military
Video: protests for Assange as British justice goes on trial in extradition case
Up to 2,000 gather for ‘last chance’ to stop disgraced US case allowed so far by courts – but system seems stacked against Wikileaks founder, press freedom and public’s right to know
Protestors outside the court on Tuesday
Up to two thousand protesters gathered to demonstrate outside the Royal Courts of Justice today in London, where Wikileaks founder Julian Assange and his legal team are fighting in what may be their last chance to avoid his extradition to the US, where the Biden administration wants to lock him in a high-security prison for the rest of his life for the ‘crime’ of exposing the actions of the US military.
Wikileaks embarrassed the US by revealing the wanton slaughter of Iraqi civilians – and the US wants its vengeance. To the UK’s shame, successive UK governments and courts have been all too eager to let the Americans have their way, despite the US case collapsing in disgrace when its main witness to Assange’s supposed ‘hacking’ of US systems admitted he had been lying the whole time – and plots by senior US officials to assassinate him. The admission should have seen the US laughed out of court, but UK judges granted its request anyway.
Protesters massed to show their solidarity with the Australian journalist, who has been imprisoned in Belmarsh prison since 2019 after a long effective incarceration in the Ecuadorian embassy while the UK and US governments conspired against him and even bugged supposedly sacrosanct meetings with his lawyers:
Wikileaks Editor-in-Chief Kristinn Hrafnsson gave the protest crowd a lunchtime update on the ‘absurd’ proceedings, which kept observers down to a handful despite the importance of the case, preventing even human rights groups from attending:
As with all the hearings so far, the case against Julian Assange appears to be stacked. After the farce of the collapsed US case being granted anyway, Assange’s appeal was denied by a judge with deep security service connections.
In the current case, one of the two judges was a lawyer for the Secret Intelligence Service and the Ministry of Defence, with clearance for access to ‘top secret’ information – and the other judge is the twin sister of right-wing former BBC chair Richard Sharpe, who resigned after an inquiry into his arrangement of an £800,000 loan for Boris Johnson before his appointment.
Activist Steve Price, who represented Skwawkbox at the demo, summarised the day:
On a cold day thousands gathered to lobby the court and raise public awareness of this situation. This morning at the RCJ, the chant of the day was “There’s only one decision – no extradition!” The demo was noisy, very colourful, with a visible but low-key police presence and many passing drivers honking horns in solidarity.
Speakers included three Labour MPs – Richard Burgon, Zara Sultana and Apsana Begum, alongside Chris Hedges, Andrew Feinstein, Stella Assange and Julian’s brother and father, as well as lawyers, Reporters without Borders (RwB) and Wikileaks’ editor-in-chief. John Pilger, the great Australian journalist, was remembered with great affection.
Julian’s brother said the Australian Parliament voted by two thirds criticising the UK and USA and demanding he be released and returned to his home country. Two of the lawyers, as well as RwB noted that this case has enormous implications for freedom of the press globally and there are obvious parallels with how journalists have been deliberately targeted by Israel in Gaza.
The magistrate back in January 2021 decided Julian should be released solely on the grounds that he might kill himself, but this was overturned by the Home Secretary. There are a number of legal grounds his team will advocate for refusing the extradition. He has been detained in Belmarsh (in solitary confinement) for nearly 5 years, spent 7 years before that confined in the Ecuadorian Embassy. His health has deteriorated, it’s a form of torture, they’re slowly killing him. He is believed to be too ill to attend court today?
They want to extradite him for the crime of journalism, for exposing their hypocrisy, their dirty secrets, their war crimes.
Keir Starmer, the ‘human rights lawyer’, as he never tires of reminding everyone, has never spoken in Assange’s defence. As Director of Public Prosecutions, his actions are murky – because the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) destroyed its records of them and destroyed notes of what it destroyed. However, it is known that in the case of another extradition the US wanted – that of autistic hacker Gary McKinnon – Starmer flew in a rage to the US to apologise to his US government contacts as soon as then-PM Theresa May quashed the extradition on humanitarian grounds. The CPS and Sweden also destroyed records of their communications when the CPS was pressuring Sweden to continue to pursue Assange’s extradition there – no doubt a stepping stone to getting him to the US – on discredited rape allegations. Despite the destruction of evidence, it is known that the CPS told Swedish counterparts not to ‘dare’ drop its request and refused Sweden’s offer to come and interview Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy.
Assange’s family and team have asked everyone who can make it to the court to continue demonstrating throughout the duration of the hearing to try to keep up pressure on the authorities. The Establishment’s relentless assault on Julian Assange is a war not just against him, but against press freedom and the right of the public to know what its supposed representatives are doing and to hold them to account.
The UK justice system has a last chance to show it is fit for purpose. If it happens, it looks as though justice will have to be wrung out of it. Absolute solidarity with Julian Assange and all persecuted journalists everywhere.
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‘Elite’ IDF brigade ‘too scared’ to go back into Gaza
Givati Brigade refuses to return to service, reports Israeli newspaper
Image blurred intentionally
Soldiers of an ‘elite’ Israeli military brigade have refused to go back into Gaza, according to Israeli paper Haaretz.
So heavy have been the Givati Brigade’s losses to Hamas’s guerilla tactics, that the group of troops are ‘too scared’ to return to service in Israel’s genocide of Palestinian civilians.
The soldiers told their commanders that they were too traumatised to return to the field and were afraid for their lives. Haaretz said that the IDF command is unsure how to react to the refusal.
According to IDF figures, around six hundred of its troops have been killed or severely wounded in Gaza since the start of the ground invasion but Israeli media, collating figures from the country’s hospitals, estimate numbers in the thousands and Hamas’s media outfit releases videos showing its successful guerilla attacks on Israeli tanks, infantry and fortifications almost daily.
According to human rights group Euro-Med Monitor, Israel’s assault on Gaza has killed and severely wounded well over 100,000 Palestinian civilians, mostly women and children, imposing famine on hundreds of thousands more and bombing schools and hospitals. Israel has been put on trial for genocide and has been ordered to protect Palestinian lives, but has intensified its assault and is now regularly bombing and shelling Rafah, the tiny enclave it ordered Palestinians to move to as a safe haven, before what is expected to be a ground assault that will cause an even greater and completely avoidable humanitarian disaster.
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The US Keeps Bombing People While Saying It Doesn’t Want To Fight
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
https://medium.com/media/c884c974e22255af4465a1c43d77cd97/href
One of the weirdest things happening in the world today is the way US officials keep insisting that they are not at war with the groups they’re dropping bombs on in the middle east, and that they do not seek conflict with the people they are attacking.
Shortly after another massive round of attacks on Houthi targets in Yemen, Pentagon Press Secretary Pat Ryder told reporters on Monday that the US is not at war with the group.
“We don’t seek an escalation with the Houthis. We’re not at war with the Houthis. We’re not seeking to go to war with the Houthis,” Ryder said.
The day before, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan told CNN’s State of the Union that “the United States also is not looking for a wider war in the middle east,” even as he refused to rule out direct attacks within Iran, and even as the US-backed war on Gaza has expanded to US bombing campaigns in Yemen, Syria and Iraq.
This is just days after President Biden released a statement saying “The United States does not seek conflict in the Middle East or anywhere else in the world” while the United States was in the process of dropping bombs on multiple middle eastern countries.
Ken Klippenstein on Twitter: "Pentagon Press Secretary today: "Our focus when it comes to striking Houthis targets is to disrupt and degrade their capabilities. We don't seek an escalation with the Houthis. We're not at war with the Houthis." pic.twitter.com/A2y3OXKHFX / Twitter"
Pentagon Press Secretary today: "Our focus when it comes to striking Houthis targets is to disrupt and degrade their capabilities. We don't seek an escalation with the Houthis. We're not at war with the Houthis." pic.twitter.com/A2y3OXKHFX
It’s just so surreal. It’s like someone running up to you and slinging punches at your face while screaming “I DO NOT WISH TO FIGHT! THIS IS NOT AN ASSAULT!” They wear a plastic smiling mask and pay lip service to peace while operating the single most aggressive and murderous power structure on this planet.
The empire has been doing this same freakish Nice Guy Axe Murderer schtick with Gaza. The Biden administration could force an end to Israel’s genocidal atrocities in the Gaza Strip at any time but are instead choosing to provide those atrocities with full unconditional support, and as they do this they’re simultaneously putting on a performance to suggest that they disapprove of Israel’s actions. The White House has expressed “concern” over the death and suffering of civilians in Gaza no fewer than twenty times as of this writing, yet has continued to back the Israeli onslaught without taking any concrete actions to make the death and suffering stop.
That’s what we’re seeing when Biden administration officials tell the press that Biden referred to Netanyahu as a “bad fucking guy”, or when Secretary of State Antony Blinken solemnly finger-wags at Israel saying the dehumanization of the October 7 attack “cannot be a license to dehumanize others.” They’re putting on a big show about opposing Israel’s crimes against humanity as though they are not enthusiastically facilitating those crimes. They’re acting like they’re a passive witness to the atrocities in Gaza when in reality they’re an active participant. They’re posing as the peacemaker while acting as the warmaker.
Antiwar.com on Twitter: "Report: US Military Advisors Deployed to Taiwan-Controlled Islands on China's CoastWhen asked to confirm deployment to #Kinmen, Pentagon told https://t.co/gQTCCELFzi it won't comment on military operations in #Taiwanby Dave DeCamp@DecampDave #China https://t.co/7kN1pgQWcs pic.twitter.com/ZlDPPdjW7F / Twitter"
Report: US Military Advisors Deployed to Taiwan-Controlled Islands on China's CoastWhen asked to confirm deployment to #Kinmen, Pentagon told https://t.co/gQTCCELFzi it won't comment on military operations in #Taiwanby Dave DeCamp@DecampDave #China https://t.co/7kN1pgQWcs pic.twitter.com/ZlDPPdjW7F
And now we learn that US military advisors have been deployed to Kinmen, a group of Taiwan-controlled islands so close to the Chinese mainland that in the late sixties giant loudspeakers were built there to blast anti-communist propaganda over the water into the PRC.
Contrast this move with a recent headline from The Times saying “China opens Antarctic base on America’s doorstep,” which will show up as self-evidently nonsensical to anyone who has ever looked at a globe. It’s taken as a given that the US is entitled to amass a military presence right on China’s coastline, but the idea of China establishing a presence literally anywhere on planet Earth is interpreted as extreme aggressions on “America’s doorstep”.
It’s almost a cliché at this point to say imagine if China did this to the US, but seriously. Imagine if China did this to the US. As one Twitter follower put it, at just three kilometers away the Kinmen islands are closer to mainland China than Martha’s Vineyard is to the coast of Massachusetts. If China came anywhere near amassing any kind of military presence that close to the United States, it would be considered an act of war and the US would attack immediately.
So the US is clearly the aggressor here. It has been rapidly surrounding China with war machinery in ways it would never permit itself to be surrounded by any rival nation, and doing so more and more aggressively by the day. But if at any point China decides that too many of its red lines have been crossed and it needs to act before it’s too late, the US will with absolute certainty have a melodramatic fit about China’s unprovoked attack on the poor innocent US military presence on its border.
Caitlin Johnstone on Twitter: "The Single Dumbest Thing The Empire Asks Us To BelieveThe dumbest thing the US-centralized empire asks us to believe is that the military encirclement of its top two geopolitical rivals is a defensive action, rather than an act of extreme aggression.https://t.co/LhZW6sQv9I / Twitter"
The Single Dumbest Thing The Empire Asks Us To BelieveThe dumbest thing the US-centralized empire asks us to believe is that the military encirclement of its top two geopolitical rivals is a defensive action, rather than an act of extreme aggression.https://t.co/LhZW6sQv9I
That’s exactly what happened with Ukraine. The US was fully aware that it was acting in an extremely aggressive and provocative way on Russia’s western border and that it was playing very dangerous games sending weapons to Kyiv while expanding NATO and ramping up cold war aggressions, and so were many experts and analysts who spent years warning that the west’s actions would lead to war. Yet when Russia finally attacked, the entire western political-media class began bleating the word “unprovoked” in unison.
This is the kind of bizarre two-step you have to do if you want to be the global hegemon with all the violence and tyranny that necessarily comes with the job while also needing to present yourself as the nice guy. The US empire exists at an oddly contradictory point in history when our society no longer considers it acceptable to be a might-makes-right strongman dominator, and yet that’s precisely the sort of disposition you need to have when you’re an empire held together by endless military violence and the threat thereof.
So you get weird nonsense like US officials bombing the shit out of the middle east while proclaiming they have no interest in war, and engaging in extremely reckless aggressions against nuclear-armed rivals while pretending they’re just innocent witnesses to unprovoked aggressions if those nations respond.
Their information interests require them to be the good guy, but their strategic interests require them to be the bad guy. You can already tell without looking that straddling these contradictory positions will result in absurdity, and looking at today’s headlines confirms it.
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Featured image via U.S. Secretary of Defense (CC BY 2.0)
Israel and media ‘Hamas rape’ claims collapse under scrutiny
‘Eye-witness’ accounts contradict evidence – and earlier claims of the eye-witnesses – as yet another atrocity propaganda campaign falls apart. Warning: potential triggering or distressing content
The outraged reaction of the family of an alleged ‘Hamas rape’ victim to a newspaper’s con is just one of the ways in which the ‘Hamas rape’ narrative now being pushed hard by the Israeli regime and its apologists has fallen apart hard – like every other piece of atrocity propaganda Israel has tried to use so far to justify its genocide in Gaza.
The New York Times has published an article claiming to have evidence of the weaponisation of rape by Hamas during the 7 October raid, but the centrepiece of its claims was supposed ‘evidence’ that Israeli woman Gal Abdush was raped and murdered by Hamas fighters, quoting extensively from an interview with her family.
But her family has furiously insisted that there is no evidence that Ms Abdush was raped – and slammed the paper for misleading and manipulating them by telling them the interview was for a memorial about her and her husband and not mentioning anything about rape.
Speak Up, which fights violence against women, condemned the NYT investigation as ‘disgraceful’ ‘weaponisation’ of sexual violence for propaganda
The family – who appear to be hardline right-wingers perfectly prepared to propagate the already-discredited Israeli lines about beheadings and dismemberments, and therefore not inclined to discredit the rape report out of support for Palestinians – responded after the article was published. They pointed out, among other things, that there were only a few minutes passed between one message from their sister’s husband that they were at the Gaza border and another saying she had been shot – no time for the rape claimed by Israeli authorities and the NYT:
Gal Abdush’s family’s statement (translation by David Sheen and Electronic Intifada)
In fact, the family’s comment – though they don’t seem to have joined the dots – suggests that Ms Abdush and her husband were killed by Israeli forces determined, under the ‘Hannibal directive‘ of killing potential hostages rather than allowing them to be taken, since ‘at the border’ the Hamas fighters would only have been interested in getting them into captivity – and Hamas had no weapons capable of leaving bodies ‘totally burned’, while Israeli planes and helicopter gunships armed with missiles did and it is now well known in Israel, if ignored by UK and US media, that IDF forces killed Israelis in their determination to eliminate Hamas fighters holding them.
Another element of the atrocity propaganda to collapse are the lurid tales from supposed eye-witnesses who claimed that Hamas fighters – while trying to flee with their captives or fight Israeli troops – stopped to rape and dismember a woman and play catch with her body parts.
The ‘eyewitnesses’ have changed their stories. One was interviewed earlier and neglected to mention the claims of beheadings and games; another – coincidentally an Israeli ‘security consultant’ – had earlier admitted that he saw nothing because he was hiding with his head down the whole time, yet now claims he saw the same as the other witness.
Haaretz, 8 Nov 2023
Not only that, but Israeli lists of victims and their means of death do not claim to have found people at the site in question who had been beheaded or mutilated.
Another ‘eyewitness’ to a different supposed rape, Raz Cohen, happens to have recently been in the Democratic Republic of Congo, training DRC soldiers. While he claims to have seen the rape and to be haunted by the victim’s ‘screams without words’, shortly after the Hamas raid he filmed himself talking about the incident and published it on TikTok – where he seems upbeat and doesn’t mention any of the claims now attributed to him. Journalist Max Blumenthal analysed the changes in Cohen’s testimony:
While much of the NYT “mass Hamas rape” report relies on innuendo, it also purports to contain several credible eyewitness testimonies. One was delivered by a survivor of the Nova electronic music festival named Raz Cohen, who also happens to be an Israeli special forces vet who trains Congolese soldiers. Since his first interview on October 9, Cohen has altered his testimony several times.
Cohen told the NYT he personally witnessed a white van filled with Hamas militants pull up a mile from the Nova music festival, gather over a woman, and gang rape her: “I saw the men standing in a half circle around her. One penetrates her. She screams. I still remember her voice, screams without words.” He said they then butchered the woman with knives.
When Cohen was interviewed on October 9 about the attack on the music festival, however, he did not mention any act of sexual assault committed by Hamas militants. See here: https://twitter.com/i24NEWS_EN/sta… And here: http://tiktok.com/@lior.shapira9…
A day later, Cohen began to introduce vague suggestions of sexual assault into his testimony, but did not indicate that he witnessed any such acts taking place. “The terrorists captured women and hurt them in any way possible, and when they were done with them, they started butchering them in front of their friends,” Cohen told an Israeli publication: http://ashkelnayes.co.il/%D7%97%D7%A8%D…
Cohen was also interviewed by Canada’s CBC on October 10, but was not quoted about witnessing any rape: http://ici.radio-canada.ca/rci/en/news/20…
The same day, Cohen offered lurid new details to PBS, claiming that “the terrorists” not only slaughtered women after raping them on October 7, but engaged in necrophilia as well: “The terrorists, people from Gaza, raped girls. And after they raped them, they killed them, murdered them with knives, or the opposite, killed — and after they raped, they — they did that.” http://pbs.org/newshour/show/…
Testimony he provided to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation on October 11 differed slightly, and remained vague: “We see from there a lot of people and girls screaming and murdered by knives. And the girls, the terrorists rape them,” he stated abruptly and without apparent emotion. http://tiktok.com/@abcnewsaus/vi…
By this point, no Israeli media had reported that any rapes occurred on October 7. Cohen quickly fell off the media’s radar. He would not be heard from for over two months, when the Israeli government launched an international propaganda campaign accusing Hamas of mass rape in a transparent bid to maintain international support for its genocidal military assault on Gaza.
At this point, when the NY Times’ Jeffrey @gettleman interviewed Cohen, likely reaching him with assistance from the Israeli government, the “IDF” special forces soldier summoned for the first time a vivid account of a shocking gang rape on October 7.
How and why did Cohen’s story transform so dramatically over time, providing explosive new details at a moment of political urgency for the army in which he served? Was it plausible that a group of hardened Hamas commandoes suddenly paused their surprise attack, which was focused on taking as many captives as quickly as possible, stood in a circle and gang raped a woman, one after another, while Israeli forces mobilized to attack them?
Why did Hamas militants use knives to kill their victims, as Cohen alleged, when they carried rifles and grenades? Why did he drop his earlier allegation of necrophilia when speaking to the Times? And why did he mention seeing “a lot of people and girls” being raped to the ABC on October 11, but alter his testimony to refer specifically to a single female victim when interviewed by the Times?
Perhaps most importantly, why did Cohen’s friend, Shoam Gueta, who took shelter with him on October 7, not describe witnessing a gang rape when interviewed by the Times?
In his very first interview, with a US news station only two days after the Hamas raid, Cohen appeared mostly relaxed – and didn’t mention anyone being raped, as this clip aired recently on Grayzone shows:
Other Israeli mouthpieces have tried to bypass the eyewitnesses altogether, claiming it would be wrong to expect eyewitnesses to come forward and that ‘the corpses tell the story’. But they don’t, because the bodies were buried without evidence being taken, using Jewish burial practices to justify the failure to collect evidence – just as the huge number of cars incinerated by weapons Hamas does not possess were scrapped and buried without collecting evidence. Not one piece of actual evidence appears to have been put forward by Israel, yet the atrocity propaganda continues to be repeated by the so-called ‘mainstream’.
Yet again, Israel’s attempts to demonise Palestinian resistance to justify genocide have fallen apart under scrutiny – scrutiny that the so-called ‘mainstream’ press and broadcasters are simply not doing, or even reporting facts that media in Israel have already acknowledged, such as the mass killing of Israelis during the raid by Israeli media.
For full analysis and more video highlighting the collapse of yet another Israeli atrocity propaganda narrative, watch this video by Electronic Intifada and this by Grayzone.
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Exclusive: Streeting uses NHS privatisation announcement to tout IDF-linked health firm
Health privatisation enthusiast ‘Labour’ health spokesman namechecks Israeli military-linked firm as glowing example of private involvement in NHS – and visited firm in Israel on LFI-paid junket
Image by ‘The Agitator‘
As the death toll of Israel’s genocide in Gaza climbed above 30,000 this week according to observers EuroMed Monitor, Wes Streeting used an Israeli private health data company as his shining example of successful ‘entrepreneurialism’ – ie privatisation – in the NHS as ‘a source close to Mr Streeting’ briefed the media about his plans to ‘throw open the doors’ of the NHS to more private corporate provision if Labour gets into government.
The ‘source’ told the i:
Labour will encourage the spread of new technologies so private sector “innovators” have a clearer route to get their product into the NHS…
The best example on the tech side of ‘opening the door to entrepreneurs’ is where you’ve got a company or innovator of a product which works really well on the NHS. There’s an example of some at home kidney tests made by Healthy.io which were first sold into the NHS in 2021
But the link – and the Labour trolling of those outraged by the Gaza slaughter – goes much further. Healthy.io is owned and run by Yonatan Adiri, former Chief Technology Officer for the whole of Israel and an adviser to then-Israeli PM Shimon Peres. Adiri’s interests are not limited to private healthcare tech. His published works include Terror in the Court: Counter-Terrorism and Judicial Power in the Israeli Case Study and Counter Terror Warfare: The Judicial Front (2008), written for the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism (2005).
Adiri’s interest in ‘counter-terror’ did not end in 2008. Just two months ago, shortly after the Hamas kibbutz raid, Adiri spoke to Bloomberg Technology ‘The importance of Intelligence in Israel-Hamas war’, comparing Hamas to ISIS and talking of the use of technology by intelligence services to defeat the Palestinian resistance organisation:
Skwawkbox did not find details of any involvement with Israeli spytech unit ‘Unite 8200’ – the cyberspy unit whose members reportedly paint an ‘X’ on their headsets for each Palestinian they help kill – in Adiri’s IDF service, but according to his bio page as a speaker for hire on allamericanspeakers.com, he remains a reserve captain in the ‘international operational negotiations unit’ and has acted as moderator at discussions held by the Israeli-government-sponsored Institute for National Security Studies on the use of drones and other technology for ‘national security’:
According to one article, Adiri acted for the IDF in negotiating a prisoner swap with Lebanese militia group Hezbollah.
Adiri also acted as senior national security ‘policy consultant’ for the Reut Institute, a right-wing Israeli think tank that now plays a key role in Israel’s attempts to counter the peaceful pro-Palestinian ‘Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions’ movement.
And while Adiri may not have been a member of Unit 8200, he is – since at least March 2023 – an ‘industry mentor’ for the ‘LEAP’ initiative:
The LEAP website says that:
Leap was created in partnership with 8200bio, an organization of 8200 alumni working to promote the Israeli healthtech ecosystem. The program does strive to bring exceptional 8200 alumni into the healthtech domain, but the program is open to entrepreneurs of any background, according to the criteria described above.
Like its partner 8200 Impact, 8200bio is run by former members of what 8200 Impact calls the ‘elite IDF Signal Intelligence and Cybersecurity unit’. Israeli newspaper Haaretz noted in 2020 that:
Nor did Wes Streeting simply pull the name Healthy.io out of a hat without knowing the company’s links. In May 2022, according to right-wing pressure group Labour Friends of Israel (LFI), Streeting visited Israel on LFI’s dime – and LFI said ahead of the trip that:
Streeting will also visit Healthy.io, a tech provider for the NHS and Boots.
Right-wing libel-merchant and ‘dauphin of phone hacking‘ Lee Harpin, writing for Jewish News rather than the Jewish Chronicle that he cost so much money in damages for smearing left-wingers, confirmed that the visit went ahead. Streeting told the NHS Confederation last spring that he had been ‘blown away’ by his trip.
Keir Starmer employs a Unit 8200 alumnus, Assaf Kaplan, to monitor members’ social media.
Wes Streeting has come out as an avid NHS privatiser – which will surprise no one who has been watching. That he chose to garnish his promise to ‘throw open the doors’ of the NHS to more private profit-taking by touting an Israeli – and Israeli military-linked – firm during Israel’s war crimes, mass slaughter of women, children, medics and teachers and the bombing of hospitals and schools, in Gaza makes the betrayal even worse.
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Making Endless War: The Vietnam and Arab-Israeli Conflicts in the History of International Law – review
In Making Endless War: The Vietnam and Arab-Israeli Conflicts in the History of International Law, Brian Cuddy and Victor Kattan bring together essays exploring attempts to develop legal rationales for the continued waging of war since 1945, despite the general ban on war decreed through the United Nations Charter. Linked through a nuanced comparative framework, the essays in this timely collection show how these different conflicts have shaped the international laws of war over the past eight decades, writes Eric Loefflad.
Making Endless War: The Vietnam and Arab-Israeli Conflicts in the History of International Law. Brian Cuddy and Victor Kattan. University of Michigan Press. 2023.
Find this book: 
For Jeff Halper, an American-Israeli anthropologist, co-founder of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, and proponent of a single democratic state in historic Palestine, the decision to become an Israeli in the first place had a great deal to do with the Vietnam War. True to the counter-culture protests that arose in response to the War, the activist Halper, like so many young, idealistic American Jews of his era, viewed Israel as a more direct conduit to his heritage than a homogenising suburban upbringing could ever allow for. This search for meaning was coupled with a widespread difference in how the Vietnam War and Israel’s wars were broadly characterised in Halper’s contexts of influence. For many Americans who opposed intervention in Southeast Asia, Israeli violence differed in its “purity of arms.” According to this framing, in direct contrast to an American government waging wars half a world away, Israel zealously fought for its very survival right at its doorstep. It was witnessing the demolition of Palestinian homes to make way for Israeli settlers in the West Bank that caused Halper to renounce this narrative and rededicate his life.
the collection centres on the broad theme of how mostly American and Israeli lawyers, statesmen and military officers used issues that arose in the two conflicts to proclaim exceptions to the general ban on war as entrenched in 1945 through the United Nations Charter.
While Halper’s journey may be a unique one, it is nevertheless a testament to how intersections between post-Second World War conflict in Southeast Asia and the Middle East shaped the lives of so many different people in so many different ways. For anyone interested in how this multitude of individual experiences might be understood in relation to broader systemic forces, especially the variable medium for navigating “legitimate” violence deemed the “laws of war”, historian Brian Cuddy and international lawyer Victor Kattan’s Making Endless War is an invaluable resource. Comprised of ten robust chapters and an insightful forward by Richard Falk (a leading international legal critic of the Vietnam War and later the one-time United Nations Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories), Making Endless War proceeds on a roughly chronological basis from 1945 to the present day, tracing developments and unearthing connections between the two (meta-)conflicts. With chapters confronting a variety of issues from multiple perspectives, the collection centres on the broad theme of how mostly American and Israeli lawyers, statesmen and military officers used issues that arose in the two conflicts to proclaim exceptions to the general ban on war as entrenched in 1945 through the United Nations Charter. While its detailing of legal doctrine is truly world-class, Making Endless War’s revelation of the individual personalities, diplomatic intrigue and political struggles behind ostensibly “apolitical” technicalities is equally outstanding.
Vietnam, emboldened by its resistance to the US, led efforts in the 1970s to include non-state national liberation movements within a regime of the laws of war that hitherto only granted rights to state actors.
One illustration of how this text accomplishes its multi-faceted, but nevertheless cohesive, focus across chapters concerns the debate on the revision of the laws of war via two Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions. In Chapter Five, Amanda Alexander explores the significance of how Vietnam, emboldened by its resistance to the US, led efforts in the 1970s to include non-state national liberation movements within a regime of the laws of war that hitherto only granted rights to state actors. Following this, in Chapter Six, Ihab Shalbak and Jessica Whyte centre the Janus-faced quality of what this revision meant for the Palestinians. While it provided their cause with a newfound degree of institutional legitimation, it also constrained Palestinian efforts to unite themselves as a revolutionary people whose struggle could not be divided along the lines presumed by the law. From here, co-editor Victor Kattan presents an account in Chapter Seven of how Israel moved from being the sole dissident resisting revision in the 70s (due to its application to the Palestinians) to being joined by the US in the 80s. This coincided with the ascent of the Reagan Administration in the 80s where an influential grouping of Neoconservatives and Vietnam veterans – invoking arguments pioneered by Israel – similarly prevented the US from ratifying the Geneva Convention’s Additional Protocols. Finally, in Chapter Eight, Craig Jones examines how, despite their nations’ disavowal, American and Israeli lawyers became adept at using the laws of war to enable, as opposed to constrain, violence through developing a regime of so-called “operational law” that integrated international and domestic legal standards in a manner “…designed specifically to furnish military commanders with the tools they required for ‘mission success’” (215).
With the ascent of the Reagan Administration in the 80s […] an influential grouping of Neoconservatives and Vietnam veterans – invoking arguments pioneered by Israel – similarly prevented the US from ratifying the Geneva Convention’s Additional Protocols
When reading Making Endless War in this present moment, it is naturally impossible to disconnect its insights from the most recent bloodshed in Israel-Palestine that erupted almost immediately following the collection’s release. Fortuitous in the most horrific way possible, Cuddy and Kattan provide an invaluable service in exposing the impossibly high stakes of the despair invoking “endlessness” that animates their collection’s poignant title. However, by connecting the greater Arab-Israeli conflict to the Vietnam War, the editors make a significant contribution in decentring the widespread viewpoint that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is fundamentally unique – a presumption that unites pro-Israel and pro-Palestine advocates who agree on virtually nothing else. In this way, Making Endless War provides a powerful statement on how episodes of violence, however specific they might appear, cannot be understood independent of greater forces – including (and perhaps especially) the principles and institutions that present their mission as an effort to constrain armed conflict. As such, Cuddy and Kattan’s collection can be viewed as a major innovation in building a greater genealogy of global violence.
Making Endless War provides a powerful statement on how episodes of violence, however specific they might appear, cannot be understood independent of greater forces – including (and perhaps especially) the principles and institutions that present their mission as an effort to constrain armed conflict.
While their comparative framework might be viewed as limited in its representations, the editors are eminently aware of this, and this very awareness forms a cornerstone of their methodology. On this point, they deliberately confront the significance of how, especially within the centres of global power, “[t]he Vietnam War and the multiple Arab-Israeli conflicts became cultural moments that captured the public imagination in ways few other conflicts did, even those that were more lethal (262).” With this comparative captivation itself an important finding, there is no reason why the insights developed through Making Endless War cannot be extended to include the multitude of other forces, fixations, and personalities that can be located within the many ideologies of war that shape our lives. The Palestinian-Israeli conflict is a particularly vast and gut-wrenching repository of said ideologies. Sadly, there is no shortage of material for interested scholars to draw upon.
This post gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science. The LSE RB blog may receive a small commission if you choose to make a purchase through the above Amazon affiliate link. This is entirely independent of the coverage of the book on LSE Review of Books.
Image Credit: Michiel Vaartjes on Shutterstock.
‘Israel is losing war’ says ex-Israeli adviser – as IDF ‘hides mass military casualties’
‘Considerable and unexplained gap’ between admitted casualties and hospital records of severely wounded soldiers at least double acknowledged number
Image: IDF
A former Israeli prime ministerial adviser has said that Israel is losing its war against Hamas – and hospital records suggest the Israeli government and military are hiding at least half of the number of Israeli soldiers killed and injured in Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
In an article for US site The Nation, Daniel Levy – who advised then-Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak – compares the situation in Gaza to the unwinnable US war in Vietnam, where unacceptable casualty levels among US soldiers meant the Viet Cong only had to survive to win, and writes:
It may sound daft to suggest that a group of armed irregulars, numbering in the low tens of thousands, besieged and with little access to advanced weaponry, is a match for one of the world’s most powerful militaries, backed and armed by the United States. And yet, an increasing number of establishment strategic analysts warn that Israel could lose this war on Palestinians despite the cataclysmic violence it unleashed
Levy also notes that the ‘delusion’ that Israel’s conduct did not contribute to the 7 October attack is being exposed and having serious consequences for Israel and its US backers:
the delusion that Israel was just another Western nation peacefully going about its business before it suffered an unprovoked attack on October 7—it’s a comforting fantasy to those who prefer to avoid recognizing a reality they’ve been complicit in creating.
And at the same time, US news site Breaking Point has highlighted studies by Israeli media of Israeli hospital data – and sudden reductions in the official casualty numbers posted on the IDF’s website – to conclude that the real casualty rate inflicted on IDF forces by Hamas’s guerilla tactics are at least twice as high as the Netanyahu government is admitted and that among the wounded there are high rates of severe injuries consistent with videos released by Hamas of grenade and rocket-propelled grenade ambushes on Israeli tanks and infantry:
Breaking Point considers that this high rate of attrition, and a lack of appetite among the Israeli public for casualties in the military, may be driving Israeli efforts to get the US to commit troops as a ‘peacekeeping’ force.
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Video: Corbyn challenges Cameron over refusal to deny UK troops are operating in Gaza
Former Labour leader demands answers over dodging of Commons question
Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has written to Foreign Secretary David Camerona over the refusal of his underling to say that UK troops are not operating on the ground in Gaza in support of Israel’s genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. In his letter, Corbyn notes the hideous death toll of Palestinian civilians and Israel’s blatant war crimes in Gaza – and demands an answer from Cleverly to his question about the involvement of UK military personnel:
Any UK troops in Gaza are likely to be using Israel-made equipment to help Israel carry out its bombing: in 2021, the UK government awarded a £103m contract to Israeli weapons firm Elbit Systems to provide laser-marking systems.
Tory PM Rishi Sunak has already sent UK ships to the seas off Gaza to provide logistical support to Israeli bombers and troops, but the direct involvement of UK forces in the targeting and killing of civilians would be a major scandal. UK special forces have often operated to provide laser guidance for bombs and Israel’s mass bombing has killed well over 15,000 civilians, around half of them children.
Cameron is likely to copy his minion and dodge the question.
An earlier version of this article mentioned former Foreign Secretary James Cleverly.
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Video: Corbyn challenges Cleverly over refusal to deny UK troops are operating in Gaza
Former Labour leader demands answers over dodging of Commons question
Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has written to Foreign Secretary James Cleverly over the refusal of his underling to say that UK troops are not operating on the ground in Gaza in support of Israel’s genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. In his letter, Corbyn notes the hideous death toll of Palestinian civilians and Israel’s blatant war crimes in Gaza – and demands an answer from Cleverly to his question about the involvement of UK military personnel:
Any UK troops in Gaza are likely to be using Israel-made equipment to help Israel carry out its bombing: in 2021, the UK government awarded a £103m contract to Israeli weapons firm Elbit Systems to provide laser-marking systems.
Tory PM Rishi Sunak has already sent UK ships to the seas off Gaza to provide logistical support to Israeli bombers and troops, but the direct involvement of UK forces in the targeting and killing of civilians would be a major scandal. UK special forces have often operated to provide laser guidance for bombs and Israel’s mass bombing has killed well over 15,000 civilians, around half of them children.
Cleverly is likely to copy his minion and dodge the question.
SKWAWKBOX needs your help. The site is provided free of charge but depends on the support of its readers to be viable. If you’d like to help it keep revealing the news as it is and not what the Establishment wants you to hear – and can afford to without hardship – please click here to arrange a one-off or modest monthly donation via PayPal or here to set up a monthly donation via GoCardless (SKWAWKBOX will contact you to confirm the GoCardless amount). Thanks for your solidarity so SKWAWKBOX can keep doing its job.
If you wish to republish this post for non-commercial use, you are welcome to do so – see here for more.