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Tag: United States

  • Biden Admin Signals Arms Will Keep Flowing as Netanyahu Rejects Palestinian State

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    Original article by JAKE JOHNSON republished from Common Dreams under under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

    U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken talks with spokesperson Matthew Miller and others after he departed from Manama for Tel Aviv on January 10, 2024.  (Photo: Evelyn Hockstein/Pool/AFP via Getty Images)

    “I don’t think we need to offer any kind of pressure” on the Israelis to accept a Palestinian state, said a spokesperson for the U.S. State Department.

    A U.S. State Department spokesperson signaled Thursday that American weaponry will continue to flow to the Israeli military even after the nation’s prime minister ruled out calls for a sovereign Palestinian state, openly defying the Biden administration’s push for a two-state solution to the crisis.

    “Our support for Israel remains ironclad,” the State Department’s Matthew Miller said during a press briefing on Thursday in response to a question about how the U.S. intends to react to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s position.

    “I don’t think we need to offer any kind of pressure” on the Israelis to accept a Palestinian state, Miller said. “The pressure is reality. The pressure is the reality that I just laid out, that without a tangible path to the establishment of a Palestinian state, there are no other partners in the region who are going to step forward and help with the reconstruction of Gaza.”

    Asked whether the U.S. will “continue to supply weapons and other support to an ally that is not listening to the warnings that you’re giving,” Miller acknowledged “differences with all of our allies” but said that “this is not a question of the United States pressuring them to do anything.”

    “This is about the United States laying out for them the opportunity that they have,” Miller added. “There is a path for real security assurances—but again, we can’t make those choices for anyone. They have to make them for themselves.”

    In an indication of its unflagging support for Israel’s war assault on Gaza, the U.S. State Department has twice bypassed Congress to expedite weapons sales to the nation’s government since the Hamas-led attack on October 7. Earlier this week, the U.S. Senate rejected a resolution from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) that would have required the department to produce a report on Israel’s human rights practices in Gaza—which by virtually all accounts are atrocious.

    The Biden administration, which could soon be facing a lawsuit at the International Court of Justice over its complicity in Israeli war crimes, opposed the Sanders resolution and has refused to formally assess whether Israel is adhering to international humanitarian law.

    The Guardian reported Thursday that the State Department has “in effect been able to circumvent the U.S. law that is meant to prevent U.S. complicity in human rights violations by foreign military units—the 1990s-era Leahy law, named after the now retired Vermont senator Patrick Leahy—because, former officials say, extraordinary internal state department policies have been put in place that show extreme deference to the Israeli government.”

    “No such special arrangements exist for any other U.S. ally,” the newspaper added.

    The administration is currently working to exempt U.S. arms transfers to Israel from a “mandatory congressional notification process that applies to all other foreign arms sales,” The Washington Post reported last week.

    Overall, the Biden administration has sent more than 10,000 tons of weaponry to Israel over the past three and a half months, declining to place conditions on the arms even as the Israeli military openly flouts U.S. officials’ entreaties to protect Gaza civilians, attacking homes, schools, bakeries, hospitals, and refugee camps.

    “If Biden was truly as dissatisfied or impatient or whatever other terms are being fed to the media about his supposed handwringing over Bibi’s war, he could have acted. But he didn’t.”

    Israel’s unrelenting bombing campaign and ground invasion have killed nearly 25,000 people in Gaza since October, and much of the territory is in the grip of famine as the Netanyahu government restricts the amount of aid allowed to enter the besieged territory.

    Ajith Sunghay, head of the United Nations human rights office in the occupied Palestinian territory, expressed horror Friday at conditions on the ground in Gaza, calling the situation “a major, human-made, humanitarian disaster.”

    “People continue to arrive in Rafah from various places in their thousands, in desperate situations, setting up makeshift shelters with any material they can get their hands on,” said Sunghay. “I’ve seen men and children digging for bricks to be able to hold in place tents made with plastic bags.”

    “It is a pressure cooker environment here, in the midst of utter chaos, given the terrible humanitarian situation, shortages, and pervasive fear and anger,” he added. “The communications blackout has continued for a sixth consecutive day, adding to the confusion and fear, and preventing Gazans from accessing services and information on areas to evacuate.”

    In a column on Thursday, The Intercept‘s Jeremy Scahill noted that “over the course of the past 100 days of Israel’s bloody rampage in Gaza, Biden has had an infinite series of events that each could have justified ceasing U.S. political and military support for Israel’s explicitly offensive war.”

    “There is no nation on Earth that wields more influence over Israel and no politician who holds more sway than Biden. The U.S. is the arms dealer and defender of this entire enterprise,” Scahill wrote. “If Biden was truly as dissatisfied or impatient or whatever other terms are being fed to the media about his supposed handwringing over Bibi’s war, he could have acted. But he didn’t.”

    “Instead, the White House made sure no cease-fire took hold, offered a public defense of Israel’s conduct in the face of clear evidence of its genocidal intent submitted before the world court, circumvented Congress to keep the arms flowing, and then publicly opposed a resolution that sought to uphold U.S. law aimed at ensuring U.S. weapons and other aid are not used to commit human rights abuses. Those are the relevant facts,” he continued. “There is no need for media outlets to serve as conveyor belts for the administration’s disingenuous posturing. Biden’s actions are the only evidence that matters. And that evidence is damning.”

    Original article by JAKE JOHNSON republished from Common Dreams under under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

    Guterres: Refusing a Palestinian State Is ‘Totally Unacceptable’

    Sanders: If Netanyahu Says No to Palestinian State, US Must Say No to Netanyahu

    Pressley, Raskin Lead Call for Biden to Oppose ‘Forced Expulsion’ of Gazans

    Thousands of Babies Being Born Into ‘Hell’ in Gaza, Says UNICEF

  • A Chance to Hold Israel–and the United States–to Account for Genocide

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    Original article by MEDEA BENJAMIN NICOLAS J.S. DAVIES republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

    A protester reacts as demonstrators are confronted by Palestinian Authority security forces during a protest held in Ramallah as US Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with the Palestinian president in the Israeli-occupied West Bank on January 10, 2024.  (Photo by Marco Longari/AFP via Getty Images)

    If the ICJ issues a provisional order for a ceasefire in Gaza, humanity must seize the moment to insist that Israel and the United States must finally end this genocide and accept that the rule of international law applies to all nations.

    On January 11th, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague is holding its first hearing in South Africa’s case against Israel under the Genocide Convention. The first provisional measure South Africa has asked of the court is to order an immediate end to this carnage, which has already killed more than 23,000 people, most of them women and children. Israel is trying to bomb Gaza into oblivion and scatter the terrorized survivors across the Earth, meeting the Convention’s definition of genocide to the letter.

    Since countries engaged in genocide do not publicly declare their real goal, the greatest legal hurdle for any genocide prosecution is to prove the intention of genocide. But in the extraordinary case of Israel, whose cult of biblically ordained entitlement is backed to the hilt by unconditional U.S. complicity, its leaders have been uniquely brazen about their goal of destroying Gaza as a haven of Palestinian life, culture and resistance.

    South Africa’s 84-page application to the ICJ includes ten pages (starting on page 59) of statements by Israeli civilian and military officials that document their genocidal intentions in Gaza. They include statements by Prime Minister Netanyahu, President Herzog, Defense Minister Gallant, five other cabinet ministers, senior military officers, and members of parliament. Reading these statements, it is hard to see how a fair and impartial court could fail to recognize the genocidal intent behind the death and devastation Israeli forces and American weapons are wreaking in Gaza.

    The Palestinians understand perfectly well who is bombing them—and who is supplying the bombs.

    The Israeli magazine +972 talked to seven current and former Israeli intelligence officials involved in previous assaults on Gaza. They explained the systematic nature of Israel’s targeting practices and how the range of civilian infrastructure that Israel is targeting has been vastly expanded in the current onslaught. In particular, it has expanded the bombing of civilian infrastructure, or what it euphemistically defines as “power targets,” which have comprised half of its targets from the outset of this war.

    Israel’s “power targets” in Gaza include public buildings like hospitals, schools, banks, government offices, and high-rise apartment blocks. The public pretext for destroying Gaza’s civilian infrastructure is that civilians will blame Hamas for its destruction, and that this will undermine its civilian base of support. This kind of brutal logic has been proved wrong in U.S.-backed conflicts all over the world. In Gaza, it is no more than a grotesque fantasy. The Palestinians understand perfectly well who is bombing them—and who is supplying the bombs.

    Intelligence officials told +972 that Israel maintains extensive occupancy figures for every building in Gaza, and has precise estimates of how many civilians will be killed in each building it bombs. While Israeli and U.S. officials publicly disparage Palestinian casualty figures, intelligence sources told +972 that the Palestinian death counts are remarkably consistent with Israel’s own estimates of how many civilians it is killing. To make matters worse, Israel has started using artificial intelligence to generate targets with minimal human scrutiny, and is doing so faster than its forces can bomb them.

    Israeli officials claim that each of the high-rise apartment buildings it bombs contains some kind of Hamas presence, but an intelligence official explained, “Hamas is everywhere in Gaza; there is no building that does not have something of Hamas in it, so if you want to find a way to turn a high-rise into a target, you will be able to do so.” As Yuval Abraham of +972 summarized, “The sources understood, some explicitly and some implicitly, that damage to civilians is the real purpose of these attacks.”

    Two days after South Africa submitted its Genocide Convention application to the ICJ, Israeli Finance Minister Smotrich declared on New Year’s Eve that Israel should substantially empty the Gaza Strip of Palestinians and bring in Israeli settlers. “If we act in a strategically correct way and encourage emigration,” Smotrich said, “if there are 100,000 or 200,000 Arabs in Gaza, and not two million, the whole discourse on ‘the day after’ will be completely different.”

    When reporters confronted U.S. State Department spokesman Matt Miller about Smotrich’s statement, and similar ones by National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, Miller replied that Prime Minister Netanyahu and other Israeli officials have reassured the United States that those statements don’t reflect Israeli government policy.

    We should have learned from America’s lost wars that mass murder and ethnic cleansing rarely lead to political victory or success.

    But Smotrich and Ben-Gvir’s statements followed a meeting of Likud Party leaders on Christmas Day where Netanyahu himself said that his plan was to continue the massacre until the people of Gaza have no choice but to leave or to die. “Regarding voluntary emigration, I have no problem with that,” he told former Israeli UN Ambassador Danny Danon. “Our problem is not allowing the exit, but a lack of countries that are ready to take Palestinians in. And we are working on it. This is the direction we are going in.”

    We should have learned from America’s lost wars that mass murder and ethnic cleansing rarely lead to political victory or success. More often they only feed deep resentment and desires for justice or revenge that make peace more elusive and conflict endemic.

    Although most of the martyrs in Gaza are women and children, Israel and the United States politically justify the massacre as a campaign to destroy Hamas by killing its senior leaders. Andrew Cockburn described in his book Kill Chain: the Rise of the High-Tech Assassins how, in 200 cases studied by U.S. military intelligence, the U.S. campaign to assassinate Iraqi resistance leaders in 2007 led in every single case to increased attacks on U.S. occupation forces. Every resistance leader they killed was replaced within 48 hours, invariably by new, more aggressive leaders determined to prove themselves by killing even more U.S. troops.

    But that is just another unlearned lesson, as Israel and the United States kill Islamic Resistance leaders in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen and Iran, risking a regional war and leaving themselves more isolated than ever.

    If the ICJ issues a provisional order for a ceasefire in Gaza, humanity must seize the moment to insist that Israel and the United States must finally end this genocide and accept that the rule of international law applies to all nations, including themselves.

    Original article by MEDEA BENJAMIN NICOLAS J.S. DAVIES republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

  • Supreme Court Rejects Bid by API, Exxon, and Koch to Kill Climate Case

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    Original article by JESSICA CORBETT republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

    An oil and petroleum refinery is shown in St. Paul Park, Minnesota. (Photo: jferrer/iStock/Getty Images Plus)

    “Big Oil companies will continue fighting to escape justice, but for the third time in a year, the U.S. Supreme Court has denied their desperate pleas,” said one campaigner.

    For the third time in less than a year, the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday allowed a key case against the fossil fuel industry to proceed in state court, delivering a win for the movement to make polluters pay for driving the climate emergency.

    “This decision is another step forward for Minnesota’s efforts to hold fossil fuel giants accountable for their climate lies and the harm they’ve caused,” said Center for Climate Integrity president Richard Wiles, pointing to the previous denials of other cases last April and May.

    “Big Oil companies will continue fighting to escape justice, but for the third time in a year, the U.S. Supreme Court has denied their desperate pleas to overturn the unanimous rulings of every single court to consider this issue,” he continued.

    “It’s time for these polluters to give up their failed arguments to escape state courts.”

    As legal leaders of dozens of U.S. states and municipalities have launched climate lawsuits in recent years, the fossil fuel industry has attempted to evade accountability by shifting the cases to federal court—a strategy that’s proven unsuccessful.

    Wiles argued that “after three strikes, it’s time for these polluters to give up their failed arguments to escape state courts and prepare to face the evidence of their climate deception at trial.”

    The U.S. Supreme Court’s Monday decision came in a case filed in 2020 by Democratic Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison against ExxonMobil, Koch Industries, and the American Petroleum Institute (API), based on the state’s consumer protection laws.

    “The fraud, deceptive advertising, and other violations of Minnesota state law and common law that the lawsuit shows they perpetrated have harmed Minnesotans’ health and our state’s environment, infrastructure, and economy,” Ellison said at the time.

    The justices declined Big Oil’s request to review the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals’ March decision that the case belongs in state court. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, an appointee of former GOP President Donald Trump, would have taken the case, in line with his position last year.

    https://twitter.com/mjs_DC/status/1744367314848329902?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1744367314848329902%7Ctwgr%5Ebd59e8fdf397707f19f31bca3942ccd4439fceb4%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.commondreams.org%2Fnews%2Fsupreme-court-minnesota

    “I appreciate the court’s consideration and decision,” Ellison said in a statement Monday. “It aligns with 25 federal court decisions across the country, all of which have found that cases like ours rest on these defendants’ failures to warn and their campaigns of deception around their products’ contributions to the climate crisis. The court’s decision confirms these cases are properly filed in state courts.”

    “Taken together, the defendants’ behavior has delayed the transition to alternative energy sources and a lower-carbon economy, resulting in dire impacts on Minnesota’s environment and enormous costs to Minnesotans and the world,” he stressed. “Now, the case can move forward in state court, where it was properly filed, and we can begin to hold these companies accountable for their wrongful conduct.”

    Cassidy DiPaola, communications director for Fossil Free Media and the Make Polluters Pay campaign, declared Monday that “today’s decision is an important step forward for accountability and justice.”

    “The Supreme Court has now laid out an unmistakable path forward,” she added, “for not only Minnesota’s consumer protection case against ExxonMobil, Koch Industries, and API, but the dozens of cases against the fossil fuel industry popping up across the county.”

    This post has been updated with comment from Keith Ellison.

    Original article by JESSICA CORBETT republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

  • UN Relief Chief Says All-Out War Is ‘Looming Dangerously Close’

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    Original article by JAKE JOHNSON republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

    A picture taken from Rafah on January 6, 2024 shows smoke billowing over Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip during Israeli bombardment.  (Photo: AFP via Getty Images)

    “This war should never have started. But it’s long past time for it to end,” said United Nations emergency relief coordinator Martin Griffiths.

    The United Nations’ emergency relief coordinator warned Friday that the threat of a broader conflict in the Middle East is growing rapidly as Israel’s assault continues in Gaza, which the U.N. official said has been rendered “uninhabitable” by near-constant airstrikes and a suffocating blockade.

    “The specter of further regional spillover of the war is looming dangerously close,” Martin Griffiths, the U.N.’s under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs, said in a statement, pointing to the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, mounting Israeli attacks in the West Bank, and rocket attacks on Israel. “Hope has never been more elusive.”

    Griffiths, a longtime diplomat who has described the situation in Gaza as the worst humanitarian crisis he’s ever witnessed, issued his unsparing statement at the tail end of a week that saw Israel and the United States launch deadly strikes in Lebanon and Iraq, killing a senior Hamas official and the leader of an Iran-aligned militia.

    On Saturday, Hezbollah responded to Israel’s drone strike on an office building in the Lebanese capital of Beirut by firing rockets at a military base in northern Israel, heightening fears of an escalatory spiral.

    While the Biden administration insists it wants to avert a regional war, it continues to provide Israel with lethal military aid and oppose international efforts to enact a permanent cease-fire that analysts say is necessary to stop the conflict from spreading. The U.S. is also reportedly drafting plans to bomb Yemen in response to Houthi attacks on vessels in the Red Sea.

    The Houthis have said the attacks will stop once Israel ends its catastrophic assault on the Gaza Strip.

    Griffiths said Friday that the situation in Gaza is shockingly dire, with displaced families “sleeping in the open as temperatures plummet” and the territory’s remaining medical facilities “under relentless attack.”

    “The few hospitals that are partially functional are overwhelmed with trauma cases, critically short of all supplies, and inundated by desperate people seeking safety,” said Griffiths. “Infectious diseases are spreading in overcrowded shelters as sewers spill over. Some 180 Palestinian women are giving birth daily amidst this chaos. People are facing the highest levels of food insecurity ever recorded. Famine is around the corner.”

    “For children in particular,” Griffiths added, “the past 12 weeks have been traumatic: No food. No water. No school. Nothing but the terrifying sounds of war, day in and day out.”

    Much of Gaza has been decimated by Israeli bombs, many of which were supplied by the United States. The Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor said Friday that around 68,000 housing units in Gaza have been completely destroyed by Israeli airstrikes.

    Roughly 4% of Gaza’s population—more than 90,000 people—has been killed, wounded, or left missing by Israeli attacks since October 7, the group estimated.

    “It is time for the parties to meet all their obligations under international law, including to protect civilians and meet their essential needs, and to release all hostages immediately,” Griffiths said. “It is time for the international community to use all its influence to make this happen. This war should never have started. But it’s long past time for it to end.”

    Original article by JAKE JOHNSON republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

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    Palestinians—and the World—Will Never Forget US Complicity With Israel’s Genocide in Gaza

  • Maine Protest Urges General Dynamics to ‘Stop Arming Israel’s Genocide’

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    Original article by JESSICA CORBETT republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

    Protesters gathered at a General Dynamics factory in Saco, Maine on January 3, 2024.  (Photo: Lisa Savage/X)

    “Why do we tolerate this massive bomb factory here in Maine, exploiting the toils of local workers to aid with the intentional mass murder and displacement of innocent children and families in Palestine?”

    Defenders of Palestinian rights on Wednesday organized a campout protest at a General Dynamics factory in the city of Saco, Maine to pressure the weapons giant to “stop arming Israel’s genocide in Gaza.”

    The demonstrators, led by the Maine Coalition for Palestine, arrived at the roadway leading into the factory before dawn in an effort to prevent workers from entering the facility.

    “Genocide in Gaza is currently supported by General Dynamics,” said organizer Lisa Savage of Solon in a statement. “It supplies Israel with the artillery ammunition and bombs used to kill and maim civilians and children in Gaza—which is illegal collective punishment.”

    Since the Hamas-led attack that set off the war on October 7, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have killed more than 22,000 Palestinians in Gaza, injured over 57,000 more, and devastated civilian infrastructure including homes, hospitals, schools, and mosques. A growing number of world leaders and legal scholars have accused Israel of genocide.

    General Dynamics—which is headquartered in Virginia but has locations across the United States and around the world—is among a few dozen companies identified in an American Friends Service Committee database as aiding the U.S.-backed Israeli war effort with 155mm caliber artillery shells and the metal bodies of the MK-80 bomb series.

    “Since October, more than 5,000 of the 500-lb MK-82 bombs—some made in Saco—have been given to Israel by the U.S.,” said Yusuf Ebrahim, an Iraqi American physician who participated in the protest. “These munitions play a particularly direct role in the ongoing criminal genocide of Palestinians by the IDF, targeting densely populated areas such as the Jabalia refugee camp.”

    “Why do we tolerate this massive bomb factory here in Maine, exploiting the toils of local workers to aid with the intentional mass murder and displacement of innocent children and families in Palestine?” Ebrahim continued. “Meanwhile, many local community members suffer from hunger and housing insecurity and cannot afford medical care.”

    https://twitter.com/SamPfeifle/status/1742533447837450706?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1742533447837450706%7Ctwgr%5E9ca38595cae7f14192bd123b87780f09e8a5ca59%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.commondreams.org%2Fnews%2Fgeneral-dynamics-israel

    Members of the Maine Coalition for Palestine include the groups Healthcare Workers for Palestine, the Maine Natural Guard, the Maine Party for Socialism & Liberation, Maine Voices for Palestinian Rights, Portland CONFRONT, and Students for Justice in Palestine from college campuses in the state.

    The coalition’s Wednesday action came after a demonstration last month that drew more than 100 protesters to Bath Iron Works, a General Dynamics subsidiary that builds ships for the U.S. military.

    The Bangor Daily News reported that Cecil Carey of Skowhegan, a teacher who spoke at the December event, said the group was protesting in Bath because the U.S. government has “got money for war but can’t feed the poor.”

    “I do not want my tax dollars going to bomb people in the Middle East,” Carey said. “I want my tax dollars helping my students and their families.”

    The United States gives Israel $3.8 billion in annual military aid each year and U.S. President Joe Biden has responded to the Israeli assault on Gaza by asking federal lawmakers for an additional $14.3 billion package that is still under consideration. Since the war began, the Biden administration has also twice bypassed Congress to enable arms sales to Israel.

    Original article by JESSICA CORBETT republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).