goofy
May 27, 2024, 11:10pm
1172
By Ehud Olmert, PM of Israel from 2006-09 (and hardly a lefty, his party was a group of moderates who split off from Netanyahu’s Likud):
non-paywall link
But at the same time, with barely anyone noticing, a war is developing that threatens to overshadow all the tragedy, blood and destruction in Gaza. This is the war in the West Bank, the territories we historically call Judea and Samaria, where some 3 million Palestinians have lived for many generations. They didn’t immigrate there, indeed they regard the area as their homeland. They were born there, as were their parents and grandparents. They have no other country . We are doing everything we can to expel them, to force them out of their homes and the landscapes where they have always lived, in order to annex the territories to the State of Israel and fulfill the dreams of a messianic, extremist, reactionary and murderous minority that is gradually taking over the government in the State of Israel.
Before October 7, there were instances of terrible settler violence against Palestinians . The pogrom in Hawara won considerable media coverage for exceeding what the Israeli public was prepared to tolerate. Smotrich’s vow to “obliterate Hawara,” not by hilltop youth vigilantes and their older supporters but by the government of Israel, shocked the world and set off an angry international reaction that included national leaders led by U.S. President Joe Biden. They all understood that Benjamin Netanyahu’s government of destruction was undermining the foundations of our existence while simultaneously striving to destroy the foundations of the Palestinian people’s existence – a people living on a land to which the Jewish people have a deep historical connection, but that for them is their land no less. They have no other.
What is happening now in the territories is an organized campaign – violent and murderous – undertaken by many of the settlers who know that they have the backing of some of the most powerful ministers in the government. They are free to act because the police and the army deliberately look the other way. They pretend they do not see or hear what is occurring and were not informed in time. It is tantamount to complicity in these crimes.
In recent days, Israeli television viewers were able to see how dozens of young men wearing kippas, with wooden and metal clubs in their hands, attacked dozens of trucks carrying humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip . These young men stopped the trucks, assaulted the drivers, forced them out of their cabs and threw the food the trucks were carrying to the ground and trampled it. The police did nothing to stop them; the army did nothing to deter them. The rioters acted with complete freedom, without troubling to cover their faces, but none were arrested, questioned or detained.
It’s time to stop this violence. The responsibility for this rests first and foremost on the government and its leader. But it is clear that Netanyahu is not ready or willing to stop it. He may even turn a blind eye and pretend that he assists Ben-Gvir’s supposed plan to prevent terrorism and provide security to the settlers.
Thus, it is left to two other leaders, members of the war cabinet. Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot are now the last hope of the many Israelis who do not want to live in an apartheid state. Both are worthy, decent people, courageous fighters and patriots in the most positive sense of the term.
When they joined this government of destruction, I thought they erred. I said at the time that when the day comes that Netanyahu is removed from power, as he should be, that they, together with Yair Lapid, would be the ones to build a new government and restore the State of Israel to its fundamental values before it is too late. More than once I expected, in view of Netanyahu’s trickery and the current government’s lack of vision and political horizon, that they would come to the conclusion that there was no choice but to quit.
I have heard the case they are supposed to have for staying – that without Gantz and Eisenkot, the government would be completely subject to the madness of the “draft dodger,” as Eisenkot calls Ben-Gvir, and that a war cabinet with Gantz and Eisenkot is better than one with Ben-Gvir. But enough. What is happening in the territories is not a matter of a military operation, like one to eliminate the Hamas battalions in Rafah. There can be different opinions about that – Gantz and Eisenkot have one, I and many others (who in our public lives have made many decisions about military attacks, operations and liquidations) have another. Their view is legitimate, even if I believe they are wrong. But their silence in the face of what is happening in Judea and Samaria is incomprehensible, unjustified and intolerable. When it comes to the crimes committed by the State of Israel, its citizens, its settlers, its police and security forces in the territories, there is no room for tolerance, acceptance or silence.
Gantz and Eisenkot, you are responsible. Either you leave this bloody government today, or you will be blamed for the destruction it causes.
4 Likes
pvn
May 28, 2024, 10:58am
1173
goofy
May 28, 2024, 3:42pm
1174
Lots of details:
Cohen, who was one of Netanyahu’s closest allies at the time and is emerging as a political force in his own right in Israel, personally led the Mossad’s involvement in an almost decade-long campaign by the country to undermine the court.
Four sources confirmed that Bensouda had briefed a small group of senior ICC officials about Cohen’s attempts to sway her, amid concerns about the increasingly persistent and threatening nature of his behaviour.
One individual briefed on Cohen’s activities said he had used “despicable tactics” against Bensouda as part of an ultimately unsuccessful effort to intimidate and influence her. They likened his behaviour to “stalking”.
The Mossad also took a keen interest in Bensouda’s family members and obtained transcripts of secret recordings of her husband, according to two sources with direct knowledge of the situation. Israeli officials then attempted to use the material to discredit the prosecutor.
Bensouda was in New York in 2018 on an official visit, and was meeting Kabila, then the president of the DRC, at his hotel. The pair had met several times before in relation to the ICC’s ongoing investigation into alleged crimes committed in his country.
The meeting, however, appears to have been a setup. At a certain point, after Bensouda’s staff were asked to leave the room, Cohen entered, according to three sources familiar with the meeting. The surprise appearance, they said, caused alarm to Bensouda and a group of ICC officials travelling with her.
Why Kabila helped Cohen is unclear, but ties between the two men were revealed in 2022 by the Israeli publication TheMarker, which reported on a series of secretive trips the Mossad director made to the DRC throughout 2019.
According to the publication, Cohen’s trips, during which he sought Kabila’s advice “on an issue of interest to Israel”, and which were almost certainly approved by Netanyahu, were highly unusual and had astonished senior figures within the intelligence community.
Fighting the International Criminal Court: Israel
pvn
May 29, 2024, 12:30am
1175
oh the good news is that joe biden’s red line actually hasn’t been crossed because (squints at notes) this isn’t actually an “invasion” it’s just sparkling genocide, I guess the de-escalation worked
https://x.com/adamjohnsonCHI/status/1795539984797274359
1 Like
Some very Barryesque red line setting by Boden here.
goofy
May 30, 2024, 5:51pm
1179
Haaretz had the story about the intimidation of the ICC prosecutor in 2022, and Israeli security spiked it by threatening to throw their reporters in the gulag if they published
non-paywall link
The investigation this week by Britain’s The Guardian newspaper revealed an alleged extortion operation led by then-Mossad head Yossi Cohen against then-International Criminal Court prosecutor Fatou Bensouda. About two years ago, Haaretz was about to reveal the affair, but an Israeli security official blocked publication. Now the affair has been exposed at a difficult time for Israel.
The timing couldn’t be worse. It is occurring in the midst of a political tsunami and a week after Karim Khan, the ICC prosecutor who replaced Bensouda, sought arrest warrants against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.
One of the investigation’s key findings would have been known to readers of Haaretz a long time ago if Israel was the democratic state it claims to be.
In May 2022, Haaretz had hoped to publish this exact headline: that Israel acted to extort the prosecutor, through the Mossad, as part of an operation directed and personally lead by Cohen.
At the entrance to the senior official’s office, I was asked to deposit my mobile phone to prevent me from recording the conversation. In the room, another senior official from a different security agency was waiting for me. The conversation began with the words, “We understand you know about the prosecutor.”
It was a polite conversation, a polite threat. The tone was calm, the content much less so. I was explained that if I publish the story, I would suffer the consequences and get to know the interrogation rooms of the Israeli security authorities from the inside. I argued against the use of security powers to prevent the publication of information whose harm is not security-related but rather reputational in nature, but to no avail.
In the end, it was made clear to me that even sharing the information “with my friends abroad,” referring to foreign media outlets, would lead to the same results.
Two years later, the government’s gagging effort has turned out to be a dual folly. Instead of being exposed in an Israeli newspaper, the investigation has now appeared in a newspaper with global circulation. Instead of contending with the story during peacetime, it must now deal with it in the midst of the war.
The timing, it appears, couldn’t be worse, occurring in the midst of a political tsunami and a week after current ICC prosecutor Khan, who succeeded Bensouda, is seeking another order against Netanyahu and Gallant on charges they violated the laws of war in Gaza. All that Israel needs is for the prosecutor to add offenses against the administration of justice to his list of allegations. This may very well happen.
2 Likes
goofy
May 30, 2024, 7:57pm
1180
Daily reminder that the Biden administration does not, in fact, have good policy on this issue
Two more US officials have resigned over the Gaza war, saying that the Biden administration is not telling the truth about Israeli obstruction of humanitarian assistance to more than two million Palestinians trapped and starving in the tiny coastal strip.
Alexander Smith, a contractor for the US Agency for International Development (USAID), said he was given a choice between resignation and dismissal after preparing a presentation on maternal and child mortality among Palestinians, which was cancelled at the last minute by USAID leadership last week.
Smith, a senior adviser on gender, maternal health, child health, and nutrition chose to resign on Monday after four years at USAID. In his resignation letter to the head of the agency, Samantha Power, he complained about the inconsistencies in USAID’s approach to different countries and humanitarian crises, and the general treatment of Palestinians.
Smith said that the breaking point for his career as a state department contractor came last week, when he had been scheduled to present a paper to an internal USAID conference about maternal and child mortality in Gaza and the West Bank.
It had been cleared for publication by the conference organisers but when it came to the attention of USAID’s Middle East section on 20 May, Smith was asked to make redactions. He said those edits included removing a slide outlining applicable international humanitarian law, and any language implying recognition of a Palestinian state, including references to agencies which have Palestine in their title, like the UN Family Planning Association (UNFPA) Palestine.
After 24 hours of discussing edits, the USAID leadership changed its mind and ordered Smith’s talk to be cancelled altogether, deleting mention of it from the conference website.
Does anyone? I don’t even know what good policy on this issue looks like? Just a completely fucked situation that has been brewing since WW2.
goofy
June 1, 2024, 12:05am
1183
Reading about this, it seems like Biden called this an Israel-proposed plan and the only party that appears to be waffling on accepting it (either because Biden lied from the start which seems unlikely, or because their right-wing government is so fucked) is… Israel?
Seems like Biden is calculating a few things here, he has AIPAC support to shore up his support here and insulate himself from ‘omg he hates jews’ stuff. It’s also him making this public, presumably to push for changes in the israeli government
goofy
June 1, 2024, 4:08am
1187
This is just typical left-bashing from the type of centrist dipshit that spent the last 6 months posting “Israel has a right to defend itself” over and over suddenly finding Jesus at the exact moment Biden said “enough is enough” and not a second before while 35,000 people were murdered
2 Likes
uh huh
https://x.com/Sandinista412/status/1796642289130873078
these people exist, and while I don’t think they’re large in number, they are annoying af and loud.
pvn
June 1, 2024, 11:33am
1189
"finally, after ~8 months and ~40k civilian deaths, and countless explicit admissions from bibi’s regime of exactly what they’re doing, finally, at last, biden has come around to ask for the bare minimum that any moral human being would start with.
here’s why the people who have been asking him to do this for 8 months are the real monsters"
ok
pvn
June 1, 2024, 11:34am
1190
ah yes ikes found someone on the internet that nobody’s ever heard of who tweeted something, obviously this is the position of “the left”
goofy:
centrist dipshit
bingo
1 Like
Surf
June 1, 2024, 12:31pm
1191
Seems like whatever peace plan has to at a minimum be implemented and change conditions on the ground before we start deciding who should get what sort of credit
African dictators