To say that RFK Jr. goes out of his way to avoid offending Jews would be an understatement. He presents himself as the world’s biggest friend of the Jewish people in general and the Jewish (supremacist) state of Israel in particular.
The first mainstream article that covered RFK’s presidential run with a positive spin was David Samuels’s piece in the Jewish magazine Tablet. But since then there hasn’t exactly been a groundswell of Kennedy support in the mainstream Jewish community. Aside from free-thinking outliers like Naomi Wolf and some of my radio guests (Josh Mitteldorf, Barry Kissin, Steve Brown, Ron Rattner) it seems that most of American Jewry, or at least its media wing, views RFK Jr.’s candidacy with trepidation.
That trepidation metamorphosed into hysterical denunciation last week, when the candidate’s off-the-record dinner-table remarks about ethnic-specific bioweapons and COVID-19 triggered the biggest two-minute anti-Semitism media hatefest since Kanye West went defcon 3. The New York Post broke the story with a lying headline: “RFK Jr. says COVID was ‘ethnically targeted’ to spare Jews.” What Kennedy actually said, in informal conversation, was:
COVID-19. There is an argument that it is ethnically targeted. COVID-19 attacks certain races disproportionately. COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese…We don’t know whether it was deliberately targeted or not but there are papers out there that show the racial or ethnic differential and impact.”
The candidate could be fairly accused of hyperbole: The study he was citing did not indicate how disproportionally COVID affected different ethnicities, but only analyzed one genetic factor, which may or may not have had much real-world effect. But that study does say pretty much what RFK says it does. What it does not say, and what RFK Jr. did not say, is that COVID was a Jewish-Chinese bioweapon designed to kill white and black people.
But you wouldn’t know that from the media coverage. Nor would you know it from remarks of Congressional reps like Debbie Wasserman Schulz, who tried to censor Kennedy’s anti-censorship testimony, saying “Mr. Kennedy has repeatedly made despicable antisemitic and anti-Asian comments.”
The witch hunt, of course, was unsurprising. What was surprising was that RFK Jr. would say something that was begging to be misinterpreted as “anti-Semitic.” This is the guy, after all, who presents himself as the most pro-Jewish, pro-Israel candidate in the known universe. Why would he even bring up the “ethnic targeting” study, much less exaggerate it in such a way as to practically force the ADL and its friends to accuse him of blaming COVID on the Jews?
Some RFK supporters might wonder if their hero, like Trump before him, is playing 3D chess. Maybe RFK knows full well who really killed his father and uncle. In that case, his exaggerated philosemitic pro-Israel schtick would be a ruse. Like his father before him, who kept publicly quiet about the murder of his brother JFK in hopes of winning the presidency and undoing the coup, RFK Jr. could be blowing (pro-Zionist) smoke to camouflage the reality of his mission. Could he have deliberately provoked the hysterical attacks in order to garner free publicity and let the media and political establishment further discredit itself—the sort of thing that Trump has made a political career out of?
All things considered, the 3D chess scenario is unlikely. RFK is considerably smarter than Trump, but he is less manipulative. Unlike Trump, RFK is sincere. He is the what-you-see-is-what-you-get candidate. I don’t think he’s lying or being manipulative when he professes undying love for Israel, hatred for Nazi Germany, and concern about COVID affecting ethnicities differently in light of what we know about ethnic-specific bioweapon research.
But the question remains: Why is Kennedy so irrationally extremist in his support for Israel? And why did he intemperately exaggerate the COVID-ethnicity study in such a way as to invite attacks? Both his rabidly Likudnik Zionism and his ill-considered “anti-Semitic” bioweapon speculation seem, shall we say, immoderate, if not a little unhinged.
So let’s put RFK Jr. on Dr. Freud’s proverbial couch. Freud coined the term reaction formation: “a defense mechanism in which people express the opposite of their true feelings, sometimes to an exaggerated extent. For instance, a man who feels insecure about his masculinity might act overly aggressive. Or a woman with substance use disorder may extol the virtues of abstinence.” In many cases, the subjects are not even consciously aware of their true feelings. The peacenik who is so bellicose in his pacifism that he is always starting fights—I have known several—is generally unaware that his real motivation is not dedication to peace, but smoldering inner aggression. And then there are the greedy, ambitious, competitive, materialistic people who adopt leftist politics to conceal their real feelings about money and status. I’ve known more than a few of those too. And don’t get me started about the ranting anti-global-warming fanatics who seem to think their bloviations will save the world while your skepticism will destroy it, even as their excessively comfortable lifestyles emit far more carbon in week than you do in a month.
So reaction formations are quite common, and often a big driver of people’s political views. RFK Jr.’s grossly exaggerated, seemingly irrational pro-Israel extremism has all the hallmarks of a classic reaction formation. If such is the case, Kennedy would be hiding his repressed hostility to the Jewish state not only from others, but also from himself.
But why would Kennedy hate Israel, yet remain in deep denial of his real feelings? For the same reason that Hamlet hated his stepfather Claudius but couldn’t bring himself to act. Israel killed Kennedy’s father, just like Claudius killed Hamlet’s. But just as Hamlet grew up in Claudius’s household, vulnerable to Claudius’s despotic power, RFK Jr. grew up in post-Zionist-coup America, helpless and defenseless. Vulnerable people in the household of an abuser, especially children, have a tendency to engage in identification with the aggressor: “an unconscious mechanism in which an individual identifies with someone who poses a threat or with an opponent who cannot be mastered.” From RFK Jr.’s perspective, that would be the Zionists. He totally identifies with them, even with their most disgustingly vulgar mediocrities like Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, and hyperbolically deems himself the biggest Zionist of all.
But What About the Blurt-Out?
If a reaction formation explains RFK’s ultra-Zionism, then what explains his COVID-targeted-to-spare-Jews blurt-out? Paging Dr. Freud again!
Actually, you don’t really need serious psychoanalytic chops to figure this one out. RFK’s repressed, unconscious hostility to Zionists, kept under wraps by his hyper-Zionist reaction formation, found a way of expressing itself. So although RFK was never consciously aware that what he was saying sounded a whole lot like “COVID was targeted to spare the Jews,” his unconscious mind was all-too-aware, and indeed put those equivocal words right into his mouth.
Like the classic Freudian slip, this kind of blurt-out scenario illustrates how the unconscious mind can occasionally short-circuit the conscious mind and speak unspeakable truths. Translation: “Outrageous Jewish anti-goy conspiracies are not always imaginary.” So the paranoid reaction of people like Debby Wasserman Schulz is not quite as crazy as it sounds: Debby’s unconscious is getting the gist of what Bobby’s unconscious is saying, and she doesn’t like it.
Intergenerational Trauma
The psychiatric symptoms on both sides stem from deeply-rooted intergenerational trauma. RFK Jr., of course, grew up with the trauma of his president-uncle’s dastardly murder in 1963, and his father’s equally dastardly murder (presumably by the same parties) in 1968. A modern-day Hamlet, he spent his formative years under tremendous social pressure to refrain from challenging his fathers’ and uncles’ murderers. We could also speculate about the Kennedy family’s roots in the holocausted earth of Ireland—the Irish have suffered real genocide and persecution to more than rival the Jews’ mostly-mythical suffering at the hands of alleged anti-Semites who supposedly hate them for no reason whatsoever—but let’s not go there, lest some of my less-enlightened readers start succumbing to Irish Holocaust denial.
On Wasserman-Schulz’s side, the intergenerational trauma is apparently so horrific that it can only be cured by psychedelic drugs. In “Can We Cure Anti-Semitism with Molly?” the Jewish Daily Forward’s senior editor Rob Eshman opens with a question:
“If you learned that a single pill had led a neo-Nazi to renounce his hateful beliefs, would you:
Demand more research to find out if the pill really works
Ignore existing evidence and continue to outlaw the pill?
Eshman notes that Israel, the world’s MDMA capital, uses the “love drug” to treat PTSD. We may imagine that child-murdering IDF snipers like the “I shot 13 kids today” tweeter are gradually eased back into what passes for Israeli normalcy with the help of psychedelic sessions that rewire their brains for love (of fellow Zionist Jews at least) instead of drooling 24/7/365 hatred of Palestinian kids (“little snakes”) and the mothers who bear them.
But can MDMA cure Zionist Jewry of its 3000-year-old collective case of PTSD? To answer that question, we would need to know whether individual Jews really suffer the pain experienced by their persecuted ancestors. Scientists are working hard to convince us that they do.
An alternative explanation of why so many ultra-privileged Jews experience so much suffering from historical collective memories blames culture, not genetics. The film Defamation memorably shows Israeli children being horrifically traumatized by their elders, who drum it into their impressionable little heads that the goys all want to exterminate them.
And speaking of Jews traumatizing Jews, what about infant circumcision? Paging Dr. Bowlby!
Attachment studies have shown that very young children—babies, really—are extremely vulnerable to psychological trauma. A terrible experience at eight months of age or even earlier is likely to ruin your life in a way that a vastly worse experience at a later age might not. Traumatic experiences involving damage to the mother-child bond, in particular, seem to be responsible for much if not most of the world’s misery. (Moral: To form a happy and peaceful person, keep the baby in skin-to-skin contact with the mother, and breastfeed on demand, for the first two years of life, as many traditional cultures do.)
What you do NOT want to do is rip the baby out of the mother’s arms and inflict unspeakable torture by carving up the most sensitive part of its anatomy with a knife. This will wreck the mother-child bond due to the mother’s perceived betrayal of her child (and create overcompensation in the form of the Jewish mother syndrome) while forming an unconscious memory of a horrific attack by a terrifying outsider. Later in life, the child will be culturally conditioned to transfer its fear and loathing onto the imaginary figure of a new terrifying outsider: the evil goy who wants to kill us. It’s the perfect formula for creating a profoundly neurotic, powerfully ethnocentric group identity.
So to summarize: RFK Jr.’s dysfunctional relationship with Zionism—which stems from the willingness of traumatized Zionists like Ben Gurion to commit outrageous crimes in order to preserve the nuclear weapons they imagine they need to save their lives from the evil Jew-hating goys—is a complete mess. I doubt that even the best therapist, armed with all the MDMA in Israel, could effect a cure.
The US Senate Foreign Relations Committee proposed new legislation on 21 July to bolster normalization efforts between Israel and Arab countries, pledging nearly $120 million in funding and naming Saudi Arabia as a key candidate.
The Regional Integration and Normalization Act seeks to encourage the Arab world to solidify diplomatic ties with Israel.
US Senator Bob Menendez remarked that “this bill capitalizes on the dynamics that are profoundly reshaping the Middle East and North Africa,” adding, “Further integration in this region, one marked by conflict and disunity, must be a pillar of US foreign policy moving forward. It will remain a region that is critical to US strategic interests, and we should support efforts that increase stability and prosperity for our partners and the region’s citizens.”
This bill will create an ambassador-level official for the Abraham Accords, expand normalization and “integration, ”support the development of an Abraham Accords and Negev Forum Economic Partnership, and support joint cybersecurity training.
This development comes a few days after US President Joe Biden hosted Israeli President Isaac Herzog at the White House.
Since Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took power last year, Biden has avoided meeting with the Israeli Prime Minister due to a controversial judicial overhaul.
Two Israeli settlers stormed the Orthodox Church complex in the Mount Zion area of occupied Jerusalem, laid blankets on the ground and announced that they would remain there.
A video shared on TikTok yesterday morning showed the two settlers sitting on the church grounds as they spread items they brought with them.
When a church official asked them to leave the settlers started shouting insults, obscene and racist slurs towards him, telling him to “get out” of the grounds, and claiming that “Mount Zion belongs to the Jewish people”, adding that every minute the church remains standing is considered “looting”.
The Orthodox Church has been battling settler associations supported by the Israeli government which claim the land the church is situated on belongs to Jews.
Staff at the church said the settlers were armed and had frightened personnel.
After hearing about the settler invasion, locals gathered outside the church to defend it.
The Israeli authorities and settlers have, in recent years, intensified their attacks against Christian churches and property in occupied Jerusalem in an effort to displace Christians, reduce their numbers and steal their property.
OCCUPIED JERUSALEM – The Hamas Movement has strongly denounced the US House of Representatives for passing a resolution claiming that the Israeli occupation state is “not a racist or apartheid state.”
In a statement on Wednesday, Hamas condemned the resolution as a flagrant US bias in favor of the occupation state and a step intended to encourage it to persist in its crimes and violations against the Palestinian people, especially its ethnic cleansing policy.
“This US resolution has ignored the black history of the Zionist occupation, which is filled with dozens of massacres, and turned a blind eye to the crimes that were committed recently by settler gangs under military protection in Huwara town and dozens of Palestinian villages, which were exposed to arson attacks and organized destruction of homes, vehicles and farms,” Hamas underscored.
Hamas described the recent settler crimes in the West Bank as “an example of the racist practices and the ethnic cleansing policy that are pursued by the occupation state against the Palestinian people.”
“Many Israeli officials have voiced fascist positions, such as the recent remarks of the criminal minister, Smotrich, in which he gave the Palestinians the choice between living in the so-called state of Israel as second-class citizens or being banished or killed,” the Movement said.
“Such a US resolution will not change the reality of the criminal and racist Zionist occupation entity, which relies on ethnic cleansing, displacing the rightful owners of the land and replacing them with intruders,” it added.
The US House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a resolution calling Israel “not a racist or apartheid state,” on Tuesday
The measure passed, in a 412-to-nine vote, a few hours after president Joe Biden met with Israeli president Isaac Herzog at the White House.
The legislation comes in response to remarks last Saturday from Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal, chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, in which she called Israel a “racist state.”
Later, the congresswoman apologized following pressures, while stressing that Israel’s “extreme right-wing government has engaged in discriminatory and outright racist policies.”
Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. took his expression of support for the government of Israel to the maximum level in a Wednesday Twitter post. After criticizing the administration of President Joe Biden for “threatening Israel with the ending of the special relationship between” Israel and the United States, Kennedy declared, “As President, my support of Israel will be unconditional.”
Looking through the wave of negative comments and quote tweets that quickly appeared in response to Kennedy’s post, it looks like Kennedy took in the tweet a position that could be destructive to the base that has developed for his campaign over the last few months.
Many individuals took Kennedy’s criticism of US intervention related to Ukraine and Russia as suggesting that he would pursue consistently as president a noninterventionist foreign policy. That hope is being dashed.
Kennedy has also made a central focus of his campaign skepticism toward activities of the US government that Kennedy has argued in many instances have harmed the American people while advancing the wealth and power of special interests. Many supporters who share this skepticism will find it hard to accept that meanwhile it is appropriate to give support unconditionally to a foreign government.
Kennedy’s endorsement of the special relationship between the US and Israel, as well as his commitment to providing unconditional support to the Middle East nation as president, follows his discussion of his great admiration for Israel in an interview earlier this week.
In an interview with Schmuley Boteach this week, Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. addressed the absurd claim being thrown around that Kennedy is antisemitic because he discussed a differing susceptibility to coronavirus generally for people of several different ethnicities, including ashkenazi.
Welcome to the club, Kennedy. Antisemitism allegations are routinely launched against political commentators, candidates, and office holders, including Donald Trump , who are perceived as threatening the DC gravy train, Indeed, people looking for a politician who is a threat to the expanding power of the US government at the expense of liberty and peace, may look to the presence of such attacks on an individual as an indication that he may be doing some good.
Before that discussion, Kennedy addressed in the interview his views in regard to the nation of Israel, making clear that he is a major Israel booster. Kennedy started off his comments in the interview by stating, “There’s nobody who’s running for president right now in either party who will be a better friend to Israel than me as president, and nobody who will articulate the moral case for Israel with the same erudition, the same persuasive power as me, because I believe it in my heart, it’s core to the values that I was raised with.” Later in his opening comment of the interview, Kennedy declared, “That friendship with Israel and making the moral case for Israel will be a key part of my presidency.”
Kennedy also declared in his opening comment of the interview that he will try as a candidate “to bring the Democratic Party back to its traditional support of Israel and to explain to my children’s generation the historical context and the moral case for Israel.” At least among the top Democratic Congress leaders — and the top Republican Congress leaders as well, though, devotion to the Israel government seems to be running very high already.
Further argued Kennedy in his opening comment, Israel expends great effort at the risk of its own soldiers to “avoid civilian casualties” in dealing with threats from its adversaries and is not an apartheid state. Later in the interview, Kennedy further asserted that a Palestinian has “much more rights in Israel than in any of the neighboring countries” and that “the best place” and “the safest place” in the Middle East for a Palestinian dissident to criticize his government is in Israel.
Piling more praise upon the Israel government, Kennedy stated that “The huge difference between the way Israel conducts itself, the civilized and moral case for Israel, is the way it conducts itself in wartime: always targeting military targets when it’s surrounded by enemies who have pledged themselves and who consistently target civilian targets as civilians — just people who happen to be jewish — as legitimate military targets.”
“Israel has steadfastly preserved itself as this oasis of democracy, of compassion, in the midst of a sea of totalitarianism and tyranny,” asserted Kennedy before the interview proceeded to other matters. Then, in his concluding remarks of the interview, Kennedy returned to discussion of his views regarding Israel, stating that “anybody who sees the history of Israel, who understands what really happened, knows that Israel has done everything that it possibly can to bring peace to that region, to bring peace and justice to the Palestinian people who live in Israel and along its borders, and is an absolute oasis of freedom.”
Oil firms in the US are “reluctant” to unload a shipment of stolen Iranian oil sitting in a Greek tanker off the coast of Texas, saying they are “too worried about Iranian reprisal” to touch the cargo, sources familiar with the matter told the Wall Street Journal(WSJ).
“Companies with any exposure whatsoever in the Persian Gulf are literally afraid to do it,” a Houston-based energy executive told the US outlet, adding that companies fear “the Iranians would take retribution against them.”
“I don’t know if anybody’s going to touch it,” another executive at a shipping company told the WSJ.
Washington illegally seized the Marshall Islands-flagged Suez Rajan supertanker in April of this year in what was described by the Pentagon as “a sanctions-enforcement operation.” Washington also charged the ship’s owner with “sanctions evasion” and directed the stolen cargo to the waters 65 miles off Galveston’s coast in the US.
According to the WSJ, the Suez Rajan came under Washington’s radar after an anti-Iran organization – the New York-based United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) – provided information about the ship’s cargo to government officials. Furthermore, lawyers representing the families of victims of the 11 September attacks, “whom US courts have given the right to claim compensation from [Tehran],” filed a lawsuit against one of the ship’s former owners.
But while the US coast guard has given the all-clear to unload the shipment, companies that manage those transfers do not want any involvement in what Tehran has described as “maritime piracy.”
“That vessel’s emblematic of a much bigger drama that’s playing out about how we deal with Iranian threats,” a former US official told the WSJ.
The “drama” playing out between Washington and Tehran has seen the former eagerly try to restart talks with the Islamic Republic to “deescalate tensions” and possibly reach a new nuclear deal. But despite these diplomatic overtures from the White House, in recent weeks, the Pentagon has significantly bolstered its military presence in the Persian Gulf to confront “Iranian threats.”
Washington accuses Tehran of attempting to “hijack” foreign-flagged vessels traveling through the Strait of Hormuz and the Gulf of Oman. At the same time, Iran says the US navy protects “fuel smugglers” and ships involved in hit-and-run incidents.
“We categorically reject [Washington’s] baseless allegations of hijacking foreign oil tankers by Iran,” a representative for Iran’s mission to the UN told the WSJ. “Iran insists on the security and stability of the Persian Gulf and Strait of Hormuz. However, if oil tankers violate harmless passage, pollute the environment, or smuggle Iranian fuel, Iran does not hesitate to address those irregularities and infringements based on its laws as well as relevant international obligations.”
Israel’s water company Mekorot has this month reduced the water supply to the occupied West Bank cities of Hebron and Bethlehem, causing severe shortages for Palestinians, Quds Press reported yesterday.
Mohammad Al-Jaabari, a Palestinian from Hebron, said he has to wait for days in queues until he gets his turn to get a tank load of water for his house.
“However,” he told Quds Press while looking at the illegal Israeli settlement of Kiryat Arba, “we see the settlers play with water, irrigate their trees and home gardens.”
Al-Jaabari said: “This is unfair, but who can deter the Israeli occupation in order to stop its unfair distribution of water?”
Hebron’s Deputy Mayor, Asmaa Al-Sharabati, said: “The Israeli occupation continues practicing its control of natural resources. This complicates the water problem.”
She said that the amount of water being provided to Hebron each day is “far less than the needs of residents,” adding that some areas that used to receive water once every 18 days are not sent supplies every 28 days. This too during the summer heat.
“We do not have any roles in the water supplies,” she told Quds Press. “All we have is to receive water from the Israeli company and ensure fair distribution among the Palestinian residents of the city.”
Al-Sharabati said everyone needs 100 litres of water a day, and 30 litres during emergencies. “A Palestinian in Hebron receives far less than 30 litres a day,” she said.
Early this month, during the Israeli occupation army’s offensive on the northern occupied West Bank city of Jenin and its refugee camp, BBC News anchor Anjana Gadgil interviewed former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and asked him whether the occupation forces “are happy to kill children” in Jenin.
Gadgil’s questions during the interview were direct and clear to the degree that shocked Bennett, who refused to give her an answer and tried to persuade her that all the Palestinians being attacked, killed, wounded or displaced during the offensive were legitimate targets.
When Gadgil told him that four of the Palestinians killed in Jenin were minors, identified by the UN as children, Bennett argued that the Palestinian children killed in Jenin were terrorists.
He explains that a terrorist is identified as someone who holds a rifle and shoots and murders people, claiming that the people of Jenin were armed and attacking occupation forces who had stormed their city and homes.
If this is Bennett’s definition of what a terrorist is, is he willing to apply that to Israelis and Palestinians alike?
The founders of Bennett’s rogue state did exactly what he described: They held rifles, broke into Palestinian homes and killed men, women, children and even the disabled. They stabbed pregnant Palestinian women before killing them, killing their unborn children.
After the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Golan Heights and Sinai in 1967, my mother told me, the Israeli occupation forces broke the doors of the Palestinian homes, rushed inside and took every male before gathering them in Gaza Square, executing them and burying them in mass graves without even telling their relatives that they had been killed.
Would Bennett apply his definition to those militias and soldiers? There are hundreds of such untold atrocities committed by the Israeli occupation forces that my relatives and neighbours witnessed. Will Bennett define those Israeli soldiers as terrorists?
During the First Palestinian Intifada, which started in 1987, the then-Israeli Defence Minister Yitzhak Rabin ordered the Israeli occupation forces to break the hands of Palestinian children in order to stop the intifada. Many witnessed the horrific scenes of Palestinian children dragged out of their homes, harshly beaten and having their hands broken by the Israeli occupation forces. Bennett, are these soldiers terrorists?
Then, during the Second Intifada, we all witnessed as Muhammad Al Durrah and his father were repeatedly shot until they were motionless while they were unarmed and trying to take shelter. Were these soldiers terrorists?
Israeli soldiers went on to strike Palestinian gatherings with missiles, killing and maiming civilians in every attack under the pretext of targeting terrorists. This occurred repeatedly during the Second Intifada and many of those killed were women and children.
The same happened when late Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon supervised the assassination of quadriplegic Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmad Yassin as he returned from the dawn prayer at the mosque. Some ten civilians were killed in the strike. Are the soldiers who killed them terrorists?
Last month, an Israeli soldier who was holding his rifle shot Palestinian toddler, Muhammad Al-Tamimi, in the head while he was sitting in a car with his 40-year-old father in front of their home. Will Bennett define that killer as a terrorist?
Of course not, because he is an Israeli soldier.
There are many such examples, many within the public domain and many more which remain etched in Palestinian memory. Time and again, Palestinian victims are accused of being terrorists and blamed for their own deaths, while the occupation is not held to account for its murderous actions. This will not stop until action is taken against this barbarous aggressor, the world cannot continue to remain silent as thousands more lives are lost.
This is the perfect opportunity for Palestinian Authority President, Mahmoud Abbas, to exit the stage. But he will not.
Abbas’ brief visit to the devastated Jenin refugee camp in the northern Occupied West Bank on 12 July demonstrated the absurdity and danger of the PA and its 87-year-old leader.
As he walked, Abbas struggled to keep his balance, in what was promoted as a ‘solidarity’ visit to the camp.
Thousands of frustrated Jenin residents took to the streets, hardly chanting Abbas’ name. Some looked on with disappointment; others asked where the President’s forces were when Israel invaded the camp, killing 12, wounding and arresting hundreds more.
The BBCreported on a “huge armed deployment” to secure Abbas’ visit, where “PA security forces joined a thousand-strong unit of Mr. Abbas’ elite presidential guard”. Their only job was to “clear a path” for Abbas into the camp.
On the initial and most deadly first day of the Israeli invasion of Jenin, Israeli media, citing military sources, said that 1,000 Israeli soldiers were taking part in the military operation.
Yet, it took more Palestinian soldiers to secure Abbas’ brief visit to Jenin.
Indeed, where were those well-dressed and equipped PA soldiers when Jenin was fighting and dying alone? And why does Abbas need to be protected from his own people?
To address these questions, it is important to examine recent contexts, three significant dates in particular:
On 5 July, Israel ended its military operation in Jenin.
On 9 July, despite protests by some of his security cabinet members, Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, declared that Israel would do its utmost to prevent the collapse of the PA. He stated outright that the PA “works for us”.
And, finally, on 12 July, Abbas visited Jenin with a stern message to Palestinian Resistance groups.
These three dates are directly related: Israel’s failed raid on Jenin has heightened the significance of the PA in Israel’s eyes. Abbas visited Jenin to reassure Israel that his Authority is up for the task.
To live up to Israel’s expectations and to ensure its survival, the PA is willing to clash directly with Palestinians who refuse to toe the line.
“There will be one Authority and one security force,” Abbas declared angrily, only days following the burial of Jenin’s victims. “Anyone who seeks to undermine its unity and security will face the consequences,” he added, further promising that “Any hand that reaches out to harm the people and their stability shall be cut off.”
The hand in reference is not that of Israel, but any Palestinian who resists Israel.
Abbas knows that Palestinians outright despise him and his Authority. Just days earlier, Fatah party deputy Chairman, Mahmoud Aloul, was removed from Jenin by angry crowds.
The crowds chanted in unison, “get out”, to Aloul and two other PA officials.
They did, but Abbas returned to the same scene. He was flown in a Jordanian military helicopter. Waiting for him, below, was a small PA army that had taken over the streets and the high buildings – or whatever remained of them – in the destroyed camp.
All of this happened through logistical arrangements with the Israeli military.
But why is Netanyahu keen on the PA’s survival?
Netanyahu wants the PA to survive simply because he does not want the Israeli occupation administration and military to be fully responsible for the welfare of Palestinians in the West Bank and the security of the illegal settlers.
Despite its near complete failure, the Oslo Accords succeeded in one thing: it provided Israel with a Palestinian force whose main mission is to assist the Israeli occupation in its quest to maintain total control over the West Bank.
Abbas’ trip to Jenin was intended to reassure Tel Aviv that the PA is still committed to its obligations to Israel.
Another message was sent to US President Joe Biden, who has, in a recent interview, cast doubts on the PA’s ‘credibility’. “The PA is losing its credibility,” Biden told CNN, and that has “created a vacuum for extremism.”
The message to Washington was that the hands of the so-called ‘extremists’ will be “cut off”, and that there will be “consequences” for those who defy the PA’s will.
Abbas seemed to speak, not only on behalf of his Authority but that of Tel Aviv and Washington as well.
Even ordinary Palestinians understand this to be the case; in fact, they always have. The only difference now is that they feel strong and emboldened by a new generation of Resistance which has succeeded in reclaiming a degree of Palestinian unity, amid factional politics and PA corruption.
The PA is now seen by most Palestinians as the obstacle in the face of full unity. That position is fully fathomable. While Israel was ramping up its deadly operations in Jenin and Nablus, the PA police was arresting Palestinian activists, angering Resistance groups in the West Bank and Gaza.
If this continues, a civil war in the West Bank is a real possibility, especially as Abbas’ potential successors are equally distrusted, even by Fatah’s own rank and file. These men were also in Jenin, standing shoulder to shoulder behind Abbas as he was frantically trying to lay out the new rules.
This time around, Palestinians are unlikely to listen. For the Resistance, the stakes are too high to back down now. For the PA, losing the West Bank means losing billions of dollars of Western financial handouts.
A clash between the Resistance and their popular support, on the one hand, and the West-Israel-backed PA forces, on the other, will prove very costly for Palestinians.
Yet, for Tel Aviv, it is a win-win. This is why Netanyahu is anxious to help Abbas keep his job, at least long enough to ensure that the post-Abbas transition goes through efficiently.
Palestinians must find a way to block such designs, preserve Palestinian blood and restructure their leadership, so that it represents them, not the interests of the Israeli occupation.
The Israeli military’s deadly raid on the Jenin refugee camp in the northern occupied West Bank fits into the parameters of war crimes under the Geneva Conventions, legal experts argue.
Susan Akram, a clinical professor at Boston University’s School of Law, said the raid, which killed at least 12 Palestinians and wounded dozens more, clearly amounts to a war crime for a number of reasons, including intentionally attacking a civilian population and attacking medical units.
“The Geneva Conventions include as war crimes during occupation, willful killings, willfully causing great suffering to an occupied population and extensive destruction of property not justified by military necessity,” Akram said during a webinar hosted earlier this week by the Arab Center Washington, DC.
There’s no doubt, she declared, that what Israel carried out in Jenin constitutes a war crime.
Daniel Levy of the US/Middle East Project and journalist Dalia Hatuqa, the other panelists on the webinar, also agreed that Israel’s actions in the West Bank amount to a war crime.
Akram said the narrative used by Israel that the raids on Jenin and other Palestinian cities like Nablus are an attempt to root out resistance groups does not stop its actions from being illegal under international law.
Pointing out that the West Bank is an occupied territory, she said, “Israel’s attacks on an occupied population are criminal in and of themselves because occupation law forbids the occupier to use military attacks against civilian targets in the territory it occupies.”
According to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), some 900 Palestinian houses were damaged and many of them became uninhabitable in the wake of the Israeli military’s raid on the Jenin refugee camp.
Adnan Abu Hasna, the spokesman for the UN agency, said on Tuesday that his fellow colleagues are still documenting the damage caused inside the camp during the onslaught.
The UNRWA’s priority is to help restore some sense of normality by resuming its services like education, healthcare and sanitation, he added.
“The other urgent priority is to provide cash assistance to families who were displaced from their homes, and help them pay for rent and rehabilitate their residences,” Abu Hasna noted.
Last week, a group of UN experts said Israel’s military raids targeting the Jenin refugee camp “may prima facie constitute a war crime.”
“Israeli forces’ operations in the occupied West Bank, killing and seriously injuring the occupied population, destroying their homes and infrastructure, and arbitrarily displacing thousands, amount to egregious violations of international law and standards on the use of force and may constitute a war crime,” the experts said in a statement.
Safi Ahmad Mohammad Jawabra, 11, was shot by Israeli forces in the head above his left eye with a rubber-coated metal bullet around 10 a.m. on May 29, 2022 at the entrance to Al-Arroub refugee camp, near Hebron in the southern occupied West Bank, according to documentation collected by Defense for Children International – Palestine. Safi was walking home from school after completing his final exam in math when an Israeli soldier shot him in the head unexpectedly and without warning. While running away, another group of Israeli soldiers around 50 meters (164 feet) away fired tear gas canisters in front of Safi.
I doubt these professors have anything to fear from a food tax
By Eric Worrall | Watts Up With That? | November 19, 2016
A group of researchers in Oxford University, England have suggested that imposing a massive tax on carbon intensive foods – specifically protein rich foods like meat and dairy – could help combat climate change. […]
This proposal, from a group of people who have probably never missed a meal in their lives, is totally obscene. High income countries often have a lot of poor people who would be hard hit by increases in the price of food.
Needlessly exacerbating the risk poor people don’t get enough to eat, especially children and pregnant mothers, who are especially vulnerable to adverse health impacts from lack of protein in their diet – if this ghastly proposal is ever implemented, future generations will look upon it as a crime against humanity. – Read full article
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.
Aletho News 