Israel « Aletho News

Another Mega Group Spy Scandal? Samanage, Sabotage, And The SolarWinds Hack

By Whitney Webb | The Last American Vagabond | January 21, 2021

The devastating hack on SolarWinds was quickly pinned on Russia by US intelligence. A more likely culprit, Samanage, a company whose software was integrated into SolarWinds’ software just as the “back door” was inserted, is deeply tied to Israeli intelligence and intelligence-linked families such as the Maxwells.

In mid-December of 2020, a massive hack compromised the networks of numerous US federal agencies, major corporations, the top five accounting firms in the country, and the military, among others. Despite most US media attention now focusing on election-related chaos, the fallout from the hack continues to make headlines day after day.

The hack, which affected Texas-based software provider SolarWinds, was blamed on Russia on January 5 by the US government’s Cyber Unified Coordination Group. Their statement asserted that the attackers were “likely Russian in origin,” but they failed to provide evidence to back up that claim.

Since then, numerous developments in the official investigation have been reported, but no actual evidence pointing to Russia has yet to be released. Rather, mainstream media outlets began reporting the intelligence community’s “likely” conclusion as fact right away, with the New York Times subsequently reporting that US investigators were examining a product used by SolarWinds that was sold by a Czech Republic–based company, as the possible entry point for the “Russian hackers.” Interest in that company, however, comes from the fact that the attackers most likely had access to the systems of a contractor or subsidiary of SolarWinds. This, combined with the evidence-free report from US intelligence on “likely” Russian involvement, is said to be the reason investigators are focusing on the Czech company, though any of SolarWinds’ contractors/subsidiaries could have been the entry point.

Such narratives clearly echo those that became prominent in the wake of the 2016 election, when now-debunked claims were made that Russian hackers were responsible for leaked emails published by WikiLeaks. Parallels are obvious when one considers that SolarWinds quickly brought on the discredited firm CrowdStrike to aid them in securing their networks and investigating the hack. CrowdStrike had also been brought on by the DNC after the 2016 WikiLeaks publication, and subsequently it was central in developing the false declarations regarding the involvement of “Russian hackers” in that event.

There are also other parallels. As Russiagate played out, it became apparent that there was collusion between the Trump campaign and a foreign power, but the nation was Israel, not Russia. Indeed, many of the reports that came out of Russiagate revealed collusion with Israel, yet those instances received little coverage and generated little media outrage. This has led some to suggest that Russiagate may have been a cover for what was in fact Israelgate.

Similarly, in the case of the SolarWinds hack, there is the odd case and timing of SolarWinds’ acquisition of a company called Samanage in 2019. As this report will explore, Samanage’s deep ties to Israeli intelligence, venture-capital firms connected to both intelligence and Isabel Maxwell, as well as Samange’s integration with the Orion software at the time of the back door’s insertion warrant investigation every bit as much as SolarWinds’ Czech-based contractor.

Orion’s Fall

In the month since the hack, evidence has emerged detailing the extent of the damage, with the Justice Department quietly announcing, the same day as the Capitol riots (January 6), that their email system had been breached in the hack—a “major incident” according to the department. This terminology means that the attack “is likely to result in demonstrable harm to the national security interests, foreign relations, or the economy of the United States or to the public confidence, civil liberties, or public health and safety of the American people,” per NextGov.

The Justice Department was the fourth US government agency to publicly acknowledge a breach in connection to the hack, with the others being the Departments of Commerce and Energy and the Treasury. Yet, while only four agencies have publicly acknowledged fallout from the hack, SolarWinds software is also used by the Department of Defense, the State Department, NASA, the NSA, and the Executive Office. Given that the Cyber Unified Coordination Group stated that “fewer than ten” US government agencies had been affected, it’s likely that some of these agencies were compromised, and some press reports have asserted that the State Department and Pentagon were affected.

In addition to government agencies, SolarWinds Orion software was in use by the top ten US telecommunications corporations, the top five US accounting firms, the New York Power Authority, and numerous US government contractors such as Booz Allen Hamilton, General Dynamics, and the Federal Reserve. Other notable SolarWinds clients include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Microsoft, Credit Suisse, and several mainstream news outlets including the Economist and the New York Times.

Based on what is officially known so far, the hackers appeared to have been highly sophisticated, with FireEye, the cybersecurity company that first discovered the implanted code used to conduct the hack, stating that the hackers “routinely removed their tools, including the backdoors, once legitimate remote access was achieved—implying a high degree of technical sophistication and attention to operational security.” In addition, top security experts have noted that the hack was “very very carefully orchestrated,” leading to a consensus that the hack was state sponsored.

FireEye stated that they first identified the compromise of SolarWinds after the version of the Orion software they were using contained a back door that was used to gain access to its “red team” suite of hacking tools. Not long after the disclosure of the SolarWinds hack, on December 31, the hackers were able to partially access Microsoft’s source code, raising concerns that the act was preparation for future and equally devastating attacks.

FireEye’s account can be taken with a grain of salt, however, as the CIA is one of FireEye’s clients, and FireEye was launched with funding from the CIA’s venture capital arm In-Q-tel. It is also worth being skeptical of the “free tool” FireEye has made available in the hack’s aftermath for “spotting and keeping suspected Russians out of systems.”

In addition, Microsoft, another key source in the SolarWinds story, is a military contractor with close ties to Israel’s intelligence apparatus, especially Unit 8200, and their reports of events also deserve scrutiny. Notably, it was Unit 8200 alumnus and executive at Israeli cybersecurity firm Cycode, Ronen Slavin, who told Reuters in a widely quoted article that he “was worried by the possibility that the SolarWinds hackers were poring over Microsoft’s source code as prelude to a much more ambitious offensive.” “To me the biggest question is, ‘Was this recon for the next big operation?’” Slavin stated.

Also odd about the actors involved in the response to the hack is the decision to bring on not only the discredited firm CrowdStrike but also the new consultancy firm of Chris Krebs and Alex Stamos, former chief information security officer of Facebook and Yahoo, to investigate the hack. Chris Krebs is the former head of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and was previously a top Microsoft executive. Krebs was fired by Donald Trump after repeatedly and publicly challenging Trump on the issue of election fraud in the 2020 election.

As head of CISA, Krebs gave access to networks of critical infrastructure throughout the US, with a focus on the health-care industry, to the CTI League, a suspicious outfit of anonymous volunteers working “for free” and led by a former Unit 8200 officer. “We have brought in the expertise of Chris Krebs and Alex Stamos to assist in this review and provide best-in-class guidance on our journey to evolve into an industry leading secure software development company,” a SolarWinds spokesperson said in an email cited by Reuters.

It is also worth noting that the SolarWinds hack did benefit a few actors aside from the attackers themselves. For instance, Israeli cybersecurity firms CheckPoint and CyberArk, which have close ties to Israeli intelligence Unit 8200, have seen their stocks soar in the weeks since the SolarWinds compromise was announced. Notably, in 2017, CyberArk was the company that “discovered” one of the main tactics used in an attack, a form of SAML token manipulation called GoldenSAML. CyberArk does not specify how they discovered this method of attack and, at the time they announced the tactic’s existence, released a free tool to identify systems vulnerable to GoldenSAML manipulation.

In addition, the other main mode of attack, a back door program nicknamed Sunburst, was found by Kaspersky researchers to be similar to a piece of malware called Kazuar that was also first discovered by another Unit 8200-linked company, Palo Alto Networks, also in 2017. The similarities only suggest that those who developed the Sunburst backdoor may have been inspired by Kazuar and “they may have common members between them or a shared software developer building their malware.” Kaspersky stressed that Sunburst and Kazuar are not likely to be one and the same. It is worth noting, as an aside, that Unit 8200 is known to have previously hacked Kaspersky and attempted to insert a back door into their products, per Kaspersky employees.

Crowdstrike claimed that this finding confirmed “the attribution at least to Russian intelligence,” only because an allegedly Russian hacking group is believed to have used Kazuar before. No technical evidence linking Russia to the SolarWinds hacking has yet been presented.

Samanage and Sabotage

The implanted code used to execute the hack was directly injected into the source code of SolarWinds Orion. Then, the modified and bugged version of the software was “compiled, signed and delivered through the existing software patch release management system,” per reports. This has led US investigators and observers to conclude that the perpetrators had direct access to SolarWinds code as they had “a high degree of familiarity with the software.” While the way the attackers gained access to Orion’s code base has yet to be determined, one possibility being pursued by investigators is that the attackers were working with employee(s) of a SolarWinds contractor or subsidiary.

US investigators have been focusing on offices of SolarWinds that are based abroad, suggesting that—in addition to the above—the attackers were likely working for SolarWinds or were given access by someone working for the company. That investigation has focused on offices in eastern Europe, allegedly because “Russian intelligence operatives are deeply rooted” in those countries.

It is worth pointing out, however, that Israeli intelligence is similarly “deeply rooted” in eastern European states both before and after the fall of the Soviet Union, ties well illustrated by Israeli superspy and media tycoon Robert Maxwell’s frequent and close associations with Eastern European and Russian intelligence agencies as well as the leaders of many of those countries. Israeli intelligence operatives like Maxwell also had cozy ties with Russian organized crime. For instance, Maxwell enabled the access of the Russian organized crime network headed by Semion Mogilevich into the US financial system and was also Mogilevich’s business partner. In addition, the cross-pollination between Israeli and Russian organized crime networks (networks which also share ties to their respective intelligence agencies) and such links should be considered if the cybercriminals do prove to be Russian in origin, as US intelligence has claimed.

Though some contractors and subsidiaries of SolarWinds are now being investigated, one that has yet to be investigated, but should be, is Samanage. Samanage, acquired by SolarWinds in 2019, not only gained automatic access to Orion just as the malicious code was first inserted, but it has deep ties to Israeli intelligence and a web of venture-capital firms associated with numerous Israeli espionage scandals that have targeted the US government. Israel is deemed by the NSA to be one of the top spy threats facing US government agencies and Israel’s list of espionage scandals in the US is arguably the longest, and includes the Jonathan Pollard and PROMIS software scandals of the 1980s to the Larry Franklin/AIPAC espionage scandal in 2009.

Though much reporting has since been done on the recent compromise of SolarWinds Orion software, little attention has been paid to Samanage. Samanage offers what it describes as “an IT Service Desk solution.” It was acquired by SolarWinds so Samanage’s products could be added to SolarWinds’ IT Operations Management portfolio. Though US reporting and SolarWinds press releases state that Samanage is based in Cary, North Carolina, implying that it is an American company, Samanage is actually an Israeli firm. It was founded in 2007 by Doron Gordon, who previously worked for several years at MAMRAM, the Israeli military’s central computing unit.

Samanage was SolarWinds’ first acquisition of an Israeli company, and, at the time, Israeli media reported that SolarWinds was expected to set up its first development center in Israel. It appears, however, that SolarWinds, rather than setting up a new center, merely began using Samanage’s research and development center located in Netanya, Israel.

Several months after the acquisition was announced, in November 2019, Samanage, renamed SolarWinds Service Desk, became listed as a standard feature of SolarWinds Orion software, whereas the integration of Samanage and Orion had previously been optional since the acquisition’s announcement in April of that year. This means that complete integration was likely made standard in either October or November. It has since been reported that the perpetrators of the recent hack gained access to the networks of US federal agencies and major corporations at around the same time. Samanage’s automatic integration into Orion was a major modification made to the now-compromised software during that period.

Samanage appears to have had access to Orion following the announcement of the acquisition in April 2019. Integration first began with Orion version 2019.4, the earliest version believed to contain the malicious code that enabled the hack. In addition, the integrated Samanage component of Orion was responsible for “ensuring the appropriate teams are quickly notified when critical events or performance issues [with Orion] are detected,” which was meant to allow “service agents to react faster and resolve issues before . . . employees are impacted.”

In other words, the Samanage component that was integrated into Orion at the same time the compromise took place was also responsible for Orion’s alert system for critical events or performance issues. The code that was inserted into Orion by hackers in late 2019 nevertheless went undetected by this Samanage-made component for over a year, giving the “hackers” access to millions of devices critical to both US government and corporate networks. Furthermore, it is this Samanage-produced component of the affected Orion software that advises end users to exempt the software from antivirus scans and group policy object (GPO) restrictions by providing a warning that Orion may not work properly unless those exemptions are granted.

Samanage, Salesforce, and the World Economic Forum

Around the time of Samange’s acquisition by SolarWinds, it was reported that one of Samanage’s top backers was the company Salesforce, with Salesforce being both a major investor in Samanage as well as a partner of the company.

Salesforce is run by Marc Benioff, a billionaire who got his start at the tech giant Oracle. Oracle was originally created as a CIA spin-off and has deep ties to Israel’s government and the outgoing Trump administration. Salesforce also has a large presence in Israel, with much of its global research and development based there. Salesforce also recently partnered with the Unit 8200-linked Israeli firm Diagnostic Robotics to “predictively” diagnose COVID-19 cases using Artificial Intelligence.

Aside from leading Salesforce, Benioff is a member of the Vatican’s Council for Inclusive Capitalism alongside Lynn Forester de Rothschild, a close associate of Jeffrey Epstein and the Clintons, and members of the Lauder family, who have deep ties to the Mega Group and Israeli politics.

Benioff is also a prominent member of the board of trustees of the World Economic Forum and the inaugural chair of the WEF’s Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution (C4IR), making him one of the most critical players in the unfolding of the WEF-backed Great Reset. Other WEF leaders, including the organization’s founder Klaus Schwab, have openly discussed how massive cyberattacks such as befell SolarWinds will soon result in “even more significant economic and social implications than COVID-19.”

Last year, the WEF’s Centre for Cybersecurity, of which Salesforce is part, simulated a “digital pandemic” cyberattack in an exercise entitled Cyber Polygon. Cyber Polygon’s speakers in 2020 included former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, the Prime Minister of Russia Mikhail Mishustin, WEF founder Klaus Schwab, and IBM executive Wendi Whitmore, who previously held top posts at both Crowdstrike and a FireEye subsidiary. Notably, just months before the COVID-19 crisis, the WEF had held Event 201, which simulated a global coronavirus pandemic that crippled the world’s economy.

In addition to Samanage’s ties to WEF big shots such as Marc Benioff, the other main investors behind Samanage’s rise have ties to major Israeli espionage scandals, including the Jonathan Pollard affair and the PROMIS software scandal. There are also ties to one of the WEF’s founding “technology pioneers,” Isabel Maxwell (the daughter of Robert Maxwell and sister of Ghislaine), who has long-standing ties to Israel’s intelligence apparatus and the country’s hi-tech sector.

The Bronfmans, the Maxwells, and Viola Ventures

At the time of its acquisition by SolarWinds, Samanage’s top investor was Viola Ventures, a major Israeli venture-capital firm. Viola’s investment in Samanage, until its acquisition, was managed by Ronen Nir, who was also on Samanage’s board before it became part of SolarWinds.

Prior to working at Viola, Ronen Nir was a vice president at Verint, formerly Converse Infosys. Verint, whose other alumni have gone on to found Israeli intelligence-front companies such as Cybereason. Verint has a history of aggressively spying on US government facilities, including the White House, and created the backdoors into all US telecommunications systems and major tech companies, including Microsoft, Google and Facebook, on behalf of the US’ NSA.

In addition to his background at Verint, Ronen Nir is an Israeli spy, having served for thirteen years in an elite IDF intelligence unit, and he remains a lieutenant colonel on reserve duty. His biography also notes that he worked for two years at the Israeli embassy in Washington, DC, which is fitting given his background in espionage and the major role that Israeli embassy has played in several major espionage scandals.

As an aside, Nir has stated that “thought leader” Henry Kissinger is his “favorite historical character.” Notably, Kissinger was instrumental in allowing Robert Maxwell, Israeli superspy and father of Ghislaine and Isabel Maxwell, to sell software with a back door for Israeli intelligence to US national laboratories, where it was used to spy on the US nuclear program. Kissinger had told Maxwell to connect with Senator John Tower in order to gain access to US national laboratories, which directly enabled this action, part of the larger PROMIS software scandal.

In addition, Viola’s stake was managed through a firm known as Carmel Ventures, which is part of the Viola Group. At the time, Carmel Ventures was advised by Isabel Maxwell, whose father had previously been directly involved in the operation of the front company used to sell bugged software to US national laboratories. As noted in a previous article at Unlimited Hangout, Isabel “inherited” her father’s circle of Israeli government and intelligence contacts after his death and has been instrumental in building the “bridge” between Israel’s intelligence and military-linked hi-tech sector to Silicon Valley.

Isabel also has ties to the Viola Group itself through Jonathan Kolber, a general partner at Viola. Kolber previously cofounded and led the Bronfman family’s private-equity fund, Claridge Israel (based in Israel). Kolber then led Koor Industries, which he had acquired alongside the Bronfmans via Claridge. Kolber is closely associated with Stephen Bronfman, the son of Charles Bronfman who created Claridge and also cofounded the Mega Group with Leslie Wexner in the early 1990s.

Kolber, like Isabel Maxwell, is a founding director of the Peres Center for Peace and Innovation. Maxwell, who used to chair the center’s board, stepped down following the Epstein scandal, though it’s not exactly clear when. Other directors of the center include Tamir Pardo, former head of Mossad. Kolber’s area of expertise, like that of Isabel Maxwell, is “structuring complex, cross-border and cross industry business and financial transactions,” that is, arranging acquisitions and partnerships of Israeli firms by US companies. Incidentally, this is also a major focus of the Peres Center.

Other connections to Isabel Maxwell, aside from her espionage ties, are worth noting, given that she is a “technology pioneer” of the World Economic Forum. As previously mentioned, Salesforce—a major investor in Samanage—is deeply involved with the WEF and its Great Reset.

The links of Israeli intelligence and Salesforce to Samanage, and thus to SolarWinds, is particularly relevant given the WEF’s “prediction” of a coming “pandemic” of cyberattacks and the early hints from former Unit 8200 officers that the SolarWinds hack is just the beginning. It is also worth mentioning the Israeli government’s considerable ties to the WEF over the years, particularly last year when it joined the Benioff-chaired C4IR and participated in the October 2020 WEF panel entitled “The Great Reset: Harnessing the Fourth Industrial Revolution.”

Start Up Nation Central, an organization aimed at integrating Israeli start-ups with US firms set up by Netanyahu’s longtime economic adviser Eugene Kandel and American Zionist billionaire Paul Singer, have asserted that Israel will serve a “key role” globally in the 4^th Industrial Revolution following the implementation of the Great Reset.

Gemini, the BIRD Foundation, and Jonathan Pollard

In addition to Viola, another of Samange’s leading investors is Gemini Israel Ventures. Gemini is one of Israel’s oldest venture-capital firms, dating back to the Israeli government’s 1993 Yozma program.

The first firm created by Yozma, Gemini was put under the control of Ed Mlavsky, who Israel’s government had chosen specifically for this position. As previously reported by Unlimited Hangout, Mlavsky was then serving as the executive director of the Israel-US Binational Industrial Research and Development (BIRD) Foundation, where “he was responsible for investments of $100 million in more than 300 joint projects between US and Israeli high-tech companies.”

A few years before Gemini was created, while Mlavsky still headed BIRD, the foundation became embroiled in one of the worst espionage scandals in US history, the Jonathan Pollard affair.

In the indictment of US citizen Pollard for espionage on Israel’s behalf, it was noted that Pollard delivered the documents he stole to agents of Israel at two locations, one of which was an apartment owned by Harold Katz, the then legal counsel of the BIRD Foundation and an adviser to Israel’s military, which oversaw Israel’s scientific intelligence-gathering agency, Lekem. US officials told the New York Times at the time that they believed Katz “has detailed knowledge about the [Pollard] spy ring and could implicate senior Israeli officials.”

Subsequent reporting by journalist Claudia Wright pointed the finger at the Mlavsky-run BIRD Foundation as one of the ways Israeli intelligence funneled money to Pollard before his capture by US authorities.

One of the first companies Gemini invested in was CommTouch (now Cyren), which was founded by ex-IDF officers and later led by Isabel Maxwell. Under Maxwell’s leadership, CommTouch developed close ties to Microsoft, partially due to Maxwell’s relationship with its cofounder Bill Gates.

A Coming “Hack” of Microsoft?

If the SolarWinds hack is as serious as has been reported, it’s difficult to understand why a company like Samanage would not be looked into as part of a legitimate investigation into the attack. The timing of Samanage employees gaining access to the Orion software and the company’s investors including Israeli spies and those with ties to past espionage scandals where Israel used back doors to spy on the US and beyond raises obvious red flags. Yet, any meaningful investigation of the incident is unlikely to take place, especially given the considerable involvement of discredited firms like CrowdStrike, CIA fronts like FireEye and a consultancy firm led by former Silicon Valley executives with their own government/intelligence ties.

There is also the added fact that both of the main methods used in the attack were analogous or bore similarities to hacking tools that were both discovered by Unit 8200-linked companies in 2017. Unit 8200-founded cybersecurity firms are among the few “winners” from the SolarWinds hack, as their stocks have skyrocketed and demand for their services has increased globally.

While some may argue that Unit 8200 alumni are not necessarily connected to the Israeli intelligence apparatus, numerous reports have pointed out the admitted fusion of Israeli military intelligence with Israel’s hi-tech sector and its tech-focused venture capital networks, with Israeli military and intelligence officials themselves noting that the line between the private cybersecurity sector and Israel’s intelligence apparatus is so blurred, it’s difficult to know where one begins and the other ends. There is also the Israeli government policy, formally launched in 2012, whereby Israel’s intelligence and military intelligence agencies began outsourcing “activities that were previously managed in-house, with a focus on software and cyber technologies.”

Samanage certainly appears to be such a company, not only because it was founded by a former IDF officer in the military’s central computing unit, but because its main investors include spies on “reserve duty” and venture capital firms linked to the Pollard scandal as well as the Bronfman and Maxwell families, both of whom have been tied to espionage and sexual blackmail scandals over the years.

Yet, as the Epstein scandal has recently indicated, major espionage scandals involving Israel receive little coverage and investigations into these events rarely lead anywhere. PROMIS was covered up largely thanks to Bill Barr during his first term as Attorney General and even the Pollard affair has all been swept under the rug with Donald Trump allowing Pollard to move to Israel and, more recently, pardoning the Israeli spy who recruited Pollard during his final day as President. Also under Trump, there was the discovery of “stingray” surveillance devices placed by Israel’s government throughout Washington DC, including next to the White House, which were quickly memory holed and oddly not investigated by authorities. Israel had previously wiretapped the White House’s phone lines during the Clinton years.

Another cover up is likely in the case of SolarWinds, particularly if the entry point was in fact Samanage. Though a cover up would certainly be more of the same, the SolarWinds case is different as major tech companies and cybersecurity firms with ties to US and Israeli intelligence now insist that Microsoft is soon to be targeted in what would clearly be a much more devastating event than SolarWinds due to the ubiquity of Microsoft’s products.

On Tuesday, CIA-linked firm FireEye, which apparently has a leadership role in investigating the hack, claimed that the perpetrators are still gathering data from US government agencies and that “the hackers are moving into Microsoft 365 cloud applications from physical, on-premises servers,” meaning that changes to fix Orion’s vulnerabilities will not necessarily deny hacker access to previously compromised systems as they allegedly maintain access to those systems via Microsoft cloud applications. In addition to Microsoft’s own claims that some of its source code was accessed by the hackers, this builds the narrative that Microsoft products are poised to be targeted in the next high-profile hack.

Microsoft’s cloud security infrastructure, set to be the next target of the SolarWinds hackers, was largely developed and later managed by Assaf Rappaport, a former Unit 8200 officer who was most recently the head of Microsoft’s Research and Development and Security teams at its massive Israel branch. Rappaport left Microsoft right before the COVID-19 crisis began last year to found a new cybersecurity company called Wiz.

Microsoft, like some of Samanage’s main backers, is part of the World Economic Forum and is an enthusiastic supporter of and participant in the Great Reset agenda, so much so that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wrote the foreword to Klaus Schwab’s book “Shaping the Fourth Industrial Revolution.” With the WEF simulating a cyber “pandemic” and both the WEF and Israel’s head of Israel’s National Cyber Directorate warning of an imminent “cyber winter”, SolarWinds does indeed appear to be just the beginning, though perhaps a scripted one to create the foundation for something much more severe. A cyberattack on Microsoft products globally would certainly upend most of the global economy and likely have economic effects more severe than the COVID-19 crisis, just as the WEF has been warning. Yet, if such a hack does occur, it will inevitably serve the aims of the Great Reset to “reset” and then rebuild electronic infrastructure.

January 23, 2021 Posted by aletho | Deception, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular | CIA, CyberArk, Israel, NSA, Unit 8200, United States, WEF | Leave a comment

Pakistanis hold massive rally against ties with Israel

Press TV – January 23, 2021

Tens of thousands of Pakistanis have held an anti-Israel march in the country’s major city of Karachi, rejecting the possibility of normalizing ties with the occupying Israeli regime.

The “million-man march” organized by opposition Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam-Fazl (JUI-F) was held with participants donning the colors of the JUI-F and raising tall black and white striped flags.

“Israel is involved in the genocide of Muslims in Palestine and we would never allow the federal government to establish diplomatic relations with it,” JUI-F leader Maulana Saleemullah Alwazi told Pakistani daily The News International.

In recent months, the news of deals signed by a few Arab dictatorships to normalize diplomatic relations with Israel under intense US pressure has sparked widespread anger among Pakistani people, who hold strong feelings for the Palestinian cause.

In December, top Pakistani officials fiercely denied rumors publicized by Israeli news outlets that Islamabad was moving towards a similar deal.

Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan rejected as “baseless” reports of his government officials visiting Israel, insisting why would any of his ministers visit Tel Aviv when Islamabad does not even recognize Israel.

Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi said later in December that he had informed the UAE — one of the US-backed kingdoms that recently normalized ties with Israel — of Islamabad’s “steadfast” policy towards Tel Aviv, insisting that the country will refuse to recognize it until the issue of Palestine is resolved.

The top Pakistani diplomat said he had explained to his Emirati counterpart Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan the “depth of emotions and feelings Pakistanis have about Palestine and Kashmir.”

The normalization trend has drawn widespread condemnation from Palestinians, who seek an independent state in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, with East Jerusalem al-Quds as its capital. They say the deals are “a stab in the back” of the Palestinians.

January 23, 2021 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Solidarity and Activism | Israel, Middle East, Pakistan, Palestine, UAE, Zionism | Leave a comment

Israel floods farmlands with rainwater in eastern Gaza

MEMO | January 22, 2021

The Palestinian Ministry of Agriculture announced on Thursday that Israel had vented its dams for rainwater harvesting, leading to the flooding of farmlands near the Gaza Strip’s eastern borders and the destruction of vast agricultural areas.

Israel has built several dams to collect and use rainwater and vents it without warning when large quantities of water accumulate during the winter, causing damage to the Gaza Strip’s farm and agricultural lands.

Ahmed Fatayer, director of the ministry’s branch in Gaza, disclosed that Israel: “Has opened the rainwater dams east of the Shuja’iyya neighbourhood in the east of the Gaza Strip, which led to flooding hundreds of dunams of agricultural land.”

In an exclusive interview with Anadolu Agency, Fatayer indicated that Palestinian farmers have suffered “great losses and direct and indirect damage” due to the sudden venting of dams.

He pointed out that Israel has been venting the dams and flooding agricultural land belonging to Palestinian citizens in recent years.

Salem Quta, one of the affected farmers, conveyed that the Palestinian landowners have suffered significant losses due to the flooding of their agricultural areas.

“About 400 dunams (one dunam equals 1,000 metres) were directly flooded with water, while 150 dunams were indirectly damaged by the flow of rainwater,” Quta told Anadolu Agency.

The farmer explained that the flooding of agricultural lands occurred when the crops he was growing during recent months were about to ripen.

Quta confirmed that in addition to flooding agricultural areas, Israel also: “Sprays chemical pesticides on the crops, which ends up destroying them, in addition to clearing the land.”

He called on human rights organisations and institutions to stand with the Palestinian farmers and support them to resist these violations.

January 21, 2021 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture | Gaza, Israel, Palestine, Zionism | Leave a comment

Why has Israel banned Jenin, Jenin? It fears the Palestinian narrative

By Ramzy Baroud | MEMO | January 19, 2021

On 11 January, Israel’s Lod District Court ruled against Palestinian film-maker Mahmoud Bakri, and ordered him to pay hefty compensation to an Israeli soldier who was accused, along with the Israeli military, of carrying out war crimes in April 2002 in the Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank.

As reported by Israeli and other media, the case seemed to be a relatively simple matter of defamation of character and so on. To those familiar with the massive clash of narratives which emanated from the singular event known to Palestinians as the “Jenin Massacre”, the court’s verdict not only has political undertones, but also historical and intellectual implications.

Bakri is a Palestinian born in the village of Bi’ina, near the Palestinian city of Akka, now located in Israel. He has been paraded repeatedly through Israeli courts and censured heavily in the local mainstream media simply because he dared to challenge the official discourse about the violence in the Jenin refugee camp nearly two decades ago.

The director’s documentary Jenin, Jenin is now officially banned in Israel. The film, which was produced only months after the conclusion of this particular episode of Israeli state violence, did not make many claims of its own. It largely opened up a rare space for Palestinians to convey, in their own words, what had befallen their refugee camp when units of the Israel Defence Forces, with air cover provided by fighter jets and attack helicopters, pulverised much of the camp, killing scores of people and wounding hundreds more.

Israel claims to be a democracy, remember. For it to ban a film, regardless of how unacceptable its content is to the authorities, is wholly inconsistent with any definition of freedom of speech. To ban Jenin, Jenin, indict the Palestinian filmmaker who made it, and then compensate those accused of carrying out war crimes is outrageous.

The background of the Israeli decision can be understood within two contexts: one, Israel’s regime of censorship aimed at silencing any criticism of its occupation and apartheid; and two, Israel’s fear of a truly independent Palestinian narrative.

Israeli censorship dates back to the inception of the State of Israel atop the ruins of the Palestinian homeland in 1948. The country’s founding fathers painstakingly constructed a convenient story regarding the birth of the state, erasing Palestine and the Palestinians almost entirely from their narrative. The late Palestinian intellectual Edward Said had this to say in his essay “Permission to Narrate“: “The Palestinian narrative has never been officially admitted to Israeli history, except as that of ‘non-Jews,’ whose inert presence in Palestine was a nuisance to be ignored or expelled.”

To ensure the erasure of the Palestinians from Israel’s official discourse, the state’s censorship has evolved to become one of the most elaborate and well-guarded programmes of its kind in the world. Its sophistication and brutality has reached the extent that poets and artists can be put on trial and sentenced to terms in prison for merely challenging Israel’s founding ideology, Zionism, or penning poems deemed offensive to Israeli sensibilities. While Palestinians have borne the brunt of Israel’s ever-vigilant censorship machine, some Israeli Jews, including human rights organisations, have also suffered.

The case of Jenin, Jenin is not one of routine censorship, though. It is a statement, a message, to those who dare give voice to oppressed Palestinians and allow them to speak directly to the world. These Palestinians, in the eyes of Israel, are certainly the most dangerous, as they demolish the layered, elaborate yet fallacious official Israeli discourse, regardless of the nature, place or timing of any contested event, starting with the Nakba (“Catastrophe”) of 1948.

My first book, Searching Jenin: Eyewitness Accounts of the Israeli Invasion, was published almost simultaneously with the release of Jenin, Jenin. The book, like the documentary, aimed to counterbalance official Israeli propaganda through honest, heart-rending accounts from the survivors of the violence brought down upon the refugee camp. While Israel had no jurisdiction to ban the book, pro-Israel media and mainstream academics either ignored it completely or attacked it ferociously.

Admittedly, the Palestinian counter-narrative to the dominant Israeli version, whether on the “Jenin Massacre” or the Second Intifada which was still underway at the time, was humble, and largely championed through individual efforts. Still, even such modest attempts at narrating a Palestinian version were considered dangerous, and rejected vehemently as irresponsible, sacrilegious or anti-Semitic.

Israel’s true power — but also its Achilles heel — is its ability to design, construct and shield its own version of history, despite the fact that the narrative is hardly consistent with any reasonable definition of the truth. Within this modus operandi, even meagre and unassuming counter-narratives are threatening, for they poke holes in an already baseless intellectual construct.

Bakri’s story of Jenin was not attacked relentlessly and eventually banned simply as the outcome of Israel’s censorship, but because it dared to blemish Israel’s diligently fabricated historical sequence, starting with a persecuted “people with no land” arriving in the alleged “land with no people”, where they “made the desert bloom”. These are two of Israel’s most potent founding myths.

Jenin, Jenin is a microcosm of a people’s narrative that successfully shattered Israel’s well-funded propaganda. It sent (and still sends) a message to Palestinians everywhere that even Israel’s falsification of history can be challenged and defeated.

In her seminal book, Decolonising Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, Linda Tuhiwai Smith brilliantly examines the relationship between history and power. She asserts that, “History is mostly about power… It is the story of the powerful and how they became powerful, and then how they use their power to keep them in positions in which they can continue to dominate others.” It is precisely because Israel needs to maintain the current power structure that Jenin, Jenin and other Palestinian attempts at reclaiming history have to be censored, banned and punished.

Israel’s targeting of the Palestinian narrative is not simply official contestation of the accuracy of facts or of some kind of fear that the “truth” could lead to legal accountability. The colonial state cares nothing at all about facts and, thanks to Western support, it remains immune from international prosecution. Rather, it is about erasure; erasure of history, of a homeland, of a people: the people of Palestine.

Nevertheless, a Palestinian people with a coherent, collective narrative will always exist, no matter the geography, the physical hardship and the political circumstances. This is what Israel fears above all else.

January 19, 2021 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Film Review, Timeless or most popular, Video, War Crimes | Israel, Palestine, Zionism | Leave a comment

The Israel lobby’s power over Congress: Both parties obey

If Americans Knew | January 15, 2021

Pro-Israel organizations and individuals have acquired major power in Congress among both parties, driving many US policies. A number of books have described this situation, including “The Israel Lobby” by Professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, “They Dare to speak Out” by former Congressman Paul Findley, “The Lobby” by Edward Tivnan, “Big Israel” by Grant Smith, and “Against Our Better Judgment” by Alison Weir. Below are resources and citations for information on the Israel-Palestine issue:

• US tax money to Israel: https://ifamericansknew.org/stat/cost… and https://ifamericansknew.org/stat/usai…

• The history of the issue: https://ifamericansknew.org/history/ and http://iakn.us/AOBJ-book

• A list of the Israel lobby: https://israelpalestinenews.org/the-i…

• The situation for Palestinians: https://israelpalestinenews.org/human… and https://youtu.be/o22x81SCBiU and https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list…

• A list of Israelis and Palestinians killed since 2000: https://israelpalestinetimeline.org/

• Daily news and analysis: https://israelpalestinenews.org/

• Statistics and overall information: https://ifamericansknew.org/

January 16, 2021 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, Video | Israel, Palestine, United States, Zionism | Leave a comment

Whatever is Wrong with Mike Morell?

undefined

By Steve Brown | Ron Paul Institute | January 7, 2021

Obama – er, Biden – pushed hard for the removal of Syria’s Assad and engineered US destabilization of Syria partly at the behest of Israel in 2011 and 2014 , in part to allow Israel free reign to annex the Jordan Valley and West Bank, in tandem with Israel’s long-standing annexation of the Golan. Yes, the Israeli Nile-to-Euphrates agenda is alive and quite well, not just among Israel’s 3rd templars, but within Biden’s proto-expansionist regime in the DC wings, too. Now, what’s that again about Russia Russia? Biden’s Russia, Russia? There’s just one problem for the Axis of Evil’s plan going forward: Russia’s continued opposition to the US plan in Syria.

Russia likely anticipated the complete destabilization of the Middle East by the US and its Israeli ally by design in 2014, where Takfiri malign infestation of the region not only threatened Europe, but Russia too, with a further militarist threat to Iran and West Asia. Russia stands in the way of that Imperial agenda, and that’s a big deal for Washington’s elite donor class. Russia also provided succor to Ed Snowden, when the DC shark pit would have crucified him alive; just as the same bloodthirsty pack will crucify Julian Assange too should they ever get their bloody incisors into him.

Now, rather than risk world war, the former US regime chose to tread a fine line with Russia in Syria, although outright war was much closer than the public realized or knew at the time. The current shape-of-things-to-come will test that envelope once more, and in a very big way. By definition, the reappearance of war-criminal and dinosaur Madeliene Albright, to re-blight a thoroughly blighted major media proves that intent. Albright’s abysmal record and advanced years have evidently not prevented her from seeking a new term within the putrefying endless expanse of DC’s Neoliberal cesspool.

Lately the voluble Albright has graced the CIA-corporate-led media to tout all subjects great and small, whether the contagion and failed US foreign policy, to the Balkans and somewhat erratic behavior of others. Apparently the non-apologetic self-acknowledged child-killer is safe for the time being for the DC establishment to trot out again — after all these years — and Albright holds her CIA-surveillance state brief well, even at the tidy age of 83.

Along with Albright and other foreign policy wonks littering the Biden-Harris space (Jen Psaki, Sam Power, and Wendy Sherman etc) Mike Morell’s reappearance has been as inspired and imaginative as his call to murder Russians (with Iranians thrown in for good measure, of course). Which apparently posed no problem for the incorporated CIA-run major media at the time; and whether Morell’s twitter account was ever suspended then for publicly threatening violence, remains unknown.

Notably the recent storming of the US bastille on January 6th caused our dear Mike to lament this failed example of democracy-in-action via a televised CBS news interview on that day, Mike posing that such brazen acts could be an inspiration for anti-American propaganda to be exploited by none other than… er, well, ahem… the Russians and RT! When a not-so-incredulous but mainly pandering CBS co-host pressed Mike about how Russia could possibly be running the Proud Boys to storm the capitol?? … our dear Mike back-pedaled a bit to say, well, like always (but never proven) the Russians definitely did hack Hillary in 2016 and cost her the election. Leaving hosts and viewers alike somewhat baffled, but fortunately the CBS ‘analyst’s’ cum CIA guy’s conversation moved on, saving further embarrassment.

If public consciousness were not just a few milliseconds, the irony of media claims that Trump’s allegations about voter fraud are baseless since proof has not yet been provided, would not be lost on the public, when compared to US intelligence claims that Russian collusion in 2015 cost Hillary the election when no proof or evidential record of that has ever been provided, either. But then again, Morell is a former CIA spy guy and CBS anchor, so that’s just how he rolls…

In closing we are left with one final perplexing and inevitable question: which CIA-led news network will pick up Gina Haspel and Mike Pompeo as news analysts going forward? CBS too? And who is the next Clinton-Obama dinosaur and war criminal to re-appear and pollute the new regime in DC?

For certain, we shall see.

Steve is an antiwar activist and a published scholar on the US monetary system.

Twitter: @newsypaperz

January 13, 2021 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes, Wars for Israel | Israel, Middle East, Russia, Syria, United States, Zionism | Leave a comment

Israel bans ‘Jenin, Jenin’ film, orders payment of damages to Israel soldier

MEMO – January 13, 2021

The Lod District Court in Israel on Monday banned the screening of a documentary about Israel’s brutal 2002 campaign in the occupied West Bank city of Jenin.

‘Jenin, Jenin’ can no longer be aired in Israel after an Israeli soldier who was depicted in the footage stealing from an elderly Palestinian filed a lawsuit against the film.

The judge said Israeli soldier Nissim Magnaji had been “sent to defend his country and found himself accused of a crime he did not commit”. The court ordered director Mohammed Bakri to pay damages to Magnaji of 175,000 shekels ($55,000) as well as 50,000 shekels ($15,936) of court expenses.

In her ruling, judge Halit Silash went on to say some of the representation in the video was untrue.

Bakri, a Palestinian with Israeli citizenship, told the AFP news agency the decision was “unfair” and that the judge had acted on instructions “from above.”

“I intend to appeal the verdict because it is unfair, it is neutering my truth,” Bakri told the Walla News website.

Objecting to the court’s ruling, the chairman of the Balad faction in the Joint List party, Member of the Israeli Knesset Mtanes Shehadeh, was quoted by the Times of Israel saying: “It’s not the film that should be shelved, but the occupation and its crimes.”

The documentary shows footage and eyewitness accounts of the massacre committed by the Israeli occupation forces in the Palestinian refugee camp of Jenin in 2002. At least 52 Palestinians, including women, children, and the elderly, were killed in the rampage that unfolded over a two-week period in a refugee camp, according to a Human Rights Watch (HRW) investigation.

Some 23 Israeli soldiers were killed at the time.

January 13, 2021 Posted by aletho | Film Review, Full Spectrum Dominance, Video, War Crimes | Israel, Palestine, Zionism | Leave a comment

Israeli occupation forces close Ibrahimi Mosque for ten days

Palestine Information Center – January 8, 2021

AL-KHALIL – Israeli occupation forces (IOF) closed the Ibrahimi Mosque in al-Khalil to worshipers and visitors for 10 days, Thursday, under the pretext of combating the spread of the coronavirus.

Sheikh Hefzi Abu Sneina, the director of the Ibrahimi Mosque, told the Palestinian News Agency (WAFA), “The occupation’s decision to close the Ibrahimi Mosque will start from nine o’clock this evening for 10 days. Worshipers and visitors will be banned from accessing any part of the holy site.”

Abu Sneina charged that these claims are not valid and that the IOF is denying Muslims access to the Haram.

He stressed that worshipers and visitors are committed to all health measures according to the preventive protocols in place, in addition to the fact that the IOF soldiers deployed at the military checkpoints surrounding the Haram have been allowing only 20 worshipers to enter the Haram at one time.

Meanwhile, the Palestinian Ministry of Endowments and Religious Affairs condemned the decision. Hussam Abu al-Rub, the Undersecretary of the Ministry told Anadolu Agency, “This decision is rejected and we will not accept it.”

Abul-Rub added that this decision constitutes an encroachment and interference with the authority of the Palestinian government to supervise religious sites in Palestine.

He indicated that the ministry is following up on everything related to organizing the entry of worshipers and the preventive and precautionary measures related to coronavirus.

Since 1994, the Ibrahimi Mosque, which is believed to be built on the tomb of the Prophet Ibrahim, peace be upon him, has been divided into a special section for Muslims and another for Jews after a Jewish settler killed 29 Muslims while they were performing the dawn prayer on February 25, 1994.

The Ibrahimi Mosque and the Old City of the al-Khalil were listed by the United Nations Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization (UNESCO) in 2017 on the World Heritage List.

The Mosque is located in an area under full Israeli control but it is managed by the Palestinian Ministry of Endowments.

January 9, 2021 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation | Human rights, Israel, Palestine, West Bank, Zionism | Leave a comment

A New Year’s Wish

Let’s remove Israel from American politics

By Philip Giraldi • Unz Review • January 5, 2021

There has been one good thing about the COVID-19 virus – for the first time many among the general public are beginning to ask why a rich country like Israel should be getting billions of dollars from the United States taxpayer at a time when many Americans are struggling. Inevitably, of course, the press coverage of the questions being asked about the cash flow failed to discuss the real magnitude of the “aid,” trade concessions, co-production projects and dicey charitable contributions that our federal and many state governments shower on the Jewish state, which easily exceed $10 billion per year.

During his 2016 campaign Donald Trump swore that he would be the best friend that Israel has ever had in the White House, a pledge that some of us viewed skeptically as Trump was also committed to bringing the troops home from “useless wars” in Asia, most of whom were in the Middle East supporting Israeli interests. More recently Trump admitted that America was in the Middle East to “protect Israel” and he has indeed proven to be the great benefactor he promised to be in responding fully to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s wish list. Trump has increased tension dramatically with Iran, moved the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, has recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Syrian Golan Heights, and has basically given Israel the green light to do whatever it wants on the Palestinian West Bank, including getting rid of the Palestinians. And as all that has played out the Israelis have attacked and killed thousands of civilians in Gaza, Syria and the West Bank with impunity, protected by the U.S. veto in the U.N. Security Council against any consequences for their actions while a subservient Congress gives Netanyahu twenty-eight standing ovations and bleats that “Israel has a right to defend itself.” Trump has made the United States completely complicit in Israeli war crimes and has committed a few of its own to include the widely condemned assassination of the senior Iranian official Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad one year ago.

Israel more-or-less openly admits that it controls the actions of the United States in its region, its leaders having boasted how the U.S. federal government is “easily moved” when it comes up against the Israeli Lobby. Nor is there any real secret to how the Lobby uses money to buy access and then exploits that access to obtain real power, which is then used to employ all the resources of the U.S. government in support of the Jewish state. The top donor to the Democratic Party, Israeli-American Haim Saban has stated that he is a one issue guy and that issue is Israel. This single-minded focus to promote Israel’s interests at the expense of those of the United States makes the Israel Lobby the most formidable foreign policy lobby in Washington and it recalls the warning once issued by George Washington in his Farewell Address, where he stated that “permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular nations and passionate attachments for others should be excluded, and that in place of them just and amicable feelings toward all should be cultivated. The nation which indulges toward another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave.”

The complete contempt that the Israelis and Israeli supporters in the U.S. have for other Americans and their interests was on full display last week when convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard flew “home,” meeting Netanyahu as he disembarked from a private plane that had departed from Newark New Jersey before being given a hero’s welcome.

Pollard is the most damaging spy in American history, having stolen the keys to accessing U.S. communications and information gathering systems. He was an unlikely candidate to become a U.S. Navy intelligence analyst, and one review board determined that he had been hired in the first place under pressure from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). A month after Pollard’s arrest in 1985, C.I.A director William Casey stated: “The Israelis used Pollard to obtain our war plans against the USSR – all of it: the co-ordinates, the firing locations, the sequences, and Israel sold that information to Moscow for more exit visas for Soviet Jews.” According to a C.I.A. after-the fact-damage assessment “Pollard’s operation has few parallels among known U.S. espionage cases…. his first and possibly largest delivery occurred on 23 January [1984] and consisted of five suitcases-full of classified material.”

Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger wrote a forty-six page review of the case that remains largely classified and redacted to this day, detailing what incredible damage Pollard had done. Part of the document states: “In this case, the defendant has admitted passing to his Israeli contacts an incredibly large quantity of classified information. At the outset I must state that the defendant’s disclosures far exceed the limits of any official exchange of intelligence information with Israel. That being the case, the damage to national security was complete the moment the classified information was given over. Ideally, I would detail… all the information passed by the defendant to his Israeli contacts: unfortunately, the volume of data we know to have been passed is too great to permit that. Moreover, the defendant admits to having passed to his Israeli handlers a quantity of documents great enough to occupy a space six feet by ten feet… The defendant has substantially harmed the United States, and in my view, his crimes demand severe punishment… My foregoing comments will, I hope, dispel any presumption that disclosures to an ally are insignificant; to the contrary, substantial and irrevocable damage has been done to this nation. Punishment, of course, must be appropriate to the crime, and in my opinion, no crime is more deserving of severe punishment than conducting espionage activities against one’s own country.”

The Pollard trip to his “home” occurred because Donald Trump had obligingly lifted the travel restrictions on him the week before, one more favor to Israel. At the airport, Pollard and his wife knelt to kiss the Israeli soil before Netanyahu handed him an Israeli citizen ID and welcomed him. The 737 luxury-fitted executive jet Pollard and his wife flew on belongs to Las Vegas casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, chief donor to the Republicans and to Donald Trump. Adelson is married to an Israeli and famously has said that he regrets having worn a U.S. Army uniform when he was drafted, much preferring instead that he might have done military service in the Israel Defense Force.

I should point out that permitting dual nationals with singular loyalty to a foreign nation to have such significant influence over the two leading political parties in the U.S. by virtue of money alone is a recipe for disaster, and so it has proven. What were Trump and Hillary Clinton thinking when they tied themselves to Adelson and Saban? Or were they thinking at all?

The Israeli boosters in the United States have flat out corrupted our political process to get where they are. They have bought or intimidated every politician that matters to include presidents, congressmen and even those in state and local governments. Anyone who criticizes Israel or Jewish collective behavior in support of the Israeli state is subject to character assassination and blacklisting a la Mel Gibson and Rick Sanchez. Those who persist are denounced as anti-Semites, a label that is used liberally by Zionist groups.

Anyone who is bold enough to either criticize the Israelis or defend the Palestinians is targeted, and if they happen to be in Congress like Cynthia McKinney, Pete McCloskey, Paul Findlay, James Traficant, William Fulbright and Chuck Percy they are first vilified in the media and then set up against a very well-funded candidate to drive them from office. The end result is that when Israel kills civilians and rampaging armed settlers destroy their livelihoods the United States government chooses to look the other way and shower the rogue state with money so it can continue to do its dirty work.

The corruption extends to the state level, where twenty-six governments have passed Israel lobby-promoted legislation that limits free speech rights if anyone seeks to criticize Israel. This sometimes includes forcing employees, under threat of dismissal, to sign a pro-Israel oath and promise not to support any boycott of the Jewish state. The massive interference in the internal governance of the United States by Israel and its U.S. born lackeys far exceeds that of any other country, including inappropriately vilified Russia or China.

It is well past time to get rid of the Israel parasite that feeds on the American government and people. The special relationship with Israel, sanctified in the halls of Congress and by a Jewish dominated media, does nothing good for the United States and for the American people. Israel’s constant interference in the U.S. political system and economy comes at a huge cost, both in dollars and in terms of actual American interests.

And then there are the hot buttons which, if the U.S. actually had a functional government that is responsive to the people, should have been pushed long ago. Israel is ranked by the FBI as the number one “friendly” country in terms of its spying against the United States. Pollard is an exception, but Israeli spies are routinely slapped on the wrist when caught and never face prosecution. The Mossad agents who were the “Dancing Shlomos,” celebrating while the twin towers went down on 9/11, were allowed to go home. And Israel has never truly paid any price for the horrific bombing and torpedoing of the U.S.S. Liberty fifty-three years ago, which killed 34 Americans and injured over one hundred more. The completely unprovoked attack took place in international waters and was later covered-up by President Lyndon Baines Johnson, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and Congress. May they burn in hell. The surviving crew members are still waiting for justice.

So, let’s all resolve for 2021 to do whatever we can to pull the plug on Israel. Let Israel pay its own bills and take care of its own defense. American citizens who prefer the Jewish ethno-religious state to our constitutional republic should feel free to emigrate. Lacking Washington’s backing, Israel will also be free to commit atrocities and war crimes against all of its neighbors but without the U.S. United Nations veto it will have to begin facing the consequences for its actions. But most of all, as Americans, we will no longer have to continue to carry the burden of a country that manipulates and uses us and also has a certain contempt for us while doing so. And maybe just maybe freeing the United States from Israel could lead to an end to all the wars in the Middle East that Washington has been waging in spite of the fact that we Americans are threatened by no one in the region and have no real interest whatsoever in prolonging the agony of staying there.

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 https://councilforthenationalinterest.org address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org

January 5, 2021 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Wars for Israel | Israel, Palestine, United States, Zionism | Leave a comment

UAE rejects ‘wholly false’ reports of foiling Iranian attack against Israeli visitors

Press TV | January 5, 2021

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has vigorously rejected Israeli media reports that its security services arrested a number of Iranians purportedly conspiring to carry out an attack against Israeli tourists visiting the Persian Gulf country.

“The Government of the United Arab Emirates has denied media reports circulating today regarding the foiling of an alleged attack in Dubai,” it said in a statement on Monday.

The Emirati government described the rumors as “wholly false” and urged accuracy in reporting.

It also called upon the public and media outlets “to refer to official sources for information and to avoid circulating unverified reports.”

On Sunday night, Israel’s Hebrew-language broadcaster Channel 12 alleged that Emirati intelligence authorities had arrested a number of Iranians in Dubai and Abu Dhabi over the previous few days on suspicion that they planned to carry out an attack against Israelis.

Thousands of Israelis have traveled to the UAE after Israel’s cabinet ratified a mutual visa exemption agreement with the Arab country on November 22 last year. The UAE had earlier that month given its final okay to the agreement, which was signed after the two sides normalized ties.

The latest reports appear to be yet another attempt by Israeli news outlets to set off a media frenzy following Iran’s pledge to exact revenge for the assassination of one of its most senior nuclear scientists by suspected Tel Aviv-tied terrorists late last year.

Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the head of the Iranian Defense Ministry’s Organization of Defensive Innovation and Research, was targeted in a multi-pronged terrorist near Tehran on November 27.

Iran says it has substantive evidence that the Tel Aviv regime has been behind the terror attack and vowed to take revenge, but it has repeatedly clarified that, unlike Israel and the US, assassinations and targeted killings have no place on its political agenda.

The Israeli report also comes at a time of heightened tensions between the US and Iran as the latter marked the first anniversary of the assassination of its top anti-terror commander Lieutenant General Qassem Soleimani by the American military in Iraq in January, 2020.

Washington has once again stepped up its campaign of military threats against Iran through deployments of warships and bombers to the Middle East under the pretext that the Islamic Republic may be seeking revenge.

January 5, 2021 Posted by aletho | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Israel, Middle East, Zionism | Leave a comment

Israel Grants Settlers Millions to Monitor Palestinian Construction in West Bank

Israeli forces carry out a demolition in the Massafer Yatta area. (Photo: via Twitter)

Palestine Chronicle | January 2, 2021

Israel has granted illegal settlements more than $6 million to fund drones and patrol units to monitor “unauthorized” Palestinian building in the occupied West Bank.

The Settlement Affairs Ministry published on Thursday the criteria for settlement councils to gain access to the $6.2 million in funding, Haaretz reported.

The councils will be able to buy drones, vehicles and electronic monitoring equipment and pay the salaries of inspectors with the funding.

Those inspectors will monitor Palestinian construction in Area C of the occupied West Bank, which is under full Israeli control.

Palestinians living in Area C must acquire Israeli permission to build, but such permits are near-impossible to get. Just 1.4 percent of requests were approved between 2016 and 2018, according to official data.

Buildings constructed without an Israeli permit are regularly demolished by the military.

The funding will also go to erecting fences to close-off areas.

It is the first time settlement councils will have access to such funds as part of the state budget.

Under the arrangement, settlement councils will then report to an “Area C situation room” to report to officials what Settlement Affairs Minister Tzachi Hanegbi described as the “hostile takeover of land in Area C”.

More than 400,000 Israelis live in settlement communities in the occupied West Bank which are considered illegal under international law.

January 3, 2021 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | Israel, Israeli settlement, Palestine, Zionism | Leave a comment

American Tax Payers Spend At Least $23 Billion On Israel Every Year

By Eric Striker – National Justice – January 1, 2021

Last September, Donald Trump accidentally upended an entire generation of myths invented by the left and right that purport to explain America’s costly and unpopular military adventures in the Middle East:

“The fact is, we don’t have to be in the Middle East, other than we want to protect Israel. We’ve been very good to Israel. Other than that, we don’t have to be in the Middle East. You know there was a time we needed desperately oil, we don’t need that anymore.”

As Mondoweiss pointed out at the time, the explosive admission went completely unmentioned in the mainstream media, which traditionally hangs on every one of Trump’s words and reacts hysterically.

Categorizing America’s foreign policy catastrophes as done in the service to Israel has until the Trump era always been dismissed by media tastemakers and political gatekeepers as rank anti-Semitism driven by reductionist, simplistic and conspiratorial thinking, even when intelligence officials like Michael Scheuer and foreign policy experts affirm the view.

Trump’s lack of subtlety when remarking on using American blood and treasure to incrementally advance the interests of the Jewish state is one reason why the Israel lobby, which is perpetually paranoid about the public noticing their activities, is not keen on reciprocating his often suffocating love.

Their paranoia is justified. This year Congress made the mistake of combining its $900 billion dollar coronavirus stimulus bill, which suffering people are closely following the development of, with the yearly $1.4 trillion dollar fiscal budget, which is typically ignored.

A deluge of popular anger was provoked by news that we would only be receiving a $600 dollar check under the guise of budget austerity. At the same time, buried deep in the 5,600 monstrosity was a provision setting aside supposed budget constraints to give Israel the equivalent of $5,000 dollars for each of its citizens.

Jews in the media responded to the controversy by calling indignant American tax payers, including actress Alyssa Milano and various left-wing journalists, “fools” and “anti-Semites.” They doubled down by stating that the $500 million dollars provided to Israel was a drop in a $2.3 trillion dollar bucket. They pointed out that other countries, such as Jordan, were receiving foreign aid as well.

But even critics of Israel do not properly calculate the true price Americans pay for a state that — unlike South Korea or Germany — does not provide any economic or military benefits to the homeland. America does not have military bases in Israel, nor does Israel have anything to trade.

The general figure provided for annual US aid to Israel is $3.8 billion, but as former CIA intelligence officer Philip Giraldi has written, this figure excludes our completely artificial $9 billion dollar trade deficit with that country, as well as the $8 billion provided in “loan guarantees” that are basically giveaways since the US Treasury pays interest and principal on these loans.

The Black Budget

Covert “black budget” funding to the Jewish state is another topic shrouded in mystery.

In 2015 a public interest group, the Institute for Research: Middle East Policy, sued the CIA for its refusal to comply with a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request demanding records on how much is spent in service of Israel, including in respect to intelligence gathering efforts on American citizens that is then sent to the Mossad.

The Department of Justice fought a ferocious, four year long legal battle to keep this information secret and ultimately won.

Based on publicly available pre-1990 black budget expenses, the CIA is dedicating between $13.2 billion to Israeli interests every year if spending has been tacked to inflation. The number may be even higher under the Trump administration, especially since it has escalated the conflict with Iran.

US Spending To Advance Israel

Rarely discussed is how US foreign aid to Muslim countries is, as Trump has constantly reminded us, nothing more than bribing them into cooperating with Israel. US aid to Israel, by contrast, is unconditional.

All of the nations that share a border with Israel (Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, and even to certain players in Palestinians and Syria) receive payments from the United States. Were it not for the peculiar, thankless relationship America has with Israel, US tax dollars would not be bankrolling the entire Egyptian military, nor would we be propping up the basket case monarchy in Jordan by handing them 4% of their GDP every year.

The following is a list of expenses — financial, geopolitical, and human — that the American people must shoulder to guarantee the security, stability and geopolitical expansion of 9 million Israelis.

1) Egypt — $2.2 billion a year

The United States’ foreign aid to Egypt, about $1.3 billion which goes to its military and the rest to its economy, is entirely predicated on the country’s military dictators maintaining a close intelligence and diplomatic relationship with Israel. The country’s current leader, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, took power in 2014 in an Israeli-backed coup that deposed the democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood.

Egypt, which was once a regional superpower that fought the Israelis during the Six Days War, restored diplomatic ties with Israel in 1979 under a US brokered deal.

The single-issue relationship was put on display when Senator Rand Paul attempted to cut aid to Egypt during a 2017 Congressional fight. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), five US Senators and Benjamin Netanyahu himself all intervened to block Paul’s amendment, which was crushed in the Senate by a large majority after Jewish groups penned a letter demanding the aid continue as usual. According to both Netanyahu and AIPAC, America’s payoff to the Egyptian military establishment is the only thing keeping Israel’s formidable neighbor from attacking them.

2) Jordan — $1.5 billion a year

In 1994, Jordan became the second Arab state after Egypt to restore formal ties with Israel.

Prior to 1994, Jordan received a smaller sum of aid from the US, but the country retained relative geopolitical independence, including support for Saddam Hussein during the first Persian Gulf War.

As a state bordering Palestine that for years retained its claim to the West Bank, the Jordanian monarchs have been a useful asset for Israel. The country’s establishment is widely despised by Palestinians, even though the Jordanian public is broadly sympathetic to their plight.

In exchange for breaking solidarity with the Arab world’s boycott of Israel, the United States signed a generous free trade agreement with Jordan, where we prop up their economy by buying 25% of their exports and hand them $1.5 billion a year (close to 4% of their GDP) via USAID.

3) Iraq — $1.1 Billion (Excluding cost of the Iraq war)

The Iraq war, and our continued presence in the country 17 years later, is the product of Jews in Washington primarily loyal to the state of Israel.

This is the opinion of the man who went before the United Nations and went down in history as having sold the weapons of mass destruction lie, former Secretary of State Colin Powell.

In Karen DeYoung’s 2007 biography of Powell, Soldier, he singles out Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz as the real architects of war. In one interview with DeYoung, Powell even refers to Donald Rumsfeld — the Gentile who is usually blamed alongside Dick Cheney for the Iraq debacle — as a man controlled by the “JINSA crowd” in the Defense Department. The Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) is an Israel lobbying firm similar to AIPAC.

If JINSA and the “card-carrying Likud members,” as Powell is reported to have remarked once, were not making foreign policy calls in Washington the war would’ve never happened.

It could be argued that the trillions spent on perhaps the most wasteful military conflict in American history was a subsidy to Israel.

4) Saudi Arabia – $1.1 Billion a year

Saudi Arabia, the nation which 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers, also lobbies the United States government through AIPAC.

The Trump administration was able to secure public Saudi support for Israel by promising $100 billion dollars in modern weapons, including F-35s, to the Gulf state. AIPAC and the Israeli government are both considered to have been the kingmakers in the deal.

The Saudi government, along with another nation that recently established official ties to Israel the, United Arab Emirates, are both state-sponsors of terrorism, including sending American weapons to Al-Qaeda.

The official sect of Islam practiced in Saudi Arabia is Wahhabism, which is the puritanical and violent dogma that inspires both the Islamic State (ISIS) and Al Qaeda.

To understand how deep terrorist ideology is penetrated in Saudi society, a Saudi Royal Air Force pilot being trained in a $740 million dollar US-funded Pentagon program to learn how to fly the F-35s killed three American servicemen and injured eight others at the Pensacola Air Station in Florida in a quickly memory holed terrorist attack last year. A study from 2014 found that citizens of Saudi Arabia were the largest private donors to ISIS in Syria and beyond.

5) Afghanistan – $5.4 Billion a year

As with Iraq, the 2001 war in Afghanistan and our ongoing presence there, is part of a containment strategy of Iran done in the interest of Israel.

According to former National Security Agency analyst Karen Kwiatkowski, the Pentagon’s logic behind the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq was to create a military pincer that would surround Iran. In a 2009 interview, Kwiatkowski stressed that Iran was not a threat to the United States or its interests, but rather only to Israeli regional hegemony,

The Israelis have been using Afghanistan to spy on the Iranian military and engage in various black ops against their country. The Iranians appear to be fighting back, including by restoring ties for their historical nemesis, the Taliban. Israel fears that an unconditional US withdrawal could end up working to the advantage of Iran.

When earlier this year Donald Trump said he wanted to withdraw troops from Afghanistan — a move supported by the overwhelming majority of the American people — JINSA and AIPAC were the sole interest groups to vocalize opposition and began pressuring the Senate to ensure it didn’t happen. The Jewish lobby succeeded, and Rand Paul’s bill last July that would’ve brought our soldiers home was defeated by a bipartisan vote of 60 to 33.

6) Palestine, Lebanon, Syria — Fluctuates

The three nations bordering or occupied by Israel receive aid from the United States in an attempt to present carrots and sticks that prevent factions from fully uniting, but the spigot is turned off and on regularly at the behest of Israel.

Last year, the US State Department cut aid to Lebanon’s military in half after a direct appeal to do so by the Netanyahu government. The complaint was that the Lebanese military was not doing “enough” to undermine Shi’ite military and political power. The US typically funds the Lebanese military as a counter-force to Hezbollah, but after the Shi’ite militia successfully defended Lebanon’s territory from an Israeli invasion in the 2006 war, the group has enjoyed nationalist support across the diverse religious groups in the country.

Hezbollah’s work in defending Christians from ISIS in recent years has also been a political game changer, as traditionally grievances from Christian organizations have been exploited by Israel to leverage against the Palestinian cause.

In Palestine itself, the Palestinian Authority under Mohammad Abbas has enjoyed about half a billion US dollars in aid, both to politically divide him from Hamas controlled Gaza, as well as subsidize the humanitarian costs of Israel’s occupation in the West Bank.

Abbas’ strategy of “negotiating” with Israel through America is in retrospect an abject failure. Illegal settlements in the West Bank have continued uninhibited, and the Palestinians in the territory narrowly avoided the full annexation of their land by Israel. While the annexation project appears to have been put off, experts believe Israel will attempt to do so once Israel has a better foothold in the region.

In Syria, which Wikileaks of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton exposed as nothing more than a regime change operation on behalf of Israel, the United States continues to spend close to a billion dollars every year in “humanitarian” relief.

While the coalition of the Syrian Army, Russia and Iran have largely defeated the ISIS and Al Qaeda rebels, the US is combining its humanitarian aid to anti-Assad areas while attempting to starve the country with crippling sanctions. By providing support to certain regions through USAID, Washington and Israel are artificially extending the conflict between Assad and the anti-government fighters, the latter which would’ve totally surrendered otherwise.

Future Expenses Under Trump’s “Israel-First” Agenda

Donald Trump and Jared Kushner have been able to secure support from multiple Muslim nations for Israel by directly offering big payments and controversial favors as a trade.

Here is what this “diplomacy” will cost Americans.

1) Morocco –$3 Billion and the Western Sahara

Under Trump’s deal with Morocco, its king Mohammed VI will receive $3 billion dollars in investments courtesy of the US taxpayer through the International Development Finance Corporation (DFC), a government entity created by Donald Trump, in exchange for recognizing Israel.

The more concerning aspect of the deal is Trump’s recognition of the disputed Western Sahara as Moroccan, as well as a deal to sell the Moroccan military billions in American arms to give them a strategic edge over Algeria and Western Saharan natives.

The interests of the Western Saharans are represented by the Polisario Front, a nationalist group seeking independence and self-governance. The Moroccans and Polisario Front have been engaging in intensifying armed battles since November, a month before Trump’s outreach to Mohammed VI. With American recognition of the Western Sahara, the Polisario Fronto will have lost diplomatic leverage and potentially have no choice but to fight the Moroccans — thus initiating a potential conflagration in North Africa if Algeria maintains its pro-Saharan position.

2) Indonesia — $2 Billion

Trump’s DFC is reaching out to Indonesia — the world’s largest Muslim nation — to provide $2 billion in US aid in exchange for normalizing relations with Israel.

The offer appears to have been rejected, with Jakarta announcing that it stands firmly behind the Palestinian cause.

Unlike Morocco, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, Indonesia is a parliamentary democracy. Supporting Israel remains highly taboo among the vast majority of Muslims worldwide, so it remains to be seen if the Indonesian state will end up accepting America’s money.

3) Sudan — $1 Billion and Taken Off State-Supporter of Terrorism List

Sudan is an important flashpoint in Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians. Iran uses Sudan as a transit point for smuggling arms to the Palestinian resistance.

The Israelis and the United States have exploited racial strife between blacks and Arabs in Sudan — funding the black side in Darfur (South Sudan) — during the country’s bloody civil war. The conflict has been winding down, but the Sudanese state and economy remains in dire straits largely due to sanctions over being a state-sponsor of terrorism.

During the 1990s, Sudan was blamed for housing Osama Bin Laden following the 1998 US embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. Under Trump’s deal, Sudan will be absolved of all blame after paying a fine and receive a billion dollars in debt forgiveness and economic aid in exchange for establishing formal relations with Israel.

4) Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, Oman, etc — Unknown

The Saudis have been sinking billions of dollars into fellow Gulf States to encourage them to support Israel since 2018, according to leaks to Arab media.

According to the documents, the Saudis were working on behalf of the US government in this endeavor, promising their neighbors a “generous aid package” from America just for collaborating with the Jewish state.

As written before, the Saudis and UAE are receiving over $120 billion in US weapons — an idea that previously would’ve been a non-starter in Washington due to potentially undermining Israel’s qualitative military edge over Arabs.

By showing loyalty to Israel, Saudi Arabia has been able to secure support in Washington for its barbaric war in Yemen. When the US Congress passed a resolution to end US support for the Saudi war effort, Donald Trump vetoed the bill and, unlike the NDAA, no attempt was made to override this decision.

The full extent of what the US plans to provide Gulf States for their internally unpopular backing for Israel is not yet possible to know.

The Real Cost of Israel

While previous packages of US foreign aid to Muslim countries on behalf of Israel were presented as an objective pursuit for “peace in the Middle East,” the Trump administration’s efforts have directly led to new and bloody conflicts (the Yemen war), and opened up the floodgates for new ones around the world.

All that is certain is that Trump’s concessions and arm’s deals pursuit of recognition for Israel is objectively making the world more dangerous and unstable.

A perfect dollar estimate of how much Israel is costing our country is impossible due to the opaque nature of Washington’s servility to the Zionist state.

In spite of this, we can arrive at a range. The on paper cost of Israel, when we include the “loan guarantee” scam and payments to neighboring countries to advance Israel’s interests, is at least $23.1 billion a year.

This figure excludes speculative figures on the black budget in service to Israel, which if correct, would bring that number to $36.3 billion. It also excludes aid to Palestine and Lebanon (which may return next year), as well as costs related to the proxy conflict with Iran, which almost all foreign policy experts agree is entirely motivated by Israeli — not American — interests.

This number will balloon under Donald Trump’s plan, which is expected to be continued uninhibited under a Joe Biden presidency. Trump’s outreach to the Arab world will put us on the hook for at least an extra $6 billion, which again, is an extremely conservative estimate since we are excluding the shady deals with the Saudis and other Gulf States.

Thus, the $3.8 billion figure that already outrages much of the American public is at the bare minimum about $23 billion per year, but could potentially be closer to $50 billion.

This price of this luxury item in the Middle East is almost half of all American foreign aid, and does not serve any humanitarian purpose (often times, the other way around), much less the interests of the American people. Understanding the outrage this sum would provoke among US voters and taxpayers, groups like JINSA and AIPAC, along with the disproportionately Jewish owned media, ensure that it is never accurately reported.

January 3, 2021 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Israel, Middle East, Palestine, United States, Zionism | Leave a comment

« Previous Entries Next Entries »

US Superpower Myth Shattered w/ Trita Parsi

Aletho News Videos

or go to

Aletho News Archives – Video-Images

From the Archives

Israel Is A Genocidal Society

The Israeli Political Spectrum From The “Liberal Left” To The Far Right, Is United In Genocide

The Dissident | May 5, 2026

… The fundamental issue of Israel is not Benjamin Netanyahu, but the fact that Israel is overwhelmingly a bloodthirsty, war-ready, genocidal society.

Historian Zachary Foster has documented that the overwhelming majority of Jewish Israelis have supported every Israeli war since the 2006 invasion of Lebanon, writing:

2006
86% of the Israeli adult population justified “the IDF operation in Lebanon against Hizbollah,” or 2006 Lebanon War, in which Israel killed 1,191 people, the vast majority civilians according to HRW (Note that the % of Jewish Israelis who supported the war was even higher)

2008-2009
82% of the Israeli public thought that the 2008-9 war on Gaza was justified (in which Israel killed 1,417 Palestinians, the vast majority civilians.) Note that the % of Jewish Israelis who supported the war was even higher

2012
90% of Israeli Jews supported war on Gaza ( in which Israel killed 160 Palestinians, 66% civilians)

2014
95% of Jewish Israelis believed the war on Gaza was justified (in which Israel killed 2,310 Palestinians, 70% civilians)

2021
72% of Israelis believed the war on Gaza should continue (as of May 21) after Israel had already killed 250 Palestinians in Gaza, vast majority civilians. The % of Jewish Israelis who supported killing more Palestinians was much higher.

2024
A January poll found 95% of Jewish Israelis thought the Israeli military was using either the “appropriate” amount of force or “too little” force in Gaza at a time when Israel had already killed >25,700 Palestinians in Gaza.

2024
In September, 90% of Jewish Israelis supported the war on Lebanon (in which Israel killed 800+, including hundreds of civilians)

2025
In March, 82% of Israeli Jews supported the forced expulsion of residents of Gaza, Israel’s main goal in it’s genocide & war on Gaza.

2025
In June, 82% of Jewish Israelis supported the war on Iran known as the “twelve day war”

2026
On March 4, 93% of Israeli Jews expressed support for the war on Iran. 97% of “right-wing” Jewish Israelis support it, compared with 93% in the center and 76% on the left.

The overwhelming majority of Jewish Israelis also have openly genocidal views towards Palestinians.

Polls in Israel have shown that:

84% of the (Israeli )public gives the IDF an excellent or very good grade regarding the moral conduct of the army
75% of Jewish Israelis agree with the idea that ‘there are no innocents in Gaza.’
A vast majority of Israeli Jews – 79 percent – say they are ‘not so troubled’ or ‘not troubled at all’ by the reports of famine and suffering among the Palestinian population in Gaza.

The fundamental problem in Israel is Zionism, not Benjamin Netanyahu. – Full article

Blog Roll

Subscribe to Aletho News

Enter your email address to receive new posts by email.

Email Address:

Join 2,458 other subscribers
Visits Since December 2009
- 7,499,279 hits
Looking for something?

Search for:
Archives
Archives
Calendar

May 2026

M T W T F S S

1 2 3

4 5 6 7 8 9 10

11 12 13 14 15 16 17

18 19 20 21 22 23 24

25 26 27 28 29 30 31

« Apr
Categories

Aletho News Civil Liberties Corruption Deception Economics Environmentalism Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism Fake News False Flag Terrorism Full Spectrum Dominance Illegal Occupation Mainstream Media, Warmongering Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity Militarism Progressive Hypocrite Russophobia Science and Pseudo-Science Solidarity and Activism Subjugation - Torture Supremacism, Social Darwinism Timeless or most popular Video War Crimes Wars for Israel
Tags
9/11 Afghanistan Africa al-Qaeda Australia BBC Benjamin Netanyahu Brazil Canada CDC Central Intelligence Agency China CIA CNN Covid-19 COVID-19 Vaccine Donald Trump Egypt European Union Facebook FBI FDA France Gaza Germany Google Hamas Hebron Hezbollah Hillary Clinton Human rights Hungary India Iran Iraq ISIS Israel Israeli settlement Japan Jerusalem Joe Biden Korea Latin America Lebanon Libya Middle East National Security Agency NATO New York Times North Korea NSA Obama Pakistan Palestine Poland Qatar Russia Sanctions against Iran Saudi Arabia Syria The Guardian Turkey Twitter UAE UK Ukraine United Nations United States USA Venezuela Washington Post West Bank WHO Yemen Zionism

May 2026
M	T	W	T	F	S	S
	1	2	3
4	5	6	7	8	9	10
11	12	13	14	15	16	17
18	19	20	21	22	23	24
25	26	27	28	29	30	31

Aletho News
If Americans Knew
No Tricks Zone
Contact:

atheonews (at) gmail.com
Disclaimer

This site is provided as a research and reference tool. Although we make every reasonable effort to ensure that the information and data provided at this site are useful, accurate, and current, we cannot guarantee that the information and data provided here will be error-free. By using this site, you assume all responsibility for and risk arising from your use of and reliance upon the contents of this site.

This site and the information available through it do not, and are not intended to constitute legal advice. Should you require legal advice, you should consult your own attorney.

Nothing within this site or linked to by this site constitutes investment advice or medical advice.

Materials accessible from or added to this site by third parties, such as comments posted, are strictly the responsibility of the third party who added such materials or made them accessible and we neither endorse nor undertake to control, monitor, edit or assume responsibility for any such third-party material.

The posting of stories, commentaries, reports, documents and links (embedded or otherwise) on this site does not in any way, shape or form, implied or otherwise, necessarily express or suggest endorsement or support of any of such posted material or parts therein.

The word “alleged” is deemed to occur before the word “fraud.” Since the rule of law still applies. To peasants, at least.

Fair Use

This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more info go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.

DMCA Contact

This is information for anyone that wishes to challenge our “fair use” of copyrighted material.

If you are a legal copyright holder or a designated agent for such and you believe that content residing on or accessible through our website infringes a copyright and falls outside the boundaries of “Fair Use”, please send a notice of infringement by contacting atheonews@gmail.com.

We will respond and take necessary action immediately.

If notice is given of an alleged copyright violation we will act expeditiously to remove or disable access to the material(s) in question.

All 3rd party material posted on this website is copyright the respective owners / authors. Aletho News makes no claim of copyright on such material.

ΑΛΗΘΩΣ

Israeli forces carry out a demolition in the Massafer Yatta area. (Photo: via Twitter)

Featured Video

From the Archives

The Dissident | May 5, 2026

Blog Roll

Subscribe to Aletho News

Visits Since December 2009

Looking for something?

Archives

Calendar

Categories

Tags

Contact:

Disclaimer

Site info