Middle Eastern Conflagration, Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Iran

goofy · May 9, 2024, 1:54am

In one incident in 2019, an Israel Defense Forces soldier shot and killed an unarmed Palestinian man on the side of a road in the West Bank. That soldier was given no jail time — only three months of community service.

Under the U.S. Leahy Laws, the government must disqualify any military or law enforcement unit from receiving assistance if there’s credible information that the group had committed violations like rape or extrajudicial killings, unless the offending entity has taken adequate steps to punish the perpetrator.

On Friday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken told Congress he had determined the punishments for the soldiers and officers in all four cases — including the community service sentence — to be adequate, according to a State Department memo to Congress. The units won’t be disqualified from receiving American military assistance. The names of the units were previously reported by Al-Monitor. ProPublica obtained the memo with Blinken’s justifications.

Following the report three weeks ago, Blinken promised to announce his determinations “in the coming days.” At the time, several media outlets reported that the State Department was poised to sanction one of the units, Netzah Yehuda, the ultra-Orthodox military battalion that has operated in the West Bank and been accused of multiple human rights violations.

The vetting forum reviewed the unit for an incident in which commanders gagged, handcuffed and left an elderly Palestinian American man for dead. (The commanders were reprimanded and demoted but did not face prison time, according to the vetting forum’s meeting minutes.) Israel’s leaders responded by fiercely pushing back against U.S. plans to withhold American assistance from the battalion. Blinken has since delayed his decision on it, Axios reported.

Netzah Yehuda is not mentioned in Blinken’s Friday memo. In the meantime, the unit has apparently remained eligible for U.S. military assistance despite the finding that there was a violation.

Embarrassing moral cowardice

pvn · May 9, 2024, 5:53pm

imagine getting absolutely destroyed by a walking shitbag like piers morgan

https://www.instagram.com/p/C6uP5gMN536/

goofy · May 10, 2024, 5:33pm

When things are going really well for you

https://twitter.com/BarakRavid/status/1788952088724062258

boredsocial · May 10, 2024, 5:36pm

Yeah the masks have been all the way off for a while.

goofy · May 10, 2024, 11:22pm

Interesting article, even if its desired actions are a pipe dream:

non-paywall link

The fate of the administration’s own gambit for Palestinian statehood rests on a renewed diplomatic blitz to establish normalized relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel, a process initially put on pause by Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack and the subsequent war. In exchange for normalization, the Israelis would have to agree in principle to “getting out of Gaza and committing to work toward Palestinian statehood,” as veteran Middle East correspondent—and Biden’s favorite pundit—Thomas Friedman said in a recent column for the New York Times. To tie up the entire package, the United States would also commit to a strengthened security alliance with the Saudis to both counter growing Chinese influence in the Middle East and deter Iran’s regional ambitions.

This matches the logic of the previous administration’s Abraham Accords, which saw Israel establish diplomatic relations with four Arab states for the first time since 1994. Both initiatives flow from the same assumption that Israel will be more likely to concede ground on the Palestinian issue once it has peaceful relations with everyone else. This idea has already failed. Israel’s annexationist program has only accelerated after nominally committing to not annexing the West Bank in exchange for relations with the United Arab Emirates, yet the Biden administration is determined to expand on former President Donald Trump’s agenda to see Israel integrated into the Middle East without a definitive resolution for Palestinians. This would be a grave mistake.

Pressure on Israel will be a key part of any solution. There will be no reason for Israel to compromise or for Palestinians to trust Washington if the United States remains Israel’s lawyer at every diplomatic forum. The Arab world has offered to normalize relations with Israel on the creation of a Palestinian state for well over two decades now. Israeli intransigence on the issue of Palestine is, and will continue to be, one of the defining roadblocks to peace in the region. Once the United States accepts that the occupation is the problem, and that peace isn’t possible without Palestinian self-determination or the realization of freedom for Palestinians, a whole new and more productive approach is able to be taken.
…
In tandem with such recognition, the United States should reverse its position toward the ongoing deliberations at both the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC) concerning Palestine. As of right now, the United States is opposed to the very notion of ICC jurisdiction over Palestinian territory and has argued in front of the ICJ that it should not declare the Israeli occupation to be illegal. These are not positions in line with international law or consensus, and the Biden administration has no room to talk about a rules-based international order when it argues that Israel should be axiomatically exempt from these rules.

By supporting Palestine’s right to pursue legal accountability for Israel’s actions, the United States would bring itself into line with the rest of the international community, and it would collapse Israel’s assumption that it can act as it pleases without consequences.

goofy · May 15, 2024, 11:46pm

lol, country of cartoon villains

https://twitter.com/Seamus_Malek/status/1790801922590376367

goofy · May 16, 2024, 3:23pm

Long Magazine article:

non-paywall link

This story is told in three parts. The first documents the unequal system of justice that grew around Jewish settlements in Gaza and the West Bank. The second shows how extremists targeted not only Palestinians but also Israeli officials trying to make peace. The third explores how this movement gained control of the state itself. Taken together, they tell the story of how a radical ideology moved from the fringes to the heart of Israeli political power.

goofy · May 17, 2024, 6:08am

Finally read this ^ tonight as it’s 15k words (also, here’s a gift link I found). Incredibly thorough and well-researched over several years, and it’s impossible to read this and not think of the Jim Crow South in terms of a population living under a regime that allows them to be brutalized at any time, for any reason, with the perpetrators being protected by the state in opposition to laws on the books that should protect them, consistently, for longer than I’ve been alive:

In May 1982, Karp and her committee submitted a 33-page report, determining that dozens of offenses were investigated insufficiently. The committee also noted that, in their research, the police had provided them with information that was incomplete, contradictory and in part false. They concluded that nearly half the investigations opened against settlers were closed without the police conducting even a rudimentary investigation. In the few cases in which they did investigate, the committee found “profound flaws.” In some cases, the police witnessed the crimes and did nothing. In others, soldiers were willing to testify against the settlers, but their testimonies and other evidence were buried.

A sample of three dozen cases in the months since Oct. 7 shows the startling degree to which the legal system has decayed. In all the cases, involving misdeeds as diverse as stealing livestock and assault and arson, not a single suspect was charged with a crime; in one case, a settler shot a Palestinian in the stomach while an Israel Defense Forces soldier looked on, yet the police questioned the shooter for only 20 minutes, and never as a criminal suspect, according to an internal Israeli military memo. During our review of the cases, we listened to recordings of Israeli human rights activists calling the police to report various crimes against Palestinians. In some of the recordings, the police refused to come to the scene, claiming they didn’t know where the villages were; in one case, they mocked the activists as “anarchists.”

I did not know this (bolded part):

And so, so many parts of this article feel like a grim look into America’s possible future. This feels particularly relevant today, as Greg Abbott pardons a guy who murdered a BLM protester:

The threat that the unchecked attacks [by Jewish terrorists against Palestinians in the 1980s] posed to the institutions and guardrails of Jewish democracy wasn’t lost on some members of the Israeli elite. As the violence spread, a group of professors at Tel Aviv University and Hebrew University in Jerusalem sent a letter to Yitzhak Zamir, Israel’s attorney general. They were concerned, they wrote, that illegal “private policing activity” against the Palestinians living in the occupied territories presented a “threat to the rule of law in the country.” The professors saw possible collusion between the settlers and the authorities. “There is a suspicion that similar crimes are not being handled in the same manner and some criminals are receiving preferential treatment over others,” the signatories to the letter said. “This suspicion requires fundamental examination.”

Plus all the stuff about how the far-right terrorists from the 90s, part of movements that assassinated Rabin and carried out mass attacks on Palestinians, were pardoned or given light punishments which allowed them to gain even more support and power until they’re now running the show with Netanyahu. Remind you of any present-day issues in America?

LouisCyphre · May 20, 2024, 12:37pm

BriansHat · May 20, 2024, 3:54pm

Good

TheDuker · May 21, 2024, 3:35am

I know it’s sort of expected for any criticism of Israel to be denounced as “antisemitism” by some Israel partisans. But Bibi is really taking it to the next level:

Through this incendiary decision, Mr. Khan takes his place among the great antisemites in modern times. He now stands alongside those infamous German judges who donned their robes and upheld laws that denied the Jewish people their most basic rights and enabled the Nazis to perpetrate the worst crime in history.

goofy · May 21, 2024, 3:27pm

goofy · May 21, 2024, 3:39pm

Israel is a state sponsor of terrorism

Individual members of Israel’s security forces are tipping off far-right activists and settlers to the location of aid trucks delivering vital supplies to Gaza, enabling the groups to block and vandalise the convoys, according to multiple sources.

Settlers intercepting the vital humanitarian supplies to the strip are receiving information about the location of the aid trucks from members of the Israeli police and military, a spokesperson from the main Israeli activist group behind the blockades told the Guardian.

The claim of collusion by members of the security forces is supported by messages from internal internet chat groups reviewed by the Guardian as well as accounts from a number of witnesses and human rights activists.
…
“When a policeman or soldier’s mission is supposed to protect Israelis and instead he is sent to protect humanitarian aid convoys – knowing it will end up in the hands of Hamas – we cannot blame them or civilians who notice the trucks passing by their towns for providing intel to groups trying to block that aid. Yes, some of our intel comes from individual members of Israeli forces,” Touitou added.

goofy · May 22, 2024, 2:42am

Ireland and Spain are expected to announce plans to formally recognise a Palestinian state on Wednesday, according to multiple reports, amid warnings from Israel that recognition will “fuel extremism and instability”.

While recognition of Palestine is pretty common across the world, it is not currently so in the “West” except for Sweden:

goofy · May 22, 2024, 3:38pm

Spain, Ireland, and Norway announced recognition today. Super normal response from Israel:

So much for “from the river to the sea” being hate speech!

SensiblePerson · May 22, 2024, 5:12pm

Yeah, Israel has set up a really twisted dynamic:

Israel does bad stuff to Palestinians
Other countries take steps to push back/help the Palestinians
Israel uses that as an excuse to double down on the bad stuff

goofy · May 24, 2024, 5:36pm

When things are going well for your very lawful & democratic country:

CaffeineNeeded · May 24, 2024, 8:29pm

Wait what? The ICC is not in charge of war in the world. It’d be extremely odd for them to do this to Israel, but not any of the other military actions throughout the world.

goofy · May 24, 2024, 8:44pm

ICJ, not ICC (a separate court that Israel is also in trouble with), and yeah it would be weird for them to do this for Israel and no one else:

Although the ruling is a blow to Israel’s international standing, the court doesn’t have a police force to enforce its orders. In another case on its docket, Russia has ignored the court’s 2022 order to halt its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

(that’s from the same article)

goofy · May 26, 2024, 9:33pm

…sinking deeper into famine.

Gift link: Far-right Israeli settlers step up attacks on aid trucks bound for Gaza

Radical Israeli settlers have expanded their attacks on aid trucks passing through the West Bank this month, blocking food from reaching Gaza as humanitarian groups warn that the enclave is sinking deeper into famine.

Groups of settler youth are tailing relief convoys, setting up checkpoints and interrogating drivers. In some cases, far-right attackers have ransacked and burned trucks and beaten Palestinian drivers, leaving at least two hospitalized.

The assailants use a web of publicly accessible WhatsApp groups to track the trucks and coordinate attacks, providing a window into their activities. Working off what they say are tips from Israeli soldiers and police, in addition to the public, members pore over photos to work out which vehicles might be carrying aid to Gaza and mobilize local supporters to block them.

An attack on Thursday showed the system in action: Users in one WhatsApp group with more than 800 members began posting about a flatbed truck loaded with sugar, sharing photos from the road as they followed it.
…
The flatbed was ransacked, its load strewn across the road, according to images posted later in the group, one of two sugar trucks vandalized by settlers that day. De Bresser said the waybills — which did not show a destination — prove that the truck was headed to Gaza.

Fahed Arar, who owned the cargo, said the 30-ton load of sugar was actually destined for Salfit, a Palestinian town in the West Bank. The driver escaped unharmed, he said, but the Israeli military wouldn’t let him reload the goods.

Instead, soldiers removed the sacks with a bulldozer and destroyed them, Arar said, putting his loses at $30,000.

“The attack happened in front of the army,” Arar said, adding that the driver said soldiers did nothing to stop it.

Ibrahim al-Razem, 35, was driving a load of Coca-Cola to Kafr Aqab on the outskirts of Jerusalem when he ran into a roadblock on the night of May 16.

“They asked me if I was going to Gaza,” Razem, a Palestinian resident of Jerusalem, said of the crowd of settlers that stopped him. He provided the group documentation showing the goods were headed somewhere else, he said.

But they weren’t satisfied. “Are you a Jew or Arab?” Razem recalled them asking right before they attacked.

“They really wanted to kill me,” he said, adding that military officers at the scene did little to control the crowd. Razem said he hid under an IDF vehicle to shield himself from the blows.
…
The truck, which he had decorated with keepsakes from his sons, was set on fire after he was taken to the hospital.

“This was my source of income,” he said, estimating his losses at around $200,000. “I was broken.”

Lawless apartheid country