As Palestinians pushes for statehood, Israel finds itself more isolated
POSTED BY: Niki2
UPDATED: Monday, May 25, 2026 02:10
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There’s a Real Plan for Ending the War in Gaza
But Israel and Hamas actually have to take it.
By Fred Kaplan | Jan 22, 2024, 3:49 PM
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/01/israel-netanyahu-biden-gaz
a-peace-egypt-qatar.html
The U.S., Egypt, and Qatar have devised a multistage plan for ending the Israel-Hamas war. One problem is that neither Israel nor Hamas has agreed to it. In fact, the final stage of the plan—the creation of a Palestinian state—is something that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly and emphatically said he deeply, unalterably opposes.
The diplomatic venture, first reported Sunday by the Wall Street Journal, reflects a deepening fissure between President Joe Biden and Netanyahu’s government as well as a desperate desire—by Biden and the region’s Sunni Arab nations, not just Egypt and Qatar but also Jordan, Bahrain, and most notably Saudi Arabia—to resume “normalized” relations, with one another and with Israel, even if it means somehow working around, and imposing conditions of peace on, the combatants.
Prince Turki al-Faisal, the former Saudi ambassador to Washington, said in a recent interview, “The present leadership of Hamas, of the [Palestinian Authority], and of Israel should be excluded from any participation in any future political role. They have to pay for what they have done. … All of them are failures.”
True words, and it’s both unusual and refreshing for a Saudi leader to say anything so critical of Palestinian leaders. But it’s unclear how to get there from here—how to create or facilitate whole new governing leaders or parties in Gaza, the West Bank, or Israel.
Netanyahu all but gave Biden the finger last week when he said a Palestinian state was out of the question . . .
More at https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/01/israel-netanyahu-biden-gaz
a-peace-egypt-qatar.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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In one of its most closely-watched rulings since its creation in 1948, the United Nations’ top court issued a series of orders to Israel to protect Palestinians in Gaza to prevent genocide there.
Here is a look at the six so-called provisional measures, issued Friday by a panel of 17 judges at the International Court of Justice in the Netherlands. The decision was one step in a broader case that the court is considering about South Africa’s accusation that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. Israel denies the allegation.
1. The court ordered Israel to “take all measures within its power to prevent the commission of all acts within the scope” of the U.N. convention on genocide. Referring to protecting Palestinian civilians, the court said Israel should work to prevent “killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; and imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.” Approved in a 15-2 vote.
2. The court ordered Israel to “ensure with immediate effect that its military does not commit any acts described in point 1 above.” Approved in a 15-2 vote.
3. The court said Israel “shall take all measures within its power to prevent and punish the direct and public incitement to commit genocide in relation to members of the Palestinian group in the Gaza Strip.” Approved in a 16-1 vote.
4. Israel was ordered to “take immediate and effective measures to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance to address the adverse conditions of life faced by Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.” Approved in a 16-1 vote.
5. The court ordered Israel to “take effective measures to prevent the destruction and ensure the preservation of evidence related to allegations of acts within the scope” of the relevant articles in the genocide convention. Approved in a 15-2 vote.
6. The court said Israel “shall submit a report to the court on all measures taken to give effect to this order within one month as from the date of this order.” Approved in a 15-2 vote.
https://apnews.com/article/icj-ruling-israel-gaza-genocide-3fa0908d995
cc104e8ab4674f5ee75cc
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Fuck the UN.
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Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.
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Quote:Updated 1:08 PM EST, Fri January 26, 2024
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Fuck the UN.
The clip of Hala’s killing is one of a growing number that show unarmed civilians holding white flags being shot dead in Gaza. The Geneva-based Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor has said that they are investigating nine such incidents. CNN has examined four cases, including that of Hala Khreis.
CNN made multiple attempts to sit down with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to share its findings. They told CNN on Friday that “the incident is being examined,” and, when pressed further, said they were referring to al-Mawasi. They did not say if the other incidents are being investigated.
The incident in al-Mawasi, a coastal town in southern Gaza previously designated a “safe zone” by the IDF, took place earlier this week. Ramzi Abu Sahloul, 51, was among a group of five men, their hands raised and brandishing a white flag. Sahloul told Ahmed Hijazi, a Palestinian journalist, that they were trying to get back to a house where his brother was being held back by Israeli soldiers to plead for his release. Moments after interviewing him, Hijazi filmed two Israeli tanks in the distance, beyond a raised bank, and then Sahloul being fatally shot in the chest. The impact of the first round is visible in the footage and appears to come from the direction of the tanks.
Among the most widely reported of the incidents CNN looked at was the shooting of three Israeli hostages, whom the IDF admitted to killing, mistakenly believing their surrender was a trap. The IDF has repeatedly claimed that it is doing everything in its power to avoid harming civilians, but its soldiers shot hostages waving a white flag, violating its rules of engagement and raising questions about those efforts.
Another video, previously reported by CNN, shows a young man on the ground after being shot while trying to evacuate Gaza City. His father, holding a white flag, could be seen crying over his body. The footage doesn’t show the moment he was shot, and the IDF did not reply to CNN’s request for comment.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/26/middleeast/hala-khreis-white-flag-shoot
ing-gaza-cmd-intl/index.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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The Importance of the I.C.J. Ruling on Israel
The court did not order a ceasefire, but its finding that Israel is the subject of “plausible” claims that it is in violation of the Genocide Convention is momentous, an international-law expert says.
By Isaac Chotiner | January 27, 2024
https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/the-importance-of-the-icj-rulin
g-on-israel
On Friday, the International Court of Justice, in The Hague—one of the six principal parts of the United Nations—found that Israel must take action to prevent genocidal violence by its armed forces; “prevent and punish” the incitement to genocide; and insure that humanitarian aid to Gaza is increased. South Africa had accused Israel of committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza during the war that began in response to Hamas’s October 7th terrorist attack. (Twelve hundred people were killed in that attack; more than twenty-five thousand Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s bombardment.)
The ruling of the I.C.J.—which is distinct from the International Criminal Court—fell short of finding Israel guilty of having committed genocide, but such a decision could take years; South Africa had also urged the court to order an immediate ceasefire, which it did not do. (The court does not have an enforcement mechanism.) But the I.C.J. still found cause for great concern about Israel’s military actions, and also the statements of its leaders. “At least some of the acts and omissions alleged by South Africa to have been committed by Israel in Gaza,” the court found, “appear to be capable of falling within the provisions of the [Genocide] Convention.”
I recently spoke by phone with Oona Hathaway, a professor at Yale Law School and the director of the school’s Center for Global Legal Challenges. She is also a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed the likely impact of the ruling, why the court was not going to make a definitive ruling on genocide so quickly, and why the court’s judgment should be considered surprising.
How do you understand what this decision is saying?
I think what this decision is saying is that Israel has engaged in acts that could plausibly constitute violations of the Genocide Convention—both genocidal acts and perhaps incitement to genocide—and that there’s enough here that’s been alleged, that those allegations are plausible. So they haven’t found that genocide has necessarily taken place, but the situation is dire enough that it is necessary for the court to issue these provisional measures.
So it’s a pretty big blockbuster, I think, because the court is finding that Israel, which of course is a state that was created after World War Two, for the protection of those who had been subject to the horrors of the Holocaust, is the subject of plausible claims that it is in violation of the Genocide Convention, which was a convention that, in large part, was created for the purposes of condemning and attempting to prevent genocides like the Holocaust from ever happening again. So this is a momentous decision.
There has been disappointment from some Palestinians, and from some supporters of the Palestinian cause, that this was not labelled genocide right now. Is that something that should have been seen as a realistic possibility?
That was never on the table. What South Africa was asking here is for provisional measures, and when the court is making a decision on provisional measures, it’s not making a decision on whether the merits demonstrate the claims that are made by the applicant have been proved, because it doesn’t have any of the evidence in front of it. It just has arguments of the two sides in front of it. All that it is being asked to do is determine whether the allegations that are being made could plausibly constitute a violation of the Genocide Convention and, moreover, that the situation is dire enough that the court should act to preserve its capacity to actually render a decision on the
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Unless Israel changes course, it could be legally culpable for mass starvation
By Alex de Waal | Wed 31 Jan 2024 06.01 EST
Alex de Waal is the executive director of the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University and the author of Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/31/israel-gaza-star
vation-international-law
Gaza is experiencing mass starvation like no other in recent history. Before the outbreak of fighting in October, food security in Gaza was precarious, but very few children – less than 1% – suffered severe acute malnutrition, the most dangerous kind. Today, almost all Gazans, of any age, anywhere in the territory, are at risk.
There is no instance since the second world war in which an entire population has been reduced to extreme hunger and destitution with such speed. And there’s no case in which the international obligation to stop it has been so clear.
These facts underpinned South Africa’s recent case against Israel at the international court of justice. The international genocide convention, article 2c, prohibits “deliberately inflicting [on a group] conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”.
In ordering provisional measures to prevent potential genocide last Friday, the ICJ didn’t rule on whether Israel is actually committing genocide – that will take years of deliberation – but the judges made it clear that the people of Gaza face “conditions of life” in which their survival is in question. Even Justice Aharon Barak, appointed by Israel to sit on the panel, voted in favour of immediate humanitarian relief.
But a humanitarian disaster such as Gaza’s today is like a speeding freight train. Even if the driver puts on the brakes, its momentum will take it many miles before it stops. Palestinian children in Gaza will die, in the thousands, even if the barriers to aid are lifted today.
Starvation is a process. Famine can be its ultimate outcome, unless stopped in time. The methodology used to categorize food emergencies is called the integrated food security phase classification system, or IPC. It’s a five-point scale, running from normal (phase 1), stressed, crisis, and emergency, to catastrophe/famine (phase 5).
In categorizing food emergencies, the IPC draws on three measurements: families’ access to food; child malnutrition; and the numbers of people dying over and above normal rates. “Emergency” (phase 4) already sees children dying. For a famine declaration, all three measures need to pass a certain threshold; if only one is in that zone, it’s “catastrophe”.
The IPC’s famine review committee is an independent group of experts who assess evidence for the most extreme food crises, akin to a high court of the world humanitarian system. The committee has already assessed that the entirety of Gaza is under conditions of “emergency”. Many areas in the territory are already in “catastrophe”, it said, and might reach “famine” by early February.
Yet whether or not conditions are bad enough for an official declaration of “famine” is less important than the situation today, which is already killing children. Bear in mind that malnutrition makes humans’ immune systems more vulnerable to diseases sparked by lack of clean water and sanitation, and that those diseases are accelerated by overcrowding in unhealthy camps.
Since the IPC was adopted 20 years ago, there have been major food emergencies in Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia’s Tigray region, north-east Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan and Yemen. Compared to Gaza, these have unfolded slowly, over periods of a year or more. They have stricken larger populations spread over wider areas. Hundreds of thousands died, most of them in emergencies that didn’t cross the bar of famine.
And in the most notorious famines of the late 20th century – in China, Cambodia, Nigeria’s Biafra and Ethiopia – the numbers who died were far higher, but the starvation was also slower and more dispersed.
Ne
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Hey! Let's expand the war!
We can attack Syria and Iraq while Israel attacks Hezbollah.
What could possibly go wrong?
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger
Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM
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What the Israeli Public Doesn’t See
In largely ignoring the suffering of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, the Israeli media both shapes and reflects public opinion.
By Elisheva Goldberg | February 7, 2024
https://jewishcurrents.org/what-the-israeli-public-doesnt-see
On January 29th, The Nightly News with Michal Rabinovitch—which airs on Israel’s public broadcaster, known as Kan—ran a series of stories that were broadly representative of the channel’s programming over the past few months. A story about diplomatic progress toward a prisoner swap between Israel and Hamas was followed by a report on the rockets launched into Israel’s interior from the Gazan city of Khan Younis; the segment included video from inside Hamas tunnels and footage captured by soldiers’ body cameras as they fought house to house. Next came a story about how Israeli soldiers were failing to open fire—as, the panelists emphasized, they had instructions to do—on any Gazan approaching the “buffer zone” along the border with Israel; that day, five Hamas fighters had come within 500 meters of an Israeli town, generating fear of another infiltration. The show then turned to coverage of Israeli politics, interviews with young war widows, a story about a car-ramming attack that day at an army base in Haifa, video of Israeli protesters trying to stop humanitarian aid from entering Gaza, and, finally, a profile of struggling businesses in the north, near the border with Lebanon. In the middle, it cut to a nine-minute briefing by Daniel Hagari, the Israeli military spokesman.
Notably absent from this coverage of the war and its reverberations was any mention of the killing of Palestinian civilians, or of the perils now facing the more than 2 million people trapped in the besieged enclave—including not only Israel’s military campaign, but also famine, thirst, displacement, and lack of medical care. In most Israeli media coverage, “it is as if [Palestinian civilians] don’t exist,” Gideon Levy, a reporter for the left-leaning Israeli daily Haaretz, which has covered the plight of Palestinians in Gaza, told the progressive American news program Democracy Now!. On international news networks, “you see Gaza. You see children dying on the dirty floors of the hospitals, bleeding to death. You see the uprooted people, you see the destruction, you see the suffering . . . and the starvation,” Levy said. “In Israel you see only the soldiers, only the hostages.”
Some media analysts have warned that this absence is shaping Israeli public opinion. A poll released by Tel Aviv University’s Peace Index and the Israel Democracy Institute in mid-November showed that a majority of Israeli Jews — 57.5% — believed Israeli forces were using insufficient firepower in Gaza, while another 36.6% thought the military was using the correct amount of force, and just 1.8% thought it was using too much.
Much more at https://jewishcurrents.org/what-the-israeli-public-doesnt-see
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Fuck Palestine.
Fuck Israel too.
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Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.
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How Israel’s war went wrong
In one case the Israeli military command knowingly approved the killing of hundreds of Palestinian civilians in an attempt to assassinate a single top Hamas military commander.
Over a dozen experts about the war back in October warned that Israel had a dangerously loose understanding of what the war was about. The stated aim of “destroying Hamas” was at once maximalist and open-ended: It wasn’t clear how it could be accomplished or what limit there might be on the means used in its pursuit.
Generally, just war theorists believe that war cannot be ethically waged without having “reasonable prospects for success.” The logic is intuitive: War inevitably involves a lot of killing, and killing can only be justified if it accomplishes a greater good. If the objective behind the killing is impossible (or extremely implausible), then there is no greater good to be won from the bloodshed.
Walzer believes that many Israelis, traumatized by the events of October 7, did not fully appreciate how intermingled Hamas — the de facto government of Gaza — was with Gazan society. It’s an organization made up of not only tens of thousands of fighters, but also many civilian functionaries and a vast physical infrastructure. Truly destroying such an entity cannot reasonably be accomplished through force of arms alone — at least not without a yearslong military campaign and an unthinkable amount of civilian death.
More at https://www.vox.com/24055522/israel-hamas-gaza-war-strategy-netanyahu-
strategy-morality
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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