Palestine

By Sharon Zhang

Published August 27, 2024

by Dr Ramzy Baroud

August 19, 2024 at 5:30 pm

At least 18 Palestinians have been killed and 30 more wounded in the occupied West Bank, where Israel has launched its largest military operation in two decades. Israeli forces have simultaneously raided four cities and refugee camps in the north, with hundreds of soldiers backed by armored vehicles, bulldozers, fighter jets and drones.

Much of the violence has been centered on Jenin, a frequent target of raids by Israeli forces, but this latest military operation is the largest since the Second Intifada. Ahmed Tobasi, artistic director at the Freedom Theatre in Jenin refugee camp, says Israel’s tactics are about “punishing the people, punishing the civilians,” with an ultimate goal of ethnic cleansing. “They want Palestine empty from Palestinians.”

He also calls on the U.S. public to speak out against continued military support for Israel, saying the killings in both Gaza and the West Bank are only possible because Israel has “the green light from the U.S. government.”

29 Aug 2024

by Abba A. Solomon August 28, 2024

[article's focus is on J Street, a prominent liberal Zionist group in the US.]

by Sami Al-Arian

10 August 2024 17:34 BST

[article gives a lot of background information about relations between Hamas and #Fatah, and Sinwar's efforts to reach agreements with #MahmoudAbbas.]

By Fayha Shalash in Ramallah, occupied Palestine and Huthifa Fayyad

Published date: 28 August 2024 05:35 BST

by Brett Wilkins

Aug 23, 2024

By Liza Featherstone

Opinion - by Farah Stockman Aug. 20, 2024

Revolution and Counter-revolution in Iran: Origins of Clerical Regime

By Argiris Malapanis and Geoff Mirelowitz

May 6, 2024

Iranian Theocracy and the Palestinian Liberation Struggle

By Argiris Malapanis and Geoff Mirelowitz

May 5, 2024

Why does the Biden administration support the Israeli genocide and war crimes even in the face of virtually universal condemnation, at massive expense, and to the point of totally debasing the rules-based international order? Why do it? People fall back on narratives about the power of AIPAC in US elections etc., which is real but also doesn't capture the whole story.

The truth is that US capitalism depends on it, and the US ruling class broadly understands this fact. The key thing to understand is that capitalist growth and accumulation in the imperial core (the US, Britain, Germany etc.) relies heavily on the appropriation of cheap inputs and resources from the periphery and semi-periphery of the world economy (broadly, the global South). They need the South to remain a subordinated supplier within global commodity chains.

In order to maintain this arrangement, it is imperative for them to suppress sovereign economic development in the South. Because the "problem" with development is it means Southerners begin to produce for themselves and consume their own resources. This makes resources and inputs more expensive for the core, which constrains consumption and profits. Economic sovereignty in the periphery threatens capital accumulation in the core.

To avoid this, the core states constantly intervene to prevent or crush any movement or government in the periphery that seeks national liberation and economic sovereignty. The US started to support the Zionist project in the 1960s, and invested heavily in the Israeli arms industry, with the explicit intention of using Israel as a staging ground—a massive military base—for counter-revolutionary interventions against rising Arab socialist and national liberation struggles in North Africa and the Middle East. The US could not accept the prospect of sovereign development in that region: liberation movements had to be crushed or destabilized and they used Israel to help them do it.

Israel is not an "ally" in the conventional sense. It is a proxy. They support Israel for the exact same reasons that they have backed assassinations or coups against liberation leaders across the global South: Mosaddegh, Lumumba, Nkrumah, Allende, Arbenz, Sukarno, Sankara... Israel assassinates movement leaders in the Middle East and interferes in regional political processes, all in concert with the US, but it also constantly bombs the frontline states, destabilizing their societies and economies and forcing them to divert resources toward defensive spending rather than industrial development.

The Zionist project is intolerable not only because it is murderously hell-bent on ethnically cleansing Palestine, but because it creates chaos and instability across the whole region. The core states used South Africa in the very same way. The key reason that Western powers supported the apartheid regime in South Africa – against overwhelming international condemnation – was because it served as a highly militarized Western colonial outpost that was geared up to run counter-insurgency operations not only within South Africa, but also in Angola, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Namibia, the DRC, etc., leaving immense violence and chaos in its wake.

The vast majority of the world—and international law itself—supports Palestinian liberation, but Palestinian liberation would constrain Israeli power and open the way to regional liberation movements, and this is strongly antithetical to the interests of Western capital. So this is the situation we are in. The Western ruling classes are willing to back obscene violence in Gaza, and shred the liberal values they claim to believe in, because they want to maintain the conditions for capital accumulation and geopolitical hegemony.

You cannot appeal to imperial power in moral terms. The only way the US will stop propping up the Zionist regime is when it becomes too costly for them to do so. This will come down to the strength of the resistance and regional political and military opposition, but also the extent to which people can coordinate boycotts, divestment and sanctions, and punitive measures under international law.

I've used bold text for key points and separated the text into paragraphs for better organization.

by Natasha Lennard

August 27 2024, 10:52 a.m.

by #NormanSolomon - Truthdig Columnist

August 15, 2024

#HubertaHarris1968_2024

A guest post by Eman Abdelhadi Eman Abdelhadi is a scholar, writer and organizer based in Chicago. She teaches at the University of Chicago and is a columnist at In These Times mag.

by Mehdi Hasan Aug 26, 2024

Aug 26, 2024 by #JamesZogby Dr. Zogby has been personally active in U.S. politics for many years; in 1984 and 1988 he served as Deputy Campaign manager and Senior Advisor to the Jesse Jackson Presidential campaign. In 1988, he led the first ever debate on Palestinian statehood at that year's Democratic convention in Atlanta, GA. In 2000, 2008, and 2016 he served as an advisor to the Gore, Obama, and Sanders presidential campaigns.