ceasefire – COMMUNIST PARTY OF MAINE

_{^{Targeting moms and moms-to-be: Palestinian paramedics inspect damage in the patient rooms caused by Israeli strikes on the maternity ward at Nasser Hospital in the town of Khan Younis, Gaza, Dec. 17, 2023. | Mohammed Dahman / AP}}

_{Reposted from Peoples World}

U.S. laws require healthcare practitioners and anyone else who suspects they may have encountered a case of child abuse to report it to “the state.” But what is one to do when it is the state itself that’s doing the abusing?

The Lancet medical journal, published in Britain and read throughout the world, recently condemned the Israeli state and the “ongoing Israeli military assault on Gaza” for causing “an unprecedented rise in maternal deaths, miscarriages, and stillbirths.”

Lancet asserts that the “violence is not just a consequence of the military assault—it is a deliberate outcome of policies that restrict access to health care.” And a “blockade, now in its second decade, and ever-tightened over the last few months, has compounded the suffering, with dire implications for future generations.”

Lancet’s report refers to “humanitarian catastrophe…the onset of famine…deterioration of maternal health services…[and the] near-total collapse of the health-care infrastructure.” It points to “a tragic surge in preventable maternal and neonatal deaths.”

Lancet adds that:

“Prenatal care is virtually non-existent in Gaza. The rise in premature labor is staggering, often triggered by the chronic stress of displacement, malnutrition, and the trauma of witnessing air strikes. As hospitals struggle to keep up with mass casualties, maternity wards are becoming non-functional. In some cases, women have had to deliver babies outside, in unsanitary conditions, without the assistance of midwives or doctors.”

The “targeting of maternity hospitals and the blockade that limits essential medical supplies…from entering Gaza have turned pregnancy into a life-threatening condition for thousands of women.”

Women “are forced to carry pregnancies through conditions unfathomable to the human conscience.” The report cites “malnutrition… a profound moral failure of the international community…[and] violation of international law.”

“Humanitarian principles dictate that civilians, particularly children and pregnant women, must be protected,” the report states. Moreover: “The world cannot remain silent any longer. The time for action is now—to restore access to health care, to protect women and children, and to uphold the sanctity of life.”

The enabling role of Israel’s partner in crime receives no mention. The United States supplies the tools for killing—the bombs, guns, ammunition, and planes.

Citing mothers, nurses and physicians, Gaza journalist Taghreed Ali points out that expectant mothers are experiencing more miscarriages, premature deliveries, and stillborn births than before. He notes an increased incidence of newborns born with congenital abnormalities.

These include deformed or absent limbs; neurologic malformations, especially hydrocephalus; cardiac defects; and digestive problems. Possible causes, according to experts whom he consulted, include:

malnutrition of mothers; no pre-natal care; stress provoked by the bombings, shooting, and forced moves to new localities; gases produced by explosions; self-administration of inappropriate medicines necessitated by the absence of care; and inhalation of dust from explosions and collapsed buildings. Ali tells of expectant mothers buried in rubble for hours and later giving birth to babies who died or were malformed.

In this war and earlier Gaza wars, Israel’s military violates international humanitarian law by using artillery shells containing white prosperous. A pregnant woman exposed to this incendiary agent risks delivering a baby with congenital abnormalities, according to Lancet.

Aggravating the lack of care for sick or malformed babies has been the denial of access to specialty services outside of Gaza. Israel continues with its lockdown of Gaza’s borders.

The Israeli state’s trashing of healthcare in Gaza parallels the sorry state of healthcare fostered by governments in power in the United States. Israeli and U.S. political leaders share an easy tolerance of preventable dying.

In his recent comprehensive analysis, reporter Peter Dolack asserts that U.S. healthcare “is by far the world’s most expensive while providing the worst results among the world’s advanced capitalist countries.” The system is “designed to extract maximum profits rather than deliver health care.” U.S. residents “live the shortest lives and have the most avoidable deaths…. More than 26,000 die in the United States yearly because of a lack of health insurance.”

Powerbrokers in both countries are dismissive, it seems, of healthcare for the poor, marginalized, and forgotten, and of their health. Such evident cruelty betokens an oppression that is widespread in both situations. Meanwhile, both leadership classes shore up power and privileges. This is one area of struggle.

Another is the decades-long striving of Palestinians to restore land and liberty. Any headway with struggle along such lines promises to fire up oppressed peoples throughout the Middle East—and not so much minders of the region’s status quo.

According to academic Jason Hickel, “A liberated Middle East means capitalism in the core really faces a crisis, and they will not let that happen, and they’re unleashing the full violence of their extraordinary power to ensure it doesn’t.”

Under these circumstances, Israeli and U.S. strategists are looking ahead and seeking to waylay progressive change, while tuning into their counter-revolutionary instincts. They apparently have latched onto a notion of power put forth earlier by one of their ideological enemies.

According to Lenin (State and Revolution), “The state is a special organization of force; it is the organization of violence for the suppression of some class.”

It’s a frame of mind that, reasonably enough, would have the victims of oppression in both the Middle East and United States casting about for ways for their own class to achieve political power.

Meanwhile, the Communists of Palestine and Israel, and their allies, meeting virtually on Oct. 7, agreed that, “Only by establishing a sovereign Palestinian state will there be peace and stability in the region.” Beyond self-determination, they also called for cessation of the siege on Gaza and the relief of suffering.

_{We hope you appreciated this article. At People’s World, we believe news and information should be free and accessible to all, but we need your help. Our journalism is free of corporate influence and paywalls because we are totally reader-supported. Only you, our readers and supporters, make this possible. If you enjoy reading People’s World and the stories we bring you, please support our work by donating or becoming a monthly sustainer today. Thank you!}

_{W.T. Whitney Jr. is a political journalist whose focus is on Latin America, health care, and anti-racism. A Cuba solidarity activist, he formerly worked as a pediatrician, and lives in rural Maine.}

_{^{Israeli soldiers eye their targets at the Israel-Gaza border on Monday, Dec. 18, 2023. | AP}}

_{Reposted from the People’s World}

Nearly 20,000 Gaza civilians, mostly children and women, have died from bombs and gunfire in Israel’s war so far. Many more will be dying soon from lack of medical care, food, water, and the spread of infectious diseases. Healthcare and social service facilities—along with the homes of a million or more—have been reduced to rubble.

The U.S. government provides the support for all of this to happen, as it continues to financially and militarily back Israel in its war against Hamas in Gaza in retaliation for the latter’s attacks of Oct. 7.

Prospects for Gazans who survive the war are grim, or worse. The families of many are gone, and international aid agencies have mostly disappeared. Dire shortages of necessities are on the horizon. Repairing the physical damage won’t happen anytime soon, and Israeli settlers are already eyeing prime Gaza lands.

_{With humanitarian disaster on full display, Human Rights Watch points out that, “by continuing to provide Israel with weapons and diplomatic cover as it commits atrocities…the U.S. risks complicity in war crimes.”}

Either the charge or the fact of complicity will very likely bedevil the United States for as long as Gazan civilians are dying in large numbers or being removed to camps somewhere else and, all the while, the U.S. goes on supplying Israeli occupiers with weapons.

A recently released Israeli military analysis raises the possibility that the U.S. government courts very serious condemnation if it provides material support for a permanent Israeli occupation of Gaza.

Dr. Omer Dostri, the study’s author, is associated with the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security and the Israel Defense and Security Forum. Each is oriented to Israel’s military establishment. His study appeared Nov. 7 in the Military Review, the self-described “Professional Journal of the U.S. Army.”

As reported by journalist Dan Cohen, Dostri declared on social media that, he “authored [the study] on behalf of the U.S. Department of Defense and the U.S. Army’s Military Review journal.” For the Military Review’s editors to have invited Dostri’s submission suggests they already knew about and were at least tolerant of, Dostri’s iron-fist approach toward Gaza.

The author and editors alike presumably expected their respective military superiors to accept some or all of the views expressed in the paper. Perhaps, then, the two military leaderships have common ground regarding Gaza. Publication of this Israeli analysis becomes a straw in the wind as to future U.S.-Israel military collaboration on Gaza, and, on that score, to U.S. war crimes.

The title of Dostri’s article reads in part, “The End of the Deterrence Strategy in Gaza.” He notes the failure of Israeli military intelligence, Israel’s lack of combat readiness, and Hamas’s “exceptional military and professional approach.” Referring to Israel’s “disregard for the fundamentalist religious dimension of Hamas as an extreme Islamic terrorist organization,” he diagnoses faulty “political perception”

Dostri reviews options for control of Gaza following the envisioned defeat of Hamas. They are: a local Gazan administration, the Palestinian Authority taking charge, a mandate exercised by another government or an international agency, or occupation and governance by Israel’s military. He favors the latter, “from a security perspective.”

The main reason for establishing Israeli settlements in Gaza, he states, is that “seizing and securing land constitutes a more substantial blow to radical Islamist terror groups than the elimination of terrorist operatives and high-ranking leaders.”

Summarizing, Dostri indicates that:

“[A] robust ground campaign in the Gaza Strip, encompassing the occupation of territories, the creation of new Israeli settlements, and the voluntary relocation of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to Egypt with no option for return will greatly fortify Israeli deterrence and project influence throughout the entire Middle East.”

Dostri examines Israel’s conduct in the ongoing Gaza war. He calls for a military strategy aimed at securing “a swift surrender of the enemy” that would allow “political maneuverability to make decisions.” The goal “is to defeat Hamas and assume control of the Gaza Strip for the benefit of future generations.”

Israel, he says though, runs “the risk of a multifront war.” Planners are “in the process of altering…policy and military strategy, not only concerning Gaza but also across other fronts.” The Gaza experience is instructive: “Successive Israeli governments…regarded Hamas in the Gaza Strip as a legitimate governing entity that could be managed and engaged through diplomatic and economic means. Not anymore.”

Now “Israel should shift from a strategy of deterrence…[to a] strategy of unwavering decisiveness and victory.” In particular, “Israel will have no choice but to invade Lebanon and defeat Hezbollah.” In addition, “Israel cannot afford to allow the Houthis [in Yemen] to significantly bolster their military strength over time.”

U.S. political leaders for the most part have yet to weigh in on the fate of Gazan civilians in the post-war period. Dostri’s view of Gaza’s future, seemingly acceptable, more or less, to the militaries of the two countries, leaves no room for the niceties of civilians being abused and dying as part of the coming occupation.

By Dec. 1, the U.S. Congress was considering a proposal for assisting Israeli forces as they clear Gaza of Gazans: Egypt, Turkey, Yemen, and Iraq would receive U.S. monetary support for taking in Gazans fleeing from Israeli attacks.

_{The next day, however, Vice President Kamala Harris indicated that “Under no circumstances will the United States permit the forced relocation of Palestinians from Gaza or the West Bank.”}

At issue for U.S. policymakers are competing realities: the suffering of Gaza civilians, obligations to U.S. ally Israel, the prospect of a region-wide war, and the control of oil, whether Israeli or Palestinian.

Reporting on counterpunch.org, Charlotte Dennett cites “oil and natural gas, discovered off the coast of Gaza, Israel, and Lebanon in 2000 and 2010 and estimated to be worth $500 billion.” The Palestinians in 2000 claimed that the “gas fields…belonged to them.”

Yasser Arafat, the then-President of the Palestinian National Authority, “learned they could provide $1 billion in badly needed revenue. For him, this [was] a Gift of God for our people and a strong foundation for a Palestinian state.”

Dennett adds that “In December 2010, prospectors discovered a much larger gas field off the Israeli coast, dubbed Leviathan.” In addition, “work has already begun on…the so-called Ben Gurion Canal, from the tip of northern Gaza south into the Gulf of Aqaba, connecting Israel to the Red Sea and providing a competitor to Egypt’s Suez Canal.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants to “convince international lenders to support his long-held scheme of turning Israel into an energy corridor.”

With such riches at stake, does anyone really believe that a truly free Palestinian state will be allowed to come into existence?

_{We hope you appreciated this article. At People’s World, we believe news and information should be free and accessible to all, but we need your help. Our journalism is free of corporate influence and paywalls because we are totally reader-supported. Only you, our readers and supporters, make this possible. If you enjoy reading People’s World and the stories we bring you, please support our work by donating or becoming a monthly sustainer today. Thank you!}

_{W.T. Whitney Jr. is a political journalist whose focus is on Latin America, health care, and anti-racism. A Cuba solidarity activist, he formerly worked as a pediatrician, lives in rural Maine. W.T. Whitney Jr. es un periodista político cuyo enfoque está en América Latina, la atención médica y el antirracismo. Activista solidario con Cuba, anteriormente trabajó como pediatra, vive en la zona rural de Maine.}