Biden Should Stop Attacking the International Criminal Court / by Branko Marcetic

_{^{US president Joe Biden speaks in Nashua, New Hampshire, on May 21, 2024. (Photo by Mandel NGAN / AFP via Getty Images)}}

The ICC seeking arrest warrants for Israeli leaders is a major step forward for international law. US officials’ attacks on the ICC are a major step backward for US global standing

_{Reposted from Jacobin}

“I’ve had some elected leaders speak to me and be very blunt: ‘This court [the International Criminal Court] is built for Africa and for thugs like Putin,’ is what one senior leader told me.”

It’s hard to know what’s more extraordinary: yesterday’s announcement by International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor Karim Khan that he was seeking arrest warrants for Israeli leaders, or the above admission, which he made on CNN the same day.

The plan to arrest senior Israeli leaders over the now seven-month-long destruction of Gaza, including prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and defense minister Yoav Gallant, takes both the court and the world itself into uncharted waters. Whichever leader made that statement to Khan, they weren’t totally wrong, as cynical as it is: for most of its two-decade-long history, the ICC really has been mostly a vehicle to go after tin-pot dictators in Africa and exact punishment on various villains and Western adversaries in the Global South.

By 2014, eleven years into its existence, the ICC had only prosecuted Africans, despite that span of time covering Western-led wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, and Palestine. Ten years later, this ratio hadn’t gotten much better: before this announcement, nearly 90 percent of those indicted were from the continent. Israel will be the first Western country, let alone a close US partner, to ever be indicted by the court.

This is a major breakthrough. Two years ago, when there was talk about prosecuting Vladimir Putin and other Russian officials over the invasion of Ukraine, I wrote that while this certainly should happen, the court’s highly selective and inconsistent application of the law carried the risk of making the decision look like little more than geopolitical score-settling against a Western adversary.

With this decision, the ICC puts those concerns to bed and takes a major leap closer to transforming international law and the institutions meant to enforce it into the actual thing its proponents have always said they should be: universal, fair, and blind to politics. In fact, there’s a good chance this indictment would never have happened without the similarly historic warrants issued against Putin last year and the subsequent pressure on the ICC to maintain its legitimacy by making sure that that case was a rule, not an exception.

Already the ICC has come under fire for this announcement, with critics firing a barrage of remarkably similarly attacks as if some kind of memo had gone out: the ICC has no jurisdiction here; this is the handiwork of a rogue, possibly antisemitic, and highly political prosecutor; it created a false “equivalence” between Israeli officials and Hamas, by seeking warrants for the latter at the same time yesterday.

Not one of these holds any water. The ICC plainly has jurisdiction here, since Palestine is a party to the Rome Statute that created the court in the first place (a statute, incidentally, that the US government still hasn’t signed onto). As many have already pointed out, we didn’t hear any of this legal hairsplitting in the Western world last year when the ICC waded into the Ukraine war, where neither the aggressor nor the victim had ever signed onto the 2002 treaty. In fact, its actions were roundly applauded within the United States and by US allies, with President Joe Biden calling it “justified” and one US official rhapsodizing the court made up “part of a larger ecosystem of international justice.”

The idea that Khan is some kind of politically driven zealot vindictively targeting Israel is equally laughable. Khan was nominated by a right-wing (and pro-Israel) British government and was Israel’s preferred candidate for the post. Plus, one of his first acts as ICC prosecutor was to “deprioritize” the court’s investigation into US war crimes in Afghanistan, under US pressure.

The last charge is the silliest one. The idea that indicting Israel and Hamas at the same time is a statement of “equivalence” is as nonsensical as saying that if officers arrest a serial killer as well as someone responsible for a hit-and-run on the same day, the police are making a statement that those crimes are fundamentally the same. In fact, it’s the opposite: by targeting both Israel and Hamas, the ICC is proving that it’s committed to taking an evenhanded application of international law. But it’s true that the two aren’t equivalent: while Hamas’ monstrous rampage killed 767 Israeli civilians, the Israeli government has so far slaughtered at least sixteen thousand Palestinian civilians, by Netanyahu’s own self-serving count (lower than the actual likely number of civilian deaths).

There’s another major significance to the court’s request. Thanks to the brazenly hypocritical, wrathful response to the ICC announcement from US officials (and some US allies), this episode is another, major step in the entirely avoidable process of international isolation and faltering global leadership status of Washington and its Western allies, as well as the Biden administration’s gradual reputational self-destruction.

It’s broadly taken as a given around the world that the response from Republicans — including those who just a year ago applauded Khan for issuing an arrest warrant for Putin and waxed poetic about the ICC’s importance then — would be unhinged. So some of the GOP’s leading lights, including Senator Lindsey Graham and House speaker Mike Johnson, are talking about slapping sanctions on the ICC, with Senator Tom Cotton even threatening ICC officials’ families.

But this kind of talk isn’t limited to the GOP. A host of prominent and even high-ranking Democrats have publicly denounced the ICC’s decision as “trash,” “reprehensible,” “wrong,” and “political,” leading them to double down on their support for Israel’s war.

Even worse, all of this is being backed up and repeated by the Biden administration itself, which at this point seems hell-bent on not just shredding its own public diplomacy strategy, but burning the shredded leftovers into ash. Biden’s state department has questioned “the legitimacy and credibility” of the ICC investigation, while the president himself explicitly said that “we reject” the application for arrest warrants. Earlier today, Secretary of State Antony Blinken confirmed the White House was backing US retaliation against the court, declaring at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing that the administration would “work with Congress, with this committee, on an appropriate response.”

Amazingly, all of this — lobbing threats against the ICC, denying its jurisdiction, preparing retaliation, even describing its indictment as “outrageous” — closely mirrors the apoplectic Russian response to the ICC’s Putin warrant last year. That Biden is doing this high-stakes act of geopolitical seppuku on behalf of not even his own war, but that of a foreign government — and a foreign government that openly disrespects him and is rooting for him to lose in November — makes this even more remarkable.

But then, so deep and integral is US support for the brutality and continuation of Israel’s war that the Biden administration’s attacks on the ICC at this point may well be an act of rational self-preservation. As Johnson put it just hours ago, “if the ICC is allowed to threaten Israeli leaders, ours could be next.”

A consistent pattern throughout this war is that the longer it’s gone on, the legal and political perils for Biden and the United States have not only piled up, but gotten progressively more serious. Netanyahu once said that not even The Hague “will stop us” from continuing to wage Israel’s terrible war. We’re about to find out just how far he and his benefactors in Washington will go to prove that true — and to what depths they’re willing to drag the United States to as a result.

_{Branko Marcetic is a Jacobin staff writer and the author of Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden.}

Israel’s War Is Not About Bringing Down Hamas / by Guy Laron

_{^{Israeli tanks move near the Gaza border on October 12, 2023. (Mostafa Alkharouf / Anadolu via Getty Images)}}

Israel clearly has little interest in recovering the hostages taken on October 7. The real objectives: protecting West Bank settlements, further eroding the judiciary, rehabilitating the military’s image, and simple revenge

_{Reposted from Jacobin}

If we judge the military operation in the Gaza Strip by the measure of the objectives that the government presented to the Israeli public, it is clearly an absolute failure.

After six months of combat, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have not accomplished their primary mission: eliminating Hamas rule in Gaza. The IDF has put out of action an estimated one-third of Hamas’s fighting force and has detonated approximately 20 percent of its tunnels. That is a hard blow but not a fatal one. Hamas is not just still functioning but managing to take over new swaths of territory upon the IDF’s departure, using them to launch rockets into Israel.

Moreover, the additional objective set for the operation, returning the hostages, has not been accomplished. The vast majority of hostages were released thanks to a deal that exchanged them for Palestinian prisoners. Only three of the hostages were freed as a result of the military operation.

What’s worse, three of the hostages were shot to death by IDF forces, and a still-unknown number of hostages have been killed as a result of indiscriminate bombing by the IDF (based on statements that Hamas ordered the hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin to recite in a recently released video, it appears that Hamas estimates the number of hostages killed in such a manner at seventy).

The cabinet that made the decision to go to war included two retired IDF chiefs, a former general, and a prime minister who has approved and conducted multiple military operations. In addition, the chief of the IDF pushed and pressured the cabinet to approve the ground maneuver in the Gaza Strip. These people knew full well what the operation they were about to approve could and could not achieve, yet pushed ahead with it anyway.

Evidence of that effect can be found in the interview that Gadi Eisenkot, a minister in the current government, gave for Ilana Dayan. The battle-tested general cogently explained to the veteran journalist why the operation had no chance of freeing the hostages: the hostages are not being held on the surface in an isolated target such as a plane or a bus, Eisenkot said; they are being hidden in tunnels that the IDF would struggle to get at. If that is indeed the case, one can conclude that the objectives of the operation as they were presented to the public aimed to garner support and were not the real objectives that the government sought to achieve.

If so, what were the real objectives of the operation?

West Bank Settlements

The first is to protect settlements in the West Bank.

The Israeli settlers’ leadership enjoys representation in key ministries of the current government: finance, defense, and internal security. The judicial coup that the coalition put forward sought to bring about a unilateral annexation of the West Bank without bestowing the rights of citizenship on the Palestinians living there. In that way, the state could guarantee the property rights of settlers to the houses they built there.

In the decade and a half preceding the Hamas attack, Netanyahu articulated a security doctrine that guided his actions and rhetoric as prime minister. One of the principles of the “Netanyahu Doctrine,” which he reiterated as often as he could, was that the occupation carried no price. Israel, Netanyahu told the electorate, could become a technological powerhouse and forge ties with countries throughout the Arab world despite the expansion of settlements in the West Bank.

The key, explained the prime minister, was to preserve the division between the West Bank and Gaza that resulted from each of these territories being ruled by antagonistic and competing Palestinian organizations. Apparently, Netanyahu thought that funding by the petro-emirate of Qatar to Hamas made it in the latter’s interest to play ball with Jewish colonialism in the West Bank. The Hamas attack on October 7 upended all the presuppositions of the Netanyahu Doctrine.

Hamas used Qatar’s money to build a sophisticated war machine and turned Netanyahu into a laughingstock, both in Israel and abroad. Had Israel restrained itself to a limited reaction against the attack and focused instead on upgrading the security fence as well as reaching a hostage deal, then the public would have had time to discuss the collapse of the Netanyahu Doctrine and demand the fall of the government. With the decision to start a military operation, the government bought itself precious time and postponed public debate on the price of settlement in the West Bank.

The prolongation of the war and the government’s de facto refusal to bring it to a close continue to serve this purpose. By rejecting yet another hostage deal, the government takes off the agenda any debate concerning “the day after” — i.e. the political settlement required to ensure quiet along Israel’s borders, a solution that the government fears will necessitate the evacuation of some of the settlements.

The government is not only acting to protect existing settlements but also striving to broaden the settlement project through actions intended to destabilize the West Bank. That is why, for example, the government is refusing to allow laborers from the West Bank to return to work in Israel and withholding funds that the Palestinian Authority (PA) is entitled to according to the Paris Accords. Thus the West Bank has been put in an economic chokehold, and the PA’s ability to pay its police officers has been compromised. Settler militias seek to damage the property of Palestinians, whose expulsion has continued even after October 7.

A Judicial Coup

As combat wears on, the government is acting to advance its second real goal: the judicial coup.

Since January 2023, Netanyahu’s coalition attempted to ram through a set of laws that would annul the courts’ independence. Among other things, the government sought to have the power to appoint judges, restrict judges’ ability to pass a verdict, and give Parliament the authority to cancel verdicts. Had these laws passed, the coalition would have gained the freedom to legislate without any judicial oversight.

The judicial coup aims not only to restrict the space for democracy but also the wholesale privatization of all government services. The government is acting to subject these services to market forces while paying off sectors of the population. These are complementary processes: restricting the freedom of expression and the right to protest are ways to suffocate protests against the collapse of the welfare state. Those most striving to this end are the ministers from the Religious Zionist Party.

Thus, for example, Itamar Ben-Gvir, the minister of national security, can go on making appointments to the upper echelons of the police and turning it into a partisan militia. Increasingly, the police shed the semblance of impartiality. Frequently, police officers have made arbitrary arrests of protesters and their leaders, shoved opposition members of parliament who participated in the demonstrations, turned a blind eye to violence inflicted on the protesters by pro-government thugs, and ignored settlers’ activity to block humanitarian aid from entering Gaza.

At the same time, Ben-Gvir is privatizing national security by granting tens of thousands of gun permits to civilians. In this way, the police lose to local militias their position as guarantor of law and order. Providing personal safety becomes a task for the individual rather than the state.

Meanwhile, the minister of finance, Bezalel Smotrich, hands out funds to sectors of the population allied with the government such as the settlers and the strictly orthodox Haredim. Each day newspaper readers learn about a new motion just approved by the government to pass hundreds of millions of shekels to the orthodox education system, municipal authorities of West Bank settlements, rabbinical services, and religious associations that perform charity work. All of this is happening at the same time that health, education, and transport services are facing budgetary strangulation. Becoming a settler or a Haredi is turning into the only option for those hoping to receive education and health services in the wake of the collapse of the education and health systems serving the general public.

Rehabilitating the IDF’s Image

The third real objective of the operation is to rehabilitate the IDF’s image and experiment with land warfare technology in which the army heavily invested during the last decade.

No organization so thoroughly internalized the Netanyahu Doctrine as much as the army. Its main task in the last decade was to maintain the occupation of the West Bank at the lowest cost possible by harnessing the latest military technology. The army’s devotion to this mission explains in part its dismal performance on October 7.

The IDF identified the educated bourgeoisie’s discomfort with the mission of policing the West Bank and thus handed this mission to low-income sectors of the population who served in units like Kfir and Netzah Yehuda. These battalions performed the humdrum tasks of the occupation such as securing the settlements’ perimeter, patrolling Palestinian towns, confronting Palestinian protests, and making arrests. The children of the educated bourgeoisie were enlisted into high-tech units aimed at making possible the management of the conflict with a relatively small amount of manpower.

As a result, the IDF was able to transfer the bulk of its ground forces to security detail in the West Bank, leaving a far smaller number of troops along the northern and southern borders. The army convinced itself that its intelligence capabilities and the robotic technology deployed along the southern border would ensure that it would never be taken by surprise. Were that ever to happen, the army supposedly would be able to respond right away.

The army so bought into the Netanyahu Doctrine that senior officers in the intelligence services refused to believe the obvious signals that a surprise attack was in the offing. Even when on-the-ground soldiers brought convincing evidence of an impending Hamas attack, the colonels sitting in the halls of the intelligence branch plugged their ears. The surprise attack by Hamas on October 7 uncovered the army leadership’s incompetence.

To contend with the shock and fear among the Israeli public, the army latched on to an armed offensive in Gaza as a quick fix to the reputational damage it suffered on October 7. Since 2006, the Israeli General Staff, led by officers drawn from the ground forces, invested in the technological capabilities that would allow the ground forces to improve over their pathetic performance during the Second Lebanon War. The land operation in Gaza, ominously codenamed “Swords of Iron,” has handed generals the opportunity to check if this investment has borne fruit, putting the troops and the technology to the ultimate test on the battlefield.

Revenge

Once those same generals realized that the ground operation would not bring about the defeat of Hamas, a fourth real objective for the operation was born: the mission of revenge.

Despite knowing that such images would create serious problems for Israel with the international court system, the General Staff and officers on the ground allowed soldiers to upload videos and pictures that could sate the public’s desire for revenge and help them to forget that that operation was bound to fail at bringing down Hamas.

Thus the ground operation in Gaza became a military failure and a political success. Under its cover, the army and the coalition are winning back their status among the public and advancing their interests. Their political egotism expresses itself through their willingness to ignore Israel’s difficult problems: the country’s transformation into a pariah state, the never-ending conflict in the Gaza Strip, economic hardships, and intensifying internal division.

The ministers and the general are heading toward a forever war. After them, the deluge.

_{Guy Laron is a senior lecturer in international relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.}

Israel ‘Has Gone to War Against the Entire Palestinian People’: Sanders / by Olivia Rosane

_{^{Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) delivers a speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate on March 6, 2023 | Photo: Sen. Bernie Sanders/YouTube Screengrab}}

“Any objective observer knows Israel has broken international law, it has broken American law, and, in my view, Israel should not be receiving another nickle in U.S. military aid,” Sanders said.

_{Reposted from Common Dreams}

Independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders repeated his calls on Sunday for the U.S. to cut off military aid to the far-right government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as it continues its devastating war on Gaza.

Sanders spoke on NBC’s “Meet the Press” in response to a U.S. State Department report released Friday, which found that it was “reasonable to assess” that Israel had used U.S. weapons to violate international humanitarian law in Gaza but that the U.S. was “not able to reach definitive conclusions” as to whether U.S. weapons had been used in any specific incidents.

“Any objective observer knows Israel has broken international law, it has broken American law, and, in my view, Israel should not be receiving another nickle in U.S. military aid,” Sanders said.

WATCH: Sen. @BernieSanders (I-Vt.) says Israel should "not be receiving another nickel in U.S. military aid."

Sanders: "Israel has … gone to war against the entire Palestinian people, and the results have been absolutely catastrophic." pic.twitter.com/9RXbCviKA6
— Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) May 12, 2024

Friday’s report came in response to National Security Memorandum 20 (NSM-20), in which President Joe Biden tasked Secretary of State Antony Blinken with obtaining “certain credible and reliable written assurances from foreign governments” that they use U.S. arms in line with international humanitarian law and will not “arbitrarily deny, restrict, or otherwise impede, directly or indirectly, the transport or delivery of United States humanitarian assistance.”

The report, made to Congress, was criticized by human rights organizations who said it mischaracterized both the law and the facts in order to avoid imposing consequences on Israel for waging a war on Gaza that the International Court of Justice has determined could plausibly amount to genocide.

“The people of our country do not want to be complicit in the starvation of hundreds of thousands of children.”

Amanda Klasing, Amnesty International USA’s national director of government relations and advocacy, called it the “international version of ‘thoughts and prayers.'” Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) called it “woefully inadequate” and told reporters, “If this conduct complies with international standards, God help us all.”

Speaking before Sanders on “Meet the Press,” Blinken denied that the report was an attempt to get out of holding Israel accountable.

“What the report concludes is that, based on the totality of the harm that’s been done to children, to women, to men who are caught in this crossfire of Hamas’ making, it’s reasonable to conclude that there are instances where Israel has acted in ways that are not consistent with international humanitarian law,” Blinken said.

He added that both Israel and the U.S. would continue to investigate those incidents.

“When we can reach definitive conclusions, we will,” Blinken said, “but it’s very difficult to do that in the midst of a war.”

In response to Blinken’s remarks, Sanders countered that “the facts are quite clear.”

He said that Hamas was a “terrible, disgusting terrorist organization” and blamed it for starting the war. But he argued that Israel’s response had been beyond disproportionate.

“What Israel has done over the last seven months is not just gone to war against Hamas—it has gone to war against the entire Palestinian people, and the results have been absolutely catastrophic,” the senator told NBC.

Sanders went on to outline some of that catastrophe: a death toll that surpassed 35,000 on Sunday, with two-thirds of the dead women and children; the destruction of around 60% of all housing; the devastation of infrastructure such a as water and sewage as well as the healthcare and education systems; and the fact that hundreds of thousands of children are now at risk of starvation.

Sanders referred to Section 6201 of the Foreign Assistance Act: “Any country that blocks U.S. humanitarian aid is in violation of law and should not continue to receive military aid from the United States,” Sanders explained. “That is precisely what Israel has done.”

Sanders’ remarks came as Israel escalated its assault on Gaza over the weekend, issuing new evacuation orders in both Rafah and areas in the north. Biden has said that a major ground invasion into Rafah would be a “red line” and threatened to withhold certain kinds of weapons if Netanyahu ordered such an invasion, but Palestinian and human rights advocates say that Israel’s current actions in Rafah should already count as a major ground operation.

Speaking on “Meet the Press,” Blinken acknowledged that the U.S. had not seen a “credible plan” from Israel to safely evacuate the more than 1.4 million civilians sheltering in Rafah ahead of an invasion.

Sanders told NBC that he thought many Republicans and also some Democrats wanted Israel to invade Rafah, but that this was not an opinion shared by the majority of people in the U.S.

“Poll after poll suggests that the American people want an immediate cease-fire. They want massive humanitarian aid to get in,” Sanders said. “The people of our country do not want to be complicit in the starvation of hundreds of thousands of children.”

_{Olivia Rosane is a staff writer for Common Dreams.}

The Main Obstacle to Peace in Gaza? The United States / by Edward Hunt

_{^{Displaced Palestinians in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip carry their belongings as they leave following an evacuation order by the Israeli army on May 6, 2024, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Hamas movement | Photo by AFP via Getty Images}}

Now that the Biden administration has established that it will not tolerate any criticism of Israel, the siege of Gaza is likely to continue

_{Reposted from Common Dreams}

Violent crackdowns on student protesters across the United States have brought to light an uncomfortable truth that goes unacknowledged by universities, the White House, and the mass media: the United States is an obstacle to peace in Gaza.

As Israel has directed an unrelenting military assault against Gaza, the United States has enabled it every step of the way. Among its most significant moves, the United States has provided Israel with offensive weapons, opposed a permanent ceasefire, and cracked down on student protesters.

“What we are doing today is very bad policy,” Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) said on April 23. “We are aiding and abetting the destruction of the Palestinian people.”

Since October 2023, Israel has been directing a military siege of Gaza. Israel began its operations in response to a terrorist attack on October 7, when Hamas militants crossed into Israel, killed 1,200 people, and took 250 people hostage. Hamas, the militant group that controls Gaza, is still holding an estimated 100 people hostage.

Not only has the Biden administration regularly approved weapons transfers to Israel, but it has also worked with Congress to secure billions of dollars of additional military assistance.

Although Israeli officials have insisted that their goal is to destroy Hamas, their military campaign has devastated Gaza. The Israeli siege has killed more than 34,000 people and displaced most of Gaza’s 2 million people. There is now “full-blown famine” in northern Gaza, according to the head of the World Food Program. The World Court is investigating whether Israel has committed genocide.

Over the course of Israel’s military offensive, the United States has provided Israel with diplomatic and military support. Although President Joe Biden has criticized Israel’s military campaign as “over the top” and Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has identified Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a “major obstacle to peace,” both the White House and Congress have worked together to help Israel continue its siege.

“This is not an Israeli war,” Senator Sanders said. “This is an Israeli-American war. Most of the bombs and most of the military equipment the Israeli government is using in Gaza is provided by the United States and subsidized by American taxpayers.”

Arming Israel

The primary way in which the United States has intervened in Gaza is by arming Israel, just as Senator Sanders noted. Not only has the Biden administration regularly approved weapons transfers to Israel, but it has also worked with Congress to secure billions of dollars of additional military assistance.

This past April, a large majority of elected officials in both the Democratic and Republican Parties voted to send more weapons to Israel. On April 20, the House of Representatives approved a bill to provide more arms to Israel by a vote of 366 to 58. On April 23, the Senate granted its approval as part of a broader package with a vote of 79 to 18.

“It’s a good day for world peace, for real,” President Biden said, shortly after signing the legislation into law.

Regardless of the president’s efforts to frame the legislation as a victory for world peace, several U.S. officials expressed dismay. Nearly 20 representatives issued a joint statement in which they warned that the approval of additional military assistance to Israel made the United States complicit in the destruction of Gaza.

“Are we going to participate in that carnage or not?” Representative Joaquin Castro (D-TX) asked. “I choose not to.”

When Senator Sanders spoke against the additional military assistance, he argued that the United States was violating the Foreign Assistance Act, which forbids the United States from providing military assistance to countries that are blocking the delivery of U.S. humanitarian assistance, just as Israel has been doing in Gaza.

“It’s illegal to continue current military aid to Israel,” Sanders said.

Regardless, only a minority of officials in Washington cared about the legality of sending additional arms to Israel. Their priority has been to ensure that Israel can continue its siege, just as several U.S. officials have acknowledged.

“If you don’t help Israel replenish their conventional weapons, there will be a day when Israel, if they have to, will play the nuclear card,” Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) warned.

Opposing a Permanent Ceasefire

Another way in which the United States has empowered Israel is by preventing a permanent ceasefire. At the United Nations, the United States has repeatedly thwarted diplomatic efforts to bring Israel’s military offensive to an end.

When the UN Security Council crafted a resolution for an immediate ceasefire in December 2023, the United States vetoed the resolution. After the Security Council moved forward with another attempt in February 2024, the United States vetoed that resolution as well.

In March 2024, the United States allowed the Security Council to pass a ceasefire resolution, as it abstained from voting, but U.S. officials made no effort to follow up on the resolution or enforce it. Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. Ambassador to the UN, falsely claimed that the resolution was “nonbinding,” meaning that countries were not required to follow it.

Growing international pressure has had some effect, however. The same month that the Security Council passed its ceasefire resolution, the Biden administration began claiming that it wanted to see a ceasefire in Gaza. Administration officials took the position that a ceasefire would be beneficial to Gaza and Israel by halting the fighting and creating the conditions for the release of hostages.

The actions of the United States are ensuring that Israel’s siege of Gaza will continue.

As administration officials changed their public diplomacy, however, they framed their demands in ways that made it difficult to achieve a ceasefire. For starters, the White House refused to call for a permanent ceasefire. Instead, administration officials said that they favored a temporary ceasefire that would enable Israel to continue its military operations at a later date.

At the same time, the White House portrayed Hamas as the main obstacle to a ceasefire, even after Hamas indicated that it would accept a permanent ceasefire and Israel insisted that it would continue with its military offensive, “with or without a deal,” as Prime Minister Netanyahu put it.

Indeed, the main priority of the Biden administration has been to enable Israel to continue its siege of Gaza, just as Secretary of State Antony Blinken acknowledged earlier this year.

“Israel has made good progress in doing to Hamas what needs to be done so that it can’t do October 7 again,” Blinken said. “That’s what Israel should be focused on. That’s what we are focused on.”

Cracking Down on Protesters

More recently, forces within the United States have made another major move in opposition to peace. Across the United States, police have been cracking down on student protesters who have been calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and divestment from Israel.

Elected officials in Washington have been behind the crackdowns. Not only have they worked to destroy the careers of university leaders by calling on them to testify before Congress, but they have pressured university leaders to call in police forces to arrest students and eliminate their encampments.

“Administrators must take charge of their institutions,” Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) demanded on April 30. “Clear the encampments.”

So far, police forces have dismantled several encampments and arrested or detained more than 2,500 people.

As legislators have pushed for the crackdowns, many of them have justified their demands by portraying student protesters as anti-Semitic. Essentially, they have weaponized anti-Semitism, meaning that they have accused the protesters of being racists for the purposes of silencing them, destroying their reputations, and undermining the broader antiwar movement.

Amid the crackdowns, legislators have increased the pressure on universities. On April 30, House Republicans announced that they are starting to investigate whether universities that have experienced student protests should continue to receive federal funding.

“The Congress has two really important responsibilities that will be fulfilled in this exercise,” Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) explained. “One is oversight,” and the other is “the use of the power of the purse.”

A day after House Republicans threatened to defund universities, the House of Representatives passed a bill to broaden the definition of anti-Semitism so that it would include criticism of Israel. Although its fate is uncertain in the Senate, the bill puts tremendous pressure on universities to silence members of their communities who are continuing to protest Israel’s siege of Gaza.

Still, a small but not insignificant number of legislators have come to the defense of student protesters. The country’s most progressive lawmakers have consistently supported the protesters, even visiting their encampments and providing messages of support.

After police violently cleared an encampment at Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts, Representative Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) issued a statement in which she praised the students for “raising their voices and putting their bodies on the line to press for action to save lives in Gaza.”

Following similar crackdowns at other colleges, Senator Sanders delivered a speech from the Senate floor in which he defended the students. Putting their actions into context, the senator linked the protesters’ actions to major movements for social justice in U.S. history, including the civil rights movement and the movements against the U.S. wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

“It is outrageous and it is disgraceful to use that charge of anti-Semitism to distract us from the immoral and illegal war policies that Netanyahu’s extremist and racist government is pursuing,” Senator Sanders said.

Regardless, there is little interest in Washington in taking the protesters seriously, even among officials in the Biden administration who have acknowledged that “the protests in and of themselves are not anti-Semitic.” Facing growing pressure from both Democrats and Republicans to take action, the White House has denounced the protesters.

On May 2, President Biden gave a speech in which he claimed that the student protesters are spreading chaos, violence, and anti-Semitism. Just as the Republicans have been doing, he weaponized anti-Semitism in an effort to delegitimize the antiwar movement.

“Order must prevail,” the president insisted.

Suppressing the Truth

Now that the Biden administration has established that it will not tolerate any criticism of Israel, the siege of Gaza is likely to continue. Even if some kind of deal is forged to establish a temporary ceasefire between Hamas and Israel, there is no guarantee that Israel won’t renew its military operations at a later date, just as it did after a previous pause in fighting in November 2023.

What is perhaps most remarkable, however, is how the United States has suppressed one of the key truths about the destruction of Gaza. Across elite institutions of American society, people in leadership positions remain largely silent about what student protesters have been trying to bring to the attention of the public: the United States is an obstacle to peace in Gaza.

“This is not just an Israeli war,” Senator Sanders insisted, in one of the few exceptions to the silence in Washington. “This is an American war as well.”

Indeed, the actions of the United States are ensuring that Israel’s siege of Gaza will continue. Not until the United States changes its approach will it become possible to bring an end to the destruction.

_{Edward Hunt writes about war and empire. He has a PhD in American Studies from the College of William & Mary.}

Israel Is Waging a War on All Palestinians, Not Just Gazans / by Madeline Hall

_{^{Palestinians evacuate following an Israeli air strike on the Sousi mosque in Gaza City on October 9, 2023. (Photo by Mahmud Hams /AFP via Getty Images)}}

Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza is part of its war of annihilation against the Palestinian people carried out with increasing fervor across historic Palestine, including the West Bank, under the most right-wing government in Israeli history.

_{Reposted from Jacobin}

As it lays waste to Gaza, slaughtering tens of thousands of Palestinians and forcing nearly two million people to flee their homes, the Israeli government is also barreling toward de facto annexation in the occupied West Bank.

Settlement expansion and killings by the Israeli military and settlers have skyrocketed in the months following October 7. In this context, Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza must be understood as part of its larger war of annihilation against the Palestinian people, one being carried out with increasing fervor across historic Palestine under the most right-wing government in Israeli history.

Last year was the deadliest for Palestinians in the occupied West Bank since the United Nations (UN) started counting the dead, in 2005. After October 7, that violence only got worse: 299 of the at least 507 Palestinians murdered in the West Bank in 2023 were killed by Israeli forces and settlers between October 7 and December 31. In the seven months since the Gaza genocide began, Israeli forces and settlers have murdered over four hundred Palestinians, more than one hundred of whom were children.

Illegal Israeli settlements are also expanding at lightning speed. Between November 2022 and the end of October 2023, the Israeli government advanced over twety-four thousand illegal housing units in already-existing settlements in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, which UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk said “risk eliminating any practical possibility of establishing a viable Palestinian State.”

The months following October 7 have seen an explosion in settler activity, with nine new settler “outposts” established in the last three months of 2023 alone. These outposts are illegal even under Israel’s warped conception of international law, but that hasn’t stopped its ultra-right-wing government from “legalizing” a record number of settlement outposts.

In April 2024, Israel’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, who once remarked that there is “no such thing as the Palestinian people,” announced that an additional sixty-eight outposts were to be treated as so-called legal settlements, despite the fact that all settlements on occupied Palestinian territory are illegal under international law.

As illegal settlements expand across the occupied West Bank, settlers are being emboldened by Israel’s government to take up arms against Palestinians and steal their land. When the Israeli government launched its genocidal war on Gaza, it called up over five thousand settler military reservists, armed them, and assigned them to “defend” the West Bank, giving them free rein to terrorize and murder Palestinians with impunity.

In the months following October 7, settlers have carried out hundreds of attacks, displacing over 1,200 Palestinians across over a dozen different communities. Seven Palestinian communities in the West Bank have been completely uprooted as a direct result of settler violence. Hundreds of other Palestinians were displaced after the Israeli government demolished their homes because they lacked government-issued building permits, which are notoriously difficult for Palestinians to acquire.

A War on All Palestinians

Israeli violence against Palestinians is getting worse, but this violence is not new. Yet the US government insists on treating this violence as an aberration from, rather than the center of, the Zionist colonial project.

Earlier this month, ProPublica revealed that US secretary of state Antony Blinken had been balking for months at recommendations from fellow State Department officials to cut US funding to an Israeli military battalion that committed rape, murder, and other grave violations against Palestinians.

Almost immediately, reports emerged that the State Department would soon announce a ban on US funding to Netzah Yehuda, the Israeli battalion in question, in accordance with the Leahy Law, which prohibits the transfer of US weapons to foreign militaries accused of serious human rights violations.

In December 2023, the State Department said it was adopting a “new visa restriction policy” targeting individuals believed to have been involved in undermining peace, security, or stability in the West Bank.” In February, the State Department imposed financial sanctions on four Israeli settlers, and in March, it sanctioned an additional three settlers and two settler outposts.

As welcome as these steps toward accountability are, the administration’s piecemeal approach belies the systematic nature of Israeli crimes against Palestinians. As if to prove that very point, war cabinet minister Benny Gantz immediately condemned reports that the State Department may cut US funding to Netzah Yehuda, insisting that it was an “inseparable part” of the Israeli military.

An indefinite military occupation cannot be maintained without extreme violence. Though this violence has become more pronounced since the most right-wing government in Israeli history took power, and especially after October 7, it is not unique to the current Israeli government, nor is it unique to the last seven months.

Some of the most well-known abuses committed by the Netzah Yehuda Battalion — the murder of an eighty-year-old Palestinian American man and the rape of a Palestinian teenager in their custody, for example — took place in 2021 and 2022, shattering any illusion of “peace” before October 7.

In one settler pogrom last June, Illinois state representative Abdelnasser Rashid was forced to barricade himself inside his family home as hundreds of armed settlers, accompanied and protected by Israeli soldiers, rampaged through the Palestinian village of Turmus Ayya, shooting live rounds and setting homes and cars on fire. A twenty-seven-year-old father of two was killed.

The State Department was quick to condemn the attacks in Turmus Ayya and demand “full accountability” for those responsible, but Palestinians aren’t counting on it. Why should they? For seven months, the US government has armed and funded their butchers.

What’s happening in Gaza cannot be understood outside the context of the war being waged against Palestinians across historic Palestine. Instead of sanctioning individual extremists, the US government should cut off the state arming and enabling them.

_{Madeleine Hall is a digital editorial coordinator at Jewish Voice for Peace.}

The Palestinians Are the Latest Victims of Empire to Be Dehumanized as ‘Others’ / by Ralph Nader

_{^{Palestinians flee after Israeli bombardment in central Gaza City on March 18, 2024 | Photo: AFP via Getty Images}}

“The Others” are always described with less charitable words by politicians and mass media.

_{Reposted from Common Dreams}

Throughout history, military empires have reduced their victims, their subjugated, and their abducted to a state of “The Others.” The political and mass media institutions usually follow suit by supporting their empire’s predatory policies with slanted coverage.

Such is the case with the U.S. global and the Israeli regional empires. The U.S. federal government and the mainstream media often move in lockstep.

For example, take the word “terrorism.” TheNew York Times regularly refers to the Hamas regime as “terrorists,” while describing the far more extensive Israeli acts of state terrorism as “military operations.” Since October 7, the Israeli military superpower has killed over 500 times more children than Hamas killed in their raid through a still uninvestigated collapse of Israel’s vaunted multi-tiered border security.

The Intercept reported that the three newspapers mentioned antisemitism against Jews in the U.S. 549 times compared to 79 mentions of Islamophobia, notwithstanding, far more frequent, and violent, assaults on Muslims and Arabs.

Apart from a massively greater overall civilian toll inflicted on Palestinians in Gaza—the vast undercount stands at 34,000 Palestinian deaths compared to the deaths of 1,139 Israeli civilians, soldiers, and foreign workers. This staggering ratio—over 14,000 Palestinian children (with many thousands under the rubble) compared to 30 Israeli children—escapes proper reporting. “The Others” don’t get accurate coverage as was also the case with huge Iraqi losses during the Bush/Cheney criminal war. (See, the March 5, 2024, column: Stop the Worsening UNDERCOUNT of Palestinian Casualties in Gaza).

Take the use of the term “hostage.” Hamas seized over 240 Israelis hostages on October 7. Since then, the Israeli army has seized about 9,000 Palestinians, including women and children, and taken them without charges, along with many more thousands languishing in these prison camps also without charges for years (it’s called Israel’s “administrative detention”). Many of the imprisoned Palestinians are being tortured. Who has gotten the far greater attention? Aren’t these Palestinian hostages also? Again “The Others.”

How about the application of the right to self-defense? Every state has the right to self-defense. Count the many times you have heard, “Israel has a right to defend itself” compared to “Palestine has a right to defend itself.” Members of Congress who bellow the former declaration daily can not get themselves to say the latter. It is a forbidden phrase. Yet, who is the violently occupying, colonizing, land- and water-stealing party? Israel. For over 50 years, more than 400 times more innocent Palestinians have been killed and injured compared to innocent Israeli civilians. Where is the detailed coverage of the loss of life from enforced destitution and denial of life-saving medicines, equipment, and emergency transport to health facilities? Again, it is “The Others.”

“The Others” are always described with less charitable words. In a meticulous content analysis by The Intercept of the Los Angeles Times, TheNew York Times, and TheWashington Post between October 7 and November 24, the use of the words “slaughtered,” “horrific,” and “massacre” in relation to Israeli and Palestinians killed was 218 to 9!

The Intercept said Israel’s war on Gaza is “perhaps the deadliest war for children—almost entirely Palestinian—in modern history.” There is scant mention of the word “children” and related terms in the headlines of articles in that span of time.

(Note, reporters from these papers are like the rest of the mainstream Western media reports, including Israeli journalists, who have been long banned by the Israeli government from freely reporting from inside Gaza, but have managed to write some exceptionally graphic stories from a distance.)

Palestinian Arabs are denied the description of armed-force antisemitism by the Israeli war machine. Arabs are Semites and have long been the victims of violent, racist, hate-filled antisemitism by brutal Israeli leaders. (See the “ Antisemitism Against Arab and Jewish Americans” speech by Jim Zogby and DebatingTaboos.org).

Western medical doctors spending a few weeks in bombed Gaza hospitals are personal witnesses of scenes beyond any level of deliberate slaughter they have ever experienced in their courageous service in troubled areas around the world. Ambulances, hospitals, and thousands of families—adults, children, women, and babies alike—huddling in areas outside these facilities are routinely bombed, and shelled by Israeli planes and tanks, and targeted by Israeli snipers. Courageous Israeli human rights groups and refuseniks will detail more of the mayhem over time.

Biden’s chosen humanitarian aid emissary David Satterfield did not mince words in his remarks during a virtual event hosted by the American Jewish Committee, “There is an imminent risk of famine for the majority, if not all, the 2.2. million population of Gaza.”

According to Satterfield, “This is not a point in debate. It is an established fact, which the United States, its experts, the international community, its experts assess and believe is real…”

Still, the duplicitous Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu twirling the hapless U.S. President Joe Biden around his bloody fingers continues to obstruct the entry of hundreds of trucks with critical food, water, and medicine, sometimes paid for by U.S. taxpayers, that are lined up daily at the borders of Gaza. Netanyahu continues to enforce, whenever he can, the genocidal orders by his barbaric ministers on October 8—“No electricity, no food, no fuel, no water… We are fighting animals and will act accordingly.”

To the White House and the Netanyahu-dominated U.S. Congress, violating numerous federal laws, (See the April 19, 2024, Letter to President Joe Biden), the response is to make the American taxpayers continue to pay billions of dollars to unconditionally weaponize further the Israeli death machine in Gaza, right down to 2,000-pound bombs that destroy entire civilian neighborhoods. After all, Gazans are “The Others.”

The streets of America have come alive with valiant Jewish, Muslim, and Christian protestors joining together and showing up wherever Biden and other callous politicians speak such as Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) who said, “As far as I’m concerned, Israel can bounce the rubble in Gaza.”

After 76 years of Congress blocking testimony by leading Israeli and Palestinian peace advocates, more lawmakers are starting to listen. But many more in Congress are still mired in their clenched-jaw obeisance to the AIPAC lobby. It is time to stop the rubble “bouncing” over decomposing bodies in the besieged tiny Gaza Strip.

_{Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate and the author of “The Seventeen Solutions: Bold Ideas for Our American Future” (2012). His new book is, “Wrecking America: How Trump’s Lies and Lawbreaking Betray All” (2020, co-authored with Mark Green).}

Recognize Palestine — and Impose Sanctions on Israel / by Harrison Stetler

_{^{A man waves a Palestinian flag as people demonstrate in support of Palestine in front of the city hall in Madrid, Spain, on January 27, 2024. (Javier Soriano / AFP via Getty Images)}}

Even as the Biden administration vetoes Palestinian statehood, several European states are moving toward full recognition. Their dissent is a welcome crack in the West’s pro-Israel line — but they should back it up with sanctions to punish Israeli apartheid.

_{Reposted from Jacobin}

Recognition of Palestinian statehood has long been one of the fault lines of global politics. In fact, the main Western powers are often outliers in this regard. Today an overwhelming majority of countries, including a near-solid band stretching from the bottom of South America up through the Caribbean and onto Africa, the Middle East and South and East Asia, recognize the Palestinian state. The United States and Canada stand outside this consensus — joined by other holdouts across the Pacific.

Western Europe is also an exception. In this region only Iceland, the Vatican, and Sweden recognize Palestine, thanks to decisions made in 2011, 2013, and 2014, respectively. They joined the former Eastern Bloc countries that recognized Palestinian statehood after the 1988 Palestinian Declaration of Independence penned by poet Mahmoud Darwish and proclaimed by Yasser Arafat.

Underscoring this divide, on Thursday, the United States again used its veto to block a draft United Nations resolution on admitting Palestine as a full member. And yet, faced with Israel’s ongoing colonization and massacre in Gaza, it looks like Western monolithism on this question is today fracturing. A growing number of European countries may soon recognize Palestinian statehood.

First Movers

Western doctrine has long premised such recognition on reaching a more general solution through the Oslo Accords framework. This has allowed Israel to simply veto progress by alleging the absence of a credible interlocutor on the Palestinian side — and, more specifically, digging its heels in over border demarcations and the future status of its settlements. Short of an overall deal, recognition of Palestinian statehood will surely have little more than symbolic value. But it is a sign of growing exhaustion in Europe with Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza, and its decades-old stonewalling of the “peace process” through colonization and apartheid.

Spain was among the first states in the European Union to call for a cease-fire late last October, and its government is again pushing for a shift in the bloc’s diplomatic position. In early March, social democratic prime minister Pedro Sánchez told a conference in Bilbao that he would soon propose that parliament recognize Palestinian statehood. Already in 2014, Spain’s Congress approved a nonbinding resolution calling for the recognition of Palestine. It was stalled by the prime minister of the day, the conservative Mariano Rajoy; but even his successor, Sánchez, had, up till the current crisis, maintained that recognition must be a collective EU initiative.

In Spain’s bid to drive a wedge within the EU on the subject, this March 28, Sánchez met with the heads of government of Ireland, Malta (which recognized the 1988 Independence Declaration), and Slovenia on the sidelines of a European Council meeting. These four EU member states cosigned a communiqué claiming a joint “readiness to recognize Palestine,” albeit with the qualification that the move should come “when [recognition] can make a positive contribution and the circumstances are right.”

That could come sooner than it may seem. Madrid’s declared timeline is to move ahead with diplomatic recognition by this July. In Ireland, Simon Harris replaced center-right Taoiseach (premier) Leo Varadkar in a government reshuffle earlier this month but has vowed to pursue with his predecessor’s call for recognition. During the April 9 session of the Dáil, the Irish parliament’s lower house, vice prime minister, and foreign secretary, Micheál Martin, said, “We have agreed that the undermining of the Oslo Accords and therefore the agreement to create two states has reached a point where the Accords’ approach of recognition after a final agreement is not credible or tenable any longer.” Before flying to Dublin for an April 12 meeting with Harris, in which the two stated they would push the issue of recognition in the next European Council summit, Sánchez was in Oslo where Norway — though not a member of the EU —appeared ready to join the Spanish and Irish-led initiative.

Faced with Israel’s paralysis of the Oslo framework, which Western states have largely ignored since the late 1990s, these moves toward unilateral recognition are symptomatic of a shift in favor of Palestinian rights in some sectors of European opinion. Amid the current crisis, however, immediate recognition of Palestinian statehood has not been one of the main demands of groups like the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign (IPSC). It has prioritized calling for more direct moves to isolate Israel through economic sanctions — demands that the Irish government has thus far resisted. Nonetheless, IPSC chairperson Zoë Lawlor sees the government’s new stance on recognition as the effect of the mass mobilization seen since October.

“We’ve had thousands of people take to the streets in the whole country, up and down, north and south,” Lawlor told Jacobin, pointing out that spurious allegations of “antisemitism” lobbed against critics of Israel elsewhere in the EU have little sway in a country that is itself influenced by a history of colonization. Upwards of 70 percent of the Irish population believe that Palestinians live under a system of apartheid, according to a recent study by Amnesty International Ireland. “Weekly vigils, marches, protests and solidarity actions have really pushed the government,” said Lawlor.

“European states have been somewhat trapped by their own passivity since the Oslo Accords,” says Franco Palestinian jurist Rima Hassan, a France Insoumise candidate for this summer’s European Parliament elections. “There were 100,000 settlers then, and nearly ten times as many today. There is a symbolic dimension to recognition, but above all I think this emergency reaction enables certain states to escape from their position of passivity. However, there’s still the problem of the concrete materiality of the Palestinian state.”

According to Hassan, one possible silver lining in unilateral recognition is that it could represent a foreclosing on the final-status negotiations stipulated in the Oslo Accords, which were supposed to be held within five years of this document’s 1993 signing. Recognition could thus amount to an implicit refusal of Israeli colonization in the occupied territories. “In no way can it be said that this resolves the problem of colonization,” Hassan told Jacobin. “On the other hand, it’s a diplomatic and political way of recognizing that Palestinians are sovereign over the territories where colonies are located. It’s a rejection of the annexationist policy of the Israeli state and a way of saying, ‘Officially, we do not and will not recognize your sovereignty over these territories in the short, medium or long term.’”

From Rhetoric to Reality

But an implicit condemnation is no replacement for applying concrete pressure to reverse colonization, let alone force Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to end its current war. For example, the Irish government’s allegedly imminent formal recognition of Palestine contrasts with its feet-dragging on adopting sanctions against the Israeli state.

Irish activists want to see Harris’s government bring two pieces of legislation to final adoption. Voted in 2018, the Control of Economic Activity Bill, also known as the Occupied Territories Bill, would effectively criminalize Irish business activities drawn from Israeli operations in occupied Palestinian territory. More pointed against Israel, the Illegal Israeli Settlements Divestment Bill (IISD) would order the Ireland’s state investment fund to withdraw from business in Israeli settlements. But the Irish government has stalled the enactment of the Occupied Territories Bill and has warned that adopting the IISD risks turning Ireland into an “international outlier.”

“That the Irish government is making this gesture at all shows the power of our mass movement, but unless it’s backed up with action that ensures the Palestinian right to self-determination, it’s just symbolism,” says Lawlor, urging the final enactment of those two pieces of legislation. “We want the government to cut off all trade with Israel and call for the European Union to suspend commercial ties.”

“There’s no point in recognizing the state of Palestine if we don’t do everything in our power to isolate Israel for its policy of occupation and colonization — above all by adopting sanctions,” says Hassan, noting that the European Union is Israel’s leading commercial partner. The EU was the source of nearly 32 percent of imports to Israel and purchased over 25 percent of its exports in 2022. “If you recognize the state of Palestine today and want to defend anything that might resemble a viable state, you have to completely isolate Israel,” Hassan continued. “We have to do to the Israeli state what we did to South Africa.”

Sanctions

The push for recognition by some European states shows that they are willing to go out ahead of Berlin and Paris, however. The latter have maintained that any recognition of Palestinian statehood needs to be first grounded in an agreement with Israel — a blatantly untenable stance given Israel’s ceaseless colonization beyond its 1967 borders and the blunt statements by Israeli officials against the creation of a Palestinian state. In a faint nod to the growing pressure for recognition coming from elsewhere in the bloc, French president Emmanuel Macron acknowledged in February that the subject is not a “taboo” for France.

Germany is likely to remain the stiffest obstacle, despite it coming under growing pressure for its support of the Israeli military — and the international embarrassment caused by its clampdown on pro-Palestine solidarity and organizing. In mid-March, Nicaragua filed a complaint against Germany before the International Court of Justice, alleging that Berlin’s continued military support for Israel makes it liable for “plausible” complicity in genocide.

The Hague court heard initial arguments on April 8 and 9, days after an April 2 report released by the Berlin-based NGO Forensis revealed that 185 of the 308 export licenses for transfers of military matériel to Israel in 2023 were authorized after the onset of the current war. Amounting to 47 percent of conventional weapons delivered to Israel for the whole of 2023, the €326 million of transferred hardware places Germany in second place globally behind the United States, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

A possible rupture within Europe in favor of recognition is a sign that popular organizing and pressure is starting to make inroads — forcing some governments to live up to their rhetorical commitments to a Palestinian state. But compared to the obduracy of the United States and Europe’s leading powers, they’re only slight cracks in the West’s long-standing and unequivocal backing for the Israeli state.

_{Harrison Stetler is a freelance journalist and teacher based in Paris.}

Israel’s Irremediable Defeat: On Tel Aviv’s Other Unwinnable War / by Ramzy Baroud

_{^{Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shakes hands with Rear Adm. David Saar Salama at the Ashdod Naval Base on October 29, 2023 | Photo: Office of Benjamin Netanyahu}}

In this scenario, all of Netanyahu’s political shenanigans, which served him well in the past, would fall short from allowing him to return to power.

_{Reposted from Palestine Chronicle}

Historically, wars unite Israelis. Not anymore.

Not that Israelis do not agree with Benjamin Netanyahu’s war; they simply do not believe that the prime minister is the man who could win this supposedly existential fight.

But Netanyahu’s war remains unwinnable simply because liberation wars, often conducted through guerrilla warfare tactics, are far more complicated than traditional combat. Nearly six months after the Israeli attack on Gaza, it has become clear that Palestinian Resistance groups are durable and well-prepared for a much longer fight.

Netanyahu, supported by far-right ministers and an equally hardline Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant, insists that more firepower is the answer. Though the unprecedented amount of explosives, used by Israel in Gaza, killed and wounded over 100,000 Palestinians, an Israeli victory, however it is defined, remains elusive.

So, what do Israelis want and, more precisely, what is their prime minister’s end-game in Gaza, anyway?

Major opinion polls since October 7 continued to produce similar results: the Israeli public prefers Benny Gantz, leader of the National Unity Party, over the prime minister and his Likud party.

A recent poll conducted by the Israeli newspaper Maariv also indicated that one of Netanyahu’s closest and most important coalition partners, Finance Minister and leader of the Religious Zionist Party, Bezalel Smotrich, is virtually irrelevant in terms of public support. If elections were to be held today, the far-right minister’s party would not even pass the electoral threshold.

Most Israelis are calling for new elections this year. If they are to receive their wish today, the pro-Netanyahu coalition would only be able to muster 46 seats, compared to its rivals with 64.

And, if the Israeli coalition government – currently controlling 72 seats out of 120 Knesset seats – is to collapse, the rightwing dominance over Israeli politics will shatter, likely for a long time.

In this scenario, all of Netanyahu’s political shenanigans, which served him well in the past, would fall short from allowing him to return to power, keeping in mind he is already 74 years of age.

A greatly polarized society, Israelis learned to blame an individual or a political party for all of their woes. This is partly why election outcomes can sharply differ between one election cycle to another. Between April 2019 and November 2022, Israel held five general elections, and now they are demanding yet another one.

The November 2022 elections were meant to be decisive, as they ended years of uncertainty, and settled on the “most right-wing government in the history of Israel” – an oft-repeated description of Israel’s modern government coalitions.

To ensure Israel does not delve back into indecision, Netanyahu’s government wanted to secure its gains for good. Smotrich, along with National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, wanted to fashion a new Israeli society that is forever tilted towards their brand of religious and ultranationalist Zionism.

Netanyahu, on the other hand, simply wanted to hold on to power, partly because he became too accustomed to the perks of his office, and also because he is desperately hoping to avoid jail time due to his several corruption trials.

To achieve this, the right and far-right parties have diligently worked to change the rules of the game, by curtailing the power of the judiciary and ending the oversight of the Supreme Court. They failed at some tasks, and succeeded at others, including an amendment to the country’s Basic Laws to curtail the power of Israel’s highest court, thus its right to overturn the government’s policies.

Though Israelis protested en masse, it was clear that the initial energy of these protests, starting in January 2023, was petering out, and that a government with such a substantial majority – at least, per Israel’s standards – will not easily relent.

October 7 changed all calculations.

The Palestinian Al-Aqsa Flood Operation is often examined in terms of its military and intelligence components, if not usefulness, but rarely in terms of its strategic outcomes. It placed Israel at a historic dilemma that even Netanyahu’s comfortable Knesset majority cannot – and most likely will not – be able to resolve.

Complicating matters, on January 1, the Supreme Court officially annulled the decision by Netanyahu’s coalition to strike down the power of the judiciary.

The news, however significant, was overshadowed by many other crises plaguing the country, mostly blamed on Netanyahu and his coalition partners: the military and intelligence failure leading to October 7, the grinding war, the shrinking economy, the risk of a regional conflict, the rift between Israel and Washington, the growing global anti-Israel sentiment, and more.

The problems continue to pile up, and Netanyahu, the master politician of former times, is now only hanging by the thread of keeping the war going for as long as possible to defer his mounting crises for as long as possible.

Yet, an indefinite war is not an option, either. The Israeli economy, according to recent data by the country’s Central Bureau of Statistics, has shrunk by over 20 percent in the fourth quarter of 2023. It is likely to continue its free fall in the coming period.

Moreover, the army is struggling, fighting an unwinnable war without realistic goals. The only major source for new recruits can be obtained from ultra-Orthodox Jews, who have been spared the battlefield to study in yeshivas, instead.

70 percent of all Israelis, including many in Netanyahu’s own party, want the Haredi to join the army. On March 28, the Supreme Court ordered a suspension of state subsidies allocated to these ultra-Orthodox communities.

If that is to happen, the crisis will deepen on multiple fronts. If the Haredi lose their privileges, Netanyahu’s government is likely to collapse; if they maintain them, the other government, the post Oct-7 war council, is likely to collapse as well.

An end to the Gaza war, even if branded as a ‘victory’ by Netanyahu, will only further the polarization and deepen Israel’s worst internal political struggle since its founding on the ruins of historic Palestine. A continuation of the war will add to the schisms, as it will only serve as a reminder of an irremediable defeat.

_{Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of six books. His latest book, co-edited with Ilan Pappé, is “Our Vision for Liberation: Engaged Palestinian Leaders and Intellectuals Speak out”. Dr. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA). His website is}_{www.ramzybaroud.net}

Russia and China veto US resolution on Gaza over failure to explicitly demand ceasefire / by Tanupriya Singh

_{^{UNSC. Photo: UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe}}

As Israel prepares for a ground invasion of Rafah, the US-authored resolution presented to the UN Security Council merely noted an “imperative” for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. Algeria, Russia, and China rejected the resolution, stating that it had failed to deliver on the core demand for a ceasefire.

_{Reposted from People’s Dispatch}

Russia and China vetoed a US-authored resolution in the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) on March 22 on the situation in Gaza. The text “determines the imperative for an immediate and sustained ceasefire” stopping short of an explicit call for a halt to Israel’s six-month long attack on besieged Gaza that has killed almost 32,000 Palestinians.

The US authored the resolution after vetoing three successive UNSC resolutions on Gaza, including a February 20 resolution presented by Algeria that had called for an immediate ceasefire.

Absent an explicit call for a ceasefire, the text presented by the US mentioned allowing for the delivery of essential humanitarian assistance, “alleviate humanitarian suffering and towards that end unequivocally supports ongoing international diplomatic efforts to secure such a cease-fire in connection [emphasis added] with the release of all remaining hostages,” according to a draft circulated in the news media on Thursday.

This unilateral demand for the release of Israeli hostages—without a mention of a reciprocal release of the thousands of Palestinians Israel has imprisoned and tortured— has been inserted by the US in UNSC discussions of a ceasefire. This is all while Israel has continued to bomb Gaza and rejected comprehensive ceasefire proposals presented by the Palestinian resistance. Friday’s vote in the Security Council was held amid ongoing negotiations in Qatar.

The US continued to make this link perhaps not “as firmly”, during the Council on Friday, with Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield speaking of an “immediate and sustained ceasefire as part of a deal that leads to the release of all hostages being held by Hamas and other groups that will help us address the dire humanitarian crisis in Gaza”. She added that adopting the resolution would “put pressure on Hamas to accept the deal on the table”.

The US resolution received 11 votes in favor, and three votes against, with Algeria joining Russia and China who cast the deciding vetoes. Guyana was the sole abstention, reiterating the lack of a call for an immediate ceasefire.

US resolution a “hypocritical spectacle”

Addressing the Council ahead of the vote, Russian Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia accused the US of presenting a “hypocritical spectacle” wrapped up in a ceasefire, that the US had been trying to “sell a product” to the international community. He added that the language of an “imperative” was not enough to save the lives of the Palestinians and was not stipulated in the mandate of the UNSC, which is vested with a mechanism to “demand a ceasefire and where necessary, to compel compliance”.

“The American product is exceedingly politicized, the sole purpose of which is to help to play to the voters, to throw them a bone in the form of some kind of a mention of a ceasefire in Gaza” and would make the UNSC “instrument in the advancement of Washington’s destructive policy in the Middle East”, and “to ensure the impunity of Israel whose crimes in the draft are not even assessed.”

“The US draft contains an effective green light for Israel to mount a military operation in Rafah”, adding that the text’s authors had tried to make it that “nothing would prevent” Israel from “continuing their brutal cleansing of the south of the Gaza Strip”.

Algerian Ambassador Amar Bendjama stated that the adoption of the February ceasefire resolution could have saved thousands of lives, adding that the present resolution had fallen short “due to the absence of a clear demand for a ceasefire those who believe that the Israeli occupying power will choose to uphold its international legal obligation are mistaken, they must abandon this fiction”.

He stated that the US draft resolution had been circulated a month ago following which Algeria had made proposed edits to “achieve a more balanced and acceptable text”, however, finally, the draft fell short as “core concerns remained unaddressed”.

Addressing the Council on Friday, China’s Ambassador Zhang Jun explained the country’s veto, stating that despite the urgent need and demand for an immediate, unconditional, and sustained ceasefire, “the Council had dragged its feet and wasted too much time”.

He added that the US-authored draft had “always evaded and dodged the most central issue- that of a ceasefire. The final text remains ambiguous and does not call for an immediate ceasefire, nor does it even provide an answer to the question of realizing a ceasefire in the short-term”.

Zhang further stated that an immediate ceasefire was a “fundamental prerequisite” for “saving lives, expanding humanitarian access and preventing greater conflicts. The US draft on the contrary sets up preconditions for a ceasefire which is no different from giving a green light to continued killings which is unacceptable.”

He noted that the draft was “very imbalanced” particularly in regard to Israel’s plans to invade Rafah. “The draft does not clearly and unequivocally state its opposition which would send an utterly wrong signal and lead to severe consequences.”

His Algerian counterpart, Bendjama, had similarly stated that the text “does not convey a clear message of peace. It tacitly allows continuing civilian casualties and lacks clear safeguards to prevent further escalation. It is a laissez-passer to continue killing the Palestinian civilians. The emphasis on ‘measures to reduce civilian harm from ongoing and future operations’ implies a license for continuing bloodshed,” Bendjama added, highlighting Israel’s looming invasion of Rafah.

Rafah invasion still on the table despite international outcry

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has reiterated the Occupation’s plan to launch a ground invasion of Rafah in southern Gaza, where 1.5 million people forcibly displaced by Israeli attacks on other parts of Gaza are currently trapped.

While the US continues to make a display of its supposed efforts to halt the looming invasion, Netanyahu has declared that Israel is “rejecting” growing international pressure “in order to achieve the goals of the war”. Following a phone call with President Joe Biden, Netanyahu stated that he “made it as clear as possible” that there was no way around a ground incursion.

“We see no way to eliminate Hamas militarily without destroying these remaining battalions. We are determined to do this”, he said. Netanyahu reiterated this in a meeting with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, saying on Friday, “I told him that I hope we will do it with the support of the US, but if we have to— we will do it alone”.

“A major military ground operation is not the way to do it”, Blinken told reporters, then going on to say, “We’re determined that Israel succeed in defending itself and becomes integrated into the region with its security.”

Meanwhile, the ten elected, non-permanent members (E-10) of the Security Council have drafted a separate resolution calling for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire for the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, “leading to a permanent sustainable ceasefire”.

It also demands “the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages”, without linking it to the ceasefire, and stresses the need to protect civilians in Gaza and provide humanitarian assistance. France has also stated that it will be drafting a separate resolution.

A vote on the E-10 text is reportedly expected to take place later on Friday or Saturday morning.

_{Tanupriya Singh}_{is a writer at Peoples Dispatch.}

Biden Says Netanyahu ‘Hurting Israel’ With Gaza Policy But Vows Unwavering Support, Weapons / by John Queally

_{^{Then-U.S. Vice President Joe Biden meets with Israeli Prime Minister in Jerusalem on March 9, 2016 | Photo: U.S. Embassy Jerusalem/flickr/cc}}

“Biden said the death toll in Gaza is ‘contrary to what Israel stands for,'” said one critic. “Maybe it’s time to admit that that is what Israel stands for.”

_{Reposted from Common Dreams}

President Joe Biden said Saturday that Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is not handling the situation in Gaza the way it should be, but said U.S. support for its ally will remain.

Following the State of the Union address on Thursday, Biden was caught on a hot mic telling Democratic lawmakers that he had privately told Netanyahu that “you and I are going to have a ‘Come-to-Jesus’ meeting,” suggesting a crossroad when it comes to the U.S. president’s so far unconditional support for the Israeli prime minister and his government’s policies.

Asked about the comment on Saturday during an interview with MSNBC, Biden said the death toll in Gaza—which he placed at 30,000 people, the approximate current figure used by the health ministry in Gaza—is “contrary to what Israel stands for. And I think is a big mistake.”

Kenneth Roth, former executive director of Human Rights Watch and now a visiting professor at Princeton University, took on Sunday issue with Biden’s remarks, even as they reflected a much more critical stance.

“Biden said the death toll in Gaza is ‘contrary to what Israel stands for,'” said Roth. “But Israel is imposing it deliberately, just as it imposes apartheid and the expansion of war-crime settlements. Maybe it’s time to admit that that is what Israel stands for.”

Biden said Netanyahu is “hurting Israel more than helping Israel” by the way he continues to conduct the assault on Gaza, and said that he wants “to see a cease-fire” so that a “major, major” prisoner exchange can take place with an initial six-week period in which fighting is stopped and noted the start of the holy month of Ramadan that begins next week.

Biden further called the looming threat to invade Rafah, where an estimated 1.5 million Palestinians with nowhere else to go have sought shelter and safety, a “red line” that he does not want Israel to cross, but added that he would “never leave Israel” or stop supporting what he called the nation’s right to defend itself.

“The defense of Israel is still critical, so there’s no red line I’m going to cut off all weapons so they don’t have the Iron Dome to protect them,” Biden said.

“The defense of Israel is still critical,” President Joe Biden tells Jonathan Capehart. “But there's red lines that if he crosses…cannot have 30,000 more Palestinians dead.” pic.twitter.com/0SAPJySAYS
— MSNBC (@MSNBC) March 9, 2024

On Friday, the U.N. High Commission for Human Rights warned the “already catastrophic” situation in Gaza would “slide deeper into the abyss” if Israel carried out its promised attack on Rafah.

“Any ground assault on Rafah would incur massive loss of life and would heighten the risk of further atrocity crimes,” said the Commission’s spokesperson Jeremy Laurence. “This must not be allowed to happen.”

During his interview with MSNBC, Biden downplayed those in Democratic primaries over recent weeks who have voted “uncommitted” to voice their disapproval of his unrelenting backing of Israel as it carries out what experts and critics have said is a clear case of genocide in Gaza.

_{Jon Queally is managing editor of Common Dreams.}

‘Finish the Problem’: Presumptive GOP Nominee Trump Endorses Gaza Genocide / by Jake Johnson

_{^{Former U.S. President Donald Trump attends a Super Tuesday election night watch party in Palm Beach, Florida on March 5, 2024 | Photo: Chandan Khanna/AFP via Getty Images}}

_{One commentator argued that while President Joe Biden has “bent over backward to support Israel,” Donald Trump would “be even worse.”}

_{Reposted from Common Dreams}

Shortly before winning nearly every GOP primary on Super Tuesday and all but locking up the 2024 Republican nomination, former President Donald Trump said in a Fox News interview that he wants Israel to “finish the problem” in Gaza—a clear endorsement of a military campaign that has killed more than 30,000 people in less than five months and sparked one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes in recent history.

Fox host Brian Kilmeade told Trump that voters who have marked “uncommitted” on their primary ballots to register their opposition to President Joe Biden’s support for Israel’s war are “not gonna like you either because you are firmly in Israel’s camp.”

“Yeah,” Trump responded.

Asked whether he is “on board with the way the [Israel Defense Forces] is taking the fight to Gaza,” Trump said, “You’ve gotta finish the problem.”

“You had a horrible invasion. It took place. It would have never happened if I was president, by the way,” said Trump, who went on to claim that Hamas militants attacked Israel because they “have no respect for Biden” and because Israel “got soft.”

Trump dodged when asked whether he would support a cease-fire in Gaza.

Watch:

It's garbled because Trump is generally incoherent but I think Trump is saying that the Hamas attack on Israel happened because the Israelis "got soft" here.

He goes on to say that dead people in Ukraine and Russia and Israel would be "leading great lives" if he was in office. pic.twitter.com/x6GpYk1BZ3
— Matthew Gertz (@MattGertz) March 5, 2024

Until Tuesday, Trump had largely been quiet about Israel’s large-scale attack on the Gaza Strip, but as president he was a staunch supporter of the Israeli government.

Trump’s administration recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, moved the American embassy to Jerusalem, and reversed longstanding U.S. policy that deemed Israeli settlements in occupied Palestinian territory “inconsistent with international law”—a shift that the Biden administration rolled back last month.

Following Trump’s Fox interview Tuesday morning, the former president’s national press secretary Karoline Leavitt toldNBC News that Trump “did more for Israel than any American president in history.”

“When President Trump is back in the Oval Office, Israel will once again be protected, Iran will go back to being broke, terrorists will be hunted down, and the bloodshed will end,” Leavitt added.

With former North Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley officially dropping out of the GOP presidential primary race on Wednesday, a rematch between Biden and Trump is now essentially set for November.

As Democratic voters have used state party primaries in recent weeks to voice their objections to Biden’s unconditional support for Israel, The New York Timesreported Friday how the Trump campaign and its allies “plan to exploit that division to their advantage” during the general election.

“One idea under discussion among Trump allies as a way to drive the Palestinian wedge deeper into the Democratic Party,” the Times reports, “is to run advertisements in heavily Muslim areas of Michigan that would thank Mr. Biden for ‘standing with Israel.'”

In a column on Monday, The Intercept‘s James Risen argued that Trump and “his MAGA Republicans” would “be even worse” on Israel than the Biden administration, which has supported Israel’s Gaza assault militarily and diplomatically while also issuing mild calls for the protection of civilians, delivery of humanitarian aid, and a temporary cease-fire.

“Trump is a big fan of war crimes, especially against Muslims,” wrote Risen, The Intercept‘s senior national security correspondent. “During his first term, he intervened on behalf of Special Operations Chief Eddie Gallagher, a Navy SEAL platoon leader convicted of posing for a photo with the body of a dead Iraqi; another SEAL team member told investigators that Gallagher was ‘freaking evil,’ but Trump said at a political rally that he was one of ‘our great fighters.’ Trump also pardoned Blackwater contractors convicted of killing Iraqi civilians in a wild shooting spree in Baghdad’s Nisour Square. There is no chance that he would try to stop Israel from indiscriminately killing Palestinians.”

“Although the Biden administration has bent over backward to support Israel, the president has said repeatedly in recent weeks that an independent Palestinian state is still possible. What’s more, political unrest within the Democratic Party is starting to have an impact on Biden, forcing changes in the White House’s approach to Israel,” Risen continued. “Trump would never face such pro-Palestinian pressure from within the Republican Party. He and his MAGA cult of Christian nationalists would never force Israel to accept a cease-fire—or a Palestinian state.”

_{Jake Johnson is a senior editor and staff writer for Common Dreams.}

Peter Mertens: “Netanyahu is the Pinochet of this generation” / by Peoples Dispatch

_{^{Peter Mertens speaking at a Palestine solidarity rally | via People’s Dispatch}}

_{_{Reposted from People’s Dispatch}}

On February 29, 2024, a day after the “Flour Massacre”, wherein Israeli forces massacred over 100 people in the south of Gaza City waiting for food aid, Peter Mertens, the General Secretary of the Workers’ Party of Belgium gave a speech in parliament calling for greater action to stop Israel’s genocide.

Below is the transcript of this speech.

Normally, Rafah has barely 165,000 inhabitants but now 1.4 million people have been driven together there. For months they said it would be safe in the south, and now everyone is crammed in those unspeakable conditions. Now Netanyahu threatens to bomb Rafah too.

It’s unbelievable. There are no words for it.

People have been driven out of their homes, expelled from their land, city after city, zone after zone. The north and center of Gaza have been bombed, barely anything remains standing.

They have made 100,000 victims, 30,000 of whom are dead.
13,000 children have been killed, and the other children are subjected to the worst torture: famine.

They have closed the borders and attacked humanitarian convoys, and there is hardly anything left in the markets.

And once they have driven everyone south, to Rafah, and made the land uninhabitable, they now announce they will bomb Rafah.

There is only one question for this parliament: how long will we continue to stand by? What does Israel have to do to be sanctioned? Do they also have to bomb Rafah? When will our country impose sanctions on Israel? That’s the question.

Imagine being Palestinian today. Imagine being Palestinian; your land is stolen, your history is stolen, and your future is stolen.

Saleh is a Palestinian farmer in the West Bank, with an olive grove. At some point, Israeli settlers arrive and take away half of his land, just like that, because they can. This land theft has been going on for 75 years now, annexation after annexation, generation after generation.

So Saleh wonders: does international law not apply to Palestinians? Israel has been condemned countless times over the years…, but nobody acts.

Imagine being Palestinian. Then your history is stolen.

Museums, cultural centers, libraries, mosques, and churches are bombed until there is nothing left of history. Israel wants to erase Palestine’s past, to say that Palestine never existed.

Imagine being Palestinian. Then your future is stolen as well.

600,000 students can no longer go to school, 90,000 university students no longer have a university, because all educational institutions are systematically destroyed.

For this parliament, there is only one question: what are we going to do? Are we going to stand by or are we finally going to impose sanctions?

Why can’t we do to Israel what we did to Russia?

To tackle Russia, it didn’t take more than a month to take three essential measures:
(1) an economic embargo: that means no more trade allowed;
(2) a military embargo: that means no more arms deliveries allowed;
(3) and the prosecution of Putin as a war criminal before the International Criminal Court.

How long will it take before we take those three measures against Israel?

(1) International trade continues as if nothing is wrong;
(2) arms deliveries to Israel continue as if no war crimes are being committed;
(3) and Netanyahu still has not been brought before the International Criminal Court.

Today, a new generation of young people is rising up who will not leave Netanyahu alone and will haunt him in his dreams until he is convicted for what he is: a war criminal. Netanyahu is the Pinochet of this generation.

Those young people, in Palestine, in the south, and in our country, demand that our country finally acts and really imposes a military and economic embargo against Israel.

_{_{People’s Dispatch}}