People gather with banners and Israeli flags to protest against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government for not signing the ceasefire agreement with Gaza and to demand hostage swap deal in Tel Aviv, Israel on September 28, 2024. [Nir Keidar – Anadolu Agency]
Israel opposition leader and Chairman of National Unity camp, Benny Gantz, has accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of “sabotaging” prisoner swap deal negotiations with Hamas, Israel’s Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper reported.
According to the outlet, Gantz criticised Netanyahu’s address to foreign press about the deal. “We are in sensitive days – life and death are truly controlled by the tongue,” he said.
Gantz’s statements came two days after the Wall Street Journal published an interview with Netanyahu in which he said: “I will not agree to end the war [in Gaza] before eliminating Hamas.”
Gantz said: “As Netanyahu himself said just a week ago, the less we talk, the better, while the negotiators are working, Netanyahu is sabotaging the negotiations again.”
Netanyahu, Gantz explained, “does not have a mandate to thwart the return of our hostages again for political reasons. Their return is the right thing to do.”
In response, Netanyahu’s office said Gantz, can not preach “about the need to eliminate Hamas and the sacred mission of returning our captives.”
“It is no coincidence that since Gantz left the government for political reasons, the prime minister has led painful blows against Hamas, the destruction of Hezbollah, and direct operations against Iran – steps that led to the fall of the Assad regime in Syria.”
Yedioth Ahronoth quoted Einav Tsinguker, mother of the detained occupation soldier Matan Tsinguker, as saying that the soldiers’ families’ greatest fear is that the “Israeli government will leave the kidnapped behind.”
“The prime minister is being blackmailed by extremists in his government who want to build settlements on the backs of those kidnapped. We need to end the war in exchange for reaching a comprehensive deal,” she added.
King Charles III reading the King’s Speech in the House of Lords Chamber during the State Opening of Parliament in the House of Lords at the Palace of Westminster in London, July 17, 2024
THE GOVERNMENT faced fresh criticism today after appointing several pro-Israel hardliners to the House of Lords.
Mike Katz, Luciana Berger, David Evans, Steve McCabe and Phil Wilson – who helped undermine left-wing former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn with anti-semitism allegations – are among 30 new Labour peers.
The appointees mostly comprise a string of ex-MPs and Sir Keir Starmer loyalists, including his former chief of staff Sue Gray.
A Jewish Voice for Labour spokesperson told the Star: “Mike Katz is one of several new peers rewarded for damaging the Labour Party we at JVL supported.
“These rewards [come] from a government keener on destroying that party than addressing the crises of poverty, oppression, war crimes and racism.”
Basem Farajallah, of the UK Gaza Community group, said the appointment of Mr Katz showed Labour is “still the same as the Conservatives … ignoring the mass support for the Palestinian cause” in Britain.
Genocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpAUK Foreign Minister David Lammy confirms that UK government and military are active participants in Israel’s genocides and that the F-35 parts that they suspended from supplying to Israel are instead simply diverted via the United States. He says see https://youtu.be/QILgUHrdWRE
STARMERISM is an attempt to turn the clock back. It isn’t working, cannot work and tolerating it risks disaster for the working-class movement.
It has always been an attempt to turn the clock back. The entire Starmer project was, from his election as Labour leader on a false prospectus, an attempt to undo Corbyn: to drag the unruly Labour Party back to a supposed “middle ground” of support for neoliberal economics and imperialist war.
It has been a project pursued with total ruthlessness: Labour members were, and are, broadly supportive of Corbyn’s manifesto commitments to greater public ownership and redistribution of wealth through progressive taxation, and certainly weren’t happy with the former leader being portrayed as the devil incarnate and cast out of the party, so Starmer had to smash Labour democracy.
His regime has banned debate in constituency parties, suspended those in their entirety when they wouldn’t play ball, and expelled anyone who dared to object. Since coming to power, MPs have found themselves excluded from the parliamentary party for backbench rebellion against child poverty — an authoritarian intolerance for dissent far harsher than anything Tony Blair ever expressed.
The paranoia reflects an underlying reality: Starmer and his acolytes know the majority are against them and must coerce because they cannot persuade. In this sense, the project is about much more than exorcising Corbyn.
It is part of a wider ruling-class effort to reboot the British system so we are back where we were in 2015 or even 2007 — pre-Corbyn, pre-Brexit, pre-bankers’ crash: when the world was one the liberal elite understood and had mastery over.
It is an impossible task. In foreign policy, the “unipolar moment” is gone: the West is no longer economically strong enough to dictate to the world, and its attempts to do so merely alienate.
In domestic policy, the consensus for privatisation and unfettered corporate domination of the economy can only continue to deliver what it delivers already: worsening services and falling living standards.
The two come together because Establishment liberalism is collapsing in the cockpit of imperialism, the United States. It is already defeated there by hard-right nationalism of the Farage type, but the nature of the US-led “free world” forces the ostensibly liberal leaders of Europe to fawn on the demagogic leader of the counter-revolution, Donald Trump.
Labour members fooled into voting for Starmer on the grounds he might be a polished, media-savvy version of Corbyn misunderstood Establishment hatred of the Corbyn project: it was about content, not form, and any leader threatening real reform would have met the same vitriol.
Similarly, the angst now expressed by liberal commentators from the Guardian to Channel 4 about Starmer not having what it takes to see off Farage is off-piste. Starmer is bad at politics, but that is not the root of a problem that engulfs Emmanuel Macron, Olaf Scholz and Joe Biden too. Liberalism has nothing to offer and populations across the West can no longer be duped.
The labour movement needs to wake up to this. Without a radical change of direction from Labour, Britain will soon be ruled by nasties of the Donald Trump sort, whose hostility to trade unions (see Elon Musk) equals their viciousness towards immigrants.
The Jonathan Freedlands and Robert Pestons wonder if Starmer needs to be replaced. He does, but not because he is incompetent: because his zombie-Blair politics are anachronistic. The political consensus of the 1990s is not coming back.
It’s over a century since Rosa Luxemburg defined the choice facing humanity as socialism or barbarism. It is the choice now, for sure. We can break with Starmer-Labour or we can resign ourselves to Reform UK: there is no middle ground.
Keir Starmer explains that he feels no shame or guilt benefitting personally from gifts from the rich and powerful while insisting on policies of severe austerity causing suffering and death.
Palestinians living in makeshift tents and ruined buildings in Jabalia Camp try to continue their daily lives under Israeli attacks in Gaza Strip on December 18, 2024. [Dawoud Abo Alkas – Anadolu Agency]
The Jabalia refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip has become a “ghost town” with around 70% of homes and buildings completely destroyed in Israel’s deadly onslaught in the area, Israeli media said on Sunday, Anadolu Agency reports.
“As far as the eye can see lie miles and miles of destroyed homes. It’s hard to look away from the devastated remains of Jabalia’s refugee camp in northern Gaza,” Amos Harel, a military affairs analyst, writes in Haaretz newspaper.
The Israeli army estimates that 70% of the refugee camp’s buildings were completely destroyed.
“I could see that even the few buildings that are still standing were badly damaged,” Harel said.
Israel has launched a large-scale ground operation in northern Gaza since Oct. 5 to allegedly prevent the Palestinian group Hamas from regrouping. Palestinians, however, accuse Israel of seeking to occupy the area and forcibly displace its residents.
Since then, no sufficient humanitarian aid including food, medicine, and fuel has been allowed into the area, leaving the remaining population on the verge of imminent famine.
“The IDF (army) operated here twice before, in December 2023 and May 2024. But this time, the camp was taken apart,” Amos said.
“Jabalia has become a ghost town. Outside, you mainly see pack after pack of stray dogs roaming around and hunting for scraps of food.”
The Israeli onslaught in northern Gaza was the latest episode in a brutal Israeli war on the Gaza Strip that has killed more than 45,200 people, mostly women and children, since Oct. 7, 2023.
Last month, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.
Israel also faces a genocide case at the International Court of Justice for its war on Gaza.
Pope Francis attends his weekly general audience in the Paul VI hall at the Vatican, on August 07, 2024 [Riccardo De Luca/Anadolu Agency]
Pope Francis on Saturday condemned the recent Israeli air strikes on Gaza, expressing sorrow over the bombing of children in the Gaza Strip the previous day, Anadolu reports.
“Yesterday, children were bombed. This is not war. This is cruelty. I want to say this because it touches my heart,” he told members of the Roman Curia, the Vatican’s central administration.
He also lamented that Israeli air strikes had prevented Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the highest representative of the Catholic Church in the Holy Land, from entering Gaza.
Israel has killed more than 45,000 people, most of them women and children, in Gaza since the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attacks, and reduced the territory to rubble.
On Nov. 21, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.
Israel also faces a genocide case at the International Court of Justice for its military campaign in the enclave.
The pontiff has also called for an investigation to determine if Israel’s attacks in Gaza constitute genocide, according to excerpts from an upcoming new book.
