IsraeliYediothnewspaper, describes Blinken’s visit as having displayed “naivete and amateurishness … effectively sabotaging the deal by aligning with Netanyahu”."
Dette er sterke ord. Og Daniel Levy er tidligere forhandler for Israel: "Daniel Levy is the president of the US/Middle East Project and a former Israeli peace negotiator."
Edward Said oppsummerer om Oslo-avtalene, om Camp David, og ikke minst om AIPAC sin tyngde i USA's politikk.
En av hans konklusjoner: "Since the mid 1980s I have
tried to impress on the PLO leadership, and every Palestinian or Arab I have
met, that the quest for a protector in the White House is a complete chimera,
since all recent presidents have been devoted to Zionist aims, and that the
only way to change US policy is through a mass campaign on behalf of
Palestinian human rights, out-flanking the Zionist establishment and going
straight to the American people."
Og videre: ... "unless American Zionism is taken on in its homelands, all
attempts to parley with the United States or Israel will lead to the same
dismal and discrediting outcome."
The Guardian har 16. august 2024 en fyldig oversikt over Aipac sin pengebruk ved valget i 2024, og resultatene av dett, se Kilde.
IDF har under den pågående Gaza-krigen utvidet og fornyet Netzatim-korridoren.
CNN-artikkel fra 8. mars 2024, se Kilde:
"Israeli road splitting Gaza in two has reached the Mediterranean coast, satellite imagery shows"
Utdrag:
"Named after the former Israeli settlement of Netzarim in Gaza, the
“Netzarim Corridor” intersects one of Gaza’s two main north-south roads,
Salaheddin Street, to create a strategic, central junction. It also
appears to connect with Al Rashid Road, which runs along the coast,
satellite imagery shows. Palestinians told CNN that they remember the
so-called “Netzarim junction” existed before 2005; back then, it was
largely only accessible to Israeli settlers."
I CNN-artikkelen er det mye informasjon. Om Netzarim-korridoren i den pågående Gaza-krigen. Men ikke minst hvordan denne kontrollposten ble brukt i de 38 år Israel okkuperte Gaza-stripen. Og sørget for de 8000 "nybyggere" som hjadde tatt til seg 30% av det beste land- og vann-området der.
I de pågående forhandlinger nå i august 2024 om våpenhvile og fred nekter Netanyahu å oppgi kontroll over Netzarim-korridoren.
Shin Bet-leder har skrevet brev til Netanyahu om "jødisk terrorisme" utført av såkalte "hilltop youths" setter Israel i fare og er ... "a large stain on Judaism":
The Guardian 23. August 2024:
"Israeli security chief condemns ‘terrorism’ of militant settlers
"Ronen Bar sparks row with letter to Netanyahu about actions of ‘hilltop youth’ being a ‘large stain on Judaism’"
Haaretz 23. august 2024
"Shin Bet Chief Warns PM and Ministers: Jewish Terror Is Jeopardizing Israel's Existence"
"'The
Jewish terror leaders want to make the system lose control, the damage
to Israel is indescribable,' Ronen Bar warned in a letter. Police
incompetence and public legitimacy led to the expansion of Jewish
terrorism, he says."
Historien om Bassem Youssef er vel verd å lese, se intervju med ham den 23. februar 2024 i The Guardian under Kilde.
‘The media and politicians are failing’: comedian Bassem Youssef on Piers Morgan, satire and ‘Genocide Joe’
Fra hjerteelege i Egypt, til kritiske TV-show der, men med kririkk av diktator al-Sisi måtte han flykte i 2014, og dro til USA., der han arbeidet seg opp som stand-up- komiker. Kjent ble han da han stilte opp til debatt med Piers Morgan om Israel-Palestina-konflikten
Bassem har vært stor på TikTok og X(Twitter), der han har hatt mer enn 11 milioner følgere. Det sises nå at han har mistet sin X-konto, se X-melding 20. august under Kilde. Og det harseleres med Elon Musk om ytringsfrihet.
2. IDF bare SER på POGROMENE på Vestbredden uten å gripe inn ...
.... så er det TYDELIGGJORT at Israel har begått krigsforbrytelser (brudd på Folkeretten) i 57 år, og fortsetter med dette løpende og økende med IDF som aktør.
DA har ICC en jobb å følge opp.
Men også andre aktører, som NORGE:
Etikkrådet for Oljefondet må ta sin rolle alvorlig.
Og konkludere at ALLE fondets investeringer i israelske selskaper avvikles.
Aftenpostens rolle er å skrive om dette på lederplass:
UTFORDRE Etikkrådet ved dets leder Svein Richard Brandtzæg."
Artikkel i "The New Yorker" 7. august 2024, HELE artikkelen nederst under Kilde:
"The Radicalization of Israel’s Military"
Her intervjues israelske Yehuda Shaul om utviklingen i IDF spesielt og Israel generelt. Utgangspunktet er nyheten om grov mishandling av palestinere i israelsk forvaring, ref Sde Teiman-leiren. Og opphisselsen hos mange i Israel ved arrestasjonene der.
In
July, Israel detained ten soldiers who were suspected of raping a
Palestinian man at a detention center in southern Israel. This followed
reports in the international press—including from the New York Times and CNN—of
widespread physical abuse at the same detention center, Sde Teiman. The
soldiers detained at Sde Teiman were brought for interrogation at
another military base; Israeli protesters stormed both that base and Sde
Teiman to demand that the soldiers be released. (The Israel Defense
Forces has denied the claim of widespread abuse and the soldiers have
denied the rape allegation.) The protesters have been supported by
right-wing cabinet ministers such as Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir,
who referred to the accused soldiers as “our best heroes.” Yoav
Gallant, the defense minister, has called for an investigation into
whether Ben-Gvir, who is the national-security minister, purposely
delayed the police from responding to the riots; eventually, military
battalions were mobilized to help protect the base where the soldiers
were being interrogated.
To talk about what
occurred and what it means for Israel’s future, I recently spoke by
phone with Yehuda Shaul, the co-founder of Ofek: The Israeli Center for
Public Affairs, an independent think tank based in Jerusalem. He is also
one of the co-founders of Breaking the Silence, an organization made up
of former Israeli soldiers dedicated to exposing what they see as the
realities of Israeli treatment of Palestinians in the occupied
territories. During our conversation, which has been edited for length
and clarity, we discussed how the Israeli military has changed over
time, whether Israel proper is at risk of becoming more like the West
Bank, and what Benjamin Netanyahu really thinks of challenges to the
state’s authority.
How does the storming of these bases fit into the history of right-wing attempts to undermine the rule of law in Israel?
First
and foremost, we need to keep in mind that we have had settler violence
in the West Bank for many years, and it has been rising for years
without enforcement, or close to no enforcement. So the settler
community has been living for decades in a reality where they can break
laws. I’ll even take one step back and say the entire settlement project
is a project that is drowning in criminality. This can mean building
settlements against the rules, the construction of housing on private
land, et cetera. It can also mean settlers beating up farmers or
shepherds, going into communities and attacking them either to displace
Palestinians or to create such a headache for the state that the message
is “It’s not worth it for you to actually enforce the law.”
We
have had decades of this kind of behavior in the West Bank, and
unchecked violence where soldiers were given orders to stand idly by.
When I was a soldier in the West Bank during the second intifada, our
orders were not to enforce law on the settlers. Our job was not to
protect the Palestinians. Our job was to protect the settlers.
Over
the years, every once in a while you would see a video of settlers
attacking Palestinians with soldiers not intervening. In the past four
or five years, there was a transition. We moved from soldiers standing
idly by while Palestinians were being attacked to soldiers sometimes
even joining the attacks. Sometimes it was soldiers who were settlers,
who were back at home in the settlement or the outpost where they live,
or where their friends live, and the guys are organizing to go down and
attack Palestinians, so they take their gun or come half in uniform and
join the attack. Sometimes it’s because specific military units were
made up largely of extremist, nationalist, religious guys that the U.S.
was even contemplating restricting military assistance to. But after October 7th things got even worse. Now the settlers are the soldiers and the soldiers are the settlers. [A spokesperson for the I.D.F. told The New Yorker
that “soldiers who encounter violent crimes committed by Israeli
civilians against Palestinians are required to stop the incident and,
when necessary, stall or detain the suspects until the police arrive at
the scene.” In cases where soldiers do not obey these instructions, the
spokesperson added, “the incidents are thoroughly examined and actions
are taken accordingly.”]
So you’re saying that the biggest change is in the makeup of who the soldiers are?
It’s
structural to the way the I.D.F. is designed. In a full-scale war, the
better equipped, better trained units go to the front line. In our case,
now, that’s Lebanon and Gaza. So who stays in the West Bank?
Reservists. But it’s not only normal reserve units. It’s also what are
called regional-defense units. The West Bank is divided into several
regional brigades. Each of them has regional-defense battalions, which
are reservist units made of local settlers. So settlers who live in the
area of Hebron, for example—many of them are mobilized in the area of
Hebron.
And remember, as a soldier, the settlers
are on our side, and Palestinians are the enemy, so we’re not going to
protect the enemy. Because the settlers host us for a Friday-night
schnitzel, because they speak our language, because they have political
power. But it’s also because they are completely integrated into the
system. On Friday night, they host us for schnitzel. On Sunday morning,
or on Monday morning, their security officers sit in the briefings at
the headquarters and get updates on what’s happening. On Tuesday, they
go and use our shooting range to stay in good shape, whatever. And on
Thursday, we’re going to arrest them?
Lawlessness
and violence was allowed because the relationship between the military
and the settlers on the ground became so symbiotic. It is now so
symbiotic that it’s not clear any more where the military starts and
ends, and where the civilians start and end.
Can I stop you for a second?
Well,
two more things are happening. One is the sociological change in the
Army. What we see is a significant shift within the Army—a change from
the old-school, secular, Labor Party-oriented people to nationalist
religious people, and especially to the ultra-Orthodox nationalists.
People like Smotrich.
In 1990, only two and a half
per cent of graduate officer cadets in the infantry were nationalist
religious. In 2015, it was nearly forty per cent. That’s about three
times their size in society. So you have this change, this sociological
change, of middle-, high-class, secular, better educated military people
going into cybersecurity and signal intelligence, more into positions
that can advance their status in the economy post-military service,
while the combat rank and file is being filled more with the ideologues,
the nationalist-religious guys, as well as blue-collar people. In the
past decade, there has been a big fight in the I.D.F. about who the real
authority is. Is it the rabbi or the commander?
In
2016, two Palestinian attackers stabbed a soldier, wounding him. The
Palestinians were shot. One of them was killed—the other one was
neutralized, laying on the ground. Minutes later, a military medic
called Elor Azaria arrived and he shot one bullet into the head of the
Palestinian—basically executed him. And it was all filmed by a
Palestinian activist who was living nearby. Once this came out, there
was outrage. Ultimately, Azaria was indicted, but there was outrage
about the fact that he was indicted. And it got to a place where even
Netanyahu, who was the Prime Minister, called the shooter’s parents to
show support. Ultimately, Moshe Ya’alon, who was the minister of defense
at the time—a right-winger and a former chief of staff of the
I.D.F.—had to resign, among other reasons, because he supported the
indictment. Azaria was sentenced to eighteen months for basically an
execution that was filmed.
That
was the moment where the rank and file within the Army, plus the
political base of the Likud Party and the Israeli right, essentially
rebelled against the old guard who want to say that the I.D.F. is a
professional army with discipline, who want to tell a story to the world
of adherence to international law, checking ourselves, investigation,
accountability. Now it became, “In our Army, we have different ethics
than you, and we have a different idea of rule of law than you have. And
it’s unacceptable that a soldier will be indicted for this.” For me,
that’s the threshold where you understand that, at least at the level of
the rank and file, the ideas had changed.
Let’s
bring the story up to today. How would you describe the current
situation in the military, and then what happened this past week?
We
have this clash between the old guard and the institutionalists on the
one hand, and the rank and file and the nationalist-religious people on
the other. The latter want to change the nature and the spirit and the
soul of the Army. But I wouldn’t underestimate the importance of the
International Criminal Court and international accountability mechanisms
here. Because the I.C.C. is looming over us. You can hear this in the
political debate in Israel. Many people who are trying to defend the
Military Advocate General—which oversees the investigations of
soldiers—frame it as important because that’s how we are protecting our
soldiers and commanders from the I.C.C. We have to show the world that
we have rule of law and we investigate alleged crimes.
And all these testimonies are coming out about the abuse of detainees. This gets out in CNN, and the New York Times,
and all over the world, and there’s pressure to actually investigate
and look into this. So the Military Advocate General sent the military
police, to go and detain a few soldiers for questioning. And right away
the call on the networks of the Israeli right is, “They’re coming after
our soldiers.”
Everybody comes out. It’s the rank
and file, it’s the base of the Likud and the national-religious
ideologues. They want to change what’s acceptable in the I.D.F. And you
can see it from October onwards with the amount of videos of soldiers
talking about rebuilding settlements. All this kind of stuff, right? The
erosion of discipline within the I.D.F. is very strong. And suddenly
there is this real clash between rule of law, or the story the
institution wants to tell the world, versus where the rank and file is.
And you get what you saw, which is hundreds of people breaking into
military bases in Israel, led by politicians. Ministers supporting them.
You could barely find ministers here who are actually criticizing it.
Netanyahu
seems like an interesting case here. At one level, it’s very clear what
he’s been doing in Gaza, and he has a long history of bigoted remarks
and trying to make undemocratic changes to the judicial system. But he
also has some interest in being a leader on the world stage who has at
least a certain level of respect. When you hear him speak to Congress or
wherever else, he doesn’t sound like Smotrich or Ben-Gvir, whatever his
actual views are. So I’m curious what his role is—because it seems like
the tension you were describing in Israeli society is in some ways
manifested within him.
I think that’s a
great question. Look, I fully agree with you. I don’t think his politics
are the politics of Smotrich or Ben-Gvir. I think that, in a way,
Smotrich represents the more ideological national religious shift in
terms of demands of where the Army should be and what its value should
be, and Ben-Gvir really represents more the working-class rank and file.
And I think that Netanyahu is where he is not only because Smotrich and
Ben-Gvir are holding his leash but because there is massive frustration
from the lack of achievements of the war.
Months
ago, after the horrendous massacres of October 7th, we were promised
that we were going to wipe out Hamas. We were going to bring all the
hostages home. We are months into the war and we haven’t wiped out
Hamas. So now what do you do? If you are a center-left person in Israel,
you blame Netanyahu and his government because they’re not willing to
talk about the day after, because these goals are unachievable by force
alone. Which by the way I fully subscribe to. That’s part of why we see a
growth in the protest movement against him.
But
if you are a right-winger, you basically start to blame the lefty, weak
generals who are not willing to do what it takes. You say people in the
military are playing a game with the Europeans, with the Americans,
with the international community, to protect people from the I.C.C. The
far right says, “They’re tying our hands. That’s why we’re not winning.
You saw what happened with Rafah. For weeks they were holding us back.
They didn’t allow us to go in.”
Before October
7th, the big demon was the courts. Now the far right is channelling a
lot of its frustration toward the old guard in the Army. And that’s, I
think, where Netanyahu comes into this. If you follow the Israeli media,
there are so many times where you have these leaks from cabinet
discussions: ministers attacking the chief of staff, ministers attacking
generals. All these attacks are part of where you channel the
frustration of the Israeli right. But actually the fact is that their
program doesn’t work, meaning we’ve almost wiped the Gaza Strip off the
face of the earth, and Hamas did not disappear. So you need to blame
someone for the failure.
Is there a point
at which you think these forces could challenge the state and Netanyahu
would fundamentally side with them? I am talking about a challenge to
the state within Israel proper.
Yeah. In the West Bank, it’s already happened.
Right, do you see that double standard spreading? Or are you afraid at some point there will be a breaking point?
So
look, we’ve seen it with the police. The Israeli police are almost
completely captured right now. It is almost fully captured and fully
political. It’s not yet happened with the Army. But you see it with the
police in the West Bank. You see it with the police versus the protests,
and you saw it when the police refused to show up to defend the
military bases. To be honest, right after October 7th, we had many cases
where Israeli peace activists were threatened. Extremist WhatsApp
groups circulated the names and addresses of friends of mine to come and
attack them. We reached a point where we wouldn’t even contact the
police because we didn’t trust the police. And that was a microcosm of
the bigger issue we saw this past week. The police in the West Bank are
almost completely settlers and militia. This is where we are. We are now
at this crossroads. This is the fight that is happening now in
Israel—whether the institutions will prevail or not.
And
if I zoom out and connect the West Bank to Israel, I would say that we
are in a place where Israel will have to decide whether we are a country
that has a settlement project—a colonial project in the West Bank—or we
are a colonial project that has a country. And even if our institutions
will not be defeated under this government, I think the changes within
the Army and those sociological developments are a threat down the road.
Today,
the national-religious ideologues are basically a dominant force up to
about brigade-commander level. Above it, it’s still the old élite. But
every five to ten years, they climb up one stage. Currently, the
institution changes them more than they change the institution. But,
once it continues enough, you reach a mass where they begin changing the
institution more than the institution changes them.
You
mentioned that there had been more pressure on the Army to look into
allegations of abuse and misconduct after reports started appearing
internationally in the New York Times and CNN. Were these reports surprising to you or surprising to people who study this stuff in Israel?
For
me, the idea that bad things are happening in Gaza, that bad things
will happen in detention centers, is not surprising. But how bad they
are, to be honest, is surprising. I fear that we’re just scratching the
surface here. And I fear the fact that the media is largely not yet in
Gaza. I fear that we’re going to discover that we’ve reached serious new
lows in our behavior—in terms of rules of engagement that were
extremely permissive in the amount of collateral damage allowed, and in
terms of treatment of detainees. For all these things, I fear that we
still don’t have the full story.
But I don’t think
there is outrage. I think there is a big chunk of Israeli society that,
for them, the kind of assault that is alleged against detainees
actually sounds reasonable. It sounds reasonable to people in the
Knesset today and for ministers in the government. You saw thousands of
Israelis standing and defending these soldiers, even with what is
alleged that they’ve done. That’s how low we’ve reached. An entire
section of Israeli society and the political class and government have
actually stood up to defend these actions. ♦
Artikkel i Washington post 15. august 2024, se Kilde:
"Israel is redrawing the West Bank, cutting into a prospective Palestinian state"
"Israeli land grabs, settlement expansion and demolitions in Palestinian communities mark the most significant territorial changes in the West Bank in decades.
During more than 19 months in power, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government has dramatically expanded Israel’s footprint in the occupied West Bank — accelerating a long-term campaign by the country’s settler movement to thwart the creation of a Palestinian state.
The government has approved strategic land seizures — almost 6,000 acres this year alone — and major settlement construction, escalated demolition of Palestinian property and increased state support for illegally built settler outposts. Together, they mark the most significant territorial changes in the West Bank in decades.
While the Biden administration insists that any diplomatic solution to the war in Gaza include a path to an independent Palestinian state, radical Jewish settlers and their far-right political backers, who have ascended to the highest levels of Israel’s government, are redrawing the map in real time — making the two-state solution envisaged in past peace accords effectively impossible."
Dette er innledningen til artikkelen. Den er lang og grundig. Og må leses av alle som vil ha innsikt i hvordan Israel systematisk tar kontroll over Vestbredden, og skviser ut palestinere der, slik at deres liv og virksomhet blir umulig.
