Israel Is Finally Being Investigated for War Crimes

Jacobin

On December 20, the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague announced that Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda was “satisfied that there is a reasonable basis to initiate an investigation into the situation in Palestine… There is a reasonable basis to believe that war crimes have been or are being committed in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip.”

Of course, this should be a no-brainer — and yet it took the ICC almost five years (a “preliminary examination” of the situation was opened in January 2015) to determine that “there are no substantial reasons to believe that an investigation would not serve the interests of justice.” Then again, Palestinians have been waiting more than seventy years for justice, so five is perhaps a drop in the bucket.

Not that “justice” is a guaranteed outcome in international legal endeavors that often amount to torturously bureaucratic charades. Nor, it bears underscoring, has the Palestine investigation been officially given the green light — Bensouda is first seeking confirmation that the court’s jurisdiction applies to the territory in question. While Palestine is a signatory to the ICC, Israel — like its BFF, the United States — is not.

Furthermore, the proposed investigation would look into not only allegations of Israeli war crimes but also Palestinian ones — a fact that has been studiously ignored in Israel’s typically apoplectic reaction to the ICC announcement. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu sounded the good old antisemitism alarm, while branding the ICC’s move a “baseless and outrageous decision” and a “dark day for truth and justice.” Netanyahu’s rival Benny Gantz, former chief of the Israeli military, asserted that “the Israeli army is one of the most moral militaries in the world” and that “the Israeli army and State of Israel do not commit war crimes.” Case closed.

The ICC examination of the “situation in Palestine” looks back only as far as June 13, 2014 and includes various allegations of war crimes during Israel’s summer 2014 Operation Protective Edge in the Gaza Strip. That particular foray killed some 2,251 Palestinians in a matter of fifty days, the majority of them civilians; 551 were children. Six Israeli civilians perished.

Additionally slated for maybe-investigation is the Israeli military’s brutal repression of Palestinian protesters participating in the Great March of Return, which began in 2018 and “reportedly resulted in the killing of over 200 individuals, including over 40 children, and the wounding of thousands of others.” In the ICC’s view, there’s also a “reasonable basis to believe that in the context of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, members of the Israeli authorities have committed war crimes… in relation, inter alia, to the transfer of Israeli civilians into the West Bank.”

In other words, this is a relatively tame judicial undertaking, considering that for the past seven-plus decades, the Israeli state has — in terms of massacres and territorial usurpation — essentially constituted one continuous war crime. READ MORE AT JACOBIN.

How the US made the so-called 'safe third countries' unsafe

Al Jazeera English

This year, US President and xenophobe-in-chief Donald Trump finagled "safe third country agreements" with Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, allowing the United States to deport aspiring asylum seekers to the very region many of them are fleeing in the first place. 

Even Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele - the possessor of the enlightened opinion that "President Trump is very nice and cool, and I'm nice and cool, too ... we both use Twitter a lot" - recently admitted that his country needs to be "safer" and that its asylum capacities are currently nonexistent.

Indeed, the fact that the homicide rates in the three allegedly "safe third countries" are consistently among the highest in the world should be an easy indicator that they are anything but safe. Femicides abound.

The US's own role in fuelling violence in Central America's Northern Triangle has been well known for decades - from its habit of backing right-wing dictators and death squads to its continuing support for homicidal state security forces. In the aftermath of the US-facilitated coup in Honduras in 2009, that nation became more unsafe than ever. 

And across the region, the US-exported model of neoliberal oppression has constituted a form of violence in its own right - perpetuating extreme inequality and condemning the masses to often existence-imperilling economic misery. 

But one of the most crucial aspects to consider when contemplating US complicity in the appalling unsafety of the Northern Triangle is the sheer volume of US weapons circulating in the region.

In March, Foreign Policy reported that Trump was "sending guns south as migrants flee north", with his administration "push[ing] to weaken oversight of gun exports".

And yet the cross-border mobility of US armaments is nothing new. Back in 2014, Harry Penate - the former attache to Central America for the US Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms and Explosives - spoke candidly about the significant role American guns were playing in the epidemic of violence in the region, which was already causing a northward exodus of refugees.

According to Penate's estimate at the time, half of the illegal weapons in murder-plagued El Salvador were from the US.

Flash forward to 2018, and the New Yorker's Jonathan Blitzer cited reports that 49 percent of illegal and unregistered weapons recovered in El Salvador came from the US; in Honduras, it was 46 percent, and in Guatemala 29. While the causes of Central American violence were manifold, Blitzer noted, "American firepower facilitates it." READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Remembering the U.S. Invasion of Panama, a Landmark on the Timeline of Lethal U.S. Hypocrisy.

El Faro

In the runup to the December, 1989 United States military invasion of Panama, the name of the operation underwent a drastic revision. No longer would it be known by the random moniker Operation Blue Spoon; henceforth, it would be called Operation Just Cause. Then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell would later explain that, not only did the updated title have an “inspirational ring,” it also meant that “even our severest critics would have to utter ‘Just Cause’ while denouncing us.”

Thirty years on, Just Cause still ranks up there with the military’s greatest hits of perverse euphemism—think Operation Iraqi Freedom, more realistically denominated as the decimation of Iraq. Just Cause, the largest U.S. combat effort since the Vietnam War, involved more than 27,000 U.S. troops and entailed a brief but maniacal battering of Panama, leaving up to several thousand—primarily poor—Panamanian civilians dead, according to human rights groups. (The U.S. has preferred to lowball casualty counts, claiming only a few hundred civilian deaths.) The impoverished Panama City neighborhood of El Chorrillo saw such a level of devastation that ambulance drivers began referring to the area as “Little Hiroshima.”

The target of the operation, Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega—a longtime U.S. crony who had fallen afoul of his gringo masters and been spontaneously recast in the role of Super-Narco Menace and Public Enemy Number One—took refuge in the Vatican embassy but was driven to surrender following prolonged auditory torture from American tanks outside, which blasted clever musical selections like Bon Jovi’s “Wanted Dead or Alive” and Van Halen’s “Judgement Day.” Noriega was then hauled off to the U.S. to face drug trafficking charges—clearly a great triumph for justice as, just two days after Just Cause began, the army had announced the apprehension of “50 pounds of cocaine” in a house he was known to frequent. 

The commander of the Panama-based U.S. Southern Command subsequently boosted the quantity to 110 pounds—before the Pentagon admitted a month later that, actually, the cocaine had not been cocaine at all but rather tamales in banana leaves. Lest anyone question the overall justness of the cause, a Pentagon spokeswoman revealed that these seemingly innocuous comestibles were in fact “a substance they use in voodoo rituals.” READ MORE AT EL FARO.

Bolivia: A coup for Israel too

Middle East Eye

Shortly after left-wing Bolivian President Evo Morales was ousted in a US-supported coup in November - disguised as a noble reaction to alleged electoral fraud - the self-appointed, fanatically right-wing Bolivian “interim” government announced the renewal of diplomatic relations with Israel. 

These had been severed by Morales in 2009 during Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip, which killed some 1,400 Palestinians, including more than 300 children. Though Israel naturally cast itself as the singular victim of the affair, the ratio of Palestinian civilian to Israeli civilian deaths was 400:1.

During a subsequent Israeli-inflicted bloodbath in Gaza in 2014, this one by the name of Operation Protective Edge and entailing the slaughter of 2,251 Palestinians (including 299 women and 551 children), Morales denounced Israel as a “terrorist state” - a perfectly accurate assessment, given the circumstances and Israel’s track record.

So it’s no surprise that Israel was quick to embrace rapprochement with the newly cleansed government of Bolivia after the November coup, with Israel’s Ynet news site reporting that “the resumption of relations between Bolivia and Israel was made possible by the end of the reign of former hostile President Abu Morales”. (It is not clear whether the Evo-to-Abu modification was a bizarre mistake or a deliberate attempt by some sneaky Ynet person to Arabise the “hostile” leader’s name.)

Additional bonding opportunities rapidly materialised, as Bolivia went about requesting assistance from Israel in training police units for counterterrorism operations. On 6 December, Bolivian interim interior minister, Arturo Murillo, told Reuters: “We’ve invited them to help us. They’re used to dealing with terrorists. They know how to handle them. The only thing we want is to bring peace.”

The “terrorists” supposedly wreaking havoc in Bolivia are, according to the Reuters report, “radical leftists allegedly linked to [Venezuelan President Nicolas] Maduro and drug-traffickers whom the [Bolivian interim] government say had instigated deadly unrest in the country”. In other words, the usual mishmash of hemispheric bogeymen trotted out to justify whatever right-wing undertaking is in need of justification - and never mind that the Bolivian military and police have been the ones perpetrating massacres. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

Trump Doesn’t Care About War Crimes

The Nation

In mid-November, President Donald Trump pardoned three American servicemen implicated in war crimes: Lt. Clint Lorance, serving a murder sentence for ordering his soldiers to open fire on unarmed Afghan men in 2012; Maj. Mathew Golsteyn, charged with the murder of an unarmed Afghan in 2010; and CPO Edward Gallagher, convicted and demoted for posing with the corpse of an ISIS detainee in Iraq.

Judging from the uproar in much of the US media over the pardons, you’d have thought these were the only three members of the US military to have ever done anything wrong.

The Washington Post, for example, unfurled the headline: “Trump pardons people accused of war crimes because he thinks war should be savage.” The author went on to speculate that the commander in chief “rejects…as a pointless quibble” the combatant-noncombatant distinction that supposedly makes US-waged war civilized, orderly, and non-savage.

Never mind, then, all the civilian noncombatants wiped out on a regular basis by the United States in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, and beyond—without much of a peep from the corporate media about the need for justice and accountability. Think of the recent murder by US drone of at least 30 Afghan pine nut farmers, the US habit of bombing wedding parties, and the joint Amnesty International-Airwars investigation that documented at least 1,600 civilian deaths in four months of US-led coalition airstrikes on the Syrian city of Raqqa in 2017.

Over at Time magazine, US military veteran Elliot Ackerman contends that Trump’s pardons “show…how little he knows about war,” while an NBC News intervention by Jeff McCausland—retired US Army colonel and former dean of the US Army War College—suggests that the president “lacks an in-depth understanding of the military, its culture and its professional ethic.” Both Ackerman and McCausland condemn Trump’s indignant October tweet on behalf of Golsteyn: “We train our boys to be killing machines, then prosecute them when they kill!”

And yet it seems that Trump has in fact better understood—or at least more transparently embraced—the actual function of the US military, compared to all the folks tripping over themselves to swear by the killing machine’s oh-so-noble essence.

Obviously, few people enlist in the military with the explicit goal of committing war crimes—though, as Financial Times reporter Matt Kennard has revealed, the US military has a worrying history of recruiting neo-Nazis to fill out the ranks (an issue the military continues to grapple with). But as Trump’s tweet makes clear, the US military is in the business of creating killing machines, which it then deploys to brutally maintain US hegemony across the globe, “collateral damage” be damned. And with the ouster of Navy Secretary Richard V. Spencer on Sunday, the commentariat has whipped up another round of hand-wringing about the tarnishing of our military institutions. READ MORE AT THE NATION.

Smash the patriarchy to save the planet

Al Jazeera English

Last December, the Trump administration enacted a scheme requiring Central American asylum seekers to remain in Mexico while their legal proceedings drag on indefinitely in the United States.

The Migrant Protection Protocols policy - a handily perverse euphemism - is the approximate equivalent of calling the Exxon Valdez oil spill the Marine Life Protection Initiative. As various human rights and advocacy organisations have pointed out, the border programme has exposed tens of thousands of asylum seekers to violence; including rape, kidnapping and assault, in the unsure border regions of Mexico.

In light of the surplus of rapes and other abuses already documented as a result of so-called "protection", the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women - marked annually on November 25 - is an ideal occasion to reflect on the violence facing migrant women in an era of mass migration.

As the UN Women website observes : " Rape is rooted in a complex set of patriarchal beliefs, power, and control that continue to create a social environment in which sexual violence is pervasive and normalised."

For an idea of the extent of normalisation, just recall Patriarch-in-chief President Donald Trump's own previous advice about fondling women without their consent: "Grab 'em by the p****."

Migrant women, of course, are particularly vulnerable to "grabbing" - and much worse - especially given that crimes against migrants are not generally reported or prosecuted. And for Central American women transiting Mexico to the US border, sexual assault is frequently par for the course.

Lest anyone assume that this validates the Trumpian vision of Mexico as composed of rapists and criminals , however, just recall the epidemic of rape in the US's own military - not to mention rampant claims of sexual abuse of immigrant children held at US detention facilities. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

'Gaza Fights for Freedom': An antidote to Israel’s criminal propaganda

Middle East Eye

On 1 June 2018, 21-year-old Palestinian paramedic Razan al-Najjar was shot and killed by Israeli forces while tending to casualties during the Great March of Return - the unarmed protests that had begun two months earlier along the Gaza Strip’s border with Israel and that continue to this day.

In predictable fashion, Israeli officials have cast the protesters - from children to elderly women to disabled persons -  as diabolical minions sent by Hamas to lay waste to Israel via “kite and balloon terrorism” and other Scary Stuff.

As with every other manifestation of the Palestinian demand for dignity, Israel has used the Great March of Return as an opportunity to engage in mass slaughter: on a single day in May 2018, some 59 protesters were killed, including children.

In the case of al-Najjar and other medics targeted by Israeli snipers, the whole pesky business of war crimes is magically dispensed with Israel’s signature assault on logic, according to which Palestinian doctors are merely “human shields” for Hamas - and thus, somehow, fair game.

For an antidote to Israel’s criminal propaganda surrounding the Great March of Return, a good place to start is Gaza Fights for Freedom, a new film by the Empire Files’ Abby Martin. From film footage of al-Najjar and interviews with her family members and colleagues, it becomes evident that - forget the “human shield” business - her real crime was in fact being entirely human.

Al-Najjar’s mother recounts how her daughter was most affected by the death of a deaf protester named Abu Sabla: “When he was shot he fell into her arms, so she held him with her hands. His brain went entirely out of his head and into her hands.”

Obviously, humanity is not something that can be attributed to any component of the Israeli killing machine - as is particularly clear in footage recorded by Israeli soldiers themselves, who yelp and shriek with delight as they apparently shoot a Palestinian child through the border fence: “Wow what a video! Yes! That son of a bitch.”

While al-Najjar is certainly one of the heroines of Gaza Fights for Freedom, the film covers a ton of other ground. Martin exhaustively categorises Israel’s violations of international law, providing details of Palestinian victims too often written off as “collateral damage” - or worse, “terrorists”.

There’s the 29-year-old man, for example, whose legs were both amputated following an Israeli air strike in 2008 and who, a decade later, is finished off by Israeli snipers as he sits in his wheelchair at the protest.

There’s the man who is shot while smoking a cigarette, and the man who is shot while wrapped in a Palestinian flag. There’s the two-year-old child, the 71-year-old woman. The journalists, the doctors. The list goes on. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

BOOK REVIEW: The Hollywood Kid: The Violent Life and Violent Death of an MS-13 Hitman

North American Congress on Latin America

During an interview in 2014, Miguel Ángel Tobar, an assassin for the Mara Salvatrucha gang, asked Salvadoran brothers Óscar and Juan José Martínez—a journalist and an anthropologist, respectively—why they wanted to tell his story:

“‘Because,’ we answered, ashamed, ‘we believe that your story, unfortunately, is more important than your life.’”

Tobar, a.k.a. “the Kid” of the Hollywood Locos Salvatrucha clique of MS-13 in El Salvador, would be killed that same year, but his story now lives on in the Martínez brothers’ masterful The Hollywood Kid: The Violent Life and Violent Death of an MS-13 Hitman, translated from the Spanish by John B. Washington and Daniela Ugaz. The book is based on years of interviews with Tobar when he was a “protected” (read: conspicuously unprotected) witness of the state after a falling out with fellow gang members who had killed his brother.

Tobar was born in the dusty town of Las Pozas in rural western El Salvador in 1983, in the middle of the country’s brutal civil war. At the age of 11, he attempted his first murder: the coffee plantation foreman whom his crippled father had permitted to repeatedly rape Tobar’s sister. At age 12, in order to seal his pact with MS-13, he killed and decapitated another youth, a baker from a small village who had pledged allegiance to the rival Barrio 18 gang. “They said the guy was a witch,” he told the Martínez brothers, 17 years later. “So that’s why I cut the dude’s head off, because they say that witches can put their brains back together.” It was all downhill from there, until he “fulfilled his own prophecy by getting murdered” as he was heading home from registering the birth of his second daughter.

The authors use the trajectory of this individual gangster—who killed more than 50 people over the course of his career, even removing one victim’s heart with his bare hands—as a vehicle to recount the country’s violent history. The book is nonlinear, an effective format for piecing together Tobar’s life alongside the national one. The timeline begins in the late 1800s, at “the moment we all went crazy in El Salvador”: when the government decided that the country would become fixated on growing for-export coffee on the backs of Indigenous folks performing slave labor after their lands had been stolen for the project.

The book extends through to the present day, with El Salvador’s intermittent distinction as the most murderous place on the planet and Donald Trump’s apoplexy over MS-13, a gang the U.S. created in the first place. Trumpian hysteria has sent the elite of Long Island scurrying to weaponize their wine cellars, while also giving a toxic boost to general xenophobia and justifying manic U.S. border fortification and deportation schemes.

In El Salvador, to be sure, life is cheap—and even more so, perhaps, if you belong to a demographic widely seen as uniquely evil, subhuman, and in need of extermination. That’s why, among other reasons, the Martínez brothers’ undertaking is so important. Not only do they humanize the Kid, they also show him to be a product of history and of “a long series of violent acts.” They depict him as a man whose “personal agency…had always been limited, always tied to distant decisions made by US and Salvadoran politicians.” As Tobar himself observed: “We were born of the war. We lived the war, and it was the people of the war that made these gangs.” Ultimately, when it came to joining the ranks of MS-13, he said, “They didn’t give me no other choice.”  READ MORE AT NACLA.

EXILE Excerpt: Italy and Beyond

The Washington Spectator

Once upon a time in Italy, a prominent citizen declared: “It is unacceptable that sometimes in certain parts of Milan there is such a presence of non-Italians that instead of thinking you are in an Italian or European city, you think you are in an African city.”

In case the message was not crystal clear, he then spelled it out: “Some people want a multicolored and multiethnic society. We do not share this opinion.”

The citizen in question was none other than Silvio Berlusconi: billionaire three-time Italian prime minister, intermittent convict, and head of a superpowerful media empire, who, as the New York Times put it in January 2018, has now “cleverly nurtured a constituency of aging animal lovers—and potential voters—by frequently appearing on a show on one of his networks in which he pets his fluffy white dogs and bottle-feeds lambs.”

Panic over the devolving color-scape of the patria is, of course, of a piece with the greater right-wing narrative of Fortress Europe, which shuns the possibility that centuries of European plunder and devastation of the African continent might have any bearing on current migration patterns. But while history lessons may not be as entertaining as lamb-nursing sessions or bunga bunga parties, it’s worth noting that, in the not-so-distant past, Italians voluntarily found themselves in many African cities—and for purposes far less dignified than trying to survive.

In The Addis Ababa Massacre: Italy’s National Shame, published by Oxford University Press, for example, author Ian Campbell explains that the Italian military occupation of Ethiopia (1936–41) was “underpinned by a policy of terror” and entailed a three-day bloodbath in February 1937 by Italian militants and civilians that wiped out—by Campbell’s estimates—some 19–20 percent of the Ethiopian population of Addis Ababa. A 2017 post on the Brookings Institution website furthermore recalls such highlights of Italy’s colonial adventures in Libya as the internment “in a dozen concentration camps” of 10,000 or so civilians from semi-nomadic tribes.

While the Berlusconian warning re: the creeping Africanization of Italy’s northern metropolis was issued back in 2009, more recent years have also produced a deluge of xenophobic rhetoric courtesy of the Italian political élite. During an ultimately successful candidacy for the president of Lombardy in 2018, Attilio Fontana alerted Italian radio listeners to the existential threats posed by that most awful of phenomena known as immigration: “We must decide whether our ethnicity, our white race, our society should continue to exist or should be erased.”

This same campaign season saw Matteo Salvini—who subsequently acquired the posts of Italian interior minister and deputy prime minister— freak out about the “Islamic presence” in the country, which had resulted in a situation in which “we are under attack; at risk are our culture, society, traditions, and way of life.” READ MORE AT THE WASHINGTON SPECTATOR

Chile and Israel: a murderous match?

The New Arab

Since popular protests over extreme economic inequality engulfed Chile two weeks ago, at least 19 people have been killed. 

Over the course of a mere four days, more than 5,400 people have been detained by Chilean security forces, and reports of torture, sexual violence, beatings and other human rights violations abound.

In an unendearing throwback to the US-backed fascist dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet which lasted from 1973 until 1990, right-wing Chilean president, Sebastián Piñera proclaimed that "We are at war" - one of the late dictator's favourite lines - but was quickly forced to backpedal.

Reuters notes that Piñera asked for forgiveness for successive governments on both left and right that failed to act sooner to stem deep inequalities in Latin America's fifth-largest economy - a pretty rich move coming from a literal billionaire.Shortly after the protests broke out, The Independent ran an opinion piece by Benjamin Zinevich on the vibrant history of military collaboration between Chile and Israel, for which the subheading reads, "In recent years, the [Israeli army] has seemingly used a tactic of maiming Palestinian protesters rather than shooting to kill - and that's something we've seen reflected in Chile this week."

Of course, given that the Israeli army has also managed to do things such as kill 59 protesters in a single day in the Gaza Strip, it seems that tactic is somewhat flexible. 

Zinevich reminds us that, in the Pinochet era - during which tens of thousands were detained, tortured, killed or disappeared - Israel was a primary supplier of arms to the military junta.

And yet the partnership didn't end with the fall of the dictatorship: In 2018, for example, the two countries signed an agreement pledging further cooperation in military education, training and doctrine, among other perks. Zinevich writes that, in both regions, those who are affected the most negatively by the alliance are working class and Indigenous people. READ MORE AT THE NEW ARAB.

BOOK REVIEW: The Border System Is Criminal

Review of Empire of Borders: The Expansion of the U.S. Border Around the World, by Todd Miller (Verso, 2019). 

Jacobin

On October 1, the New York Times reported on some of Donald Trump’s visions for the United States-Mexico border, including “a water-filled trench, stocked with snakes or alligators” and a wall with “spikes on top that could pierce human flesh”:

After publicly suggesting that soldiers shoot migrants if they threw rocks, the president backed off when his staff told him that was illegal. But later in a meeting, aides recalled, he suggested that they shoot migrants in the legs to slow them down.

Trump would quickly take to Twitter to decry the moat-alligator-spikes allegations as “Crazy,” although shooting people was apparently still fine in his book. As the president has often said to justify his wall fantasies: “Just ask Israel” — another border-obsessed entity that delights in deploying lethal force against unarmed civilians.

Given the present international landscape, Todd Miller’s Empire of Borders: The Expansion of the U.S. Border Around the World couldn’t have come at a better time. Fittingly, part two of the book — “The Global Pacification Industry on the Palestine-Mexico Border” — addresses Israeli contributions to manic US border fortification schemes and other lucrative security endeavors. Israel’s access to a captive Palestinian population on which to test various methods of barbarism gives it a unique advantage in sustaining “a US structure of power and domination” in a world where — as Miller quotes late US diplomat George Kennan’s candid forecast — “we have to accept a certain unchallengeable antagonism between ‘him that has’ and ‘him that has not.’”

Crossing Israel’s notorious Qalandiya checkpoint in the West Bank, Miller observes that it “felt like being strained through the metallic innards of the global classification system . . . Qalandiya was the prime example of the twenty-first-century breed of war, hidden behind the word ‘security.’”

Empire of Borders is hardly just about the “post-9/11 planetary expansion of US border enforcement,” although there is certainly plenty of evidence of the 9/11 Commission Report’s proclamation that “the American homeland is the planet” (how else do you explain things like the presence in Iraq of US Customs and Border Protection officials?). In the course of his exploration, Miller finds that “the harmonized global border system was not necessarily attached to the nation-state, but rather to the global economy; the elite world was not beholden to the flags of individual countries, but rather to the banner of Walmart, Boeing, Google, and the power structure that sustains such corporations.” READ MORE AT JACOBIN.

Just how 'dictator loving' is Twitter?

Middle East Eye

On 2 October, Egyptian film star and political activist Amr Waked tweeted his opinion that Twitter and its CEO Jack Dorsey "should investigate their management and behavior of dictator loving @TwitterMENA@", a reference to what Twitter defines as "the official Twitter account for the Middle East and North Africa".

Waked continued: "Why are they leaving obvious dictator bots active and suspending anti dictator activists[?]"

This would seem to be a valid question in light of reports of a Twitter crackdown on critics of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi's regime, which has pursued a typically "draconian response" to recent demonstrations across the country and once again exhibited its penchant for mass arbitrary arrests.

Waked himself announced back in March that he had been sentenced in absentia to eight years in prison for “insulting state institutions”. Middle East Eye reported that he was additionally "facing fresh charges" for tweeting against the death penalty - clearly a much greater crime than, you know, manically executing people.

But in an age in which social media is lamentably central to - and sometimes a substitute for - life itself, just how “dictator loving” is Twitter? More broadly, has Twitter wilfully politicised itself, or is it merely haphazardly finding its way in a chaotic and often unregulatable digital realm? READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

Netflix and Israel: A special relationship

Middle East Eye

Back in 2016, the Israeli embassy in the United States tweeted with regard to Netflix’s global expansion: “For the 5+/- days a year the weather’s not good… @Netflix, now in Israel!”

What fortune, indeed, that Israel managed to erect itself on stolen land with such favourable meteorology. And speaking of luck, Netflix has proven itself a veritable godsend for the Jewish state, for a lot more than five days out of the year. As with various entertainment platforms, Netflix has been willingly subsumed into the Israeli hasbara industry.

The latest pro-Israel production to grace subscribers’ screens is the six-part Netflix series The Spy, starring Sacha Baron Cohen as Israel’s celebrated Mossad agent Eli Cohen, executed in Damascus in 1965. 

Predictably, the series humanises Cohen as a humble, loving and dedicated patriot engaged in noble subterfuge on behalf of innocent Israelis under attack from dastardly Syria. No mention is made of Israel’s preeminent role as attacker-provocateur, while its history of mass slaughter in the service of predatory regional designs is - as usual - disappeared under the mantra of “self-defence”.

But The Spy is only the beginning. Search “Israel” on Netflix and you’re bombarded with all sorts of offerings, from Inside the Mossad to Fauda, a series about “a top Israeli agent [who] comes out of retirement to hunt for a Palestinian fighter he thought he’d killed”. In the trailer, we learn that “Abu Ahmad has the blood of 116 Israelis on his hands” and that “no other terrorist has killed so many: men, women, children, elderly, soldiers”.

Never mind, then, real-life episodes such as that time in 2014 that the Israeli military had the blood of 2,251 Palestinians on its hands, including 299 women and 551 children. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

The IDF Can’t Wait to Go to War

Jacobin

In recent days, Israel has launched attacks against “Iranian-backed” forces in three countries. The motive for the violent triple-violation of sovereignty was not lost on the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, which ran the headline: “A Looming War Lifts Netanyahu’s Spirits” and explained that “Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu looked hale and hearty this week … The more security tensions escalated and captured headlines, the more his self-confidence soared.”

Why? Because “the attacks in Syria, Lebanon and Iraq, some of them open and official, others less so, and the saber-rattling in the direction of Iran and Hezbollah, were fuel for the fire of his campaign” ahead of the Israeli elections, scheduled for September 17.

On Sunday, Hezbollah retaliated by shooting anti-tank missiles into Israel, while Israel fired “volleys of artillery against three villages in southern Lebanon.” For now, Reuters reports, all is quiet following the cross-border exchange between “Lebanon’s Iran-backed Hezbollah group and the Israeli army” (forever immune in the US media from relevant modifiers like “US-backed” or “insanely US-backed”).

But while an all-out physical war may be on hold, Israel’s propaganda war is in full swing. Over at the official Twitter account of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), videos are being churned out that purport to reveal the sinister activities of Iran & Co., including “surveillance footage of Iranian Quds Force operatives in Syria carrying a killer drone that they intended to use for an attack on Israel.” Though the quality of the footage is so poor that one is just as likely to perceive Ewoks traipsing across an extraterrestrial landscape, the IDF has helpfully labeled the video “Syria” and drawn a circle around the blob that is allegedly the killer drone.

Then there’s the video, complete with dramatic musical score, about the “senior Iranian commanders running Hezbollah’s precision missile project in Lebanon” — and the one suggesting that “terrorists” in Lebanon are on the verge of being able to direct missiles to specific Israeli addresses using something like the Waze navigation app.

Even CNN felt compelled to draw attention to the IDF’s “propaganda offensive” and “barrage of agitprop,” although in a grotesque oversight the article’s author, Sam Kiley, refrained from including Lebanese civilian deaths in his casualty count for Israel’s 2006 war on Lebanon, “during which the IDF lost nearly 120 troops and scores of civilians and about 270 Hezbollah fighters and 50 Lebanese soldiers and police died.” In reality, some 1,200 people were killed in Lebanon during Israel’s thirty-four-day assault, the overwhelming majority of them civilians.

Among the casualties, for example, were south Lebanese children fired on at close range as they fled their homes in a pickup truck. Veteran Middle East reporter Robert Fisk provided some details of the grisly aftermath: “Two small girls … were blasted into such small body parts that they were buried together in the same grave after the war was over. Other children lay wounded by the initial shell burst and rocket explosions as the helicopter attacked them again.”

Talk about “precision.”  READ MORE AT JACOBIN.