An Ohio-class guided missile submarine arrived in the Middle East on Sunday, as per a social media post by the US Central Command.
The Ohio-class guided missile submarine (SSGN) – depicted entering the Suez Canal northeast of Cairo by the US Central Command – is one of the four US underwater craft of this type converted to fire Tomahawk cruise missiles rather than nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles.
Per the US press, each SSGN sub can carry 154 Tomahawk cruise missiles, which is 50% more than a US guided-missile destroyer and nearly four times what the US Navy’s newest attack submarines are equipped with.
The Tomahawk cruise missile can strike targets precisely from 1,000 miles away and has been used in combat more than 2,300 times by the US and its allies. Most recently, US Navy warships and subs fired 66 Tomahawk missiles at Syrian government facilities in 2018.
According to the US press, the heavily armed submarine sends “a message of deterrence” to Israel’s “regional adversaries, as the Biden administration “tries to avoid a broader conflict amid the Israel-Hamas war.”
The deployment of the submarine is triggering concerns, as per the DC-based think tank Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. The crux of the matter is that the US has already amassed a huge military force in the Middle East over the unfolding Gaza war.
The think tank particularly refers to:
· two aircraft carrier strike groups, with roughly 7,500 personnel on each;
· two guided-missile destroyers;
· nine air squadrons (deployed in the Eastern Mediterranean and Red Sea region);
· 4,000 troops dispatched to the region, with another 2,000 on standby, in addition to roughly 30,000 troops already stationed in the region.
These figures do not include “several dozen” commandos deployed to Israel in order to “actively help the Israelis to do a number of things,” as per Christopher P. Maier, an assistant secretary of defense.
On top of that there are US top military advisers on the ground in Israel to work out strategies to defeat Hamas together with the Israel Defense Forces.
“The United States is barreling toward another war in the Middle East,” Jon Hoffman, a policy analyst in defense and foreign policy at the Cato Institute, wrote for RS on Monday. “The conflict between Israel and Hamas is rapidly escalating across the region and risks dragging the United States directly into the fray.”
November 6, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Militarism, Wars for Israel | Israel, Middle East, Palestine, United States |
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Some people are expressing surprise about the warmongering comments Tulsi Gabbard has been making in regard to the Israel war that has been ramping up over the last few weeks.
I thought she was for peace; how can she be saying this? That’s what some people are asking when discovering the recent comments of Gabbard who had worked hard to portray herself in the 2020 presidential election as the candidate for voters favoring peace.
The recent comments by Gabbard that have surprised people include this statement at Twitter on October 9, two days after the Hamas attack that sparked the new war:
The United States must stand with Israel in the face of this terror attack by the Islamist terrorist group Hamas. This is just the latest example of the greater war being waged by both Sunni and Shia Islamist jihadists throughout the world. This should be a wakeup call to leaders everywhere that Islamist jihadists are the greatest short and long-term threat to the safety, security, and freedom of the American people, and people throughout the world.
Saying the United States must “stand with Israel” is a shorthand expression politicians in Washington, DC routinely use to declare that they support the United States government providing whatever aid Israel requests to pursue Israel’s “national security” related objectives. Indeed, Gabbard, a former member of the US House of Representatives, mentioned this week in a Fox News interview with host Laura Ingraham that House members can demonstrate they “stand with Israel” by voting to provide Israel with the roughly 14 billion dollars in aid for Israel’s war effort that was then under consideration in the legislative body.
The House on Thursday approved legislation, HR 6126, to provide this aid. (This money will supplement the billions the US already doles to Israel yearly.) As Gabbard would put it, the House “stood with Israel.”
While Gabbard’s support for the US jumping in to help Israel pursue its new war is surprising to some people, it is in line with a warning I provided in February of 2019 — two weeks into her presidential run. Here is what I stated then:
In 2015, Gabbard spoke regarding foreign policy in her speech at a Christians United for Israel conference. Comments in that speech suggest Gabbard’s foreign policy may be more interventionist than that of President Donald Trump. In comparison with Trump, Gabbard seems in that speech as antagonistic toward Iran, at least as devoted to Israel, more devoted to the Kurds, and much more devoted to the “they attack us because we are free” perspective on terrorism that has been at the heart of the Global War on Terror.
Check out Gabbard’s speech I mentioned here. It is an eye-opener for people who had fallen for the Tulsi Gabbard is an antiwar presidential candidate charade.
Copyright © 2023 by RonPaul Institute.
November 5, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Wars for Israel | Christians United For Israel, United States, Zionism |
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Israel is an unrestrained monster that endangers all of us
Mainstream media and official government commentary on the violence in Gaza appears to have acquired a certain rhythm to make sure that everyone understands that it is the poor Israelis who are the real victims being assailed by a group called Hamas that is invariably labeled as “terrorists.” It is absolutely obligatory in the first paragraph of an article on developments in the fighting to remind the reader that on October 7th the “terrorist” group Hamas “invaded” Israel and killed 1,400 peace loving Israelis, taking 200 additional Israelis as hostages. Israel is described as “retaliating” and it is frequently seen as relevant to state that it was the most dreadful mass killing of Jews since the alleged “holocaust.” To add a bit of current cultural and historic relevance, “9/11” and “Pearl Harbor” are often also cited to suggest that it was a both a surprise attack and a game changer in terms of how Israel now sees the external threat and will have to harden its national security imperatives. And there might even be inserted a comment from Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi or Senator Chuck Schumer that “Israel has a right to defend itself!” Joe Biden was also quoted as saying it was 15 “9/11”s for Israel given the comparative size and populations of the US and the Jewish state, emphasizing the enormity of the tragedy.
And that’s just in the first paragraph to make sure that the reader gets his or her mind right. The second paragraph is the really important contribution to the discussion, raising the issue of “surging antisemitism” in the United States and Europe, frequently including a quote from the relentless Jonathan Greenblatt of the redoubtable and widely feared Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Greenblatt is cited frequently, often intoning something along the lines of “There is a growing, radical movement on many campuses in which opposition to Israel and Zionism is required to be fully accepted, effectively marginalizing campus Jewish communities.” The intention of raising the antisemitism issue is to lead the reader away from any possible perception that an apartheid Israel was attacked because of its exceptionally brutal behavior towards the Palestinians over the past 76 years and was instead a victim of vicious terrorists who did what they did largely because they hate Jews. In that fashion, the possible issue of Israeli responsibility for what occurred goes away and Benjamin Netanyahu and his fanatical and racist colleagues Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir get a pass to do whatever they want to solve their Arab problem. Both men have expressed their dream of an Israel without any Palestinians, whom they regard as not quite acceptably human, and have endorsed shoot to kill authority for policemen and soldiers who are confronted by any Arab demonstrators. More than 100 Palestinians have already been killed on the West Bank by armed settlers, police and soldiers who will not be held accountable for the murders while there have also been hundreds of arrests of protesters.
In America Fox News has been a leader in pumping out the interviews and reports suggesting that America’s Jewish students are so terrified by the threats implicit and explicit in the antisemitic rage that is manifest on college campuses and elsewhere that they have stopped eating at the university kosher dining halls lest they become the targets of a madman. And there are the inevitable calls to completely ban gatherings expressing sympathy with the Palestinians or even waving or displaying Palestine’s flag. The moaning about surging antisemitism is indeed all over the mainstream media even though there are quite a few things wrong with the narrative about Israel-Palestine and the events on October 7th and subsequently. In short, the American and European public are being subjected to the usual con job when it comes to anything having to do with Israel. And the propagandization is certainly also given additional effectiveness when it is repeated by senior politicians coming from both parties with a unanimous Senate vote of 97-0 and a House of Representatives vote of 412 to 10 on resolutions pledging unconditional and total support for Israel and whatever it chooses to do, backed up by two US carrier groups plus Marines standing by in the Eastern Mediterranean.
Colleges and universities have been particularly targeted by Israel’s many friends, with mostly Jewish alumni holding back donations from those schools that do not explicitly denounce Hamas and praise Israeli “restraint” or that permit demonstrations by students supporting Gaza. Students who sign on to protests about what is being done to the Palestinians are being identified and placed on lists that will be submitted to potential future employers and universities to make it more difficult for them to get good jobs or secure academic appointments and fellowships. Ambitious politicians out to endear themselves to Jewish campaign donors and voters, like Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, have gone to extremes, banning Palestinian political groups at state universities and considering prosecution of members of such organizations for “hate crimes” as they are automatically being regarded as motivated by “antisemitism.” DeSantis has also vowed that his state will not accept any Palestinian refugees, though it is not clear how he would enforce that, basing his decision on his judgment that they are “all antisemites,” and Florida has recently purchased $135 million’s worth of so-called Israel Bonds to help in the Jewish state’s war effort. Senator Lindsey Graham has said that there should be “no limit” on Israelis killing Palestinians while Donald Trump has called for all Palestinian students in the US to be deported. It is just one more example of how low and even inhumane our politics have become when Israel is in any way involved, but it is also interesting to note that several European countries and Israel itself are also silencing critics of the Gaza massacres, in some cases by firing them from their jobs.
Part of the problem is that the narrative of what took place on October 7th and subsequently has been so spun by the media and talking heads that it continues to be somewhat unclear regarding what actually happened. The Israelis have persistently claimed that 1,405 Jews and Asian farm workers were killed by Hamas, 386 of whom were apparently soldiers. But how they died is where the tale goes adrift. Israeli survivors of the attack have told journalists that they were treated well when captured by Hamas and that the real killing began when Israeli Army units including tanks, artillery and helicopters counter-attacked Hamas, creating a brutal cross fire referred to in the trade as “friendly fire” which killed many if not most of the civilians. Houses in one kibbutz, where civilians were sheltering, were largely destroyed by fire from heavy weapons, which Hamas did not possess.
What we now also know from a growing body of evidence obtained from the Israeli media and eyewitnesses is that the Israeli military appear to have been overwhelmed by the day’s events. The reaction may have triggered an apparently long-standing policy referred to as the “Hannibal procedure” that seeks to prevent Israeli soldiers from being taken captive due to the high price the Israeli public insists on paying to make sure that the soldier-prisoners are returned. As a result, the military command has authorization to order Israeli troops to kill fellow soldiers rather than allow them to be taken prisoner. For the same reason, Hamas expends a great deal of energy in trying to find innovative ways to seize soldiers.
The possible reality that the Israeli military killed many of its own soldiers and civilians is, of course, being suppressed in the mainstream and by politicians eager to assist Israel in the Gazan genocide, but it is nevertheless out there. There is, however, another part of the story that is devastating in terms of its implications, and that is the immediate response to the crisis by offering to send Israel $14.5 billion to help in its defense, an incomprehensibly large figure that appears to have been pulled out of some lobbyist’s behind, which translates to performing genocide in Gaza and committing a host of war crimes along the way. The tribute payments, as some have described it, was approved by a party-line 226-196 vote in Congress last Thursday. The vote would have been closer to unanimous but for a partisan dispute over the funding of the measure. If Joe Biden and Congress are not aware that genocide is a big time crime against humanity as defined by the United Nations charter and by the Geneva Conventions and most international lawyers would agree that arming and funding an organization or state that is exterminating a nation or identifiable ethnicity is complicity or even participation in the crime.
Biden and Blinken may not have any idea of how much money Israel gets from the American taxpayer at all levels of government in a year beyond the $3.8 billion per year that it gets in direct “military assistance,” a gift from Barack Obama. Additional money flows from joint military projects, through dubious charities and via state and even local level development boards that bring the total up to roughly $10 billion. That contributes to making Israel a wealthy country which can afford to give its Jewish citizens free health care and college education as well as subsidized housing and it does not need additional US support to fight its wars.
And, by the way, that brings us to the final issue, Israel’s secret nuclear program which certainly should be of concern to US policymakers confronted by an exploding conflict that could engulf the entire Middle East and even spread beyond that area. The fact that Israel uniquely has the nukes in the region, numbering more than 200 by some estimates, is significant. In the United States government there exists a so-called “legislative rule” that no federal employee can confirm that Israel has nuclear weapons. The rule is ridiculous as the existence of the Israeli nuclear arsenal is well attested, including by Colin Powell, who once confirmed that “Israel had over 200 nuclear weapons pointed at Iran.” Powell made the statement when he was out of office but even prominent Israel-firster Senator Chuck Schumer has confirmed the existence of the arsenal.
The reason for acute sensitivity by the Israel Lobby and its bought-and-paid-for politicians over its nukes is the Symington Amendment in Section 101 of the US Arms Export Control Act of 1976 which bans foreign aid to any country that has nuclear weapons and has not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Which means that Israel’s annual $3.8 billion in aid would be in jeopardy if Washington were to enforce its own laws, though one cannot imagine that President Joe Biden or the Attorney General Merrick Garland, both fervent Zionists, will take the necessary steps to do so.
Another sticky bit of law consists of the so-called Leahy Amendments, which prohibit the US Department of State and Department of Defense from providing military assistance to foreign security force units that violate human rights “with impunity.” Israel’s numerous brutal assaults on Gaza, including the current one in which it is targeting hospitals and churches, bombing and killing helpless civilians, half of whom are children, is a textbook case for when the Leahy Amendments should be applied, but, of course, they never will be. That reality illustrates once again the actual political power of the Jewish Lobby in the United States backed up as it is by Christian Zionists like the new Speaker of the House Mike Johnson.
Finally, one must take a look at the Israeli nuclear arsenal itself coupled with the country’s reckless and aggressive leadership and what that represents, a subject that no one currently is even considered as a factor in what the expanding Gaza war might lead to. Twenty years ago, when the United States President George W. Bush initiated his disastrous neocon devised “war on terror” Israel’s Prime Minister Ariel Sharon saw the war as an opportunity and Israel as a major beneficiary, poised as it was to draw the US into the much-desired attack against Iran coupled with a renewed drive to terrorize the remaining Palestinians into fleeing into the neighboring Arab states. Israel clearly intended its nuclear capability to be used against its neighbors if needed, as described in the 1991 book by veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, entitled The Samson Option. The book’s title refers to the Israeli government’s nuclear strategy whereby Israel would launch a massive nuclear retaliatory strike if the state itself was under threat from outside forces and was in danger of being overrun, just as the Biblical figure Samson pushed apart the pillars of a Philistine temple, bringing down the roof and killing himself and the thousands of Philistines who had gathered to see him humiliated. One of Hersh’s sources in the Israel intelligence service reportedly told him “We can still remember the smell of Auschwitz and Treblinka. Next time we’ll take all of you with us.”
When Sharon was queried about how the rest of the world might respond to Israel using its nukes to effectively wipe out its Arab neighbors, he responded “That depends on who does it and how quickly it happens. We possess several hundred atomic warheads and rockets and can launch them at targets in all directions, perhaps even at Rome. Most European capitals are targets for our air force. Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: ‘Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother.’ I consider it all hopeless at this point. We shall have to try to prevent things from coming to that, if at all possible. Our armed forces, however, are not the thirtieth strongest in the world, but rather the second or third. We have the capability to take the world down with us. And I can assure you that that will happen before Israel goes under.”
So, there we are, poised on the edge of what might plausibly be the second avoidable nuclear war mishandled by Joe Biden and the muttonheads that he has chosen to “advise” him. Colonel Douglas Macgregor is rightly referring to the exploding crisis that contains a nuclear threat as an “Armageddon War.” Few Americans know that Israel only has nuclear weapons because it stole the enriched uranium and triggers from the United States with the cooperation of a Jewish industrialist Zalman Shapiro, owner of the NUMEC plant in Pennsylvania and a Jewish-Israeli Hollywood producer Arnon Milchan, neither of whom has ever been seriously held accountable by the US government. So, we have an Israel with a secret nuclear arsenal that no American official can even mention and that it currently is at “war” and is in theory prepared to use the weapons, most likely against an arch-enemy like Iran, but if threatened, to “take the world down.” As for the mostly silent majority of us Americans who would like to see a government that actually tries to do good for the people who live here and pay taxes, having a world at peace where Washington leaves everyone alone and is in return left alone by others, is an aspiration whose time seemingly has expired.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.
November 4, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes, Wars for Israel | Israel, Palestine, United States, Zionism |
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Last week, standing beside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a visit to Jerusalem, French President Emmanuel Macron suggested recycling the global coalition of 86 nations against Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) to focus on Hamas.
“Hamas is a terrorist group, whose objective is the destruction of the state of Israel. This is also the case of ISIS, of Al-Qaeda, of all those associated with them, either by actions or by intentions,” Macron said, betraying a short and selective memory. The stated goal of IS wasn’t to eradicate Israel – it was to establish a caliphate in Syria and Iraq, then broaden it into Arab countries. IS was first and foremost a threat to the stability of Syria – the same country whose government the US and its Western allies actively hindered in its fight against terrorism by making a failed attempt at overthrowing President Bashar Assad through Pentagon and CIA-backed training and equipping of “Syrian rebel” jihadists. As for Al-Qaeda, Israel was even reportedly at one point helping treat wounded militants from the group who were fighting their common enemy, the Iranian-backed Hezbollah, in Syria – in turn effectively hindering the fight against IS, as Syria and Hezbollah worked to destroy it.
The Global Coalition against Daesh (another name for IS), founded in 2014, explicitly excluded Russia, whose invitation by Damascus to help it eradicate the terrorist threat can be largely credited for Syria’s stabilization, and the fact that it’s rare to even hear any talk of IS anymore. Russia’s involvement in neutralizing the terrorist group, coupled with former US President Donald Trump’s refusal to continue funding Washington’s incursion into Syria, beyond hunkering down in the oil-rich Kurdish part, was the ultimate key to IS’ defeat. So with apparently little left for it to do now, Macron recommends that the coalition that mostly sat and watched – while Russia, Iran, and Syria did the heavy lifting – take on Hamas. Who does he think is going to do the work this time? Russia, which is still excluded from the coalition? Syria, which has recently taken incoming missile fire from Israel? Iran’s Hezbollah allies, who lost 1,000 men fighting IS in Syria – and whom Netanyahu has placed in the same basket as Hamas as an enemy of Israel? Good luck with that.
So with the most effective anti-IS fighters excluded from fighting Hamas, who’s left in Macron’s proposed coalition? There’s the Global South, including some African countries that just kicked out French troops for their own failed counterterrorism missions which had led to multiple coups and the flourishing of jihadism. It’s doubtful these nations will now be keen to embark on yet another counterterrorism mission alongside the same forces that they just expelled.
Then there are all those members of the international community who are quietly thinking what United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres dared to say aloud last week – that Hamas’ brutal attack on October 7, which left close to a thousand civilians and hundreds of military and security personnel dead, “did not happen in a vacuum.” He was, of course, hinting at Israel’s longstanding, UN-recognized oppression of civilians in Gaza. His statement begs yet another question: Is Hamas really a global threat? Or is it just Israel’s problem?
Anti-Israel unrest has reverberated outside of the immediate conflict zone, including in Western Europe and the US, but these protests have nothing to do with Hamas. Instead, citizens elsewhere in the world are merely reacting to perceived injustices, particularly in light of what they consider to be an overwhelmingly pro-Israel bias on the part of the Western establishment, which initially and drastically minimized concerns over the protection of Palestinian civilians. So any global action against Hamas seems futile.
The anti-IS coalition targeted the terror group’s propaganda, with its website stating that IS’ “use of social media tied to acts of terrorism is well-documented. In response, Coalition partners are working together to expose the falsehoods that lie at the heart” of its ideology. They’re free to do that, but why bother when there’s already open debate among those who have the opportunity to see reports from the ground and assess the situation for themselves? Governments can’t be trusted not to promote their own propaganda under the guise of combating it – all to secure an advantage for their preferred narrative.
Just consider the recent example of propaganda emitted by one of the self-styled gatekeepers of truth: European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. “Russia and Hamas are alike… their essence is the same,” she said. Nah, actually they aren’t the same at all. And not even Israel has been saying that, but still, “Vladimir Putin wants to wipe Ukraine from the map. Hamas, supported by Iran, wants to wipe Israel from the map,” von der Leyen explained. Besides the hot take on Putin’s intentions regarding Ukraine, that’s like saying that since Warren Buffet has a bank account, and I have a bank account, then I’m also a billionaire. This is exactly the kind of nonsense that Western anti-propaganda campaigns end up spewing.
The anti-IS coalition was made to tackle IS. If that’s no longer an issue, then just toss it in the trash. How many interventionist entities does the West need to spearhead, anyway? There are already more than enough vehicles and coordination mechanisms for intelligence sharing, propagandizing, and security operations. Besides, there’s no proof that better intelligence could have helped Israel when Egyptian and American officials have claimed that Netanyahu had warning of the impending Hamas attack. About the only thing that more useless Western-led bureaucracy would help is the West’s own hunger for more of it.
Rachel Marsden is a columnist, political strategist, and host of independently produced talk-shows in French and English.
November 2, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Islamophobia, Wars for Israel | al-Qaeda, France, Hamas, ISIS, Israel, Middle East, Palestine, Zionism |
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The Yamamah Palace, the epicenter of Saudi Arabia’s royal authority in Riyadh, is known for its deliberate and measured decision-making, particularly in the face of significant regional events.
But Israel’s genocidal war against Gaza proved an exception, warranting a rapid dispatch of Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan to Baghdad within a mere 48 hours after the Hamas-led resistance operation Al-Aqsa Flood was launched. This is far from a coincidence; a large subset of Iraqis belong to the regional Axis of Resistance.
Likewise, it is noteworthy that Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani revealed a discussion point that was visibly absent from the White House statement on his 16 October phone call with US President Joe Biden. Specifically, the part where the Iraqi leader expresses that “the continued aggression in Gaza stirs outrage among people in the region and globally.”
These two incidents lay bare Iraq’s state of confusion. The Persian Gulf state’s inner turmoil became even more evident in the way it voted on the Arab draft resolution presented by Jordan at the UN General Assembly.
War in West Asia
Although Baghdad had a hand in sponsoring the draft calling for a “sustained humanitarian truce,” the electronic vote initially showed that it had abstained. The Iraqi delegation in New York later scrambled to amend its vote in support of the resolution, blaming the mishap on “technical issues.”
Geographically, Baghdad may seem distant from occupied Palestine, but for many Iraqis and Palestinians, the legacy of Iraqi soldiers who helped prevent the Zionist occupation of Jenin in 1948 remains a powerful memory, with the cemetery of Iraqi martyrs standing as a solemn tribute.
However, Prime Minister Sudani faces challenges far more treacherous than reviving the heroic legacy of the Palestinian cause. Over the past week, at the Trebil border crossing with Jordan, large crowds of Iraqi protesters have camped out, and Iraqi oil shipments offered to Jordan at favorable prices are being hindered.
Chants of “Give me the fatwa, and see with your eyes” reflect the Iraqi street’s desire for a fatwa from the supreme Shia authority in Najaf, calling for defensive “jihad” against Israel. Sudani is also dealing with almost daily attacks on US military bases since 17 October.
While there are no “official” military fronts opened against Israel by the Arab states, the intensity of the political scene in Baghdad makes it almost impossible for Iraq to remain immune from the ripple effects of the “Unity of Fronts” that brings together the forces of the Axis of Resistance in Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen.
The Resistance’s ‘red lines’
If Israel has shown little concern – at least so far – about the extent to which its brutal assault on Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank affects the passive Arab governments near and far, it is the US that should actually be most anxious.
The relentless Israeli onslaught on Gaza, which has so far claimed over 8,000 civilian lives and left more than 20,000 people injured, poses a significant threat to one of the few accomplishments the US could still claim from its illegal 2003 invasion of Iraq. Back then, Washington boasted it was establishing a democratic system to replace an authoritarian Iraqi regime.
However, even the staunchest American ideologues who defended and justified the invasion are lost for words today, as the Gaza war undermines any noble goals attributed to their intervention. This genocide being committed in Gaza before the eyes of the world is eroding the last remnants of respect and prestige associated with the US.
Indeed, the urgent visit of Prince Faisal bin Farhan to Baghdad underscores Saudi awareness, traditionally aligned with US interests, of the sensitivity of the situation in Iraq. It signals a growing conviction that Iraq may not stay neutral in the ongoing conflict, especially now that Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi has announced that Israel has crossed certain “red lines” set by the Axis of Resistance.
These red lines include the much-delayed ground invasion of Gaza, an attempt to completely uproot Hamas and other Palestinian resistance factions, and the Israeli government stepping up its acts of aggression against other fronts.
Checking US moves
For Sudani, being Iraq’s prime minister without a solid party, parliamentary support, or political base to weather the looming regional war is a daunting challenge. Diplomatically, Baghdad is also in an uneasy position.
Incidents such as the one at the UN, where Iraq supported a ceasefire resolution but balked over references to the defunct “two-state solution” – given Iraqi legal stances against normalization with Israel – and concerns about placing Palestinian civilians on the same footing as their occupying overlords.
Sudani’s biggest fear is being pulled into Iraq’s messy domestic politics over this issue. Observers believe that the “Coordination Framework” forces, which played a pivotal role in bringing him to power, won’t stand idle if the US allows Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu to bring about another nakba.
Among these Framework forces, there are Iraqi factions that align themselves with the Resistance Axis, maintain close ties with Iran and Lebanese Hezbollah, and consider the Palestinian cause a central issue in their political discourse.
Hadi al-Amiri, leader of the Badr Organization, was among the first to escalate the rhetoric a day after Washington announced it would ramp up arms supplies to Israel, warning that: “If they intervene, we would intervene… if the Americans intervened openly in this conflict… we will consider all American targets legitimate … and we will not hesitate to target it.”
Three weeks into the current conflict, the extent of US involvement becomes clearer, including implicit and overt threats to prevent any regional party from intervening against US and Israeli interests. Calls and letters from western leaders to Baghdad have also been on the rise.
Jaafar al-Husseini, spokesman for the prominent Iraqi resistance faction Kataib Hezbollah, said that “the resistance in Iraq achieved its first attacks … and will continue at a higher pace,” adding that “The Americans are essential partners in killing the people of Gaza and therefore they must bear the consequences.”
US Proxy or Protector of Palestine?
The west, particularly the US, is employing intimidation tactics through messages conveyed to Baghdad. They are trying to push the Sudani government to act as their proxy within the “containment front,” which will potentially spark internal conflict.
This would jeopardize the relative calm that marked the first year of Sudani’s premiership. It will further undermine efforts to promote Iraq’s regional integration and distance it from Iran in exchange for closer ties with Arab states like Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE.
Iraqi sources say that the status-of-forces agreement known as “SOFA” between Baghdad and Washington may be one of the first “victims” of the Israeli escalation in Gaza and the destabilizing US military involvement in the war.
If Iraqis cancel the agreement regulating US military presence in their country, it would render the US mission and presence illegitimate, effectively pushing Iraq out of the Atlanticist orbit two decades after the invasion.
Another potential casualty of Al-Aqsa Flood is the third Baghdad Conference backed by Paris – Its convening is now in doubt, especially if the region becomes further inflamed. This would be a setback for France’s influence and its role in Iraq, including a lucrative deal worth over $27 billion with French conglomerate Total Energy.
The “hands on the trigger,” as the Iranians have stressed repeatedly, are not just a threat but also a form of pressure to compel the US to rein in the Israeli government’s genocidal actions. Baghdad has conveyed a message from Washington to Tehran that calm is needed, and the Iraqis have also relayed to the Americans the importance of not provoking Lebanese Hezbollah if the US truly wants to contain the situation regionally.
The real question here isn’t whether Iraqi factions will engage in a major war, but whether Washington is so beholden to Israel that it will overlook the potential repercussions of the growing outrage within Iraq and the rest of West Asia, which will eventually engulf the US’s remaining overt colonial outpost in the region.
November 2, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Wars for Israel | Gaza, Iraq, Israel, Middle East, Palestine, United States, Zionism |
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The world-wide condemnation of Israel’s horrific violation of international humanitarian law is not deterring its military operations in Gaza. In remarks on Monday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dismissed the calls for ceasefire, saying these “are calls for Israel to surrender to Hamas. That will not happen.” And he sought moral and spiritual support from the Bible for his war.
At least two armoured and infantry divisions of about 20,000 soldiers have reportedly entered the Palestinian enclave. The New York Times reported, quoting Christopher Maier, assistant secretary of defence, that US special forces, including commandos, have also been deployed to Israel. The report disclosed that several other Western nations have also quietly moved teams of special forces closer to Israel.
Maier said without elaborating, “We’re actively helping the Israelis to do a number of things.” As he put it, the situation in Gaza “is going to be a very complex fight going forward.”
On the other hand, there are growing domestic worries that the US could get entangled in another costly conflict in the Middle East. Braving threats of physical assault and vilification by conservative media, 55 members of Congress have appealed to Biden and Blinken that Israel’s military operation should “take into account” international law. But the administration refuses to take much notice of such demands.
What emerges is a grim picture of President Biden giving a free hand to Netanyahu on how he chooses to seek retribution. In exceptionally sharp remarks, the Washington Democrat in the House Pramila Jayapal said on Sunday that the US is “losing credibility” on the global stage due to its “double standard” in its level of support for Palestinians compared to Ukraine, and as a result, the US is “being isolated in the rest of the world.” Jayapal flagged, “There are racists within the Netanyahu government.” This must be the first time that such pointed criticism of Israel is voiced by politicians in America.
Indeed, the Biden administration’s doublespeak scatters the strategic ambiguity that shrouded its stance so far. What stands out is a bizarre neocon project to force regime change in Gaza through coercion and install a pliant regime, midway to a “two-state solution”.
Mahmoud Abbas, a tragic figure but a fixture still of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with a complicated multi-decade relationship with America and Israel (and his own people) appears to be at the centre of the proposed transition. At any rate, all roads lead to Ramallah.
The US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is heading for Israel on Friday on yet another regional tour. Significantly, during a testimony before the Senate Appropriations Committee on Tuesday, he publicly declared the Biden Administration’s project for the Palestinian Authority to return to the Gaza Strip from where it was ousted by Hamas in 2007, a year after the resistance group won the legislative elections.
As Blinken put it, “At some point, what would make the most sense would be for an effective and revitalised Palestinian Authority to have governance and ultimately security responsibility for Gaza.
“Whether you can get there in one step is a big question that we have to look at. And if you can’t, then there are other temporary arrangements that may involve a number of other countries in the region. It may involve international agencies that would help provide for both security and governance.”
It appears that Abbas at 87 may be a transitional figure. But CIA and Mossad have longstanding contacts within Fatah.
Suffice to say, the regime change in Gaza Strip is at the core of the neocon vision of “two-state solution”, which Biden keeps talking about. Only, the US’ “two-state solution” and what the global majority understands it to be are two different things — like chalk and cheese.
Evidently, the US estimates that the unprecedented Arab unity is not going to translate as decisive action on the ground. Secondly, from Blinken’s words, the US intends to control and dominate the two-state solution (regime change in Gaza) per its blueprint.
To be sure, the Iran factor is going to be crucial. The US seems to be betting that so long as Israel does not invade Lebanon or go for the jugular veins of Hezbollah, Iran will not intervene. Now, that is a big gambit — the “known unknown” — as it underestimates Iran’s commitment to the Palestinian problem.
In Tehran’s assessment, Israel suffered a massive blow from Hamas from which it will not recover — that is to say, Israel is a weakened regional power going forward. Thus, an inflection point is reached, as the US’ capacity and influence is also diminishing.
Iran’s Foreign minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian visited Doha and Ankara on Wednesday. While in Doha, he met with the head of the Hamas politburo, Ismail Haniyeh, for the second time last month. Later, while addressing a joint press conference with his Turkish counterpart Hakan Fidan in Ankara, Amir-Abdollahian warned that “If the genocide and war crimes against civilians are not stopped, the region is very close to making a big and decisive decision… (and) the consequences will be severe, and the warmongers will definitely not be able to bear the consequences.”
Meanwhile, the Russian position on the Gaza situation also has hardened. In a powerful speech at a meeting on Monday with members of the Security Council and Government and the heads of security agencies, President Vladimir Putin called out the US and its satellites as “the main beneficiaries of global instability … (who) are behind the tragedy of the Palestinians, the massacre in the Middle East in general, the conflict in Ukraine… channelling financial resources, including to Ukraine and the Middle East, and fuelling hatred in Ukraine and the Middle East.”
Notably, Putin compared the wars in Ukraine and Gaza as two sides of the same coin — manifestations of the US’ desperate attempt to shore up its diminishing global influence in a multipolar world. Putin alleged that western intelligence instigated through social media the rioting in Makhachkala (Dagestan) on Sunday night in an attempt to provoke “pogroms in Russia”. Putin said the US and its satellites hatched the plot to discredit Russia.
Importantly, he drew the conclusion that “They (US) do not want Russia to participate in solving any international or regional problems, including in the Middle East.”
Where the Biden administration’s “two-state solution” is deeply flawed will be on four counts. First, the entire project is anchored on an absolute military victory over Hamas. It reminds one of the triumphalist cry of “Mission Accomplished” after the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the deceptively easy ouster of the Taliban in Afghanistan previously. (By the way, Biden was an ardent supporter of Iraq invasion and had voted to launch the war in Afghanistan in the first place, three days after the 9/11 attacks.)
Second, there is a human content here. Palestinians detest the US and Israel and will not submit to quislings handpicked by these countries. Both Fatah and Abbas are thoroughly discredited entities. At any rate, what makes the Biden Administration so very confident that the Arab regimes will be willing to act as Washignton’s surrogates or fifth column in Gaza? It is a rude and insulting assumption, to say the least.
Third, Hamas’ grassroots support cannot be wished away. Resistance movements may have their ups and downs but seldom die so long as conditions of foreign hegemony exist.
Finally, Washington would still need UN Security Council mandate to legitimise whatever plot it is hatching, which is difficult to extract on American terms if Putin’s speech on Monday is anything to go by. Putin used exceptionally harsh language to describe the carnage unleashed in Gaza.
November 2, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes, Wars for Israel | Gaza, Human rights, Israel, Middle East, Palestine, United States, Zionism |
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Canada’s most elite soldiers have been dispatched to Israel. While it’s unclear if they are assisting the onslaught on Gaza, their deployment highlights close Canadian ties to the genocidal apartheid regime.
Global News has reported that JTF2 were in Israel. The stated reason for the deployment of Canada’s most specialized soldiers is to assist the embassy with security and evacuations. That may be true. But the deployment also reflects Canada-Israel military co-operation and may entail a more direct role in Gaza.
Would Israel accept special forces from South Africa or Chile? How about Russia? Or Syria?
Extremely unlikely. At minimum the JTF2 deployment reveals close military, as well as diplomatic and political, ties between the two countries.
After Hamas’ October 7 attack the Canadian Air Force flew 30 Israeli reservists back into the country. With flights evacuating Canadians from Tel Aviv to Athens, military aircraft transported Israeli reservists in the other direction.
Ten days ago, Canadian Forces Intelligence Command endorsed Israel’s highly suspect claim the IDF wasn’t responsible for killing hundreds at the al-Ahli Anglican Hospital in Gaza. Echoing US and Israeli claims, Canada’s military intelligence suggested an errant Palestinian rocket was the cause of the destruction. But a subsequent New York Times investigation rejected an important part of that claim while previous Al Jazeera and Britain’s channel 4 reports have questioned Israel’s denial.
Through the Five Eyes, Canadian military intelligence has close ties to its Israeli counterparts. The Department of National Defence run Communications Security Establishment (CSE) has long gathered intelligence on Palestinians for Israel. According to files released by Edward Snowden, CSE spied on Israel’s enemies and shared the intelligence with that country’s SIGINT National Unit. “Palestinians” was a “specific intelligence topic” of a CSE, US NSA and British GCH project shared with their Israeli counterpart.
Alongside relations with the Five Eyes intelligence apparatus, Israel has a Strategic Partnership with NATO. Canada and Israel both have military attachés in each other’s countries and top military officials regularly visit each other. The Israeli Air Force trains in Canada and Canada has a “border management and security” agreement with Israel, even though the two countries do not share a border. Additionally, the Canada-Israel Industrial Research and Development Fund has pumped tens of millions of dollars into joint research ventures between the countries’ military companies.
Through Operation Proteus Canadian troops in the West Bank have been regularly coordinating with their Israeli counterparts for over a decade. Since 2007 about 20 Canadian troops have been training Palestinian Authority security forces to act as the subcontractor of Israel’s occupation as part of a mission led by the Office of the United States Security Coordinator.
A bevy of Canadian groups, including some registered charities, assist the IDF in different ways. Israel and affiliated groups have long recruited Canadians in possible violation of the Foreign Enlistment Act. In 1947/48 hundreds of Canadians fought to establish Israel and ethnically cleanse Palestine. Israel’s initial Air Force was led by a Canadian and dominated by former World War II Canadian pilots.
Back to the present day, the JTF2 deployment to Israel may go beyond assisting evacuation efforts and embassy security. Since the fighting erupted three weeks ago the US has dispatched an aircraft carrier and about a dozen vessels with 15,000 soldiers to the region. US forces, including a three-star general, are advising the IDF on its fighting strategy. According to the New York Times, US special forces are helping locate Hamas hostages. Assistant secretary of defense for special operations, Christopher P. Maier, said their main task is to “identify hostages” but he also noted that “we’re actively helping the Israelis to do a number of things.”
JTF2 works closely with their US counterparts so they may be assisting its special forces with regards to hostages or other military planning. As part of their longer term plan, Israeli and US officials have discussed “granting temporary oversight to Gaza to countries from the region, backed by troops from the US, UK, Germany and France”, reported Bloomberg. JTF2 could be preparing for that possibility.
From Afghanistan to Iraq, Libya to Haiti Canadian special forces have deployed on many politically controversial missions. What the secretive forces are doing in Israel remains unclear, but they certainly aren’t assisting the Palestinians being slaughtered in Gaza.
November 2, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Militarism, Wars for Israel | Canada, Gaza, Israel, Palestine, Zionism |
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The Hidden History of How the U.S. Was Used to Create Israel
As the crisis involving the Israelis and Palestinians deepens after the October 7 Hamas attack, we might pause to examine how the state of Israel was created in the first place. At the current juncture, as World War III looms on the horizon, as massacres are currently being perpetrated by Israel against the civilian population of Gaza, with a death toll exceeding 9,000, of which over 4,000 are children, and as a Western armada is gathering in the eastern Mediterranean, it is befitting to review journalist Alison Weir’s book Against Our Better Judgment: The Hidden History of How the U.S. Was Used to Create Israel. The book was published in 2014, is packed with often hard-to-access details, and is masterfully documented. Alison Weir is also head of a group she has founded: If Americans Knew.
Alison Weir’s book is crucially important in considering ways to gain a broader perspective in order to defuse the situation. It is also of keen interest with respect to the larger potential conflict, where U.S. political leaders are again trotting out the phrase, “Axis of Evil,” this time to describe the nations of Russia, China, and Iran. (Sometimes North Korea is tossed in for good measure.) It’s Iran, of course, that U.S. leaders are identifying as an alleged sponsor of the resistance groups in and around Palestine, including Hamas.
Following are what I view as the main points from Alison Weir’s book. My own interspersed editorial comments are in italics. Page numbers are given in parentheses only for quotations from the book.
Origin of Zionism in the U.S. Against Our Better Judgment: The Hidden History of How the U.S. Was Used to Create Israel begins by explaining that support for Zionism, defined as the desire for creation of a Jewish national state somewhere in the world, goes back in U.S. history to the late 1880s, around the time that the Zionist Movement was becoming prominent in Europe. By the 1910s, there were thousands of U.S. adherents, though many Jews opposed Zionism as not in the interests of the Jewish people and certain to result in antagonism toward them. Probably a majority of Jews in the U.S. had never even heard of Zionism and/or were happy to have assimilated into American society. In fact, there was nothing that could even be viewed remotely as an “anti-Semitism problem” in the U.S. at this time.
Role of U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Louis Brandeis and Creation of the Parushim. Still, some very powerful people became Zionists, including U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, whose main disciple was future Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter. Brandeis formed a secret organization called the Parushim, whose sole purpose was to bring about the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. This Zionist organization required an oath that appeared to give life and death power over its sworn members.
“Parushim,” also spelled “Purushim,” is the Hebrew word from which the name “Pharisees” is derived, meaning “separatists.” From the Pharisees came Rabbinical Judaism and the idea that, “We should not assimilate or acculturate at all.” (prezi.com) I would note that Alison Weir’s book did not aim at giving an account of the deeper motivations of the Zionist movement, other than its claim to be a reaction to European “anti-Semitism.” For more depth, I would recommend a careful reading of the classic The Controversy of Zion by British journalist Douglas Reed (1895-1976).
Justice Louis Brandeis was close to Wall Street banker Jacob Schiff. Brandeis was also closely involved with the creation of the Federal Reserve System, as was Schiff, though Brandeis’s involvement in political issues was largely behind the scenes.
The Federal Reserve, I would add, was largely a project of the U.S. Money Trust and the British/European Rothschilds. The Rothschilds were also heavily involved in Zionism and in the creation and support of the Zionist state. The fact that Zionism was sponsored by some incredibly rich people might cause us to ask to what extent financial rewards played a role in the rapid conversion of many Jews and non-Jews to Zionism during this period. For information on creation of the Federal Reserve, see my own book, Our Country, Then and Now (Clarity Press, 2023).
Collaboration Between the Parushim and Great Britain. Justice Louis Brandeis’s Parushim worked closely with Zionists in Great Britain, including travel back and forth, to persuade the British government to designate Palestine as a future Jewish homeland. This was after Zionist leaders had rejected such locations as Kenya. Thus was created a “contract” between Britain and the Parushim that if the British would generate what became the Balfour Declaration, the U.S. Zionists would endeavor to assure U.S. entrance into World War I against Germany on the side of Britain. This contract was fulfilled by both parties, though, as in the U.S., many British Jews opposed Zionism for similar reasons—as a threat to Jewish assimilation.
The Balfour Declaration specified that it should be “clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” (p.97) At the time, non-Jewish communities made up 92 percent of the population of Palestine.
Zionism and the Failure to Make Peace with the Ottoman Empire. World War I begin in 1914. By 1915-1916, the Ottoman Empire, which was allied with Germany but not at war against the U.S., offered to make a separate peace with the U.S. The Ottomans had also offered to allow the Jews of Europe to live at peace anywhere in their empire. The U.S. sent a delegation to negotiate this separate peace, but Brandeis informed the British Zionists that the delegation was on its way. The British Zionists then send their leader, Chaim Weizmann, to intercept the U.S. delegation at Gibraltar, where he prevailed on it to call off the negotiations. The reason was that the British were going to lay claim to Palestine after the war as a homeland for the Jews, so they wanted to assure that Palestine was going to be available for British control. The British design was to break up the Ottoman Empire, not leave it intact through a separate U.S.-instigated peace.
Warnings Against the Zionist Project. Diplomats within the U.S. State Department both in Washington, D.C., and in the Middle East were aware of and warned against the Zionist project, arguing that a million Palestinians would be displaced or made virtual servants/slaves of the invaders.
World War I. In 1917 the U.S. entered the war on the side of Britain, per the Zionist agreement, and Germany was defeated, along with the Ottomans. Britain also signed a secret agreement with France by which it would get control of Palestine after the war. Control was implemented through the vehicle of a British Mandate approved by the League of Nations.
During this period, antagonism against Jews had begun to grow within U.S. society, partly in reaction to perceptions that Jews controlled the banks and other financial institutions. “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” had also appeared. While claimed to be a forgery from Czarist Russia, the Protocols received credence and publicity from Henry Ford and others.
Germany was aware that the Zionists had contributed to the defeat of Germany in WWI. This contributed to the anti-Jewish attitudes of Germans after the war and was a factor in the later Nazi anti-Jewish policies.
During WWI, the Parushim gave the FBI a list of Americans who were opponents to Zionism or the war. Many of these people were arrested and sent to prison. Through all of this, Brandeis was directing matters from behind the scenes. He was arguably the most powerful person in the U.S., but his political activities were secret or carried out through proxies.
At the end of WWI, President Woodrow Wilson sent a commission to Palestine to investigate the situation. Known as the King-Crane Commission, its report “recommended against the Zionist position of unlimited immigration of Jews to make Palestine a distinctly Jewish state.” The report stated that “the Zionists looked forward to a practically complete dispossession of the present non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine,” that “armed force would be required to accomplish this,” and that “the project for making Palestine distinctly a Jewish commonwealth should be given up.” The report of the King-Crane Commission “was suppressed.” (p.25)
Zionism After World War I. Between the two world wars, a growing number of U.S. Zionists worked to further the project for the creation of Israel. In Germany, the Zionists supported the rise of the Nazis, as this would lead to German Jews wanting to emigrate to Palestine. In Iraq, where the Jewish leaders did not support Zionism, Iraqi Jews were attacked, even murdered, to force them to emigrate to Palestine. Without arousing the anxiety of Jews around the world that they were unsafe in their homelands, Zionist planners believed there would not be enough Jewish settlers to create a Zionist state and force the Palestinians out.
Opponents of Zionism in the U.S. diplomatic service were threatened with having their careers destroyed if they did not support the claims that Jews in foreign countries were suffering discrimination so should want to move to Palestine. The Zionists worked to limit immigration opportunities for Jews elsewhere than Palestine, including the U.S. The Zionists opposed measures by the British government to limit the number of Jews who could enter Palestine.
Collaboration Between the Zionists and Nazis. Building on work by author Hannah Arendt, Edwin Black wrote The Transfer Agreement: The Dramatic Story of the Pact Between the Third Reich and Jewish Palestine. Click Here According to author Tom Segev, “Arendt stated that many Jews would have survived ‘had their leaders not helped the Nazis organize the concentration of Jews in the ghettos, their deportation to the east, and their transport to the death camps.’” (p.146) This was called the “Haavara Agreement.”
The famous 1930s Jewish boycott of German products may have been instigated by Zionists to promote anti-Jewish sentiment leading to more desire among Jews to emigrate to Palestine. Other Zionists made claims that persecuted Jews were prone to becoming revolutionary communists for the same purpose.
Zionist Activities Between the World Wars. In the U.S. during the 1920s and 1930s, Zionist leaders muffled talk of a Jewish state in Palestine and focused on creating new institutions there as altruistic enterprises. An example was Hebrew University, opening in Jerusalem in 1925. Zionist leaders complained that most U.S. Jews saw themselves first and foremost as American citizens. Organizations like the American Zionist Emergency Council and the United Jewish Appeal were founded to generate funding and support. Donations to the United Jewish Appeal in 1948 was four times that of the American Red Cross. Pro-Zionist publicity and lobbying efforts were unleashed across the U.S. Some Jews, like the American Council for Judaism, still opposed Zionism as inimical to real Jewish interests. The ACJ opposed the Zionists’ “anti-Semitic racialist lie that Jews the world over were a separate, national body.” (p.152)
Zionist advocacy in the U.S. had powerful political adherents. New York Congressman Emanuel Celler told President Harry Truman, “We’ll run you out of town,” if he did not support the program. Senator Jacob Javits said, “We’ll fight to the death and make a Jewish state in Palestine if it’s the last thing that we do.” (p.38) Zionist propaganda included funding of best-selling pro-Zionist books by non-Jews. Zionists such as wealthy Wall Street lawyer Samuel Untermyer began to interject “dispensationalist” ideas of “Christian Zionism” into the discourse through sponsorship of the “Scofield Reference Bible.” (Untermyer was also a leading backer of the Federal Reserve and advocate of the worldwide Jewish boycott of Germany.)
Today, as we all know, “Christian Zionism” among “evangelicals” is part of the bedrock support of the Israel Lobby. Leading evangelical ministers like Jerry Falwell received large donations from Zionist supporters. An entire “dispensationalist” mythology involving the “Rapture,” etc., has been constructed and promoted to justify the political union between this group of American religionists and the most extreme factions of Israeli politics led today by such figures as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Though Netanyahu has surfaced this mad mythology to cover Israeli genocide in Gaza, the topic is not covered in detail in Alison Weir’s book, so will not be dealt with further here.
Protestant Support of Zionism. By the 1930s, U.S. Zionists were trying to organize American Protestants in their support. By the end of WWII the Christian Council on Palestine had grown to 3,000 members and the American Palestine Committee to 6,500. The appeal to Protestants was based on generating sympathy for refugees, though no mention was made of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians becoming refugees due to the Zionist takeover. During the Israeli war of independence in 1947-1949, Christian churches and institutions in Palestine were assaulted by the Zionists along with the Palestinians.
Beginnings of Terrorism and U.N. Partition of Palestine. In Palestine in the 1930s and 1940s, the Zionists tried to buy Palestinian land but few inhabitants wished to sell. The Zionists then began to organize terrorist forces to drive them out. These terrorist groups also targeted British government officials, as Palestine was still a British Mandate. Author Alison Weir cites a statement by David ben Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, that suggests this was at least part of what started today’s worldwide phenomenon of terrorism.
By the start of the 1947-1949 war, Jews made up 30 percent of the Palestinian population but owned only 6-7 percent of the land. In 1947, Britain turned its Palestine Mandate over to the U.N. A General Assembly resolution to partition gave the Zionists 55 percent of the land of Palestine. The U.S. State Department opposed the partition plan as against the wishes of local people and in violation of U.S. interests and of democratic principles. Officials warned that partition “would guarantee that the Palestine problem would be permanent and still more complicated in the future.” (p.45) Officials said the proposal was for “a theocratic racial state” that discriminated “on grounds of religion and race.” (p.45) The leading anti-Zionist Department of State official, Loy Henderson, was exiled by his superiors to a post as ambassador to Nepal.
U.S. Government Opposition to Zionism. Nevertheless, virtually the entire U.S. executive branch was opposed to a Jewish state in Palestine. Statements and reports were made by a 1946 commission headed by Ambassador Henry F. Grady, the CIA, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson. A 1948 report of the Joint Chiefs of Staff stated that, “The Zionist strategy will seek to involve [the U.S.] in a continuously widening and deepening series of operations intended to secure maximum Jewish objectives.” (p.47)
Jewish leaders were well aware that U.N. partitioning of Palestine was temporary and that over time, the Jewish state would expand to absorb the entire region. The concept of “Eretz Israel” was formulated, whereby the Zionist state would encompass Transjordan, as well as parts of Lebanon and Syria. Zionists also had begun using U.S. antagonism toward the Soviet Union as an argument for creation of a pro-Western Jewish state. This hearkened back to the early days of Zionism, when Zionist leaders characterized their proposed state as a bulwark of British influence in the Middle East; i.e., as an extension of British colonialism and geopolitics.
Today, pro-Zionists make the argument that Israel is an outpost of benign “Judeo-Christian” influence in the Middle East, as they try to arouse antagonism toward the one billion Muslims in the world in a purported “clash of civilizations.” Such attitudes became prominent in U.S. politics during the “War on Terror” of the Bush/Cheney administration that continues today through U.S. labeling of anti-Zionist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah as “terrorist” organizations. This is despite the historical fact cited above that it was the Zionists who introduced terrorism into the Middle East.
U.S. Recognition of Israel and the Role of President Truman. The U.S. was the first country to recognize Israel as an independent state when on May 14, 1948, President Harry Truman issued a statement of recognition following Israel’s proclamation of independence on the same date. Truman’s main motivation was believed at the time, and still is today, the winning of Jewish support in the presidential election that year. His decision was strongly opposed by Secretary of State George Marshall, Secretary of Defense James Forrestal, the CIA and National Security Council, and top State Department official George Kennan. Intelligence agent Kermit Roosevelt wrote: “The present course of world crisis will increasingly force upon Americans the realization that their national interests and those of the proposed Jewish state in Palestine are going to conflict.” (p.51) Contrary to the belief that U.S. oil interests promoted the Zionist project, officials argued that U.S. ability to access Middle Eastern resources would be adversely affected. Truman also had pro-Zionist insiders at high levels of his administration.
Author Alison Weir points out that bribery also played a part. “Gore Vidal wrote: ‘Sometime in the late 1950s, that world-class gossip and occasional historian, John F. Kennedy, told me how, in 1948, Harry S. Truman had been pretty much abandoned by everyone when he came to run for president. Then an American Zionist brought him two million dollars in cash, in a suitcase, aboard his whistle-stop campaign train. ‘That’s why our recognition of Israel was rushed through so fast.’” (p.167) Jewish businessman Abraham Feinberg explained his raising of cash for Truman in an oral history interview published by the Truman Library in 1973. The CIA also discovered Feinberg’s illegal gun-running to Zionist groups.
I may be the first writer to point out that Truman’s action in accepting bribes, if discovered, could have been seen and treated as an impeachable offense.
Zionist Takeover of Palestine. At the time of Israel’s proclamation of independence and immediate U.S. recognition, the U.N. resolution of partition had been passed, with war ensuing between Zionist and Arab forces. The U.N. General Assembly adopted the partition plan by 33 votes to 13 with 10 abstentions, with many nations subjected to intense Zionist lobbying and threats. For instance, “Financier and longtime presidential adviser Bernard Baruch told France it would lose U.S. aid if it voted against partition.” (p.55) A Swedish U.N. mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte, was killed by Zionist assassins. To this day, no accepted legal authority for the U.N. in its partitioning of Palestine has ever been demonstrated. In other words, it was likely an extra-legal action in response to Zionist lobbying.
Though sporadic violence between Jews and Palestinian Arabs had taken place over the previous two decades, the Zionists committed wholesale massacres of Palestinians after the U.N. resolution for partition. By the end of Israel’s war of independence in 1948, over 750,000 Palestinians had been expelled from Zionist-controlled territory. Israeli historian Tom Segev wrote: “Israel was born of terror, war, and revolution, and its creation required a measure of fanaticism and cruelty.” (p.58) Today this is called in Arabic the “Nakba”—“catastrophe.”
The most well-known massacre took place at the village of Deir Yessin in April 1948, before any Arab armies had joined the fight. There, 254 villagers were murdered in cold blood. The heads of two militias present at Deir Yessin, Irgun and the Stern Gang, were Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, both of whom later became prime ministers of Israel. The Irgun bombed the King David Hotel in Jerusalem on July 22, 1947, killing 86. The Stern Gang also solicited aid from the Axis powers during WWII.
Zionist Front Organizations in the U.S. During the 1930s and 1940s, the Zionists created a number of front organizations to raise money used to finance militant activities in Palestine. After WWII, the U.S. maintained an arms embargo against Israel and the Middle East. Foremost among the sponsors of the front organizations intended to skirt the embargo was Irgun. One group, the Jewish Army of Stateless and Palestinians Jews, claimed it was formed to fight the Nazis in Europe, but was intended instead to fight the British and Arabs in Palestine. These groups espoused such radical ideologies as the idea that “non-Jews are the embodiment of Satan, and that the world was created solely for Jews.” (p.67) Another group, headed by Orthodox Rabbi Baruch Korff, hatched a plot to blow up the British foreign office in London that was exposed in the New York Herald Tribune. Through political influence, U.S. charges against Korff were dropped. Later he “became a close friend and fervent supporter of President Richard Nixon, who called him ‘my rabbi.’” (p.71) Nixon’s support for Israel manifested in the gigantic airlift of military supplies that helped save Israel from defeat in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Another major organization raising money for sending arms to the Zionists in Palestine was the Sonneborn Institute. Between 1939 and May 1948, the Jewish Agency for Israel was also active, raising the equivalent today of $3.5 billion.
Zionism and Organized Crime. Financial backers of Israeli independence included members of organized crime, including Meyer Lansky, head of the Jewish Mafia in the U.S. In an April 19, 2018 article in Tablet (tabletmag.com) entitled “Gangsters for Zion: Yom Ha’atzmaut: How Jewish mobsters helped Israel gain its independence. Robert Rockaway wrote: “In 1945, the Jewish Agency, the pre-state Israeli government headed by David Ben-Gurion, created a vast clandestine arms-purchasing-and-smuggling network throughout the United States. The operation was placed under the aegis of the Haganah, the underground forerunner of the Israel Defense Forces, and involved hundreds of Americans from every walk of life. They included millionaires, rabbinical students, scrap-metal merchants, ex-GIs, college students, longshoremen, industrialists, chemists, engineers, Protestants and Catholics, as well as Jews. One group, who remained anonymous and rarely talked about, were men who were tough, streetwise, unafraid, and had access to ready cash: Jewish gangsters.” Rockaway, a professor emeritus at Tel Aviv University, also wrote that through their control of U.S. ports, the Jewish mob arranged for arms deliveries to Israel aboard vessels flying the flag of Panama.
Recruiting Jews to Relocate to Palestine. “Zionist cadres infiltrated displaced persons’ camps that had been set up to house refugees displaced during WWII. These infiltrators tried secretly to funnel people to Palestine. When it turned out that most didn’t want to go to Palestine, they worked to convince them—sometimes by force.” (p.74) Another recruiting source was Jewish foster children in Christian homes. The Zionists claimed to be the sole representative of all the world’s Jews in order to legitimize efforts to divert war survivors to Israel, not to countries like the U.S. to which many preferred to go. “After a voluntary recruitment drive netted less than 0.3 percent of the DP [displaced persons] population, a compulsory draft was implemented.” (p.79) Some draftees were required to fight in Palestine in the Zionist war of independence. Meanwhile, the secretive Sieff group was formed in Washington, D.C., to carry out back channel lobbying for the Zionist project. The group was protected by such powerful individuals as Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr., and the aforementioned financier and presidential adviser Bernard Baruch.
Fate of the Palestinian Refugees. Three-quarters of a million Palestinian refugees fled to neighboring regions in a gigantic humanitarian disaster. A 1948 State Department report stated “The total direct relief offered…by the Israeli government to date consists of 500 cases of oranges.” (p.83) The value of land confiscated by the Zionists amounted to $5.2 trillion in today’s dollars. Christians also suffered as “numerous convents, hospices, seminaries, and churches were either destroyed or cleared of their Christian owners and custodians.” (p.83) Efforts by U.S. government officials to withhold aid to the Israeli government due to the refugee crisis were overruled by President Truman.
Zionism and the media. Even as early as WWI, the Zionists exerted almost complete control over the U.S. press. This included placing pro-Zionist articles in prestigious newspapers like The New York Times. In 1953, author Alfred Lilienthal wrote: “The capture of the American press by Jewish nationalism was, in fact, incredibly complete. Magazines as well as newspapers, in news stories as well as editorial columns, gave primarily the Zionist views of events before, during, and after partition.” (p.86) Zionist coercion extended to withdrawal of advertising, cancellation of subscriptions, and blacklisting of journalists and authors, even those offering a mere trace of sympathy toward the displaced Palestinians. Particularly emotional in their support of Zionism were the journals the Nation and the New Republic. An example of how the Zionists could destroy an author’s career was the attack on then-famous journalist Dorothy Thompson after “she began to speak about Palestinian refugees, narrated a documentary about their plight, and condemned Jewish terrorism. (p.92)
We all know that the complete slanting of U.S. media coverage toward Zionism and Israel dominates news reporting at all levels and across the ideological spectrum, from the top newspapers and networks to what is left of small town journalism. This includes so-called “independent” outlets like Breitbart. The start of this bias began, perhaps not coincidentally, during the time before WWI when the newsrooms of U.S. newspapers were taken over by propagandists sympathetic to the Federal Reserve System and the Money Trust. Today, of course, we have the internet, which has begun to make inroads into the control of the news by pro-establishment media corporations and Deep State censors. Internet outlets also must be cautious, however, so are often reduced to the role of “limited hangouts,” reporting only selected stories that protest particularly egregious Israeli offenses, but never the “big picture.”
In conclusion we can say that, as Alison Weir’s book makes clear, it was largely American Zionists who financed and enabled the violent takeover of Palestine and who thereby share responsibility over the past three-quarters of a century for the atrocities committed against a diverse population whose forebears had been living in peace and rooted in the region for millenniums. This population also inhabited the holy city of Jerusalem, sacred to the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic religions.
The book also makes it clear that people can oppose Zionism—the forceful establishment of a Jewish national state in Palestine—without being anti-Jewish or “anti-Semitic.” Of course, most of the indigenous people of Palestine are “Semites” in ethnicity and language. Also, the most forceful opponents of the original Zionist movement in Great Britain, the U.S., and possibly other nations, have been, and still are, Jews themselves who had successfully assimilated into their host cultures. Examples are the Hassidic Jews of Brooklyn, N.Y., and Jews in Iran who refuse to support Israel.
Many more volumes could or should be written about U.S. enabling of Israel and Zionism and about Israel’s and Zionism’s interference in internal U.S. affairs. I would include an examination of Israel’s possible participation in the JFK/RFK assassinations and the 9/11 attacks, U.S. acquiescence in Israel’s nuclear weapons program, Israel’s links with the Neocons who control today’s U.S. foreign policy, and today’s courting of World War III against more than half the world’s countries, starting with Israel’s nemesis, Iran. Will the U.S. stumble into WWIII because of its pro-Zionist captivity?
Copyright 2023 by Richard C. Cook. Comments are welcome and will be read at monetaryreform@gmail.com.
Richard C. Cook is a retired U.S. federal analyst who served with the U.S. Civil Service Commission, FDA, the Carter White House, NASA, and the U.S. Treasury. As a whistleblower at the time of the Challenger disaster, he broke the story of the flawed O-ring joints that destroyed the Shuttle. After serving at Treasury, he exposed the disastrous flaws of a monetary system controlled by private finance in his book We Hold These Truths: The Hope of Monetary Reform. As an adviser to the American Monetary Institute and while working with Congressman Dennis Kucinich, he advocated the replacement of the Federal Reserve System with a genuine national currency. His latest book is Our Country, Then and Now (Clarity Press, 2023).
“Every human enterprise must serve life, must seek to enrich existence on earth, lest man become enslaved where he seeks to establish his dominion!” Bô Yin Râ (Joseph Anton Schneiderfranken, 1876-1943), Translation by Posthumus Projects Amsterdam, 2014.
November 2, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Book Review, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes, Wars for Israel | FBI, Israel, Palestine, UK, United States, Zionism |
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Israeli forces launched another limited ground incursion into the Gaza Strip overnight on Thursday, the second in a row following an incursion the night before.
The small-scale incursions carried out so far are meant to test the waters for the upcoming ground invasion Israel has announced.
“The IDF conducted strikes on Hamas terrorist targets over the last 24 hours. IDF ground troops, fighter jets, and UAVs struck: Anti-tank missile launch sites, Command and control centers, Hamas terrorist operatives,” the Israeli army said in a statement.
“The troops exited the area and no injuries were reported,” it added.
Israeli troops also carried out a limited incursion into Gaza the night before, on 25 October.
The incursion aimed to help prepare forces for the “next stages” of the war and the anticipated large-scale offensive on the besieged enclave.
“IDF tanks and infantry struck numerous terrorist cells, infrastructure, and anti-tank missile launch posts. The soldiers have since exited the area and returned to Israeli territory,” a military statement said on 26 October.
A previous Israeli attempt to enter the strip last weekend was met with fierce resistance by Hamas’ Al-Qassam Brigades.
Israeli troops crossed the border fence by several meters for a preparatory incursion into the Gaza Strip. The Al-Qassam Brigades ambushed the troops, destroying two army bulldozers and a tank, leaving several soldiers seriously wounded, and forcing them to withdraw.
Retired US Army colonel Douglas Macgregor said this week that US special forces went into Gaza with the Israeli army to “reconnoiter” and plan for the release of prisoners.
“They were shot to pieces and took heavy losses, as I understand,” Macgregor added.
Israel announced plans to launch a full ground invasion of the Gaza Strip following the launch of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on 7 October.
The stated goal is to “eradicate” Hamas. Israel says it intends to find and destroy the group’s extensive network of tunnels and wipe out its infrastructure while its army attacks from the air and sea.
However, Tel Aviv has continued to delay the operation, coinciding with reports that Washington is unconvinced of Israel’s readiness for a ground invasion. Nonetheless, US special forces have been advising and coordinating with the Israeli army to prepare.
“The military leadership has already finalized an invasion plan, but [Benjamin] Netanyahu has angered senior officers by refusing to sign off on it — in part because he wants unanimous approval from members of the war cabinet he formed after the Oct. 7 attack,” the New York Times (NYT) reported on 26 October, citing two anonymous sources who have been present at Israeli cabinet meetings.
“Analysts believe that Mr. Netanyahu is wary about unilaterally giving the go-ahead because, with public confidence in his leadership already decreasing, he fears being blamed if the operation fails,” NYT added.
According to a recent poll, a majority of Israelis believe that Netanyahu must bear the responsibility for the massive security and intelligence failure which led the success of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.
Israel announced on 25 October that it is waiting for further equipment deliveries from the US, but continues to maintain that the full ground invasion is imminent.
Analysts have said Israel’s goal of “eradicating” Hamas is overambitious.
According to The Cradle’s Hasan Illaik, such an operation will drag Israel into a massive multi-front war which it would not be able to bear the cost of.
Hamas’ Al-Qassam Brigades have heavily prepared themselves to face Israel on the ground.
October 27, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Militarism, Wars for Israel | Gaza, Israel, Palestine, Zionism |
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The US has dramatically beefed up its presence in the Middle East, sending two carrier strike groups, thousands of Marines, multiple THAAD and Patriot missile batteries, and more warplanes to the region amid the Palestinian-Israeli flare-up. But these forces can’t guarantee victory in case of a shooting war, says military observer Andrei Martyanov.
Tehran issued its strongest warning to Washington to date over the Palestinian-Israeli crisis on Thursday, cautioning that the US wouldn’t be able to escape if the conflict continues unabated.
“I say frankly to the American statesmen, who are now managing the genocide in Palestine that we do not welcome [an] expansion of the war in the region,” Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian said in New York during an emergency United Nations General Assembly session. America “will not be spared from this fire” if the crisis endures, Amir-Abdollahian emphasized. “It is our home, and West Asia is our region. We do not compromise with any party and any side, and we have no reservation when it comes to our home’s security.”
Tehran has so far moderated its response to US and Israeli actions during the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, ignoring efforts by Tel Aviv to goad the country into a military response by attacking Iranian allies in Syria and Lebanon, and snubbing threats by loudmouth officials and lawmakers to bring the war home to “Iran’s backyard.” Instead, Tehran has joined countries including Russia, China, Brazil and Turkiye in calling for an immediate ceasefire.
Netanyahu cabinet minister Nir Barakat threatened last week to cut off the Iranian “head of the snake” and launch attacks against the Islamic Republic if Hezbollah tried to open a second front against Israel from the north. Meanwhile, President Biden on Wednesday said he had issued a “warning” to Iran’s supreme leader that if Iran “continue[s] to move against” American troops in the Middle East, the US “will respond, and he should be prepared.”
But as observers with an understanding of Iran’s military capabilities observe, tackling Iran would be unlike anything either Israel or the US have ever attempted, with the Islamic Republic’s combination of natural defensive geography, powerful indigenous military-industrial complex, advanced missile and drone programs, and readiness to defend its interests even against much more powerful foes, making it an extremely difficult target.
US Carriers in Eastern Med ‘Sitting Ducks’ for Missiles
The centerpiece of the US forces deployed to the Middle East amid the Palestinian-Israeli crisis are the USS Gerald Ford and USS Dwight D. Eisenhower carrier strike groups. Each armada theoretically has enough firepower to level a small country, with each carrier carrying a complement of up to 90 combat aircraft, and the giant warships themselves flanked by between four to six cruise missile-equipped destroyers.
The armadas are certainly no threat to be taken lightly, but do have important weaknesses when stacked up against countries with modern missile capabilities, transforming into “white elephants” from a bygone era, says veteran military analyst and best-selling author Andrei Martyanov.
“In terms of their real power projection,” carriers “are big fat sitting targets against modern weaponry such as anti-ship missiles and hypersonic missiles,” Martyanov told Sputnik’s New Rules podcast.
“In this respect, they are not a real asset, but rather a liability against any major power such as Russia or China,” the observer explained. “In this particular case, those aircraft carriers and their battle groups, which usually comprise two or three ‘Aegis’-carrying destroyers – they are not really any more a serious military asset except for their ‘fear factor’…They could be sunk or basically disabled, and that’s pretty much it,” he said.
Israel-Palestine War: Is the US Preparing to Attack Iran?
The same can be said even for a mid-tier military power like Iran, given its vast arsenal of thousands of medium and long-range ballistic and cruise missiles, and recent development of a hypersonic missile known as the Fatah. Many of these weapons are theoretically in range of US warships, plus dozens of US bases dotting the Middle East – some of them conveniently just across the Persian Gulf separating Iran from the Arab Gulf oil states.
“Iran will be able to deliver both an asymmetric and a very symmetrical” response, Martyanov observed. “Iran has a vast number of highly sophisticated, highly developed ballistic missiles… And they have a vast number of cruise missiles. [The response] can be very symmetrical. And every single air base, military base of the United States will be under attack.”
Combined with carriers’ vulnerabilities is their massive cost, Martyanov said, pointing out that the new Ford-class carrier alone costs some $13 billion, plus $5-6 billion for its complement of aircraft.
“So you have a single weapon, a single carrier, a single ship, which carries on itself almost $20 billion worth of military assets and could be taken out by two or three missiles such as Zircon or Kinzhal. Can you imagine the impact, apart from fact of them having a very serious cultural and mental influence within the United States? The loss of a single ship can escalate…to the nuclear threshold because of the political, emotional, cultural and of course military impact of such a loss. Don’t forget, you also have more than 6,000 people onboard this carrier,” the observer stressed.
Even the Russian-made Yakhont anti-ship missile possessed by Syria – which can reach up to Mach 3 at the terminal stage of flight and has a range of some 300 km, can pose a serious challenge to the American carrier groups, Martyanov said, not to mention the various missiles possessed by Hezbollah – which together force the US to stay further away the region’s coasts.
Israeli or US attack on Iran Would Result in Massive Retaliation
Asked to comment specifically on Lindsey Graham’s threats against Iran, Martyanov emphasized that the “blowhard,” “certified war criminal” lawmaker “doesn’t know what he’s talking about” when it comes to the consequences of the actions he’s proposing.
For one thing, Martyanov said, Graham “doesn’t understand that the United States is not capable” of mounting “any kind of serious ground operation at all” against Iran.
“They know if they go in” that they “can send some Tomahawks there. Well, guess what? Iran is not even Syria. Iran is a serious regional power with actually quite significant military potential. And it has some high-tech weapons, including extremely advanced air defense. So in the United States, obviously, those statements are primarily made for public and for the benefit of Israel, too,” the observer said.
The same is the case for Israel, Martyanov noted, with Tel Aviv’s spate of anti-Iranian rhetoric constituting “empty threats,” since the Jewish State lacks the resources to mount a ground operation against Iran even if it were technically feasible.
“It would be decimated, but don’t forget, there are 1,200 kilometers separating Israel and Iran. Neither side can actually provide serious deployment of forces to fight a real war,” the observer said, pointing out that neither country would be able take advantage of combined arms multipliers fighting at such great distances.
“So what’s left is primarily air operations. And even this, on the part of Israel, will require direct interference and support from the United States because, as already stated, it’s 1,200 kilometers and they would have to fly over the territory of Jordan, Saudi Arabia. Good luck getting permission to do that. Or you can try to circumnavigate them, but then you have to refuel them nonstop. And that’s where the United States comes in,” Martyanov said.
“People forget that Iran has not only good air defense – they have a pretty outstanding variety of all kinds of operational tactical and operational ballistic missiles. And those are not Katyusha [rockets]; they are very serious, highly sophisticated missiles with great targeting. As the United States experienced in 2020, when Donald Trump ordered the absolutely irresponsible assassination of [IRGC Quds Force Commander Qasem] Soleimani,” the military analyst noted, recalling Iran’s bombardment of a pair of US bases in Iraq using precision missiles.
“Iran can literally blow up every single American base in the Middle East as a retaliation. So we have these dynamics there. And that’s why, for the most part, these are pathos statements or chest thumping,” Martyanov summed up.
October 27, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Militarism, Wars for Israel | Israel, Russia, Syria, United States, Zionism |
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It now appears certain the United States is concentrating a huge naval force in the eastern Mediterranean, Red, and Arabian seas.
Several NATO nations are also sending warships to join this growing fleet.
Unknown numbers of US and NATO submarines are also certainly lurking in these regions.
There is already substantial US air power presence in the Persian Gulf region.
Israel is clearly working in concert with the US/NATO in whatever is brewing.
And make no mistake, something big IS brewing.
It is something I have written about for several years now, but consistently believed the Pentagon was not stupid enough to actually attempt.
As I view it, there can be only one primary target that would warrant such a large projection of military power as is underway: Iran and its allies in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon.
And, as I have repeatedly argued over the years, I am convinced making war against Iran is a recipe for unforeseen disaster.
Iran wields much more military capability than is generally understood and appreciated both by western military analysts and the western populace.
There is no doubt the US/NATO/Israel, in tandem, can inflict severe damage against Iranian targets. But I am convinced they cannot do so without also incurring severe damage themselves.
Let’s also not forget there is a wildcard in this game: Russia and its strategically imperative bases in Syria.
As I see it, there are two realities at work here that will necessarily come into conflict:
1) The Pentagon is almost certain to regard the Russian bases in Syria as unacceptable threats to their objectives in the region. And therefore they will seek to neutralize them.
2) The Russians will fight to retain their Syrian bases.
Having now been compelled to abandon their designs to use the #MotherOfAllProxyArmies in Ukraine to weaken Russia, the Masters of Empire would no doubt love to “change the narrative” by defeating the Russians in Syria.
I believe Russian recognition of this likely move by the Americans is why Russian President Vladimir Putin — in China, no less — publicly announced 24/7 patrols of Kinzhal-armed Russian aircraft within range of the eastern half of the Mediterranean and much of the Red and Arabian seas.
The #EmpireAtAllCosts cult must have convinced themselves the Russians are bluffing, or that their capabilities are much weaker than claimed.
I am convinced both ideas are mistaken.
If the US itself is not merely bluffing, then this whole thing could get out of hand really fast.
October 26, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Russophobia, Wars for Israel | Iran, Israel, NATO, Syria, United States, Zionism |
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The “Al-Aqsa Flood” battle launched by the Palestinian resistance on 7 October dealt Israel an unprecedented blow – in terms of human loss and its impact on the country’s military, intelligence, psychology, and deterrence.
In exchange for the blow it received, Israel set itself a goal of eliminating the Hamas movement. This goal was announced by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his Defense Minister Yoav Galant, and the majority of Israeli officials.
Hence, any ceasefire without achieving the full elimination of Hamas means a pure Israeli loss.
And while the Israeli military has killed about 5,000 Palestinian civilians and caused massive damage to housing and infrastructure in its 17-day air assault on the Gaza Strip, it has neither restored the pre-7 October deterrence it enjoyed, nor is it capable of emerging victorious.
To date, Israel has not been able to seriously harm Hamas’ military structure, say Gaza sources who spoke to The Cradle. Any ceasefire today would therefore mean that Tel Aviv has publicly swallowed the losses it incurred in Operation Al-Aqsa flood: at least 1,400 dead Israelis, the destruction of its army’s Gaza division, and 250 captives held by its enemy inside Gaza. Together, these will deliver a massive blow to Israel’s hard-fought deterrence capacity.
These prisoners will be used by the resistance to negotiate the release of more than 6,000 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli detention centers, in addition to lifting the siege on the Gaza Strip. Unless Tel Aviv is willing to sacrifice all these prisoners in its Gaza air blitz, the captives will play a big role in any settlement. Consider, for instance, that in 2011, Israel exchanged a single captured soldier for 1,027 Palestinian detainees.
Israel cannot exit this battle without fighting a ground war. Its army spokesman, Jonathan Conricus, told the Australian ABC that a ground war will occur unless Hamas complies with two conditions: surrendering without conditions, and releasing all Israeli prisoners. The Palestinian resistance outright rejects these conditions, and will continue to use its captives to pressure Israel to stop the war.
What’s taking so long?
Israel believes it needs a ground war to restore its deterrence with not only Gaza’s resistance factions, but also with adversaries in Lebanon, Iran, and the rest of the region. This ground war will focus on the northern Gaza Strip, including Gaza City and its environs, where the military and heart of the resistance is based. Eliminating Hamas in the northern Gaza Strip will inflict a defeat on the resistance that will take years, and perhaps decades, to recover from.
So then, why hasn’t the ground war begun yet? Eighteen days have already elapsed since Israel’s declaration of war, when it began to mobilize its 300,000 soldiers and reserve officers.
First, the occupation army knows well that the goal of “eliminating Hamas” is no easy feat. Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak has said that “eliminating Hamas is not possible” because it is an expression of an ideology and exists “in people’s hearts and minds.” Barak’s analysis is important – he isn’t just a former head of state, but importantly, a former Israeli army chief of staff and a former defense minister who led two battles in the Gaza Strip in 2008 and 2012.
Second, the Palestinian resistance in Gaza has prepared itself well for the ground war. The last such operation conducted by the Israelis in 2014, in which 60 troops were killed and two went missing, ended in failure by not achieving any of its goals. At that time, the Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) forces had nowhere near the quality of armaments, training, and numbers that they have today.
Furthermore, the network of strategic underground tunnels allegedly built by the Gaza resistance also developed significantly after 2014, allowing Hamas, PIJ, and others to move troops, weapons, and supplies around the territory unseen.
While the Israeli army seems prepared to bear greater human losses than it did in any previous war, largely because of Al-Aqsa Flood’s huge death toll, this does not mean that Tel Aviv can bear the cost of thousands more deaths, hundreds of destroyed armored vehicles, and the economic fallout of war.
The Israelis usually also try to avoid lengthy battles at all cost. In the case of a ground war, Tel Aviv recognizes that it may need to occupy the northern Gaza Strip for months, which will place severe hardship and pressure on Israel’s settlement community who will effectively become refugees.
Third, is Israel’s fear that its regional adversaries will open other battle fronts to relieve pressure on the resistance in Gaza. Both Washington and Tel Aviv are most wary of this development unfolding on the border with Lebanon.
But even the introduction of two US aircraft carriers into the East Mediterranean was unable to deter the Lebanese resistance, Hezbollah, from continuing its attacks on Israeli military positions along the Lebanese-Palestinian border. Since October 8, these borders have turned into daily clashes that have only escalated on both sides.
So far, the Israeli army has lost most of the surveillance equipment that it amassed over years on that critical border. Hezbollah has also destroyed more than 15 tanks and 20 armored vehicles, in addition to the killing and wounding of dozens of Israeli troops. In turn, the resistance has lost 28 of its soldiers, along with four Lebanese civilians.
Palestinian resistance factions (Hamas and Islamic Jihad, which had 5 casualties) have also participated in these Lebanese border operations, in addition to the “Islamic Group,” the Lebanese branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, and the “Lebanese Brigades for Resisting the Occupation,” which lost two fighters.
The situation on the Lebanese-Palestinian border is still being classified as “clashes,” despite the intensity of confrontations escalating each day. Tel Aviv expects the pace of these clashes to spike after the start of its ground operation in Gaza, which it fears will prevent the achievement of its goals in Gaza.
While the Resistance Axis refuses to divulge any of its plans, its sources indicate that escalation against the Israeli military will increase in correlation with developments in the Gaza war.
US presence & the Axis of Resistance
The fourth factor delaying the onset of Israel’s ground war is Washington’s need to secure its own regional military bases, assets, and interests, in advance of any regional escalation.
In recent days, US bases in Iraq and Syria have been bombed by Iraqi resistance factions, as Yemen’s resistance movement, Ansarallah, launched missiles and drones in the direction of Israel. When some of these projectiles were shot down by US defense systems, Ansarallah threatened to target Israeli ships in the Red Sea.
On the Iraqi-Jordanian border, Iraqi resistance factions are mobilizing thousands of supporters who have declared their intention to head to the occupied West Bank, via Jordan, if the aggression against Gaza continues.
To date, Israel’s western allies have amassed aircraft carriers and battleships; 2,000 American soldiers have landed in occupied Palestine; about 1,000 tons of western military aid has been airlifted to Israel; tens of thousands of munitions intended for Ukraine have been diverted to the occupation army; the Biden administration has announced the allocation of $14 billion in urgent aid to replenish Israel’s war coffers; the US has issued threats to the entire regional Axis of Resistance in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Iran that it will enter the war if those forces attacked the Israeli army.
Together, all these factors have delayed the start of Israel’s ground war in Gaza, as Tel Aviv awaits the arrival of even more US and western forces into West Asia and the eastern Mediterranean – both to bolster Israeli military forces and to fortify US bases in the region.
The fifth and final reason for postponing Tel Aviv’s ground invasion, is to provide a short window for Qatari-led negotiations to gain the release of further captives held in Gaza, as revealed by Israeli Army Radio on 23 October. The news leak coincides with fears expressed by the Washington establishment that the region could catch fire, to the detriment of American interests, if Israel insists on pursuing its Gaza ground war until the very end.
Delaying the ground war does not, however, mean canceling it. In 2014, Israel’s ground attack began two weeks after the war’s onset, although the number of Israeli reservists called up was no more than 40,000 – one-seventh of the 300,000 troops mobilized today.
Israel also faces another problem that it cannot solve: the presence of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians in the northern Gaza Strip who refuse to comply with Israeli orders to abandon their homes.
All these factors pose a potentially insurmountable challenge for Tel Aviv. They each conspire to thwart Israel’s plan to destroy Hamas and re-establish the deterrence capacity it lost on 7 October. While the occupation state may win many battles ahead, it cannot win the war with so many uncontrolled variables in the air.
October 26, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Wars for Israel | Israel, Middle East, Palestine, Zionism |
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