Category: News

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jun/13/israel-gaza-war-rafah 

Israeli tanks rolled into the western part of Rafah on Thursday as the city came under intense helicopter, drone and artillery fire in what residents described as one of the worst bombardments of the area so far.

The assault on Rafah has driven out more than a million Palestinians who had been sheltering there, forcing them into areas with little or no access to food, water or shelter. The UN has warned that more than a million people are expected to “face death and starvation by the middle of July”.

Joe Biden had warned he would cut off the supply of US weapons if Israel went ahead with an attack on Rafah, in part because of the lack of an adequate humanitarian plan for all the civilians who would be displaced, but the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his war cabinet launched the attack anyway over a month ago.

The Biden administration has yet to slow the flow of arms in response, arguing that Israel had yet to carry out “major operations”.

People living in Rafah described the level of fighting as devastating, however.

[Mitchel Plitnick plots the obvious, simplest, and most humane path to avoid a regional conflict: Ceasefire and release of hostages]

The way out

And yet, the way to avoid all of this has never been clearer: stop playing games with the terms of a ceasefire and demand that all hostilities end, Israel fully withdraws from Gaza, and all hostages—Israeli, Palestinian, and international—are freed. 

There doesn’t need to be three stages; just one, where the above terms are carried out forthwith. Hamas has made it abundantly clear that they would accept such a deal. The Israeli people will accept that deal. And Netanyahu will accept it if the United States tells him we will cut off the arms supply and political support for his genocide. 

It really is that simple. Yes, it would still be a political minefield for Biden, but even he seems to have finally realized that the Israeli misadventure to “eradicate” Hamas is a failure. If he is worried about the backlash from the Republicans and from Israel’s zealots within his own party, especially the funders—which, to be fair, will be enormous—imagine what he’ll have to contend with politically if American soldiers are once again being killed and maimed in a Middle Eastern war. 

The Americans seem to have correctly assessed at last that there can be no ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah without an end to the Gaza slaughter. It may well be that was a factor in Biden’s futile announcement last week.

It was pointless because Biden still hasn’t learned that Netanyahu, and Israel more broadly, does not act because they are cajoled, convinced, or pleaded with. They act when there are consequences if they don’t. And so, almost immediately, Netanyahu made it clear that the deal Biden announced was not the “Israeli offer” Israel meant to put forth. 

If Israel does intend to raise the stakes with Hezbollah, then the risk of the regional war the U.S. fears grows enormously. If all Biden cares about is the politics, the political risk of letting that happen is far greater than the political risk of coercing Israel to stand down both in Gaza and at the northern border. If he is concerned about the potential damage to the entire world that a regional Middle East war could do, then he has every reason to finally act. 

https://mondoweiss.net/2024/06/the-biden-administration-must-stop-israel-before-it-escalates-in-lebanon/

 

Israel organized and paid for an influence campaign last year targeting U.S. lawmakers and the American public with pro-Israel messaging, as it aimed to foster support for its actions in the war with Gaza, according to officials involved in the effort and documents related to the operation.

The covert campaign was commissioned by Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs, a government body that connects Jews around the world with the State of Israel, four Israeli officials said. The ministry allocated about $2 million to the operation and hired Stoic, a political marketing firm in Tel Aviv, to carry it out, according to the officials and the documents.

The campaign began in October and remains active on the platform X. At its peak, it used hundreds of fake accounts that posed as real Americans on X, Facebook and Instagram to post pro-Israel comments. The accounts focused on U.S. lawmakers, particularly ones who are Black and Democrats, such as Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader from New York, and Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia, with posts urging them to continue funding Israel’s military.

ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence-powered chatbot, was used to generate many of the posts. The campaign also created three fake English-language news sites featuring pro-Israel articles.

Read more at:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/05/technology/israel-campaign-gaza-social-media.html

Reject messaging from local media outlets and the Jewish Federation of Portland that criticizing Israel and calling for unobstructed humanitarian aid is antisemitic. Add your voice to shift the narrative and demonstrate that Jewish values demand a permanent ceasefire, and an end to the occupation.

Add your name here and spread the word: https://www.jvpportland.org/food-bank-support

The chief prosecutor of the international criminal court has said he is seeking arrest warrants for senior Hamas and Israeli officials for war crimes and crimes against humanity, including the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his defence minister, Yoav Gallant, a move that puts the post-second world war rules-based order to the test and presents new challenges for Israel’s western allies.

Karim Khan said his office had applied to the world court’s pre-trial chamber for arrest warrants for the military and political leaders on both sides for crimes committed during Hamas’s 7 October attack and the ensuing war in Gaza. 

He named Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas chief in the Gaza Strip, and Mohammed Deif, the commander of its military wing, considered to be the masterminds of the 7 October assault, as well as Ismail Haniyeh, the leader of the group’s political bureau, who is based in Qatar, as wanted for crimes of extermination, murder, hostage-taking, rape, sexual assault and torture.

Netanyahu and Gallant are accused of extermination, causing starvation as a method of war, the denial of humanitarian relief supplies and deliberately targeting civilians.

“The world was shocked on 7 October when people were ripped from their homes, from their bedrooms in different kibbutzim … people have suffered enormously,” Khan told CNN on Monday. “We have a variety of evidence to support the applications we’ve submitted to the judges.”

“These acts demand accountability,” Khan’s office said in a statement.

The ICC has previously issued warrants for Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Muammar Gaddafi of Libya, and the Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony, but no leader of a “western-style” democracy has ever been issued a warrant. The court has moved remarkably quickly, by its usual standards, to request warrants within eight months; the case against Putin over his invasion of Ukraine took a year to build.

Read more on The Guardian

Over the past two weeks, it’s become clear that Maxine Dexter’s campaign to represent Oregon’s 3rd Congressional District in the United States House has been the beneficiary of millions in donations from political action committees (PACs) with unknown contributors. 

Dexter’s campaign has also received hundreds of thousands of dollars in recent contributions from individual, out-of-state donors—many of whom have donated to Republican candidates and pro-Israel groups in the past. Millions in PAC money has gone toward mailer ads attacking Susheela Jayapal, Dexter’s top opponent in the race. 

Jayapal and Eddy Morales, another candidate in the race, have both spoken out strongly against the recent flood of donations. Jayapal and Morales—along with dozens of Portland voters—say Dexter hasn’t condemned the dark money spending strongly enough. 

Read more on The Portland Mercury

For all the periodic meltdowns about foreign interference in US elections and politics by countries like Russia, it’s actually Israel, a nominal ally, that has done far more meddling in American politics — with far more influence.

The fact is that Israeli political meddling in the United States has gone from an open secret in Washington to more-or-less public knowledge nationwide under Netanyahu’s leadership — something complained about by media commentators, US officials, intelligence officers, and prominent Jewish public figures. More and more, this political interference is not so much linked back to the Israeli government as a whole but to its most right-wing factions. And its scale, frequency, and power far outdo the meddling of any other foreign power, making Israel, in practice, closer to an adversarial state than a friendly one.

(more…)

In one of Oregon’s most progressive congressional districts, anonymous super PAC money and tensions over Israel’s war in Gaza have taken the spotlight.

As a wave of nearly $3 million in dark money enters Oregon’s 3rd Congressional District race, voters are questioning the donors backing Maxine Dexter’s campaign, and whether the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is among them.

A political action committee (PAC) known as 314 Action Fund, has spent  $1.67 million to support Dexter’s campaign. Dexter is a current state representative now seeking election to Congress. The PAC claims its mission is to elect Democrats with a background in science. 

While Dexter is a physician, this level of spending on one candidate is unprecedented for 314. 

The money trail came under heightened scrutiny late last week, after The Intercept reported on claims from two anonymous Democratic members of Congress who say AIPAC was discreetly funneling money through 314 to target Susheela Jayapal’s campaign in favor of Dexter. 

Read more on the Portland Mercury

The pro-Israel group is funneling money through a “pro-science” PAC, according to two members of Congress.

 

And what The Intercept can reveal is that Susheela Jayapal is being targeted by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, which is secretly funneling money into the race by washing it through 314 Action, according to two Democratic members of Congress familiar with the arrangement. 

The pro-Israel community telegraphed its intent to target Jayapal early on, primarily for suspicion that her politics on Israel–Palestine may align with her younger sister’s, the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus who called for a ceasefire early in the current war on Gaza.

 

Read more on The Intercept.

Anatomy of a Genocide – Report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967 to Human Rights Council – Advance unedited version (A/HRC/55/73)
March 24, 2024

After five months of military operations, Israel has destroyed Gaza. Over 30,000 Palestinians have been killed, including more than 13,000 children. Over 12,000 are presumed dead and 71,000 injured, many with life-changing mutilations. Seventy percent of residential areas have been destroyed. Eighty percent of the whole population has been forcibly displaced. Thousands of families have lost loved ones or have been wiped out. Many could not bury and mourn their relatives, forced instead to leave their bodies decomposing in homes, in the street or under the rubble. Thousands have been detained and systematically subjected to inhuman and degrading treatment. The incalculable collective trauma will be experienced for generations to come.

By analysing the patterns of violence and Israel’s policies in its onslaught on Gaza, this report concludes that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating Israel’s commission of genocide is met. One of the key findings is that Israel’s executive and military leadership and soldiers have intentionally distorted jus in bello principles, subverting their protective functions, in an attempt to legitimize genocidal violence against the Palestinian people.

Read the full report here.