from #CommonDreams
We Risked Our Lives to Treat Patients in Gaza. Now President Biden Must Act to Save Lives
As I think about my colleagues who put their lives at stake to save #Palestinians wounded in #Gaza, the question I must ask is: when will President #Biden force the #Israeli government to stop this slaughter?
"The good news is—actions like this by the #USA or #European countries taken under pressure from the pro-Israeli lobby or #Israel itself smell of sheer panic and desperation," the renowned author said.
The #israelis, the #americans and other backers of the #israeli religious war in #gaza let the world forget that the #icj in July 2004 referred in its ruling to Art. 51 of the #un#charter which you can read in the second text image in full with comment.
We would add:
Israelis have been a war belligerent since 1967 as they never lifted the declaration of war, and never signed peace with the country it is occupying: #palestine
Peace would also mean to make an end to the occupation.
"In December,...civilian casualty figures reported by #Hamas...indicated discrepancies...reported numbers, particularly those of women and children compared to men and combatants, are significantly exaggerated.
A May 9 OCHA update...significantly altered the portrayal of casualty figures...the #UN effectively conceding the untrustworthiness of Hamas figures...parroted by various media outlets."
A growing rift within the #Israeli government over the governance of #Gaza after the war has become a 'colossal game of chicken' between rival factions who are each waiting for the other to make a mistake, according to Israeli political commentator Dr Ori Goldberg. He also says that that Israelis have trouble articulating a critique of #Netanyahu 's management of the war and that as long as the war continues, Netanyahu continues to be safe in power. #Israel#Hamas
After 75 years of failure, one would imagine that a people would learn what works and what doesn’t, both from their own experience, as well as the experience of others.
#Palestinian predicament is the direct or indirect outcome of three #Arab-#Israeli wars, each about a generation apart. These are the wars that started in 1947, 1967, and 2000. Each war was a complex event with vast, unforeseen, and contested consequences for a host of actors, but the consequences for the Palestinian people were uniquely catastrophic: the first brought #displacement, the second brought #occupation, the third brought #fragmentation.
A generation after 1967, the #SecondIntifada involved no armies on distant fronts. There was a campaign of #terrorist attacks against #Israeli civilians… together with a campaign of #suicideBombings in Israeli cities.
In the #WestBank it looked less like either a #civilWar or a conventional war and more like an #asymmetricWar or a #counterinsurgency campaign by an occupying army that took years to settle down into a victory on the Israeli side.
In the #KhartoumResolution rejecting any accommodation with #Israel that was agreed on by the #ArabLeague less than 3 months later, the war is referred to unironically as the #Israeli “aggression of June 5.”
As with the 1st #Arab-#Israeli war, memories expanded and hardened with time, and the mythology of the defeat came to assume much larger dimensions than the size of the war or the actual defeat itself.
Major anniversaries of the #SixDayWar were largely marked in the Arab world as “the beginning of the #occupation.”
Minimal reckoning with Arabs’ own failures was with military errors and not with the overall goal of exacting revenge and eliminating #Israel.
As happened 30 and 50 years before, in the months after #CampDavid and well into the #SecondIntifada, the rhetoric was as militant as ever, and triumphalist too.
Less-moderate voices hoped that violence could replicate #Hezbollah’s success in forcing a full #Israeli withdrawal from #Lebanon without Israel receiving anything in return
The common and deeper meaning to all was that #Israel’s enemies needed to be protected from the consequences of THEIR defeat in the wars THEY initiated and LOST.
The #Arab-#Israeli conflict isn’t a normal conflict, and the cause of Arab #Palestine still isn’t a normal cause of national liberation.
The fundamental fact of this conflict, that one side believes the other’s #existence is a metaphysical crime for which a just resolution can only be #elimination, means that standard diplomatic practice is much harder to apply at best, and gets scrambled, inverted, and abused at worst 🔥🔥🔥
A new analysis from #HumanRightWatch argues that numerous attacks on humanitarian relief operations by #Israeli forces prove the bombing that killed 7 people was "far from being an isolated 'mistake.'"
Blinken delivers some of the harshest public US🇺🇸 criticism yet of Israel’s conduct in Gaza
#Israeli🇮🇱 tactics mean “a horrible loss of life of innocent civilians” but failed to neutralize #Hamas🇵🇸 leaders & fighters & could drive a lasting insurgency