THE government’s “independent” adviser on political violence and disruption has received funding from pro-Israel groups while pushing for a crackdown on pro-Palestine protests, Declassified UK revealed today.
Former Labour MP John Woodcock — ennobled as Lord Walney for backing Boris Johnson in the 2019 election — was assigned in 2021 to produce a report investigating “the extreme fringes on both ends of the political spectrum” in Britain.
…
During his time as a Labour MP, he was appointed chairman of Labour Friends of Israel (LFI) in 2011. He embarked on a trip funded by LFI, the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Portland Trust the same year.
Lord Walney also accepted funding from the Australia-Israel Cultural Exchange during his time as an MP.
In January this year, while preparing to deliver his report concerning Palestine protests in Britain, Lord Walney visited Israel as part of a parliamentary delegation organised by the European Leadership Network, with flights and accommodation paid for by the organisation. He kept the trip under wraps and did not post about it on social media.
Philippe Lazzarini, commissioner-general of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East delivers a speech at the U.N. General Assembly in New York, United States on March 4, 2024. (Photo: Fatih Aktas/Anadolu via Getty Images)
“The implementation of this plan is already underway with the destruction of our infrastructure across the Gaza Strip,” said Philippe Lazzarini, the agency’s commissioner-general.
The head of the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees told the U.N. General Assembly on Monday that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his allies are intentionally trying to decimate the critical aid body as mass starvation looms in the Gaza Strip.
“UNRWA is facing a deliberate and concerted campaign to undermine its operations, and ultimately end them,” said Philippe Lazzarini, the agency’s commissioner-general. “Part of this campaign involves inundating donors with misinformation designed to foster distrust and tarnish the reputation of the agency. More blatant, is the Israeli prime minister openly stating that UNRWA will not be part of post-war Gaza.”
“The implementation of this plan is already underway with the destruction of our infrastructure across the Gaza Strip,” he continued. “Attempts to evict UNRWA from its headquarters in East Jerusalem, and from a nearby vocational training center for Palestine refugee youth, are underway. Draft legislation in the Israeli Knesset seeks to prohibit outright any activity by UNRWA on Israeli territory.”
The UNRWA, the most important aid agency operating in Gaza, has long been a target of the Israeli government. But attacks on UNRWA have escalated since October 7, with Israeli forces killing more than 150 of the agency’s employees during its war on Gaza and accusing a small number of the body’s staffers of taking part in the Hamas-led assault on southern Israel.
The Israeli government has not provided any evidence to support its claims, but the allegations alone led more than a dozen countries—including the United States—to suspend aid to UNRWA, putting its operations in Gaza and across the Middle East at risk of total collapse.
Last month, the U.S. Senate passed legislation that would prohibit any U.S. funding for UNRWA.
Babies are dying of malnutrition & dehydration.
Man-made famine is looming.
Doctors are amputating limbs of injured children without anesthetic.
Despite all the horrors – the worst might be yet to come.
On Monday, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) claimed—again, without providing evidence—that 450 of UNRWA’s 30,000 employees are “military operatives in terror groups in Gaza.”
Lazzarini noted Monday that he swiftly terminated agency staffers accused of playing a role in the October 7 attack and that an independent probe into Israel’s accusations was launched by the U.N. Office of Internal Oversight Services.
“Despite these prompt and decisive actions, and the unsubstantiated nature of the allegations, 16 countries have paused their funding, totaling $450 million,” said Lazzarini, thanking the countries that maintained or boosted their funding as the agency faced a potentially existential threat. The European Union has also agreed to partially restore funding.
“Thanks to them, the agency, which is the backbone of humanitarian assistance in Gaza, can continue operating and remains a lifeline for Palestine refugees across the region,” he said. “But for how long? It is hard to say. We are functioning hand-to-mouth. Without additional funding, we will be in uncharted territory—with serious implications for global peace and security.”
“I shudder to think of what will still be revealed about the horrors that have taken place in this narrow strip of land.”
Lazzarini said conditions on the ground in Gaza are “impossible to adequately describe” as Israel continues its bombing campaign and blockade, which have prevented badly needed aid from reaching large swaths of the territory.
“Doctors are amputating the limbs of injured children without anesthetic. Hunger is everywhere. A man-made famine is looming,” said Lazzarini. “Babies—just a few months old—are dying of malnutrition and dehydration. I shudder to think of what will still be revealed about the horrors that have taken place in this narrow strip of land.”
Ahead of Lazzarini’s speech to the U.N. General Assembly, a coalition of aid organizations issued a joint statement warning that if “funding suspensions are not reversed, the risk of a complete collapse of the already restricted humanitarian response resulting in preventable loss of lives in Gaza becomes even more likely.”
“Over 1 million displaced Palestinians are sheltering in UNRWA facilities across Gaza,” the groups said. “UNRWA’s 13,000 staff in Gaza far outstrip the collective capacity of the rest of the humanitarian sector in the territory. Their role in the facilitation and delivery of lifesaving humanitarian aid at scale in this crisis has been heroic. UNRWA’s supply of vital shelter, food, and basic services like sanitation, as well as the use of infrastructure by other aid organizations, is irreplaceable.”
The dome of the Capitol is seen in the distance on a rainy morning, March 5, 2024, in Washington
THE US presidential election increasingly resembles a ghoulish farce without anything resembling an amusing punch line to anticipate.
Barring some unexpected turn, Joe Biden and Donald Trump will face off against each other once more, two elderly men both displaying clear signs of cognitive impairment. Each routinely confuses countries and people, indicating unfitness for office without taking other considerations into account.
Much comment focuses on the risks for democracy in the US of a Trump victory, given his evident Mussolini-like tendencies. Indeed, the US is an unhappy marriage of an archaic and unworkable constitution and extreme culture war polarisation, presided over by a ruling class wallowing in its own cupidity.
However, the risks for the rest of the world are at least as great, given the outsize role the US plays in world affairs, expressed in the course of this century through a series of military aggressions.
On this front, the choice is just as unappealing. Joe Biden’s full-throated support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza reminds us that US liberalism is a political expression of imperialism.
Indeed, even before the Gaza crisis, the Biden administration had continued the main lines of Trump’s policy in the Middle East, with the exception of a fruitless attempt to revive the nuclear deal with Iran which his predecessor had recklessly scrapped.
An image grab from video footage shows Palestinians running toward parachutes attached to food parcels airdropped from U.S. aircraft on a beach in the Gaza Strip on March 2, 2024. (Photo: AFP via Getty Images)
The real purpose of this spectacle was to deliver votes for the president, not meals for the starving.
The head of Save the Children described the Biden Administration’s recent airdrop of food into Gaza airdrop as “theater.” That it is. So is the Vice President’s sudden “demand” for a six-week ceasefire. For that matter, so is the ceasefire itself — if it happens. It’s likely to be characterized by ongoing immiseration and slow death, to be followed by the faster forms of killing.
It’s an American theater of cruelty whose real purpose is to deliver votes for the president, not meals for the starving. It will end as it began: in fire. The question is, what kind of fire and for whom?
Breadcrumbs
The American airdrop consisted of 38,000 “MRE’s,” or “Meals Ready to Eat,” those unwholesome feed bags the US military buys by the millions to feed its underpaid and undervalued soldiers. To call this gesture a publicity stunt is unfair to publicity stunts, which are hollow but rarely lethal. It’s part of a killing strategy of deflection and deception.
More than 2,100,000 people are starving in Gaza; the children are already dying. If divided evenly, every person in Gaza would receive precisely 1.8 percent of each bag pictured above – that is, if they got any of it, which is unlikely amidst all the US-backed chaos. Hunger can’t be cured homeopathically, with microscopic doses.
The average weight of an MRE is 22 ounces. (I looked it up.) That means this airdrop provided roughly one-third of an ounce of food for every man, woman, and child. That’s like a bird hunter scattering breadcrumbs for pigeons before he starts killing them again.
At the going price for MREs (I looked that up, too), the retail cost of the food dropped comes to $617,405. That’s 29 cents for every starving person in Gaza (which is pretty much all of them.) And the military probably got a discount.
Perhaps the cost should be billed to the Biden campaign. Its real purpose is to offset the growing backlash against the administration’s support for mass slaughter, which was quantified in the Michigan primary’s surge of anti-Biden “uncommitted” votes. The president has seemed publicly insensate to the deaths of children, but even his dimming organs of perception can smell unfriendly votes. And whatever he doesn’t catch, his advisors presumably will.
Meanwhile, the president and his party continue to push a bill that would provide $14 billion in military aid to Israel. That’s more than twenty-two thousand times as much as the US spent on this food drop. Roughly $10 billion of that would consist of weapons for the IDF, including “advanced weapons systems” like the ones that are currently destroying apartment buildings, schools, and hospitals.
That cost should be billed to the American conscience.
The Airdrop Show
From the Washington Post: “Critics say airdrops are expensive and ineffective, and argue diplomatic efforts should be focused on opening Gaza’s border crossing to allow aid convoys access.” But that would require confronting Israel, which the Biden Administration has yet to do in any meaningful way.
The United States could send food aid on ships to the Gaza shore with troops through the Rafah Crossing. It could confront Israel with a simple choice: fire on our military, or accept that the policy of mass starvation has come to an end. The fact that it doesn’t means that the dying will continue.
The same inaction gives the lie to Kamala Harris’ belated discovery that “people in Gaza are starving” and her lofty call for “an immediate ceasefire” – which sounds good, except that the administration is absolving Israel of all responsibility for the deaths and for the lack of a ceasefire.
