Imagine that one of these children is your son or daughter.
Imagine that you live under military law.
You have no civil rights; no freedom of speech; no freedom of movement or right to assemble; no right to protest or object to your mistreatment.
Imagine that you can be arrested without charge for anything at any time, based solely on the whim of the soldier who grabs you and throws you into the back of his truck.
Imagine that your child will be forcefully “interrogated” as he/she sits alone in a concrete cell surrounded by hostile, aggressive soldiers.
Imagine that these soldiers will hit, kick, slap, punch, ridicule, and humiliate your child with impunity. And you alone will be left to treat his/her injuries.
Imagine that you have no recourse for complaint. No one listens to your demands for an explanation. They may not even tell you where your child was taken.
Imagine that your complaints can only be heard by a military judge in a military court where Palestinians effectively never win a case.
This is Palestinian life under Israeli occupation.
Yesterday’s Consortium News had an illuminating article by Patrick Lawrence warning about the danger signs embedded in president Biden’s recent actions in Syria.
The US began to destroy Syria during the Obama administration as yet
Syrian school children meeting in front of their bombed out school building
another Democratic president initiated another attempted coup followed by incessant “regime change” operations in the Middle East.
It didn’t take long for American forces to ally themselves with al-Qaeda troops (yes, THAT al-Qaeda) in our imperial attempts to “rebuild” a “democratic” Syria. (You can’t make this stuff up…)
Syrian dictator Bashar al Assad is no saint. But America’s reckless,
Syrian president Bashar al-Assad
shortsighted, selfish interference makes Assad’s authoritarian nationalism look like an oasis of tranquility in the midst of Dante’s inferno.
Things have only gotten worse for the Syrian people since US interference in the country’s internal affairs. The Biden administration shows no sign of working to repair the damage we have done.
Below is an excerpt of this article. Read it and weep, oh ye citizens. For these are your tax dollars at work:
For a time after Joe Biden took office not quite three months ago, among the questions raised was how the new administration would address the Syria question.
I do not think we will have to wonder about this much longer. It is early days yet, but one now detects the Biden’s administration’s Syria policy in faint outline. From what one can make out, it is bleak, it is vicious, it is unconscionably cruel to the Syrian people.
And it may prove yet worse than anything the Trump administration came up with, the Bible-banging Mike Pompeo in the lead as secretary of state.
Will Biden’s national security people drop the covert coup operation Barack Obama set it in motion nine years ago, its failure long evident? Or will they reinvigorate American support for savage jihadists in the name of “regime changing” the secular government in Damascus? What about the American troops still operating illegally on Syrian soil? What about the oilfields the Trump administration took to “protecting” from the nation that owns them? What about the brazen theft of crude from those fields?
And what, of course, about the murderous sanctions that various executive orders have escalated on numerous occasions since the Bush II administration imposed the first of them 17 long years ago?
What will Biden and his people do, in short, about the godawful mess the U.S. has made of the Syrian Arab Republic since it bastardized legitimate demonstrations against the Assad government in early 2012 (at the latest) by perverting them with Sunni extremists and hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of weapons?
These were the questions. Answers now begin to arrive.
Condemning Christian nationalism has become all the rage among certain members of the evangelical punditry. Even a few evangelical Republicans felt uncomfortable at the sight of Jesus flags and Christian paraphernalia on prominent display among the rioters who stormed Congress on January 6th.
In the immediate aftermath of those events, I saw a number of editorial condemnations on television and in print chastising any Christian’s involvement in violence or sedition. Each of them raised the same questions in my mind, for they all were morally tepid and intellectually shallow, ignoring the role those very media outlets had played in promoting president Trump’s “Big Lie” about a stolen election.
I wholeheartedly agree with the reminder that Christians should not commit acts of violence, especially when those actions lead to others being
FILE – In this Jan. 6, 2021 file photo, Trump supporters participate in a rally in Washington. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)
killed and injured. However, I also found it very strange for right-wing, Christian, patriotic pundits, people who swear allegiance to a nation founded upon revolution, violence, and bloodshed, to suddenly clutch their pearls and faint at the sight of modern “patriots” doing what they believed needed to be done in order to save their nation and democracy.
I won’t even begin to address the hypocrisy on display when Religious-Right folks self-righteously condemn insurrection at home while heartily endorsing America’s many military coups and wars of aggression around the world! Apparently, Christians are only supposed to shun violence when the their fellow Americans become the enemy. Black and brown-skinned people around the world are always fair game.
All of this is very strange indeed unless we understand two crucial points:
First, these suddenly pacifistic, evangelical commentators were demonstrating how deeply embedded they are in the American, corporate establishment.
For all of their complaints about suffering as marginalized, Christian outsiders, none of them were willing to follow the logic of their messianic Trump-devotion to its logical conclusion. Why? Because they all had network executives telling them to toe a more establishment line or they would need to empty their desks and head for the unemployment line.
None of them were condemning police violence when BLM protesters were being assaulted by lines of militarized patrolmen wielding plexiglass shields and billy clubs.
Second, their exclusive focus on an anti-violence message exposed the consistent lack of self-awareness and intellectual rigor that characterizes so much of American evangelicalism today.
Of course, superficial critiques may be better than no critique at all, but if we only ever scratch the surface of a problem, then the underlying disease is allowed to deepen and spread. (On a side note, this was also my response to Mark Galli’s tepid critique of president Trump in his editorial at Christianity Today.” Only fellow evangelicals would interpret his words as shocking.)
Linking the errors of Christian nationalism to the dangers of patriotic violence (at home, mind you; violence abroad is always permissible for Christian America) is only the tip of the iceberg.
I recently began reading a book by the US historian, John W. Compton, entitled, The End of Empathy: Why White Protestants Stopped Loving Their Neighbors (Oxford, 2020). Compton first tells the story of how white Protestantism once led the way in condemning, addressing, and working to transform the many social, cultural, and political evils in this country.
Child labor laws, worker safety regulations, the 6-day work week, the 8-hour work day, a living wage, plus much more were policies all implemented in response to massive Christian political pressure during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
But all of that changed in late 1970s-early 1980s with Ronald Reagan’s presidency and the rise of his neo-liberal economic agenda. Nowadays, Christians concerned with things like social justice are regularly condemned for compromising the gospel. What happened?
I won’t answer that question here, but I will share a few thoughts from Compton’s introductory chapter where he begins to lay out his argument about the transformation that led to the wholesale conformity of American Christianity to the social/political/cultural status quo.
Concerning Christian political involvement:
Religious believers are on average much like similarly situated secular citizens when it comes to their behavior in the political realm. Like their secular neighbors, believers routinely base their political decisions on self-interest or ingrained prejudice rather than careful and disinterested study of sacred texts or deliberation about the will of a higher power. (4-5)
On the Christian vision for the church’s role in transforming society:
…from the mid-nineteenth century through the 1960s, most non-Southern Protestants not only professed to believe that Christian principles, properly understood, favored government efforts to aid the downtrodden; they were also embedded in religious networks that were capable…of focusing attention on specific social problems and incentivizing the faithful to take responsibility for correcting them.
On the current state of American evangelicalism:
In the new age of personal autonomy, the leaders of the Religious Right flourished by reshaping the Christian message to comport with the prejudices and material self-interest of their target demographic.
I will probably review this book here when I have finished digesting all that it has to say.
But in short, nowadays the average Christian doesn’t work at thinking, and thus acting, differently in the light of God’s word. We conform to the ways of those around us, ignore the illuminating study of the holy scriptures, and are afraid to stand alone on behalf of those less fortunate than ourselves.
For now, I will only note a deeper description of the dangers that accompany Christian nationalism. The heart of that danger is cooption, conformity to the national status quo — which explains a lot about American evangelicalism and the Religious-Right in this country.
Once Christians begin to imagine that their country is God’s country; that its national history is a story written by and for Christians like themselves, then it is a very tiny step to confuse national interests with Christian interests. National norms become Christian norms (think of laisse faire capitalism) and Christian norms become national norms (think of the fight over equal rights for gay citizens).
Granted, this confusion may require a reimagined past that describes our current state of affairs as a gross deviation from historic norms (think of David Barton and Wallbuilders promoting a fictitious story of our “Christian” founding fathers and the Constitution’s adherence to the Bible). But modern diversions into sin cannot change America’s basic orientation as a “Christian nation” – at least, to the minds of Christian nationalists.
The identity between the one and the other is very simple for Christian nationalism and it goes far beyond a problem with violence. Christian values become America’s true, historic values. Thus, American true values are Christian values. This is where Christian nationalism becomes heretical.
Yet, this false identity between nation and church is ignored by pundits on the Religious-Right who now chastise Christian insurrectionists for colluding with violence.
The genuine danger for the church in this country is not that it would collude with violence but that it would continue to collude with American exceptionalism.
The greatest political danger facing evangelicalism today is our willingness to roll over and accept the economic and political status quo, embracing corporate, crony capitalism, labor exploitation, systemic racism, militarized policing, social Darwinism, and American exceptionalism as God’s preferred methods of directing a nation.
Where is the Christian voice of dissent to all these sins?
Where are the people who will not conform to their political surroundings and vote and think and act like their neighbors?
Where are the Christian activists willing to break away from the way things today are in order to pursue God’s vision of the way things ought to be tomorrow?
Below is a video of Israeli soldiers arresting 5 Palestinian children, ages 8 through 13. Their “crime” was picking wild herbs and vegetables near an illegal Jewish-only settlement in the West Bank.
It is another example of the way Israel criminalizes Palestinians for merely existing in their own land.
The video was released by B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization. Below is an excerpt from Aljazeera describing the arrest.
Israeli forces detained five Palestinian children for several hours after they were confronted by Jewish settlers while gathering wild vegetables near a settlement outpost in the occupied West Bank, an Israeli human rights group said on Thursday.
B’Tselem released video of the arrest in the southern Hebron Hills, in which heavily armed Israeli soldiers can be seen dragging the children away.
Footage shot earlier shows the children gathering akoub, a plant similar to artichoke, when two masked settlers emerge from a grove of trees near the illegal settler outpost of Havat Maon.
The outpost is located near Masafer Yatta, a collection of about 19 Palestinian hamlets. The area is a frequent target of assaults by the Israeli military and settlers.
“This is another example of the absolute disregard on the part of Israeli authorities and forces on the ground to the wellbeing and rights of Palestinians, no matter how young or vulnerable,” B’Tselem spokesman Amit Gilutz said.
“The youngest boy from yesterday’s incident is eight years old,” he added.
The children, whose ages range from eight to 13, were held for about five hours
An Israeli soldier detains a Palestinian boy during a protest against Jewish settlements in the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh, near Ramallah August 28, 2015. REUTERS/Mohamad Torokman
at a police station in the settlement of Kiryat Arba, according to Gaby Lasky, a human rights lawyer who is representing them. The two eldest, who are 12 and 13, were ordered to return next week for more questioning as, under Israeli military law, they are deemed old enough to face charges. . .
. . . According to Defense for Children International, Israel prosecutes between 500 and 700 Palestinian children in military courts each year. Prisoners’ rights group Addameer has said 140 Palestinian children are currently imprisoned by Israel.
Regular readers of this blog know that the Australian journalist Caitlin
Caitlin Johnstone
Johnstone is one of my favorite bloggers.
Even though I cannot share in her atheistic, philosophical humanism, I deeply appreciate her analytical insights into the manipulative corruption at the heart of the American establishment.
I have excerpted her article below, or you can read the entire piece by clicking on the title above:
A new Twitter post by Secretary of State Tony Blinken reads as follows:
“We will never hesitate to use force when American lives and vital interests are
US Secretary of State, Tony Blinken
at stake, but we will do so only when the objectives are clear and achievable, consistent with our values and laws, and with the American people’s informed consent – together with diplomacy.”
Like pretty much everything ever said by Blinken, and indeed by every US secretary of state, this is an absolute lie.
Firstly, US military force is never used to protect “American lives” in modern times, unless you count the lives of US troops and mercenaries in foreign lands they have no business occupying in the first place. The US military is never used to defend American lives against an invading enemy force; that simply does not happen in our current world order. It is only ever used to protect the agenda of unipolar planetary domination, which would be the “vital interests” which Blinken obliquely refers to above.
Secondly, Blinken’s claim that the Biden administration will never use military force without “the American people’s informed consent” has already been blatantly invalidated by Biden’s airstrikes on Syria last month. The American people never gave their consent to those airstrikes, informed or uninformed. A nation the US invaded (Syria) was bombed because troops are being attacked in a second nation the US invaded (Iraq) on the completely unproven claim that a third country against whom the US is currently waging economic warfare (Iran) supported those attacks. At no time were the people asked for their consent to this, and at no time was any attempt made to ensure that they were informed of the situation before it happened.
Thirdly, US military force is never, ever conducted with the American people’s informed consent. Literally never. Consent is always manufactured for US wars by lies and mass media propaganda, one hundred percent of the time, without exception. The bigger the military operation, the more egregious the deceit used to manufacture consent for it. Even in relatively “peaceful” times when the US is merely raining dozens of bombs and missiles per day on foreign soil, Americans are subject to a nonstop deluge of distorted and outright false narratives about their military and the nations it targets for destruction.
Consent that has been artificially manufactured by propaganda is not informed consent, any more than sex with someone who’s been dosed with rohypnol is consensual sex. US imperialism does not rely on informed consent, it relies on disinformed consent; consent for it is manufactured by disinformation. Informed consent plays no role whatsoever in the use of US military force, nor indeed in any other major aspect of the behavior of the US or its allies.
Every aspect of the US-centralized power alliance is propped up by a relentless deluge of mass-scale psyops. Imperialism, capitalism, electoral politics; consent for all its key pillars is constantly being manufactured by the plutocratic news media, by television, by movies. All of the most influential generators of modern mainstream thought and culture are heavily influenced by a plutocratic class which has a vested interest in keeping power out of the hands of the people.
A few days ago I wrote here about the hypocrisy of US (and Israeli) military exploits in the Middle East. It was titled “A Tale of Two Missile Attacks.”
As I was preparing another post on this unfolding situation, I discovered Caitlin Johnstone’s article covering the same ground, in fine form. Her piece is titled “US Bombs Syria and Ridiculously Claims Self Defense.”
I remain ashamed to be an American today.
I have excerpted her article below, or you can read the entire piece by clicking on the title above:
On orders of President Biden, the United States has launched an airstrike on a facility in Syria. As of this writing the exact number of killed and injured is unknown, with early reports claiming “a handful” of people were killed.
Rather than doing anything remotely resembling journalism, the western mass media have opted instead to uncritically repeat what they’ve been told about the airstrike by US officials, which is the same as just publishing Pentagon press releases. . .
So we are being told that the United States launched an airstrike on Syria, a nation it invaded and is illegally occupying, because of attacks on “US locations” in Iraq, another nation the US invaded and is illegally occupying. This attack is justified on the basis that the Iraqi fighters were “Iranian-linked”, a claim that is both entirely without evidence and irrelevant to the justification of deadly military force (emphasis mine). And this is somehow being framed in mainstream news publications as a defensive operation.
This is Defense Department stenography. The US military is an invading force in both Syria and Iraq; it is impossible for its actions in either of those countries to be defensive. It is always necessarily the aggressor. It’s the people trying to eject them who are acting defensively. The deaths of US troops and contractors in those countries can only be blamed on the powerful people who sent them there.
The US is just taking it as a given that it has de facto jurisdiction over the nations of Syria, Iraq, and Iran, and that any attempt to interfere in its authority in the region is an unprovoked attack which must be defended against. This is completely backwards and illegitimate. Only through the most perversely warped American supremacist reality tunnels can it look valid to dictate the affairs of sovereign nations on the other side of the planet and respond with violence if anyone in those nations tries to eject them.
It’s illegitimate for the US to be in the Middle East at all. It’s illegitimate for the US to claim to be acting defensively in nations it invaded. It’s illegitimate for the US to act like Iranian-backed fighters aren’t allowed to be in Syria, where they are fighting alongside the Syrian government against ISIS and other extremist militias with the permission of Damascus. It is illegitimate for the US to claim the fighters attacking US personnel in Iraq are controlled by Iran when Iraqis have every reason to want the US out of their country themselves.
Even the official narrative reveals itself as illegitimate from within its own worldview. CNN reports that the site of the airstrike “was not specifically tied to the rocket attacks” in Iraq, and a Reuters/AP report says “Biden administration officials condemned the February 15 rocket attack near the city of Irbil in Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdish-run region, but as recently as this week officials indicated they had not determined for certain who carried it out.”
This is all so very typical of the American supremacist worldview that is being aggressively shoved down our throats by all western mainstream news media. The US can bomb who it likes, whenever it likes, and when it does it is only ever doing so in self defense, because the entire planet is the property of Washington, DC. It can seize control of entire clusters of nations, and if any of those nations resist in any way they are invading America’s sovereignty. . .
. . . This sort of nonsense is why it’s so important to prioritize opposition to western imperialism. World warmongering and domination is the front upon which all the most egregious evils inflicted by the powerful take place, and it plays such a crucial role in upholding the power structures we are up against. Without endless war, the oligarchic empire which is the cause of so much of our suffering cannot function, and must give way to something else. If you’re looking to throw sand in the gears of the machine, anti-imperialism is your most efficacious path toward that end, and should therefore be your priority.
This past Monday evening, the Iraqi city of Erbil was hit by a rocket attack that
A rocket explodes in the streets of Erbil, Iraq
killed one US contractor and injured eight others, as well as one US service member.
Naturally, US spokespersons are up in arms threatening retaliation “at a time of our own choosing,” to quote the president. This has been a leading news story in the American press (see here, here, here, etc.)
The issue right now is that US officials have yet to identify the perpetrators.
Of course, their ignorance does not stop those same officials from pointing fingers at Iran (read the articles highlighted above). Naturally, no one in the American press has the courage to push back or ask questions like:
If you have evidence of Iran’s guilt show it to us. You have yet to produce anything.
It seems far too convenient for you to accuse Iran while you are also pressuring them to accept your unreasonable terms for reentering the JCPOA nuclear treaty.
Of course, Iran mightbe responsible. Or it might not. If it is responsible, the fact that president Trump assassinated Iran’s Commander of Iranian military
Iranians mourn Qassim Suleimani
forces, Qassim Suleimani, certainly gives them good reason to strike back at the US.
Imagine how the US would respond if Iran launched a drone strike and assassinated the the head of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, the leader of all US armed forces, on American soil. I don’t think I need to elaborate, except to point out that Iran has remained amazingly restrained.
On the other hand, the rocket may also have been launched by any one of a number of Iraqi militias.
The vast majority of the Iraqi people are Shia Muslims, as are the majority of Iranians. Most Iraqis have more reason to identify with Iranian opposition against the United States than they do to sympathize with America.
After all, the Iraqi government has repeatedly told US officials that they want American forces OUT of their country. Yet, the US continues to ignore these demands.
While there have been Iraqi protests against Iranian actions in Iraq, there have been far more popular protests against the American presence in Iraq. The people want the US out of their country just as much as the government does.
So, perhaps the recent rocket attack was the work of an Iraqi militia showing their displeasure with American forces remaining in their country?
This is an equally valid conjecture, perhaps even more so, yet American’s will
Iraqi crowds demand US withdrawal from their country
never hear about this possibility in US news coverage. No, Iran is the current US whipping boy. So, whether with evidence or without, Iran will continue to be demonized in the American press.
But that is only half of the story.
Another rocket attack occurred in Syria only a few days prior, but this attack received minimal coverage by the US press. More than that, US officials have not offered a word of condemnation because these missiles were launched from Israel.
Israeli sources report that nine pro-Syrian government personnel were killed. Syrian sources report that three Syrians and four Iranians were killed in the attack. And we must remember that whatever Iranian forces are fighting on the ground in Syria, they are in Syria at the government’s invitation to help Syria combat US aggression.
Actually, this was the third Israeli missile attack in ten days. How much US coverage did Israel’s offensive actions receive? Very little.
Attacking its neighbors is standard Israeli operating procedure.
Israel has bombed Syria for years, with impunity. Israel even boasts about its
The US never objects to these attacks because Israel shares the US goals of overthrowing the Syrian government. And both nations have black-balled Syria and Iran as dangerous enemies.
So, let me get this straight.
Israel can attack whomever it wants whenever it wants, with US support (and media silence).
The United States can continue forcefully to occupy whatever nation it wants for as long as it wants, despite the fact that both the national government and the majority of the population repeatedly demand that the US withdraw its forces.
However, Iran and Syria remain the “bad guys” who deserve to be punished — primarily for refusing to accept US/Israeli unilateral demands.
Meanwhile, any attack, no matter how small and ineffectual, against US (or Israeli) forces is decried as a horrible crime deserving the harshest punishment.
This is the Tale of Two Missile Attacks. One by Israel. The other by who knows who.
It is the story of American (and Israeli) Empire. It is ugly and unjust. It is a wicked abuse of power that ought to be condemned by every follower of Jesus Christ around the world.
Yet, the majority of America’s evangelical Christians will faithfully cheer on the bloodshed.
Tragically, Biden is continuing to pursue standard, irrational bullying tactics that have long characterized US foreign policy.
And, of course, no one but no one in the mainstream media pushes back or dares to question the fundamental injustice, not to mention the militaristic dangers, now posed by this administration’s behavior.
I have excerpted a part of the article below, or you can read the entire piece by clicking on the title above:
In a new interview with CBS Evening News, President Biden confirmed that his administration will not be lifting sanctions imposed upon Iran in order to bring Tehran to the negotiating table for the restoration of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), commonly known as the Iran nuclear deal.
“Will the U.S. lift sanctions first in order to get Iran back to the negotiating table?” Biden was asked by CBS’s Norah O’Donnell.
“No,” the president replied.
“They have to stop enriching uranium first,” asked O’Donnell.
Biden nodded in response.
With Iran resuming its enrichment of uranium, we asked Pres. Biden if the U.S. will lift sanctions first in order to get Iran back to the negotiating table on a nuclear deal.
“No,” Pres. Biden says, affirming that Iran will have to stop its enrichment program first pic.twitter.com/OPszf15Q1o
There are a few things that are ridiculous about this, the first being that the JCPOA does not require that Iran “stop enriching uranium” at all. As explained by Al-Monitor‘s Arash Karami, the deal only calls for Iran to “keep its level of uranium enrichment at up to 3.67 %”, a level it only began exceeding when the Trump administration backed out of the deal and imposed sanctions. The administration later clarified that Biden meant Iran would have to return to its JCPOA levels before negotiations could begin, but the fact that neither the United States president nor the high-profile reporter interviewing him appear to have been clear on this says a lot about the vapid nature of America’s political/media class.
More importantly, this is confirmation from the horse’s mouth that Biden is in effect continuing Trump’s Iran policy. Trump began strangling Iran with crushing sanctions in an effort to force it to obey US dictates, and Biden is continuing that exact same strangulation while continuing to demand compliance with its dictates. The demands might be a little different, but the effect is identical since Tehran would never bow to either of them.
The Iranian government has repeatedly made it abundantly clear that it will not be rejoining the JCPOA until the United States comes back into compliance, since it was the US who first abandoned it. It claims, correctly, that it was in full compliance with the agreement when the Trump administration unilaterally backed out in May 2018. The argument that it is therefore Washington’s responsibility to come back into compliance first is indisputable. Why would it re-enter a deal with a government that is clearly acting in bad faith and could just back out and impose civilian-killing sanctions on the nation again?
Juan Cole has a new article at his news site, Informed Comment, discussing
Professor Juan Cole
the recent decision by the International Criminal Court to investigate numerous charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity made against Israel.
I examine these issues in my new book, tentatively titled, Like Birds in a Cage: How Bad Bible-Reading Leads Christian Zionists to Collaborate in Israeli War Crimes and Palestinian Suffering (Cascade, forthcoming).
Israel’s defensive public relations campaign is already in full swing, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and others unleashing the now standard canard of accusing such investigations as expressions of antisemitic hatred.
This action by the ICC is an important first step that needed to happen years ago. What will come of it is anyone’s guess.
But I know this: Christians must stand on the side of justice and oppose all oppressors. That means that God’s people must stand with the Palestinian people while condemning Israeli racism and apartheid.
Here is professor Cole’s article:
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – On Friday, the International Criminal Court found that it had jurisdiction to consider war crimes and crimes against humanity and the crime of Apartheid in the Palestinian territories.
Israeli politician Abba Eban once quipped that Palestinians never lost the opportunity to lose an opportunity. But Palestinians have carefully, methodically created this opportunity to be heard in an international tribunal. It is the ruling Israeli right wing about which one can now quip about missing opportunities.
Israel has egregiously violated the 1949 Geneva Convention on the treatment of people in Occupied territories by flooding its own citizens into the Palestinian Territories, by stealing Palestinian land from its owners and building squatter settlements on it, and by using disproportional force against Palestinian demonstrators at the Gaza border.
The court will also look into war crimes by Hamas, which was elected in 2006 and retains control of the Gaza Strip.
It has been impossible for anyone to stop Israel’s repeated and serious crimes against the Palestinians because the United States backs them to the hilt and is deeply implicated itself in keeping Palestinians stateless. (The “two-state solution” long since became geographically impossible, and invoking it and an alleged “peace process,” as the Biden administration does, is just a way of keeping the Palestinians from enjoying any human rights).
Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu cynically called the ruling “anti-Semitic,” in the ultimate debasement of a term that has otherwise been central to human rights struggles.
Filistin al-Yawm (Palestine Today) quotes Rami Abdu, head of the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor as saying that the International Criminal Court announcement that it has jurisdiction over the Palestinian Territories represents a victory, won by many sacrifices, for justice, freedom and ethical values in the world. It is, he said, the fruit of a Palestinian struggle that has lasted decades to win recognition of the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination.
As a result, he said, Palestinian victims of Israeli war crimes from various generations will gain the right to seek justice after decades of occupation and to see the perpetrators tried in the Hague. He cautioned, however, that “The decision does not mean the end of the road, and the task will not be easy. The hope is that the Biden administration will adopt a different course from its predecessor, and will refrain from putting any pressure on the court.”
In spring of 2020, Trump declared a national emergency as a pretext for being able to target justices and staff of the International Criminal Court with sanctions because they were looking into alleged crimes by US military personnel in Afghanistan. These outrageous and ineffectual sanctions have been lifted by the Biden administration.
The International Criminal Court was established by the Rome Statute circulated to UN member states in the late 1990s and finalized in 2002. The United States and Israel refused to sign or to recognize the court’s jurisdiction. Some 123 countries have, however, ratified the treaty and so incorporated it into their national law.
The court can take up cases of war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide and Apartheid committed by officials in the signatory states. It can apply sanctions to individuals in those governments after trying them. It does not sanction states but individuals. So far its cases have been entirely from Africa.
But the court’s hands are usually tied with regard to non-signatory governments. It cannot move against their officials unless the United Nations Security Council forwards a case to them. Thus, when the murderous regime of Muammar Gaddafi attacked civilians in winter-spring of 2011 during the Arab Spring youth revolt, the Security Council referred the case to the ICC. Its justices considered evidence against Muammar Gaddafi and his son Saif Gaddafi, as well as interior minister Abdullah Sanusi. Arrest warrants were issued by the court for these individuals on June 27, 2011.
The State of Palestine led by Mahmoud Abbas had little hope of the US Security Council asking the ICC to look into Israeli war crimes in the West Bank and Gaza, since the United States almost always uses its veto to protect Israeli officials from sanctions for their illegal occupation policies in the Palestinian Territories that they grabbed beginning in 1967.
The Palestinian David very carefully and with foresight therefore moved to join the International Criminal Court. The first obstacle they faced is that court members have to be members of the United Nations. Since the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the eclipse of Labor in favor of the far, far right Likud and its offshoots, Israel’s policy against the Palestinian people has been predicated on preventing Palestinians from ever having a state. They are to be kept stateless and deprived of the basic human rights that come with citizenship in a state.
In 2015, the state of Palestine (as the UN calls it) acceded to the International Criminal Court and recognized its jurisdiction in the Palestinian Territories, including East Jerusalem.
This is like three dimensional chess on the part of the Palestinians. Because they now have what is called in the law “standing.” They are a permanent observer state at the UN and they are signatories to the Rome Statute.
Now just one step was left, which was to take to the ICC those Israeli officials operating in the Palestinian Territories in such a way as to violate the Rome Statute. Palestine did not hurry to do so, hoping that the government of Binyamin Netanyahu would see the legal peril and become more reasonable. But Netanyahu kept stealing their land and urging Trump to cut their funding (which he did), and by 2019 the Palestinians concluded that they had nothing left to lose by filing a claim.
The ICC prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, declared a delay while she sought reassurances that the court had jurisdiction over Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
A little over a year later, she has been assured that it does, given the recognition of the Palestine Authority as the government of those region in the Oslo Accords.
As Mr. Abdu said, this step is more the beginning of something rather than its end. Netanyahu will attempt to obstruct the workings of the court. But this is a great day for the international rule of law, and all believers in human rights should rejoice.
This past week, president Biden gave an important speech on US foreign policy. He included a pledge to scale back US military involvement in the war that has destroyed the nation of Yemen.
However, as with every political speech, Biden’s words were measured
US President Joe Biden speaks about foreign policy at the State Department in Washington, DC, on February 4, 2021. (Photo by SAUL LOEB / AFP) (Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)
carefully. In fact, they hid as much as they revealed — perhaps more.
While any reduction in US war investment is worth cheering, Biden’s verbal hedging was a deliberate strategy to appease peace activists while leaving lots of room for war-hawks to maneuver.
Those who care about the fate of the Yemeni people still have a lot of word to do.
Abby Martin does a good job of parsing the president’s words. Watch and listen as she explains the issues below:
Neighbors (Oxford, 2020). Compton first tells the story of how white Protestantism once led the way in condemning, addressing, and working to transform the many social, cultural, and political evils in this country.
illegal Jewish-only settlement in the West Bank.
artichoke, when two masked settlers emerge from a grove of trees near the illegal settler outpost of Havat Maon.
After all, the Iraqi government has repeatedly told US officials that 
Plan of Action (JCPOA), commonly known as the Iran nuclear deal.
