Nakba
Video: Palestinian ambassador breaks down as he tells ICJ of plight of children under occupation
Court hearing evidence of effects of Israel’s illegal occupation
Palestinian ambassador to the UN Riyad Mansour broke down today near the close of his presentation to the International Court of Justice (ICJ), as he spoke of the effects of Israel’s illegal occupation in Palestine on his nation’s children and on the human rights of its people. The hearing is being televised live by Al Jazeera English:
The court is hearing evidence from over fifty countries about the illegal occupation. Earlier, Mansour and others had spoke of the 1948 Nakba, in which almost 800,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes with many massacred, and the world’s decades-long indifference – and of the impacts of Israel’s current genocidal campaign in Gaza.
As Mansour spoke, UK news channels covered a variety of items but did not stream the court hearing. In January, the ICJ put Israel formally on trial for genocide and ordered the apartheid regime to protect Palestinian lives. The slaughter of civilians continues unabated.
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Israel’s UNRWA ‘tunnel’ smear collapses as ‘Hamas’ gear revealed as solar power kit
Yet another risible propaganda video falls apart almost as soon as it’s published – but ‘mainstream’ media parrot lies without checking
Israel’s appalling – and woefully inept – propaganda has been exposed again after the Israeli military showed reporters around what it claimed was a ‘Hamas tunnel’ under the Gaza HQ of UN aid agency UNRWA.
A video published by Fox News of the tour revealed green boxes on the walls of the supposed ‘tunnel’ – but as former diplomat Craig Murray pointed out, the boxes are not supposed ‘terror’ equipment. Instead, they are solar power converters kept in a cellar to keep them cool as they process energy from solar panels above – and the wires leading from them into the UNRWA building were there to send the converted electricity up into the HQ, as you’d expect:
Despite the ease of checking what the IDF claimed – and the IDF’s long record of ridiculous lies and smears – the so-called ‘mainstream’ media have tamely parroted the lie:
Israel’s attempts at propaganda have routinely been exposed almost as soon as they were uttered – from claims that five hundred refugees sheltering at the Al Ahli hospital were killed by a Hamas rocket, to lurid atrocity propaganda about beheaded babies and severed breasts, to the burned bodies supposedly murdered by Hamas in the 7 October raid that were killed by Israeli military missiles, shells and bullets, and everything in between.
Just as routinely, western governments and media continue to regurgitate the lies without fact-checking, or just as likely in full knowledge that they are lies – and stubbornly ignore even the Israeli military’s admission that it killed ‘immense’ numbers of Israelis during the Hamas raid, despite this being freely discussed by Israeli media.
Israel has long wanted the end of UNRWA for the organisation’s support for Palestinians’ right of return to lands stolen from them. The arrogance that seems to underpin the lazy shoddiness of Israel’s propaganda attempts shows no sign of abating.
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Ignore Israel’s spin: ICJ HAS ordered a ceasefire – and much more than a ceasefire
Desperate damage control by genocidal regime can’t hide the facts – the ICJ has gone well beyond a mere ceasefire: Israel has been ordered to protect Palestinians in Gaza, not just stop shooting at them
In the wake of the International Court of Justice’s (ICJ) historic verdict that officially put Israel on trial for genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza, Israel’s spin doctors, apologists and mouthpieces have desperately been trying to spin the court’s crushing judgment as some kind of victory on the basis that the ICJ did not ‘order a ceasefire’.
Unfortunately, some supporters of Palestine have fallen into the trap – but in fact, the ICJ went way beyond merely ordering a ceasefire. As the president of the court announced, Israel has not just been ordered to stop shooting at and bombing Palestinians.
It has been explicitly ordered to protect them by preventing anyone killing them, inflicting psychological harm on them, preventing reproduction or any other means:
A ceasefire is an agreement to cease hostilities between two countries engaged in a war – in a genocide, the murderous party is ordered to stop the genocide, but the court went further and told Israel it must prevent the killing of Palestinians, as well as pursue any who try to do so and to ensure evidence of such war crimes is not destroyed, as Israel has routinely been doing.
Craig Mokhiber, who resigned as a UN genocide expert last autumn because the UN was failing to prevent Israel’s ‘textbook genocide’ against the people of Gaza, agreed in an interview on Friday night:
Of course Israel will ignore the ruling and the orders that come with it – decades of impunity have instilled such an arrogant sense of entitlement in Israeli politicians that they will flout the ruling. But – vitally – Israel’s backers and enablers are now explicitly breaking international law every single time they provide materials, funding or practical assistance, or political cover, for Israel’s mass murder. And in a month, Israel has to come back to the court and detail its compliance or lack of compliance with the court’s order.
And every country that wishes to uphold international law will be able, and even obliged, to use their own jurisdiction – granted to them by the ruling – to issue warrants for the arrest of anyone committing or complicit in the genocide, in addition to the vast political damage those complicit, criminal regimes will be doing to themselves.
And the UN General Assembly, if Israel and its backers flout the ruling, will be entitled to remove Israel from the UN community of nations and even to refuse to recognise Israeli passports, as was done to apartheid South Africa.
The extent to which this damages Israel and its international standing can be seen in the outraged, petty, desperate and clearly coordinated reaction of its mouthpieces.
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Event: ‘Never Again Must Never Again Be Used to Justify Genocide’
Register for this webinar here. An organiser wrote:
The slogan Never Again symbolised the determination of anti-fascists and the labour movement that after the Holocaust, genocide must never happen again – that no one should be annihilated because of an accident of birth and who they are.
Six million Jews, a million Gypsy Roma, half a million mentally and physically disabled, to say nothing of the millions of prisoners of war, Poles, Russians and other people who were exterminated by the nazis between 1939 and 1945.
Zionism however drew different conclusions from the Holocaust. As Professor Yehuda Elkana, a child survivor of Auschwitz and the Rector of the Central European University wrote in Ha’aretz, in ‘The Need to Forget’ in 1988:
a profound existential “Angst” fed by a particular interpretation of the lessons of the holocaust … that we are the eternal victim (arose). In this ancient belief… I see the tragic and paradoxical victory of Hitler. Two nations, metaphorically speaking, emerged from the ashes of Auschwitz: a minority who assert, “this must never happen again,” and a frightened and haunted majority who assert, “this must never happen to us again.”
The Holocaust played an important part in the establishment of the State of Israel yet it was because of the Nakba, the expulsion of three-quarters of a million Palestinians from their homeland, that a Jewish State was formed. A series of massacres accompanied the Nakba which were aimed at ‘encouraging’ the flight of the Palestinian refugees.
In our Public Meeting we not only have Professor Ilan Pappe, the foremost historian of the Nakba, who has written The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine but Ghada Kharmi, a British Palestinian doctor who was expelled by the Zionist militias in 1948 from her home in Jerusalem.
Also speaking are Stephen Kapos and Suzanna Weiss, two child survivors of the Holocaust who were hidden from the fascists in Budapest and France, along with Tony Greenstein who has written Zionism During the Holocaust .
Holocaust Memorial Day Meeting
Saturday 27 January 7 pm
Never Again Must Never Again Be Used to Justify Genocide
Register in advance for this webinar here. Event details are here.
Video: “I lost my family in Gaza” – police aggression as protesters shame Rayner and Reynolds
Deputy Labour leader and Shadow Business Secretary confronted with their complicity in Gaza slaughter during fundraiser
Police aggressively forced protesters – including two women – out of a Labour fundraising event for the ‘crime’ of protesting against the complicity of deputy party leader Angela Rayner and Shadow Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds in Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
At least three protesters stood to confront the two front-benchers with the horrific reality of the slaughter in Gaza, with the women targeting Rayner’s ‘modern feminism’ while thousands of women are killed by Israel and more than a million undergo daily loss and humiliation. Party leader Keir Starmer has argued that Israel has a ‘right’ to commit its crimes, yet the pair continue to support him.
Reynolds has been pictured smiling during a funded visit to Israel shortly after the Israeli regime massacred peacefully-protesting Palestinians in 2018. Rayner told a pro-Israel front group earlier this month, in the middle of the ongoing genocide, that she and the party ‘completely oppose’ any boycott or sanctions against Israel.
And despite the completely non-violent behaviour of the protesters, they were forcibly – even violently – removed from the event so that the MPs could avoid being challenged for their actions:
So far, according to human rights group Euro-Med Monitor and the World Health Organisation, more than 33,000 civilians – mostly women and children – have been killed in Israel’s wanton slaughter, at least double that amount have been wounded with many maimed, and almost two million people have been forcibly displaced into ever-smaller areas as famine and disease begin to outstrip the death toll from bombs, missiles and bullets.
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Fry equated pro-Palestine demo to nazism. In ’08, he said Israel founded on terrorism
Stephen Fry’s ‘alternative’ Christmas message appeared to equate UK protests against the slaughter of Palestinians with ‘1930s Europe’. But fifteen years ago he was prepared to put his name to the most direct condemnation of the very founding of Israel
Stephen Fry has rightly been widely criticised for his supposedly ‘alternative’ Christmas message, produced by a pro-Israel production company, that has been described as minimising the horrific suffering of Palestinian women and children at the hands of the genocidal Israeli regime – and which appears to equate UK protests against the genocide with the rise of nazism in the 1930s.
Fry’s more than six-minute video builds to his claim that:
I’m glad [my Jewish grandparents] aren’t alive now to read newspaper stories that would have reminded them of the 1930s Europe that they left.
As one former ardent fan put it:
To hear him conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism has shocked me… Smashed windows vs carrying your dead child?
By contrast, Jewish comedian Alexei Sayle’s ‘alternative alternative’ Christmas video, standing in solidarity with Palestinians facing genocide – and pointing out that he confidently and safely marches regularly for Palestinian human rights alongside thousands of other Jewish people – was watched millions of times and received overwhelmingly positive comment.
But Fry’s message in 2023 is starkly at odds with his position just fifteen years ago – when he was prepared to put his name to a letter, on the occasion of Israel’s sixtieth anniversary, that condemned the apartheid regime as one ‘founded on terrorism’, a reference to the 1948 ‘Nakba’ or catastrophe of the violent expulsion of more than 700,000 Palestinians from their homes and the massacres that marked it.
The full letter read:
In May, Jewish organisations will be celebrating the 60th anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel. This is understandable in the context of centuries of persecution culminating in the Holocaust. Nevertheless, we are Jews who will not be celebrating. Surely it is now time to acknowledge the narrative of the other, the price paid by another people for European anti-semitism and Hitler’s genocidal policies. As Edward Said emphasised, what the Holocaust is to the Jews, the Naqba is to the Palestinians.
In April 1948, the same month as the infamous massacre at Deir Yassin and the mortar attack on Palestinian civilians in Haifa’s market square, Plan Dalet was put into operation. This authorised the destruction of Palestinian villages and the expulsion of the indigenous population outside the borders of the state. We will not be celebrating.
In July 1948, 70,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes in Lydda and Ramleh in the heat of the summer with no food or water. Hundreds died. It was known as the Death March. We will not be celebrating.
In all, 750,000 Palestinians became refugees. Some 400 villages were wiped off the map. That did not end the ethnic cleansing. Thousands of Palestinians (Israeli citizens) were expelled from the Galilee in 1956. Many thousands more when Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza. Under international law and sanctioned by UN resolution 194, refugees from war have a right to return or compensation. Israel has never accepted that right. We will not be celebrating.
We cannot celebrate the birthday of a state founded on terrorism, massacres and the dispossession of another people from their land. We cannot celebrate the birthday of a state that even now engages in ethnic cleansing, that violates international law, that is inflicting a monstrous collective punishment on the civilian population of Gaza and that continues to deny to Palestinians their human rights and national aspirations.
We will celebrate when Arab and Jew live as equals in a peaceful Middle East.
Fry’s name appeared among more than one hundred Jewish signatories – many of whom have maintained to this day their principled opposition to Israeli apartheid, occupation, brutality and ethnic cleansing, such as Michael Rosen, Rica and Jo Bird, Diana Neslen, Sayle and many more.
Mr Fry, despite Israeli ministers’ boasts that they want their slaughter in Gaza to be a ‘Nakba 2023’, has not – and has now equated opposition to Zionism with antisemitism. What happened to him?
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Two Palestine Action activists acquitted by jury for putting ketchup on Balfour statue
Pair charged ludicrously with criminal damage for putting sauce on a statue have been found not guilty
Protestors who squirted tomato ketchup on to a Commons statue of Arthur Balfour, after whom the UK’s commitment to the creation of an Israeli state on Palestinian land is named, have been found not guilty of criminal damage by a unanimous jury decision.
The protest by the two women took place on the 105th anniversary of the ‘Balfour Declaration’ by the British Government in 1917:
Video released by Palestine Action
According to the defendants’ legal firm,
this case is thought to have been the first trial to take place in the Crown Court as a result of Section 50 of the Police Crime Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 – which amended the mode of trial for low value criminal damage to memorials.
Legal argument during the trial included whether the protest amounted to damage, whether the defendants had a lawful excuse in accordance with their right to freedom of expression protected under Article 10 of the EHRC, and also due to their belief that the public would consent to their protest as a form of expression and if they were aware of the history, consequence and legacy of the Balfour Declaration.
The pair were defended by Hamish McCallum of Garden Court North Chambers’ protest rights team.
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Outrage builds over Unite’s use of Israel-linked firms as protesters occupy Axa Dublin office
Union management’s choice of firms is ‘huge embarrassment’, say insiders
A row has broken out in Unite over the union’s choice of insurer and hotel chain, after a group linked to the union occupied the European HQ of Axa insurance in Dublin.
Community Action Tenants’ Union (CATU) and the Dublin for Gaza group took over Axa’s offices and called for boycott of the company, according to Irish paper The Journal, because of the business being one of “725 European financial institutions that have subsidised apartheid Israel’s colonial settlements“. Axa told the paper that it “has no proprietary investments in any of the banks cited in recent calls for boycott”.
The action prompted growing anger among supporters of Palestinian human rights in Unite Ireland that the UK and Irish union’s official, democratic position is firm support of Palestinian freedom and right of return to lands taken from them by the Israeli settler-colonial project – and opposition to Israeli occupation, apartheid and oppression.
In fact, at its annual conference earlier this year, Unite delegates voted to formally support the ‘Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions’ (BDS) movement that represents Palestinians’ peaceful resistance to the occupation by encouraging businesses to refuse to buy from or do business with illegally-occupied territories, in a resolution saying that Unite:
[recognises that] Israel is practicing the crime of apartheid, calls for an end to the UK Government’s proposed free trade agreement with Israel, and for support for BDS campaigns against companies complicit in supporting Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian land.
Yet according to union insiders, Axa is Unite’s insurer in Ireland – and Unite’s designated provider of hotel accommodation is the Leonardo hotel group, which is part-owned by the Israeli Fattal group. One outraged insider told Skwawkbox:
It’s a huge embarrassment to Unite and one that is causing a lot of anger – even more so as our Irish exec meeting next month is taking place in the Belfast Leonardo’s.
What’s worse is that this has been going on for months and the union still hasn’t done anything to change it. Businesses linked to Israel should never have been selected in the first place, let alone still be used now with everything that’s going on in Gaza.
Unite general secretary Sharon Graham has already infuriated supporters of Palestinian rights by remaining silent for many weeks at the start of Israel’s latest genocidal assault on Gaza – then making a grossly asymmetrical statement appearing to treat Israeli deaths more seriously than Palestinian; and ultimately allegedly having the exec railroaded into accepting only her preferred wording when a statement was eventually issued.
Graham was also exposed using proxies to order the cancellation of showings of the film ‘Oh Jeremy Corbyn/The Big Lie’, which exposes the political abuse of antisemitism accusations against left-wingers in the Labour party, and discussion of Asa Winstanley’s forensic book Weaponising Antisemitism: How the Israel Lobby Brought Down Jeremy Corbyn. Proxies were similarly despatched to try, unsuccessfully, to cancel a Unite ‘fringe’ event at Labour’s conference earlier this month in support of Palestinians.
Her popularity in Ireland is already low. Irish union legend Brendan Ogle is also suing her, her ally Tony Woodhouse and the union for defamation; he also alleges that he was abused by the union after his return from treatment for serious cancer – and after he made ‘protected disclosures’ to the union about its failures to adhere to covid protocols during the pandemic. Graham and her representatives have been accused of ‘disgusting’ behaviour toward Ogle – and anger in Ireland at the situation became so great that an entire sector branch threatened to disaffiliate entirely from Unite, the well-known ‘Right2Water’ campaign said it will no longer work with Unite, Unite’s Community section in Ireland condemned the ‘injustice inflicted’ on him and members picketed general secretary Sharon Graham’s long-delayed visit to Dublin.
Ms Graham is using Denton’s one of the world’s most profitable law firms to defend the defamation suit and Ogle’s the tribunal case. Denton’s was lambasted after its initial social media statement on Israel/Gaza failed even to mention the many Palestinian deaths. The statement was subsequently deleted and replaced.
Her tenure as Unite boss has been marked by a string of other allegations – which neither she nor the union has denied – including alleged destruction of evidence against her husband in misogyny and bullying complaints.
The Euro Med Monitor group reports that some 24,000 civilians in Gaza have been killed so far in just nine weeks by Israel’s bombing, shelling and invasion, around half of them children. Israel is also continuing to kill Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. Politicians around the world have called on the International Criminal Court to investigate and prosecute Israeli government ministers for genocide and other war crimes.
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