This Isn’t News. This Is War Crimes Apologia.
By Caitlyn Johnstone | Medium | December 18, 2018
The fact that George W Bush has given Michelle Obama two pieces of candy is once again making headlines in mainstream outlets like Time, The Hill, and Newsweek. He has not given her any new pieces of candy since the last time he did so at his father’s funeral. He also has not ceased to be the man who facilitated the murder of a million Iraqis and inflicted a whole new level of military expansionism and Orwellian surveillance upon our world. As near as I can tell, the only reason this story is once again making headlines is because Michelle Obama and the mainstream media have decided to bring it up again.
“He has the presence of mind and the sense of humor to bring me a mint, and he made it a point to give me that mint right then and there and that’s the beauty of George Bush,” Obama said of the war criminal in conversation at the SAP Center over the weekend, which we apparently need to know about because the news is telling us about it.
“We’re all Americans. We all care about our family and our kids, and we’re trying to get ahead,” Obama continued. “And that’s how I feel about [Bush]. You know? He’s a beautiful, funny, kind, sweet man.”
If you’re starting to feel like attempts to rehabilitate George W Bush’s image are being aggressively shoved down your throat by the mass media at every opportunity, it’s because that is exactly what is happening. Every few weeks there’s a new deluge of headlines explaining to consumers of mainstream media why they should love the 43rd president because he’s such a cutesy wootsey cuddle pie, and completely forget about the piles upon piles of human corpses he is responsible for creating for no legitimate reason at all. The last Bush appreciation blitz was less than two weeks ago.
And there is a reason for this. Make no mistake, this relentless, aggressive campaign to rehabilitate George W Bush whether you like it or not is actually a campaign to rehabilitate what he did and the mass media’s unforgivable complicity in it.
The mass media failed spectacularly to practice due diligence and hold power to account in the lead-up to the illegal and unconscionable Iraq invasion, not just the ghouls at Fox News but respected centrist outlets like CNN, the New York Times and the Washington Post as well. Bogus government reports were passed on uncritically and unquestioned, antiwar demonstrations with hundreds of thousands of protesters were ignored and downplayed, and the words “Saddam Hussein” and “9/11” were deliberately mentioned in the same breath so frequently that seven out of ten Americans still believed Saddam was responsible for the September 11 attacks months after the Iraq invasion had occurred.
In an environment where the New York Times is instructing its readers how to “help fight the information wars” against Russia, the BBC is coaching its audience to scream the word “whataboutism” whenever a skeptic of establishment Russia narratives brings up Iraq, and the US Secretary of Defense is claiming that Putin is trying to “undermine America’s moral authority,” the massive credibility hit that imperial media and institutions took by deceiving the world into the destruction of Iraq matters. Propaganda is a lot more important in cold war than in hot war since avoiding direct military confrontation limits the options of the participants, and Iraq is a giant bullet hole in the narrative of US moral authority which Moscow is rightly all too happy to point out.
Without the claim of moral authority, none of America’s manipulations against Russia make any sense. It’s absurd for America to spend years shrieking about Russian election meddling after it openly rigged Russia’s elections in the nineties, unless America claims that it rigged Russia’s elections for moral reasons while Russia rigged America’s elections for immoral reasons. It makes no sense to have mainstream western media outlets uncritically manufacturing support for wars and coaching their audiences on how to help government agencies fight “information wars” against Russia while also criticizing RT as “state media”, unless you can say that western media functions as an arm of the US government for moral reasons while RT does so for immoral reasons. It makes no sense for the US to criticize Russian military interventionism when the US is vastly more guilty of vastly more egregious forms of military interventionism, unless the US can claim its interventionism is moral while Russia’s is immoral.
For this reason it’s been necessary to rehabilitate the image of the Iraq invasion, and since there is no aspect of the Iraq invasion itself that isn’t soaked in blood and gore, they are rehabilitating its most recognizable face instead. Mainstream media outlets are doing this both to restore their own credibility and the credibility of the US world order they serve, in order to help secure crucial narrative control as we slide ever closer to a direct military confrontation with Russia and/or China.
Whoever controls the narrative controls the world, and Iraq is a major weak point in the US-centralized empire’s narrative control. When you see a political insider like Michelle Obama constantly facilitating the mass media’s fixation on how cuddly wuddly George W Bush has become, you are not witnessing a heartwarming moment, you are not witnessing redemption, and you are most certainly not witnessing the news. You are witnessing war propaganda, plain and simple.
Australia’s Shameful Gift to Netanyahu
By Jeremy Salt | American Herald Tribune | December 17, 2018
Australia and Israel are white settler states, established violently over the heads of the indigenous people, without the benefit of any treaty arrangement. ‘A land without people for a people without land’ was the Zionist lie. ‘Terra nullius’ was the Australian white settler equivalent.
Australian aboriginal ownership was collective and traditional. Palestinian ownership was collective, traditional and individual but in both cases, the land was stolen. How can the foundations of any state established on stolen land be said to be legal? What will white Australians say if someone comes along and takes ‘their’ country from them? ‘You can’t do this to us’?
The essential differences between Israel and Australia are numbers and hinterland. The land the white settlers called Australia was inhabited in the late 18th century by about half a million people. They had lived in this island continent and its small heart-shaped island off the southern coast, Tasmania, for more than 60,000 years, making the oldest recorded civilizations in the Near East look like newborns. They had their own languages, traditions, art, and oral history, the ‘dreaming,’ which is the most wondrous telling of the experiences of their ancestors.
But they were not numerous. They had no written laws and – most importantly – no modern weaponry. Killed, driven off their land and stricken by the diseases the white settlers brought with them, they were soon decimated. There was no-one to whom they could turn for help, no sympathetic similar civilization living nearby that could spring to their assistance. They were all on their own.
Contrast this with the Palestinians. Their land was also taken from them but they lived according to written laws and contracts which Europeans could understand even if they violated them. They were not sufficiently well-armed to defend themselves against a colonial-settler minority backed by outside governments but they were far more numerous than the settlers, 90 percent of the population in 1920, even after 40 years of Zionist colonization, and still two-thirds of the population at the time of the war of conquest in 1948.
By 2018 the Israeli population stood at 8.4 million, of which number 6.1 million (about 75 percent) is Jewish and mostly Zionist. The Palestinian world population of about 12 million includes about 4.4 million Palestinians living in the West Bank, East Jerusalem or Gaza and about 1.4 million within Israel’s pre-1967 borders. Within a few years, the Palestinian population between the Mediterranean and the River Jordan is expected to surpass the Jewish population.
These numbers aside, as part of an Arab-Islamic civilization with a rich history, the Palestinians also have the support of a vast hinterland. The population of the Arab world stands at about 420 million. The world Muslim population is about 1.8 billion. Corrupt and undemocratic Arab governments may collaborate with Israel but the people are behind the Palestinians, as are Muslims everywhere as well as Christians and those of no particular religious or ideological affiliation who know right from wrong and, as a matter of conscience, must support the Palestinians.
In the face of these demographics, Israel’s continuing war against the Palestinians would seem to be suicidal. Palestine as an issue is not going to go away. In the long term, this is a war Israel cannot win. It holds Palestine by force, not by right, law or morality. All three are on the side of the Palestinians and not on the side of an Israeli state which continues the illegal settlement of their land.
No plan, no UN resolution gave Israel any right to drive the Palestinians from their homes and out of their homeland. No resolution gave the Zionists any sovereign right to Jerusalem. It was a Palestinian city which, after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, should have remained the property of the Palestinian people, overwhelmingly Muslim and Christian, in their own state or as part of a Syrian state. Instead, their land and the right to choose their future was taken from them.
Here are some relevant land ownership figures, compiled in 1945 by the British mandatory authorities (one dunam is the equivalent of 1000 sq. meters or about 0.245 of an acre):
Jerusalem district (Hebron, Jerusalem, Ramallah):
Arab ownership – 3,3993,001 dunums.
Jewish ownership – 39, 679 acres.
In the Jerusalem region, the ‘Arabs’ (mainly Palestinian Muslims and Christians) owned 1,326, 571 dunums against 33,401 dunums owned by Jews. In 1946 the UN produced a map showing that 62 percent of the Jerusalem district was ‘Arab’ and only 38 percent Jewish, despite the heavy Zionist settlement.
While the demographics of Jerusalem city showed a Jewish majority, as many incoming Jews preferred to live in cities rather than work on the land, most properties even in West Jerusalem (about 70 percent) were Palestinian-owned in 1948.
Almost all of the east – the old city – was. The fine stone buildings, the walls, the cobbled streets and the arches were designed and built over the centuries by Muslim and Christian Palestinians. They were part of the booty that fell to the Zionists when the city was taken over, first installment 1948 and second 1967, with the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population continuing until the present day.
In law, all Jerusalem – not just the eastern sector – is an occupied city. It is an Israeli city, Israel’s ‘capital’, only according to the occupier’s law, which in fact is not a law at all but a gross violation of international law.
Yet, with two of the world’s most populous Muslim countries, Indonesia and Malaysia, not far away and objecting loudly, the Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, has announced his government’s recognition of West Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and its recognition of East Jerusalem as the Palestinian capital when the time comes. He was speaking in Sydney at the Zionist think tank, the Lowy Institute, started by, and named after, Frank Lowy, a billionaire businessman of Czech origin who, as a member of the Haganah, helped to ethnically cleanse Palestine in the war of 1948 before migrating to another ethnically cleansed country, Australia, in the early 1950s.
Of course, Zionism never had any intention of sharing Palestine, let alone sharing Jerusalem as the capital of two states. Morrison has pledged to recognize East Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state when the time comes. He must know that Israel is determined to make sure the time will never come. Israel, of course, is only partly happy because Australia is only-half recognizing its claim to Jerusalem.
Had the indigenous Australian people been more numerous, had they had the weapons to defend themselves and had they the support of a hinterland willing to support their resistance to white settlement, Australia could well have been driven openly in the direction of Israel or apartheid South Africa. Israel is now pursuing the same goal that white settler Australia managed to achieve, the reduction of the indigenous population to an insignificant minority, whose rights are covered up with tokenism, as exemplified in the ‘sorry’ movement and the verbal acknowledgment of traditional land ownership at every conference or workshop, at a time rural aboriginal communities are treated with the same neglect as before. Out of sight, out of mind.
Why did Morrison do this? Out of his Christian religious convictions? (He worships at a Pentecostal church in Sydney, which boasts of its adherents speaking in tongues when being baptized. Morrison has denied ever speaking in tongues himself, even though it would clearly be good practice for anyone planning a political career).
Does Morrison have some idea that the ‘Jewish vote’ will swing the next federal election his way? Did not the Wentworth byelection in 2018, lost by his government, show him that while there is a strong and influential Zionist lobby in Australia, there is no such thing as a Jewish vote, but individual Jewish voters, who may support Israel, but not Netanyahu’s Israel, and might see the Morrison decision as inflammatory and not helpful in the long term to anyone, including Israeli Jews.
Like Israel, Australia began life as a colonial settler state. Its Foreign Minister, H.V. Evatt, played a significant role in imposing Israel on Palestine in 1948. There have been exceptions, but by and large, all Australian governments have given open-ended support to Israel ever since. Their criticisms of its frequently vicious behavior never amount to more than a mild slap on the wrist, delivered for propaganda purposes.
It is no wonder that in Malaysia and Indonesia, Australia is widely regarded as a post-colonial remnant, still dependent on distant countries, first Britain and now the US, and still unable to pluck up the courage to carve out a genuinely independent future.
When Israel refuses to abide by international law, on Jerusalem, on the West Bank, on Gaza, on the occupied Golan Heights, on the return of the Palestinian people to their homeland and on the laws of war, why give Netanyahu the gift of recognizing even the western half of an occupied city as his capital?
Almost everyone writing on Australian politics seems to believe that Morrison will be out of government after the federal elections in 2019. Bill Shorten, an ALP (Australian Labor Party) machine man all his political life, has criticized Morrison over Jerusalem, but is he just playing politics, scoring points, or when he takes over as Prime Minister, will he rescind this unnecessary and provocative decision?
Putin warns US against misadventures
(Russia’s President Vladimir Putin addresses an extended meeting of the Russian Defence Ministry Board in the National Defence Management Centre in Moscow, Dec 18, 2018)
By M. K. BHADRAKUMAR | Indian Punchline | December 19, 2018
The Russian President Vladimir Putin’s address to an expanded meeting of the Defence Ministry Board in Moscow on December 18 stands out as a tour d’horizon of the global strategic balance. The speech must be seen against the backdrop of the free fall in US-Russia relations, build-up of NATO infrastructure on Russia’s western borders and, in particular, the Trump administration’s statements about the US withdrawing from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty of 1987.
Broadly, Putin’s message is in three directions:
The modernization of Russian armed forces has been most successful and the combat readiness of Russian military is at an all-time high level;
Russia has developed new hypersonic weapons of immense destructive power, which are going into serial production for deployment with the strategic nuclear forces to which the US simply has no answer;
Russia is determined to ensure that any US attempts to tilt the strategic balance in its favor will be effectively countered.
Putin disclosed that the share of modern arms in Russia’s “nuclear triad” (air, navy and ground forces) is already at an impressive level of 82 percent. He implied that all in all, the US is punching above its weight: “These weapons (unique state-of-the-art weapons such as the Avangard missile system, Sarmat missile, Kinzhal hypersonic air-launched ballistic missile, Peresvet combat laser weapons, etc.) will multiply the potential of our army and navy, thus reliably and absolutely ensuring Russia’s security for decades ahead. These weapons are consolidating the balance of forces and, thus, international stability. I hope our new systems will provide food for thought to those who are used to militaristic and aggressive rhetoric.”
The main thrust of Putin’s speech was on the US plans to withdraw from the INF Treaty. He warmed, “Such a step will have the most negative consequences and will noticeably weaken regional and global security. In fact, in the long term, it may result in the degradation and even collapse of the entire architecture of arms control and non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction… In the event the United States breaks the treaty – I have already mentioned this publicly and I believe it is important to state it once again directly for this audience – we will be forced to take additional measures to strengthen our security.”
Putin starkly forewarned that Russia’s newly developed Kinzhal hypersonic missiles (at a speed in excess of Mach 10 with an intermediate range of 2000 kilometers) which are presently deployed on Mig-31 aircraft can as well be modified “and put… on the ground, if need be.”
In geopolitical terms, Putin drew the bottom line that Moscow will not blink and Russian military prowess is indomitable. Quite obviously, the stern Russian warning comes at a time when the US is pushing the European allies to impose more sanctions against Russia and is threatening to increase its military presence in the Black Sea following the Kerch Strait incident last month. Tensions are rising over Ukraine, which lies historically in the First Circle of Russian national defence. Russia has reportedly deployed Sukhoi Su-27 and SU-30 fighter jets to the Belbek air base in Crimea. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Monday, presumably on the basis of intelligence inputs available with Moscow, that Ukraine may stage provocative moves militarily on the border of Crimea later this month and that the Ukrainian Armed Forces have amassed around 12,000 troops and a great amount of equipment on the contact line with the insurgent region of Donbass.
Lavrov disclosed that instructors from the US, Britain and other countries are actively helping the Ukrainian build-up, while a US drone is constantly flying over the region. (Xinhua ) With a near-certainty that the chances of pro-American Petro Poroshenko winning a renewed mandate in the March presidential elections being virtually zero, a casus belli would suit the US to prepare the ground for Ukraine’s post-haste induction into the NATO and the EU. Putin only briefly touched on Ukraine, saying the conflict in the southeastern region “continued unabated.”
Significantly, in his address on Wednesday, Putin made a pointed reference to China while commending the Vostok-2018 military exercises. He said the maneuvers contributed to the “substantial upgrades” in the level of operational and combat training of Russian armed forces and in displaying their ability to “promptly move forces and equipment” over 7000 kms “and to quickly reinforce units in major strategic areas wherever necessary.” Putin then added that it was “important” to note that units from China “also acted under the general plan, in single formation with our troops.” He came close to taking note of what western analysts call the “functional military alliance” between Russia and China.
Russia’s defence budget of $46 billion compares with the Pentagon’s $725 billion budget. What emerges is that instead of getting drawn into a debilitating arms race that will be a strain on resources, Russia will focus on developing the strategic capability to inflict such colossal losses and destruction on the West, including the US, which will deter the latter from launching militaristic adventures targeting Russia. Thus, Putin gave topmost priority to “further strengthen the combat potential of the strategic nuclear forces.” He stressed the importance of quickly transitioning to weapons with enhanced capabilities that overcome US’ missile defence systems and, in particular, the production and supply of the Avangard global range missile systems to the armed forces.
The commander of Russia’s Strategic Missile Force Commander Colonel-General Sergei Karakayev said in an interview with Krasnaya Zvezda newspaper on Monday that the first Avangard hypersonic missile systems will enter combat duty in 2019 at the Dombarovsky missile division based in the Orenburg Region in the south Urals. According to a TASS report, the Avangard is a strategic intercontinental ballistic missile system equipped with a hypersonic glide vehicle capable of flying at hypersonic speed in the dense layers of the atmosphere, maneuvering by its flight path and its altitude and breaching any anti-missile defense.
Don’t Laugh – It’s Giving Putin What He Wants
By Caitlin JOHNSTONE | Medium | December 15, 2018
The BBC has published an article titled “How Putin’s Russia turned humour into a weapon” about the Kremlin’s latest addition to its horrifying deadly hybrid warfare arsenal: comedy.
The article is authored by Olga Robinson, whom the BBC, unhindered by any trace of self-awareness, has titled “Senior Journalist (Disinformation)”. Robinson demonstrates the qualifications and acumen which earned her that title by warning the BBC’s audience that the Kremlin has been using humor to dismiss and ridicule accusations that have been leveled against it by western governments, a “form of trolling” that she reports is designed to “deliberately lower the level of discussion”.
“Russia’s move towards using humour to influence its campaigns is a relatively recent phenomenon,” Robinson explains, without speculating as to why Russians might have suddenly begun laughing at their western accusers. She gives no consideration to the possibility that the tightly knit alliance of western nations who suddenly began hysterically shrieking about Russia two years ago have simply gotten much more ridiculous and easier to make fun of during that time.
Couldn’t possibly have anything to do with the emergence of a demented media environment wherein everything around the world from French protests to American culture wars to British discontent with the European Union gets blamed on Russia without any facts or evidence. Wherein BBC reporters now correct guests and caution them against voicing skepticism of anti-Russia narratives because the UK is in “an information war” with that nation. Wherein the same cable news Russiagate pundit can claim that both Rex Tillerson’s hiring and his later firing were the result of a Russian conspiracy to benefit the Kremlin. Wherein mainstream outlets can circulate blatantly false information about Julian Assange and unnamed “Russians” and then blame the falseness of that reporting on Russian disinformation. Wherein Pokemon Go, cutesy Facebook memes and $4,700 in Google ads are sincerely cited as methods by which Hillary Clinton’s $1.2 billion presidential campaign was outdone. Wherein conspiracy theories that Putin has infiltrated the highest levels of the US government have been blaring on mainstream headline news for two years with absolutely nothing to show for it to this day.
Nope, the only possibility is that the Kremlin suddenly figured out that humor is a thing.
The fact of the matter is that humorous lampooning of western establishment Russia narratives writes itself. The hypocrisy is so cartoonish, the emotions are so breathlessly over-the-top, the stories so riddled with plot holes and the agendas underlying them so glaringly obvious that they translate very easily into laughs. I myself recently authored a satire piece that a lot of people loved and which got picked up by numerous alternative media outlets, and all I did was write down all the various escalations this administration has made against Russia as though they were commands being given to Trump by Putin. It was extremely easy to write, and it was pretty damn funny if I do say so myself. And it didn’t take any Kremlin rubles or dezinformatsiya from St Petersburg to figure out how to write it.
“Ben Nimmo, an Atlantic Council researcher on Russian disinformation, told the BBC that attempts to create funny memes were part of the strategy as ‘disinformation for the information age’,” the article warns. Nimmo, ironically, is himself intimately involved with the British domestic disinformation firm Integrity Initiative, whose shady government-sponsored psyops against the Labour Party have sparked a national scandal that is likely far from reaching peak intensity.
“Most comedy programmes on Russian state television these days are anodyne affairs which either do not touch on political topics, or direct humour at the Kremlin’s perceived enemies abroad,” Robinson writes, which I found funny since I’d just recently read an excellent essay by Michael Tracey titled “Why has late night swapped laughs for lusting after Mueller?”
“If the late night ‘comedy’ of the Trump era has something resembling a ‘message,’ it’s that large segments of the nation’s liberal TV viewership are nervously tracking every Russia development with a passion that cannot be conducive to mental health — or for that matter, political efficacy,” Tracey writes, documenting numerous examples of the ways late night comedy now has audiences cheering for a US intelligence insider and Bush appointee instead of challenging power-serving media orthodoxies as programs like The Daily Show once did.
If you wanted the opposite of “anodyne affairs”, it would be comedians ridiculing the way all the establishment talking heads are manipulating their audiences into supporting the US intelligence community and FBI insiders. It would be excoriating the media environment in which unfathomably powerful world-dominating government agencies are subject to less scrutiny and criticism than a man trapped in an embassy who published inconvenient facts about those agencies. It certainly wouldn’t be the cast of Saturday Night Live singing “All I Want for Christmas Is You” to a framed portrait of Robert Mueller wearing a Santa hat. It doesn’t get much more anodyne than that.
Russia makes fun of western establishment narratives about it because those narratives are so incredibly easy to make fun of that they are essentially asking for it, and the nerdy way empire loyalists are suddenly crying victim about it is itself more comedy. When Guardian writer Carole Cadwalladr began insinuating that RT covering standard newsworthy people like Julian Assange and Nigel Farage was a conspiracy to “boost” those people for the advancement of Russian agendas instead of a news outlet doing the thing that news reporting is, RT rightly made fun of her for it. Cadwalladr reacted to RT’s mockery with a claim that she was a victim of “attacks”, instead of the recipient of perfectly justified ridicule for circulating an intensely moronic conspiracy theory.
Ah well. People are nuts and we’re hurtling toward a direct confrontation with a nuclear superpower. Sometimes there’s nothing else to do but laugh. As Wavy Gravy said, “Keep your sense of humor, my friend; if you don’t have a sense of humor it just isn’t funny anymore.”
UK psyops bigwig pushed plan to ‘mine Sevastopol Bay’ during 2014 Crimea crisis – leaked documents
RT | December 17, 2018
In the midst of the Crimean crisis, a special adviser to the UK House of Commons Defence Committee had a suggestion for Kiev – to lay mines in Sevastopol Bay, leaked documents have revealed.
“I am trying to get this message across” to Kiev, reads a leaked document purporting to show the strategy that Christopher Donnelly, who was a Special Adviser to the UK House of Commons Defence Committee, recommends.
The documents, leaked by a group which claims to be associated with the Anonymous hackers, purport to indicate that Donnelly had drafted “military measures” that he would implement if he, personally was “in charge.” The documents are allegedly dated March 01, 2014, when the Crimean crisis was in full swing.
A print screen of the leaked document with alleged “military measures” which Christopher Donnelly wanted to communicate to Kiev. © cyberguerrilla.org
Donnelly noted that “at the moment the new ‘Government’ in Kyiv is unable to think in terms of military reality,” since it was not sure if its “orders will be obeyed or not.”
“They are like a rabbit in the car’s headlights,” he said, according to the documents.
The measures which the official would supposedly implement, include “mining of Sevastopol harbor,” setting up a “cordon sanitaire” across the Crimean Isthmus with “troops and mines,” and trying to “inspire” their own troops, endeavoring to explain to them what exactly they had to fight for.
Donnelly allegedly writes that he would have used “some seriously important weapons” Ukraine “used to have,” namely some sort of “big microwave anti-satellite weapon.”
Apart from that, the text says all the air forces in the region should have been scrambled and anti-aircraft defenses activated. If the aviation in Crimea proved to be not airworthy, it should have been destroyed “as a gesture that they are serious.”
While all the “measures” appear to be designed to incite an open armed conflict, the last one was also about making profit by the West: “They should ask the west now to start supplying oil and gas. There is plenty available due to the mild winter.”
Donnelly has a rich background that ties him to top military officials. Between 1989 and 2003, as special adviser to four NATO Secretaries General, he was closely involved with NATO. From 2003 to 2010 he ran the UK Defence Academy’s Advanced Research and Assessment Group. He has been a specialist adviser to three UK Defence Secretaries (both Labour and Conservative) and was a member of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s Soviet advisory team. Since 2010 he has been the Co-director of The Institute for Statecraft – a shady think tank that provides “decision takers & policy makers with reliable, alternative solutions.”
This is the third of a number of leaks, which began on November 5. The leaks claim that the UK government-funded group “Integrity Initiative” (II), which was founded by the Institute of Statecraft, has a network of journalists, analysts and former politicians who make up a Europe-wide chain of “clusters” that help London meddle in other state’s affairs.
Commenting on the previous leak, the II neither confirmed nor denied that the documents were genuine, saying that it didn’t have time to validate them.
However, II did confirm that the organization has, indeed, been receiving funding from the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) for the past two years, but insisted that private donors were its primary source of money. Meanwhile, in response to a question by Labour MP Chris Williamson last week, Minister for Defence, People and Veterans Tobias Ellwood admitted that the Institute for Statecraft had also received funding from the British Army and the Ministry of Defence. The FCO money came from the department’s ‘Conflict Fund’ which investigative journalist Mark Curtis exposed last year as a “secretive slush fund” which had backed “some of the world’s worst security forces.”
RT has reached out to Mr. Donnelly for comment over the contents of the “military measures” list, as well as over allegations that his organization targeted Jeremy Corbyn in an anti-smear campaign which are now being investigated by the Foreign Office. He declined to comment.
“Thank you very much for your enquiry but as RT is a state-sponsored propaganda organization and not a legitimate news channel, we have no comment to make,” Donnelly said in a mailed statement.
What Does Israel ‘Occupy’?
By Blake Alcott | Palestine Chronicle | December 17, 2018
In what is written and said about Israel and Palestine the word ‘occupation’ is ubiquitous. But what territory, exactly, is the ethnocratic state occupying? Is it just the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, or all of Palestine?
Everybody agrees that the territories Israel took over in 1967 are occupied. However, both pro-Palestinians and liberal Zionists routinely write of ‘the Occupation’ or ‘occupied Palestine’ to refer to these territories only. The demeaning acronym ‘OPT’ means only the West Bank and Gaza Strip only. But if those territories are ‘occupied’, then by the same token so is the 80% of historic Palestine called ‘Israel’. All of Palestine has been taken over.
When we demand freedom ‘from the river to the sea’ what are we demanding other than an end to rule, control, and occupation by a non-indigenous Power? When Palestinians use the term ihtilal they always distinguish between the ‘1948 occupation’ and the ‘1967 occupation’. Why, then, does the international discourse in Western languages ignore the 1948 occupation, in denial of the fact that Israel in 1948 merely took over from the British-Mandate occupation of 1917-1948?
Palestine was a British colony, and all colonies by definition are occupied by the colonial Power. And indeed, when we correctly and routinely call Britain’s successor Israel a ‘settler-colony’ we are not just referring to the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Especially since it is thoroughly supported by pro-Zionist forces outside of historic Palestine, all of Palestine is now a settler-colony and thus occupied from the river to the sea. And if the settler-colonialist paradigm is accurate, all non-indigenous Israelis are ‘settlers’, not just those in the West Bank. If we talk of boycotting ‘settlement goods’, that should mean all Israeli goods.
Does this matter? Yes: If it is only the West Bank and Gaza Strip that are occupied, then the rest of Palestine ‘within the Green Line’, is not occupied, and if it is not occupied, what is it then? It can then only be rightfully controlled by Israel, for if you are not ‘occupying’ a territory, it must be yours. Using the term limited to the 1967 occupation thus implies that the Europeans who colonized Palestine under British protection for thirty years are the rightful owners of the land of Palestine. The basic premise of Zionism is conceded.
That is, withholding the epithet ‘occupation’ from today’s Israel normalizes the Zionist Entity’s presence; it pulls the rug out from underneath Palestinian claims to political rights in Palestine. As Colonial Minister Churchill and High Commissioner Samuel wrote in their pathbreaking 1922 White Paper on the Palestine question, one worldwide outside ethno-religious group is in Palestine “by right and not on sufferance” and thus cannot be an Occupier.
Which Narrative?
Denying implicitly in this way that Israel occupies the lands taken over in 1948 is thus a key part of the Zionist narrative that Jews own Palestine, while the diametrically opposing Palestinian narrative claims that rightful ownership lies with the indigenous inhabitants (whatever their ethnicity or religion). It insists that this is the territorial and historical ‘self’ entitled to realize self-determination in non-partitioned Palestine. If moreover, this political ‘self’ consists of all Palestinians, they are all ‘occupied’, and the logic in calling only West Bank or Gazan land ‘stolen’ undermines the unity of all Palestinians.
We similarly identify Israel as an ‘apartheid’ state, exercising and enacting discriminatory separation not only on the Palestinians in ‘Israel proper’ and in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, but as well on the 6 or 7 million Palestinians residing outside of Palestine – as Richard Falk and Virginia Tilley argued in their UNESCWA report in 2017. The Green Line upon which the restricted use of the concepts ‘occupation’ and ‘apartheid’ would rely is historically, ethically and emotionally irrelevant.
A third, ‘liberal-Zionist’ narrative also contends that Israel is occupying only what it took over from the Egyptian and Jordanian occupiers in 1967. This diverges from the Jewish-Israeli mainstream in at least admitting it, but it leaves Israel intact – although, sadly, bereft of ‘Judea and Samaria’. This soft Zionism certainly takes comfort in seeing that some Palestinians and many of their supporters join them in granting that the Jewish state is not guilty of occupying the 1948 territories.
The fatal consequence of this limited use of ‘the Occupation’, in whichever camp, is the implication that once Israel quits doing its occupying of 20% of Palestine (and a part of Syria), as far as its relations with its neighbors goes it reverts to a normal, well-behaved state. The use of this central term is thus a litmus test. If limited to the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Israel is normalized.
A common-language Definition
In common parlance, a state is ‘occupying’ territory if, first, a force or a state has come in from outside the territory in question. Second, that force has established military and political hegemony in that territory. Third, this happens against the will of the indigenous inhabitants.
The second and third conditions obtain in the entirety of Palestine. Disputed is only whether Israel was a force that moved into ‘1948’ Palestine from the outside. Or was it somehow already there? Was it by 1948 somehow also ‘indigenous’, in which case the situation should be described not as an ‘occupation’ but as a victory in a civil war – as the Israeli narrative indeed describes it? Even though the European-Jewish community was obviously vastly ‘less indigenous’ than the Palestinians in terms of length and unbrokenness of habitation, perhaps on 15 May 1948 it suddenly became legitimate.
However, left to their own devices after freed from the Ottoman occupation in 1918, the Palestinians would, by the early 1920s, certainly have constituted their state covering all of Palestine – or perhaps a single sovereign Greater Syria would have emerged covering al-sham, i.e. historic Palestine plus today’s Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan. But instead, outsiders from and in Britain occupied it.
But were the Jewish Agency and its military arm the Haganah, together renamed ‘Israel’ in May 1948, any different from Britain in terms of coming from the outside? The overwhelming majority of Jews in Palestine as of that date was, after all, very recent European immigrants, and given near-unanimous indigenous opposition based on justified fear of political takeover, a necessary condition for their implantation was thirty years of support by colonial Power Britain. ‘British bayonets’ both fostered Jewish military strength and, especially during the years of the 1936-39 Revolt, crushed Arab military as well as political potential. Without this enablement by Britain and its fellow Powers, the self-described Jewish entity would not have had a shred of a plausible claim to statehood in any part of Palestine at the time of the decisive debates of 1947 leading to the Partition Resolution of the UN General Assembly (Resolution 181).
In other words, the most realistic picture of the forces taking over Palestine is of a British/European-Jewish amalgam functioning during three entire decades. It is one occupation, an overlapping transfer of power from protector to protected.
By the way, even the usurped 55% of Palestine recommended for the “Jewish State” by the General Assembly majority had a slight indigenous non-Jewish majority of 509,780 to 499,020 if the 105,000 Bedouins living there were counted, a fact that strengthens the notion of an outside occupier rejected by a majority.
What about the territory conquered during 1948 over and above that 55% granted by the outsiders at the UN, amounting to about half the area it granted to the “Arab State”? Certainly, by any criterion, it is ‘occupied’ – taken by force without even a pretense of legitimacy. It is thus especially egregious to exclude it from the term OPT, the more so as it included the almost-totally indigenous Galilee.
To be consistent and coherent, there is thus no way around terming the whole territory ‘within’ the 1949 armistice line ‘occupied’. As Uri Davis wrote in 1972 in the Journal of Palestine Studies, he “first had to come to grips with the fact that, essentially, the right-wing Zionist contention that there was no essential difference between the colonization of Tel Aviv and Jaffa prior to and immediately after 1948, and the colonization of Hebron in 1967, was correct.”
Examples of the Problem
The Quakers in Britain recently decided to quit supporting the “occupation… now in its 51st year”, thus dating this “illegal occupation” from 1967 only. The other 80% is thus not occupied and of necessity ‘legal’, under legitimate Israeli control. In consequence, since it is this 51-year occupation that motivates the Quakers, they will cease boycotting Israeli goods when the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip is ended, whatever the fate of the other Palestinians. This results from distinguishing between a boycott of ‘settlement-complicit’ goods and the blanket boycott of Israel that would target the source of the problem and be a true successor to the blanket boycott of South Africa which brought down Apartheid.
Another example is the discourse of the large US-based organization which starting in 2001 called itself the “US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation”. It fought for most Palestinian rights, but as its name suggested most strongly against the occupation of the 1967-occupied areas. Perhaps aware that having ‘Israeli Occupation’ in its title lent implicit recognition to Israel’s permanency, in 2016 it changed its name to “US Campaign for Palestinian Rights”. However, its “common principles” and “Factsheet” still make it clear that the term “military occupation” refers only to what Israel took over in 1967, for conceptually it treats the refugees and the “Palestinian citizens of Israel” separately. Its use of “settlements” refers likewise consistently only to the West Bank.
Part and parcel of this narrative, moreover, is this US Campaign’s support for “all relevant UN resolutions”. This must include the soft-Zionist position of Security Council Resolution 242 which cements the Green Line and the Jewish state on one side of it. The group is also careful to criticize only “Israel’s policies and practices”, not its right to be in Palestine in the first place. Finally, its reference to the “illegal West Bank colonies” implies that the earlier Jewish Agency/Israeli colonization of the bulk of Palestine was legal.
A final example of an ‘occupation’ narrative leaving room for an Israel legitimately present in Palestine is an article in Haaretz on 29 November 2018 by Gideon Levy entitled “Why I am obsessed with Israel’s occupation of the Palestinians”. Said occupation is again that of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Its main victims, to be sure, are “the Palestinians”, but it also “harms” an Israel worth saving because of its “crucial impact on our daily lives and on the image of this country.”
Referring to Israel’s culture-loyalty, nation-state, nakba, citizenship, and anti-BDS laws Levy even claims that “In the absence of the occupation, all these laws would be redundant.” I interpret this to mean that for him Israel’s worst crime is its treatment of the West Bank and Gaza Strip – a view certain to disappoint the roughly three-quarters of Palestinians living in Israel or outside of Palestine.
Counter-arguments
I have challenged various speakers on their restricted use of the term. The most common answer is that one can’t apply it to all of Palestine because by that logic California – or all of North America, or Australia – would be ‘occupied’.
My first reaction was ‘So what? So be it. If it’s true, deal with it.’ But more deeply, or unconsciously, this answer takes the indigenous conquered less seriously than they deserve, for how could any Native American say anything but Yes, Europeans moved in, took over and occupied their lands? If meant as an assertion that the world’s settler-colonies are somehow legitimate, this is not post-Zionism but simply Zionism.
Another answer is that ‘occupation’ is a specific term in international law and should not be watered down by broader use. But to the extent the term is defined at all in international law, it is not useful for a political discussion; it is only a backdrop for humanitarian rules for treating occupied people in armed conflicts between states.
And in general, terms such as ‘occupation’ which function perfectly well in common and historical language should not be co-opted for specialist purposes. In fact, routinely using the term ‘illegal’ to characterize the 1967 occupation and the ‘settlements’ there – as does even the BDS Movement – doesn’t just imply that the rest is legal, but detracts from more important ethical and political dimensions.
A third answer is that we should not use our terms in ways that regard Palestinians as one polity because this erases the Green Line. The division of Palestine gives (a limited number of) Palestinians leverage at international institutions and courts to plead within the mainstream narrative as political, if not military, equals. The danger of this ‘parity pitfall’ cannot be covered here, but it definitely belongs to the liberal-Zionist narrative that the Israeli state of the two-state solution is rightful.
Israel’s Illegitimacy
The basic, fatal effect of co-opting the Arabic term ‘occupation’ for the 1967 territories only is its implication that a non-occupying, non-Palestinian ethnic state is in legitimate, or at least acceptable, ownership of the rest. This is not compatible with Palestinian self-determination, liberation of the Land, right of return, or anti-Zionism.
In terms of the fashionable ‘rights-based approach’, it is likewise not compatible with all the rights of all the Palestinians because it normalizes the Zionist premise that, ethically, at least in part of Palestine indigenous wishes can be ignored. If this premise is rejected, on the other hand, the Zionist Entity is occupying all of Palestine.
We often advise ourselves to watch our words carefully. Israel spends millions to tailor certain words to serve its goals – ‘right to exist’, ‘return’, ‘democratic and Jewish’, and ‘anti-semitism’ being a few examples – and those in solidarity with Palestine should take a page out of that approach and ask whether the word ‘occupation’ is not worth utmost care.
Both logically and in the context of actively arguing for Palestinian self-determination, joining the Zionist narrative or even just indulging in ambiguity serve no purpose. The time is ripe to say that, if Palestine belongs to the Palestinians, it is not right that Israel occupies it.
Featured Video
When Israel Is Mighty
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
From the Archives
US murdering 1 million Iraqis is democracy, Iran giving yogurt to Iraq is “domination”
By Ali Salaam | American Herald Tribune | July 31, 2017
The New York Times, owned by the Zionist Jewish supremacist Ochs-Sulzberger family, has no problem with Iraqi suffering as long as Iran is not the one behind it.
The Iraq War was a genocide of the Iraqi people by Zionist supremacists in the Bush administration. Over 1 million innocent people were killed based on a lie. American soldiers died in an Israeli war and now an average of 22 soldiers commit suicide every day because their consciences cannot cope with the fact they committed crimes in an illegal war that served no purpose other than to benefit Israel, not America.
Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of the Zionist regime, once said “We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq.”
Paul Wolfowitz had his sights on Iraq since his time in the first Bush administration. Former Israeli official and Bush administration official Richard Perle had his eyes on Iraq since at least his authorship of the Clean Break white paper. The Zionist regime had their eyes on Iraq since the 1980s when strategist Oded Yinon wrote his white paper in support of dividing the Arab-Muslim world along ethnic and sectarian lines. The global Zionist lobby has had their eyes on Iraq since Theodor Herzl stated that Eretz Israel’s true borders go from the Nile River in Egypt to the Euphrates River in Iraq. … continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- When Will This White House Madness End?
- Huckabee aide goes to ‘unusual lengths’ to portray ‘Israel’ positively
- Trump Announces Diesel Supply Deal With Putin Following Phone Call
- MEP blasts ‘Euro-Gestapo’ for lecturing Russia on democracy
- Syria May Send Troops to Saudi Arabia Amid War with Ansar Allah
- UK whines about losing billions to ‘Putin tax’
- Baghaei to Rubio: Distorted narratives cannot erase US record of broken commitments
- Houthis Don’t Have to Conquer Saudi Arabia to Make It Pay
- MOE: Nearly 22,000 Students and Education Workers Killed
- Guterres in Islamabad: Genocide, cowardice, and the cage of Imran Khan
- If Americans Knew
- Gaza ceasefire exists in name only, say more than 100 organizations
- Nearly 2 Million in Gaza Need Urgent Shelter Assistance as Winter Looms: IOM Chief Warns
- Suppressing Palestinian resistance: US charity under fire for AI monitoring of Gaza classrooms
- Thousands Are Held in Israeli Torture Camps. This Is What Happens Inside
- Israel puts Gaza’s sick, injured, newborn in peril – Daily Update
- Report claimed Mark Levin used by Israeli government to influence Trump
- Over 2,000 Gazans have died awaiting medical evacuation amid Israel’s continued siege
- How a U.S. Diplomat Suppressed and Altered Reports Critical of Israel
- 5 Palestinians Die from Israeli Strikes in Gaza as Relentless Attacks Continue
- Report: Ceasefire Slows Killing but Leaves Devastation Intact
- No Tricks Zone
- New Study: 50 Years Of The Most Aggressive ‘Net Zero’ Policies Can Only Affect The Global Climate By 0.03°C
- US September “Heat” Was No Record…Many Records Set Decades Ago
- Latest European Green Energy Debacle; Portugal’s Largest Flagship Solar Park Insolvent!
- Green Energy Debacle: German Expert Professor Fritz Vahrenholt Warns Of Severe Economic And Social Consequences
- Two More Paleo Reconstructions Affirm Meters-Higher Sea Levels Across Ireland, Brazil 7000-6000 Years Ago
- New Study: Earth And Venus Surface Warmth Largely Explained By Convection And Lapse Rate, Not CO2 Or Radiation
- 2025 Nature Paper Claiming Worsening Global Drought Gets RETRACTED …Heavily Flawed
- New Study: ‘Global Drought Shows No Detectable Recent Acceleration Under Climate Warming’
- Economic Masterminds: German Socialists Suggest Taxing Productivity Gains Stemming From Using AI
- The South China Sea Has Not Been Cooperating With The Climate Change Narrative
