Israel's War on the World

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on October 17, 2024

Israel’s War on the World

Photo credit: Muhammad Mahdi Karim, Wikimedia Commons

By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies, World BEYOND War, October 17, 2024

Each new week brings new calamities for people in the countries neighboring Israel, as its leaders try to bomb their way to the promised land of an ever-expanding Greater Israel.

In Gaza, Israel appears to be launching its “Generals’ Plan” to drive the most devastated and traumatized 2.2 million people in the world into the southern half of their open-air prison. Under this plan, Israel would hand the northern half over to greedy developers and settlers who, after decades of U.S. encouragement, have become a dominant force in Israeli politics and society. The redoubled slaughter of those who cannot move or refuse to move south has already begun.

In Lebanon, millions are fleeing for their lives and thousands are being blown to pieces in a repeat of the first phase of the genocide in Gaza. For Israel’s leaders, every person killed or forced to flee and every demolished building in a neighboring country opens the way for future Israeli settlements. The people of Iran, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia ask themselves which of them will be next.

Israel is not only attacking its neighbors. It is at war with the entire world. Israel is especially threatened when the governments of the world come together at the United Nations and in international courts to try to enforce the rule of international law, under which Israel is legally bound by the same rules that all countries have signed up to in the UN Charter and the Geneva Conventions.

In July, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that Israel’s occupation of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem since 1967 is illegal, and that it must withdraw its military forces and settlers from all those territories. In September, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution giving Israel one year to complete that withdrawal. If, as expected, Israel fails to comply, the UN Security Council or the General Assembly may take stronger measures, such as an international arms embargo, economic sanctions or even the use of force.

Now, amid the escalating violence of Israel’s latest bombing and invasion of Lebanon, Israel is attacking the UNIFIL UN peacekeeping force in Lebanon, whose thankless job is to monitor and mitigate the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah.

On October 10 and 11, Israeli forces fired on three UNIFIL positions in Lebanon. At least five peacekeepers were injured. UNIFIL also accused Israeli soldiers of deliberately firing at and disabling the monitoring cameras at its headquarters, before two Israeli tanks later drove through and destroyed its gates. On October 15th, an Israeli tank fired at a UNIFIL watchtower in what it described as “direct and apparently deliberate fire on a UNIFIL position.” Deliberately targeting UN missions is a war crime.

This is far from the first time the soldiers of UNIFIL have come under attack by Israel. Since UNIFIL took up its positions in southern Lebanon in 1978, Israel has killed blue-helmeted UN peacekeepers from Ireland, Norway, Nepal, France, Finland, Austria and China.

The South Lebanon Army, Israel’s Christian militia proxy in Lebanon from 1984 to 2000, killed many more, and other Palestinian and Lebanese groups have also killed peacekeepers. Three hundred and thirty-seven UN peacekeepers from all over the world have given their lives trying to keep the peace in southern Lebanon, which is sovereign Lebanese territory and should not be subject to repeated invasions by Israel in the first place. UNIFIL has the worst death toll of any of the 52 peacekeeping missions conducted by the UN around the world since 1948.

Fifty countries currently contribute to the 10,000-strong UNIFIL peacekeeping mission, anchored by battalions from France, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Italy, Nepal and Spain. All those governments have strongly and unanimously condemned Israel’s latest attacks, and insisted that “such actions must stop immediately and should be adequately investigated.”

Israel’s assault on UN agencies is not confined to attacking its peacekeepers in Lebanon. The even more vulnerable, unarmed, civilian agency, UNRWA (UN Relief and Works Agency), is under even more vicious assault by Israel in Gaza. In the past year alone, Israel has killed a horrifying number of UNRWA workers, about 230, as it has bombed and fired at UNRWA schools, warehouses, aid convoys and UN personnel.

UNRWA was created in 1949 by the UN General Assembly to provide relief to some 700,000 Palestinian refugees after the 1948 “Nakba,” or catastrophe. The Zionist militias that later became the Israeli army violently expelled over 700,000 Palestinians from their homes and homeland, ignoring the UN partition plan and seizing by force much of the land the UN plan had allocated to form a Palestinian state.

When the UN recognized all that Zionist-occupied territory as the new state of Israel in 1949, Israel’s most aggressive and racist leaders concluded that they could get away with making and remaking their own borders by force, and that the world would not lift a finger to stop them. Emboldened by its growing military and diplomatic alliance with the United States, Israel has only expanded its territorial ambitions.

Netanyahu now brazenly stands before the whole world and displays maps of a Greater Israel that includes all the land it illegally occupies, while Israelis openly talk of annexing parts of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

Dismantling UNRWA has been a long-standing Israeli goal. In 2017, Netanyahu accused the agency of inciting anti-Israeli sentiment. He blamed UNRWA for “perpetuating the Palestinian refugee problem” instead of solving it and called for it to be eliminated.

After October 7, 2023, Israel accused 12 of UNRWA’s 13,000 staff of being involved in Hamas’s attack on Israel. UNRWA immediately suspended those workers, and many countries suspended their funding of UNRWA. Since a UN report found that Israeli authorities had not provided “any supporting evidence” to back up their allegations, every country that funds UNRWA has restored its funding, with the sole exception of the United States.

Israel’s assault on the refugee agency has only continued. There are now three anti-UNRWA bills in the Israeli Knesset: one to ban the organization from operating in Israel; another to strip UNRWA’s staff of legal protections afforded to UN workers under Israeli law; and a third that would brand the agency as a terrorist organization. In addition, Israeli members of parliament are proposing legislation to confiscate UNRWA’s headquarters in Jerusalem and use the land for new settlements.

UN Secretary General Guterres warned that, if these bills become law and UNRWA is unable to deliver aid to the people of Gaza, “it would be a catastrophe in what is already an unmitigated disaster.”

Israel’s relationship with the UN and the rest of the world is at a breaking point. When Netanyahu addressed the General Assembly in New York in September, he called the UN a “swamp of antisemitic bile.” But the UN is not an alien body from another planet. It is simply the nations of the world coming together to try to solve our most serious common problems, including the endless crisis that Israel is causing for its neighbors and, increasingly, for the whole world.

Now Israel wants to ban the secretary general of the UN from even entering the country. On October 1st, Israel invaded Lebanon, and Iran launched 180 missiles at Israel, in response to a whole series of Israeli attacks and assassinations. Secretary General Antonio Guterres put out a statement deploring the “broadening conflict in the Middle East,” but did not specifically mention Iran. Israel responded by declaring the UN Secretary General persona non grata in Israel, a new low in relations between Israel and UN officials.

Over the years, the U.S. has partnered with Israel in its attacks on the UN, using its veto in the Security Council 40 times to obstruct the world’s efforts to force Israel to comply with international law.

American obstruction offers no solution to this crisis. It can only fuel it, as the violence and chaos grows and spreads and the United States’ unconditional support for Israel gradually draws it into a more direct role in the conflict.

The rest of the world is looking on in horror, and many world leaders are making sincere efforts to activate the collective mechanisms of the UN system. These mechanisms were built, with American leadership, after the Second World War ended in 1945, so that the world would “never again” be consumed by world war and genocide.

A US arms embargo against Israel and an end to U.S. obstruction in the UN Security Council could tip the political balance of power in favor of the world’s collective efforts to resolve the crisis.

Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies are the authors of War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, with a new, updated edition due out in February 2025.

Medea Benjamin is the cofounder of CODEPINK for Peace, and the author of several books, including Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher for CODEPINK and the author of Blood on Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.

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The Continued War on Black America by Jess Devitt

by
85sc
on August 14, 2024

Rest in Power Samuel Sharpe (right) and D’Vontaye Mitchell (left)

The Continued War on Black America

by Jess Devitt

Your author began writing this in a coffee shop near the lake, as what seemed like a whole squadron of Charlotte, North Carolina police officers swarmed to grab an iced beverage to stay cool in the Milwaukee summer heat, on the third day of the Republican National Convention being hosted here. Tuesday, the second day, “dialogue officers” from the Columbus, Ohio Police Department shot and killed Samuel Sharpe, a homeless man at a tent city near the old social services building on Vilet Street. Samuel had chosen to live in King Park with the homeless residents there in solidarity. His faith was a driving factor in his life, wanting to show the people in King Park that they weren’t alone. The other residents of the park, his family, and local organizations he worked with remember him fondly as a compassionate man who gave everything to his community.

A vigil was held Tuesday night for Sam Sharpe near the King Center on Vliet St. Beyond the cement barricades and 12-foot black metal fencing marking the border between Milwaukee and the Convention, the downtown area designated as a “protest zone” or “free speech zone” was abandoned; a dozen or so bored-looking, orange-shirted event staff chatted the shade or found busy-work. The only other visible residents of the entire downtown, besides a few scattered fanatics, were police, hundreds and hundreds of police, tense but polite, and obviously scared.

Parking was surprisingly easy to find downtown; perhaps this was because so many people assumed it would be difficult-to-impossible. In the same way, it seems plausible that, as many assumed that the climate was so ripe for confrontation and violence, most everyone stayed home, except the cops.

Within certain privileged parameters, one got the sense that we locals were afforded some leeway in our dealings with the police; they feared actual violence, and so were more likely to let slide, say, a Milwaukeean spitting on the ground at their feet, or telling them how unwelcome they are.

That’s within privileged parameters, as mentioned: outside of them, if you are poor and/or Black or Brown, you still had no rights, and could be killed even by out-of-town police with few repercussions. The mayor and police chief will even support the murderers.

Thursday, a March was held at Red Arrow Park, with the families of Samuel Sharpe (the man killed Tuesday) and D’Vontaye Mitchell (a man killed by Hyatt hotel security in mid-June). Attendees heard from his sister that Mr. Sharpe had multiple sclerosis, and, in conversations with his family, had told them that he and his dog were being threatened, which was why he appeared to be attacking another man when Columbus PD shot him (within about 10 seconds of having seen him).

Prior to the murder of Sharpe was that of D’Vontaye Mitchell, who was murdered by private security guards. Private security firms may not have the same prestige with boot-licking sectors of the general public as do sworn police officers, but they serve the exact same function: guarding businesses, enforcing white supremacy, and protecting capital. The difference in prestige is accounted for by the fact that private security guards/rent-a-cops , do not pretend to be serving some higher calling; they just in it for the money. Big establishments like the Hyatt have the money to pay and are enabled by the racist culture of American society.

The out-of-town cops are gone now, but the roughly 1,600 strong Milwaukee Police Department remains, to enforce white supremacy and to keep capital and its possessors safe from those they rule over and exploit. About 700 people have been killed around the country by police this year.

D’Vontaye Mitchell and Samuel Sharpe were working class Black men, whose lives who were not seen as valuable by the system. Their lives mattered, and we will fight for them and to bring down this racist system.

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Time to retire the phrase 'Military Industrial Complex'

by
85sc
on July 25, 2024

Responsible Statecraft

Time to retire the phrase 'Military Industrial Complex'

ANALYSIS | MILITARY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX

It is time to retire the phrase “military-industrial complex.”

President Dwight Eisenhower coined this immortal phrase during his January 17, 1961 farewell address to warn Americans against the “acquisition of unwarranted influence” by the conjunction of “an immense military establishment and a large arms industry.”

As a five-star general, Ike knew, perhaps better than anyone, the self-serving and mutually beneficial relationship between the defense industry and the military. But he neglected to mention Congress’s role in the arrangement, nor could he necessarily have foreseen the ways in which corporate interests would intertwine themselves with the various bureaucracies that keep the Pentagon's coffers flowing.

While the phrase “military-industrial-congressional-information complex” would be more accurate, it doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. And like Eisenhower’s snappier appellation, it still suggests an element of conspiracy. But, of course, none of this is theoretical.

The Pentagon, Congress, the defense industry, think tanks, lobbyists, and industry-sponsored media outlets are all very real. When combined, they make up what is better termed the “National Security Establishment,” which Americans see in action all the time.

We see it when a retired general goes on television to explain exactly how the Ukrainian army can defeat the Russians — but only if Congress passes the latest billion-dollar aid package. No mention is made of the rather relevant fact that the general’s think tank is funded by defense contractors who stand to benefit from the aid package he is calling for.

We see it when another general retires from his post as the head of his service branch and turns up six months later on the board of a major defense contractor. Coincidentally, it’s the same defense contractor that celebrated a year earlier when that general announced the company had won the $21.4 billion contract to build a fleet of bombers.

We see it when a senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee proposes the U.S. spend 5% of the gross domestic product every year on the military — a $55 billion increase to the current Pentagon budget. Predictably, he fails to mention that the majority of this money would go to defense contracts awarded to the same organizations that have given him more than $530,000 in campaign money since 2019. He fails to acknowledge how flush Pentagon budgets over the past 25 years created the sorry state of the military today.

We even see it when we least expect to, as when the country’s largest defense contractor runs advertisements during the Oscars and posts an interactive map on the company’s website touting the economic benefits of a weapon program. The company wants everyone to know how many jobs could be lost if Congress votes to disrupt the program in any way.

The American people also see the impact of these actions by the National Security Establishment.

We see tens of billions spent on a fighter jet that can only be reliably ready for combat a third of the time. We also see more than $60 billion spent designing and building warships that were so flawed Navy officials apparently can’t get rid of them fast enough. The Navy decommissioned one of these ships less than 5 years after its commissioning ceremony, roughly two decades ahead of the ship’s planned lifespan.

Starting in 2003, the Army spent at least $8 billion, and some sources say the better part of $20 billion, developing the Future Combat System, a family of armored vehicles to replace Cold War-era tanks, personnel carriers, and artillery vehicles. The Pentagon then canceled the program in 2009 with little to show for the effort and expense.

There are plenty of other examples of failed acquisition efforts from the past 25 years which partially explain why annual defense spending is now a whopping 48% higher than it was in 2000. Compounding these efforts is the Pentagon’s reliance on contractors to perform many roles once performed by uniformed service members at a much lower financial rate. The Department of Defense itself analyzed one case where hiring a group of contractors cost 316% more than the government employees tasked with similar work.

In a city where partisanship and political rancor impacts nearly every debate, wasteful and ineffective defense policies are a conspicuous exception. That is because the National Security Establishment is party-agnostic. Military contractors donate money to candidates and lobbyists on both sides of the aisle, those candidates vote for Pentagon budget increases and fund weapons programs long after their failures are widely known, and lobbyists and corporate-sponsored media groups generate public support for those programs.

Without massive structural changes, this pattern is all but certain to continue into future generations. Today’s National Security Establishment has launched several major weapons programs in recent years that, if allowed to continue on their current trajectories, will drive the annual Pentagon budget to truly unprecedented levels.

As programs like the B-21, Constellation-class frigate, Next Generation Air Dominance fighter jet, Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine, several ground vehicle programs, the Sentinel nuclear missile, and myriad space and cyber systems mature and enter full-rate production in the coming decades, the Pentagon budget will expand to cover the costs.

But this doesn’t have to be the case, if Congress actually does its oversight job. Several of these programs are already behind schedule and over budget. Costs for the Sentinel missile program have increased 81% to $140.9 billion from the original $77.7 billion estimate and it will still be several years before the first missile is installed in its silo. Yet, given the massive financial influence, even these egregious failures are all but glossed over, a simple footnote for most, and then prepared for a rubber stamp.

The services and their bureaucracies, the defense industry, members of Congress, and the paid mouthpieces promoting their interests in the media and during lobbying visits all comprise the all-too-real National Security Establishment. Identifying this network is the first step to avoid saddling future generations with the crushing debt associated with unsustainable U.S. military policies today.

While it is long-past time to update the name, Eisenhower’s warning is still more real than ever. Americans must remain vigilant and guard against the self-serving nature of this apparatus that is more intent on lining its own pockets than it is actually keeping Americans and our allies safe.

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NATO/US Complicity In Relentless Israeli Genocide Of Gaza

by
85sc
on July 18, 2024

NATO/US Complicity In Relentless Israeli Genocide Of Gaza

By Colonel (Ret) Ann Wright, World Beyond War. As Israel continued its relentless genocide on steroids of Palestinians in Gaza with over 140 killed in the past weekend, imprisonment without charges of thousands of Palestinians in the West Bank and destruction of the hospitals, universities, schools (8 UNRWA schools bombed in the past 10 days), cultural centers and indiscriminate bombing of markets, soccer fields and “safe area” residents of Gaza have been forced into, an assassination attempt was made on former President Trump and NATO finished its gala 75th Anniversary celebrations in Washington, DC. -more-

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vigil outside Waupun Correctional for the four inmates who died there

by
85sc
on June 10, 2024

Waupun warden and 8 staff members charged after prison death probe

The state Dept. of Corrections dozens of workers were still under internal investigation, placed on leave or fired in the past year

By Brittany Schmidt, TODD RICHMOND and SCOTT BAUER

Published: Jun. 5, 2024

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How the Military-Industrial Complex is Killing us All

by
85sc
on June 07, 2024

INFORMED CONSENT

How the Military-Industrial Complex is Killing us All

TOMDISPATCH06/03/2024

By David Vine and Theresa (Isa) Arriola

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US Targets Journalists Who Criticize Administration's Foreign Policy

by
85sc
on June 04, 2024

US Targets Journalists Who Criticize Administration's Foreign Policy

State-ordered Purge of Truth-Tellers in Time of War. Scott Ritter Passport Seized, WaPo Smears Indy Journalists

DENNIS KUCINICH

JUN 4

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Inside West Virginia’s Chernobyl A highly radioactive oil and gas facility

by
85sc
on March 06, 2024

SEP 18, 2023

Justin Noble

Inside West Virginia’s Chernobyl

A highly radioactive oil and gas facility has become a party spot in Marion County.

Most Americans do not realize that fuel is far from the only thing that comes to the surface at an oil or gas well, be it a modern fracked well, or an older conventional one. Every day, 2.9 billion gallons of toxic and often radioactive liquids are brought to the surface at oil and gas fields across the country. The industry has a number of innocent names for this waste: oilfield brine, produced water, salt water. Sometimes, they simply call it “water.” While it is natural, brine contains extraordinary levels of salts, toxic heavy metals like arsenic, lead and strontium. It can also be rich in the radioactive element radium..........

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Stop US Drone Attacks in West Africa

by
85sc
on February 07, 2024

Black Alliance for Peace’s U.S. Out of Africa Network Deplores Plans to Expand U.S. Drone Atrocities in West Africa

Feb 5, 2023

Media Contact

[email protected]

(202) 643-1136

The Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) and the U.S. Out of Africa Network (USOAN) opposes in the strongest terms the U.S. plans, in collusion with West Africa’s comprador class, to further violate Africa’s sovereignty and right to self determination in the form of three new military drone bases in Ghana, Ivory Coast and Benin. Further, we condemn the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and the U.S. Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) for not publicly renouncing this proposal in particular, and the existence of the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) in general. Their silence around this development confirms their complicity and betrayal of Pan-Africanism and the interests of the African masses struggling against the ravages of neo-colonialism.

More U.S. drone bases in Africa spell more violence, vicious anonymity, and "collateral damage" from drone assassinations. It spells enhanced surveillance capabilities for imperialism to use against any threat to the neocolonial order. U.S. maneuvering to expand its already massive military drone operations is consistent with the U.S. incessant drive to wage war globally and its militarization of the planet. U.S. drone and air strikes in Africa have primarily been in Libya and Somalia with the numbers of confirmed civilian deaths from drones as high as 3,200 in these two countries, and studies have shown these conditions “have inadvertently aided the growth of terrorist groups in the region.” This is what the U.S. proposes now for West Africa.

There are clear and disturbing geostrategic implications regarding the countries they have chosen for these U.S. drone bases. The bases will form a border along the three countries of the Alliance of Sahel States – Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger – countries which have been adopting an anti-imperialist disposition. In fact, Burkina Faso’s entire southern flank would be surrounded by these U.S. drone bases. The last two administrations as well as members of Congress have clearly stated in policy declarations and legislation that the U.S.' primary objective in Africa is to counteract the presence and influence of China and Russia in order to maintain its full spectrum dominance of all regions of the world. This is also consistent with the Global Fragility Act that states the Biden administration’s first sites of focus would be Haiti, Libya, and "West African coastal states," where the U.S. seeks to place the drone bases.

The bases will not be there to end so-called terrorism of extremists in Africa; they will be there for the U.S. to terrorize the region. It is folly to believe that the settler criminals who rule the U.S. state, who can justify the genocidal assault on Gaza, and who systematically murder, sanction, and attack nations globally to maintain white supremacy and global capitalism, are spending hundreds of millions to “fight terrorism” in Africa.

Rather than “an urgent effort to stop the spread of al Qaeda and Islamic State in the region,” according to American and African officials, the USOAN contends that this is more likely a contingency plan to preserve drone capabilities in the event of losing their $110 million U.S. drone base in Agadez, Niger. Niger has also recently temporarily suspended the granting of new mining licenses and ordered an audit of the sector, a move that would invariably raise the eyebrows of the U.S.-EU-NATO axis of domination, concerned over the future of exploitative access to the mineral resources there, such as uranium. Resource sovereignty runs counter to the true colonialist objectives of U.S. foreign policy.

BAP and the USOAN call on all who support African sovereignty to denounce the U.S.’ latest imperialist moves in Western Africa as well as the neocolonial African governments and collaborators like the Ghanaian president Nana Akufo-Addo who, face-to-face with U.S. Secretary Antony Blinken, openly begged for the U.S. to violate the sovereignty of the countries in the Alliance of Sahel States.

BAP and the USOAN will continue to expose the puppets of neocolonialism in Africa and the misleaders masquerading as Black representatives in the legislative branches of the U.S. setter state. We maintain that the U.S. and its Western Europe progenitors are the root cause and primary sustenance for the poverty, displacement, despair, and violence in Africa, born from decades of colonialist plunder.

#ShutDownAFRICOM!

#USOutofAfrica!

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Poisoning Gaza By Pat Elder January 31, 2024

by
85sc
on January 31, 2024

Poisoning Gaza

The buildings and the people in them are burning while the soil, sea, air, and groundwater are being poisoned in Gaza.

Joshua Frank’s article, Making Gaza Unlivable ought to be read by everyone. Frank is the managing editor of CounterPunch. He describes the collapsing infrastructure and dire circumstances of Gaza in this January 12 story:

“Like the Allied forces of World War II, Israel is killing indiscriminately. Of the 29,000 air-to-surface munitions fired, 40% have been unguided bombs dropped on crowded residential areas. The U.N. estimates that, as of late December, 70% of all schools in Gaza, many of which served as shelters for Palestinians fleeing Israel’s onslaught, had been severely damaged. Hundreds of mosques and churches have also been struck and 70% of Gaza’s 36 hospitals have been hit and are no longer functioning. According to HRW, Israel is using a lack of food and drinking water as a tool of warfare.”

We’ll examine the deadly contamination that accompanies the Israeli onslaught, starting with Aljazeera’s coverage.

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